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If somehow Jihoon could have prepared for this moment—hand stuck in a tuba only a few hours before the spring concert—he would have taken all precautions necessary to avoid it.
Now he’s stuck in a busy hospital behind a blue curtain, waiting anxiously for Soonyoung’s arrival and simultaneously blaming himself for 1) impulsively reaching into a tuba and 2) putting his hand into the tuba in the first place.
His right hand is already so sticky with sweat that he’s surprised his hand hasn’t already slipped out yet. A pool might as well been created at the bottom of this tuba. Jihoon wants to try and tug his hand out for again, but he’s too afraid that his hand might rip off if he does, so he just sits quietly like a little child and christ it gets more and more humiliating by the second. And, well, he sits as quietly as someone with their hand inside of a tuba can sit.
Frustrated and defeated sighs replace his normal breathing, and he starts thinking about where his life went wrong. Was it when he was born? Maybe not, that’s a bit too early. Was it when his students started roughhousing when he stepped out of the room and someone threw a flash drive straight into a tuba by accident? Proba—no, maybe not.
Was it when he instinctively shoved his fat hand down the tuba without a second thought?
Uh. Yes.
It all happened just a few hours ago, but when your hand is stuck in a tuba for those hours it feels like years. If the spring concert wasn’t today he wouldn’t mind it so much, but the entire band needs this tuba and their conductor. And Jihoon would rather shoot himself in the leg then go on stage with a tuba hanging from his hand like a bracelet. The flash drive is barely handing from his fingertips, and he can already feel an outline of its perimeter form on his fingers.
Soonyoung finally steps in and he breathes a sigh of relief. His friend jumps at Jihoon’s appearance, half relieved but half confused all at the same time. “Dude, when you told me you were here in the hospital, I thought it was something serious but what is this?” Soonyoung, the only medical student in their friend group, bounds over, inspecting the situation.
Five years ago, when they both met, Jihoon would have never guessed that Soonyoung wanted to be a nurse. Soonyoung is always clumsy and got himself into so many accidents that nurses probably hate him, so it’s kind of ironic to see him as a medical student now. But at least it works in his favor: Soonyoung will be the absolute last person to see him with his hand in a tuba. And that’s really the only reason he called Soonyoung over or even came to the hospital he works at.
“Hoon, your arm is stuck in a tuba.”
“Oh, I didn’t notice!” Jihoon says sarcastically, rolling his eyes. “Obviously! Can you help me?”
“What happened to you?”
“The kids were fooling around while I was away and someone threw a flash drive into this tuba and I tried to get it out but my hand is too big !” Jihoon takes a breath of air, exasperated. This must have been the eightieth time he had to explain himself today and even the lady at the counter didn’t seem to believe him so he hopes that Soonyoung can excuse his over snappy-ness for today. “So can you help me or not!? I only have a few hours until the spring concert and the kids need me!”
Soonyoung steps back, hands on his hips and lips pouted in thought. “To be honest, I don’t think I can.” Jihoon groans, throwing his head back. “Why didn’t you go to the firestation? I’m sure they can help you out better than I could.”
Jihoon shakes his head vehemently. “No fucking way. I need both my hand and this tuba in tact for today’s concert! I don’t have an extra if this tuba gets split in half!”
“Well, then I really can’t help you!” Soonyoung puts his hands up, defeated.
Jihoon deflates, holding his face in his singular hand. “Soonyoung, I hate to say this but I think you’re the only person I can trust to help me get out of this,” he admits, face scarlet red with embarrassment.
Soonyoung stares, confused. “What? Why me?”
“Because this is embarrassing!” Jihoon exclaims, hand turning into a fist. “My hand is stuck in a tuba, goddamnit!”
The older of the two laughs nervously. “Ah, right,” a hand comes up to rub the back of his neck. “Hey man, hate to break it to you, but medical school didn’t teach me how to get someone’s hand out of a tuba so I don’t think I’ll be able to do this.”
Jihoon’s face morphs morifically. His students have been preparing for the spring concert for almost half a semester. If he can’t show up and the tuba kid can’t play, he might as well resign as a teacher! He’s about to give up before he jolts, realizing that Soonyoung had slapped his right shoulder rigorously like he’s trying to encourage him. “I meant do this alone! Don’t worry, I think I can bring in someone who can actually help!”
Jihoon’s head shoots up at that. “What? No! Didn’t you just hear me? No one else can know about this or I will die.”
