feel me | yeonbin

030

Soobin’s face appears on the screen, and his brow is furrowed in concern. He’s sitting on his couch, barefaced and wearing a pink beanie, and the image is like an anvil to the head. It steals the breath out of Yeonjun’s lungs to see Soobin like this, soft and cozy and full of concern. All he can wonder is if Soobin feels the same breathlessness, the same dizziness.

The same love.

“I’m okay, I’m fine,” Yeonjun promises. “I’m…” He hesitates, swallowing the lump in his throat. “I’m home alone for the weekend. And I just wanted to… after everything that’s happened, I thought… I’m calling to talk to Daigo.”

“Mhm.”Soobin’s expression of concern morphs into nothing more than narrowed eyes, but there’s a smile there. Yeonjun knows it intimately, especially because the dimple he has in his right cheek is there. “That’s why you’re calling?”

“Yes.” Yeonjun takes a deep breath. “Just… for the dog.”

“Yeah?” Soobin raises one eyebrow. “He’s sulking because he can’t go outside. Daigo! Come here. Yes, you. Come here. Yeonjun’s on the phone. Yeonjun wants to talk to you. Yeonjun—no, you doofus, he’s on the phone, not at the door.”

It’s as good as comedy, but it makes Yeonjun’s heart clench. Daigo’s first instinct upon hearing Yeonjun’s name is to go to the front door. If that’s not enough to shatter Yeonjun into a thousand pieces, he’s not sure what is.

“Up. Come here,” Soobin encourages. Yeonjun hears the sound of oversized paws on leather, and then Daigo is taking up the entire frame. He plops down halfway in Soobin’s lap, and then he turns and promptly licks Soobin’s face several times.

“I feel like he’s bigger than the last time I saw him,” Yeonjun comments.

“He hit his growth spurt at a year old, hyung. He’s the same size,” Soobin says with a fond laugh, gathering both of Daigo’s floppy ears with one hand and holding them up. Daigo just stares at him, so Soobin kisses the top of his head twice and then settles with Daigo lounging in his lap. “He just eats like a teenage boy.”

“Must be the angle,” Yeonjun reasons as thunder rumbles in the distance.

“Why did you actually call?” Soobin asks, leaning his head back on the couch and staring at Yeonjun down his nose. For the first time in years, Yeonjun finally just allows himself to feel. He allows himself to think only about Soobin, about how he used to tuck himself right beneath Soobin’s chin and in his arms when they watched TV shows or movies together. About how one night close to Yeonjun’s birthday it rained just like this, and they got drunk off soju and played strip Candyland and laughed until their stomachs hurt and they were both almost naked.

Happiness. The kind of happiness Yeonjun lost because of his own foolish decisions.

“Because I’m alone,” Yeonjun admits. “And because Taehyun could have died, and there’s an entire attempted smear campaign out there on you, and—”

“Hyung,” Soobin interrupts, so Yeonjun purses his lips, averting his eyes. “Taehyun is like a cockroach. They keep smacking him, but he just gets back up and fucks them over. He’ll do the same thing this time. And he has a really good insurance pay-out for his office.”

Yeonjun snickers. “Of course he does. But is he okay?”

“He’s fine. He knew what he was getting into when I roped him into this,” Soobin replies.

“Which was how?”

“Uh, I called him on the way to KHK and said I made sex tapes with you, so he just dropped what he was doing and showed up,” Soobin replies, rubbing his beanie against his hair a few times and then sniffing. Allergies. He’s always sniffling. Not much has changed. “He’s also attempting to do it pro bono, but I’m planning to tattoo several hundreds of millions of won on his forehead.”