DOUBLE DARE | sh

06

[ chapter six: awkward encounters ]

     After what is now named The Most Awkward Lunch in the History of Lunches, Soonyoung spends the rest of the day actively avoiding Jihoon for reasons he's uncomfortable thinking about. He slinked around in between classes, eyes shifting nervously for any sign of the smaller boy. The thought of facing the younger right now makes him physically ill. And no, it has nothing to do with Jihoon possibly being... into men and all to do with the fact that he sees him too much. Seriously, he probably has been hanging around Jihoon more than his own friends this week and that realization alone makes his gut twist uncomfortably.

He needs a Jihoon cleanse and fast.

He's so strung up on nervous energy that it's to the point where he's been struggling to hold the simplest conversations all day, even about what pieces to use for dance class—something he never has issues with simply because dancing comes to him like second nature—because he's unable to do much other than blink repeatedly at the wall, fazing out and getting lost in thought in seconds flat, busy trying to figure out how he's going to live with the knowledge that Jihoon may or may not be into men.

He's not.

Shut up, he tells his brain. Shut up, shut up, shut up.

Soonyoung's next forty-five minute math class is spent, minute by minute, telling himself he didn't care about Jihoon until he could honestly say he didn't anymore. The tradeoff is that he now has no idea how he's supposed to factor any of the quadratics his classmates had been working on for the better portion of the hour, but Soonyoung feels he'd had his priorities in the correct working order.

That's how his day went, being paranoid as hell and arguing with his mind over Jihoon and his semantics enough to want to bash his head into a wall until his brain explodes from his ears.

Granted, there's a small part of Soonyoung that believes Jihoon was also going out of his way to hide from him. The air had been so thick with tension and unspoken words during lunch that Soonyoung could have probably cut it with a dull knife. And when the lunch bell had rung, Jihoon had jumped to his feet and practically tore down the cafeteria doors in escape, the only thing left being another empty chocolate pudding cup and too many thoughts.

That and, despite avoiding him at all costs, he hasn't seen him all day. Not even in biology, the one course they share together and he knows for a fact Jihoon wouldn't normally miss unless on his actual deathbed. So it's not just him, he concludes, and a something tight twists in his chest.

"Are you...I mean you aren't...your not like—Which is totally fine if you, uh, are—"
"I'm straight."

So why can't Soonyoung stop fucking thinking about it?

By the time schools over and it's time to go home, Soonyoung's ready to drive his head into a wall. In fact, he's about ready to go find Jihoon and punch him in the face for making him actually insane over worry that he might have fucked up. Which shouldn't matter cause fuck Jihoon, but still. He can't help but feel something so inherently wrong about that situation, like he did something he wasn't supposed to do and now he's in trouble.

Soonyoung grabs his bag from off the floor of his English class and makes his way to the hallway, numbly pushing past the students filing out to leave and go home. Today he has to talk to his teacher about a test that he may or may not have completely failed.

Soonyoung knows he's not the smartest person around, and he's man enough to admit that he might not be putting as much focus on his studies as he does other things like playing video games and spending hours after school holed up in the dance studio practicing his choreography until each move is crisp and clean, the janitor finding him and physically dragging him out before locking the school.