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There had been eight balls of dough stuffed with brown sugar, cinnamon, and walnuts resting on the parchment paper lined plate beside the stove when Yoongi had started to heat oil in a frying pan.
Six of them are still there, although now turned golden-brown and flat.
One of them is sizzling in the shimmering oil.
One of them is missing.
There’s a thief in the apartment.
“Kim Namjoon!”
“But they’re so much better hot!”
Namjoon’s whine comes from the vicinity of the couch. He isn’t actually on the couch, though. Instead, he’s sprawled in front of it. The legs of his shorts are bunched up around the tops of his thighs. His discarded shirt is a lump of fabric over by the television console. His left arm is stretched out flat to make the most of the relatively cool floor, but his right is bent so he can bring his hand, and his purloined hotteok, to his lips.
He catches Yoongi looking. He sees Yoongi’s raised eyebrow. He doesn’t even have the grace to look guilty.
Yoongi turns back to the frying pan. “You’re going to burn your mouth.”
“You’re going to burn your mouth,” Namjoon, the petulant five year old, grumbles. It’s followed quickly by a hissed aish!, and then, “I can feel you thinking, hyung.”
“I’m not thinking anything.”
“You absolutely are.” The words are quickly followed by the horrible sound of Namjoon’s sweat-damp skin peeling off the floor. “You’re a horrible liar. I know your tells.”
“Me?” Yoongi asks, with feigned incredulity.
“You,” Namjoon confirms, draping himself across Yoongi’s back and nuzzling his ear. Objectively the whole situation is disgusting. Namjoon’s chest is just as sweaty as his back in the relentlessly humid August heat, and now it’s pressed right up against Yoongi, making his shirt damp. He smells, too, although not in the sexy way, and his mere presence raises the temperature around the stove by at least three degrees.
Yoongi shivers regardless.
“You get this air of smugness when you’re thinking I told you so,” Namjoon continues, the words partly muffled by his next bite of hotteok. “It’s just all…” He waves his hand in the air around Yoongi’s head to illustrate, stirring up an ineffective breeze. “And then when you say you aren’t thinking it your neck goes pink.”
“My neck is pink because you’re a furnace, and the air conditioning is broken.” Yoongi lifts the hotteok in the pan with his spatula to check the underside. “And I’m cooking. I’ll die without hotteok,” he adds, in his best imitation of Namjoon. “Why does nowhere sell it in the summer, hyung, do you know how to—” He breaks off in a sharp inhale as his knees try to give out underneath him.
“How to what?” Namjoon asks, the jerk. He’s slipped his free hand under Yoongi’s loose white t-shirt so it can splay hot and broad across Yoongi’s stomach, the tip of his pinky just brushing the elastic of Yoongi’s boxers, and dropped a sticky-sweet kiss on the back of Yoongi’s neck.
“Do you want this hotteok or not?” Yoongi demands, trying to fix Namjoon with a glare. It’s proving difficult, what with the way Yoongi’s eyes keep fluttering closed.
“I do,” Namjoon says, stepping back immediately. His expression is beatific but also smug, like he knows how much Yoongi already misses his gross, sweaty chest. “I’ll be good. Promise.” He even crosses his heart to emphasize the point.
Yoongi wants to kiss him properly, and taste the sweet-cinnamon of his mouth. He turns back to the stove instead and flips the still-frying hotteok over to reveal its perfectly golden belly. “See that you are. And no more stealing!”
“Yessir!”
There’s the sound of Namjoon’s bare feet crossing the kitchen floor, then the noise of his chair being pulled out from the tiny table squeezed in at the end of the kitchen counter. It’s the one that has its back against the wall, where he can both watch Yoongi work and keep out of Yoongi’s way. This close, Yoongi will be able to hear the pleased little hum he lets out as he takes each new bite of his stolen treat, and have to fight the urge to swallow them.
