#rollercoasterwrite

Crickets chirp at Jonghyun’s feet as he walks along the dirt side of the road. The sidewalk dropped off about a block ago as he got towards the back of the neighborhood, where all of the big older houses are, the ones that are framed on this corner by the train tracks ahead of him and the creek to his left across the street.

 He can hear the creek now, barely; it's summer so it's pretty low, but there's still a very faint trickle of water running through the rocks at the very bottom. He follows it, hands in his jeans pockets, leather jacket over his shoulders, collar popped for style and gay, and alternates between watching where his feet are going in the darkness and gazing up at the starry sky through the trees grown tall and wide by the house on his right.

  Soon he comes to the end of the houses, the corner of this block, and faces the train tracks just on the other side of the road. He turns right and starts making his way that way, walking with the tracks to his left now, and keeps going until he hops back up onto the sidewalk in front of the blue apartments that line the road here. There he counts doors, passes one, two, three, four, Taemin’s, comes to a stop, turns left.

 There, across the street, sitting lazily on the metal rail of the train tracks, softly illuminated by a street lamp a couple of yards away, Taemin lifts a hand and waves at him.

 Jonghyun smiles even though he knows it's too dark for Taemin to see and waves back. He knew he would find Taemin here tonight. Taemin is always out here when he starts posting his emo lonely shit on his blog at 2 in the morning. Looking both ways, hopping off of the sidewalk yet again, Jonghyun jogs across the street and joins Taemin, sitting on the rail opposite him with their feet purposefully close together so that when he gets bored of sitting still they can play footy. 

 “Hey,” he says.

 “Hey,” Taemin says back.

 “How are you feeling?”

 “Mmh. Buh. You?”

 “Yeah. Same.”

 “Nice.” Taemin reaches one hand out over the tracks and Jonghyun takes it, a handhold of solidarity over their shitty mental health. They grin at each other in the lamp light, Jonghyun taking in Taemin’s tired eyes and mussed dirty blond hair under his hood and blotchy skin, knowing that Taemin is looking him over as well.

  A moment passes like that, and then another where Jonghyun appreciates that moment, appreciates Taemin, appreciates the gay little nut that he always harbors inside of himself for his friend. Then, before he even gets bored of sitting still, he gets bored of not sitting next to Taemin.

 So he stands up, just for a second, and moves to sit on the opposite train track, next to Taemin so their sides are pressed together. Swinging his arm around Taemin’s shoulders with enough force that they sway backward and forward a little bit, he smirks when Taemin rolls his eyes at him and leans their heads together. This is good.

 “How's work?” Taemin asks him then. 

 “Oh, awful,” Jonghyun says cheerfully. Taemin snorts, but not in a surprised way; Jonghyun knows that he already knew what the answer was before he asked. He elaborates more anyway: “Hours suck, mr. manager can't decide whether or not he wants to give me none or all of them,” he says, lifting one finger on the hand around Taemin’s shoulders. “Ever since summer started we get way less cool broke college kids and way more entitled Karens, management spent a whole month hyping up a super big raise that turned out to be a whole $0.50, one of the other stockers quit and I got stuck with training the new kid, except the new kid is just the managers son and he refuses to learn how to do jack shit because he knows he won't get fired, and Sekyung transferred to a different store last week before I could even get up the courage to tell her I liked her.”

 “Oh, dude,” Taemin says, a disappointed sigh accompanying his words. He turns to Jonghyun with a look that's half exasperated, half sympathetic. “I told you to get on that before you lost your chance.”

 “I know,” Jonghyun whines. He knows. Everyone has been telling him to confess to her for like 5 months. “I'm shy around femmes,” he pouts, turning to smush his face into Taemin’s shoulder. They make him all flustered and shaky. It's always been so much easier for him to flirt with everyone else. Taemin’s hand comes up to ruffle through his hair sympathetically, which Jonghyun appreciates.

 “How’s school?” he asks into Taemin’s hoodie. He knows the answer to this just like Taemin did when he asked his question, and just like he expected, Taemin groans rough in the back of his throat. 

