★☆★☆★ @devouredstar - Tumblr Blog

the left-behinds ☆ kang yeosang/choi jongho/reader

★★★★★

☆ female 9th member reader/jongho/yeosang (poly)

☆ chapter 3 of 3 // 16.3k words // read chapter 1 here // also on ao3

☆ summary // Ever since everyone else in the group paired off to be stupidly in love, you and your best friends Jongho and Yeosang are often left to your own devices. You’re not jealous that the others all have their person. You’re not. You have your friends. They’re everything you need. So why is it that when you find out Yeosang and Jongho have been hooking up behind your back, it feels like the end of the world?

☆ tags from chapter 1 still apply // MINORS DNI i'm serious there is smut here // chapter-specific tags: referenced homophobia, more implied aro-spectrum reader, mentions of vomiting, explicit sexual content, dominant jongho (he's a switch but in this scene he is mostly dominant), switch yeosang, submissive yeosang, switch reader, oral sex, praise kink, anal fingering, vaginal sex, multiple orgasms, unprotected sex (i mentioned reader is on birth control in ch2 but still)

<< chapter 2

★★★★★

Even after dark, it’s still too warm for a jacket. You put it on anyway and tug the hood up for anonymity. There’s a disposable face mask in the pocket, and you pull that on, too, although it’s clearly been worn before. You nearly snatch both off when you register that this is Yeosang’s zip-up hoodie, imbued with the citrus notes of his cologne, and that the mask had once been pressed up snug against his skin.

You walk nowhere in particular for a while, sweating under the borrowed jacket, the mask ricocheting your humid breath against your face. It isn’t until you wander into a GS25 for a drink that you notice you don’t have your phone or wallet. Just the mask, the hoodie, and the crumpled tissue (unused, you hope) in its pocket.

Drinkless, you return outside and keep walking. Some vicious part of you likes the idea of being unreachable and untrackable—the same part that’s enjoying how no one in the store looked twice at you. Like this, you’re no one, free of expectations and scrutiny.

With nothing to do aside from putting one foot in front of the other and monitoring street signs so you don’t get lost, your traitorous mind circles back to the conversation you’d just run from, no matter how much you wish it wouldn’t.

What would you do, hm?

Going from a theoretical they’ll probably get together one day to a factual they’ve been sleeping together for over a month is a hard leap for you to make. You had been certain you knew everything about them, could map the lines of their every emotion through the specific shift of their eyes and the tension in their shoulders.

You suppose it’s a testament to how well they know you that they were able to hide it for so long. They have to know exactly what you will do and think in order to navigate around you the way they have. You hate the small comfort that brings you.

If she were here?

Here, in the aftermath, you reconsider your knee-jerk reaction. If they only said they want you to placate your fear of being left behind, why would Jongho be talking like that to Yeosang when he didn’t know you were there?

Then maybe they weren’t lying? Which puts your reaction in a different light. You’d thought it cruel for them to say that. Your refusal to believe it might be crueler.

Go on, hyung.

Six weeks. Six weeks since the two of them started…whatever they’re calling it. You hadn’t asked. Are they only sleeping together? Are they boyfriends? Do they know?

Six weeks, during which neither of them spoke up. Then you remember Yeosang’s confusion when he’d asked, Since when do you date?

Oh. Well, fuck. Some of this may be more your fault than you’d realized. It wasn’t like you’d announced it when you stopped caring about intentionally dating. You didn’t explain to them or to anyone else your shift into the ambivalent mindset of ‘if I happen to find romantic love at some point, great; if I never do, also great.’

To them it probably looks like you don’t want anything at all, ever, and that it might make you uncomfortable if they tried to make a move.

Tell me like you did last time.

You had no idea they thought of you that way. It stutters the breath in your throat. You don’t hate it, not even a little, not at all.

You remember the lesson shoved at you when you were a trainee. Obviously, you cannot be with any of them. The scalpel, the careful excision of your desire, the locked box, the high shelf in the attic of your mind where you could forget about its existence.

On a random street where no one knows your name, you return to that attic for the first time since you were seventeen. You climb the dusty ladder and open the door, anticipating that the unlocking and unpacking of your boxed-up desire will be a slow, piecemeal process.

It’s not. The room is a complete wreck. The raw want you had stowed tidily away all that time ago has exploded out of its box. It layers the floor. It drips from the walls, bloody and viscous.

Wait, you think, terrified by the enormity and pervasiveness of your desire, which had been so small and easily excised when you’d first set it aside. Wait, I’m not ready. I didn’t think it would be like this.

You scramble away and slam the door on it.

★☆★☆★

There’s only one person in whom you want to seek refuge, and it is not the person who answers your knock.

“You don’t live here,” you say stupidly.

“I sure don’t,” Wooyoung answers, gleeful in a punchable way.

“Where’s Seonghwa-oppa?”

“He’s in the—Hold on, have you been crying?”

“No.” A lie. Kind of. You had been when you’d fled the building however long ago, and you assumed the evidence would have since faded.

Wooyoung’s lips thin into a displeased line. “Come in. Hyung was just getting us a snack.”

You toe off your shoes in the entryway. Although you’re warm from walking several miles in the humidity, you don’t take off Yeosang’s jacket. The big collar and slightly oversized fit of it give you the illusion of a place to hide, armor against the inspection Wooyoung is currently giving you and the one Seonghwa is about to.

In the kitchen, Seonghwa stands at the counter, chopping fruit. Before you can speak, Wooyoung sails by to go sit on the barstool opposite him, declaring, “Something’s wrong with ____, hyung.”

“Oh?” He sets the knife down and gives you a concerned once-over as you multitask scowling at Wooyoung and helping yourself to a glass of water. “What’s up?”

You drain the glass, refill it, sip again. “Why is Wooyoung over? Is anyone else here?”

Seonghwa hesitantly picks up the knife. He has the demeanor of someone handling a spooked stray cat: he doesn’t want to press until he’s confident you won’t scamper off and hide in a storm drain. “Just us and San. Wooyoung’s staying the night, but San went to bed early. Yunho came over for dinner but he and Mingi left a while ago. I think they went over to yours. Did you see them?”

You filch a strawberry quarter off the cutting board. “I only saw Yunho earlier, I don’t think he and Mingi were there yet when I got home. That was…I don’t know, eight? I probably just missed them.”

“Home from what?”

You let yourself be cornered because being cornered into admitting this is far easier than admitting the reason you spent the last two hours—a glance at the oven clock tells you it’s nearly ten o’clock—wandering around after dark and showed up here disheveled in the aftermath of tears. “My date.”

Wooyoung gasps and nearly leaps over the counter. “That was tonight? Was he why you’re crying? I’ll kill that guy, I swear to—”

“No, no killing necessary,” you placate. “It was fine. He was nice. I ended it early because I wasn’t feeling it and he was cool about it.”

Wooyoung sinks back into his seat. Then his eyebrow creases. “You wore sweatpants and…Yeosang’s hoodie on a date? Not that I’m judging, but, like…”

“Obviously I changed,” you say on a sigh, and steal another berry.

Seonghwa pauses chopping and leans one hip into the counter. “You ended the date early, got back around eight, and changed. I would assume you’d been sitting at home until you came over here, but you don’t know if Yunho and Mingi are at your dorm. You also said you ‘probably just missed them,’ implying that you left right after you got back from the date. So where have you been for the last couple hours?”

“Oooooh,” Wooyoung intones. “Private Investigator Park Seonghwa is clocked in.”

Your stomach drops. A tiny smirk curls at the edges of Seonghwa’s lips. For someone so cute and sweet, he’s a clever fucker when he wants to be. “I went for a walk.”

“A walk?” Seonghwa’s gaze is innocent, but you sense you’re on very thin ice. “To where? How far?”

“Nowhere specific. I don’t know how far.”

“The health app on your phone should have tracked your steps.”

Great. You came here to avoid confrontation at home, and now you’re about to be read the entirety of the Riot Act and then some. “I didn’t have my phone.”

“____!” he scolds. “You were walking around by yourself at night and you didn’t even have your phone?”

“We live in a safe area. I was fine.”

“That doesn’t matter. What if something happened?”

“Well, nothing did.”

“Clearly something did or you wouldn’t have been crying,” Wooyoung puts in. You nearly jump the counter to throttle him, until you realize that his lightly teasing tone belies genuine concern.

“I went on the walk because something happened,” you say before you can think better of it.

Wooyoung points at you. “So you admit something happened.”

You close your eyes, searching for patience in that brief, personal darkness. When you open them, you’re no less reluctant to explain. You should’ve risked going home, where you’d have the privacy of a locked bedroom instead of two friends who know you better than you care to admit.

“I fought with Yeosang and Jongho.”

Seonghwa lets the ensuing pause stretch while he pulls out three sets of chopsticks and scrapes the cut fruit into a bowl, which he sets in the middle of the counter. When you still don’t elaborate, he prompts, “About what?”

You hesitate. There is no way to explain without outing Jongho and Yeosang, which is the last thing you want to do.

Wooyoung says, “Did you find out they’ve been secretly fucking?”

It’s a good thing you hadn’t taken another bite, because if you had, one of them would’ve needed to give you the Heimlich. As it stands, you choke on your own spit, nearly lose a lung from coughing, and by the time you recover enough to speak, your voice comes out raspy. “How did you find out? They said no one else knew.”

He does a goofy little victory dance without getting out of his seat. “I didn’t know, but I do now! I called it. I knew Sangie was hiding something from me.”

“Wooyoung-ah,” you say, still gravelly, gravely serious, “you can’t tell anyone else. I’m mean it. I wouldn’t think they want everyone knowing if they didn’t even want me to know.”

“I won’t, I won’t.” He waves a dismissive hand. “That’s their business. And yours, I guess.”

“Not even San,” you insist, not comforted by his airiness. “No gossipping, Youngie.”

His face pinches with hurt. “I would never, ____. Not about this.” Then his lips purse into a dramatic pout. “Why doesn’t hyung get the no-gossip warning?”

“Because your hyung spent three years whining to me about how down bad he was over Hongjoong-oppa. I know he can keep his mouth shut.”

Clearly eager for a topic change, Seonghwa hurriedly says, “Was that really why you fought? You found out about them?”

