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Jaemin is ten years, three months, five-and-a-half minutes and nine seconds old when he is first introduced to grown-up things.
His father drags him along to some schmooze-fest he’s hosting with other men who have more money than they know what to do with and plenty of alcohol, because important people will be there and it’s never too early to get acclimated. He’s finally growing into a young man, and as his only child and successor of the family business, Jaemin now needs to be taught how to charm people until they’re wrapped around your finger and hanging off of your every word, until they’re shaking your hand under the table and writing you a fat check.
He’s shoved into a corner at a table with his mother and some cousins he doesn’t talk to and has no interest in knowing, watching as his mother gets up to stand in the middle of the large ballroom, making a toast with her thin flute of champagne. She looks as beautiful as ever, wearing the navy satin gown his father had gifted her a week before. Jaemin knows that the things his father gives to his mother are less out of love for her and more for his need to control, but she ignores it in exchange for false hope that their marriage isn’t falling apart piece by piece.
Jaemin wasn’t really listening to whatever pretty words she was saying, but he claps along with the crowd as she finishes her toast and walks back over to where he’s sitting. She walks with a careful and practiced grace in her stilettos, but Jaemin can tell that she’s more than tipsy.
“Jaeminnie,” she smiles, bending over where he’s seated to ruffle his hair. It makes the hair that she had so carefully slicked back for the event stick up in the middle.
Even though Jaemin would rather be anywhere else, her smile is infectious and a smile of his own creeps up onto his own face. “Mom,” he asks, “How much longer?”
She sucks her teeth at him and pets him under the chin, quickly smoothing his hair back into something presentable. “You need to learn how to be more patient, Jaemin-ah.”
He wants to disagree, but he doesn’t like to fight his mom so he learns how to be patient instead.
When he turns eleven, Jaemin comes to realize that his father only really pays attention to him when he wants to teach him something that he deems important. He’s brought along like a pretty bouquet of flowers to more meetings and gatherings and fundraisers, shoved in rooms with gross old men and people even more influential than his father. The smile he’s spent years perfecting comes in handy, his teeth shiny and brick straight from years of pampering and the best health insurance money can buy. People fall to his feet and hang on his every word, cooing about how well-spoken and smart he is for such a young boy. A prodigy is what his father tells them, but without years of being trained up like a dog and being pressured to be good at everything, Jaemin thinks he probably wouldn’t do much of anything at all.
He’s been conditioned into dealing with it.
By the time he’s thirteen years old, he’s already made it into the tabloids. A prodigal son, president of the debate club at his academy and top of his class, avid volunteer at local orphanages and animal shelters, a humanitarian in the making in succession to take over the CEO position whenever his father decides it’s time to step down. He’s already sufficient at playing violin, but his mother hires him a private piano coach even though he’s a bit old for it, because you can never have too many skills. It makes him look good, and it rakes in more support from the general public and piques the interest of potential business partners, and his father praises him for finally taking initiative.
Jaemin is not doing any of it for approval. He gave up on trying to gain his father’s affection years ago, and he’s angry that his real interests are being reduced to nothing more than a strategy to get more people watching them, a farce only for show.
He hates the attention, but he deals with it anyway. He’s been looked after by nannies and maids and housekeepers and butlers ever since he was born, and he’s used to other people’s hands and eyes on him. He’s used to the blinding flash of cameras following his family everywhere, used to being driven around and having people at his every beck and call. He’s used to stares and whispers from classmates just as privileged as he is, used to rumors being spread about him because he rarely speaks to any of them. He’s just a show dog, a pretty painting on display for people to point and ogle at until he becomes an asset and takes the seat of his predecessor.
When he turns fourteen, he has his first piano recital. He doesn’t hate it, but the fact that he was forced into it has him pressing the wrong keys on purpose in the middle of Prélude in E Minor so that he never has to do it again. He doesn’t touch a piano again after that.
Things stay the same, until Jaemin turns seventeen and his mother hires a new head housemaid for their estate.
This would normally be of little importance to him, except this situation is a little different. His mother is inappropriately excited, and she tells Jaemin that the new maid has a son the same age as him, sweet like him. The sentiment makes Jaemin smile, but he’s already written it off. Her past attempts at getting him to be social and talk to more kids his age were futile, the only person he actually enjoyed having around being the son of the president of their Tianjin branch, Renjun. He sees him often at events, and they actually share things in common. Renjun is the only one who doesn’t lie to Jaemin, preferring straightforwardness over keeping up appearances like everyone else around them.
Jaemin decides that he’ll humor his mother just to appease her, but he won’t put any effort into trying to be friends with some boy he knows absolutely nothing about.
The new maid starts working for them the second week of the beginning of the school year. She has dark, dark hair down her back and a kind face, kinder than the women who came before, and she bows deeply before his parents like they’ve saved her life, thankfulness rolling off of her in waves. Jaemin can smell his father’s distaste at her actions, but his mother waves her off with a that won’t be necessary and pulls her in for a hug instead. The woman momentarily stiffens in her arms and then returns the gesture, holding her back delicately like she’s made of fine china.
A boy, who he assumes is her son, is a couple paces behind her. His school uniform shirt is wrinkled and untucked and his tie is askew, like it had been messily undone as soon as school was out. His features are pleasant, a little bit of a babyface, and his mouth is pulled up into a polite smile, but Jaemin can see that it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. He’s watching Jaemin unabashedly with an inquisitive look in his eyes, like he’s sizing him up. Jaemin stares back at him, unashamed, and the boy’s eyes flicker away to stare at his mother’s back instead.
“This is Donghyuckie,” the new maid is suddenly saying, releasing his mother and gesturing to the boy behind her. He copies her actions from earlier and bows before them, albeit with less enthusiasm. “A pleasure to meet you,” he says with practiced ease, and it’s not that obvious that he doesn’t believe a word he’s saying, but Jaemin has an eye for bullshitters. “Please take care of us.”
Jaemin’s mother coos like he’s a kindergartener and not a teenager, reaching forward to pinch his cheek affectionately, which sends a trickle of sticky irritation down his spine. Donghyuck continues to nod politely as she fusses over him and asks him how school is going for him. He and his father exchange a look, and he says something about showing her around later before disappearing into his study.
“Jaemin-ah, come say hello.”
His mother’s eyes flicker to the spot his father had just been standing at before she cheerily beckons him over with a perfectly manicured hand. He follows orders and contorts his mouth into an award-winning smile, returning their bows. “Hello. We look forward to having you here.”
Later that night, when the day is almost over and the house is quiet, he finds out from his mother that their previous housemaid had referred Donghyuck’s mother to her before she retired, singing her praises and assuring his mother that she was just the person for the job. “She’s a delight,” she tells him. “Don’t be difficult and try to get along with Donghyuckie, okay?”
“Okay,” he agrees easily, but he plans on doing anything but.
Donghyuck’s mother fits right in with the rest of the staff, and soon it’s like she was always a part of it. Donghyuck comes over often after school, his mother insisting the car that takes Jaemin to school everyday be granted to Donghyuck to use as well. He refused at first, telling them that he had a bike and that he could get home just fine, but his mother insisted. Jaemin wasn’t sure if it was because she felt bad for him and was treating him as a charity case, or if she just genuinely liked him that much. Or maybe she was doing it to irritate Jaemin to hell and back.
He doesn’t usually care where their money goes or how they use it, but he hates it when other people touch his stuff. He likes to ride home alone with no stops to pick up other people, he doesn’t like people sitting in his house, and he doesn’t like playing pretend to maintain a shallow friendship.
Donghyuck doesn’t seem to notice Jaemin’s slowly growing disdain for him, or maybe he just doesn’t care.
They start to ride to school together too, much to Jaemin’s irritation, and one day Donghyuck has the gall to ask him if he can see his room.
“Do you have a King bed or something? Or your own bathroom?” he asks Jaemin on the ride home from their schools, looking down at a Nintendo DS instead of paying attention to Jaemin who has his nose in a book. “Do the maids help you wipe your ass?”
“No,” Jaemin says calmly, tightening his hands around the hardcover of his book. He thought that the book in his hands and the wired headphones in his ears would help Donghyuck get the hint and leave him be, but clearly it was his mission in life to annoy Jaemin to his grave. “I have a normal sized bed. And…my own bathroom.”
Donghyuck makes a high sound in the back of his throat like he’s thoroughly impressed. “That’s crazy. I only got to have my own bathroom when my dad took my sister to live with him.”
Jaemin’s interest is piqued at that, but he doesn’t act on that interest. He hums noncommittally and turns back to his book, turning his music up to tune out any future attempts at conversation. Seoul whizzes past them in blues and grays, and he prays that Donghyuck’s mother gets replaced like the countless others before her sooner than later.
Donghyuck’s mother does not get fired sooner than later.
In fact, he starts to see the both of them more often than not.
He blames his mother’s lack of friends for them overstaying their welcome. But the most peculiar thing of all is that Donghyuck’s mother actually seems to enjoy her job.
Past employees tread carefully and only spoke when spoken to, like the royal blood in the Na family counted for something in the present day. To some people maybe it did, but Jaemin hated being treated like porcelain, like something to be revered and never touched. He didn’t think that he was better than much of anyone just because of what he’s inherited, but the world seems to think otherwise.
Donghyuck’s mother treats them like family, like she’s known them for all of her life. Donghyuck almost becomes the sibling he never had or wanted, pouring himself over into every facet of Jaemin’s life like he can’t help it. They don’t even talk; Jaemin knows virtually next to nothing about him. Not to say that Donghyuck hadn’t tried at first, but they were simply too different and Jaemin shut down all of his previous attempts at congeniality until Donghyuck stopped trying altogether.
With his mother now working part-time, Donghyuck becomes something of a second child. Or, as Jaemin sees it, a little side project. A new fixation, one of those electronic babies they give you in high school sex-ed to look after.
His mother is a profoundly lonely woman. Jaemin knows that his father hasn’t truly loved or even liked her in years, and maybe he never really did in the first place. She’s a nice accessory on his arm in front of cameras and media-people, a pretty thing to show off to slimy old men and to flaunt to rooms of hundreds of adoring eyes. On paper and in theory they were the perfect couple–loving and committed. Behind closed doors, it wasn't the same. Jaemin isn’t too sure what exactly it even is.
At the very least, his father ignores Donghyuck just as much as he ignores Jaemin.
Jaemin is still seventeen when his mother asks him, “Why don’t you and Donghyuck study together?”
It was framed as a suggestion, but Jaemin is the one who knows her best. Her tone is insistent, and it makes all of the blood inside of his body curdle.
They’re in the same grade, Jaemin knows this much, and Donghyuck is always sitting somewhere in the common room with his sister after school more often than not. It’s easy and it should make sense.
It does not make sense to Jaemin.
Lee Donghyuck has done nothing in his short life to deserve everything that Jaemin has (everything mostly meaning his mother)–he knows this much to be true. He’s abrasive and boisterous, he laughs too loud and with his entire body, and he doesn’t understand boundaries. Boundaries, which are the only thing in the whole wide world that make Jaemin feel like he has an iota of control over his life.
It doesn’t matter what Jaemin thinks though. The next week they’re sitting across from each other at the kitchen island with thick textbooks sprawled in front of them.
The house around them is bustling with activity. At the end of the month, there will be hundreds of people gathered inside for a yearly benefit–an annual auction to raise money for the United Nations Children's Fund. It’s the only event that happens in their world that Jaemin actually cares about, so he doesn’t mind the noise like he usually would.
Except Donghyuck is sitting across from him and smacking on his gum so obnoxiously that Jaemin wants to tear his own eardrums out with his bare hands. Or better yet, bring Donghyuck upstairs to his bedroom so he can smother him with one of his overly fluffed pillows until he stops.
What’s worse is that Donghyuck has not made an effort to talk to him at all since he arrived, and it’s throwing Jaemin for a loop. He’s the one who’s supposed to do the ignoring.
Donghyuck has earbuds in and is preoccupied with his notebook, so he doesn’t notice the cartoon steam coming out of Jaemin’s ears. His music is loud enough to the point where Jaemin can slightly hear it even over the bustle of the kitchen–someone is singing in English, and he can make out a couple of words.
They’re supposed to be studying together. Jaemin has a human biology test to prepare for; he already knows that he doesn’t need to study in the first place, but surely he could brush up on his facts a little, if only to keep everyone happy.
“Could you turn your music down?”
For the first time, Jaemin is the one to break the silence first. Donghyuck doesn’t even hear him because he’s too engrossed in his notes and the music, bobbing his head back and forth to the beat like he doesn’t have a care in the world.
“Donghyuck-ssi,” Jaemin says again, louder and careful not to let any irritation seep into his voice. Donghyuck will sniff out any sign of weakness like a shark smells blood. “Turn your music down. Please.”
The ‘please’ is an afterthought. They’re not at the point of friendship where Jaemin can tell him to do things instead of asking for them.
Donghyuck finally acknowledges his existence and snatches out his earbuds, leaving them clattering on the marble in front of them. “What? You don’t like my music?”
He says it innocently like he’s serious, and Jaemin resists the urge to roll his eyes up to the ceiling. He always has to make something into a joke, or a jab, or a nosy observation. It’s exhausting, but Jaemin just smiles placatingly at him instead.
“I couldn’t hear myself think.”
Donghyuck lasts three whole seconds before he averts his gaze back to his notes, tapping his pencil five times in succession against the paper. “Are you any good at calc?”
He’s also always changing the subject whenever he feels like it, and Jaemin never knows what he’s going to say next.
“Yeah. Do you need help?”
Donghyuck lets out an affronted huff and it sends the middle of his fringe into the air and flopping back down onto his forehead. “I don’t need help. I just have questions.”
Helping someone with math is something that Jaemin knows how to deal with, so he internally settles down a little. He’s not exactly sure what it is about Donghyuck that gets him so riled up in the first place. “What is it?”
He leans forward to Donghyuck’s side of the counter, peering down at his notes. His handwriting is neater than he was expecting, but his notes are still nonsensical. Donghyuck smells like oranges.
“The fifth problem,” Donghyuck says, pointing a finger at some numbers he had written down. Jaemin notices that his fingernails are bitten down to nubs. He suddenly sounds a little unsure, slightly distant, like he’s not sure what to do with Jaemin in his space. That’s what Jaemin prefers anyway.
“Here,” Jaemin says sweetly, leaning his elbows on the counter and taking the pencil from Donghyuck’s fist. He ignores the brush of Donghyuck’s burning hot hand against his and starts to write. “You have the formula down, the order is just wrong.”
Donghyuck listens to him surprisingly well as he walks him through the problem, nodding and humming along when he understands–maybe it’s because he actually takes school seriously. If they only talked about school matters exclusively, maybe Jaemin could actually stand to be around Donghyuck for more than thirty minutes at a time.
“Thank you,” Donghyuck says genuinely when he gets the answer, voice uncharacteristically quiet. Jaemin finds himself not pulling away, so Donghyuck is the one to put distance between them. “I didn’t know you were a nerd.”
And just like that, the weird mood is broken and they’re back to square one, Donghyuck saying something childish and sneering at him, and Jaemin barely reacting but internally trying to light Donghyuck on fire with his eyes alone. Insufferable, but familiar.
When Donghyuck is seventeen years old, his mother tells him that things are going to change for them.
At the time, Donghyuck doesn’t completely understand what she means, but at the very least he knows that whatever she does mean probably isn’t true. Things don’t just change.
Her nine-year-old busted pair of work sneakers–the ones with the peeling bottoms and the rips in them–is replaced with a new pair of pristine white trainers. Donghyuck isn’t sure how much they cost, but he’s sure that it was more money than he’d ever seen at one time.
She doesn’t look much like herself; she starts to wear her hair in a slicked back bun instead of letting it hang down her back, and she has a uniform now. It’s not the comical black and white maid outfit Donghyuck was originally imagining, but instead a crisp button up and formal skirt. When she cleaned houses for other people, normal people, she didn’t need to look a certain way. It bothers Donghyuck in a way that he can’t explain.
He knows that he should be happy, because his mother looks happy that she snagged a better gig and the salary is better, but instead he’s filled with a profound sense of dread.
All that Donghyuck knows is that she’ll be the new head housemaid for some rich people who have more money than they know what to do with. Except they’re not just any run-of-the-mill rich family; they own half of the buildings that Donghyuck passes by everyday on the way to school. He’s seen them on television before–businesses opening, initiatives being announced, press conferences aired on televisions nationwide.
His mother tells him that they have a son the same age as him, but Donghyuck has no interest in being friends with him. He tells her that much, and she thwacks him smack dab in the middle of his forehead and tells him to be nice to him or I’ll bury you six feet under.
Donghyuck knows that she doesn’t mean it (literally) but no matter how much he hates the elite group of people with silver spoons shoved so far up their asses they come out of their mouths, he’ll do whatever he can to keep his mother happy.
Donghyuck tries. He really, really does.
Na Jaemin is a robot at worst and a stick in the mud at best. He has the temperament of an eighty year old man stuck inside the body of a scrawny seventeen year old, and Donghyuck can’t tell if he wishes that Donghyuck would disappear or if he simply didn’t associate himself with his type. Donghyuck assumes that it’s probably both, and he only blames Jaemin for the second one.
Donghyuck imagines their places being swapped; how he would feel if someone he didn’t know started coming over and his mother took a liking to them, if someone intruded his rides back home from school and ate his expensive food. But Donghyuck had been nice at the very start, cordial even, and Jaemin hadn’t even made an effort, so Donghyuck makes sure to start putting his feet up on the expensive living room table when only Jaemin is looking just to piss him off.
He’s very well-spoken for his age, even better than Donghyuck, whose mother says he has a silver tongue. Donghyuck can’t get a good read on him like he can everyone else, and no amount of prying and jabbing and annoying makes him crack. He sees him in intervals though, when he lets whatever concrete wall he has up down for a tenth of a second. Jaemin doesn’t seem to notice when he does, or maybe it’s all intentional and just another part of his need to keep Donghyuck on his toes.
Donghyuck isn’t so sure.
He starts to spend more time at the manor than at the small house he shares with his mother, and even if it seems like the one true purpose of Jaemin’s life is to make the hairs on the back of Donghyuck’s neck stand up at all times, he can’t say that he hates his second home.
Jaemin’s mother dotes on Donghyuck way more than his own mother, who can be hard as nails at the worst of times. He’s waited on hand and foot as long as he is inside of the Nas’ four walls, and he completely forgets that he’s not a part of their world until he’s back out in the streets again.
Donghyuck isn’t oblivious enough to not realize that this must be part of the reason Jaemin has such an unsubtle distaste for him. It’s not like he shows it, but Donghyuck knows anyway.
It’s a month and a half into the new arrangement when Donghyuck notices something a little off. Jaemin’s father is barely around, and Donghyuck had simply chalked it up to being a CEO–it was partly true, but the actual main reason was that he was simply an asshole.
Donghyuck isn’t sure if he would rather have an asshole father or an absent father, but Jaemin seems to have both in one. The few times he’s seen them interact, Jaemin was very obviously on edge like it was something he couldn’t hide, violently uncomfortable around the man who made him in more ways than one.
He barely spares his wife a glance most days, and it seems like he’s more in love with his work than anything else. Jaemin’s mother is good at pretending and keeping up appearances, but Donghyuck can see right through her.
It irritates him to no end, but he keeps his head down because it’s not his place to intervene. It’s not even his place to breathe the same air as them in the first place, so he’ll count his blessings.
They continue to study (ignore each other) together in amicable silence for a couple more weeks before Donghyuck finds out that Jaemin actually has friends.
“Hello,” the boy says pleasantly, reaching out to shake Donghyuck’s hand. “I’m Jaemin’s friend. Renjun.”
Renjun looks slightly brood-y and just as expensive as Jaemin, a polo shirt sitting on his rail thin frame. Donghyuck bets that a light wind would blow him right over.
He’s certainly nicer than Jaemin, actually engaging Donghyuck in conversation and asking him questions about himself. Donghyuck decides that he likes the kid.
Renjun is visiting Seoul from Tianjin, is what he finds out, and the son of some other rich guy Donghyuck can’t be bothered to care about. He’s well-spoken and frankly adorable, and even if he is a little more scholarly than what he’s used to, Donghyuck can quickly learn to manage.
Jaemin stares at them like he’s planning to physically harm someone. He reminds Donghyuck of the sociopath kid who tried to drown his sister in a lake from that one American movie he watched a while ago. He had a perfectly blank face most of the time, but you could see in his eyes that he was up to no good. Jaemin looks like a snake ready to strike sometimes, albeit one with abnormally large eyes.
It fascinates Donghyuck, so he scoots closer to Renjun.
He’s not sure why Jaemin seems one second away from murdering him, although he could take an educated guess. Another thing that Donghyuck is taking away from him.
Maybe Jaemin will finally get mad at him, at least outwardly. He still isn’t entirely unconvinced that Jaemin is an android living secretly amongst human society. If he could just get him to show a little un-meditated emotion, wheedle a crack into his wall of steel, surely something would shift between them. He’s not sure what exactly he’s hoping for.
“What’re you doing in Korea?” Donghyuck asks, Jaemin’s eyes boring steaming holes into the side of his head.
Renjun doesn’t even seem to notice the way Jaemin is staring at them from the fancy living room armchair like he has x-ray vision, or he’s simply choosing to ignore it. He smiles at Donghyuck good-naturedly. “I’m here for the gala next week, I attend every year. And Seoul is like my second home, anyway.”
Donghyuck nods along exaggeratedly like it’s the most interesting thing he’s ever heard. Maybe it is, considering nothing of notice ever happens to him. “Oh, the United Nations one.”
Renjun hums before he seems to realize something important. “Oh! Donghyuck-ssi, will you be there?”
‘Will you be there?’ being one of the craziest things Donghyuck has ever had the pleasure of being asked in his short, uneventful life. The thought of attending hadn’t even crossed Donghyuck’s mind. In fact, he wasn’t even sure if he was allowed to go in the first place. But now that he thinks about it, his mother will be a part of the staff working there, so why wouldn’t he be? He’s at the Na estate more than Jaemin’s father himself.
And why did Renjun even ask him? Donghyuck hadn’t even properly introduced himself or explained who he was; he’d bombarded Renjun with questions as soon as he stepped in from the front door. That could only mean one thing: Renjun already knew who he was.
“Oh,” Donghyuck doesn’t miss a beat, barely able to conceal the shit-eating grin trying to make its way onto his face, “I’ll definitely be there.” He turns to see Jaemin looking slightly perturbed, but his posture is still rail-straight; if it weren’t for the deep furrow of his brow, nothing would give him away. “Right, Jaemin-ssi?”
“Right,” he responds through pretty teeth. “Of course you will.”
Renjun looks between the two of them curiously, but if he has anything to say, he’s interrupted before he can open his mouth.
A meek woman who sometimes cuts up fruit for Donghyuck just because she wants to peers into the living room. “Mrs. Na said you all must be hungry. I prepared dinner.”
She’s gone as quickly as she came, taking the weird tension with her.
It’s only later that night when he’s lying half-awake in bed listening to the hum of his humidifier that he realizes he doesn’t own a single item of formal clothing.
The fanciest event he had ever been to was his preschool graduation, and he barely has any memory of it. His mom made him wear a clip-on tie that ended up wrapped around his head like a bandana by the end of the ceremony.
He jumps up from his bed and struggles out of the spider web of blankets around him to sprint to the other side of the house. He bum-rushes into his mother’s room and blindly feels around the walls for the light switch.
“Mom! I need a suit.”
“What–” she slowly rises up from where she was passed out on her pillows and snatches off her sleep mask, squinting at him through the artificial light. “What the hell are you doing?”
He leaps onto her bed, only narrowly avoiding crashing into her and grabs her shoulders. “I need a suit!”
She slaps his hands off of her shoulders and runs a hand tiredly through her tangled hair. “What do you need a suit for?”
“The gala.”
She raises her eyebrows in confusion for a moment before she bursts out laughing right in his face. “What? The gala?”
Donghyuck leans back a little and crosses his arms defensively over his chest. He doesn't like to be laughed at. “Yeah.”
“Sweetheart,” she laughs, biting her lip to stifle her amusement when he frowns harder. “You’re not going to the gala. It’s adults only.”
“What?” Donghyuck yelps, scrambling onto his knees and accidentally kneeing her in the shin. “What do you mean adults only? Jaemin is gonna be there! And–and Huang Renjun!”
She rubs her shin and squints at him again. “Huang who?”
“That’s not the point!” Donghyuck whines so loudly he hurts his own eardrums. “Jaemin and Renjun are my age and they get to go. I’ll be eighteen this year, anyway.”
“Hyuckie,” she says gently like she wants to soften the blow, but she still looks like she’s about to laugh at him again. “Jaemin-ah is the son of the CEO. Of course he’s going. And this Renjun person you mentioned is probably the kid of someone important too. They don’t count.”
“But–” Donghyuck starts to argue but then cuts himself off, thinking it over. “I’m the son of someone important, too.”
Her face softens a little at that, but the way she pinches his cheek affectionately is anything but. “Oh, you’re sweet.” She tightens her grip on his cheek and digs her nails in, earning her a pained shriek so loud it probably wakes up the entire neighborhood. “But it won’t make me forget you woke me up at one in the morning for this.”
Donghyuck rubs at his cheek when she lets go and frowns again. “I’m serious, though…”
“Hm? What do you mean?”
“The people who work for them are just as important. You guys cook and clean and organize events and…stuff. Without you, they couldn’t even exist.”
She smiles and pats him gently on the head. “I’m sure they’d manage.”
“No,” Donghyuck insists, and she tilts her head at his serious tone. He hates it when she downplays the things she does, when she acts like nothing she does is important. She’s too hardworking, and she gives everything for barely anything in return. “You deserve just as much as they have. And more.”
She stays silent and looks at him attentively, the hum of the aircon filling her bedroom.
“It’s not fair.”
She shakes her head and opens up her arms at the annoyed look on his face. “Come here.”
He shakes his head stubbornly and keeps his arms crossed tightly over his chest. When she doesn’t budge, he sighs and gives in immediately, tossing himself into her arms. She rubs soothing lines down his overheating back and hums gently. “What’s this about, huh?”
Donghyuck huffs into her sternum at the familiar uncomfortable feeling prickling up his neck at the first sign of needing to talk about his feelings. “Nothing.”
She responds with silence and he sighs even louder. “Fine, I guess it’s something.”
She pats him on the butt and gently pries him off of her. “Talk to me.”
“It’s just–” he rolls his eyes in disdain and she gives him a pointed look, “I don’t know. The new job has just been…weird.”
