Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

He doesn’t know exactly how he scored this second interview. 

The application and first interview process had been hell – demeaning, demanding and essentially torturous. The whole time, Jeongin had been surrounded by better, more qualified, more confident people all vying for the single full-time position at the prestigious and elitist accounting firm Bang and Lee. And yet, it was his name on the emailing list that confirmed he’d made it past the first round. He’d made it through the culling of three-hundred and seventy-two potential candidates, and it was him that was sitting in a stuffy waiting room, full of nervous erratic energy that couldn’t be calmed by the two receptionists’ offerings of water or tea. 

(A lot of the interviewees were also on edge due to the literally beautiful male that took their names at the door, Mr. Angelic. Jeongin found himself included in that group yet tried to stop it from disarming him.)

He’s cold in the room - unsure if it’s from nerves or the winter weather outside. Every other applicant have a luxurious-looking coat draped over their arms, but he couldn’t find one at the charity shop he frequents. The application process has spanned over December for a January start. It’s far different to the five minute interviews and begin-the-next-day jobs he’s usually done before.

“Yang Jeongjin?” his name (well, mostly his name) is called out, and immediately he stands up, raising his hand in that business etiquette hopefully-professional-and-not-eight-year-old-answering-a-math-question manner.

The receptionist (receptionist? Is that what Mr. Angelic is?) beams. “Just room three today, please.”

And so, he goes.

Seo Changbin is the name of his interviewer. Seo Changbin is quite possibly one of the most intimidating men he’s ever met.

“Explain a key difference between the Korean and Australian fiscal year.”

Well, shit.

“Well, hopefully not the number of days in the year,” he goes for humour because most intelligent people are quite funny. “If I’m wrong about that, then I’m really screwed.”

Seo Changbin does not laugh, in fact his face does not change from its monotone scariness. Seo Changbin writes something down in his navy clipboard and after a few more questions that Jeongin’s stumbles through his pre-rehearsed answers for, sends him away with a flick of the wrist.

When he arrives home to his studio literally underground apartment that no one would rent because of the rancid stench coming from the left corner (the only way he could live two train stations away from Seoul’s city centre) he crosses out Bang and Lee from his list of accounting firms and finance agencies.

Although he’s sad, it was expected. Despite it being one of his three dream firms (largely because its branch of pro bono work) as he was just out of university, he didn’t have the experience (or the knowledge if his interview told him anything) to immediately start full-time work at one of the most prestigious firms in South Korea.

There were still a few options left - two smaller firms were hiring right now. He would be fine. He’d make it through the month with the last of his savings at that night janitor position on Wednesday’s, Friday’s and Saturday’s. Otherwise, the restaurant a train stop away was hiring… as much as his pride had stopped him from taking job offers from places he used to work when he was sixteen, the money was more important.

He could do this.

So, when on Saturday morning when he was rudely interrupted by a phone call at eight in the morning, only two hours into his rather fitful sleep, he admittedly was rather snappy when answering.

“Hello?”

“Is this Yang Jeongjin?”

“I don’t want whatever you’re trying to sell me. Please remove my phone from your contact list.”

“Wait-!”

And it was the note of urgency, and slight familiarity that made him not end the call right then and there. Blinking sleep wearily out of his eyes, he squinted at the contact number and-

“Oh my! I’m – I’m sorry!” he shot up in bed, slamming his forehead into that stupid, stupid shelf that sometimes opened at night like he was haunted by a particularly mischievous ghost. “This is Jeongin, yes! I – I thought you were a telemarketer, I’m so sorry!”

There’s a laugh on the other side of the line and Jeongin feels his face flush, almost considering hanging up just to escape his mortification, but knows that will only make things worse (especially for his bank account.)

The rest of the phone call doesn’t take long. Hyunjin tells him to arrive at the office on Monday at seven-forty-five sharp. Jeongin makes sure he says ‘thank you’ twice before the call ends.

And as he sits on the edge of his bed, he feels his heart pound beneath his sweater.

This is it. He has… a job . A job that seemed unreachable, impossible to infiltrate, a mere… dream. But now, the idea of Yang Jeongin - newest employee at the prestigious nation-renowned Bang and Lee is… a reality.

He can’t wait for Monday.

When he enters the glass sliding doors he’s basically shitting himself. The receptionist hands him an ID card already made for him, with the picture he used on his resume,  an employee number and a barcode. 

“You scan this to enter your floor,” she explains when he questions it. 

“Oh,” he hopes he sounds less nervous than he is. Looking around the wide room, he finds a series of poles sticking up from the tile by an elevator, and can only assume this barcode allows him access to it. 

Seemingly she follows his gaze and answers the question he has before he even says it aloud. “The lift is currently out of service. But yes, when it’s back up and running again you will use it there as well.”

“Right,” he accepts the lanyard and puts it around his neck, the weight of it, and it’s implicit responsibilities, not calming him at all. “I’m working in the accounting sector, what floor is that on?”

And her response almost makes him die inside. “Floor eight.”

Just great. 

He struggling by the time he reaches the fifth floor and he awkwardly waves to an employee that looks at him strangely as he rests there for a second to catch his breath. Jeongin would think he’d be better at climbing flights of stairs - he’s not exactly unfit or anything, but God, these endless steps are deceiving. 

At long last, he reaches a door that has the number ‘8’ carefully engraved onto a shiny white sign. He childishly feels victory leap in his throat when he presses his ID card to the black receiver that turns from red to green and forces himself to calm down. 

Even though his access is granted he can’t help but pause. What will he find behind this door? The answer is his workplace, of course, but that word holds so many different connotations. Behind this door he will find his desk he will sit on almost everyday for the next few years, behind this door he will meet the people described to him as his colleagues, and his bosses too. God he hopes they like him. He thinks he’s a pretty likable guy - he did well in school and university and all the other jobs he’s worked before this, but he’s never been in this type of cut-throat accounting environment before. 

With no time to lose, the time bordering on eight o’clock, with a final preparatory breath he pushes open the door. 

No one notices him at first. Despite work not starting for another three minutes, almost every chair is filled. The desks are laid out in a clean but communicative fashion - two long white desks pressed together by the horizontal edge so whenever someone looks up they can be comforted by the fact there is another person opposite them, but not too close to the next set of two as to not feel crowded. 

Along the wall with the exit door there are kitchen amenities - a fridge, a kettle, a small selection of fruits and drinks and luxury biscuits too. The other three walls are all glass, and there Jeongin finds hallways linking to other glass offices he can only assume are reserved for the managers and higher-ranking figures. The set up of the office floor seems welcoming and clean, not one smudge on the glass walls, and yet there is a feeling of pressure as well. There’s no hiding here, but it is mutual. Just as a manager could monitor him, he in turn could also watch them, unless the blinds he can spot on the inside of the private offices are pulled down, cutting off all vision entirely for both parties.