“Yeah.” A half truth; you can’t stomach telling these two what Yeosang and Jongho had confessed by the end. “I’m not mad about them. I’m mad they hid it from me.”

“Why would they do that?” he wonders aloud.

“They were doing it to keep me from getting butthurt over all eight of you being paired up, grossly in love, and, in the case of Yunho and Mingi, having loud sex where I can hear.”

“If you think they’re loud, you should be grateful you don’t live with me or San.” Wooyoung spears a pineapple chunk without acknowledging the appalled scrunch of your nose. “Hm. I would ask if that was why you wanted me to set you up on that date, but that was before you found out about those two.”

“I was trying to prepare for them to figure it out in the near future, not realizing that ship had sailed six weeks before.”

“Did they expect to keep it from you forever?” Seonghwa says. “They had to know you’d find out eventually.”

“Maybe they didn’t think it would become a long-term thing?” Wooyoung offers.

“They had to know it wouldn’t have changed your friendship with them,” Seonghwa muses. “Unless…”

You inspect the fruit bowl, avoiding eye contact and making a show of poking around for another strawberry. They might be getting more out of you than you had planned to share, but they couldn’t waterboard the ‘we want you’ part out of you right now.

“You aren’t telling us everything,” says Wooyoung.

“I don’t know what you mean,” you reply evenly.

He stabs his chopsticks in your direction. “You are so annoying to talk to sometimes.”

You give him a flat look.

“Were they right to think you would be upset about all of us being in relationships with each other?” Seonghwa asks, gentle.

Wooyoung lights up. “Do we need to set you up on another date?”

“I don’t need a date, I need people to put their friendships on equal footing with their romantic partners,” you snap. “Look, even if I did have a partner of my own, I’d still feel like this. Partners come first. That’s just how it is. I wish it wasn’t, but it is. Them being together will inherently change our friendship even if they don’t think it’ll happen.”

Seonghwa shifts his weight uneasily. “I didn’t realize you felt that way.”

You give him a helpless shrug. It’s not fair for you to make him or the others feel bad when not only did they all have their pathetic pining phases, they also have to hide that they’re with men. “That’s just how it is,” you say again.

“You say it’ll inherently change your friendship, and yet they’ve been together for six weeks and you didn’t notice,” Wooyoung points out.

You don’t have an answer for that.

He puts down his chopsticks and leans back in his chair, looking thoughtful in a way that makes you cold with dread. “I have a theory.”

Done eating, you lob your chopsticks into the sink. “Whatever it is, I don’t think I’m ready to hear it. I need to go take a long shower and lay down in a dark room for the next twenty-four hours.”

“We’re filming the dance practice video in less than twelve hours,” Seonghwa reminds you.

You press your head against the cold edge of the counter. Having a job when you’re in the middle of a crisis is so inconvenient. “Not if you take me out back and put me out of my misery first.”

★☆★☆★

Seonghwa—shockingly—does not agree to put you out of your misery. Consequently, the next several days are an exercise in avoidance.

You wait for the second car in the morning even though there’s space for you in the first because Jongho’s in the back row and Yeosang’s in the middle row. During breaks for dance practice, you escape to the bathroom or plant yourself between San and Wooyoung (to San’s confusion). You arrive five minutes late for your vocal lesson—bringing a coffee for the instructor to apologize—so as not to cross paths with Jongho, whose session was immediately prior to yours.

You check the shared calendar to verify you and Yeosang won’t be home at the same time during waking hours, and if you are, then you invent reasons to leave: going for walks, haunting the Seonghwa-San-Mingi dorm, working extra hours in the studio with Hongjoong due to what he thinks is a sudden obsession with learning about production. (When he looks at you sideways, you fumble for an excuse and come up with, “Wouldn’t it be cool if our next album wasn’t just written by you, me, and Mingi, but produced entirely by us, too?”)

The most difficult part is avoiding them during group schedules. Given that there are six other people to use as buffers, even that isn’t terribly complicated—except for when the staff have you sit between the two of them. It’s a quick filming, intended to be a two-minute video, just some filler content for social media. The staff give each member a situation and have them choose which members they’d pick to do it with them.

When asked who he would like to have with him on a deserted island, Hongjoong answers Seonghwa and San. When asked who he’d take as sous-chefs on a cooking show, Seonghwa answers Wooyoung and Yunho.

For your turn, you’re asked about ideal road trip companions. Normally you’d name your two best friends, no question. You can feel both of them watching you when you answer, “Mingi and Wooyoung.” Luckily, that it’s for a short video means you don’t have to explain for the cameras.

If asked, you can’t say what situations the others who went after you are given or what they answer. You have enough experience with masking that you make it through the remainder of the filming without appearing outwardly perturbed, but the moment the staff call cut, your placid smile drops.

You have thirty free minutes before you’re scheduled to meet Hongjoong in his studio after this. The others start discussing a group coffee order, but you’re jittery enough without caffeine today. Too busy attempting to vacate the room before Jongho and Yeosang can try to talk to you, you don’t notice Wooyoung following you until you’re out in the hallway and he yanks your arm to pull you to a stop.

“What are you not telling me?” he demands. “What you told me and Seonghwa the other night—it’s not the only reason you’re fighting with Yeosang and Jongho, is it?”

You don’t verbally respond, but your dodging of eye contact and the tension in your jaw are answer enough.

“Is it?” he says again.

“No,” you relent.

“And?” he prompts when you don’t elaborate.

You look up at him, your mouth open, but the words don’t come.

Wooyoung heaves a deep breath. “Getting things out of you requires, like, a crowbar. Ugh. I’m getting Seonghwa-hyung.”

“What? Why?”

One hand on the doorknob, Wooyoung sends you a grim smile. “He’s my crowbar.”

He disappears into the room you’d both just left. Against your better judgment, you wait for him, although it would be so easy to hide.

Before long, Wooyoung returns, Seonghwa in tow. Seonghwa is holding a company phone and a ring light—apparently, a manager was looking for volunteers to film a few dance challenges and skits to trending audios. It means that, though the three of you have an excuse to sequester yourself in a private room, you have to actually take the videos first, which feels ridiculous with the conversation looming over you.

“Okay,” Seonghwa says when you’re finally done, you three sitting cross-legged on the floor in a lopsided triangle. “What’s going on?”

You cover your face with both hands and bite the bullet. “My fight with Yeosang and Jongho was partly because they also told me they’re interested in me. Like, both of them.”

“‘Interested’? As in, romantically? Sexually?” says Seonghwa.

You let your hands slide down your face and drop into your lap. “I assume both. The exact phrasing was ‘we want you.’”

Wooyoung stage whispers, “Crowbar.”

Seonghwa squints, puzzled, at Wooyoung, but when Wooyoung doesn’t bother explaining, he turns back to you. “Alright,” he says delicately. “Do you want them back?”

“I don’t know. Why do neither of you seem surprised?”

“...Because it’s been obvious for literally forever?” Wooyoung says. “Is that a real question?”

“You guys are different about each other,” Seonghwa agrees.

It’s one thing for your best friends to confess to you. It’s another, entirely unique beast to know that people on the outside had seen it coming.

“They’re my best friends. Of course I’m different about them,” you say.

“Yeah, but—Let me ask you this, then,” says Seonghwa. “Would you kiss them?”

“I…guess?”

“Hey, so if they ask you, don’t respond like that,” Wooyoung advises.

Ignoring him, Seonghwa continues, “Do you want to kiss any of us? Me? Wooyoung? Yunho?”

“Ew. No.”

Wooyoung pouts. “No need to be mean about it.”

“Maybe think on that,” Seonghwa says. “It’s an immediate no for us but not for Yeosang or Jongho.”

“Have you considered that you’ve liked them for way longer than you realize but you’re just repressed as hell?” Wooyoung says, fluttering his eyelashes.

“Wooyoung-ah,” Seonghwa sighs.

“No,” you say drily, “I had not considered that, but I will be doing so now.”

“Are you ready to hear my theory from the other night?” asks Wooyoung.

“Fine.”

“Your friendship didn’t change even after Jongho and Yeosang started fucking because you three are basically in a relationship already. The only thing is missing is they aren’t having sex with you.”

And, well. You have no idea what to do with that, especially when you know deep down it’s pretty much the truth. Rather than tell Wooyoung as much, you slump backward until your back meets the dirty tile of the floor. The ceiling is far easier to look at than the knowing in Wooyoung’s expression or the sympathy in Seonghwa’s.

★☆★☆★

JONGHO Are you going to ignore us forever, noona?

YOU no

JONGHO It sure seems like you’re going to try

YOU not forever but i’m not ready to talk to you guys about it yet

YEOSANG did we make you uncomfortable do you hate us

YOU no and no

YEOSANG ok good. because we weren’t lying about liking you

YOU i know i’m sorry i thought you were

JONGHO I know I’m supposed to tell you to take as long as you need to think But I miss you Come back soon, ok? I want you in my life no matter in what way

YEOSANG wow Jjong. unexpectedly poetic but I agree would you really road trip with Mingi and Woo over us? :(

YOU no

★☆★☆★

The storm comes on fast and unrelenting. Truly, you should have seen it coming, but you had chosen to ignore the dark swirl on the horizon when you left the apartment for another evening walk.

This time you do have your phone, assuming it’s not getting water-damaged in your soaked pocket. Although you could hypothetically call a car to take you home, when you look around you realize you’re not far from the KQ building. It says a lot that you find going back to work after you’d clocked out for the day preferable to trudging home where you might run into Yeosang.

You show up at Hongjoong’s studio for the second time that day rainsoaked and shivering in the air conditioning. Hongjoong, who hasn’t moved from the spot you left him in two hours ago, swivels in his chair to appraise you with horror.

“____? What are you doing? Did you walk here? Someone would’ve driven you—agh, you’re dripping all over the carpet, come here, let me…”

It’s sweet when he gets all fussy. You don’t protest when he comes at you with a wad of paper towels and makes you pull off your wet hoodie and replace it with his sweatshirt. He parks you on the couch and wraps you in the blanket draped over the back, then stands back with his hands on his hips and a big old frown.

