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He held his breath in the back of his throat, watching closely as Minho scribbled numbers across their shared worksheet.
“The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell,” Jisung whispered out like it was a secret spell.
Minho deadpanned at him.
“Please stop saying that. This is Physics,” the older sighed and dropped his forehead into his palm, eyes closing with exasperation.
It wasn’t Jisung’s fault that he was so lost. How could he know all of the science lingo and inside jokes right off the bat? Okay, maybe it was over a month into the semester, he was still lost, and it was a little bit his fault.
When he transferred colleges in his sophomore year, he decided to start fresh. Pursue a new degree, and leave his old and abandoned dreams behind. It wasn’t like songwriting was going to work out for him anyway.
People always told him that he should be a singer when he grew up, that he should go into music production when he went to university and become rich and famous someday. And like any other artist, he agreed with them. But as time ticked along and he got closer and closer to graduating high school, he realized that while making art in the form of songs was his true passion, it wasn’t something that he could make a living off of. He came to that conclusion after a drunken late-night conversation in senior year with his best friend Hyunjin, two bottles of cheap wine into the evening, and at least one underage drinking law broken.
“I’m going to study Sociology in college,” Hyunjin blurted out in the middle of their movie, completely interrupting the scene where Lavagirl dives into the ocean and risks her life to save Sharkboy. Jisung reached out his hand and tapped the spacebar on his laptop, pausing the movie and giving Hyunjin a melodramatic stare.
“What? What about painting?” Jisung gaped at him, flabbergasted at the mere concept of his friend doing something other than art for the rest of his life. Hyunjin shrugged and hugged himself lightly, avoiding Jisung’s eyes.
“People don’t make money painting, Sungie,” Hyunjin said defeatedly, his words sobering his demeanor, “Even if you’re really, really good. You can’t make a living off of art.”
Jisung frowned and turned to fully face him, confused and a little bit hurt. His brain was in no state to be processing this information. He had accepted that they would be going to different colleges and living in different cities, but this particular detail threw him for a loop.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Jisung asked quietly, his emotions amplified by the red wine and his fingers fidgeting.
“Because. You want to make a living off of art,” Hyunjin shrugged and leaned forward to hit play on the movie.
Jisung gave it a shot. He spent a year at an art school pursuing music production and songwriting, but he slowly realized that Hyunjin, and whoever had convinced Hyunjin to study Sociology, was right. He couldn’t think of a plausible way to support himself with a career in music, or at least not without being rich and famous in the first place. So he gave it up.
He transferred to Hyunjin’s university, dyed his hair, and picked a new major—did anything he had to do in order to forget about the dream he had left behind. Picking something new to study was a bit like spinning a globe and traveling wherever your finger landed. He scrolled through his new college’s list of offered programs for a few hours, googling most of them and losing interest before even finishing the first line of each Wikipedia article. Apparently, they didn’t have a Biology major, which was Jisung’s Plan A. He enjoyed it decently enough in high school and got the marks to prove it, which wasn’t something that he could say for many other classes on his transcript. With a vague knowledge of Bill Nye and a keen interest to learn, Jisung figured that Chemistry was close enough, and he choose it from the drop-down menu on the transfer application when it asked for his choice of major.
It was already October but Jisung was still not quite grasping anything in any of his courses. He supposedly had the prerequisites for Chemistry 213 on his transcript, but he certainly did not have the prerequisites in his brain. He had no damn clue what was going on around him at any given point.
The most interest that he had taken in his classes was when he was assigned a lab partner, and the lab partner ended up being hot. He had two classes this semester with Lee Minho, and he would be lying if he said that he hadn’t taken notice of the boy. He usually sat in the row in front of him in Physics and a few seats to the right in Chemistry, and he had caught Jisung’s eye on the first day of class. His purple hair and soft sweaters were hard to miss, and Jisung sometimes liked to look at the back of his neck when he was too tired to listen to their 10 am Physics lecture.