The nurse shrugs. “I can either bring in this guy, who might just be your saving grace, or the spring concert is over!” he chuckles. “Up to you!”
Jihoon makes the loudest groan possible, hoping that this guy will be the last person to see him like this. “Fine! Bring this guy in,” he grumbles, realizing that he already lost his dignity after he signed up to be a band teacher.
Soonyoung scurries out of the room at that and leaves Jihoon to wallow in his despair and mentally prepare himself for the humiliation of a lifetime. He tugs his hand one last time in a last-ditch effort to get his hand out before anyone else sees, but it doesn’t work and he feels like sobbing.
His friend returns quicker than he thought and he lifts his head to see a a man trailing behind Soonyoung, eyes on his clipboard. Jihoon does his best to keep his jaw from completely dropping to the ground because the man behind Soonyoung is fucking handsome. He looks like god took about twenty days to make him, carefully sculpting his sharp jaw and gorgeous brown hair that comes down in waves over his forehead, creating this beautiful cascade of brunette locks. The man also looks about their age with cat-like eyes and a kind, almost childish aura surrounding him and to be honest he’s kinda Jihoon’s type.
But Jihoon has no more time to ogle at the man’s beautiful features before he remembers his hand is an a tuba and this man is now a witness to that. And now he wishes to lay in his grave and bury himself alive.
“Good afternoon! I’m Jun, a medical student with—” the man—Jun—finally looks up from his clipboard and stops reciting his committed-to-memory introduction to stare at the scene in front of him speechlessly. A nervous Jihoon sitting casually on the hospital bed with his hand elbow deep in a tuba like it’s just an accessory or a pet of some sorts stares straight at him, biting his lips. If the sweat accumulating at the bottom of the tuba really wasn’t enough, the new pools of sweat seeping from his Jihoon’s palms will surely be enough to get his hand out.
Jun opens his mouth very carefully, almost like he's choosing his words. “Um...hello.”
“...Hi.”
“Your arm is…” Jun gestures slowly, “in a tuba.”
“Oh, yes, I’m well aware.”
Jun makes a very confused face and Jihoon’s ears burn red in humiliation.
“Okay!” Soonyoung shouts over their awkward exchange, causing both of them to jump in surprise. “Junnie, can you get his hand out? I couldn’t think of anything to help him.”
“Oh, yeah, definitely,” Jun answers promptly like he wants to forget what he’s just seen. Jihoon’s face brightens even more, but he can already taste freedom on his tongue and craves to feel his fingers again. At this point, he’s probably forgotten what his hand looks like at all. Their gazes follow Jun as he opens and closes a couple drawers, searching for something. “Soonyoung, do you know where the medical lube is? We can just use that.” He says it like it’s the most obvious thing ever, and it kinda is. Why didn’t Jihoon think of this?
Soonyoung’s jaw drops and Junhui uses this time to slip on his medical gloves. “Oh. My. God! You’re so right!” He runs to Jun’s side and fishes it out from one of the cabinets above the sink, swinging it around in amazement. “Here you go. Damn, Junnie, how did you know to do this?” Jun plucks the tube from his fingers with a word of thanks and Soonyoung continues to stare in astonishment.
“Let’s just say,” he chuckles as he twists the cap to the tube, “that I have a lot of experience in loosening things up.”
The other two just contort their face in disgust at the sexual innuendo, making Jun bark out a laugh. “Come on, it’s a joke! And we’re all adults here!...Unless…?” his gaze darts to from Soonyoung, to Jihoon, and back to Soonyoung, his eyes asking are we really all adults here?
Soonyoung stifles a laugh behind his hands and Jihoon feels deeply offended but also not sure if Jun is calling him a child for his height or the fact that he has his hand irresponsibly stuck in a tuba. “Excuse me, but I’m twenty-six.”
A pretty smile adorns Jun’s face, smiling up at Jihoon with all his teeth and his eyes closed into tiny moons. If Jihoon wasn’t so pissed off at him he might have fell for him right there, but his joke was just flat out rude! But then again, Jun’s still gorgeous so he can’t stay mad that long. “That was a joke, too,” Jun sings, but Jihoon doesn’t reply nor laugh, keeping his mouth in a straight line.
The medical student leans over and squirts a good amount of medical lube into the tuba and onto Jihoon’s hand. Jihoon wiggles his hand out on his own while Soonyoung pulls the tuba in the opposite direction and he cheers inwardly at the fact that his hand is actually loosening. Jun stands to the side with his arms crossed. “So how did this happen?” he asks, examining the tuba with his eyes.
