Entry tags:
[FIC]: you and me between sheets
you and me between sheets, pg, baekhyun/tao.
it just doesn't get better than this.
i was made to keep your body warm
but i'm cold as the wind blows
so hold me in your arms
my heart's against your chest
your lips pressed to my neck
i've fallen for your eyes
but they don't know me yet
and the feeling i forget
i'm in love now
ed sheeran, "kiss me"
YOU AND ME BETWEEN SHEETS
baekhyun/tao
Baekhyun walks into the bathroom and finds Tao in the bathtub, leaning back against the porcelain with his eyes closed. It’s bright, late morning, and the light makes the whole bathroom glow white-yellow, like Baekhyun has walked into some kind of surrealist’s dream. Tao has his arms stretched out along the walls of the bathtub, and he looks impossibly relaxed, body pliant against the porcelain of the tub. “You look comfortable,” Baekhyun says, crouching by the side of the bathtub and reaching out to touch a drop of water clinging to Tao’s shoulder.
Tao cracks an eye open and smiles at Baekhyun. “It’s comfortable,” he agrees, his Korean slow and carefully-enunciated, the way it always is. Tao thinks about each syllable before he says it, and there’s a precision to his speech that you never hear in native speakers—it’s cute, Baekhyun thinks. Endearing. He’s improving day by day, and Baekhyun likes to think he has some part in that.
“Are you trying to make the most out of the time we have off?” Baekhyun asks. The brutal business of the days since their promotions has worn on all of them, ground all of them down until their sharp edges are gone. Maybe it’s easier for the Chinese members—or maybe it’s much harder, Baekhyun doesn’t know. But he does know he’s watched far too many of them break down into tears of utter, bone-deep exhaustion.
It’s clear that Tao doesn’t understand the entire question—he tilts his head a little, his dark eyes inquisitive, and lifts his shoulders in a slight shrug that makes the bathwater ripple. Baekhyun tries again: “Before we have a comeback, are you relaxing?”
Tao gets it, this time. “Right,” he agrees, smiling and pushing his damp hair out of his eyes. “Baekhyun hyung too?”
“Me too,” Baekhyun agrees. He drops to his knees and rests his chin briefly on Tao’s bicep, watching him, then presses a kiss against the skin and says, “Let me wash your hair.”
The bathtub is too small, and Tao too big, to fit comfortably facing sideways, but Tao tries his best. Baekhyun reaches for the shampoo, lathers it between his palms, and then reaches up to dig his fingers into Tao’s hair. He loves the way that Tao’s eyes close, his mouth curving up in the softest smile—Tao is so fierce onstage, so full of intensity, but like this he’s soft and easy and gentle, the gentlest man Baekhyun knows. Baekhyun cards his fingers through the hair at Tao’s temples, and can’t help the way he returns Tao’s smile. Something about it just demands a smile in answer.
“Does it feel good?” Baekhyun asks, brushing his thumbs over Tao’s temples, his fingers curling at the back of his head.
“It’s good,” Tao agrees in Mandarin. Baekhyun has been learning, too—slowly, but he knows a few words. The things Tao says around him, mostly—good, there, don’t stop—but a few other things too. Thank you and you’re beautiful and I love you.
Baekhyun’s not sure when he got this way. Tao must bring out the best in him.
“Rinse your head,” Baekhyun says. Tao opens an eye, squinted against the potential for suds, and gives him that inquisitive look again. Baekhyun scoops water up in his hands and drips it over the back of Tao’s head. “Rinse,” he repeats, and this time Tao gets it.
Baekhyun showered this morning, but the way Tao stretches out in the bathtub to duck his hair back into the water is strangely alluring. Baekhyun likes the way his body stretches, the way his skin moves over his muscles—likes the tan of Tao’s stomach and the paler skin of his upper thighs. It’s not really sexual, although things between them always have the potential to be so. It’s just that Tao looks comfortable, stretched out in warm water under the sun that streams in through the high-set windows, and Baekhyun thinks they could all use some comfort in the moments they’re given to catch their breath.
