Chapter Text
“What are you doing.”
Felix jumps, and when he turns around, he’s greeted with Changbin’s utterly unimpressed face. “What do you mean what am I doing, I’m leaving the school like a normal person—”
“Felix. Are you a normal person?”
Felix sputters.
“It’s 2:37. You’re leaving the school? By yourself?”
The answering silence is more telling than anything.
Changbin heaves a sigh so exasperated that it could rival Ms. Ahn’s when she catches Felix sleeping in Physics. Then he starts walking, snagging Felix’s wrist as he walks past and dragging him along through the back doors of the school.
“Help, I’m being abducted,” Felix mumbles, flailing around halfheartedly.
That makes Changbin draw to a sudden stop just outside of the doors. He turns Felix around to face him and proceeds to scrutinize him for an uncomfortably long time. Felix fidgets.
“You’re being all sad and un-Felix-like and I don’t like it,” Changbin finally says. He flicks Felix gently on the forehead. “Why aren’t you talking back? Where’s that smile? Look at these eye bags. You’re basically catatonic.”
Felix squirms under Changbin’s unblinking gaze and doesn’t reply.
Changbin sighs. “Okay, since you’re not going to say anything I’ll just tell you that Hyunjin’s an idiot too and already left with Seungmin, so you don’t have to sneak out of the school like this to avoid him.”
Felix blinks, surprised, and tries to ignore the sharp, brief pang of hurt in his chest. “...He’s avoiding me.” It’s not a question.
Changbin stares for a second, then pulls Felix into a firm hug. His voice is softer than before when he says into Felix’s shoulder, “Hey, you’re avoiding him too. Come on, let’s go get food somewhere and you can tell me all about it, okay? You guys are going to be fine.”
Felix nods and takes a deep breath. Changbin’s usually right.
Felix tells Changbin everything over bowls of cheesy ramen and a shared roll of kimbap. Changbin’s good at things like this, listening to his friends with minimal judgement and a kind of casual air that makes it easy to pretend that whatever the problem is isn’t as big of a deal as it seems.
Felix scrapes a piece of scallion off the side of his bowl. Hyunjin had acted completely normal the morning after the lax sleepover, if not a little bit hungover. And Felix hadn’t had the guts to act any different. But now they’re both avoiding each other and it’s only been a day but everything sucks already. “I don’t even know if Hyunjin remembers. He drank a lot,” Felix says around a bite of kimbap. He swallows, and after a moment, adds, “Maybe the whole thing was just Jisung’s flask of Fireball speaking.”
Changbin makes a face. Fireball is nasty and Jisung has terrible taste. “He didn’t drink more than he normally would. Besides, he didn’t have anything after like, twelve. He knew what he was doing.”
“Okay, so why’s he avoiding me?”
“Emotional constipation,” Changbin shrugs. “I’m sure you can relate.”
Felix glares and mentally takes back what he said about minimal judgement.
“Sorry,” Changbin snickers unapologetically. “But come on, you can’t expect Hyunjin to just... know that you’re madly in love with him.”
“I’m—” Felix opens his mouth to protest, then seems to think better of it and shuts it, his cheeks tinged pink.
Changbin looks far too amused and Felix kind of wants to crawl under the table and hide forever. “Thank god, I thought for a second that I was going to have to forcibly drag you out of denial.” Under his breath, Changbin mutters, “I should’ve taken Seungmin’s bet.”
“Taken Seungmin’s—"
“Anyway,” Changbin says loudly. “Hyunjin kissed you first. Now you’re avoiding him. What’s he supposed to think? I think—” Changbin puts his chopsticks down, chews his lip the way that he does when he’s thinking carefully about lyrics. After a long moment, he continues. “I think that it’s your move now. The ball’s in your court. Hyunjin reached out a hand, all you have to do is take it.”
