Chapter Text
“I just can’t right now. Doyoung is on the verge of a break-up, making noise about moving away and –
“And what?”
“They need me.”
“I need you.”
“For what? To fix up like another room in your house?”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means…this isn’t working. Not for me. Not any more.”
~~~~~~
“Your friends are nice.” Ten helped toss red cups into the trash bag Johnny was holding. It was weirdly nostalgic. He hadn’t messed with disposable cups in years. He supposed it matched with the rest of Johnny’s apartment and the party. A little bit ratty but fun. It reminded him of the frat houses he’d gone to before he knew better. He wasn’t exactly sad to have a hotel room to go back to once he got what he came for.
“Sometimes,” Johnny laughed, sounding awfully fond as he cleaned up their mess. “Degenerates, all of them.”
Ten picked up a stack of cups and held them out between his finger tips. He hadn’t thought he’d end up cleaning when he texted Johnny that he was in town for the week, but he supposed this was what he needed to do before he could get Johnny alone. Yangyang was going to have a field day when he told him that he had spent his first night in San Francisco vaping and playing arm candy to a DJ who was going big in his living room. He had to wonder if he was going to end up sucking dick on the sagging leather couch before the night was over. Johnny’s dick was nice enough that he was willing to consider it, but he hoped that Johnny had a big boy bed behind locked door #2.
“I liked the kid we smoked with. He seemed sweet.”
“Jungwoo?” Johnny poured out the remnants of some concoction into the kitchen sink. “Yeah, he’s the baby of the group.”
“I thought you said Mark was the youngest.”
“You were paying attention.” Johnny sounded impressed.
Ten gave him a look. He would have paid attention anyway but it was hard not to when Johnny talked about his friends like they were family. He was always all up in their business even when he was out of town, texting even that first morning two months ago when Ten had woken up in a room at the Mandalay Bay with DJ Johnny Be. He had come out of the shower, fully intending to drop his towel and sit on Johnny’s lap, but Johnny was on his phone, busy catching up with “the boys.” Ten still wasn’t sure if he found the dedication endearing or annoying, or a little of both. He still wasn’t sure he really wanted it to be any of his business.
“Mark is the youngest. But Jungwoo is the newest.” Johnny tied up the trash bag and stuck it in the corner of the kitchen like it was tomorrow’s problem. “Doyoung brought him around, what, three months ago? Fresh off the farm. Or out of the valley. Something like that.”
“Mmm, he does have that new kid in the big city energy.” Ten remembered how thrilled Jungwoo had been when they had breathed smoke into his mouth. Jungwoo reminded him a little bit like the Vegas first timers, dazzled and not very good at handling their liquor, but charming somehow in their unfettered enthusiasm for the lights and bling. He watched Johnny run a sponge over the counter and asked, “Are you helping to break him in?”
Johnny snorted and tossed the sponge in the sink. “Only a little.”
Johnny stepped closer and tried to put his hand on Ten’s waist. Ten pointed at the dish towel. He was wearing silk and he didn’t need someone else’s leftover Maker’s Mark staining his shirt. Johnny almost obeyed, making a show of wiping his hands on his pants until they were dry. Ten rolled his eyes. If Johnny wanted to ruin his pants that was on him.
“And not in the ways you think.” Johnny resumed coming closer, reaching for him with a tired smile.
“You don’t owe me an explanation.” Ten arched an eyebrow and let his waist be touched. He had been thinking but maybe Johnny hadn’t been full of shit when he said he hadn’t been with a man in awhile.
“I don’t,” Johnny agreed, backing Ten onto the counter they had just cleaned. “But I wanted to give one anyway.”
Ten didn’t want to like that answer, but he did. Enough to let Johnny bend down and kiss him for the first time that night without an audience, without a backdrop of noise and drink and smoke. Johnny was hot when he was working, even in a cramped and crowded living room instead of the clubs where Ten had noticed him first. He was hot when his hands were on the decks but he was hotter when they were all alone and his hands were reaching for Ten.
There were big hands on his waist and then his ass was on the counter and Johnny was reminding him why he had bothered to text when he got on the plane from McCarran to SFO, kissing him as nicely as he had the last time they fucked in Johnny’s hotel room in Vegas. Johnny had been a little rusty when it came to what to do with his mouth between Ten’s legs, but he had known how to kiss, how to put his palm on the back of Ten’s neck and move him where Johnny wanted him to go. Ten didn’t like to be told what to do or who to be, but he was never above a little well-timed manhandling.
