Work Text:
wise men say —
1.
The first person Ten tells is his mom.
It’s a tricky conversation. Ten doesn’t really know how to explain this whole situation — that’s the word he’s going with, situation — to anyone in any way that makes sense beyond him and his own priorities and his own thought process with regards to it. Ten spends most of the time on the phone with his mom just rambling on and on, and she spends most of it humming disapprovingly at him in return.
She uses his full name when she speaks to him, which is how Ten knows she’s really worried. “I won’t pretend to understand,” she says to him, “but I trust your judgement, baby.”
The second time Ten tries to explain the situation, capital S, it’s to his friends.
When Ten tells Yukhei and Kun he tries to do it fast, like pulling off a band-aid. He’s hoping that’ll make it easier.
Kun is so surprised he chokes so hard on a mouthful of beer it comes out his nose.
“You’re getting married?” He says it loud enough some people in the bar turn to look at them.
Ten shrinks into his seat, shoulders coming up to hide his reddening face. “Yes,” he says, just out of the corner of his mouth.
“Wait,” Yukhei holds up a hand, like a referee calling for a time out. “I thought you were single?”
“I am,” Ten replies. “I am, technically. Except for, like, the getting married thing.”
Yukhei blinks.
“No, wait. Rewind. We’re taking this from the top,” it’s Kun speaking now, sitting up in his chair and posing his hands against the bar table. It reminds Ten of those heist movies, where they sit and plan everything out with kitchen utensils. “You forgot to renew your visa,” he says, and looks at Ten, and Ten nods, “but if you go home you’d have to go home for months and leave the company, which would be bad,” Ten nods again. “So you’re getting married?”
“Basically. Yeah. To Johnny.”
This time, it’s Yukhei who chokes on his beer. “To Johnny?”
2.
Ten and Johnny have known each other for the better part of four years. They met through Taeyong (Ten’s fellow dancer at the company, Johnny’s roommate from their first year of college, before Taeyong dropped out. God, Ten wishes he had dropped out). They have never hooked up. They have never kissed. They have never held hands. They have never expressed any kind of romantic feelings towards one another.
But they are going to get married.
This might be the single most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to Ten.
It’s not like he forgot about renewing his visa. Okay he kind of forgot about renewing his visa. He knew he had to do, and he knew he had to do it soon, but he got the dates wrong. And, in Ten’s defence, he was really fucking busy. Between nights spent doing online school to finish his degree and days spent at the company, he just kind of wasn’t thinking about his visa. He lost track of time. And then didn’t regain his grip on it, he didn’t think about his visa, until it was way, way too late.
There are worse people to be married to than Johnny Seo. He’s very nice. He offered to marry Ten so he wouldn’t get deported so, yeah, he’s very, very nice. And he’s handsome. He’s tall, with sharp eyes and a sharp jaw, and Ten has always thought that his hair looked soft. He’s got a pretty good job as a software engineer, at the same tech startup Yukhei interns at. He’s got a big apartment. Like, objectively, Ten could do worse.
(Could he do, like, any better? Unlikely.)
Ten refuses to feel bad about marrying someone he doesn’t love. At least he likes Johnny well enough, which is more than he can say for most straight couples. And they get married anyway all the time.
3.
They don’t have a wedding. That seems like such an overt bastardization of the sanctity of marriage, however bullshit that actually is, that Ten just can’t abide. They go to the city clerk’s office. Ten gets all of his official documentation officially translated. A judge performs the ceremony. He and Johnny sign the forms. They ask them if they’ll be changing their last names. They both say no.
Just like that: Ten has a husband. An honest to God, totally official, sign, sealed and delivered, motherfucking husband.
“Hey,” Johnny says to him as they’re leaving. He wore a nice baby blue button down and navy slacks to the courthouse. It had made Ten feel underdressed when he showed up in jeans. “Do you wanna go, like, get food? I’m buying. Beer, too. To celebrate, I guess.”
Ten had planned to take the subway home and sleep until practice the next morning, excited at the prospect sleeping without the threat of being handcuffed into a flight back to Thailand hanging over his head. But, he thinks, he could go for drinks.
4.
Johnny’s the only motherfucker in New York with a car, probably. He takes Ten to this expensive, hipster steak place not far from where Johnny works.
“You come here often?” Ten asks, sliding his chair close to the table. It’s not that this place is outrageously expensive, per se, but it’s definitely higher end. The wine and beer list is long and only offered in bottles. The waiters wear custom worn leather aprons and all have the same haircut.
Johnny shrugs. “It’s close to the office,” he explains, “and we don’t really deal with stuffy businessmen types? It’s more mid-thirties dudes who work for their dad, trying to be our friend when we’re not friends, who love to fellate themselves. Those guys dig this place's whole vibe.”
Ten’s let’s Johnny order for them. Because Johnny’s said he comes here a lot, and Ten doesn’t know where to start with this menu, and he’s also kind of so tired so he doesn’t feel like reading.
He watches Johnny speak to the waiter. The way his brow furrows and his mouth purses as he mills between options, and then smiles and nods when he makes a decision. Ten thinks about how this is his husband now. Like, they’re married. Not in any way that matters, really, but also the only way that really matters. They’re gonna have to file their taxes together this year. According to the state of New York, Ten is a bonafide non-single person. Ten is married. Ten is married to Johnny.
He had thought maybe this all would have been a little weirder. It doesn’t feel weird, not right now. Not yet, maybe. Ten should probably stop thinking about it. Before it gets weird.
When the waiter leaves them, Johnny speaks, “so, I had a thought.”
“Oh?” Ten raises an eyebrow.
“I don’t wanna overstep but I was thinking about this whole,” Johnny makes his face like he’s considering his words very carefully, and then simply waves a hand between him and Ten in the most non-specific way. “Thing,” he says, “I’ve been thinking about this whole thing. And I think maybe -- maybe you should move in with me. Y’know, in case, I don’t know. Something gets flagged in the system, or someone calls someone -- not that I think anyone we told would call someone, I’m just saying -- it would be weird if we weren’t living together.”
