Work Text:
Hyung can I do laundry at your place next weekend
Jinhyung turns his phone over and over in his hands until it buzzes with a reply.
Wumuti
What no
Do laundry at your own place
Rui says “Is Hyunie still terrified of that twink”
Me
No!!!
I put in too many loads at once tonight and somebody was mean
Wumuti
So don’t do that next time
I promise they won’t hate you forever, or if they do it’s because they’re terrible people so you shouldn’t care
Me
😭😭😭
Jinhyung hadn’t meant to end up in this situation. It had been exciting, finally - finally - making enough money to get his own place. Not having to have roommates anymore.
But the thing is, he hasn’t had to use a shared all-building laundry room since university, and apparently he’s bad at it.
The first weekend, he’d gone down late, when he figured it would be quiet. And he was right. There was only one other person in there.
Unfortunately, he was the most attractive person Jinhyung had ever seen - and Jinhyung’s best friend is Wumuti, and then there’s Rui. But no. No, this person was even more attractive, to Jinhyung at least, because he had that kind of messy skateboarder streetdance vibe, baggy pants and hoodie, blue-tinged dark hair poking out at funny angles from below a beanie, getting in his eyes, and he was so little and so cute, his features so pretty, and he definitely was wearing at least foundation and lip tint even though it was just laundry day, and he’d smiled at Jinhyung when he came in even though nobody else in the building was friendly at all, and that had been when Jinhyung had noticed he wasn’t wearing a shirt under his hoodie, and he’d died a little.
So he’d turned hurriedly to the machines, but it ended up that was a problem, too. They didn’t have any words? Just symbols? But symbols he didn’t know, they weren’t the ones from the clothes labels?
The little skater guy had been bopping around behind him, taking clothes out of the dryer, clearly listening to something on earbuds hidden under his hat, and Jinhyung had in his earbuds too, like any self-respecting person trying to do tasks in public, but maybe he should have had more situational awareness because suddenly the guy was RIGHT THERE, at his elbow, pushing close to the machine and to Jinhyung like he had no sense of personal space.
“Confusing!” he declared, and Jinhyung took out his earbuds. The guy noticed, bowed a little, seemed to remember to step back a bit. “Sorry. Hi! It’s confusing, the machine, yeah? May I help?” He had an accent, and a kind of funny way of combining his words. Maybe Japanese, Jinhyung thought. He didn’t sound like Wumuti or Rui.
“Oh, uh - yeah, please, I don’t understand any of this.”
The guy smiled like being told he could help a stranger do laundry was the best thing that happened to him all day. His smile crinkled up his whole face. He was only getting cuter by the moment.
“Okay!” He said, and stepped back into Jinhyung’s personal space to point at the symbols on the machine. His fingernails were short, and painted - black, with silver glitter. “I looked it up! This is washing. Hot, medium, cold. This is, mm…” He stepped back, and made a round-and-round gesture with his hand, like a cyclone. “This!”
“Spin cycle?”
“Yeah!” Another huge smile, more pointing at the buttons. “Fast, normal, less. Good?”
“Good. I get it now, thank you.”
“You’re welcome!” He bowed, still smiling, so Jinhyung bowed back. Smiled back.
And a minute later, while he was still loading his laundry into the machine, the guy bounced out of the room with a “Bye, hyung!!” and Jinhyung felt a little like he was going to have a heart attack, again. It was so casual, but so cute. He wanted to be the cute boy's hyung!!
Whoever sees you in the laundry room won’t even remember you, Wumuti adds, bringing Jinhyung back into the present.
Me
Haru remembers me though.
Wumuti
Who?
Wait is that the twink??
He remembers you???
Me
Yeah
Jinhyung’s phone starts vibrating. A video call. Wumuti, of course. He presses the button and Wumuti’s face fills the screen, immaculate eyebrows raised. “Excuse me??” Wumuti says. “The twink remembers you??”
The image on the screen jostles as Rui pushes into frame, too. “WHAT.”
“It’s nothing! I’ve just seen him a few times around the building, and he asked my name.”
“And remembered it,” Wumuti says.
“And said it again!” Rui puts in.
“It’s not a big deal! He’s just friendly.”
“How many times have you two talked?” Wumuti asks.
“I don’t know, maybe five?”
“How many, A-Hyun.”
Jinhyung frowns at the screen. More of a pout, really. It has no effect, Wumuti just keeps giving him a cold-eyed stare.
“Eight.”
“Eight!!!!!” Rui exclaims.
“And?” Wumuti prompts.
“And nothing?”
“No, there’s something else.”
Rui nods wildly. “She’s being coy. Hyunie, what did skaterboy do?”
“He. Hegavemeapresent.”
“What???” Their combined voices are so loud that it makes Jinhyung’s phone speaker glitch. Maybe they’ve been hanging out too much with him, Wumuti wasn’t that loud when they first met.
“It wasn’t anything! Just a chocolate muffin. I think it was leftovers from work, I think he works in a coffee shop.”
“You think or you know?” Wumuti asks.
“… Sometimes he’s wearing the uniform when he comes home.”
“Jinhyung-ah!” Wumuti exclaims. “Is that why we couldn’t go to the place near your place last week?”
“I didn’t want him to think I was following him or something.”
“Why would he ever think that?”
“‘Cause Hyunie probably did follow him,” Rui says, with perfect confidence.
