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**Unforgettable**
Namjoon was first to step into the borrowed house, discovering a foyer that had been built to look bigger than it was, with a scaled down grand piano in its midst. A spiral staircase climbed around it, to a second floor that presumably had bedrooms; the curved doors behind the piano must lead to the kitchen, dining room, and living areas.
Tae stared gape-jawed, at the ceiling.
Now I can’t stage a break up with Jin after all. Or stop being slightly famous, whatever that takes, because I have to live here forever.
“These are proper full-immersion VR goggles.” Awed, he picked them off the piano bench, setting them on his face. Everything went black. Then Joon shimmered back into view as the system came online.
“Piano’s in the way,” Joon complained, reaching for the other set. “Begging for an accident.”
Tae shrugged. He didn’t care. He poked the controls and conjured a coastal city. Green mountains rose up around them: misty peaks, lots of cedar trees. A little like Hong Kong, but…
“Is this Vancouver?” Joon turned a slow circle.
The simulation was so perfect that he could count the frost-edged trees on the northern mountains. “Have you been?”
“Once. Visiting academic gig.”
“Oh.” He was disappointed. “I was trying to surprise you. Is there somewhere you’d rather be?”
“Show me one of your socials.”
“You won’t like that.”
“How do you know?” Namjoon said. “Give me the boyfriend experience. If I don’t buy in, we’ll stop it.”
Tae loaded up the simulation. He found himself staring into his own eyes, a long ago version of himself in a school uniform, in a school hallway projected—dangerously, just as Joon had said—around the piano.
He’d been almost fourteen. Baby Tae was lounging on a bench near a standard-issue school principal’s office.
“There’s supposed to be a second bench over there,” he explained to Namjoon. “Out of reach, you know? The player talks to me from across the hall.”
Joon frowned and nodded. Tae managed not to cringe at the sight of his flat hair and baby actor attempt at surly.
I gotta stop opening with episode one when people ask me to share this!
“I take it you were meant to be a bit of a bad boy?”
“I’m a bad boy,” Tae agreed, putting on a silly voice. His heart soared when it actually raised a little chuckle from Namjoon.
“You’re right, this is too weird and you are too young. Bring back Vancouver.”
Taehyung pulled the piano bench over to the Lost Lagoon seawall. He sat, and tapped the spot beside him. After a second Joon did, sitting cross legged, not quite touching him. Tough feat; the bench was narrow. A blue heron wafted down from the heights and settled in front of them, hunting fish. Small planes took off and landed in the harbor.
“Have you shown me that one before?”
“It’s one of three options for getting acquainted,” Tae said. He didn’t begrudge Namjoon trying to forget their relationship, but… this was hard. Awkward.
”Sorry,” he said. “I may’ve done a lot of out-of-character that first week, after you… after you went.”
“What if it wasn’t just heartbreak?” Taehyung said suddenly. “Blocking me? There would be no sense in harassing you if you we weren’t in touch… if you didn’t know where I was.”
“You’re selling it as me protecting you from the folks who were after you, instead of emotional cowardice?”
“I mean,” Tae said, “Heartbreak really sucks.”
A harbour seal glided past, locking eyes with them before vanishing under the inky surface of the Pacific. A light pulse of breeze lifted his hair.
“It’s so real ,” he marveled. “I can smell the sea.”
“We’re a hundred meters from the coast,” Namjoon said dryly. “You can smell the sea.”
Tae fought not to wince and made himself tackle the awkward again. A different angle, maybe?“I feel dumb,” he confessed. “That I never told Jungkook who you were. It feels like that’s just piled misunderstanding on top of everything else.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Jin would’ve told him not to say dumb . Tae scrubbed at his hair, accidentally bumping him with his elbow. Joon didn’t flinch away.
“Aish. Kookie had a little bit of a thing for me, see, and I didn’t want to rub his nose in him being mostly single and me being head over heels. For one of his sunbaes, no less. He’s already got so much attitude about being the youngest—what if he took it to class?”
Namjoon nodded, hanging his head.
“I was gearing up to tell him. He’d taken up flirting with some guy from his hometown, and said he was seeing someone properly, too, from his boxing gym.”
“Ah, Jungkook was the department’s legendary boxing addict. I should’ve guessed.”
Tae pushed the words past his defenses: “I was, you know. Infatuated. With you.”