“Are you crazy?” he demands.

You shrug expansively.

Hongjoong blows out a slow breath and collapses into his desk chair. “What is going on with you? You spent half the day in here with me already, now you’re walking back over in the middle of a storm?”

“I’m not trying to work more. I was out for a walk. This was closer than going all the way back home.”

He studies your face. “I know something’s wrong. You haven’t been yourself the past couple days. But I also know you won’t spit it out unless it’s on your own terms.”

He lets that settle between you, expectant but not demanding.

Unnerved by his astuteness, you toy with his sweatshirt sleeves. There’s ink on the right cuff from how he toys with his pen when he’s thinking, and you run a thumb over the darkest streak. “How did you know you liked Seonghwa as not a friend?”

A beat of surprised silence. Hongjoong runs a hand through his hair and says, “Actually, I didn’t understand it at first, but everything felt different with him. Heightened, I guess. I wanted him to like me. I wanted him to think I was cool and well-spoken and put together. Whenever I wrote anything, I cared the most what he thought of it. I would’ve done anything to make sure his eyes were on me. I would find excuses to touch him—little nudges, a hand on his waist, leaning on his shoulder. I didn’t know why I felt like that until I realized the thought of seeing him in love with someone who wasn’t me made me want to burn down the whole world.”

He tends to be awkward about his own feelings, but the more he speaks, the more starry-eyed he gets. It’s cute.

“Do you want to tell me what this is about?” he adds softly.

“Seonghwa hasn’t said anything?”

“Not if you didn’t want him to.” The corner of his mouth lifts. “Should I be hurt that you went to him instead of me? I thought I was your favorite oppa?”

Not dignifying that with an answer, you reply, “I just thought you might’ve heard—between him and Wooyoung and probably Yunho, I assume Yeosang’s told him at least part of it since I haven’t been home all week, which means Mingi probably knows something too. It’s like everyone else already knows and is just waiting for me to realize I’m in love with them.”

A surprised beat passes. “Them meaning Jongho and Yeosang?”

When you nod, sinking further into your blanket cocoon, Hongjoong hums thoughtfully. “Ah. That’s unexpected. I assumed you were fighting.”

“We are.”

“Are you in love with them?”

“I love them. How am I supposed to know the difference between loving them and being in love?”

“A little like what I said before. The way you feel about them is elevated. You look for them in a crowd first. They’re the first person you reach for when something goes wrong, and the first person you reach for when something goes right. You would sit there and watch them fold laundry or brush their teeth or write a grocery list, it wouldn’t matter how mundane, as long as you get to be with them.”

“Isn’t all of that true for best friends, though? Hence, best?”

Hongjoong tips his head to either side as he weighs this. “Yes, but it’s also…okay, here: You don’t want to do that mundane stuff with anyone else in the world. You think, I only want to be with this person—er, people—and you only want them to be with you. I mean, I guess the two of them can be with each other too. I’m sorry. I’ve never been in love with more than one person at once. I kind of don’t know how to say this. Yah, stop laughing at me. See if I ever give you advice again.”

You hide the tail end of your snickering behind your hand. “No, Hongjoongie-oppa, wait, I’m sorry. This is actually helping a lot. Really.”

His eyes narrow in suspicion. When you gesture for him to continue, he eventually relents. “There’s also, ah. The physical aspect.”

Your eyebrows lift. “If you can’t say the word ‘sex,’ I’m not too sure you should be having it.”

“I can say it! It’s just weird with you. Feels like talking about it with my hyung.”

You won’t subject him to a verbal parsing out of if you want to have sex with two other people who Hongjoong likely also couldn’t say the word ‘sex’ in front of. Especially since the answer is yes.

Huh, you think, taken aback by how easily you arrived at that answer.

“Alright, fine. Say I understand the difference, and say I conclude that yes, I am in love with them in a romantic way. I’m still not—allowed.”

Hongjoong frowns. “What do you mean?”

“That was, like, lesson number one after the company decided to let me stay: no hooking up with or dating any of you. If I do and they find out, they’ll…how did they put it? Drop me like a something. I don’t remember the exact wording.”

“____.”

When it’s clear he isn’t going to say anything else and is going to keep looking at you like you’re stupid, you shake your head. “What?”

“The same goes for all of us. Do you think any of us thought it was a good idea to not only date within the group, but date men? We might not have gotten a whole lesson when we were trainees the way you did, but we know how this works. While I’m not sure if the company would ‘drop’ any of us at this stage, you can’t let them rule every aspect of your life. They already take so much of us.”

You sink down in your seat. He really wasn’t wrong to look at you like you’re stupid. You are.

He continues, not unkindly, “None of us will be able to go public. But it doesn’t mean you have to let that dictate what you do in your private life. You would never, ever tell me I’m not allowed to be with Seonghwa, and you’d fight anyone who would even suggest that. Extend the same courtesy to yourself.”

“Oh,” you say, feeling very small. Over the last eight years, you’d made too many decisions out of the fear that everything you had worked for, everything you wanted so badly it sometimes hurt to look at, would be torn out of your grasping hands. To be given permission to just be shouldn’t be this much of a revelation when you’re nearly twenty-seven years old.

“Good ‘oh’?”

“Yes, Captain,” you say, a touch mocking; there’s only so much vulnerability either of you can handle in one day.

“Good. Now,” Hongjoong says with an air of authoritative finality. “I’m going to text a manager to take you home. While you wait, I need your opinion on this song.”

“Noooo,” you plead. “I’m clocked out for the day.”

“Should’ve thought about that before you showed up at work,” he says, shoving a pair of headphones at you. Evil, evil man. “Come listen to this outro.”

★☆★☆★

WOOYOUNG hey can one of you come over pls i think jongho is sick but he won’t let me or hyung help you know how he is

YEOSANG and you think he’ll let either of us?

WOOYOUNG literally yes

YEOSANG I’ll come over. give me 5 min

WOOYOUNG front door is unlocked. his bedroom is locked but he’ll prob open it if it’s you

YOU cold sick or throw up sick?

WOOYOUNG throw up

YOU sangie are you sure you want to go you’re a known sympathy vomiter

WOOYOUNG he’s already here guess you’ll have to come too what a shame

YOU jung wooyoung you suck be there in a few

★☆★☆★

Given that he is now aware of the situation, you wouldn’t put it past Wooyoung to lie about Jongho’s health just to get you, him, and Yeosang in the same room. But true to his word, when you arrive, Jongho is in the bathroom, Yeosang, Hongjoong, and Wooyoung himself hovering outside of the locked door.

“He won’t let any of us in,” Hongjoong says by way of greeting, over the whir of the bathroom fan. “Not even Yeosang. He said he isn’t allowed because he knows Yeosang will throw up too.”

You nudge Yeosang out of the way and knock. “Jongho-ya? Please will you let me in?”

No immediate response. You’re torn between asking more insistently and telling Wooyoung I don’t really know what you expected, when to everyone’s surprise, the doorknob clicks as Jongho undoes the lock without opening the door.

“Fine,” he says. “But just you, noona.”

Hongjoong gives you a meaningful look. “The first person you reach for.”

Yeosang and Wooyoung blink confusedly at him. You twist the knob and slip inside before Hongjoong can see the realization cross your face—or before the smell of sick reaches them outside.

Inside, Jongho is kind of exactly where you expected him to be: hunched over the toilet with his arms wrapped around himself in poor facsimile of a hug. His normally golden skin is somehow both pale and flushed at the same time.

“Hey,” you say, hovering uncertainly by the door.

“Hey,” he murmurs. “Don’t feel good.”

“I know, Jjongie. What can I do?”

Most of the time, an unknowing stranger would be hard-pressed to name Jongho as the youngest of the group. This is not one of those times.

“Make it stop,” he whimpers, his head drooping until his cheek presses against the toilet seat. “I can’t throw up anymore but I still feel nauseous and I don’t know what to do and the hyungs won’t stop hovering and I have schedules tomorrow but my voice is going to be all messed up from puking and my stomach hurts and I want you to hug me but I don’t know how to ask for it since you aren’t talking to me right now. Can you fix all of that? That’s what you can do.”

Not all of it, but some. You spring into motion, grateful to be given tasks to accomplish. It’s far easier to check items like ‘find anti-nausea medicine in the cabinet’ and ‘yell at Hongjoong through the door to tell a manager to reschedule Jongho’s Wednesday’ off of a mental list than it is to confront the nebulous uncertainty you feel at being alone with him for the first time in five days.

You sit down on the floor beside Jongho and stay close while he tentatively sips water and tests if it and the pills will stay down.

“You shouldn’t get too close,” he warns. “I don’t know what this is or if it’s contagious.”

“You asked for a hug, Jongho-ya. I can’t make you stop hurting but I can do that.” You scoot forward and wrap him in your arms. He’ll deny it to his grave, but part of him loves being taken care of. “You were perfectly fine when I saw you a couple hours ago. If it came on this fast, it was probably something you ate. You’ll sleep it off and be fine by tomorrow.”

“Okay, Doctor ____,” he mumbles into your shoulder. You can feel the slight flush of a low fever where his cheek is pressed against your bare neck. “Thanks for coming even though it’s late and you’re mad at me. I didn’t tell Wooyoung-hyung to call you.”

“I’m not mad at you, Jongho-ya.”

“Whatever you want to call it, then.”

You squeeze him tighter and run a gentle hand over his hair. “I’ll always come if you need me. No matter how ‘whatever you want to call it’ we are with each other.”

You feel more than hear him let out a long breath as you brush a hand up and down his back. It takes a few moments, but eventually his body goes lax, trusting you with more and more of his weight. He must really not be feeling well, if he’s falling asleep sitting up on a freezing tile floor.

“____?” Hongjoong calls from outside. “Does Jongho need to go to the doctor?”

Mutely, Jongho shakes his head against your shoulder.

“No,” you relay to Hongjoong.

“I got him a sick day tomorrow. Hopefully he won’t need more than that, but if he does, I’ll figure it out. Wooyoung and I are going to bed, but wake us up if you need us. Yeosang is going to stay out here in case you need help getting Jongho into bed.”

“What do you think, Jongho-ya?” you ask, once you’ve thanked Hongjoong and said goodnight. “Can we get you up and into bed?”

