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Love makes people do crazy things.
Chan, unfortunately, is one of those people.
His downfall? He is a victim of catching (very real and very romantic) feelings for someone he’s regarded as his best friend for 10 years. The double-digit number is enough to prompt anyone to look at him in pity and beg the question, why now? how does this happen so late into the friendship? and Chan can do nothing but hang his head in shame. Because this is not a new development.
Chan’s not sure when exactly, but he knows it happened sometime during high school. He didn’t have an “oh. oh.” moment like main characters in cheesy, coming-of-age movies did. One day, he just paused and took a good look at Felix while he messily devoured a cone of chocolate ice cream and realized the tumult of gay emotions that had been brewing in him since the very beginning. Chan’s always loved Felix, and along the way, that love gradually blossomed into something far more intimate and romantic than it had been at the start. There wasn’t a single event that was responsible for this catastrophe, but rather, a series of events that led Chan right into a ditch.
He’s been stuck in this ditch for several years now, and there was no hope for him. He’d tried climbing out several ways: attempting (and failing) to move on through dating other people, convincing himself there was no way they’d work out together (even though they were essentially soulmates), and psyching himself out with disastrous consequences (were he to ever confess). Every attempt sent him flying back down into the ditch, perhaps even deeper than he’d already been.
As his dear roommate and friend, Minho, had kindly supplied, cowards like him were going to stay in the ditch for a long, long time. The prospect of being emotionally unavailable for the rest of his life scared him, but what frightened Chan even more was having to imagine missing a chance with the boy who quite possibly was his first love.
Now, Chan was about to do something that he’d convinced himself he’d never do. In the name of love and his mental wellbeing.
He was going to confess to Lee Felix.
In his head, he had it all figured out. Chan would take an afternoon or two to pour his heart’s contents out on a pretty piece of paper, which would somehow make it into the hands of his best friend. Chan hadn’t exactly mapped out the logistics of the last part, but he was sure things would fall into place. The universe had to be on his side for once.
The opportunity presents itself to him in the form of his best friend urgently messaging him at 3 am to borrow his notebook for calculus the next day. Chan wasn’t sure whether he was fond of the idea of Felix stumbling upon his warmly-worded confession letter in the middle of a 2-hour lecture on derivatives, but alas, he reasoned that it was best if he made his approach appear as accidental as possible. Just in case Chan had any last chance to avoid confronting this problem.
In the morning, when Chan is still basking in the regrets of choosing an 8 am class, he finds himself slipping a fondly worded letter between the pages of his notebook. Felix had agreed to meet him outside of his lecture hall, of which Chan was now positioned in front of with a pallor that made students passing by him send him concerned looks. Chan had his own lecture to get to on the other side of campus, but the prospect of running late didn’t scare him as much as this did.
Felix arrived a few minutes later with a sleepy pout and his hair sticking out at odd angles. Chan had to look away and restrain himself from reaching over and carding his fingers through the blond locks out of instinct.
“Here you go,” Chan smiled tightly at the younger boy, handing off the notebook and a chunk of his heart. He felt the fear simmering in his gut amplify tenfold when Felix’s hands gently grasped the sides, bringing the notebook over to hold it securely against his chest.
“Thank you, it really means a lot to me!” Felix chirps back with a level of enthusiasm that should be illegal at 7:56 am. “I’ll get it back to you as soon as possible. See you later, Channie!”
Chan could only muster up another strained smile in response, too afraid to open his mouth in case the rest of his heart would take the opportunity to slip out.
☼
It’s a few hours later at lunch when Felix confronts him.
Chan’s seated at an outdoor table in the courtyard with Minho, engaged in a heated debate over humanity’s worst creation, mint chocolate ice cream (second only to the Emoji Movie), over a cup of soggy ramen. In the middle of Minho’s defensive spiel, Chan feels a warm and familiar hand on his shoulder, effectively drawing his attention away from the frowning boy across from him.