Felix lowers his gaze. Oh, how badly he wants it to be as simple as that. It’s so hard not to let Changbin’s words sink into him, convince him that this whole mess is just Hyunjin and Felix and nothing else. Changbin has given him the control, and Felix wants nothing more than to believe that he can have what he wants as long as he reaches out and grasps it. But he knows that there are some things he can’t hold on to. “It doesn’t matter anyway,” he says, pushing around the remaining pieces of scallion floating sadly on the surface of the ramen broth. “College is a thing, remember?”
Changbin is quiet for a long, long time.
When Felix finally looks up, Changbin is chewing thoughtfully on a mouthful of kimbap. He swallows, wipes his mouth with a napkin, and says: “You’re not going to go off to college and stop talking to me, are you?”
Felix blinks, taken by surprise. “Of course not,” he says immediately. He doesn’t even need to think about it.
“Good,” Changbin smiles, big and genuine and unabashedly affectionate. “So have a little more faith. If you’re not going to stop talking to me, your most useless Cola Can staff member, you and Hyunjin are going to be more than fine. You two are like gum and those desks in room 419. Annoying and inseparable and kinda gross. College isn’t the end of the world—you know that already. It’s just so much scarier when it comes to Hyunjin because he means so, so much to you. Don’t be scared! No matter what happens, I know you guys will find a way to make it work. Okay?”
It doesn’t solve everything, but it does make a couple of important pieces slide into place and suddenly the days ahead don’t feel so daunting anymore.
“Okay,” Felix says simply, because he isn’t sure how to put how grateful he is for Changbin into actual words. “When did you get so smart,” Felix mutters into his glass of water. It’s okay, he knows Changbin will get it.
“I’ve been acting as your brain for years, dumbass. You’d be dead in a ditch without me by now,” Changbin replies, not missing a beat.
Felix grins. Changbin gets it.
+++++
Felix isn’t someone who needs to be around people. He doesn’t mind being alone, sometimes even craves it. He’s never been the one to text the group chat and ask if anyone wants to come with him somewhere or meet up after school. He likes people, but he doesn’t get lonely just because he’s by himself.
Felix isn’t someone who needs to be around people, but here he is, shuffling his feet on the E train platform and feeling loneliness settle uncomfortably in his stomach. The station is bustling and someone’s yelling something about churros two feet away from Felix but it’s too quiet. It’s eighty degrees but it’s too cold. There are people all around him but none of them are Hyunjin.
Felix hates it. He turns the music on his headphones up and glares at the bright pop of color on his phone as he lines up another three purple candies. He probably looks like every other angry emo teenager on the subway, but how is he supposed to follow Changbin’s advice when Hyunjin’s avoiding him like the plague?
Felix matches four red candies and watches them combine into some horribly cheery looking power up. In his head, Jisung slams his chicken over rice down on the courtyard steps next to Felix and says, way too loudly, Stop being so sad-angry or I swear on Kendrick’s Pulitzer, I’ll drag Hyunjin’s ass here myself and— Thankfully Changbin had slapped his hand over Jisung’s mouth and wrestled him down onto the steps as inconspicuously as possible while every kid eating lunch in the courtyard turned and stared.
Jisung had a point. Stop being so sad-angry, Felix reminds himself, sliding a green candy into place and trying not to let his brain turn the chain reaction of exploding candies into some pathetic metaphor for his life.
Yeah. It’s pretty bad.
Then, on Friday, Felix is shuffling his feet on the platform again when he glimpses a familiar shock of dark hair coming down the escalator.
Felix is actually pretty impressed that he’d managed to avoid encountering Hyunjin along their identical commutes all week, but of course, his luck has to run out on the last day before he can safely escape into the weekend. He’s a mature, almost-adult. He will not turn tail and run, or duck behind a column, or jump into the tracks, or—
He ducks behind a column.
Craning his neck, Felix sees Hyunjin walk past him. Hyunjin’s glancing around, as if he’s looking for someone. For one, barely-there second, Felix swears their eyes meet.
Felix whips his head back around, heart halfway up his throat. His mind swings wildly between wanting Hyunjin to come over and hoping that Hyunjin hadn’t seen him at all.