It’s a type of pressure, however, that is welcome not shunned. All top-ranking, high-calibre firms need it, as without it nothing productive would occur. It’s a pressure that builds onto the ambiance; makes every employee work harder, type faster, be better. 

He shivers as a phone call rings out, cut off as a desk worker answers it. This is it. His workplace, his home.

“Yang Jeongin?”

The correct pronunciation of his name startles him. In his jittery awe of the office space, he’d barely noticed a man, neatly-dressed stand in front of him.

“Y-Yes!” he bows quickly, crimson embarrassment rushing to his cheeks. “Nice to meet you.”

“Kim Seungmin, general accounting,” he man nods back with a small bow. “I’m mentoring you until you find your footing.”

“Cool,” he smiles and then at the others raised eyebrow despises himself for using such informal casualty. “I mean, thank you.”

The other seems to fight the urge to roll his eyes for a moment, until he leads Jeongin to a set of desks. 

“This is my half,” he points to one side, stationary in small holders, no speck of dust visible. “And that is yours. Don’t cross the line.”

Jeongin looks at his side. It’s basic: a desktop computer, a cup full of pens and connected desk drawers that he’s sure hold paper. But there’s one difference between his workstation and every other one in the room. 

“Why is my chair… red?”

Seungmin looks like he was expecting this question. “You’re in the hotseat.”

Faintly, Jeongin is reminded of all those ‘who wants to be a millionaire’ shows where the hotseat is bright red and used for rapid-fire questioning. Unless he’s accidentally applied to be a contestant into a show, he’s sure he’s missing something.

“What… does that mean?”

“You’re a newbie,” Seungmin languidly blinks. “You’re a rookie, and it means that right now, you’re nothing. Bang and Lee can fire you at any moment, at any small mistake. So, my advice is not to screw up.”

“Oh,” he blanks out, looking at the offending chair in front of him. “Okay.”

It’s symbolic really - he’s in the hotseat and it means there’s a lot of  heat on his ass - heat being pressure, of course (he thinks actual flames may be a workplace safety hazard.) Although half of him feels a little humiliated he’s going to have to sit in this bright fire-truck red chair until he’s told not to, his other half is glad for the pressure, for the attention. It may mean he can prove himself faster.

“Don’t look now,” Seungmin voice is a whisper and immediately Jeongin tenses. “But over there in that office, is Changbin-nim. He’s one of Bang Chan-nim’s closet confidants and advisors.”

Jeez - Jeongin knew Changbin had superiority over many at Bang and Lee but to know that the man just a few meters and two glass walls away from him is an advisor of the ‘youngest most successful CEO; Bang ‘Christopher’ Chan ‘is just plain extraordinary. 

Woah.

He swears he didn’t say it aloud but the way Seungmin’s mouth whips into a poorly hidden chortle Jeongin flushes red immediately. Almost as red as his chair, which Seungmin points out which in turn makes him blush even brighter.

Seungmin concludes the tour by taking him to the kitchen, the bathroom which is opposite the stairs, and finally back to his desk. 

“As long as you follow the hierarchy and work hard you’ll be fine,” Seungmin plops onto his seat and Jeongin does so too. “Well, if you’re smart enough that is.”

The jab at his personal pride is bait, he knows that enough. Yet when he doesn't respond with a witty comeback it almost looks like Seungmin is somewhat disappointed by him.

A flash of platinum blonde hair catches his eye. It’s Mr. Angelic - moving fluidly across the halls like it is as simple as counting to five. 

“That’s Hyunjin-hyung,” Seungmin notes. 

Jeongin hums, glad to have a name to put to the face. “Is he a receptionist?”

Seungmin almost looks astonished that he’d ask such a thing. “Not at all, he’s Chan-nim’s personal assistant.”

Oops. Titles and job occupations really do mean a lot around here.

“Right,” he picks up a pen, needing something to fiddle with to calm his nerves. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to assume.”

“Don’t assume,” the elder just replies and that makes a spike of irritation flood through his veins. But he just clicks his pen a few times at takes it.

“-Don’t click your pen either. This is a shared space, be mindful of others around you, please.”

He stops. He sets the pen down and tries anything to change the subject.

“Changbin-nim interviewed me for this position,” he starts eyeing the other’s private glass office once more, and Seungmin looks away from his computer. “Is he the manager here?”

“He’s a manager of accounting,” Seungmin explains, looking bored despite the inflection of his tone seeming rather interested in the idea of explaining the concepts. “Each branch has it’s own manager. The other branches are on the other floors; finance, marketing, advertising, design, and more.”

“Cool,” he nods, wrapping his head around the information. “I-I mean… right.”

Seungmin almost laughs. At him.

Okay, he knows he’s supposed to ‘follow the hierarchy’ and it’s obvious that Seungmin is a level beyond himself - the rookie in the hotseat -  being his mentor, but this disrespect is getting out of hand. His parents always taught him to speak about what he believes in, and he doesn’t think he should allow himself to be treated this badly.

So he opens his mouth and-

The slam of the entrance door however cuts them both off. The mood in the office shifts at this man’s entrance, people freezing in their typing, people speaking quieter into their phone lines. He wears cleanly pressed suit, black pants and perfectly-fitted (probably tailored) matching jacket, along with a  white crisp button up and a elegant dark green tie. Whoever this man is, he’s the symbol of power.

And God is he hot.

“And that’s Lee Minho.”

“Lee?” the name is familiar on his tongue as they both watch this Lee Minho walk straight past them into his private office. “As in Bang and Lee?”

“Wrong Lee,” Seungmin rolls his eyes from his across his desk. “The Lee side runs the Sydney headquarters; Bang is stationed in Korea. The head here is Bang Chan-nim, he and Minho-nim were friends in business school.”

His mouth involuntarily forms as ‘o’ in understanding, looking back at the well-dressed man, listening to a brief from a board of women and men in a soundproof room. “Close friends?”

Seungmin huffs at that. “Close enough for Minho-nim to be promoted to second in command of the firm. I mean, apart from all the family ties and rampant nepotism. It’s hard to break into a family-run business, so I’ll respect him for that. Especially one this successful.”

“Why?” he questions before he can think if it’s one, he should even ask. 

At Seungmin’s pause in his typing, he realises maybe he should have kept his mouth shut after all. 

“Start thinking, Jeongin,” the brown-haired boy returns, entirely blunt. “It’d really help you out in the long-run.”

“And then he said, ‘it’d really help you out in the long run! ’” Jeongin rants on the phone, swaying as the underground train turns a corner. “Who says that!? It was so uncalled for, Eomma.”