He makes a weak sound of protest.

“Think of how much better you’ll feel in clean pajamas, with a blanket and a pillow,” you coax. “You can’t be comfortable like this.”

“You’re very comfortable, noona,” he counters, but pulls back regardless. Even unwell, he looks cute—there’s something particularly disarming about the sleepy squint to his eyes, the childish pout on his lips, and the fact that he trusts you enough to let you see him like this.

You both get up. Jongho sways tiredly on his feet, but you jerk your chin at the sink before he can go for the door. “Brush your teeth first.”

He groans. “That wasn’t part of the deal.”

“You’ll thank me when you don’t wake up with puke breath.”

Grumbling, he picks up his toothbrush. You open the door and peer out to find Yeosang sitting on the floor outside, staring at the opposite wall.

“Sang-ah, could you grab clean pajamas for Jongho? He needs to change before he goes in his room, because I think once he sits down it’ll be game over.”

Jongho makes an indignant sound around the toothpaste foam in his mouth. Yeosang pushes to his feet with a nod and vanishes down the hallway.

You and Yeosang wait outside the bathroom while Jongho changes, and once he emerges, the three of you file into his bedroom. As you’d suspected, Jongho collapses on top of his bed the moment he’s through the door. Together, Yeosang and you wrangle the comforter out from under him. When you finally manage to pull it up over him, he lets out a drowsy noise of gratitude.

“Do you want one of us to stay until you’re asleep, Jongho-ya?” Yeosang asks. A nice sentiment, but you aren’t sure how much it’ll matter when Jongho seems halfway to knocked out even with the lights still on.

“Yes.”

You try to share a look with Yeosang, but he won’t meet your eyes. “Who?”

A brief pause. “Both.”

Yeosang blanches. You don’t move.

“Please?” Jongho says into his pillow.

And when he asks like that, looking all cuddly and vulnerable and cute, neither you nor Yeosang stand a chance. Without further discussion, Yeosang crawls into the space beside Jongho, sitting up against the headboard and permitting Jongho to fist a hand in the loose fabric of his pants. You cross the room to turn out the lights and crack the door to let a slice of light from the hall inside so you and Yeosang don’t have to navigate a pitch black room when leaving. There isn’t room for you to lean against the headboard too; you sit at the foot of the bed, facing Yeosang, who has to bend his legs to give you room.

It doesn’t take long for Jongho to start snoring. Even after several minutes pass of him remaining solidly asleep, you and Yeosang still don’t move to go.

When you glance up from peeling the polish off your fingernails, Yeosang is looking at you for the first time all night, his gaze unerring even in the low light.

“Do you hate us?” he asks softly.

“Never.”

“It didn’t feel nice. For me to tell you what I told you and then hear you say it couldn’t be true and then not talk to us for almost a week.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t…I had never let myself think about you that way. To hear that you had been thinking about me as anything other than a friend, and for way longer than I realized—it caught me off guard. It scared me.”

Yeosang ghosts a thumb over Jongho’s knuckles where they’re clutching his pants. “I don’t know if this is going to scare you more. But we’ve been talking about you being included in what he and I have since the first time it happened. And I’ve been thinking about it for even longer.”

Abruptly, you’re finding it hard to swallow or breathe or blink or do anything other than sink into the warmth of his attention. “Oh,” you say.

He doesn’t seem aware that what he’d said had switched your body to operate on manual. You hope that in the half-light he can’t see the pink in your cheeks. “Do you hate us now?” he checks again.

“No, Yeosangie,” you say, terribly fond. “I like you very much.”

Finally, he looks away, unable to hide his pleased smile. God. For someone who hates being called cute, there is no better way to describe the embarrassed, full-body squirm he does in spite of that smile.

I’d like to kiss it off his face. The thought sidles up behind you, taps you on the shoulder, and punches you in the gut when you turn to meet it. It’s the first time you’ve considered it, or at the very least, the first time you acknowledged the want rather than shoving it in the attic where it couldn’t touch you.

But you shouldn’t kiss anything off of his face yet. Not on Jongho’s bed while Jongho is sleeping off what you’re guessing is mild food poisoning. Not while you three still have to talk beyond brief apologies and reassurances that you don’t hate them.

As you sit there, listening to the rumble of Jongho’s breathing and watching Yeosang’s eyelids begin to flutter shut, it sweeps over you with the swift inevitability of the storm you got caught in the other day. You stare at them, these two who are the first ones you reach for when something goes wrong or when something goes right, who you would watch fold laundry and brush their teeth and write grocery lists a thousand times over, and you love them, and you can’t believe you were somehow the last to know.

You’re on Jongho’s bed but you’re also in that attic in your head, surrounded by four walls covered in the bloodred shame of the desire you’d refused to acknowledge. It doesn’t look so scary this time around. You walk further inside, close your eyes, let yourself sit in the feeling of wanting. Of being wanted back.

Yeosang has slumped over, finally succumbing to sleep, his head nearly touching Jongho’s. Jongho has shifted so his forehead is pressed against the side of Yeosang’s thigh.

I didn’t know. I’m in love with you, I’m sorry, I’m in love with you, I’m sorry I didn’t know.

★☆★☆★

JONGHO Thank you both for helping me last night Noona you were right, I woke up basically fine …Don’t tell Hongjoong hyung though

YOU choi jongho are you FAKING SICK to get a free day off???

JONGHO Hey I puked my way into this day off fair and square Plus I am very tired and my throat is sore. After I rest more I’m sure I’ll be back to 100%

YEOSANG ____ what time did you end up leaving? and why didn’t you wake me up?? I didn’t mean to sleep there! I didn’t have an alarm set or anything I would’ve missed my Japanese lesson if Wooyoung hadn’t come in to check on Jongho

YOU i didn’t want to disturb you you guys looked so cute and cozy i left around midnight? i think? even if i’d wanted to stay there wasn’t room. y’all were starfishing like crazy if us sharing a bed is going to become a habit we’ll need to do something about that

YEOSANG HELLO?

JONGHO What do you mean by that? 🤨

YOU no comment assuming your day of rest fixes you, jjong, can we all talk tonight?

JONGHO Yes please

YEOSANG my room? I’ll tell Yunho to get lost

JONGHO What do YOU mean by THAT? 🤨

YEOSANG oh um I didn’t mean it like that I just meant I don’t want him eavesdropping but also I sorta didn’t NOT mean it like that?

JONGHO 🤨

YOU 🤨

★☆★☆★

You’re getting déjà vu.

Here you are again, in Yeosang’s doorway, looking in on him and Jongho on the bed. It’s even the same time of night, the same quality of streetlight orange coming through the half-pulled curtains. The same hesitance overtakes you for a beat, until Yeosang—who is not on top of Jongho this time around, but sitting across from him and playing a puzzle game on his phone—sees you hovering ghostlike and beckons you inside.

“Sorry I’m late,” you say, although no one had set a time other than an imprecise ‘whenever we’re all done with work.’ “Hongjoong-oppa, Mingi, and I were kind of in a groove and it took us a while to get to a good stopping point.”

Privately, you’ll admit that was your fault. You hadn’t exactly been in a rush to get home knowing what awaited you there. So maybe you’d given Hongjoong a push here and Mingi a push there to send all three of you down a minor rabbit hole of what if we tried it this way? and, oh, would you look at that, it’s already 8:30? Wow, time flies when you’re having fun!

Your downfall had been Yunho texting Mingi from Mingi’s bedroom asking where he was. Mingi had showed you Yunho’s text saying Yeosang had kicked him out for the night and asked if you wanted to come over to game with them, figuring you were banished too.

“Uh, no,” you said. “I’m not banished.”

Mingi had shrugged it off, but Hongjoong perked up. His head had slowly turned like a demon out of a horror movie. If horror movie demons were short and gay and squirrely.

“You’re not?” he’d asked, too nonchalant for the dangerously acute glint in his eyes. “What’ll you and Yeosang be up to, just the two of you with the whole place to yourselves?”

“Not just the two of us,” you admitted, setting your jaw. “Jongho too. We’re having an overdue discussion.”

He made a show of checking the time. “You wouldn’t happen to be stalling, then, would you, ____?”

There had been no use lying. And so you’d packed up slowly and dragged your feet out to the car, wishing you could skip the conversation you knew you needed to have and fast forward to the after when everything would be squared tidily away, apologies delivered and truths admitted.

Right now, obeying Yeosang’s summons and coming over to sit on the bed with them, you find it hard to believe there will be an after. You feel like you’re going to be wading through the tide of this discussion for the rest of your life.

“All better?” you ask Jongho.

“Yeah, thanks. I slept most of the day, had some tea, and I feel fine. I haven’t had much of an appetite, though.”

“You’re not still nauseous, are you?” you say with concern.

“No, I think I wasn’t hungry because knowing we were talking tonight was making me anxious.”

Jongho’s bluntness is refreshing in comparison to Yeosang’s shyness and your reticence. You still aren’t eager to get into this, but at least with him here you can trust that all the cards will be laid on the table, rather than hidden behind backs or scattered forgotten on the floor underneath the table.

“Yeosang-hyung told me what you said last night after I fell asleep,” Jongho continues, in the same breath as his last sentence. “I’m sorry we scared you.”

“And I’m sorry I sprung it on you the way I did.” Yeosang had stopped playing the game as soon as you’d sat down and is now toying with the case on his dark-screened phone to occupy his nervous hands. He visibly winces. “I don’t feel great about how I said it, either. ‘We want you.’ I didn’t mean for it to sound…crude.”

“From what I heard, it sounded like you”—you direct this to Jongho—“wanted to tell me everything right away but you”—and this is to Yeosang—“vetoed that. Why?”

“I was completely certain you would never, ever like us the way we like you. You hadn’t dated in, what, almost three years? You didn’t seem to care about falling in love, you didn’t seem to care about sex, and even if you did, what were the chances you would like both of us? I was sure we would tell you and everything would be so awkward and our friendship would be ruined forever.”

