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It is, of course, at a party that Jongin meets him again, eyes widening, rounding over the only other shoulder far across the room. He sinks his gaze into his juice and tries to let his thoughts pearl down the straw, listens for the tinny music coming from laptop speakers.
It’s barely a party; everyone who hasn’t had second thoughts ends up carrying their chair into the kitchen, where the lying in wait for stray guests turns into a murmur of laughter. Now that Jongin’s noticed him, his smell begins to fill the living room, splintering and billowing like a thread of smoke. Inescapable, unless he leaves.
“You never called.”
Everything about Junmyeon is frustrating; it’s not just how kind his hands had remained that night, how the smile on his face had not chipped, or the politely curated taste he’d left in his mouth, it’s that he’s still set on seeing behind Jongin’s rejection.
“Didn’t keep your number,” swindles Jongin, sucking down more of the ice-cooled juice. It’s a short relief: his cheeks feel tender already, the seams of his mouth growing sore with the rising urge. It was a miserable enough night already, as it goes whenever another batch is due.
For a moment, Junmyeon looks hurt. Then his expression softens into a shaky laugh plucked from worry, and he makes room for himself between the armrest and Jongin, their sides pressed up tight, the back of Junmyeon’s hand coming to rest against his thigh, bare of intention. “I had a health scare shortly after we . . . it turned out to be just that, but.”
Jongin can feel his gaze, where it draws a line to his mouth, on a once-walked trail, then wanders over his face, a harbinger of a most cautious touch. He tries to submerge the memories along with himself in the yielding embrace of the couch, to keep from blinking. The image reassembles itself against his effort—unclouded, desire-logged, arresting him anew.
It seems a dream, weathered and worn, when he remembers: being unable to look away from Junmyeon even when he’d leaned closer than it took to kiss Jongin, a foreign willingness arising in his body to turn itself inside out, to witness Junmyeon with his every cell. (Junmyeon had laughed at finding Jongin with his eyes wide open and caught by surprise by how mesmerised Junmyeon left him, and his hands had followed his mouth, in another kiss encompassing his face.) It left him sick, after they’d parted, how much he had wanted, how unshaped this want was beyond soaking Junmyeon up into him, through other means than his bite. His cheeks ache now with the sheaths threatening to part skin, to fill this old want with the copper of fresh blood.
“I hoped to see you again,” says Junmyeon when Jongin pays him no reply.
Not quite confession, not quite invitation. His hand twists on Jongin’s thigh, lies now heel and three fingertips attentive against fabric.
Jongin swallows. “You didn’t try very hard to find me.”
It’s unkind, and does what it’s supposed to: Junmyeon flusters. The earnest shine leaves his eyes, leaves behind an unanticipated exhaustion, one Jongin shares, with his aching cheeks, and a creeping aversion to the juice filling his mouth where its taste is turning into the blaze of acid.
Earlier, there’d been a scent that had turned Jongin’s head. Before he could make out who it belonged to, it had been tinged by alcohol. Junmyeon’s wine glass, now deposited behind them on a sill, is still full, his breath and smell untainted—it’s enough to have Jongin wanting. If not a full meal, then a sip.
Jongin catches the tail end of a shrug in the corner of his eyes, lets his head fall back when Junmyeon’s palm comes to rest over his kneecap, his fingers drawing idle lines underneath—he’s almost convinced Junmyeon’s hands have a life of their own, one that’s not reporting back to his mind.
“Didn’t want to ruin my chance with you, if you really didn’t want to be found,” says Junmyeon.
“A chance for what?” Jongin hears himself asking.
“It doesn’t have to be exclusive,” rushes Junmyeon to say. Presumptive, Jongin thinks. “It doesn’t have to be anything. A dinner, or a walk. A museum visit, if you’d like.”
Jongin feels his eyebrow arching, and closes his eyes to rein it back in, too upset with this alien desire, an importunate heartbeat of its own, to keep glancing at Junmyeon’s face. More than the slight rearrangement of his organs, of his face, the widened horizon of scents, it was learning the architecture of this desire built on an uninhabited shore that had Jongin struggling. “Should I be worried you haven’t made friends to do those things with?”
