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Euijoo thinks, often, that someone needs to teach him how to have a normal human brain. Feels with acuity, sometimes, that there is something fundamental missing in him—the part that allows things to be easy.
Euijoo’s lying down in bed, head spinning, thinking about nothing and everything. Like he’s been running and now it’s all catching up with him, finally supine after a long and exhausting day. He turns his face into the pillow, tries not to think about Nicholas, fails. Thoughts coming like waves. The unbearable immediacy of their new, tentative relationship; their shared bed; the way Nicholas keeps looking at him like he wants to peel Euijoo’s skin back and map out every synapse.
It’s thrilling, terrifying. It’s nothing like the distant future Euijoo imagined for himself: a sensible relationship, a girl he could bring home to meet his parents. Someone he could keep at arm’s length without feeling too bad about it. Someone who liked him just enough, not too much, so he wouldn’t have to feel guilty when he inevitably couldn’t return their depth of feeling. Stale, symbiotic, safe.
And then in came Nicholas.
And then in comes Nicholas, now.
“What are you thinking so hard about?” Nicholas asks, walking into the room, face pink and still a little shiny from his skincare routine. A few strands of his black hair are sticking to his forehead, damp with moisture. His lips, too, damp, always sticky when he comes to bed, full of the thick honey-scented balm that Euijoo keeps finding himself tasting long after they’ve stopped kissing.
Euijoo could say: you. It would be the truth, and it would make Nicholas smile, the soft one that he likes, with one corner curled up. For some reason it makes Euijoo’s skin crawl to imagine voicing it. So instead he says: “Schedules tomorrow.”
“It’s just the radio thing, right?” Nicholas asks, using a hand to shake out the last remaining drops of water from his bangs. “Then practice?”
Euijoo, who hadn’t thought about their schedules since he checked in the early morning, has to quickly rack his brain. That sounds about right. “Yeah. It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it.”
Nicholas raises an eyebrow but keeps his mouth shut. He’s learned through trial and error that pushing Euijoo when he’s like this tends to be unproductive for them both. But sometimes he still tries, and it looks like tonight is one of those nights, because after a few moments he adds, “How’s your condition holding up, though?” He moves to sit at the foot of the bed on Euijoo’s side. ”Can I, y’know, help? With anything?”
Nicholas likes to pay an inordinate amount of attention to Euijoo’s ‘condition,’ something that had started way before Euijoo even realized. Euijoo has a brief, painful flashback to the time he had almost snapped at him on camera, that one time on tour, when Nicholas was just trying to tell him he was happy to see Euijoo look so healthy, so strong. The shame he had felt when he realized, his warring pleasure and discomfort at being looked at so closely. The next time Nicholas commented on it, Euijoo made sure to reply with sincerity. Thank you. He remembers the clench of his heart when he looked at Nicholas’s earnest smile in return, lopsided and real.
Now, Euijoo says, “Not really. I’m doing alright.” A pause: Nicholas looking at him with those dark, delving eyes. “It’s just, I guess, tonight it’s more—my head is sort of—” Euijoo isn’t sure how to finish the sentence. He makes a vague gesture with his hand, scrambled.
Nicholas makes a noise, mm, assent tinged with sympathy. His hand is wrapped around Euijoo’s ankle where he’s been lying on top of the sheets; his thumb is stroking and pressing into the dip between tendon and bone. Euijoo doesn’t think he’s ever been touched there before, at least not with intent. It’s oddly soothing, or maybe it’s just Nicholas, his rough, healing hands.
Maybe thats why Euijoo continues, words coming out without his brain proofreading them first, “It’s like it keeps going. But I don’t know where it wants to go. I keep feeling like there’s something I should be doing, or—something I’ve done that’s already wrong. But I can’t figure it out. It’s all just circles.”
There’s a beat of silence. Euijoo winces, hopefully mostly internally, replaying the nonsensical words back. He can’t even get a grip on his own brain. Why would he expect someone else to?
