July 1

Seunghyun is wrapping up his phone call for the live broadcast. He hears Daesung and Seungri talking, but the line cuts out before they’re finished, and suddenly he’s in his silent hotel room again. Jiyong must’ve hung up. He hands his manager’s phone back to him.

“How’d it go?” his manager asks.

Seunghyun’s mind flashes through what was said, but he hasn’t processed it enough to have an opinion. “Okay, I think,” he says with a shrug. They say good night and Seunghyun can’t help but review the phone call in his head while he washes up.

Whoever thought it was a good idea to let Jiyong hold the phone clearly didn’t know what they were doing. Seunghyun feels like he just had a conversation with his boyfriend, not with the leader of his group. Did Jiyong really talk about his face like that in public? It’s a reference to the last time they were in bed together – Jiyong started teasing that he was going to serenade Seunghyun with Youngbae’s song “Eyes, Nose, Lips”. Then he’d said, “If I’d written that song, it’d have a lot more lines.”

“Oh yeah? Like what?” Seunghyun had asked. He was on his side with his head propped up on his hand, looking down at Jiyong lying next to him.

From his vantage point below, Jiyong studied Seunghyun’s face. “Mmm, well, there’d definitely be a line about your eyebrows.”

“My eyebrows?” They shot up in amusement at the thought.

“Yeah,” said Jiyong. He reached up and smoothed one beneath his finger. “They’re long and thick…like something else… Very nice.”

Seunghyun grinned. “What else would you write about?”

Jiyong considered, expression still serious. “Your jaw,” he said, cupping his fingers delicately around one side of it. “It’s sharp and shaped nicely.”

“Is that so?” Seunghyun asked.

“Yes,” Jiyong said. His mouth twisted into a sly smirk. “And there’d be a whole verse about your dick,” he said, and he reached down and cupped that, and then the conversation was over.

When Jiyong’d started saying that stuff during the broadcast – your eyes are big, your nose is handsome – Seunghyun had gotten a little thrill, basking in their shared memory, but when Jiyong mentioned his lips, and then his eyebrows, Seunghyun had a flash of panic that Jiyong might actually bring up his cock on camera.

Seunghyun has to laugh. That's so like Jiyong: to make a gesture that's sweet also feel scary.

He supposes it's all right. They never really crossed a line. It was just...a lot of silence. Seunghyun guesses the other guys didn't enjoy playing a collective third wheel to the two of them.

Seunghyun digs his phone out and sends Jiyong a message: Was that as awkward as I think it was? with an embarrassed emoji. He waits a moment, then sends a kissy face. He knows Jiyong won’t be able to answer, so he sets his phone down and heads to bed for a few precious hours of sleep.

He wakes up the next morning to an even more effusive kissy face from Jiyong than the one Seungyun sent and a message: The songs are doing very well, you should feel proud. Call me when you have time. Good luck filming today~

It’s late afternoon before he sees an opportunity to slip away. He sends Jiyong a message, Is now good to talk? and hears back a moment later: Yes, call me. When Jiyong picks up the phone, he whines, "Hellooooo?"

"Hellooooo," Seunghyun says back, and for about two minutes they just giggle and talk to each other in silly voices. "Your favorite oppa is calling youuuu," "Oppaaaa, thank you for calling me, do I sound cute todaaaay?" After dropping the bit, they just chitchat – Seunghyun tells him about an awkward conversation he had with one of the sound guys that morning and they cringe over it together; Jiyong tells him about a funny dream; and they both tell each other what they've eaten today. (Jiyong chastises Seunghyun a bit for not having enough veggies.)

They get around to the countdown broadcast, and Jiyong fills in some of the details of how it went. "Everyone loves your voice in 'If You'," Jiyong tells him. "Everyone's saying you should sing more."

"Really? Wow," says Seunghyun, but he takes that with more than a few grains of salt. Jiyong has been claiming Seunghyun has a beautiful singing voice for quite a while now, which is of course ridiculous. It started because Seunghyun would sing Jiyong cheesy love songs when he was drunk, and then Jiyong began to sing them back, until it turned into a weird tradition where every time they're alone together, at some point one of them sings something. They started making up rules, like that a minimum of two lines must be sung in falsetto, and they can't repeat a song for at least a month, and they can't do any of their own songs, and if they sing a song written by someone they know personally, they both have to tell that person about it – including details like what they were wearing (or not wearing) – the next time they see the writer in question. (It’s never actually happened, but they threaten each other with it regularly – like Jiyong threatening to sing “Eyes, Nose, Lips”.) Somehow, all that had grown to include Jiyong earnestly insisting that Seunghyun's singing voice is actually good – which usually just provokes him to sing as terribly as possible.