 “It sucks,” Taemin says, probably too loudly for how close they are to a line of apartments at 3 in the morning. “It sucks and I hate it. I have too many classes because I need to take so many classes and fucking rich boy mc asshole that always sits next to me in bio always goes," Why don't you just take fewer classes and stay for more years?" and it's like, because I'm not fucking made out of money, asshole, and also, I don't even know why the fuck I'm taking bio, I don't know why I'm majoring in biochem, I hate it, I still can't believe I let my parents bully me into it, and I can't even join the dance club because the fucking dance club got cancelled somehow, and it's like, how the fuck do you--? It’s just a dance club? It's like one of the least problematic clubs in the school? How does that even happen? And all my teachers talk so much big shit about how woke and accommodating they are but they never even let me have one extension on anything, and--” 

 He stops talking in favor of just curling up his knees and pushing his forehead into them, and then tapping his forehead on them, harder and harder, almost to an alarming intensity. Almost because Jonghyun, knowing to expect it, quickly curls his arm even further around his shoulders and lifts his other arm to push on his chest, keeping him away.

 “Hey! Hey... Hey,” he says quietly, close to Taemin’s ear. He drops a tiny little smooch to his temple as well, rubbing his shoulder soothingly. “Be gentle with yourself,” he chides. He can't keep banging himself up every time he gets all worked up because of all of everyone else's bullshit. Taemin sighs through his nose, whole body sagging into Jonghyun’s.

 “Yeah, yeah,” he says. He sounds a mix of tired of how often Jonghyun says that to him and tired of how often he needs to be told that. “Thanks,” he mumbles.

 Jonghyun hums back and then lets it be quiet between them for a little bit. That's what always helps Taemin. Just sitting with someone that supports him and thinking through his brain stuff on his own. Jonghyun likes the comfort of quiet snuggling as well. He didn't walk four blocks in the middle of the night just because he was worried about his friend getting lost on the train tracks 10 yards in front of his own apartment. He was feeling emo and lonely and couldn't sleep, too. And Taemin has to know that, because he shifts closer to him and takes his hand to hold in both of his, rubbing warmth into his skin.

 Taemin looks into their laps, at their hands, scuffs the pebbley ground with his foot. Jonghun looks up, to the sky, at the moon and all the stars that twinkle down at him. Both of them are getting lost in the same way, lost in their thoughts, lost in their surroundings, lost in each other's comfort. It's a familiar and easy escape to settle into and Jonghyun rests their heads together gently again.

 After a while, a bouncy song worms its way into his head, has his heel tapping on the wooden slat of the train tracks. Taemin is holding his wrist in one hand, poking and pinching at the veins in his hand with the other. Jonghyun twists his hand so he can hold Taemin's instead, lacing their fingers together.

 “Hey love, let's run away,” he sings softly. Taemin snorts quietly, the sound followed by a slow sigh.

 “Sometimes I really want to,” he mumbles. He tilts his head away, but only until Jonghyun’s head falls to rest on his shoulder. Then he rests his head back on top of Jonghyun. “Just…” he says. “Pack some shit and... leave.”

 “Same,” Jonghyun says. The allure of it is so strong that sometimes he only has his executive dysfunction to blame for not actually doing it.

 “Yeah?” Taemin asks, turning to him with a raised eyebrow, so close that Jonghyun can see up his nose. He fights down his giggle in favor of nodding simply. Yeah. “Where would you go?” Taemin asks. Jonghyun grins. This at least is a question he can answer easily. 

 “Ideally?” he says, and then points a finger straight up at the stars. “Infiltrate NASA, steal a spaceship, blast off, explore the cosmos and find a universe where everything doesn't suck.” He lets his hand fall back down into Taemin’s. “Realistically?” he asks quieter, and then he shrugs. He's never really done more than daydream and he doesn't really have any actual plans. “SHINee is doing that free little concert on the beach this weekend,” he says. That would be fun to go to.

 “Fuck, I forgot about that,” Taemin hisses. “I was going to say Japan, but, fuck, I love SHINee.” Jonghyun chuckles. Japan sounds fun too, but, yeah, a chill acoustic beach concert a couple of hours away sounds much more doable. “One time, in high school,” Taemin says. “When I didn't feel guilty about asking for shit like concert tickets or whatever, I went to go see them. And this was, like, before they were popular, so I got front row seats, and Taeyeon did one of her spins, you know?”

