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The hotel room in LA smelled faintly of rain and citrus polish, the kind of clean, anonymous scent that clung to every room on this leg of the tour no matter which country they landed in.
Four cities in nine days. Stages that all looked the same under the lights, crowds that all sounded the same when they screamed his name, and yet somehow the only thing that felt entirely unchanged, entirely steady beneath the exhaustion, was this: Euijoo, sitting cross-legged on the end of his bed at eleven at night, hair still damp from a shower, a room-service mug of tea balanced between his palms, saying nothing at all.
It had started nearly a year ago, this habit of theirs. After the first few shows of their first real world tour, when the adrenaline had nowhere to go and the silence of an empty hotel room felt more suffocating than the noise of ten thousand people, Euijoo had knocked on his door one night and said, without much explanation, "Can I sit here for a while?" Nicholas hadn't asked why. He hadn't needed to. There was a specific, wordless exhaustion that came after a show — a hollowed-out feeling, like your body was a costume you'd stepped out of and left crumpled on a chair — and it turned out neither of them wanted to feel it alone.
So they sat. Some nights they talked, quiet unimportant things — what they'd eat if they could have anything, whether the crowd in Osaka had been louder than the one in Bangkok, a joke about their manager's terrible taste in in-ear monitors. Other nights, like tonight, they didn't talk much at all. Nicholas had his laptop open, halfheartedly scrolling through set-list notes for tomorrow's show, and Euijoo had claimed the corner of the bed like he always did, back against the headboard, knees drawn up, watching the city lights blur through the gauze curtains.
There was something in the quality of that silence that Nicholas had never tried to examine too closely. It wasn't awkward. It wasn't the strained silence of two people who had run out of things to say. It was more like breathing in tandem. comfortable, unthinking, the kind of silence you could only share with someone who had already seen you at your least composed, sweat-soaked and shaking with adrenaline backstage, and hadn't looked away.
"You're not even reading that," Euijoo said suddenly, nodding toward the laptop screen without lifting his eyes from the window.
Nicholas blinked. "I am."
"You've had the same page open for ten minutes."
"I'm memorizing it."
Euijoo's mouth curved, the smallest hint of amusement, but he didn't push further. He turned his mug slowly between his palms, steam long gone, and Nicholas found himself watching the movement instead of his screen — the way Euijoo's fingers wrapped around the ceramic, unhurried, like there was nowhere else in the world he needed to be. It was such a small thing, and yet Nicholas felt it settle somewhere low in his chest, a familiar warmth he had stopped questioning months ago.
He closed the laptop.
"Tired?" he asked.
"Not really." Euijoo tilted his head against the headboard, finally looking at him. His eyes were a little glassy from the shower's heat, cheeks still faintly flushed. "Just thinking."
"About the show tomorrow?"
"No." A pause. "About us, actually."
Nicholas raised an eyebrow, setting the laptop aside on the nightstand. "Us who?"
"Us us," Euijoo said, gesturing vaguely between them with his mug. "You and me."
There was something in his tone that made Nicholas sit up a little straighter, some faint shift in gravity he couldn't quite name yet. "Okay," he said slowly. "What about us?"
Euijoo was quiet for a moment, looking down into his tea like the answer might be floating somewhere in the murky liquid. When he finally spoke, his voice was careful, testing each word before he let it out.
"You've seen the shipping stuff online, right? The — what do the fans call it — the 'quiet nights' theory, or whatever they've named this." He gestured at the room, at the space between them on the bed, at the whole unspoken architecture of their routine. "The photos from soundcheck. The way we always end up standing closer together than everyone else in group shots. Someone made a whole compilation video of us doing that thing where we finish each other's sentences."
Nicholas felt his face warm, though he wasn't entirely sure why. "I've seen some of it. I don't really look for it."
"I look for it," Euijoo admitted, and there was something almost sheepish in the way he said it, a small laugh escaping that didn't quite reach his eyes. "Not, like, obsessively. But sometimes. Late at night, like this, when I can't sleep."
"Why?"
Euijoo shrugged, but it wasn't a careless gesture — his shoulders were tight, deliberate, like he was working through something even as he spoke. "I don't know. Morbid curiosity, maybe. Or —" He stopped.
"Or?"
"Or because I get it," Euijoo said quietly. "I get why they think that. I get why they see it."
