Chapter Text
It's been a little over a month since Minghao left for LA and he can officially say that he's extremely Minghao-deprived. Ever since Minghao and Mingyu became Minghao-Mingyu, Mingyu's embarrassed to admit that he's never left his boyfriend's side for longer than a couple of days at most. Being clingy is in his nature, he doesn't think it's unaccounted for when it comes to his own boyfriend. It's basically his job to shower Minghao with affection.
"I'm starting to miss your mullet." He mutters, switching hands to hold his phone as his right pinky finger starts to numb. Mingyu hears Minghao's questioning voice but he's more than half asleep to process it. He lets out a short hum and lilts his voice in a way that he hopes his boyfriend gets as a what? and a repeat that please.
"I said," there's a soft smile on Minghao's face, "did I hear that right?"
"I miss your stupid mullet okay," Mingyu never would have thought he'd ever admit to having feelings other than annoyance towards Minghao's choice of hairstyle. "I miss the old you more."
Mingyu has his eyes closed now, and he can feel the eye roll from the other side of the call. He really misses Minghao. More than he ever thought was the possible quantified amount to miss someone. He faintly hears a It's just a hairstyle, Gyu, and he supposes the man's right, maybe he should lay off the comments. But then he thinks, What the fuck, because if he really is considering anything other than cutting off the mullet himself as soon as Minghao comes back, absence really does make the heart grow fonder.
"I'll be back in two weeks—"
And okay, maybe he'll be too busy demanding cuddles the moment Minghao steps into the dorm to cut off his mullet. But that's alright. At least the next time he sees it, it won't be through FaceTime.
Classes without Minghao are uneventful. Not that they're usually that much more interesting with him around, but it's definitely less miserable. The days seem to pass slowly and Mingyu finds himself actually enjoying writing the pages of notes so that Minghao can make up for the classes he's missed. It helps distract him from the frozen clock. He spends his fifteen minute breaks with Wonwoo or Jun, or voluntarily but unhappily third-wheeling the both of them, and his hour-long lunches—when Jun has his Aesthetics of Dance course—with Wonwoo, Seungcheol and Hansol.
The latter three of his friends are unacceptably unempathetic when it comes to his life crises. Mingyu is all alone when it comes to dealing with his pining amidst Minghao's absence.
They're sitting at a table for six, with Seungcheol and Hansol on either side of him and Wonwoo across them.
"Well, maybe it was meant for someone else?" Seungcheol asks, always the level-headed one, trying hard to hide his own uncertainty and failing.
Wonwoo fiddles with the bright neon yellow post-it note, folding it into a smaller square. "He found it in his locker."
"Maybe you opened the wrong locker," the oldest of the four whispers, but Mingyu and Wonwoo are quiet enough to catch it.
Mingyu tries to keep his facial expressions in check, but he can feel his eye twitching. He snatches the note from Wonwoo's endless torture and internally sighs when he sees the creases that leaves behind a crumpled mess. For all the grades Seungcheol achieves in his classes, he can be a straight up idiot.
"How could I have unlocked the wrong locker?" His forehead crinkling in disbelief as a scowl forms its way on his face. He leans back against the backrest of the metal chair. "So this wasn't a prank? It wasn't one of you?"
Mingyu's outburst catches Hansol's fleeting attention and he glances up from whatever it is that he had deemed more worthy of his time than his friend's breakdown.
"What's up?"
Mingyu hates him. He really does. No you don't. He hears Jun's voice in the back of his head. Wonwoo—smart, smart, Wonwoo—ignores Hansol. Not that it matters anyway, since he's already shifting his attention back to his phone.
"Why would we do that? We have no intentions of getting in your pants," he quips lazily, swirling the plastic straw to mix the little of his smoothie left in his glass and taking his last sips.
"It's not like you haven't tried before." Mingyu holds the growing urge to smirk as he watches Wonwoo launches into full-blown, lengthy coughing.
"Oh," Seungcheol clears his throat, "okay, uh—"
Mingyu tunes out the eldest's voice as he goes over to Wonwoo's side and sympathetically pats his back in an effort to calm his coughs. He looks down at his hand and unfurls the crumpled note, laying it flat on the table and smoothing out the edges. His eyes does a once-over of the messy sentence written with the tip of a blue highlighter. Who even uses a neon blue to write on a yellow post-it note? Who even writes with a highlighter? He cringes, jaws set, and drops his head on the table—flattening out the paper even further.
is ur boyfriend a photographer? bc i can picture us together
His pick up lines suddenly seem amazing when compared to whoever wrote this. How is this his life? A short-term long-distance relationship, shitty friends, and now pranks? In the two years he's been here, he's gotten along well with everyone. People seem to like him, and he's pretty sure they all know of his relationship. They never bothered hiding it. So he really doesn't understand why this is happening to him.
God, he suddenly misses Minghao even more than he already did.
"Do they even realize that this makes no sense?" Jun frowns. "Like literally zero sense. Mentioning your boyfriend in a pick up line? Were they not paying attention to what they were writing? They specified the boyfriend part—you have a boyfriend!"
Mingyu would like to retract his previous statement about his hatred for his friends. His roommate is an exception. He mentally notes a reminder to re-stock their fridge with Jun's favourite brand of flavoured milk.
"Also, I thought we agreed not to bring up that time you and Wonu dated," Jun pouts, making him look even more like a child. "It makes him uncomfortable!"
"Sorry Junnie, it was too good of an opportunity to pass up," Mingyu grins. He doesn't understand how Jun is a year older than he is when he acts like this.
He's not really sorry. Dating Wonwoo was nice, and he was as good of a boyfriend as he could have been for Mingyu. But he knew the elder's feelings weren't as serious as they'd both pretended and neither one wanted to acknowledge it. They danced around it for weeks. Perhaps with time, he could have loved Wonwoo—if he wasn't so painfully aware of the amount of time the other spent pining for his roommate whenever he was over at their dorm, and if Mingyu had tried investing in the relationship a little more rather than distancing himself and driving an even bigger wedge between them. So Mingyu ended it.
Considering how well things turned out, he never regretted any of it. He wouldn't be with Minghao had any of that not happen. He even planted the seed for Wonwoo and Jun's ever-growing relationship, when he encouraged them to go out and dismissed their individual guilts. It's safe to say that Wonwoo owes him enough to let him off with the great ex comment. So, he's not really sorry, not at all.
Mingyu glances sideways at Jun occupying three quarters of his bed, resting on his stomach with his elbows holding his upper body up as he holds an emptied banana milk in his left hand and his phone in the other.
"Don't worry, he knows it's a joke, he won't leave you for m—"
"Oh, of course not," Jun scoffs, typing out a text message on his phone. A message to Wonwoo most likely, "he left you for me first, remember?"
Mingyu kicks him off his bed.