Chapter Text
Clean sheets, check. Pillows fluffed, check. Scented candle extinguished? Not check, shit.
You shuffled quickly over to your bedside table and blew out the tiny flame, breathing in the smell of evergreen and sandalwood before waving away the small curls of smoke that rose from the wicks. You then surveyed the room for any more pre-customer checklist items, but the apartment looked spick and span. You’d chosen a mellow color scheme for your walls and furniture after leaving on-campus housing--a blend of soft gray, white, and sage green-- and you’d already received several assurances from regulars that the space felt as calm and cozy as the last. Even better than the old one.
You hoped so, because your newest customer would be arriving any minute and the answers he’d given in the profile suggested he’d been be a high-maintence one.
Along with a list of one-word responses and neatly marked responses on the preference sheet, Min Yoongi had requested the option to choose the couch or the bed after he had arrived and seen the place, had blocked off four hours of time, and had asked that you shower within two hours of his appointment (a normal request for a shifter customer but with his time slot, it meant you’d lose the entire afternoon for anything else). So you’d showered and blow-dried your hair after returning from class, left off all makeup and perfumes (you’d even used a shampoo and conditioner set designed for shifters, with very faint smells and free from chemicals), and put on your softest sweater and lounge pants. All this after cleaning the apartment from top to bottom and washing the thick quilted throw that you’d folded onto the couch.
At this point, you were ready for a nap too.
You checked the kitchen again, where you’d set out two mugs and several tea boxes in case he needed some help winding down, when the doorbell rang once, then again rather impatiently. You allowed yourself a quick frown before walking to the entrance and pulling a pair of clean slippers from the shoe rack.
Taking two deep breaths, you unlocked the door and opened it.
It was a typical rainy, cold and miserable January day outside, and perhaps that and the insomnia had combined to make Min Yoongi appear almost ghostly in the gray light of the cloudy afternoon. He had a couple inches on you at the most, with his bleached blond hair sticking up in all different directions and accounting for at least one of said inches. His baggy sweater and jeans both looked like they’d seen better days, and the dark circles under his eyes were two identical and painful purple smudges on his pale skin. He seemed exhausted and irritable and in need of a good cuddle.
Well. He’d come to the right place.
“Min Yoongi?” You asked softly, before opening the door completely when he gave a quick nod. “It’s nice to meet you. I’m Y/N. Please come inside.”
Without a word, he stepped into the entrance area and tugged his sneakers off with a wet thud on the tiled floor, his wary gaze trained on you from the corner of his eye. You brushed it off without much thought-- your customers were typically kinda taciturn and surly at first.
In a carefully relaxed voice, you offered him the slippers and lead him further into the apartment, gesturing to the chair where he could put his backpack and taking his coat to hang up and dry on the coat hanger. You gave him a quick tour of the layout and offered him a cup of tea, which he refused with a shake of his head and a frown.
“So... do you have any other questions?” You asked, watching him curiously as he looked around the living room with dull eyes.
“Not really...” he murmured back, his voice surprisingly deep compared to the rest of him.
“In the profile, you’d asked if you could choose between the couch or the bed when you got here. Do you know which one you’d like to try? We can always switch between them, if you feel uncomfortable.”
Yoongi sighed heavily and glanced at the plushy couch and the quilted throw before peering into the bedroom again. Then he turned to inspect you where you’re standing by the kitchen counter, his eyes dragging from the top of your head to your socked feet. “Couch.”
Everything about his behavior screamed skeptical. You’d encountered this many a time before, particularly when said customer had been referred by a friend or a psychiatrist and had already tried nearly everything else before resorting to paid cuddling. Which, you were perfectly willing to admit, was an odd job to have and rightfully made most people suspicious. But several clinical studies had recently shown how valuable skinship could be in treating mental illness and insomnia, particularly for shifters that didn’t like to interact physically or emotionally with other people.
Min Yoongi definitely seemed to belong in that last category.
“Okay,” you replied easily with a small smile, before walking slowly around the counter and into the living room. You picked up the thick throw at the end of the couch and held it in your arms, waiting as Yoongi reluctantly followed, his jaw tightening as he stared at the blanket in distrust.