The room seemed to hold very still.
Somewhere below them, faint through the walls, the muffled sound of traffic drifted up from the street, and further off, impossibly distant, the murmur of the city living its ordinary nighttime life, entirely unaware that up here, eleven floors above the wet pavement, something had just shifted in the air between two people who had spent the better part of a year sitting quietly in hotel rooms together without naming what it was.
Nicholas didn't understand yet — not fully — but something in his chest had gone very tight, very aware.
"What do you mean, you get it?" he asked carefully.
Euijoo set his mug down on the nightstand with more focus than the action required, buying himself a second, maybe two. When he looked back at Nicholas, his expression was unusually open, stripped of its usual teasing edge.
"I mean," he said, "that if I were a fan watching us from the outside — the way we are together, the way this—" he gestured at the room again, at the two of them, at the strange gravity of their nightly ritual, "—looks, I wouldn't just think it was a coincidence, either."
"Joo."
"I'm not saying it to make things weird," Euijoo said quickly, a flush climbing his throat. "I just. I've been thinking about it for a while and I don't really know how to bring it up in a way that doesn't sound insane, so I figured I'd just say it badly and let you make of it what you want."
Nicholas felt something in his chest, warm and uncertain, expanding with no clear shape yet. He studied Euijoo's face — the flush along his cheekbones, the way his eyes kept darting to the window and back, unable to hold Nicholas's gaze for more than a second at a time — and understood, with a slow, dawning clarity, that Euijoo was afraid. Not of him, exactly. Afraid of the silence that might follow what he'd just admitted.
"I'm not upset," Nicholas said softly. "I just don't — I don't totally understand what you're saying. Are you saying you think there's something between us? Or are you saying you've noticed people think that, and it bothers you?"
"Neither," Euijoo said, then immediately amended, "Both. I don't know." He let out a short, frustrated breath, running a hand back through his still-damp hair. "I'm saying that sometimes I sit here with you like this, and it feels like more than just two friends being tired after a show. And I don't know if that's just me being an idiot who's read too many fan theories, or if you feel it too, or if I'm about to ruin the one part of this whole exhausting tour that actually makes me feel normal."
Nicholas's pulse had picked up somewhere in the middle of that sentence, a low, insistent drumbeat he could feel in his throat. He thought of all the nights like this one — dozens of them now, scattered across a dozen cities — and the particular, specific quiet he only ever felt with Euijoo. He thought of the way he always noticed, before anyone else in the room, when Euijoo's smile faltered during interviews. The way he'd started angling himself toward Euijoo in group photos without meaning to, a small gravitational pull he'd never examined too closely because examining it felt dangerous, felt like it might require him to admit something he wasn't ready to say out loud.
"I don't think you're an idiot," he said finally, voice quieter than he meant it to be. "And I don't think you're ruining anything."
Euijoo looked up at him, something cautious and hopeful flickering behind his eyes. "Then what do you think?"
Nicholas opened his mouth to answer — and didn't have one ready. Not a real one. He had thoughts, fragments, the shape of a feeling he'd been circling for months without letting himself land on it, but no clean sentence to offer.
"I think," he said slowly, "that I've never really let myself think about it. On purpose."
"Why not?"
"Because it felt easier not to." He met Euijoo's eyes, and found himself unable to look away, caught in the strange gravity of the moment the way he'd been caught, quietly, for longer than he wanted to admit. "Because if I thought about it too much, I was scared of what I'd find."
The air in the room had changed texture entirely now — thicker, charged, every small sound amplified: the drip of the air conditioner, the faint hum of the minibar, the sound of their own breathing. Euijoo had gone very still, watching him with an intensity that made Nicholas's skin feel too warm, too aware of itself.
"And now?" Euijoo asked, barely above a whisper. "Now that you're thinking about it?"
Nicholas didn't answer with words. He reached out instead — a small, almost involuntary motion — and brushed a strand of damp hair back from Euijoo's forehead, the way he might have done a hundred times before without thinking, except this time his hand lingered, fingers trailing down Euijoo's temple, down to the curve of his jaw, and Euijoo's breath caught audibly in the quiet room.
"Nico," Euijoo's said softly, not pulling away.
"I don't know what I'm doing," Nicholas admitted, voice rough. "I just know I don't want to stop."
"Then don't," Euijoo's breathed.
And so he didn't.
