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With the other bedroom in the shared apartment empty, not long after Mingyu and Wonwoo threw out a sudden trip to Anyang over their shoulders, Seokmin wants to revel in Soonyoung’s presence after so long. With their roommates’ promise of being gone for most of the day, he considers making up for lost time like they always do when either one of them has to part for a longer period of time. The thirty-something nights with Soonyoung across the world have relied on internet connection and somehow making the distance shorter pixel by pixel. The odd hours have often been punctuated by ringing up at the wrong time of the day because an ocean’s worth of a time difference refused to hit them the entire way yet. Having Soonyoung close now, sometimes not even an arm’s stretch away, is their reality now etched up by their dreams, and Seokmin doesn't want to let go of it anytime soon.
When Soonyoung wears his clothes, there’s always a size discrepancy in every article he lets the older borrow. Today, his tank top allows peeks of Soonyoung’s skin usually hidden by shirts and sweatshirts and away from sunlight’s greed of setting his skin ablaze. Along the skin of the arms he missed sheltering himself in to sleep and the slight bumps of his ribs he missed tickling the morning yawns out of. Black strands farther away from the hem this morning because of that size discrepancy. If Soonyoung moves, the tank top rides off his shoulders, and it’s the peek of the collarbones he would placate a kiss into to scare off a nightmare. He wonders how much the cost is of these touches long overdue, but he wouldn’t mind spending an afternoon or thirty-something of them just making up for each and every one of them.
Soonyoung’s presence seeps palpable into the corners of the apartment and every room they find themselves in, whether he means to or not, whether he even acknowledges it or not. Seokmin is uncertain if it’s also because of last night’s two-in-the-morning rush from Soonyoung’s home to their apartment that still sends him feeling like he’s walking into a daydream. The flutter in his heart that still holds onto the lone light above their kitchen counter glowing hours ago. Just within the borders of the kitchen like disco lights as Soonyoung held his hand, dropped a kiss onto his knuckles, and asked him if he wanted to dance. Their hands slick with sweat because elevator maintenance shoved them out to brave the summer heat with the staircases. His forehead yearning for purchase against Soonyoung’s and the seething breaths from oxygen finally catching up to their lungs. The futility of it all when they fell back and away from one another because tears started drowning in Soonyoung’s eyes above a trembling, “I haven’t seen you in so long, Seokmin.” And he still grasped onto Soonyoung’s hand for as long as he could, just to tell him that “It felt like forever.”
He dismissed jet lag and exhaustion all over him when Seokmin pointed out that he danced the entire time he was away, so “Dancing is the last thing you should be doing right now, Soonyoung.” Toes knocking into one another, lighthearted kisses when Soonyoung stepped on his socks. Then it was lips knocking into each other because it really did feel like forever was testing them since they could do anything close to that, to be anywhere close to where they are now.
Seokmin thinks last night still lives in the heart of his soul and is meant to stay much longer than just last night.
The same greed of sunlight opens up to a beauty mark at his ribs. Seokmin’s eyes can’t help but drift a little north and stare at the pink mark there. The skin almost scratches away there, peeks above the armhole but the rest disappearing under the fabric.
He finds it while Soonyoung waits for the kettle to bubble to a whistle. Soonyoung sets down two mugs for instant coffee, ready on the kitchen counter for an afternoon dedicated to unpacking his bag and washing New York City air off his clothes. A couple steps through the kitchen, his fingertip draws outlines around the scratch but never dares to touch it. He tries to bury the scowl on his face with the thought of Soonyoung’s clumsiness, with something that won’t break his heart into concerns and a possible rush to the hospital.
“What happened here?” his voice hollows low. He throws out the idea of sending the scowl to flatten because the scratch looks like it must have been recent and by the rosy skin there, it must have hurt, too.
Soonyoung flinches at the break in quietude, then at the accidental poke directly on scraped skin. The kitchen rouses into apologies colliding into a hiss and into forgiveness. Into a playful smile that sheds Seokmin’s worries and into forgetting those worries in the first place. Seokmin captures every second of it all in his palms, steels himself from kissing Soonyoung right there and then just to feel his skin along the lines of his hands and the smile stretching under the runs of his thumbs over Soonyoung’s cheeks.