Johnny smiled into the kiss like he knew what Ten was thinking, which was ridiculous, because if he did, he would have known that Ten was still cringing at the toothpaste flecked bathroom mirror and fretting over the potential state of Johnny’s bedroom. When he told Yangyang about it all, he would blame it all on Mark, Ten decided — Mark, who wasn’t yet totally old enough to know better.
Johnny petted the back of his neck and moaned against Ten’s mouth when Ten bit Johnny’s lip.
“Let’s go to bed?” Johnny asked, using his free hand to wrap Ten’s legs around his hips.
Ten tangled his fingers in Johnny’s overly-long hair and pulled until Johnny picked him and started moving. There were some questions that didn’t need to be answered. Ten had come all the way across town in silk and satin and then spent the night putting straws between Johnny’s lips instead of his cock. He had danced and laughed and tossed out Solo cups when he could have been lounging in his hotel room drinking the expensive red wine they sold at the lobby bar.
Johnny laughed, kicking aside a cup that both of them had missed, plastic skittering on the linoleum of the kitchen floor. Ten licked Johnny’s throat and hoped that the dick would still be worth it. Johnny backed him into a bedroom door that had remained closed – the den of the Lord of the Party was apparently verboten, even when Johnny let his friends have everything else – and kissed him. Ten put one hand behind him, circling his fingers around the doorknob to the sacred space and turned. The door opened for him and then closed again behind Johnny, the room pitch dark but for the glow of a computer in the corner and the light of the city seeping through the gaps in the blinds.
It smelled like cologne and cheap floor cleaner, lemon-sharp and slightly bitter. The warm curve of Johnny’s neck smelled better, cologne and sweat and just a hint of Ten’s perfume. Johnny carried him across a space that was blessed free of plastic cups and sticky surfaces and whispered filthy-sweet things into his ear.
The mattress that caught him as he tumbled out of Johnny’s arms was too small – a queen at best, a double at worst – but Johnny was perfect above him. Ten remembered this, the feeling of being covered, of being coveted. Johnny had whispered to him the first night they fucked that he hadn’t been with a man in years, that he was sorry in advance if he wasn’t any good, but he would try his best to make it good. Ten had considered walking away, wary of being any man’s little walk on the wild side, but Johnny had looked so earnest in his desire to touch him that Ten had told him to go ahead and give it his best shot.
Staring at the ceiling afterwards, loose-limbed and wrung out, Ten had wondered what he was supposed to do with the idea that he may have just had Johnny at his “out of practice” worst. Johnny put an arm around him and asked him to stay, so Ten did and in the morning, Johnny looked at him with stars in his eyes when Ten came up from under the covers, licking his lips and swallowing Johnny’s load. Johnny had brushed the hair from his forehead and said:
“If we were at mine, I’d make you breakfast in bed.”
Ten’s heart had beat double-time, harder and faster than it had even when Johnny had leaned down from the DJ booth and winked at him.
“We’ll see about that,” Ten had murmured, kissing Johnny with the taste of Johnny’s come still on his tongue to know just how much Johnny could stomach when it came to fucking a man.
Johnny sucked on his tongue just like he had sucked on Ten’s bottom lip and said, “Try me.”
Now, Johnny was kissing Ten at his and Ten had come all this way to know if Johnny Suh would make good.
The sixth time Johnny fucked him was the first time in Johnny’s bed and it was even better than the last. In the morning, Ten woke up with a back that ached from a mattress that was too old and soft. Johnny’s side of a too small bed was empty, but the apartment smelled like bacon and eggs, and maybe even waffles. It had been almost a decade since he had last used his finger to brush his teeth, but Ten squeezed out toothpaste that he assumed was Johnny’s and made his breath fresh enough to give the kiss Johnny had earned. He walked out of a bathroom that needed a clean in nothing but his silk shirt, hoping that Johnny’s cute roommate and stayed out wherever he had gone the night before.
Johnny fed him perfectly scrambled eggs before fucking him over the kitchen table, sucking on his ear lobe and asking Ten how long he was going to be in town.
“A week,” Ten said, wondering if Johnny even cared that the table was probably cutting new scratches and grooves into his shitty linoleum floor with each thrust. “I’ll give you a card to my hotel.” Ten looked over his shoulder and let Johnny kiss him on the mouth, biting into Ten’s little smirk. “I’ve got a king sized bed and a tub that might even be big enough for two.”
~~
It wasn’t as cold outside as he had expected, even if his sweaty skin still prickled from the sudden shock of fresh air. He should have brought a coat, but his coat was currently draped over the back of a booth at the back of a bar that Johnny had referred to as “kind of our booth,” and he didn’t feel like wading his way through the sea of dancers and drinkers for five minutes of quiet time on the street. It was ironic. He practically lived in clubs for a living, but he hadn’t been half-drunk and sweaty from dancing with strangers in a long time.