He leaves his slippers and clothes in a pile by the toilet and climbs into the bath with Tao, who doesn’t even look surprised, just shifts to accommodate. The water is warm, and Tao’s body is warmer in the places where it touches Baekhyun’s—Baekhyun leans back against Tao’s chest, tilting his head back onto Tao’s shoulder. Tao is much bigger than Baekhyun is, and he cradles Baekhyun against him, his hands solid where they press against Baekhyun’s skin.
“Comfortable?” Tao asks. His breath is soft against Baekhyun’s jaw, his voice a rumble that Baekhyun can feel.
“Very comfortable,” Baekhyun says. He feels Tao’s arms wrap around his waist, holding him close. That’s one of the things Baekhyun loves about Tao: he’s gentle, but he can still be strong. Like this, Baekhyun feels safer than he does anywhere.
“Good,” Tao says, in Mandarin again, and then says something else which Baekhyun doesn’t understand. What he does understand, though, is the way Tao noses against the curve of his throat, and the kiss he places against Baekhyun’s shoulder, soft and thoughtful, almost proprietary. Some things don’t need a shared language to be made clear.
Tao spends a night with Chanyeol, just because, and wakes up early to a sliver of light streaming in the blinds and cutting right across his face. To his left, Chanyeol is asleep, on his stomach with his face half-hidden in the pillow—Chanyeol even sleeps inelegantly, not that Tao was ever surprised. When he pushes himself up onto his hands, he can see that the other bed is empty—Baekhyun must be awake, despite the early hour. Maybe he’s in the bathroom, or maybe he’s like Tao, unable to go back to sleep once woken.
“Mrph,” Chanyeol says when Tao climbs over him to get out of bed. Tao freezes, prepared to apologize, but Chanyeol just shifts a little and goes back to sleep immediately. It’s good—sleep is something they’ve learned to sacrifice, but that just means they appreciate it more when they have the chance.
In the kitchen, Baekhyun is sitting at the table, a bowl of cereal in front of him. His hair is messy from sleep, and his feet are bare—his toes are curled against the linoleum of the kitchen floor. It’s silly that Tao even finds Baekhyun’s feet endearing, but they are, and he does.
“Hyung,” he says, his voice coming out rough with sleep. Baekhyun looks over at him and smiles, sleepy and sweet. Tao’s heart clenches. “Hi.”
“Hi,” Baekhyun says. His voice is soft, too early in the morning for volume.
Tao slides into the seat across from Baekhyun and watches him for a moment, as Baekhyun takes a bite of cereal, chews, swallows. It’s not the first time Tao has watched Baekhyun eat breakfast, but every action seems different when you’re in love with the person doing it.
It had never been something Tao thought about, really—more like, one day in China, between filming takes of Happy Camp, Baekhyun had sat down next to him, his smaller hand folding into Tao’s. Baekhyun had given him one of those guileless, sweet smiles, and Tao had thought, Well.
Falling in love with Baekhyun had never been difficult. There were a handful of weeks in between K’s departure from China and M’s arrival in Korea that had been stressful, but then when they’d had a moment alone, Baekhyun had pushed up on his tip-toes and cupped Tao’s jaw in both hands and kissed him, and so even those weeks hadn’t been bad, in the end. Tao knows he’s lucky. But he also knows that with enough dedication, anything is possible.
Baekhyun hides a yawn behind one hand. Tao is abruptly and forcefully reminded of a sleepy kitten, so he laughs, trying to stifle it in the crook of his elbow.
It doesn’t work, and Baekhyun grumbles something that Tao thinks is probably, “What are you laughing at?”
It’s also too early in the morning for them to be able to speak each other’s languages. Tao won’t be able to think about Korean for at least another hour, and even when Baekhyun’s fully awake, his grasp on Mandarin is tenuous at best—so for now, Tao settles on smiling when Baekhyun looks back up, because he likes the way Baekhyun smiles back.
