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There are a lot of things to love about Yokohama.
The twinkling ferris wheel, for one. The way the city lights bounce off the bay, bright like water stars. The cool wind, how it draws everyone tighter to preserve warmth.
How Mark’s arm presses against his, and presses against his, and presses against his.
Normally, it wouldn’t. When flashing red cameras follow them around, Mark stays two, three steps away. Not consciously, Donghyuck knows now, because he’d blinked in surprise when Donghyuck had offhandedly pointed it out to him.
“Does it bother you?” Mark had asked, big, black eyes endlessly sincere.
Donghyuck had bitten his tongue not a moment too soon, refraining from launching into a probably too-loud embarrassing speech about how no, actually, it doesn’t bother him. Far from it. In fact, he might like it a little too much.
He could’ve said it, but they don’t do that. Or, well, they haven’t. Yet.
Everyone and their mother knows about the Mark and Donghyuck intangible something at this point, but the problem lies in teasing out something material—something Donghyuck can weave his fingers through and hold on with confidence, no longer having to rely on ten-year-long fermented intuition.
Not that he has much to complain about there, though. It’s not like it’s failed him so far.
The back of Mark’s hand brushes against his just once, a little cold, a lot dry, and Donghyuck thanks whatever god is responsible for technical difficulties that their night of filming fell through. He can’t middle-school flirt with Mark as easily when he’s those unconscious two, three steps away, after all.
He’s preparing to not-so-accidentally bump into Mark with more force than necessary when a raised patch of ground catches his foot, taking him by surprise. He half-trips forward instead of to the side and only manages not to fall because of a firm grip around his bicep helping him resist gravity.
As much as he wants to play it off like a joke, there’s no doubting the way his heart thuds a little too loud in his chest, the phantom pain shuddering through his shin. Any other time, and he’d only be a little embarrassed at the lame gracelessness of it all, but Dream is on tour.
He’s seen this film before, is all.
Mark’s grip tightens, maneuvering him back so they’re face to face. Donghyuck reminds himself of where they are, composes himself, and looks at Mark. He’s fine. Mark is scanning his feet.
“I’m fine, hyung,” he says playfully like he hadn’t almost went into cardiac arrest. When Mark looks at him, the concern slowly peels away, grip relaxing as his hand slides down.
“It’s like you try finding the worst possible times to forget how to walk,” he sighs like he’s over it, but his fingers are circled around Donghyuck’s wrist, thumb pressed too securely against Donghyuck’s pulse point to be anything but searching. Donghyuck almost snorts. Subtlety has never been Mark’s forte.
Still, Donghyuck’s body isn’t completely convinced they’re in the clear just yet, so he shakes Mark’s hand off and shoves his hands in his pockets. No need to make him worry needlessly, no matter how special it makes Donghyuck feel.
“I only do it when I know hyung will save me,” Donghyuck croons, leaning in close with a cheesy grin. Mark lets him stay like that for a moment too long before taking a step back. A reflexive smile forms on his face as he looks away and starts walking again, bumping shoulders with Donghyuck when he catches up.
“Just be careful.”
“I won’t,” Donghyuck says to be difficult. “I’m gonna scrape my knee and get you to kiss it better.”
Mark screws up his face, probably at the grisly image, but it turns into a soft laugh when he catches Donghyuck’s pleased expression. “You’re so lucky you’re cute, Hyuck.”
He doesn’t get the chance to reply, which is probably a good thing—Mark says these things on camera from time to time, but when it’s just them, it knots up his tongue and makes his already sweaty palms sweatier.
Chenle’s voice is what grabs their attention, yelling at them to turn back, and they both spot the others stopped a good distance away. Huh. When did that happen? The last Donghyuck had been tuned in, Chenle had been yammering on about riding the cable car, a lot closer than he was now. And then Mark had said something, and he’d replied, and they’d laughed, and, well.
“Don’t run,” Mark warns, reading his mind. Donghyuck rolls his eyes but listens. He doesn’t see the spot he’d tripped over as they double back. Weird.
“We need to figure out if we actually want to ride the cable car or just walk around more and head back to the hotel,” Renjun says when they’ve joined the group. Mark shifts his weight, arm pressing back into Donghyuck’s.
