Chapter Text
Third week of summer.
San thought that after spending a year with his world narrowed down to his dorm and a handful of lecture buildings, it would be weird to be home again.
It was, at first. When he and Wooyoung got back, it was just his dad at the house; Wooyoung’s mother had apparently gone abroad for an extended family reunion. San was used to it being just him and his dad, but something in the last five years had changed between them too. They were closer once, but the distance seemed to come as part of the growing pains. When his dad remarried and his new stepmother and stepsister moved in, San was just grateful for more buffer around the house.
Wooyoung alone was good at filling those gaps. On most days, he woke up almost as early as San’s dad did, and San would walk down to find them in the kitchen together, cooking or talking casually over the breakfast counter. His father Seonghwa had always been a reserved man, but Wooyoung had magically endeared himself to him within weeks of their first meeting, and Wooyoung treated him with just the right amount of playful irreverence to melt the ice. San suspected that this was also because some fathers were born to be girl-dads, even if his dad had no way of knowing that Wooyoung wasn’t always a girl now. She called him dad just as naturally as she called San her brother, and treated them like how San thought she would have all this time, if she had been born and raised alongside him from the beginning.
Mostly, anyway. If that was how it happened, San was sure that a few things would be different. Like he wouldn’t sometimes wake up to Wooyoung, having sneaked into his room overnight, badgering him for a kiss on the mouth, or he wouldn’t sometimes be accosted in the kitchen with his pancakes, trying not to alert their dad that his sister was hiding under the counter, mouth stuffed full of her brother’s dick.
Or he would be able to get through a movie night uninterrupted. Though, granted, this time was his fault.
Wooyoung had picked out some action movie with flashy explosions and actors constantly shouting and cussing at each other onscreen. Halfway through, their dad resigned himself to bed, stuck with an early office meeting the next morning, which left San alone with his sister in the living room.
Wooyoung carried some kind of magnet that seemed specifically designed to pull San’s attention whenever he was in the room.
San thought about him plenty when they were apart too, but it was especially worse when they were together.
He thought it was some sensory thing. As a kid, he used to be unable to sleep without something in his arms, and clung to his dad’s leg in front of strangers and always had a stuffed animal within reach in his bed, in the car, on the couch. Some similar impulse seized him when Wooyoung was nearby.
It hadn’t taken long after their dad left for Wooyoung to crawl closer, tucking herself into his side so that her folded knees rested on his thigh, and then not much longer after that for San’s hand to wander under the blanket, up her bare legs.
Wooyoung was in the habit of wearing boxer shorts now. At first she started stealing his, until San, who turned bright red every time she flounced into his dad’s view wearing San’s shorts, finally drove her to the mall and ordered her to buy her own. San missed her panties and the way they’d cling to the shape of her pussy, perfect for him to bury his tongue into, but he liked even more how her eyes lit up when she tried on her new shorts in the mirror.
They were just as easy to get under, anyway. Wooyoung was wet by now, lax and easy to play with, and she was paying more to the movie than he was.
“Yunho wants to come over next week,” he said when the current sounds of explosions died down. “Can I borrow one of your fancy pillows while he’s here?”
Wooyoung smelled like his body wash. She was probably still using his stuff in the shower. San needed to take her shopping again—he liked smelling her, not himself.
“Uh, sure,” Wooyoung said distractedly. “He doesn’t drool, does he?”
”He’ll use my pillows,” San corrected her, frowning at the thought of someone else touching his sister’s pillow. “So I need an extra for me.”
“Oh, okay. Yeah, you can do whatever.” Wooyoung sighed as she slunk down a little lower in the cushions, the blanket slipping low enough to expose where the bottom of her shirt was riding up.
San worked away languidly at her pussy. He liked to make her cum, but sometimes it wasn’t even about that. He just liked to touch her. He liked to take care of her, feel her warm and dozy weight on him, relying on him. He liked being something she could lean on.
”Pull up your shirt,” he mumbled into her hair.
Wooyoung sighed. “Dad could walk out and see.”
San turned towards the hallway, hearing nothing. “So you better do it fast.”
“You’re so bad,” his sister said with an exaggerated sniffle. She shimmied her arms free of the blanket, then tugged down the neckline of her tank top.
