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As usual, Jungwoo is the first to notice.
“When did you guys start dating?” he asks as soon as the dorm room door closes behind them. Yuta is still a little distracted, double-checking his bag for his wallet and keys, so it’s not until they’re on the second floor landing that he finally replies.
“Who?”
“You and your roommate?”
Yuta blinks, then almost slips down the staircase as Jungwoo’s words sink in. “Me and my— we’re— what?” he sputters out, which is apparently confirmation enough for Jungwoo.
Although confirmation for what— Yuta’s not so sure. His morning coffee hasn’t fully kicked in yet.
“I see,” Jungwoo intones as they continue to go down the stairs. “You’re just fucking, then?”
“Jungwoo—!” Yuta exclaims almost automatically, cheeks heating up at the words even though he’s still quite confused about the topic at hand.
Jungwoo just raises an eyebrow at him before turning to smile at the guard — they’re at the dorm lobby now — and sign out of the visitor’s logbook. “Hey, I’m not judging,” he says, putting a hand up as they finally exit the building.
Yuta just shakes his head, feeling like something’s off with the morning.
Everything finally sinks in halfway into their 8AM CMSC 124 lecture.
“We’re not dating,” Yuta hisses in reply, almost an hour after the question was first asked.
Jungwoo, who’s starting to nod off in the seat beside him, startles and sits up groggily. “What?”
“And we’re also not…” Yuta continues, then leans in closer as he lowers his voice further, “fucking.”
Jungwoo rubs his eyes and shamelessly lets out a huge yawn, complete with an accompanying sleepy groan and all. Yuta slinks down in his seat as their professor pauses from flipping through his slides to glare at their side of the room.
“Okaaay…” Jungwoo lets out when he’s done stretching his arms over his head, drawing out the word. “So, what, you just— kiss each other on the mouth when saying goodbye? That’s kinda weird.”
Yuta stares at him for one, two, three seconds.
Who says on the mouth when lips is a perfectly nice and non-clinical sounding word? And also— fuck. That’s what was off with the morning.
His eyes widen as he scrambles for a believable excuse, although he doesn’t know why— Jungwoo doesn’t look like he cares anyway. Still, Yuta settles with, “It’s a European thing. From my semester abroad last year.”
Jungwoo scoffs loud enough for their professor to glare at them again. “Don’t give me that shit. I’ve seen Friends.”
Well.
Yuta doesn’t reply to that, and Jungwoo doesn’t press any further. When they head out of their building after the lecture and Yuta checks his phone, he has thirteen unread messages from Doyoung. Oh god.
Maybe we should backtrack a little.
Two nights ago was orientation night for NCIT Coding Crew. Doyoung had been pestering Yuta to join since they became roommates at the start of the semester, but Yuta had always insisted that he’s busy enough with his courses for the sem that he didn’t need org activities to add to his already teetering pile.
But he suddenly had some free time (okay fine, he may have rearranged some stuff in his schedule to specifically free up that night) and getting to hang out with Doyoung is not exactly the worst thing in the world (it’s in fact the best thing and the sole reason Yuta eventually agreed to go to the stupid orientation).
The night was uneventful, as expected. And in the grand scheme of things, it actually doesn’t have much of a relevance, except… maybe… for the fact that it was thenightYutarealizedhemayhavejustatinybitofacrushonhisroommate. Haha, what?
Yuta has known Doyoung for a while, being in the same major and all. They’ve been in a few classes together, and they shared a lot of mutual friends. He hadn’t really known known him, though, until they got assigned to be roommates this semester. (Thank god for the power of love and Taeyong deciding to move in with Jaehyun in an apartment off-campus and leaving Yuta behind in their college residence hall.)