Johnny Suh had him doing all sorts of things. Grinding on a dance floor because he liked Johnny’s hands on his hips. Standing on a street corner and getting a little bit high because he didn’t want to like it as much as he did. Ten took a hit, exhaled and thought it was good that he was going home tomorrow, even if California had better weed. He missed his cats and the quiet of his house and his bed. Even Yangyang. He’d spent so much time over the last two weekends with Johnny’s crew that he longed for his own, for the people who knew him best, even if they were going to laugh at him for how he had spent the afterhours of his business trip.
Ten exhaled and looked up from his phone. Someone else was loitering in his alley disrupting his quiet time, even though so far all he had heard was their footsteps crunching on the busted pavement behind the bar. He abandoned the group chat to find the handsome guy he vaguely remembered from Johnny’s house party lingering on the periphery, as if uncertain of his welcome. The one who stared a lot and said little. Ten pushed through the haze of his thoughts for the names that tripped off Johnny’s lips so often. Mark, Doyoung, Jae–
“Jaehyun,” Ten said. The guy looked up so he knew he had gotten it right. He looked a little bit lost, like he wasn’t totally sure what he was doing outside. Ten held out his vape pen to give him an excuse. “Want some?”
Jaehyun shrugged but stretched out his palm. “Cool, thanks, man.”
“Ten, please.” Ten laughed and passed it over, watching as Jaehyun took a deep hit. “No need for bro talk with me.”
Jaehyun blew out long and slow. He had a nice mouth. All of Johnny’s friends were attractive. He amused himself with the idea of ranking them all for Yangyang and Kun. Jaehyun, he thought, would probably rank near the top, even if he had yet to match the looks with a personality.
“Thanks, Ten.” Jaehyun put his nice mouth near the tip of the pen. “Okay if I hit this again?”
“Have at it,” Ten said, mellow and buzzed enough to not really want any more. He wanted to be pleasantly soft around the edges when he went home with Johnny for his last night in SF, not so stoned he couldn’t feel it when Johnny sucked him off. He couldn’t wait to ditch the bar and go to bed. He couldn’t wait for Johnny to want to do that, too.
Jaehyun took him at his word, scuffing his shoe over the loose gravel as he closed his eyes and availed himself of the remainder of Ten’s good weed. Ten tried to remember what Johnny had told him about Jaehyun. He had a big boy job, Ten knew that much. A big boy job and a place somewhere else in the city. He had a vague recollection of Jaehyun watching him as he had blown smoke into the New Kid’s mouth.
“Where’s your friend?” Ten asked, moving his fingers through the smoke that spilled out of Jaehyun’s mouth and into the night. Jaehyun arched an eyebrow. “The pretty one who doesn’t know how to smoke?” Ten clarified, laughing a little as the high started to seep beneath his skin. “The baby of you lot.”
“Jungwoo?”
“Mmm, that one.”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Jaehyun said, which Ten found ridiculous since he couldn’t possibly know better, but he was still lucid enough to pick up on what Jaehyun was throwing down, the pout and the petulance. “Not here.”
“Obviously.” Ten felt like kind of a dick for being amused, but the downward curl of Jaehyun’s lips and the sourness of his voice helped him color in some of the lines of Johnny’s found family picture, to shade in the blank space that had been Jaehyun. “So,” Ten drawled, deciding to show some self-serving interest, “how do you know Johnny?”
“Through Doyoung.” Jaehyun fiddled with Ten’s vape pen. Ten had heard more about Doyoung than he had seen him, but he knew that Doyoung also had a day job. “I lived with Doyoung for a couple of years when I first moved here. And you can’t know Doyoung without also knowing Johnny.” Jaehyun took another hit, breathing out smoke alongside faint praise. “Johnny’s great. Really.”
Jaehyun would make a shitty salesman, Ten thought, if not for that face. Johnny needed to be grateful that he had someone like Mark to sing his praises, to do the hard work of trying to sell the potential love interest on Johnny’s many merits. Great wasn’t really going to cut it. Ten wanted to know who Johnny was when he wasn’t on the clock, who he was beyond a really good lay with a really nice cock who cooked a decent breakfast. Mark, at least, had pulled him aside and told him that Johnny was sweet and loyal and a stand-up guy – even if Mark hadn’t really known that Johnny was that into guys, but it was totally cool, of course, he just wanted Johnny to be, like, happy, for Johnny to find the right person to stick around.