Hyunjin doesn’t come over.
It hurts in a weird, uncomfortably self-aware way, that Hyunjin had probably seen him and walked right past anyway. Felix isn’t someone that needs to be around people, but Hyunjin’s always been around.
Five minutes later, when Felix gets a text from Jisung, he doesn’t think twice.
sungie, 4:12 PM: There’s a party on Elm and 60th today. Wanna roll? Seungmin, Hyunjin, and Chan said they’re busy but a bunch of us are going!
chex mix, 4:12 PM: yeah ofc
+++++
The party is awful, of course, because Felix hates parties and he makes terrible decisions.
The first thing Changbin says when he sees Felix is “Where’s Hyunjin?” Felix knows it’s his way of caring, of checking up on Felix’s life but that doesn’t make it any less annoying. Felix is barely half way through a shrug when Changbin’s eyebrows shoot up under his fringe and he says, “Lee Felix is that Hwang Hyunjin’s jacket.”
Felix flinches. He’d known it was bad idea to wear it. “Shut up, it’s just the one I stole from him last year. It’s practically my jacket now,” Felix hisses defensively.
Changbin’s eyebrows don’t come back down. He opens his mouth, closes it. Looks Felix up and down. “...Your mind works in interesting ways, you know that?”
Felix rolls his eyes and forcibly pushes down the urge to hide. He’s aware of the implications, all too aware, and it makes his head spin. He knows it doesn’t make sense that he’s wearing it but not speaking to Hyunjin, knows that maybe he shouldn’t, maybe he can’t.
“It’s just a jacket,” he mutters, and it’s not really a lie. It’s one of his favorite jackets, perfect for the slightly chilly nights of the ephemeral space between spring and summer. But he has other jackets, and he’d grabbed this particular one anyway. If he had to explain what had made him do it, Felix might compare it to leaning out of a window just to see how far you can go, or prodding a sleeping cat just to see if it might wake up (and claw you in the face). So. Not the best explanation.
Changbin sighs one, deep, overly dramatic sigh, and leaves it alone. But not before a very pointed, snide, “Yeah, just a jacket and a week’s worth of emotional constipation.”
Felix is a mature almost-adult and absolutely does not push Changbin into a ping pong table.
Jisung finds him on the couch. He squeezes himself into the space between Felix and the armrest, jostling Felix into moving over and making room.
“So,” Jisung says conversationally.
Felix makes a face. Jisung’s eyebrows are doing that thing they do when he’s trying to figure out how to broach a subject. “What?” Felix asks warily, shifting over and putting another inch between them.
“Hyunjin texted me,” Jisung begins, sounding not unlike someone opening the door to a burning house and wondering out loud, Is it safe?
Felix wills himself not to get up, say something stupid like oops, left my stove on, and run the hell away. That would be lame and Felix is better than that.
“He told me to remind you,” Jisung continues, infuriatingly slow like he’s dismantling a bomb, “That the E train track is undergoing maintenance right now and you should take the F home.”
A lot of things run through Felix’s mind at that, namely how the fuck does he know I’m here, but the only sound that makes it out of his mouth is a sharp, “I knew that.” Felix winces at his tone.
Jisung barely even blinks, and Felix has to try very hard not to look away from his searching eyes. “He also said to stay safe.”
Felix grabs the nearest cushion and presses his face into it. “How does he even know I’m here.”
Jisung shrugs. “Pretty sure you’re on Jeongin’s Snapchat story. And Minho’s.”
So not only does Hyunjin know Felix, who doesn’t even like parties, is at a party without him, he probably also saw that Felix is at a party without him and wearing his jacket. Felix makes some weird, dying noise, and half-heartedly hopes that the cushion muffles it. From the way Jisung pats his knee consolingly, no luck.
“He said, and I quote, ‘don’t tell Felix I’m texting you this but please make sure he doesn’t die.’ Here I am, telling you anyway because I feel like you need a reminder how ridiculously gone for you a certain Hwang Hyunjin is.”