“Shouldn’t we get some food before we go back?” Jisung asks, always one to voice wants as questions. It’s a habit Donghyuck’s been trying to get him to break for years, now. Mark knows this and shoots Donghyuck a small, private smile that doesn’t mean any one thing in particular, but Donghyuck still translates it perfectly in his head.
Ten-year-long fermented intuition. It’s tough to override. They may not have telepathy, but they have history. Sometimes, they feel like the same thing.
“Cable car before food, then,” Renjun decides, not unwisely. Jaemin’s stomach has a bad track record with heights. “Someone find out where we get tickets.”
Jeno pulls out his phone and Chenle hooks his chin over his shoulder, mouth still moving but less audibly, for once. Jeno nods, says something back, then frowns at his screen before looking up, eyes scanning their surroundings. Donghyuck follows his line of sight once it pauses on something, and he points at the white building before Jeno can.
“There,” he announces. “It says tickets.” He thinks.
Then, before anyone can say anything else, he elbows Mark once in warning and throws his finger to his nose, “Not it!”
Mark echoes him first, obviously, and the others chime in quickly after that. To Donghyuck’s glee, Renjun and Jaemin come in last. Renjun, because he wasted a precious second with an offended Hold on!, and Jaemin, because he, predictably, didn’t even bother participating.
“Hold hands if you get cold!” He cups his mouth to yell as they start walking, laughing when Renjun turns back to scowl and flip him off. And then, because the universe loves Donghyuck, Jaemin catches Renjun’s hand without even looking back, intertwining their fingers. All of Renjun’s attention snaps back to Jaemin.
An oddly warm gust of breeze sweeps by, and Donghyuck drags his eyes away from them with a small smile still on his face.
“My feet love you right now,” Mark tells him, falling into step as Donghyuck walks over to the water’s edge. The other three have gently dispersed, sitting on benches with their phones out. The city’s practically humming, though, alive and attentive—it only seems fair Donghyuck take it all in.
“Okay, grandpa,” he teases, but his voice has gone too soft for it to take full effect. That’s his off-camera unconscious act: two, three layers stripped of impish fun.
“We literally walked for two hours,” Mark snorts, hand curling around the railing right next to Donghyuck’s, pinkies pressing together. The cold of the metal was a shock to his system, but Mark’s touch is a parasympathetic wave, dousing him with an out of place warmth.
“Go sit down, then.”
On camera, they’d have been more sensible, maybe. Avoided cold, pink fingertips and rough, dry knuckles. Donghyuck looks out at the canal spiderwebbed with flickering reflections, lips twisting to keep a smile from breaking out when he hears Mark suck in a breath like he’s about to say something, then huff out a small, shy laugh.
“Don’t think I won’t,” he finally warns, not even trying to mask how much he doesn’t mean it.
Donghyuck just looks at him for a moment, chin resting on his palm. He can smell Mark’s lotion, something fresh and safe and so quintessentially him it makes Donghyuck’s toes curl. If it were up to him, he’d find excuses to do this a lot more often. Just look. Drink him in. Let him metabolize. Have him be the thing that keeps Donghyuck up and running. (He already is, but—excuses.)
Mark’s steady gaze brings him back into the moment, and he curves his eyes, asking innocently, “Yeah?”
Mark’s eyebrows pop up at the challenge, and he takes a step back, fingers loosening around the railing. Donghyuck doesn’t even blink, shifting his ring and pinky finger so they’re hooked with Mark’s. That gets his attention. His eyes flick to their hands, and then he’s gluing himself back against Donghyuck’s side, lips pressed together.
“What happened, hyung?” Donghyuck laughs, tilting his head to get a good look at him.
Mark looks away, jostling Donghyuck with a strong shoulder. There’s laughter laced into his voice when he tells him to shut up, and when he eventually turns back around the tops of his cheeks are dusted pink. Belatedly, Donghyuck realizes his own ears are hot, too, and he laughs again, quieter. Mark smiles, cheek fondly dimpled and affection so intimately woven into his gaze it’s almost primeval.
A few weeks ago, an exasperated Renjun had stopped Donghyuck mid-way through one of his when Mark and I finally start dating… episodes to ask him, one serious eyebrow raised, “How can you even be sure that he actually likes you, Hyuck?”