His mother’s cracked laugh comes through the speakers and despite his embarrassed frustration, he starts to chuckle too.

“So that was my first day at work,” he grumbles, shifting his weight so someone can pass behind him. “What did you do today?”

“The usual,” she answers the sound distorted slightly as the microphone hits something. “Went to the florist, spent time with your father, worked at the stall… a peaceful day. Well actually your auntie called, and she told me all about your cousin’s baby…”

He hums, comforted by his mother’s voice as she rambles on. She had always been the rock in his life; stable, reliable, grounding. With scrambling to find a job after graduation and entering ‘adulting,’ he’s definitely needed it, needed her.

“I’m coming up to my stop now, Eomma,” he notes as the train creaks to a halt. “Talk soon?”

“Of course, Jeonginnie,” he can hear her smile through the phone. “Talk soon.”

The dial tone sounds, and he slides the device back into his pocket. He stares down at his shoes. His plan had been to save up so he could buy a new pair to celebrate being employed, even if the new pair would be a low-cost dupe of the expensive ones many at Bang and Lee paraded around in. But his shower had broken just last week, and thus his savings had quite literally went down the drain. The shoes he wore now were the same ratty ones he used to wear for band performances in high school – those being the only slightly professional-looking black shoes he owned.

His toes ached. Luckily his mother had forced him to buy a medical kit when he moved into his apartment – those band-aids would certainly come in handy now.

“Shit,” he hisses out, lurching for the rapidly closing doors and thumping pathetically into the surface as the train moves to a slow start again. He’d spent so long criticising his stupid shoes, that he’d missed his stop entirely. He wouldn’t be able to pay the fare to get back.

Another twenty minute walk in the too-small shoes would serve him right.

“Jeongjin?” a voice asks and at the mortifying idea of something not only seeing him run into a wall, but someone at Bang and Lee seeing him run into a wall freezes him in place.

Ears redder than his desk chair, he pivots around. “Oh! Hyunjin-nim? Fancy seeing you here!”

“Is your face alright?” the assistant doesn’t try to conceal his amusement and Jeongin feels his face flush a brighter red, and his nose aches dully.

“Ah, yes, sorry,” he bows quickly to his senior. “I got lost in my mind for a moment there.”

“Did you miss your station?” Hyunjin cocks his head, and even more abashed, Jeongin nods, still wondering how to even bring up that the latter mispronounced his name again.

“There’ll be a train back soon,” the other pouts as if actually affected by his own error. 

“Yes,” he dips his head in agreement. “Where do you get off, Hyunjin-nim?”

“Oh please,” the blonde laughs and for a second Jeongin is horrified that he’s offended him. 

But instead, the elder says four words.

“Please call me ‘hyung’” he runs a hand through his hair in a way that would make teenage girls (and himself included) swoon. “I despise people being so formal with me, even if we are a different age. After all, we’re all human beings, right? All supposed to be equal?”

And that’s how Jeongin makes his first friend.

They catch the train home together the next day. He asks the elder why they aren’t on the same train to work either as the other only lives two stations out of the city centre than him, but Hyunjin replies that he starts at seven-thirty, not eight.

“It’s all to prepare the office for Chan-hyung,” Hyunjin says with a genuine smile. “I’m sure you’ll be properly introduced to him soon.”

“I hope so,” he murmurs, watching the sunset behind Seoul’s skyscrapers. When the train stops at the next station the very man is plastered on a billboard. Fitting.

And Hyunjin is right. Maybe the man had organised it in the first place, but Jeongin heavily doubts it. It’s because even though he’s never seen ‘Korea’s miracle’ in person, he just knows it’s Bang Chan when he arrives into their office square. He knows because everyone stops talking, stops moving, not out of fear, but in total admiration.

After all, Chan is the most put-together confident man Jeongin has ever seen. With a beaming dimpled smile, and boyishly curly blonde hair juxtaposed with a clean-pressed polished suit that probably cost more than a year of his rent, Jeongin just knows.

This is the incredible man articles ranted about, elders wished their child to marry or be, one of South Korea’s youngest millionaires and CEOs, Bang Chan.

He’s on talk shows, he’s in advertising posters marketing not only Bang and Lee as a company but the idea of what Bang and Lee can do for the people. Make them successful, make them rich, make them charismatic and make them attractive; all praises sung around the decrepit laneways and private jets of Seoul about the very man himself.

The duosyllable name ‘ Bang Chan’ rang proudly wherever it was called, the semantics of the name itself separating itself from the sea of tri-syllable common titles of other upcoming figures of Seoul and holistically all of South Korea.

“Hello,” and it’s a simple greeting, but it’s powerful. The charismatically natural curls give him a greater sense of individualism many only dream of, in harsh lighting, it gives him the silhouette of a lion.

Seungmin stands, and Jeongin quickly jumps up out of his hotseat and follows suit. 

Jeongin bows with the rest of the company as they greet him.

He can barely understand the words the holy man is saying, his mind too busy screaming at him not to make a fool of himself whilst in the other’s presence, but he swears Bang Chan meets his eyes and nods his head.

After the holy man completes his brief speech, Jeongin can barely contain his flustered, nervous heart from pounding out of the confines of his chest. Because the man is walking right towards him.

“Jeongin, right?” and the fact he got his name correct when almost every employee here failed, makes his chest burst.

“Yes, Chan-ssi,” he bows deeply, making sure to use the most formal of honorifics when addressing the CEO.

And just like Hyunjin had a day ago, the man just chuckles.

“Please call me ‘Chan-nim,’” he corrects with that brilliant award-winning smile. “Everyone else does around here, and you are one of us, correct?”

“Yes, Chan-nim,” he bows once again, straightening up to see Changbin glaring unimpressed at him behind Chan’s shoulder, but the man smiling at him like this simple interaction has made his own day.

“He - like - looked at me,” he gushes on the train back, Hyunjin laughing (not at him, with him) as he speaks. “But it wasn’t just that, it was like he really saw me. And guess what?! He asked me to call him ‘Chan -nim,’ isn’t that just amazing?!”

And really it was - for someone to be so distinguished but not expectantly cocky like everything in the whole of Seoul worked under his fingertips and was controlled by him (even if in reality it was.) To ‘level oneself down’ by allowing the use of a less formal honorific, the ones that were just used for managers or - or senior employees was plain respectable and charming.

No wonder why the man was so genuinely charismatic.

“You newbies are so cute,” the blonde chuckles and Jeongin can’t help but join in too (the elder is just so contagious like that.) “Seungmin was exactly like you a month ago.”

“Seungmin-nim is new?” he asks, surprised. “I thought he had been here for years.”

“No, no,” Hyunjin refutes, smiling fondly. “He only joined a little over a month ago - you were the one that replaced him in the hotseat.”

