Chapter Text
234 days
Mingyu loves his friends. He really does.
Any other time and he would've probably helped them out. But when he's being dragged to the mall during Hell Week of all days… well, he has to draw the line. He takes academics (read: his rivalry with Wonwoo) quite seriously, after all.
However, it should be said that when begged enough (and really, it should count as a kink with how much Mingyu enjoys begging), he would come with because Mingyu is actually a total pushover. Might be a little annoying about it but definitely easily coerced.
"How does this look?" Eunwoo asks, turning to his supposed company while holding up a baby blue Ralph & Lauren polo. "Mingyu?"
Yugyeom peeks at them from behind the rack of trousers he was sifting through, at the sound of his friend's name, frowning when he doesn't see the body attached to it. "Where's he?"
Eunwoo groans and tilts his head around the store to try and spot a certain dark-haired, incorrigible male as if Mingyu isn't six-foot-two with a build much taller than the mannequins they have on display that literally spotting him would be like finding a needle in a haystack.
Yugyeom leans on the rack and inspects a pair of plaid trousers. "Well, he's gone, isn't he?"
Eunwoo nods and turns back to the baby blue polo he was holding up with a sigh. "He had the attention span of a gnat. God, I swear he's like a child sometimes."
Yugyeom snickers. "He is. But he's also twenty-two and can handle himself so you don't have to worry about him. You baby him all the time like a sitter."
Eunwoo scoffs, indignant. "I do not."
Yugyeom throws him a look which the latter pretends he doesn't see. "Yes, you do; but you're not ready for that conversation. Anyway, you should totally get that. The blue suits your skin tone."
Eunwoo rolls his eyes and decides to drop the topic. "I was already planning to."
In Mingyu's defense, he'd gone to buy a drink for himself to pass the time when he found Jeon Wonwoo shopping for hoodies at the adjacent store. And, honestly, it shouldn't've been fascinating, but it is: first of all, Mingyu is relieved that he's not the only one being dragged away from his textbooks if only because he thinks it wouldn't have been fair if Jeon Wonwoo maintained Rank 1 just because he was forced to chaperone his friends; second of all, it isn't his business but it's also a tad bit interesting that Jeon Wonwoo's wardrobe seem to mostly consist of winter clothes even when it's thirty degrees out and thirty minutes under the sweltering sun could make anyone break out a sweat; and lastly, for some reason which Mingyu refuses to put a name to, his eyes always seem to find Jeon Wonwoo, drawn to him like a magnet— no, a gravitational force—and reeling him in like a moon resigned to orbit a planet.
Even when he isn't purposefully trying to be, he's oh so painfully aware of him. Always . And it's how he finds himself blindly perusing the aisles of Gap as well, cold Iced Americano in hand.
"Like this one? It's wool inside," Jun asks, holding up a navy blue hoodie that looked way too big for his best friend who, despite being bulked up, still had a dorito figure that Mingyu thinks he could break if he so much as hugs him.
Not that he's ever thought of doing that, no sir.
Wonwoo perks up and lets Jun drape the hoodie over his already hooded frame, and from the back of Mingyu's mind he thinks, Navy isn't his color . Mingyu, in fact, looks at his own pick of a burgundy hoodie and smirks, believing that this certain color would look absolutely stunning on Wonwoo's pale, pale skin. How he arrived at that conclusion, he simply brushes off as having better fashion sense than any of Wonwoo's friends combined (actually, false).
"Looks warm," the boy in question mumbles, bringing a sweater pawed-hand out of the pockets of his jacket to thumb through the material.
And Mingyu tries not to pay attention but from where he's standing, he can see that Wonwoo's fingers looked frostbitten: red and swollen. If asked how he notices, well, he doesn't really have any answer other than Wonwoo irks him. He irks him so much that everything about Wonwoo irks him: like how Wonwoo always seems to be gripping ice cubes in his hands that Mingyu itches to stuff in his own jacket pockets because he's a really good heater, okay? Or how Wonwoo seemed to have something against better fitting and structured clothes that Mingyu has actually, subconsciously dressed him in, knowing the bare minimum about the other's physique from a physical check up he'd been able to witness before.
"They have it in black," Soonyoung says, holding up the same hoodie except, as he says, it's in the darker color. "The more it absorbs light, the better, right?"
The boy only nods and holds out his arm so that Soonyoung could drape the hoodie on top of it where, Mingyu notices, two others have already been hanging, both in varying shades of black.
"You know, if it wasn't for that incident our first year, you could probably survive off of wearing bubble jackets," Jun says.
And Mingyu tries again because even when he doesn't want to he's always trying around Wonwoo; tries not to be so interested and invested in him. But when his number one nemesis dresses like he's going through a personal apocalypse, well, Mingyu kinda wants to know why. Partly because he's his nemesis and he feels the need to be the reason Wonwoo is suffering (if he is), but mostly because every other itch he cannot scratch revolves around wanting to do something to Wonwoo.
All bad things, Mingyu likes to think.
"Nah," Wonwoo says. "I think I was in over my head on that one. It barely kept me warm. Useful during winter, though. Not so much when it's summer and I'm just internally freezing."
Mingyu's internal rambling doesn't get very far when Wonwoo and his friends are suddenly moving towards his direction. And Mingyu isn't exactly hiding, but he's not about to be caught snooping in on Jeon Wonwoo's daily life.
Not that that's what he was doing, no sir. Can't he go looking for hoodies in Gap too?