“Weird how?”
Donghyuck huffs. “Rich people are weird.”
“That is true.”
“And I just feel weird around them, like they look down on me. The people you used to clean for were so normal.”
“Look down on you? I’m sure that’s not true.”
He gives her the same look she gives him when he says something utterly ridiculous, and she rolls her eyes and surrenders. “So maybe they do. Since when do you care what other people think about you, anyway?”
“I don’t,” he insists, and it’s true. “But that doesn’t mean I like it when people look down on me.”
She sighs deeply and stifles a yawn. It’s only then that Donghyuck realizes just how tired she looks, face swollen from lack of sleep. “That’s okay. But what other people think of you isn’t your business. You know who you are, Donghyuck-ah.”
He sits back on his calves and deflates a little. She’s right, and he knows that she’s right too–but it still pisses him off nonetheless. So he just says, “You shouldn't have to work for people like that.”
They don’t treat her badly, not really. Mrs. Na treats her like they’ve been best girl friends for years, Mr. Na doesn’t spare her any glances which is probably for the best, and the rest of the staff is just as pretentious as most people in that inner circle, but at least they only make snide comments in secret. It could be way worse–at least that’s what the dramas on television tell Donghyuck–but he’s still wary.
He wishes that she could kick her feet up for the rest of her life and let someone else take care of her for a change, but he knows that the chances of that happening are very low. His father doesn’t care about them, she has bills to pay and kids to take care of, and Donghyuck is too young to do anything about it.
“I don’t do anything I don’t want to.” She ruffles his hair until it becomes a bird’s nest and she finally sees a small smile on his face again. “I do everything for us. If it’s for you, I can do anything. You know that, don’t you?”
“I guess.”
“If anyone is ever mean to you, just tell me and I’ll spit in their food.”
He jumps up again and groans. “Mom, Jaemin is so mean. He doesn’t even talk to me and I’m supposed to be getting along with him!”
She laughs again and lets him shake her around. “Jaemin-ah is a wonderful kid.”
“He’s not. He’s mean, and he probably kicks puppies for fun.”
“Maybe he just doesn’t know how to talk to you, hm? You have a unique personality.”
“Unique? What’s that supposed to mean?”
She rests a hand on his shoulder and sighs through her nose like she’s already had enough of him. Usually she can last longer. “Maybe you should just try a different approach. You can’t talk to everyone the same. I’m sure he’ll open up soon, alright?”
Donghyuck does not believe her. He knows Jaemin well enough (re: barely at all) to know that he’s simply just like that. Once he decides he doesn’t like someone, he won’t ever like them at all. But he’s bothered her enough, and a twinge of guilt builds behind his eyes when he sees the dark circles under her eyes. He nods.
“Okay.”
“Good. Now go back to sleep before I kick you out of my house.”
He hops out of her bed before she can hit him again and runs out of the room, slamming the door shut behind him.
“By the way, I’m still going to the gala if it’s the last thing I do!”
He hears her yell a string of expletives at him from down the hall, but he’s already made up his mind. He just needs to figure out how.
—
According to Occam’s Razor, plurality should not be posited without necessity. Meaning, in normal-people-words, the simplest solution is usually the correct one.
So the next day, instead of trying to artfully sneak his way in like he normally would, Donghyuck goes up to Jaemin’s mother while she’s helping staff decorate the ballroom for the gala.
“Mrs. Na, can I ask you a question?”
She turns around from where she’s looking over two color samples with a staff worker who gives Donghyuck the evil eye whenever he stays over. A bright smile overtakes her face when she sees him, and it makes Donghyuck smile despite himself. Going to the most agreeable person at the estate who likes him a little too much isn’t really manipulation. He’s just asking for what he deserves.
He cuts to the chase. “Can I go to the gala too?” Normally he would butter someone up first before asking for something he wants, maybe lay it on a little thick, but Donghyuck knows that that’s not necessary with Jaemin’s mother. “Jaemin-ah said he wanted me to come.” Lie. Jaemin said no such thing. In fact, he and Jaemin aren’t even on an informal speaking basis. They still treat each other like strangers. Or maybe arch nemeses.
“Oh!” She hands over the sample she was holding to the woman in front of her and turns her full attention to him. “Of course you can! I can’t believe I forgot.”
It’s like taking candy from a baby.
“Do you have something to wear?”
Donghyuck isn’t sure if she’s just curious or if she thinks he’s too poor to afford formal clothes, but he doesn’t think about it too much. “No, but I can find something.”
She waves him off. “No need. Jaemin-ah has more clothes than he knows what to do with. You can borrow something from him.”
Well, this certainly isn’t where he wanted things to go.
One of the things that Donghyuck hates most in the world is taking handouts. He’s fine with gifts, other people paying for his food, things like that. But taking something offered to you from a rich person is at the top of his list of things he would never like to do. He may not have as much money as they do, but he can buy his own clothes.
“You don’t have to,” she reassures him like she can hear his thoughts, “but it’s really no problem. If not, you can wear whatever you want, okay?”
He unclenches a little. She’s really, unfortunately, a disgustingly sweet lady. Disgusting, to the point where it makes him feel genuinely sick.
He can find an old suit at the thrift store around the corner from his house, maybe bother his dad for one of his old ones if he cared that much, but would it really be so bad to pretend for a day? To wear something that isn’t on the verge of falling apart at the seams? To piss off Na Jaemin?
“That would be nice,” he agrees amicably, stifling a shit-eating grin at the prospect of making Jaemin mad. “I’ll give it back as soon as the night is over.”
“Great!” She turns to the staff worker she was talking to before Donghyuck interrupted him. “Eunsoo-ssi, please find something for Donghyuck-ah to wear to the gala tomorrow!”
Donghyuck feels slightly uncomfortable, like he’s imposing on them, before he remembers that they probably couldn’t care less about what happens to some suit, given all of the things they have. He feels his smile stretch all the way across his face to the point that it’s painful. “Thank you so much,” he says in his best Good Boy voice and bows deeply before her.
She leans over to ruffle his hair much more gently than his own mother does. “Don’t worry about it!”
This is why Donghyuck never hesitates to go after things he wants. Free suit, free food, a chance to see what rich people get up to in their spare time. Life is good.
Jaemin had been swept away early in the morning for last-call measurements, so Donghyuck doesn’t see him at all. Even better, because he can’t wait to see the look on Jaemin’s face when he shows up to the gala.
He goes home with his mother that night with a navy suit ironed and starched to perfection under his arm.
“Where did I go wrong?” is what his mother asks him when she watches him hold it in front of himself and admire it in the dirty bathroom mirror.
Donghyuck smooths the blazer over his chest. “I’m a man who knows what he wants.”
“You can’t even grow leg hair.”
“Hey!”
Even though she’s mildly annoyed at him for going behind her back, she’s too busy to do anything about it. She tells him to be on his best behavior and to not embarrass their family or she’ll put him up for adoption. Donghyuck thinks it’s a fair trade off.
The next morning, Donghyuck wakes up extra early. Extra early, meaning ten minutes before he usually wakes up, but for him it’s progress. He accompanies his mother in her car on the ride there, trying not to bounce too much in the passenger’s seat out of anxiety. He doesn’t even know what exactly he’s anxious about; he thrives in social situations and he won’t let some yuppies get him damp under the collar, but he still feels a little sick. He watches as the scenery around them quickly changes from modest single family homes and businesses to miles-high skyscrapers and million won mansions. The juxtaposition is a little jarring, and Donghyuck imagines what it would be like if he lived in one of those mansions, what it would be like if he was the son of a CEO with generational wealth and a lifetime of leisure.
In theory, it sounds nice. But in practice, he’s not sure if it would be quite ideal. Jaemin is still a dickhead, but Donghyuck isn’t stupid. Part of his ultimately confusing disposition is probably from the pressure he faces as the son of someone so important, the successor of one of the largest financial groups in South Korea, and the glue that keeps the family together.
Still a dickhead though.
The gate to the estate normally opens for them immediately when they arrive, but a security guard flags them down when they pull up, lifting a hand in a signal to slow down.
His mother looks confused, but she pulls to a stop and rolls her window down politely.
“Hello, I’m here for the gala.”
The guard walks up the window like he’s apprehending a criminal, and Donghyuck rolls his eyes so hard he almost sees his brain.
“Name?”
“I work here.”
Donghyuck can tell from the particular tone of her voice that she’s already becoming annoyed, but on the outside she’s a perfect picture of calm. The guard looks her up and down like he’s appraising her, maybe judging, and Donghyuck resists the urge to lunge across her lap to rip out his trachea. He must be new, because all staff should know each other, if not by name, then by face alone.
“I’ll need to confirm.”
He turns to walk away, probably into the guard booth, but Donghyuck stops him. “Sir, this woman here is the head housemaid of this place. She needs to get in there now, or else there will be no gala.”
His mother sends him a dirty look so loud it almost stops him in his tracks, but he’s already stepped in shit, so he might as well continue. “Everyone knows her.”
The guard laughs a little like Donghyuck isn’t meant to be taken seriously at all, and it makes his blood curdle. “Calm down, kid, we just need to be cautious.”
Donghyuck scoffs and ignores his mother’s eyes lighting him on fire from the driver’s seat. He hates being called a kid, even if he is one. “You wouldn’t be doing this if she was driving a Bugatti or wearing fancy clothes. You would just let her in without asking. You just wanna feel important.”
“Donghyuck-ah,” his mother says sternly, not trying to disguise her irritation anymore. “Stop.”
“Mom, he’s obviously not letting us in because he thinks we don’t belong here.”
“Stop!” she raises her voice louder, and Donghyuck flinches and sinks down into his seat. Another guard peers out from the booth at the commotion and walks over. “Is there a problem here?”
Yes, Donghyuck wants to say, but if he opens his mouth again, his brains will probably end up splattered all over the dashboard, so he stays quiet.
“Not at all,” his mother says in a pleasant voice, and he hates how she lets others get away with treating her like shit. “Just a little misunderstanding.”
The guard furrows his brow when he gets a good look at her face. “Say, this is the head maid. Let her in.”
The other guard goes red in the face and immediately bows at a ninety degree angle before their car, security cap almost falling off of his head. “My apologies, I didn’t know.”
Donghyuck grumbles under his breath while his mother assures them that it’s okay. The grand gates open before them, and she starts the car again and drives up the cobblestone path.
“Don’t ever pull something like that again,” she says once they’re out of earshot, staring ahead at the road like she wants to light it on fire. “I told you time and time again not to embarrass me. How do you think this will look?”
Donghyuck hates arguing with his mom more than anything else in the world, but he wants her to stop acting like she owes these people anything. Respect, courtesy, all of it. Like they even give her that.
“Why do you care so much about what they think of us?”
“Because it’s my fucking job!” She never really raises her voice or swears at him, not seriously, so he knows he’s overstepped. “Our entire life and security relies on this, you think I wanna act like they own me? Huh? You think this makes me happy? Well they do own me, Donghyuck. And as long as I need to pay bills and put food on the table, it’ll stay that way.”
Donghyuck clenches his fists hard enough that his dull nails dig painfully into his palm. Logically, he knows that she’s right like she always is, but it still makes him angry, and he hates feeling angry. Even though he inherited the same stubbornness from her, this is where they’re wildly different: he would rather die than do something he doesn’t want to do.
Maybe he’s just selfish.
Before he can even think of anything to say, she’s parking and killing the engine. She wordlessly reaches into the backseat to grab his suit, placing it on his lap.
“Don’t get it wrinkled.”
She opens the door and exits without another word, leaving Donghyuck in contemplative silence.
No matter how you look at it, this is the fault of rich people.
—
The benefit is an extravagant affair.
The ballroom has been decorated to the nines; it’s almost extravagant to the point of gaudy, and Donghyuck expected nothing less. It’s the most chandeliers he’s ever seen in one room, to the point it’s almost painful to keep his eyes open. There are dozens of tables placed all around the room, a centerpiece of white lilies in the middle of each one. He stands toward the back, looking for his mother on his tip-toes, but she’s nowhere to be found. Jaemin’s mother offered to buy him a new pair of shoes, but Donghyuck thought that that would just be too excessive. His dirty Converse are certainly an eyesore, but the only formal pair of shoes that he owns are currently three sizes too small for him. No one had enough balls to say anything yet, but he could feel some older women from across the room staring at his feet in disdain.
Donghyuck doesn’t think that his mismatching shoes matter though, because the real showstopper is his suit. Jaemin’s suit, if you wanna be specific, but that didn’t really matter. It’s the first time in his short life that he’s worn a suit or had any reason to wear one. He even did his hair, when the most he did everyday was run a hand through it before school and pray that it looked mildly presentable.
He’s shoving his fists in his pockets for something to do with his hands before he looks up to see Renjun waving at him from the other side of the room. The space is so vast that he looks like a speck, and for once it isn’t because of his height.
Donghyuck waves back and makes his way to the table Renjun is at, ignoring confused stares from people who most likely have no idea who he is or what he’s doing here.
“Donghyuck-ah!” he greets him enthusiastically over the chatter of the room as soon as he’s in hearing distance. Donghyuck was so preoccupied with Renjun that he didn’t notice Jaemin sitting to his right, in a crisp black suit and not a hair out of place. If Donghyuck flicked it, his finger would probably break off from the sheer amount of product sitting in his hair. “You made it.”
“Hi, Renjun,” Donghyuck beams, the hairs on the back of his neck prickling upward in anticipation at whatever Jaemin will surely say. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
Which is mostly a lie, but he definitely wouldn’t miss a chance to piss off Na Jaemin for the world.
Speaking of Jaemin, the boy in question is looking at him with an expression Donghyuck can’t really place, something akin to confusion and amusement. Or maybe disgust.
“Jaemin-ssi,” Donghyuck greets him calmly as Jaemin sizes him up like he can’t believe what he's seeing. “You look very handsome today.”
“Is that my suit?” he asks in lieu of a proper reply, and Donghyuck wonders what happens to those manners that are so deeply instilled in him that they’re second nature.
Donghyuck smooths his hands over the lapels of the suit jacket like he’s suddenly realized what he’s wearing. Oh, this old thing? Is what he wants to joke, but he reels it in a little since he has an audience.
“Do you like it?”
He kind of wants to know if Jaemin really does like it, but he’s not sure why.
“It looks nice on you,” Jaemin responds, and his voice is so perfectly neutral that Donghyuck isn’t sure what the intention is behind his words. It does look nice on him though, so he takes the compliment and doesn’t think too hard about what it could possibly mean.
“Thanks.” Donghyuck knows that realistically, Jaemin couldn’t throw a temper tantrum in the middle of the gala even if he wanted to, so he’ll just keep prodding for as long as he’s allowed to. He’s perfected the art of getting under people’s skin, so he can get even someone like Jaemin to crack eventually. And even if Jaemin had reeled in his disgust/confusion/annoyance as soon as it could even become apparent on his face, Donghyuck had still seen it for a split second, so he considers it a win.
He catches Renjun looking at them in a lethal mix of curiosity and exasperation, and Donghyuck wonders if he knows more than he lets on.
He’s not sure about what exactly.
The auction starts not long after. It’s for some antique necklace that once belonged to some old rich person Donghyuck doesn’t know, with more diamonds than he has ever seen in his life, and he almost goes cross-eyed as he stares at the way it twinkles under the chandelier lights in its glass display.
After much heckling, it’s eventually sold to some douchey-looking guy for a ridiculous amount of money, but it’s for charity, so Donghyuck isn’t mad about it.
Even if the entire point of the gala was to raise money for charity, the real main event is really the schmooze-fest that occurs after. Staff start to serve food and musicians that Donghyuck didn’t even notice in the room start to play live music. He rolls his eyes and looks around the ballroom for any sign of his mother. He eventually spots her carrying a tray of champagne to serve to the guests; she’s not wearing her usual work attire, but rather a simple black dress that Donghyuck doesn’t recognize. It definitely isn’t from her own closet, and he wonders where she got it from. She found some time to do her hair in the time between her arrival for last-minute preparations and the start of the gala, and it flows down her back in waves instead of straight down like it usually does. He wonders if this is what she would look like all the time if she were one of the people sitting at the tables and not one of the people serving them.
She looks pretty.
While Donghyuck wasn’t paying attention, other people joined them at the table until it was completely full. They’re the only teenagers at the table and at the entire event, and he feels a little out of his element, but he refuses to show it.
A server comes around with a large tray of the same expensive champagne his mother is carrying around, and he wonders if he can get away with underage drinking. The filthy rich usually have little regard for the law anyway, so he’ll take his chances.
“Excuse me, sir?” he asks when the server tries to pass him up for the next person, “Can I ask you a question?”
The server, some young guy wearing a button up two sizes too small for him, pauses and looks around like he can’t believe that someone is actually talking to him. “Yes?”
“What are your views on underage drinking?”
Renjun snorts loudly and chokes on the olive in his mouth while Jaemin tilts his head at him in vague what the fuck are you doing fashion.
The server looks bewildered, and Donghyuck momentarily feels bad because he definitely doesn’t get paid enough for this shit. “Uh.” He looks down at the flutes of alcohol below him like they’re going to grow teeth and attack him. “Well, it’s. Illegal.”
Donghyuck is about to bring out the puppy eyes, but he speaks up again before he can interrupt. “But you can have one.” He passes a glass to Donghyuck under the watchful gaze of the other people at the table. He may not get paid enough to deal with the shit of people like Donghyuck, but he probably also doesn’t get paid enough to care about giving alcohol to minors. Another win for Lee Donghyuck.
He takes a sip as soon as the server leaves, and it’s honesty fucking disgusting. It must show on his face, because Renjun laughs his loud hahaha laugh right in his face.
“What is wrong with you?”
Donghyuck almost spits out the alcohol in his mouth back into his glass which only makes him laugh louder. Jaemin looks thoroughly horrified. “It tastes like motor oil.”
“Wait, let me try.”
He passes the glass across the table to Renjun. Jaemin is watching his hand like it’s a foreign object. “You definitely won’t like it.”
Renjun brings the glass delicately up to his mouth and takes a sip from the exact place Donghyuck had moments earlier. He probably doesn’t even think anything of it, but Donghyuck tries not to blush.
It’s in that moment that Donghyuck realizes just how weird Jaemin is about Renjun.
He’s not sure if it’s just possessiveness over things in his life that he obviously thinks Donghyuck is taking away from him, or if it’s something else altogether. But Donghyuck is nothing if not nosy by nature, so he decides that he’ll get to the bottom of it.
“You’re right, it does taste like motor oil,” Renjun winces, but he takes it more gracefully than Donghyuck did. “Why do people even drink this?”
“To get drunk,” Donghyuck shrugs. “Jaemin-ssi, do you want to try some?”
He waves him off dismissively, that strange look still in his eyes. “I’m fine.”
Donghyuck didn’t have any ulterior motives this time around, he was just genuinely trying to be nice, but clearly no matter what Donghyuck does, it doesn’t matter, because he’s still Donghyuck.
He wants to be immature and call Jaemin a pussy, but he thinks better of it and brushes it off.
They manage to have civil conversation after that, Jaemin even cracking jokes here and there (definitely for Renjun’s sake, not Donghyuck’s) and Renjun chatting Donghyuck up because he seems to have a genuine interest in whatever the hell Donghyuck gets up to in his spare time. Donghyuck charms the pants off of the older woman sitting next to him who couldn’t hold in her curiosity any longer and asked him who he was, and things are going fine. Nice, even, given the circumstances. His suit, Jaemin’s suit, is getting too stuffy around his neck and the gel in his hair is starting to forget how to do its job, but he’s feeling good.
Some time later, Jaemin's father appears to do a toast. He’s met with raucous applause like he’s some kind of celebrity, and even though Jaemin is smiling his perfectly straight Colgate smile, Donghyuck can tell that he wants to blow his own brains out. Renjun seems to notice too, and Donghyuck wonders if Jaemin actually shares these things with him. All Donghyuck has are his own assumptions.
Donghyuck has never really gotten a chance to look at Jaemin’s father for more than five seconds at a time, but this close up, he can see where Jaemin gets his looks from. They’re not spitting images of each other, but they have the same large, dark eyes and razor sharp jawline.
He’s very handsome, but that doesn’t really matter when you have a shit personality.
Even though he would rather play in traffic than admit it out loud, Donghyuck thinks Jaemin is handsome too. His personality isn’t really as shit as his father’s, but it certainly comes close at times. Donghyuck wonders if they would get along if Jaemin wasn’t so…weird.
Across from him, Jaemin has an unreadable expression on his face as he looks at his father, and Donghyuck would pay to know what he’s thinking, would pay to know all of the things that he’s done to Jaemin.
He’s so lost in his thoughts that he doesn't realize that his father has finished his speech and that the people around him are clapping again, loud and admiring like he’s just announced the way to achieve world peace. Jaemin is clapping and smiling too, and from the outside, no one would be able to tell that he hates his father’s guts. Hate is only what Donghyuck assumes, but his intuition is right more often than not.
Everyone goes back to drinking and mingling and rubbing elbows, and Jaemin gets up to leave. He whispers something to Renjun who nods but doesn’t follow, and Donghyuck is left in the dark. He also doesn’t even get a goodbye, which is duly noted. He doesn’t know why it bothers him so much, so he pushes it to the back of his mind.
“Hey, Renjun, can I ask you a question?”
“Hm?”
“Is there something wrong with Jaemin?”
Renjun tries to cover up the snort that comes out of him with a cough, but the man next to him pauses mid-conversation to give him a weird look anyway.
“What, like mentally?”
“Well, I mostly meant in general, but yeah.”
Renjun daintily takes a sip of water and seems to think over his question. He always pauses before he opens his mouth to talk, like he actually thinks before he speaks. Donghyuck can’t say the same for himself. “I’d say everyone in the Na family has a couple of screws loose.”
“Huh.”
Honestly, that would explain a lot of things.
—
Things go back to normal after that, if you can qualify anything in Donghyuck’s life as ‘normal.’ His mother lets him stay home from school for two whole days in lieu of an apology for getting angry at him before the gala. Donghyuck tries to return the suit he borrowed from Jaemin, only to be met with a “Keep it. It looks better on you.”
Whatever that means.
Donghyuck’s mother gets a raise soon after, and she uses the first paycheck to buy him a bike. It’s red, his favorite color, and now he has an excuse to ditch the shiny black chauffeur car that keeps bringing him to school. Unfortunately, he then realizes that he barely remembers how to ride a bike, but he’ll take bloody knees and a couple of mild concussions over being in close proximity to Na Jaemin five days a week until they graduate.
It doesn’t end up mattering though, because Jaemin is going to take over the business within the next couple of years, and he needs to prepare accordingly. Donghyuck isn’t sure what that preparation entails exactly, because all of a sudden Jaemin becomes a ghost and is only ever at the house occasionally. Donghyuck imagines that they take him to some remote location far away, training him like a samurai before he’s deemed worthy of officially taking the CEO position.
It doesn’t bother Donghyuck at all, because without Jaemin in his hair (or depending on how you looked at it, Donghyuck in Jaemin’s hair) he can focus on getting his diploma and figuring out what the fuck he’s going to do with his life after he graduates. He always told himself that he had time to completely find himself, he was still young after all, but then all of a sudden eighteen was sneaking up on him and he had no plan. He needed to make money, this much he knew for sure, but career options that actually made you good cash were bleak. If only Jaemin had a sister or something, then maybe he could marry into the Na family and live a life of luxury for the rest of his days.
“I’m gonna die broke and alone,” Donghyuck announces to his mother a couple weeks before his graduation ceremony. “We can’t even afford a funeral, they’re just gonna throw me into the trash instead.”
They might actually be able to afford a funeral now, given the paychecks his mother is getting, but 90% of the money she’s making has been going to him and his sister’s college fund, rent, gas, and general savings in case of an emergency/sudden death.
“I would never let them do that to you,” she says, not looking up from the soap opera she’s immersed in during her rare moment of free time. “I’ll steal the body and keep you in the closet.”
“Are you saying I’m gonna die before you?”
“Are you calling me old?”
He holds back a yes because he doesn’t need any broken bones right now. He’s in crisis.
Soon enough, Donghyuck turns eighteen, and he starts volunteering at an animal shelter to kill time and feel like a productive and useful member of society. It doesn’t pay, but Donghyuck is just that selfless of a human being that he doesn’t mind. The animals are cute, he makes some friends, and he’s only been peed on twice.
Graduation comes around quickly, and while everyone is crying and pretending that they actually enjoyed high school or learned anything of value, Donghyuck is freaking out.
“You could always work with me until you figure things out,” is what his mother had told him the night before, and now Donghyuck is trying not to throw up all over the stage. The pay would be great, sure, and he would no doubt get the job immediately, fair, but Donghyuck had made a vow to himself long ago that he would never work for rich people.
It’s not that big of a deal, working at the estate wouldn’t kill him (at least physically) and he’s fine at house chores, but it’s the principle of it all. Whatever that means.
But as stubborn as Donghyuck is, he’s also a hypocrite.
And that’s how he ends up standing in front of the looming Na estate like many times before, except he’s not just a visitor this time; he’s working under his mother.
He doesn’t even know what the hell he’s gonna be doing, because don’t the Nas already have enough help as is? Their staff is already the size of a small army, and Donghyuck isn’t sure what more they could possibly need.
A butler opens the front doors for him, and as soon as he walks inside he feels like he’s stepped into an active war zone. Staff are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, and Donghyuck assumes they’re in preparation for something like always.
He tugs at the stuffy collar of his shirt boredly and looks around. No one has noticed his arrival because they’re all too busy stressing over something that probably isn’t even that important to normal, well-adjusted people.
He’s about to walk into the kitchen to find his mother when something catches his eye. There’s someone ascending down the large staircase in the middle of the house, and it takes a couple of confused seconds to realize that that someone is Jaemin. It only hits him then that he hasn’t really seen Jaemin in a while. It hasn’t been that long, but apparently it has been long enough for Jaemin to change. He still looks the same, but in the time he had been away doing whatever it is people like Na Jaemin do, he had grown a little taller and a little broader. His hair parted away from his face elegantly, revealing his strong eyebrows and predator eyes. It seems like he notices Donghyuck at the same time, because his eyes widen a modicum like he wasn’t expecting him to be here.
Yeah, suck it, Na, Donghyuck thinks to himself, but truthfully his palms start to sweat a little because Jaemin is…hot. In a completely heterosexual, purely observational way. He’s always been handsome, but what’s left of his teen-hood has clearly started to leave his body, and what replaced it is a boy becoming a man. Donghyuck still feels like a little kid sometimes; his voice is still a little high, he can barely grow a mustache let alone a full beard, and the old lady at the convenience store still coos at him whenever he hands her cash. He’s lost a good amount of his baby fat, though, and the last time he saw his father he was a couple centimeters taller than him, so he counts his blessings.
