just a touch of your love is enough

Here's the fucked up thing about finals week: it's a week-long.

Hyungwon can think of a million and one things that are better than spending the last two weeks of the semester with his nose in a book and a headache that can crack open a person's skull. He should know, the headache he's sporting now as he reviews notes he has no recollection of learning about for an exam he'll probably fail can and will probably split his head into two halves of the same overworked whole.

The headache makes Hyungwon slump forward on his notebook-littered desk with a loud thump! that rattles his teeth and his second—or fourth, he lost track—cup of coffee that's been sitting near his pile of textbooks for he doesn't know how long. It's cold, Hyungwon can tell that much. Is it drinkable? Most likely. Will Hyungwon drink it? Yeah, he will, because he needs to stay awake for at least another hour before he sleeps, but this fucking headache is making it hard to stay conscious. And alive, it seems. His head feels as if a jackhammer's pounding at his temples with the sharpest end-point known to man, the intense throb crawling from the front of his head to the back like Death himself is personally wielding the jackhammer makes Hyungwon think ending it all here—surrounded by highlighters and cold coffee and a mortgage's worth amount of college textbooks to his name—might kinda be worth it.

Dropping out of college a week before the semester ends is also an option. At least then Hyungwon won't have to endure another six months of this bullshit, but the reminder of disappointing his mom if he drops everything and becomes a stripper like how Minhyuk suggested ("You have an hourglass body and a pretty face. You were made for the pole.") strikes Hyungwon with enough energy to pick his head up from his desk and refocus his blurry vision onto the mass of words scribbled in his notebook.

Which notebook? He has no clue. Hopefully, it's the one with diagrams he needs to remember for his first exam of the week in—Hyungwon glances at his bedside table and represses the urge to slam his head back into the desk—eight hours.

A loud, elongated groan breaks through the stuffy air of his room and Hyungwon knows it's from him because by the time the sound finally dies down, his throat is raw and he sounds like a forty-year-old smoker. His headache hasn't subsided, if anything, after his failed attempt at a whale's mating call, it's only doubled in annoyance and pain, so Hyungwon thinks not moving a single muscle for the next few minutes or so would do him some good. He'll get back to studying in five minutes. Yeah, that sounds great.

Sadly, like how this entire night is treating him, it's barely five seconds into his fleeting peace before another annoyance barges into his room like someone lit a fire under his ass.

"Holy shit, what was that noise? Are you okay? Bro, did you hear that? It sounded like a dying walrus! Y'know, like the one we saw on that nature documentary? That one!" Jooheon says all in one breath as if the art of talking and breathing is foot-racing to the finish line of his sentence. He stands in Hyungwon's doorway looking a little frazzled, but maybe that's because his hairband—the one with the little bear ears—sits crookedly on his barely kept hair. His green face mask is also smeared in a heavy streak across his left cheek to the middle of his forehead and something in Hyungwon happily thunders in his chest because Jooheon never messes up his skincare routine for anyone. Not even for his own boyfriend. Never.

But here he is with wild eyes the size of saucers, the hand that slammed into Hyungwon's door smudging the wood with green tea paste, and his bear headband slowly sliding up his forehead, making his hair resemble a potted plot. Specifically a blond cactus. He's also only in his red polka dot boxers and that elicits the first crack of a smile from Hyungwon since...well, he doesn't know when. Probably before he started studying (read: fucking dying).