Pain and Pleasure Rewind - Chanbaek

Wait, you're new? I thought so. Fresh meat. Ha. It's what we call all the new blood around here. Look at you blushing. So cute.

...So what brings such a sweet thing to the Underdark on a work night hmm?

...Have you seen Fifty Shades of Grey? Okay well yeah, that's a lot like me in real life. I like to think of myself as the next Christian Grey. What about you? What's your favourite scene? I bet I can recreate it for you if you ask nicely enough.

...I can't tell you how many subs I've trained, angel hair. Too many to count over the years. Yeah, you gotta have the right kind of mind for it. Hmm? Yeah, you could say it's like a second hobby in my spare time and I only take the most beautiful whores.

* * *

"He's finally done it," Chanyeol moans balefully into his folded arms, nose squashed against a stack of receipts below him as he splays flat on the front desk. That's how Minseok finds him as he walks in to start the shift.

"What?"

Chanyeol doesn't raise his head. "Baekhyun," he mumbles by way of answer instead. Minseok will get it. And anyway his whole body feels like it weighs a thousand pounds. Or is that just his heart?

Minseok gently elbows past him as he enters the far-too-tiny space the games arcade allocates them to serve prizes from. "You can't say I didn't tell you to move your ass faster. Baekhyun is hot as fuck and in no known universe would be just sit around waiting forever for you to grow some balls and stop mooning over him like a lost puppy."

"Three years isn't forever," Chanyeol grouses, feeling the sting in Minseok's overly-sensible words.

"Might as well be." Bending down, Minseok fishes their master keys out of the safe behind the counter and squeezes back past to start up the power box for the machines squashed onto the arcade floor before they officially open for the afternoon, kindly patting Chanyeol's shoulder as he moves. "No one waits forever."

Chanyeol pouts, unseen. It makes his bottom lip stick to a piece of waxy receipt paper and he spits it back off, finally straightening up. "I was just waiting for the right time."

"Remind me again what century that was going to be in?"

"Don't mock my pain. I'm hurting." Chanyeol tosses the ruined paper into the nearest bin and hits the switches for the counter, lighting up the glass cases below the counter top and the ones behind him displaying all the prizes on offer ranging from dollar squishy balls on strings (that Kyungsoo for some daft reason adores and Jongin blows most of his measly wages on for him despite the fact that if he saved up his tickets he'd probably be able to buy their highest tier prize now) to PlayStations and iPhones gathering dust that almost no one ever gets the chance to claim. Chanyeol eyes his sad reflection in the glass. "I just... I wanted to find the right words. Wanted it to be perfect."

Three years. Three years of scribbled confessions and sappy poems all torn up, of half-finished chords on his guitar notebook because no matter how much Chanyeol was head over heels for his college classmate he could never find the right way to ask him out. His best friend was perfect; Chanyeol knows he deserves the best in return.

Only Chanyeol's best never seemed (at least in his own mind) to be good enough. Not for Byun Baekhyun; beloved by college students and teachers alike, quick-witted and blindingly kind. And the absolute crush of Chanyeol's life since the fateful night they'd been freshmen and at their first really big party.

* * *

Seven Minutes In Heaven had seemed like a great drinking game at the time, plastered as they all were. And just like that... Chanyeol's heart had been decided on the spin of a dirty beer bottle against the bedroom carpet of a frat house.