Jeongin baulks. “You know about the hotseat too?”

He’d hoped it was just an accounting-sector thing.

“Of course, Jeongin!” the elder confirms his sorrows (and also gets his name right. It had taken him forty-eight hours to get the confidence to correct the othrer on such a basic thing.) “It’s tradition, but I think it’s a little cruel. Then again all of accounting is like that.”

Jeongin frowns. “The people?”

When Hyunjin doesn’t respond immediately his heart sinks. “The people are… fifty-fifty. Seungmin’s one of the good ones even if he’s being a huge cocky shit right now. I think he’s just grateful you came along and he has someone to talk to. I think everyone pretty much ignored him when he joined. Well… expect for me, of course.”

“Oh,” Jeongin can’t help but feel bad for the other man. He’d just assumed someone had taken the time to look after Seungmin when he had first joined too. “Didn’t he have his mentor?”

Hyunjin cocks his head. “His mentor?”

“Yeah,” Jeongin continues. “Ya’ know, someone to give him the tour, tell him about the different people and the office hierarchy?”

“Hm,” Hyunjin frowns. “As far as I know that’s not really a thing… Changbin-hyung like… sees you and makes sure you’re alright - he’s one of the good ones in accounting too - but otherwise I heard it’s just a thrown-in-with-the-sharks type of situation.”

And Jeongin pales. In his first five minutes in the office, Seungmin had made it seem like he was appointed to look after him. And even though it wasn’t his first day anymore Seungmin had still checked on him several times during the day; questioning whether he wanted a snack from the bar, or whether he knew how to input the data set he was assigned by Changbin into the computer’s system.

But… now it seemed like he had made the whole ‘mentor’ program up entirely , plucked it out of thin air. All so he, Yang Jeongin, wouldn’t feel as nervous and confused and lost as Seungmin had potentially felt on his first day.

And the whole time Jeongin had tolerated him, skin still prickling from the way Seungmin had laughed at him on his first day, but now that he knew this truth, this vulnerable truth, he can’t help but feel… thankful for the other’s presence. Because, God, if Seungmin hadn’t been there he probably would have walked out twenty minutes in.

“Are you alright?” Hyunjin snaps him out of it. “You look ill - please don’t faint on me, or - or please please don’t vomit on me, I have emetophobia. And you’ll ruin my designer coat.”

“No, I’m okay,” he promises, flashing the other a hopefully reassuring smile. “Just have some things to think about when I get home.”

Hyunjin looks more horrified than when he said the word ‘vomit’ aloud. “Please don’t quit on me, Jeongin! Who will I spend my commute home gossiping to!?”

Jeongin does laugh then, and bows once as his station arrives. “Don’t worry Hyunjin. I don’t think anything could make me quit yet!”

Not even twenty-four hours later he’s beginning to regret those words.

Because it’s on his third day he has his first interaction with Lee Minho. And it’s on his third day he decides he completely despises the latter.

It’s twelve-fifteen. Changbin hasn’t given him a new data set yet, so he’s taking the time to set up his desk more to his liking; sticking a photo from his childhood - one of him and his mother in his desk drawer, hoping that he won’t have to take it down and clear out his things anytime soon.

That’s when for the first time that day Lee Minho exits from his office, bee-lining for the kitchen wall. Jeongin tries to behave normally as he struggles with opening his jammed-shut bottom desk drawer, but as it remains put, and his frustration grows, he can’t help but give it a hard yank and- 

“Fuck,” the voice behind him curses softly and guiltily Jeongin stumbles to his feet, mortification flooding through him. Oh god, he’d tugged too hard on that stupid drawer so that when it finally became unstuck he’d toppled over! And worse, with his timing, of course, that’s when Minho was pouring coffee out of the kettle and when he’d slammed directly into the other’s legs.

“S-Sorry!” he quickly apologises with a bow, running a hand through his now damp hair. “Are you burnt?”

“It’s cold,” Minho is deadpan as he sets the kettle down on the counter with a ‘slam.’

Jeongin’s mouth forms into an ‘o’ as he realises why his boss had uttered such profanity. Across the berth of his blazer is a dark brown coffee stain. Oh shit.

“ Hold on… you’re hotseat?” the words are spat with so much vitriol that Jeongin literally caves into himself. Even worse, his name is hotseat, he is hotseat. 

He knows he just barrelled into the elder - ruining the man’s blazer and seriously being maybe one of the worst first interactions of all time, but that hatred and utter lack of human decency are just so uncalled for. He made a mistake! If anything were to blame it was the stupid desk drawer! 

“Yang Jeongin,” he introduces himself with more bite in his words than he necessarily wanted as he brushes off his pants. “Pleasure to meet you.”

He doesn’t mean that last part. But he knows better than to say that aloud. Hopefully, this Lee Minho will go back to his office as soon as possible so he won’t have to see his (annoyingly handsome) face.

Minho just glares at him. Shifting on his feet, sure his tumble gained some attention (he can see Hyunjin nervously peering at him in his peripheral) he bows once more.

“I apologise for bumping into you,” he says because his mother taught him better than this. “If you’d like I can clean it for you, I have nice products at home and I’m quite good at removing stains-”

“No,” his boss’s tone is sharp in blatant cruel refusal. “As if I’d leave my belongings with someone as disorientated as you. Besides I don’t even know who you are.”

He grits his teeth into a smile because his mother taught him that if he doesn’t have anything nice to say, he shouldn’t say it at all. “I’m Yang Jeongin, sir-”

“And I don’t care.”

His smile drops. Fuck, that’s harsh. Some people are just born as assholes.

Then a small, smug, cocky, irritating smile comes onto Minho’s face, the pair having swapped expressions entirely. “Wait, I do know who you are. You’re the kid who didn’t understand the difference between the Korean and Australian financial years, aren’t you?”

Before he has a chance to even process the words or defend himself, the elder cackles, looking at him like he’s nothing but spat-out gum on the sole of his shoe. An inconvenience, an irritant, an idiot.

Another thing his mother taught him was to not let people take him for a fool.

The debate begins.

Jeongin frowns. “I do understand it. I just didn’t initially know there was a difference to understand.”

Minho’s eyes flash, like a predator excited at the prospect of hunting its prey. “Which is arguably worse when interviewing for a position at a Seoul and Sydney-based accounting firm. It highlights a lack of preparedness.”

“In that instance, yes,” Jeongin agrees. “But preparedness isn’t everything.”

“Accounting and finance are based on predictions. Finding patterns and responding to them accordingly. How can preparedness not be essential to this career?”

“How about this,” Jeongin stands up stiff, changing the rapid flow of their rebuttals. “You can ask me any question you want, and I’ll answer to the best of my ability.”

