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Like any kid who's lucky enough to have the world want him in it, Mark has been taught how to love—he still remembers that one seminar where his dad showed him how to strip aloe vera in two to lay it over spots the sun had shined on for too long, or that whole lecture dedicated to how his mom kept telling him stories to sleep even when he was grown enough to read on his own. But even though he had technically attended every lesson, he’d never thought he would need to pay attention to the instructions.
It seemed like an easy pass, and for years it was: some acts of service, a couple pats on the back and smiles delivered at the right time could get the job done anywhere, anytime, person regardless. At least until he takes another class later on in life, an elective of a postgraduate study on affection, when a night out for a drink ends with Donghyuck teaching him what it’s like to drink up a soju-brewed kiss, and Mark realizes he may be well-versed on giving up time for someone and then spending it with them, but on intimacy, not so much.
Alas, Mark makes it to twenty-one with little to no clue which bits and pieces from romcoms and teen daydreams to take as reference, expectations spilling all over. What's the yearly average of arguments for South Korean couples? (And who's the current record-holder, so they can be cordially notified they've been knocked off the podium once Donghyuck leaves the toothpaste on Mark's floor's bathroom open one more time and they get to have Argument Number Nth of the month). The little spoon—When and how does he get to be it? Is it normal to not know how they end up kissing half the time, or does Mark have to start worrying about his memory's missing gaps between watching bad reality TV and Donghyuck's mouth on his?
He knows they were sitting too close this once (conclusion drawn by picturing himself having Taeyong's thigh thrown over his own or Chenle's hand being that high up his leg and—yeah, no) and one of them started it (only because nothing exists that hasn’t had a beginning), but he can’t even try and get himself to remember just how many inches there were between them or who was the one to lean in first, because all he can think about is how Donghyuck looked the moment right before, sunburnt by Mark's bedside lamp on the dim black of the room to showcase smoldered pores and a mouth out-of-habit gnawed dark pink, and just how sweet dessert has left the curve of his mouth, peaches and cream threatening to rot Mark’s own teeth if he keeps on kissing him.
He tries and tries, but it’s all motion, Donghyuck either having climbed or been pulled into Mark’s lap—but he’s there whichever way, the small of his back warm under Mark’s hand—and fingers he’s let purposefully tangle in Mark’s hair, or maybe they’ve fallen victims to the vining of split ends and dark roots—but they curl in on themselves and tug at Mark’s hair all the same, a greedy grip like he wants to hold him in a fistful, have him fit in the palm of his hand and get Mark to trust him with his skin and bones filling the gaps between his fingers.
How does he do that?
“Do what?” Donghyuck asks back, little to no pause put to the trail of wet presses being left on Mark's cheeks by run-down lips—puffy, chapped, teeth-marked, and only one out of three entirely Mark's fault.
“You always know, like, what to do. Where to put your hands and stuff.” Mark is fully expecting the Earth to crack in two only so the ground will swallow him whole by the end of it, a question that sounded reasonable on his mind coming out with shame turning it squeaky in tone and stupid in content when he wonders, “Who taught you?,” sounding a little jealous and a lot envious, like he's a second away from asking for the number of Donghyuck's non-existent former love affair.
“Nobody taught me," Donghyuck mocks him even when holding back on laughter, making sure each word comes out as dipped and dyed in ridicule as the original. “I mean, you do, kind of,” he grants Mark after a moment, parting from him to look him in the eye. “When I do this,” Donghyuck’s hand winds back into that same greedy grip to tug at the hair on Mark’s nape, “your face goes a little stupid—yeah, like that,” he laughs, and Mark realizes only after the fact that his eyes have been reduced in sight from his eyelids growing heavy at the pull, declaring right after as if it's really as easy as it seems, “So I know you like it.”
Donghyuck kisses him the way he does when he wants to call conversation quits, languid and long enough to make sure all Mark can think about is television static and the feeling of warmth reaching as far down his body as it can go. This time it journeys down to his neck and up his ears, skin burning hot when Donghyuck parts to run his tongue over the seam of Mark's mouth.
“Just do whatever. I'll tell you if I don't like it," he says before catching Mark's top lip in one more peck, adding then as an afterthought, "Or just ask me."
