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You peel back at an orange. Its skin fights back as it comes apart in your hands, stringy white threads screaming to stay shut. There is safety in remaining closed off. There is sweetness in letting yourself fall apart.
The base of Minho’s spine presses awkwardly into the rounded corner of the shoe rack by the front door. She ignores it easily, instead focusing on the urgency of Chan’s lips against hers. The leftover buzz of alcohol is sweet in her mouth with the taste of another date gone well, just enough bubbly elation left to let her hang her arms around Chan’s shoulders and run her hands through their hair, mussing up inky black between her fingers.
Chan’s hands fit into the small of her back. They make up the subtle space between her and hard edges, and Minho smiles into another kiss.
They touch her like they’re memorizing the shapes that they find. Lips tracing her collarbones, hands inching backwards feeling out the length of Minho's spine to hook themselves under her thighs once they’re done. She giggles at the childishness of it all. The way that they're tripping over each other's shoes in a way so like teenage hormonal yearning. Because right now she wants nothing more than to press her bare skin up against Chan’s, to hear every garbled, broken noise she can elicit from the back of their throat and feel power zinging up her spine for it.
“Should we," Chan murmurs, "We should probably go inside - bedroom,"
She hums out an incoherent response, tipping her head backwards to expose her neck. An unspoken answer.
She hears them laugh against her skin, soft and worshiping, and something like hope kindles in Minho’s rib cage that they aren’t taking this for granted. Do they know? Do they know how much Minho is willing to offer them? To cleave herself down in parts, in halves and quarters for Chan, and feed them each piece out of the palm of her hand.
It should scare her more, how quickly she’s letting her walls down. Oh, it should terrify her. She has never been less afraid in her life.
“Take me there,”
You press down into the pith of the orange, pink sunrise arched nails stained with juice. It runs down your fingers, sticky and sweet, and you wonder if this is what vulnerability is supposed to taste like. Openness so deep it feels like corruption.
Minho’s shirt comes off first. She brings Chan’s hands up to her chest and has them undo each button for her. Desire is sweet and sour on her tongue when she watches them unravel a little bit as she does so. Their breath is already labored. How cute. They haven’t even gotten to the bed yet, hovering at the threshold of their room.
“What do you want?” Chan asks her, still barely above a murmur. She cannot fathom how they’re being so tender, so achingly slow, hands even now hardly brushing up at her bare skin.
One does not raise their voice in front of a deity, Minho realizes, her cheeks painted pink at the implication. She’s only human. She’s just herself.
What does Minho want?
“I want you to take off my bra now,”
She doesn’t wait for an answer, clutching at Chan’s shirt to lead them into their room. She sits down on the bed without asking permission aloud, slipping out of her shirt entirely and draping it onto the carpet somewhere along the way. She doesn’t quite know where it falls and she doesn’t quite care.
Her hands reach out to Chan’s wrists, pulling them forwards. They slip; a knee falls between Minho’s legs for balance, breath hitching in their throat. Their left hand falls out of her grasp, pressing down on Minho’s thigh to steady themself.
Minho’s heart thrums, hard and fast and flighty, a butterfly right under her ribcage. Her hands tremble. But she doesn’t stop; she cannot stop now. She brings Chan’s other hand round her back and waits.
Gentle fingers unhook her bra. Slow and careful and agonizing. Their eyes dart up quickly, searching for permission. If Minho had even a sliver of patience, she’d wait before handing it over just to watch her squirm. But, she’s only human, after all. Just a mortal being faced with wide-eyed innocence. Wide-eyed reverence that she doesn’t know the first thing about.
“You know you can look, right?” she grins, “I did ask you to,”
Chan’s breath catches again, trapped like a prayer between their teeth. Their eyes rove down Minho’s front, deliberate and admiring. So painfully aware of the privilege of being allowed.
“You can touch too, y’know, if you want,”
Light and teasing. Just to watch the heat rise up Chan’s neck, a lovely tinge of red settle up their skin. If Minho were an artist, she thinks she’d paint the sky with that shade of red. She settles on imprinting it into the eye of her memory. She settles for the hope of seeing it on Chan’s face again.