And Donghyuck had shuffled through 1001 cuts of Mark’s eyes in his mind, the way they fixate on him in different ways, sparkling and flitting about and turning into lava and saying nobody else, nothing else. The way he doesn’t even try to hide it (the way he can’t), because no one around them considers it to be a particularly well-kept secret, anyway.
The way it’s never been a secret. (The way it feels like the whole world has to know how important it is when Mark looks at him, or the way the whole world has never mattered less with Mark’s eyes on him.)
“How can you not?” He’d told Renjun, soft with memory but sure.
There’s a lot of things they’ve casually started to leave out in the open with time. Donghyuck’s not sure when it started, not sure when both of them caught on to the threads of their intangible something, but the fact is that it was a turning point.
Donghyuck’s favourite moments are the casual dismissals. The first time it happened was a year ago, sitting in a booth of some lowkey club on a rare night out with 127. The server had slipped Mark her number, and Johnny had asked with a grin if he was going to call.
“Nah,” he’d said simply, not really looking at any of them. He’d rolled up the piece of paper and tucked it into one of the empty beer bottles as the table did a collective conversational shrug and moved on.
Meanwhile, Donghyuck’s focus had narrowed to where the paper slowly unfurled where it was trapped. It was too dark to spot details, but Donghyuck had felt his unnoticed edges soften like he knew the paper must be mirroring in a tiny puddle of beer as Mark’s hand found his thigh under the table.
A quick squeeze, a quick look.
The fluency of them had snuck up on Donghyuck, really. Not that he minds.
He hums lightly as a few boats pass by, slowly ramping up to a far too dramatic rendition of Beatbox he decides to serenade Mark with, eyebrows drawing together with emotion and a heartfelt hand on his chest. He’s expecting laughter, an eyeroll, a quiet duet, maybe, and he does get that last bit, but it’s only for a moment. Lips tugged up, Mark harmonizes for a few seconds before he just—stops.
It’s not gradual, it just cuts off like something muted him, leaving Donghyuck to his fake ballad. The streetlights seem to soften along with Mark’s eyes, transforming his entire face into something so utterly sweet and tender it nearly clogs up Donghyuck’s throat. He keeps singing because it wouldn’t be like him to stop, but he can barely hear himself. Mark’s attention is an immovable sort of thing, and it pins him in place as it persists, pure and proud.
Donghyuck faintly thinks, someone should teach you not to wear your emotions on your face, and then, I think I’d know, anyway.
When he comes to a close, Mark is still looking at him like they’re in the loneliest city in the world. Population: two. A shiver brushes down his spine, and he involuntarily lists Mark’s way. Funny, that Yokohama wind, how it can feel like a lover’s touch if he closes his eyes.
“Did you just fall for me?” Donghyuck asks with cheek, turning the breathless parts of him inwards until they can’t even fathom clawing their way out. He can’t have Mark start thinking of himself as the confident one, after all.
Mark tilts his head to the side like he’s actually thinking about it, a small smile on his face. He picked that up from me.
Donghyuck reaches for the railing again to ground himself, startling when the metal sends something like a chatter of static electricity up his arm. His mouth tastes like batteries.
The moment their pinkies touch this time, something unlocks in Donghyuck’s head.
Years of learning how to compose himself in front of the media are his saving grace when he manages to keep a straight face as an image blooms in his head, dream-like and watery around the edges. He sees himself singing, a moments-ago-memory frozen in time, then blinks when everything swirls around and rearranges itself into another image—this time, of him in the studio. He’s wearing an orange shirt. His hands are twisted together, the light harsh but warm on his face. His eyes are closed.
A searing heat presses over his heart like a feverish palm, and he has to focus on his breathing. It’s all—too much. And Mark is fine, is still looking at him like—
“Got them. Come on, up.”
Everything gets sucked into itself and blinks out of existence in half a heartbeat, leaving Donghyuck’s mind dark and vaguely empty. The world rushes back in, and he feels sluggish watching Mark turn his head. He follows suit robotically, unsure of what just happened.