The male pauses. Stares deep into him with those cold eyes. Where he looks, Jeongin burns.

 “Why do you want to become an accountant?”

He almost falters. It’s such a basic question, one he actually prepared for the interview yet under Minho’s relentless gaze, he can barely form words.

“I’m interested in the social side of finances; how what work we can do here, can interact with and help others around us, because in reality money itself is a very one-dimensional measure,” is what he answers.

It seems to irritate Minho because he is the one between them that falters. “Money is one of the most complex notions that the human brain created.”

Jeongin does frown then. “Respectfully, I disagree. What’s complicated is the people behind the money, not the figure itself. The complexity is why some people have it and make it and why others don’t.”

“No,” the manager stands and Jeongin feels Minho’s stare burn every fibre of his being. “The answer to that is simple. Those who work hard have money, those who have intelligence and luck make it. The people who don’t have it, or who lose it, are simply weak.”

That stuns him into silence. How can someone have such a backwards, selfish, completely morally and ethically incorrect opinion?! And not only that, how could someone with that sort of opinion be his boss?!

So he starts. “I know in this hierarchy I am under you, Lee Minho-nim, but even I cannot sit by idly and take this . I have no interest in continuing this conversation. I will dismiss myself.”

And with a quick turn, he leaves - walks the few paces back to his desk indigent and mighty. He expects to be yelled at, brandished for being so rude to his senior. He wonders how he’s going to explain he’s been fired from his dream career to his mother. He wonders how he will survive unemployment again.

When he takes his seat (his bright red seat) with a huff, Seungmin looks appalled. The other employees surrounding him stare at him dumbly like goldfish, mouthing at the surface with their jaws dropped wide open.

He fights everything within him not to look when Minho walks straight by him back to his office.

He opens up his computer and ignores everyone, preparing himself for Minho, Changbin or maybe even Chan as this is bound to reach head office, to storm out and scream.

But one o’clock turns to two with no issue. When Minho leaves his cubicle (wearing a new blazer) he walks straight past him and fetches another coffee, not even stopping for milk. 

At three the dreaded moment arrives. With a swift flick of a hand, he’s called into Changbin’s office.

“What happened?” the man seems bored already.

“I disagreed with Minho-nim,” he explains simply, confident only for the fact that he can say whatever he wants because he won’t be invited back tomorrow. “I told him that and left.”

Changbin sighs. “Did he offend you?”

That actually makes Jeongin sit back a little. He’s surprised the ever-scary Seo Changbin seems to be… on his side more than the side of his fellow brethren. 

“Yes,” he remarks, honest. “He offended my entire moral code.”

The manager across from him just drags a hand down his face, like he's exhausted. “Don’t let this event interrupt your work.”

And that surprises him even more.

“In future I expect you to follow all commands given by authority unless they breach the Bang and Lee code of conduct. Be insubordinate again and you’re out. You’re lucky Chan-nim hasn’t got the time to even think about something like this nevermind stress about it.”

“Y-Yes, Changbin-nim,” he clasps his hand together, shocked he managed to keep his job, and now realising what an idiot he had been just two hours ago, thanking every God in the universe for it.

“Alright,” Changbin looks away, opening a file on his desk. “Get back to work. And don’t waste my time, Yang Jeongin. ”

It’s Thursday when his ‘initiation’ is complete. The final step is understanding the work-setting culture around food. And this is the bagel joint everyone had been talking about. It’s the smell that hits him first, enticing scent that almost makes him topple over in prayer to thank the heavens such an aroma even exists. It’s enchanting, seductive even as it reels him inside the belly of the shop, and the interior is nothing to complain about either. Baby blue walls, green strong ivy vines, blackboards with the menu in fine-print chalk, and a buffet of options.

Truly, it’s beautiful.

“Home away from home,” Hyunjin chuckles. “I’m usually the one who picks up the bagels so I’m here literally six times a week.”

“They don’t do delivery?” Jeongin inquires, stepping into the half-modern-half-rustic shoppe.

“Nah,” Hyunjin shrugs. “They’re trying to be old-fashioned, I guess.”

“If they wanted to be old-fashioned they’d deliver by horse and cart.” He barely believed he had ‘hangrily’ he mumbled it until Hyunjin is cackling and Seungmin hits his shoulder with a smirk.

“Trust me, although coming down here is a bit of a pain, it’s worth it,” Seungmin nods over at a selection of goods that make Jeongin’s mouth water. “Since I’m the newest, well, was the newest employee, I was the one who had to tag along.”

“Wow,” Jeongin isn’t completely sure if his response relates to Seungmin’s words or the literally spell this place has over him. “This place is incredible, literally I can’t find a single fault here-”

And then he sees the price.

He hopes his friends don’t see him literally die inside.

“Uh – yeah, I’m actually not that hungry,” he chokes out and wishes his nose would fall off so he could stop smelling the god-damned fresh bagel bread-

“We’re accounts, Jeongin,” Seungmin has a look of disbelief on his face. “We’re always hungry.” 

“Money-hungry, maybe,” Hyunjin mumbles out teasingly and Jeongin lets Seungmin’s response fade out. 

His stomach rumbles louder. God, he is like the donkey and this shop is the carrot on a stick. Just so desperately out of reach.

But if he indulges in this most primitive, yearning hunger, and purchases even the cheapest bagel of the several options (Basic Bagel – white bread, cheese, lettuce and tomato), he won’t have the money to make it home tonight. In fact, he won’t have the money to make it home or to work for the rest of the week. The cost is four times his daily train fare.

“Jeongin, you’ve got to get something ,” Hyunjin exclaims dramatically, so loudly he’s sure all of Seoul can hear it. 

“No,” he denies, shameful about his financial situation. (God, he works as an accountant in one of the country’s top firms – the irony doesn’t die on him.) “I’m really okay, had a big breakfast.” 

The home-brand granola bar he ate on the subway feels tiny in his stomach.

“Well, if you’re sure,” Hyunjin gives up. “Now I must order like forty bagels. The good thing about being the only one buying them means I can just pretend they only serve the Basic Bagel rather than putting through a million individual complicated orders.”

Jeongin does laugh at that and watches Seungmin accepts his own ordered bagel. 

“The perks of tagging along are customising our orders,” he grins. “Almost makes up for lugging them up seven flights of stairs.”

“Yeah,” Hyunjin pulls out a navy-blue credit card. “We only get customs ones for the heads of department, so basically just our bosses. And us too.”

The explanation makes him hungrier. He thinks hard about the seventy-cent instant ramen he has at home – maybe he could even bougie it up by getting some discounted-end-of-the-day spring onions from the market just before they close. That’s nice, that’s expensive – scallions with his meal, very rich if he thinks so himself-

“Wait Jeongin, you’re not sitting this out because you think you have to pay, right?”