Much like the watched pot which never boils, the hotteok in the pan defies the laws of physics and probably chemistry as it stays stubbornly light no matter how much Yoongi presses it against the heat of the pan. Usually he wouldn’t mind, but having called Namjoon out for being a thief because he started to eat before all the hotteok were ready means that, on principle, Yoongi has to wait to eat any until he’s done frying the full batch. It might be the middle of summer, and Namjoon’s cravings that’d led to this situation, but that doesn’t mean Yoongi can’t be impatient.
He counts to fifteen and clicks off the stove. Good enough.
To his surprise, when he turns around with the plate in one hand and his half-drunk coffee in the other Namjoon isn’t watching him, or looking up in anticipation of more hotteok. He’s absorbed by his phone, poking carefully at his screen with the index finger of his left hand. His tongue is caught between his teeth, and his brow furrowed in concentration, and his hotteok, still in his right hand, apparently forgotten.
Curious as to what has ensnared Namjoon’s attention so completely, Yoongi glances at the phone as he sits in the vacant chair and sets down the plate and coffee. He frowns. “First time I made hotteok?”
“What?!” Namjoon jumps almost a foot in the air, his hand scrabbling to grip his phone and succeeding only in flinging it off the table. It tumbles unceremoniously to the floor, the fall muffled by the thick case they’d bought for it. At least the screen won’t have broken.
Yoongi is closer to where it landed, and thinks nothing of leaning over to scoop it up. Only as he’s handing it back to Namjoon does he remember he’d meant not to glance at the screen again. It’s too late — he’s already seen that the screen has changed to show a calendar, and now he’s even more confused.
He isn’t going to push though. Namjoon is chewing the inside of his cheek and looking deliberately away like he does when he’s embarrassed, or feeling too much. His cheeks and ears are red, and his neck is quickly following suit. Yoongi can feel his own face heat in sympathy.
“Sorry,” he says as he relinquishes the phone. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have—”
“It’s fine,” Namjoon says, but it doesn’t sound like it’s fine, and after a fleeting glance at Yoongi’s face Namjoon’s shoulders deflate. Something twists deep in Yoongi’s chest, directly behind his sternum. He follows his impulse to reach out and brush the tips of his fingers over the knuckles of Namjoon’s left hand.
It was the right choice. Namjoon deflates further, his head hanging in front of him, but he also flips his hand over, so Yoongi’s fingers are trailing across Namjoon’s palm instead, and then catches Yoongi’s fingers with his own so he can curl them together. The twist in Yoongi’s chest twists the other direction. As if in response, muscles he hadn’t noticed were tense relax, and he can breathe easier.
“It’s fine,” Namjoon repeats, sounding more sure, and actually looking at Yoongi. His deep embarrassment has softened into a sheepish smile. “But, okay, remember when Seokjin was asking us about our anniversary last year? And you asked if he meant when we started dating, or when we met? And he said you remember when you met? and you said November thirteenth, two thousand and ten without any hesitation at all?”
Yoongi doesn’t, but Namjoon has the date right, and it sounds exactly like the sort of thing Yoongi would say. Yoongi squeezes Namjoon’s fingers gently. He’s gratified when Namjoon squeezes back.
“Well, you did, and I thought he knows when we met, and I’m not even consistently sure when our anniversary actually is, so I put that in a calendar, and then I put in the day we met, too, and then I figured out things like first kiss, and first time you slept over…” As he speaks he starts to flip through the calendar on his phone with the pinkie of his right hand, careful to hold the hotteok so the filling won’t drip on the screen. Event after event show as little yellow bubbles on the date grid. “And I guess now I just keep it updated, with the firsts I want to remember? It’s nice sometimes to have a— a record, or whatever. Of us.”
Namjoon is back to not being able to look at Yoongi, which suits Yoongi just fine. He’s finding it almost painful to physically exist next to Namjoon’s intense sincerity, so much more vulnerable outside the protective shadow of night when they usually fall into this kind of discussion. If they actually made eye contact his heart, already working triple overtime, might quit completely, citing unsafe workplace conditions. Even the touch of their hands, still joined, feels like too much.
Neither of them move.