“Can I help?” Nicholas asks. His hand trailing upwards to the back of Euijoo’s calf.
Euijoo turns the question over in his head. Can I meaning am I able to? or can I meaning will you let me? A question that, depending on interpretation, could have multiple different answers. Instead of risking getting it wrong, Euijoo just asks, “How?”
“Whatever you want,” Nicholas says. “Maybe you can tell me. What would help.”
Euijoo looks at Nicholas’ hand on his leg. Talking about it like this, if this is going where Euijoo thinks it’s going, is something he’s not familiar with. So much easier to let it happen wordlessly, to feel out for himself what Nicholas wants—always so eager, stretching out catlike with delighted languor whenever Euijoo gets his hands on him. Easy to let the pleasure of giving it to him buoy Euijoo throughout the exchange. It’s only been a couple months, but each time it’s felt like that: Euijoo fully present, tethered and in control in a way that thrills and aches in his chest.
He likes the control. Sometimes it even feels like he needs it. But sometimes—now, maybe—the idea of relinquishing it, of letting—no—trusting someone to hold onto him if he went away, if he let himself become untethered, what that could feel like, giving himself over, the onerous weight of everything just for a moment finally lifted—
Aloud, Euijoo says, “It’d be nice to not have to think about it, I guess.”
When Euijoo eventually looks up to gauge Nicholas’s reaction, he sees the little frown he always wears when he’s thinking hard about something, that crease between his handsome eyebrows. Euijoo realizes his answer was not particularly illuminating. He’s not quite sure himself exactly what he’s asking for, but maybe that’s part of it: to be given something you weren’t even sure you wanted.
They look at each other for a few moments. Euijoo has to work hard at not averting his eyes, letting Nicholas find whatever’s written in Euijoo’s nebulous gaze. Euijoo can’t be sure what it’ll be—if anything—but Nicholas seems to see it, something clawing in those brackish depths, because he just says, “Okay,” and then, “Hold still,” and then his weight is leaving the bed.
Euijoo feels himself frowning involuntarily. If Nicholas leaves the room to get him an ice cream or something, or brings Fuma in here for counseling, Euijoo is going to—
“Juju,” Nicholas says, flicker of amusement in his voice. “Stop pouting. I’ll be right back.”
“I wasn’t—“ Euijoo starts, but Nicholas is already out the door.
Euijoo, mortified, fixes his face into something more neutral. He’s gotten greedy. He never used to want like this.
When Nicholas returns, it’s with one of his hands hidden behind his back. Euijoo stares at Nicholas’s bare forearm, scarred; his torso, broad; as if he’d be able to see through him via sheer force of will.
“Can you close your eyes?” Nicholas asks, sounding a little unsure, tripping over one of the syllables. He locks the door behind him.
Euijoo doesn’t like surprises. He closes his eyes anyway. Four, five steps, and then Nicholas’s weight is back on his side of the bed, and then there’s a piece of fabric covering his closed eyelids.
Euijoo makes a noise: involuntary, shocked, but there’s something else he doesn’t want to examine in it, a timbre that makes his blood run hot with embarrassment.
“Is this okay?” Nicholas asks, quiet, puff of air as he speaks on Euijoo’s cheek.
Euijoo isn’t even thinking about it when he nods. And then Nicholas is saying, “Lift your head up a little,” and Euijoo does, and then Nicholas is tying the fabric back once, loose. A few strands of Euijoo’s hair get tangled in the process, Euijoo letting out a little pained noise, Nicholas saying back, breathy, Sorry, Juju, sorry.
Euijoo lies back down. It feels better and worse: a tumult of sensation that he’s used to, when it comes to Nicholas. But it feels different now. It’s still there, it’s just—further away. The strange peace that darkness brings.
Euijoo can hear Nicholas swallow, hearing heightened by the removal of another base sense. And then he feels Nicholas’s weight on his thighs as he swings himself over Euijoo’s lap, gingerly, like he’s trying not to touch him too much.