And maybe he was wrong about Hyunjin’s perceptiveness after all.

“S-Sorry?” he stammers, praying his cheeks aren’t burning red. 

“It’s company lunch,” Seungmin frowns like this part was obvious. “You can get whatever you want. It’s all paid for.”

Maybe Jeongin really will get on his knees and thank God in the middle of this store. 

But as soon as he goes up to the far-left side of the counter he feels out of depth. If he were buying sandwiches, he’d get the pre-packaged, probably mayo-made-from-plastic ones at the bottom of the shelf, those hidden out of the direct line of sight, as if shameful He’s never made his own sandwich, nay, bagel before – at least not in the past five years since leaving high school. He barely remembers what to say.

“Um,” he stalls, looking at the selection of base bagel bread he can choose from, having only had a bagel once as a child, not knowing what’s best. He points at a shiny one, curious. “What’s this?”

“Gold plated,” the cashier says nonchalantly like it’s completely normal. “Would you like to try it out today?”

He pauses, looking over his shoulder to find his co-workers playfully debating about something as they wait for the company order to be finished in the back kitchen. He turns back to the bread, the gold-plated bread.

He doesn’t have to pay… he might never get the chance to try gold-plated anything again.

“Yes, please,” he smiles because viva la vida or whatever the saying was.

As he continues down the line, his excitement, anticipation builds. He gets everything he’s wanted to try, items that were far too expensive for his weekly, nay, monthly budget to consider.

“Avocado?”

“Yep.”

“Italian tomato chutney?”

“Yes, please.”

“Smoked salmon?”

“Uh – yeah... Actually, can you make it double?”

He doesn’t quite know why he doesn’t expect the egregious number on the till at the end of his bagel escapade. 

“Sir? Are you alright?”

He almost passes out on the spot. He fiddles with the navy-blue card in his nimble fingers and hopes Hyunjin nor Seungmin see the grand total for his one bagel. It’s almost an entire month’s worth of his travel fare… maybe that gold-plated bread and double smoked salmon was a mistake.

“Yeah, sorry,” he fumbles with the plastic, tapping it shakily on the reader. “Thank you so much.”

“No worries,” the cashier hands him the probably one-kilogram bagel. “Enjoy your meal.”

And God , does he. It’s delicious, mind-blowing, ludicrously spectacular and erotic even… 

It even makes up for when Changbin exits his office, looking red from head to toe – completely furious.

“Which one of you ordered a forty-dollar bagel?!”

Of course, his traitorous cheeks go red. And Seungmin and Hyunjin just cackle in glee.

That Friday night, well, early Saturday morning, as he walks home, lugging his vacuum behind him, the smell of freshly baked bread returns to him. It’s not the bagel joint – it’s just a regular bakery, starting its day at five in the morning to catch the nine-to-five office workers in time for an on-the-way-to-work breakfast.

His stomach grumbles as he stumbles past it. That shift had been terrible, spent bent over bleachers scrubbing home-coming dance’s intoxicated vomit and… other substances off them. Not only that, one of the newbies stole his expensive window spray so now he had to take that out of his budget again…

The only good thing was that it was payday. Under the counter, slightly shady cash that was to be expected for such a low-level job mostly every fortnight. 

(When he first joined the service in university, they didn’t pay him for two months - those were the days when he worked five nights a week. Now he’s cut his shifts down to only three for this side-hustle; Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Anyway, there had been a strike back then and finally, the company heads agreed to more regulated and timely payments although there were still many instances of underpaid and over-exploited workers. Every time he saw it happen, or happen to him, he thought of why he wanted to be an accountant, especially one and Bang and Lee for its pro bono work. These failed, overlooked people just like himself were the reason why he needed to work so hard, even if it meant no sleep.)

Well, despite its shadiness, if the cleaning service was really a money-laundering drug-trafficking cover, at least the cash would be washed. (Wow, maybe he really was funny, or maybe it was the no sleep delirium getting to him. He had work again in three hours and he wasn’t even home yet… God he needed to sleep.)

But before his apartment, there was one stop that he needed to make. And he sets his cleaning equipment down just as he rounds the corner.

An ATM. Inconspicuous at first glance just like many, terrible, terrible things. He tries to think happy thoughts, like yesterday’s bagel, or his mother’s cheerful laugh as he deposits almost all of his first Bang and Lee paycheck except a few dollars into the machine. 

‘Please put in your pin.’

He puts it in with a solemn heart and watches the grey take away his hard-earned cash.

‘Thank you for your continued service with G&G Bank.’

He turns away a second too late, allowing his eyes to find the final message that he desperately tries to ignore.

‘See you next time, Yang Chaesun.’

And he walks home, the vacuum rattling as over every uneven concrete slab, showers with his shitty cold water, dresses himself up into a suit and tie, looking so incongruent from his cracked walls, his stained carpet floor no amount of bleach can remove. 

He pretends the smell of water mould in the left corner of his rental his bastard of a landlord refuses to fix is instead the smell of freshly baked gold-plated bagel bread. 

And he leaves to start his new day.

Two weeks in he thinks he’s found his groove. 

Changbin has actually given him actual real data to analyse and predict market fall for, which is a win. Number-crunching is not particularly entertaining, however; he’s lucky Seungmin fills the time from eight to five with a few silly jokes.

He gets to know some of the other people in adjacent desk cubicles but most of them treat him with some sort of pitying ingenuity. He’s hotseat after all, punished under the system. Why would they bother getting attached to someone who may quit or be fired at any minute? 

Minho’s making both those probabilities more… probable. He seems butthurt at being contested by him in that first interaction, now barely acknowledging him when he’s there. Not when he brings the elder his lunch on days Hyunjin is busy, not on days when Changbin looks at his completed work and sends him to Minho’s office to be assigned more. All of it just pisses Jeongin off more than it did the last time.

He rants to his mother about him when he’s particularly irritated in the barely used bathroom on the third floor. Sure, it’s a bit of a trek when he’s busting to pee, but it’s worth the emptiness of the urinals and stalls, the time he has to rest his head on the cool tiled wall and take a breather with no one watching him.

No one uses the bathroom, but he’s not sure why. Each time he comes in, no matter how late in the workday,  the line of sinks have no droplets of water at the bottom of them, indicating the faucet has never been turned on yet. 

When he washes his hands with that warm, warm, water, and looks down at the tiny splashes of water clinging to the sides of the porcelain makes him feel like he’s done something. Made something appear that wasn’t there. Changed something irreversibly.

Left his mark.

And some days when he’s feeling a little down, he wonders if these droplets of water may be the only marks he leaves of his existence as an employee of Bang and Lee. (He tries not to think about it too hard. Luckily in between focussing on calculating the predicted growth of dental floss, and scrubbing school floors with Kaejung, he barely has time to think of anything crisis-evoking at all.)