“Chan!” Felix chirps, leaning down to envelope his shoulders in a loose hug that wouldn’t be so suffocating if it weren’t for Chan’s gay little heart suddenly seizing.
Despite the uneasy turning in his gut, Chan quirked a brow at the other’s enthusiasm. “You’re way too excited to see me. Do you need to borrow another notebook?”
At the light jab, Felix immediately detached himself from the older boy and landed a hefty punch on his unsuspecting shoulder. Chan yelped in response, which earned a bright, euphonious laugh from Felix. He felt the pain on his shoulder simmer down immediately.
“Careful, there’s more where that came from.” Felix patted his shoulder threateningly, a saccharine smile playing at his lips. He reached over again, this time to place the notebook he’d borrowed on the table. “Thank you though, your notes helped me actually comprehend the lesson. I might not have to drop calculus after all.”
Before Chan could respond, the boy across from them, seemingly starved of attention, cleared his throat pointedly and tilted his head in a manner that startlingly mimicked that of a cat. Felix’s head snapped up, his eyes widening for a second before he waved at Minho with a sheepish look.
“Hi, hyung.”
"Hey to you too,” Minho slurped down another mouthful of ramen, gaze flickering towards the notebook with interest. Chan now vaguely remembers spewing his nonsense of a plan to Minho at an ungodly hour the night before, only to be met with a very sleepy and harsh whisper of profanities directed at both him and his “gay cowardly bullshit”. Chan gulps and musters up a look of feigned composure. He shouldn’t be allowed to speak after 1 am. His roommate was privy to too much and it was dangerous.
After a second of consideration, Minho reached out to draw the notebook closer to him, and, with a pointed look toward Chan, began listing through the pages with an air of innocence. Chan squirmed in his seat.
Felix turned back to Chan to begin explaining his new theory on why being hot directly correlates with poorer math skills, but Chan was too busy anxiously scanning the contents between the pages of his notebook. Minho kept thumbing through the pages, until a section near the back fell open to reveal something stashed between the neatly scribbled pages. The haphazardly folded piece of pink paper was still there. Uh oh.
Minho looked back up at Chan with a quirked brow.
There was a second where Chan swore he felt his entire nervous and respiratory system shut down. The discovery meant one of two things: either Felix had not stumbled upon the very obvious and strategically placed letter or Felix was very much aware of his best friend’s feelings and was actively trying to avoid addressing them. If it was the latter, Chan was already in the process of switching his body to its self-destruct mode.
Chan didn’t know how to ask the question without giving himself away. But sitting there for a second longer and letting his brain anxiously come up with scenarios for him made the ramen in his gut want to rise. Wordlessly, he looked up at Minho for help, mouthing pleads that were immediately shut down by the other shaking his head and mouthing something back that Chan was too scared to decipher. In Chan’s book, this constituted as homophobia.
“Did you uh,” Chan began hesitantly, turning to Felix and eyeing the cover of his notebook, “notice anything about the notes?”
Felix gave him a weird look. “Just that your handwriting’s gotten sloppier. But besides that, nothing.”
Across from him, Chan swore he heard Minho giggle into his own cup of ramen.
“Oh,” Chan was unsure of what to do with this information. Maybe Felix hadn’t read his letter.
In the days leading up to the execution of his plan, Chan had prepared himself for multiple outcomes. More specifically, the ones that would lead him to holing himself up in his room with several tubs of ice cream, a box of tissues, and a playlist consisting of Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey (carefully and artfully curated by his other friend, Jisung). He’d even schooled himself on his potential reaction and figured out how to bite back any traitorous tears, were they to escape. In theory, Chan was ready to face rejection.
However, he hadn’t prepared himself for this outcome.
“Agh,” Felix suddenly groaned and glared down at his phone screen, the noise drawing Chan out of his thoughts and making him blink up at Felix questioningly. The younger boy just shook his head and pocketed the device in his jeans, standing up and turning away from them with a slight frown. “I’ve gotta go, I forgot that I had to meet up with someone from Econ.”
