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Chapter Text

It was his parents’ idea and, like with everything else that concerned his life, that was all it took to make the decision. Nevermind the fact that Changmin was practically an adult already and should have been able to make his summer plans by himself; nevermind the fact that he hardly knew the uncle that they were sending him to stay with and the man’s relationship with the rest of the family was precarious at best, to his understanding. Any argument that Changmin raised was met with the stony, impenetrable wall of his father’s indifference towards his feelings. 

The mountain air will be good for you, Min-ah, was all that his mother had to say on the matter. She’d brushed off all of his protests with a toss of her hand and her stiff curls that stunk like too much aerosol and that was that. Changmin was going, whether he liked it or didn’t. 

His uncle had paid for his ticket—Changmin counted his small blessings; if he’d had to pay for his own train ticket to go on a trip he didn’t even want to take he might’ve simply said to hell with them all and made a run for it with his girlfriend. At least Joohyun’s parents were slack enough with her not to make her plans for the summer. 

“It’s only a couple weeks, oppa,” she was saying as he stepped off the train, his knees groaning like a pair of rusty hinges as they stretched after being folded up like a pretzel for the four hours it took to get from the bustling streets of Seoul to the sticks, “it’s not like they’re sending you away forever. And we’ll be twenty next year, anyways. We can plan something together then.”

Her voice crunched through the tinny speaker of his cellphone. This far out, the reception was bad, and it seemed to force her normally pretty, melodious tone through an incomprehensible layer of static. He cradled the device between his ear and the crook of his shoulder and hefted up his duffle bag, crossing the strap over his chest. 

“That’s a whole year out, though,” he wheedled, fully aware that he sounded childish and not really caring. It wasn’t as if his parents ever treated him as anything but a child, no matter how much pressure he applied to the contrary. 

“Oh, don’t sound so dramatic,” Joohyun chided. She was one of those people who had a way of always seeing the good in everything, a way that Changmin sorely lacked. It was a habit of hers that seesawed constantly between being endearing and being insufferably annoying. She proffered, “it can’t possibly be that bad to go and spend the summer at your uncle’s place. Isn’t he rich?”

Changmin passed through the turnstile at the entrance to the station and immediately the heat hit him as he stepped outside. “I guess so,” he huffed. 

He threw his gaze out over the lot: it was a smaller station than the ones in Seoul, but still a couple of cabs idled on the side of the road, their engines chugging, the mustard hoods gleaming where they caught the piercing glare of the sun. It pounded the pavement, and already Changmin could feel his sweat beginning to pool along the collar of his hoodie. He stood there, tugging the fabric away from his neck, and unintentionally met the sharklike eyes of one of the cabbies. Slowly the car began to creep its way over, as if the driver was lured to him by the smell of blood—or a generous tip. 

He glanced back up and quickly walked away, ignoring the car. To Joohyun he said, “he’s a lawyer or something like that. I don’t know, Joohyun-ah, the guy’s basically a stranger to me. My old man keeps saying I met him when I was little, but how am I supposed to remember that? For all I know he’s just some weird hermit. I mean, who lives all the way up in the mountains by themselves, anyways?”

“It’s not that weird, oppa,” she reasoned with him, “maybe he just likes the quiet. Not everybody’s a city-boy like you. I bet he has a really nice house.”

“If you say so.”

They lapsed into silence for a moment, before Joohyun began to prattle on the other end. She mentioned wanting to visit the public pool with Sooyoung and Hyoyeon and the rest of her friends, and of course the others would bring their boyfriends, and maybe if everyone was feeling up for it they’d all go for noraebong after, who knows. Changmin tried not to let himself burn with jealousy as he nodded and hummed along, the visions of his girlfriend’s taut belly framed by the spaghetti straps of her two-piece swimming within his mind’s eye. 

Just his luck that he was stuck all the way out here instead. 

Her voice faded into the background of Changmin’s thoughts as he paced the side of the lot, eyes keen, though he wasn’t exactly sure what he was meant to be looking for; he was supposed to be getting picked up, but he had no idea what sort of car his uncle drove. He couldn’t imagine what the tastes of a man who voluntarily holed himself up in the woods would be like, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to. 

Eventually a red pickup came roaring towards the station, choking out exhaust like a bad cough, and Changmin’s stomach dropped to his sneakers. There wasn’t any way that this was his ride, was there? He bit out a quick, “hey, I’ll talk to you later, okay?” to Joohyun—who made him promise twice that he’d call, and three times that he’d send pictures if it turned out that his uncle’s house was, in fact, nice—before snapping the phone shut and stuffing it into the duffle. 

The pickup parked at the entrance and out stepped a man who couldn’t have been much older than Changmin, dressed in a flannel with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and dirty acid-washed jeans. He approached Changmin and left the pickup to keep coughing behind him. 

“Changmin-ssi, right? Yunho-hyung’s nephew?” The man wagered. He scrubbed his palms over the thighs of the jeans before offering out a hand meant for Changmin to shake. “Kim Junsu. Ah, sorry I’m late, you weren’t waiting long, were you? Hyung asked me if I could stop at the mart on the way, see, to grab his groceries.”

His overly casual way of speaking only made Changmin want to turn tail and run, but instead he bit the inside of his cheek and reluctantly shook the hand dangling in front of him. Junsu lent him a lopsided smile afterwards and didn’t make any offer to take his heavy duffel bag—not that Changmin would’ve accepted one if he had. He clambered into the passenger side of the pickup, trying to take up as little space as possible, and held the duffel in his lap. 

Junsu took the driver’s side, pulling down the mirror to block out the sun and then switching on the radio. Like something out of a bad joke, a trot song wailed to life, and the singer’s ear-piercing crooning filled the car. 

He turned to Changmin, his palms gripping the wheel, thumbs in the air. “You don’t mind this stuff, do you?” He asked, referring to the music. 

Changmin had half a mind to say that he did, but he worried more about the consequences of saying as much aloud—what would Junsu change the radio to then? Worse, would he shut it off with the expectation that they fill the silence with conversation?—than he did about how far his tolerance for trot extended. “I don’t mind it,” he said. 

“Great.” Junsu pulled the pickup out of park and the truck kicked on the gas, the engine belching loudly. “Well, get comfortable. The drive to hyung’s place’ll be about two hours from here, give or take.”

They kicked up a cloud of dust the whole way there. After leaving the station they’d hit a long stretch of open highway, the road bordered by nothing but the rolling fields and the sun, and Junsu left the windows down so that the passing air cut through the truck like a whip. In the distance, the mountains loomed, a dark silhouette simmering against the hazy blue horizon. 

The man spent the ride alternating between impassionedly belting out the notes of whatever was on the radio and making earnest attempts at conversation with Changmin—the worst of both worlds. He was persistent, in that way that country people always were; always assuming that you were comfortable with how they addressed you, always assuming that you wanted to get along, even if what you really wanted couldn’t be further from that. 

“So,” Junsu drawled. His voice had a high, slightly nasal quality to it that almost seemed exaggerated, as though every word was left to trail off like a half-finished thought. “Yunho-hyung’s nephew, huh? You guys close?”

Changmin stared outside, where the puffy, picture perfect clouds whizzed past. He wanted to tune Junsu out, but being in such close quarters his overt friendliness was inescapable. “Not really,” he mumbled in answer. 

“Well, that figures. The guy doesn’t really talk much about family. I mean, I didn’t even know he had a nephew up ‘till he asked if I could do him a favor. He was all, can you swing by the station to pick up my nephew and I was like nephew? You’ve got a nephew? Funny, right?”

Changmin didn’t find it all that funny, but he’d be lying if he said that it didn’t make him raise a brow. There was something that had been nagging at him for a while, ever since the moment several weeks back, over family dinner, when his father had announced that his uncle had offered to take him for the summer. He’d dropped the news like a heavy stone onto the table. 

My uncle? Changmin had gaped. He hadn’t caught up yet on the unfairness of it all; instead it was that granule of information that seized him. He’d looked at his father, whose expression was impassive. I thought he was disowned. I thought you hated him. 

The response he got was defensive and it came like a smack across the face. I don’t hate him and he wasn’t disowned. I don’t know where you got that shit from, but it’s nothing like that. We had a disagreement a long time ago, is all. 

It’s very generous that Yunho’s willing to let you come and stay with him, Min-ah, his mother had supplemented from her side of the table. She’d reached over to take her hand in his and stroked over his knuckles with the pads of her fingers. 

