"I really don't want to be in a TikTok," Sora said, but his insistence did little to convince Charlie. If anything, it just egged him on.
"I know you know the dance," Charlie said.
"Yeah, because I sent it to you. I thought we could do something for the stage—not a damn TikTok," Sora said. He'd be lying if he said he couldn't fall asleep without getting a few TikToks in, and the habit nearly slipped away entirely until Ray, half-asleep, became entirely too invested in Sora's dim phone screen the night before when Sora sent the dance over to Charlie.
And by Friday night, Charlie had watched it a dozen times over and had the choreography committed to memory. When Sora came into work that evening, Charlie had pawned off his phone to David under the impression that David would be their camera man.
"I've got a bar to run, dude," David said.
"The drinks can wait—I gotta see this," a customer said, waving David off and eliciting a laugh through the group of people he was with.
Charlie gave Sora a "you see?" look, and Sora gave him a dull stare that slid into a smirk when he caught the intrigue on the customers faces. He feigned disinterest, arms crossed and a grimace on his face until they egged him on with compliments and requests for a... TikTok dance.
He sighed, dramatically relenting, and gave them a bow. "Well, if you insist."
David recorded the several takes it took for their choreography to sync up. When it did, Charlie took the phone back, the customers got their drinks, and they all cheered and spread a round down the table full of vodka shots. Sora took one the moment Charlie sent the video off to the great wide web and let the alcohol sent a hot flush through his system.
Sora drank on the job plenty of times—read: most of the time—but that night, he got particularly wasted after a few fourth year students from a nearby university tipped him to film another video—this time with them and a dance they invented. After yet another successful video, he was three shots in and feeling it.
Working at a club had plenty of perks. On weekend nights, it felt more and more like a fucked up frat party, especially considering the number of college kids that came by. Drinking, talking, dancing, lap dances (people did that at frat parties, right?) and just like every frat party, there was an entry fee that sexy motherfuckers didn't have to pay (Sora and the other dancers). Unlike a frat, however, Sora was getting paid to party, and he considered that a bonus.
Later in the evening, though, when things mellowed out, Sora was back on the pole until two in the morning when he metaphorically clocked out for the night.
Sora's head felt heavy as he sat on the bus that early, early morning scrolling through videos and memes. His brain was still sloshing with alcohol, and continued to do so as he staggered off of the bus at his designated stop. As the bus continued on, he paused to look across the street to his apartment building, where the living room window was still lit.
A faint smile tugged on his tired lips. He frequently forgot that his new "normal" involved coming home to the company of his favorite person.
Weird, he thought as he crossed the street. I've never had a favorite person before.
It seemed like an off-handed thought, but the more he considered it, the more he realized how he looked forward to his interactions with Ray. He never really despised the thought of seeing Ray, even from the start. He had only ever avoided Ray when his work was a secret.
His legs ached as he climbed the steps of the building. He took a breather at the end of the hall, stretching his arms and legs out as he went. They were tight from the bus ride, and they would sink oh-so wonderfully into his mattress that night. Or perhaps Ray's mattress. He wasn't quite sure what the plan was, and he wouldn't know until he opened the door and heard Ray's bright voice chime, "Welcome home!"
"Hey," Sora said, smiling as he nudged his shoes off and kicked them to the side. He locked the door behind him as he wandered down the hallway and tossed his duffle in front of the laundry room door. "How's it going?"
Ray was perched at the kotatsu, a text book open, his guitar out, and a sheet of music paper beside it all. Ray lifted his pen up from the paper and said, "It's good. I was just working on something—but you can't take a look at it yet! I wanna finish it first 'cause you might not like how it is right now and—"
"Alright, chill," Sora laughed, blocking his view of the music sheet as he walked past. "I work again tomorrow night so you'll have the place to yourself."
"O-Okay," Ray said, scratching his head with the end of his pen. He pouted as he studied the page and continued thinking as Sora went to fetch clean clothes and a fresh towel from his room.
Sora emerged, scrolling through his phone, and as he passed on the way to the bathroom, he put Charlie's TikTok in front of Ray. "That video we saw yesterday. I sent it to Charlie and this is what happened."
Ray gasped, amazed. He clutched at Sora's phone and cried, "Whoa! Amazing! You guys are so talented—! Hey, where are you going?"
"To take a shower," Sora said, waving his clean clothes out. "I'll be right back."
Ray slumped over Sora's phone to watch the video again, and again, and again for all ten minutes of Sora's shower. It fascinated him how anyone could move that well.
It's better than the original, Ray thought as he investigated the likes and comments. It was nearing half a million views, and he thought to himself, Good! Sora deserves that level of recognition! He wished the whole world could see Sora move like that! And, in his curiosity, he wondered if Sora was in any other videos that Charlie posted. It sent him on a deep-dive through Charlie's TikTok, which primarily took place in the club. Considering they danced all the time anyway, Charlie's videos weren't really focused on that. They were borderline ASMR as he did his makeup for the night. There were some of his pole dancing practices, and one of his videos even had over a million views.
Sora came back to Ray still glued to his phone, watching Charlie's content. Sora laughed and said, "Dude, you know you can watch it on your own phone?"