After exchanging brief goodbyes, Chan sank down into his seat and let out a defeated noise. Watching Felix’s figure retreat further and further, he held his breath until his best friend disappeared around the corner. Turning back to eye Minho, he found that the other was already staring at him with raised brows and pursed lips.
“Don’t say anything.”
“I wasn’t going to,” Minho shrugged, but his eyes said everything.
Chan wasn’t sure whether he wanted to cry out of frustration or relief. None of this was ever meant to be easy, but he couldn’t even get past the initial step. Y’know, like a loser. It was looking very bad for him.
“You look constipated.”
Chan looked back down at his notebook and sighed, far too emotionally drained to acknowledge Minho’s comment.
☼
Chan devises his next plan a few days later. He’s sitting at the kitchen counter, enjoying a bowl of cereal while his laptop plays an episode of Glee. What prompts him to take action is the sudden horrid thought of Will Schuester finding true love before Chan can even afford to confess to his. Real scary shit.
After consulting the world wide web on “the best ways to confess to your very oblivious best friend”, Chan came to the following conclusion: he had to eliminate all platonic factors in his next approach. Anything that would give Felix the allusion that this was all an act out of friendship. His coquettish advances shouldn’t leave any room for interpretation, as wikihow.com had kindly supplied.
Conveniently, a very non-platonic date in the calendar was approaching, which gave Chan the perfect excuse to execute something with maximum gay potential. The ever-adulated and loathed February 14th fell on a Friday, which meant that he had the rest of the week to get his shit together.
Now, for the hard part.
chan
felix felix felix
bffelix
chris chris chris
chan
Very Important question
r u free on valentine’s day?
bffelix
hmm… unfortunately :*
why?
chan
great
ill pick u up at 7
wear something nice
Chan thinks that the universe is letting him off a tad bit too easily.
It takes a bit of begging and bribing for Chan to earn a reservation at one of Seoul’s finest restaurants. He’s able to score it thanks to one of Minho’s friends, Seungmin, who sounded pleased to know that both he and Minho will owe him a favor. Chan had yet to tell his roommate about the second part.
Everything was slowly falling into place, and Chan was starting to believe that his initial bad luck was done and over with. Maybe it was his time to thrive.
On the dreaded day, Chan finds himself standing in front of the mirror in his room on the brink of a meltdown. With all of the intricacies of his plan, he had forgotten to consider something very crucial– what he’d wear when spilling the contents of his gay little heart out.
There’s a heap of clothes strewn about on his bed, all of which are suddenly hideous, and God, why did he even buy a yellow v-neck in the first place? Chan consults the internet once again, and he’s told to keep it simple, classy, and fresh. He glares back at the screen. What does that even mean? And what the fuck does Tim on Reddit know, anyway?
He goes for a combination that makes the most sense in this situation. Chan pairs his favorite (and only) black slacks with a black silk button-up, ending off the look with a crisp and form-fitting blazer to tie everything together.
“Whoa,” Minho stops in his tracks to his room, surveying him up and down with furrowed brows. “Whose funeral are you attending?”
“My own,” Chan mumbles forlornly, earning a pitying look from his roommate.
He’s escorted out the front door ten minutes later. Minho, who looks a tad too fancy and put-together for a night of cheap wine and romcoms by himself, tells him that at this rate, he’ll be late. And the Grim Reaper is never late. Chan doesn’t have the mental capacity to laugh.
He picks Felix up promptly at 7, greeting him with a bouquet of roses that the shopkeeper reassured him were as “romantic and least platonic as it got”. Felix takes the bouquet into his hands with a smile that could instate world peace and a laugh that resembles the tinkling of quaint bells. He’s dressed in a similar fashion as Chan, except Chan thinks that he belongs on the runway, not in his rundown 2005 Toyota Camry.
The restaurant is nice. The food is satisfactory, and their waitress is friendly. Felix babbles animatedly about a golden retriever that he saw stand on its hind legs in the park that morning while Chan enjoys his medium-rare steak. In return, Chan tells Felix about the latest exciting development in his life, his newly-leaky washing machine, while the younger wolfs down his Aglio e olio enthusiastically.