Her tits spilled out. Her nipples were already stiff. San felt his cock twitch in interest, but this wasn’t really about him either. He leaned down, arm braced across her lower back, and gathered her closer a little so he could cup one tit and take the other into his mouth.
He liked sucking on his sister’s tits almost as much as he liked eating her out. He liked how Wooyoung pretended she didn’t care but how he could feel her breathing grow steadily unsteady, and the way he could get her heart to pound hard enough for him to feel right through her clothes.
San squeezed and played with her chest while her stupid movie prattled on. He wanted her bitten pink from his mouth, so that even when she pulled her shirt back down he’d still be able to see the flush spreading across her skin. But a few minutes later she started squirming restlessly, so San had to slip his hand back between her legs to give her something to squirm around.
”You know, I can’t believe Yunho’s actually real,” he heard her mumble.
Hm. “What’s that supposed to mean?” San pushed two fingers into her, rolling them languidly into her sweet spot.
Jeong Yunho was his age. He didn’t get out much either, so it was perfect when the roommate lottery matched them up. He happened to like a lot of the same food and the same games that San did, which meant that their schedules outside of classes eventually synced up. And yet despite being as much of a shut-in as him, Yunho was charming enough to ahjummas like the one at the cafe downstairs, who gave him plenty of extras for breakfast. Then Yunho would bring it back up to their room, wake San from his precious two hours of sleep, and they’d eat together with their matching sore eyes, slouched on opposite ends of their shitty sofa. He was probably the best friend San had ever had.
A small sound from Wooyoung brought him back to the present. San fingered her a little deeper, thinking. Was Wooyoung his best friend, or Yunho? No, Wooyoung didn’t count. A sister was different.
“I mean I’m proud of you for making an actual friend,” Wooyoung said. ”Is he cute?”
San frowned again, though he wasn’t sure which part of her reply he was frowning at. “He’s Yunho.”
”Uh huh,” Wooyoung sighed. She wound a hand into the back of his hair, scritching approvingly when San rubbed her sweet spot. “Mmh. We gotta stop before I soak the couch.”
“Come here then,” San grumbled.
”Fine.” With a rustle, Wooyoung was on top of him, grinding her clothed cunt on his lap. “So he is cute?” Her eyes glinted with mischief.
Why was she talking about his best friend while he was touching her? He thought of Yunho and what he would say if he knew Wooyoung was bringing him up like this. But that only led San to think of Yunho himself, and he realized distantly that he missed his old roommate already.
San felt his dick throb again. Probably because Wooyoung was now doing her best to fuck herself through their clothes.
“Are you really going to sulk about this? Don’t worry, you know you’ll always be the cutest to me, hyung.” Wooyoung pretended to coo at him like a baby, and San’s face grew hot.
“Shut up,” he said. He reached back into Wooyoung’s panties to make him cum.
“Don’t be jealous. I—” Wooyoung’s eyes widened as they suddenly heard a loud creak from the stairs. “Fuck.”
Their dad chose to come downstairs at that moment, groggily announcing himself somewhere from the kitchen. Wooyoung tensed instantly, ducking into San's shoulder to hide.
“Get off,” San hissed at his squirming. “Take the blanket.”
“I can't, your leg has a wet spot.”
“And whose fault is that, brat?”
Wooyoung started to move. Tense, San kept still so it wouldn’t look any more suspicious from their dad’s view. But a few seconds passed, and he realized that Wooyoung wasn't trying to leave at all. Instead he was grinding down in tinier circles, panting harder, shameless, into San's neck.
“Wooyoung, move,” San said through clenched teeth. “Dad’s going to see.”
He swore he felt his pussy clench at that.
“Don’t let your sister stay up too late, San,” their dad called out from the kitchen. San heard the sound of the medicine cabinet opening and closing, followed by his footsteps leaving the kitchen. “She’s getting bags under her eyes like you.”
“I know, dad. We’re just going to finish the movie,” he called back. “Go back to bed.”
“Uh huh.” Their dad yawned, and he heard the sound of the stairs creak. “Good night, then. Good night, Wooyoung.”
Wooyoung opened his mouth, but San saw from the dumb fog in his eyes that he was just going to moan loud enough for their dad to hear. San swiftly clamped a hand over his mouth and held him tight as he came around his fingers, arching in his lap. Only the smallest of whimpers eked through.