So he was a little bit more than excited when the person who usually sat between them in Chemistry chose not to show up on the day that they were split off into partners, leaving him sitting next to Minho and his cute yellow sweater. The professor announced that they would be working with the person to their left, and Jisung dumbly turned to his left and almost smacked his nose against the window that he had been sitting next to since the beginning of the semester. He scratched the back of his neck, hoping that no one saw, and turned to the right to see Minho watching him keenly with an amused smile. He offered the boy a hesitant grin, and his heart picked up the pace a little when Minho slid across the empty seats between them to sit right next to Jisung.
“I’m Minho,” he introduced himself confidently, offering his sweater-pawed hand out for a handshake.
“I know,” Jisung said like a stalker, fist-bumping Minho’s outstretched hand like a dude-bro with only one brain cell. He was only one of these things, and it was not the dude-bro part. Fraternities scared him and he was too clumsy for sports.
He wasn’t a stalker, really. He asked Hyunjin if he knew anything about a boy with purple hair and cute fluffy sweaters, and as a living breathing catalog of every pretty boy on campus, Hyunjin told Jisung all about the junior Lee Minho.
“You know?” Minho raised an eyebrow and looked Jisung up and down, but he didn’t seem offended.
“Uh!” Jisung panicked, waving his hands in front of his face frantically as he tried to come up with an excuse, “I saw your Instagram on my Explore page!” Not bad. He had heard worse excuses and had certainly said worse excuses.
“And you didn’t follow me?” Minho fake-pouted at him cutely, crossing his arms and trying his best to look offended while Jisung tried his best not to get on one knee and propose. Pining for the lab partner that he barely knew was not on the list of things he wanted to do when he transferred colleges, and it probably wasn’t on the list of ‘smart things to do in general’ either.
Jisung was in for a long semester.
Three weeks in and two failed quizzes later, his crush on Minho was suffocating him almost as much as his undecipherable courseload, and he wasn’t sure how much longer he could hold out.
He turned out not to be very good at Chemistry, which was no surprise to literally anyone who knew him, but he still tried his darndest. Minho tried, too, to help him.
“Han Jisung,” Minho scolded him sternly from across the experiment table, eyes serious behind a pair of plastic safety goggles. Jisung was used to it by now, but sometimes he still wondered how someone could still be hot while wearing those ridiculous glasses. Freezing where he was leaning over the table to reach their experiment, Jisung looked over at Minho and smiled sheepishly.
“How is it possible to mess up a titration this many times,” Minho didn’t even bother giving his words the inflection of a question, almost looking impressed. Jisung shrugged, resuming his dutiful fuckery.
He turned the knob on the buret ever so slowly, squinting and scrunching up his nose as he watched a single drop squeeze out of the glass tip.
“If I see this solution go bright fucking purple one more time I will beat the shit out of you with this beaker,” Minho warned while brandishing said beaker above his head like a weapon, eyes serious. Jisung learned rather quickly that although Minho’s outside was all pastel sweaters and soft hair, the older boy was actually out for blood every second of every day. That was okay, though. It just made Jisung like him more.
Minho was most ruthless when they studied together at his apartment after Physics on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He was never afraid to kick Jisung in the shin when he was tapping his leg too loudly, or to take away his pen when he clicked the tip too often. Jisung would give him an apologetic smile and Minho would roll his eyes before going back to his textbook.
They usually sat quietly in their study sessions, except for when Minho would hum a little tune and Jisung would stop what he was doing just to listen. He preferred it this way, since the lack of conversation gave him less opportunity to embarrass himself in front of the boy who made him forget how to string together a sentence. He was already good enough at embarrassing himself without talking. One time, Minho bumped their knees together under the table and Jisung slammed his textbook shut on his fingers.
“You good?” Minho had asked him, eyebrows high. Jisung made a dying noise and let his head fall onto the table.