Dinner is wonderful, because Felix is sitting across from him with his cheeks full of expensive pasta and a delighted look in his eyes. Outside, the sun sinks below the horizon and paints the city in a luminescent brilliance that is almost as pretty as the twinkle in Felix’s eyes. The sky grows dim, and by the time Chan is done with his steak and is busy hastily wiping at his mouth to get rid of any barbecue sauce, the moon is up and hanging prettily in the darkness.
The drive home is pleasant, filled with Felix’s renditions of early 2010s hits and fond laughs on Chan’s part. Seoul is alive and bright, even as their evening and the day careens to an end. As they near the bustling neighborhood where Felix lives, Chan spots snowflakes dancing down onto his windshield.
When they reach Felix’s apartment building, Chan parks his car and trips in his haste over to the passenger side to open the door. Felix laughs mellifluously again, and Chan reckons that spring may come early this year. They shuffle over to the entrance, where they stand and finish up their conversation regarding doggy winter fashion. The snowflakes begin to thicken, Chan notes, as their conversation lulls and they fall into an easy silence.
Felix is looking up at him with those big honey eyes, and something in Chan’s chest flails helplessly. The light spilling from the nearby lamppost bathes them both in a serene glow, and Chan faintly thinks that this is likely what one sees in front of heaven’s pearly gates.
“Thank you for today,” Felix beams after a moment, the edges of his eyes scrunching up endearingly. “I had a great time. Maybe I can finally consider myself a Valentine’s Day enthusiast.”
Chan smiles in response, stuffing his hands into the warm pockets of his blazer. In the icy evening, he can see both of their warm breaths weaving together in the small space between them, forming small puffs of air that mimic cotton candy. Before he can stop himself, he reaches out to grab one of Felix’s hands, enveloping it in the heat of his own.
The words are sitting on the tip of his tongue and Felix is right there. He’s staring at him expectantly, like he can decipher the jumble of words in Chan’s head. Chan wants to speak, wants to tell Felix just how lovely he is, but his mouth won’t open.
In the next moment, Chan sees Felix lean in toward his face, and his brain short circuits. He freezes and stands dumbly as the younger presses a sweet, fleeting kiss against his cheek, drawing back to flash him a toothy grin.
“Text me when you get home, okay?” Felix turns to unlock the door to his apartment block, waving gently.
The door shuts in his wake, leaving Chan shivering under the merciless pelt of the February snow.
☼
Take three.
The delirium that usually accompanies Chan’s 3 am work sessions has actively joined forces with the universe to make the state of his mind a living hell. The program that he uses to produce music lays open and untouched on his laptop screen, silently mocking him. Chan stares back at it with furrowed brows and a grimace, turning restlessly in his swivel chair.
A week had passed since he’d taken Felix out to dinner. Now, instead of the foggy weariness that normally filled his head at this hour, Chan’s mind was overwhelmingly active with regrets from that day. Any time he reached out toward his keyboard to attempt to put together anything that was remotely satisfactory, his hand paused against his will and his mind began to churn as if it were producing butter.
So, technically, Chan is forced into attempting to confess to Felix one last time by a combined effort made by his gay little heart and his (gay) masochistic brain. Contrary to popular belief, he does not rejoice in watching his own sanity wear thin.
He decides to go out with a bang.
Chan sits himself down the next night with a few cans of caffeinated drinks by his laptop to keep him company. His music program runs readily for the next several hours, until the moon begins to disappear and the sun peeks over the horizon with a milky hue. In those hours, he’s either mindlessly scribbling down lyrics with a haste otherwise unmatched or testing out rhythms and melodies that his sleep-boggled mind miraculously managed to create. Rinse and repeat, and by early Friday morning, Chan finds himself with a semi-finalized draft of a song that will either bring him extreme happiness or extreme pain.