San worked his sister’s cunt through his orgasm until he heard their dad’s bedroom door shut again. At that point, Wooyoung was drooling a little into his hand, hips pushing greedily into his fingers even though they both knew by now that Wooyoung tended to make a squirting mess whenever pushed himself to oversensitivity too soon. San had a feeling that was really what he wanted.
“Pervert,” he accused him when it was safe.
“It runs in the family,” Wooyoung said lazily.
San turned and deposited her longways on the couch. She fell with a small bounce, steadied soon after when San shoved her shirt higher up and tugged the lip of her shorts aside. He saw a glimpse of her pink cunt, shining wet, and felt his dick throb again as he fisted it out of his sweats.
He pushed into her soaked underwear, rubbing his dick up the hood of her cunt until her eyes rolled back and he was sure she wasn’t thinking about their dad or his best friend or anything else that wasn’t him. He stroked his cock against her while he watched, mesmerized by the eroticism of her pudgy belly heaving with shallow breaths.
“You can’t cum inside,” she mewled, like she knew what he was thinking. She turned pretend-helpless eyes on him. “Do you really want to make your little sister pregnant?”
San spilled into her underwear with a bitten groan, squeezing the base of his dick and making sure to pump as much as he could into her slit before pressing his mess inside. Yes, if he knocked her up, he thought pettily, then he’d come first in her mind for at least the next nine months. After that, he’d have to reassess. It was possible that he’d need to knock her up again to make sure her mind didn’t keep wandering.
But admittedly he grew distracted too when he leaned down to kiss her. It was unfortunate that no matter how much of a pain in the ass she was, he held an incurable affection for her. His pretty, pretty sister—
Thoughts of the visit slipped his mind for now as their priorities turned to keeping the mess off the couch. Wooyoung blamed him, and San blamed her back, and he didn’t notice the movie had ended because he was too busy afterwards kissing his sister good night.
A week of domestic peace like this would pass. Then Yunho would come to visit.
— ☀️ —
Yunho had traveled for a few people before. There was the one elementary school friend who invited him to her family’s vacation house one winter, because she didn’t want to look friendless in front of her older siblings. There was the boy in his first year of high school who he had a massive crush on, who wanted to see a band perform two cities over but wasn’t allowed by his parents to go alone, so he asked Yunho to go with him. There was the senior year road trip he got roped into, just two weeks of hopping motel rooms with classmates he wasn’t really that close to. They’d taken him along for the same reason that everyone else gave: You’re so nice to everyone all the time. We knew you’d look after us.
It wasn’t hard to be nice to people. Yunho liked doing things for them, and he liked getting a smile out of someone, especially if they were doing the opposite of smiling before. He didn’t mind if he had to do something stupid once in a while. He knew people like his parents who took themselves a little too seriously, and who didn’t really have any friends to call or talk to or have over probably because of it.
He didn’t want to end up like that.
Being nice to people made them more likely to stick around. Not for forever—never for forever—but he already knew that, and he wasn’t asking for forever. Just some company, for the in-betweens. For when it was quiet enough that he could hear that long, droning hum under his life.
Anyway. He thought San would only stick around as long as their apartment lease, like the last roommate he thought he had been real friends with, so Yunho tried not to treat it like a big deal when they moved out.
You could come over in the summer if you’re ever around, San had said. Yunho could tell he wasn’t used to saying things like that; his shoulders had been tense, and he didn’t turn around from packing up his desk. I have more games at home. I’ll beat you at one of them.
Which was weird, because Yunho kept waiting for a hint to what San really wanted out of inviting him over, but San didn’t say anything else. Apparently that really was all he wanted to do.
Maybe that was why Yunho ended up driving two hours to see him after all, two bags packed in the back of his car for a week’s stay.
yeah feel free to stay as long as u need to, San said. my stepmom’s away but my dad and my sister r cool with it.
sounds good. thanks again san :) i’ll try not to stay too long. i don’t want to waste too much of your summer lol.
Yunho had told him that he needed to drive up to pick up his parents from a trip in a week, and since San’s house was on the way, Yunho could stay with him for a while, and then leave once his parents were ready. It was good to have escape routes for things like this.
i don’t think you’re a waste of anything. The typing symbol hovered on the screen for a while. i like being around you.