Mark allows Donghyuck to lead him away by sucking on the swell of his lip, tracing the roof of his mouth, drawing a circle with a finger over his cheek in an axiom gesture to have him open up wider. He lets himself be kissed red and tender, and only when he feels his hands be placed on the dip of Donghyuck's waist does he remember words, pulling away with every effort put on not losing rational thought to Donghyuck's short wet kisses to his chin, lips parted and whining discontent into Mark's stubble.
"Isn't that lame?" Mark's panting can only be felt with a hand to his chest, but his embarrassment is all over his voice, with his eyes avoiding Donghyuck's and settling on a spot of the duvet far, far away from the limestone of his thighs that try to draw Mark in as the next best thing in sight, with the skin that stands behind a pale line telling apart the stretch of his legs that had tanned over the summer and the one not even the sun had been allowed to kiss. "Me having to ask what—you know, like—what you like-like?"
"What I like-like,” Donghyuck repeats, like the sound of his own voice might make it make sense. Going by the looks of it, it doesn’t.
“Yeah. What you’re into,” Mark manages not to choke on the words on their way out, and Donghyuck must have heard the last piece of Mark’s pride come tumbling down with the effort, his hand on the valley between Mark’s ribs letting him feel his game of catch with breath and the thump of his nerves single-handedly taking over the pumping of his blood.
Sharing every first with someone else sounds nice on paper, romantic even, until it comes down to it.
It being a drunk first kiss that tasted far too much like friendship, only getting the hang of it after many more attempts and with the sight of Donghyuck—flushed and glassy-eyed, batting Mark’s hand away from him because he can’t, sentence forever unfinished with a hand wiping spit off his mouth—learning to share a living space with his memory of fourteen-year-old Donghyuck—both arms looped around the crook of Mark’s elbow and cheek pressed to the puff of the jacket over his shoulder, asking to pair up with him for a game during trainee years.
It as in spending their manager’s night out in Mark’s room left all to themselves, every light but two of them out. One being Mark's lamp, the other the bulb that lights up inside his head at the realization that he doesn’t know how to get around someone else’s body, doesn’t even know what he likes himself, having nothing to lead Donghyuck with or offer him except clammy hands and a mouth that, apparently, won’t shut up.
“I like-like you, despite your many-many flaws,” Donghyuck doesn't miss a beat, which is very sweet of him. Also a little insulting. Definitely unhelpful. "It would be lamer if you acted like you got me all figured out and then tried to lick my eyeball or whatever.”
Something must show on Mark's face, because Donghyuck's smile goes from rocky-ground entertainment into softer territory, the smooth land of his hands coming up to take Mark’s face in their curved palms, holding his eye just how Mark needs it to.
“Seriously, though. I can't come up with anything more attractive you could do than ask me how to make me feel good." A thumb runs down the line of Mark’s neck, pressing hefty and running gentle in a sweep over the skin. "That's what you’re trying to do, right?"
Mark hums agreement into a kiss he's pulled into by the back of his neck, a smile against his mouth the next moment. “Then do your worst.”
It’s Donghyuck calling on him now, telling him it’s his turn for show-and-tell, to go up to the front of the class and demonstrate how it’s done.
Scene unscripted, role unrehearsed, character unprepared, he looks at the length of Donghyuck’s legs—still long even when bent in half and two-toned with shorts hiked up, still showing pale skin not even the sun has kissed—and uncertainty loses its fight when he thinks of beating daylight to the punch. "I kinda, uhm—Lay back?"
Asking isn’t always helpful, it turns out.
"I don't know," Donghyuck tells him when he’s between unsunkissed legs, staring up at him with the leftover taste of self-consciousness on his tongue at admitting he’s clueless, a juggle of thoughts not letting him forget he doesn't know how much of it should be his lips pressing down, if licking would be weird, if biting would feel nice. "Just try? I'll tell you."
Try, is the answer every time, like he's asking Mark to take a gamble or put on a show without a screenplay.
And so Mark improvs.
“Good?”
The word comes out muffled by the cotton of Donghyuck’s turtleneck, which gets in the way of Mark’s mouth, a finger being hooked inside the fabric to pull it back down and kiss a path up Donghyuck’s jaw.
"You don’t get to ask when you know,” Donghyuck complains, voice pointing out the betrayal when Mark kisses behind his ear and his neck cranes back as if he’s trying to look through a skylight, messing the back of his hair up against the company’s bathroom wall in the midst of it.