He invites Felix over on Saturday evening, claiming to need his opinion regarding a piece he was experimenting with. Minho, refusing to be a witness of another one of his “failed homosexual antics”, told him he’d be gone by 6. His roommate is out the door at 5:57, backpack in hand and a pointed look in Chan’s direction that tells him all he needs to know.
Felix arrives around 8, a bag of snacks in one hand and Chan’s entire heart in his other. He’s dressed casually, sporting his usual, puppy-like grin that makes Chan’s essential organs do acrobatics. He loops his arms around Chan at the threshold of his apartment, excitedly chattering about the flowers in his room that had somehow already begun to sprout.
They slowly make their way to his bedroom and it eerily feels like Chan’s marching to his death. His room looks like death, too, but he doesn’t have the energy to worry about insignificant things like that. Pushing the door open, Felix strolls in with familiarity, instinctively gravitating toward the equipment on his desk. If Felix sees the stack of energy drink cans by his chair, he doesn’t comment on it.
Chan gestures for Felix to take a seat while he entertains the thought of backing out.
“It’s um,” Chan pauses, his eyes scanning the screen briefly, “not quite finished. But I wanted your feedback before I finished it up.”
“No worries, you know I love listening to your stuff.”
Watching the younger boy situate himself in his desk chair, Chan took a second to compose himself. He could feel the jitteriness in each of his little movements, and he wondered whether it had anything to do with his astonishing caffeine consumption or the boy next to him. Most likely a combination of both.
After Felix beamed up at him and flashed him a quick thumbs-up, Chan leaned forward and clicked on the play button on the screen. In the next second, a soft melody filtered through the small speakers on his desk.
“I actually wrote this as a present for you,” Chan murmured, almost too softly to be heard above the music coming from his speakers. But Felix nodded and sent him another enthusiastic smile in response, and the warm feeling from earlier returned to Chan’s gut.
Dear my sunny day
It’s winter again and I thought of you
You’re missing and the sky is bleak
Without you, my day feels incomplete
Hey, I woke up without you again
The sun is coming up and the snow is now gone
But I still feel impossibly weak
As I tend to the garden that you grew
Like a paradise in our own little world
With heavenly dahlias that remind me of you
It’s April and I notice the bells pealing
You’re bringing the daisy light of spring
As you run and meet me with a grin
But even the flowers smile up at you
The lovely spring that they missed
I feel the harsh winter melting away
In our haven as you hold me
And there’s a silly feeling in my gut
As I look at you and I feel crushed
And I stop to realize with fright
That I want spring to love me back
“So,” Chan’s hoarse voice broke the silence first, his eyes landing everywhere but Felix’s face. He shifted awkwardly from his position beside the swivel chair, choosing his next words carefully, “that’s my little gift to you. What did you think?”
For a few seconds, Chan was met with radio silence. The air felt heavy, and Chan was finding it increasingly harder to breathe as the seconds ticked by. But as he risked a peek over at Felix, he found that he too seemed to be struggling with forming sentences.
“Wow,” Felix looked back up at him with a stunned expression, his mouth stuttering around the words that he failed to voice. The younger seemed to take a second to compose himself as well, taking in a deep breath and glancing over at the screen with wide eyes. “That was… really, really beautiful.”
It’s nothing compared to how I see you he thinks, but chooses not to voice aloud. Chan smiles weakly in return, suddenly hyperaware of the close proximity between them. From here, even in the low lighting of his room, he could count the individual freckles spilling prettily across Felix’s nose bridge and cheeks.
“Thank you,” Chan flushes.
“Seriously, it blows my mind how you’re able to capture so many emotions in your songs every time,” Felix leans forward and gestures about excitedly. “You’re amazing! And I can’t believe I get the privilege of listening to your pieces before you release them. Perks of being your best friend, huh?”
Yeah.
…what?
Chan’s laugh gets stuck in his throat. He stares back at Felix in horror, attempting to process what he had just said. Felix, sensing the sudden shift in atmosphere, furrows his brows and reaches out to grab at Chan’s hand in a concerned manner. Chan feels his throat run dry and his hand burn where Felix is touching him. Fuck, even when he was being subtle, it felt like a punch to his gut.