Jisung usually left after an hour and a half, politely leaving Minho’s apartment and giving him a smile and a promise of seeing him tomorrow. He never stayed very long, and couldn’t find a reason to hang around once he got bored of his textbook and lost interest in his worksheets. These days, Jisung had been thinking about asking Minho if he wanted to hang out to do anything other than Chemistry and Physics. It was especially difficult because he didn’t want to invite the purple-haired boy to his dorm, because it was small and often messy, and the offer usually implied something far more suggestive than Jisung was going for. He didn’t want to ask to stay longer at Minho’s, either, because that could come across as creepy or imposing. “Hey, can I stay in your apartment after we finish doing the one thing that I come over for?” was not going to cut it. But as it turned out, he didn’t have to find a better way to ask.
“Are you going anywhere after this?” Minho asked once they had hit the hour and fifteen-minute mark, the time in the afternoon when Jisung started to get restless and too fidgety to focus.
“My room,” Jisung answered plainly, not looking up from his scribbled notes.
“Want to stay, then?” Minho’s voice sounded a little hesitant this time, a stark contrast to the bold and brazen way he usually spoke. Jisung looked up at the lack of ferocity, and he saw Minho giving him a hopeful smile. He thought maybe he saw the older blushing, but there was always the chance that he himself was blushing and his lovesick brain was just projecting onto anything around him that moved.
“Yes,” Jisung said too quickly, setting down his pencil and closing his notebook without a second thought. The more socially appropriate response was closer to a casual “Yeah, sure” or maybe a “That sounds cool,” but Jisung was born without a filter and wore his heart on his sleeve. Minho giggled at his eager response, covering his smile with a sweater paw.
They sat on Minho’s yellow couch and watched Ouran High School Host Club, making annoying commentary to each other any time that they saw fit. Cheesy romance anime was never really Jisung’s thing, since he liked to watch shows that put him in immense emotional pain in the solitude of his room, but he agreed when Minho promised that it was funny and insisted that it was too classic for him to live out his life without seeing it.
“If roses flew at me like that every time I entered a room, I wouldn’t know how to act,” Jisung admitted as he leaned against the arm of Minho’s couch, watching the second episode with mild skepticism. Minho snorted from the other side of the couch and kicked him in the thigh.
After three episodes of stupid questions and even stupider jokes, they forgot about the show and bickered back and forth about which anime boy archetype was the best.
“Hikaru is the clear choice here,” Minho said seriously, waving his hand in the direction of the television and turning to sit facing Jisung.
“How can you say that when Kyouya is right there?” Jisung huffed, mirroring the action and staring at the older defiantly. He was a little taken aback at how passionate he was feeling about a romance anime that he had never intended on watching.
“Kyouya? Kyouya?! Oh my god Jisung where is your taste!” Minho screeched, looking incredibly offended over his choice of anime boy. Jisung learned where throw pillows get their name when Minho hurled one at his head, and he caught it with his face with a small ‘oof.’
“My taste is just fine, thank you!” Jisung defended himself, a little flustered. Did he really want to get into this discussion? Minho didn’t know that he was just Jisung’s taste, to a tee.
“Besides,” Jisung tried to divert the conversation ever so slightly, “Haruhi is too cute to settle for any of them anyway, she should find someone that’s less insane.” He folded his arms, the pillow resting between his elbows and against his chest. Minho squinted at him like he was suddenly examining Jisung under a microscope from the Chemistry lab.
“Jisung, are you straight?” Minho asked accusingly, and Jisung was caught so off-guard that he choked on his own spit. Coughing into the pillow and fighting for his life, Jisung cast him an offended glare.
“Are you ?!” he shot back, and Minho just blinked at him. He didn’t indulge Jisung in a reaction.
Instead, he looked down at his fluffy pink sweater, up at Jisung, and then back down to his sweater. He pinched the fuzzy fabric on his chest and lifted it off of his skin slightly, throwing Jisung a raised eyebrow.
“Do I look? Like I’m straight?” Minho’s face was unimpressed, his voice dripping with sarcasm. The answer was no, obviously, since Jisung had never seen a straight man wear pastels like they were the only colors in the world and style their hair with such skill. Not that those things were inherently gay, but they were fruity enough that Jisung had figured out Minho’s preferences after only a few conversations.