He missed Soonyoung so much, and the words want to tiptoe out from his lips, tripped out in the open to be said and heard and known and repeated over and over again.
“Ideally speaking, Junhui, Minghao, Chan, and I should be the least clumsy out of all the guys, right?” Seokmin nods into the idea. He lets his hands fall from his face, only for Soonyoung to reach over and hook their pinkies together, swinging in the slow space. Being in a dance team, the four of them have caused far less incidents that could have been avoided simply by paying attention to their surroundings. And theoretically speaking, the four of them harbor much more grace in their bones than the other nine of them combined. “Well, we were all wrong about that,” Soonyoung deadpans. The seriousness of his words, juxtaposed in what he believes in him, sends him sputtering into laughter, airy all around them. “I wanted to sleep on the top bunk on our last night there because I always took the bottom, so I switched with Junhui.”
Seokmin’s heart plummets at the idea of Soonyoung falling from the top bunk. And Soonyoung must have caught onto the silence, the anxiety of what might have happened while he was away brewing inside him, because he turns away from the kettle completely and shakes his head, left and right, left and right, eyes climbing up from Seokmin’s lips to his eyes. Searing warm fingertips across his face, hot at his palms from holding the kettle for a second, he hears Soonyoung loud and clear.
“I didn’t fall, Seokmin.” Seokmin sighs the relief out of his lungs, the chuckle brushing along his lips that isn’t from his own. “I was climbing up the ladder and slipped, but Minghao caught me.”
Seokmin nods under his palms, under the reassurances. He chances about perhaps putting a bandage there when their coffee is all done.
Mugs of instant coffee on the nightstand, Seokmin settles at the edge of the bed and pops open the small tin of bandages, wedged between foils of antibacterial and alcohol wipes in the drawer. Soonyoung waddles over to kneel at the end of the bed, tipping over and planting himself face-first into the center of the mattress. His head dives into the valley of the two pillows there before he sits up against the headboard, right next to Seokmin.
And watching Soonyoung shed his own shirt off still startles a flare down his chest, kicks away his heart into skipping every other beat and having to pick up the pace just to fill up those missing ba-dumps in the silence of his chest. It’s been months since the first time, since he could clearly define the lines and contours of Soonyoung without fabric barriers and stutters of hesitation just to reach out and brush a finger on his skin. It’s been months, yet the mere act of it all still does something to him.
It's smooth skin all over, not even a drastic tinge anywhere anymore because time away airbrushed those purples and reds that once littered his chest back to his natural skin tone. There’s a knit strangling Soonyoung’s eyebrows when he drops the tank top off to the side. From this angle, guilt trips Seokmin up about the eye bags telling the older to sleep, but the promise of organizing his belongings this afternoon would waste those mugs of brimming coffee.
When he asks Soonyoung to raise his arm, he feels it drape around his shoulder, giving him enough space to clean the scratch and secure a bandage on it. The arm tops short, though, halfway across his shoulders, just to delve a soothing thumb at the back of his neck until the thumb branches off to Soonyoung’s entire hand. And he succumbs himself into a heavy sigh, at the slow drag of digits over the back of his head, slight tugs of hair along the path.
Even with the bandage fixed on, he doesn’t stop himself from letting his fingertip ghost along his skin and back to the beauty mark he discovered back in the kitchen. Having started knowing each other through sporadic texts and naked relief, Seokmin would have thought he was already used to spectating Soonyoung bare and no strings attached, so accustomed to watching Soonyoung pull each article of clothing off an aching second at a time or in the alarming haste before their dorm-mates could find them that way. Little marks along his skin, the ones he typically can’t discover within the rush of relief or a sparing glance, are things he wishes he knew more about of Soonyoung.
So when Soonyoung brings the tank top back to his lap, about to slip it back on, he stops him without thinking it through. A hand caressing the side of his face, lips stealing kisses along his jaw and back down to his neck suspend the shirt in a loose grip from covering him all over again. Breaths hitching by his ear, Soonyoung surrenders into reaching over and behind, nails sliding over the skin at the nape of his neck.
