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Sehun didn’t usually require a reminder.
It was usually Minseo who was rattled out of the closed-eye fever dream of feeling Sehun’s body from the inside, of the reverie of knitting together the image taken by her hands with her every thought now leaking into his cells.
She felt his hands straining against the grip of her own so firm Sehun’s bones felt brittle. So he had listened when she’d told him she was stronger than she looked and he’d sweet-talked his way out of being beaten in arm-wrestling. (Minseo had understood. It was one of those things between them that didn’t need explaining.) He’d listened and was using her own body against her now.
“Sehun, let go.”
The switch back was always worse, the sorting back into their own bodies abrupt once their hands broke touch. Sehun detached in the same moment too, sat with his back to her, legs pulled against his chest, head between his knees. Minseo sat quietly and stared down the line of his spine, into the depression between his shoulders where its knobs vanished, like the questions she never asked about these moments. It helped with the nausea, anchoring her gaze in the sight of him.
Then she remembered. “You haven’t been eating.” For the first few weeks, he’d taken precautions, hastily wolfed-down meals she could still taste in his mouth. Now, he knew her better, had drawn the conclusion that they both liked this better.
It went without a reply. Minseo’s sensations must have swum back into focus long before his did, this time. She slid a hand up his spine, to his nape.
“How do you not hate this?” she asked when the sensation of having her insides torn to shreds slotted into place as well, and reached for the flat white tablet and cup of water on his nightstand. She’d learned him to be one not to enjoy pain, yet he’d asked her to switch during her periods more often, had turned uncommonly calm and docile the one time her painkillers hadn’t worked. Minseo had let him feel it since. She preferred him brash and demanding, but couldn’t resist a Sehun like this, sitting in her palm, an unbroken yolk.
“Sehun,” she whispered, her grip tightening on his neck, “let eonnie see you.”
She watched his spine straightening, his shoulders pulling back, and let go of his neck to touch her palms to the dunes of his shoulder blades, trail her short nails down his sides. She watched his breaths broadening his shoulders. She knelt, legs parted around him, and with her cheek against his back reached around, laid one hand flat over his navel, the other over his sternum, and told him to breathe. “Sehunie,” she whispered against his skin.
As much as he disliked this part, as much as he’d rather have her pressed up against his insides, would rather be seen by her through his own eyes outside of the confines of his body, he knew it had to be done. He turned around, and Minseo stared at his eyes. His gaze stayed pinned to the bed, hers averted the weightlessness of his chest. “Sehunie,” she said, shifting closer, throwing her legs over his, forcing him closer as she closed them around his waist. “Look at eonnie.”
She didn’t know when she’d started to see the grave he carried himself in, but he’d not once corrected her, and like nothing else it eased the tense line of his eyebrows into something like relief.
With Sehun reluctant, relief was far. There was no being sealed back into their own bodies until their bodies were made to look at one another, shed the memory of the other. And yet, it was one of those days; his gaze stuck to the moon of her stomach, his hands followed soon, holding softly its sides. Not quite tethered yet, Minseo wanted to feel the heat of his mouth as if it was hers still, kissed his static mouth until the line between them fell into oblivion. For a moment, her body began to negate its own existence, and went alienly quiet, until she felt fingers clawing into flesh, felt a trembling grow into a shiver beneath her own.
It wasn’t Sehun who broke the kiss; his mouth had opened to hers, stayed awaiting now. She slipped two fingers inside, parting to run along the rows of his bottom teeth, hit his thigh when he bit her, although his teeth had closed around her fingertips with only the intention to hold.
He fell back onto a pillow. Minseo pulled her legs out from under him, wiped his spit into his briefs, and crawled to sit on his hips. He still hadn’t looked at her, but his face had assumed a sheen of softness she would not toss stones into. Sehun sighed, contented, when she laid her hands onto his cheeks, and let them wander down his neck and shoulders to travel the length of his arms. Without disturbing the path of her touch, he brought them up in a soft, automated motion to lie next to his head, for Minseo to hold him by the wrists, thumb to pulse, for her to search the corner of his pursed mouth for another kiss.