Yunho considered this message at a gas station, twenty minutes away. It was after sunset and the air had cooled enough to numb the tips of his fingers on the wheel.
He couldn’t decide how to reply to that, so in lieu of an answer, he got back in the car and finished the rest of the drive to San’s family’s house. And when he hopped out in San’s driveway and saw him walking out to meet him, Yunho felt a wave of relief for something as small as seeing his old roommate in that ratty gray hoodie he loved to wear all the time, and he realized that the answer had actually been simple, which was that he liked being around San too.
San held out a hand for his bags. “You got here faster than I thought.”
Yunho didn’t have much, only two duffel bags and a plastic bag full of snacks. “This is why I beat you at every racing game.” Grinning, he handed over the snack bag. “Hope this works as a housewarming gift.”
San blinked at the bag like Yunho had just offered him some alien artifact. “You didn’t have to bring anything,” San said.
Yunho shrugged. “I know. Just wanted to.”
He’d tried to hunt down as many snacks as he could remember seeing in San’s half of their old pantry. He made sure to throw two boxes of those chocolate-ringed biscuits that San liked so much specifically—and when San peered into the bag and his eyes lit up at the sight of them, Yunho decided that it was well worth the extra hour it had taken to find them that morning.
“Thanks,” San said, sounding shy.
“Mhmm.” Yunho hummed, cheeks dimpling with a smaller, knowing smile. He moved his other bags to one hand so he could nudge San in the side as they started walking. “I’m starving, though. You eaten dinner yet? I was thinking of ordering in if you’re up for it.”
“Uh, sure. Dad’s at work, so it’s just me and you and my sister. I gotta see if he— if she’s hungry too.”
They made their way up to the front door together, gravel crunching underfoot. The house was two stories tall and slouched towards the garage. He recognized San’s truck sitting inside the open garage, the driveway big enough to fit two other cars. It was surrounded by small flower bushes, a half-coiled garden hose visible from around the side of the house. A stray tennis ball nearby. A toolbox half sticking out of the garage. A stack of plastic outdoor chairs.
The house itself looked older and more worn than his own house. More like an actual family lived there and made use of it.
All of the upstairs windows were dark except for one on the farthest end. It was covered by a lace curtain, the ends slightly curled away to give him a glimpse of something moving inside. It looked like a person jumping around in the room, gesturing wildly, hair flying. San’s sister, he assumed.
“You coming?”
He tore his gaze away, realizing San was already standing at the front door. San turned towards the direction Yunho had been looking at, and Yunho was pretty sure he couldn’t see the windows from where he was standing, but his eyebrows briefly furrowed like he knew where Yunho had been looking.
“Sorry. I was just trying to remember if I forgot something,” Yunho said quickly, closing the distance in three broad steps.
San nodded and pushed the door open for him, and Yunho slipped past, their shoulders brushing as he went. He smelled a familiar detergent on him. It would’ve been nice to lean down and bury his nose into San’s hoodie and breathe it in, full.
But he liked San. He wasn’t going to fuck this up.
— ☀️ —
All San could think was that if Wooyoung could read his mind right then, she would probably never let him hear the end of it.
In his own defense, he’d never been close enough to anyone to invite them over before. When he was younger, before all the other kids fell into the social circles that would carry them all throughout school, he used to get invited for sleepovers—but sleeping at anyone else’s house was like a concept ripped out of a horror movie, so much so that he inevitably ended up on the phone with his dad, asking to be picked up. Eventually, he stopped getting invited, and that was that.
Watching Yunho step into the house, he started to feel a new anxiety that he’d never felt, even back when he was more gung-ho about making friends. Yunho was cool and funny and generally a nice guy. San was afraid that as soon as he stepped foot in the house, Yunho would finally see him for what he was, which was some alien freak wearing human skin.
But Yunho walked in, and he looked around, and he said, “Your family looks nice.” He was looking at the family picture by the door, the one his dad had them take a few weeks after the wedding. “You want anything specific for dinner?”
San was suddenly conscious about how his face didn’t look so good in that picture. In Wooyoung’s words, he looked like he was being filmed for a ransom video.
“I’ll eat whatever.” He paused, then admitted, “My sister might still need to eat too. I have to check.”
“Yeah, no problem. I was looking at places near you on the way here, you’ve got some good takeout spots.”