Seokmin’s lips are lost somewhere along the pulse on Soonyoung’s neck, thoughts lost in everything transpiring in the kitchen moments ago, when he asks, “Can we try something different?”
They’ve never done this before, not in the dorms nor in the apartment. If he’s completely honest with himself, he never suggested it until now because the idea never hit him before.
When he brings himself back up, just enough to look at him in the eyes, he watches the smile slowly grace across Soonyoung’s lips between hushed pants for air, fluttering eyelashes into the quiet, above an even quieter, so gentle that it’s generous to his ears, “What is it?”
And so forgiving to his ears that it might mean stealing hours of laundry and precious sleep. “What if-” collapses in Soonyoung resting his hands over his, lethargic thumbs over the back of his palms. Rare summer sunshine at the corner of the month paints Soonyoung in a halo of innocence, white all around accentuating the red marks blooming on his neck already. He picks his voice up when he notices the beauty mark at his ear, the purpose of stirring up the question at all, and drops a peck there before coming back up. Lips gaping to a slit when he comes back up, he loses it all once more when his eyes stumble upon another one above the hook of his jaw. He can’t help himself from dropping a second kiss there, feeling Soonyoung’s smile budding his skin against his lips and sending one across his own. “What if I just want to look at you?”
Soonyoung studies him before breaking into a pinched smile, as if trying to contain every bit of that smile from spilling into Seokmin’s lips. “You’re looking at me right now, though.”
“No, I mean-” Seokmin shakes his head, wandering in his thoughts and how to explain it all. He scrambles how to lay out his desires for him. How can he tell Soonyoung that he wants nothing more than to just study all the subtle marks on him like chapters of his life? Periods of beauty marks on his skin, sudden and unquestioning. Lasting scars, patching him up somewhere not fully healed nor fully complete without them in the story of Soonyoung’s life like semicolons. Seokmin sighs, attempts to bottle the disappointment of knowing so little about Soonyoung. He swallows hard but not enough to let the words spiral down his throat mute- “like how I found the mole on your side. I’ve seen you so many times like this already, but I just noticed it today.”
Soonyoung’s eyes dart across his face before pressing a soft pad of his finger on his cheek, right below his eye. “You have a mole, too, right here” sends Seokmin’s heart breaking into a grin and a short trip down, close to the corner of his lips, “and here,” under his jaw, and maybe Soonyoung wants to do this, too, “and here,” at his chin, because he doesn’t seem to want to stop, “and here.”
Seokmin wanders in all of Soonyoung’s wonderment at mere beauty marks on his face. Sunlight’s greed latches onto the corners of his eyes this time, no matter which direction he studies.
The sound of his voice at his ears takes him back to those thirty-something days and nights. But this time, there are no earphones poking into his eardrums or checking the battery on his phone before slipping it next to his pillow, no worries of falling asleep in the midst of the call or “I forgot you’re not here in Seoul.” The hands he has craved for in every one of those thirty-something times but resorted to grasping vacant sheets and the lonesome. The small reminders popping up on his phone hours too late because Seokmin was always ahead in time; to never skip breakfast, that he’s doing great, that he thinks New York City would be perfect if only Seokmin was there with him. That he loves him. The reminders Seokmin has sent to Soonyoung hours too early and only riled up his anxieties too soon before a performance. Apologies whispered into Soonyoung’s night through the receiver, verbal sticky notes for Soonyoung not to strain himself or overdo a move if it would risk his health, that he wishes Soonyoung was enjoying New York City despite not having that perfect image printed out for them in the flesh, but he still misses and loves him all the same.
Above all of those, he misses Soonyoung like this.
Seokmin side-eyes him as two fingers perch at his chin and his head is tilted to the side. Soonyoung’s eyes search for another mole to stamp with his fingertip. Suspicion sends his voice a little higher-pitched, a little questioning at how quick he is to point out a few already, “Something tells me you look at me more than I think you do.”
“You think I’ve never wanted to look at you like this?” Before he can answer, his thumb rubs close to the end of his sideburn. “I found another.”
He traps Soonyoung’s hands in his because he doesn’t think it’s fair how he wanted to find all of these little marks on Soonyoung first, how he brought up the idea, yet Soonyoung is the only one searching for them right now.