“I like how you say my name,” he said before she could find one. “It sounds like a secret.”
His lips moved under her closed mouth, tracing his like fingers, blotting up the ink of his words. Sehun had never liked being kissed much, could only find a ravenous appetite for it that left their lips sore as an intruder to Minseo, but he knew to open beneath the heat of her tongue now. It was the one thing he didn’t insist she ask for.
His legs would have folded over her spine if they could, she knew, while she filled her catalogue: the offset of the angular lines of his body she had yet to learn how to wear against the blaze of his mouth, the flashes of struggle of his body that held carvings of memories of her as its intruder, her weight pressed up against him in a stroll along his seams. The lingering desire to one day overstay, one body away from her own.
Between the two of them, it was Minseo the burden of separation fell to. Between the two of them, it was her who passed thumbs over Sehun’s palms until they both wavered again into oscillation, who folded the sounds he made between her teeth, filaments of sinuous desire he would return to drink from her mouth.
It was a kiss until it wasn’t, until Sehun pressed up into her in demand. She sat back, and finally he looked, drank in her stomach, the obstruction of her ribs, the line of her neck, the curves of her cheeks.
“You never smile anymore.” Better than Minseo herself, he knew she forgave him the trespass. His fingers twitched, closed over his abandoned palms, the tips of his fingers paling. “We don’t have to keep doing it.”
Sehun’s eyes betrayed the weight of his craving; if Minseo allowed, he’d remain in her for days. If not for the bands of his promises, she believed he’d long have betrayed her entirely. And she’d thought about it to herself—if she had anything for him to take from her beyond himself, what she’d find in herself, living off his remains in the body he would leave behind. If Sehun asked, she would yield. But he hadn’t, wouldn’t, and it was not for a lack of obedience but what they recognised in each other whenever they traded.
“We should eat,” she said, although she never wanted his taste gone from her mouth. She stood, pressed her hands into her lower stomach for a moment of relief. When she closed her eyes, she could still see the glare of a star, standing out stark and less foreign than she could comprehend against the canvas of his body, in the absence of the light he’d polluted himself with.
Sehun frowned as she pulled his t-shirt on and threw hers at his chest. “Please don’t try to cook for me again.”
He was scratching at the edge of the print when she looked over her shoulder, scratched loose flakes and dust. “What do you suggest, then?”
Her tone startled him. He reached for her wrist, pulled her to sit back on the bed, and let go to lay his hands between her shoulder blades. She shivered into the warmth of his hands; if there was one thing that irked her about Sehun, it was that she’d let him get too close.
“Junmyeon hyung. He’ll order your favourite.”
“Don’t you dare say a word to him.”
“Not even if it would make him pay for patbingsu, too?” He kissed her of his own volition, sweet and mild, in disregard of her glare. “He’d do most anything for you. If you ever get tired of me, make sure to go to him.”
It was such an earnest mistake to make, such a severely insincere request, it clawed a laugh from Minseo. Junmyeon, with his hands full of little for many, excelled in the breaking of hearts, not the mending. Excelled especially in keeping Sehun close, pressed up against his bared heart. How would Sehun know any better? He nipped at her ear when she turned her face away, as if he was seeking to embed his teeth above the line of her piercings. “I like you tiring me out.”
It was as close to a truth as she could get. She waited until he’d taken a few deep breaths with his nose pressed into her nape, then looked back to see how it set his face alight with a flush, catch a glimpse at his nervous tongue.
“Call him soon, or I will eat for you.”
He gave her one of his terse smiles, sweet and mild too, and she watched the corners of his mouth fill with the thoughtlessness he’d curated around Junmyeon. “Hyung, order dakbokkeumtang for us,” was all he said once the call connected. Minseo left him there, a hand covering his mouth so as not to laugh out loud, at Junmyeon’s irritated indulgence. She washed her hands and set the table: one set of chopsticks and a spoon would suffice, for them.