They take her up on the offer fast. Only hesitate for half a moment before pressing their mouth to her nipple, eyes looking up at Minho in a question as she does so. She wants to laugh at her eagerness, and she would but for the sound that comes out the back of her throat when Chan’s tongue sweeps out over her.
Chan’s eyes flick back up at her again, pupils still blown wide with wanting.
“Is this okay?”
Minho nods. God. God, it’s more than okay when they’re looking at her like that. It is blasphemous the way they’re looking at her, as though asking to be struck down. Neither of them had much hope of being invited into heaven before this but any final minute chance they’d had left, has come crashing down with the look in Chan’s eye.
And then Chan’s lips are on her’s again. Their thumb tilts her mouth open gently for their tongue to slip in and she loses any last bit of hope she had for coherent thinking.
Her hands tug at Chan’s shirt, cotton soft between her finger tips for a moment before slipping over their waist underneath, toying with the elastic band of their boxers. They gasp into Minho’s mouth and a wave of pleasure rolls up the pit of her stomach.
“Does this have to be here,” she asks, twisting the fabric round her fingers, "Does it really?"
Chan laughs. The shirt slips off their shoulders, tossed somewhere into the dark behind them. Moonlight shifts between wind blown gaps in bedroom curtains. Silver traced scars, dark and healing against tanned skin. Minho’s hands come up to them unthinkingly, unflinchingly, tracing them out to where they taper off on either side of their chest.
“I did warn you,” Chan mumbles, “It’s a little different seeing them up close, I guess,”
She’s told them not to call it a warning before; she’s told them that they shouldn’t need to warn her about the wholeness of their own body. Minho doesn’t blame them for it, she knows she’s been guilty of the same in the past. She knows she’ll probably slip up again in the future. She files it into a cabinet at the back of her head anyways, a promise to break old, bitterly-imposed habits someday.
She hopes they can learn together. She’s letting herself want so much with Chan already, what’s one more to add to the list?
For now, however, Minho presses her mouth at Chan’s sternum. For now, she says - “You look so handsome like this,” and prays that the way it makes them tremble is pleasure enough.
She wishes she had something more eloquent in mind. She wishes she had something more concrete to offer in return for their vulnerability.
But she’s only human, you see. All she has to give is herself.
The orange falls apart at last in your lap. You let each segment spread out within white pericarp. If you squint, you can find poetry in the way the juice laps up against your bare skin, and you wonder if you have the making of an artist after all.
Minho gasps when fingers ghost down her front. She clutches at wrinkled bed sheets, eyes fluttering shut when Chan massages their middle and ring fingers inside her. It takes all of her focus not to buck up into their hand when a litany of more, more, more is all that’s playing in her head.
“You’ll have to show me how,” Chan had murmured into her ear earlier, “I want to make it feel good for you, can you show me how,”
They’re staying true to their word, too.
Chan knows the facts of it already. She ran her through the textbook theory of what to expect down there before their night had even begun. Minho had chosen to trust them with that information.
So they know about the razor bumps and the pigmentation and the surgical scars. They know it all. And they are seeing it - far, far more than seeing it frankly - in unflinching awe. Taking the privilege that they’re being offered and turning it around their finger tips in the best way possible.
“You look so pretty like this,” they say, and Minho’s mind turns to liquid and foam, reduced to nothing but a series of breathless noises.
Chan dips down to press their mouth on the inside of her thigh, tongue swiping up gentle against bare skin. Their breath puffs warm against her skin. Another low murmur to spread her legs just a little more for them. Another low, syrupy question that makes heat pool at the bottom of her stomach and leaves her heady, needy, wanting.
“How is this for you, baby,”
Minho lets out the noise trapped behind her ribcage when they rub two fingers inside her again. Pleasure trembles down her spine. She doesn’t stop her own body from curving up to meet their hand this time. Her hips jerk forwards, head thrown back into the pillows. Chan makes a broken whine below her, coming back up to press another kiss to her mouth again, tongue begging for entry.