But he swore that he remembered hearing that name— Yunho— hissed like a curse over the discussions that his parents held in the kitchen at night, the shadows illuminated only by the pale bulb above the stovetop, when they thought that he was asleep; and if he looked farther back, he remembered his father’s anger, flaring as white and hot as a flame, at the tall, dashing man who’d showed up fashionably late to his grandparents’ funeral. You’re no brother of mine. Not anymore— those were the words his father had said to that man that day. He thought that the man had smiled in response, could picture the brilliance of teeth as lips curled back, but he wasn’t sure. The rest of the service remained spotty in Changmin’s memory, the way that everything he recalled from his childhood was—roughed around the edges and with fading colors—but those words, those words were clear. 

Glancing away from the clouds, Changmin wet his lip and tentatively asked, “hey, what kind of person is he? My uncle.”

He watched Junsu tap his fingertips against the wheel. “Let’s see,” he began, “honestly, he’s not really the type you see out here a lot. Fancy suits, fancy car, you know, that kind. I mean, of course you would know, if you’re from Seoul.”

The wheel spun between Junsu’s palms as the truck took a sharp right turn and he continued, “great guy though, I mean, really great. Crazy smart too, but he’d have to be, being the prosecutor and all. Ah, he’s got his own building in town and everything. I can show you when we drive by it.”

It wasn’t the sort of answer he’d been expecting, but when Changmin took a second to think about it he realized he was unsure of what exactly he expected to hear in the first place. That his uncle was strange, perhaps, or that he was horrendously ill-mannered, by country people’s standards; surely there had to be some reason for him to keep to himself up in the mountains. But Junsu spoke with the distinctly awe-filled airiness of someone who truly admired the man and thought that he was alright, which was somehow even stranger. 

“Hmm.” Changmin’s eyes flickered back out to the clouds. “And you’re friends with my uncle?”

“Oh, it’s not like that. Yunho-hyung doesn’t really have time for friends. He’s friendly, sure, but he’s way too busy for friends.”

They fell back into silence—or as much of a silence as it could be with the radio still cranked all the way up—after that, with Changmin not sure what to make of that answer. He leaned back in his seat and let his thoughts wander, aimlessly wondering what Joohyun was up to right around then. 

She’d probably already gone out with her girlfriends and was at the pool, laying out on one of the long chairs, reclined beneath the sun, measuring how deep her tan was compared to the others. Joohyun didn’t tan easily, not like Hyoyeon did, but that didn’t stop her from trying. She greased herself up with coconut-scented oil and would spend hours frying in the sun until she wandered back in, pleasantly peach, and when the two of them snuck under the covers of her queen bed on the hot, balmy nights where Changmin was able to escape his parents’ watchful gaze long enough to sneak out, he would spend hours tracing his tongue over the salty impressions left behind by her two-piece. That was all last summer. 

He and Junsu passed through two small towns on the way up the mountain, one being slightly bigger than the other, but not by much. They were odd things, those towns, seemingly frozen in time, and to gaze out at them felt akin to gazing into a scene from twenty, thirty years into the past. Changmin watched in mild fascination as storefronts with murky windows and dingy dive bars peeked through the dust as if flickering through a roll of old film. 

At one point Junsu gestured with a nod of his head to a building at a street corner with tan colored bricks and shiny gold lettering spelling out the words Jung & Associates over the awning. The blinds in the windows were drawn even though it was the middle of the day. “Right there,” Junsu motioned. “Your uncle’s office. He’s probably in there now.”

They didn’t linger in town long enough for Changmin to do more than catch a quick glance about the place. The shape of his uncle’s office building and the rest of the town disappeared in the rear view mirror, growing gradually smaller and smaller until they were swallowed by the dust. 

The paved road gave way to gravel the farther up the mountain they went, and after long the radio cut out entirely and there was nothing left to listen to but the sound of the stones being crushed noisily under the tires. “Ah, there’s no reception all the way out here,” Junsu said by way of explanation, “no cell towers either. I hope you’re not the kinda kid who spends all day on that phone of yours, hah. You’ll get really bored really fast if that’s the case.”

“I’m not,” Changmin said, and it was the truth, he wasn’t, but he couldn’t help but think of the promise he’d made to call Joohyun. It didn’t bode well to hear that he might not be able to contact her; he hoped his uncle had a landline, at the very least. 

The mountain road was surrounded on all sides by thick, healthy conifers, whose branches blotted out the sky and sent the sunshine through silver slivers into the truck. The forest became denser and denser still, and Changmin was starting to seriously wonder what sort of recluse his uncle must be to live in such an area, when the sea of trees abruptly parted and revealed a magnificent clearing. Within it was a small lake, glimmering as brilliantly as an emerald beneath the sun, and a wide, rustic midcentury-style house with two stories. 

They skimmed the sandy shore of the lake before pulling up to the house and finally killing the engine of the truck. It sputtered and sagged as Junsu put the pitiful thing into park, and he announced, “well, here we are.”

Changmin sat in the truck a moment longer, taking in his surroundings, and studying the house. His uncle did well for himself, that much was obvious. The house was so large that it seemed to sprawl like a lazy cat, taking up much more room than necessary. He’d never seen a place like it; his parents had money, yes, and the penthouse apartment they kept in Seoul was by no means small, but compared to this, it seemed modest. Humble, even. 

He hopped out of the truck and followed Junsu to the entrance, glancing over towards the lake. Its waters were vibrantly green and sat as still as though they were glass. The heat returned to him, seeping through his clothes, and Changmin thought about how nice it would feel to wade into it. 

Junsu fumbled at the front doors—there were two of them, locked with a metal latch—for his key, one fist digging through the pocket of his jeans. As he watched him Changmin said, a little absently, “this is really my uncle’s place?”

After unlocking the door Junsu pushed it open with his hip, keeping one hand on the latch. His eyes flicked up to meet Changmin’s and he smirked. “Nice, isn’t it? There’s central air inside, too. Yah, you’re lucky, I bet any kid your age would kill to spend the summer in a place like this.”

You have no idea , Changmin wanted to say, but his indignation evaporated as soon as he stepped inside. The foyer was beautiful, open, painted with the sunlight let in by the enormous windows. He toed off his shoes at the door and walked slowly past the entryway, peering into the hall. 

“Here, let’s get your stuff settled and I’ll give you the grand tour.” 

Junsu led Changmin through the halls, pointing out the living area, the den, the sunroom, the home office, and the guest room that he’d be staying in, all of which were on the first floor. In one hallway they passed a single closed door that Junsu waved a hand towards dismissively, and offhandedly said that the stairs to the upper level were behind it, but he did not open it and he did not offer to show Changmin around the second floor. He simply breezed past it, already moving into the next room. 

Afterwards they sat in the kitchen, which was large and airy and faced the lake. Changmin perched at a stool beside the kitchen island as Junsu rifled through the fridge and stared out at it, memorized by the way the water shimmered. It was beautiful—the entire house was. He thought that this place was more suited to be a mountain resort, or a pension, than a bachelor pad for a man who most likely spent more time in the office than at home; all this splendor seemed wasted on his uncle. 

Junsu shut the fridge and slid a glass over to him, which shrieked as it flew across the island. Changmin took it, and found that it was filled with sweet peach iced tea. He nursed it a bit, and then asked, “hey, you said you’re not friends with my uncle, but he just lets you hang around in his house like this?”

Junsu chugged at his own glass of tea, his Adam’s Apple bobbing with the movement. When he finished a satisfied haah left his lips and he brought a hand up to swipe at the droplets that escaped his mouth. Then he turned to Changmin.

“Ah, Yunho-hyung’s so busy, see,” he said, “that he asks me to run his errands for him. Groceries, laundry, you know, that sort of thing. I swear I spend so much time up here, I keep thinking, may as well move in , but hyung’s a stubborn bastard, hah. He insists that there’s no room for me.” A thoughtful look crossed his features. “Anyways, we’ll probably run into each other again before the summer’s up.”

So his uncle spent so little time in this house that apparently he had someone else to be his errand boy—Changmin wasn’t sure how he felt about that. It should have come as a relief to know that he wasn’t going to be watched like a hawk all summer, the way that his parents no doubt would have done had he stayed at home, but somehow the idea that he’d have to find some way to entertain himself on his own in this house sat nervously in his stomach, like a warty toad. 

For a moment longer he lingered, sipping on his tea, staring at the reflections of the conifers rippling on the lake’s surface. He set the glass back onto the island and the ice cubes jingled inside like a set of keys. It wasn’t until he heard that delicate clink that Changmin realized just how quiet it was; being on the mountain, he’d expect to hear bird calls, the wind rustling through the trees, or things like that; instead there was nothing save for the faint hum of the air conditioner. 