  He looks at Jonghyun like he expects Jonghyun to know what he means; Jonghyun does. The kind of spins that Taeyeon does when she's dancing, where she winds herself up and then nuts herself around like a top.

 “And some of her sweat dripped on me,” Taemin continues dreamily. He taps a spot high on his cheek, next to his nose. “Right here. It was so great.”

 “Lucky,” Jonghyun sighs wistfully. “2 years ago I got Junghee to sign a guitar pick for me,” he says. He blushes just thinking about her crescent eye smile, her sharp teeth, her buff babely arms as she handed him back the pick. He still has it in a tiny little glass frame on his headboard. “Do you think she would sign my bass for me, if I took it to the concert?” He asks. 

 “Probably, if we got up close to the front,” Taemin says. Jonghyun feels his shoulder shrug under his cheek. Then he feels it shift and move more, and sits up a little bit so Taemin is free to dig in his hoodie pocket for his phone. “How far away is that concert, even?” he asks, pulling up a map app and entering in two addresses. Jonghyun snorts as the directions and distance pop up. It's even further away than he thought; about four hours drive. Taemin doesn't snort, but he does sigh in the back of his throat, rolling his eyes and stuffing his phone into his pocket again. “Fucking. Hundred fifty bucks worth of gas,” he mutters.

 “I forgot how awful your car is,” Jonghyun says, the words coming out as half of a laugh. He knows he can't talk because he doesn't have a car, but Taemin’s car is a piece of shit. He loves that rusty little bug. Taemin laughs too, embarrassed, probably a little offended. Then he sighs again.

 “Plus hotel costs,” he mumbles. “You know I can't drive at night. It's scary.”

 “Sure,” Jonghyun says. He can't relate, but he understands. “Train tickets are only like, eight bucks each,” he says. “$30 round trip, that's not bad. Still would have to find a hotel, though.” The trains stop running too early around here.

 “Does it even have to be a round trip, though?” Taemin says absently. “I thought we were running away.”

 “Oh yeah,” Jonghyun says. He yawns into his popped collar, and then smiles as a wild thought appears in his brain. Leaning back on his hands so the pebbles skittered all over the ground dig into his palms, he says, “What if when we get there and I get Junghee to sign my guitar, I show her some of the songs I've written and she's so impressed she hires me to be like, her roadie slash groupie slash songwriter?”

  “Dude, yeah,” Taemin grins. “and Gwiboon wouldn't be able to resist my super cute face,” he says, poking his own cheek proudly. Jonghyun snorts, giggling into his shoulder.

 “Please, she has standards,” he says, elbowing Taemin in the side. Taemin just shrugs lazily.

 “Not high ones, you've seen how soft she is for Taeyeon.” and Jonghyun can't argue with that, so he doesn't. He just shakes his head fondly as he thinks about his 5 favorite ladies. Looking up at the stars, he finds his favorite one and smiles at it while Taemin yawns into the back of his hand. “We could pick up jobs with them, if we tried,” he says quietly. “You know they've talked about needing more help on their tours. We could just... Go. right now. Just us two. We could do it.” 

 “Yeah,” Jonghyun says, just as quietly. It really could happen. If they went. If they tried. He turns his head to his left to look at Taemin, to say something, but before he can, something behind Taemin catches his attention. Further down the track, way further, down on the main road, red lights blink slowly back and forth. And one big bright yellow light in the middle of the track slowly approaches. Faint dinging from the train crossing reaches his ears now as well.

 “Shit,” he mumbles, and stands up. When Taemin blinks at him in question, he reaches both hands out to help him stand. “Train’s coming,” he says, nodding down the track. 

 “Oh,” Taemin says, looking down there himself. He pulls Jonghyun off of the track, to the little metal fence on the other side of it that separates them from the ditch between the track and the high soundproof walls that encase the fancy rich people apartments. 

  They hoist themselves up and sit on top of the fence, Jonghyun slipping his arm behind Taemin to hold on to the railing on his other side, keeping him safe. Together they watch the train slowly draw near, chugging it's way along steadily, thick clouds of smoke puffing from the front. It moves slowly; it's one of the usual supply trains that runs on this track, not one of the fast public transportation trains. Jonghyun watches the line of cars on the main street pile up behind it, amused.