Namjoon put a hand up, as if he was warding off a wasp. Almost slipped off the bench trying to put another centimeter of space between them, all while looking heartbreakingly stricken.
“I wasn’t protecting anything, Tae. I wanted to forget you.”
Tae put in a fog transition, washing out the Burrard inlet, and called up his other travel photos, looking for something more distracting. Found an art museum in the same album, full of streaky and colorful paintings of the mountains in the rain.
Joon’s head came up immediately. “Emily Carr?”
It sounded plausible. Tae made a noise that passed for a yes but left him an out if he was wrong.
Joon stood. He walked the perimeter, scrutinizing every painting, and then faked out the door, which was stuck in the piano, so the scene would change to the next gallery. He looked at all those paintings too. Finally he said: “Let’s see what the non-imaginary part of this mansion has to offer.”
“I wouldn’t call this a mansion, hyung.”
“That’s right, you were born with a golden spoon.” Joon scratched his jaw. “I’d forgotten.”
Taehyung’s heart was pounding. “It wasn’t important. I only told you on that last day together.”
Joon didn’t say more, just waited for him to shut off the simulation and take off his goggles. He seemed to have decided something; as Tae set the rig back on the bench, he put out a hand, with just the barest of hesitations.
For the old Joon at least, that was halfway to making a pass.
Tae took it. They started up the spiral staircase, fingers entangled, and started trying doors. The house had been closed up for a while, maybe decades, so everything was stripped, draped, and locked away.
The master bedroom was over the top in the same way the piano atrium had been: home to a big princess bed frame in laminated white, raised in a way that gave an elevated view through a big window seat. The coast of Jeju shimmered below. They could see the rooftops of the village, all layered in an inch of white.
“Wasn’t I bolder back then?”
There was so much self-doubt in that voice, cracked voice leaking pain. Like seeping scabs, Tae thought. “Are you not bold now, Joona?”
Namjoon tugged him closer.
Body memory took Tae straight to the sensitive spot behind Joon’s ear. He nuzzled it with the tip of his nose and felt the response ripple through him, as if he was a drum, as if he’d struck him in just the right place, with a big padded baton.
Joon let out a little growl. He wrapped a leg around Tae’s waist—
…enviable core strength, I guess he’s been sublimating all the sex he hasn’t had lately into exercise…
– and pulled him down to the window seat.
“Stay still. I want to get a look at you.” Joon started peeling him out of his clothes— see, hyung you do remember something I like! —and Taehyung did as he was asked.
In most of his fantasies, he was the one taking the lead, doing the stripping. But he liked all kinds of undressing, whether it was a literal transition from clothed to just skin or contests of nerve, like truth or dare. And Joon was meticulous about it – always had been. No torn buttons, no stretched zippers. It was as much an unveiling as anything else. Like he was art.
Downside, though: if you gave him half a chance, he would wash, press, and fold all the clothes as he took them off.
Tae didn’t mean to give him the chance, picking each garment away from him as he slid it away, and tossing it in a soft crumple to the bedframe.
Soon Joon had him bared in the cool blue light of the winter afternoon, pointed at the window and the sea. He pulled out Jin’s bottle of ointment, reached around to run two palms full of it over Tae’s scabbed back, and smiled sympathetically when he flinched.
“Doesn’t hurt so much,” Tae said. “Getting into the itchy stage.”
“Healing up.” Joon ran his hands up and down Tae’s sides, from the front of his legs around his hip bones, then over the chest to the shoulders. Then down again. He ran one finger over his chin, scraping the stubble there. Then did the same to himself.
He pressed one fervent kiss to Tae’s cock. “I can be bold. There’s no compulsion. I can do this.”
“Hyung! You aren’t using me to test yourself?”
“Do you feel used?”
Not by you. He shook his head.
“Turn around, then, and stop complaining.”
Strong hands crossed his hips, brushing the small of his back once, then twice, before taking hold. Teeth grazed the curve where the base of the spine met meat. A tongue explored the very top of the cleft.
“Ohhhhhhhh,” he said “Oh, Joona.”
“I can’t remember… have we done this before?”
“Hmmm…” He tried to remember specifically as a pattering of kisses danced the top of his ass. Then the tongue probed downward, pushing on his tailbone before pressing on. “Not in a princess bedroom.”
Joon tongued his way down to his entrance, urging him to bend a little, to give him better access. He licked a stripe across him, lighting up several major chunks of brain. “You do like this, don’t you?”