Weaving digits over his lap, how many nights he prayed the days to go faster or for the moon and sun to meet them both at the same time so he could do so, he leaves quiet kisses along Soonyoung’s knuckles. “Wait,” Seokmin’s voice strikes the air tense without meaning to. His voice softens all at once, like a secret only meant to be heard by the two of them in a crowded room, “I want to look at you, too, Soonyoung.”
He watches the way Soonyoung’s eyes map all across his face again, short stops somewhere below his eyes and a longer break at his lips, before nodding, before whispering a tranquil “Okay” with a teeter of a smile. “You can look at me, Seokmin.”
“But it’s the same as before,” he reminds him of the one thing that won’t change from all their other times. “If you want to stop anytime, if-if something doesn’t feel right, just let me know.”
“You, too, Seokmin.” A tender touch of lips at the corner of his, he feels Soonyoung’s hands disappear from his, only to bring them much closer than earlier. His fingertips reach for the bottom hem of his long-sleeve shirt there. “Can I look at you, too?”
Seokmin seeks out a curious challenge at the spark in Soonyoung’s eyes, perhaps one comprising who will lie down on the bed undone and traced out first, and he wouldn’t mind losing this once. “Okay.”
Soonyoung swings his legs over, planting himself on his lap, and there’s no way he can escape without hurting either one of them. He rattles in a deep breath when his shirt rumples to the floor and the air conditioner’s teasing for goosebumps is replaced by Soonyoung’s warm palms guiding their ways from his shoulders and down to the waistline of his basketball shorts. His back slanting along the headboard, his spine cooled by the wood, he sits himself in a more comfortable position for both of them in the middle of the bed.
Above the hook of digits at his waistline, scraping by the top layer only, trepidation strikes in the way Soonyoung hasn’t hitched a centimeter, frozen right there. Soonyoung has done this so many times before, but why is he stopping now? He reaches out without a passing thought, tilts Soonyoung’s chin up. “Hey, it’s alright.”
Soonyoung’s eyes surrender to the sun as he ghosts out an Okay out his lips, droplets of white at the edges of deep browns that all soften with the smallest of smiles. Then it’s raising his hips and watching Soonyoung skate his palms down his legs, down with his shorts. With his legs bare, he relaxes under Soonyoung’s palms grazing the sides of his thighs as he sits back up and on his lap, plants them back on his shoulders.
He places a hand on Soonyoung’s shoulder, pushes him back enough to send him sitting on the mattress this time. A kiss to his lips and another when Soonyoung is the one to bring their lips together again, Seokmin tells him he’ll slip his shorts off for him, too, over languid strokes of his thumb at the corner of his waist.
Their shorts and shirts building into a hill on the floor, Seokmin wants to keep himself close to the touch of Soonyoung’s skin on his after a month without it.
Soonyoung straightens Seokmin’s arm between them, and he doesn’t resist when he’s barely tugging on the limb and ghosting a fingertip along the tan blotches all around. Scrutinizing the rise of hair on his arm at just the slightest grace there, he doesn’t seem to notice Seokmin’s hand settling on his bare thigh, just at the partition of skin and fabric of his boxers there.
“Where did you get these from?”
The darker ones breach closer to them in time than the rest, a week or two ago while the apartment roofed for three instead of four. All battles against oil splatters, against Mingyu’s hopeful advice on simply buying those oil guards, Seokmin forgot about adding it onto their shopping list every time they head for the store. “For some reason, whenever I cook with Mingyu, I get hit with more oil.”
“What about this one?” zips by them when Soonyoung traces stitchlines of an older scar along his finger.
“I cut my finger with the knife,” he sighs. The same morning of not wanting to wake anyone up so early in the morning strikes him back to a repeated past, scrambling for the first-aid kit again and peeling gauze wrappers with his teeth. “I must have been too sleepy.”
“I don’t remember this one,” the confession dissipates as quickly as it comes in, as if Soonyoung doesn’t want to be heard, and his voice drops into his next thought. “It’s almost done healing, though.”