Felix’s soft voice registers in his mind in the next moment, “Hey, are you okay?”
“Yeah,” Chan chokes out too quickly. His tongue feels heavy in his mouth as he spits the word out.
Felix gives him a look that says yeah, I’m absolutely not buying that but doesn’t prod further.
A familiar burning sensation has returned behind Chan’s eyes. It’s at the back of his throat and it’s accumulating like an ugly gray cloud in his ribcage. He stares at his wall and tries not to hurl the contents of his stomach onto his desk. Chan blinks blearily, biting the inside of his cheek and inhaling emphatically. He knew it would hurt, but not this damn much.
The wound’s raw and exposed, and Chan feels like it’s been there the whole time. It stings and it aches, but he has been the one rubbing salt into it. He has been the one feeding his mind senseless fantasies that only came back to bite him in the ass. Hard.
Felix is looking at him from his chair with a level of worry that isn’t healthy. It makes Chan feel even more guilty, but he’s having difficulty figuring out why he even feels guilty in the first place. For burdening Felix with something he can’t reciprocate? Or for indulging himself in his feelings that were dangerous from the very beginning?
It all feels silly. Chan wants to simultaneously cry and laugh at himself. It’s all his fault.
“Since you’re already here, do you want to stay and watch a movie? I can order food for us,” Chan meekly suggests, trying to dispel the weird energy circulating around them. He sees Felix’s expression morph into one of genuine surprise, and something queasy shifts in his stomach.
“Sure.”
☼
Felix is out like a light halfway into the movie.
After they’d settled awkwardly on the couch, Chan had offered him the remote to search for a movie while he attempted to navigate the food delivery app. The movie that Felix had chosen for them played mindlessly in the background while Chan simmered in his own shame and misery. Simultaneously, he had the arduous task of figuring out how to order a pizza from a place that didn’t overcharge. It should’ve helped distract him from the overwhelming urge to sob into his own hands, but it only further fueled the amalgamation of negativity he was currently fist fighting inside of his head.
As Chan was about to turn to Felix and complain about the complexity of the app because why the fuck is it so difficult to order a pizza nowadays, he’s met with a series of light snores that have absolutely no business sounding as cute and gentle as they do. He watches Felix shuffle slightly, dragging his cheek against the soft material of the couch, likely seeking somewhere to purchase his head. As Felix’s lashes softly flutter in his sleep and his chest rises and falls like a gentle wave, Chan feels something in him somberly resign.
Things are okay like this too, Chan thinks. He ignores the way his heart falters.
☼
Chan is rudely awoken way too early the next morning. The culprit? A familiar jingle of keys coming from the front door, loud enough to alert the entire apartment complex. He blinks several times, trying to rid the bleariness from his eyes. What does the job quicker for him is a low groan coming from a spot that is way too close to his neck.
Glancing down at the speed he did almost gave Chan whiplash. Tucked into his side is Felix, harboring the expression of a puppy in the midst of a nightmare. The position they were in was much, much different from the one Chan distinctly remembers seeing them in last night. The three feet of distance between them was gone, and oh, fuck, was that Felix’s leg resting atop his lap, or did he suddenly grow another leg?
“I’m home!” Minho’s shrill yell bounces off the walls and hits Chan right in the head. Chan has half a mind to ignore him and go back to sleep, but the universe seems to be, once again, plotting his downfall. His roommate clears his throat at a volume Chan swears is inhuman, “put your clothes back on! I don’t want to see a dick at 9 in the morning. I haven’t even had my coffee yet!”
This makes Chan’s eyes snap open. There’s a brief moment where the thought of murder flashes through his mind. He quells it down with another thought that hesitantly tells him that maybe, Minho will tone it down. He’ll catch a hint. Plus, murdering your friends is morally wrong. Or something.