“Fuck, Namjoon,” he gasped, as the tongue laved between his cheeks again. “Who wouldn’t?”
Thoughtful noise in response to that, and then he felt breath. A hot sigh, then a cool whistle of air. Finally, the tip of the tongue, undulating against him.
One of Joon’s hands moved between his slightly spread legs, alternating between silkily petting his balls and giving the softest of caresses to his already leaking cock.
It certainly feels like you remember your A game . He didn’t say it aloud.
Something made him flash on that old kiddy version of himself, waiting outside the principal’s office.
“I’m a bad boy,” he said again and Joon promptly drove his tongue into his entrance. Stepping on the line, no doubt deliberately. Boy came out “Booooyyyyyyyyohboy….”
He tightened his grip, pushing his tongue in and out, sucking lightly on his rim and hijacking everything Tae might possibly think or remember or analyze with, dimming all higher brain function and ramping up the oh that feels oh that feels oh that feels, and still only teasing with the hand between Tae’s legs. Licking and biting softly, eating his ass while making hoarse, hungry sounds until Tae’s knees buckled. He would’ve fallen forward onto the carpet if Namjoon hadn’t anchored his hips with his free hand.
Joon pulled him back then, all but into his lap. He rubbed a moistened thumb over Tae’s left nipple. Unlike Tae, he was still completely clothed, but the pressure and heat of his erection through his pants, was like a heated bar. The contrast in power—Tae naked, horny and vulnerable, Joon still covered—was the thing that really made him moan.
Once again, Joon seemed to be trying to decide something.
Tae forced words out. “We don’t have to do anything… anything else, that is.”
An oddly shy smile. He had forgotten how completely Joon’s intermittent self-consciousness could rip at him. His whole heart felt like it was wrenching in his chest, at just that little glimmer of mischief or happiness.
“I’m thinking I want to hump up against you while jerking you off,” Joon said. “Just put my cock between your legs, so you can squeeze me, while I have you in my hand.”
Lust punched through Tae as he imagined it.
“Where?”
Joon looked around the room, passing over and rejecting the unmade bed. “Let’s brace you there.” The mattress was tied up in a roll, stiff and unyielding, beside the bed.
“Okay.” Shocking, how ragged and frankly desperate he sounded. “Yeah, do it.”
Joon coaxed him upright. Tae took a grip on the mattress. The straps holding it curled like a jelly roll were tight, and gave good purchase. He felt Joon sliding his pants down, heard a glurt of moisturizing lotion, and then the slick skin-on-skin sound of him jerking himself. A hiss of desire.
Oh, he remembered that, too. His own cock jumped at the sound, as if no time had passed.
A hand, now slippery and smelling of lanolin and vanilla, rubbed through the crevice of his legs.
“Shit, shit,” he panted. “Shit!”
The hand withdrew. When it came back, it was guiding Joon’s erection into the space between his thighs, into a groove between his legs, aside his scrotum and balls.
“Tighten up around me,” Joon’s voice was still raw. “Please, let me—”
“Anything you say.” Tae flexed his thighs. The slicked hand came around, taking a grip around the shaft of his cock, and—ever so patiently—giving it a few preliminary strokes as they both felt their way to remembering the right angle, the right rhythm.
And then they were all but fucking, Tae turned away from Namjoon, unable to see anything but the smallest sliver of his face in his peripheral vision. Unable to feel any of his skin but the hand and the small part of exposed flesh, right in the center, encased between his legs. All the skin he was getting was hand and cock and the front of Joon’s thighs, and the weird modesty of that, the idea that Joon wanted him enough to do this, here in this empty house, here with so much going on, yet couldn’t let himself be fully seen…
“Could you close your eyes?” He asked.
Tae let out a groan as he did it. He played a little with the idea of being a vessel, something to be used in a sacred moment of desperation. Like he was making up for something, atoning for some small part of the hurt he had obviously inflicted. Or like he might be making a downpayment on the right to fuck Joon properly, at his own pace, at some point in the future. Once amends had been made.
And all while holding on to this, this fuck, the one that was happening now, as the memories he’d replayed so many times tried to crowd in. Tae bit his lip as hard as he could, fisting his hands into the mattress so tightly the pressure was painful. He arched his back to break the new scabs, exposing broken skin to the air.