He climbs up the stairs back to the eighth floor to his desk.

Seungmin cocks an inquisitive eyebrow instead of a returning greeting. “Where did you go?”

“Bathroom,” Jeongin tugs his chair closer to his desk and glares at the graph curve he’s been working on for the past two hours with pain.

Surprisingly, Seungmin doesn’t question him any more than that, and doesn't even interrupt him once.

In fact, it’s a tap on his shoulder that does.

“Jeongjin?’” it’s a random employee looking a little anxious.

“Hello?” Jeongin questions before briefly bowing to the woman, remembering she’s his senior. “Can I help you?”

“Changbin-nim asked if you could get Minho-nim to see him, please.”

“Me?” Jeongin stammers just as Seungmin crows ‘him?’ 

“You just don’t want to do it yourself,” Seungmin crosses his arms, and Jeongin is appalled at the other’s fraught challenge. “And his name is Jeongin.”

“I-” the woman appears shocked too, but Jeongin can tell Seungmin has hit the nail on the head with her stammering.

“You’re Hotseat,” the lady’s demeanour shifts as she places her hands on her hips. “Are you disobeying a direct order from your senior?”

Before Seungmin objects again, Jeongin stands. 

“No, no, of course not!” he bows once more. “I’ll just… go get him then?”

And he does. Well, he walks out into the hall, maintaining eye contact with both Seungmin and the other rude woman as he stands outside. When he notices the drawn blinds decorating the wall windows of Minho’s office, however, he stumbles.

It seems to be that Lee Minho does not want to be disturbed. At all. By anyone. Especially not by his nemesis. (Okay, Jeongin’s sure the other doesn’t even care enough to view him as that, but he does.)

The concealment of this room makes it seem like an impenetrable palace. A force not to be reckoned with. Like if he even knocked on the door he’d be scorched by the sun and then blasted out into space to freeze. 

Never once has he seen the blinds used on any occasion. Not during the managers’ lunchtime break, not when they left their office for a break, not even when Changbin was cursing out the tech guy who accidentally deleted his file. The blinds were never down. At Seungmin's shocked face he could tell the latter had never seen them used either.

God, this was going to go poorly. He’d be a liar to say he wasn’t scared and just wanted to ignore all this and get on the next train home.

But he has a job to do. His senior is still watching him. By now Changbin is probably too.

He has to do this.

So, he knocks.

He waits. 

No response.

Maybe his boss isn’t in here - went out for a break. But Jeongin knows his stupid brain is keeping stupid tabs on the other’s movement (definitely for no other reason than knowing where to avoid when the hermit Lee left his office, definitely not-) and he would have known if the elder walked by.

So he’s in here. He’s got to be.

He knocks again.

Nothing. 

Slowly he turns to Seungmin through the glass and the dark-haired boy looks just as bewildered as he feels.

He clears his throat, wishing he had an excuse, like a coffee or a bagel to invite himself in, but he really doesn’t. That company senior is probably getting annoyed by now but maybe if she wasn’t an asshole and just walked into Satan’s den herself then-

“Minho-nim?” his voice squeaks and he tries once more.

“Minho-nim? I’m - uh - coming in.”

As he twists the unlocked door knob an image of his boss secretly fucking someone or masturbating. 

Oh my God, Jeongin, he forces it out of his head and prays he’s wrong because walking in on something like that would definitely get him fired and-

There he is.

Lee Minho, sitting in his office chair looking at the expanse of Seoul - the ground of tiny little ant cars and ant people below them.

He stays quiet for a moment, trying to figure out exactly what’s going on. For a second he thinks the other might have wireless headphones in and is trying to meditate or something but there is nothing. 

And then he hears it.

A stifled sob.

Lee Minho, is in fact, crying.

How can he hate his literal enemy when the man is literally breaking down in front of him? Half of him turns to leave – not out of malice but out of respect. No man wants to be seen being weak, especially not in this cut-throat of an industry and especially not by a worker under them. But that half of him, the man his mother taught him to be, compels him to enter, pulling the barely used shutters down further to conceal the man further.

“Minho-nim?” his question is hesitant; having no clue how to even approach the man, this situation. “Are you-?”

And then he smells it. The scent that permeated his living room as a teenager, when things got bad. 

It almost makes him reel backwards, alcohol harsh on his nostrils, almost burning. The difference between it here, and at his previous home, is the undercutting scent of richness. 

His father only bought cheap booze.

“Minho-nim,” he tries again, keeping formalities. “Can you hear me? It’s Jeongin, the… the new desk worker. It’s… hotseat.”

The seems to catch the other’s attention. “I know who you are, Jeongin.”

Jeongin stalls, taking another step forward. “Oh… I didn’t know if you remembered me.”

His boss’s words are a slurred mumble, that Jeongin thinks his mind is piecing fantasies together when he hears; “How could’a forget you?”

His heart stops. He stops. Minho looks up at him, still seated on the desk almost three times larger than Jeongin’s own. His eyes are bloodshot; from intoxication or despair, Jeongin doesn’t know.

“I’m sorry,” the man suddenly sits up, wiping his nose with the sleeve of his blazer that likely costs a million times more than a single tissue. “I’m being ridiculous, I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologise,” he replies, déjà vu of this very conversation happening once before when he was twenty-one. “Really, everyone has bad days.”

Minho barks out a laugh then, the sound short and almost bitter. “Trust me, I know.”

Jeongin pauses once more. The other seems more sober now; at least more sober than he was a minute ago. What could have caused him to be like this? Being so vulnerable, turning to liquor to quell problems created by the mind that can only be solved by the mind – an inescapable paradox. If it could knock down Lee Minho, one of the strongest appearing men Jeongin had ever met, then it had to be bad. That scared him.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” he asks because that is his purpose. He is at least two rungs below Minho on the workplace hierarchy – as the newest recruit, his duty is to serve. 

He’s expecting the other to command him to order a coffee or run down to the bagel place for a comfort meal, but Minho just sighs and shakes his head.

Jeongin bows once. “I… I’ll leave you in peace then.” 

“No,” his boss’s sharp order freezes him mid-step towards the door. 

Obedient, he turns to face the elder.

Minho’s eyes are almost pleading. “Stay?”

And so, he does.

As he watches the sun go down through the train windows (Hyunjin taking a photo of it for Instagram) he has to remind himself that tomorrow is a Sunday. A day off.

At first, the notion of six-days-a-week work sounded ridiculous. As they pass by another station, too tired to talk after the day’s events, Jeongin lets his mind take him back to the day he’d complained about it.