You chew on your bottom lip. “I stopped actively dating because I was always like, you are a stranger, I met you two hours ago, and you think that because we had one meal and know a handful of facts about each other, I’m supposed to want to kiss you? And if I don’t, I’m nothing to you? It felt so shallow. They didn’t even know enough about me yet to actually want me. But I…I think about it with you, both of you, and I don’t feel like that. Because you’ve known me for almost ten years and you know me better than anyone else in the world. Because you care about me, whether or not I want to kiss you. And I do, to be clear.” You don’t give them time to respond, barreling on in a rush. “I’m sorry I was convinced you were lying to me about wanting to be with me. In the moment, it really did feel like you were just saying that.”

Jongho looks sad. “Was it so hard to believe? I’ve told you on multiple occasions you’re one of my favorite people. It’s not a big leap to make.”

“It was hard to believe because when we were trainees, I completely locked down the part of me that could’ve ever considered looking at you guys as anything other than my friends. I didn’t want to give the company a reason to boot me or the fans any more reasons to hate my guts. I assumed it went both ways. I mean, it’s not like either of you had openly showed interest in me before.”

The sadness gives way to utter disbelief. “Noona. We flirt with you all the time.”

You turn to Yeosang, lost. Surely there’s no way the patron saint of missed social cues picked up on this before you.

But Yeosang nods. “It’s true. And you might not realize you do it, but you treat us differently than the others, too.”

Your mouth opens and closes around the shape of several failed responses. Finally, you land on, “That can’t be right. There isn’t anything I do with you guys that I don’t with the others.”

They share a look that says, do you want to take this one or should I? You’re so stupefied that you nearly miss how they aren’t shutting you out of their unspoken exchanges like they had before.

Yeosang goes first. “Neither of you are big on touching but you’ll lay on each other or me with no problem.”

Then Jongho. “I’ve said before that you are the only people on the planet who don’t wear out my social battery.”

“You two can tell when I’m about to get too overstimulated and always know exactly how to help.”

“When I asked you for help picking which photos to use when we got the last photoshoot samples back, you told me you couldn’t pick because I looked too handsome in all of them.”

“And you told me I looked pretty in mine, but when Wooyoung asked about his you only said he looked ‘good’ and that the ‘stylist did their job well.’”

“And you laughed when I told you you looked perfect in your photos even though I meant it! We’re always complimenting you and you never take it seriously.”

“You’ll come lay in my bed but never in Yunho’s.”

“You let us use your bathroom even though everyone else is banned from touching it.”

“You let me sip off your water bottle all the time but the one time San drank from it you made him go scrub the entire thing.”

“Do we need to continue?” Jongho says.

Once again, you’re speechless. You had had refutations ready (you lay on them because they’re comfortable and you know they won’t make a big deal out of it; you won’t lay on Yunho’s bed because he and Mingi fuck like crazy on that thing; San didn’t ask before taking your water and it pissed you off so you had to retaliate somehow) but in the end you just say, “That’s all circumstantial. Everyone’s close in different ways, of course we’re going to be different about each other.”

Throwing his hands up, Jongho huffs out a sigh. “Alright, fine. Here’s another thing we do with each other that we don’t do with everyone else.” And he leans forward and kisses you.

The immediate intensity catches you off guard. Jongho’s frustration with your obliviousness is apparent in the hard grip he has on your waist, the sharp line of his teeth dragging over your bottom lip.

But as your initial shock burns off, you give back as good as you get. You’re the one to swipe your tongue against his and to draw an unexpectedly pretty moan from him. His hold on you turns gentler, one hand coming up to cup your face far sweeter than it would’ve when he’d first reached for you.

By the time you separate, his exasperation is gone, replaced with something softer, more permissive. “It’s always been the three of us,” he says softly, still leaned into your space so the warmth of his words curls over your face. “Why would this be any different?”

You stay there, struck dumb and tingling all over, unable to answer and knowing he’s more than a bit smug about that, and then Yeosang props his chin on your shoulder.

“Do I get a turn, too?” he says, pouty.

Yeosang is far more hesitant at first, keeping his hands folded politely in his lap and his tongue and teeth to himself. You match his rhythm, amused by how he only seemed to have confidence for the time it took to ask for a kiss and to draw you in for it before reverting to demureness.

If kissing Jongho had been an evenly-matched battle, kissing Yeosang is like taking the first strike and watching him drop his weapon and fall to his knees without bothering to fight back. You want to devour him.

You tilt your head to the side, split open the seam of his mouth with your tongue, and slide one hand into the hair at the back of his neck. He melts into you with a beautiful pliancy and lets you have him. As you press further, obsessed with the tiny, desperate sounds he makes when he exhales, one of his hands splays over your thigh, fingertips digging in hard enough to have you idly hoping they’ll bruise.

He’s breathless when you pull back, dazed in the eyes and blushing hard. You like the idea that maybe he could taste Jongho on you.

Even after you’d heard them talking about you while clearly in the leadup to sex, even after they had confessed to your face, you had studiously avoided thinking of either Yeosang or Jongho in this way. Now that you’ve started, though—now that you know firsthand how they taste—the brakes on that train of thought have been cut. You couldn’t stop even if you wanted to.

And you don’t want to.

You run your tongue over your lower lip, damp with their combined spit, and sit back to better see both of them. Yeosang doesn’t remove his hand and you don’t want him to. “You know, I never asked how you two got together in the first place.”

Yeosang’s eyes go wide, though how he’s embarrassed when his tongue was just in your mouth, you aren’t certain.

Jongho chuckles cockily. “Been thinking about us, noona?”

“…Yeah.”

“It was the weekend you went home for your cousin’s wedding.” Jongho takes the reins, because Yeosang still seems too panicked to speak. “The eight of us went out for dinner, had a few drinks. Everyone started discussing who was going to sleep where, and as soon as I heard Seonghwa-hyung and San-hyung were going to be in my dorm, I jumped ship. Your dorm was going to be quiet since Yunho-hyung was going to Mingi-hyung, so I invited myself over. Yeosang-hyung said I could take your bed, but I didn’t want to without asking, and who knew when the last time Yunho-hyung had changed his sheets was…. I tried to take the couch but hyung said it would make him sad and begged me to come cuddle with him—”

“I did not beg!”

“He begged. He was a little tipsy and very needy and who was I to say no? We stayed up talking for a while and the way he was laying, with one of his legs over mine, I could feel it on my thigh when he started getting hard.”

“What were you talking about?” you ask.

“Oh, nothing in particular,” Jongho says, obviously feigning indifference. “He brought up the dress you were wearing to the wedding—you’d sent that mirror selfie in the group chat when San-hyung asked how it was going, remember? It wasn’t anything provocative, of course, but it seemed to get Yeosang-hyung going—”

“Shut up,” Yeosang wails.

Jongho gleefully does not. “Then we started talking about clothes. Hyung let me know that he liked the suit I’d worn for the photoshoot we did earlier that week. He really liked it, in fact. I don’t know if it was because he was tired or still a bit tipsy that he didn’t realize he was trying to get himself off on my thigh.”

“Please stop talking.”

“Aw, but hyung, it was so cute.”

“Great,” Yeosang sighs. “Exactly the word I want you to use when you describe the first time we slept together.”

You say, “One last question. Yeosang said last night that you’d been wanting to include me since the first time. How did you…I mean. Did you just know because he was talking about my dress, Jongho-ya?”

Jongho cuts Yeosang a saccharine smile. “Would you like to tell her, Yeosangie-hyung? You were the one who did it, after all.”

Yeosang shakes his head frantically. “No. Nononono.”

“But you were the one who made her wonder,” Jongho goads. “What, you don’t want to tell her we had to talk about it because you were moaning both of our names even though she wasn’t touching you? Wasn’t even in the same city as us?”

You’re blushing just as much as Yeosang. Maybe more. The desire that had been building low in your stomach since you kissed both of them pulses, heightening into a raw, unignorable need.

“I ask because I…” You take a deep breath. While you’re aware you had started down this path when you’d kissed, admitting what you’re about to is crossing a line you can’t uncross.

And you don’t want to.

“Because I kind of haven’t been able to get what I heard when I walked in on you out of my head.”

Yeosang slowly unfurls from his full-body cringe, haltingly intrigued like a curious gopher poking its head out of a hole in the ground. By contrast, the immediacy with which Jongho perks up with his own intrigue is better likened to those videos of cats hearing their automatic feeder beep and tripping over their own limbs with how fast they shoot over to it.

“If you liked that, just wait until you hear what else we’ve said about you.” He sends Yeosang a meaningful look that causes Yeosang to cover his face with his hands. “Don’t get shy, hyung, normally your mouth can be so filthy.”

You can barely reconcile that with how bashful he’s being as he whimpers, embarrassed. The sound shocks straight into the growing pit of warmth at the base of your spine. You want to hear him do that again. You want to be the one to make him do it again.

This must show in your expression, since Jongho murmurs, “He tells me all the time what he wants you to do to him. What he wants to do to you. Whether he wants to be the one doing or having things done to him depends on the day.”

Yeosang keeps hiding his face.

“What were you saying the other week? About her thighs?”

Yeosang whines again, shakes his head without dropping his hands.

“Ah, hyung, don’t hide from us.” Jongho tries to pry Yeosang’s arms down, but he flops over and twists to hide in the pillows instead. “Go on, tell her.”

A pause, a pained mewl, and then, through a mouthful of pillowcase: “Iwantyoutosuffocatemewithyourthighssofuckingbad.”

“You…Oh.”

One big brown cow eye, framed by a flush that blends in with his birthmark, emerges from the pillow. “Too much?”

“No,” you say, coming to the realization in real time. “No, I just wasn’t expecting it. Yeosang-ah, you’re so cute. Do you know that?”

“Oh my god.” It comes out mumbled, as he’s shoved his face back into the pillow with a ferocity that speaks to a desire to suffocate himself in a far less enjoyable way. “I’m fighting for my life to be sexy and you think I’m cute. Someone kill me before I die of embarrassment.”

When you tug him up, he lets himself be manhandled, but his eyes are squeezed shut. You shift him into your lap, and his eyes open, startled, his hands landing instinctively on your waist before he can fall facefirst into your chest.