Nicholas says, adjusting, “If any of this isn’t—I mean—if you want to stop at any point. Please tell me. Or just like, smack me. Okay?”
Euijoo almost laughs. An emotion, immediate and heady rising from the darkness: endearment. “Okay,” he replies.
And then there are hands pushing his shirt up, not off, just up to his collarbones. Warm palms pressing into the twin indents at his waist. Nicholas’s fixations are so apparent, written all over his face. Even when Euijoo can’t see it—it bleeds into everything, messy, getting everywhere. Sometimes he wants to roll around in it like a dog.
A gasp when Nicholas bends to kiss over Euijoo’s torso. Every sensation is so heightened when he can’t see it coming, when he isn’t trying to predict all of Nicholas’s touches before they happen. His tongue, wet and teasing when it peeks out to lick at Euijoo’s nipples. Another gasp, louder, hitching when Nicholas bites, not hard. A dimly lit part of Euijoo’s mind wishes it was—hard—wants it madly for a moment to hurt. It passes, but it leaves a trace.
Nicholas makes his way down to Euijoo’s hipbones, the scant swell of flesh over the sharp bone. Here he doesn’t bite; sucks, instead, leaving his mark in the hollow of Euijoo’s body. Euijoo can feel his chest heaving, legs twitching on the bed, affected by these small touches to an overwhelming degree. He has half a mind to feel embarrassed, worries distantly that it’s going to seep into humiliation, and then he hears Nicholas, mumbled into his skin—
“You’re so beautiful,” he’s saying, so quietly it’s almost like he’s talking to himself. “God,” he says, in between kisses, a ridiculous worshipful note in his voice that Euijoo shies away from. “God.”
Euijoo’s about to tell him to stop, shy joy and mortification cascading through his body geyser-strong, when Nicholas suddenly puts his mouth on his cock. Even through the layers of fabric—the pleasure is like touching a hot stove, almost painful in its immediacy, in the shock of having received it.
After a few moments of Nicholas mouthing greedily at him, tracing the shape of Euijoo with his lips and tongue, getting him fully hard, he asks—“Can I?”—fingertips under the waistband of his sweats. Meaning: is he able to? Yes.
Meaning: will Euijoo let him? Yes. Yes.
Euijoo speaks his affirmation aloud and it comes out raspier than he intended, more affected. It’s so strange, with the blindfold. He feels hidden even though he knows he isn’t; he knows he’s more vulnerable than he’s ever been. But he wants to let it happen with a voracity that frightens him.
Nicholas takes his pants and underwear off in two quick tugs, Euijoo’s lower half suddenly exposed to the cool air. He shivers from the uncomfortable chill only briefly before he feels Nicholas shifting, lowering, wrapping an arm under and around Euijoo’s thigh before taking Euijoo’s cock properly in his mouth.
Euijoo keens, can feel Nicholas’s big hand clench on his thigh when it flexes in his grip. Euijoo’s body trying to get closer and further away at the same time. It’s not as if Nicholas has never done this for him before. So why does it feel like so much—
“Can you try and stay still for me?” Nicholas asks, taking his mouth off, after another squirming minute.
A deep breath. Another. Euijoo wills his frantic body into repose. Nicholas puts his mouth back on him. Euijoo is still taking heaving inhales, letting out every other breath in a moan. Tries to choke the noises back; fails miserably; wishes he had earplugs so that he wouldn’t have to listen to himself, the need in his voice so nauseatingly obvious.
“You’re doing so well,” Nicholas says, pulling off after another minute of blinding heat, and then, “I know,” like he understands what Euijoo is feeling, and maybe he does—maybe for him it’s always this immediate, this overwhelming. Euijoo isn’t sure how he bears it.
Euijoo opens his mouth to say something, to ask for something, though he isn’t sure for what. He wants him to stop and he wants him to keep going and he wants it to never end. He ends up not saying anything at all.
“Let’s try it like this,” Nicholas says, after a moment of taut silence. Not being able to see his expression is an agony and a relief.