"Yeah, but you gave your phone to me and I just didn't turn it off—I was too fascinated," Ray said, his hand all but chasing after it when Sora extracted his phone from Ray's clutches. Their eyes met and Ray opened his mouth to ask that they spend another night together.
"You wanna sleep in my room tonight?" Sora asked.
Ray floundered for a second. Heat flushed to his face. Sure, it was one thing to ask the same of Sora, but to have Sora ask him? It was too much for his heart to take. It defied every last spec of doubt he had in his head that told him that Sora was just entertaining him.
Ray put his hands to his cheeks and looked down at his textbook, smiling like an idiot. "I, um, yeah, that'd be nice," he said.
"Okay, cool," Sora said, "I'm pretty exhausted so I'm probably gonna pass out as soon as I hit the mattress. So..."
"Oh! Right, yeah, you're probably super tired from work! Let me just clean up my stuff—"
"Oh, no, take your time—"
"It's fine! Just gimme a sec," Ray said, shutting his textbook and stacking his papers. He ran to put Melvin 2.0 back and, once in his room, jumped into his pajamas for the night.
Sora was just opening his bedroom door when Ray skidded out of his room. Sora jumped, startled, and hurried through the door to avoid being flattened by Ray cruising in.
Ray flung himself at the bed and rolled towards the wall. He wiggled under the covers and waited, beaming with his face just barely tucked underneath the sheets. Sora could still see his rounded cheeks, though, where they gave away the smile. They huddled in together, the light from the window casting a bluish glow into the room where Ray huddled close to the edge of his pillow, and watched Sora sigh from exhaustion, half-groaning from the pain of his sore muscles.
"You okay?" Ray asked in a whisper.
"Yeah, I'm fine," Sora said. "Just thinking about tomorrow."
"It'll be fine," Ray promised. He reached a hand out to Sora's stomach, where Sora's hands were clasped together. He linked his fingers between Sora's as Sora's breathing leveled out and he fell into a dead-to-the-world sleep.
Ray made sure his alarm was set before closing his eyes and preparing for a temporary death. They woke up similarly to how they had the night before. Sora didn't move a damn muscle, which meant that their fingers were numb against his chest. Ray weaseled his free hand out from under the pillow to shut off his phone alarm. They had an hour before Alice and the others were due to arrive, which gave him a little time to hit the snooze button.
He put his numb hand a little further around Sora, nestling close so his cheek could rest on Sora's arm. Sora sighed in his sleep and turned towards him. Ray smiled until Sora kept turning—and turning—and turning until he flattened Ray beneath all of his compact muscle.
Ray grunted, trapped with Sora's head on his collarbone and his hair tickling Ray's chin. Sora's arm tightened in a vice-like grip around Ray's torso before settling with a deep breath. The warmth and weight of his body would have been suffocating if Ray wasn't so endeared by being inadvertently tackled like that.
He wrapped his arms around Sora's back and closed his eyes against the morning sunlight leaking in through the window. He sighed, content and comfortable in an otherwise unfamiliar room. He recognized the smell of Sora's shampoo after their previous night, and he recognized the tidiness that always seemed to follow after Sora. The clean, neutral furniture, the "Ikea aesthetic", and the fact that Sora didn't have a single piece of clothing out in the open.
The room smelled fresh. Ray took a deep breath and released it through a sigh as he rubbed a hand up and down Sora's back.
When it came time to get up, Ray shook Sora about until Sora roused enough to consider himself mostly awake. Sora sat for a moment, squinting, completely dead to the world as his brain booted up for the morning. Ray tipped his head against Sora's shoulder as the two of them sat on Sora's bed, soaking in the sunlight and preparing for a new day.
Ray kickstarted his morning with a shower while Sora made breakfast and coffee. He was back to singing in the shower and blasting music whilst doing so, and Sora found it laughable and, honestly, a little contagious. He felt heavy from work the previous day, but it didn't stop the bounce in his step, or the rock in his hips as he flipped French toast on the stovetop.
Ray burst out of the bathroom strutting to the beat, his phone still blasting the music. He hopped into the middle of the room singing and swinging his arms to and fro as Sora feigned indifference and delivered the food to the kitchen table.
"'Como tú me tientas cuando tú te mueves,'" Ray sang as he danced off to grab something from his room, and when he came back, Shakira's verse came up, so Sora casually sang, "'Te dicen por ahí que voy haciendo y deshaciendo—'"
Ray skidded straight off of the living room steps with a clatter. He yelped, swinging his arms wildly to catch his footing. Sora paused, eyes wide and his hand just then pulling his chair back.
Ray and Sora stared at each other from over the length of Shakira's verse. Ray's ears went red as he stammered, "You—!"
"What?" Sora said.
"You speak Spanish?!" Ray cried.
Sora squinted at him and gave an exasperated shrug. "Everyone learns Spanish in high school."
Ray scrambled over to the table, clutching the surface of it like his life and sanity depended on it. "Uh, yeah, and literally no one has an accent like that—"
"To be fair—I was just singing the lyrics–" he started, but Ray would have none of it.