Ten is surprised at the offer, at first. He considers what Johnny is saying. He thinks, yeah, from a purely critical stand-point here, Johnny is probably right. Ten has considered the possibility of being found out; it weighed heavily on his decision. Ultimately, he had decided the risk was worth the reward, and if he got caught -- well, same outcome, right? But he would like to avoid any unnecessary suspicion.
So he says, “yeah,” in response. Ten says, “yeah, let’s move in together.”
After they’re finished eating Johnny insists on picking up the bill, and then he insists on driving Ten home. From his spot in the passenger seat, Ten wonders, probably much later than he ever should have, what he’s really gotten himself into here.
5.
At the company on Monday, Taeyong saunters right up to Ten while he’s breaking in a new pair of ballet slippers. “Johnny told me you guys are moving in together?” He says, plopping down next to Ten on the floor to start stretching.
“When do you talk to Johnny?”
“I don’t,” Taeyong shrugs. “Johnny told Yukhei. Yukhei told Yuta. Yuta told me.”
Ten rolls his eyes. “Yeah, we are. But I wouldn’t say it’s us moving in together when it’s more like I’m breaking my lease to move into his apartment because it’s nicer.”
“Are you guys gonna like,” Taeyong leans over, like it’s a secret, “share a bed.”
“He has a guest room.”
“But you’re married,” Taeyong says it like it’s the most obvious thing in the world and like, somehow, Ten didn’t know.
“So I’ll be married to my roommate, who I do not share a bed with, because he is my roommate. Does that offer enough clarity for you?”
Taeyong opens his mouth, looks like he’s about to say something. Before he can get it out their coach is calling them to attention, though, to guide them through warm-up for the day. Whatever Taeyong was going to say dies before it leaves him.
6.
The first week they’re married feels like holding his breath.
Ten has a nervousness he can’t shake, like it’s laced itself into his veins. He’s so on edge he feels like he’s vibrating, like a million little bees are crawling their way inside of his skin, into his bones, and are buzz-buzz-buzzing.
He waits for the day his and Johnny’s carefully constructed house of cards falls. They move in together. They are married but Ten sleeps in the guestroom. They are married but they don’t wear rings. Ten waits for the veil to be stripped off everything, reducing the haze, bringing the real world back into focus. But the day never comes.
He and Johnny settle into an odd sort of domesticity.
They go grocery shopping together. Ten perpetually tries to get Johnny to buy things they don’t need, and Johnny always steers them back to the list he’s made. Ten does Johnny’s laundry. Johnny organizes his and Ten’s shoes at the door. Johnny learns what Ten likes on his bagels and Ten learns what Johnny likes in his coffee. They surprise each other, sometimes, with little things. Ten will buy Johnny’s favourite organic beer on his way home from the company and leave it in the fridge for him to find. Johnny will come home late, on his busier days, and hand Ten a bag of his favourite type of candy. On Sundays -- every single Sunday, the only day they both have off, a day that they could spend with anyone else, anywhere else -- they cook dinner together. It becomes a sort of tradition. Ten realizes he hadn’t missed this kind of stability in his life until he had it again.
He thinks that now, he and Johnny must be friends. They must be very good friends. They sit next to each other on the couch while they eat. Ten lets his eyes linger on the open, well-cut planes of Johnny’s face while Johnny’s distracted by the TV.
They’re good friends, Ten thinks. And then he thinks of how easy it must be — for other people — to fall in love with a friend like Johnny Seo.
7.
Ten had presumed, in the beginning, that being married to someone he wasn’t actually in love with would, at the very least, give him the opportunity to continue to prioritize himself.
It’s not easy balancing his career, his school work and his social life. Ten has frequently been met with forks in the road, where he was forced to make choices. More often than not, he chooses his career. He’s a good dancer, he knows this, and he thinks it’d be unfair to himself not to try as hard as he can to the best dancer.
Maybe that’s why he had to marry a random acquaintance, rather than someone he already had built something with. Something that was reaped and sowed together.
He’d never be unkind to Johnny, obviously, or ignore him. But there was a difference in how you prioritize your friends and how you prioritize your significant other. He’s married to Johnny, sure, but he — Ten doesn’t think he’d call Johnny his significant other. He doesn’t think that’s the correct qualifier. And so Ten had thought that, even if he married Johnny, his life could continue on mostly as normal. He would do what he wanted, when he wanted, and he still wouldn’t need to extend someone the courtesy of also knowing those things.
And yet.
And yet Ten finds himself offering Johnny the courtesy anyway. He texts Johnny when he makes it to the company in the morning and, again, when he leaves at night. Sometimes he’ll offer to pick up take out for them, or he’ll remember how Johnny mentioned they were low on oats this morning, and he’ll stop and pick them up without even asking. Ten settles better into their shared space. He knows the ways Johnny likes to keep things organized and he tries to respect that. Johnny makes small adjustments to better suit Ten in return.
Johnny never asks for any of this. Ten gives it to him anyway.
8.
The first time they sleep together is not a very interesting story.
It’s Sunday. They’re making dinner. Johnny’s at the stove sauteing vegetables, the sleeves of his button up pushed to sit around his elbows. He’s taken off the watch he always wears. It sits on the counter beside him. Ten watches Johnny, warmth curling in his gut. He thinks of Johnny’s mouth, pressed into a line in concentration, and his fingers, curled around the handle of the frying pan, and his legs, seemingly going on for miles before they reach the floor.
“Hey,” Ten says, hip balanced against the kitchen counter. When Johnny doesn’t turn and look at him, he repeats himself. “Hey, Johnny.”
“What’s up?” Johnny asks, finally turning to face Ten.
“Should we have sex?”
And there it is, out in the open. The hornet’s nest in the corner they’ve been ignoring finally kicked.
“I — what?” Johnny swallows. Ten wonders if the vegetables are burning, or if Johnny turned the element off before he turned to face him. “Do you — do you want to have sex with me?”