“Let me explain,” you tell him. “I think it’s cute how shy you’re being. I think it’s very hot that you want to suffocate between my thighs. You can be both cute and hot at once. In fact, I think both of you are very good at it. I’d like to see a demonstration of what else you’re good at, Yeosang-ah.”

“I don’t know if I’d say I’m good. I’ve never—I mean, not with a girl…”

“He’s very good with his mouth,” Jongho supplies. “I bet he’d learn fast. I can teach you, hyung.”

Yeosang blinks slowly at Jongho. You anticipate another cringe, a deepening of his blush, but a resolved determination settles over his delicate features. “Yes. Please.”

The thing about being with two people at once, you discover, is that it provides perfect opportunities to gang up on one person. Case in point: when you pull Yeosang into another kiss, Jongho slides in next to him to press wet, openmouthed kisses down his throat. You have to separate to allow Jongho to rid Yeosang of his shirt, and you use that pause to remove your own in solidarity.

At the sound of your shirt thumping to the carpet, Jongho lifts his head from where he’d been skimming his tongue along the line of Yeosang’s collarbone. For a moment you regret not changing into a nicer bra than the plain one you’d thrown on that morning—it’s not as if you’d anticipated ending up here when you got dressed for the day—but Jongho smiles softly and says, “Pretty. Isn’t she pretty, hyung?”

“Stop,” you grumble, and come closer to capture his lips with yours before he can say anything else with such knee-weakening sincerity.

But Jongho curls back, affectionately displeased. “What? I can’t compliment you?”

“What you can do is take this off,” you say, tugging at the collar of his button-up shirt. “Equal exchange.”

“Go on, then.” He holds out his arms in equal parts invitation and taunt.

Rolling your eyes, you bend to the task, starting from the bottom with full intentions of kissing him when you reach the top. Yeosang beats you to it. You fumble with the middle buttons at the sound: the slick slide of their mouths, the affected hitches in their breathing.

They don’t need to break apart for you to slip the shirt off Jongho’s shoulders. But his undershirt does need to go over his head, which, judging from how far his tongue is in Yeosang’s mouth, isn’t happening right this second.

Still, since Jongho lives in high-collared shirts and zipped-up hoodies, you rarely, if ever, see much below the swell of his Adam’s apple. The exposed expanse of his forearms and the sharp jut of his clavicle feel scandalous. You can’t stop from licking a long stripe on the column of his golden neck from the collar of his undershirt up to the curve of his jaw.

He makes a “mmmfph,” noise against Yeosang’s lips and looks down at you like you’re crazy. Yeosang dissolves into giggles.

Without removing your attention from Jongho’s stunned face, you say, “Isn’t he pretty, Sang-ah?”

Jongho’s eyes narrow. He pulls off his own undershirt, perfunctory, and does not allow you a chance to touch or even truly look before he’s kissing you again, hard and with intent. One finger gently tilts your head to the side, and you let him maneuver you without understanding why until you feel Yeosang press his lips to the sensitive part of your neck. How elegantly you’ve been cornered.

The thing about being with two people at once is that it provides perfect opportunities to gang up on one person. This is significantly more nerve-wracking when you are the one being ganged up on.

They work together with a nonverbal communication that speaks to experience and years of friendship. You end up reclined against Yeosang’s mountain of pillows, Jongho sucking lightly at your shoulder in a way you hope won’t bruise, and Yeosang kissing his way down your stomach. When he gets low enough you cut him some slack and shove off your own pants so he doesn’t have to stumble through asking—and maybe you’re getting a little impatient, sue you—and he immediately presses his lips to the soft inside of your thigh.

You’ve sunk into the feeling of both of their mouths warm and wet on you that you aren’t able to bite back the gasp that escapes you when Yeosang kisses your clit through the thin fabric of your underwear.

Jongho, who had migrated to kissing the tops of your breasts where they’re spilling out of your bra and was likely considering unclasping that next, glances down at Yeosang, eyebrows raised. “I thought you wanted me to teach you?”

Yeosang looks only a little sheepish. And you’re more than a little conflicted over how to feel about how cute this is while he’s shirtless between your bare legs. “I know how to kiss, Jongho-ya. I still need your help with everything after.”

“Okay, hyung,” Jongho says indulgently as he moves down to join Yeosang.

The hand Yeosang has on your right thigh prevents you from fully closing your legs, but your left one folds in instinctively. Seemingly sensing your nerves at having their undivided attention on you, Jongho doesn’t lie down next to Yeosang and begin the lesson immediately. Instead he gifts Yeosang with another kiss, one hand on Yeosang’s cheek in a touch contrastingly innocent to how his right hand nudges your other thigh until your legs part again.

You hold your breath, waiting, but they don’t turn to you yet, giving you a moment to collect yourself. You’re so distracted by the brief flashes of tongue visible in the scant space between them that you barely notice Jongho’s hand sliding up to push your panties aside. His fingers ghost over your folds, tantalizing in that he’s exactly where you want him but not applying enough pressure to do anything. He drags down into the wetness building around your hole and then further up to spread you open.

A whimper punches out of you, a sound you’ve never heard yourself make, and never would make again if you had any say in the matter. It gets Jongho and Yeosang to separate and finally gaze down at you. If you felt exposed before it’s nothing compared to now, under the dual weight of their stares—Yeosang’s awed and disbelieving, Jongho’s molten and heavy—but you can’t close your legs with how they’re holding you.

“Cute,” Yeosang says as he shuffles down the bed to get his mouth closer to your pussy.

You cover your face. “Can someone kill me, too?”

Jongho moves his fingers just so, brushing your clit, and you hiss out a jagged breath. “No one’s dying. Hyung, why don’t you start with—”

But Yeosang has already leaned in and sucked your clit into his mouth.

All the breath in your lungs shudders out of you. The specific combination of his mouth on you while Jongho holds you open for him is driving you insane despite the tentative, uncertain swirl of Yeosang’s tongue.

“Are you sure you even need help?” Jongho says, terribly amused.

Yeosang’s already out of breath when he replies, “I liked the sound she made when you touched her there. I wanted to get her to do it again. But I…don’t know what else to do.”

“Keep doing what you were. It’s the same principle as with me, except a little more like kissing. Sometimes you want to lick, other times you want to suck. Just listen to how she sounds. And watch your teeth.”

“I’m right here,” you halfheartedly complain, although you don’t hate how they’re talking about you like you aren’t.

Yeosang sets to work again, his face scrunched adorably in concentration. Jongho was right, he is a fast learner. He alternates licking in broad stripes and sucking your clit gently into his mouth, as instructed, gazing wide-eyed up at you to gauge your reactions.

When he pulls away, you let out a sound of desperate protest you’d prefer to pretend never happened. Yeosang brushes his thumb soothingly over your hipbone. “I’m not going anywhere, ____. Just taking these off, okay?” He helps lift you up so he can slide off your underwear. They’re so soaked from your own wetness and from his saliva that you’re shocked they don’t make some gross squelching sound when they join the rest of your clothes on the floor.

You don’t even have it in you to be embarrassed—by that or by your moan when he starts lapping at you again.

Distantly, you hear Jongho say, “I have an idea for you, Yeosang-hyung. Do you want to try?” Yeosang’s affirmative hum vibrates against you, and Jongho says, “Go a little lower.”

Yeosang obeys, his tongue slipping hot through your folds all the way down to your hole. “Can I—I want—inside. Is that what I’m supposed to…Is that what you—?”

God, he sounds halfway to destroyed and he hasn’t even been touched. This might be the wettest you’ve been in your entire life, and it only multiplies when Jongho murmurs, “Go on, hyung, trust yourself,” and Yeosang plunges his tongue into you.

“Oh my—Yeosang,” you gasp.

“Do you like that, noona?” Jongho says in calm contrast to the ragged sounds you’re making and Yeosang’s inability to string together a complete sentence. With Yeosang’s mouth occupied, Jongho uses the fingers still spreading your pussy open to circle your clit, jolting sparks of pleasure across your whole body. “I thought you would. Hyung’s doing so well, isn’t he?”

Yeosang whines. It’s such a lovely sound. Before you can think of a way to make it happen again, his nose nudges your clit and you jerk up into his mouth.

“You might want to hold her down,” Jongho suggests. Obedient to the last, Yeosang’s hands come up to grip your hips. At your noise of discontent, Jongho gently shushes you.

“I want—” you start, but Yeosang interrupts.

“Let me. Please. We’ve got you.”

They keep going, spurred on by the increasingly frequent ah-ahs you’re making and your hands: one in Yeosang’s hair, the other clawing at Jongho’s thigh. Yeosang, gaining confidence, alternates between fucking into you with his tongue and dragging it up to suck at your clit, nudging Jongho’s fingers out of the way.

Your discontent at Jongho no longer touching you is quickly assuaged by him asking, “Noona, do you want hyung’s fingers?”

You can hardly breathe, let alone remember how to nod, but you jerk your head enough to get the point across.

That isn’t enough for Jongho. “Words, please.”

“Yeah, yes, please, yeah.”

“Start with one,” Jongho directs Yeosang.

“No, you can—shit—you can do two.”

Jongho raises an eyebrow. You raise one right back.

“It’s how I usually do it,” you say simply, unable to find shame given the present circumstances.

His lips part in something close to awe. “Later, we’re going to talk, in detail, about how you touch yourself.”

“We’re…we’re what now? Why would we—oh fuck.”

This is because Yeosang takes the initiative to slide two fingers into you, certain and smooth, and begins pumping them like he was born knowing how.

“She’s so wet, Jongho-ya,” he murmurs. “So nice, feels like when I do this to you.”

Based on how tonight has been going, you had assumed you had a good idea of their typical dynamic. This new information upends that completely. You’re showered with a sudden flurry of images: the two fingers curling inside of you now, inside of Jongho; Jongho’s face twisted with pleasure as Yeosang fucks recklessly into him.

Your body must react, because Yeosang smirks. “Do you like the thought of that, ____?”

A shaky moan slips through your teeth without permission. There’s so much you want; you’re starving to know what they’ve done together, what else they want to do with you. It’s like when you don’t think you’re hungry but the second you smell food you realize you’re ravenous. Greedy, you want everything, and you want it right this second.

“Please,” you gasp, not entirely sure what you’re asking for, only more. “pleaseplease.”