“Do I look like I’m straight?!” Jisung was unable to answer Minho’s questions with anything other than the same question fired back at him, and he waited for the response like his life depended on it.
“Kind of,” Minho shrugged and Jisung gasped dramatically with a hand over his chest. He looked almost as upset as Minho did when Jisung picked Kyouya as his match for Haruhi, and he felt even more offended. Did he really have het vibes? This was devastating news.
“Sometimes you just act like a fratboy,” Minho explained when Jisung did nothing but stare, “Like when you say ‘swag’ or when you bite your lip and raise your eyebrows every time you get a question right.”
Well, he had him there. Jisung dropped his face into the pillow against his chest and groaned, and he felt his cheeks heating up. He seemed straight to his crush. How did he manage to mess that up so badly?
“I know you aren’t, though!” Minho said encouragingly when he saw how distraught the younger was, and Jisung looked up at him hopefully. Minho didn’t say anything, but he pointed at the pair of platform Docs that Jisung had left by his front door. The owner of the shoes made a small ‘o’ with his mouth, made a face like he was pondering the meaning of life, and then dropped his head into the pillow again.
Jisung squeaked with a startle when he felt the couch shift, and he thought maybe he had died and gone to heaven when a hand patted his head gently.
“Sorry I called you straight, it won’t happen again,” Minho apologized, but his voice carried a teasing lilt, like he was trying not to laugh. Jisung whined and leaned forward until the top of his head bumped into Minho’s shoulder, and they just sat there in silence for a few moments. It was comfortable, surprisingly so, since this was the first time that they had hung out under implications other than studying. Minho fidgeted with his hair and Jisung simultaneously felt comfortable enough to take a nap and flustered enough to explode. If he exploded, he wouldn’t have to write the Physics midterm on Wednesday. It was beginning to look like a solid option.
“Do you want to stay for dinner?” Minho asked from above him, his voice a little shy again. Jisung wanted to look up and see if he was blushing again, but he kept his face buried in his pillow and the crown of his head against Minho’s shoulder. He nodded slowly, the movement difficult with how he was pressed up to the older.
Minho hummed in response and Jisung managed to prevent a complaint from slipping out when he felt the lavender-haired boy rise from the couch. He heard him pad away swiftly on sock feet before returning, and his heart sang a little song when Minho sat down right next to him again and guided his head to rest in the same spot.
“I’m getting some fried chicken and dessert,” he announced from above Jisung, placing one hand on the top of the lovesick boy’s head and scrolling through his phone with the other, “You like cheesecake, right?”
Jisung had to look up at that. He pulled his face from the pillow of shame and shot a look at Minho, indulging in his turn to be suspicious.
“How do you know that?” he grilled Minho, squinting and trying his best to ignore the hand that still laid on his head.
“I asked my friend about you when we first became lab partners,” Minho admitted, and Jisung envied how easily he said it. The envy was a faint feeling though, drastically overshadowed by the excitement that filled him at the knowledge that Minho had asked about him. His heart pounded and his stomach was doing flips, and he thought he might pass out if Minho didn’t stop fidgeting with a strand of his hair.
“And they told you I liked cheesecake?” Jisung pressed on, seizing the opportunity to interrogate Minho. He wanted to know how Minho thought and felt about him, just a little, even if it was just his favorite food.
“Well, he said that you wear big shoes and like to eat cheesecake. And that you’re kind of weird and bad at flirting,” Minho shrugged, and Jisung was certainly not imagining the blush this time, “But that was from my friend Seungmin, who heard it from your friend Hyunjin. And Seungmin is not a reliable source.”
“Hyunjin is not a reliable source either. And I’m gonna skin him alive for saying that,” Jisung made a mental note to not let Hyunjin live to see another day, but that could wait until after he was done experimentally half-flirting with Minho, “But it’s cute that you asked about me~”
Minho flushed an unmistakable bright red and turned away from Jisung to look at his phone intensely.
“Do you want your damn cheesecake or not?”