“Donghyuck-ssi,” he calls out first, and Donghyuck is thankful because his brain is five seconds away from completely short-circuiting. He makes his way down to the bottom of the staircase and Donghyuck meets him halfway. “Hey.”
“You don’t have to speak formally with me anymore,” Donghyuck blurts out, and Jaemin raises his eyebrows in amusement. The step he’s on gives him more uncomfortable height on Donghyuck to the point that he’s craning his neck up to look at him, and he feels like at any moment Jaemin will unhinge his jaw and swallow him whole. “We’ve known each other for, like, a year.” Donghyuck digs his nails into his palm and ignores the heat crawling uncomfortably up his neck. “Hi.”
Jaemin smiles at him, and it actually looks genuine, but there’s no way in hell some time away has made him a pleasant person. “Donghyuck-ah,” he corrects himself, and Donghyuck quite likes the way it rolls off his tongue anyway. “You look different.”
Donghyuck’s hand flies up unconsciously to touch his hair; he dyed it black not too long ago, and he finally got a haircut when it started to cover his ears after months of nagging from his mother telling him that he looked too much like his sister. It’s still long enough to fall over his eyes, though, and he’s feeling thankful for the slight obstruction of his vision so that he doesn’t have to look Jaemin directly in the eyes. “Oh. Yeah. You too.”
Donghyuck has no idea where all of his snark and innate charm has gone since the last time he saw Jaemin, but it’s probably because of the warm weather making him sluggish and not because of whatever it is Jaemin has going on.
“How have you been?” Jaemin asks conversationally, and Donghyuck can’t tell if he’s just being nice or if he’s genuinely curious. “It’s been a minute.”
“Fine,” Donghyuck nods slowly, not so subtly looking around for an out from the conversation. “I graduated. You? Are you going to become a CEO soon?”
Jaemin snorts a little, and Donghyuck isn’t sure what exactly is so funny. “I just became an adult. You wanna get rid of me that bad?”
That throws Donghyuck off guard a little, because since when did he and Jaemin joke around with each other? It’s familiar territory for him though, so he shakes it off. “Were you not good enough?”
“Very funny. I’ll still take over one day, but I’m still too young. I have a lot left to learn.”
“How much learning could possibly be left?” Donghyuck hadn’t meant to ask that out loud, but Jaemin seems to be very amused by the direction the conversation is going in, so whatever.
“Do you think businessmen just sit around all day and boss people around?”
Well, yes. “I mean, kinda.”
“Of course, you do.” He sends Donghyuck a kind smile, and Donghyuck can’t tell if he means of course you do because he’s broke, stupid, or both. Before he has time to be offended, Jaemin is hopping off of the last stair and making his way down the hall. “I’ll see you later, hm?”
“Cool,” Donghyuck nods, and it is cool. Awesome. Great. Nice.
Everything is completely fine.
Jaemin has had to deal with a lot of things in his life, but nothing will ever be as bad as having to pretend to be interested in keeping the family business afloat.
He graduates a couple of weeks early after his father pulls some strings and is whisked away to China to the Tianjin branch; he sits through dozens of seminars, lectures from his father, PowerPoints and board meetings, and a new tailored suit is added to his wardrobe everyday. He’d much rather wear a t-shirt like a normal kid, but nothing is ever normal when it comes to his family.
He’s irritated, quite frankly, but he can’t let it show because not doing what is expected of him will never be an option. The only upside to being in China is that he gets to see Renjun almost everyday, so he holds onto that little fact so he doesn’t hang himself with one of his expensive ties.
At least his impromptu imprisonment across the Yellow Sea doesn’t involve Lee Donghyuck, who has been a thorn in his side ever since they met. He planned on not thinking about him at all, but Renjun just so happened to be so taken by Donghyuck that he won’t shut up about him.
“Why do you hate his guts so much?” is what Renjun had asked him his first week in, and Jaemin had responded with a very unconvincing ‘I don’t,’ which led Renjun to berate him about how full of bullshit he was for ten minutes straight. Jaemin wasn’t really listening, because he knew that he didn’t hate Donghyuck, or anyone for that matter, so Renjun could believe whatever he wanted.
By the time he was finally allowed to go back home, he felt twenty years older and even worse off than before. He hadn’t absorbed anything his father had tried to teach him, and if he was being honest, he would rather just live a modest life and volunteer for the rest of his years instead of running a corporation. He didn’t say that, though; he just smiled and nodded whenever it seemed appropriate and hoped that his father couldn’t see through his bullshit.
Jaemin has had to deal with a lot of things in his life, but he never foresaw this happening.
He’s only been back in Seoul for a couple hours, and as soon as he gets back home he’s being fussed over and suffocated like he’s anyone actually important. (His father would probably say otherwise, because even if he plays the loving father role for the media, a father who supports and encourages his only child and successor, he truthfully believes that Jaemin is a worthless and lazy piece of shit. He’s never said it out loud, but Jaemin doesn’t need it spelled out for him to get the picture. He can see it in the way that he can never have a conversation with him that doesn’t involve something work-related, the way that he doesn't pay real attention to Jaemin unless eyes are on them. Jaemin thinks that if they cared more about the same things, maybe they would get along. But if Jaemin isn’t interested in doing something, he won’t put in pointless effort.)
The smothering and brown-nosing was expected, but what he wasn’t expecting was seeing Donghyuck again and then immediately finding out he’s joining the house staff. Whatever that entails.
He’s the same as he was the last time Jaemin saw him, except he’s a little taller and he’s lost a bit of his baby fat and his eyes are actually visible. So, maybe he’s a little different. Jaemin never really realized just how big his eyes are because they were always covered, (and Donghyuck only really makes eye contact with him when he wants to drive a point home) and he never really noticed just how innocent Donghyuck looks when he’s not opening his mouth to say something completely asinine.
None of it matters, they’re just observations, because Jaemin doesn’t see anything changing between them in the future. Just because Donghyuck will be doing whatever the hell it is he’ll be doing doesn’t mean he has to keep putting up with him. It’s clear that Jaemin will be preoccupied with things he doesn't care about for most of the year anyway. Jaemin expected Donghyuck to fuck off to college somewhere after graduation, but it’s fine, because he knows nothing if not how to adapt and adjust accordingly.
Except his plans for himself don’t matter anymore when his father calls him to his office the next day, telling him that he needs to take some time to ‘get his head straight’ and ‘remember what’s important.’
“Maybe you should go live with your uncle for a little while,” he tells him without looking up from his desk, casually flipping some papers in front of him like he can’t even be bothered to have a proper conversation. “You’re not taking this seriously. It might do you some good.”
He says it like it’s a mere suggestion, but the pinched smile on his face tells Jaemin that he doesn’t have a say in the matter. It’s becoming increasingly clear that his father is close to completely washing his hands of him altogether. Maybe he’d eventually get so frustrated that he’d try for another kid to be heir one day, or adopt some poor child into their family himself.
“For how long?” Jaemin asks calmly, but the blood in his body is boiling and bubbling into something thick and black.
“Until you’re fit to come back.” He finally looks up to look Jaemin in the eyes. “Don’t look so down. It’s for your own good, hm?”
Jaemin tenses and then relaxes his fists. There’s no use in fighting it; whatever his father asks for is exactly what he gets. “Fine.”
So he’s being exiled once again. He’d rather be paraded around in public with the word ‘FAILURE’ written across his forehead in big bold letters than be sent away again, but he tries to look at the positives. There’s really only one: he won’t have to be around his family.
He’s only seen his uncle a handful of times in his life, and he barely remembers them. He lives in Ulsan, and he and his father aren’t technically really on speaking terms, so maybe his father is doing it just to spite his brother. Whatever the case is, Jaemin is caught in the middle like he always is.
He exits the office without another word and bites his lip until he tastes metal, walking up the stairs to his room. He doesn’t even know when he’ll be leaving or how he’ll get there, but he starts throwing things into a suitcase anyway. If his father wanted him out of his hair, then so be it. If anything, the sooner he left, the better.
A shiny black car is sent for him at four in the morning the next day. It’s probably meant to be discreet, but Jaemin thinks it’s overkill. He must be meant to be whisked away in silence, a blip on the radar that disappears as soon as you notice it’s even there. He has no idea what his father is going to tell the world, probably that he’s going on some very important philanthropic mission in another country, or maybe that he’s doing business elsewhere. It doesn’t really matter.
The house is quiet, and all he can hear as he ascends down the stairs to his exile is the sound of the walls watching him, and the eyes of his grandfather following him from where he’s immortalized in a painting above the staircase.
The doorman greets him at the front, and even if he only offers Jaemin a curt nod, he can feel the questioning and pity in his gaze.
The sun isn’t up yet, leaving the sky a dull and depressing gray. It suits the mood, if anything. He gets in the car calmly, the smell of stiff leather and car freshener filling his nose. Just as the driver is starting up the car and preparing to take off down the cobblestone path, the front doors are creaking open loudly. His mother stumbles down the stone steps and rushes toward the car, tapping his window three times in succession. She’s not wearing any shoes, and her silk robe is falling off of her frame.
Jaemin rolls the window down quickly at the distraught look on her face, and she leans her head into the car to take his face gently between her hands.
“Jaemin-ah, what are you doing?”
“Going to Ulsan,” he tries to say, but the words come out garbled because of her palms digging into his cheeks.
She grips his cheeks tighter and he tenses in her hold. “No, I know that. Why are you going? You don’t have to go. Stay here, baby. What are you doing?”
“Dad wants me to go,” he tries to say nonchalantly once she drops her hands down to his shoulders, but it’s too early in the morning to act like it doesn’t hurt him. “To get my head straight.”
“He’s just not thinking,” she says as she smooths down the creases in his sweater, like she’s trying to convince herself more than anything. “You don’t have to go.” It all sounds like a roundabout way of saying don’t leave, and Jaemin shrugs her hands gently off of him, leaving them to hang limply in the negative space of the cold car.
“It might be good for me,” he reasons, trying to put some cheer in his voice that’s inappropriate for the hour. He knows that in reality the trip will be fruitless, especially if after all this time he still isn’t sure what exactly his father wants from him. It’s to placate his mother more than anything, who looks like she wants to punch him straight in the face or burst into tears or both. His father never consults her when he makes decisions; once he’s made up his mind about something, that’s just the way it’s got to be. He isn’t even sure how she knew what time he was leaving. She must have heard him leaving his room or ascending down the stairs as quietly as he possibly could, like a sixth sense. He wonders what his mother must think of her husband after all this time, if she still loves him or if she’s just too afraid of being alone. Maybe sending him away wasn’t just to hurt Jaemin, but to hurt her too.
“Don’t,” she whispers, and he’s not sure if she’s just talking about him leaving anymore. “Don’t do that.”
He sighs quietly out of his nose and reaches out to hold her cold hand, squeezing in what he hopes is a reassuring way. “It’s not a big deal. I’ll be back soon, alright?” He feels like he’s the parent and she’s the child at that moment, and he wonders what their relationship would be like if they were normal people.
“You wanna get away from him, is that it?”
Jaemin has never tried to make his distaste for his father discreet; if his father could outwardly hate him with no problem, then why couldn’t he do the same? But it was still rare for anyone to really address it, much less his mother of all people, the woman whose favorite pastime is playing pretend. He can’t figure out exactly how it makes him feel.
“Bye, mom.” He presses the button to roll the window back up, and she snatches her arms out of the car so they don’t get rolled over. A look of confusion flashes over her face before it simply goes blank. She’s saying something again, but it’s muffled nonsense to Jaemin ears.
“Drive, please,” he tells the faceless form behind the cracked open partition. He starts the engine back up and drives, leaving the shadowed figure of his mother behind at the bottom of the gray marble stairs, hands hanging limply by her sides.
The drive to Ulsan is almost six hours long, and Jaemin wonders if his father sent a car for him instead of buying him a train ticket just to annoy him. He puts his headphones in and sleeps most of it away.
When they arrive, it’s only ten-something in the morning. His uncle lives in a modest house, at least modest by the standards of the rest of their family. Jaemin hardly recognizes him, but his uncle shakes his hand and slaps him on the back so hard his lungs almost rupture anyway. He certainly has more personality than his brother, and it’s probably because he’s the most well-adjusted out of all of his relatives. He never wanted anything to do with the family business like Jaemin’s father, and he was probably better off for it. He wanted to work hard for himself and get a real job, to be a real man and start a family, whatever that meant. It’s a concept so outlandish that everyone hates him for it, but he seems happy enough.
Even if he hardly considers his house back in Seoul a home, a couple days in he does find himself missing it. He always thought that when people said that distance makes the heart grow fonder they were spouting bullshit, but now he’s starting to think that there might be some iota of truth to it. He misses his room, and he misses his mom.
His uncle tells him it’s better if he stays inside most of the time to avoid tabloids, and he doesn’t have to tell Jaemin twice. If it were up to him, he would be a hermit for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, his uncle does take him and his cousin to soccer games occasionally, teaches him how to fish, and lets him drive his car. It's the most normal Jaemin has ever felt in his entire life, and he’s unsure how he survived before he was allowed to do these mundane, ordinary things.
He watches television in the living room occasionally, and he sees stories about a CEO’s son who went away to deal with ‘personal matters.’ It’s so vague and such a cop-out that it almost makes Jaemin laugh, but he’s not a businessman yet and he’s technically still just a kid, so it’ll become unimportant news very quickly.
He soon discovers that his uncle works just as much as everyone else he knows, and Jaemin holes himself up in the homey guest room most days. At the very least, he brought along his camera, and he takes one photo everyday to at least document his time there. The next thing he knows, there’s more photos than he can count. The next thing he knows, it’s winter. The next thing he knows, he’s finally nineteen and he’s not sure if he even wants to go back.
His mother calls him every single day that he’s gone, and she eventually stops nagging him when she sees how relaxed he seems. He had never known how it felt to have no pressure on his shoulders, no people to please, no one to be except for himself. She tells him how things are going in Seoul: the same as always, his dad is pissed at him, they’re opening a Singaporean branch, Donghyuck has been a wonderful addition to their staff.
Donghyuck has been a wonderful addition to their staff. He hates the curiosity that overtakes him, but he had assumed that Donghyuck would eventually move on after this amount of time or get bored or something along those very vague lines.
“He’s been keeping me company while you’ve been gone,” she says over the phone in a very fond voice, and it sours Jaemin’s mood immediately. It must show all over his face, because his uncle looks at him confusedly from the driver’s seat of his SUV.
“Has he?’ Jaemin asks pleasantly, contorting his face into something calm and collected. “How is he?”
Despite himself, he’s genuinely curious.
“Oh, he’s been great,” his mother chirps on the other end, completely oblivious to Jaemin’s progressively souring mood. “He’s been volunteering and helping us out with events. You know, he should be getting his license soon. He’s grown up so much.”
So have I, Jaemin thinks, so pay attention to me instead. He can’t say that he hadn’t thought about Donghyuck occasionally over the last couple of months, but it was always in passing. Like, the song on the radio is one Donghyuck used to hum or that dog kinda looks like Donghyuck or I wonder if mom has adopted Donghyuck yet. Maybe he wasn’t that far off, given the way she’s still gushing over him after almost two years of knowing him. And that’s when Jaemin realizes he doesn’t really know Donghyuck at all.
“Come back soon, hm?” She cuts his train of thought off suddenly. “I miss you.”
It’s not really up to Jaemin, nothing ever really is, but he smiles and says, “Okay.”
—
His father calls him three weeks later and tells him that he’s needed at the estate as soon as possible.
It would be a bold-faced lie to say that Jaemin isn’t disappointed. But most of all, he’s annoyed. He was only finally getting used to life outside the bubble that had been carefully curated for him, and now he has to leave it all behind to be a prodigal son again. His uncle tells him that he’s welcome to come back anytime, and the sentiment is appreciated, but Jaemin has a feeling he won’t be allowed back in Ulsan anytime soon.
His father’s plan, which wasn’t really much of a plan in the first place, had backfired and Jaemin was more or less the same person he was when he left. He has an inkling that his father had thought that Jaemin would hate living life as a normal person, whatever normal meant. He was meant to come crawling back, desperate for the things that were previously handed to him on a silver platter, but all it did was give him some time to think about how much he didn't want that anymore, and maybe never did. If he could live in a modest house and go fishing for the rest of his life, maybe then he would finally be happy. And that’s when he realizes his father really doesn’t know him at all, either.
Jaemin has been doing a lot of realizing lately.
The main takeaway being that he’s simply tired. If everyone around him has an idea of what he should want and who he should be, then that’s who he’ll be.
He’s bought a train back home and immediately shipped back to the other side of the country with his giant suitcase and Leica camera around his neck.
His mother squeezes the life out of him as soon as he steps past the threshold of their house, the doorman rushing to take the suitcase out of his hands so he doesn’t drop it on her dainty feet. She reeks of perfume and persimmon wine, but he ignores it and lets her crush all of his bones into fine powder.
“Jaemin-ah, it’s like I haven’t seen you in years,” she mumbles into his shoulder. “It was awful without you here. I thought I might die.”
“That’s really dramatic.” He pats her consolingly on the back. “I missed you, too. I’m not going anywhere, alright?”
It wasn’t that outlandish of a theory to think that she had almost drank herself to death while he was gone, so he means it this time. Her drinking problem had already been concerning before he left, and he didn’t need yet another thing on his conscience.
“Good.” She lets him go and looks startlingly sober for a second. “If you do, I’ll kill you, okay? I’ll kill you, I mean it.”
Jaemin wonders just what the hell happened while he was gone that no one told him about and nods curtly. “Yes, ma’am.”
A kitchen staff comes up to him and asks him if he wants anything to drink when he sees something a couple feet away. A couple messy tufts of hair and a large pair of curious eyes peek from around the corner of the kitchen threshold, and Jaemin immediately recognizes that it’s Donghyuck.
When they meet eyes, Donghyuck rounds the corner. As if she has a sixth sense, his mother turns around as soon as he materializes into the room.
“Hyuckie,” she garbles and makes grabby hands at him, “Look who’s back.”
Hyuckie is definitely new.
Donghyuck looks pretty much just the same as Jaemin left him, albeit a little older now. His naturally dark hair is a sweet honey brown now, and his skyscraper legs seem to have grown miles longer.
“Jaemin-ah,” he greets pleasantly, steadying his mother where she looks like she’s about to trip over thin air, “It’s good to have you back.”
All Jaemin can really focus on is his veiny hands secured around his mother’s thin shoulders and the way she looks at Donghyuck like he came from her own womb. It’s vomit-inducing.
“Donghyuck-ah,” Jaemin parrots back and tears his eyes away from his hands, “It’s good to be back.”
That’s definitely a lie, but Donghyuck smiles gently and nods back like he’s happy for him. He looks nice when he’s not trying to wither away at every last one of your nerves.
“Go help Jaemin-ssi with his things. I’ll go tell the kitchen to prepare lunch,” the doorman tells Donghyuck, and that’s also new. Donghyuck lets go of his mother and nods, taking the large suitcase from him and gesturing at Jaemin to head up the stairs first.
Jaemin swallows down the bitter taste in his mouth and shakes his head. “After you.”
He forgot what it was like to not be able to go anywhere by himself, waited on hand and foot even though he’s now legally an adult and out of school for over a year now. Donghyuck blinks at him owlishly before following his orders and trekking up the stairs, Jaemin in tow.
Donghyuck is certainly stronger now, too; just a year ago he had been a scrawny little thing, and even if he’s still thin as a rail, his shoulders are wider and he’s able to carry Jaemin’s suitcase up the winding suitcase with little trouble.
They make it to Jaemin’s room, and it’s just as neat as he left it. Donghyuck settles his suitcase onto the floor and looks around unabashedly, and it’s only then that Jaemin realizes he’s never been in his room. He always refused when they were younger purely out of spite, but now that Donghyuck is in his room in the present day, he feels a bit exposed. He doesn’t like it.
“I can help you unpack?” Donghyuck hesitantly suggests, and Jaemin has no idea why he’s the one who sounds unsure. Jaemin has half a mind to tell him to go fuck off somehwere, which is why he surprises himself when he shrugs and says, “Sure.”
Jaemin is grown and more than competent, meaning no one should be in his room helping him with his things in the first place. It’s almost as bad as when his old nanny tied his shoes for him when he was younger because his mother wasn’t there to teach him, and she kept tying them for him even when he got the gist of it. But he finds he doesn’t quite mind the image of Donghyuck kneeling over his suitcase on the floor of his childhood bedroom, avoiding his gaze like he’ll explode if they meet eyes.
“You pack like an old man,” Donghyuck observes, and it seems his personality hasn’t changed much at all, either. It’s wildly contradictory how he can barely meet Jaemin’s eyes half of the time but can still insult him easily, like it’s second nature to him. Just as the sky is blue and the sun sets at night, Donghyuck will always find a way to bully him. “Why the fuck do you only have a couple shirts but a billion grooming items?”
Jaemin kneels down on the other side of the suitcase and snatches the expensive shaving cream out of his grubby little hands. “Hygiene is more important than appearance.”
Donghyuck blinks at him. “You’re weird.”
You’re one to talk, Jaemin thinks, watching as Donghyuck lifts his camera out of the suitcase to examine it. “Don’t touch that.”
“What, this?” He bounces the camera up and down in his hand like he’s playing with a baby, and Jaemin’s heart drops all the way down to his ass. “Why not?”
Jaemin snatches the camera from his grasp so quickly that Donghyuck almost topples over face-first into the suitcase. “I don’t like it when people touch my things,” he says carefully, but his blood is starting to simmer a little bit. It’s not even that big of a deal, but the simple act of Donghyuck touching his camera makes him want to choke him out.
Donghyuck looks unfazed, and honestly, Jaemin has yet to find out if he’s fazed by much of anything. “And yet you’re letting me help you unpack.”
Well, Donghyuck certainly got him there. Jaemin doesn’t have an answer to that, so to gain the upper hand back he offers,
“If you shut up, I’ll let you see the photos I took.”
Donghyuck’s interest seems to pique at that, and he diligently starts to take out the rest of Jaemin’s things and sort them into piles on the floor. He’s like a dog, Jaemin thinks, only behaving at the first sign of a reward for his good behavior.
Donghyuck asks him where each of his things go, and Jaemin gets up to sit on his bed and delegate him around like he truly is a maid, leaning back on his palms as Donghyuck gets his scent over all of his things. The Jaemin of the past would have never let Donghyuck anywhere near his underwear drawer, but maybe he has been changing more than he would have liked.
It doesn’t take long for them (re:Donghyuck) to finish putting everything away, and when he’s done he hovers in front of where Jaemin is sitting on his bed like he’s unsure of where to put himself. His gaze flickers to the empty space next to Jaemin, but he makes no move to sit there, like he needs permission. Jaemin doesn’t give it to him, finally satisfied because he has steady footing again. It is his room after all.
“Can I see your pictures now?” Donghyuck asks him like he’s annoyed, but the ruddiness climbing up the bare expanse of his tan neck is giving him away. “You promised.”
“Fine,” Jaemin says, and he finally pats the space next to him, gesturing for him to sit. Donghyuck looks relieved, and he plops down a body-width away from Jaemin. At least he remembers what some boundaries are.
Jaemin grabs his camera from where he had rested it on the foot of his bed earlier and turns it on. It chimes to life, and Donghyuck scoots a hair’s length closer to get a better look at the screen.
Jaemin scrolls through the gallery all the way to the beginning when he first arrived in Ulsan. It’s a picture of a stray cat in a field of green grass.
“This is the first thing I saw when I got there,” Jaemin explains, and this is easy and familiar and not that painful, talking about photographs. He flicks to the next photograph. “This is a kid that was busking outside of the Big Crown Stadium.”
Donghyuck makes approving noises in the back of his throat and gasps when Jaemin shows him pictures of the sky and the ocean, and asks him if he liked it there. Jaemin finds himself being honest. “It was way better than being here,” he shrugs.
He can feel Donghyuck’s curious gaze on the side of his face, but if he has something to say, he holds it back. Jaemin continues clicking through this gallery, and it’s only then that he realizes just how many photos he took over the past couple of months. Some he barely remembers.
“Is that your uncle?” Donghyuck asks him when Jaemin lands on a photograph from one of their fishing trips. They were on a boat, and Jaemin had taken a candid of his back as he hunched over a can of worms, the sky a cloudless gray above them.
“Hm, yeah,” Jaemin hums, and it’s only then that he realizes Donghyuck had somehow gotten closer while he was clicking through his photos. He smells like floor cleaner and chocolate, and Jaemin can feel the warmth coming from him like he’s a human space heater.
“He looks so normal.”
Jaemin snorts confusedly at that, but he thinks he has a good idea of what Donghyuck means.
“Are you saying the rest of my family isn’t normal?”
“Yeah,” Donghyuck doesn’t miss a beat and nods, scooting even closer to get a better look. “That must be where you get it from, huh?”
Jaemin thinks he’s right, so he lets him get away with it for now.
Things pass uneventfully like that for the next couple of days, and Jaemin becomes convinced that he’s going to be on temporary house arrest until he’s old and gray.
His father hadn’t told him specifically that he’s forbidden to step a certain point away from the estate; he can still go outside, talk to people, whatever it is people like Jaemin do with their time. But the subtext of his tone when he welcomed him back and said something about how he was still quite young and had all the time in the world has Jaemin guessing that he’s postponing his early retirement by at least a couple more years. Not that Jaemin opposes the decision, but it does quite a successful job at making him feel useless. Jaemin doesn’t even want anything to do with it, so he doesn’t know why after all these years his father’s blatant disapproval still cuts deep.
A part of him deflates a little bit after that even though he promised himself that he wouldn’t let dumb things affect his mood. It’s a chore just getting out of bed and the food that’s made for him doesn’t look appetizing anymore. It’s like the little bit of control that he had left has suddenly slipped away, leaving him numb and blindsided.
He’s sent to the family tailor since he’s grown a couple centimeters, and he tells Jaemin that he’s gained a little weight. It’s purely an observation; it’s his job to notice these things, and it's true that Jaemin had been allowing himself to eat more since he had less pressure to worry about his image. When he goes back home later that day, he observes himself in the mirror and notices that his face has almost filled back out to the way it was before he had finally lost the last of his baby fat, and there’s a small pouch of fat where his abs used to be visible. He has gained weight. He doesn’t like it.