Ten had been turning that over in his mind for the last two days. The right person. And sticking around. Who had been wrong? Why hadn’t other people stuck? Did Johnny have a Teflon side he had yet to discover? Did he want to?
Mark, at least, had given him things to consider. Jaehyun’s great wasn’t even worth the weed Ten was letting him smoke.
“Good to know,” Ten said, taking the pen back when Jaehyun held out his hand, his eyes already reddened and a little glassy.
He joined Jaehyun in his listless lean against the wall for lack of anything better to do. They were quiet for a few minutes, Jaehyun was either one of those people who was OK with silence or someone who didn’t have much to say. Or both. Ten let the silence linger, too buzzed and too disinterested to have the energy to feel awkward. A bus pulled up on the road outside of the club, the door screeching open and breaking the moment.
“He’s certainly fond of all of you,” Ten murmured, pulling a thought out of the miasma of Johnny Suh that had followed him around all week.
“Yeah,” Jaehyun said slowly, like he was squeezing words out of stone as he drifted southward. “He’s good to us. Like a brother.” Ten put a hand on Jaehyun’s elbow, trying to prop him up, to stop his lazy slide down the wall. “Not that I would know,” Jaehyun laughed, still sliding, taking Ten with him. Jaehyun put his hand on Ten’s knee and looked him dead in the eyes. “I’m an only child.”
Ten laughed because he was high and because he was suddenly crouching above a busted back alley road with one of his fling’s best friends. He practically could hear Yangyang’s laughing at him. He could really hear Johnny’s voice.
“What are you two doing out here?”
Ah. Johnny was outside. Johnny had come to collect him, at last. Ten looked up and broke into a new round of giggles. Johnny held out his hand. Ten took it and let himself be pulled to his feet, abandoning Jaehyun to his fate of falling on his ass, which only made him laugh harder. Jaehyun just stared blankly into the void, rubbing absently at the top part of his butt.
“God, I love California,” Ten said, swaying into Johnny’s nice, big chest.
“No, you don’t.” Johnny put his arm around Ten’s waist and held him tight. Johnny’s smile was small but sweet as he nuzzled Ten’s cold cheek with his warm nose. “You’ve told me that every other day this week.”
Ten hadn’t really seen him smile at anyone else like that. His friends got his big grin. His audiences got the you want to fuck me leer. Ten got this little thing, the close-lipped curl that felt like a shared secret. Ten caressed his chest because it really was nice to touch. He told him so.
“Thanks.” Johnny laughed and kissed the top of his ear. “Wanna come back inside and dance with me?”
“You think you can keep up?” Ten stood on his tiptoes and thought about sucking on the underside of Johnny’s jaw, marking him up so he’d be off the market for at least a few days after Ten went back home to his cats and his great big bed.
“I feel like I might have a chance right now.” Johnny’s throat rumbled with laughter beneath the press of Ten’s lips. “So, what do you say?”
“What about him?” Ten waved a hand behind him in what he thought was the general direction of where he had left Jaehyun in a sprawl on the ground.
Johnny rested his chin on top of Ten’s head, looking down at his friend, who was now looking at his phone, staring at it like it had answers or like he had forgotten his passcode. “Jaehyun, you good?”
“Just thinking,” Jaehyun murmured, phone clattering to the ground as Jaehyun stretched out his legs and closed his eyes.
Ten doubted Jaehyun was having anything close to thoughts, but Johnny seemed convinced, content to leave his friend stoned off his ass in the alley, likely contemplating the whereabouts of the New Kid.
“Is he really going to be alright?” Ten asked as Johnny walked him back towards the bar.
“He’ll be fine. I’ll make sure he gets home later.” Johnny put his hand on the back of Ten’s neck and pulled him in for a kiss. “I wanna pay attention to you right now.”
“Why don’t you make sure he gets home now and pay attention to me for the rest of the night?” Ten asked, kissing Johnny between every other word. “I leave tomorrow, so let’s leave the kids behind, hmm?” Johnny hesitated. Ten was just sober enough to catch it. “What? You don’t want to go?”
“I do,” Johnny said, his hand slipping beneath the back of Ten’s shirt, his palm nice and sticky warm on Ten’s outdoor chilled skin. “I’m just usually the last to leave, not the first.”
“Party animal,” Ten scoffed, remembering how Johnny had let Mark and all of his little friends disappear once the music stopped, leaving Johnny to pick up their mess. “Pack leader.”