Facing Junsu he commented, “it’s a nice place, but wouldn’t my uncle go a little stir crazy being up here all alone?”

The man lent him a funny look. “Who said that he was alone?”

Whatever slightly bored sense of calm Changmin might have been feeling up until that point snapped like a thread. He waited for Junsu’s explanation, but none came. Rather all he could do was watch as the older man suddenly stood, collecting both of their glasses and depositing them in the sink, before asking if Changmin would mind helping him bring in the groceries. 

Dazedly, he nodded. He followed Junsu back out to where the pickup was parked, hauling up two armfuls of brown paper bags, and tried not to think about the way that the house seemed to gasp and shudder and groan around them. 

“Oh, fuck… tighter, Joohyun-ah, don’t play with me.”

Featherlike touches skated up the heated shaft of his cock, teasing, manicured nails faintly scraping against the thick vein under his head. Changmin raised his hips instinctually, trying to get more of that coy touch, but a flat, heavy hand on his hip held him down. 

His eyes were closed, but even without seeing it he could imagine Joohyun’s grin—one side of her blush pink lips quirked up as she worked over him, her small fist curled gingerly over his length, delicate fingers just barely brushing over his sensitive skin. Her nails catching the light, shiny, the same as the precome which he could already feel pulsing from his slit, easing the glide. God, he was close. 

He kept them shut and simply leaned into the feel of it, the softness of her touch, the headiness of her weight hovering above him. A groan escaped him, long and low, as a fingertip dug into his slit. Joohyun must’ve found his stash of lube, because her touch was as slick and velvety smooth as syrup. In her hand Changmin was stiff as stone, his balls taut and fat with the overwhelming need to come. 

He pleaded, his release a mounting pressure in the pit of his belly, “fuck, stop teasing.”

The reaction that earned him was the grip around his cock harshly seizing at the base, where he was so engorged that it hurt. Changmin shouted, wanting to just grab Joohyun by her sleek black hair and fuck into her face, to send his seed shooting down her supple throat, but a puff of warm breath against his head wiped all thoughts of doing so clean from his brain. 

“Do you want more?” Joohyun asked him. Her voice was deep, breathy and steeped in lust. She hardly sounded like herself, he thought. 

Changmin panted, gasping desperately in the wake of the orgasm he was deprived. His arousal ebbed and flowed by the tightness of that grip, those fingers holding him at bay. The need to come buzzed just beneath his skin, electric, threatening to burst, but those words kept him suspended in a limbo, ruling his body as if he were trapped under a spell.

He huffed, not speaking, but simply breathing instead, trying to regain what oxygen he’d lost. His pulse pounded violently in his ears, like thunder. 

She said again, “do you want more?”

He did. God, he did. He wanted it so badly he ached with it. Changmin couldn’t remember the last time that he was this aroused, that he stood this far over the edge. He teetered there at the tipping point, unable to see what laid at the bottom, but wanting nothing more than to dive into it. 

He licked his lips, shuddered out a shaky breath, and nodded. 

“I’ll give you more.” If it was possible, Joohyun’s pitch seemed to dip even lower, guttural now. Changmin could physically feel her words, and each exhale fanned over his stiff dick, hot and dewy. “I’ll give you everything. All you have to do is keep your eyes closed.”

A tongue flicked out, teasing his head, lapping up a bead of precome. “No matter what, don’t open your eyes, okay?”

It was the last thing she said before pillowy lips enveloped him. The grip at his base slacked, and Changmin could feel those fingertips skate lower, until they were cupping his balls, squeezing them in time with the pull of her lips over his shaft. Within the heat of her mouth her tongue slicked over him, tracing the underside, curling around the skin where his veins bulged, wet and satiny and utterly maddening. 

He didn’t have time to wonder how Joohyun had miraculously gotten so good at giving head—the last time she’d attempted to deepthroat him, she’d ended up gagging loudly onto his bedroom floor, which resulted in Changmin leaping from the bed, his fly still down though his erection had rapidly waned, to crouch beside her and clamp a hand over her mouth to shush her, praying that his parents wouldn’t come in and interrupt their ‘study time’—because as soon as she hollowed her cheeks around him, all of his thoughts and questions evaporated as easily as though they were vapors. 

He came embarrassingly quickly. Changmin’s orgasm rolled through him like a tidal wave, coursing through every nerve ending in his body, from the tips of his red ears down to his toes curling in his socks. Joohyun swallowed his load, the soft flesh of her throat fluttering around him, not allowing even a single drop to spill from her mouth.  

It seemed to go on for an eternity, that white-washed bliss, until gradually his hips stopped pumping and his breaths evened out. His fingers tingled, and Changmin thought about touching his girlfriend, cupping her jaw, pulling back the strands of her hair. He knew what she told him—not to open his eyes—but surely she wouldn’t notice if all he did was steal a peak, would she?

Ontop of that, why was it that she’d wanted him to keep his eyes closed in the first place? Joohyun was shy occasionally, yes, and tended to prefer sex with the lights out, but she’d never openly asked for Changmin not to look at her before. 

Amidst his thoughts he felt a weight moving over him, as Joohyun crawled up his body, hands smoothing over his still-shivering chest, where his heart leapt against the bars of his ribcage. Hesitantly, he brought his own palms up, and searched for her shape, like a blind man. He could feel the tight hardness of muscles on her shoulders, and her forearms, firm under her silky skin—did Joohyun start working out? When did she become so lean?

A laugh breathed against his skin. Fingers cupped his chin, tilting his jaw up, so that those lips could meet his own. Her tongue licked into his mouth, and Changmin could taste his own rich musk in the kiss. 

And then she pulled away, giggling faintly. What was so funny, he wondered? 

Changmin wasn’t even thinking of anything as he drew his eyes open. Consciousness was coming back to him slowly, but it wasn’t there yet, and all that he knew he wanted in that moment was to see Joohyun’s face as he kissed her, to embrace her and ask her how did she find him, all the way out here, up in the mountains, alone in his uncle’s—

—living room…?

He blinked twice, and then a third time, until his surroundings cleared. He glanced about the room, studying it. 

That’s right. He was in his uncle’s house, far from Seoul, far from Joohyun. Outside the windows, the sun was setting, and orange rivulets of light soaked into the room, washing everything in a soft, hazy hue. It was evening? That much time had passed already? Changmin shook his head, and raked his fingers through his bangs, the last vestiges of sleep slipping away. 

He didn’t remember falling asleep. The last thing he remembered doing, when he took the time to think of it, was unpacking his uncle’s groceries with Junsu, the overly cheerful errand boy that had picked him up from the station. It hadn’t taken them long, and Changmin had spent that time with an anxiety curtly bubbling below his guts, not wanting Junsu to leave despite how eager he’d been earlier in the day to be rid of the man. But he’d stood still and watched as the pickup drove away, until it disappeared into the conifers. And then…

He must have gone back inside and made himself comfortable on the couch in the living area. Now that he thought about it, while Changmin wasn’t the sort of teen who normally took naps, it wasn’t that unusual. He had after all been up since five-thirty that morning to catch the train, and had been on the road all day. Such a trip would tire out anyone.

It wasn’t until Changmin got up from the couch that he noticed the gooey warmth still spread over the crotch of his jeans. Well, shit. His cheeks flared firetruck red, embarrassed even though there was no one around to see. 

He shuffled out of the living area, making a beeline for the guest room where he’d dropped off his duffle bag. How mortifying. At nineteen, wet dreams weren’t uncommon—especially after he’d gone and found himself a girlfriend in the prettiest, sexiest girl from his graduating class—but he’d thought he’d outgrown the days of waking up sticky, to soiled boxers and stained sheets that he’d have to try and find a way to wash out without his parents’ discovery. 

Out here Changmin didn’t have to worry about that, but it still left him lightly singed with humiliation. Who has a wet dream in the middle of the day, in someone else’s house, no less? How horny was he that he couldn’t go less than twenty-four hours in Joohyun’s absence without making up fantasies of her? Fantasies which, though incredibly arousing and likely speaking to some deeper subconscious needs he had that weren’t getting met, weren’t even all that accurate to the real deal?

Changmin ambled through the halls, his steps awkward as he tried to avoid skin contact with the tacky, cooling remnants of his dream in his pants as best as he could, before he paused, slowing in front of a door cracked part of the way open. 

That door…

Hadn’t it been closed earlier?