Silence falls, thick and clinging, worse than the humidity. In scant seconds it will become unbearable, unless Yoongi can figure out a way to lift it. It will have to be him, too — Namjoon’s jaw is jutting forward and clenched tight, his fingers spasming in Yoongi’s grip. Yoongi doesn’t need to be psychic to know Namjoon is in the process of swearing a vow of silence, and starting to make plans to climb up some mountain and never come down.
That settles it. Without thinking too hard about anything at all, Yoongi extends his free arm until he’s able to scoop some of the filling out of Namjoon’s half-eaten hotteok. Namjoon watches him as if turned to stone, only his eyes moving. That makes it easier for Yoongi to take the still-warm filling and smear it on Namjoon’s cheek, right where his dimple would show if he smiled.
“Hyung?”
Namjoon’s smile is uncertain, but still enough for his dimples to appear. Yoongi takes advantage of the moment and rises out of his chair, bracing his free hand on the table so he can lean over and kiss the filling off. It’s sweet, with the perfect amount of cinnamon. Yoongi barely tastes it.
“Hyung?”
The uncertainty is still there, tempered with amusement. Namjoon doesn’t understand yet. Yoongi sits back down and cocks his head to the side, looking pointedly between Namjoon’s face and the phone.
Namjoon frowns. “What?”
There’s nothing for it. Yoongi taps the calendar still displayed on the phone screen with a filling-free finger. “Write that down, Joon-ah.”
“Write— what?”
Yoongi tsks, shaking his head in feigned disappointment. “Aish, kids these days! Can’t even follow simple instructions. First time hyung kissed hotteok filling out of my dimple or whatever.”
“That’s not—” Namjoon breaks off to vigorously rub his face with the back of his hand. “You—” he says when he’s done, pointing an admonishing hotteok at Yoongi.
Grinning, Yoongi snags the top hotteok off the stack beside him. It’s still hot to the touch, but not so much so that he will burn his fingers or tongue. “I?” he prompts, before taking a big bite and chewing as smugly as he can. He probably looks ridiculous, but since the goal is making Namjoon laugh he doesn’t mind.
Namjoon does laugh, his eyes reduced to two dark crescents in his cheeks, his thumb rubbing over Yoongi’s knuckles . “I love you,” he says, like all other words have disappeared from his usually impressive vocabulary.
“Good.” Yoongi nods with satisfaction. “I love you too. And when you’re done writing, add me. To the calendar,” he clarifies at Namjoon’s confused expression. “Gotta make sure you have the right dates. Gotta make sure—” he stumbles over the words, nearly losing his nerve, but presses on. “Gotta make sure I can add stuff, too.”
Now that he knows of the calendar’s existence Yoongi is helpless to do anything else. While Namjoon might describe it as a record of their firsts, Yoongi can see that it’s something else, too — an enumeration of each new way they’ve found to express their love for each other.
Only, it will be a lopsided list. Namjoon tends to downplay the impact and importance of his actions. Yoongi is confident that when he reads through he’ll find a lot of the things he’s done for Namjoon, or they did together, listed there, but hardly any of the things Namjoon’s done — and does — for him. The bubble baths he’s drawn after Yoongi has had a bad day. The unprompted trips to the store when they’re missing an ingredient for dinner, and Yoongi would make do rather than go, but still be annoyed it wasn’t made properly. The ridiculous movies he finds for them to watch, because he’s pegged Yoongi’s sense of humour perfectly, and knows they will make Yoongi laugh.
How lucky is Yoongi, to love a man who loves so well.
As so often happens, Namjoon’s thoughts appear to be mirroring Yoongi’s. He surges up out of his chair, accompanied by a groan that perfectly articulates just how overcome Yoongi feels. He brings their joined hands to cup Yoongi’s cheek. After what might be the most intense split-second of eye contact Yoongi has ever experienced, he uses them to pull Yoongi in for a kiss.
His mouth is soft and sweet, familiar and beloved, and in this particular case apparently intent on never letting Yoongi catch his breath. Yoongi smiles into it, can taste Namjoon smile back, even as he shifts his coffee and the plate of hotteok off the table and onto the counter, out of range of Namjoon’s enthusiasm.
They can come back to their treat later.
For now they have more important things to attend to.