“Ah yes, ‘Please make sure he doesn’t die,’ the peak of modern romance,” Felix mutters, trying to ignore the way his heart softens. “God, why didn’t the dumb ass just text me?”
“Hey.” Jisung nudges Felix’s knee until he lifts his eyes and meets Jisung’s gaze again. “I told him he should just text you and all that, and you know what he said?”
“What,” Felix asks reluctantly.
“He said, ‘I can’t. I messed up and I don’t think Felix wants to talk to me.’”
“Oh,” Felix says, oh.
“That’s not true right? That you don’t want to talk to him?”
“No,” Felix exhales. “That’s not true.”
Jisung stares for a few seconds, then he abruptly stands up and hauls Felix to his feet. Hands on Felix’s shoulders, eyes wide with understanding, Jisung says, “You wanna go home?”
Five minutes later, Felix is at the door, but Jisung is lingering, fussing. Felix sighs. “Jisung, I can’t go if you don’t let go of me.”
“Okay, okay,” Jisung mutters, letting go of Felix’s shoulders. “You’re sure you don’t want me to leave with you?”
“It’s really okay, I had like, half a beer,” Felix says with as much nonchalance as he can muster. “You have to go home with Jeongin later, remember?”
Jisung squints. “If you say so. Don’t die, Hyunjin will drown me in the east river. And I might miss you.”
Felix tries to roll his eyes, he really does, but he’s smiling hard and it kind of ruins the effect. He pulls Jisung into a hug. “Don’t tell Changbin but you’re my favorite,” he says into Jisung’s hair.
Jisung laughs, but when he lets go of Felix, his eyes are serious and searching. The Jisung Look, Felix patents in his head. Jisung is an intensely sincere, deeply perceptive person, and after so many years The Jisung Look still makes him feel exposed, but safe. “Your real favorite thinks you don’t want to talk to him. Get home safe, and fix all this tomorrow, okay?”
“Okay,” Felix promises, and he surprises himself with how sincere he sounds.
Of course, he falls asleep on the bus.
When Felix wakes up, the sky is still dark, there’s no one else left on the bus, and he has no idea where is. He squints out of the window. It turns out he does know where he is, it’s just about thirty streets away from he’s supposed to be. It also happens to be two streets away from where Hyunjin lives, because that’s just the kind of cruel joke the universe likes to play on him.
He presses the request stop button and tries not to panic about the fact that it’s almost one already and he doesn’t have enough money left in his metrocard left to take another bus back.
The bus lurches to a stop a street later. Felix thanks the bus driver, wishes him a goodnight, and steps off onto the street. He knows this place. It would be easy to turn the corner, walk three blocks, and knock on Hyunjin’s door. He would know the way blindfolded.
Instead, he grudgingly tugs the sleeves of Hyunjin’s varsity jacket over his fingers—because it’s stupidly cold and he would rather wear the ugly thing than freeze to death—and seriously contemplates walking thirty streets home by himself at 1 am.
His phone pings. It’s a text from Hyunjin. Did you get home safely, it reads, in tiny black letters on his glowing phone screen and Felix gets the vague impression that he’s being mocked by higher powers.
Fuck it, he thinks, it’s really fucking cold and late and he’s too tired to walk thirty streets. He turns the corner.
I slept past my stop and I’m kind of outside of your house, open the door, Felix types.
He deletes it. Two more blocks left.
I don’t want to be here either, but I kind of am and it’s cold, let me in. I should return your jacket anyway.
He deletes that too. One more block left.
Thanks for asking. Tell your mom I’m sorry I’m bothering you guys so late. I know we’re kind of weird right now, but I don’t really have anywhere else to go.
In the end, he just shuffles his feet awkwardly on Hyunjin’s porch and sends a simple open the door.
Hyunjin opens the door.
“I didn’t come here on purpose, I swear. I slept past my stop,” Felix blurts, because he’s an idiot.