Dread shot down the length of his spine, cold as ice. Unwittingly, he thought back to what Junsu said earlier, as he was walking Changmin through the house, tried to remember his exact words, but his memory failed him on what the details were. Something about the second floor laying beyond this door. Junsu hadn’t opened it. 

His pulse quickened, and Changmin could hear the roar in his ears as it did so, the footfalls of his socked feet quiet and careful as he crept towards the gap. It was only open a sliver, hardly enough to see what was behind it. But the lock was undoubtedly turned when it hadn’t been before, of that he was sure. 

He placed a hand on the dark wood and pushed at it, just a bit, until that narrow opening widened. The door groaned as it moved, like a weary old man huffing out a sigh while he stood, loud in the otherwise silent hall. Slowly, a stairway was revealed to him. Junsu was right after all. 

Changmin leaned forward, peering up the stairs, trying to get a better view of where they led. He couldn’t explain the way his heart was pounding, or the way that his forearms pimpled with goosebumps, at the thought of what might be up there. If anything, the stairway seemed perfectly ordinary, and he could see the way that sunlight poured down its steps from above. 

So why did he feel so on edge…?

The sound of crunching stones outside yanked him out of his thoughts as abruptly as if he was a fish on a line. Changmin staggered back out of the doorway, suddenly dizzy, half-wondering what he’d even been doing less than a moment ago. 

It was the telltale sound of a car coming up the road, and it was gradually growing louder the closer it drew to the house. Shit. It must have been his uncle, finally driving back from town. Changmin had done a lot of stupid, embarrassing things in his life, he had a practical catalogue of moments he would scrub from his memory if given the opportunity; but so help him, he wasn’t about to greet the man, still a virtual stranger, with a comestain staring at him from the front of his pants. 

He slipped into the guest room and changed hastily, tossing the dirtied jeans and boxers back into his bag. All the while the car pulling up came closer. 

Freshly comestain-free, Changmin made his way towards the foyer to greet his uncle. Of course he was a good, filial nephew, always one to respect his elders, and—fuck him, he was curious. He tried to draw up a mental image of his uncle—this eccentric man who’d, for whatever unholy reason, made the voluntary choice to drive up a dusty road to get to work in a tiny, backwater town every day, only to retreat into his mountain dwelling at night like some sort of troll—but even his imagination fell short. All that Changmin could picture was that shadowy, half-forgotten smile from his grandparents’ funeral. 

As the glass paneling in the walls exposed the foyer to him, though, Changmin felt his breath catch for the second time that day. He stuttered in his tracks and froze. 

There was someone already there. 

Red. In an instant the color seemed to take up his entire line of sight, how vibrant and bright and sudden it was against the neutral tones of the walls. A man in a red blouse, as vivid as a winestain, was standing there in the middle of the foyer, waiting in the entryway. The waning twilight let in by the windows reflected off the fabric of the blouse, and as a result red was sprayed onto the walls and the shiny hardwood floors as well. 

At Changmin’s approaching footsteps, the man in red seemed to notice that he was no longer alone, and the stranger craned his neck, slowly turning until they faced one another. 

Piercing eyes met Changmin’s from across the foyer. They were large, the shade of gunpowder, and framed by an almost viciously beautiful face; the depthlessness of their color was contrasted by the fairness of the man’s skin, which was as white and glossy as porcelain, and his lips, red like his blouse. All of these features were aligned in such a way which demanded attention, selfishly, perhaps cruelly, even, refusing to let it go, or to allow Changmin to so much as breathe or think or wonder who this man was or how long he had been here in all of the time that Changmin thought he’d been alone. 

Their gazes held each other—or rather it was the man who held Changmin’s gaze—for a very long moment. He could do nothing but stare when, as if in slow motion, a pink tongue darted out to swipe over those lips, and left them glistening in the low light. It was such a simple, mundane gesture, but Changmin felt his face burn at the sight of it. 

Then the front doors parted and as suddenly as it came on the spell was broken. Changmin glanced away from the man in red and instead watched as someone in a grey sportcoat and polished shoes stepped into the house. He was tanned, and tall—though not as tall as Changmin, but few people were—and carrying a briefcase. He bore a slight resemblance to his father. It didn’t take a genius to realize that this man was his uncle, the prosecutor. 

His uncle lingered in the entryway a moment, toeing off his loafers and hanging his sportcoat on the rack, before he turned to the man in red. He murmured something too low for Changmin to hear and then passed off his briefcase to the man, who took it and quickly ducked out of the foyer—but not before those eyes flicked to Changmin one last time, dark and filled with indiscernible intent. 

A shudder involuntarily rippled through him. Just who… was that?

Finally his uncle addressed him. “Minnie!” He exclaimed, in a voice that surely boomed across a courtroom during the day. His grin was huge, tiger-toothed, and he clapped his large hands together loudly as he spoke. 

“ Yah! Look how big you’ve gotten! Last I saw you you were barely up to my knees, and you looked just like a little girl. Now you look just like hyung, go figure.”

There was an almost derisive note to the way he said hyung that Changmin wasn’t sure was only in his imagination or not. His uncle let out a sharp bark of laughter and clapped him on the back, asking, “Junsu pick you up from the station alright? Did he help you get all settled in?”

Changmin stumbled a bit at the force and let the man lead him back through the halls. His uncle’s presence seemed daunting, his smile so white and so wide that it pinched the corners of his small, almond-shaped eyes. “Ah—yes, Samchonnim,” he answered a bit clumsily, “he showed me around. You have a very nice home.”

“Oh, don’t call me that, it makes me feel so old,” his uncle guffawed. “Call me hyung, Minnie. Or better yet, call me Yunho.”

It was entirely too much to ask, considering the age disparity between them and the fact that Changmin hardly knew the man, but his uncle—Yunho, he mentally amended, though there was no way he was about to address him so casually to his face, even if it was asked of him—had that same insistent, overt friendliness to him that Junsu had. It must have simply been a common trait of all country people, he realized. 

“It’s not much,” his uncle shrugged, humbly boasting about the house, “but it’s home. Ah, I really can’t take too much credit for the interior, though. That’s all Jaejoongie.”

Changmin paused beside him, his brows twisting. “Jaejoongie?” He echoed. The name felt heavy, and thick on his tongue, like pitch. 

But his uncle continued on, as if he hadn’t heard Changmin at all. “He spends all day reading those catalogues—you know, those types that women love, with mail-order furniture and drapes and things like that. It’s all so impractical, and then they say that it’s all organic and vegan—as if they use meat to make the normal stuff!—and then they have to send a truck all the way up here—I feel bad for them, the roads being what they are, Minnie, I’d hate to be the one driving a truck on them—and then there’s the installation, my god, they charge a premium for the installation! After they’ve already shipped the damn stuff, after they’re already in your house, you’re stuck paying for them to put it together! But if it makes him happy, well, I guess it’s not so bad. And it comes together pretty well in the end.  He really loves that stuff, my Jaejoongie.”

For the whole time that his uncle rambled on, Changmin waited, holding his words like poker cards he had to play at the right moment. His thoughts swirled. It felt like there was something he was missing, a piece of information that was there, but he couldn’t see; something that had been left out by his parents when they announced that he’d be staying with his uncle for the summer. Like there was something they’d been deliberately keeping from him. 

When his uncle finally finished, Changmin pointedly cleared his throat. “Samchonnim,” he began, waiting until the man’s gaze fell over his face before he asked, “who is Jaejoongie?”

His uncle’s grin narrowed, ever so slightly. In contrast, his eyes widened. “Ah,” he sighed, “I thought you two would be acquainted by now. I guess not?”

“He was asleep in the den when I saw him, Yunnie. He must’ve been so tired after the trip, I didn’t have the heart to wake him,” a third voice, deep and breathy, piped up behind them, and immediately the hair on Changmin’s neck stood on end. 

Like a slinky cat turning a corner, the man in red oozed out from the shadows cast by the dimming lights in the hall. They curled around that svelte figure like a veil until they fell away, revealing his body entirely. He was smiling this time, Changmin realized, and it was such a lovely smile that he couldn’t seem to pull his gaze from it. Once again, he felt captured by this man’s strings, as if he wasn’t himself in the face of those endlessly deep eyes, which lingered on him even as the man in red sauntered up to his uncle and draped himself over the taller man like a particularly striking, vivid curtain. 

“Ah, I guess it’s my job to introduce you, then, isn’t it?” His uncle slid a hand around the man’s waist, tan fingers playing over that eye-catching fabric. “Jagiyah, you remember that kid I told you about, hyung’s son? This is my nephew, Minnie. He’ll be staying with us a while.”