Something warm and wet lands on the head of Euijoo’s cock—spit, he thinks, from a distance, an image he’s vaguely disappointed he didn’t get to see—and then Nicholas’s hand is on him, hot and messy.
“You don’t have to talk,” Nicholas says. “I’ll talk.”
Euijoo doesn’t think he has the capacity for words regardless, but it’s nice to be relieved from the expectation. He breathes out again, whoosh of air as Nicholas jerks him off. His other hand, up somewhere around Euijoo’s heart, nails digging in just a little over his sternum.
“I can feel you everywhere,” Nicholas says. “Your blood moving. God, it sounds stupid when I say it out loud.”
“It doesn’t,” Euijoo says. Somehow easier to speak after he’s been told that he doesn’t have to. And he wants to reassure Nicholas, feels it with a sudden importance.
“Thanks, baby,” Nicholas says, honey in his voice. Euijoo winces a little at the endearment, pulse kicking. Even when said casually, carelessly, it’s—Euijoo doesn’t know how it falls from Nicholas’s mouth so easily. “You feel so perfect under me like this.”
Both of Nicholas’s hands on Euijoo’s body tighten when Euijoo lets out a particularly loud noise. The one on his cock, squeezing around the head; the one on his chest, nails scratching down hard. Euijoo can’t help but arch against it, the heat of pain and pleasure both igniting something deep in his core. A nail catches on the edge of his nipple and he gasps, feels flames traveling throughout the length of his body. Thoughtlessly, he reaches a hand up to press Nicholas’s hand at his chest down with even more force.
Nicholas, letting up on the pressure, asks, “Doesn’t that hurt?”
No. A little. Not enough. Euijoo doesn’t know how to answer.
Finally: “Thought you weren’t making me talk,” he mumbles. His head feels like it’s full of fog. Steam, maybe, after the fire has died down.
Nicholas’s hand is just wrapped around him, now, not moving anymore. “I don’t want to hurt you,” Nicholas says, slow, like he’s unsure of the words as they come out.
Euijoo doesn’t say anything for a while. If you had asked him before tonight—Do you want Nicholas to hurt you?—he would have said no. He has enough of his own hurts, enough pain. But this feels different: pain that he’s asked for, that will be given to him gently. Pain that he knows will be soothed. Hands that he knows will hold him after.
Nicholas’s thumb at his chest is moving in small circles, patient. He knows when to wait for Euijoo. Protected by the darkness surrounding him, Euijoo manages to grit it out after a few long seconds. “I want you to.”
Four laborious syllables, just hanging there in the air. Euijoo feels their weight in his chest, their presence alongside the press of Nicholas’s palm.
“You’d want that?” Nicholas asks, taking his hands away, and the obvious shock in his voice makes Euijoo’s teeth clamp together, hard.
Stupid to have asked. Stupid to want anything at all.
“Nevermind,” Euijoo says, quickly, the hot flush spreading through his body much less pleasant than it usually is with Nicholas. He tries to curl away, reaching up to touch the fabric still covering his eyes, starts mumbling an apology. Why would he even—
“No, no, no,” Nicholas is saying, soothing. “Juju, no. I didn’t mean it like that. I was just surprised.” He sounds a little frantic, trying to hide it. He reaches out to tuck a strand of hair behind Euijoo’s ear; Euijoo tries not to flinch away. “I’ll do it. I’ll try.”
“You really don’t have to,” Euijoo says, swallowing. He has to clear his throat to get the words out, something choking him up.
“I know,” Nicholas says. “I want to. Actually I… I have an idea. Maybe it’s not—well—just let me. Can I?”
Again: Euijoo doesn’t like surprises. But it hasn’t been so bad up until now. Maybe it’s even been good; maybe it could even be great.
Despite it all, he wants to try. He nods. Nicholas hums.
And then finally, for the first time all night, they’re kissing: Nicholas’s thumb on his cheek, thick lips against his, honey in his mouth.