Seokmin remembers the mornings he woke up earlier than Soonyoung, Wonwoo, or even Mingyu for. Those days where Soonyoung would have to travel far for competitions. Those days consisted of making breakfast for all four of them and for an extra lunch box specifically for Soonyoung to eat on the way to the venue or while he waits for the organizer’s call to make their way up the stage. He blinks at the one close to his wrist.
He remembers buying all the ingredients at the supermarket and waking up early the next day to cook it all. “Remember the lunchbox I bought for you? I wanted to cook the first meal you had in it.”
Soonyoung’s eyes light up and his touches pause for a moment to ask, “The baby blue one that came with a spoon?” Seokmin nods at how specific he nails the memory down gets, the odder details of that lunchbox. Not the tiny orange tiger at the bottom or the white buckles at the sides. Soonyoung shifts on his lap until their eyes meet halfway. “The one you bought when you told me you were buying a lunchbox for yourself?” Seokmin nods a second time, and the side of his neck paints in the ease of Soonyoung’s giggle, the faint kiss at his jaw.
“And after I showed you the one I got for you, you asked me about the lunchbox I got for myself,” Seokmin continues on their shared recollection.
“But you only came home with the one you got for me,” has Soonyoung slipping his arm across his chest and hugging him there, chuckles along the slope of his shoulder before dropping another kiss there.
“I forgot about it,” he admits, threading his fingers through Soonyoung’s hair. His other hand falls naturally at the small of the older’s back, fingertips drumming on the naked and warm skin there. Soonyoung is always so warm, and perhaps that might be the reason why Seokmin finds himself dragging the blanket up to his shoulders for the past summer month or so. “It didn't hit me until I was halfway home.”
Soonyoung carries himself back up and raises his other arm and the leftovers of a blister there. He remembers the frying pan set too high the second he poured that first batch of green onion pancake and the yelps from Soonyoung evading the apartment before his own. He remembers the running water all over his arm that was followed by an endless stream of pecks on his lips and along the curves of his face. The roll of Wonwoo’s eyes when he walked in on both of them in that mess of a state and Mingyu’s heavy sigh reaching for the first-aid kit are things neither of them will forget to this day.
“Was this the pancake?” Soonyoung’s voice shrinks. Seokmin nods this time, voices it all out and even down to Wonwoo rolling his eyes at them. Halfway, though, he feels him bring his hand up to his lips and kiss the healing patch of skin there. Soonyoung scowls above him. “You don’t have a lot of scars or scratches.”
“I try to be careful.”
“But a lot of them are from cooking.” Soonyoung sticks his own arm out this time, plants his palm over Seokmin’s heart, close to another mole he knows there. He swipes a fingertip over that mark slowly. Seokmin basks in the repose of it all, shuts his eyes for a moment, and if he could, he would fall asleep then and there. “Before we made what we had real,” Soonyoung’s eyes flit up, lips parted in uncertain, empty sounds and Seokmin begins to count all the marks along his skin, “before I realized that I love you, I’d always want to kiss you here.”
Curiosity piques under each languid stroke. Soonyoung’s eyes fall somewhere farther than the distance enclosed under their shared stops of the next inhale, searching for something not within his reach. A single question strikes the reverie raw. “What stopped you?”
Soonyoung shakes his head, curt and barely survives against the sigh out between them. “I don’t know.” The same hand rides up his skin and to his shoulder, placating the tense muscles there. “And here.” The hand skitters down to the one on his abdomen, close to where his lower ribs start. “And here, too.”
“Do you see moles there?” Soonyoung nods, smile hiding his eyes all over. “I’m sure you have some, too.” Seokmin reaches out and threads his digits between Soonyoung’s, presses their palms together until Soonyoung is the one squeezing them instead. He straightens the older’s arm out between them and catches a white scar coursing into a stretched S on his forearm. Branching off tendrils at the edges, Seokmin frowns at it.
“It’s an old scar,” Soonyoung mumbles. When he looks up, Soonyoung is barely lifting the end of his lips at the memory. “I ran and tripped and fell on something sharp in the dirt,” his chuckle rings airy yet a tad bitter for the past. “There was so much blood that my sister cried with me.”
“It’s been a while?”
“I was eleven when this happened.” Soonyoung tenses up on his lap. “It was my first time going to the emergency room.”