Baekhyun says something else in Korean, and Tao catches a few words—”early” and “why” and “sleep”. It’s early, so why are you awake? is probably the question, one Tao knows how he wants to answer but can’t find the words for. “I can’t go back to sleep after I wake up once,” he says in Mandarin, watching the way Baekhyun’s eyes track his lips. He wonders if Baekhyun understands—if maybe he’s the way with Mandarin the way Tao is with Korean, able to understand so much more than he knows how to say.
“Okay,” Baekhyun says. He offers Tao another smile and curves his hands around his cereal bowl. Baekhyun has nice fingers, musician’s fingers, long and tapered and slender, and the bones in his wrists are delicate. The first time they’d met, Tao had looked at Baekhyun and wondered if he could break him just by handling him wrong,
Baekhyun is a lot stronger than he seems, though. Tao knows.
The cereal is gone, but Baekhyun’s still looking down at his milk, stirring his spoon around and clinking it lightly against the sides of the bowl. This is morning-Baekhyun, who Tao thinks is probably still mostly asleep, because it usually takes Baekhyun at least half an hour to be fully functional.
“Good morning, sleepyhead,” Tao says softly.
Baekhyun looks up and blinks, then smiles, because even if he doesn’t understand the words, Tao thinks he understands the meaning.
Under the table, Tao shifts so he can catch Baekhyun’s ankle between his, holding him in place. It’s the kind of small intimate gesture that Tao has never made for anyone, or at least anyone before Baekhyun, who inspires him to a kind of sentimentality that even he’s not used to. Everyone knows Tao is softhearted, but there’s something about Baekhyun that makes Tao want to protect him, even if he knows Baekhyun doesn’t always need it.
“Good morning,” Baekhyun says. He flexes his ankle, and maybe Tao’s imagining the faint pink across the bridge of his nose, but then again Baekhyun has always been easy for Tao to read.
In very careful, precise Mandarin, Baekhyun adds, “Stay here for a while.” And he’s definitely blushing now, but Tao can’t look away from him, because that’s not something that Tao taught him, and even though he knows Baekhyun’s been picking Mandarin up in little pieces, that’s not something he would know unless he learned it himself. Unless Baekhyun taught himself to say it, just so he could say it to Tao.
“I’ll stay,” he agrees, because there’s nothing else he can do. His skin is warm where it presses against Baekhyun’s legs. Baekhyun smiles, and Tao is very, very much in love.
Baekhyun wakes up and Tao is there, asleep in the bed next to him. His face is mashed into the pillow and his mouth is open, a little, and it’s a little silly but Baekhyun thinks Tao is about the cutest thing he’s ever seen, anyway. These moments, between waking and having to face the day, are Baekhyun’s favorites, when they don’t have to worry about schedules and makeup and transportation, but can pull the covers up to their shoulders and smile at each other for a while.
He reaches out and touches Tao’s back, between his shoulderblades. Tao’s skin is smooth and soft and warm, his spine a barely-raised ridge traveling down his back, and Baekhyun traces it with light fingertips, counting the vertebrae—he gets to twenty before his fingertips reach the small of Tao’s back and the blanket he’d pulled up to cover himself.
“What are you doing?” Tao mumbles, his accent heavier than usual, consonants blurred with sleep. He cracks one eye open and looks at Baekhyun, smiling a little—just a little, but enough that Baekhyun relaxes.
“Memorizing you,” Baekhyun says. He’s fairly sure Tao doesn’t know the verb “to memorize” yet, but he doesn’t know how else to say it—I want to learn you in every way you can be learned seems a little too heavy for the early hours of the morning, no matter how honest Tao’s smile makes Baekhyun want to be.
Tao’s brow furrows slightly—he hasn’t understood—but he shrugs and closes his eyes again. “Okay.”