Junmyeon’s smile is one Jongin can hear, soaked in sickening confidence. “You were very—” the scraping of a glass lifted off stone sill, the sway of wine announced by small plumes of its stinging-bitter poison, “—warm with me, last time. Can you fault me for wanting more of that?”
“Do you want more of what you’re getting now, too?”
It takes long enough for Junmyeon to reply, for something hopeful to bloom in Jongin, before Junmyeon’s words come to kneel on the sprouts. “I’m a bit of a . . . it’s nice having to work for it. And knowing you’re sincere with me, when we don’t know each other yet. I don’t think I could forget you, even if I wanted to.”
The shudder is a violent one, and Jongin cannot tell if it’s disgust or twisted enamourment, or the revelation that it’s what draws him to Junmyeon in turn. Tacky as he is, it’s his heart split open for Jongin to see.
Still: “If I’d known how terrible you are, I wouldn’t have kissed you.”
“I hear that a lot.” Junmyeon’s voice barely parts the air enough to reach, dull and rounded by the kind of hurt imparted thoughtlessly, lined with a compliant laugh.
Jongin, redesign aside, isn’t a monster. He reaches for the hand on his knee, lets Junmyeon’s fingers find into the spaces between his for a brief touch, firm, bristling at how he wants it to be heartening, too. Some of the ache slicing into Jongin’s cheeks is arising from his heart, he knows. He’s wanted someone’s blood before, but it hadn’t felt like this; a desire so invasive not even a torch would burn it out. A betrayal so ardent it could only hail from the pouch in his stomach, wanting more of Junmyeon than what he’d swallowed down that night to hold on to until it was emptied.
“Hyung,” Jongin says—tests, his heart pressed up against Junmyeon’s to take home its print. “Have you ever dated a vampire?”
“Once, almost,” says Junmyeon. Now that Jongin looks he finds him sitting on the armrest, arms slung around legs crossed in front of his chest, socked feet shy of Jongin’s thigh, his wine glass in one hand, tides of deep red licking at the seam of the glass, a different smile licking at his teeth. “I’d let you bite me, if that’s what you’re asking. Right here, too.”
Jongin glances around the room bare of chairs and others’ eyes, stares at the bared skin of his neck where he hooks a finger into the collar of his turtleneck, and tries to remember that any blood would do. Junmyeon is barely anyone to him. It would be an impersonal touch suited to an impersonal task if he were to guide Junmyeon’s offer to his mouth.
“Do you have a thing for,” he begins. “You should be more cautious,” he accuses instead, and takes the wine glass from Junmyeon’s hand, setting it onto the floor beneath the low table. As frustrating as Junmyeon is, finding someone else tonight—Jongin was barely in the mood to leave behind his book and bed when the craving struck him. “You’ll end up with something bad if you let random people bite you.”
“I’d never have guessed you were a vampire.” To Jongin’s misfortune, he finds more to say. “Although I should have known, you are irresistible.”
This time, Jongin swats at his shin. It has Junmyeon laughing, sweeps the tinge of hurt off his face; reminds Jongin that this mouth against his own had felt like autumn sun on skin, a promise of rest at its heel.
Tired, Jongin stares ahead but leans to the side, ribs to shin and shoulder to knee, until he can rest his chin on its peak. Holds onto Junmyeon by his ankle. “I’m not, a vampire. But I do want your blood.” His face needs suspending in ice, not Junmyeon’s knuckles stroking along his cheek in a touch like parting grass.
He watches it dawning on Junmyeon. “Oh, you’re one of the—are there any perks to donating blood? I’d take a lunch set, or a movie ticket. And the volunteer hour certificate, of course.”
The laugh Jongin bites out of his knee is an anticipating one. “Let’s rewind to when you assumed I was a vampire.”
“Oh, I never did,” says Junmyeon. His hand found his way around Jongin’s neck where he now pulls at strands of hair, in a most gentle and lulling scolding. “You behave more like someone who might still be teething.”
It has Jongin pressing into the space between his legs, just enough to spell his frustration out against his mouth, just enough to take note of small scars dotting his cheeks, of the warmth of his eyes that mirrors his hands’. He’s kissed back with the yielding opacity of a rice cake, guileless and suffocating at once, until Junmyeon’s hands travel to his cheeks and the kiss breaks apart under the reminder of needles sitting in them like hardened veins.