Renjun’s standing by the bench with tickets in hand. He shoots Donghyuck a funny look and then beckons them over, waving the tickets in the air. Mark pulls away, but Donghyuck grabs his wrist. Their eyes meet. Donghyuck sees a flicker of his own lips, chapped and dull. He lets go almost immediately.
Dark. Empty.
Donghyuck almost laughs, hysterical, because of course. Of course this shit is happening to him on a random Tuesday in Japan. Why not? He shrugs it off quickly, pulling himself together. Okay, this is fine. The facts are that, somehow, he can see what Mark’s thinking when they touch, and maybe feel a crumb of what he’s feeling as well. He doesn’t know what caused it, and he doesn’t know what will end it, but—Donghyuck smiles as he walks over to the others, Mark trailing behind him—he’s pretty sure they just moved past an intangible something.
The path to the cable cars isn’t long, and the city seems to preen as they pass it by.
Dream is a group comprised of some of the nosiest people Donghyuck has ever met in his life, which can be a touch annoying from time to time but is mostly nice because some things just go unsaid, like how Mark and Donghyuck will be riding the cable car together.
“Jisung and Chenle in one, and then us three,” Renjun sums up, raising his eyebrows at Jeno and Jaemin for confirmation as he hands off the tickets. They’re in the middle of the winding line, all squished in a shape that, with enough generosity, could be a circle. Really, they’re just an overlapping blob of limbs and voices.
“Do we not even get a say?” Mark asks with a laugh, but he clearly doesn’t mind. Just to double check, Donghyuck brushes his fingers against the back of Mark’s neck. Sees an image of their knees touching in the back of a van. Feels the quiet patter of anticipation. He shoves his hands into his pockets when Mark shoots him a confused look, reaching for his own neck like he’ll find an answer there.
“Thought I saw a bug,” Donghyuck lies easily, and Mark nods, immediately believing him. That, more than touch, colours in the tips of his ears.
He doesn’t smile at the ground, but only because he can feel someone’s eyes on him. His quick scan lands him on Jaemin, who just raises an amused eyebrow from the opposite end of the group.
“No one wants to ride with you two because you’re hard enough to deal with in public,” he drawls, mirth carelessly, thinly veiled considering how many people are around. He’s banking on their language’s minority status, but paranoia is hard to dismiss.
“Says you,” Donghyuck snorts.
He doesn’t have to elaborate before everyone’s pulling out of their own conversations and chiming in, jumping at the chance to point out just how weird Jaemin can get. Donghyuck doesn’t miss the way Jaemin holds eye contact for a beat, creepy, unbothered smile sustained just long enough to unsettle before he pouts and brings his attention back to the others, nuzzling into Jeno’s side to get him to defend his honour.
I’ll play nice this one time, Donghyuck decodes, half-shuddering as he shuffles forward in line.
The others tease, but not like Jaemin, not with his single-minded focus and that sadistic intent to make someone squirm practically radiating off him. He’s weird that way. Donghyuck doesn’t get it, he’s not anything like that.
A leaf smacks him in the forehead with the force of a well-timed finger flick. It feels, inexplicably, like he’s being chastised.
Frowning, he reaches up for it, but Mark beats him to the chase, already peeling it off and letting the wind carry it elsewhere. Donghyuck tracks its farewell through a squint. For a moment there, he could’ve sworn it swirled into the shaky shape of a hieut.
No, that’s crazy.
Crazier than reading Mark’s mind? Donghyuck thinks, wry. It’s a solid point.
“Your skin is so sensitive,” Mark mutters absently, drawing him out of his thoughts. The pads of his fingers brush over Donghyuck’s forehead, unknowingly transmitting images of tan limbs splattered with bruises. “It’s all red.”
Donghyuck wonders how much of Mark’s attention is exhausted on him on a daily basis.
“Red means danger,” he replies automatically, trying to look as pitiable as possible. “You have to kiss it better or I’ll die.”
Mark laughs softly, fingers curling so he can tap Donghyuck’s forehead with a shy knuckle. “What goes on in here, man?”
“You’re better off not knowing.” Donghyuck grins at the curious tilt of Mark’s head before moving forward in line.
For once, he means exactly what he says.