Facing Changmin he said, “Minnie, this is my husband, Jaejoong. He’s one who keeps me sane up here, hah.”

Jaejoong. So that was his name. Changmin wanted to say it, to feel the sound of each syllable on his tongue, but his mouth was too dry to form words. He watched the man in red—Jaejoong—tilt his hips and find his husband’s grip where it was tight, possessive, on the dip of his waist. Their fingers tangled together against the silky fabric, startling pale interlacing with burned-rice tan, all while his smile curled like a python over his pretty features and his inescapable gaze was on Changmin. 

“Welcome to our lovely home, Minnie-ah.”

His uncle insisted that they share a dinner outside to celebrate Changmin’s first night at the house. He lit the fire pit with the bright snap of an electric lighter and mused, with a hearty laugh that echoed through the clearing, “what else is summer for, Minnie, but to enjoy great barbecue outdoors?”

And maybe his uncle had a point, because there was something to be said for the way the deep blue evening settled onto the waters of the lake, transforming it into a clear, spotless mirror that reflected the embers of their fire pit and the silhouette of the house; and the scent of the conifers in the air, crisp, refreshing, reminiscent of the holidays that Changmin once spent at his grandparents’ house over Chuseok; and the lightning bugs that eked their ways out of the shadows, like tiny, softly flickering lanterns which lit up the night. It felt ripe with potential, almost, like anything could happen, and for the first time since he’d been forced to cancel all of the tentative plans he’d made with Joohyun he was beginning to feel somewhat optimistic about his summer. 

At the thought of his girlfriend, though, his ease faltered a bit. Joohyun would love this place. Changmin didn’t doubt that one bit. He hoped that she wasn’t waiting for his call, the one he’d promised to make earlier but was quickly coming to realize would be impossible. Junsu was right; he had absolutely zero bars out here, and to make matters worse, his uncle didn’t keep a landline at the house. What reason was there for it, the man had mused when questioned on the subject, when he could make any calls he needed from his office?

He imagined that was exactly the sort of response he should have expected. Changmin spared a long glance at the man sitting across from him on the patio table, whose pressed shirt was undone by three buttons and had a can of sweaty beer in hand which he used to make broad, sweeping gestures as he spoke animatedly about small-town court life. 

Apparently it was much more active than the aging populations of plump, podgey old men who spent their remaining days arguing about the price of fermented kimchi per-kilo and wishing that their wives were still young and sexy and that they themselves were still young and sexy and that everything would just go back to the good old days would lead you to believe. Just last week, his uncle had put a teenager behind bars for life, for the crime of murdering his parents. The way his uncle described the story was ghastly—the boy was nineteen, Changmin’s age, and he’d chopped their bodies into pieces one day and strung them up in the meat locker where they kept cuts of beef and hides for tanning. He’d been running the family’s butcher shop in their absence all on his own until he was caught, and when anyone from town asked after them, he’d hum and say, oh, they’re here, they’re just hanging around out back. Want me to show you? It was weeks before someone finally answered, yes. 

“There are some real sickos out there, Minnie,” his uncle commented on it all after he’d finished with the grizzly details. “This kid, you’d never have guessed he had it in him. Smart boy, decent grades, always helpful around the shop. Some of the officers weren’t even convinced he’d done it. But me? I knew it from the moment he walked into the courthouse.”

There was a self-aggrandizing note to the way his uncle spoke—as if it was solely himself responsible for keeping the streets clear of murder-happy teenagers, and not the local police officers who’d had to clear the mangled bodies out of the locker, or the poor woman who’d come into the butcher’s to buy beef round that day and stumbled upon the whole mess—and a certain glint in his white smile that showed he truly believed in what he said. 

And oh, did his uncle have a lot to say; it was beyond obvious how much the man liked to talk about himself. For the entire dinner he rambled on, only seemingly remembering that a conversation can be focused on more than one person every five minutes or so, when he’d stop and pause a bit stiffly, rearrange his smile so that his cheeks didn’t look quite so tight, and ask Changmin something like, “so what are you in school for, Minnie?”

And Changmin would answer, “I’m—er—I’m taking a break from school to look at internships at entertainment companies. I want to write music.”

“Is that so?” His uncle’s expression seemed to jump in excitement. “You know, I did just the same thing when I was your age. I wanted to be an idol—you know, singing and dancing and all that—so I shopped around a little, I even got scouted at one point.”

Now that caught Changmin off guard—“really?” He asked in pure bewilderment. His uncle was handsome, sure, and maybe, now that he thought about it, he had the looks for TV, but it was almost impossible to imagine him being any way other than the way he was right then. 

“Oh, yeah. I even had a stage name picked out for my debut: U-know, get it? Hah. They would’ve loved me.”

“So what happened? You didn’t get accepted?”

His uncle paused and swirled his can of beer in his hand as he thought. The light from the bonfire reflected off of his face and made him seem almost somber when he answered, “well, I got married, Minnie. I couldn’t much support my husband on an idol’s debt, could I?” 

He abruptly changed the subject afterwards, and that was that on that—but at the mention of Jaejoong, Changmin’s thoughts strayed back to the alluring red beacon that had been tugging persistently at his attention all evening. For the entire dinner, the man had been silently fluttering in and out of his peripherals, never lingering, like a train of thought he couldn’t catch; rather than joining the two of them at the table, Jaejoong was the one bringing over fresh beef (that Changmin had since lost the appetite to eat) from the grill as well as lettuce to make wraps with and side dishes. 

My husband. It shouldn’t have come as such a surprise to know that his uncle was married, really. Changmin couldn’t say what it was about the fact which shocked him so much, aside from perhaps that he’d never once heard or seen any mention of this man from his parents.

And looking at Jaejoong, it seemed unlikely that he hadn't left any sort of impression on them. 

Unlike his uncle and his rambling, Jaejoong drew attention without having to say anything at all. Changmin stared as he approached the table without a word, his movements sharp and graceful beneath the flowing fabric of his blouse, and bent at the waist to collect a stack of dirtied dishes, his pants pulling taut over the smooth curve of his ass as he did so. 

Changmin flushed, and averted his eyes. 

The rest of the dinner continued on like that, without Jaejoong sitting down with them even once. At one point, Changmin caught his uncle slipping a hand along the length of his hip as he passed—they were faintly swinging with every stride, those hips, not so much that it looked intentional but enough to notice the round, tight shape of them, and even Changmin couldn’t deny that he, too, wanted to touch them, to feel the heated skin burning through those pants—but that was the extent of their interactions. When Changmin and his uncle finished eating Jaejoong carried all of their trash and their dishes away and disappeared into the house, and Changmin had to dig his thumbs into his thighs with the restraint it took to keep from watching him go. 

His uncle stayed outside to smoke on the pavilion while the last of the fire pit fizzled out. He drew a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and propped one between his teeth, then offered the pack to Changmin. “You smoke, Minnie?” He asked. 

Truthfully, Changmin did—really you would be hard pressed to find any kid his age who didn’t—and if it were Joohyun or one of his friends from school offering he wouldn’t have hesitated to take one and light up, but coming from his uncle the offer was enough of a shock that it must have shown on his face. 

“Now,” his uncle shook his head, “don’t go looking at me like that. Whatever hyung knows isn’t going to kill him. Go on, I won’t tell.”

There it was again, that almost insulting way that his uncle’s voice curled around the honorific. Hyung, spoken as if it were a thinly-veiled insult. Unbidden, his father’s voice came back to Changmin then, cracking out like a sucker punch, loud and sudden. 

I don’t know where you got that shit from. 

We had a disagreement a long time ago, is all.

His uncle was tipsy from the beers he’d had with dinner and his stance was relaxed, with his shoulders thrown back and a lazy hand rolled over the side of his chair. His knees were spread and he tapped the sole of his shoe—he’d slid on a pair of slippers—periodically against the floor while he waited for Changmin’s answer, his expression inviting, tiger teeth exposed by the curl of his upper lip. 

Taking in all of this, Changmin carefully pulled a cigarette from the pack. 

His uncle offered to light him, which Changmin accepted, and then took a drag. The embers on the butt of his cigarette flickered just like the lightning bugs swirling around them. 

Changmin sucked on his own cigarette, the weight of it on his lip calming and familiar, letting the comforting burn sit in his lungs a moment. After the sun went down, the air turned cool, and it nipped slightly at the exposed skin of his forearms. On the lake’s surface, he could see their figures, two dark shadows swimming amidst the towering conifers. 

Eventually he broke the silence and said, “I didn’t know you were married, Jageunabeojinim.”