He has always thought of Doyoung as cute, objectively speaking. But god was he unprepared for all that objectivity to be thrown out of their fourth floor window the moment Doyoung came to live with him. There’s something about seeing Doyoung late at night, glasses askew and mouth hanging open whenever he falls asleep in the middle of coding. (There’s something about seeing Doyoung in glasses, period.) There’s also something about seeing him first thing in the morning— bedhead, squishy cheeks, and drowsy eyes. Yuta may have just realized his feelings for Doyoung at the org orientation, but actually thinking about it? Doyoung had him at “You can have the bathroom first” their very first night.
Yuta was still processing these feelings when Jungwoo came over last night to cram an exercise they’ve been partnered up for. And he was still processing them in the morning, when he woke up to Doyoung setting down three to-go cups of coffee on their study table.
“Morning,” Doyoung greeted him, already showered and looking strangely perky for the hour. “I was roped into Taeil’s 6:30 AM bikram because Johnny’s too chicken to make a fool out of himself in front of his crush alone,” he explained, then paused a little, looking up at the ceiling. “You know what, that’s offensive to chickens.”
Yuta clutched his chest, distantly thinking that there must be some law about being this whipped so early in the morning. The drum of his heartbeat felt borderline illegal.
“What’s with you?” Doyoung asked, raising an eyebrow.
“I’m touched,” Yuta replied without missing a beat. “Is one of those cups for me?”
“No,” Doyoung deadpanned. “It’s for me and Jungwoo and the ghost in our room.”
Yes. Fucking illegal.
Oh, right— the kiss.
Yuta managed to shower and get dressed free of thoughts of Doyoung (mostly because he committed to sing all his favorite anime OSTs all the while). But Doyoung just had to smile at him with that bright, endearing smile of his just as Yuta was about to go out the door, that Yuta involuntarily stopped singing in his head and got caught up in a fantasy instead—
Of what it would be like to come home to that smile every day, not just as a roommate but as a boyfriend. Of what it would be like to have the right to kiss him goodbye and not just settle for a smile. He thought about it for a moment, waved goodbye, then went out the door with Jungwoo for their 8AM class.
But apparently… he actually kissed Doyoung in real life.
“So… what was that?” Doyoung asks now in their dorm room, an echo of the text messages he sent Yuta in the morning. Has their room always been this small and starved of oxygen?
“Are you sure you weren’t just… sleep-deprived?” Yuta tries.
Doyoung rolls his eyes and throws a pillow at him. “Yuta.”
“Okay, okay, that’s me then,” Yuta throws his hands up, then grimaces at the look Doyoung is giving him. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what came over me. You know I barely got an hour of sleep and I was just really, uhm…” he trails off as Doyoung’s fake-annoyed look from earlier transforms into something that Yuta hasn’t seen before. God, give it to him to screw everything up before he can even manage to make sense of what he’s feeling and much less talk to Doyoung about it. “That was totally random of me, I’m sorry,” he finishes lamely.
“Oh, okay.” Doyoung presses his lips together then stands up from his bed. “So that was nothing, then?”
Well, it was a lot of things, but Yuta doesn’t really know how to put them into words. Besides, the look on Doyoung’s face is… searching, like maybe he’s hoping for it to be nothing. Because— right. They haven’t even been rooming together for a year, and here Yuta is already screwing up their roommate dynamics.
“Pshaw,” Yuta chokes out, which is definitely an expression — much less a sound — that has never in his life came out of his mouth. Doyoung understandably furrows his brows.
“What?”
“I mean, it’s nothing. Don’t worry about it,” Yuta clarifies, even waving a hand for effect.
Doyoung nods. “I wasn’t.”
Days and weeks pass, and life goes on. As much as life can go on in university, anyway.
Doyoung said he wasn’t worried, but Yuta is starting to think that maybe he was. It’s not like he started avoiding him, but Yuta can definitely feel that something has shifted in what relationship they had before the Kiss, which he’s come to pathetically think of in a capital K. And it’s all his fault— falling in lo- uhm, in crush with his hot roommate. What a fucking cliche.