Jihoon sighs. “Band practice. Kids were fooling around. Flash drive in the tuba. I try to get flash drive. Hand gets stuck in tuba.”
Jun stays silent for a minute, eyes still on the tuba. The silence in the room is tight and nauseating that Jihoon thinks he’d rather just cut off his hand and leave, but he deals with it. Jun blinks and shifts his gaze to Jihoon with a quirked eyebrow. “Why didn’t you just tip the tuba over? It would fall right out.”
Jihoon lets an irritated scoff escape his lips before he can catch it. It’s mostly directed at himself for being so incompetent as to not think of that first, but he takes it out on Jun instead. “Some of us aren’t Yale graduates, Dr. Jun.”
The medical student grumbles something about it being common sense and turns to throw away his medical gloves in the trash before Jihoon’s hand finally touches fresh air. He almost sobs with tears of happiness at the sight of his precious hand, thanking the gods for this second chance of life. Soonyoung cheers happily, congratulating Jihoon. “Thanks,” he says to Jun, a bit guilty for sneering at him a moment ago. But his hand is free and he is now a changed man! All is well. He hops off of the tall patient bench and swings his wrist around to stretch it. “Now I gotta get ready for the spring concert—wait, uh, do I have a hospital bill?”
He brings a finger to his chin, thinking. “Yeah. but I might need to charge you extra.”
He furrows his eyebrows and Soonyoung stares curiously. “For what?”
Jun takes a step forward. “For staring at me so intensely earlier,” he answers, staring at Jihoon through his eyelashes and licking his lips very provocatively yet intimately.
Jihoon’s entire body burns a bright red. “Wh—What!?” he exclaims incredulously, his eyes following Jun as he dips out of the curtained room and back into the rest of the hospital.
Soonyoung starts laughing and gestures to the spot that Jun once occupied. “He’s cool, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, right!” Jihoon scoffs, grabbing the tuba next to him. “So full of himself.”
But, in the end, even if Jun was a bit too cocky, Jihoon thinks it was still kinda hot.
Hours later and it’s time for the spring concert to start. Behind the red curtain sits a bunch of parents and friends of the students in his band all waiting for the show to start, bored out of their minds and only showing up to see their friends and families toot a little horn and hit a little drum.
Jihoon’s student band consists of freshmen, sophomores, and juniors in high school, but they’re good for their age. It took months of tweaking and training, but they’re good. And besides, they have him as a teacher so how could they possibly be bad?
He returns the tuba, cleaned clear of sweat, flash drives, and medical lube, back to his tubist with a pat on the back. Before the curtain opens, he gives a speech of encouragement and tells the kids that if they fool around again they will all find themselves inside of a tuba one way or another.
The show starts and music fills the air without effort, like the waves filling holes in beach sand. The speakers do a good job in resonating the music to the ears of every person in the room and he feels pride pit in his stomach with every note that they play. Every student in his class came from different musical experiences so the fact that they eventually came together like this to make music is something beautiful to him. Some people in the audience react to the beat, swaying slightly, while others continue to chatter over the music. Jihoon never really cared about that stuff as long as his students had fun playing.
At the end of the show, Jihoon plays his signature piece that he composed himself on his piano and it’s this performance that really moves people a bit. He hears people talk about having goosebumps and how relaxing his notes were and it’s because of that that he feels even more proud of himself.
The show ends after two hours and he is last left on the stage, bowing as the bored people in the audience give him a few claps. But his students cheer the loudest and it makes him feel great.
The students shove flowers that they bought at Stop and Shop before the show into his hands, thanking him for teaching them how to play and play the pieces that they performed today. He laughs and thanks them all back and takes a picture with all of them.
As he sets down the flowers, a tap is placed on his shoulder and he turns, expecting a student to thank him for everything. Instead stands the scorching hot medical student, Jun, that helped him get his hand out of the tuba just a few hours ago. His face scrunches in curiosity as to why a doctor from two towns over is suddenly at his school’s spring concert, but Jun’s words beat him to asking anything.
“Your little band did pretty well out there,” Jun says, smiling and cupping his hands behind his back.
“‘Pretty’?” Jihoon bites back before even asking how Jun has any affiliation to this place.
Jun chuckles, a nice little symphony that has Jihoon’s heart skipping a beat. “Nah, they were really good.” Jihoon nods and opens his mouth to thank him, but Jun interrupts him. “You were incredible.”