“What did I say about calling me Yunho, Minnie? Don’t go making me feel old, now.” It was another beat of silence before his uncle answered, “no, of course you wouldn’t. The folks weren’t too keen on us getting hitched. Not that I gave a rat’s ass how they felt about the situation. No, we eloped, Jaejoongie and I, and then we came up here to settle down.”

The folks. His grandparents and his father. He tried to picture them, a family of four living in that house that he hadn’t seen since Chuseok at five-and-a-half years old.  “Why didn’t they want you to marry?” Changmin asked. 

“Why the hell do they do anything?” His uncle huffed. He pushed out a spotty cloud through his teeth. “We had a bit of a disagreement. They always had some way that they wanted me to be. Hyung was the same, always expecting I’d follow in his footsteps.” A scowl twisted across his features. “I wasn’t looking to stick around, anyways, and Jaejoongie always liked the quiet.”

Quiet. It was, perhaps even more so than during the day. The only sounds were the softly lapping waters of the lake against the gravel and the bonfire popping and crackling as it died. 

“You know, I was around your age when we met. Maybe a little older,” his uncle considered him. “When I tell you it was love at first sight, Minnie. Jaejoongie was older—yah, surprising isn’t it? You’d never guess by looking at him, and he won’t tell you if you ask, he’s sensitive about that sort of thing—and he came by the house one day, asking for directions. Said he had the wrong address and needed help getting to somewhere—I couldn’t tell you where. All I could tell you was that from that moment, I knew he was the one. I’d never even seen him before, but I felt like I’d already been in love with him for my whole life.”

His uncle paused to finish his cigarette. When he was through with it, he tossed the butt down to the floor and squashed it under his slipper like an insect. The ashes stained the wood of the pavilion. Then he asked Changmin, “have you got anyone special like that, Minnie?”

Yes, he wanted to say, as Joohyun’s image flitted through his mind’s eye, but the word caught on his tongue. He liked Joohyun, and maybe he even loved her, but really, he was only nineteen—they both were—and what did he know about that stuff? When his uncle spoke about Jaejoong, the longing in his voice was audible, and the way that he put it— I’d already been in love with him for my whole life— seemed incomparable to whatever half-baked feelings Changmin might’ve had for his girlfriend. 

Why were they together? Because Kyuhyun from the other class had been eyeing Joohyun up for all of their final year at school, and Changmin could never let that guy be the first at anything. It was too easy to proposition Joohyun outside of the school gates one day in late April, with the plum blossoms swaying over them; easier still to persuade her to accept his do you want to go steady? with a hand curled under her jaw and another caging her against the fence as his lips tasted hers. 

Before he even thought about it so much he was answering, “…no, there’s no one like that.”

Without the cigarette to busy his hands, his uncle fidgeted. He no longer looked relaxed; instead, a wave of restlessness seemed to come over him. His uncle stood from his chair and scratched at his jaw, which, without the bonfire to light it, looked less sharp; his face less handsome than it had been only a moment ago. Was it a trick of the darkness? He popped another button on his pressed shirt, but the movement wasn’t smooth; he struggled with it, his fingers shaking. 

“That’s such a shame,” he said, and he almost sounded angry over the fact. He dusted invisible dirt off from the front of his slacks. He seemed hurried, as if he’d suddenly remembered something. “Well, I had better turn in for the night. I’ve got an early start tomorrow, you understand, right? You enjoy that smoke, Minnie. Don’t stay up too late now.”

And that was the last that Changmin heard from his uncle before he was watching his retreating back heading towards the house, utterly stupefied. 

He couldn’t sleep a wink. 

It must’ve been thanks to his impromptu nap on the couch, Changmin thought bitterly. He was lying in bed in the guest room, staring vacantly up at the pale blue ceiling, cursing his uncle for buying a train ticket so early in the morning and fucking up his entire sleep schedule as a result. 

He’d gone back inside a while after the awkward conversation he’d had with his uncle. It didn’t sit well with him, the way his uncle’s behavior changed so abruptly. Changmin replayed it in his mind, trying to pinpoint the moment he must’ve said or done something wrong, but couldn’t help but come up dry. 

What did he have to be so upset over? Changmin almost wanted to apologize, if only to ease the unsettled feeling stirring in the pit of his stomach, but by the time he’d wandered back into the house, all of the lights were out, and it was clear he’d missed his chance. Shit. No wonder his parents were always getting on his case about respect, and never speaking out of turn. Apparently he had the ability to piss people off without even meaning to. 

With a huff he rolled over under the covers, struggling to get comfortable. He closed his eyes, trying to will sleep to come, but all he saw behind his eyelids was—

Red. 

Right, there was that, too. 

He couldn’t stop thinking of Jaejoong. It seemed ridiculous—Changmin had exchanged all of maybe ten full words with the man, and he’d barely paid Changmin a drop of attention after their encounter in the foyer—but somehow no matter what he tried to distract himself with, his thoughts inevitably circled back around to that silky red blouse tucked into an impossibly tiny waist; those round hips swinging under too-tight pants; and those eyes, so sharp and piercing he could almost feel their stare even now. 

He started at the thought, swiveling around, half-expecting to find those inky pools gazing back at him from the doorway, just to be left with a feeling of emptiness when there was nothing but the dark brown oak instead. What was he expecting? That Jaejoong was watching him in his sleep? Ridiculous. Completely fucking ridiculous. 

But it was impossible to shake the thoughts of the man from his head. Like a stubborn weed, he had taken root there in only a handful of hours. 

After what felt like an age of tossing and turning uselessly, feeling too warm beneath the thick comforter, and trying to purge the image of Jaejoong bending over the table to grab a plate out of his mind, Changmin threw the covers from himself and left the stuffy room. He thought about the crisp coolness of the mountain air and the beautiful lake, and figured that his uncle wouldn’t mind too much if he went back outside for a bit to clear his head. 

The house was different at night. The open floor plan left too many places for shadows to gather, and Changmin was making his way cautiously through the halls, half-paranoid that he was going to trip and smash his face into one of the expensive, avante-garde pieces of furniture, when he saw it. 

The door to the second floor was open. 

Once again, it was only left open a sliver—as if whoever had gone through it had meant to shut it on their way in, but did so thoughtlessly, or perhaps hurriedly, and left the door to sway in their wake. 

Changmin swallowed. All plans of going outside vanished in that moment. Instead he found himself pushing the door open, and peering up the staircase that was beyond it, Deja vu rushing through his veins. Curiosity gnawed at him and the stairway gaped like a mouth. 

With careful steps, he ascended the stairs, all too aware of the fact that he wasn’t meant to be doing this. He was a guest in this house, and already he’d seemed to earn his uncle’s ire; the last thing he should be doing is exploring the parts of his home which are clearly private. And yet with every soft creak of the wooden steps beneath his weight his anticipation was building, growing monstrous, consuming him. 

He wasn’t sure what he expected to lay at the top of the stairs—a sex dungeon perhaps? At least something equally embarrassing that someone would definitely not want to be on display for nosy guests and errand-boys. But it was only another long hallway lined with large windows, almost a carbon copy of the first floor. Changmin was almost disappointed. 

He took long strides through the halls, his shadow dark and watery as it swam through the pools of moonlight on the floorboards. His pulse was loud in his ears. Every corner he turned, he imagined that there would be something lurking behind it, waiting to leap out at him. But there was nothing. 

He stopped and stood suddenly, listening; no, it wasn’t nothing. He waited a moment and heard it again: there were faint sounds coming from one of the bedrooms. Low groans and the rustling of furniture. The hairs on the backs of his arms stood on end. 

Changmin followed the source of the noise, and it led him to the bedroom at the very end of the hall. He swallowed his nerves, and they traveled down the length of his throat, thick and dry. The door was open, and a slice of light cut through that narrow space. 

Nothing could have prepared him for what he found there. 

Changmin had to squint as his eyes readjusted to the darkness of the room, and he sucked in a startled breath; there was Jaejoong on the bed, his back against the mattress, his vibrant red blouse opened and spilled beneath his naked skin like a pool of blood. His pale chest was rising and falling gently, and he was gasping—no—moaning, high and breathless, in time with Changmin’s uncle’s movements over his body. 

His uncle loomed over Jaejoong, still in the same pressed shirt and slacks he’d been wearing earlier, and with a pair of smooth white thighs wrapped around his waist as he drove his hips into the space between them. He seemed huge compared to the fair man on the bed, his back hunched like boar’s, with his fingers buried in the soft, plump flesh of Jaejoong’s ass, and the noises coming from his mouth seemed strange, animalistic, almost. There were no words, but merely gravelly grunts escaping the man. Changmin couldn’t see his face from where he stood. 