After they ate and Jisung choked on his cheesecake at Minho licking some sauce from his fingers, they settled comfortably onto the couch. He managed to convince Minho to watch A Quiet Place with him, and he decided that it was a great movie choice when he felt the older curling into his side a little more with every tense scene. Jisung hesitantly tipped his head in the direction of Minho’s shoulder, letting his anxiety get the best of him for a moment as he paused, but a voice in his head said ‘fuck it’ and he let himself rest in the spot between Minho’s shoulder and neck.
Minho screamed into his sweater paw whenever the monsters made noises that pierced the characteristic silence of the movie, and Jisung embarrassingly cried at one of the ending scenes. The humiliation felt worth it when Minho wrapped an arm around his shoulder and rubbed his back comfortingly.
The credits rolled and neither of them moved to leave, and Jisung wished that they could stay there forever. That way, he could be with Minho for the rest of his life and also miss the impending Physics midterm. But alas, the universe was cruel and nothing lasted forever, a phone buzzing on the coffee table and popping the comfortable bubble that they had built themselves into. Minho hummed and leaned forward to pick up Jisung’s lit-up phone, his hand dragging across the younger’s back and sliding back into its previous position when he leaned back against the couch. He handed Jisung’s phone to its rightful owner, who almost choked for the third time in a four-hour time span when their fingers touched. Jisung clicked the power button and murmured ‘shit’ when he saw the time, completely ignoring the text from Hyunjin that asked if he thought goldfish liked to be pet.
“Oh,” Minho also reacted to the time, scratching the back of his neck with the hand that wasn’t rubbing circles into Jisung’s shoulder, “I didn’t realize it was that late.”
“Me neither,” Jisung laughed at their combined stupidity and shut his phone off without replying to Hyunjin. He knew that it was time for him to get going, to start the trek back to his dorm room and tuck into his bed for a long and tiring evening of scrolling Twitter.
“It’s past my bedtime,” Minho yawned with his nose scrunched, and Jisung didn’t even bother to stop himself from cooing at the sight. Minho glared at him and kicked his ankle.
“Me too,” Jisung sighed fondly, fidgeting with the corner of his phone case. They stood still for thirty more seconds, the movie credits long finished. Minho hummed and squeezed Jisung’s shoulder before untangling himself from the younger and rising to his feet with a big stretch. Jisung did his best not to look at the hem of the sweater that rose when he reached his arms above his head to stretch his back, but he was not a very strong man.
He stood up soon after, catching Minho’s contagious yawn and shuffling over to the table to grab his backpack and his abandoned notebook. Packing his things at a sloth’s pace, tiredness in his bones, Minho watched him keenly from the couch. Jisung flashed him a smile and threw the strap of his bag over his shoulder once he had collected his things.
They came face to face again when they met at the doorway, Minho tapping his fingers on the doorframe while Jisung laced up his boots. It shouldn’t be surprising that the quietness between them was comfortable, since they almost always sat in silence while studying, but he thought that maybe the recent change in the air about them would have complicated things. It didn’t, though, and Jisung was thankful.
“Thank you for sticking around,” Minho smiled at him softly when he stood from tying his laces, and he was close enough that Jisung would have counted his eyelashes if he were capable of focusing for that long.
“Thanks for having me,” Jisung reflected the grin, and his cheeks hurt from smiling and laughing all night. Minho twisted the doorknob and light from the apartment hallway spilled into the dimly lit room. Jisung stepped over the threshold and desperately wished that he could stay. He wished that someday, he would come to Minho’s apartment and not have to leave by the end of the night.
He spun on his platform heel to face Minho once he was in the hallway, trying to stretch out the time before he had to leave.
“See you tomorrow, yeah?” Jisung asked, voice quiet. He was sad to be leaving behind the comfortable something that he had built with Minho, whatever it was. The older looked at him for a moment, mouth open to say something but no words coming out.
Suddenly, he was close, very close, and Jisung forgot how to breathe. Minho leaned over the threshold with his sock feet still planted on the opposite side of it and his hands on either side of the doorframe, and his eyes flitted down on Jisung’s face. Jisung was suddenly very aware of how long it had been since he had last put on lip balm.