“Yes. That’s why I asked.” Ten says because why say anything else.
“Okay,” Johnny replies. “Okay, if that’s something you want, we can do that. I want that too.”
Ten half expects for Johnny to step over to him and kiss him, then. Press him up against the kitchen counter and lick into his mouth, maybe hold him by his hips. Make Ten tilt his face up to meet him, let Ten touch the curves of his face he’s been admiring for so long. But he doesn’t. He goes back to making dinner and when he’s finished he doesn’t kiss Ten either. Ten doesn’t say anything. He lets Johnny guide him to eat dinner on the couch, watching TV with their knees pressed together. The entire time Ten spends with all of his muscles curled up in anticipation, waiting for the moment Johnny will look at him a certain way, or put his hand on his thigh, or say something, anything, that will take the rest of the night in the direction they both want.
The worst part, Ten thinks, is that he likes it. He likes the tight clench in his gut. He likes being made to wait, held on the edge. He likes handing all of this over to Johnny and saying here, now this is yours. Do whatever you want with it.
It’s not until after they do the dishes that Johnny finally kisses him. The water is still draining from the sink, and the perimeter of it is still all wet, but Johnny presses Ten into it anyway. He doesn’t hold Ten’s hip. He cups his face instead, palms framing it from chin to forehead, while one of Johnny’s thumbs passes it’s way back and forth over the jut of Ten’s cheekbone.
It’s a good kiss. Ten shifts his legs apart and Johnny slides his thigh between them, pushing, just so, against Ten’s already hardening cock in his pants. Ten sighs into Johnny’s mouth, heart stuttering in his chest.
“Oh,” Ten manages to breathe when Johnny pulls away. His legs do not feel stable and he worries that, maybe, he would fall if not pinned between the kitchen counter and Johnny. He moves his hips against the press of Johnny’s thigh, just a little. “You’re really good at that.”
“Yeah?” Johnny asks but it’s not a question, not really. No one who kisses that way doesn’t know they’re good at it. “Do you want to go to the bedroom, Ten?” Johnny says next, and his voice is deeper than usual, sounding stretched thin over sandpaper.
“Yes,” Ten replies, breathless. “Yes, please.”
It should be more awkward. There’s seemingly been no build-up to this, not in any way that makes sense, and yet when it’s finally happening it feels like a damn cracking down the middle and splitting apart with water pressure anyway. But it’s not awkward. Ten wonders if it would have always been like this — being with Johnny — or if it’s something in the trajectory they took to get here that’s coloured it this way.
Johnny lays Ten back against the mussed sheets of his bed — he must not have made it this morning — and undresses him slowly.
The apartment is cool but Johnny’s hands are warm against Ten’s skin. Everytime Johnny removes a piece of Ten’s clothing he spends a few minutes exploring the new parts of him he has exposed. He kisses Ten’s chest and stomach, after his shirt comes off, and then the jut of bone of Ten’s ankle and his thighs when his pants do. Eventually, Ten is laid bare before a fully clothed Johnny, who slowly removes Ten’s boxers before putting his mouth around Ten’s cock.
Ten’s reaction is instant: his back arches off the bed, his head pressed into the pillows below it, and his fingers immediately tangle themselves in Johnny’s hair, tugging, while an unexpected moan tears it’s way out of Ten’s throat.
Johnny’s mouth is so, so good. Warm and wet thorough. Ten feels like his bone marrow has been replaced with molten lava. He wants to lie back into the sheets, melt away, and let Johnny take him.
He can’t keep quiet. He keeps making noise, moans and stuttering breaths and syllables that might be Johnny’s name, but cut themselves off before he can ever finish them. Then, Ten starts rocking his hips up into Johnny’s mouth and he’s going to come soon, he knows it, and he really wants Johnny to fuck him but he still can — Johnny can still fuck him if Ten comes, Ten will let him.
But Johnny holds Ten’s hips down, not painful but insistent, and slides his mouth off of Ten with an obscene pop. “Don’t come,” Johnny says and then, maddeningly, puts his mouth back on Ten.
Which is — that’s not fair. That’s not fair at all. The words play on repeat in Ten’s head (don’t come, don’t come, don’tcomedon’tcomedon’tcome) while Johnny continues sucking him off, now moving slower and more purposeful. Forget melting, Ten may actually explode.
But he doesn’t come. He doesn’t come because Johnny told him not to.
It feels like Ten tries to hold himself together for so long, hips still pinned under Johnny’s open palms and his fingers still in Johnny’s hair, but Johnny relents, finally, and lets Ten's cock fall out of his mouth and begins kissing his way up Ten’s body.
“Do you want me to,” Ten manages as best as he can, his breath still running away from him. He gestures to Johnny’s untouched dick, straining the front of his pants, and hopes Johnny understands the implied suck you off, do you want me to suck you off?
Johnny shakes his head. “I love your mouth,” he says, and to punctuate that thought he drags his thumb against Ten’s bottom lip. Ten lets his mouth fall open, ready for Johnny to slide his thumb past his lips and against his tongue, but Johnny doesn’t. “But I wanna fuck you,” Johnny clarifies, and then finishes, “grab the lube out of the night stand, baby, while I get undressed for you.”
Ten almost wants to bat his lashes, drip his voice in faux-coyness like honey and say, oh, for me? but Johnny has just told him he wants to fuck him, and Ten is single-minded in making that happen.
So Ten does as he’s told. He’s good at doing what he’s told. He fumbles into Johnny’s night stand and finds the lube, and a condom, and when he turns back around to hand them to Johnny, Johnny is naked. As in, totally naked. And, well, that’s something, huh?
Ten settles back amongst the pillows and rumpled sheets of Johnny’s bed and spreads his legs, just to see what reaction that might produce. Johnny breathes in sharply through his nose and Ten smirks, satisfied.
