Adamant Adoration | Soonhoon

D-3

Bounding over in large steps that were too loud to miss, Jihoon braced himself as Soonyoung jumped onto him from the back, arms automatically wrapping themselves around the shorter male's shoulders.

"Morning, Ji," Soonyoung greeted softly this time since his face was right beside Jihoon's and he didn't want to ruin the composer's perfect hearing with his loud screeches. "Figured it out yet?"

Jihoon just hummed and continued to make his way to the lockers, hand unconsciously going up to ruffle the older's fluffy jet black hair.

One would think that it would be hard to walk when a tall, lanky 12th grader was latched onto you the way Soonyoung had latched onto Jihoon, but they'd done this so many times that they somehow made it work, managed to walk perfectly fine as if they were one unit all along.

The student body had witnessed this enough times to not find the urge to stare or think of it as weird either. They dismissed it as one of the many things the childhood duo did since Soonyoung was always up to something weird. It wasn't much of a surprise that Jihoon just adapted to it over the years.

"I'm leaving it for now. Or at least until I know what I want to do with it anyway," Jihoon replied, fiddling with the padlock until it opened.

One after another, Jihoon handed the books he needed to Soonyoung, who finally let go to help place them into Jihoon's backpack.

"Really now?" Soonyoung asked, his tone suggesting that he didn't believe a word Jihoon said. He secured Jihoon's padlock shut and stared the shorter down.

"It doesn't look like you had enough sleep. What else are you stressed out about, if not the song?"

Jihoon inwardly cursed the fact that Soonyoung knew him so well. He would be the first to admit that he didn't have the greatest sleeping schedule, and often slept at unspeakable hours even if it wasn't due to stress.

But over the years Soonyoung managed to tell the difference between Jihoon sleeping late because of his crappy sleeping pattern and Jihoon sleeping late because he was stressed out over something. This was just one of the many things Soonyoung could tell about Jihoon, and the latter didn't know how.

(He wouldn't say that he hated it because his insides felt all warm and fuzzy whenever Soonyoung proved to know him too well.)

There was no way of hiding things from Soonyoung and Jihoon knew that, so he just shrugged and said, "it's really not because of the song."

Soonyoung stared at the younger male, studying him, contemplating his answer. Then, he slowly lifted a hand and cupped Jihoon's cheek, thumb swiping the area beneath the latter's prominent eyebags, expression unreadable.

Jihoon stiffened, saying nothing and trying to keep a straight face, hoping that his facial muscles wouldn't betray him and let a smile slip out.

They remained like that for a while, Jihoon staring directly at Soonyoung and Soonyoung not really looking at him in the eye, but studying his whole face while his thumb continued to caress Jihoon's cheek, the world around them dissipating, irrelevant at this very moment.

Eventually, Soonyoung dropped his hand, and his face lit up once more as if all of that hadn't just happened between him and Jihoon, right in front of the younger's locker 15 minutes before class started.

"Well! Let's get to class. Wouldn't want Miss Park to give us detention. I swear she hates our guts-"

Jihoon let Soonyoung ramble, tuning him out as he trailed 3 steps behind him, thinking about what just happened.

(He would never admit it, but he didn't pay attention at all in class, his mind busy replaying the entire scene back to back as he hid his warm cheeks behind his sweater sleeves that were thankfully too long for him.)

✽+†+✽――

Jihoon flopped onto his bed, sighing as he stared at the ceiling, clutching the latest draft of his letter in one hand, chewed up sorry excuse of a pencil in the other.

Writing a love letter was a lot harder than it seemed. Jihoon had sung about the nerves and uncertainty that came along with writing one for a midterm project, but he didn't think that it would actually be twenty times harder than he'd thought.

The nerves were one thing, wondering if what he said was too much or too creepy. But another thing was actually putting his feelings into words.

Before he started, he had thought that it would be a breeze, seeing as how he had often composed songs that contained deep, poetic lines - but when his pen came into contact with the paper, his mind came up blank. Where would he start? He wasn't even sure when he started feeling this way.

As he started writing out whatever he was feeling at the moment, hoping to get somewhere eventually, he found himself scrapping the drafts. Line after line, he crossed them out, the perfectionist in him severely upset.

It wasn't enough. The words, they weren't good enough. They didn't even begin to scrape at the surface of his feelings, unable to even properly put what he felt into context.

This was much harder than any song Jihoon had ever written.