There's no end game to this ten minute escapade more than finally getting his hands on Donghyuck after a number of days that seemed like far too many, as well as the fact he just can, Donghyuck’s endlessly high libido willing and discretion granted.
Unlike how Donghyuck is in everything else, he’s pin-drop quiet as soon as Mark gets him behind a closed door, either by a lock or one of their hands clutching a handle to keep it shut, only muted and drowned out sounds coming from the back of his throat. Closed-doors Donghyuck, just like he is on a stage or behind a camera, is all about putting on a show, something made to be seen: red-faced, mouth hung open or bitten shut, tongue lapping over his front teeth when he likes something and eyes either rolled back or tucked away from sight by eyelids when he’s gotten far away enough from thinking that Mark has to call him back down.
So Mark has to break away from Donghyuck’s neck or come up from between his legs to check for pink cheeks or a soundless gasp-shaped mouth as a progress lead, and his ear has to filter out the white noise of a bedroom's AC or the murmur of conversation outside a photo studio’s empty make-up room to make use of every hitch and heave of breath as compass, because, contrary to popular opinion, Mark does not italics know.
Nothing about this is smooth. It takes far too much molding, a constant awareness in the back of his mind that he’s trying to make himself fit in someone else’s nook and crannies—his knee is probably digging too hard where it’s settled in the space between Donghyuck’s thighs, neck kisses too full of grazing teeth that can’t even have the luxury of leaving a mark and have to settle for biting in brushes and skims of incisors, still fully brand new to reading between the lines of a language he’s just picked up. (Or, in Donghyuck’s words, Mark’s a big fucking virgin too scared of fucking up.)
“Is it?” Mark asks again, a genuine need in it even when Donghyuck grinds down against the top of his thigh, the scratch of jeans on jeans swallowing up the air that gets tugged out of him, who never humors Mark for long.
“It’s so bad.” One more press of lips that’s more of an open mouth pushing teeth and tongue to skin than a dictionary-definition kiss, and Mark’s hand comes up to hike one of Donghyuck’s legs up to his waist, fingers clasping the bend of the back of his knee and pulling on it to press up against him even closer, face rising up from the crook of Donghyuck’s neck with hearing and sight always on call.
“This is doing absolutely nothing for me. Worst experience of my life.” Donghyuck’s voice cracks when his act comes close to being given up, with red cheeks and mouth opening and closing without ever falling shut, as if trying to wrap his lips around words that won’t come out. “I think you did it. You’ve finally put me off sex,” are the ones that do make it out, head lolling to the side against the wall and cheek cooling down on top of the bathroom tiles.
Mark isn’t sure how Donghyuck expects him to buy that, looking like he's only a praise away from coming apart, chest rising and falling without Mark's touch having gotten the chance to slip under his clothes yet, and the need to ask again this once is almost entirely just to tease him.
“Want me to stop?” Mark's eyebrows go up, and when his hand untucking Donghyuck's shirt from inside his jeans gets slapped away, he laughs as he goes right back to trying to tug it free.
“It’s fucking—the best. You're good. So good," Donghyuck says it both reluctantly and like a promise, almost making Mark believe he isn't an even bigger virgin than him with nothing to compare this to, the muscles of his stomach contracting under Mark's cold palm when it splays open over his tummy and starts to travel up and up. "Noooo, get off. If you touch me I'm literally gonna di—nn.”
Mark makes sure he doesn't die, at least until he gets to hear him say just how good he is one more time.
“I’m with Mark,” a fourteen-year-old Donghyuck announces to no one’s interest, both arms looped around the crook of Mark’s elbow and cheek pressed to the puff of Mark’s jacket over his shoulder.
“Jaemin asked me first.”
“Jaemin doesn’t have a single competitive cell in his body. He’s not gonna make you win.”
“Neither will you," Mark shrugs, pretending he doesn't mean for the motion to try and knock Donghyuck's cheek off its perched point on his shoulder.
“But I can make you,” Donghyuck answers back, tone impassive and cheek squishing further against Mark's puffer jacket, pretending he doesn't know that he's right about being able to make him—
Mark blinks. “Make me what?”
The line of Donghyuck's shoulders goes up, imitating in a taunt Mark's every move. “You’re gonna have to pick me to find out,” he sets out the bait.