His profile had definitely been a bit different than most predatory shifters, and you could only guess that the severity of the insomnia had forced him to be honest about his preferences rather than try to save face. Or he didn’t give a damn what you thought about him, regardless of whether or not you were about to get up close and personal. Both seemed like a solid bet.
You spread the blanket neatly out over the back of the couch before laying down on top of it, your back elevated slightly against the gently sloping armrest. With a few shimmies and adjustments, you folded yourself neatly into the cushions and made sure you were comfortable before looking up at the cat.
If you’d looked up the definition of uncomfortable-and-fuck-my-life, Min Yoongi’s picture would be under the center-fold. He glared down at you for a few moments, tense and extremely reluctant, before another heavy sigh passed through his thin frame. His hand rubbed roughly through his hair once before he shuffled closer, a flush rising from beneath the collar of his sweater.
Letting the slippers drop from his feet with two small kicks, Yoongi leaned over you and planted his hand on the cushion between your arm and the back of the couch, followed by his leg swinging over your hip. He glanced up at you, his glare almost daring you to laugh at him. You returned the look with a soft kind of patience that you’d learned from over a year doing this with people a lot more upset or depressed than Min Yoongi at this moment, and you watched something in his eyes relax.
He lowered himself on top of you, his weight somehow heavier than his appearance would suggest, and curled in between the back of the couch and your side. His arm slid cautiously over your stomach until his hand slipped between the cushion and your back, the cold from his skin sinking into your sweater. When this prompted no reaction from you, he fit his leg in between yours and stuffed his cold feet into the crease between the cushion and arm rest. For a moment, his head stayed poised over you, neck bent at an awkward angle to the rest of him, before finally dropping down to rest his face in the crook of your shoulder.
For a minute, you waited as he shifted here and there, stretching his back and turning his hip, before Yoongi relaxed. “Ready?” You whispered.
He nodded quietly, whatever expression he was making hidden against your sweater.
You reached up to the back of the couch, careful not to displace him, and tugged the blanket down over the two of you. You grabbed the remote from the side table and dimmed the overhead lights, leaving only the faint glow of the sky outside filtering in through the far windows. For the next few minutes, you focused on taking slow, deep breaths and slowing your heartbeat, sinking into the calm of the room and the growing warmth under the blanket, perfectly balanced by the slight chill of the room, and waited for Yoongi to follow.
To your surprise, he took to it beautifully.
Within minutes, his body had relaxed against yours, the muscles of his arm, back and leg loosing their tension and tightness until his weight rested entirely on you and the couch. His breathing grew steadily deeper, the quick thumping of his heart against your stomach slowed in tiny increments. His lids lowered slightly over his eyes, not fully closing but becoming steadily drowsier with every passing minute. A small ache of sympathy grew in your stomach when you realized how much he must have been struggling to respond like this.
A sleepy haze fell over the room, and around ten minutes had passed before you remembered another of Yoongi’s requests on his profile. You waited a bit longer to see if he would prompt you himself, but he didn’t move or shift from the little hollow he’d made for himself, still staring with half-lidded eyes at the far wall. Quietly, you lifted your arm from your side, slowly to not disturb him, and brushed it in a soft warning over his hair. You could see the movement of his eyelashes as he looked up at you consideringly, before another small sigh pushed through his chest and his cat ears grew from his head.
Most shifters wanted you to brush their hair or stroke their ears during their sessions. Another of your customers, a sweet dog shifter named Jimin that recently had his heart broken and had come to you for reassurance, liked to press his face into your stomach and just rest there with his arms around your waist and his ears out, whining every now and then when he thought your hand had stopped its endless brushing through his hair and ears. Most canine shifters in general really liked having their ears played with, and the few feline shifters that visited you did too but almost never until three or so sessions had passed and they’d grown more comfortable with you. Yoongi had requested it right out of the gate.