He closed the last small distance between them slowly, giving Euijoo every chance to pull back, to laugh it off, to say this was a mistake — but Euijoo only leaned into it, eyes fluttering shut, lips parting sllightly in anticipation, and when Nicholas finally kissed him, it was soft, almost hesitant, the kind of first kiss that asked a question rather than made a statement. A brief, testing press of lips, warm and slightly trembling.
Euijoo made a small sound against his mouth — not quite a gasp, more like relief given a voice — and that undid something in Nicholas entirely. He cupped Euijoo's jaw more firmly, tilting his head, deepening the kiss just slightly, and Euijoo responded in kind, one hand coming up to fist gently in the front of Nicholas's shirt, anchoring himself.
When they finally broke apart, both a little breathless, foreheads still close enough to touch, Nicholas found himself smiling despite the pounding of his own heart. "So," he said, voice unsteady, "I guess I do feel it too."
Euijoo laughed — a soft, disbelieving sound, equal parts nerves and relief — and pressed his forehead more firmly against Nicholas's. "You couldn't have said that before kissing me? Would've saved me a lot of anxiety."
"I'm a man of action," Nicholas murmured, and kissed him again before Euijoo could retort.
This kiss was slower than the first, less about the shock of discovery and more about the deliberate exploration of something newly permitted. Nicholas slid his hand from Euijoo's jaw to the back of his neck, fingers threading into damp hair, and felt Euijoo shiver against him, a full-body response that made his own pulse stutter. Euijoo's grip on his shirt tightened, pulling him closer, and Nicholas went willingly, angling his body toward him on the bed until there was almost no space left between them at all.
They kissed like that for a long time — unhurried, deep, punctuated by small breathless pauses where they simply looked at each other, foreheads together, breathing each other's air, as if to confirm that this was real, that neither of them had imagined it. Every time they came back together, the kiss grew slightly more certain, slightly less careful, until Nicholas found himself guiding Euijoo gently backward, one hand braced against the mattress beside him, the other still cradling the back of his neck, until Euijoo was lying against the pillows and Nicholas was leaning over him, their mouths never quite parting for more than a few seconds at a time.
"Is this okay?" Nicholas murmured against his lips, pulling back just enough to search Euijoo's face for any hesitation.
"More than okay," Euijoo said, voice rough, eyes dark. His hands slid up over Nicholas's shoulders, fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt. "Don't stop."
Nicholas didn't.
He kissed along Euijoo's jaw, feeling the way his breath caught and released beneath his lips, the way his fingers tightened reflexively in the fabric of Nicholas's shirt every time he found a particularly sensitive spot. He kissed the corner of Euijoo's mouth, the curve of his cheek, the soft skin just below his ear, and Euijoo tilted his head back against the pillow with a quiet, helpless sound that sent heat coursing through Nicholas's chest.
"You're going to be the death of me," Euijoo murmured, voice unsteady, fingers sliding up into Nicholas's hair.
"Good death, though," Nicholas said against his throat, and felt Euijoo's laugh vibrate beneath his lips before it dissolved into a soft, shuddering breath.
He kissed his way back up to Euijoo's mouth, slower this time, savoring the way Euijoo met him halfway, lips parting easily now, familiar with the rhythm they'd found together in such a short span of time.
One of Euijoo's hands slid from his hair down to his shoulder, then his chest, resting flat against his sternum as if to feel the frantic beat of his heart, and Nicholas covered that hand with his own, lacing their fingers together against his chest for a moment before letting go to trail his palm along Euijoo's side, over the thin fabric of his sleep shirt, feeling the warmth of his skin beneath it.
Euijoo arched slightly into the touch, a small, involuntary motion, and murmured something that might have been Nicholas's name, muffled against his mouth. Nicholas smiled against his lips, feeling something unfamiliar and enormous settle into place in his chest — not just desire, though there was plenty of that thrumming beneath his skin, but something steadier, warmer, that felt dangerously close to certainty.
They stayed like that for a long while, tangled together on the too-large hotel bed, trading slow, unhurried kisses interspersed with quiet murmured words — half-formed sentences, laughter at nothing, the occasional soft gasp when Nicholas's hand found a particularly ticklish spot along Euijoo's ribs, or when Euijoo's teeth grazed his bottom lip just a little too sharply and made him groan low in his throat.