Instead, he had a clear view of Jaejoong’s expression—and what a view it was. Even from where he stood Changmin could see the fierce pink searing the apples of his cheeks, and the way his lips, kiss-bitten raw, were dropped open as he cried. His brows were twisted in pleasure, and he was beautiful. Utterly, breathtakingly beautiful. 

Changmin stood there enraptured, unable to move while his uncle fucked Jaejoong with all the abandon of a beast. With every piston of his hips another cry erupted from the man on the bed, and he clutched at the twisted sheets, helpless. 

The thought that this was something he wasn’t meant to see didn’t even cross Changmin’s mind. All that he could focus on was the way that Jaejoong’s hot breath steamed into the air, in actual clouds; the way his pink nipples peaked like tiny mountains which rose and fell with his labored breaths; the way his voice became louder and airier the closer he came to his climax. 

Absently, Changmin brought a hand to the front of his sweats, where his cock was filling with hot blood at the sight of it all. He stroked over himself through the fabric while his uncle’s rabid groans grew deeper, his thrusts more wild. He could see where precome leaked out from their joined bodies, glistening as it smeared over the reddened skin of Jaejoong’s ass. The sounds of their fucking were obscenely wet, and the lurid squelches that Jaejoong’s body made were audible as his uncle pulled and pushed his cock into it. They made Changmin’s cheeks burn, and warmth pooled in his guts, thick like syrup. 

Eventually Jaejoong gave a loud whine, and his tiny, pale toes curled against his uncle’s back. He threw his head against the pillows, back arching, his hands spasming around air as he came. Changmin could hear the splatter of his orgasm against his stomach, could see where the milky liquid pooled in the dips of abdomen and caught the faint light, shining. Through his sweatpants, Changmin squeezed his head, and felt precome bead from his tip. 

Then Jaejoong’s head fell to one side and their eyes met. His gaze wasn’t the misty, ecstasy- filled one it had been the moment before; instead it was clear and focused intently on Changmin. He froze, a deer caught in headlights, except that those eyes felt infinitely more dangerous than any threat a car could pose. 

His uncle continued to fuck into Jaejoong while Changmin stood there, his fingers still gripping his cock through his sweats, the wet patch at his tip blooming over the soft fabric. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t move. There was nothing he could do but watch as his uncle buried himself to the hilt and shot his load deep, his hips undulating. Jaejoong let out a soft sound at the feeling of being filled, a broken, half-gurgled little thing which fell from between those red lips, more air and spittle than it was vocalized, and he didn’t take his eyes off of Changmin at all. 

It was that sound which finally snapped Changmin out of his stupor. He fell back from the doorway, his vision blurring at the edges. What was he doing? What was he doing? His breath lodged like a stone in his throat. 

He stumbled over his own steps as he turned and ran through the halls, down the staircase, his heart hammering in his ears, the image of Jaejoong’s flushed, orgasmic expression burned into his retinas. He slammed the door—the one which separated the second floor from the first—behind him after he passed through it, and it rattled violently on its hinges. 

When he was standing back in his guest room, he shook and nervously ran his hands up and down his thighs, struggling to catch his breath. He could still smell the musk of sweat and sex under his nose, could still hear Jaejoong’s sweet cries as he took his uncle’s cock. 

Worse still, he remained hard, no matter how much he tried to will his erection away. He thought of his usual boner-killers: dead puppies; Kyuhyun and Minho in skirts and stockings; his parents. But every image was vaporized in the heat that boiled inside of him, and all that he could think about was Jaejoong, Jaejoong, Jaejoong. 

With a grunt Changmin shoved his sweats down, until the elastic caught on his swollen balls, just far enough that he could take his cock in hand. He gripped it around the base and shuddered out a gasp, his stomach leaping, before trying one slow, tentative stroke up the shaft. His touch was too dry, it bordered on painful, and so he spat crudely into his palm and then began to work himself in earnest. 

He pictured Jaejoong writhing on the bed, his milk white body contrasted by the dark sheets, rocking against them as Changmin’s uncle speared into him with his cock; his molten obsidian eyes glazed with want; his wet, shiny mouth open; and his voice, choking out his desire in the pitch of his breathless moans. 

Then the image shifted, it changed. In his mind’s eye, it was no longer his uncle hovering over Jaejoong, but it was Changmin himself driving his cock into that silky wet heat, digging his nails into supple flesh. Pulling those pale cheeks apart to find the dewy core between them. 

His fist flew over his cock to the rhythm that he wanted to fuck Jaejoong to: fast, unrelenting, so intensely that the man below him couldn’t even catch the air to breathe. No, more than that—he didn’t want to fuck Jaejoong, rather, he wanted to break Jaejoong; to cut him open on his dick, exposing the delicate, squirming insides hidden beneath that cruelly beautiful exterior; to watch as those dark eyes which were always so steady and so clear in front of him lost their focus, rolled back, or gummed shut with tears. 

The need to punish Jaejoong grew in time with the need to come, ballooning huge inside of him. Punish him for what? He didn’t stop to wonder; instead he envisioned his cool palms around Jaejoong’s long, elegant neck, gripping it, digging his thumbs into his windpipe until he begged for Changmin to stop—or worse, for more. To give it to him harder, rougher. More. More. Break me. Please. It’s not enough. Half-swallowed gasps smothered beneath his hands; white knuckles and coral bruises in the shapes of crescent moons. I’ll give you more. 

Changmin’s climax shot out of him suddenly, in thick ropes, landing as far as the covers on the guest bed. His hand, the one he had wrapped around his head, with one finger pressing against the sensitive vein on his shaft, shivered and quaked as the sensations rocked through his body. 

The aftershocks rolled over him like an oncoming tide, sweeping through his limbs, washing away the vision of Jaejoong purpling under him that Changmin came to. As the haze gradually faded his mind went carefully blank, numb, not sure what to think or how to feel but knowing for certain that he’d never had an orgasm like that before in his life. Never that intense, like he was losing himself to the streams of it. What did it say about him that it was caused by a fantasy of choking out a man he’d hardly even met?

He didn’t want to know. He stood in the silence with his hands trembling in front of him as the ringing in his ears grew impossibly loud. 

The next day Changmin did everything in his power to avoid the other two occupants in the house. He stayed in bed well into the morning, long after the sun climbed up over the peaks of the conifers and spilled into the room. He kept his ears peeled, straining to hear the moment anyone approached the door, hoping to hell that neither his uncle or Jaejoong were coming to confront him about last night. He had to spend the rest of summer in the company of these people, what was he going to do if he’d already ruined everything on day fucking one?

But to his simultaneously immense relief and inexplicable disappointment, no one came knocking; instead Changmin kept his head under the covers and started to wonder to himself if maybe everything he’d seen had really been a dream or a figment of his own overactive imagination. It certainly seemed plausible, considering how surreal it was in retrospect. When he—reluctantly—tried to recollect the mental images of what he’d spied through that open bedroom door, the memories were shockingly watery, the scenes blurred and unclear, as if they might have never existed after all. 

If that was the case, though, it was almost more concerning than the alternative. Since when were his fantasies so violent? Changmin wasn’t a pussy or some innocent dope; he knew that there were people out there who got their rocks off on that sort of thing. He’d just never imagined that he was one of them. All of the sex he’d ever had in his life had been—well, vanilla, by most standards. Joohyun wouldn’t even try to ride him; she worried that it would hurt more from that angle. And Changmin, being the good boyfriend that he was, always considered her concerns and was more than willing to fuck her on her back, with the lights dimmed, just the way that she wanted. They’d both always come in the end, and it was good enough. 

So it wasn’t like he was unsatisfied. But the rush he’d felt at his fingertips when he thought of hurting Jaejoong, of bruising that flawless skin black and blue and blocking off his windpipe until he paled and grappled at Changmin’s crushing grip, was unlike anything he’d ever felt before. It made his stomach turn, part-nausea, part-arousal, all topsy-turvy excitement; and his hands twitch at his sides, itching for—something. 

He didn’t know what. 

It was afternoon by the time that Changmin finally pulled himself out of bed with great reluctance, like a particularly sun-avoidant vampire. He tossed on a clean tee he rooted from his duffle and a pair of sweats and padded out into the hall, his footfalls soft on the wood. He was surprised to find that the house felt much the same as it did the day previous, when Junsu had dropped him off from the station: vast, gaping, and utterly empty. 