After a minute, Nicholas says, mumbled against his lips, “Sorry for making you talk.” He sounds a little amused, a lot fond.
“Just don’t do it again,” Euijoo replies, all hot breath. He swallows the warmth of Nicholas’s laugh down into his lungs.
Euijoo was flagging during their stilted little conversation, but he can feel his body start to settle down as they kiss, can feel the blood starting to pool again as Nicholas reaches down to stroke up and down his thighs.
It becomes clear after a minute or two of this—Nicholas’s clever hands taking their time scratching, pressing, kneading the flesh at his inner thighs—that there’s a specific location that he seems to be avoiding. Even when Euijoo tries to subtly shift, to knock one of Nicholas’s hands closer to where he’s hard and aching, Nicholas stays staunchly where he is.
Euijoo makes a noise, involuntary, probably a little pissed-off sounding. Nicholas huffs. And then his nails are digging into his thighs, ten little pinpricks of pain, pressure that feels like it’s pushing down right on his femoral artery. Blood rushing, his cock throbbing with it. He moans.
“Good boy,” Nicholas says, and the words—the praise—make Euijoo feel a little lightheaded, or maybe that’s just the quickness with which he’s gotten hard again. “You’re being so perfect.”
Euijoo really doesn’t want to think about how much of an effect Nicholas’s words have on him, but it’s as if they bypass his brain entirely; the weight of them drags down through his body, like someone caressing his spine from the inside.
Euijoo tries hard to unclench his muscles, but he can’t stop writhing on the bed. His entire body feels taut with exertion. Nicholas had told him to stay still. But he’s so—
“You want me to touch you?” Nicholas asks. Euijoo just lets out his breath hard. Some questions aren’t deserving of an answer.
Nicholas continues, saying, “That’s right, no more talking, my bad.” His thumbs, now, pressing into the tender space between leg and groin, a painpleasure that he’s never felt before, one that makes him almost cry out. His hips buck up without his control. Nicholas presses him down further into the mattress, with an almost alarming force, that transient strength that only comes out around Euijoo a tiny fraction of the time. “I guess it’s up to me to decide.”
Euijoo hears Nicholas shift on the sheets. And then: warm breath at the head of his dick, where he can feel himself leaking onto his stomach. The sensation is barely-there; the sensation is his entire world.
“Do you want it, baby?” Nicholas asks. Euijoo has his fists clenched tight in the sheets, his knuckles flexing with strain. He untangles one, reaches out blind until he reaches Nicholas’s shoulder. Hopes that’s answer enough. When Nicholas eventually puts his mouth back on him, Euijoo finally does cry out.
“Yes,” he hears himself saying, somehow slipping out, yes yes yes, his control slipping with every swipe of Nicholas’s tongue and the slick, tight heat of his throat. It’s been pissing him off, just a little, how good Nicholas is at this; the ridiculous, self-conscious part of his brain that he struggles so hard to turn off, even during sex. His petty, past self feels very distant now—how could this ever have felt like anything other than a gift?
Euijoo can hear himself whining as Nicholas sucks him off; wishes again, inane, that he had earplugs, that he could mute himself and only listen to Nicholas’s ragged breathing instead. Euijoo thinks maybe Nicholas is getting himself off at the same time, can see in his mind’s eye how his pale forearm moves when he’s touching himself, and he feels—close, suddenly, on the edge of a precipice that he can almost feel himself teetering off of, but then—
Nicholas takes his mouth away, fist clenched tight around the base of Euijoo’s cock. “I think that’s enough,” he says, voice wrecked. Euijoo feels like he’s about to burst into a million pieces.
“Nico,” he says, strained.
“Juju,” Nicholas says, dulcet.
Is this what Nicholas was talking about? Is this what Euijoo wanted? Pain given gently. Pain that promises relief. A safe place to land. Euijoo breathes in deep, feels the ache, tries to let the fog clear again. Yes. It is.