 It takes at least five minutes for the train to actually come near them, the scent of metal and grease and rust and smoke thick in the air. As it draws near, Taemin raises a hand in a lazy wave. Jonghyun smiles, then is filled with a sudden impulse.

 Slowly, hesitantly, with all of the same hope in his heart that he had when he was 8 years old, he lifts his hand next to his head and pumps it up and down twice. Then he waits, other hand gripping tight to the railing in anticipation. He can't see the conductor in there; it's too dark, and the headlight makes it too bright in all of the wrong places. The train chugs ever closer, almost passing them, and Jonghyun starts to lose hope, but then--

 The train whistle sounds, 2 long notes, just as the front cabin passes them.

 The sound blasts through the night air, no doubt annoying everyone except Jonghyun, who does his biggest and loudest woohoo!, both hands raised high in the air, fists pumping back and forth triumphantly, and Taemin, who has one hand on the fence and one hand on Jonghyun’s thigh as he doubles over laughing. 

 It's exhilarating; Jonghyun feels ecstatic, rejuvenated, alive. His heart beats against his ribs, his lungs expand with huge breaths of air, his cheeks almost hurt from how wide and hard he's smiling, his body tingles, the warm summer breeze feels extra sharp against his skin. He watches the train go, gratitude and excitement in his soul, feeling so light and so bright from that small favor from a friendly stranger that he feels like he'll burst into a million elated pieces. 

  It's overwhelming, almost. How happy he is right now, in this isolated moment, how intense the emotion is. He never gets emotions this intense anymore. He loves it, loves feeling so much so suddenly, so hard, so positive. It fills him up all the way, starts in his chest and expands to every single part of his body, and Taemin’s continued laughter next to him only makes him feel better.

 He turns around, takes in Taemin’s wide open mouth and round red cheeks and scrunched up eyes and feels like with him, he could feel this happy all the time. His heart, already so full and so happy, beats even faster, feels so good, so good that he reaches up and cups Taemin’s face in both hands and presses a kiss firm to his mouth.

  Taemin makes a noise into his mouth, not surprised, just a little muffled exclamation. Jonghyun keeps kissing him, shallow, simple, just to feel their mouths together, to prolong this moment of happiness, to share it with his friend. Taemin, after a moment, kisses him back, a breath of a laugh puffing over Jonghyun’s upper lip. His hands come up and cover Jonghyun’s, not to move them away, but to hold. 

 “Yeah?” he asks between two kisses. His voice is a little incredulous, but mostly resigned, and a little enamored. Jonghyun nods, moving their hands down together to rest gently around Taemin’s neck and angle him better into the kiss.

 “Yeah,” he smiles. He loves this, loves kissing, loves kissing Taemin, loves feeling this good. He wants to feel this good all the time. He wants to be with Taemin, to go with him, run away with him, he wants to--

 He pulls away for just a moment, and in that moment, looking at Taemin’s closed eyelids, his chapped skin, his softly parted lips, Jongyun’s elation fades away. Reality creeps back in, slowly, a trickle of disappointment. A thought comes to him. A real thought, not an emotion. A thought of responsibility. He sighs, sliding his arms down to hug Taemin around the arms instead, pulling him close and hooking his chin over his shoulder.

 “We should... Call someone to be our voice of reason and not let us run away,” he mumbles sadly. If he's feeling impulsive enough to want to kiss Taemin and be with him forever, and Taemin is feeling desperate enough to drive to the coast and never come back, then the two of them together really shouldn't be left alone. In his arms, Taemin expands and deflates in his own heavy sigh. 

 “Yeah,” he mumbles. “I guess you're right.” It's awkward when they're sitting next to each other like this on the fence, but he slips his arms around Jonghyun’s waist and hugs him back. “Jinki?” he asks. And despite how little and sad Jonghyun is suddenly feeling, he snorts and giggles a little bit. 

 “Are you kidding, his Sagittarius ass?” he asks. “He'd drive all the way over here right now and pick us up. Minho too.” he wouldn't trust either of them to stop a runaway impulse if his life depended on it, and that's him speaking as an Aries. Taemin scoffs quietly next to his ear.