At some point, Euijoo's hands found their way beneath the hem of Nicholas's shirt, palms flat and warm against his back, tracing the line of his spine with unhurried curiosity, and Nicholas shivered at the touch, breaking their kiss to press his forehead against Euijoo's shoulder, breathing hard.
"Okay?" Euijoo asked, voice soft with concern beneath the desire.
"More than okay," Nicholas echoed his earlier words, and felt Euijoo's chest shake with quiet laughter beneath him.
"You're ridiculous," Euijoo said fondly, tightening his arms around him.
"You like it."
"I really, really do."
Nicholas lifted his head to look at him properly then — Euijoo's hair mussed against the white pillow, lips reddened and slightly parted, eyes soft and unguarded in a way Nicholas had rarely seen outside of the most private, exhausted moments after a show. He looked, Nicholas thought, achingly beautiful, and something about the vulnerability of that thought made his chest ache with a tenderness he hadn't expected to feel this intensely, this suddenly.
"What?" Euijoo asked, noticing his expression.
"Nothing," Nicholas said, then reconsidered. "Just — you. This. I don't know. It's a lot, all at once."
"Good a lot, or bad a lot?"
"Good," Nicholas said immediately, firmly, and leaned down to press a soft kiss to the corner of Euijoo's mouth, then his cheekbone, then his temple, mapping his face with unhurried affection that had nothing urgent left in it, only warmth. "Very, very good."
Euijoo's hands slid up his back to rest at the nape of his neck, fingers idly playing with the short hair there, and for a while they simply lay together like that, foreheads occasionally touching, trading slow kisses and quiet laughter, the initial urgency of discovery settling into something gentler, more exploratory. Nicholas learned the particular way Euijoo sighed when he kissed just beneath his jaw, the small, helpless noise he made when Nicholas's fingers trailed along his side just above the waistband of his sleep pants, the way his breath hitched every time Nicholas whispered something soft against his skin between kisses.
At one point Euijoo rolled them slightly, not with any real intent beyond wanting to be closer, until Nicholas was on his back and Euijoo was draped half over him, one leg tangled between his, head tucked against his shoulder as they kissed languidly, unhurried, comfortable in a way that felt entirely natural despite how new all of this was. Nicholas's hands roamed slowly along Euijoo's back, over the curve of his shoulders, into his hair, down to rest at the small of his back, never pushing further than either of them seemed ready for, content instead to simply memorize the feeling of him — solid and warm and undeniably real, no longer a careful distance away on the far side of the bed but here, pressed against him, breathing the same air.
"Can I tell you something?" Euijoo murmured eventually, lips still close enough to brush against Nicholas's jaw as he spoke.
"Anything."
"I've wanted this for months. Maybe longer." His voice was quiet, a little embarrassed, muffled slightly against Nicholas's skin. "I kept telling myself it was just — I don't know, tour exhaustion, or loneliness, or something easier to explain than the truth."
"What's the truth?" Nicholas asked softly, fingers still tracing slow patterns against his back.
Euijoo lifted his head to look at him, eyes searching his face for a long moment before he answered. "That I've been in love with you for a while now, and I didn't know how to say it without risking everything we already had."
The words settled over Nicholas like warm water, slow and complete, filling every space in his chest that had been quietly, unknowingly empty. He reached up to brush his thumb along Euijoo's cheekbone, marveling at the openness in his expression, the courage it must have taken to say something like that out loud after months of careful silence.
"I think," Nicholas said slowly, choosing his words with care, "that I've been in love with you for a while too. I just didn't let myself call it that."
Euijoo's breath caught audibly, and then he was kissing him again, softer this time, almost reverent, and Nicholas kissed him back with everything he hadn't let himself say until tonight — every quiet night they'd spent together without naming what it was, every glance held a beat too long, every small gravitational pull toward each other that he'd dismissed as friendship because the alternative had felt too enormous to face.
They kissed like that for a long while longer, slow and unhurried, hands mapping familiar new territory with a kind of wondering tenderness — along collarbones, over the curve of shoulders, fingers tracing the shell of an ear, a thumb brushing along a cheekbone — until the urgency of discovery softened into something quieter, more settled, the kind of intimacy that didn't need to rush toward anything further to feel complete.