“Oh,” Hyunjin says. He’s wearing ugly flannel pajama pants and a worn lax team shirt from ninth grade and there are a million things Felix wants to say to him. Hyunjin’s hair is sticking up all over the place like he’d been sleeping, but his eyes are clear and awake and focused on Felix’s face like he’s looking for something there. “Okay. Come in, I guess.”
Hyunjin calls for his mom, tells her Felix slept past his stop. He doesn’t make some stupid joke like he normally would about Felix missing his stop on purpose just to see him, and Felix isn’t sure if he’s thankful for that or if it just makes him sad.
Hyunjin’s mom gives him a hug and that makes him feel a little bit better. She calls Felix’s mom to tell her that he’s here and not dead in a ditch somewhere. “Oh my god, that idiot,” he can hear his mom saying over the phone. “I’ll come to pick him up in five minutes.”
Of course, Hyunjin’s mom insists she stay home and that it’s perfectly fine, Felix can just stay the night. It’s no problem at all, she promises. Except it kind of is. Felix wants to speak up and say no, please pick me up mom it’s not because I’m trying to be polite I just don’t really want to be here. But that would be weird and stupid and neither Hyunjin’s nor his own mom need to hear Felix’s bullshit. So he simply thanks her, takes the phone for a second to apologize to his mom and get yelled at for being an idiot, then follows Hyunjin upstairs to his room.
“Sorry I woke you up.” Felix hovers awkwardly just inside Hyunjin’s doorway.
“I wasn’t sleeping.” Hyunjin tosses him a pair of sweatpants and a shirt Felix sort of recalls Hyunjin getting at lacrosse championships last year. Why are all of Hyunjin’s clothes lacrosse related, Felix thinks with an irrational twinge of annoyance. “I texted you, didn’t I?”
“You did.”
Hyunjin looks like he doesn’t know what to do with his hands anymore. “You, um,” he waves a hand vaguely at Felix. “My jacket.”
Felix flinches despite himself. He feels his cheeks warming, and he immediately begins slipping it off.
“No, wait,” Hyunjin exclaims, then immediately looks like he regrets ever opening his mouth. Felix pauses, his arm halfway out of the jacket. Hyunjin opens and closes his mouth a few times, floundering like a fish out of water. “I didn’t mean like, give it back right now. I don’t mind you wearing it. You look good wearing it.” Hyunjin’s bright red, like stop sign red or ketchup red and fuck, Felix is apparently kind of short-circuiting too because ketchup? He hates ketchup.
“I was just,” Hyunjin gestures vaguely again. “Making an observation. That you’re wearing my jacket.”
And Felix knows Hyunjin has a terrible habit of rambling, so he cuts him off before Hyunjin can embarrass himself to death. “I was just going to shower anyway, so, you can have it back. Now. Because I’m going to shower.”
Maybe he should’ve just let Hyunjin keep rambling because now he’s floundering.
Hyunjin nods mutely, face still pink. Felix slips off the jacket, tosses it in Hyunjin’s general direction, and high tails it out of the room as fast as he can, short of sprinting.
In the shower, sometime between scrubbing the grime of his skin and reaching for Hyunjin’s shampoo without even realizing it—he would always use it whenever he stayed the night—Felix realizes, an urgent, surging wave of a thing, that whatever it is he’s waiting for, there isn’t time to wait for it.
They climb into bed quietly. Felix is lost in his own thoughts, which is a nice way of saying “panicking.” He doesn’t realize that his silence is making Hyunjin jittery until Hyunjin tosses and turns for the sixth time, accidentally bumps Felix’s knee under the covers, and jumps a foot in the air.
The look on Hyunjin’s face is priceless, and any other day, Felix would laugh. But tonight, he breathes, once, twice, three times, and taps Hyunjin’s arm until Hyunjin meets his eyes.
“You thought I didn’t want to talk to you?” Felix asks, and almost asks again because his voice was so soft he wasn’t sure if Hyunjin had heard.
Hyunjin cringes. “Of course Jisung told you.”
“Well yeah, but—” Felix pauses. He wants to do this right. “I always want to talk to you. You know that, right?”