His uncle was away at work, that much was obvious. As for where Jaejoong was at that moment—it was anyone’s guess. From his conversation with his uncle over dinner he’d learned that the man didn’t keep a job. Instead he spent all day alone at the house; when Changmin asked his uncle what on earth Jaejoong got up to to entertain himself, he’d shrugged and answered flippantly, this and that. 

Right then, Jaejoong was nowhere to be found. Changmin breathed a sigh of relief at that, glad for the fact that he wouldn’t have to face the person whose mere presence caused his cock to stand stiff at attention. He couldn’t help but think that beneath the scrutiny of those eyes, everything would come involuntarily spilling out of him. Jaejoong seemed like the sort of person that noticed everything—even the things about yourself that you wanted more than anything to keep hidden away. 

With the comforting knowledge that he had the house to himself for the time being, Changmin meandered lazily through it, running his fingertips over each piece of furniture like it was his own. He passed the door to the second floor while deliberately not giving it too much thought—his pulse grew just a bit quicker when he noticed that the lock was turned shut, and he did not give this much thought either—and came to arrive in the kitchen, which was washed pale with sunlight. It was another bright day, and through the windows, he could see where the lake caught the flecks of light and reflected them off from its waters, as lustrous as little diamonds. 

His stomach growled noisily and he realized belatedly that he was starving. He’d held back last night from stuffing himself—though the beef was grilled to perfection—and skipped breakfast, which was unusual for him. Changmin found the pitcher of iced tea in the fridge door and poured himself a freezing glass, downed it, then looked over his options. 

There were leftovers from last night in the fridge, all neatly packed into tupperwares—he didn’t bother with those. Instead he made a late breakfast out of a bowl of gummy rice and cold broth, which he slurped slowly while perched at the island, gazing vacantly out the windows at the lake, not thinking too much about anything. The silence was so thick that the sound of his eating echoed loudly through the kitchen. 

Despite his relief at finding himself alone, already he could feel the oncoming boredom knocking persistently against the back of his mind. No cell service and no landline meant that he couldn’t idle away the hours by chatting with Joohyun like he normally would. When he gave the idea some more thought, though, he realized he wasn’t really in the mood for her particular brand of sincere optimism anyway. How can you complain in a place like that, oppa? He imagined her chiding him, her voice slow and steady like she was speaking to a child. Or if he brought up his uncle and his eccentricities, and his strange, startlingly beautiful husband, and the odd behaviors of both men, she would probably sigh and tut and say something like, you shouldn’t judge them, oppa, they’re your family, of course they mean well, in that way of hers which was always slightly condescending, and always slightly put-out, as if Changmin and all of his problems were incredibly small to her, or incredibly stupid. She’d been that way all throughout the weeks leading up to the summer, shucking off every one of his worries in favor of whatever she wanted to talk about, and though Changmin never said as much to her face, he found it unbelievably, intolerably grating. 

As much as he liked Joohyun, he couldn’t help but feel that he couldn’t stand her sometimes, that they were a terrible match for one another. With a deep sigh, he thought to himself that maybe it was an unexpected stroke of luck that she wasn’t here with him after all. 

The only solution to his boredom, Changmin eventually decided, was to get up off his ass and run from it—literally. It was afternoon, and the weather was balmy, typical for midsummer, but the elevation saved it from being humid: the perfect combination for a jog. He wasn’t exactly vigilant at exercise, not like Minho—the gym-obsessed bastard that he was—but Changmin worked out as much as was required to keep a trim physique, and he enjoyed running, anyhow. 

Outside the air was fresh and ripe with the sharp scent of fallen conifer needles. Changmin gulped in a deep lungful of it and put a pair of sturdy knots into his laces and set out for the road, leaving the key in the lock behind him. 

He stayed off the gravel but kept close to the road, weary of the forestry, his mind gradually clearing with the steady rhythm of his pace. It was a wonder what a little time in the great outdoors could do to improve one’s mood. The house grew slowly smaller in the distance, until he made a sharp turn down the slope, and it vanished behind the towering conifers, like it was never there to begin with. 

How miraculous that such a place could be kept a secret—it seemed like the ideal hiding spot, and he wondered, seriously for the first time, if maybe his uncle had something to hide. His uncle’s words from the night prior came back to him, and the way he’d spoken then, his unreadable expression faintly illuminated by the shuddering, pale glow of his lit cigarette. The folks weren’t too keen on us getting hitched. We had a bit of a disagreement. 

No one chose to live this far out without reason to. Not only that, but without any means of contacting the outside world; his uncle’s choice couldn’t have been anything but careful and deliberate. All of Changmin’s initial assumptions were wrong: his uncle wasn’t a hermit, and the house certainly wasn’t a bachelor pad. 

A vision of dark eyes flicked through his mind’s eye and a sudden cold dread shot down his spine, like a dousing of ice water, spreading all the way down to the tips of his trembling fingers. Changmin froze, his sneakers scuffing through the dirt. There was that feeling again, the sensation of the hairs on the back of his neck and his arms perking up, like he was being watched. He whipped his head back, scanning through the trees, but of course there was no one there. His heartbeat hammered in his ears as he waited, half-expecting for something to emerge through the narrow gaps in the bark and branches, where the shadows draped and blotted out the sunlight. 

It was quiet, so quiet. He’d noticed as much before, but that was while at the house; maybe the wildlife simply steered clear of the property due to the smell or the light, he didn’t know. But now Changmin was some paces away and surrounded on all sides by the thick wood, and still there was only silence. Surely there should have been something— some sound, some evidence of life out here beyond the raggedness of his own unsteady breathing, too loud for his liking. 

In that moment there was something that he remembered, a factoid he must’ve learned from a documentary or maybe a magazine, a piece of information that he’d deemed entirely useless at the time but his brain had shelved away until then, when it came drifting slowly back to him before blaring like a siren:  

Silence, in a place where there was otherwise sound, was a telltale sign of a predator lurking nearby. 

Changmin didn’t stick around to find out if it was true or not. He took off in the direction of the house, sprinting now, the trees blurring in his peripherals. His strides were clumsy, and he almost slid over the gravel more than once, kicking up a spray of loose stones in his wake. He couldn’t shake the feeling that there actually was something behind him; he thought that he could practically feel it gaining ground, its hot breath sliding over his neck, promising pain. 

But there was another voice in the back of his mind, a small, reed-thin murmur which was telling him that he was going the wrong way, that he was running towards danger, not away from it. That voice grew louder and louder until his every instinct was screaming at him to turn back. But he couldn’t, he knew he couldn’t, or whatever it was on his heels would catch up to him. 

His lungs burned with exertion and his pulse pounded in his ears. Just a little farther. He thought he felt something catch on his ankle but he wasn’t sure, didn’t have the time to check. Turn around, turn around, the voice in his head pleaded, and his quads ached, heavy as lead, as if the will to reverse was physically pulling at his limbs, dragging Changmin back down the road. He resisted, pushing his tired muscles to their limits, his breath thin, until the conifers parted and he could see the house once again, a beacon at the end of the trees. 

Relief swelled inside of him, but it was too early to celebrate, because a poorly placed step caused Changmin to slide and trip, and lose his movementum. He tumbled onto his side, rolling into the dirt. The gravel shredded the skin from his elbows to his wrists raw as he was sent skidding over it like a slice of cheese on a grate. 

“Fuck!” He hissed, clutching one wrist to his chest. The scrapes stung like a bitch, and Changmin could do nothing but lie there crumpled, stunned, to wait for the aberration from the woods to descend upon him. 

But—he held his breath for a long moment—nothing came. 

He blinked, and scrubbed a hand over his eyes, wiping away the sweat that had fallen into his lashes. The salt burned against his open cuts. Looking behind himself, he saw that there wasn’t anything chasing him after all. Just the empty road, and the conifer needles swirling in the air, which he’d shaken loose from their branches. 

He swallowed. That couldn’t be right. He’d been so sure. He swore that there was something there—to know that there wasn’t made him, what? Crazy? Schizophrenic? He wasn’t, though. 

However no matter how long he sat there in the dirt, the fact that he was alone didn’t change. He tried to reason with himself, to assure himself that it must’ve simply been the heat, or the lack of sleep getting to him. 

Changmin stood on shaking legs and tried to will his frenzied heartbeat to slow. It slammed against the insides of his ribs like it was trying to burst out from within, to escape the too-tight confines of his chest. His hands were still trembling. He brushed off the dirt and gravel from his clothes and hobbled back towards the house, the sun beating down on him with every unsteady step.