Baekhyun runs his fingers along Tao’s ribs, raising goosebumps in the wake of his hand. He has never gotten over how sensitive Tao’s skin can be, sometimes—even the lightest touches can make him shiver, and sometimes Baekhyun wants to spend minutes, hours, just touching Tao, finding out what places he likes, what places he doesn’t. All the ways Baekhyun can memorize Tao’s body, one caress at a time.
They don’t have time for that, these days, but it doesn’t stop Baekhyun from wishing.
“That tickles,” Tao says. Baekhyun had taught him how to say that once, after he’d punished Tao for some quip or another by tickling him until he cried. He opens his eyes again, smiling over at Baekhyun, open and honest in a way only Baekhyun ever gets to see. “Stop that, hyung.”
Baekhyun laughs, and Tao reaches out to curl an arm around Baekhyun’s shoulders and pull him closer. They fit, like this, with Baekhyun tucked against Tao’s body, his face pressed into the curve of Tao’s shoulder. Like this, there’s nothing in the entire universe except this bed, and Tao, and the warmth of his breath and the way their chests rise and fall together.
From the next bed over, Chanyeol heaves a giant snore.
“I like you a lot,” Tao whispers, and Baekhyun figures Chanyeol’s snores don’t really matter. As long as they have this, everything is fine.
--------------------
AUTHOR'S NOTES: I said I would never show y'all the images I used as inspiration for this because then you would judge me until I died, but I guess I'm gonna do it anyway: Bathtub, breakfast, totally unrelated to spending time in bed but somehow appropriate because even though Baekhyun's hanja for "baek" doesn't mean "white" I still think of them as the white peach couple. SUE ME. The song is "Kiss Me" by Ed Sheeran, a song brought to my attention by![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
boeboebi and has rapidly become my literal favorite ficwriting song.
This is formaayacola, who undoubtedly thought she was getting something of actual quality when she agreed to trade baektao with me. I'M SORRY MAIA I HOPE YOU CAN LOVE E ANYWAY 8(
it just doesn't get better than this.
i was made to keep your body warm
but i'm cold as the wind blows
so hold me in your arms
my heart's against your chest
your lips pressed to my neck
i've fallen for your eyes
but they don't know me yet
and the feeling i forget
i'm in love now
ed sheeran, "kiss me"
YOU AND ME BETWEEN SHEETS
baekhyun/tao
Baekhyun walks into the bathroom and finds Tao in the bathtub, leaning back against the porcelain with his eyes closed. It’s bright, late morning, and the light makes the whole bathroom glow white-yellow, like Baekhyun has walked into some kind of surrealist’s dream. Tao has his arms stretched out along the walls of the bathtub, and he looks impossibly relaxed, body pliant against the porcelain of the tub. “You look comfortable,” Baekhyun says, crouching by the side of the bathtub and reaching out to touch a drop of water clinging to Tao’s shoulder.
Tao cracks an eye open and smiles at Baekhyun. “It’s comfortable,” he agrees, his Korean slow and carefully-enunciated, the way it always is. Tao thinks about each syllable before he says it, and there’s a precision to his speech that you never hear in native speakers—it’s cute, Baekhyun thinks. Endearing. He’s improving day by day, and Baekhyun likes to think he has some part in that.
“Are you trying to make the most out of the time we have off?” Baekhyun asks. The brutal business of the days since their promotions has worn on all of them, ground all of them down until their sharp edges are gone. Maybe it’s easier for the Chinese members—or maybe it’s much harder, Baekhyun doesn’t know. But he does know he’s watched far too many of them break down into tears of utter, bone-deep exhaustion.
It’s clear that Tao doesn’t understand the entire question—he tilts his head a little, his dark eyes inquisitive, and lifts his shoulders in a slight shrug that makes the bathwater ripple. Baekhyun tries again: “Before we have a comeback, are you relaxing?”