Nicholas is talking as Euijoo tries to relax, his tender babble: so hot, so beautiful, so perfect. Mine, mine, mine. The words wash over him, low tide. And then, finally, Nicholas’s hand starts moving again. The tide crests once more, slow, shifting from low to high as Nicholas takes him back into his throat.
It’s better than last time; it’s worse. He can’t stop squirming. Nicholas told him to stay still. His hips are being pressed down with one of Nicholas’s hands, the other—maybe—back to touching himself, but it’s not enough force, because when Nicholas sucks the head particularly hard he can’t stop his hips from thrusting forward, and Nicholas almost chokes but he doesn’t pull off, waiting, presumably, for Euijoo to reach the edge before denying him, again.
Luckily, unluckily, he doesn’t know, but it doesn’t take long. Euijoo’s hand is still up at Nicholas’s shoulder, but it’s moved slightly more to the center, so when he squeezes, his thumb is pressing into the tendon at the side of his neck. It sounds like Nicholas lets out a tiny wheeze, but the noise barely registers, Euijoo a hairsbreadth away from coming, a rush of blinding feeling, and then—nothing. The wet heat of Nicholas’s mouth suddenly far away.
It hurts.
“Fuck,” Euijoo says, his voice humiliatingly thick with desperation. He doesn’t swear often, but sometimes there’s just nothing else to say.
Nicholas puts his thumb down hard into the dip of Euijoo’s hip bone, the nail pressing in. Euijoo squirms without thinking about it, arching his back and letting out a pained whine. He wants Nicholas’s mouth back on him. His hand. Something. He needs Nicholas more than he’s ever needed anything.
Nicholas is groaning a little, saying, “You’re killing me,” low and tight, but that doesn’t seem right, that seems to be the wrong way around.
Euijoo tries to think about the tides again, but it’s harder to calm down this time, especially when he can sense Nicholas’s mirrored desperation above him, his breathing heavy and irregular. He wants to—maybe he can—
Euijoo releases the grip he has on Nicholas’s shoulder, hand trailing down his torso to find—when the hell did he take his pants off?—Nicholas’s hard cock, trailing a finger feather-light, not even trying to tease, just wanting to feel it.
“Hey,” Nicholas says. “Hey. That’s against the rules.”
“What rules,” Euijoo grumbles. If Nicholas can make this shit up as he goes along, maybe Euijoo can learn how, too. Euijoo has to shift a little to reach, but he manages to wrap his hand around Nicholas. He wants to see, suddenly, in a way he hasn’t since Nicholas came back into the room with the blindfold, a keen urge. He could ask. He could just ask.
So he does, after a grounding inhale. “Can I see you?”
He hears Nicholas’s breath hitch. And then his hands are up at Euijoo’s temples, pushing the fabric up to his forehead, and then taking it off completely. Euijoo opens his eyes, adjusting to the dim light, immediately zeroing in on Nicholas’s presence in front of him. Always so stupidly handsome. He sees: dark eyes, catlike, twin spots of pink high up on his cheeks, a mouth red and bitten. A face wholly affected, someone fully present, someone who’s taking this—him—seriously. Someone who really wants to do it right. Someone who, maybe, is just as in love as Euijoo is.
Every part of Euijoo’s body feels like it aches. He can think himself in circles about this later; right now, if he doesn’t come soon, he feels like he might shake apart. Nicholas seems to be in a similar state, which makes Euijoo smile, just a tiny bit.
Nicholas, a little shyer now with Euijoo’s attention on him, asks, “Happy now?”
“Not quite,” Euijoo says. He tilts his hips up, trying to remind Nicholas of his previous task.
“Be patient,” Nicholas says, such a ridiculous statement coming from him of all people, but Euijoo—he wants to comply, wants to let Nicholas see this through till the end. So he just sighs, lies back.
“You looked so hot just now,” Nicholas says. His eyes are like obsidian, dark and dense. “God. I can’t fucking believe you’re mine. That you’re even letting me…” he trails off.