"¿Por qué no me dijiste?" Ray cried, and Sora startled at the realization that shit, he actually had to comprehend that.
"I—! I'm not good at it!" Sora exclaimed, flushing with embarrassment. Sure, he could speak it, but that didn't mean he had the slightest idea what he was saying.
Ray relaxed a little, sighing with a laugh. "Oh, okay. Phew."
Sora squinted at him again and said, "Why, what've you and Xavier been saying in front of me?"
Ray turned bright red in the blink of an eye. "N-Nothing!" he screamed, voice cracking, and Sora snickered and said, "You told him about my dick, didn't you?"
"I'VE ONLY SEEN IT ONCE!" Ray shrieked. "A-And why did you act dumb when I talked about the tololoche?"
"I wasn't acting! I seriously don't know what a trololoche is—" Sora said, and Ray slammed his forehead onto the table, rattling the plates. "R-Ray!"
Breakfast consisted of Ray picking out his favorite songs and ordering that Sora sing them while Sora sighed and said, "I don't know that song," while Ray grumbled incredulously under his breath and went back on the hunt. Sora popped a slice of French toast into his mouth and thought to himself, I guess I'll have to do my research and learn all these songs...
He really screwed himself over with this one.
When their designated movie time approached, Ray set to work cleaning up the apartment, dragging pillows and blankets in, and arranging cushions against the stairs so they could pretend they had a couch. He shut the curtains over the living room windows, which darkened the white wall across from the stairs.
Leo, Huey, and Barry were the first to arrive. Ray ushered them in eagerly, beaming from ear-to-ear as they came equipped with junk food and soda. Shortly after them, Xavier and Alice arrived after having bumped into each other at the entrance.
"I... didn't realize this was a party," Alice said, her hands on the straps of her backpack.
"Oh, it's a party for the rest of them, but the three of us have work to do," Ray reassured, smiling apologetically as she and Xavier toed off their shoes. "Make yourselves at home!"
The living room was buzzing with energy where Huey and Barry were fighting over the blankets. Alice paused at the archway, just past the laundry room door where Sora stood guard, waiting for everyone to vacate the area. She glanced back at him with a faint look of confusion. He shrugged and gestured for her to join the fray.
Ray helped Alice with the projector. They stationed it at the kotatsu and, once there, it was just a matter of propping it up with books and hooking it into Ray's computer. They focused the screen until the image became "crystal clear" (it looked like shit, according to Leo) and distributed the snacks in preparation to begin the film.
Ray settled in next to Leo, who was busy with a bag of Cheetos. They all rotated bags through the film, sharing snacks, and shushing one another when the banter got too loud. Ray took notes while Sora sat there with his arms crossed, indifferent, even as Ray turned to him and whispered, "Shouldn't you be writing stuff down?" to which Alice replied, "I've only seen him take notes once in class."
"Yeah, and that was for Ray," Sora whispered back.
"I still have those," Ray confessed, tapping his pencil to his chin. "Haven't read them though..."
"For shame," Sora said before popping a Dorito into his mouth when Leo held the bag across Ray to the rest of them. Sora stretched an arm back over the pillows and quietly criticized Ray's handwriting through the remainder of the film as Ray grumbled and erased things, flushed from the proximity of Sora's arm to his shoulders.
They went through two films. After the first film, the whole crew left to take a breather outside and walked around the block so Ray, Sora, and Alice had a chance to digest the content and plan ahead for their essay. Ray enjoyed that time as he watched from afar as his friends all but adopted Xavier into their group. He supposed it helped that Xavier was on the track team, which was entirely why Huey and Barry ever found each other. It was a relief to see that his childhood best friend was doing just fine.
At the end of the afternoon, when the second film was complete, Alice snapped her notebook shut and interrupted this broadcast with fresh new tea. Ray was in the middle of opening the blinds when Alice said, "Now that all that's done, I have an interesting video to show you guys."
She extracted her laptop from her backpack and set it on the kotatsu. She swapped the HDMI cord from Ray's computer to her own, and Leo whispered, "Ooh, this has got to be juicy. I wonder if it has to do with Xavier punching that guy—" Xavier elbowed him in the rib when Alice looked at him, eyes wide.
She pointed at Xavier and said, "I'm intrigued, but tell me later."
She tapped open a file on her computer and from the freeze-frame, Sora's heart plummeted. Ray stilled at the window, frozen by the familiar sight of Sora in his work lingerie, but instead of Charlie, he was with a group of college kids at Bandaids.
"Fuck," Sora cursed under his breath as silence spread across the room. Alice hit play.
The video was bound to go viral—anything on TikTok had that possibility—but he underestimated how quickly it would spread. And, it seemed, he underestimated his work makeup was. It wasn't a complete disguise from humanity, or Alice, for that matter.
Leo straightened, startled, and cried, "Is—Is that—? Holy shit—" He clasped his hands over his mouth as Sora glared at him and every last one of those idiots staring at him.
"Listen..." Sora started with an exhausted sigh, like seeing the video drained several years off of his life, "I can explain."
a/n: THE END! Just in time for the Watty Awards :)
Sora and Ray's lives will never be calm 🙈 I hope you enjoyed reading!