Really, Baby (I Will Be Just Fine)

12

As a child, Hoseok always envied Calvin and Hobbes and their unbreakable friendship and adventures. The last time he’d read a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, he’d ended up wiping tears from his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt and sniffling loudly into tissues. Yoongi had shot up in his bed like the dead and threw a pillow at him from across the dorm room, telling him to “shut his face, it’s two in the fucking morning”. 

And although he doesn’t have a stuffed tiger to keep him company or squeeze him so hard his tears come out, he thinks Taehyung comes pretty close (or rather, he comes pretty close to being the Hobbes to Taehyung’s Calvin).

After lunch the other day at the playground, Hoseok gets Taehyung’s number from Jimin, as hindering as it is to his pride to see Jimin smirk teasingly without a word and hand over his phone. The first text is always the hardest, he thinks, but Taehyung is the type of texter that replies at the speed of light and gives up after the third, resorting to calling Hoseok instead to plan their next hang out.

But the thing is that small talk essentially does not exist when it comes to Taehyung, and they end up staying on the line for three hours talking about glow-the-dark tattoos before Taehyung has to hang up and head to work. It’s okay, though, because Hoseok had been rolling around in bed during the entirety of the phone call, neglecting his open textbook and empty Word document save for his name in the upper right hand corner. It’s a good thing Taehyung hung up when he did.

Sometimes they grab coffee, and somehow Taehyung always convinces him to get the drinks that are most likely to give him a heart attack. Studying at coffee shops isn’t his ideal way of doing homework, but listening to the low register of Taehyung’s voice as he hums along softly to the music playing overhead is calming. He thinks it’s one of those things he wouldn't mind getting lost in.

Hoseok isn’t much help when it comes to Taehyung’s music theory homework because it applies specifically to saxophone, which he has zero knowledge in. But he does what he can with his minor in audio production and his skills in Google. 

When Taehyung is busy scribbling down notes onto empty staff paper, Hoseok tilts his screen out of view and searches up the anatomy of the human hand because he can’t quite understand why his itches to slide over Taehyung’s palm and thread through long, thin fingers. So Hoseok exits out of the page and grabs Taehyung’s hand resting over his notebook and pulls out his pen to draw lines into his palm. He’s a terrible artist and an even worse pretender. He thinks Taehyung can see through his bluffing for the excuse of holding his hand by the way he smiles in his direction and turns back to work.

Hoseok goes to bed wide awake that night, staring at the palm of his outstretched hand, a replica of his own drawing pressed into the skin from gripping Taehyung’s hand under the table for so long, until his palms were sweaty and his chest was pounding the rhythms on Taehyung’s worksheets. Hoseok doesn’t memorize the anatomy of Taehyung’s hand or the spaces between his fingers, not yet, and he wants to.

But then, he realizes, he likes Seokjin, Seokjin with the broad shoulders and pretty eyes. Seokjin, the one he craved the attention of and longed to be noticed by. And Taehyung.

Well, Taehyung is just a friend.