The bustle of the practice room around them reminds them it's not just the white-noise soundtrack to their lives when someone speaks up, facing Mark's way when they ask you two pairing up?
Mark looks over at every blinking eye fixed on him, his thought process a buried treasure for him to dig up later, once he's curled up in bed with the lights off and wondering what on Earth went through his mind when he said, “Yeah, me and Donghyuck.”
When the eyes leave their places on his face vacant and the bustle dials up, Mark turns his head back to the side to find Donghyuck’s got his chin dug deep in the summit of his clavicle and a smile that one-eighties the set of his face, for once clear on intentions and far too interested in the way Mark's face crumbles when he tells him, “See? I made you.”
Donghyuck got him to do exactly what he wanted then, and he’ll most likely get him to do so now, with a hand reaching out to him from behind a shower curtain in an almost pitch black room, making grabby motions once time ticks on by.
“We’re going to die,” Mark tries to argue anyway, because they didn’t win then, and they’ll probably die if he gives in now.
They got back from an hours long practice to their building’s power being out, the bone-deep tiredness making it hard for anyone to do much more than groan out frustration or pad to their rooms in drenched dirty socks. By now, everyone’s either in bed or out, bored or absent enough not to mind Donghyuck’s phone playing music loud with its echo as back-up vocals inside the bathroom.
Mark’s plans had involved stripping down to his underwear and feeling around his night table for baby wipes to get rid of the sweat, Donghyuck welcome to slip under the covers and cuddle up to him before he’s officially dead to the world. What he actually gets is his forearm pulled towards the bathroom with his shirt halfway off, Donghyuck—who’d slipped not under sheets but inside Mark’s dorm—insisting on a shower under the pretense of feeling sticky and Mark’s smell being strong enough to make a statement.
Mark gets to strip off all the stickiness and the sweat with Donghyuck’s phone flashlight making do as vanity lights for his belt to get unbuckled without excessive fiddling and to know where to drop his shimmied off his pants, music masking the sound of a matching set of zippers going down and fabric meeting the ground. Donghyuck’s happy sigh at the scalding water hitting his back isn’t enough to persuade Mark to jump inside the tub right after him, however, and the happy little breath he had let out comes back shaped into a weary sound.
“Come on, you big baby. Here.” Mark feels hands wrapping around his wrists, and the pull this time gets him to move, if only because tripping over his feet makes it hard not to.
One foot in, and Mark finds he can’t tell the difference between blinking and keeping his eyes open. “Are you sure we—”
“No,” Donghyuck guesses before he can finish. “Highly unlikely you’ll slip and crack your skull,” Mark’s hands are let go just as he’s hauling his other leg inside the bathtub, “but not impossible.”
The light from Donghyuck’s phone flashlight grows duller under the shadow of the closed curtain, and Mark’s survival instinct seems to flick on all red-blaring alarms at finding him standing naked on wet acrylic in the dark, arms flailing out for something to hold onto with feet planted firm on the non-slip mat. “Dude, wait.”
“You’re fine,” Donghyuck’s laugh is the only thing the dark can’t hide nowhere near a fraction of, his fingers squeezing Mark’s back just as tight and a hand sitting atop his hip in reassurance even while muttering, “Drama queen.”
Washing-off shampoo dripping down his nose, Mark scrunches up the skin around his eyes in a squint and listens to Donghyuck drone on about missing the finale of that drama he never remembers the name of, to remind him to resend Mark a video Renjun sent him, how do you still smell as he takes a step closer, one hand yet to leave from around Mark’s wrist in an indulgent gesture, his other hand dragging from Mark's shampooed nape down to his shoulder blades, raising chamomile suds on its wake, and a question mark suddenly takes a seat on the tip of his tongue.
Just ask, Donghyuck has told him time and time again, and Mark has. Just never about this.
It’s somehow more shameful than inexperience, tounge-tiedness. The fact Mark can put feelings into words, but struggles to ask about them, implication of a we in the midst of it. The word boyfriend feels heavy, like he’s dressing their relationship down from its permanent casual wear and into a suit and tie—squeaky new, stiff to the last thread, straight up awkward.
