love you to the stars and back - Hongbae oneshot book

Rain Whispers and Summer Thunders

Living in that house had been suffocating.

He has been on his own for a couple years now and he feels like he can finally breathe. But sometimes there is too much air. Too much space. Too much...nothing. And that's when it hits Hoyoung that he is, indeed, very alone in his apartment that isn't even meant for more than one person but feels like it should be anyways.

The drumming noises of the rain begin to drown his mind. Hoyoung leans away from the window, slowly shaking his head. Blood rushes to the place where his forehead was pressing against the glass but the numb sensation in his brain refuses to go away.

He feels detached from the world. Isolated.

A feeling he believes that it belongs into a time way in the past, years and years away, starts creeping up his chest.

His body moves before he can think about it. It has become a reflex. A habit. And not necessarily a good one since he used to loathe this way of communication, but since that one time he crashed Minchan's apartment after a nightmare, the thought is a lot less anxiety-inducing as it has been before. It has come to a point where he doesn't even question his actions until he has unplugged his phone from the charger and tapped onto the first contact on the list.

Underneath the simple telephone icon, three dots appear and vanish, one after the other. Then the pattern repeats itself.

Once.

Twice.

This could be a bad idea. He has two assignments due and some sleep to catch up on...

But then the dots disappear and stay gone, are replaced by a familiar name and Hoyoung decides that he can't get himself to care.

"Chan," he breathes into the phone as soon as he hears excessively busy rustling of papers on the other side. "Chan, let's go somewhere."

There's static noise for a second, two, three, five.

Then, "Uhm— I'm kinda busy?" Minchan is a horrible liar. Has always been.

"You're not busy, you're avoiding being busy by scrolling through Insta for the past hour. Don't even try to fool me."

Minchan scoffs. "You dare making such unreasonable assumptions about my exemplary phone usage—"

"When was the last time you touched one of your textbooks that wasn't just for show?"

The silence gives him the answer he needs. He bites back a chuckle.

"So I was right?"

"So what if you were?"

"I was right."

"How about you shut up...?", Minchan whines. (The way it sounds less than a threat and more like a friendly suggestion tugs at the corners of Hoyoung's lips.)

They keep on bantering for a bit more, back and forth between their ever-growing piles of work and comparing coping mechanisms like being stressed and sleep deprived is some kind of grand achievement. But there is no heat to any of their words. There never is. It's nice. And it's safe. Hoyoung allows himself to smile when Minchan wails in capitulation and still smiles at the small giggle that follows.

His laughter drowns out everything else and Hoyoung is comfortable listening to it for a bit longer than he needs to.

"Suggest a better way to waste my time then?"

The sky growls.

Hoyoung flinches, struck by the lightning of Minchan's words. Louder than ever before, the rain is hammering at his window, grabbing him on the sleeve and pulling him back to reality. Assignment instructions and opened websites glow dimly on his screen, and if the computer had a face, it would frown at him for neglecting his work for meaningless chitchat. He shouldn't be doing this. What on Earth was he thinking? He has so much stuff to do, plus a body to keep warm and dry. Going out in this weather goes against everything he stands for. Against everything he would do if he was in his right mind. He flops back into his chair and before he knows it, he's spinning the pen in his hand again.