Eventually, Euijoo settled more fully against his side, head resting on Nicholas's chest, one arm draped loosely over his stomach, and Nicholas wrapped his arm around him in turn, fingers idly tracing patterns against his shoulder. The room had gone quiet again, but it was a different quiet now — no longer the careful, comfortable silence of two people avoiding a conversation, but the easy, replete silence of two people who had finally said everything that needed saying, at least for tonight.
"We have soundcheck at two," Euijoo mumbled against his chest, voice heavy with the beginning of sleep.
"I know."
"We should probably sleep."
"Probably," Nicholas agreed, making no move to disentangle himself, and felt Euijoo's soft laugh against his skin.
"You're not moving."
"Neither are you."
Euijoo tilted his head up to look at him, a small, drowsy smile on his lips. "I don't want to. Is that okay?"
"That's more than okay," Nicholas said, echoing the words from earlier, and pressed a soft kiss to the crown of his head.
They lay together in the quiet dark for a while longer, listening to the faint hum of the city outside, the distant sound of rain beginning to fall against the window, and Nicholas found himself thinking, with a kind of quiet wonder, that this — this exact moment, Euijoo's weight warm and familiar against his side, the steady rhythm of his breathing gradually slowing into sleep — was somehow both entirely new and achingly familiar, as if it had always been waiting for them to finally arrive at it.
"Nicholas?" Euijoo's voice was barely audible now, right on the edge of sleep.
"Yeah?"
"I'm glad I said something tonight."
Nicholas smiled into the darkness, pressing another kiss to his hair. "Me too."
"Even though I was terrified the whole time."
"I couldn't tell," Nicholas lied gently, and felt Euijoo's soft laugh against his chest one more time before his breathing evened out into sleep.
He stayed awake a little longer, watching the rain trace slow patterns down the window, feeling the steady weight of Euijoo against him, and let himself, finally, without hesitation or fear, name the feeling that had been sitting quietly in his chest for months: this was love, uncomplicated and certain, and he was no longer interested in pretending otherwise.
Morning came too soon, gray light filtering through the curtains, and Nicholas woke first, the unfamiliar warmth of another body against his own registering slowly before the memory of the night before rushed back all at once, vivid and startlingly real. Euijoo was still asleep beside him, hair mussed, one hand curled loosely against Nicholas's chest, breathing slow and even.
Nicholas allowed himself several long minutes simply to watch him — the soft rise and fall of his shoulders, the slight furrow between his brows that smoothed out gradually as he settled deeper into sleep, the faint marks along his throat that made heat rise unbidden to Nicholas's own face at the memory of how they'd gotten there. He thought about waking him, about the two hours until soundcheck, about all the ordinary, complicated logistics of what came next — how to be around the others without giving anything away, how to navigate this new, fragile thing between them amid a schedule that left almost no room for privacy.
But for now, in the quiet gray hush of early morning, none of that felt urgent. He simply watched Euijoo sleep, memorizing the shape of this new, unguarded happiness, and thought that whatever came next, they would figure it out together — the same way they'd figured out, slowly and almost without noticing, exactly how to reach this moment in the first place.
Euijoo stirred eventually, blinking slowly awake, and the first thing he did upon registering Nicholas's face close to his own was smile — small and a little shy, but entirely unguarded.
"Hi," he said, voice thick with sleep.
"Hi," Nicholas said back, unable to stop smiling either.
"This is real, right? I didn't just dream all of that."
Nicholas leaned down and kissed him softly in answer, slow and unhurried, and felt Euijoo relax against him, any lingering uncertainty melting away beneath the reassurance.
"Very real," Nicholas murmured against his lips. "Believe me."
Euijoo laughed softly, looping an arm around his neck to keep him close. "Good. Because I really don't want to go back to just sitting quietly and pretending I don't want to do that."
"We don't have to pretend anymore," Nicholas said, and meant it completely.
Outside, the city was waking up around them. traffic beginning to hum along wet streets, distant church bells marking the hour, the ordinary rhythm of a foreign morning entirely unaware of the quiet, monumental shift that had taken place eleven floors above the pavement. Somewhere in a few hours, they would have to become performers again, running through soundcheck, smiling for cameras, sharing the stage with the rest of their group as if nothing between them had changed.
Except everything had, in the best possible way, and Nicholas found he wasn't afraid of that anymore.
𝘈𝘵 𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘮𝘢𝘥𝘦 𝘰𝘶𝘵.