Words (TaoXChanyeolXreader fanfic)

Chapter 7: Tao

It was Tao who showed up the next time. He appeared where he wasn't expected, helping himself to a seat in Chanyeol 's 1020 lecture and grinning without saying anything. They sat together until break when one of Chanyeol 's students decided he had a pressing question that took up the entire ten minutes and then they sat together through to the end. Chanyeol grabbed his sleeve and yanked him out of the classroom before someone could find something else to stop him with.

"Do you often audit freshman classes?" Chanyeol asked.

"Haven't done it since Victoria was in one," Tao said in a voice that carried too much weight. He said it like he wanted to say all the things they hadn't been talking about.

"You two really are the romantic ideal aren't you?" Chanyeol said.

"Took us awhile to get there," Tao said with a shrug.

"She made it sound like you had been together since the first week of high school," Chanyeol said.

"Not quite," Tao said.

Chanyeol was walking in the direction of his next class, not one he TA'd for but one that he actually needed to attend to graduate. He stopped at the corner. He needed to turn left and head down to the seminar rooms in the Branwell Building but to the right, were the fine art buildings. He looked at Tao and Tao just waited, the conversation paused until Chanyeol said something or started moving again.

"Are we talking about this?" he asked.

"I'd like to," Tao said.

"Okay," he said.

He went right. Tao followed along behind him. He stepped into the music building. Punched in the code from memory and went up to the practice hall. He wasn't on the schedule but there were going to be empty rooms on a Tuesday afternoon. He didn't get his violin, he just scribbled his name down on an hour long time slot and took Tao up to the little room with the sound proof walls. In the hall you could hear the distant drone of strings and brass but inside the room was eerie silent.

"If I start screaming will anyone hear me?" he asked.

"If they were right outside," Chanyeol said with a shrug. He dropped down into one of the chairs and hung his bag off the back of it. Tao sat down on the bench beside the keyboard and pressed some keys with long graceful fingers. It was off. The flat little thunk of them made Chanyeol smile. He reached over and clicked it on and Tao tried again. This time he pulled out notes but not a tune.

"You play?" Tao asked.

"Violin, not piano," he said, "But if that was any indication, I am better on piano than you are."

"That's not hard. An angry monkey would be better on the piano than I am," Tao said.

"You were telling me how you somehow managed not to fall immediately in love with Victoria?" Chanyeol said and Tao looked at him in a way that said he understood what Chanyeol was trying to gloss over. That Chanyeol had fallen immediately. Chanyeol pretended he didn't have a blush climbing his neck and raised his eyebrows.

"It was you," Tao said.

"What?" Chanyeol said.

"You were my match. I doubted it a little at first but that night we climbed up onto the roof and you leaned your head into my shoulder while laughing at my poetry, I knew. I never doubted it until her. I had never even had a crush on a girl until she pushed her way into my life with big gray eyes and a sense of humour like a razor blade. It took me a long time to let go of you. I had spent the year after camp making plans to come and find you. I had all these fantasies of going back to camp and you'd be there with your tan and all your friends and you'd leave them all behind to hug me and tell me that you missed me," he said.

"You didn't come back that summer. I tried to get the camp office to tell me your name but they wouldn't. Privacy reasons, apparently," Chanyeol said remembering the moment at every new session's first camp fire when he'd scan all the new arrivals getting ready to step up for their name and their clan and how each week the disappointment got heavier until the last session when he reached the end of the row and actually walked away from the group to go sit on the dock in the dark and pretend he wasn't heartbroken.

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