The rest of it plays out much like you’d expect: Johnny opens Ten up slowly, one and then two and then three fingers, mouthing wetly across Ten’s chest, occasionally letting his tongue linger over one of Ten’s nipples. Ten is a mess. He’s been a mess the whole time. He pants in a way that makes his whole chest move with it and he wishes he could say something, anything, but everytime he tries he gets cut off by a moan, or he loses the plot on the words before he can manage to get them out.
When Johnny first pushes into Ten it is slow and drawn out, as if Ten can feel every inch of Johnny as it disappears inside of him. After he bottoms out, though, Johnny’s pace becomes meticulously rhythmic, almost brutally so. It’s like he’s counting in his head, spacing out every piston of his hips exactly, finding the exact combination of every thing that will most effectively tear Ten apart, piece by piece. Ten likes it — but he likes it even more when Johnny’s ministrations begin to become more erratic, less practiced and assured. Because that’s when Ten knows Johnny’s about to come. Johnny’s about to come from fucking Ten, from being inside of him.
“Can I pull out and come on you?” Johnny asks, voice harried. Ten considers the dilemma for a moment; he wants Johnny to come inside of him, he does, but then Ten imagines they way he might look painted in that kind of mess, all over his chest and stomach, and nods despite his hesitation to let Johnny be anywhere that isn’t inside of him.
Johnny slips the condom off of his dick in record time, tying it off and throwing it away. He braces one of his arms on the bed, palm pressed flat into the mattress near Ten’s shoulder. It makes it so that he’s leaned over Ten, his whole body casting Ten’s body in shadow, but hovering far enough above him so he can work a hand over his own cock uninhibited.
Ten follows his lead. He palms his own cock, briefly teasing, before circling his hand around the base of it and beginning to stroke himself in earnest.
Johnny looks at him and Ten looks back. They are quiet, only the sounds they can’t help but make falling out of their open mouths. Ten wants Johnny to kiss him but something tells him Johnny doesn’t want to. Something tells him that Johnny just wants to watch him.
“Hey,” Ten finally manages to scrape out of what feels like hollowed out vocal chords. “You wanna come for me?”
Johnny’s elbow falters, for just a minute, and he almost collapses onto Ten before he’s locking it again. “Yes,” he says, “yes, I want to come for you.”
“Okay,” Ten can feel his own orgasm cresting inside him like a wave, about to pull him under. “Come, then. Come for me, Johnny.”
Johnny’s groans, head falling, eyes screwed shut. The sweat-wet ends of Johnny’s hair ghost over Ten’s chest, touching but just barely. Johnny comes loud, and he comes everywhere, and Ten loves it, and it’s barely another thirty seconds before Ten is coming too.
(“Look at that,” Ten says, after they’ve cleaned up. “We’ve consummated our marriage, finally. Good for us.”)
9.
Ten expects something to shift, after that.
Because, well, they’ve crossed that bridge, now what? It’s not as if he’s under some delusion. That he thinks he and Johnny will now somehow decide their marriage is anything besides a sham. That they’re made for each other and who cares if the law sees them as a single unit, and will until Johnny and Ten tell them otherwise, because that’s what they want now. It’s not that Ten has fooled himself into conflating sex with love, and now that he and Johnny have done one the other has come with it. It’s none of that.
If anything, Ten thinks, they can just have a little bit more fun now.
It’s a cosmic joke that nothing changes at all.
Well, not nothing. Because they’ve apparently decided they may as well share a bed now. Or, Johnny has. It’s two days after they’ve slept together when he asks Ten, “come to bed with me?”
Ten would be lying if he said he didn’t think Johnny was going to fuck him again. In fact, the same heat and anticipation curls in his gut like the first time. He brushes his teeth next to Johnny in the bathroom, spits into the sink after him, and imagines what it might be like to kiss Johnny with his mouth all minty and cold. But they don’t kiss. Johnny slides into bed and waits for Ten to slide in next to him, and Ten holds his breath, waits for the moment Johnny will curl his hand around Ten’s hip and pull him closer, pull him into a kiss, pull so he’s pressed right up against Johnny, pull him until Johnny is pressed inside of him. But, again, none of that happens.
Instead, Johnny says, “good night,” and settles into bed after he turns off the light.
Ten is left staring at Johnny’s back, blinking rapidly and stunned. He doesn’t know what’s happening. He doesn’t know what’s going. He wakes up the next morning in Johnny’s bed, and the night repeats itself over again.
Johnny does not kiss him. Johnny does not touch him.
Nothing ever happens. Nothing else changes.
Ten’s not sure where this all went wrong.
10.
The bachelor party is technically not a bachelor party at all and it is Yuta’s idea.
“We’re already married,” Johnny says. He and Ten sit across from Yuta and Taeyong at a coffee shop. It’s Saturday. Ten is — selfishly, he thinks — pressing his leg up against Johnny’s underneath the table. Johnny hasn’t acknowledged it, but hasn’t moved his leg away. “Neither of us are bachelors, technically.”
“Bachelors smachelors, who cares? You guys got married and didn’t have, like, one single party when that’s what getting married is supposed to be about. Parties.”
From his spot beside Yuta, listening to him ramble, Taeyong rolls his eyes. “I’m pretty sure getting married is about promising to be with one person for the rest of your life because you love them, but okay.”
“For most people, sure, but it wasn’t for them,” Yuta gestures towards Ten and Johnny. “So, for them, it was supposed to be about the parties. So, we should have a party.”
11.
They do, in fact, end up having a party. The next Saturday.
Yuta plans it all. He insists. Because they’re still operating under this false pretense that is some sort of bachelor party, when Johnny and Ten are already married and not even like — Ten hesitates to call them not “real married” because they are, in the eyes of the law (or Ten would be an unemployed and in Thailand right now, leaving with his mom again), but they aren’t real married because they’re not actually together, in every other sense of that word besides marriage.
In short: the terminology here is very, very complicated and Ten doesn’t want to think about it. So they let Yuta call it a bachelor party.