Euijoo doesn’t want to stop looking at Nicholas, but he has to close his eyes, just for a second. Sometimes Euijoo can’t believe it either. But here he is. Here they are.
“It’s unbelievable,” Nicholas is saying, voice thick, and suddenly Euijoo feels his hand back on his cock, light-wing touch, “I think—if we had never met. I would have just spent my entire life waiting for you.”
Warring impulses to open his eyes, to squeeze them shut tighter. The words feel like they’re cracking Euijoo’s sternum open.
“I can’t even imagine it. Who I’d be without you,” Nicholas continues, stroking him now, not slow and not fast, just right. “You make me better. All I want is—is to do the same for you. For you to believe me when I say you deserve it.”
Euijoo feels the pleasure bubbling up slower this time, at a sweeter pitch. The words are like knives, gently carving him to pieces. He feels, ridiculously, a little bit like crying.
Euijoo finally wrenches his eyes open again right as Nicholas says, for the first time, voice colored with an unbearable sincerity: “I love you.”
Euijoo trembles, shakes, can’t catch his breath. “Come here,” he says, voice pitched strangely to his own ears. “C’mere, Nico, here.”
He grabs for Nicholas’s waist and pushes their bodies closer together, the weight of him pushing Euijoo further into the mattress. Euijoo can feel the hard length of his cock pressed against his own.
“Together,” Euijoo says, raising a hand to wrap around Nicholas’s where they’re touching, trusting him to get it.
“Yeah,” Nicholas says, mostly air, sounding relieved and maybe a little close to tears himself. He starts to stroke them both at the same time. “Together.”
Euijoo lets go of Nicholas’s hand to clutch hard at his arm, feeling the unfamiliar texture of his scar, fingertips digging in. The tide rising, cresting. Pleasure like being doused with warm water. Like sun after a long winter. Like being touched, being held.
Nicholas’s hand slows down, almost stops; a noise rockets out of Euijoo’s chest.
“How badly do you want to come?” Nicholas asks. Cruel question: surely he knows. Surely he can see Euijoo breaking apart at the seams.
Euijoo doesn’t answer, just arches up into the touch. He can feel it in his stomach, like boiling water, the need so potent he thinks he might die if Nicholas stops again.
“It’s okay,” Nicholas says. His voice is so, so low, so affected. His hand goes back to its previous rhythm. “You don’t have to say. I already know.”
Euijoo knows he’s talking about more than just this. His eyes feel wet. The wave crests and crashes, Euijoo thrusting upwards to meet Nicholas’s hand as the sensation overtakes him at last, a noise like a sob erupting from his chest, pleasure tunneling through him so strongly it feels like it’s hollowing him out, taking something from him and making room for something better. It’s a relief so great it makes the room spin.
Nicholas is saying, fuck, fuck, fisting his cock desperately, Euijoo’s come on his fingers, dripping. Euijoo feels like he’s taking a breath for the first time in years, watching him.
When Nicholas finally comes with a broken moan, Euijoo watches it pool in the hollow of his own hip, right over the small, red crescent moon that his nail had made. Claimed in so many ways. Euijoo holds his breath—and then finally lets it go.
Euijoo doesn’t say anything for a while after. Nicholas stays anyway.
And then when Euijoo wakes up in the early morning, he finds that his unconscious limbs have wrapped themselves around Nicholas in the night. Not uncommon for them to wake up this way. Euijoo finds himself reaching out to hold on tighter, deliberate and—he hopes—meaningful. Nicholas mumbles sleepily, always so slow to rise, his gentle presence like a balm. Euijoo feels the three words he wants to say in his chest, in his throat.
He can’t loosen them. Euijoo presses a lingering kiss to the top of Nicholas’s head instead. After a second, he feels the curve of Nicholas’s smile against his neck.
It doesn’t matter; he already knows. He’ll say it one day.
For now: honeyed sleep. Euijoo falls back into darkness, caught by the tides.