“Yes, everyone loves your voice,” Jiyong says. “But I love it the most.”

Seunghyun grins. They’re in love, but the wonderful thing about Jiyong is that he’s still infatuated. Seunghyun’s pretty infatuated himself. “I wish I could’ve been there,” he says.

“Me too,” Jiyong sighs. “Although between the doll and the phone call, I suppose we got the effect.”

“Yah! You’re saying I can be replaced by a pillow with my photo on it and a cell phone?”

“Not to me, Hyung. The doll was not anatomically correct.”

Seunghyun laughs. “But to everyone else?”

“It was basically the same, yes.”

“Ah, I don’t know, don’t you think the phone call was a little weird? It would’ve been easier to talk if I was there in person.”

“No, the call was fine. The others had the nerve to complain about it, though; did I tell you that? Youngbae said I wouldn’t let him get a word in.” Jiyong clicks his tongue huffily.

“Well, you didn’t,” Seunghyun points out.

“Even if I didn’t, so what? I was talking to my boyfriend.”

“Jiyongie,” Seunghyun says through laughter.

“Oh, I know,” Jiyong says with a sigh. “I’m just annoyed. Youngbae got really shitty with me. He said I was acting like a teenaged girl.”

Seunghyun can’t formulate a tactful response quickly enough. “Uh –”

“Hyung!”

“Well, it’s just that...listen, obviously you’re not a teenaged girl. I wouldn’t sleep with a teenaged girl.”

There’s a pause, and Seunghyun thinks maybe he’s managed to smooth things over, but Jiyong pushes on. “That aside,” he says, “do you think there was something wrong with how I acted?”

Seunghyun purses his lips and thinks about it. “Give me a second!” he says when he hears Jiyong take a breath to start talking again. “It’s just that,” he finally says, “it’s just that, I think we made Youngbae and Daesung and Seungri uncomfortable, and I think maybe – maybe they feel like we should be at a point in our relationship by now where we’re a little more… I don’t know, adult, or something?”

“What do you mean by ‘adult’?” Jiyong asks irritably. “Boring? Less in love?”

“I just mean – you know how when two people have been together a long time, they’re just like less...possessive?”

“But Hyung, I have to be possessive of you.”

“You do?” asks Seunghyun, genuinely surprised. He’d never considered Jiyong had a real reason behind his jealousy.

“Yes. I can’t just tell people you’re mine, so I have to show it.”

Seunghyun feels a twinge of sadness at that. “But Jiyongie,” he says gently, “you know you can trust me. And you have to trust me. We’re adults; we’re in an adult relationship, and –”

“Hyung, where are you right now?” Jiyong interrupts.

Seunghyun cannot fathom the reason behind this sudden shift in the conversation. “What do you mean? I’m in Japan, I’m filming –”

“So you’re on set,” Jiyong says impatiently.

“Yeah.”

“So you’re surrounded by the cast and crew right now?”

“No, I walked a little bit away from everyone else. I didn’t want to be rude.”

“And are you standing still, or are you walking around so that it’ll be harder to eavesdrop on you?”

Seunghyun is so startled by Jiyong’s acuity that he stops short for a second. He has indeed been pacing throughout their conversation. It’s a habit, at this point: If he’s talking to Jiyong, he does what he can to make sure his voice only reaches his boyfriend’s ears. He starts moving again. “I’m walking around,” he admits.

“Hyung, how can you expect me to be mature about you? We’re sneaking around like guilty teenagers just to have a normal conversation. It’s not like we’re having phone sex or something. We’re just talking. But if we want to say ‘I love you’ at the end, we have to make sure the wrong people don’t hear. What kind of adults have a relationship like that?”

He could say, ‘Adults who want to keep their careers,’ or ‘Adults who rely on their reputations,’ but Seunghyun bites back all the possible snide replies. He takes Jiyong’s point. How can he ask Jiyong to behave like they’re in an ordinary relationship when they’re so clearly not? “You’re right,” Seunghyun says. “I’m sorry.”

Jiyong sighs. “It’s okay, Hyung. And you’re right too – I don’t really want to make the others uncomfortable. It’s just –”

“I know,” says Seunghyun quietly.

They talk a little longer about their schedules, how the songs are being received, the two birds Jiyong is watching out his window, but soon enough Seunghyun sees it’s time for him to get back. “Talk soon,” he says.

“Yeah,” says Jiyong. “Send me pictures. I miss your face. They didn’t let me keep the doll.”

Seunghyun laughs. “Okay,” he says. He stops walking and stands very, very still. “I love you,” he says.

Jiyong releases a breath and Seunghyun imagines he can smell the sweetness of it through the phone. “I love you too.”