Tao gets it, this time. “Right,” he agrees, smiling and pushing his damp hair out of his eyes. “Baekhyun hyung too?”
“Me too,” Baekhyun agrees. He drops to his knees and rests his chin briefly on Tao’s bicep, watching him, then presses a kiss against the skin and says, “Let me wash your hair.”
The bathtub is too small, and Tao too big, to fit comfortably facing sideways, but Tao tries his best. Baekhyun reaches for the shampoo, lathers it between his palms, and then reaches up to dig his fingers into Tao’s hair. He loves the way that Tao’s eyes close, his mouth curving up in the softest smile—Tao is so fierce onstage, so full of intensity, but like this he’s soft and easy and gentle, the gentlest man Baekhyun knows. Baekhyun cards his fingers through the hair at Tao’s temples, and can’t help the way he returns Tao’s smile. Something about it just demands a smile in answer.
“Does it feel good?” Baekhyun asks, brushing his thumbs over Tao’s temples, his fingers curling at the back of his head.
“It’s good,” Tao agrees in Mandarin. Baekhyun has been learning, too—slowly, but he knows a few words. The things Tao says around him, mostly—good, there, don’t stop—but a few other things too. Thank you and you’re beautiful and I love you.
Baekhyun’s not sure when he got this way. Tao must bring out the best in him.
“Rinse your head,” Baekhyun says. Tao opens an eye, squinted against the potential for suds, and gives him that inquisitive look again. Baekhyun scoops water up in his hands and drips it over the back of Tao’s head. “Rinse,” he repeats, and this time Tao gets it.
Baekhyun showered this morning, but the way Tao stretches out in the bathtub to duck his hair back into the water is strangely alluring. Baekhyun likes the way his body stretches, the way his skin moves over his muscles—likes the tan of Tao’s stomach and the paler skin of his upper thighs. It’s not really sexual, although things between them always have the potential to be so. It’s just that Tao looks comfortable, stretched out in warm water under the sun that streams in through the high-set windows, and Baekhyun thinks they could all use some comfort in the moments they’re given to catch their breath.
He leaves his slippers and clothes in a pile by the toilet and climbs into the bath with Tao, who doesn’t even look surprised, just shifts to accommodate. The water is warm, and Tao’s body is warmer in the places where it touches Baekhyun’s—Baekhyun leans back against Tao’s chest, tilting his head back onto Tao’s shoulder. Tao is much bigger than Baekhyun is, and he cradles Baekhyun against him, his hands solid where they press against Baekhyun’s skin.
“Comfortable?” Tao asks. His breath is soft against Baekhyun’s jaw, his voice a rumble that Baekhyun can feel.
“Very comfortable,” Baekhyun says. He feels Tao’s arms wrap around his waist, holding him close. That’s one of the things Baekhyun loves about Tao: he’s gentle, but he can still be strong. Like this, Baekhyun feels safer than he does anywhere.
“Good,” Tao says, in Mandarin again, and then says something else which Baekhyun doesn’t understand. What he does understand, though, is the way Tao noses against the curve of his throat, and the kiss he places against Baekhyun’s shoulder, soft and thoughtful, almost proprietary. Some things don’t need a shared language to be made clear.
Tao spends a night with Chanyeol, just because, and wakes up early to a sliver of light streaming in the blinds and cutting right across his face. To his left, Chanyeol is asleep, on his stomach with his face half-hidden in the pillow—Chanyeol even sleeps inelegantly, not that Tao was ever surprised. When he pushes himself up onto his hands, he can see that the other bed is empty—Baekhyun must be awake, despite the early hour. Maybe he’s in the bathroom, or maybe he’s like Tao, unable to go back to sleep once woken.
“Mrph,” Chanyeol says when Tao climbs over him to get out of bed. Tao freezes, prepared to apologize, but Chanyeol just shifts a little and goes back to sleep immediately. It’s good—sleep is something they’ve learned to sacrifice, but that just means they appreciate it more when they have the chance.