 “Astrology hoe,” he teases. Then, before Jonghyun can grump at him, says, “Key would murder us if we woke him up this late.” Jonghyun chuckles a little more. That also is true.

  “That's the Libra in him,” he says slyly.

 “Excuse me? He's a Virgo.”

 “He's a cusp.”

 “What the fuck is a cusp?”

 “If you were an astrology hoe, you would know.”

 “God. Shut up.”

 Taemin shoves him away, but he's smiling when Jonghyun leans back and smirks, smiling and shaking his head. He pulls down his hood, runs his hands through his messy dirty blond bangs a few times, and pulls his hood back up. Jonghyun elbows his side gently, wiggling his eyebrows when Taemin glances at him just to make him shake his head again. Then he just grips the railing on either side of his hips, looking back up at the stars. Taemin holds onto the fence too, his right hand so close to Jonghyun’s left that their pinkies overlap, and looks down at the earth. 

 “I guess if we can't call anyone to stop us then we have to find some shred of responsibility between the two of us and do it ourselves,” Jonghyun says to the sky. He’s sure that between the both of them they can find one small nugget of good mental health and adult skills to keep them from making a bad decision at 3 in the morning. Jonghyun rolls his head to the side to nudge Taemin’s shoulder. “Want to go back to my place and just sleep?” he asks. Taemin breathes out a laugh, feet kicking against a lower rail of the fence so Jonghyun can feel every hit of contact under his thighs.

 “I don't want to fucking.” he lifts one hand to rub over his face tiredly, smile still wide behind it, then gestures it vaguely over the neighborhood. “Walk, like, over a mile in the dark, that's so much work,” he says. He nudges Jonghyun back. “You just come sleep with me in my place.” he nods his head forward, over the track, across the street, at his apartment door. Jonghyun raises his eyebrows, surprised.

 “I thought I wasn't allowed in your house?” he says. “Because your parents hate me, because I'm a bad influence and I turned you gay and I filled your head with awful horrible thoughts like, free healthcare is a human right and capitalism is inherently evil and no one should have to work for a living.”

  Taemin snorts into laughter, ugly adorable little giggles that crinkle his eyes, then shakes his head. Shrugging, he says, “I convinced them that it was actually college that did all of that, and you couldn't have done it because you didn't go to college, so now they just hate you because you didn't go to college.”

 “Oh, well, that's so much better,” Jonghyun says sarcastically. Taemin just shrugs back again, looking completely unbothered.

 “They're both asleep right now and they'll both be gone in the morning anyway,” he says. “Besides, I bought myself a lock for my door and pulled the I'm a 24 year old adult and I deserve privacy excuse for it. It'll be the easiest thing in the world to sneak you into my bed. Come on.” He hops off the fence, straightens his hoodie around his hips, and then holds out his hand. 

 Jonghyun looks at it, his weird little fingers, his bony wrist peeking out of the sleeve. Then he looks up at Taemin’s face. Acne on his cheeks, bags under his eyes. He feels nice in his heart, the way he did earlier, but less intense, more familiar. Taking Taemin’s hand, he resists the pull in favor of tugging Taemin close to him instead, pulling him to stand between his legs. Even from here he has to tilt his head up a little bit to look into Taemin’s eyes. He cups Taemin’s face again, rubbing his thumb over his bumpy cheek, and smiles, leaning in to softly peck his lips. 

 Taemin makes the same kind of not surprised but just amused noise as he did before. His hands slide up to rest on Jonghyun’s thighs. Jonghyun appreciates that Taemin lets him just do this a whole lot.

 “Hey, not to be impulsive emotional gay and also genuine soft gay in the same ten minutes, but,” Jonghyun says, resting their foreheads together, letting their lips brush as he speaks. “Thanks for being my friend,” he says. Then he kisses the little humming noise that Taemin makes in response to that.

 “Don't mention it,” Taemin says. “Come on.” He gets his hands around Jonghyun’s waist and tugs him off of the fence. Jonghyun pretends to stumble and leans all of his weight on Taemin, clinging to him, smiling against his ear when he staggers for real and makes a surprised, disgruntled little noise. Then, before Taemin can get mad at him, he just swings his arm around his shoulders, steadies him on his feet, and bumps him gently to start walking back to his apartment. 