Yeosang isn’t the type to tease, not like Jongho. Yeosang is, you’re finding, the type to obey. He drops his mouth to your cunt and does what you asked.

You feel your orgasm approach from miles away and the intensity of it still manages to catch you off guard. Yeosang works you through it, the singular hand he has holding your hips down no longer enough to prevent you from bucking up against his mouth, but he moves with you while you get out broken syllables vaguely resembling his name.

“Oh my god,” you say, dazed. “Are you sure you’d never done that before?”

He smiles, the rounded edges of his teeth peeking out from his glistening lips. “I had a good teacher.”

Jongho kisses him while you catch your breath (something hungry in you trembles when you realize he’s tasting you on Yeosang’s lips), and then shifts up to kiss you too. “Good, noona?”

“You know it was, why do you need to ask?”

Yeosang remains where he is, his cheek soft on your thigh, his wet fingers on your hip, which should be gross but is kind of hot—and then his tongue is back on your clit.

You twitch, both confused and overwhelmed. For a moment, you think he’s giving a couple licks to tease or to see how sensitive you are, but…no, he’s not stopping.

“Sang-ah, ah, wait, I’m good. I came.” Does he not know that? If he’s never done this before, it’s not out of the question. Not that you want him to stop, but it’d be selfish to just do this all night. You want to focus on them, too, even if on the other side of this sensitivity is a bone-deep pleasure you want to fall headfirst into.

“I know. And I want you to again.” Yeosang blinks guilelessly up at you. “I need to show you and Jongho-ya that I learned well.”

How could you possibly deny him, when he asks so sweetly?

This time around, Jongho doesn’t kneel beside Yeosang to supervise. He wrangles you out of your bra, kisses down your neck, thumbing over the peaks of your nipples as Yeosang, unexpectedly relentless, slides one of your legs over his shoulders and presses a third finger into you.

“Is he making you feel good, noona?”

“Mm-hmm. B—both of you.”

“Tell him. Hyung likes it when you tell him.”

“Yeosang,” you get out on a broken exhale. “Sang-ah, feels good, so good, please don’t stop.”

It makes zero sense that the youngest of you has the most control. You can’t think, and Yeosang is whimpering so bad you almost can’t believe all that is being caused by what little friction he’s getting through his briefs from rubbing against the comforter. Jongho remains mostly composed, only betrayed by the dark voids of his pupils, the redness in his bitten lips, and the bulge in his pants.

After you come again, your heel digging into Yeosang’s back and one hand tight on Jongho’s bicep, you decide that, another time, you’d like to see how many times Yeosang can make you come like that in a row. And to see how Jongho compares to him.

While you were riding out your orgasm, Jongho has sucked the fingers Yeosang just had inside of you into his own mouth with a casualness that makes your head spin even more than it already is. You drop your head back on the pillows and fight not to beg for him to let you ride his face immediately.

Greedy, you want everything, but you can’t have it right this second. Not everything, at least.

Here’s what you can have: You beckon Jongho closer. He comes readily, and oh do you like how well he listens. Something to explore further later. For now, you cup a hand around your mouth to whisper in his ear, “I want to fucking wreck him. Will you help me?”

Jongho’s answering grin is downright devious.

Somewhere along the line, you aren’t sure when, you think sometime before your second orgasm, Yeosang had taken off his loose lounge shorts, leaving him in only his briefs. The dark grey does nothing to obscure the wet spot on the front, and when you sit forward with your eyes on it, Yeosang squirms as if trying to hide. Cute. He goes pliant when you kiss him, sinking into you as you lick the taste of yourself off of him. Hot.

“Yeosangie, you did such a good job. Made me feel so good,” you tell him, sincere but with an added pinch of sugar just to see him shiver. “Will you let us make you feel good?”

His lips part as he looks first at you and then Jongho behind you. In the ensuing quiet, Yeosang’s swallow is audible. “Please.”

“Okay. Would you like to tell us what you want?”

How he manages to redden further, you have no idea, but he’s crimson down to his chest at this point. He shakes his head.

“No you don’t want anything?” Jongho, catching onto your game, sidles up beside you and plants his chin on your shoulder. The warmth of his bare skin is distracting. “Or no you don’t want to say?”

“I don’t want to say,” Yeosang admits.

“But why, hyung? You were just being so good for us.”

He squeezes his eyes shut but surrenders. He doesn’t try to cover his face again, which you count as progress. “I want your mouth, an—and your fingers.”

“Whose?” you prompt.

Despite seeming like he’d rather explode, Yeosang takes a deep breath and elaborates. “Your mouth and Jongho’s fingers.”

“Thank you, hyung. See, it wasn’t so hard. Noona, can you get the lube from his nightstand? In the second drawer down.”

Oh. The drawer has condoms in it, too. And a vibrator. And a few other fun items. Good to know. You return to them armed with lube and more things added to your ‘for later’ list.

While you were occupied, Jongho has divested himself and Yeosang of the last of their clothing—Yeosang’s briefs and his own pants and underwear—and you have to take a deep breath. This is in part due to how Jongho has maneuvered Yeosang flat on his back with his head at the foot of the bed, and has a loose fist wrapped around Yeosang’s cock.

Passing the lube to Jongho, you kneel on Yeosang’s right side, studying the way Jongho’s hand moves to get an idea of what he likes. He’s so reactive, even the lightest touch is making him quiver, and so wet, precum shining where Jongho has spread it.

Jongho withdraws his hand and uses it to push Yeosang’s legs open, not unlike how he’d done to you. With his other hand, he flips open the lube’s cap and squeezes a glob onto his fingers. “Will you be needing a lesson too, ____-noona?” he asks playfully.

“I’ll observe. So I know what to do for later.”

Yeosang whimpers, another blurt of precum spilling from him. “____…”

“Yes, Sangie?”

“Want you to—please.”

You feign innocence. “You want me to finger you? But you already asked Jongho.”

“No, I don’t care who—just, please, touch me, I need—ah.”

His voice breaks at the end. Belatedly, you realize it’s because Jongho has pressed one slick finger into him. Not to be outdone, you lean down and lick a wide, flat path up his dick before taking as much of it into your mouth as you can.

You’ve barely gotten started when Yeosang’s litany of unraveled whines gives way to: “Wait, wait, wait.”

Unsure if you did something wrong, you freeze and pull off. “Are you okay?”

“I’m gonna come if you don’t stop,” he breathes.

“Already?” Teasing him is so much fun; hearing him whimper again turns it addictive.

“Don’t make fun of me!”

You kiss the crease of his thigh. “I wasn’t making fun of you. I think it’s—”

“Please don’t say it’s cute.” He aims for deadpan but loses all sense of dryness when Jongho fucks his finger back into him and laps lightly at his rim. “Oh, fuck, oh.”

“Come help me then, if he doesn’t want you touching his dick,” Jongho says to you.

At first you don’t understand; Jongho seems to have this down to a science. You let him show you what he wants ‘help’ with as he drizzles lube on your fingers and guides you to slide one into Yeosang beside his.

Clumsily, you both try to hit the same rhythm, the hot line of Jongho’s arm flush against yours. Yeosang is keyed up enough—and, by your guess, overwhelmed at being tag-teamed—that he doesn’t seem to mind the initial awkwardness, judging from the pleas he’s choking on. You follow Jongho’s lead, aiming for Yeosang’s prostate once the violent jerk of his body lets you know you’ve found it.

When Yeosang starts babbling, you wonder if he’s ever come untouched. You’re about to ask Jongho, but Jongho reaches up to smack Yeosang’s hand away where it’d snuck down to grab at his own cock.

“I thought you didn’t want to come yet, hyung.”

“No, no, I do, please, I can’t, I can’t.”

“Let me,” you say, echoing his words from earlier. “We’ve got you.”

With your free hand, you only have to jerk him twice before he’s coming across your knuckles and his own stomach, smothering his moans against his forearm.

“Pretty,” you say, partly because it’s true and partly to see Yeosang get shy again, but he’s too fucked out to react. You start to wipe your lube- and cum-covered hands on his sheets, and that gets a grunt of protest from him. “Calm down, they’re already nasty. You’re going to have to do laundry anyway.”

Before you can get off the remainder of Yeosang’s cum, Jongho takes your wrist and drags his tongue over your knuckles to clean them. You and Yeosang go completely still. Then he wipes his lubey hands on the sheets as well. Notably, Yeosang doesn’t make a sound.

Jongho looks up to find you both staring at him. “What?”

Your next words are hoarse from how dry your throat has gone. “It’s your turn, that’s what.”

He seems, for a beat, as if he’s going to give you instructions. That won’t do. You want to see him lose control. You want to be the reason that calm, unaffected demeanor shatters, and you doubt it will be as plainly given as Yeosang’s submission—which only makes you want it more.

“I want to ride you,” you tell him.

He smiles indulgently. “Good, because I was going to ask if you would.”

After pressing a soft kiss to Yeosang’s cheek, Jongho moves to sit where you had been before, against the head of the bed with his legs splayed out, unashamed of having his entire dick out and uncaring of the damp spot you’d left there.

Annoyed by how at ease he looks, as if he couldn’t care less whether you come sit on his cock or if he has to finish himself off, you grit your teeth and straddle his lap, purposely maneuvering so his cock slides between your folds without fully entering you. You’re rewarded with a low, shuddery moan.

He presses a thumb to the corner of your smirking mouth. “Proud of yourself?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You do,” Jongho argues, shifting his hips to push the head of his cock teasingly over your clit. From what you can feel, he’s just as wet as Yeosang was. You cling onto his shoulders—sturdy with hidden muscle, tacky with sweat—to keep from collapsing. “Aren’t we past lying to each other by now?”

Whatever you might’ve said next is drowned out by your hitching gasp as he pulls you forward and you receive the dual sensations of your chests pressing together and his tip teasing at your dripping entrance.

“Hyung,” Jongho says over your shoulder, and the tremor in his voice would bring back your smirk if you weren’t so quickly devolving into desperation, “can you get a condom, please?”

“No, don’t,” you tell Yeosang without turning. “Don’t need one, just—Jongho-ya, please.”

You push closer at the same time that he cants his hips up; like this, together, you sink onto him.

