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There’s something wrong with him. There must be.
It’s the only reasonable explanation as to why he’s sat at one end of Minho’s couch with Minho himself at the other, admitting he’d like to be much closer, actually.
Something excruciating, to the effect of:
“Hey, um. I really like you. Like. Really. It, um. I don’t know how to phrase - more than I should. A lot.”
Minho’s looking at him with a flat gaze, and he isn’t sure if he’s just made a horrible mistake, but it sure feels like one. His blood feels hot, sticky. He feels it running through his veins like lava. He can picture the insides burning, crisping up, turning black and hard. He presses down on one of the back of his hand, just to reassure him it’s still there, soft, normal, human.
“You’re drunk,” says Minho, eventually, and while it’s mostly a fact, it also sounds like a question. The soft wash of Minho’s floor lamp, the only light, makes the space dim and warm, inviting confession.
“Yes,” Chan can’t hide it, “It’s the only time I’m honest.”
He looks at his hands, down to his feet, socked toes curling in the fluffy shag of the cat shaped rug there. (A gift from a friend, Minho had said. Not his choice. It had to go somewhere.)
“Thank you,” Minho said. “I don’t think that would be a good idea, though.”
“Right, of course,” Chan found himself agreeing, though he didn’t know why. He felt himself shrinking, like a vacuum sealed bag, collapsing inward, become soft and hard all at once, strange shaped.
“It hasn’t been that long,” Minho carries on, carefully, and while it’s still a rejection it feels strangely considered. Chan tells himself not to hope. Can’t hope. His blood will explode out of all of his pores and pool on the floor in sticky puddles and Minho will never, ever get it out of that stupid rug.
“Right,” Chan nods, but it’s wrong.
He digs his fingertips into the meat of his thighs at the top of his knees and wills himself to disappear.
Minho cocks his head to the side. “Are you sure you’re not just lonely?”
He is, is the truth. So lonely he constantly feels two seconds from tears about it, has to look away from the couples on the streets, chews his lips raw and picks his cuticles ragged watching dramas in the middle of the night just to try and simulate some kind of what it must be like to be loved. To be in love. He sucks the blood off his fingertips and pretends it’s the taste of a kiss.
What he does, though, is smile weakly and try to roll us off his shoulders with a shrug. “I just like you.”
“I think you’re great,” Minho says, but Chan can’t believe it. It’s a platitude, surely. “I just don’t think-“
“Please,” gasps someone, breathless, and it takes Chan a couple seconds to realise that someone was him. “I thought you’d get it.”
Minho’s eyes narrow, just a little. “I’m getting over it. Not about to go screwing my friends just for fun, sorry.”
“I don’t even-“ and here’s the hysteria, the rising sobs, constriction of the throat. “Half the time I’m just sitting around thinking, fuck, when was the last time I got to hug someone for more than hello/goodbye. I don’t even - sorry - I wasn’t trying to proposition you like that. I’m just. It’s been a long time since I liked anyone, and now I like you.”
‘I like you and I feel like I’ll rip out of my skin if I don’t have you hold me together’, is what he doesn’t say. ‘I need you to press me back into shape, because I’m coming apart.’
It sits in the space between them, and Chan tries very hard not to hyperventilate. The air feels too thin. He can feel every thread against his thrumming skin. Breathe in, count to four. Breathe out, try not to cry with it.
He stands to leave. Minho’s still watching him, impassive. Chan’s shoulders slump in defeat, and he turns.
He hasn’t taken two steps when he hears a sigh, reluctant, and the pat-pat of hand on soft couch. His heart does a funny little flop against his sternum, and he turns back round.
“Don’t make me regret this,” says Minho, his eyes gleaming in the light, and Chan stares dumbly as he pats the couch beside him again, and lifts one arm up in invitation.
A puncture in the case around his vacuum sealed little soul lets everything come rushing back in, and he swells with it. He almost asks, ‘are you sure?’, but he daren’t waste the opportunity, so he floats over to Minho’s side, feet numb with disbelief almost tripping on the carpet pile.
Tentatively, he tucks himself in at Minho’s side. He’s warm. He’s so warm. Chan fancies himself spun round in a microwave, shot through with waves of some inexorable human force only available through skin to skin contact (or that’s the oxytocin talking, whatever.)
Minho settles him in, guides his head into the crook of his shoulder, rests his hand comfortably on Chan’s upper arm. He can feel his breath tickle his ear, move the short hairs there. He still wants to cry, more than anything, but he daren’t move a muscle.
Perhaps he died, just then. The rejection went straight through him and out the other side, instant heart attack, and all his good karma let him dream this, ghostly, for a few sweet moments before he got dragged off to hell.
Right now, he wouldn’t really be surprised if he dissolved into bitter soap and sweet longing, lathered into impermeable and swirled down the drain. But no. He was still there, and Minho was real and solid at his back. He didn’t deserve this. What made him most undeserving of all was his unwillingness to give it up.
Minho’s dragging his fingers idly up and down his bare skin, just below his T-shirt sleeve, and it makes him shiver. He feels rather than hears Minho laugh at this.
“You don’t let people see how broken you are, huh?” He comments, idly, as though on the weather. Chan full-body flinches in his arms, prompting him to gently shush, “Woah, woah. It’s alright.”