Jaemin prides himself on his impeccable self-control. He knows how much to talk and when to be quiet, when to smile and when to keep a neutral face, how much exercise he needs and how much food to eat. He’s too young to let himself go, and he doesn’t need anyone making snide comments behind his back. Appearance is important.
Honestly speaking, the first meal he skips is an accident. He wakes up late and breakfast has already been made and eaten, so he says that he’ll wait for dinner. But he finds that he quite likes the feeling of the emptiness of his stomach, like it makes him clean inside. No one questions him when he says that he feels sick and can’t eat. A staff member hands him a mug of ginger tea, and he drinks it in his room before knocking out.
When he wakes up on an empty stomach, his head is throbbing and he can hardly stand up. His mom notices him stumbling down the stairs a little, and he realizes belatedly that he’ll have to eat something to keep from concerning anyone. He snatches a banana up from the kitchen for breakfast and gulps down 3 bottles of water for lunch. He brings dinner upstairs and flushes it down his toilet. A little bit of guilt pinches at his nerves watching the vegetables turn into mush and swirl down the toilet into the sewers, but it's a small price to pay to get back in shape.
He gets a couple of weird looks everytime he brings dinner up to his room, and it worries him a little. But it probably doesn’t matter.
Because if anyone found out, they would probably just tell him congratulations on your diet. It’s just temporary, anyway.
Donghyuck finds himself hating working for rich people less than he initially thought he would.
Even if it wasn’t verbalized, it was obvious that 90% of the staff had their reservations about some kid working with them. A broke kid, at that. Donghyuck simply took it as a challenge; he would just have to make them like him. And if they still didn’t like him after that, then that was simply their problem to deal with.
Without any Jaemin or Jaemin-like things to distract him and with his mother’s (impatient) guidance, he managed to wiggle his way under the skin of most of the people who were uncomfortable with him being in their workspace. He played up his cuteness and weaponized his sob story about his dickhead father and little sister he had to take care of back home (neither of which lived with them anymore), and eventually everyone but a select few was happy to have him there and show him the ropes. His mother didn’t appreciate him using their personal family business to garner sympathy, but Donghyuck wondered why she didn’t take advantage of it more.
He continued to volunteer at the animal shelter because it gave him something to do in his free time, and he finally starts taking driving lessons because he can pay for it now. He still essentially has no direction, but at least he finally has money to spare.
Donghyuck uses his first paycheck to buy his mother a bottle of perfume that she’s always wanted, and she smacks him on the back of the head hard because he’s spending his money like it’s endless when he needs to be saving, but she starts wearing it everyday.
He never liked doing house chores and domestic work, and he still doesn’t like doing it, but it’s nice to at least be getting paid for it. It seems that their version of the family business has become washing dishes and preparing food and running baths and steaming someone else’s laundry.
Donghyuck didn’t think about his job requiring him to do these things for Jaemin specifically until he comes back from his impromptu trip and he’s standing right in front of him, in the flesh.
Jaemin looks healthier, certainly more relaxed, and Donghyuck is sure anyone would look a thousand times better if they were given a break from the Na family. He’s taller and he’s filled out even more, the width of his shoulders making Donghyuck look like a child in comparison. He’s just as handsome as he was when he left, if not more, and it makes Donghyuck uncomfortable in a way that he can’t explain.
He’s not repressed enough to say that he’s not attracted to Jaemin, anyone with functioning eyes would be, but it only stops at the physical. No amount of rock-solid muscle or money in a bank account could fix a personality like that. A personality that Donghyuck has yet to completely wrap his head around.
The realization is kind of mortifying; it’s not even because Jaemin is a man, (he’d crossed that long and harrowing bridge at age fifteen) but because it’s Jaemin. If Donghyuck is going to have a gross, embarrassing, horrifying infatuation with someone, he would rather it be with someone less confusing and unattainable. But life always has a good way of throwing him for a loop when things are going too well for him.
So when Jaemin shows him the photos he took while he was away in Ulsan, Donghyuck chalks it up to a rare good mood. What he was not expecting, however, was Jaemin asking him a week later if he wanted to play tennis with him and Renjun.
Donghyuck didn’t know that rich people outside of movies and television actually played tennis, so it almost makes him laugh. But then it sets in that Jaemin is voluntarily requesting his company, and he’s not sure if he’s just doing it to be nice or if his tolerance for Donghyuck has increasingly improved. Either way, Donghyuck has never played tennis in his life, and he already deems walking up and down the winding staircase everyday enough exercise for himself. Which is why he surprises himself when he says “Sure.”
He knows that there’s a lot of the estate that he hasn’t even seen yet, but he had no idea that there was an entire tennis court in the back. He wouldn’t be surprised if one day he stumbled upon an entire grocery store.
It’s annoyingly hot and muggy outside, and Donghyuck immediately regrets leaving the house where it’s nice and air-conditioned to the point it feels like a hospital.
“I think I might die,” he says as soon as he steps onto the court, and Jaemin gives him an unimpressed look from where he’s standing over a caddy of tennis balls with Renjun. “Hi, Renjun. S’been a while.”
“You’ll survive,” Jaemin tells him sweetly, and Renjun sends him a friendly wave from beside. His hair is now a platinum blond that almost looks white in the sun. “Here,” Jaemin says, “You can be the ball boy.”
Renjun laughs, and Donghyuck physically recoils back in offense. Ball boys are almost as lame as waterboys, except they get slightly more action.
“What makes you think I don’t know how to play tennis?”
“Well, do you?” Renjun asks, and Donghyuck can’t tell if he’s genuinely asking or making fun of him, and he doesn’t like it.
“Good point.”
Secretly, Donghyuck is grateful he’s not being forced to play tennis. Tennis is for rich kids and posers anyway, so he’ll take being on the sidelines over fraternizing with the enemy any day.
They’re both surprisingly good at it, and Donghyuck wonders if it was just another thing they were both forced to learn how to do as children for the family reputation or something. He’s not sure how playing a sport is good for business, but Donghyuck doesn’t know much about anything concerning this part of society in the first place. The only reason he was made to learn piano when he was younger was because his mother didn’t want him to be completely useless and untalented. It worked, but Donghyuck hasn’t touched an instrument in a couple of years.
This is the most emotive he’s ever seen Jaemin, and at that moment he realizes that he’d never really seen Jaemin have fun before. He’s always sat with a straight face like he’s lost somewhere in his mind, or smiling so widely that it can only be for show. This Jaemin, when he’s around his friend, when he’s not shoved into a stuffy suit and paraded around like an object, looks like an actual person. Not someone untouchable, unattainable. Donghyuck watches the way his biceps flex and the way his hands tense and relax around the handle of his racket, the way he throws his head back in delighted laughter whenever he scores, the way the sun reflects off of his coal-dark hair and shiny white teeth. He makes sure to store away the moment in case he’s never allowed to see anything like it again.
Donghyuck has no real grasp on the rules of tennis, but judging from the taunting and sneering and expletives being thrown, Renjun is winning by a landslide.
“Go Team Huang!” Donghyuck yells unhelpfully from the ground when he’s given up running after balls in favor of trying not to die of heat stroke on the acrylic court. “Beat his ass!”
“Why are you on his side?” Jaemin complains loudly. He takes a large swig from his water bottle, and Donghyuck pointedly ignores the up and down bob of his Adam’s apple.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” Donghyuck asks, and turns to Renjun who’s blowing a raspberry at Jaemin.
Renjun walks over to him to give him a high-five. “You should keep him,” he says, turning to where Jaemin is watching them resentfully. “He’s a catch.”
Donghyck feels mild embarrassment settle deep into the pit of his stomach, but he laughs it off. “You’ve known me way longer,” Jaemin nags, “and you’ve only met him like twice. You’re a traitor.”
They continue to bicker, but Donghyuck doesn’t hear any of it.
You should keep him, he thinks. He’s a catch.
—
Jaemin is fairly nice to him after that, in his very Jaemin way. Donghyuck is just bracing for something to set him off or send him crawling back into his shell.
He’s noticed that it usually has something to do with his father, whether it be something that he says or something that he does. Donghyuck can’t say that he blames Jaemin, but he has no idea what it’s like. He only sees his own dad a couple times a year, and they exchange a handful of words at most. He’s not sure which one is worse. Maybe they’re equally as bad.
Donghyuck wants to test the limits of Jaemin’s kindness, so a couple of days after the first tennis game he was invited to, he asks Jaemin if he can teach him how to play.
Jaemin must be bored out of his mind because he shrugs and says why not. Once Donghyuck is off the clock and wiping dish soap onto his jeans, he tells his mother that he’s going to stay behind for a while and that he’ll see her at home. She barely spares him a glance because she’s tired out of her mind, telling him to at least be home by 12AM or she’ll beat him up.
“The balls and rackets are in the storage room,” Jaemin tells him as Donghyuck follows him up the stairs, and Donghyuck has no idea what storage room he’s even referring to. “This way.”
The aforementioned storage room seems to be all the way on the other side of the estate, at the end of a very, very long hallway. It reminds Donghyuck of The Shining, and he imagines a pair of creepy twins in matching baby blue dresses suddenly appearing in front of them. Modern and abstract paintings line the pristine cream-white walls as they walk along, colorful people following their movements and jagged lines reaching out to touch them. No family photos anywhere to be found, is what Donghyuck notices, staring straight back at the bottomless, imploring eyes of a woman painted in rushed dark blue streaks.
Donghyuck tears his eyes away from the creepy people on the walls and stares at the back of Jaemin’s head. It’s a nice head, his brain unhelpfully supplies.
“When did you learn how to play tennis?”
Jaemin is someone who can go long intervals of time in silence, simply keeping to himself. It drives Donghyuck crazy; he always has to fill the silence somehow. Maybe he just has too many thoughts, and he needs somewhere to put them. Maybe Jaemin really is a robot and doesn’t have any thoughts at all.
“My mom taught me when I was younger. She was really good when she was a kid, and she told me that if I didn’t wanna be a boring businessman like dad, I could just become a tennis player if I wanted to.”
Well, that’s certainly depressing. Dognhyuck tries to think of something sympathetic but not prying to say, but Jaemin cuts the conversation for the both of them when they reach the end of the hallway. He sighs ominously and opens the door to the storage room unceremoniously.
Donghyuck doesn’t see any tennis balls. Instead, he's met with the sight of the pale back of a man, dainty legs wrapped around his waist as his hips pivot like a jackhammer into the person under him. Donghyuck stumbles backwards as Jaemin jerks back like he’s been slapped in the face, shoulder bumping hard into Donghyuck’s chest. At the sound of the door creaking open, the woman sitting on the counter underneath the man gasps and rushes to cover herself up with the robe beside her, eyes becoming so large they look like they’ll pop out of her head at any moment. Donghyuck gasps scandalously when he realizes that she’s the head cook, someone his mother works with closely and speaks highly of. The man bends down to hurriedly pull up his trousers where they were pooled at his ankles.
“Jaemin-ssi!” she exclaims, the hand holding the flowery robe around her tightening. Donghyuck rubs his chest in pain and slight mortification, and now that the man has turned around and his face has come into view, Donghyuck realizes that it’s Jaemin’s father. An uncomfortable flush creeps down his neck and bile rushes up his throat.
“Did you…did you have these walls soundproofed?” The tone in Jaemin’s voice is completely unreadable, and Donghyuck takes a step back as the absolute uncomfortableness of the situation skyrockets even more.
“I’m just gonna–”
“Oh my god, Donghyuck-ah?” His eyes widen when he realizes that the head cook whose name is suddenly hard to remember is referring to him, bold even when she’s just been caught in the act and Jaemin’s father is next to her, one tug away from his dick being half out.
“Why are you awake?” Jaemin’s father asks, or demands, like he still knows that he has the upper hand in the situation, even when he’s half naked. “And why is Donghyuck still here? Non live-in staff have gone home by now.”
Indignation trickles nastily down Donghyuck’s back at the way his father is talking about him like he’s not even there, and he has half a mind to cuss him out. Before Donghyuck can begin to even think of anything to say, a cold and bony hand wraps around his wrist with the grip of a thousand bodybuilders, and he’s being dragged away like a sack of potatoes back down the hall.
“Sorry you had to see that,” Jaemin apologizes as he continues to drag Donghyuck down the hall and all the way down the stairs. Donghyuck would complain if he wasn’t absolutely mortified.
“See what?” Donghyuck asks, and a small, genuine smile flashes across Jaemin’s face before he schools his expression back into something neutral just as quickly. He glances down to where his hand is still wrapped around Donghyuck’s wrist, almost completely engulfing it, and retracts it quickly. “I think you should go. We can work on it…another day.”
“Yeah,” Donghyuck picks up his backpack from the bottom of the stairway and swings it onto his back. He can hardly look at Jaemin. The butler is called back to the foyer to escort him out, and that’s that.
The next time Donghyuck steps foot into the Na estate, he prepares for the worst, just in case.
As inappropriate as it sounds, this is the most interesting thing that Donghyuck has ever witnessed in his life.
Anyone with a brain could tell that Jaemin’s father didn’t love his wife, but he never expected him to be fucking someone else, a staff member, no less. It’s the type of stuff he sees in those makjang dramas that his mother loves to watch. An unfaithful husband, an unstable mother, a bitter son. Donghyuck could write a script about it.
It’s so shocking that he almost tells his mother about it, but then he realizes that he shouldn’t tell anyone unless he wants the entire city to set on fire. No one around here knows how to keep their mouth shut, and a scandal would be bad for everyone involved.
It’s at that moment that Donghyuck wishes he actually kept in touch with people from school after graduation; most of his relationships were shallow and face-value at best, and it was hard to find people who were normal and didn’t shove other kid’s heads down the bathroom toilets. Or whatever it was they did.
But most all, he’s just worried about how Jaemin is feeling. Finding out that your dad is cheating on your mom would be insane to deal with for any normal person, so he can’t even begin to imagine how Jaemin, who’s quite the opposite of a normal person, is taking it.
Donghyuck is expecting Jaemin to get all closed-up and weird around him, and for a moment he mourns the friendship that was actually progressing between them–if it could even be considered that.
For his next couple of shifts, he’s expecting to get called to Jaemin’s father’s office, like he’s a domineering principal. Maybe he would scold Donghyuck for overstepping his boundaries and staying over too long, or maybe he would threaten to kill him if Donghyuck opened his big stupid mouth. It’s probably a bit of a dramatic thought, but Donghyuck wouldn’t put it past people like him.
When there’s complete radio silence from him, Donghyuck isn’t sure if he should be relieved or if he should be pissing his pants. Maybe he was planning how to make Donghyuck’s death look like an accident. That would suck, because Donghyuck still hasn’t crossed anything off of his bucket list.
The head cook, whose name Donghyuck still doesn’t remember and kind of doesn’t want to remember anymore, continues work like normal, although she’s crazily jumpy. She looks awfully guilty, like she’s killed a man and gotten away with it. With the amount of secrets these people keep, Donghyuck wouldn’t put it past her. Either way, it seems like Jaemin’s father isn’t even breaking a sweat about it, so Donghyuck doesn’t know why she’s acting like she’s about to lose her job. Or be executed.
Donghyuck has not even an inkling of what Jaemin could possibly be doing, but whatever it is must be very important and time-consuming because he rarely makes an appearance during the day. Maybe Jaemin is planning how to make his own father’s death look like an accident.
That would certainly put Donghyuck’s mind at ease.
The days Jaemin actually appears for more than a couple of minutes, Donghyuck makes sure to get a good look at him to try and gauge what’s going on in his dumb head.
The most noticeable and alarming thing is that his face is looking a little gaunt, and he’s looking paler than normal. He’s always wearing baggy clothes when he’s not prettied up for the outside, but his already knife-sharp collarbones are protruding a bit more from where they’re hiding underneath his sweatshirt.
“Do you still wanna play tennis?”
The first thing he’s said to Donghyuck in weeks, and he says it nonchalantly like he hasn’t been M.I.A. for days on end. Donghyuck had been in the laundry room hunched over a washing machine with more buttons than he’d ever seen in his life, contemplating if a paycheck was worth the pain of figuring out how to use expensive and convoluted household appliances. When his voice rings out into the room, Donghyuck flinches and hits his knee so hard against the machine that he yelps and keels over.
“Is that a no?” Jaemin is looking at him like he’s unimpressed, but Donghyuck can tell he wants to laugh at him.
“You can’t just sneak up on someone like that, Jesus Christ!” Donghyuck whines, staggering back up into a standing position and cradling his knee. “What did you say?”
Jaemin crosses his arms over his chest and leans against the doorway casually like he hadn’t almost sent Donghyuck to an early grave ten seconds prior. “Tennis,” he repeats patiently. “Do you wanna learn or not?”
Donghyuck internally cringes; the last time he was supposed to learn how to play tennis, the image of Jaemin’s father balls-deep inside of the head cook was burned into his retinas instead. He really wouldn’t like a repeat of that.
Jaemin looks like he knows what he’s thinking, but he doesn’t bring it up. For his sake, Donghyuck won’t either.
“I’d love to, but I’m kind of in the middle of something. Something, meaning your dirty laundry.”
Jaemin frowns like he’s offended. “It’s not just mine.”
Donghyuck rolls his eyes and turns back to the washing machine with one thousand buttons taunting him. Why can’t they just go to a laundromat like normal people? “Anyway, I’m busy.”
“Just take a break,” Jaemin says like it’s the simplest thing in the world. “You can come back later.”
Donghyuck looks at him like he’s grown another head because not only is he acting like he’s so far removed from the real world he can’t see straight, but he’s also insisting that Donghyuck come. With him. To be in his vicinity.
“This is literally my job. You know what that is, don’t you?”
Jaemin uncrosses his arms from over his chest and shrugs like the jab didn’t get under his skin. “I can do it for you.”
Donghyuck stumbles back like he’s been hit, holding onto the edge of the machine for balance. “You know how to do laundry?”
Jaemin blinks at him. “Hilarious.”
But really, he was only half joking. When has Na Jaemin ever needed to do laundry when other people could simply do it for him? Why did he have basic life skills?
“Not everything is done for me, you know,” he continues, and Donghyuck can’t tell if he’s genuinely angry or not. “I can take care of myself.”
Donghyuck believes him. It doesn't take a genius to look at him and realize that he’s competent. It’s still hard to believe that he’ll voluntarily do laundry for Donghyuck though.
“Alright.”
He kicks the washing machine he was fighting with moments before and immediately regrets it when a sharp pain shoots up his foot, but it makes Jaemin laugh, so it’s worth it.
Na Jaemin does not consider himself a hateful person by any means.
There are a lot of things he doesn’t like, but never hates. He always makes sure to say ‘I love you,’ to his mom, he volunteers, he loves children, and he doesn’t jaywalk. But when it comes to his father, he’s starting to come very close.
He’s not stupid; it wasn’t really a surprise that his father was being unfaithful. But to do it in his own house, with one of the staff members he hired no less, that was just crossing a line. Jaemin doesn’t like it when lines are crossed.
What’s bothering him the most about it isn’t even the image of his father’s back that presses against his eyelids everytime he tries to go to sleep–it’s the fact that he’s realizing his mother knew all along.
She didn’t say anything, but in retrospect it should’ve been obvious. She’s always been good at faking things, but she’s really been putting on a performance lately, like everything is fine. She’s been tense, on edge, and when she thought no one was looking, completely dejected. Knowing her, she probably blames herself, probably thinks that it’s something that she did or could have prevented, if she were prettier, skinnier, sexier, better. Jaemin should’ve seen the signs.
And to think Jaemin hadn’t even tried to help her or talk to her because he’d been too caught up in his own nonsense. He’s starting to think that he can’t do anything right.
He’s not a good son, he’s not a good heir, and clearly he’s not disciplined enough because it’s taking way too long to get the last bits of fat off of his face. The weight is leaving his legs and waist the fastest, but everything else is having a hard time catching up.
The only way he can vent his frustrations in a subtle and incognito way is to walk around the tennis court until his knees feel like jelly and sweat is falling from his body like rain. When he was little, he would pace around his room whenever he was angry, and eventually he would get so tired that he forgot what he was mad about in the first place. Now, this has the same effect, with the added benefit of cardio.
Jaemin was never really an exercise person, but once he sees that his face is starting to slim back down and his stomach is back to being flat, he thinks that he could get used to it.
When he goes back to the tailor a couple of weeks after he was told about his weight gain, the tailor hums underneath his breath with a measuring tape around his waist and tells him he’s slimmed back down. (His mother tells him he’s starting to look like a skeleton and that he needs to eat more, but that doesn’t matter. He doesn’t agree, and he knows she won’t do anything about her concern, anyway.) The groundskeeper sees him doing his daily walks and tells him that he looks great and asks him what his secrets are. But when he looks in the mirror, he’s still not satisfied. His arms aren’t defined enough, and his chest-to-waist ratio could be better. He’s been losing weight, but eating less and burning off the fat doesn’t tone your figure. He needs to do something about that.
There’s always more work to be done.
He finds a gym near the estate and gets a membership; even if he finds himself hating it and doesn’t use it, it doesn’t matter because he can afford to throw his money around. He can’t be bothered with lifting weights, so he hits the treadmills instead and runs until his feet start to go numb. He gets on the spinners, does some pull-ups, jump ropes, and almost kills himself on the StairMaster.
He continues on like that for days and finds his mood improving because he finally feels in control of himself again. As long as he doesn’t lose it again, then he can forget about his father and focus on what’s really important: improving himself.
Donghyuck comes up to him a week later on his break, tossing him a sleazy, “Looking good, tough guy,” before asking him if he wants to volunteer with him at an animal shelter near his house. Jaemin vaguely remembers his mother mentioning something about him doing volunteer work, but that was the gist of it.
“You work at an animal shelter?” Jaemin asks him, and he must sound shocked because Donghyuck throws him an unimpressed look.
“I do have a life outside of here, you know.”
Jaemin shakes his head. “That’s not what I meant.”
“What did you mean, then?”
Jaemin isn’t really sure. It’s strange to imagine a Donghyuck outside of this bubble, with his own life and his own hobbies and his own friends that aren’t Jaemin. If they can even be considered that. But Jaemin finds that it quite suits him, to be surrounded by cute things and to care for them.
“I just didn’t know.” He shrugs lamely, and before he can find himself feeling embarrassed around Lee Donghyuck of all people, he asks, “Why do you want me to come?”
Donghyuck scoffs sassily, and Jaemin has no idea where the attitude is coming from, but it’s not bothering him as much as it used to. If anything, the actual personality that he has and his concerning lack of filter is a nice change of pace from the people around him. “I’m just asking because we’ve been short-staffed lately. I mean, it was barely holding up before people started quitting, anyway.”
“People started quitting?”
Donghyuck nods and sits down at the kitchen island, leaning his elbows onto the countertop to rest his cheeks in his palms. “There’s only so much people can take when they’re not getting paid to be there. Not to mention most volunteers are broke teens doing it to spruce up their college resumes.” He blinks up at Jaemin tiredly, and only then does he realize how exhausted Donghyuck looks. A pang of guilt slaps him in the rib cage, and he doesn’t know what for. “So are you in or not?”
“I’ll do it.”
Donghyuck sends him a small and genuine smile, the one that turns his eyes into half-crescents and dimples his cheeks sweetly, and Jaemin finds himself smiling back.
When Donghyuck gets off later that night, he drags Jaemin by the hand out into the courtyard.
“What are you doing?”
He looks at Jaemin like he’s an idiot, the evening wind blowing through his hair. “Taking you to the animal shelter.”
“We’re walking?”
Donghyuck stares at him incredulously, like the words that are coming out of his mouth keep getting increasingly more ridiculous by the second. “Were you expecting to be chauffeured there?”
Honestly, Jaemin isn’t entirely sure what he was expecting. He still doesn’t have his license and walking places is usually out of the question. He’s almost twenty years old and yet he barely does things for himself. But that doesn’t mean he can’t, right?
“I'm not some princess locked away in a tower.”
Donghyuck scoffs dramatically and lets go of his wrist, hopping down the cobblestone path like he’s playing hopscotch. “Coulda fooled me.”
Whatever. Jaemin doesn’t care about what Donghyuck thinks of him, anyway. He doesn’t need to prove anything to him.
“You don’t know anything about me,” Jaemin follows him calmly, catching up to where Donghyuck is balancing on top of a stone in the courtyard.
“Really?” He waves at the security guards on duty and the gate into the residential neighborhood opens. “Tell me, then. What do I need to know?”
It’s been getting colder lately, and Jaemin regrets not bringing a jacket with him. Donghyuck, however, looks unfazed in his flimsy flannel. “You don’t need to know anything.”
Donghyuck laughs and steps out onto the pristine sidewalk, Jaemin falling into step beside him. He feels exposed like this; with only the clothes on his back and nowhere to go except some animal shelter on the other side of the city. There’s no chauffeur, no bodyguard, no one with a microphone to his mouth, no watchful eyes waiting for him to misstep or mess up. And then Donghyuck, who could rob him or axe-murder him if he so pleased.
“Then you can’t get mad when I make assumptions. I have very little to work with.”
He walks ahead of him and leaves Jaemin to stare at his back, the setting sun casting a subtle halo around him and the wind tangling his hair into waves.
He’s pretty. And very annoying.
He always has a point though. And he’s one of the only people who constantly manages to keep Jaemin on his toes. Jaemin still doesn’t owe him anything, though.
It’s a long way to the shelter, and it’s only then that Jaemin realizes he has no idea where Donghyuck lives, and yet Donghyuck is always at Jaemin’s house. It must be a very long commute for him, and the same pang of guilt that stabbed Jaemin in the ribs earlier makes a second appearance. It’s not his fault; he didn’t build Donghyuck’s house and tell him to live there. Why he feels so strangely responsible for Donghyuck sometimes, he doesn’t know.
By the time they reach the other side of town, the sky has changed colors three whole times, and Jaemin is half-convinced he’s developed frostbite.
“Here,” Donghyuck holds the door open for him, “After you, Your Highness.”
Jaemin only has the energy to roll his eyes and step inside. He’s immediately hit with the smell of pee and gross animals, and it makes him smile a little.
“Ms. Choi,” Donghyuck calls out, stepping in front of Jaemin to lead him into the back where a woman is typing fastidiously on a desktop computer, “I brought you a new volunteer.”
“If it’s some random kid you found on the street, keep it.” She adjusts her reading glasses where they’re sliding down her pinched nose and sighs like the weight of the world is resting on her shoulders alone. “Actually, I take that back. It doesn’t matter.”