A palm runs over the hill of Mark’s eyebrows right before shampoo slides into his eyes, and after blinking them open with enough time gone by to get used to the dark, he meets the yellowed and blueing blobs that make up the curve of Donghyuck’s cheeks and the round tip of his nose, expression relaxed into a mellow resting face, and Mark thinks just ask him, he’s your boyfriend, literally just speak. Talk, Mark. Just ask—
"Do you ever think—" he starts, backing out as he realizes he's talking over whatever Donghyuck has moved onto topic-wise, both cutting off at the same time.
"Sometimes,” Donghyuck answers anyway after a patch of silence, Mark's laugh startled out of him with it. Mark's head gets lured under the spray with a step taken back, rinsed hair in a limbo state between matted down and damp tufts. "Do I think what?"
Donghyuck's nails scratching at his scalp dissuade him even more from talking, neck bending forward to give up the crown of his head to caresses, humming to get Donghyuck to join him in on desisting.
"Mm?"
"Mm. It's stupid."
"You're stupid."
And Donghyuck does nothing further than keep on rubbing Mark’s head in gentle laps from front to back, wasting away their leftover hot water long enough to be a corner away from having steamed up their mirror through and through, but he can still get Mark to do just about anything, the weight of him standing beside him, behind him, right in front of him under a shower spray and out of sight, all being enough to have Mark bend and break at his will, keep on improvising even when all he wants is a script, an already written down line to say, so he can blame it on his life’s screenplay when things inevitably go sideways.
"I was thinking," he begins again, pausing when the shampoo is pushed into his hands. "Do you think, maybe,” the half-empty bottle gets squeezed to the point of no return, until the right amount of product dribbles down onto his palm, “we're just—uhm, together, ‘cause we’ve spent so much time around each other? Like really think about it. We grew up together. We work together. Live together.”
Donghyuck stays quiet through the motions, eyes closed as pink-dyed lather builds up, and waits for Mark to trail off with hands wiping the excess white-blue bubbles off on his chest.
“There was that year where you just went back and forth from SuperM to us, remember?" he finally breaks the quiet, giving room for Mark’s completely at sea, agreeing yeah, to then furrow his brow with one eye peeking open. "Are you saying you're into Taeyongie, then?"
Mark blinks, hands going tense where they’ve settled over Donghyuck’s shoulders at the trick question—because it’s a trick, surely. “Of course not.”
"You and hyung sure spend a lot of time together. All alone in that room after hours,” Donghyuck pays him no mind, singsonging the end of his sentence with water droplets catching on his lashes not being enough to have him break away from Mark’s wide open eyes, the effort to figure out Donghyuck’s point showing from pupil all the way down to their white. "Are you gonna cheat on me with our manager?"
Mark’s shoulders drop and sag with realization setting on slowly but surely, defeat in the sound of his voice when he replies no.
“Oh, and what about—?”
"Okay, alright, I get it."
Mark catches what he can through the dark of the satisfied smile at his point reaching its destination that Donghyuck shows him proudly, his one open eye falling back closed as Mark takes his time washing off the small-scale clouds of shampoo. Once he's done, Mark's hands slide from Donghyuck's head to the skin he's taken his time to get familiar with: over his neck and down his back, up his spine and then back down his arms, reaching awaiting hands that wrap their fingers around the back of Mark's with no questions asked. His forehead comes down to rest on a piece of an unknown named bone by the middle of Donghyuck's chest, letting the water hit his back head-on as a hand squeezes his for a countless numbered time, Donghyuck remembering his slip-and-crack fear even when it's left the forefront of Mark's own mind.
"I'm not saying you're wrong," Donghyuck’s voice is rough in the peace of electricity's breaktime, with only the tip-tap of the showerhead rain to fill in the blanks of sounds, and his chin digs into Mark’s hair whorl when his mouth moves once more. "I'm saying I don’t care," he shrugs. "I love you. Take it or leave it.”
And that's a heavy word if Mark's ever heard one, boyfriend and together left to bite the dust, Mark building up a grin tooth by glee-filled tooth that meets the soapy, wet skin over Donghyuck's heart entirely too fast.
Life without a script to rule out questions and the possibility of fucking up sounds horrible. Life with Donghyuck, not so much.
"Do you love me enough to let me be the little spoon tonight?”
“I say this with love.” A kiss gets dropped on top of Mark’s head, right before the water shuts off. “No.”