Yunho looked up his address before he came? Well, of course he had to, to get here, reasoned a voice in the back of his head.
“Wooyoung-ah,” he shouted up the stairs. “Did you have anything for dinner yet?”
He glanced back and saw Yunho slipping off his shoes. He looked good—dark hair tousled from the wind, denim jeans, light brown jacket, and a plain white t-shirt underneath that rode up a little when he took the jacket off next. San pretended not to see that flash of skin, forcing himself to turn back to the stairs and the fact that Wooyoung wasn’t answering.
“Wooyoung,” he repeated, louder.
He finally heard the faint, muffled sound of music. Typical.
“Guess it’s just us,” he told Yunho.
Twenty minutes later, San had him set up in the basement. It used to be his biological mother’s home office, though she had passed before San was anywhere near old enough to make any memories of her working there.
Before it was decided that Wooyoung and her mom would be selling their house and moving in with them, his dad had enlisted his help in transforming the entire basement. We could put a TV and some of your video games here. Maybe you two can bond.
His dad, meaning well, shelled out a bit to decorate the space. He bought a couple of giant stuffed animals to fill the empty corners despite San’s reminders that, she’s my age, dad, I don’t think she cares about that stuff anymore, and then loaded a small bookshelf with various thrillers and mysteries and romances and historical fictions because he didn’t want to presume what “girls their age” were interested in. With a beaten loveseat, a fluffy rug, and a mini fridge in the corner, it was a nice place to hide in when their parents were hosting people upstairs.
To their dad’s credit, it did give them a place to bond. The basement was where, for example, San found out that his new sister had been faking her incompetence in video games for months; she tested his patience, asking repeatedly to be shown “how to hold the controller right,” only to destroy him in Mortal Kombat when she finally grew bored. It was where she liked to wander in and join him for movies when his dad fell asleep in the living room and they didn’t want to wake him up. And it was where he kissed her for the first time, through her relentless teasing for being a lightweight, pressing her into the corner of the ratty pullout until her giggling died down and she started going pink, eyes darting between his eyes and his mouth uncertainly.
“This is cool, dude. Your parents let you have the whole basement?” Yunho said appreciatively, dropping his bag at the foot of the loveseat.
A few weeks ago, San thought about saying to him, Wooyoung had him pinned there, riding his mouth to a messy orgasm while San jerked himself off under her. He liked that memory because afterwards she let him be a big spoon for her. He also liked when she was on top, because when she got carried away, she had a habit of tugging on his hair.
None of this made it out of his mouth, of course.
“Actually, the whole thing was my dad’s idea,” he said as he put their drinks away in the mini fridge.
“You’ve got a cool dad, then. Some of our old houses had basements, but we never really did anything with them.”
He bit back a smile, knowing their dad would probably preen at being called cool. “Does that mean you moved around a lot?”
“Sort of. We’d stay around the same area but change houses, like, every other year.”
He tried to imagine if his dad had decided to move in with Wooyoung’s mother instead and what his room would have looked like, broken down into pieces small enough to fit into boxes. “That sounds like a lot of packing and unpacking,” he observed.
“Mm. At some point you just learn to stop having so much stuff, I guess. Stop putting too many roots down, you know?” Yunho sounded a little distant. San glanced over, but Yunho had already crept forward to look through the pile of games he kept under the TV.
The door buzzer rang then. San hopped up. “I’ll get it.” He paused on his way to the stairs. He didn’t know what possessed him, but he said, “You can put some roots down here if you want, Yunho-yah.”
He wasn't thinking about how it would sound. Was it too desperate? Too cringey? Wooyoung was always saying that he needed to stop thinking like that, so he clenched his jaw and didn't take it back.
To his surprise, Yunho laughed. It was one of those sounds that made San want to say something else just to hear it again. “All right," Yunho said, "at least for this week.”
San broke out into a small smile. “At least for this week.”
It turned out that Yunho had already paid on the app without telling him. San was flustered when the delivery man handed over three bulging bags of food, piping hot and smelling of freshly grilled meat. San fumbled his way through a tip and had all three bags precariously balanced in his arms when his sister finally decided to make an appearance.
“You ordered?”
Wooyoung was audibly excited. San heard her footsteps rapidly descend the staircase as he locked the door back up.
“Oh shit, it’s like you read my mind. I’m starving,” she moaned, flinging her arms around him from behind.