Donghyuck smiles widely at the top of her head. “Oh, well that’s good, because I found him in an alleyway dumpster.”
She sighs again and mutters something along the lines of God, what is this kid ever talking about, before finally looking up from her screen. Her eyes widen comically like a cartoon character’s, and Jaemin is scared they’ll pop out of their sockets any minute. He waves awkwardly from where he’s standing behind Donghyuck, which finally prompts her to speak.
“Oh my god, how rude of me!” She gets up from her seat so fast it gives Jaemin whiplash. “You can call me Ms. Choi, I run this dump.” She bows, looking like she’s itching to say more, but she holds herself back when Donghyuck throws her a not-so-subtle cautious look. It’s quite obvious that she knows who Jaemin is and is probably wondering what he’s doing at a place like this, but he appreciates the gesture nonetheless. “Thank you for offering to volunteer! We need all the help we can get.”
Jaemin smiles and bows back, and Donghyuck seemingly deflates beside him, like he didn’t want Jaemin to feel bombarded. “It’s really no problem, it’s my pleasure to be here.”
She and Donghyuck seem to have a brief telepathic conversation before Ms. Choi is clapping her hands together pleasantly. “Well, Jaemin-ssi, I’ll show you around!”
Donghyuck face-palms, and she covers her mouth when she realizes her slip up. Jaemin thinks that it’s nice that she’s at least trying to pretend that he’s a normal, everyday person.
“Anyway,” Donghyuck grabs Jaemin by the wrist a little too roughly and drags him out of the office to another room that looks like a nursery. It’s quieter, and all that can be heard is the sound of soft chatter and puppies whining for attention.
“Most of the dogs and cats here are found on the streets,” Donghyuck explains, and Jaemin has never really heard this particular cadence in his voice before, like he’s talking about something he actually cares about. “Some of them are from people who thought they were ready to own a pet but eventually gave them up. We get tons of puppies coming in after Christmas and stuff.” He walks over to one of the playpens and crouches over it, gently picking up a Beagle puppy and shoving it into Jaemin’s face. “This is Mong. Say hi.”
He drops him into Jaemin’s arms, and immediately all of the stress from the past couple of weeks washes away, because there’s a smelly, loud, helpless little thing in his hands, sniffing at his face like he smells like the most delicious dog food in existence. Jaemin always considered himself more of a cat person, but he thinks he can make an exception for today.
“Hi, Mong,” he coos, and the dog in question answers with an enthusiastic lick to his cheek. “Aren’t you just the cutest puppy ever?” He continues to baby-talk him, which garners the attention of the volunteers feeding the kittens formula in the back. Donghyuck tries and fails to hold back a snicker, and when Jaemin looks up at him he’s caught between a laugh and looking at Jaemin like he’s the strangest thing he’s ever seen.
“What?”
Donghyuck schools his expression into something vaguely serious, but his face starts to turn red from the effort. “What are you doing?”
Jaemin looks down at Mong and then back at Donghyuck. “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m talking to Mong.”
“Oh.” Donghyuck clears his throat and nods very seriously. “Right.”
Jaemin doesn’t appreciate being laughed at, but he lets it slide.
Donghyuck eventually tells him to stop being weird and smothering the puppies and shoves a bottle of floor cleaner into his hands.
“You’re on poop cleaning duty.”
Donghyuck must be expecting him to throw a fit, but Jaemin nods and reluctantly leaves the playpen of puppies to their own devices.
Surprisingly, cleaning up animal shit is the most relaxing thing he’s done in a while. It’s mindless, and also a good workout. Not to mention, he gets to look at baby animals the whole time.
Donghyuck goes off somewhere to answer phone calls, and Jaemin gets lost in the mindless cycle of spray, wipe, repeat.
By the time Donghyuck comes back, the nursery is completely poop-free, and Jaemin has made himself comfortable in one of the playpens. The puppies are walking all over him like a human playground.
“Enjoying yourself?” Donghyuck leans over the edge of the pen and coos at the puppies clawing at his sweats and walking all over him with their dirty paws. “I think they like you.”
“What can I say?” Jaemin stands up reluctantly, watching as the puppies crowd around his feet like a hivemind. “I’m very likable.”
Donghyuck rolls his eyes and laughs. “Likely story.”
He makes Jaemin help him put the puppies to sleep and lock everything up, (not that he was going to say no in the first place) and by the time they’re done and everyone has gone home, the sun has set and the moon is blindingly high in the sky, shining down on them like a lone satellite.
“I’m hungry,” Donghyuck yawns as he locks the door to the shelter behind them.
Jaemin eyes his hands curiously. “Do you close everytime you work here? Ms. Choi trusts you with all of that stuff?”
Donghyuck gives him a sleazy smile and deftly twirls the keys around his pointer finger. “I’m basically her son. I was there when she opened this thing. She trusts me with her life.”
Jaemin hums in consideration. “You have a lot of moms.”
Donghyuck barks out a laugh at that and hugs his shirt tighter around himself. “You could say that.”
He leads them to a 24-hour convenience store, and all Jaemin can think about on the way there is how different the neighborhoods on the other side of the city look from the ones he grew up around. There’s no mansions, and there’s no skyscrapers. Just regular everyday houses, small businesses and parks. Normal schools, normal streets, normal people.
The artificial light of the convenience store gets stuck behind his eyes as soon as they walk in, and Jaemin realizes that he isn’t sure if he’s even stepped foot inside of a convenience store in the past five years.
Donghyuck turns back to look at him. “You want something?”
Why Donghyuck is offering to buy Jaemin of all people food, he’s not sure, but Jaemin appreciates the sentiment.
“I’m good.” He gestures to the aisles upon aisles of vibrantly colored food products with a hand. “Go crazy.”
Donghyuck takes that as an initiative to rummage through the snack foods like a man starved, and Jaemin is thoroughly entertained. He wonders what his father would think of Donghyuck right now, what he would think of Jaemin hanging around Donghyuck in general. He’d probably say something about bad influences and hanging around the wrong people and not focusing on what’s important, and it makes Jaemin smile to think that his father would be pissed.
“I fuckin’ loved these when I was a kid,” Donghyuck exclaims, picking up a bright red package of what looks like some sort of cookies that will probably send you into cardiac arrest after one bite.
“You’re still a kid.”
“I’m basically twenty. Fuck you.”
Donghyuck continues to meander around while grabbing more snacks than one person should probably consume by themself, and Jaemin pulls out his wallet when they’re at the register.
Donghyuck looks at him like he’s crazy. “What are you doing?”
“Paying for you.” Jaemin swipes his card while Donghyuck stares at him wordlessly. “What does it look like I’m doing?”
The cashier rings them up and Donghyuck’s voice goes all soft like he’s embarrassed. “You didn’t have to do that.”
Jaemin doesn’t understand why it’s a big deal, but Donghyuck is looking at him like he’s just risked his life for him, so he doesn’t mention it. “I know,” he says instead, reaching forward to pat Donghyuck on the head like a child. He tries to ignore the fact that his hair is uncomfortably soft. “I wanted to, okay?”
The most Valentine’s Day shade of pink appears on Donghyuck’s cheeks, and Jaemin finds himself staring for longer than he would ever admit. “Oh. Okay.” Donghyuck snatches the plastic bag out of Jaemin’s hands and looks down at his feet. “Thanks.”
Donghyuck is so confusing, because one moment he’s cockier and more boisterous than the businessmen Jaemin has had the unfortunate opportunity of being in the same room as on multiple occasions, and the next moment, he’s hesitating and blushing like a schoolgirl. It’s almost obscene in its juxtaposition.
“There’s benches outside.”
Donghyuck scurries out of the store and walks to the seating area off to the side. He sits down and dumps the contents of his snack bag onto the table unceremoniously.
“It’s like Christmas.”
Jaemin gingerly sits down in front of him, legs aching from walking and an obscene lack of nutrients. “You’re weird.”
Donghyuck takes a ginormous bite of a candy bar and says with a mouthful of chocolate, “But you like it, though.”
Jaemin frowns and smacks his hand. “Don’t talk with food in your mouth! It’s not polite.”
Donghyuck rolls his eyes and mocks back in an exaggeratedly dumb voice, “It’s not polite.”
They settle into a comfortable silence, and Jaemin feels his hackles wanting to rise at just how relaxed he feels. He can count the number of people he truly trusts on one hand, and he doesn’t want Lee Donghyuck to be added to the list. Sometimes it seems like it’s not really up to him, though.
“Jaemin-ah, do you hate me?”
He asks it out of the blue, in a simple and noninvasive voice like he’s asking Jaemin about the weather.
“What?”
“I asked if you hate me,” Donghyuck repeats patiently, crumbling a candy wrapper in his balled up fist.
Jaemin’s brow furrows, and he has no idea where this is coming from or where this conversation is meant to go.
“What? Why would I hate you?”
Donghyuck tilts his head and looks off to the side like he’s thinking, dull nails rapping against the tabletop. “Well, I dunno. I always thought that you felt like I was taking everything from you when we were younger, y’know?”
Donghyuck is actually making eye contact with him this time, and a stone drops deep into the pit of Jaemin’s stomach. Now, years later, is when they’re talking about things. Jaemin has always known that Donghyuck was smart, probably even smarter than him, but he never foresaw him hitting the nail on the head so succinctly it left him a little dizzy. Maybe Jaemin isn’t as unknowable as he thinks he is, after all. Or maybe, Donghyuck’s need to know him is stronger than any wall he could have ever built to keep him out.
“I never hated you.” Jaemin looks away from Donghyuck’s earnest eyes and picks at the chipping paint on the table with his nails. His first instinct is always to lie in a way that seems truthful, or to skirt around the subject until it wasn’t even the subject anymore, but he finds himself wanting to be honest in a rare moment of vulnerability. “You just came out of the blue. And I think…you just represented everything I wanted to be, or couldn’t be.”
Jaemin is too tired and hungry to really be embarrassed, and the shock on Donghyuck’s face is worth it. “I never hated you,” he repeats. “I think I quite liked your company. But I was so used to Renjun being my only friend and everyone else taking advantage of me, so I didn’t want to be your friend.” Donghyuck continues to stare and blink at him dumbly, and it’s one of the rare times Jaemin has seen him keep his big mouth shut. “But I think we’re better now, don’t you think?” Jaemin pauses. “You’re still annoying, though.”
Donghyuck must still be in a state of catatonic shock at Jaemin actually opening up to him, because he doesn’t hurl an insult back at him. “You think so?”
Jaemin tilts his head at him, and it’s a bit too dark outside to tell, but he’s sure that Donghyuck is turning red again. “I know so.”
Donghyuck nods slowly like Jaemin has just told him the meaning of life and gently places down his crunched up candy wrapper. “So, we’re friends.”
Jaemin rolls his eyes to keep from doing stupid like laughing. “Yes, Donghyuck. We’re friends.”
“So, since we’re friends, can I tell you something?”
“What is it?”
Donghyuck looks down apprehensively, like he’s contemplating if he should even say anything. “Thank you for volunteering with me. I didn’t have anyone else to ask. That place means a lot to Ms. Choi.”
Jaemin finds himself smiling openly, and he doesn’t find himself feeling as scared as he probably should. “Of course. I can come back whenever you need me.”
He perks up like a dog being offered a bone. “Really?”
“Yes, really.”
Donghyuck schools his face into something nonchalant and clears his throat like he hadn’t just been excited. He fixes his posture and sits up straight, reaching out a knobby hand for Jaemin to shake.
“Pleasure doing business with you.”
Jaemin bites the inside of his cheek to stop from laughing and takes his hand.
“Pleasure.”
Donghyuck has no idea what the fuck is going on.
Not only does Jaemin now consider them friends, but he’s also being a relatively normal, amicable human being. It’s doing nothing to help remedy his definitely-not-a-crush, and if Jaemin is nice to him one more time, Donghyuck thinks that he’s going to spontaneously combust into a million pieces, leaving his brains and his heart to go splat! against the pristine walls of the Na estate.
The best thing he can do is not think about it. He’s never been an overthinker; he’s more of a spontaneous kind of person when it comes to his personal relationships. He just does what feels right in the moment, and deals with the consequences later. He does that with most aspects of his life, and his mother hates that about him.
Maybe she has a point.
Regardless of anything Jaemin-related, Jaemin’s mother is throwing an extravagant birthday party for herself, and for some reason, he’s been invited.
A lot of planning is going into this particular party, and Donghyuck is assuming that this must be considered another one of their Very Important Events. Or maybe, it’s only really important to Jaemin’s mother. It makes sense, because it’s not like she really has anything else to be doing.
Jaemin tells Donghyuck that she has a party every year, but they’ve never been this dramatic. It makes sense. If Donghyuck had a husband who was very obviously cheating on him, he would drain his bank account of its funds for unnecessary things too.
“Am I, uh…required to wear a suit or something?”
Donghyuck finds Jaemin sitting in the empty kitchen at the marble island reading a book (who even reads nowadays?) after going on a grocery run. Apparently, rich people don’t shop for their own groceries, and Donghyuck has found that out the hard way. But honestly speaking, if he were rich, he would hire people to do it for him instead, too.
“To the party?” Jaemin doesn’t look up from the page he’s engrossed in, and from the cover Donghyuck recognizes it to be a very depressing bestseller that was all the rage last year. “You can wear whatever you want.”
Donghyuck highly doubts that that’s true. He dumps the grocery bags in his arms onto the island, and Jaemin finally looks up from his book when he hears the clatter. “Why are you sweating? You carried that all the way here?”
Donghyuck tries to catch his breath, and he’s entirely too exhausted to deal with Jaemin’s nagging. “Yeah.”
“Why didn’t you let a driver take you?”
Definitely not in the mood for this conversation. “My legs can get the job done just fine.”
Jaemin closes his book shut and grabs some bags from the monster pile in between them.
“What are you doing?”
“Putting up groceries,” Jaemin says like Donghyuck is dumb as he walks over to the pantry.
Donghyuck collapses onto the stool Jaemin was previously sitting at. “Such a gentleman.” He grabs the water bottle next to Jaemin’s book and takes a giant swig from it. Jaemin sends him the nastiest glare Donghyuck has ever seen in his life. “Are you sure I can wear whatever I want, though? Knowing your mom, she’s gonna show up in a ballgown or something. I need to fit in.”
“That’s true.” Jaemin reappears from inside the rabbit hole his family calls a pantry and grabs another bag full of vegetables. “But it doesn’t matter. As long as you show up, she won’t care what you’re wearing. You could be wearing a potato sack and she would still call you cute.”
Donghyuck isn’t sure if he detects some bitterness in his tone or if Jaemin is just playing with him, and honestly, sometimes he can never tell when Jaemin is joking or when he’s being serious. Maybe he should just give up on trying to differentiate the two. “Okay, but that doesn’t mean I wanna wear a potato sack. I’ll find something.”
Jaemin shrugs like he’s deemed the conversation not important anymore, and Donghyuck watches him carefully as he puts the rest of the groceries away even though it’s not his job.
The next day, two days before Jaemin’s mother’s birthday and three days before her party, Donghyuck decides to enjoy a rare day off instead of stressing once again about owning little to no items of acceptable-looking clothing. He’s catching up on some drama his mom loves, and he’s not really sure what’s going on, but the female lead screaming and crying over something very dramatic that just happened to her makes him laugh anyway.
“I could totally act better than this,” Donghyuck says, stretching his legs out onto the tiny coffee table in front of them. “She’s trying too hard.”
His mother shushes him and smacks him on the leg. “Don’t talk during my dramas.”
Minutes later, after the same female lead decides to take revenge on whoever had wronged her before Donghyuck had sat down to watch, there’s a knock at the door.
“Go answer that.”
Donghyuck groans and throws his head back against the couch. “But it was just getting interesting!”
“Answer it!”
He sighs and slithers off of the couch reluctantly, walking over to the door. He has no idea who could possibly need to bother them on a Saturday morning, but he’s gonna give them a piece of his mind.
“What is i–”
He pauses as he’s met with a faceful of Na Jaemin, looking far too well-rested and perfectly put together for the day and time.
“Uh.”
“Here.” Jaemin shoves a large shopping bag into his hands without greeting him. “For the party.”
His mom calls out from the living room, “Duckie, who is that?”
Who is that, indeed. Donghyuck stares down at the bag in his hand like it’s going to grow teeth and attack him, and his mother appears behind him when he doesn’t answer her question.
“Jaemin-ah?” She asks, perking up when she sees their unwelcome visitor. “Hi, sweetheart. What are you doing here?”
Jaemin seemingly remembers his manners and bows, and his mother smiles fondly at him. Don’t trust him, Donghyuck thinks to himself, staring at the perfect crown of Jaemin’s head. He’s pure evil.
“Hi, Ms. Lee. I just came by to bring Donghyuckie something.”
Jaemin has never called him Donghyuckie in his life.
“Oh, come in! I just made some tea.”
Donghyuck is expecting him to politely decline, to say something about not intruding or making up some excuse about how he has somewhere to be, but he nods and brushes past where Donghyuck is still staring dumbfoundedly at what he presumes is clothing in his hands.
Now Donghyuck is truly fraternizing with the enemy, even though they’re technically friends, because Jaemin is standing in his house, sticking out like a sore thumb. His mother is offering him a cup of tea, and he sits down at the dining table. Their dining table. On a Saturday morning, which are supposed to be the days specifically for Donghyuck and his mom. Not Donghyuck and his mom plus one.
“Duckie, go put that away and come sit.”
Only then does he realize that he’s still standing stupidly at the open doorway, mouth opening and closing robotically. He closes the door shut and scurries away into his room, tossing the bag onto the floor like it’s about to catch on fire. But then he remembers that whatever is inside of it is probably worth more than their mortgage and sets it gently on his desk instead.
When he walks back into the living room, Jaemin and his mother are deeply engrossed in a conversation like they’re aunties gossiping at Sunday brunch. Donghyuck feels like he’s heading to his execution as he walks over to the dinner table and gingerly sits down, very, very far away from Jaemin. His mother doesn’t seem to notice because she’s too enraptured by whatever black magic spell Jaemin has cast on her. Surely, what he’s been saying to her can’t be that interesting.
“Jaemin-ah was just telling me about the shelter,” his mom is saying as she slides a mug of tea to his side of the table, “I had no idea you’d become so close!”
Well, that was certainly one way of putting it. Donghyuck has no idea if they can even be considered ‘close.’ In fact, after all this time he doesn’t even know what Jaemin’s favorite color is. Probably something pretentious, like gray.
“I, uh…” Donghyuck watches his terrified reflection stare back at him from inside of the mug in front of him, “Didn’t think it was important?”
He can feel the heat of the shit-eating grin Jaemin is sending him to his right burning craters into his skin, and he resists the urge to roll his eyes. “Of course, it’s important.” She sucks her teeth at him, and Donghyuck couldn’t have imagined that he would be getting scolded by his mother in front of Na Jaemin mere hours ago when he woke up. “You don’t tell me anything.”
Well, if this is how you’re gonna react, Donghyuck thinks, but he’s not in the mood to get smacked so he keeps his mouth shut.
Donghyuck finally looks up from his mug to see Jaemin shooting his mother a perfect smile, charming as ever. “Donghyuckie likes to pretend that he doesn’t like me–”
Donghyuck grumbles more than asks, “Why do you keep calling me that–“
“–but we are very much friends, yes–“
“Did you hit your head on the sidewalk on your way he–“
“Ah!” Jaemin seems to suddenly remember something and reaches into the front pocket of his impeccably ironed slacks, pulling out a small box wrapped neatly with a white satin bow. “I almost forgot!” He passes it across the table and gently places it into her hands. “Ms. Lee, please have this.”
Great, now Jaemin has decided to butter up Donghyuck’s mother for God knows what reason. The next thing he knows, he’ll be on the street and Jaemin will be her new son. “Oh, sweetheart, you didn’t have to!” she exclaims, but what she leaves out is: but I’m glad that you did. Donghyuck can see right through the traitor he calls his mother.
He watches with bated breath as she gently undoes the bow like she’s disassembling a bomb and gasps as she removes the lid.
“Oh,” she whispers reverently, like she’s witnessing the immaculate conception of Christ Himself, “It’s gorgeous.”
Donghyuck reckons that it’s a piece of jewelry, but he doesn’t ask because he doesn’t want to sound like he’s interested. Luckily, his mother takes it out of the box and shows it to him like she’s showing off a newborn. To be fair, it is very beautiful. It’s a necklace, and Donghyuck could probably pawn it and use the money to put a down payment on a car, given the sheer amount of tiny diamonds bespeckling it. He almost goes cross-eyed from staring at it for a second too long, and she starts to coo and squeal about how sweet and generous Jaemin is and how she doesn’t deserve such a gift. Donghyuck almost pukes a little bit.
This must be what Jaemin felt about his own mother and Donghyuck not even three years ago. Except, Donghyuck feels less jealous and more mildly threatened.
“It’s really no problem at all,” Jaemin is brushing her off kindly like he didn’t just drop presumably more than her monthly salary on jewelry for her, “You’ve done so much for my family, so it’s the least I can do.”
That’s kind of sweet, unfortunately, and it’s definitely true. In fact, now that Donghyuck thinks about it, they should be given free stuff all the time. He likes free stuff.
Donghyuck is a little affronted that he didn’t get his own token of appreciation, but they can work up to that.
She clasps the necklace around her neck, and Donghyuck uses the distraction of her admiring the pendant on her chest proudly as an out.
“We’ll be right back!”
Before she can look up he grabs Jaemin by the wrist so hard it hurts his own hand and drags him all the way to his room. His mother is yelling something incomprehensible after them, but he slams the door shut with his free hand. There’s still muffled nagging coming from behind the door when he realizes he’s been holding onto Jaemin for too long and drops his arm.
Jaemin is the one who was manhandled into his bedroom but Donghyuck is the only one who seems to be frazzled, if the same shit-eating grin on his face is anything to go by. Donghyuck crosses his arms over his chest to give himself some semblance of authority.
“How do you know where I live?”
Jaemin leans back against his bedroom door and mirrors his stance. “We have records on all employees. It’s not like it was secret knowledge.”
Donghyuck scoffs. “So you’re stalking me?”
“Don’t flatter yourself.” Jaemin spots the gift bag he handed him earlier and walks over to his desk. “Here, tell me if you like it.”
He holds the bag out to Donghyuck like he did about a half hour ago, looking at him innocently and expectantly like he hadn’t just barged into their house and ruined their sacred Saturday mornings.
Donghyuck snatches it from him affrontedly and peers into it, only to be met with fancy tissue paper. He sits down on the edge of his bed while Jaemin watches him like a hawk and tosses the paper onto the ground. He hasn’t received a real gift since three Christmases ago, and suddenly he’s filled with guilt before he remembers that Jaemin probably wipes his ass with gold-plated toilet paper.
It’s a suit. A very nice suit, at that, one that is uncomfortably close to Donghyuck’s taste even though he rarely has a real reason to wear one. It’s slightly similar to the one he wore to the gala when they were seventeen except it’s a sleek black instead of navy. He ignores just how old he feels at the memory and pulls the entire suit out of the bag, subduing his reaction so it doesn’t go straight to Jaemin’s ginormous head.
“It’s very nice,” he mumbles, setting the bag down and holding it up in front of him. It even has a waistcoat, and the pants are tailored to perfection.
Jaemin frowns and sits down on the floor in front of him. “You don’t like it?”
Donghyuck sighs deeply and tries desperately to set his pride aside for a second. “I love it, okay? Asshole.”
“You’re being very aggressive right now,” he observes calmly, like he’s some therapist and not plain old Na Jaemin. “Why is that?”
Donghyuck is going to throw some childish insult at his stupid face before he notices the tag attached and almost has a heart attack at the ripe age of nineteen-almost-twenty. “What the actual fuck?”
“What?”
Donghyuck snatches the tag up to bring it closer to his face, just to make sure he isn’t hallucinating. “I haven’t seen this many zeros since…ever.”
Jaemin leans back on his palms and waves him off. “Don’t worry about that. So, you’ll wear it to the party, won’t you?”
“Uh.” Donghyuck says and then snaps his mouth shut. I can’t accept this, he wants to say, because it’s too expensive and also I hate feeling like I’m taking a handout even if that wasn’t your intention.
“Uh.”
Jaemin looks like he’s not sure if he’s allowed to laugh at him and tilts his head, waiting.
“Well, I mean.” Donghyuck is quite rarely made to be speechless; if anything, that’s his job. But it seems more often than not that his tongue ties anytime he’s somewhere in Jaemin’s vicinity, or his throat gets dry, or his palms get sweaty, or he second guesses himself like an idiot. Lee Donghyuck does not second guess himself. Lee Donghyuck is not an idiot.
“You know I got it for you because I wanted to, right?”
Jaemin interrupts his internal monologue before he can even say anything for himself. He’s looking at Donghyuck like he's seeing him for the first time. “I don’t know what weird things you have in your mind,” he continues, “but it’s not a handout. Or out of pity, or whatever it is you’re thinking. I got you a suit. Simple as that. It doesn’t have to be so complicated.”
So, maybe Donghyuck needs to work on his transparency. “Everything is complicated with you,” he says before he can stop himself, and Jaemin only blinks confusedly. “I…” Donghyuck looks down at the suit on his lap, brushing his knuckles against the buttons of the waistcoat. “You’re right… I guess. I’ll wear it. Thank you.”
Jaemin, seemingly satisfied with his answer, gets up to brush imaginary dust off of his pants and drag him over to the closet mirror. “Let me see.”
He takes the suit from him and steps behind him, draping it over Donghyuck’s body and smoothing it over his chest like he’s sizing him up. Donghyuck ignores the brush of his knuckles over his heartbeat and instead focuses on the black material hanging over him, a nice contrast to his skin.
Jaemin hums considerably and continues to smooth the suit jacket out against him until his hand is just shy of his waistband. “I think it’s a perfect fit.”
“How did you even know my size?” Donghyuck mumbles, utterly mortified at the flush creeping over his shoulders and up his neck all the way to his cheeks that Jaemin definitely notices but doesn’t mention.
Jaemin smiles at him through the mirror, and it’s simultaneously comforting and threatening all at once. “Don’t you know I have my ways?”
Donghyuck finally musters up the strength back into his legs and pushes Jaemin off of him. “You really are a stalker.”
“Maybe I just like you,” he drawls, and Donghyuck knows that he’s teasing, but he still flinches a bit. Jaemin has never said he liked him, even as a joke.
“Fuck off,” Donghyuck says, but there’s none of the usual malice behind it. “After I allowed you in my room? Tread carefully before I kick you out of my house.”