Johnny’s friends come and so do Ten’s. They go to this bar where Yuta’s reserved a booth and bottle service, and the drinks are expensive, but Ten doesn’t pay for any of them.
Ten has never found the charade of this all more silly that it is tonight, though. Everyone wants to be in on the joke. All their friends tell anyone who will listen about how their friends are getting married. Strangers comment on it to Ten all night. He thinks about telling them he’s already married, actually but — it’s nice, the attention. The way people will look at Johnny and then tell Ten he’s lucky.
Ten doesn’t drink much, he’s not in the mood. People keep buying him drinks (“Congratulations,” they all say when they do) and he drinks the first few obediently, before he starts deflecting all of them to Johnny. Johnny, who has decided this is going to be an outlier night where he actually lets loose.
Johnny drinks more beers than Ten can keep count of. And then he does shots.
Ten lets Johnny do as he pleases. There are three specific reasons for this:
1) Ten is not, actually, Johnny’s keeper. He has no right to tell him what to do.
2) Johnny deserves the break and,
3) The alcohol is making Johnny all handsy.
It starts with him putting his hand on Ten’s knee while they’re sat next to each other at the table (Taeyong had given him a look when he noticed, eyes darting to Johnny’s hand, his fingers spread out on the inside of Ten’s knee, and Ten had just shrugged) and devolves into Johnny putting his arm around Ten’s waist, tucking him into his side.
Ten says nothing. He revels in it, Johnny’s affection and the way he smells and how warm he is, the same way he did the night Johnny told him he was going to fuck him.
It’s about to be 1AM when Johnny leans his whole chest against Ten’s back to be able to whisper into Ten’s ear. He’s so drunk Ten can smell it on his breath, and his words come out slow and slurred. “When we get home,” he says, “when we get home, I’m gonna bend you over our couch and fuck you from behind.”
A shiver of pleasure creeps it’s way through Ten’s spine but a heavier, uglier feeling settles into Ten’s throat and gut, like he’s swallowed a rock. Johnny hasn’t touched him again, not since that first night, and Ten knows, intrinsically, that Johnny wouldn’t be saying any of this right now if he wasn’t so drunk.
Ten’s not going to take advantage of that.
He stands. “We should go,” he says, looking down at Johnny, at the empty space at his hip Ten had been filling just a moment ago. “We should go home.”
Johnny licks his lips. “Okay,” he replies. His eyes are half-lidded and they are not frenzied, but they are missing the more carefully constructed part of them, the thing that is in everything else Johnny does. “Okay. We can go home.”
12.
It is a mistake to let Johnny kiss him against the front door when they get home. He does it anyway.
There are parts of Ten, fuzzed by alcohol, scratching at the padlocks of the cages Ten is determined to put them in, that tell him to just give in. Let it happen, they say. He wants it and you want him. What’s the downside?
But he can’t — as long as he’s been holding his breath under the water, waiting for Johnny to touch him with his kind of purpose, he can’t surface yet. And maybe he’ll drown, down here, waiting forever, but so be it.
“Johnny,” Ten speaks his name quietly, turning his head to the side. Johnny’s mouth, still searching for Ten’s, finds his cheek instead. He drags it lower, then, across Ten’s jaw and the spot just below his ear. “I think you should go to bed, Johnny.”
Johnny shakes his head. “I don’t wanna go to bed,” he says, “I want to fuck you. Spread you out and get you open and put my cock in you.”
“Johnny, I —”
“We can do whatever you want,” Johnny continues, and all his words sound garbled together, coming out of him the way a magician pulls a line of tied together scarves out of his jacket sleeve. “I’ll do whatever you want me to do to you, okay? It’ll be good, I promise.”
The voices rattle the bars of their cage. Ten ignores them.
“I want --” he starts. Johnny cuts him off.
“You want me, right?”
The words are so open and vulnerable. It spreads a crack down the centre of Ten’s ribcage. Johnny lets himself be pushed away, just slightly. Just so their hips aren’t slotted together anymore, and so Ten can stand up straight, no longer pressed against the door.
“Johnny,” Ten makes his voice as firm as he can. “You’re so drunk. I would really like it if you went to bed.”
Johnny’s face breaks open, for just a second, the same his voice did, but then it’s gone. Then he’s back away from Ten even further, scrubbing his hands over his face.
“I don’t get it,” he says and Ten doesn’t think Johnny is even talking to him even more. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to do this the right way.” Johnny’s tearing off his jacket like it’s on fire. He tosses it over the back of the couch. He always usually hangs it up in the closet right away. “I don’t touch you and it’s wrong but then I touch you and it’s wrong anyway.”
Ten doesn’t respond. He doesn’t know if he should. He knows he’s already embarrassed Johnny, that Johnny has already embarrassed himself, and that this will be a conversation neither of them will want to have in the morning. He thinks acknowledging any of Johnny’s words right now might make that worse. So he doesn’t, and he hopes and prays that that’s the right call.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m getting it wrong on purpose,” Johnny is saying next. He’s sitting on the arm of the couch, slumped over, and saying, “I don’t know why I’m so determined -- so determined to be so fucking lonely.”
The night lulls into silence then. All the curtains in the apartment are open, from this afternoon. Ten wishes they were all closed.
“Have you ever tricked yourself into thinking you want to be lonely, Ten?”
Ten’s heart lurches when Johnny calls his name. He does not answer the question.
“Johnny,” he says instead, “please. Please just go to bed.”
He does, defeated.
For the first time in weeks, Ten sleeps in the guest room.
13.
In the morning, they do not discuss it. Ten pads out of the guest room and finds Johnny on the couch, doing work on his laptop.
“How are you feeling?” Ten asks, for lack of anything better to say.
“Fine,” Johnny responds. He does not look up from his computer screen. “I got PostMates. In the kitchen.”
Ten is almost relieved they do not discuss it, but not really. It’s like when you’ve realized you’ve been standing in poison ivy: there is no itching yet, no inescapable pain, but it’s coming. You know it’s coming. It’s simply a matter of when.