Despite Chan’s prayers to every higher entity that was listening, in the next moment, Minho is barging into the living room and glancing around with a scowl. He pauses when he sees Chan and Felix curled up on one end of the couch. It’s almost comical how quickly his expression changes.
“Really?” Minho looks like he’s going through the 5 stages of grief. “You had to do it on the couch of all places? It has enough stains as it is!”
Chan thinks that sometimes, murder is okay.
Before he can lunge forward and strangle his menace of a roommate, beside him, Felix stirs ever so slightly. Chan freezes and holds his breath, praying that Felix wouldn’t regain consciousness right fucking now, when Minho looks like he’s about to gut both of them like fish. But alas, he’d be asking for too much. Felix wakes up with a pout and messy hair, making Chan’s heart clench.
“What’s happening?” Felix’s sleepy, gravelly voice just makes Chan want to cry even more.
“You and your boyfriend couldn’t keep it in your pants until you got to his room. Now I have to sit on the floor when I watch Netflix,” Minho grumbled in response, actively ignoring the death stares that Chan was sending him.
At this point, Chan didn’t even need a mirror to tell that his face, ears, and neck were all a concerning shade of red. Felix looks over at him with a confused expression, which soon morphs into one of mortification once he’s finally caught on.
“What the hell? No, no, we didn’t even–” Felix’s voice pitches up toward the end where he abruptly cuts himself off with a flustered expression. His eyes are blown wide and he’s sitting up, tone frantic. “Why would you even assume that? We were just watching a movie!”
The silence that follows is painful. Chan sees Minho throw Felix a doubtful look, a raised brow clearly insinuating he still believed something raunchy had gone down. Next to him, his best friend is shaking his head vehemently, lips quivering at the allegation. Neither of them speaks, just continuing to stare at each other with various degrees of disapproval.
“Minho,” Chan cuts through the silence, unable to take another second. He was several moments away from putting his head down the toilet. “It didn’t work.”
Felix fixes him with a bewildered stare that makes the older want to shrivel up. “What didn’t work? Why are you being so cryptic?”
Unsure of how to answer, Chan turns to stare expectantly at Minho, who is currently the one responsible for everything going wrong in his life. And in the world. Minho stares back at him silently, crossing his arms defiantly.
“So I bought you a cake for nothing?” Minho clicks his tongue, exasperatedly throwing his hands up. Chan thinks about how much he wants to cry and considers screaming really, really loudly until the ground is eventually forced to swallow him up.
Minho leaves the living room after another bout of confused shouts on Felix’s part and silent cries for help from Chan’s. Chan sits and reflects on every bad thing he’s ever done. Once they’re left alone, Felix immediately rounds on Chan, face still a bit flushed. “What were you two even talking about?”
Chan has hit a dead end and he knows it. He stares back at Felix with pained eyes, and the urge to pinch himself to wake up grows stronger by the second. His hands are curled into tight fists in his lap, nails digging into his skin and keeping him grounded in a present he desperately wants to escape. Chan can feel the universe laughing in his face, grabbing him roughly by the shoulders and shaking him coldly and relentlessly.
“The whole confession thing last night,” Chan miserably utters, “I wrote a song to tell you how I feel. Minho was in on it too. But I forgot to text him that uh. You rejected me.”
“Wait,” Felix looks like he’s busy connecting mental dots, “confession… like, you have feelings for me?”
The question hangs in the air and it makes Chan pause. He feels silly, like he’s back in high school and discussing some juvenile crush in the back of the class with a playful look in his eyes and a light heart. Except they’re no longer in high school, and Felix is not a juvenile crush that Chan can get over in a week. Chan can’t get over Felix, and that’s the issue.
“Um,” Chan clears his throat and scrunches his eyes closed, “yeah?”
“Oh my God. Oh my God.”
Chan’s afraid to open his eyes. He’s afraid to look up and see the disappointment and dismay on Felix’s face. He doesn’t want to face the laughable and unrealistic scenarios that his mind conjured up to scare him weeks ago, suddenly all too realistic and absolutely not humorous.