Jaemin sits down on the edge of his bed feigning hurt, and Donghyuck wonders where those boundaries he’s always talking about have suddenly gone.
He neatly folds the suit back up into the bag because there’s no way he’s putting it anywhere near his dusty closet, and turns back around when he’s done to see Jaemin making himself comfortable on his bed.
“So, Duckie, huh?”
“Alright, get the fuck out of my house!”
—
The birthday ‘party’ (which grossly undersells it) is held at the Na estate. The entirety of the house is decorated to the point that it’s almost unrecognizable, and Donghyuck wonders just how much money was blown on this singular event.
He’s wearing the suit Jaemin gave him like he said he would. He stands in front of his bathroom mirror adjusting his tie and fixing his hair for longer than he would ever admit to anyone on Earth; he looks fine, nice even, but he still feels grossly out of his element for some reason. Maybe he’s just getting sick.
He brings a neatly wrapped present with a bow and all that his mother forced him to carry and gives it to Jaemin’s mother as soon as he sees her. Donghyuck has no idea why anyone is required to buy her gifts when she can probably purchase a small island for fun in her free time, but manners are important, or something.
Jaemin’s father has even decided to grace the party with his presence, and he sends Donghyuck a polite nod from where he’s drinking wine in the middle of the parlor with some other men. It looks innocuous enough, but Donghyuck can recognize crazy eyes from a mile away. After being smothered with a thousand hugs and kisses and losing his mother in the steadily growing crowd of people, he finds Jaemin in the kitchen chatting up some older woman. Donghyuck has no idea who 90% of the people at this gathering are because he doesn’t particularly remember her ever having…friends. Maybe they’re just here for appearances. Or paid actors.
To most people, Jaemin’s smile would be seen as polite, charming, flirtatious, even, but Donghyuck is finally well-versed enough in his expressions that he can tell he would probably rather be anywhere else.
“Jaemin-ah,” Donghyuck swoops in when he thinks he can see Jaemin’s left eye physically start to twitch, “Did you dispose of the body like I told you to?”
The woman turns to look at Donghyuck, bewildered, and then looks back at Jaemin with a furrowed brow. Donghyuck has to give it to him; he’s truly mastered the art of the poker face. “Ah, um, Jaemin-ssi, I’ll talk to you later.”
She scurries out of the kitchen leaving a flowery scented trail in her path, and Donghyuck wonders if she’s considering calling security.
“Thanks,” Jaemin says when she’s out of sight, holding back a laugh. “I was handling it, though.”
“Just accept help for once in your life.” Donghyuck walks over to his side of the kitchen and sits down at the counter. “Also, no offense, but how much longer do I have to be here?”
Jaemin gingerly sits down next to him and rests his hands down onto the marble. “You can leave whenever you want.”
“Cool,” Donghyuck nods. “That isn’t helpful at all.”
It’s only the late afternoon, not even evening yet, and Donghyuck would very much like to return to the comfort of his own bed. Or any bed, really. He has half a mind to sneak upstairs and crash in Jaemin’s bed, but his father would probably have his head on a platter if he ever caught him up there off the clock. Maybe he could sleep in a storage room, or maybe the bathtub in the spare bathroom, or maybe in the laundry room. There’s too many enticing options.
Before he can figure out his plan of escape, he’s getting pulled aside by Jaemin’s mother.
“Hyuckie,” she chirps, petting him gently under the chin, “I’m so glad you were able to make it.” She's definitely drunk, but not drunk enough to the point that it’s scary yet.
“Of course,” Donghyuck smiles easily, and she smiles back, but it feels a little hollow. It’s her birthday, but she doesn’t look too happy. “You look very pretty today, Mrs. Na.”
“Oh,” she waves him off but is clearly pleased at the compliment. “You’re too sweet.” She brushes her hands against her baby blue dress and gives him a smaller, more genuine smile. “Make sure you have fun tonight, okay?”
It’s a simple request, but she says it with sincerity, so he nods. “Yes, ma’am.”
He loses her again after that and Jaemin is nowhere to be found, so he sneaks back into the kitchen to get a look at the drinks. It’s purely innocent; he’s just curious is all, and the extent of his drinking experience consists of drinking overly-sweet grape soju at some shitty high school party at one of his classmate’s houses. Rich people seem to have different tastes than the rest of society, because there’s no Jinro to be found. There’s a bunch of foreign labels, strangely colored concoctions in twinkling bottles. If Donghyuck drank one of them, he would probably start levitating.
He’s examining the label of something pale-gold colored when someone sneaks up behind him and asks, “What are you doing?”
He whips around so fast he almost drops the bottle, and he curses loudly as Jaemin’s smug face comes back into view. “How do you do that? I never hear you when you enter a room, you freak. Jesus.”
“I asked you what you were doing.”
Donghyuck gently places the bottle back onto the counter and leans his back onto the marble. “You’re seriously stalking me, right? I’m gonna file for a restraining order if you don’t stop.”
“I’m bored,” Jaemin pouts, and that’s certainly new. “And there’s too many people here, it’s suffocating.”
“Shouldn’t you be used to this? Events and stuff like this, I mean.”
“Maybe.” Jaemin leans back out of his space, and Donghyuck unfortunately finds himself missing his warmth. “Doesn’t mean I have to like it, though.”
Donghyuck wonders just how many fancy gatherings Jaemin has been forced to attend in his life. The extent of Donghyuck’s experience doing things he didn't want to consisted of: school, family gatherings, and changing diapers when he and his sister were younger. He can’t imagine what it must feel like for your life to not be your own. It must be that pity, normal human concern and not compassion or caring that makes him turn to Jaemin and ask,
“Do you wanna get drunk?”
Jaemin stops fiddling with his fingernails and turns to look at him in confusion. “Drunk?”
“Not here, obviously.” Donghyuck stands up abruptly as the half-baked plan he came up with about five seconds ago starts to become a full one. “I took my bike to get here, it’s out back. We can go somewhere else.”
He continues to stare at Donghyuck like he’s just said the craziest thing he’s ever heard in his life. “But I can’t.”
“What do you mean you can’t?” Donghyuck huffs, plopping back down beside him exasperatedly. “You can do whatever you want.” Jaemin opens his mouth again to refute his point and Donghyuck cuts him off. “And don’t act like any of the drunkards here would even notice that we’re gone. No offense. We don’t even have to be gone that long, promise. We can just get some fresh air. And steal some alcohol. Minor detail.”
He seems to mull it over, which is really all that Donghyuck can ask for. “Hm,” he says very cryptically, like this is a matter of life and death and not some good old-fashioned rebellion. Even though they’re not really teenagers anymore, Jaemin needs to get some experience in while he still can. “Fine. Whatever.”
He hops up from his stool and stalks over to the counter, forgoing the assortment of drinks pre-picked for the event and going straight for the fancy liquor cabinet. “We should try this.”
He presents a shining bottle of whiskey that looks older than the both of them combined. “I have no idea what it tastes like.”
“Wait,” Donghyuck says, eyes almost popping out of skull when he realizes, “Isn’t that your father’s liquor?”
He raises his eyebrows at Donghyuck suggestively.
“Who are you and what have you done to Na Jaemin?”
“Are you coming or not?”
Donghyuck grumbles and walks over to snatch the bottle from him. “It was my idea in the first place.”
He has no idea what’s gotten into Jaemin or if this is even really Jaemin and not some weird clone, but he’ll take advantage of it while he can.
It’s easier than expected to make it to the back of the estate without being snatched up and/or interrogated. Everyone is either already pleasantly buzzed or they simply don’t give a shit, and soon Donghyuck has snatched his backpack up (while Jaemin grabbed his Leica) from where he had abandoned it in a spare powder room earlier and successfully brought Jaemin out back to where his bike is.
“You know, this beauty was given to me because of your family’s money,” Donghyuck sighs dreamily, caressing the sleek handlebars of his bike. “Everything bad I’ve ever said about you, I take it back, y’know?”
“You’re only saying that because you like my money.”
“Yeah.”
Donghyuck tosses a leg over his bike and looks at Jaemin expectantly. “Hop on, baby.”
Jaemin looks at him incredulously. “How is that even possible?”
“I stand riding and you get on the seat. It’s simple.” Jaemin continues to blink at him, and Donghyuck blanches. “Don’t tell me you've never ridden a bike.”
Jaemin crosses his arms over his chest defensively. “It was never necessary.”
“Oh my god,” Donghyuck says, and he’s not sure if he should laugh or cry. “And you had the nerve to tell me ‘I’m not some princess locked away in a tower!’”
“I’m not!”
“You totally are.”
“I’m not arguing with you.”
“C’mon, sweet thing,” Donghyuck simpers, only because Jaemin actually seems embarrassed for once in his life and he can get away with it. “I’ll make sure you don’t get hurt.”
“Don’t call me that.”
Donghyuck is probably having more fun than he should be. “Don’t you trust me?”
“No.”
“Well, you should.” Donghyuck straightens his back and puffs out his chest proudly. “I was the best bike rider in all of elementary school.”
“Somehow, I doubt that.”
“It’s true! Now are you gonna get on or not? We don’t have all day.”
“You don’t even have a helmet. Don’t you know the first thing about safety?”
Donghyuck just blinks at him. Jaemin’s resolve seems to be completely destroyed because he just shrugs and hops up to sit on the bike seat in defeat. “What do I do now?”
“Hold onto me.”
“What?”
Donghyuck sighs. “You say that a lot. Are you forgetting what words mean lately? I can take you to the retirement home instead if that’s what you need.”
“You know what? Just start riding before I kill you.”
“You’ve always been such a gentleman.”
After a little more bickering and much convincing, Jaemin wraps his arms tightly around Donghyuck’s middle and they take off out of the open back gate and into the streets. The weather is finally warming back up bit by bit, but the breeze is still cool against Donghyuck’s face.
“You wanna see a cool trick?”
“Why can’t you just ride like a normal person?” Donghyuck isn’t sure if that’s a bit of panic that he hears in Jaemin’s voice or if he’s imagining it, but he certainly hopes that he’s not.
“Yes? You wanna see a cool trick? Is that what you said?”
“Lee Donghyuck, I swear to God–”
Before he can go on a tirade, Donghyuck spots a bump in the middle of the road and straightens his back. “Oh no,” he says, feigning deep concern. “There’s a pothole up ahead. What ever shall we do?”
He can feel Jaemin’s sharp nails digging into his skin through his blazer and tries to hold back a laugh. “You’re not funny, you know that, huh?”
“But Jaemin-ah,” Donghyuck says seriously, maneuvering his bike into a front pull and feeling Jaemin jolt behind him, “I’m not being funny. Our lives are in danger right now.”
“Pull something stupid, and I’ll never forgive you.”
Jaemin continues to nag him, but Donghyuck tunes him out as he shoves his weight into the ground through the back wheel. Jaemin cuts himself off with a gasp as Donghyuck pulls the front wheel up into the air. “What the fuck are you doing?”
Before he can say anything else, they’re bunny hopping over the pothole in the middle of the road, and Jaemin shrieks so loud into the street it leaves Donghyuck’s ears ringing.
“I didn’t even know I could still do that!” Donghyuck laughs once they’re safely back on the ground, swerving to the left and almost crashing into some neatly trimmed bushes as he tries not to laugh too hard. “Ah, I still got it.”
“You didn’t know if you could still do it and yet you still did it anyway?” Jaemin slaps him on the back so hard, Donghyuck feels his soul momentarily leave his body. “Let me off this bike right now.”
“Come on,” Donghyuck giggles, trying and mostly failing to make sure that he doesn’t end up killing the both of them. “Live a little.”
Jaemin is seemingly slowly losing his usual composure, groaning loudly into Donghyuck’s ear in agony. “Where are we even going?”
“That’s a secret.”
“You almost committed involuntary manslaughter–you owe me this at least.”
“Don’t be so dramatic.”
Donghyuck can feel strong arms wrapping back around his middle and tries not to lean into the touch. “I’m being very reasonable right now.”
“Hey, why are you talking my ear off right now? That’s usually my job. It’s not very Jaemin-like of you, Jaemin-ah.”
He jabs his fist so hard into Donghyuck’s stomach that he almost keels over onto the road.
“Okay, ow, fuck, sorry.”
Contrary to what Donghyuck had said to Jaemin moments prior, he actually does not have any idea where they’re going. He could take him back to his house, but that would be too personal. There aren’t really any other options besides that, and at that moment Donghyuck realizes that he really doesn’t have a life. Tough shit.
He shrugs it off and ends up bringing Jaemin all the way to the old park near his house that he used to play in as a kid.
“A park?” Jaemin questions as he hobbles off of the bike like an old man, looking a little motion sick.
“Not just any park,” Donghyuck says. “This is a historical site.”
Besides a lone kid on a swing, it’s quiet and empty and the grass tarmac sparkles unearth the weak sunlight. He walks over to the big elm tree looming near the playground and points up. “This is where I broke my first bone.”
Jaemin laughs and shields his eyes with a hand as he looks up into the glowing branches of the tree. “What happened?”
“There was a brief period in my life when I thought firefighters were the coolest thing ever so I wanted to see if I could climb trees like them. And, well. I slipped on a branch and broke my arm. Good times.”
“Huh. That’s very you.”
It sounds like an insult and a compliment at the same time, but Donghyuck will take it.
“That playground,” Donghyuck turns and points towards the swings and the monkey bars and the big blue slide, “is where I had my first kiss.
Jaemin raises an eyebrow at him like he’s trying not to laugh. “Oh?”
Donghyuck tries to dust off the old and formative memory from his childhood. “When I was nine, there was this girl in the class right above me, I can’t even remember her name. She used to live on my street, and I thought she was so pretty; I guess she figured it out. But anyway, she came up to me on the swings one day and asked me if I had ever kissed anyone. And when I said no, she pecked me on the lips and then ran away. I guess it was like a favor or something.”
“A favor?”
“Well, everyone liked me and stuff back then, but I was quiet and she was like, crazy popular. So it was a forbidden romance.”
“Romance?”
“Well, she moved away later that year, so not really. But I like to think of it that way.”
Jaemin does his scoff-laugh and turns to look at him with the sun in his eyes. “You really keep me on my toes.”
“There’s more to me than meets the eye, Na Jaemin.”
“Hm,” he hums in consideration, “I’m realizing that.”
He lifts up his camera to take a picture of the playground, and Donghyuck plops down on the wet grass under the shade of the big elm tree and waits for Jaemin to do the same. He watches as he seems to hesitate for a moment before shrugging and sitting down next to him. There will definitely be wet grass stains all over his expensive suit later.
“Now you tell me something about yourself.”
The afternoon wind blows Jaemin’s air out of his eyes as he says, “Huh?”
“I told you things about my childhood. Now you have to say something. Quid pro quo, or whatever.”
“Or whatever,” Jaemin repeats, and he turns back forward to the view of the back of the old playground. “What do you want to know?”
“If I’m being honest, I’ll take anything,” Donghyuck says, trying not to sound too desperate. “You’re so mysterious. Like a spy, or something.”
Jaemin turns to look at him once again, and it takes every muscle in Donghyuck’s body to will himself not to blush red at the intensity of his eyes. He’s so intense for no reason, like they’re discussing nuclear war codes and not something trivial. “I’m not mysterious.”
Donghyuck can barely hold back an ugly snort. “Yeah, right. Good one.”
“I’m not,” Jaemin insists, and for some reason he’s fucking pouting again, but it looks like he doesn’t even realize it this time. “Ask me something.”
“Fine.” Donghyuck racks his brain for the juiciest, most scandalous question he can think of, but comes up short. “Uh, what’s your favorite color?”
“Huh?”
“Color. Your favorite color. What is it?”
“Oh. It’s yellow.”
Donghyuck snaps his head so hard to the side he’s afraid he’s broken his spinal cord. “Yellow?”
Jaemin blinks at him, unimpressed. “Is that shocking to you?”
“Uh, yeah.” That just isn’t what he was expecting. He’s thought about this more than he would like to admit. “Yellow. Like, sunshine yellow? Or mustard? Or the ugly brown kinda yellow?”
“Just yellow,” Jaemin shrugs. “It doesn’t matter what kind of yellow it is. I just like yellow.”
Donghyuck leans back against the cold rough wood of the tree behind them and nods. “Huh. Yellow. Okay.”
“That was a boring question.”
“I’ve wanted to know your favorite color for a while, okay?”
“Really?”
Donghyuck tears up shards of grass from the ground and looks down at his hand. “Yeah.”
Jaemin laughs. “You could’ve just asked me.”
“No, I couldn’t have.” Dry roots are starting to pile up in his hand and he crumbles them up in a fist. “I mean, I didn’t even know that I was allowed to even ask you questions until, like, a month ago. So. Yeah.”
There’s sudden silence on Jaemin’s end, and Donghyuck gathers the courage to look up to be met with the sight of Jaemin still looking ahead, seemingly in deep thought. His dark hair is tangled up out of his face, and Donghyuck can see the deep crease between his perfect eyebrows, making him look older than he is. “You really thought I hated you all this time, huh?”
He says it as more of a statement than a question, but Donghyuck nods anyway. “Well, yeah. We discussed that already.”
“You wanna know the truth, Donghyuck-ah?” Jaemin asks him, suddenly staring straight into his face with his black hole eyes. “I think I did hate you a bit.”
Donghyuck is stuck in place as all he can do is stare back. “What?”
“You annoyed the shit out of me. I couldn’t stand to be around you more than five minutes at a time.” He says it with the utmost sincerity, and Donghyuck is almost impressed. “I could say that it was because I just didn’t like you as a person. And the feeling that you were taking everything that belonged to me, that was a part of it, yeah. But it was mostly that…you were fine with just…being yourself. I think I was jealous of that. Jealous of you.”
“Jealous of me?” Donghyuck is too shocked by his sudden confession to even feel shy or overly-aware of their proximity. “How could you possibly be jealous of me? I mean, you’re…you. You have everything.”
Jaemin hums. “I’m not gonna be an asshole and tell you that that’s not true, because I do have everything, in a sense. At least, material things and things that others don’t. But freedom? That was the one thing I never really had. And you’re the embodiment of that, I think. So I hated you for it. Maybe I still do.”
Jaemin’s honesty comes in layers and it has always been conditional, but right now he seems to have no problem metaphorically offering the soft flesh of his belly up to Donghyuck. As if to say, I trust you, or maybe just, I still don’t fully trust you, but I know that you’re not gonna use this truth against me, anyway. So here it is, since you’re so fucking hungry for it.
The last couple of months have made Donghyuck realize that maybe Jaemin is more normal than he initially thought. He has feelings like he does, and fears and hopes and flaws and faults. He’s just better at hiding it.
“I’m sorry,” is what decides to come out of Donghyuck’s mouth.
Jaemin stares at him. “What are you saying sorry for? There’s nothing to be sorry about. You didn’t do anything. Not really.”
“I know,” Donghyuck says carefully, “but I feel like I should be apologizing anyway. I didn’t know.”
“There’s no way you could’ve known. I never told you.”
“I guess that’s true.”
There’s a lull in the conversation then, like Jaemin is either regretting what he’s said or he simply has nothing else to add, and something unnameable simmers beneath Donghyuck’s skin.
Donghyuck sighs and braces himself. “Will you tell me things now?”
Jaemin seems to snap out of a daze like he was lost in thought and blinks down at the grass in front of them instead of giving him an answer. For a moment, Donghyuck is afraid he’s gone too far, but then Jaemin nods slowly and says,
“Yeah. I’ll tell you things now.”
By the time the sun has started to set, Donghyuck has learned three things: One, contrary to towering amounts of information gathered over the past two and a half years, Na Jaemin is not evil. Two, Jaemin gets tipsy very easily. And three, the infatuation that Donghyuck had felt for Jaemin all that time ago has not gone away, even though he’s been ignoring it ever since he realized it was even there in the first place.
The last one isn’t that important.
They sat under the arm-breaking tree until the sky started to turn orange, and Jaemin had to physically drag Donghyuck off his ass and back to his bike. Donghyuck is only mildly uncomfortable with the fact that he didn’t even feel the need to fill the silence with words for once, content just to sit there in his presence. There’s no use in dwelling on it for now.
Jaemin had been calm the entire time they sat next to each other, but now that he’s realized what time it is, he’s back to being scarily serious.
“We’ve been gone way too long. Someone will have my head on a platter when we get back.”
Someone most likely being his father, but Donghyuck doesn’t mention it.
It’s early evening when they make it back, but it seems as if not many people have left the house at all. In fact, it seems like even more people are there. Donghyuck and Jaemin sneak in through the rear, but there’s probably really no point in trying to be stealthy when no one is paying attention in the first place. Jaemin insists that they split up so that they won’t be seen together, but the half-baked plan comes to a halt because Jaemin’s father sees them anyway.
Jaemin had mumbled something vaguely hopeful about his father maybe not even being there when they returned, fucking off somewhere else because he couldn’t be bothered to pretend to care about his wife’s birthday for more than a couple hours. But there he is, in all his glory, leaning back on the white leather sectional in the middle of the living room with his arm wrapped delicately around Jaemin’s mother. He’s still sipping wine like he was hours ago. He sends the both of them a calm look over the rim of his glass, and it only lasts a second before he’s laughing at something someone across from him is saying as if on cue.
Donghyuck has never gotten in any real trouble with him, but he feels mildly threatened, like a child about to get a scolding and a slap on the wrist.
As the night goes on and Jaemin gives him somberly ominous stares from across the room in between conversations with other people, Donghyuck regrets offering to help clean up afterward, because now he can’t scurry back home with his tail between his legs and leave the cleaning staff to it. He’s never going to be nice again.
Rich people’s way of partying hard seems to just be getting absolutely shitafced but in a very calm, collected and refined manner, and people only start to go home once it’s finally dark outside.
Jaemin idles around to tell guests goodbye and to wish them a lovely evening, but once everyone is out, he whisks himself up the stairs and presumably to his room when no one except Donghyuck is looking.
Donghyuck may not be the most well-adjusted or emotionally intelligent at his worst moments, but he feels like he should check up on Jaemin and make sure he’s…okay? He’s not really sure. It’s not that important.
He’s only made it to the top of the stairwell when Jaemin’s father appears from around a corner like a bad omen. It seems like Jaemin had not made it to his room in time, if the way his hand is hovering over the doorknob of his room is anything to go by.
“Jaemin-ah.” It’s obvious who he’s speaking to, but he looks at Donghyuck while he says it. His face seems to be devoid of any real emotion, and it has Donghyuck stuck in place. “Where were you?”
Jaemin turns slowly to see what exactly he’s looking at, and the moment he makes eye contact with Donghyuck standing dumbly on the stairway landing, Donghyuck wishes the Earth would spontaneously open up beneath him and swallow him down to its core.
“I was with Donghyuck-ah,” he says plainly. There was really no point in bullshitting, and his father already knew the answer to his own question before he asked it anyway, but it still makes Donghyuck cringe.
“Everyone was asking about you,” he continues, and only then does he turn his attention back to Jaemin. “I had to tell them that I wasn’t sure where you were. You know that’s a bad look, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
Donghyuck is definitely overhearing a conversation that he has no business being a part of, but Jaemin’s father is staring directly at him again. “Very important people were here today. You need to be here. How do you think that reflects on me, on us? To tell people that I don’t know where my own son is?”
“It won’t happen again,” Jaemin says robotically, and Donghyuck isn’t sure if he’s completely disinterested in the conversation or shutting down. “I promise.”
“And to think you left to…be with a maid’s son.” He gives Donghyuck a look so venomous it makes him shrink back a little. “Have you lost it?”
Jaemin’s hand slips off of his door knob, and he throws him a dirty glare that Donghyuck has never seen on his face before. “He has a name.”
“Excuse me?”
“His name is Donghyuck.”
He stalks up to get in Jaemin’s face so fast that for a second Donghyuck is afraid he’ll hit him. “None of that matters. This is what matters.” He jabs a strong finger into the center of Jaemin’s chest. “This. You. Did you think you could ever get out of this? You are my only son. An heir. Behave like it.”
He steps back as quickly as he came, and his sudden anger is replaced with his default air of calm and coolheadedness. “Don’t forget who you are.”
He pushes past where Donghyuck is standing on the landing and bumps him so hard it leaves his shoulder stinging, sharp footsteps resounding throughout the house.
Jaemin is still standing in the same place, staring blankly ahead at the wall in front of him. Donghyuck starts to tread wearily closer like he’s approaching a distressed animal, but Jaemin seemingly snaps out of it and turns back to his door.
“Jaemin, wait–”
The door is slamming in front of his face before another word can get out, and he hears the telltale click of a lock being clicked into place. There’s radio silence behind the door, like Jaemin has disappeared completely.
So much for progress.
While everything is spiraling out of control around Jaemin, there seems to be only one real solution to get an iota of control back. Hunched over his toilet with his middle and pointer finger down his throat and sweat beading down his temple isn’t really a good look, but it’s more about the result than the process, anyway.
He never planned on resorting to such extremes, content to eat less and exercise until his body was aching so much that he couldn’t move it anymore. But even if he’s been seeing progress in the way he looks, the way he feels is simply getting worse.
Throwing up should be easy, but it’s harder than it looks and he’s struggling to get anything up in the first place. He tries to stab at the back of his throat again and just ends up gagging on his own spit, so maybe he should just give up.
He never imagined that the beginning of his twenties would look like this, but he knows nothing if not how to adapt and overcome. It’s getting a little impossible now, though.
He slumps over in defeat, and his wobbly reflection in the toilet water stares back at him, taunting.
He never dealt well with vomit, anyway. Exercising will just have to do.
When he gets up the world tilts on its axis a little, and his vision splits into three. He probably just needs to take more vitamins, so he shakes it off and leaves his room to go to the kitchen.
The stairwell starts to swirl before him, and the vertigo sends his sense of balance and direction off. The next thing he knows, he’s freefalling to the bottom of the staircase and landing on his ankle. It sends a sharp pain up his leg and down his heel, and someone whose face he’s too dizzy to make out comes rushing over to him and asking if he’s okay.
He tries to brush them off and stand back up, but a wave of nauseousness crashes over him and he falls back down, flat on his ass.
He’s whisked away to urgent care, which is fucking annoying, because it’s just a sprained ankle. He’s told that he’s torn a ligament, given a brace and crutches and told to take it easy for a couple weeks, and this is just another thing spiraling out of Jaemin’s control.
His father looks at him like he’s facing some kind of karmic retribution, and his mother just worries herself sick even though he hasn’t even broken a bone.