Jisung’s eyes closed by instinct and not a second later he felt Minho’s lips pressing against his, soft and a little bit hesitant. He returned the kiss and his heart swelled at the way Minho’s filled with confidence once the action was reciprocated. It was over too quick, feeling like half a second and five minutes all at the same time. Minho pulled away and offered him a shy smile, his bottom lip slightly caught under his cute front teeth.
“Yeah, see you tomorrow,” Minho echoed him, pushing himself back over the threshold by his grip on the doorway. He was blushing, looking timider than Jisung had ever seen him. It was such a night and day difference from the confident Minho that usually strode across campus, like a different, shyer Minho that hid beneath it all. Like a Minho that was just for Jisung to see.
Jisung could not help the stupid grin that he wore, and he donned it until Minho finally closed the door, while he walked down the steps to the exit, and while he skipped along the sidewalk on his way home.
When he flopped onto his pathetic twin mattress in his dorm, he lifted his fingers to his lips and felt them, to make sure it wasn’t a dream. His phone buzzed on his chest and the notification sprouted another dumb grin.
lee minho at 11:14 PM
gn jisung :>
He stared at the message for way too long, blinking at it until his eyes burned from the harsh light. Tucking under the covers and cradling his phone like it was the most precious thing in the world, he replied and finally closed his eyes to sleep.
me at 11:22 PM
goodnight <3
Jisung did see Minho the next day, the sight of the boy in his big blue sweater knocking the air out of his lungs and filling his chest with a giddy feeling. They didn’t pay any attention to the Chemistry lecture, whispering to each other and passing notes, bumping knees under the desk. Jisung went to Minho’s apartment after they both finished classes that day, and they walked there together after meeting at the campus bubble tea shop.
They started going to Minho’s apartment after school every day, and then on the weekends too. Jisung eventually got his wish of staying the night.
“According to the second law of thermodynamics, you’re supposed to share your hotness with me,” Jisung pouted from his perch on the bed, sulking under the blankets. Minho snorted and flopped onto the mattress to join him, throwing an arm over his waist and pressing his cheek to the pillow. They were lounging around in Jisung’s room, spending alone time together to commemorate finishing their winter semester midterms.
“Stop trying to make science your thing, it’s painful,” Minho complained with a fond smile, kicking Jisung in the back of the knee lightly.
“But it’s your thing, and you’re my thing,” Jisung argued, pouting and wriggling to lay closer to him.
It really didn’t have to be Jisung’s thing, since he had abandoned his short-lived Chemistry career. He made it through the fall term and passed his finals with respectable grades, but it just didn’t scratch the itch in his brain. About a week into hanging out with Minho at every second of the day, he told the boy about his original dreams of writing songs and making music. They talked about it on and off for a couple of days, until Minho was able to convince him to try it again.
Jisung stayed at the same university but transferred out of the science faculty and into the arts program, taking another crack at the walk of life that had always called to him. He was thriving in the music scene, flourishing in a way that he couldn’t even imagine in the Chemistry department.
“Stick to your love songs, loser,” Minho rolled his eyes before letting his eyelids flutter shut, pulling Jisung against his chest and sighing. Jisung hummed and shut his eyes too, nosing at the older’s neck and wearing his signature dumb smile.
“You handle the science, and I’ll just make a silly little soundtrack for your research,” Jisung smirked and opened his eyes, tilting his head back to fully observe Minho’s face, “But, can I still be your lab partner?”
“Lab partner?” Minho repeated after him, meeting his gaze and making a thinking face with his eyebrows pulled together.
“You know, so we can experiment. Don’t you think we have great Chemistry?” Jisung was smug, a shit-eating grin on his face. He wiggled his eyebrows suggestively and ran his fingers along Minho’s back. Biting his lip and trying to look as coy as possible, he pressed their foreheads together.
Jisung fell on his ass with a yelp when Minho pushed him off of the bed.
“Seungmin was right, you are bad at flirting.”