Hyunjin’s eyes are wide, and Felix sees surprise, sheepishness, and a lot of shades of warmth he doesn’t quite recognize. “Of course I know that,” Hyunjin says, slowly, carefully—ever so carefully.
Felix thinks back to the conversation with Jisung on the couch, the way he had brought up Hyunjin like he was dismantling a bomb, or navigating a minefield. Hyunjin and Felix, this thing they have, it’s—it’s something, but it’s not a bomb, or a minefield. Danger, uncertainty, the need to be careful—Felix hates feeling these things with Hyunjin. He’s sick of being careful.
“I’m going to talk to you now, because I like talking to you, but I’m gonna need you to push me off the bed if I say anything stupid, okay?”
Hyunjin raises an eyebrow and doesn’t bother to bite back his smile. “Okay.”
Felix sucks in a deep breath. This is it, he thinks, or as Changbin might say—fucking finally. Felix opens his mouth, and talks.
It’s—it’s surprisingly fine. Easy, even, to admit that he’d been scared. That he is scared, but he knows now that there are a lot of things more important to him than fear.
Hyunjin’s leaning in the way he does whenever he wants someone to know he’s paying attention, and it’s so fucking cute Felix almost loses track of his thought mid-sentence. It’s a near thing, but he manages to plow on. “I’m sorry I made you think I didn’t want to talk to you. You kissed me, and I—” Felix knows his cheeks are bright red and the only thing keeping him from bolting is Hyunjin’s wide eyes pinning him in place. “I was stupid about it.” Felix winces at how it sounds, but it’s too late to backtrack now. “Let me try again?”
Hyunjin’s smile is blinding, even in the dark. “Okay,” he breathes, and his voice sends a thrill down Felix’s spine.
“I’ve been thinking—I mean, you didn’t even get rid of me last year when I dabbed after, like, every single sentence and remember when I risked my life to defend your dumb ass during the Munchlax Fiasco of 2015? I guess, I guess what I’m saying is that we’re—I think we’re pretty hard to separate. I shouldn’t have ever doubted that. It’s just that you’re really, really important to me and—” Felix’s mind seems to finally catch up with his mouth, and he flushes immediately. “Oh my god, just interrupt me and say you like me too already.”
Hyunjin’s grin only grows wider, teasing. “I did that already. Remember?”
It takes Felix a second to remember Minho’s kitchen floor and Hyunjin’s hand fisted in his shirt and his lips—”That doesn’t count,” Felix manages, trying to ignore the flush creeping up his neck. He’s red enough already. “I just embarrassed myself for you. You have to do it properly too.”
“Okay,” Hyunjin says, nose brushing Felix’s cheek. “I like you a lot.”
“That was like four words, you cheater—” Felix manages to get out before they fall into each other again and he can’t think anymore.
A few seconds, minutes—Felix doesn’t know—later, Hyunjin pulls away just enough to speak, words tumbling straight from his mouth into Felix’s. “I really do like you a lot. Have for a long time. And I’m not scared of the future because I trust you and I know we’ll figure it out no matter what. You’ve been around for way too long for me to let go so easily.” Hyunjin presses his lips to Felix’s again, a short, brief thing, but long enough that Felix can make out the shape of his smile against his lips. “That was a lot of words, right?”
Felix elbows him and buries his traffic light red face in his hands. “I changed my mind, stop talking and just kiss me instead.”
Hyunjin laughs and gently tugs his hands away, interlacing their fingers and reaching up with his other hand to push Felix’s hair back. His palm warm against Felix’s temple, Hyunjin comments absentmindedly, “Your hair’s getting so long.” His breath grazes the curve of Felix’s cheek and their feet tangle beneath their blankets. Then, closer still, the future lapping at their ankles and his lips moving against Felix’s, Hyunjin says, “You’ll always be my day one.”
Then Felix is kissing Hyunjin for real and in that moment, he feels brave, bold enough to dip his head below the rising tide of the future because he knows there will be someone there to pull him up for air.