The pain isn’t even an issue, nor is the fact that it looks like his ankle is growing another ankle; the real issue is the fact that he can’t use a fucking treadmill or walk around the tennis court until he drops anymore. He’ll just have to keep his food consumption under an even more careful watch.
It’s easier to not eat when he’s put on bedrest, and he spends his first couple of days under his covers editing old photographs he’s taken.
There’s a tentative knock on his door a week later, and it’s confusing because there had definitely been an unspoken order for everyone to avoid him like the plague unless absolutely necessary until he fully healed up.
“Come in,” he says, focusing on the bright blue light of his laptop and silently sizzling his eyes raw.
The door cracks open slowly and half of a head peeks out from around it.
“I brought you a compression wrap.”
Donghyuck shoves his arm through the space in the doorway that he’s made for himself and waves a small box around. Jaemin just stares at him, half hoping he’ll get fed up with his silence and leave, but Donghyuck has never been one to give up easily.
“Look, it’s not like I’m here for my own good or anything. I’m doing my job. Kind of. So just put your pride aside for one second and take the fucking bandage.”
It’s funny that Donghyuck of all people is preaching to him about pride, but he won’t mention it. Maybe Jaemin would be slightly hurt if he could see more than a sliver of Donghyuck’s face, but he’s also just too tired to really care.
“Alright, come in.”
Donghyuck looks like he’s half-surprised Jaemin is actually letting him in, but he shakes it off and walks inside, shutting the door gently behind him. He slowly makes his way over to the bed like he’s lost some of the audacity he had five seconds prior. He sits gingerly on the edge of Jaemin’s bed, under where Jaemin is sat cross-legged near his headboard. “You’re supposed to keep your leg straight and elevated, you know.”
Jaemin straightens his leg out across the bed in lieu of an answer, and Donghyuck takes that as his cue to unwrap the bandage from the box. He hates the way the dumb, ugly brace is sitting on his foot, cutting into his sweats and all of his blood circulation. Donghyuck seems hesitant to touch him, but when Jaemin makes no move to say or do anything else, he gently grabs his foot and places it delicately on his own lap.
He seems deadly focused as he takes Jaemin’s foot out of his brace like he’s doing open-heart surgery instead, bottom lip caught between his front teeth and eyebrows furrowed.
“Have you been icing it? The swelling is still pretty bad. It should be going down by now.”
Donghyuck looks up at him sternly and expectantly, and Jaemin feels a little ashamed. He’s usually better about taking care of himself. It also isn’t helping that Jaemin has been indirectly-directly avoiding even having to look at Donghyuck after his mother’s party. It all comes down to one little thing: his pride is hurt. Being reprimanded in front of Donghyuck was not something he had ever prepared for, and now he feels a little out of his depth. He’s known Donghyuck long enough to know that he’s probably not judging him, but a deep shame burns in the pit of his stomach anyway. It’s hard to face him.
“Is it that bad?”
“It’s fucking terrible, Jaemin-ah. It’s like your ankle ate another ankle. Jesus.”
Jaemin wants to laugh at that, but he’s too doped up on anti-inflammatory drugs to do anything else but make a small sound in the back of his throat.
“And it’s turning purple. Have you even been doing the things the doctor told you to do? You tore a ligament, you have to take this seriously.”
Jaemin blinks groggily at where Donghyuck is wrapping the compression bandage carefully around his foot like it’s made of fine china.
“Why are you so mouthy today?”
Donghyuck pauses like he wants to hit him but then remembers that he can’t, going back to wrapping the bandage around him a little rougher. “I’m helping you in your time of need and you’re calling me mouthy? I should’ve left you to wallow in here and let your foot develop gangrene and fall off. Asshole.”
He turns away like he can’t even bear to look at Jaemin anymore and continues to grumble under his breath, definitely calling him a handful of distasteful names. It’s at that moment that he feels a sudden urge to do something very stupid, like pat him on the head or brush his overgrown hair behind his ear or touch his neck or something else equally as inappropriate and over-the-line. It’s a stunning realization that happens all in the breath of a second, except Jaemin can’t put a name to the feeling.
He can’t think of a time where he ever liked someone. He thought that there were people who were nice to look at, and he knew the type of people that he was expected to like, but that was as far as it ever went. No one ever really interested him or kept him on his toes long enough for him to ever really pay attention. But Donghyuck came around when he was seventeen and pulled Jaemin into his orbit, making himself so big no one could dare to look away, chipping away at Jaemin piece by piece until there was space for him that he knew Jaemin would never make first. He made himself vital, needed, until Jaemin forgot the times when he wasn’t there.
Lee Donghyuck is a thief, he thinks, and while Jaemin was busy worrying that Donghyuck would take everything that belonged to him in his own world, he had gone and stolen that traitorous thing beating inside of his chest instead.
It’s a gross thought.
“There,” Donghyuck says, lifting Jaemin’s foot off of his lap and placing it back down on his bed, completely unaware that Jaemin is about five seconds away from having a heart attack at the young age of twenty years old. “Make sure you ice it, okay? And don’t walk on it until the swelling goes down.”
Donghyuck looks up when he doesn’t respond, and it’s like Jaemin is seeing him in a new light. He looks just the same as he always does, but it's like the wool has been pulled from over Jaemin’s eyes, and he can finally see him. He’s just a boy. And maybe that’s the appeal, the most dangerous weapon of all.
“Why are you staring at me?” Donghyuck asks defensively when he doesn’t respond, and Jaemin has come to learn that Donghyuck cannot stand his silence. “Say something.”
Jaemin crosses his legs back under himself just to see Donghyuck snarl. “Why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?”
Jaemin gestures vaguely at the space between them. “Just…this. You don’t have to do any of this.”
Donghyuck shuffles further up the bed and crushes the plastic box in his fist. “Remember when you got me those sweets at the convenience store? And when you bought me the suit for your mom’s party?”
“Yeah?”
“You said that you did those things because you wanted to. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that. So let me do this. I’m doing it because I want to.”
Jaemin just blinks. He’s not used to his words being thrown back at him. Donghyuck crosses his arms over his chest like a stern teacher.
“It’s hard for you to believe that someone actually cares about you, is that it?”
He feels a little too exposed at that moment because Donghyuck is digging his grubby little fingers into his chest again, never faltering on his lifelong plan to make Jaemin’s life as difficult as possible.
“You care about me?”
He turns it back on Donghyuck and says it in his obnoxious know-it-all voice to cut through the energy, and Donghyuck sputters like he can’t believe what he’s hearing.
“Don’t turn this back on me, this is about you! Deal with your feelings!”
What he doesn’t know, though, is that Jaemin is actually curious. And he wants to hear it again.
“Admit that you care about me. You can’t take it back.”
Donghyuck is properly glowing Rudolph-red like he always is, and this time Jaemin doesn’t resist the voice in his head telling him to touch him. He reaches forward to pinch his cheek, and Donghyuck yelps in pain as he digs his fingernails into his skin.
“What the fuck?!”
“Ad. Mit. It.”
“Fine, okay, I care about you, Jesus, is that what you wanna hear? Let me go!”
Satisfied, Jaemin lets go of his cheek and slides his laptop to this side. “Yeah, that is what I wanted to hear. Thanks.”
Donghyuck glares a thousand fiery daggers at him, but Jaemin feels smug. But most of all, he feels lighter, and he doesn’t want to think about why.
“Hey,” Jaemin says suddenly, seriously, and Donghyuck quits whining when he senses his shift in tone. “Thank you.”
Donghyuck smiles the brightest smile that Jaemin has ever seen on his face, showing all of his shiny teeth, and the pain is worth it at that moment. “Don’t mention it.”
In the past, Jaemin’s entire body would physically reject the idea of showing Donghyuck gratitude. Now, it feels necessary.
—
Renjun visits him on a Sunday.
His hair is black again, and he seems to have bought another overly-priced bag to lug his things around in, but most of all, he gives Jaemin a look so devoid of emotion that it stings.
“You look pathetic.”
It’s true, but that doesn’t mean he has to say it. The only hygienic thing Jaemin has been doing while waiting for the torn ligament in his ankle to magically untear is showering regularly, but his room is a wreck and there’s a stash of uneaten food that was given to him hidden underneath his bed. He only leaves his room when absolutely necessary, he hasn’t properly brushed his hair in days, and he’s pretty sure it’s been weeks since he’s seen actual sunlight, but his grasp on the passing of time has been severely incapacitated.
“Injunnie, would it kill you to spare me a little sympathy for once?”
He walks over to his window and tears the curtains to the side, and Jaemin resists the urge to hiss like a cat at the brightness. “Are you a vampire? When was the last time you went outside?”
Jaemin groans and tosses his duvet over himself to shield the light from blinding him. There’s shuffling and sounds of rearranging coming from wherever it is Renjun has moved next, no doubt cleaning up his floor.
“It looks like a bomb hit this place.”
Stop bullying me, Jaemin tries to say, but it comes out as more of a “Mmph.” The sounds eventually stop and he can hear Renjun walking back over to him. The duvet is snatched off of his body in one swift pull, and Jaemin buries his face into his over-fluffed pillow to chase the warmth being stolen away from him.
“You need to get up.”
Maybe if he plays dead, Renjun will leave him alone.
“I know it’s hard, but you have to get up. If you just stay like this, you’ll end up feeling worse.”
Renjun is no psychologist, but logically, Jaemin knows that he’s right, so he uses what little strength he has left in his weak muscles and twists himself into a sitting position. Renjun offers him a small smile that makes him feel a little better. “Scoot over.”
Jaemin obliges and he sits down next to him, rummaging around in his bag for something. “I asked Nǎinai to send me some Jasmine tea leaves from home. It’s good for stress.”
He makes a triumphant noise when he finds what he’s looking for and pulls out a thermos. He holds it out to Jaemin, but he just stares at it. The thought of putting something into his stomach alone is enough to make him feel sick, but Renjun sends him a look so uncompromising that he shuts up and takes it.
“Drink it.”
Jaemin brings the thermos up to his mouth and only stops drinking when Renjun seems satisfied.
“Are you happy now?”
“Hm. A bit.” Renjun takes the thermos from him and settles it on his bedside table. “Now tell me what’s wrong?”
“What?”
He’s clearly not in the mood to repeat himself, because he just keeps staring like Jaemin is majorly getting on his nerves.
“What?”
Renjun pinches the bridge of his nose and sighs like he’s just finished a hard day’s work. “You reek of sadness and we’re sitting in a pigsty. Not to mention you’ve dropped a couple pounds. Have you been eating?”
Jaemin hugs a pillow defensively to his chest. They’ve never talked about that, whatever that even is. Jaemin doesn’t think it’s a problem. Renjun is definitely perceptive enough to have noticed, but he’s probably never brought it up until now for the sake of his feelings.
“You haven’t, have you?” Renjun says it quietly and gently, like he’s talking to a child, and Jaemin hates it, but he doesn’t know what to say or how to make it stop. “Did someone say something to you? Who was it? I’ll beat them up. Just tell me who–“
“I say this with nothing but the utmost respect for you as a human being,” Jaemin interrupts, holding back a laugh at the look of pure determination on his face, “But what are you gonna do? Realistically. You’re like five centimeters tall.”
Renjun immediately stops his tirade and throws him a nasty look more powerful than any of his painful punches. “Just remember that I can walk out of here at any second.”
“Renjunnieee,” Jaemin drawls, shaking him back and forth by the leg, “Don’t leave.”
“Just,” Renjun says, refusing to go off topic, “Let me know if you need anything. I’m here if you need to talk. Always.”
Jaemin nods to placate him, but there’s really nothing to talk about. But deep down, Jaemin knows that he's been carrying a lot with him for the past year, and Renjun of all people deserves nothing if not his honesty.
“When I got back from Ulsan,” he speaks up quietly, and Renjun looks up at him to offer his undivided attention. “Our tailor said I had gained some weight. And none of my stuff fit the same. So I just…started cutting calories. That’s what started it. But I’m doing better now, so you don’t have to worry. The ankle made it a little worse, but I’ll be back to normal soon.” Renjun blinks slowly at him. “You don’t have to worry,” Jaemin repeats, hoping that he’ll get what he’s really trying to say, which is pleasepleaseplease leave it alone.
“Okay,” Renjun obliges, and Jaemin deflates a little. “But if things ever get really bad, you’ll tell someone, right? Promise me you’ll tell someone.”
“I promise,” Jaemin says, and he can never lie to Renjun, so he has to mean it. “I will.”
Renjun watches him like he’s trying to see if he’s lying or not. “Okay.”
Jaemin reaches for his laptop to find some dumb drama for them to watch together like they used to do when they were younger, and Renjun starts to twiddle his thumbs.
“Where is Donghyuck-ah? I didn’t see him when I got here.”
Jaemin sighs as he clicks around on the first streaming service he finds. “Why are you always asking about him?”
Renjun side-eyes him. “You always get so weird when I mention him.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You do,” Renjun insists, and Jaemin isn’t sure if his palms start to sweat a little or if it’s just his imagination. “Cut the bullshit, seriously, it’s just me. What is your deal?”
“I don’t have a deal,” Jaemin grumbles, and it sounds unconvincing even to his own ears.
Renjun doesn’t even humor him with a response, letting him stew in his own silence. Jaemin continues to stare at his computer screen resolutely.
“I don’t know. He keeps bringing me snacks and trying to get me to talk about my feelings.”
Renjun snorts which only makes Jaemin more defensive. “And that bothers you because…? Actually, no, don’t answer that, I know why it bothers you.”
“Why does it bother me, divine and all-knowing Huang Renjun?”
“Because,” he states matter-of-factly. “You’re scared of your own feelings.”
“Scared?”
“Yeah, scared. You’re so afraid of being vulnerable. I mean, I’m like the only one you actually tell stuff to. But Jaemin-ah,” he says, and Jaemin hates the serious tone of voice he takes, “Even if you don’t like it, you’re gonna have to suck it up at some point. Because sometimes, you don’t really have a choice. And if you keep pushing people away, you’ll have no one left.”
Jaemin’s first thought is to say I don’t have anyone in the first place, but he knows that that’s not true. He has his mother, he has Renjun, and as much as he hates to admit it, he has Donghyuck. It’s better than nothing.
“I’ll always have you, though.”
Renjun seems to contemplate hitting him for a split second before deciding against it, but a small and ugly part of Jaemin deep down inside of him really wants to know. Like even after all this time, he’s scared that Renjun will leave him. “Yes, you’ll always have me. But that’s not the point. You can’t just depend on me for the rest of your life. You have to let other people in, too.”
Jaemin does not appreciate getting lectured at eleven in the morning, but when Renjun is telling you something, you have to listen. “Hm.”
“And with Donghyuck,” Renjun continues, and Jaemin hates the way his heart starts up a staccato rhythm at the mention of his name, “I don’t need to be here 24/7 to see that he’s trying. He tries so hard with you. Honestly, I don’t even know why he still chooses to put up with you–“
“Hey–“
“–but he does. And that counts for something, yeah? He must really like you if he hasn’t given up yet. You’re the most frustrating person I know.”
“Are you trying to tell me something, or is this just an excuse to insult me?”
Renjun sighs. “You can’t keep only accepting love on your own terms, or giving love on your own terms. Sometimes, you just have to let it happen.”
Jaemin flinches so hard his vision darkens at the edges for a second. “Love? Who said anything about love?”
Renjun smiles at him like he knows something that Jaemin doesn’t. “Anyone would be lucky to know you. So let people know you.”
Jaemin is still a bit stuck on the love thing, but he doesn’t push it. Renjun is looking at him with all of the sincerity of a child, so he bites his tongue and nods.
“I’ll try.”
That seems to be a satisfying enough answer for Renjun.
“Good.”
—
Jaemin’s ankle heals up eventually, and it feels good to be able to walk normally again. He cleans his room up and throws the stale food from under his bed in the trash, and finally brushes his hair for the first time in what seems like forever.
He still doesn’t feel like doing anything, though, so he takes a scalding hot shower to get his temperature up and redden his cheeks and pretends to come down with a fever.
It’s elementary, but it works like a charm. He’s bought another couple of days to not be bothered, and the longer he doesn’t have to come face to face with his father again, the better.
It seems that Donghyuck has suddenly decided to just start barging into his room unannounced, because the door swings open to reveal his dumb face a couple hours into his self-quarantine.
“I knew you didn’t have a fever!”
He stomps over to where Jaemin is (was) peacefully reading a book on his bed and slaps a warm hand on his forehead.
“Temperature’s normal. You dirty liar.”
Jaemin shrugs his hand off of him and puts down his book. “Why do you care anyway?”
“I don’t. I just like being right.”
“Congratulations,” Jaemin says, and for fuck’s sake, he’s smiling. “Anything else?”
Donghyuck suddenly looks lost, like he’s not even sure why he’s here in the first place. “Huh. I guess that was it.”
Jaemin nods curtly and picks his book back up to ignore the weird feeling in his stomach. He can feel Donghyuck watching him, the way he does when he has something to say but is figuring out how to say it.
“What is it, Donghyuck-ah?”
Donghyuck worries his bottom lip between his front teeth and stands up, walking over to the other side of the room and leaning against the wall.
Jaemin frowns and puts down his book again. “You’re acting weird. What is it?”
Donghyuck looks scarily serious all of a sudden, arms crossed over his chest, and Jaemin knows that this can’t be going anywhere good.
His patience starts to thin quicker than usual. “Are you gonna tell me what’s wrong or are you gonna keep staring at me forever?”
Between them, Jaemin is usually the one in charge of long, solemn silences. From Donghyuck, it’s just unsettling.
“Is there…” Donghyuck finally speaks up but then stops himself, shaking his head like he’s erasing the words that have just come out of his mouth. “Ever since you hurt yourself–no, ever since you came back from Ulsan, you’ve been a little off. I mean, ever since I first met you you’ve been off, but it’s more noticeable now. I know you’re a private person and stuff, but you just…withdraw into yourself sometimes.” Donghyuck’s voice lowers to a whisper. “And you’ve lost a lot of weight recently…”
Maybe Jaemin isn’t being as subtle as he feels like he’s being. He knows that Donghyuck is perceptive, can be even more perceptive than Jaemin is, but he’s surprised that he’s bold enough to bring it up.
“What are you trying to say?”
Donghyuck looks a little taken aback at the sudden change in his tone. “N–I’m not trying to say anything. I just wanted to know if you’re okay.”
Jaemin crosses his arms. “What do you think?”
Donghyuck doesn’t try to hide the shock on his face at it being turned back on him. “What do I think? I…I don’t know what’s wrong with you, that’s the whole point. You just get so weird sometimes. I–” He pauses like he’s contemplating whether or not he should say what he’s about to say, and if Jaemin were him, he’d shut up. “The extent of my knowledge is that…I know that with your family and stuff…and being an heir…it’s hard.”
It’s hard. That's one way of putting it.
“You don’t know a thing.”
“Well, how am I supposed to know anything if you won’t tell me?” Donghyuck asks, and Jaemin wasn’t expecting him to get angry, but at least it’s a nice change of pace from his default smugness. “We’re supposed to be friends.”
“Friends don’t have to tell each other every gritty detail of their lives, Donghyuck.”
He scoffs, and Jaemin wants to lunge across the room and choke him out. “That’s the whole point of friends, Jaemin.”
To a point, Jaemin is surprised at his lack of things to say back. “I tell you things.”
“Jaemin-ah,” Donghyuck says suddenly, and he looks scared by what he’s about to say. “I found rotting food under your bed.”
His first reaction is to deny it. His second is red-hot burning shame scalding him from the inside out. His third is wondering how that could even be when he had been so careful. His fourth is anger.
“I’m sorry that I didn't notice sooner,” Donghyuck continues, sounding like he’s pleading with Jaemin for something unknown. “I should’ve paid more attention.”
Jaemin hates the way that the anger pooling in his stomach rises up to burn inside of his throat. “Stop apologizing for things that aren't your fault.”
“But–”
“I am not your responsibility.” Jaemin gets up from his bed to walk over to where Donghyuck is leaning against the wall in one quick stride. “Don’t act like we’re something more than we are.”
Donghyuck doesn’t shrink back, and Jaemin wasn’t really expecting him to either. He doesn’t avoid his gaze either; he just leans forward. “You need to get your fucking feelings in order.”
Jaemin backs him up into the wall until he’s caged in, leaning forward until their noses are almost touching and he can smell past bubblegum in the exhale that Donghyuck lets out. Only then does his gaze waver. “You want me to react, is that it?” Donghyuck’s eyes widen. “Well here’s me reacting. Remember it.”
“You’re so hot and cold,” Donghyuck spits. “What the fuck do you want from me? You don’t want me to cross whatever weird fucking line you’ve created in your head, but you let me touch your things, you buy me stuff, you open up and then you shut me back out. You’re a fucking hypocrite.”
Jaemin can’t lose control, he can’t put his foot in his mouth even more than he already has. “Don’t talk to me like that.”
“What do you want from me then?” Donghyuck repeats, and he sounds angry, he’s fuming, but more than that, he sounds confused, like he’s still trying to understand Jaemin even when he’s arguing with him. “What the fuck do you want from me?”
Jaemin steps away from him, and he gets dizzy like he almost forgot what it felt like to not be chest-to-chest with Donghyuck.
“I want you to get out of my room.”
Donghyuck has the audacity to immediately sober up and look hurt. “What?”
“I want you,” Jaemin repeats patiently, “To get out of my room.”
Donghyuck just blinks at him, effectively shut down, and the rational part of Jaemin’s brain tells him damage control damage control damage control. He doesn’t actually want Donghyuck to go. The problem is that he wants him to stay. And that’s exactly why he has to leave.
He removes himself from the wall and doesn’t even spare Jaemin another look as he walks over to the door, Jaemin stuck in place as he watches his retreating back.
“Fuck you.”
The door slams shut behind him so roughly that the vibrations resound inside of Jaemin’s bones for the rest of the day.
Donghyuck isn’t sure what happened.
The version of himself a year ago would say something immature, like it’s all Jaemin’s fault, but the version of himself that exists now guesses that they’re both at fault. Donghyuck should have dealt with him more delicately, Jaemin should have been less of an asshole, whatever. For all of his calm and posturing, Na Jaemin might be the most delicate person he’s ever met. One moment, he and Jaemin are making progress, and the next, they reach another roadblock. For every step they take forward, they take three steps backwards.
He’s going over every conversation and interaction that they’ve ever had since they met, wondering what he should’ve said differently, what he should’ve done differently. It’s bothering him so much mentally and physically that his mother asks him what’s wrong and he has to fake a stomachache and stay home to save face.
He and Jaemin just aren’t compatible; he’s come to realize that, but he wants to be with him anyway. In whatever way Jaemin will allow him to be.
Whenever something bothers Donghyuck and there seems to be no clear solution, he feels the need to do something drastic. So he takes a chunk of his latest paycheck from working for the object of all of his confusion and dyes his hair bright pink.
It looks pretty good if you ask him, and his mother tells him that he looks like a circus clown when she could’ve insulted him way worse, so he considers it a win.
He shows back up to work like normal. Half of the people at the estate give him thinly-veiled judgemental stares, and the other half tell him that it suits him. Jaemin’s father is surprisingly there for once, and he shoots Donghyuck the most degrading look known to man. All it does is make Donghyuck feel smug.
Everytime he does see Jaemin, he’s either avoiding him altogether or looking at him like he’s trying to telepathically communicate something very important to him. Donghyuck just wants to grab him by his shoulders and shake him and tell him to spit it out already, but he knows that it would be unproductive and end up with the both of them more pissed off than before, so he bides his time. In a perfect world, Jaemin will come to him first, but Donghyuck isn’t sure that that’s even possible. It’s like they’re just idling, dancing around each other, waiting to see who will crack first.
Donghyuck hates losing.
Jaemin’s father invites some people over for dinner at the end of the week. Donghyuck has no idea who they are, but they must be important, so Donghyuck should be on his best behavior. There’s probably no way to get back into his father’s good graces that he actually wasn’t in in the first place, but buttering up some guests while he serves them seems to be the least he can do.
Donghyuck can hear them arrive from his place in the kitchen, and his mother isn’t on shift today so he can’t even ask her if she knows them. Which she definitely does, because she knows everything. Donghyuck needs to start paying attention more.
He badly wants to be nosy and see what all the fuss is about, but Ms. Shin, a full-time kitchen staff member who Donghyuck is 90% sure hates his guts, clears her throat to bring his attention back to the task at hand.
“Donghyuck-ah, serve the drinks.”
She reminds him of his grandmother but more annoying, or maybe a schoolteacher. Donghyuck isn’t sure what he did exactly, but he must have done something to piss her off pretty badly because she treats him like a neglected stepson, but worse.
A tray full of fancy alcohol is shoved into his hands and he’s shooed away like the kitchen will simultaneously catch on fire if he stays any longer. He self-consciously smooths out his button-up and brushes imaginary dust off of his pants before walking into the dining room as discreetly as possible. It’s more of a hall than a room, but his eyes still find Jaemin immediately. His gaze is perfectly even and he’s not giving away anything he’s thinking, the bastard, but he looks devastatingly handsome all the same.
From what Donghyuck can see, it seems that there are two other families there with kids around his age. He’s not usually one to flounder in social situations, but the way all of their heads turn when he enters like he’s someone important and not some nameless staff makes him pause a little bit.
Donghyuck has never really understood day-drinking, but they look very delighted to be served mimosas or whatever fruity shit it is they like to drink. He can feel Jaemin’s eyes burning mountain-sized craters into the side of his face as he greets them politely. There’s no rule that staff shouldn’t really speak unless spoken to, but Donghyuck knows that it’s still expected. But rules are stupid, and he’ll do anything to piss people off; people meaning Jaemin and his father. So much for good graces.
His mother isn't here to step on his shoes to get him to shut up and stay in line, so he turns his charm up to one thousand and sabotages the conversation going on to introduce himself. The guests he still doesn’t know are nice enough in that shiny-fake way and no one throws tomatoes at him. Jaemin’s mother seems delighted, even, but that doesn’t really matter. Because all he’s really paying attention to is Jaemin’s father at the head of the table, and the stern look on his face. Jaemin is to the left of him, and Donghyuck has known him long enough that his eyes are telling him to stop while the rest of his face remains perfectly neutral. Donghyuck just smiles at him, because he doesn’t plan on making his life easier unless he asks very, very nicely.
