OFF OF THE DEEP END | CHANGLIX ✔️

25. the way you make me feel

ditto // new jeans
⚠️Everything mentioned about the personal life of idols is completely fictional and made for this story⚠️

A wide smile wouldn't leave Felix's face.

Even now, a full day after, his cheeks were still mimicking a severe sunburn and his face muscles hurt from all the exercise.

God, he was acting so much like a twelve-year-old boy, it was embarrassing. Acting as if this was his first kiss in the way he smiled to himself after routinely touching his lips, smashing his head into the pillows littering his bed every time he imagined it.

The feeling of Changbin's lips moving in tandem with Felix's own, of hands tracing the line of his jaw. The look of the older underneath him, lips a swollen red and hair a mess, eyes swimming with a desire that beguiled Felix to kiss him again and again until the idol couldn't remember his own name. The sensations caused by feeling hardened muscle under his curious fingers, sketching out the map of toned muscle stretching over Changbin's torso. The way Felix's stomach lurched violently when soft palms caressed his clothed hips, drifted upwards to clutch the bare skin of his waist and skated across the expanse of his bare stomach.

The way that Changbin kissing him made him feel.

It wasn't even Felix's first kiss. Not even close. Of course he'd had one night stands as an idol, there was an influx of pretty people existing who desperately craved contact as a stress relief and needed to oblige by NDAs as well. He'd made out with some of the names known as the most beautiful people in the country, for crying out loud. But those didn't occur as much as he needed, because it was always awkward meeting those people for a collaboration or on a show and not being able to get their moans out of his mind. Still, the amount of drunk kisses and possibly more that happened at private celebrity gatherings with an absence of paparazzi was obscenely more than would be expected of such civilized people on camera.

Changbin was different. A new friend, the first one he'd ever made that wasn't somehow connected to the spotlight or he'd known before idol days. It wasn't like he had an influx of friends to compare to, but his closest friends— Minho and Hyunjin— both dabbled in professional dancing and were often hired by his workplace, and he'd met them as a younger kid. The rest of the people he contained a friendship with were other idols or actors he'd met, and he shared smiles and compliments every several times a year he'd see them. Not exactly a friendship, but fans idolized their interactions and made it seem like their relationship was so much more than acquaintances.

Changbin had quickly advanced to the stage of close friendship, despite not knowing Felix for that long. The simple bookshop worker broke through all of the barriers that Felix thought were foolproof, shattered them like thin glass and paraded to the unprotected trophy of Felix's affection.

Felix had fallen quickly, but not in love. His desperation for contact had amplified his feelings and left his heart defenseless and looking for attention. Rather, he was infatuated with the idea of love and barring one's entire soul to a certain person. He was surely attracted to Changbin's physical appearance, and more importantly his personality. But his true feelings for Changbin resided only in the form of platonic love. Perhaps it could evolve over time, but he certainly didn't love Changbin in a romantic way.

And that was okay. It was perfectly fine, even normal, despite works of literature displaying love as something that happens at first sight. That concept had never appealed to Felix, and the idol didn't understand how someone could dedicate their entire heart to a stranger.

Love scared him. Simple dating was better, a relationship built upon lust, basic affection, and care. Felix had only been in love once, and while it was heavenly when it lasted, the heartbreak broke him apart. Impacted his career too, with the stress causing him to neglect his idol duties and skip meals and valuable sleep.