 Taemin bumps him back even harder, but he also slips his arm around his waist, so Jonghyun doesn't mind.

 Their shoes crunch over the gravel around the train tracks, clink against the metal of the rail, thud against the planks. Jonghyun tilts his head to look up at the stars, thinks that would make a good picture, pauses as that thought stirs something in his memory. Tightening his hold on Taemin so he stops too, Jonghyun puts his hand into his jeans pocket and pulls out his phone.

 Opening up Instagram, he leans back and snaps a picture of the sky. Then he takes another with the moon in it, his favorite lesbian, and then he lowers his phone and takes a picture of the train tracks disappearing into the darkness. Then he flips it to the front camera and smushes his cheek against Taemin’s, smiling pretty and watching him roll his eyes on the screen.

 “Why?” Taemin asks, even as he lifts a hand to mess with his bangs and make them look nicer.

 “It's this thing I read online one time,” Jonghyun says, waiting for Taemin to close his eyes and smile tiredly for the camera. He takes the picture and then continues, “to help with, you know, not being so mean to myself all the time. I'm documenting all the times that I feel like it's pretty okay to be me.”

  As Taemin hums quietly in approval, Jonghyun raises his phone and tilts it to give them one of those funny face selfie angles. Taemin catches on very quickly, raising both hands in little v signs and pushing up his cheeks. Jonghyun giggles, muffling them in Taemin’s shoulder, before popping back up and tilting his head and opening his eyes super wide so they look gigantic in the picture.

 Once he takes it, he pulls his phone back close so he can look at all of the filters and everything. He lets Taemin pull him across the street and up onto the sidewalk as he does. He plays with it, putting filters on all of the pictures except the selfies while Taemin quietly jiggles his key into the lock and sneaks him through the apartment and to his bedroom.

 When they get there, Jonghyun snorts at the fact that Taemin purchased a whole ass electronic fingerprint lock instead of a key or combination one. That must have been one hell of a conversation with his parents. Taemin opens his bedroom door and gestures Jonghyun inside with a silent flourish and a huge grin, one Jonghyun returns as he curtsies gratefully and flounces inside like a delicate princess.

 Then he tosses his phone onto Taemin’s bed and shrugs out of his jacket and jeans, doing his best not to stumble around and curse when his foot gets stuck. Taemin isn't doing much better; Jonghyun hears more than sees him bang his knee on his dresser as he makes his way to the bed. 

 Still, they manage to fall into bed together without making too much noise, and Jonghyun gets comfortable with his right arm under Taemin’s head. He picks up his phone and goes back to his Instagram post, typing out a summary of his night so he'll be able to look back on it another time when he isn't feeling as good. Taemin grumbles at the brightness and turns his face into Jonghyun’s shoulder, pulling his blankies up high over them.

  Ruffling Taemin’s hair gently, dropping a tiny kiss to the top of his head, Jonghyun finishes his post, sends it, and then puts his phone on power save mode so it doesn't die during their little snooze. Then he curls up on his side, wrapping his other arm around Taemin’s waist and tangling their legs together. He always likes sleeping with Taemin. It's so easy for them to be comfortable next to each other.

 “I hope you dream about playing guitar with Junghee on the pier at sunset,” Taemin whispers to him. It takes a moment for that sentence to process in Jonghyun’s brain, but when it does, his heart swells and he squeezes Taemin that much closer, that much tighter. That's so sweet.

 “Thanks,” he whispers back. “I hope you dream about dancing with Taeyeon and then you both have the sweatiest hug imaginable.”

 “Hell yeah,” Taemin giggles. “Nighty-night.”

Jonghyun is so wonderful. Jonghyun is so lovely. Jonghyun is so incredible. Jonghyun is so gorgeous, so sweet, so talented, so fun, so pretty, practiced, femmy, delicate, fantastic, skilled, adorable. Jonghyun is so lovable in every way.

 Taemin thinks all of this all at once as he watches Jonghyun perform up on the little corner stage of this coffee shop. It's just him up there, but his presence and his aura fills the room, bright, dazzling, pink, infectious. His pink hair bounces on top of his head, rosy pink cheeks pushed up by his huge glossy pink smile as he sings into his standing microphone. He has a patterned pink short sleeve button up layered on top of a slightly darker pink t-shirt with a cute pink strawberry splashed on the front, both layered under baggy denim overalls with only one strap done up.