Help me out here, Donghyuck thinks briefly as they finally step into their car, fingers brushing the cool glass door. It doesn’t surprise him as much as it probably should when he hears an affirmative in the pneumatic hiss of the closing doors.
They sit facing each other, comfortably quiet as the car starts moving. Mark’s face doesn’t pale, eyes mirroring the sparkling city view, but his hands are tucked firmly under his thighs, palms down. He only does that when he doesn’t want to nervously fidget.
A fear of heights isn’t exactly sustainable for people who spend a third of their lives in airplanes, but Mark’s always taken pleasure in embodying the unexpected. (Even when it doesn’t particularly work out in his favour.)
Donghyuck relaxes in his seat, letting his legs stretch into Mark’s personal space. He allows himself a moment to soak in the brave joy on Mark’s face, the subtlety of it as well as the sincerity. There are few people in Donghyuck’s world who know how to squeeze every experience for all its worth in wonder, and Mark is undoubtedly one of them. Donghyuck wouldn’t be surprised if someone told him Mark had been brought into the world smiling, eyes just as big and unblinking as they are now, seeing the world for the first time (again and again and again).
Sometimes, it’s tough to reconcile that Mark with the Mark Donghyuck is most intimately familiar with against the backdrop of a practice room, a recording studio, bathed in blinking red lights that ape morse code for all eyes on you—careful, now.
That Mark is still unflinchingly true, just in a different way. That Mark is the furthest thing from a newborn.
He’d said it himself once, hadn’t he? A boy who grew up living with sharks does not need to be taught how to swim.
God, does Donghyuck like him.
“Are you just gonna keep staring at me like that?”
Donghyuck’s ears grow hot before his brain even finishes processing the sentence. It takes a few fluttering blinks for him to look through his thoughts at Mark, whose head has turned towards Donghyuck. They’re probably over the water if he’s not facing the city anymore. He’s mentioned before it’s easier when they’re high over solid ground—god knows why, if they fell they’d be safer over water.
“There’s just something on your face,” Donghyuck gets out, the picture of nonchalance. It’s not the best excuse considering the lights inside of the car aren’t even on. Mark’s face is lit half by the moon and half by all the Yokohama windows that haven’t yet fallen asleep.
His lips twitch in amusement, and not for the first time, Donghyuck wonders how much of Mark’s trust comes from naivety, and how much comes from knowing people value being trusted, find safety in it.
Mark’s small smile does dangerous things to Donghyuck. “It didn’t look like that.”
Wiping his palms in his pockets, he raises a cool eyebrow. “What did it look like, then?”
Predictably, Mark falters.
He licks his lips unconsciously, shifting his legs to buy time, maybe, but the hem of Donghyuck’s pants have ridden up, and before he knows it something warm is pressed against the skin of his ankle. An image fizzles into focus. Donghyuck, through the screen of a laptop. Donghyuck’s lips, soundlessly forming words he remembers having had to swallow around. Donghyuck’s eyes: intense, true, speaking past a camera with unabashed heart.
(I just… want to say I love you so much.)
This snapshot is stunning in its strength and clarity. There’s less of a blur to the details, like everything had been fiercely committed to memory when it happened, from the worn grain of the table to the specks of dust on the screen. And there’s a certain sense of bone-deep familiarity Donghyuck gets a pulse of, like Mark’s visited this moment before. Like he hasn’t been able to stop coming back to it.
(Like Donghyuck’s kept giving him reasons to.)
The cable car comes to an abrupt stop, swinging enough that Donghyuck’s foot slides away from Mark. His mind becomes his own again, but his breath still lies a little out of reach, stolen by a precious memory. Nevertheless, he collects himself enough to notice Mark’s fingers have jumped atop his thighs, digging in.
“What—”
“It’s fine,” Donghyuck cuts in, trying to emanate something calm. “Sometimes people don’t get on or off properly and they have to stop everything. It’s probably just that, hyung.”
“Right,” Mark says, laughing quietly. It’s a little too high-pitched. He’s not quite afraid, Donghyuck can tell, just a little thrown off. A touch nervous.
Unbidden, the soft hiss of the door closing comes to mind.
“Give me your hand,” he instructs, scooting forward until he’s on the edge of the seat. Mark does, and Donghyuck internally braces himself before holding onto the skin between his thumb and pointer finger.