“I did not! I just. Looked through the window to see if that was where he worked.”
“And he does?”
“He waved at me…”
Wumuti and Rui both groan dramatically, Rui flopping all over Wumuti to further drive home the point.
“You’re impossible,” Wumuti says. “I can’t believe we ever managed to hook up.”
“Noona!! That was different!” And it was, they met on an app, they both knew exactly what they were looking for and getting. Jinhyung doesn’t know what to do with crushes, crushes are different.
Maybe he sounds a bit pathetic, because Wumuti’s expression softens. “I know, baby. But also: suck it up and do your laundry. And also don’t be weird, it sounds like he likes you.”
Jinhyung is only just starting to get out a protest when Wumuti hangs up on him, so instead he just wails and throws his phone to the other end of the sofa.
The next weekend Jinhyung does manage to work up the courage to return to the laundry room. Mostly because he doesn’t have another option. He’s running out of socks. He decides to go late again, on a Saturday, because it’s less crowded then, and therefore less scary to contemplate.
And it is a great choice, everything’s perfect, none of the other machines are even in use. All is totally well until he goes down to switch his stuff to the dryer and almost runs right into someone coming out the laundry room door.
It’s Haru, of course.
Haru, who grins at him, and says “Hyung!” with what sounds like real excitement.
Haru, who very much is not wearing pants.
Jinhyung blinks. Manages a “Hi, Haru-ah,” before his eyes drift south again. Haru has a hoodie around his waist, but not in the normal way where it only covers your butt. Instead it’s wrapped all the way around to cover his legs. Mostly. But Jinhyung can definitely see that there’s nothing else under there, at least in the expanse between his charm-embellished crocs and the black edge of what is definitely a pair of underwear, peaking out near the top of an exposed slit of thigh.
Haru also glances down, and then looks suddenly stricken. It’s the first time Jinhyung has seen him look anything except cheerful. Even when he’s clearly tired after a shift, he’s always smiling. Now he grimaces, and his eyes dart up to Jinhyung’s, then away again.
“I had to wash my laundry hat!” he says, which is confusing.
“Your… laundry hat?”
Haru nods emphatically. “Laundry hat.” He gestures at his head, which is unusually bare. He almost always wears a hat of one kind or another. Jinhyung hadn’t known they had assigned purposes. “It was dirty. But I didn’t want to, because then what do I wear while I laundry? So, I was distracted. And then I wore my jeans, but I needed to wash them. So I think, nobody is around, and maybe my hoodie will hide it, but you’re around, and you saw! You see!”
“Oh,” Jinhyung says.
Haru whines and rubs his cheek with a hand. “It’s embarrassing.”
“No it’s not! It’s cute!”
That startles Haru out of his spiral, which is an excellent result, exactly what Jinhyung would have wanted to do if he’d been capable of forming any sort of plan with Haru standing bare-legged in front of him.
“Cute?”
“Yeah.”
“Baby cute or puppy cute or want-to-kiss cute?”
Jinhyung is momentarily distracted by the question of whether baby cute and puppy cute are different things, but he catches up quickly. “I, uh. Want-to-kiss cute.”
And then Haru’s smiling the biggest smile Jinhyung has ever seen him smile, which is saying something. “Really???”
“Yeah?”
Haru cheers, fully throws his arms up in the air and everything. And Jinhyung laughs, and then his instincts must take over, because he’s got his hands on Haru’s narrow waist, and Haru’s bringing his hands back down to rest on Jinhyung’s shoulders, and pushing up, because he’s so small, and Jinhyung feels ponderously tall, but Haru’s smiling up at him as he bends down to meet him, and they kiss.
Jinhyung might black out a little, because the next thing he knows Haru’s letting out a pleased, startled sound as Jinhyung grips his waist and pushes him up onto a nearby dryer. Haru’s heavier than he looks - he must be all muscle under those baggy clothes - but he hops a little and gets there, and exclaims “Strong!” as though Jinhyung did the work. Then he pushes forward for another kiss and Jinhyung stops thinking again.
It’s not the best kiss Jinhyung’s ever had, but it is eager, and Haru makes pleased little noises into his mouth, which he likes a lot. He pulls Haru closer, hands still tight on his hips, and Haru wraps his legs around his waist - which is when Jinhyung remembers he wore a cropped shirt, because Haru’s bare legs are warm against his skin. Haru squeezes, and Jinhyung gasps, and that’s when the laundry room door opens.
Jinhyung glances back just long enough to lock eyes with a guy who lives down the hall from him, who raises an eyebrow but doesn't say anything, just heads for a washer as far from them as possible.
It's too mortifying. Jinhyung is never going to be able to do laundry in his building again.
But it doesn't really matter, because Haru has his face pressed into the crook of Jinhyung's neck, and he's giggling, and it tickles.
Haru slithers down off the dryer with a move so graceful that it borders on being a body roll, and grins up at Jinhyung again. "I think you're cute, too." Then he says a number, which makes no sense to Jinhyung's whirling brain. Haru must be able to tell, because he laughs, and says it again, and points up, to the floors above them. "Do your laundry," he says. "Then come up?"
Jinhyung understands now, and he nods eagerly. Haru smiles, and pushes forward quickly, planting a kiss on Jinhyung's lips before he flees the room, still laughing.
Jinhyung has never switched clothes to a dryer so fast in his life. He has places to be.