Before either one of them can mention any more emergency-room visits, Seokmin whispers that he doesn’t have to talk about it if it’s too much, lets the calm of his thumbs across Soonyoung’s wrists whisper for him afterwards. He discovers one beauty mark on the side of his forearm. “You have a mole right here.” Almost like red dabs of a paintbrush, with only some of the bristles latching onto the skin, not too far from that beauty mark, Seokmin asks what happened here. He wonders why he never saw nor questioned it when it’s placed in such an obvious spot to see everyday.
“It’s a birthmark,” Soonyoung explains as Seokmin traces the outline of it. “It looks kind of scary to be called a birthmark, though.”
A hushed hum in agreement, he would have guessed this mark was a bruise drying up and healing in odd strokes at a time. “I believe you.”
“When I was little, I used to cover it everyday before going to school.” He tilts his head to the side and peers up to Soonyoung. The slight pout at the memory and the straight line of his lips there, he asks why he would do that. “Because it looked scary.”
He lowers his hands, settles them right at Soonyoung’s bare hips. He runs slow thumbs at the corners of his waist. “How long did that go for?”
“Maybe a month?” Soonyoung tilts his head a slight, too, in thought. “When my mom asked me why we were running out of bandages so fast.”
“Did you tell her the truth?”
Soonyoung nods. “I can’t lie to her.”
Seokmin grins at that. Warmth marks up his shoulders in the shape of Soonyoung’s hands again, and he chases after them until their palms slide past each other and align, and it’s all Seokmin needs to tug Soonyoung down, to knock him off balance for a moment and kiss him. A palm courses from his shoulder and up to his neck as he lets the parting seam of his lips trail from Soonyoung’s lips and down to his jaw.
He slips his arm along the back of Soonyoung’s waist, pulls him closer and lowers him until he’s the one lying flat on the bed and he’s the one slipping so easily between his legs. He lowers himself down, carves each one of Soonyoung’s inhales against his chest, against his own breaths.
When he breaks away, his eyes cast down on a brown blemish on his neck, just below his collarbone. “There’s a scar here.”
“Oh.” Soonyoung lies back across the pillows after expelling that single syllable in disappointment. “Remember when I tried making you breakfast?”
“Are you talking about this morning?” Soonyoung offers him a wide smile in return, stretching his lips and showcasing his gums even in the innocence of being caught guilty. His eyes flicker up to him, perhaps in hopes of his mirroring it on his own face. “Soonyoung.”
“You have a birthmark on your neck,” Soonyoung diverts his attention before he can push himself off the bed and grab something to alleviate the burn for him.
And it works.
Seokmin lets all tension loose everywhere to completely mold into the shape of Soonyoung under him, press his lips onto whatever part of Soonyoung is beneath him at the moment. Heartbeat under his ear, he sinks even more when Soonyoung hooks a leg across the backs of his thighs, pressing his cheek to his shoulder. It’s not far from a kiss to his neck if only he nudges himself closer. It doesn't stop him from raising his head and leaving a peck over his heart. “I do?”
He feels Soonyoung’s nod grazing the crown of his hair. “It’s on the back of your neck.”
Soonyoung props himself on his elbows, bringing Seokmin rising and knees hiking up. When he pushes himself back onto the flat of his calves, his eyes linger on a small scar on Soonyoung’s shin, a crater almost into flesh. He winces at what might have happened, and he doesn’t stop the worry from escaping. “This one looks like it really hurts.”
Soonyoung nods again. “Coco pecked me when I was in middle school, and I guess it just won’t heal any more than that.” He catches the frown at his lips in the longing for his longtime pet and reaches forward, brings his hands to cup Soonyoung’s face and tries to kiss the frown off. “I was feeding the chickens,” spreads the kisses to his cheeks and his forehead, “and maybe she thought I was skipping her that day.” When he traces Soonyoung’s smile against his lips, he continues on sitting back up, sits up with his back facing Soonyoung to locate that one birthmark he’s only heard about from tales of his family.