They lock eyes, and Donghyuck breathes deeply with purpose, wordlessly encouraging Mark to follow even as his mind starts sparking with distracting bits and pieces of thought. There’s a too-quick flash of untangled hand holding, the way kids do. Mark’s fingertips guiding Donghyuck’s over a fretboard. Pinkies hooked and drawn out of sight in a room full of strangers. A bitten down nail idly tracing veins on the back of a hand. A thin echo of relief resonates inside of him.
“Better?” He asks even though he knows the answer.
Mark opens his mouth, looking at their hands, and then slowly shakes his head no. Donghyuck feels a shy flutter of something… dishonest. And then the flutter becomes an ache that Donghyuck can’t name.
“Okay,” he thinks he says, not quite hearing himself anymore.
He moves his other hand up to Mark’s ear, fingers hovering for a split second before he carefully tucks some of the hair behind it. He presses down on what he thinks is the right spot and lets Mark’s hand go.
“Pressure points,” he explains faintly, eyes on Mark’s ear. “A minute of light pressure is supposed to help.”
Donghyuck draws in a short breath as a hazy image floats to mind of his hand holding a phone. Judging by the tight surroundings, it looks like they’re on a plane. On screen, there are search results for ‘ways to relieve acrophobia’, weirdly sharp and tinged with a confusion that’s quickly molting into understanding.
There’s that ache again.
Donghyuck worries his bottom lip with his teeth, slightly embarrassed. Being seen is one thing, being seen through is another.
The amount of power Mark wields over Donghyuck is terrifying, sometimes. Even knowing what they mean to each other, Donghyuck gets the good kind of knots in his stomach over hard proof—hard proof that he’s constantly on the lookout for, but often develops a hummingbird heart over.
“Things should start moving soon,” he says to fill the silence, pausing before catching Mark’s eye. They’re closer than he remembers them being, knees slotted together. “Do you need me to keep going?”
Mark nods, and Donghyuck’s fingers tingle in anticipation.
“Are you lying to me, hyung?” He asks quietly, forgoing the again as he bites the inside of his cheek.
Mark’s mouth curves wonderfully. Images burst forward in quick succession, flashy and loud and sure. He can barely keep up, doesn’t even catch two thirds of what he sees, just knows that it’s him.
Jesus, how can Mark stand it? How can he be around Donghyuck 24/7 for years and years on end and still come back to him in the recesses of his mind, still want to see him in the one place he has the complete and utter freedom not to?
The ache stretches, and Donghyuck’s not sure it’s just Mark’s, anymore.
“I don’t think I have to answer that,” Mark says, eyes glittering. He doesn’t seem at all shaken at being caught red-tongued.
Donghyuck wants to kiss him.
(Donghyuck always wants to kiss him.)
His mind fills with the screen of his phone again, this time displaying a picture of a head with the pressure points highlighted. Mark tugs his wrist to his forehead, leaning forward until Donghyuck’s thumb is pressed between his brows. The rest of his fingers naturally splay out on Mark’s cheek, and he feels like he’s moving on autopilot when he rests his other hand on the back of Mark’s head, keeping them stable.
Lightning quick, Donghyuck’s fingers threaded tight through blue hair. The image is patchy and distant. Fabricated. A want tamped down immediately with practiced ease.
“Funny that you know this,” Donghyuck murmurs.
Like water, affection runs warm down his spine. It feels broken in, comfortable. Gently, a memory glows in his mind. Him walking across a practice room, subtly favouring one leg over the other. A cup being lowered from his mouth before his lips pucker in distaste. In a waiting room on his phone, slowly sitting up until he’s unnaturally straight. The angle of Jisung’s neck becoming less severe in turn, head pillowed on Donghyuck’s shoulder.
Always paying attention.
Donghyuck’s heart squeezes like calloused fingers are curling around it.
“Yeah.” Mark shrugs, and the images shake apart into nothing. “Funny.”
The car lurches back into motion and Donghyuck nearly slips off his seat, saved for the second time that day by Mark’s firm grip. This time, on his thigh. The cheesy my hero dies on his tongue when he looks at Mark. He could let go. He should let go.