“Ow,” he grunted as her weight sent him an unsteady step forward. “Stop it, you’ll make me drop everything.”
“What’d you get?”
“I don’t know. Yunho ordered.”
“Who?”
“Yunho. I told you he was coming today, remember?” He managed to duck out from her hold, but then she managed to get a hold of his arm and clung on stubbornly. She was in nothing but black pajama shorts and a thin tank top, slipping low. Nothing she should have been wearing with company over. San huffed. “Maybe you would’ve heard us if you weren’t blasting your music at full volume. Again.”
“You’re such a crotchety old man sometimes. And a baby. An old man baby.”
He slapped her thigh, and she squealed. The bags rustled as he finally shook her off and headed for the kitchen to grab some cups, but of course she wasn’t far behind, rambling.
“I was on the phone with Mingi, okay? She’s going through a crisis right now, so I was trying to cheer her up with her favorite playlist because she’s been moping all day. I wasn’t ignoring you on purpose.”
“Whatever. What if I wasn’t home and some murderer came into the house and you didn’t hear them coming?”
She tilted her head. “Don’t you actually have to leave the house for that to happen?”
Why was she always making him out to be some kind of hermit? It wasn’t his fault that there was absolutely nothing worth going out for these days. “Well, since you’re so good at going out, go out and get your own food then,” San grumbled, turning away resolutely before she started pouting.
“Ugh. You’re so mean.” He heard her throw her hands up and stomp out of the kitchen.
With a sigh, he fished two glasses and a plate out of the cupboard. Once he got the food to Yunho, he’d split some of his own half and bring it to Wooyoung’s room before she started sulking for real.
But it turned out he didn’t have to.
He heard Yunho’s voice first. “Hey, San, do you have any extra— Oh, fuck—” Then a thump, followed by Wooyoung’s shout of surprise.
He hurried out to see both of them at the short landing where the top of the basement stairs met the stairs to the second floor, Wooyoung with both hands on her chest like she’d just been jumpscared and Yunho looking down at her, flustered.
San had never really thought about how tall Yunho was until then, seeing him standing next to his sister. Wooyoung had her back turned, but San could see that she needed to crane her neck up to look at Yunho, even more than she had to with him.
It was surreal to see them together. An unfamiliar knot tightened in his stomach.
He cleared his throat. “What happened?”
“He almost smacked me with the door!” Wooyoung answered first. She moved first too, creeping slowly to the bottom step and subtly raising herself closer to Yunho’s height.
Yunho’s gaze was following her every move. “I didn’t see you there,” he stammered. “Sorry. I was coming up to talk to your brother.”
Wooyoung looked between them, a frown slowly growing on her face. “Right. Then I guess I’ll let you do that.”
She turned and started going up the stairs. San sighed in exasperation, leaning over the railing to call after her, “I thought you were hungry.”
“Yeah. Which is why I’m going to get changed, so I can go out and find my own food, remember?” Even in the dark, San could hear the scowl in her voice.
“I was going to bring you a plate right after I brought this downstairs.”
“That’s not what you said!”
“Okay, fine, I didn’t mean what I said.” San turned his gaze gingerly to Yunho, who he saw was now looking up the stairwell, as if he could still see Wooyoung in the shadows. “I was going to give her some of mine, if that’s okay with you?”
That finally seemed to take Yunho out of his little reverie. “Uh. Yeah, ‘course I don’t mind, there’s more than enough for the three of us. She can eat with us if she wants…?”
San hesitated. He turned to the stairs. “Wooyoung-ah, do you want to eat with us?”
A pause. “I guess I can,” she answered, very casually. Then San heard her footsteps scurry across the second floor, much happier. “Okay. I’ll be down in a few minutes!”
San shook his head to himself. “She’ll come down eventually,” he said, turning back to Yunho, who was still staring at the stairs with a strange expression. “Did you say you came up here for something?”
Yunho blinked, finally turning to him. “Uh, yeah. Do you have an extra sheet for the pullout?” He shot San an apologetic smile. “I could’ve sworn I packed one, but I must have left it behind.”
San waved him off. “Don’t worry. We keep extras in the closet downstairs.”
Yunho was his guest. San might have been bad at dealing with people, but he knew how to be a decent host. He wanted Yunho to like it here, and for some reason he couldn’t explain, he also wanted Yunho to get along with Wooyoung.