“If you’re going to reject me,” Chan huffs, sulky, even as he reaches to pull Minho’s arm tighter round himself, “Please stop perceiving me like that.”
“What do you really want from me, hmm?”
Chan, who quite honestly feels that admitting that he even needs to breathe occasionally is a huge, outrageous inconvenience, wonders what’s ok to admit to without sounding insane.
He takes a couple moments to think, and Minho lets him. After a while, he speaks, in slow, halting words.
“I live in a cupboard room in a flat share with two people who wouldn’t notice if I died. I eat alone. I go to bed alone, wake up alone. My best friends live half a world away and we send reels to each other a couple times a week instead of having and kind of friendship, while I watch them post photo after photo of them having a life. I like work too much. I like the team too much. Now, I like you too much. I can’t stop - I just - I like you and I feel like I’d be better if I could get closer to you. I can’t imagine being loved. But I can imagine you.”
The fingers move on his arm still. They sit there. A minute drags on, infinite. Chan can no longer stand not seeing his face, not knowing what he’s thinking, so pulls himself upright, shuffles along the couch and twists round to look at him.
Astonishingly, Minho looks like he’s about to cry. He’s never seen him anything less but perfectly centred, self assured, a joke on his lips. Even in embarrassment, he was never - this. Minho dips his eyes away, a muscle working in his jaw, as something fights within him.
He looks back. His eyes are wet and shining, pools of light, mixing, swirling round and round. They trace over him, seeing him new.
Minho swallows, nods. “I can understand that.”
His eyes drop again, just briefly, and up again. Minho shifts on the couch, gets himself facing Chan properly, weight on his hips and not his arms.
Carefully, he places one cool, soft hand on Chan’s dry, burning cheek.
“Do you want this? Would it help?”
Chan, a desiccated husk offered promise of water after an endless stretch of desert, could never refuse. He nods, a tiny motion, under Minho’s hand.
Just as slow, deliberate, so slow as to make both of them tremor with it, the unreality of this perfect, imperfect unfolding occurrence, Minho leans in. Just slightly, he chases his tongue round his lips, wets them slightly, then - finally - presses them to Chan’s.
It would be more fun to describe it as something momentous - stars exploding into fireworks painting the endless skies in glitter, a thousand birds bursting forth from his shattered rib cage, the world melting and giving way to blinding light and sound and colour forever and ever and some more.
But what he thinks, as Minho’s mouth moves against his, and his hand pulls him closer, and he shuffles forward to better wrap his arms around Minho’s shoulders and pull him in, is:
‘Finally.’
A quiet homecoming into someone else’s arms. Someone who won’t cringe away at the sight of him, pick him up just to drop him, forget him down the back of their couch. Just - the immediate warmth of someone who’s kind enough to let him share.
When does it stop being ‘I want to set myself on fire’ and start being, earnestly, ‘I love you’?
He tries to lose himself in it, he really does. But the little worm in the pit of his heart whispers - this is pity. Two lonely stones, striking sparks, hoping for a blaze; but there’s no tinder to catch. Just more stones.
Chan wouldn’t ask Minho to pick him up from the airport. Wouldn’t call him when he’s sick, ask for soup and paracetamol. Wouldn’t take him as a +1, should he get invited to an acquaintance’s wedding. No. Just. When he was too broken down to pretend any more - he might just about have hope of this.
He breaks the kiss, pitches forward to bury his head in the crook of Minho’s shoulder, squeezes as tight as he dare. Minho falters in surprise, but snakes his arms under Chan’s and up his back, holds him just as firm.
It would be too much to expect Minho to return his feelings, but his kindness in letting him pretend is casting him adrift. Still, he clings to him like a lifeboat, and is glad to feel a little less like he’s drowning.
Over his shoulder, his voice a little husky, asks, “You always seem fine, around others. They like you. What gives?”
Chan, in the cage of Minho’s arms, just wriggles deeper. “Surface is easy. But I don’t know how to say - how you actually get close, you know? Everyone’s already got those people. If you missed the boat - too bad.”
“Or if you had those people, and they left you - yeah, tough shit.” Minho, bitter, mutters into his shoulder. He squeezes Chan, then leans back, indicating escape.
They part, shuffle a little apart on the sofa, and sit side by side, knees still touching.
“You’re pretty brave,” Minho says, and Chan can’t help but snort, derisive. Minho casts him a sharp glance, not understanding.
“Is an animal in a trap gnawing off its own leg brave?”
“It’s trying to fix things. Better than dying without the attempt,” Minho pauses, then adds, cautious to the last, managing expectations - “Even if it doesn’t work out.”
Chan grimaces, mirthless, but he’s glad for that care. Even if it’s hard to accept right then.
“Thanks for not, like,” Chan picks his words, “Thinking it’s weird.”
“Not sure I get to have much say on what’s weird about other people,” Minho says, wryly. “You’re a person with needs. You’re not a monster. Neither am I.”
Chan flopped over, rested his head on Minho’s shoulder.
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
The things unsaid outweighed what they were willing to talk about, but they had time.
For now, they could be just what they were; two lonely people, dreaming.