He falls into the gentle brushes there. It’s not just the light kiss at his neck, at the border between hairline and skin. Even the fingertip outlining his birthmark there, tracing down his bare spine and to the border of his boxers and skin has him crumbling into shivers under Soonyoung’s fingertips, under the fever of the city from summertime. A kiss to his shoulder blade, Soonyoung quiets down his heartbeat with “You have beauty marks here, too.”
He caves into each pave of Soonyoung’s touches, how he lingers his fingertips a little longer than where his palms once were, printing each layer of warmth, sealing his fingerprints on his skin there. His head leans forward, though, to expose more places for Soonyoung to touch, to dive into. The palms close to his lower back, the way they skate back up so gentle at his sides, fingertips bordering which part is his sides and which part is the start of his abdomen.
There’s an open-mouth kiss at the dip of his neck, and he doesn’t even want to try silencing the gasp from his lips. It’s the first time Soonyoung has done that anywhere on his skin that wasn’t on his lips. He must have done something that laid him out vulnerable between them because when he tries to coax out the words for a second kiss just like that, buries the desires into a sigh instead, Soonyoung brings his lips to his shoulder and does it again. And the second gasp rings louder than the first time, sends Seokmin to shutting his eyes and soaking in the ministrations there.
“You have a scar here,” Soonyoung whispers quietly. A fingertip tracing on his back, just at the junction of his arm and his shoulder, he hears the frown in Soonyoung’s voice. “Like your skin was scraped off.”
Seokmin blinks, tries to jog his memories at that one scar and what could have happened there. When his memories meet him halfway, he relaxes under Soonyoung’s continued touches again. “My sister runs that flower shop, right?” Soonyoung hums into a kiss on his shoulder again, over where his hands discovered that scar. “When I was in high school, I really wanted to help out, but I was so clumsy that I knocked a flower pot above me.” He feels the separation of his lips from his skin, hears the gasp over his shoulder. “It was one of those clay pots, too.” Seokmin smiles at that day of sitting in the back of the flower shop, tears being lulled by his mother’s picking at his scalp punctuated by the comforts of her own laughter. “I had so much dirt in my hair.”
Soonyoung sputters into giggles behind him, but it wanes down into a single yawn, into the bed dipping more behind him and Soonyoung’s forehead pressing onto his back, between his shoulder blades. Arms slip their ways around his waist until he can clasp onto both palms on his lap. He listens to his slow breaths, sigh of content in between.
“We should do this again,” Soonyoung whispers when he moves backwards, exhales skating and cooling the spot where he just kissed him there. Bits of his voice loses itself in the fight against exhaustion, “Maybe when Wonwoo and Mingyu are out of the apartment longer.”
Maybe when you’re not tired, he wants to tell him.
He knows he should say something, anything because he would love to do this another time. Again and again, until he can kiss Soonyoung’s past all over the skin he allows exposed like this. Again and again, until Soonyoung can do the same all over Seokmin’s own skin. Again and again, and he knows he won’t get tired of it.
Even with the risk of their roommates walking in on them like this if one or of both of them knock on their door, he doesn’t bother thinking their decision through. Almost bare on the bed, abandoning their pile of clothes on the floor for good today, just the cotton of their remaining undergarments stopping them from touching everything, he pulls Soonyoung’s back against his bare chest and brings the blankets up to wade along their waists. With his arm reaching over the curve of Soonyoung’s chest and pressing over his heart, Soonyoung’s own arms enveloping his single arm there, it’s almost an instinct to send kisses along his shoulder and the back of his neck.
Fingertips start tracing somewhere on his arm. Soonyoung brings up the question of their hours of this whole afternoon. “How did this happen?” barely escapes his lips decipherable.
He lifts his arm up, just enough to sign his eyes along the dotting line of scars on his forearm but not enough to pull their arms apart. “From moving boxes at work.”
He breathes Soonyoung in, notices something a little off this time. He breathes Soonyoung right in front of him again, breathing in the scent of his own shampoo in Soonyoung’s hair. He’s about to point it out, to ask if he used his shampoo when he showered this morning, but what comes out is a croaky “I missed you” from the pit of his throat, from the pit of his heart.
“I missed you, too, Seokmin,” Soonyoung breathes across his hand encased in both of his. He feels Soonyoung tuck their hands under his head. “I missed you a lot.”