San herded him back downstairs. Walking behind him, he couldn’t help but notice that the tips of his ears were flushed pink.
— ☀️ —
By the time Wooyoung finally came down to join them, they already had the food spread out on the coffee table and drinks poured for each of them. Yunho had been right, there was definitely more than enough to feed all three of them—San tried to protest, insisted on paying him back, but Yunho just chuckled and shook his head and said that it was the least he could contribute while he was taking up room in their basement.
San didn’t see it that way, but Yunho was surprisingly stubborn. And San had never really paid attention while they were roommates, but now he noticed the designer tag sticking out on the back of Yunho’s shirt and the shiny silver rings he wore on his right hand.
He vaguely remembered Yunho talking about his parents working in law, and wondered if Yunho was rich and he’d been too stupid to notice the signs. Like how Yunho always magically kept the pantry in stock, and how he would often drag San out to a restaurant for lunch and insist on taking up the bill “because it had been his idea,” and how even his casual sweaters always felt expensive whenever San was taking them out of the drier.
But Yunho never acted like there was any important difference between them. They shared the same bad habits, the kind that enabled each other, and was why San’s sleep schedule was still fucked beyond repair.
“So that’s your stepsister?”
“Yep.”
Yunho had taken one side of the loveseat, and San sat opposite him on the floor, waiting for Yunho to finish pouring their cups of soda. The sheets sat off to the side for later, but Yunho already had a blanket draped over his lap. The basement got cold fast.
“I thought she would be, like, five years old.”
“She and I were born in the same year, but I’m a few months older. So.” San shrugged. “She’s my little sister.” Or little brother, or whatever she was at any given moment. It didn’t matter much to San. He was still her older brother either way, and therefore responsible for things like making sure she wasn’t going out alone this late looking for food. Stuff like that didn’t have an age limit.
“Cute,” Yunho said.
San looked at him sharply.
“I mean it’s cute, both of you,” Yunho said quickly, thrusting his cup at him. “The way you seem close. I’ve mentioned my brother, right? He’s thirteen years older, so he wasn’t really around while I was growing up. It was weird. My parents talked about him all of the time, so I knew I had a brother, but it didn’t really feel like it.”
San accepted the glass, watching the bubbles fizz around the edges contemplatively. ”I know the feeling,” he admitted. “It was just me before my dad remarried. But that’s because I didn’t have any blood siblings.”
“So you were by yourself in the beginning.” Yunho leaned back, sipping at his own cup. “Do you ever feel like some people were meant to be an only child?”
What, born to grow up on their own? Maybe. But then the opposite had to be true, that some people were born to be surrounded by others. Like Wooyoung: Wooyoung was a kind of light that was meant to pass through other lives, not just stowed away in the dark. Even if San hated to share him with anyone else.
“I don’t think it matters what I think about that,” he said with a shrug. “Not like I can do anything about the way I’m born.”
Yunho looked curious, but they heard the basement door open before he could say anything else. A few seconds later Wooyoung appeared at the bottom, wearing a fresh jacket over her top and new pajama pants. San’s eyes narrowed. That jacket looked like one of his. It hung on her loosely, too big for her frame.
”Sorry, I had to tell my friend good night. Wow, that smells good.”
Wooyoung threw herself over the back of the loveseat, and Yunho sat up with a small noise just to hold his plate out of the way.
“Wooyoung-ah,” San scolded, but she had already rolled over fully, knocking over a pillow in the process.
“What?” She settled down, sweeping her hair back from her face. She’d cut it short and shaggy but it was growing longer again, wispy ends reaching past the bottom of her neck.
She bent over to pick up the fallen pillow, and San was treated to a glimpse of her tits as her shirt fell forward. He glowered.
Wooyoung turned to Yunho, holding up the pillow. “Is this what you’re sleeping with tonight?”
Yunho was getting that wide-eyed, somewhat stunned look in his eyes again, but he recovered much quicker this time. “Yeah?” He glanced at San questioningly.
“I thought you were going to let him borrow your pillows, San,” Wooyoung accused. “You know the couch ones are stiff as hell.”
“I am,” San said exasperatedly. “I was going to get them from my room when we set up the pullout later.”