In the kitchen, Baekhyun is sitting at the table, a bowl of cereal in front of him. His hair is messy from sleep, and his feet are bare—his toes are curled against the linoleum of the kitchen floor. It’s silly that Tao even finds Baekhyun’s feet endearing, but they are, and he does.
“Hyung,” he says, his voice coming out rough with sleep. Baekhyun looks over at him and smiles, sleepy and sweet. Tao’s heart clenches. “Hi.”
“Hi,” Baekhyun says. His voice is soft, too early in the morning for volume.
Tao slides into the seat across from Baekhyun and watches him for a moment, as Baekhyun takes a bite of cereal, chews, swallows. It’s not the first time Tao has watched Baekhyun eat breakfast, but every action seems different when you’re in love with the person doing it.
It had never been something Tao thought about, really—more like, one day in China, between filming takes of Happy Camp, Baekhyun had sat down next to him, his smaller hand folding into Tao’s. Baekhyun had given him one of those guileless, sweet smiles, and Tao had thought, Well.
Falling in love with Baekhyun had never been difficult. There were a handful of weeks in between K’s departure from China and M’s arrival in Korea that had been stressful, but then when they’d had a moment alone, Baekhyun had pushed up on his tip-toes and cupped Tao’s jaw in both hands and kissed him, and so even those weeks hadn’t been bad, in the end. Tao knows he’s lucky. But he also knows that with enough dedication, anything is possible.
Baekhyun hides a yawn behind one hand. Tao is abruptly and forcefully reminded of a sleepy kitten, so he laughs, trying to stifle it in the crook of his elbow.
It doesn’t work, and Baekhyun grumbles something that Tao thinks is probably, “What are you laughing at?”
It’s also too early in the morning for them to be able to speak each other’s languages. Tao won’t be able to think about Korean for at least another hour, and even when Baekhyun’s fully awake, his grasp on Mandarin is tenuous at best—so for now, Tao settles on smiling when Baekhyun looks back up, because he likes the way Baekhyun smiles back.
Baekhyun says something else in Korean, and Tao catches a few words—”early” and “why” and “sleep”. It’s early, so why are you awake? is probably the question, one Tao knows how he wants to answer but can’t find the words for. “I can’t go back to sleep after I wake up once,” he says in Mandarin, watching the way Baekhyun’s eyes track his lips. He wonders if Baekhyun understands—if maybe he’s the way with Mandarin the way Tao is with Korean, able to understand so much more than he knows how to say.
“Okay,” Baekhyun says. He offers Tao another smile and curves his hands around his cereal bowl. Baekhyun has nice fingers, musician’s fingers, long and tapered and slender, and the bones in his wrists are delicate. The first time they’d met, Tao had looked at Baekhyun and wondered if he could break him just by handling him wrong,
Baekhyun is a lot stronger than he seems, though. Tao knows.
The cereal is gone, but Baekhyun’s still looking down at his milk, stirring his spoon around and clinking it lightly against the sides of the bowl. This is morning-Baekhyun, who Tao thinks is probably still mostly asleep, because it usually takes Baekhyun at least half an hour to be fully functional.
“Good morning, sleepyhead,” Tao says softly.
Baekhyun looks up and blinks, then smiles, because even if he doesn’t understand the words, Tao thinks he understands the meaning.
Under the table, Tao shifts so he can catch Baekhyun’s ankle between his, holding him in place. It’s the kind of small intimate gesture that Tao has never made for anyone, or at least anyone before Baekhyun, who inspires him to a kind of sentimentality that even he’s not used to. Everyone knows Tao is softhearted, but there’s something about Baekhyun that makes Tao want to protect him, even if he knows Baekhyun doesn’t always need it.
“Good morning,” Baekhyun says. He flexes his ankle, and maybe Tao’s imagining the faint pink across the bridge of his nose, but then again Baekhyun has always been easy for Tao to read.