14.
Their world settles itself again.
Johnny starts spending longer hours at the office. Ten convinces himself it’s nothing to do with him. They’ve got a big project coming up, he remembers Johnny saying. Never the mind that Johnny has seemingly relocated all the work he was doing, perfectly fine at home, to the office.
Ten focuses on dancing, and the company, and hopes that maybe if he focuses on it hard enough it will simply overtake his life.
The Sunday dinner together persists, despite everything. Ten allows himself the small comfort of it. He finds a new appreciation for watching Johnny cut vegetables, or sprinkle salt into pasta water, or sliding pans into ovens.
Ten let’s himself savor the small pieces of things they’ve let carry over, from when things were maybe just a little simpler.
15.
The day Ten decides he’s going to kiss Johnny again begins much like any other.
It is an unassuming Tuesday. Ten has no idea when the thought truly comes to him; when it plants itself into the soft dirt of Ten’s thoughts, waiting for sunlight and water to grow. But by noon that day it’s all he can think about.
Very specific problems, Ten thinks, require very specific solutions.
Johnny brings home takeout for dinner. It’s from the noodle place they both like. They sit and eat in each other’s spaces like they always do and it almost feels like much the same as it always was. Ten wonders, not for the first time, how things might have been different under the right circumstances. If Johnny was something less than Ten’s husband, but also something more.
The contradictions that exist between them have always been the worst part.
For the sake of circularity, for the sake of creating patterns where there are none, Ten kisses Johnny in the kitchen. They both reach for something in the fridge -- Johnny for that beer he likes, Ten for the jug of lemon water he made -- and they both just sort of. Stop.
Ten closes the fridge door. Neither of them move out of each other’s space. There must be something in Ten’s expression that’s telling Johnny not to move, because he has otherwise not made his intentions here clear. And yet Johnny waits, obediently, for Ten to do as he pleases.
This kiss is a lot like the first one, slow and warm and wet. Except it lacks the context the first one did. It lacks the innate feeling of knowing where this kiss is going to go.
They kiss for a long time, just standing in front of the fridge with Johnny’s fingers still curled around the neck of his beer. It’s nice. It is somehow exactly had Ten had expected it to be, despite all the variables that could have changed it. Johnny’s hand grips Ten’s elbow and his front presses against Ten, and his legs sit on either side of Ten’s, their feet touching.
And then the kiss ends, just like that. Not because it was bad, not because it had to be stopped, but it had felt right, to end it then. And maybe they would pick it back up and finish it later, but that could wait.
This was fine just the way it was.
16.
It takes two days for them to have sex again.
They share the bed again (they never really stopped, Ten spent two nights in the guest room, before he had asked, gultilly, selfishly, if they could share again and Johnny -- of course, of course -- had said yes) and somewhere between getting into bed and falling asleep they’ve started kissing.
They’ve kissed a lot, since Ten initiated it that night in the kitchen. Long moments spent on the couch, or in the bathroom, or even in the bedroom, sometimes, just kissing slowly, as if that’s all they really understood how to do. Tonight, the kisses take on a different feeling. Tonight, they feel like a means to an end.
They’re both just in their boxers, laying on their sides. Johnny has a hand curled around Ten’s hip and, in a moment of boldness, Ten throws his leg over Johnny, circling it around his waist and pulling him closer, and their cocks rub together, for just a second and still covered in fabric, but still. It shifts everything.
Johnny takes the lead then. He moves them both so he’s lying flat on his back with Ten on top of him, straddling his waist. It causes more friction between them, and Ten moans against Johnny’s mouth. He doesn’t want them to part, he wants to stay here, against Johnny’s mouth, and waste away.
It’s like finally breaking the surface after straining to hold your breath underwater. Ten feels off his rhythm, adjusting to everything around him after being somewhere else for so long, and yet finds comfort in the breath he shares with Johnny through the press of their mouths.
They take it slow, Ten above Johnny while Johnny rocks his hips up into him the whole time. It’s rougher than last time, though. Johnny’s movements are less methodical and a little harsher. Ten bites into his shoulder after Johnny knocks him forward, off his carefully balanced axis, and Ten collapses against his chest. It’s good, though, it’s so good. Ten feels made and unmade over and over again, Johnny’s hands on his chest and his hips and his thighs, Johnny’s mouth against his mouth, against his jaw, against his throat.
Ten thinks about how things might have been different under other circumstances. And then, he thinks, that those differences don’t matter. Because these are the circumstances, and these are the outcomes, and he may as well be present in his body for them.
17.
There is a brief moment where Ten is nervous that the cycle will repeat itself. That Johnny and Ten will cross this bridge, yet again, and then double back to the other side of it again and pretend as if nothing has ever happened.
This time, that is not what happens.
Instead, it’s what Ten was expecting to happen the first time: they keep having sex. Turns out they just had to do it a couple times before it was going to stick.
And now, honestly, it’s hard for them to escape the gravitational pull of each other’s bodies.
Johnny makes good on his promise to fuck Ten over the arm of the couch. They shower together, sometimes, and Ten gets very good at ignoring the way soap always gets in his eyes when he drops to his knees to suck Johnny off. It happens in the kitchen, too. Against the countertops and, once, just on the floor. And it happens in the bed, of course, over and over and over again.
Ten starts to categorize, in his head, all the things they’ve implemented into a routine. The Sunday dinners, and the sex, but now there’s more he hasn’t noticed before too. How Johnny gets them breakfast every Sunday. How Wednesdays have been designated as pseudo-lazy nights, where they order takeout and sit on opposite ends of the couch, Ten’s feet tucked under Johnny’s thigh. How they get lunch with Taeyong and Yuta on Saturdays.
Somehow, in the steady haze of a too hot desert that has permeated all these months Ten has been married to Johnny, they have constructed some kind of life together.
It seems like they’re just doing all of this in reverse order.
18.
