Jae-min reached the door still flushed, still half-laughing at himself for the kiss, the rabbit tucked under one arm, when it swung open before he'd even touched the handle.
Tae-hyun stood on the other side.
"Oh—" Jae-min blinked, caught off guard. "Hey."
"Hey." Tae-hyun's expression was easy at first, faintly amused at the stuffed rabbit, at whatever state Jae-min's face was clearly still in. "Didn't expect you back yet."
"Didn't expect you to be here at all." Jae-min glanced past him into the apartment, spotting Min-woo hovering somewhere near the kitchen looking distinctly like a man who'd been caught doing something, though Jae-min couldn't immediately place what. "You're still here?"
"Came to check on him this morning. Ended up staying longer than planned."
"Clearly."
Tae-hyun's easy smile held for another second—right up until his gaze drifted past Jae-min's shoulder, out toward the street, and landed on the black sedan still idling at the curb.
His whole expression shifted.
"...Is that hyung's car?"
Jae-min's stomach dropped. "Uh—"
Tae-hyun didn't wait for an answer. He shot Jae-min a look—sharp, searching, gone almost as fast as it appeared—and then he was already moving, jogging down the steps and across the small stretch of pavement toward the car before Jae-min could think of a single useful thing to say.
---
Jihan was still sitting there when Tae-hyun reached the window, one hand resting loosely against the wheel, the ghost of a smile still lingering on his face, entirely unaware he was about to have company.
Tae-hyun knocked hard against the glass.
Jihan startled, blinking out of whatever he'd been lost in, and rolled the window down with visible confusion.
"...Tae-hyun?"
"Get out. I'm coming in."
Jihan didn't argue. He unlocked the doors, and Tae-hyun climbed into the passenger seat, arms crossed, staring straight ahead through the windshield with an expression that made it very clear he had questions and intended to get through them methodically.
For a while, neither of them said anything. Jihan pulled away from the curb, the streetlights sliding past in slow, familiar rhythm, the silence stretching thin enough to feel deliberate on both sides.
It was Tae-hyun who broke first.
"Why were you with Jae-min?"
"Why were you at his apartment?" Jihan shot back, quicker than he probably meant to.
Tae-hyun's jaw tightened. "I asked first."
Jihan exhaled slowly, eyes fixed on the road. "We went to see a movie. Something we'd talked about a while back." A pause, too smooth, too rehearsed. "It's nothing."
"It's not nothing."
"Tae-hyun."
"I'm serious, hyung. I know what nothing looks like, and that—" he gestured vaguely back toward the apartment they'd just left "—was not nothing."
Jihan didn't answer right away, and the silence that followed felt heavier than the one before it, thick with things neither of them was quite ready to say out loud.
Then something shifted in Jihan's expression—a memory surfacing, slow and unwelcome.
"I sent someone to deliver a package to you this morning," he said. "The office assistant said you weren't home. Said you'd left before she even got there."
Tae-hyun went still.
"How long," Jihan asked, carefully, "were you at Min-woo's apartment?"
Tae-hyun opened his mouth—some easy deflection already halfway formed, *I told you, I was just checking on him*—but the words dried up somewhere in his throat when he caught the look Jihan was giving him. Not accusatory. Just knowing. The same look Tae-hyun himself had been aiming at Jihan not sixty seconds earlier.
He swallowed.
Neither of them said anything else for the rest of the drive.
The silence sat there instead, comfortable in its own strange way, both of them staring out at the passing streetlights with the exact same unspoken understanding settling quietly between them—that whatever question either of them had been about to ask, the other one already knew the shape of the answer.
---
Back at the apartment, Jae-min shut the door behind him, still holding the rabbit, and immediately turned on Min-woo with an expression that promised no escape.
"Okay. Explain."
"Explain what?"
"Tae-hyun. Here. All day, apparently."
"He came by to check on me." Min-woo busied himself with the dishes he definitely didn't need to be washing right that second. "I told you that already."
"You didn't tell me he'd still be here when I got back."
"I didn't know how long you'd be gone."
"Min-woo."
"Jae-min."
They stared each other down for a solid five seconds, neither one blinking first, until Min-woo finally cracked, throwing the dish towel down with a groan.
"Fine. He made me breakfast. We watched a movie. He stayed for lunch. It wasn't—it's not like that."
"You've said that about six times now, and every time you say it, it sounds less true."
"Because you keep asking!"
"Because you keep avoiding the question!"
Min-woo threw up his hands, clearly done, and turned the whole thing around with the practiced ease of someone who'd been waiting for exactly this opportunity. "Fine. You want to talk about avoiding things? How was your date?"
Jae-min blinked, caught off guard by the sudden pivot. "It was—good. Really good, actually."
"Yeah?" Min-woo's grin came back slowly, sharp and delighted. "Tell me everything."
And Jae-min, still riding the leftover warmth of the whole afternoon, did—the roller coaster, the haunted house, the ridiculous claw machine rabbit currently tucked under his arm, Jihan's face going pale and undignified on the first drop, the bench at the end of the night with the lights coming on across the park.
"—and then he said there's never really been a reason to do stuff like that, until now, and I didn't know what to say, so I just—" Jae-min's mouth kept moving before his brain caught up with what was about to come out of it. "I kissed him. On the cheek. And then I ran."
Silence.
Min-woo's whole face lit up like a firework had gone off behind his eyes. "You *what*—"
"Nothing. Forget it."
"No, absolutely not, you don't get to drop that and then—"
Both of their phones buzzed at the exact same moment.
They stopped mid-sentence, both glancing down automatically.
Min-woo reached for his first, and Jae-min's followed a half-second later, a small notification lighting up the screen—a name he hadn't seen in weeks, one he'd almost, almost let himself forget was still out there somewhere, still waiting.
Both of them went quiet at once, staring at their respective screens, the teasing energy of a moment ago draining out of the room entirely.
They looked up.
Their eyes met across the small kitchen, both faces gone carefully blank, the same question sitting silently between them.