Minho presses rounded nail beds into the skin of Chan’s back, approvingly when they angle their wrist in the way she'd shown them. She revels in the sound they make from the back of their throat. White, starry constellations dot the back of her eyelids.
That is how the two of them move. Slow. Rhythmic. Mirroring what the other gives them. Time lies suspended above them, ebbing along at its own sticky pace. They can think about it later. They have eternity on their hands right now.
Minho feels split open by the time Chan makes her come. Every stitch, every seam of her body full to bursting with desire, when they make her eyes roll backwards into her head and hips arch upwards, When Chan draws one last moan out of her before massaging their palms gently at her walls as they pull out.
She cannot imagine how she must look now. Face splotched in raspberry pink; her Cupid’s lips freshly kiss-swollen. Something swoops in her stomach to see Chan almost as affected. Hair ruffled back to expose their forehead, flushed down to red-tipped earlobes. Their mouth is parted into a perfect, little ‘o’ already shaking her head when Minho’s fingers tap lightly down their abdomen in a question. Not today.
“Was that okay for you?” they’re asking her, "was it good?"
The answer is easy. The answer rests easy in the marrow of her bones.
“Yeah, yeah it was,”
They pull themselves back together in a comfortable silence. Chan’s eyes are already slipping shut when Minho draws slow circles over their bare back.
“Shower?”
Chan mumbles into one last kiss, “Tomorrow,”
Minho smiles in the dark. They have kept every single promise so far. And perhaps it is naive to be keeping track like this, everyone is sure to break promises someday. But she keeps each tally close to her heart anyway.
She traces the moon traced outline of Chan’s body, limbs and eyelids turning heavy with sleep. Her fingers splay out over their stomach. It rises and falls beneath her palms, heartbeat thudding steady. She commits each detail to memory - each faint, dust speckled freckle, each growing scar, each tan line and imperfection.
Chan sighs warm into the crook of her neck, arms wrapped around her waist. She tucks herself into the space they make for her, and Minho lets herself feel like she belongs.
Tomorrow.
Maybe even the days after that.
Maybe the most significant out of any of this, is that she wants the days after that. She wants them all. She wants them openly.
You pick up a slice, cupped delicately within between your index finger and thumb. Sticky discomfort drips down the love line on your palm. The tips of your fingers burn where they brush against their open mouth, skin burns where it grazes up at their teeth. And you decide that all of it is worth it.
Dappled sunlight slants through the curtains. Minho hums, fingers reaching out for human warmth next to her. They come away disappointingly empty, curling up at thin air. Dimly, mind still sleep heavy, she hears shuffling slippers from outside. Something sweet and delicious hangs in the air.
“Channie?”
Her voice is hoarse, cracking at the tail end of their name. The shuffling comes to an abrupt stop. Chan’s head peaks through into the bedroom, their curls still frizzy from the morning dew, face still puffy. It’s endearing on a level so primal that Minho forgets, for a moment, how to breathe.
“I hope you like pancakes,” they say, “It's a store-bought mix but this is my favorite. I promise it’s really good,”
Minho blinks.
“I could make something else if you want! I can’t guarantee it’ll be good but, I mean, I can try?”
“Channie,” she tries again, eyes squinting up against the sun. Minho puckers her lips and lifts herself up by the elbows. Playful glee dances down her skin at the picture of Chan struggling through making breakfast. It would be criminal of her not to even offer them a kiss for this. She’d be depriving herself.
Chan laughs into the kiss. Just a quick peck. Their noses bump light against each other.
“Pre-mixed pancakes sound great,”
“Yeah?”
Minho cups their face in her hands, “But next time I’ll make you something nicer,”
“Next time?”
“At my place,” she clarifies, her voice as matter-of-fact as she can make it. Heat rises unbidden to her cheek, "if you want,"
Chan grins into another kiss, lips barely brushing over hers, “You promise?”
They taste of orange juice, all sour, fresh sweet-tart and citrus.
“I promise,”