The ballet company has it’s bi-annual fundraising banquet. All the dancers are required to go, and they are allowed to bring a plus one. Taeyong brings Yuta. Ten brings Johnny.
It’s not black tie, but it’s close to it. They wear suits and ties. Johnny wears his hair, usually looser and falling into his eyes, pushed back. Most people at the company just know Ten is married, nothing beyond that, so it’s not odd to let Johnny hold him around the waist all night, or to let him lean in a little too close when he whispers something into Ten’s ear.
Johnny is gone to get a new round of champagne flutes. Taeyong looks like he’s been waiting to say something to Ten all night.
“I’ve been thinking,” he finally does, now that Johnny's gone.
“Careful with that,” Ten jeers back at him. “Think too much and smoke will start coming out of your ears.”
“Haha, very funny,” Taeyong replies, clearly not finding it funny at all. “I’m serious.”
“What is it?”
“Are you guys,” and Taeyong’s eyes briefly flit to where Johnny must be behind Ten, still waiting for drinks. “Are you guys gonna stay married?”
“We have to stay married,” Ten explains. “We have to be married for . . . two years, I think? For me to keep my green card.”
Taeyong nods, slowly. Ten doesn’t know how to explain it to him that will remove the concerned look from Taeyong’s face.
“And after that?”
“And after what?”
“After two years, when you’ll be a citizen for good?” Taeyong elaborates, “will you guys stay married then?”
“We, uh,” Ten bites his lip. “We haven’t really talked about it, I guess.”
“Are you guys, like, seeing other people?” It’s Yuta who asks this question. Ten wishes he wouldn't have.
“What do you mean?” Ten asks, but he knows what they mean. He hates this conversation. He doesn’t want to have it. But, more than that, he doesn’t want anyone to know he doesn’t want to have it.
“I mean,” Yuta tilts his head to side, looking like he’s considering this whole arrangement. “You guys aren’t -- well, you’re not together, obviously. Which is weird, because you’re married, but we all get it. We do. So if you guys aren’t together, well, could you guys be seeing other people? Because the reason you don’t see other people when you’re married is because you love the person you’re married to. Which you guys don’t, right?”
It’s phrased like a question, that last part. Ten wishes it wasn’t.
19.
The conversation with Yuta and Taeyong weighs heavily on Ten’s mind.
He brings it up to Johnny a few days later.
After they’ve finished having sex is probably not the most delicate time to do it. But Ten finds his nerve, in those moments just after, and he knows he has to say something before he loses it.
“Do you want to be with other people?”
“What?” Johnny lays next to Ten, the both of them on their backs, still wet with sweat and a little sticky. The looks he gives Ten is confused.
“I just mean,” Ten averts his gaze from Johnny. He stares up that ceiling. “I just mean I don’t want to keep you from anything. I know -- I know the whole ‘we’re married’ thing is weird but we’re not -- we’re not actually together, y’know? And I don’t want you to feel you have to do all this stuff with only me just because we signed a couple of papers.”
“So you’re saying . . . ?”
“I’m saying,” Ten takes a deep breath, “I’m saying if you want to see other people or -- or have sex with other people you can do that. If you want.”
“You want me to see other people?” Ten still isn’t looking at Johnny but he can imagine his expression. It probably looks a lot like the expression he had after Ten pushed him away, when he was drunk, and he started talking about being lonely, and carved a split into Ten’s heart.
Those voices Ten locked away in his head are back. They’re saying don’t. Don’t lie. Don’t tell him all of this. But the worst part of that is that Ten doesn’t know why they’re saying those things. His head is a mess, a mess of questions, of half-formed conclusions and a million different theories. And that’s not fair. It’s not fair to make Johnny hang, waiting, for things that Ten doesn’t even know will ever exist.
So he lies.
So, he says, “if you want to see other people, then I want you to see other people.”
20.
It is absolutely, unbelievably unfair when Johnny takes Ten up on his offer.
Or, that’s what Ten believes is happening here. He is too afraid of the answer to ask Johnny directly about it, but he’s not stupid. He can fit the pieces of a puzzle together. He can be presented evidence and come to a conclusion.
Johnny starts coming home later and later from work. Whereas he’d used to come through the door when the sun was still setting, the sky a mix of pink and orange, it is always inky black night when he returns now. He leaves the house a lot without Ten now too. They used to go everywhere together. It was easy. It’s what married couples did -- though, they were only the former of those things and not the latter. But now Johnny leaves without extending an invitation to Ten and when he comes home and Ten offers him dinner he always declines, and Ten assumes it must be because he’s already full. Because he’s been to a restaurant somewhere, with someone else, on something probably like a date.
Johnny never sleeps anywhere else, though. And they’re still having sex.
Ten lets that be the balm for his wounds.
21.
Ten lets them continue their charade for the better part of the month.
He starts to steadily realize that Johnny avoids him more and more. Besides the Sunday dinners, which never falter, somehow, they barely speak at all. They see each other every day and they still have sex (and god, Ten wishes he wasn’t so weak, that he could put up a high enough, strong enough, barrier that would make him turn Johnny down, make him not seek Johnny out) but the number of words they speak to each other, Ten thinks, he could probably count on two hands.
And maybe Ten is just tired. He’s tired of work, of dancing, of only staying in school because it’s what his mom wants for him. Of being married and it not meaning anything, of perpetually performing in every aspect of his life.
He just doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t know how to hold the reins of his life. So, in a moment of weakness, he does the only thing he can think of.
“I think we should get divorced.”
Johnny slips with the knife he’s using to cut potatoes. It slices a big gash down the length of his thumb, opening skin and pouring blood when it does. Before Ten can ever think to react, Johnny is tearing three pieces of paper towel off the roll and pressing it to the wound.
“Fuck,” he breathes out, once the stunned moment has passed. “Ow, shit. Okay. Thanks for that.”
“Sorry,” Ten mumbles uselessly. He can see the blood is starting to seep through the towels and he desperately wants to forget everything he just said and make sure Johnny’s okay.