Ten put his thigh between Johnny’s legs and leaned up as far as he could reach to make his case, even if he couldn’t quite believe he wasn’t persuasive enough all on his own, wearing one of Johnny’s button ups with nothing at all underneath. He’d plucked it from his hotel room floor that morning and kept it because he wanted to see if Johnny would let him have it, if he would go home in nothing but a sleeveless shirt and a Northface jacket. He’d hoped that Johnny would come over and fuck him in it, but Johnny had insisted they go out, so he’d put it on and let it swim on his frame, pairing it with the tightest jeans he owned and leaving the top three buttons undone. When Ten walked into the bar, still a little annoyed to be drinking with the boys, Johnny had looked at him like he regretted his choices and Ten decided it was fine to lose a battle if it meant he won the war.
“Leave first,” Ten said, “and I’ll let you fuck me up against my hotel room window.”
“Jesus.” Johnny’s hands dropped down to his ass, one palm kneading. Johnny looked at him with that same small, sweet smile. “Will you keep the shirt on?”
Ten stepped out of his arms and smiled back. “Call the cab and let’s find out.”
The window was cold against his back, but not as cold as it could have been had he taken off the shirt. Johnny’s hands were warm beneath his ass, holding him in place, but he knew that Johnny was feeling the warmest, his cock so far inside of him that Ten could feel his rim stretching against the base of Johnny’s dick. Ten put his fingers in Johnny’s hair and kissed him, feeling like he was suspended in time and place, still just high enough for his toes to curl every time Johnny moved his hips in tight, little circles.
“I asked you like three times if we could do this when we first hooked up,” Johnny murmured, his voice strained. Ten clenched around him just because he could, just because he had such a nice view of Johnny’s face when he was this close, when the city lights were casting shadows on his cheeks. “How come I’m getting lucky tonight?”
Ten could hear the churn of San Francisco beyond the glass, the hum of traffic, the occasional raised voice of someone who was out of their mind on liquor or possibly just out of their mind. It was familiar, in all the ways that big cities were. Johnny had asked him three times. The first time was the second time Ten fucked him, the night after he’d taken what Johnny referred to as his re-virginity. Johnny had pinned him up against the window of his room on the 33rd floor of the Mandalay Bay and asked if Ten liked to be picked up.
Ten did like to be picked up. He liked men like Johnny because they could pick him and press him against walls and fuck him like he was weightless. What he didn’t like was the idea of leaving his hand prints and the shape of his ass all over the window of one his places of work, no matter how many floors up he was from the club, from his little office in the basement.
“Because that’s what tourists do when they’re in Vegas,” Ten said, arms looped around Johnny’s neck and Johnny’s arms looped under his thighs. “And I’m no tourist.”
“Good thing you came to San Francisco, then.” Johnny laughed, his kiss-swollen lips framing the clench of his teeth as he worked Ten over. Johnny’s shirt bunched as Johnny pulled out and pushed back in, fucking him up and down the glass. “To play tourist.”
“That’s right.” Ten twisted his fingers in the ends of Johnny’s hair and arched his back until Johnny’s shirt slid down his shoulders and hung loose over his elbows. He wondered if Johnny would let him take it home. It would be comfortable to sleep in, he thought. “Lucky you.”
Johnny looked at him like he agreed, something terribly soft in the corners of his eyes. Ten wasn’t sure how he felt about it, but he didn’t look away, moaning into the inches between their mouths when Johnny spread his fingers on Ten’s ass and opened him up even wider. Ten let him have it, let him see how much he liked it, let him hear and taste what it did to him when Johnny changed the angle and hit him with short little thrusts.
For all that Ten had taken his re-virginity, showing him finger by finger how to open up a man, Johnny had known just what to do with him from the start. He had a big dick and the confidence to go along with it, a swagger that skated the line between smarm and cool just well enough that Ten had wanted to talk to him all those weeks ago when he had finished his set and asked for a glass of water. Ten had watched him drink the water and known that he wanted to fuck Johnny Suh at least once.
He slept with him three times in two days and then again when Johnny had come back to Vegas two weeks later. Ten had asked for his number and saved it in his phone as “Johnny D Good,” and filed Johnny away as a potential long-distance bed friend with a nice cock.
Then Ten had come to San Francisco and Johnny made him breakfast and took him out to dinner every single night that Ten was free and introduced Ten to his precious friends like Ten was someone that they might see again. Johnny kissed Ten like he might like him, like he would give Ten the shirt off his back. Ten put a hand on himself and stroked as Johnny’s arms started to shake, closing his eyes and coming all over Johnny’s chest as he tested out the shape of lucky me on the tip of his tongue.
~~