With gentle, lazy strokes, you smoothed back the hair from his forehead and cheek before curling around and scratching gently at the base of his cat ears. His hair was much softer than the bleached dry color would suggest, and his ears matched the black peaking from his roots rather than white blonde. He must’ve had his hood up for most of the journey to your apartment, because the silky texture below felt clean and dry, untouched by the rain.
When your arm began to feel tired from reaching over, you rested it on top of your chest and played with the nape of his neck for a while, drawing little designs with your finger tips into the soft skin there before sinking your hand into the back of his hair and scratching in sleepy, measured circles.
By the time an hour had passed, Yoongi had fallen dead asleep against you, his eyes firmly shut and dancing lightly beneath his lids in the prelude to a REM cycle. His lips had parted, small puffs of air warming the skin of your neck and drawing goosebumps along your skin, the occasional soft snore working its way from his slightly pinked nose. A faint rumbling had begun to vibrate along his neck and chest, a feline purr humming through his body and into yours with gently fluctuating vibrations as he breathed deeply.
You had to fight the pull of sleep as well, lulled by the purring, the cozy warmth of the blanket and the cuddling, the smell of rain and black coffee that lingered on Yoongi’s skin, but you continued to pet his hair and ears for the next three hours, alternating between his neck and breaks in between, sleepily gratified when he stayed asleep for the rest of the session.
When the clock struck six and his session was meant to be over, you had an internal debate. On the one hand, you had to keep with your schedule and enforce the rules of the contract-- it provided much needed boundaries between you and your customers and ensured that you had time in your day to do the necessary bits of life like go grocery shopping and cook dinner. Yoongi might have had something that he needed to do after six, hopefully something that included a good dinner because you’re genuinely concerned that he hasn’t been eating.
On the other hand, he was sleeping so well. It was actually kinda heartbreaking, how deeply he was sleeping, curled up against you and purring, and your heart melted at the image. The perpetual grimace that he’d brought into the apartment had slipped away, and something innocent and vulnerable had come in its place, and the last thing you really wanted to do was wake him up.
But you had to.
You reached over the couch and grabbed the remote, wincing at the ache in your muscles from petting him for so long, before turning up the intensity of the lights. Night had fallen outside, the sun having set at least an hour before, easing the room into near complete darkness before you turned them on, careful to keep the light gentle but bright enough to be noticeable.
You called his name softly, patting his back in rounds of three to try and wake him gradually, but he didn’t stir. With a sinking heart, you pulled the blanket down his back until they settled at his hips, and within a few moments he curled up tighter against you, squishing himself further into the cushions and away from the chill of the room.
“Yoongi? I’m sorry to wake you up, but our session is over for today,” you said quietly, sighing in relief when his eyes started to flutter before opening and squinting up at you.
For a few moments, he only stared, blinking sleepily as his gaze traveled from your eyes to your cheeks and hair, before his head jerked back. Confused, Yoongi tried to sit up and separate from you, his limbs moving sluggishly and his hand pushing against your stomach clumsily. He struggled to remember where he was and who you were, his brow and nose scrunching, before he mumbled, “Oh... right.”
It took thirty minutes to draw Yoongi back from sleepy cat to complete wakefulness, but you managed it with a cup of coffee and a couple cookies. He’d nibbled on them and watched you thoughtfully from the other side of the counter, some of the previous stress and fatigue lifted from his shoulders, and seemed pleased at the taste of the French-pressed coffee.
You didn’t try to draw him into small talk or commentary on his session--you sent follow-up questionnaires afterwards so people didn’t feel pressured to be nice to you in person--but let him get ready to leave in his own pace, even holding in a smile when he’d missed the hole of his jacket sleeve three times before finally succeeding with a lazy indifference.
You watched patiently as he tugged his sneakers back on and hooked his arm through the strap of his backpack, before you said, “Good night, Yoongi.”
He glanced back at you over his shoulder, the door half-open, something like acknowledgement in the otherwise inscrutable expression in his eyes, before he muttered, “Thanks....Y/N.”
And then he curled around the door and left.
He showed up the next week, same time and day, and the dark circles already seemed just a little bit lighter.