Junmyeon hasn’t looked away from him since he first left his friend behind, Jongin’s sure, and it’s beginning to feel like a glaze of expectation.
“Would it be so bad to say I trust you?” whispers Junmyeon between them. “I just need to know.”
“Next weekend,” Jongin relents, the corners of his mouth bursting at the seams. “Hyung—”
Junmyeon unfolds, and in barely a moment has Jongin beneath him, his collar pulled down again, head turned to the side, bracing himself on Jongin’s shoulder with one hand as he leans towards Jongin’s mouth. “More comfortable for you,” is all he gets out before Jongin feels the sheaths breaching as his nose strokes over his throat, as his mouth finds the thrum of his pulse.
Junmyeon flinches at being pierced, but presses closer, as if some of Jongin’s want leaked into him, until the needles sit securely in his neck, and his shoulders untense under Jongin’s hands. There’s the odd pulse of blood being guided through his cheeks, the daze of satisfaction sinking claws into him, his hands stumbling over fabric to close around Junmyeon’s neck in a firm hold, nails too short to anchor, a gasp followed by a small noise torn between ache and delight—and he remembers the taste of Junmyeon on his tongue, the heat of his thighs closing around him—until there’s only the dense waft of nausea left.
Jongin retracts. He lets his head fall back, passes his tongue along the inside of his cheeks to feel for their soreness, some of the nausea following the blood deeper into his body to contort his stomach. Even in the low light, the puncture wounds on Junmyeon’s neck stand out, twin Orion’s belts.
Junmyeon’s touch casts a veil over them, until— “You’re crying.”
He’s quick to pass his thumbs over the crest of Jongin’s cheeks. Jongin takes him by the wrists before he can lick the wet off them. “Don’t, it’s extracted from your blood.”
Relief takes a seat in Junmyeon’s eyes, a sickle of a moon hanging sharp above a sinking sun. Jongin reaches into his hair, strands running through his fingers like tame sand, stomach twisting when Junmyeon presses closer still, his want firm against Jongin’s stomach.
“I like you so much already,” he says in a brush of heat against Jongin’s mouth, a brush of knuckles against where Jongin’s soft between them when he readjusts himself. “Tell me what to think of this. What you think of me.”
“Your friends are just around the corner,” Jongin says, watery cement beneath Junmyeon.
“There’s nothing here I’d have to hide from them.” Glass clinks, and something twinkles in Junmyeon’s eyes when he blinks. “Last time, you also didn’t—if it’s a dry spell, I can wait it out.”
Jongin’s throat catches on a laugh, and he coughs out a good luck with that, at Junmyeon’s eyes round in earnestness, then at how his name sounds in Junmyeon’s mouth: dressed in the silk of a future, saturated with the inky dye of hope.
“Jongin,” Junmyeon says again, shirking one kiss but not the next, shivering in his grasp when Jongin licks at the underside of his nose. “Take my phone number home if you won’t take me.”
“You don’t have to ask. I told you, this weekend.”
Flustered, one hand of Junmyeon’s comes to cover the side of his neck. “I thought it was something you just said, in the heat of the moment.”
“I wish.” Flustered himself by how much he wishes he didn’t have to return to the strict routine a batch of eggs requires, now that he’s had a blood meal, Jongin can’t look away from the smile that turns Junmyeon’s cheeks round, shiny with anticipation. If he could have one moment to breathe, this affection spiderwebbing across his chest would collapse into disinterest. If he had another, he’s almost sure he’d spend it falling into Junmyeon. “Could you get me a juice once you’re—”
Junmyeon’s smile grows into something unruly. “Aloe? Pumpkin? Cabbage?” He laughs when Jongin lets his fist fall onto his thigh, quiets when Jongin’s hand slips up to the belt sitting over the summit of his hipbone. “ABC, then?”
“Worry about your own health, you just lost a lot of blood.”
“I like you even better when you’re worried about me.”
Junmyeon leans forward, bestows something of a conspiratorial kiss onto Jongin’s mouth, of pickled longing, of immodest aspirations. When he stands, it falls away with the heat between them severed, and he pulls at the thighs of his jeans, fits his hands into their pockets, gestures erratic until Jongin takes pity on him.
“I won’t run away,” he promises, and this time, mortifying as it is—Jongin is almost certain he means it.