 Bangles and bandanas decorate his wrists as he moves his arms and shimmies his shoulders in his dainty, delicate little dance moves. Thick brown boots tap on the floor as he does femmy little heel kicks and toe twists and hip sways. Glittery studs and balls decorate his ears and catch the stage lights that shine down from above him. He’s clipped the blue snapback he was wearing earlier to the front of his overalls so it swings and moves around with him while he dances. At one point, one of his bandanas falls off of his wrist and drifts to the floor, but Jonghyun just  picks it up in the middle of a line without blinking and wraps it around his hand, smooth and professional. 

 His gorgeous smile is bright enough to light the whole room by itself anyway, bright white teeth, a little uneven on the bottom, sharp canines prominent between his lips. His eyes sparkle, twinkle, gorgeous brown peeking through dark lashes of his crescent eyesmiles. He controls the stage, the atmosphere, the whole room with his performance, with his song, his music playing through the speakers, his gorgeous voice, deep and light and soft and steady, sung directly into the microphone and transferred throughout the coffee shop with every speaker.

 Even the coffee shop-- Jonghyun showed up here early to decorate it for his performance. Taemin dropped him off here with his little box of supplies and then left to go grocery shopping, drop everything else at home, and then come back, and when he did, the place was transformed. Streamers drape above and below the stage,  confetti is scattered over the floor, each table has a little laminated display Jonghyun put together that says who he is and where you can find his music with complimentary little strawberry candies to go with them. Everything pops pink, yellow, and blue, complimenting his outfit and making him shine without overshadowing him.

 Just looking at him makes Taemin feel bright and fuzzy and pink inside. He's not exactly front and center, but he is still front row, off to the right side, closest to the steps of the stage so that when Jonghyun finishes Taemin will be right there. Right there to hold his hands and wipe his sweat and tell him how proud and happy he is for him, for writing this song, for putting all of the instruments and vocals together, for writing his own lyrics, for making up his own little dance, for finding somewhere to perform, for being a musician. 

 It's all Jonghyun has ever wanted in his life and he's finally here, his first performance, showing off his music, proving to himself and to the world what Taemin has known all along: that he has the skill and talent and ability to make his dreams come true all on his own. The more Taemin watches, the further Jonghyun gets into his song, the more Taemin's chest bursts with pride.

 Up on stage, Jonghyun is singing Taemin’s favorite line: “Even if it's ugly to you, oh, I like everything about you--”

 “You know that.” Jonghyun swivels on stage to lock eyes directly with Taemin as he sings the line, and Taemin mouths it right back because it's true. He loves everything about Jonghyun with his whole heart.

  He watches the rest of Jonghyun’s performance with his heart threatening to burst out of his chest, chin in his hands, feet tapping under the table, eyes locked on his sun and his moon, his whole galaxy. When Jonghyun finishes, Taemin claps loud and hard like he's at a concert instead of a coffee shop, far outshining the polite applause from the rest of the people in here, but he doesn't care if he gets stared at. All he cares about is that Jonghyun knows how well he did up there. 

 Jonghyun practically bounces off the stage after bowing and blowing kisses and saying his thank yous. He hops, skips, vibrates right into the chair next to Taemin, smile so big and bright and gorgeous and now so close as he reaches for Taemin’s hands. But as he does, it turns into a little ‘o’ of surprise for a second before breaking into a smaller smile, a gorgeous little chuckle.

 “Babe, what are you crying for?” he asks, letting go of Taemin’s hand in favor of cupping his face, swiping his thumbs over his cheeks.

 “Am I?” Taemin asks, bewildered, lifting his hand to touch his own cheek and blinking in surprise when his fingers come away wet with tears. Oh. He grabs at a napkin from the middle of the table and then lets Jonghyun take it and dab his face for him. “I was just watching you and thinking about how much I love you,” he says.

 “You love me so much you started crying?” Jonghyun asks. His voice rises to almost a squeak, his face flushing all pink all over, like he's about to start crying himself. Taemin just smiles and cups Jonghyun’s hand on his cheek with his own, just to touch, just to feel their skin together.