“Oh, fuck,” Jongho says under his breath and presses his forehead against yours, his careful poise wavering. “Fuck, noona, you’re perfect, do you know that? Do you?”

For all your need to see his composure crack further, you can’t summon enough of your own composure to respond. The only thing you can do is fall into your instinct to move, rocking back and forth into that perfect feeling of fullness.

Jongho’s breath comes out in a series of delicious, erratic grunts. His hands drop from your waist to the space where your ass curves into your thighs, and he uses that grip to help you pull up and drop back down onto him. The slight change in angle hits just right to snag a whine out of you despite the burn in your thighs.

The mattress dips behind you and Yeosang is there, the plane of his chest hard on your back. One of his hands creeps down your stomach, then two fingers circle your clit with the expert aim only someone who’s made you climax before can have.

The hottest thing is how Yeosang’s other hand joins Jongho’s at the juncture of your upper thigh. How the pressure of their grips, layered together, keeps urging you to fuck yourself on Jongho’s cock. How you don’t have to see Yeosang to know he’s making heated eye contact with Jongho over your shoulder when you surrender the game and tip forward until your forehead meets Jongho’s collarbone. How Yeosang’s fingers keep drifting down to frame where Jongho is sliding in and out of you.

You tilt your head up and lick a line up Jongho’s sweaty, golden throat for the second time tonight.

“You have a thing for my neck or something?”

“It’s a nice neck,” you mumble, and lick it again.

“Not like you’ve never seen it.”

“Not like this, I haven’t.”

It’s your last coherent sentence before he starts fucking up into you harder and you dissolve into wrecked cries. You can hear Jongho and Yeosang kissing sloppily over your shoulder; Jongho says, into Yeosang’s mouth, “Come for me, noona.”

You clench hard around him, reveling in the choked sound it yanks from him. “You f—first.”

Maybe earlier he would have fought back, would have taunted, would have made this into some drawn-out challenge. But he doesn’t seem capable of any of that right now. Another bolt of pride surges through you. You did that.

He does come first.

You have a split second to feel victorious before the combination of his subdued yet broken groans, the hot pulse of him spilling inside you, and Yeosang flicking his fingers just right has you following right behind.

You come for the third time that night trapped between them, exactly where you want to be.

★☆★☆★

“Hold on. We never said…” Yeosang says into the quiescent dark, right when you were on the precipice of sleep. “Are we, like, official? Dating? I don’t know what word to use.”

You had migrated to your bedroom, as Yeosang’s bed was too filthy with sweat, lube, cum, and who knew what else, and no one was interested in doing a midnight load of laundry. Your mattress wasn’t made with three people in mind. You’re making it work by clinging koalalike to Jongho, who was unanimously voted into taking the middle because Yeosang flails in his sleep and you run too hot to be trapped between two bodies.

“Oh. Right,” you say. “I guess we didn’t discuss it directly.”

Your brain trips and stumbles over two separate thoughts: (1) that you’re in love with them, and (2) that you already have a mental to-do list for the next time(s) you have sex. You adamantly refuse to admit to either of these until at least twenty-four hours have passed, in the interest of retaining your dignity.

Jongho sighs heavily. “You’re both so stupid. Obviously we’re official. Dating. Together. Boyfriends and girlfriend. However you want to phrase it. Go the hell to sleep.”

“Yah, don’t speak to your elders that way.” Yeosang aims a halfhearted whack at Jongho that glances uselessly off his bicep.

“Yeah, yeah. Wait until I tell ____-noona that when you were moaning her name the first time we slept together, you kept calling her noona.”

You sit up so fast you get lightheaded. “WHAT?”

★☆★☆★

YUNHO Good morning…

HONGJOONG Good morning? Since when do you send unsolicited good morning texts? With ominous punctuation?

YUNHO Since I discovered something However I don’t want to blow up anyone’s spot so I will let them come forward

WOOYOUNG elaborate. now.

YUNHO That’s all I’m saying

WOOYOUNG HMMM idk what you would have discovered between leaving mingi’s dorm and going back to yours. and i know there was nothing to discover in mingi’s dorm because san and i would have discovered it too. and you didn’t look like you had just discovered something when you left

SEONGHWA How many times are you going to say ‘discover’ youngie

WOOYOUNG it was yunho’s word i’m just borrowing it

MINGI Well he didn’t tell me about any discovery before he left so it must be something in his dorm

SAN Do we get a hint, Yunho?

YUNHO Three of us are being real quiet in here Is all I’m saying

WOOYOUNG oh my god jeong yunho what do you know

YOU why are you putting this in the group chat, judas???

YUNHO Because you three have been fucking up the group’s vibe crazy style for the last week and if it’s finally sorted out the people deserve to know

YOU i know where you sleep you fucker ‘don’t want to blow up anyone’s spot’ I Am Going To Blow Up Everything You Own

SEONGHWA Whoa! Let’s not do that please

JONGHO It’s sorted out I will not be explaining further

WOOYOUNG JJONGIE MY BELOVED MAKNAE MY BEST BOY PLEASE EXPLAIN FURTHER ____ PROBABLY WON’T TELL ME I HAD TO CROWBAR THE TRUTH OUT OF HER AND SHE WON’T LET IT HAPPEN AGAIN

JONGHO And what makes you think *I’m* telling you anything, crowbar or otherwise?

WOOYOUNG fair point oh yeooooosaaangggg

YEOSANG no

WOOYOUNG PLEASE? come on if this is what i think it is we should all know all of us made our announcements like right after it happened :( why are you gatekeeping :(

YEOSANG let me commune with my advisors and see what I am permitted to say

MINGI Brother what. Why did you turn medieval

YEOSANG I have permission from the council to inform you that ____, Jongho, and I are in a relationship no further questions at this time

WOOYOUNG YYYEEESSSSSSS

SEONGHWA 💃♥️🥳!!!!!

HONGJOONG👍

SAN Yay! 💗 Happy for you guys!

WOOYOUNG yunho how exactly did you discover this i need details don’t tell me you walked in on them

YUNHO Nothing crazy actually, I was just confused bc I got back early and Yeosang should’ve been asleep but his door was open and he wasn’t in his bed. Also there were clothes everywhere that I knew weren’t his Then Jongho came out of ____’s room in his boxers to get a water bottle. I gasped out loud

JONGHO Does this not count as blowing up our spot, hyung

MINGI Wait wtf why are none of you surprised?? Did everyone know about this except for me? HOW?

YUNHO I made Sangie tell me bc he was being suspicious about ____ going on a date with a rando

WOOYOUNG hwa hyung and i knew bc of ____

HONGJOONG ^ Same.

SAN Jjongie told me the absolute bare minimum and I kind of assumed the rest

YUNHO So ____ confided in three different people…wow. Is this a parallel universe? Where am I…

YOU Everything You Own, jeong yunho

HONGJOONG Please refrain from bringing explosives into the building where all of us live, thank you! And everyone, don’t forget the group schedule at 11. Don’t bring explosives to that either, ____.

★☆★☆★

You’re at the head of the table again, watching the others pass drinks around and bicker over what meat to order. Four on either side of you, the couples sitting in pairs across from each other, Jongho to your left, Yeosang to your right.

It works itself out neatly, to sit nine people divided into two, two, two, and three like this.

It also puts a sour taste at the back of your mouth that has nothing to do with the citrus soju Mingi had poured for you.

You raise your voice enough to catch everyone’s attention, even San and Wooyoung at the far end. “Everyone get up. We’re playing musical chairs.”

Eight confused faces stare back at you. “What?” San finally says.

“We need to switch seats,” you clarify. “We’re being annoying.”

“...To who?” Wooyoung asks.

“To me.”

Yunho frowns. “How?”

“It’s…” You struggle for the right way to say it without making them feel bad. “Look, just because we’re all—” you’re in the restaurant’s private room but it feels unsafe to say aloud, so you skip the word altogether in favor of a meaningful tilt of your head “—doesn’t mean we have to be paired up at all times. I don’t want us to be like that. Like…like it’s a given that we’re going to do everything forever with whoever we’re…involved with.”

Yeosang and Jongho are acutely aware of your feelings on this subject—and they’ve only learned more since you’d explained to them how difficult it was for you to differentiate between your romantic and your platonic attraction to them. How you have never understood the need to be in love when your friends have always been more than enough.

Perhaps you should’ve thought this through more before attempting to tell your friends, ‘hey, I love you, you’re some of my favorite people ever, please don’t let that we’re all in relationships within the group change the shapes our platonic relationships take’ by declaring a game of musical chairs.

“I just don’t get why it’s such a big deal,” Yunho says. “You’ve never said anything about this before.”

“Yes, I did,” you sigh. “And I was accused of jealousy every time. Which isn’t an argument you can make anymore.”

Wooyoung has the grace to look chastened.

You swallow. “I know everyone is going to put their partner first, that isn’t unique to us. But can we make an effort to not always do everything all the time in pairs?”

“Isn’t it a trio, in your case?” Mingi says hesitantly.

The strange tension that had settled over the room fractures. You roll your eyes.

Hongjoong has been giving you a long look—something about the combination of his role as leader and that he’s known you longest gives him the uncanny ability to see right through you. “You heard her,” he says. “Everyone grab a new seat.”

You can tell the others are humoring you by the way San salutes and shoots to his feet while Wooyoung says, “Yes, Captain!” But you don’t care if they don’t completely understand. So long as they try.

A few minutes of chaos ensue as chairs are exchanged, personal belongings are moved, and drinks are misplaced. You end up sandwiched between Mingi and Seonghwa. Jongho has taken your old seat at the head of the table; you can feel him trying to catch your eye, but you don’t let it happen. If he has something to say, he can say it later, when you and him and Yeosang have each other all to yourselves in the private hours of night.

Right now, Mingi is roping you into his bickering with Hongjoong about how it doesn’t matter that he ‘doesn’t like green,’ he is a grown ass man who needs to eat his damn vegetables, and you let yourself be dragged into the argument willingly, wry and amused, loving and loved.

★★★★★

tags: @plan3t-plut0, @rooks-tattooed-boob, @fruitymoonbeams-blog

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

★☆★☆★