Joon in the present—as well as in some of the memories—did that thing where he dragged air over his lower lip, just before he was about to come. It almost sounded like a slurp, and he was doing it now, huffing and humping, his hand still jerking Tae with steady, rhythmic insistence.
He let out a noise that was almost a choked-back sob, because this was both so good but also really hard , harder than he thought, going back to the past he thought was over. For a second this did feel like atonement. Without benefits, maybe even punishment.
But then his body overwhelmed that little moment of self-pity or self-flagellation or fear, Joon feeding a rising orgasm that swamped that little twister of emotional pain before Tae even really knew how to name it. Joon came with a long guttural exhalation, splattering Tae between the thighs, sending hot fluid running running down the insides of his legs as he very suddenly pressed a thumb back to his entrance, where his tongue had been, piercing him not roughly but with a certain sense of commanding abruptness. And that did it. Tae, pinned between Namjoon and the rolled-up mattress, found himself exploding too.
He clung to the haze of satisfaction for a second as Joon stepped back, leaving one hand on him until he was sure he had his balance. “Why don’t you clean up here and get dressed?” he said gently. “I’ll find the other bathroom.”
Sound of a zipper. Then he was gone.
Don’t cry, don’t cry…
Tae fought to keep himself from slipping to the floor as soon as he was behind a shut door. He dabbed ineffectually at the twin wet spots on the wrapped mattress and the rug below, then gave up and went into the master bath. He was so heavy suddenly he could barely hold his head up. Body sodden with pleasure, his mind was laced with a feeling he’d always labeled homesickness.
“I’ve been homesick for you all along,” he told the face in the mirror, but he wasn’t really speaking to himself.
This wasn’t his fault.
It felt like one or both of them was punishing him, and a petulant inner toddler stamped and insisted: he wasn’t to blame!
Never mind that. Focus on all the nice feelings. You have a brand new memory of fucking Namjoon after all this time. Set the rest aside.
By the time he was clean and properly dressed again and had taken a more thorough swipe at all the wet patches of floor, cleaning up their mess, he could hear the piano playing.
He made it to the spiral staircase. Gripped the rail to hold himself up. The urge to sleep was still strong—after so long running on adrenaline, the orgasm had hit him like a horse tranquilizer. “I don’t remember you being a musician.”
Joon smiled up at him. Shyly, Tae thought. “I’ve been taking lessons for three years. We kept getting memos about interacting with the townspeople, and there’s a teacher.”
Tae made himself stagger down the steps and settled half a flight up, where he could watch and listen.
The sight of Namjoon at the piano, unfamiliar and looking… looking okay , really… eased the jangle in his heart, at least for the moment.
“So has she taught you Moonlight Sonata ?”
“I said no. If I recognize it from a drama or a movie, I absolutely refuse to learn it. Except…” He slid into Tiger pop hop .
Tae froze.
“I got her to arrange this for me. It’s been on some of the new music channels—I think some of the musicians are from Vancouver, actually.”
“That’s… that’s… “
Namjoon stopped playing. “What’s wrong?”
“That’s… that’s my secret solo.”
“What?”
He’d been in a recording studio in Vancouver, mooching around with some folk he met there in the indigenous jazz fusion scene. They had been trying to record a new version of the hop for a charity give they really wanted to make – there was someone they were desperate to impress. But their trumpet player kept flaking on them.
Tae had stepped in. Played it, enjoyed it, showed off. And let them put their friend in the credits anyway, because why would he take anything from a fellow musician?
“To be honest, I get off on it a little. Being the lips behind a secret underground hit.”
“You’re a particular kind of romantic, aren’t you? Stories, secrets, hidden rooms, coded messages…”
“Maybe that’s why I agreed to run away to Asia with all Kookie’s pass phrases and study data.”
Joon switched songs, into an old US classic from the very early days of jazz, tickling his fingers over the shrunk-to-scale baby grand. He was too big for the instrument, Tae thought. He made it look small.
The homesickness surfaced again.
Tae said: “I know this. I’m going to stay in town until Jimin’s investigation is over. And Joon, if there’s anything I can do for you as you’re figuring it all out—”
“—nice euphemism for coming to terms with a passionate yet doomed love affair—”
Doomed.
“Don’t deflect. I’m going to do it. I’m here for you.”
“I believe you,” Joon said. Then he sang it: “I believe you I believe you I believe you.”
There were tears running down his face, but the music never dropped a beat.