Throughout the rest of the afternoon, Donghyuck observes a couple of things. The first one being that rich people love small talk, which is something that he realized a couple of years ago. They also love to brag about their children, apparently, and he finds out that one of the girls there, the daughter of a doctor and someone Jaemin went to school with, is also on her way to becoming a doctor, about to start her third year of medical school. (That would be one minus point for Jaemin who is evidently not in college, if he weren’t a successor of a big, big company. It was a nice attempt, though.) The other family’s kid is a musician, which is decidedly less important and world-changing, so that conversation gets brushed off quickly. Donghyuck stands with him in solidarity, though.
There’s also talk of the stock market, and someone even brings up the weather, which is mind-boggling in its own right. It becomes increasingly clear that Doctor Girl’s mother, whose name Donghyuck doesn’t remember, is trying to set up her daughter with Jaemin in a subtle not-so-subtle way. It makes sense; they’re both rich, pretty, it would look good on camera, it’d be fruitful in the money-sense and they would produce an heir. Donghyuck would have half a mind to feel envy if Jaemin wasn’t so obviously uncomfortable. Or maybe only obvious to someone who really, really knows him, and as much as Jaemin strives to be unknowable, there’s only so much a person can hide. It’s in the stiff line of his shoulders, the rigidity of his mouth framing a pretty, polite smile.
Serves him right.
“Jaemin-ah,” Doctor Lady is saying when lunch is over and Donghyuck and Ms. Shin are clearing the plates and utensils away from the table, “You get more handsome every time I see you. And you’ve slimmed down so much. What’s your secret?”
Starving yourself, clearly, Donghyuck wants to say, but it’s not his place in more ways than one, and as much as he doesn’t completely understand it, Jaemin isn’t to blame. The extent of his knowledge on these things comes from movies and from when he was younger and people would make off-handed remarks about his weight under the guise of teasing or well-meaning concern. But Donghyuck doesn’t really care about what others have to say about how he looks. At least, not enough to do something drastic to change it. He wonders how Jaemin feels.
Jaemin smiles at her, and it’s so convincing that it almost fools Donghyuck. “You’re too kind,” he says, but it sounds more like go fuck yourself. Donghyuck is grabbing Jaemin’s empty glass when he says, “But sometimes I feel like I could improve myself. What do you think, Donghyuck-ah?”
His hand freezes where it’s wrapped around the cold glass. It's an inappropriate question to be asking in front of distinguished guests, and Donghyuck is not sure what Jaemin thinks or is hoping the endgame will be here. He’s probably just trying to embarrass him, get him to react, but Donghyuck won’t give him the satisfaction.
“I think you’re very handsome the way you are, Jaemin-ssi,” Donghyuck responds, and the grin on Jaemin’s face turns into an evil-er one.
“Maybe I should dye my hair like him?” Jaemin seemingly asks the rest of the table, but he’s only looking at Donghyuck. “Pink is the new black, after all.”
Donghyuck has never been more confused in his life.
Doctor Lady looks the most uncomfortable she’s looked all afternoon, probably at the prospect of Jaemin interacting with someone so below him, much less being…friends with him. “It’s a bit unprofessional, no?”
Like Donghyuck hasn’t heard that one before. Jaemin finally turns away from him to look at her, and the look in his eyes turns so icy that Donghyuck flinches a little. “What do you mean by that?”
Her husband laughs suddenly, an annoyingly pompous thing, and Donghyuck holds his breath. “Well, clearly pink hair is unbecoming of a staff, let alone a future businessman, no?”
Donghyuck tenses up at the sudden shift in atmosphere, and it’s sobering to think that these people can say things and laugh about them without any consequences. He’s made the Na family look bad, and now is probably his cue to apologize profusely and walk out of the room.
“I don’t think it’s that big of a deal,” Jaemin says calmly, and there goes Donghyuck’s chance at an out. “No one is so important that they can’t have a little fun, don’t you think?”
“Jaemin-ah,” his father clears his throat, a tense smile on his face and crow’s lines sinking their talons into the skin around his eyes.
“That’s okay,” the husband says, a curious look on his face as he turns back to Jaemin. “There are certain rules you have to follow when you’re in this business. And you can’t do that while looking, frankly, crazy. You still have a lot to learn before you take over, son.”
Donghyuck cringes internally, not because of the subtle jab at his own self, but because he knows that this is a soft spot for Jaemin. Being good enough in more ways than one. Being fit and ready when his father gives up his seat.
“I,” Jaemin starts, and judging by the wild look in his eyes, he can tell that this can’t be going anywhere good, “Think you should go fuck yourself.”
Multiple people gasp around the room, completely scandalized, and Donghyuck would feel a little proud if he weren’t so mortified. “Your made-up rules, your judgment, your fakeness, all of you assholes. You act like you’re so much better than everyone else because, what, you just so happen to have more money than most people? Donghyuck looks fine, and I’d rather be like him than spend another second around you people.”
Jaemin pushes his chair back and stands up, exiting the room in a blur of navy and inky black hair, leaving Donghyuck standing there awkwardly as everyone sits in complete silence, dumbfounded.
Donghyuck points behind himself with his thumb in the vague direction of where Jaemin left. “I’m gonna just…uh…”
He doesn’t even try to finish his sentence and runs after Jaemin.
The trail up the staircase is even more dizzying than usual, and Donghyuck finds that the door to Jaemin’s room is unlocked.
“What the fuck was that?”
Jaemin is sitting on his bed calmly with his Leica on his lap, not looking up like he’s the one who can’t bear to look Donghyuck in the eyes this time. “What?”
“Don't give me that shit,” Donghyuck sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose between his middle and pointer finger. “What the fuck were you thinking?”
It was so out of character for Jaemin that for a split second he had convinced himself he imagined it. But maybe he’s just finally had enough.
“They were insulting you.”
Jaemin finally looks up, and Donghyuck feels all of his defenses fall immediately. Even in the circumstances, he’s taken aback by just how beautiful he is.
They were insulting you, he said, and not they were insulting me. It’s asinine. “Since when do you care about me?”
“Since always,” he shrugs, like it’s the simplest thing in the world. Donghyuck has no idea who he’s talking to, or why it’s suddenly easy for Jaemin to say this to him now. “Is that a problem?”
“They–“ Donghyuck’s brain short-circuits. Jaemin is distracting him. The conversation wasn’t supposed to be about caring. “They’re important people, right? You can’t burn these bridges. You have to sit down and shut up and agree with everything they say. I mean, how is this gonna look?”
Jaemin has the audacity to laugh. “I thought you didn’t care about stuff like that.”
“I don’t,” Donghyuck frowns, making his way over to sit down angrily in front of where Jaemin is perched on his bed. “But don’t you?”
Jaemin seems to think his question over very deeply, like he’s asked him something mind-blowing. “I’m starting to rethink the things that I care about.”
That shuts Donghyuck up because it wasn’t what he was expecting at all. It could mean more than one thing, and he’s not sure if he wants to unpack all of them.
“Oh.”
Jaemin puts down his camera and looks at him earnestly. “Your hair looks pretty. I’ve been wanting to tell you since I first saw it.”
Donghyuck’s hand subconsciously shoots up to touch his hair, and he valiantly wills away the blush threatening to creep up his neck. He never blushed this much before he met Jaemin. “Are we gonna do that thing we do where we act like nothing happened and then we go on like normal?”
“I’m sorry.”
This must be the first time Jaemin has ever seriously apologized to him, and it would’ve knocked Donghyuck right off of his feet if he were standing.
He hates how fast he forgives him.
“I didn’t mean it. Or, well, I did mean it in the moment, but only because I wanted to push you away. I’m sorry.”
Donghyuck pauses and stares at him, his big eyes, his spiky eyelashes, the sweet curve of his mouth. “Did you mean what you said?”
He tilts his head to the side. “When?”
Donghyuck smirks. “About me being pretty.”
“I–“ Jaemin says, and this is the first time Donghyuck has ever seen him this frazzled. “I said your hair was pretty.”
Donghyuck frowns, pretending to be deeply hurt. “So you don’t think I’m pretty?”
Jaemin watches him like he’s searching for something within his eyes. He seems to make peace with something before he shakes his head a little. “I think you’re very pretty.”
Donghyuck’s heart does some weird sequence of flips inside of his chest, and his plans of flustering Jaemin have been foiled. “You…you do?”
He hates the way his voice peeks out of his throat; small, hesitant, like a child’s. Jaemin doesn’t make fun of him for it, just smiles one of his genuine smiles he only saves for moments that matter to him. “I do.”
Donghyuck has always considered himself a relatively brave person. He does what he wants and he says what he wants, he talks to strangers and rides his bike when he’s drunk, he barges into Na Jaemin’s life even when he’s supposedly not welcome there.
That’s why he throws all caution out of the window and leans forward until their lips are touching.
Jaemin’s camera is digging into his arm and there’s commotion downstairs, but none of that matters when he feels Jaemin cup his cheek and kiss him back. Donghyuck has imagined this more than he would ever admit, but the real thing is better than anything his imagination could ever come up with.
Jaemin pries open Donghyuck’s mouth gently with his tongue, and as Donghyuck gets kissed within an inch of his life, the only two things he can think of are one: this is fucking awesome, and two: I really should have locked the door.
Donghyuck is the first to break away when he hears someone raise their voice downstairs, and he has no idea why he’s the one who’s being responsible right now. Jaemin doesn't seem to be fazed and starts kissing gently down his neck, and it makes every drop of blood inside of Donghyuck’s body rush south.
“I fucking hate you.”
His breath puffs against the sensitive skin of Donghyuck’s neck as he laughs and then bites down hard enough to send a sharp shiver wrecking down Donghyuck’s spine. “If you really hated me, would you be letting me do this?”
Donghyuck can only mumble something incomprehensible because Jaemin won’t fucking stop. “You bastard.”
Jaemin pops up from where he was trying to extract Donghyuck’s soul from his body with his teeth and kisses him again, and Donghyuck hates how all of his thoughts dissipate into thin air as he kisses him like he’s trying to steal all of the oxygen out of his lungs.
They only separate when a door is slammed downstairs and it startles Donghyuck badly. Jaemin laughs against his mouth, and Donghyuck hits at his arm weakly before giving up.
“We need to deal with the consequences of our actions.”
Jaemin finally pulls away from him and his cheeks are flushed red, lips swollen to hell and back. Donghyuck thinks he likes him a little disheveled.
“Yeah.”
Neither of them make any attempt to move, and Donghyuck opens his mouth to say something before Jaemin interrupts him.
“But let me kiss you again first.”
—
The fallout happens like this: Jaemin’s father calls Donghyuck and his mother to his office and lays them off immediately, and neither of them even need to question why because it’s glaringly obvious why. She’d heard about what happened, which, to be fair, was 90% Jaemin’s fault. (They–meaning Donghyuck–are too much of a liability now, and having them there has done more harm than good. He wonders what Jaemin’s father would have done if he knew about the kiss on top of everything else.) Donghyuck would almost be relieved, if it wasn't entirely his fault that his mother is now out of a job. She takes it in stride, bowing deeply before him and thanking him for everything that he’s done for their family, but Donghyuck knows that she’s pissed.
In that moment, as he’s solemnly walking down the stairs for the last time, he wonders if he should’ve just put his pride aside and been more quiet, more normal, someone to be used for work and not to be looked at, someone who was not involved with perfect, untouchable Na Jaemin.
Apparently he didn’t consult with anyone before firing them, because Jaemin’s mother takes one look at them and rushes over.
“What happened?”
Donghyuck’s mother bows deeply before her like she had done seconds prior. “It was an honor to work for you. Thank you for everything.”
Her face drops like she’s just been told someone has died, and before she can get a word out, Jaemin is rushing out of the kitchen and walking over to them.
“What?”
Donghyuck can barely look him in the eyes, mostly out of shame but also out of regret. “It’s not a big deal,” he says, and he’s not sure if he’s trying to reassure them or himself. “Don’t worry about it.”
“I’ll fix it,” Jaemin’s mother says immediately, trying to push past them up the staircase.
“There’s no need,” Donghyuck says at the same time his own mother says, “That won’t be necessary.” Jaemin shoots him a glare and Donghyuck shrugs helplessly.
Donghyuck’s mother grabs him so roughly by the wrist that he’s sure that it’ll bruise later and starts to drag him away. “We’ll be leaving now.”
They’re met with multiple protests, other people coming out of the shadows of the house to see what all the fuss is about, but she doesn’t let go of his wrist until the doorman lets him out and they’re sitting in the car.
She doesn’t talk to him the whole drive home, and Donghyuck would rather be on the receiving end of her anger than be given the silent treatment. She stares straight ahead and doesn’t even turn on the radio, and he’s forced to stare out of the window in complete silence.
When they get back home, she immediately goes to her room and slams the door shut behind her. Donghyuck stands in front of her door and hears her make a phone call to someone, but the sound is too muffled to make out her side of the conversation.
He shuffles to his room and falls straight into his bed, muffling a loud groan with his pillow. He should’ve gone to college. Right now he could be slaving over assignments and drinking cheap coffee until it started leaking out of his eyes instead of whatever this is.
Donghyuck doesn’t have anyone to turn to, so he just wallows until he falls asleep.
He has no idea how long he’s asleep for, but he only wakes up from being completely dead to the world by a rough hand jostling him awake.
“Duckie. Duckie. Duckie. Wake up.”
He mumbles something incoherent to his own ears and burrows himself further into the pillow, but his mother doesn’t let him rest.
“Get up! Come here!”
Donghyuck is mildly alarmed at the urgency in her voice and finally opens his eyes. He must have slept longer than he thought, because the sun peeking from behind his window curtains is high in the sky, making the entire room hot. “What s’it?”
“Come on!”
She manhandles him out of the bed with superhuman strength that he didn’t know she possessed and ushers him to the living room. Donghyuck is still trying to properly wake up, but he’s lucid enough to be confused about why she’s even talking to him. He was expecting at least another couple of days of psychological warfare before she said something.
The television is blaring into the living room, and he rubs the sleep out of his eyes to focus on it. The news is on, and there’s a breaking story happening in real time.
The face of Jaemin’s father is blown-up wide on the screen, and Donghyuck’s eyes pop out of his skull as he realizes what’s happening.
“–allegedly with multiple women–“
“What the actual–“
“Shut up!” His mother shuffles to sit down on the couch in her robe and house slippers, but Donghyuck is still stuck in place above her.
“–leaked emails show correspondence between him and unnamed women, most of which work under him–“
Donghyuck splutters. “But how–“
“Be quiet!”
“The CEO has yet to make a statement, and it is not clear who has leaked the information to the media as of now.” A graphic of the stock market is shown, and Donghyuck doesn’t know the first thing about business, but they’re definitely going down.
It’s interesting timing.
His mother’s phone rings and it’s no doubt some nosy family member ready to ask, “Don’t you work for him?” or something similar. Donghyuck is just staring at the television. He’d witnessed the cheating firsthand, but he didn’t know that it was this…bad. And as far as he knows, there’s only two other people in the world who knew about it.
Jaemin’s father is doing damage control in no time, appearing before the press with his head bowed deeply and cameras flashing in his face a mile per minute. He denies the rumors and assures everyone that they’re fake, and that a more detailed statement will be released to the public soon. He’s whisked away before people can start asking questions, and Donghyuck bites his nails down to nubs.
His plan only lasts for another day, though, because the head cook herself comes forward and confirms that it’s true. Her name and identity are hidden for her own safety, but Donghyuck knows that it’s her. Now that the nation has heard it straight from the horse’s mouth, it only gets worse from there. To no one’s surprise, people turn on Jaemin’s father like clockwork. It’s definitely not because they hate cheating, but because of good business practice. It’s not a good look to be an investor or partner of a liar and an adulterer, so they cut ties and take their business elsewhere. Simple. No hard feelings.
His mother gets a call from Jaemin’s mother, and she seems to be crying out of horror or shame or relief or all three. Even though she already knew, it’s obvious that she still loves her husband and is mortified at his public, humiliating crucifiction. It must not be her who leaked the information, then, because she sounds scandalized and is asking what she should do.
Donghyuck gets up from where he’s watching his mother trying to console her over the phone and throws on a pair of sneakers. His mother is looking at him like he’s crazy, mouthing what are you doing, at him, but Donghyuck just leaves and slams the door shut behind him.
He bikes the fastest he’s ever biked in his life to the Na estate, and by the time he gets there the muscles in his thighs are burning so much he's afraid his legs will come straight off.
He’s half-unsure if security will even let him past the gate, but one of the nice ones is on shift and only shoots him a look of confusion before letting him in anyway. He definitely doesn’t get paid enough to care that much.
Donghyuck rings the doorbell so hard he almost jams his finger, and he only gets a brief glimpse of the doorman’s face before he’s pushing past him into the foyer and running all the way up the stairs to Jaemin’s room.
It’s unlocked, and he flings the door open so hard it slams against the wall.
“What the fuck did you do?”
Jaemin peeks his head out of the bathroom. “Donghyuck-ah?”
“What did you do? It was you, wasn’t it?”
Jaemin wipes his hands on his pajama pants and walks over to him. Donghyuck must have interrupted him, because there’s a little shaving cream on the side of his neck and he smells like soap. “What did I do?”
Donghyuck raises his fists up before bringing them back down to his sides, because what is he gonna do, fight him? “Don’t act coy with me.”
Jaemin nods calmly, like he’s not in the mood either. “I took his computer and leaked information to the press,” he shrugs, like it’s not a big deal, like he hasn’t just done something very drastic that affects not only him, but pretty much everyone around him. “I was angry with him.”
“But–but what about everyone else? The business? Your mother?”
“I thought about that a little,” Jaemin nods, sitting on the edge of his bed and tucking his hands neatly between his knees. “But I just had enough. I was tired of everyone pretending. And no matter what I do, I know that Mom is gonna stick by that asshole’s side, so does that really matter? Not to mention, even if we lose some money, we’ll be fine. That’s just how it works, isn’t it? These things blow over. They always do.” He sucks his teeth and stares off to the side. “Who am I kidding,” he mumbles under his breath. “I didn’t do this for me, or even because of him. I did it because of you.”
Donghyuck freezes in place. “You what?”
“I thought about what you would do if you were in my place,” he continues, undeterred. “I was always worried about keeping up appearances even to my or other’s detriment. But you don’t care about things like that. You’re impulsive. You do whatever you want and whatever you think is right. So I did what I thought you would’ve done. I was impulsive. You think everyone should be honest. You think that bad guys should be punished. Am I getting this right?”
“I…”
“I was just tired of sitting around and taking everything that was happening around me and doing nothing about it. That’s all. So, yeah, I leaked that bastard’s business all over South Korea. I know you’re mad, but I’m not going to apologize for it.”
He tilts his head at Donghyuck’s shocked expression and offers him a small, secret smile. “I was also just getting back at him for firing you.”
That startles a laugh out of Donghyuck, but he shuts it down immediately because he needs to be serious. “But…Jaemin-ah,” he says softly, making his way over to where he's perched on the edge of his bed and twiddling his thumbs. “If this gets out of hand, which it will…he’ll step down as CEO, won’t he? And that means…”
He trails off, too scared to say it out loud, but Jaemin doesn’t look scared.
“If this is what I’m meant to do,” Jaemin says so softly that Donghyuck has to lean forward to make sure he doesn’t miss a word, “Then I can change things, can’t I? I can make things better, more ethical. I can donate. I can treat the staff better and pay them fairer wages, I can prevent money from being wasted on our stupid things and give back. It doesn’t have to be this way anymore.”
Donghyuck sighs and kneels in front of him, wiping the lone streak of shaving cream off of his cheek. As much as he postures and performs and plays up things about himself to hide the other, rawer parts he won’t allow anyone to see, Jaemin has a good heart.
“You know you deserve to be happy, right?”
Jaemin blinks down at him. “Hm?”
“You’ve been martyring yourself, like, since I met you. So if you really think you can do this and it’s what you want, then I’ll support you. I just want you to be happy.”
Jaemin is looking at him like he wants to say something, but his feelings are probably too big to put into words. Normally, at this point, he’d smoothly change the subject or crack a joke, but instead he just hauls Donghyuck up into a hug.
It's crushing, his strong arms pulverizing his bones into dust, but he melts into it all the same.
“I think I learned a lot from you,” Jaemin says, muffled into the skin of Donghyuck’s neck. “Unfortunately.”
Donghyuck tries to think of something snarky to say to deflect, but he comes up short so he just rubs Jaemin’s damp back and says, “Me too.”
They still have a lot to learn.
—
Jaemin’s father announces his resignation on a Monday.
It makes national headlines, and it’s a Grade A example of public humiliation. Donghyuck knows that at the end of the day, the world won’t stop turning because another rich guy somewhere in the world got exposed for being shitty, but it is satisfying.
Nothing is going to happen to him. He’ll still have his money and he’ll still have a job if he wants it, but it just wouldn’t be a good look for a company to have an adulterer as its leader. A twenty year old stepping up to take his place is unprecedented and quite frankly bad for business, but it’s evidently the only option. Donghyuck loves things that are bad for business.
Jaemin calls their house phone and asks Donghyuck and his mother if they would like to come back or if they’d like to move on to different things. Surprisingly, his mother is the first to speak up, saying that she always wanted to open her own flower shop, which is something even Donghyuck didn’t know about her. Donghyuck half-jokes that he’ll come back if Jaemin doubles his salary, but he immediately agrees and tells him that he’ll have it arranged immediately.
“I guess you’ll get to open that flower shop that you’ve always wanted,” Donghyuck says as she hangs the phone back into its dock. “Which you never told me about, by the way.”
She stares at him for a couple of seconds. “I’m glad that shit bastard got what he deserved.”
His mother never really liked to talk about work at home, always keeping the two seperate, much less calling her boss a shit bastard, but Donghyuck isn’t opposed to the change. “Oh. Okay.”
She places a gentle hand on his shoulder. “You still wanna work for him?”
“Well, I mean, technically Jaemin is my boss now.”
She lets go of him and smiles. “I think I raised you pretty well, you know?”
“Huh?”
“I don’t think Jaemin-ah ever would’ve done that if he didn’t meet you. Your crazy rubbed off on him. In a good way.”
“I’m not crazy!”
“All that time ago,” she says calmly, taking his hand and into hers, “When you said that we shouldn’t work for people who treat us badly or look down on us. I knew you were right. I just wasn’t ready to accept it. But after this, I’m not gonna put up with it anymore. I can do whatever I want without apologizing for it. You taught me that.”
His mother is never this direct or open with him, and he starts to wonder if a hex has been put on him that makes other people open up to him. He’s not mad about it, though, and he’s glad that they’ve come full circle.
“Thank you,” Donghyuck smiles. “Now please stop being cheesy and go back to being mean to me.”
The slap to his hand is worth it.
Jaemin calls again the next day.
“You know what I realized?” he drawls, rustling and panicked murmuring coming from his side of the line, “After all this time of knowing each other, I still don’t have your number.”
Donghyuck laughs. “Well, yeah. We saw each other everyday. And I worked for your dad, so it wasn’t really appropriate…”
“But we were friends!”
“Jaemin-ah,” Donghyuck sighs patiently, “You didn’t even admit that we were friends until a couple of months ago. Why would I ask for your number?”
There’s silence on the other end of the phone, and Donghyuck is going to make good use of his new super-ability of being one of the few people in the world that has learned how to render Jaemin speechless.
“Anyway. I have to address the press as soon as possible. Help me find a suit.”
“Don’t you already have a billion suits?”
“Those were picked out for me,” Jaemin says matter-of-factly. “This is the first time I can choose for myself.”
Donghyuck smiles grossly, only because Jaemin can’t see his face over the phone. “Well, I’d be honored, then.”
Jaemin sends a car for him much to Donghyuck’s exasperation. He’s already there at the tailor’s when Donghyuck arrives, examining a plain black suit at the edge of the room.
“That one is too boring,” Donghyuck chides, coming up behind him and pushing him to the side. Jaemin looks surprised to see him even though he’s the one who invited him. “I like this one.”
The tailor’s assistant takes one in his size down for him and whisks Jaemin away to the changing room, leaving Donghyuck to flop down onto the fancy couch in front of the mirrors. Jaemin comes back a few minutes later, and suddenly Donghyuck feels severely underdressed in his t-shirt and track pants.
“Don’t you think it’s too much?”
The assistant leaves them to their own devices. Donghyuck wants to roll his eyes, but he’s a bit distracted. It’s just a dark gray pinstripe suit, nothing too showy or flashy, but he makes it look way more phenomenal than it really is.
“It’s not even that crazy. What are you, a nun?”
Jaemin frowns and examines himself in the mirror. “Are you sure?”
Donghyuck walks up behind him and peeks over his shoulder at their reflection. “You look good in anything you wear. Don’t quote me on that.”
Jaemin smiles softly at him but it’s a little strained, and Donghyuck frowns.
“What’s wrong?”
“You know,”' Jaemin says, looking at the reflection version of Donghyuck, “I haven’t even seen my father since the news broke. He’s, like, completely cutting everyone off. I’m not having second guesses or anything, because given all the things he’s done to his employees and with his money that I don't even fully know about, this is light punishment. But I think deep down, a part of me thought that maybe…this would be what it would take for him to actually acknowledge me. Even if it was in a negative way. But I don’t think anything I do will ever be enough for him to care, not even this.”
Donghyuck nods in understanding, and Jaemin turns away from the mirror to look at him directly. “But most of all, I think I’m just angry it took this long for anyone to do anything about it. Me, my mother, all the people who kiss his ass. And I’m mad for letting him get to me all this time.”
Donghyuck wants to say something productive, something profound and helpful, but all that comes out of his mouth is, “Fuck that asshole.”
Jaemin laughs, a real laugh, so Donghyuck suspects he’s said the right thing. “Yeah, fuck him.”
Donghyuck bites his lip between his teeth and chases his gaze. “Are you okay, though?”
Jaemin’s grin grows like he’s said something mildly funny. “I don’t know. I’ll figure it out.”
His stupid canines are peeking out, and Donghyuck grabs him by the shoulders and shakes hard just to see him laugh again. “Y’know, you’re lucky you have me.”
“Hm, am I?”
Donghyuck snatches his hands off of him and scoffs. “Say another word and I leave right now.”
Jaemin grabs his arm before he can completely slip away. “You can’t leave yet,” he reasons. “I still don’t have your phone number.”
A shit-eating grin grows ocean-wide and skyscraper-high across Donghyuck’s face, and he can already hear Jaemin’s exasperated tone before he can even say anything. “You’re asking for my number?”
He sighs long and deep like he’s already regretting it, but Donghyuck won’t let him take it back. “Yes. I’m asking for your number.”
“What, do you like me or something?”
“Don’t push it.”