“Oh, okay.” Wooyoung seemed to lose interest in the fight as soon as she saw the food. She slid from the couch to the floor and shimmied closer to the coffee table until her knees were budged against it, then reached for San’s plate.
“Young-ah,” San complained, fumbling to stop her in time. “That’s mine. Here, this one’s yours.”
“Oh my god, fine.”
Yunho swooped in to move their glasses out of the way during the exchange. This was exactly why San didn’t like being around more than one person at a time—there were so many moving parts.
“Mmm.” Wooyoung moaned as she took her first bite of meat, melting against the foot of the couch. “That’s so good. We might just keep you around, Yunho.”
A beat passed, and she popped open an eye to see them both silently staring at her.
Her chewing slowed. She raised an eyebrow at San first, glanced at Yunho, then San again. “What are you doing over there?” she finally said, jabbing her chopsticks at her brother. “Are we going to watch a movie or what?”
San hadn’t really made any plans for the night. He figured they’d eat, Yunho would get settled in, and they would eventually fall asleep. But Wooyoung had a better intuition for entertaining people, so he followed her lead and turned to the DVDs.
“San’s dad was a big actor back in the day, did he tell you?” Meanwhile, Wooyoung started chattering away to Yunho like she’d been involved in the conversation all this time. “He was cast in a huge movie, but he turned down the role ‘cause that’s around when San was born. They ended up recasting him, and that movie won, like, five awards when it came out later. Isn’t that fucked up?”
“Really?” he heard Yunho say faintly. “You never told me that, San.”
San felt the top of his cheeks heat up. He hunched a little closer to the DVD case, pretending he couldn’t hear.
“My brother’s like a clam, he doesn’t like showing off the interesting parts about him. That’s what I’m here for.” Wooyoung’s voice brightened. “To open him up for you!”
Yunho laughed. It was a different laugh than the one San had grown used to hearing from him, unrestrained, coming from his chest.
San picked a random thriller and shut the case a little harder than necessary. That didn’t deter his sister, who went right on talking as he loaded up the DVD player.
“Anyway, his dad still has crazy industry connections. If there’s a specific movie you like, I bet we have a copy of it, or some test footage from some sequel that never got made.”
“Huh. Okay. If you have any good horror ones, maybe we can check it out.”
“Probably just a few crappy ones that didn't get a theater release, do those count?”
“Sure. You know what they say—the crappier, the better.”
“I’ll be real with you, Yunho-ssi. That’s literally the first time I’ve ever heard someone say that.”
He turned to see Wooyoung playfully grinning at Yunho. Yunho liked horror? Since when? Wooyoung had somehow managed to unearth something new about Yunho in five minutes that San hadn’t found out in nearly a year of living together.
Wooyoung caught him staring and started patting the spot on the couch behind her excitedly. “Come on, sit. Which one did you pick?”
He flicked the light off on his way, dousing the basement in darkness with the TV as their only source of light. He patted Wooyoung’s head threateningly as he passed her. “Maybe you’ll find out if you pay attention.”
She rolled her eyes at him.
Yunho took up more room on the loveseat than Wooyoung usually did. San tried his best not to bump into him, but by then, Wooyoung had already claimed one of his legs to lean against, which rendered it impossible to move.
“Sorry,” he mumbled when his knee bumped into Yunho’s thigh for the third time.
He froze when Yunho reached out without warning, squeezing a broad, warm hand over his knee. “It’s fine, San-ie. Hurry up and start eating, the food’s going to get cold.”
The touch lasted only for a few seconds, and Yunho only flashed him a quick smile before his attention turned to the TV, but it was enough to make San blush. Blush. San was glad for the darkness. He thought that years of living with Wooyoung’s clinginess would have desensitized him to touch, but clearly he had overestimated himself.
“Oh, I love this one!” Wooyoung piped up when the title screen came on. “It’s been a while since we’ve seen it. I bet you’ll never guess the plot twist.”
“He’s going to be thinking about it now that you said that,” San said, frowning down at her.
“It’s a mystery, San, so you'd already know that there’s going to be a twist.”
San nudged her with his knee mindfully. “Manners.”
“Manners,” Wooyoung parroted, elbowing him back in the shin. San took it with a grunt.
In the corner of his eye, he caught Yunho smiling at them.
At least, San thought, it wouldn’t be an uneventful summer.