The words of praise sends chills down his spine and his body begins to heat up under Jun’s gaze. “Yeah?” he whispers and he swears that Jun is moving closer to him. “Wh-Why are you here anyway? Are you stalking me or something?”
The medical student starts laughing uncontrollably for a few moments. “No, no! My brother is part of your band.” Jihoon’s eyes widen to the size of saucers because there is no way that makes sense—he would’ve noticed! Jun raises a hand and points to a group of students who are sitting on the edge of the stage, talking endlessly about something random. “Minseo over there on the stage. He’s my little brother.”
“Minseo!?” Jihoon exclaims, shocked. There is no way that soft-spoken, kind Minseo is related to Jun at all, it just doesn’t make sense. “But you don’t look alike and you’re way too different!”
Jun nods his head slowly. “Correction: step-brother.”
Jihoon’s jaw drops. “Ah, right…sorry,” he replies. “So you came to watch your brother this year?”
“Well, this isn’t the first year, actually,” Jun answers quite shyly, cheeks brushed with red. “I’ve attended all of the recitals you’ve held for a while now. You’re great—like, really amazing at what you do.”
“Thank you…” Jihoon whispers, kinda guilty that he treated Jun like shit this afternoon.
“So I gave it some thought and I realized it was you that I took care of this afternoon,” he continues, “I also realized that I might have pissed you off once or twice because of the jokes I made.”
“You pissed me of three times, actually, but I wasn’t counting or anything,” he jokes.
Jun starts chuckling loudly. “Right, so I thought that we could start over again.” From behind his back, his left hand extends, brandishing out a real, single scarlet red rose for Jihoon to take. Jihoon gasps and stares at him in awe because the rose is gorgeous and looks really expensive. “Junhui Moon. I am actually a Yale graduate—well, I will be, and I really admire you.”
Junhui. What a nice name , he muses. “Hi,” Jihoon breathes, taking the rose from him with such delicacy, afraid that it will shatter under his fingertips. “I’m Jihoon Lee, a college dropout, and I think you’re pretty hot.”
“‘Pretty’?” Junhui parrots, teasing him.
“Oh, stop,” Jihoon replies, rolling his eyes.
“I saw that you didn’t see the hospital bill.” Junhui mentions.
Jihoon nods slowly. “Soonyoung said it was fine,” he replies before his eyebrows turn downwards. “Which means you lied about needing to pay the medical bill!”
“Yeah, well, it was a joke! I wanted to you see it.” Jihoon gives him a quizzical expression, almost asking why? Junhui laughs and takes a piece of paper out of his pocket. “I have it here, look.”
The teacher takes the piece of paper from his hand and starts reading through it before his eyes land on the huge number at the bottom of the paper. “What the hell is this? This is not—“ he pauses and reads the number carefully. “Oh, psh. Whatever.” Jihoon pretends that his cheeks don’t turn red at the sight of Junhui’s phone number at the bottom of the page and pretends that Junhui wasn’t pretty smooth with that.
“Oh, come on! A for effort?” Junhui jokes as Jihoon folds the paper back and pushes it against his chest.
“Maybe a B for effort,” he teases with a smirk on his face.
Junhui laughs a little more before they both realize that the school auditorium is clearing out and that they’re really the only people left inside. “Oh, it’s getting late,” Jihoon mentions, checking his clock that shows him that its almost fifteen to ten.
“Do you have plans?” Junhui asks nervously.
Jihoon studies his expression a bit, smiling. “No, nothing.”
The older of the two grins and leans in closer to Jihoon. “You wanna get dinner with together?” he questions in a sing-songy voice.
Jihoon pretends to think just to keep him anxious. “What kind of food?”
“Your choice.”
“Thai?”
Junhui genuinely gasps, his eyes widened. “Woah,” he says, amazed. “Literally my thoughts exactly.”
“I’m a mind reader, dude,” Jihoon replies with a shrug. “Are we going or what?” he asks, offering Junhui his hand to hold.
Junhui laughs and slips his fingers in between Jihoon’s. “Yeah, yeah, we’re going,” he replies, grinning ear to ear as he drags Jihoon out of the auditorium and into the school parking lot.
And if Jihoon ever admits that that date night with Junhui wasn’t the most fun he’s ever had in his life, he’d be lying straight through his teeth.
Well, unless he's crowning their wedding night with that title.
That’s an exception.