It’s quiet, too quiet. Until it isn’t. There’s a voice ringing in the back of his head, loud and mocking and humiliating. There’s blood rushing in his ears, and the tight feeling in his chest constricts until he feels like he can’t breathe. He’s gone cold all over, and he feels sick to his stomach. It’s all overwhelming, and Chan wants to curl in on himself and disappear.
He can feel the tides throw him under. He can feel himself swallowing mouthfuls of sour regret that stick to his tongue like tar. Regret for what? his mind begs, but Chan can’t bring himself to answer honestly.
There’s a tentative hand reaching out to curl itself gently around his wrist. Chan breathes in shakily. He knows what’s coming. It’s a phrase that his mind has repeated like a mantra. He’s well-acquainted with what he has to face, but that doesn’t make the searing pain in his heart any more bearable.
It’s silent, until the room is filled with the familiar and honey-sweet lilt of Felix’s laughter.
“I guess calculus isn’t the only thing I’m absolute shit at,” Felix mumbles softly, and Chan hears him shuffle closer. The momentary bewilderment is enough to draw Chan out of his man-made snail shell, his eyes darting up tentatively.
He doesn’t expect to see Felix so close. Felix is already looking back at him with an oddly tender expression on his face, and Chan feels his heart leap into his throat. The warmth from Felix’s hold on his wrist begins to spread languidly, like light from the rising sun. “You’re kind of shit at this too, Chris. I’ve been dropping my own set of hints for years now.”
It’s Chan’s turn to look back at the younger in disbelief. The churning in his stomach has stopped, but his heart has still not recovered from the 50 foot drop to his ass.
When he still hadn’t found the power to respond, Chan feels Felix sigh in fond exasperation and gently scoot even closer. The warmth of his palm settles at the back of his neck, bringing their faces closer, closer, until Chan feels himself melt. Faintly, he hears a set of footsteps enter the living room, followed immediately by a groan and a string of colorful profanities. Felix giggles into the kiss, and Chan is suddenly no longer distracted.
After they break apart, Chan feels his phone vibrate from its place next to his thigh. Glancing over, he spots a message notification that makes him laugh airily.
from: menace to society
you owe me dinner for a week
Chan smiles down at his phone before tossing it aside, making a mental note to prepare his wallet and digestive system for a week’s worth of expensive Italian.
☼
“Wait, hold on,” Felix is looking at him with gleeful eyes and a teasing smirk. “You put your confession letter for me in your calculus notebook?”
They’re currently seated on Chan’s bed with a plate of cake in hand, curled against each other’s side and musing over the events that nearly drove Chan to the brink of insanity. Felix seems to be enjoying this an unfair amount, which makes Chan question whether or not the pain he had to endure these past 3 weeks was really worth it (it was).
“Don’t say it like that,” Chan bemoans into his bite of red velvet. To be fair, it was completely true. But was Chan going to admit that and easily give Felix the pleasure of embarrassing him? Absolutely not. “You make me sound like a huge nerd. Plus, you weren’t any better.”
Felix chooses to ignore his last statement, “You could’ve just told me, Channie. But no, you wanted to be the main character of a shitty Netflix romcom so bad.”
Instead of replying, Chan just stares back at him in feigned annoyance, before setting both of their plates to the side and lunging over to tackle him onto his comforter. Felix shrieks in response, followed by the sweet chimes of his familiar, jubilant laughter. They fall back onto his bed, bouncing once, twice, as Felix’s saccharine honey scent washes over him like sunlight. Chan slides his hand over Felix’s waist, immediately feeling him shift under his ticklish touch and evoking another bout of chuckling that makes Chan feel cozy.
There’s a teasing hand sneaking up his side accompanied by the dulcet lilt of the younger’s laughter, and Chan thinks Felix sounds like pleasant spring. But as he draws back to stare down at the boy giggling in his arms, Chan thinks that not even the sunniest spring day can make him feel this warm.