He takes a step towards Johnny. Johnny turns away from him.
“No, it’s fine,” he says, holding his ruined hand close to his chest, trying to balance keeping the paper towels in place so he doesn’t get anything dirty and applying enough pressure to maybe temper the bleeding. “Keep going. Finish what you were saying.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“I said finish what you were saying,” Johnny presses, and his tone of voice cannot be argued with.
“I said I think we should get a divorce.”
“They’ll send you home.”
“Well, we don’t -- we don’t know that,” Ten counters, but he knows it’s a lie. He’ll be here illegally. Eventually, they’ll send him home. “I -- I’ll figure something else out. We don’t have to do this. It’s not fair for me to make you do this.”
“Make me?” Johnny echoes Ten’s words, much more incredulously. “I’m an adult, Ten, I make my own decisions. But you’ve somehow tricked me, I guess. Not like I offered. Not like I’ve been good to you. Not like I’ve tried my best, all I’ve done is try my fucking best.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Then don’t say anything, Ten. It doesn’t matter.” Johnny shakes his head. “I’m going to go take care of this. You can stay here.”
And just like that Ten is alone in the kitchen, the offending knife and potatoes abandoned, and when Johnny closes the bathroom door he locks it.
There are a few drops of blood, scattered along the kitchen floor. Ten looks at them, listening to the sink run in the bathroom. They are starkly red against the white of the kitchen floor beneath them. Soon, they will coagulate and dry and probably stain.
Ten dutifully wipes them away, leaving behind no trace that they even existed to begin with.
22.
The days that follow the incident in the kitchen are tense and awful.
Johnny and Ten’s infrequent speaking reduces itself to a pitiful zero. Ten sleeps in the guest room again, and the bed feels too big and cold. His coaches love the extra time Ten is spending practicing at the company and the seemingly unprecedented emotion he’s been pushing through his dancing lately, but the praise is hollow to Ten.
Ten and Johnny have been married for nearly half a year -- and for the first time they miss Sunday dinner.
Ten supposes this is what it should be like when you marry someone you didn’t really know. But it had been so easy to slip into something closer to the real thing, closer to the way people who are in love enough to get married are supposed to be. Ten had convinced himself he understood the parameters of all of this, the boundaries, but maybe he’s been fooling himself. Maybe he’s been fooling himself without even realizing it.
Maybe that’s why he had been so tired: he has been lying to himself for so long.
23.
This story does not end the way Ten expects it to.
The Monday after the only missed Sunday dinner, Johnny comes home from work and he looks tired. He drops his messenger back and jacket into a heap by the door, something he never does. His hand is still wrapped tightly in the bandage he put on the night he cut himself. Ten watches him from the couch. They’ve been doing this a lot lately; watching each other with neither of them willing to shatter the careful, safe silence between them.
Only tonight, Johnny breaks it.
“I do not want to get divorced.”
“Johnny,” Ten turns away, he can’t look at him. “I don’t want to tie you down to anything. It’s -- it was unfair of me to ask all of this from you. I know you’re trying really hard, and I appreciate it but. But I shouldn’t have done it.”
“You’re not tying me down to anything,” Johnny’s voice is steadfast and assured. “I don’t want to get divorced because I’m in love with you.”
Ten is reminded of that feeling, the feeling he had the second time he and Johnny slept together. The feeling of breaking the surface of the water, finally finding the air above you, breathing so hard it almost hurts, pins and needles against the fabric of your lungs. Only this time, it feels like being pulled from the water entirely. It feels like Johnny has grasped Ten, tore him from the waves and salt, and laid him on the bank, safe and sound and already warming in the sun.
He doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t know what to say. He’s reminded, now, of something different. Of when Ten felt like he had offered Johnny control of everything, to do with as he wanted, and how now Johnny was doing the same for Ten. This whole moment is so fragile. Ten would hate to break it.
So Ten says, “I love you too,” and holds his breath. He’s not sure where the words come from but he knows they are the truth.
Johnny surges forward to kiss him. It forces the air out of Ten’s lungs and suddenly the world comes back into focus. Ten and Johnny have somehow managed to end up doing this the right way, even though they did it all wrong. Did they have to do it that way to make it work for them? Maybe. Maybe not. It doesn’t matter. They made it here anyway.
Later, they will sit and they will talk about this. Johnny will say, we should stay married, I love you, I don’t want you to go back to Thailand, not without me, please, let’s just stay married and Ten will laugh and agree. And, later still, in the bed that is now undeniably theirs, they will spend a very long time kissing, and then Ten will let Johnny fuck him from behind with both of them laying on their sides, Johnny’s palms pressed to Ten’s chest while Ten’s rolls his hips back against him. And, later than even that, they will fall asleep, and it will be blissful and warm and Ten will no longer feel as if he is projecting a false-reality but, in fact, simply living the present gifted to him.
For now, Ten and Johnny kiss, and the whole world shifts around them and yet things remain strangely the same.
24.
It takes thirty minutes of walking her through it but, eventually, Ten’s mother’s face appears pixelated on his computer screen through Skype.
She doesn’t even let him speak before she’s chastising him. “Sweetheart, you’re so thin. Are you eating well? They aren’t working you too hard at that military school they pretend is a dance company, right?”
“Mom,” Ten shakes his head, smiling. “I will never have enough weight on my bones for you until I look like I did when I was baby.”
“I fed you well back then,” She responds proudly. Then, she’s squinting -- but not at Ten, it’s as if she’s looking for something behind him. “Sweetheart, is your apartment haunted? There seems to be some kind of spirit lurking behind you.”
It’s Johnny, who blushes as he brings himself forward and better visible within the frame of Ten’s computer.
“Mom, it’s not a ghost,” Ten laughs, “it’s my boyfriend.”
“He’s your husband, sweetheart.”
And, sure, she may be right. But Ten likes calling Johnny his boyfriend. He’s been Ten’s husband for a while now. He hasn’t been his boyfriend for quite as long.
the end