In his head, he sees a live feed of himself. Right here. Right now. Just him.
The ache sews itself into him insistently, stitching a name tight across his sternum. Longing.
Donghyuck brushes his thumb along Mark’s brow bone and lets it skitter lower until it’s resting on the apple of his cheek. His other hand twists in Mark’s hair. It’s all very tangible. (A patchy memory fills out, gaining dimension.) Mark’s eyes are a burning black.
Donghyuck wants to kiss him.
It all comes back to that ten-year-long fermented intuition when Mark asks, more breath than sound, “Red means danger?”
An irritated patch of red on his forehead fades into view before swiftly turning into a pair of bitten lips.
“Kiss it better, hyung,” Donghyuck murmurs with a smile, already leaning in.
And Mark does.
His mouth quiets every and any thought in Donghyuck’s mind until all he’s focusing on is pulling him closer by the neck, wanting so much to be overwhelmed by him. Mark kisses sweetly, all small smiles and gentle squeezes that somehow get to Donghyuck more than if he’d been rough and heated. He’s practically vibrating from the rush of adrenaline.
A sigh of pleasure leaves him when Mark’s teeth barely graze his lower lip, and that prompts Mark to pull away, touching their foreheads together in apology.
“Later,” he promises, sounding a little more than breathless. “Ride’s almost over.”
Something creaks overhead in reply, and Donghyuck groans along with it, hot all over and filled with far too much restless energy to sit through dinner with the guys.
“Ma-ark,” he whines, tongue rolling in that foreign way. He tips forward, resting in the crook of Mark’s neck. “You suck.”
And because Mark has never been able to pass up a good dick joke, he replies, sounding stupidly smug, “Pretty well, too.”
This is it, this is the life Donghyuck’s chosen for himself.
He smiles into Mark’s neck when Mark cracks himself up, cheek pressing into Donghyuck’s hair. Thinks that nothing is ever going to feel as good as this, as good as them.
All in all, it’s not the worst choice he could’ve made.
Later, as they walk to the restaurant, Donghyuck touches their knuckles together and asks, “What are you thinking about?”
It takes longer than it should for him to realize that he actually needs an answer, mind no longer buzzing with the latent presence of another. When did that happen?
“You,” Mark replies distantly, eyes sort of unfocused. And then he seems to swim back up to the surface of himself, re-hearing what he just said. “Not like I—it’s just because—fuck off.”
Donghyuck only laughs harder, fondness extending warmth out from his gut. In the back of his mind, he contemplates the pros and cons of telling Mark it’s a little too late to be embarrassed now.
“We just did nothing about it for so long,” Mark huffs under his breath, stopping at an intersection. “Sue me for being distracted now that we have.”
Donghyuck thinks about all the things they could do once they’re back at the hotel and ducks his head, hands playing with his hair so it covers the tips of his burning ears. His mind is one hell of a traitor, because it keeps recalling the feeling of Mark’s full lips sliding over his own, the way his breath felt on Donghyuck’s skin, the small noise he’d made when Donghyuck had pulled his hair taut.
God, is he glad that Mark can’t read his mind. It would even the score, maybe, but it would cost Donghyuck approximately all his dignity. He groans internally as his brain starts firing up images of Mark’s thighs, his arms, his waist—
“Yo, is that the ring that—”
Donghyuck looks up and finds Mark’s lips parted, sentence seemingly aborted. He’s touching Donghyuck’s fingers with one hand, the other pushing down on the walk button. There’s something like panic on his face, and Donghyuck is about to ask him what’s wrong when he notices the way Mark’s cheeks are pinking. The way his pupils have gone wide.
He’s looking at Donghyuck like—
“No,” Donghyuck says with meaning, mortified as he clutches his hand to his chest. He does not agree with the city’s sick sense of humour.
Mark seems to blink himself out of a stupor, and then the smile of a menace slowly takes shape on his face.
There’s a lot of things to love about Yokohama, like how it roots for love, bright and cheeky. But, as Donghyuck attempts to speedwalk away from an overjoyed (and fucking overconfident) Mark, he kind of can’t wait for their flight out of here.
A leaf smacks him in the face.
Yeah, whatever.