Now the semester’s about to end, just one grueling hell week to go through, and in between cramming projects and aggressively studying for exams, Yuta has just the time to worry about what he’s supposed to do with the Doyoung-shaped hole in his heart.
“Alright, how do I look?” the hole himself asks.
Yuta shakes his head— that didn’t come out right.
He looks up, then loses his breath for a second. Doyoung doesn’t notice, busy alternating between fiddling with the hem of his denim jacket and pouting at the tiny mirror mounted on the wall.
“You look… passable,” Yuta says, clearing his throat.
Somewhere along the way, he decided that pretending he’s not affected by every little thing Doyoung says and does is the way to go to manage his feelings. It hasn’t worked so far.
Doyoung drops down on his bed at the opposite side of the room with a groan. “Passable? You said this denim jacket really accentuates my shoulders.”
Yuta did. It does.
And the truth is, Doyoung looks great. So fucking great, that Yuta has a hard time looking at him for more than two seconds before feeling like he’s gasping for air.
But he doesn’t say it, because he’s scared that at the end of I think you look great, he might accidentally blurt out I think I’m in love with you and it’s a Thursday night and he has that damn Advance Programming final tomorrow so he really doesn’t have the time for this.
“Who are you going out with again?”
Doyoung rolls his eyes. “I’ve told you, like, a thousand times. The guy from my Sociology elective? You kind of met when he dropped off some readings here a few weeks ago.”
Yuta nods, hums, then picks up his phone to aimlessly scroll through his Instagram feed. It’s the first time in weeks that they’re talking, kind of, without the feeling of that Kiss hovering in the air above them like a representative ghost of bad decisions— and it’s Doyoung asking for Yuta’s opinion on his date outfit, of all things.
In the wise words of Jungwoo, it really is brutal out here. (Actually, that might have been Jungwoo singing Olivia Rodrigo.)
Who goes on a date during hell week, anyway? Doyoung, that’s who.
Yuta looks up again, only to see that Doyoung is still pouting, so he sighs and gets up from his own bed. “You look great, Dons.”
Doyoung beams.
(Sometimes, Yuta tells himself it’s enough, tells himself he probably can live with just that smile. Fuck that fantasy that ended this whole thing before it even had a chance to start. But then Doyoung turns to him and a part of him—okay, the whole of him—cries out, more.)
“Okay then! Don’t wait up, roomie,” Doyoung says, winking, which would have been comical if it wasn't for Yuta’s heart doing somersaults inside his rib cage at the sight of him leaving.
So the next thing he knows, he’s blurting out— “What if you don’t go?”
Doyoung’s hand freezes on their door handle. “Huh?”
Yuta gulps, thinking it’s now or never. He doesn’t know where the sudden courage is coming from, but the sight of Doyoung’s back as he was walking away to go meet another guy seems to have unlocked something in him.
So he says, “Stay.”
In his peripheral view, he can see the stack of readings he was planning to pull an all-nighter for.
“Taeyong just shared his Netflix password again, so we can finally watch Money Heist?” he says, a bit tentatively, and Doyoung just stares at him with a confused knit in his brows.
“Plus,” Yuta continues, walking over to the corner where they keep their mini-fridge, “we still have this… uhm, half a bottle of blueberry soju.” He holds it up in the air, willing it to look more appealing. “What do you say? Netflix and soju night?”
“Yuta.”
“Or, you know that volcanic clay mask I ordered online just came today, right? Let’s try it out.”
“What?” Doyoung exclaims, incredulous, but starting to smile a little now. “What’s going on? Don’t you have a final early tomorrow?”
Yuta points at him like it’s the greatest idea. “You’re right. You could just help me study.”
Doyoung glares at him jokingly. “Okay, enough, I’m going to be late for my date now.” He starts to turn towards the door again, but Yuta rushes to try and stop him.