In very careful, precise Mandarin, Baekhyun adds, “Stay here for a while.” And he’s definitely blushing now, but Tao can’t look away from him, because that’s not something that Tao taught him, and even though he knows Baekhyun’s been picking Mandarin up in little pieces, that’s not something he would know unless he learned it himself. Unless Baekhyun taught himself to say it, just so he could say it to Tao.
“I’ll stay,” he agrees, because there’s nothing else he can do. His skin is warm where it presses against Baekhyun’s legs. Baekhyun smiles, and Tao is very, very much in love.
Baekhyun wakes up and Tao is there, asleep in the bed next to him. His face is mashed into the pillow and his mouth is open, a little, and it’s a little silly but Baekhyun thinks Tao is about the cutest thing he’s ever seen, anyway. These moments, between waking and having to face the day, are Baekhyun’s favorites, when they don’t have to worry about schedules and makeup and transportation, but can pull the covers up to their shoulders and smile at each other for a while.
He reaches out and touches Tao’s back, between his shoulderblades. Tao’s skin is smooth and soft and warm, his spine a barely-raised ridge traveling down his back, and Baekhyun traces it with light fingertips, counting the vertebrae—he gets to twenty before his fingertips reach the small of Tao’s back and the blanket he’d pulled up to cover himself.
“What are you doing?” Tao mumbles, his accent heavier than usual, consonants blurred with sleep. He cracks one eye open and looks at Baekhyun, smiling a little—just a little, but enough that Baekhyun relaxes.
“Memorizing you,” Baekhyun says. He’s fairly sure Tao doesn’t know the verb “to memorize” yet, but he doesn’t know how else to say it—I want to learn you in every way you can be learned seems a little too heavy for the early hours of the morning, no matter how honest Tao’s smile makes Baekhyun want to be.
Tao’s brow furrows slightly—he hasn’t understood—but he shrugs and closes his eyes again. “Okay.”
Baekhyun runs his fingers along Tao’s ribs, raising goosebumps in the wake of his hand. He has never gotten over how sensitive Tao’s skin can be, sometimes—even the lightest touches can make him shiver, and sometimes Baekhyun wants to spend minutes, hours, just touching Tao, finding out what places he likes, what places he doesn’t. All the ways Baekhyun can memorize Tao’s body, one caress at a time.
They don’t have time for that, these days, but it doesn’t stop Baekhyun from wishing.
“That tickles,” Tao says. Baekhyun had taught him how to say that once, after he’d punished Tao for some quip or another by tickling him until he cried. He opens his eyes again, smiling over at Baekhyun, open and honest in a way only Baekhyun ever gets to see. “Stop that, hyung.”
Baekhyun laughs, and Tao reaches out to curl an arm around Baekhyun’s shoulders and pull him closer. They fit, like this, with Baekhyun tucked against Tao’s body, his face pressed into the curve of Tao’s shoulder. Like this, there’s nothing in the entire universe except this bed, and Tao, and the warmth of his breath and the way their chests rise and fall together.
From the next bed over, Chanyeol heaves a giant snore.
“I like you a lot,” Tao whispers, and Baekhyun figures Chanyeol’s snores don’t really matter. As long as they have this, everything is fine.
--------------------
AUTHOR'S NOTES: I said I would never show y'all the images I used as inspiration for this because then you would judge me until I died, but I guess I'm gonna do it anyway: Bathtub, breakfast, totally unrelated to spending time in bed but somehow appropriate because even though Baekhyun's hanja for "baek" doesn't mean "white" I still think of them as the white peach couple. SUE ME. The song is "Kiss Me" by Ed Sheeran, a song brought to my attention by
boeboebi and has rapidly become my literal favorite ficwriting song.This is for
maayacola, who undoubtedly thought she was getting something of actual quality when she agreed to trade baektao with me. I'M SORRY MAIA I HOPE YOU CAN LOVE E ANYWAY 8(