“If you don’t help me study, I might fail my final and get expelled. They’ll match you with a new roommate who’ll probably have disgusting habits that will drive you mad and then—”
“What the fuck?” Doyoung’s laughing now. “That’s not really how it works.”
Yuta tries to laugh too, but something about the moment feels so slippery. Yuta feels Doyoung slipping out of his fingers, and he has run out of arbitrary reasons he can think of to make him stay.
Doyoung must see something in Yuta’s face, because he stops laughing. “What’s going on?”
“You look really great,” Yuta whispers in reply.
Doyoung stares at him and it’s probably only for a few seconds, but Yuta feels like it’s an hour that passes, waiting for what he says next. “Okay, no fair. You said that kiss was nothing,” Doyoung finally mutters, which is… not at all what Yuta expected him to say.
“W…hat?”
“You said that kiss was nothing,” Doyoung repeats. “So what are you doing now? You’re really confusing me, Yuta.”
Yuta just stands there slack-jawed, before Doyoung steps closer and brings him back to his senses. “This conversation is confusing me,” he manages to let out, which is apparently not the right thing to say, because Doyoung steps back again.
“Do you really want me to stay?” he asks.
The air in the room has turned serious, maybe it has for a few minutes now.
Yuta gulps. “I mean, if I say yes… would you?”
He sees Doyoung take a deep breath, casting his gaze heavenwards, before shrugging off his denim jacket and throwing it into his bed.
“Well,” he says, walking over to take the half-empty bottle of soju that Yuta has not realized is now condensing in his hands. “Half a bottle of soju, Netflix marathon, volcanic clay mask… helping my roommate ace his final so he doesn’t get expelled and I don’t get a new one with disgusting habits?” At this, he looks straight into Yuta’s eyes, pursing his lip in a soft smile, bringing out the tiny scar below it that Yuta all too often finds his gaze being drawn to.
“With all these reasons to stay, how can I not?” Doyoung finishes in a soft voice, and Yuta finally catches up to his words earlier—
“That kiss was not nothing!” he blurts out, startling Doyoung, who almost drops the bottle in shock.
“What?”
“It was all kinds of things— good things! But you were looking at me like you hoped it was nothing and I—”
“The fuck do you mean?” Doyoung interrupts him. “I was looking at you like I hoped it was something.”
“How was I supposed to know that?” Yuta retorts. “You looked so… unperturbed about it all that—”
“Unperturbed?”
Yuta rolls his eyes. “It was the word of the day in English Composition, okay?”
Doyoung bites his lip, sarcastically gesturing for him to continue.
“And I said don’t worry about it and you said I wasn’t which now I know you were, and I didn’t want to mess up what we had going on because you are a pretty nice roommate, I didn’t know there’s someone in this entire campus who’s as much of a clean freak as Taeyong and—”
“Yuta,” Doyoung interrupts him for the third time. “Can I kiss you to shut you up? Is that a thing we can do to each other? Because I really want to.”
Yuta blinks. “…To kiss me?”
“To shut you up,” Doyoung says, smiling and stepping closer.
Yuta shrugs. “I’ll take it.” He smiles too, then, “as I was saying, Taeyong is— hmph.”
Kissing Doyoung in real life and when he’s actually awake enough to savor it? Fucking great.
Doyoung brings a hand up to hold his cheek when they pull away. “You know that first kiss has now become, like, an important pillar to whatever this is? So when you forget to kiss me goodbye, it could very well mean the end of us?” he says, and Yuta laughs, just because everything feels right in the world again.
And also because it’s funny.
“Like I would ever miss even one goodbye kiss, now that I have the right?”
Doyoung scrunches his nose, then leans forward to steal a quick kiss again. Yuta grabs his waist to pull him closer and make the most of it.
Yuta aced his final, as lovestruck people do, and the next night they make a quick run to 7/11 for some more soju to celebrate the end(ish) of their exams. God, who falls in love during hell week, anyway?
Yuta and Doyoung, that’s who.