“All other firms in Seoul only do Monday through Friday,” he had frowned as he carried coffees and bagels upstairs with Seungmin, Hyunjin too preoccupied assistant-ing to help deliver the order. “Why is Bang and Lee different?”

“Debt doesn’t sleep on Saturdays,” was Seungmin’s response.

Jeongin almost laughed. Trust me, I know.

“And it does on Sundays?” he quipped back to regain his witty persona, perhaps the thing that got him the job in the first place.

“No,” Seungmin wrinkled his nose, honest. “But that’s not our problem till Monday.”

He sighs. God, this debt is going to be the death of him.

“What ya’ thinking about?” Hyunjin swings around on the train pole, seemingly oblivious to the other passengers glaring at him with a dirty look. Jeongin watches the other move for a moment; perfect body proportions, grace and fluidity that he could only dream of. In another life, Hyunjin would make a great dancer.

As the thought (innuendo) enters his head, immediately he blushes. No Jeongin, not ‘that’ type of dancer! But as he glances at Hyunjin once more he can’t deny that he’d be alluring in both professions, one spent in hoodies in front of mirrors all day and the other spent under neon lighting in revealing outfits at night.

“Thinking of Seungmin?” Hyunjin asks with a cocked brow and that makes Jeongin turn crimson even more.

“N-No!” he splutters sounding utterly unconvincing. “Why would you even think that?”

“It was just an innocent question,” Hyunjin dances around the bright pole again, his face looking completely the opposite of innocent. “Dunno’ why you got so red about it.”

“Hyung, I’m not red,” Jeongin defends himself – a bold-faced lie.

The other man just snorts before plopping down next to him in a way that if Jeongin did it he’d break his tailbone, but Hyunjin does it elegantly without a hitch. “Well, what do you think of Seungmin then?” 

“He’s…” Jeongin starts, conjuring up the memories of them together. There was the whole ‘showing him around the office’ segment where Jeongin had gotten so offended he’d complained to his mother, then there were their good-humoured jokes and sarcastic quips that made number-crunching for six hours straight slightly more tolerable… 

“He’s a good friend,” is what he settles on.

Hyunjin seems to find that hilarious but refuses to explain why.

“The only thing is, he still won’t let me call him ‘hyung,’” Jeongin complains as the subway grinds to a halt.

Hyunjin just laughs again. “He’s just odd like that. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“But we’ve been working together for three weeks now!” he pouts, overly-petulant much to Hyunjin’s pleasure. “I can’t even tell if Seungmin-nim even likes me.”

The elder laughs again like he knows something Jeongin doesn’t. “Oh, don’t worry. I don’t think that’s the problem.”

Jeongin doesn’t know how to reply to that so he doesn’t.

Hyunjin hums along to a tune probably playing in his head before he asks his next question. “Where were you yesterday?”

“Hm?” Jeongin frowns confused.

“Yesterday lunch,” the assistant queries and Jeongin sucks in a breath. Right, yesterday lunch. He spent it consoling Minho. But he couldn’t just say that!

“Sorry, I got caught up in stuff,” his mumbled excuse is weak and although Hyunjin teasingly wiggles his eyebrows at him, but sensing the topic is personal, he drops it.

“No worries, man,” Hyunjin hums flashing him one of his award-winning but genuine close-lipped smiles. “You don’t have to apologise for that.”

His own words being spoken back to him almost makes him chuckle.

And as his station appears at the train doors, the conversation ends.

There’s a note on his desk in the morning.

‘Thank you. I’m sorry you had to see me like that. Please let it be you who delivers me my lunch and coffee today. I like when it’s you.’

And anything that ever made Lee Minho an enemy in his head goes completely down the drain.

And it’s promptly replaced with… something else.

It’s waiting for his instant ramen to cook when he notices it. His floor creaks as he goes to inspect it, his too-old slippers slapping as he bends down.

On the façade of his expensive shoes is a dot of grey, of peeled back fabric that only cheap leather does when aged. He runs his thumb over the offending hindrance and scowls. He can’t afford the crack in his perfectly constructed façade. He can’t afford new shoes.

So, he rummages through his cutlery drawer where his pens are stored because the apartment only came with one cabinet and finds a Sharpie. And carefully, he fills that dot of grey in.

There, perfect. The shoes are sleek, black, regal, normal, again. From afar, nothing’s changed at all.

His ramen tastes triumphant.

He’s with Seungmin again, something becoming increasingly more common. It’s Friday lunch which means they have a full hour instead of just half. So, Seungmin showed him the fastest path to a scenic park a block away, stopping for kimchi fried rice on the way. 

Usually, Hyunjin would be there too – them being a trio, but the other was running around sorting appointments for Chan that Jeongin had hardly seen him the entire week. Seemingly there was a big meeting on Sunday, something serious – ‘a union of the board’ whatever that meant.

“You’ve been here for a month,” Seungmin starts, chewing his food slowly. “How are you finding it?”

“Good,” his answer is honest, the truth almost surprising himself. “It’s good, it’s just… I don’t know if this is too ambitious and all, but… I don’t really see a clear road up the ranks from hot-seat.”

Seungmin seems both surprised and satisfied by his answer. “It’s great you’re thinking like this already, no one wants to be hot-seat forever, I know I didn’t - five months was enough for me.”

“So,” he shoves some rice in his moth far less cleanly than Seungmin. “How do I move up? Or - Or anyone, really. Like what is the usual progression of a Bang and Lee employee?”

“Well to answer the first part, no matter how much you prove yourself you’ll be in hot-seat until someone new arrives, even when the stigma around it fades out,” Seungmin sits back against the park bench. “In terms of progression, there used to be two pretty clear paths.”

Jeongin frowns at that. “Used to be?”

“From my understanding of what Hyunjin-hyung’s told me, accounting used to have two mini-branches - one-on-one and team-focussed. One-on-one was pro-bono work; charity work with people, not companies, just any person who had a case big and complex enough for Bang and Lee to take interest.”

Seungmin pauses to take another careful bite of his rice. “That was when there was all that stuff in the news - ‘Bang and Lee save grandmother from losing house in financial battle with property developers,’ attention-grabbing, under-dog titles like that. It gained respect for Bang and Lee not only from other firms and advertisers but in the eyes of the people too; made them hope maybe their lives could be turned around from help from the ‘saviour’ Bang and Lee.”

“Oh,” Jeongin pauses. “Well, why did we stop doing that if it was so good?”

“Honestly, I don’t know,” Seungmin looks away from him then. “I theorise it was lack of funds, lack of time. Investors don’t like a Mother Teresa story of success, they like profit. Helping normal civilians free of charge wasn’t doing that, but that’s just conjecture. The pro-bono work stopped around a month before I joined.”

“Maybe you were a bad omen or something,” Jeongin taunts and feels happy when it wrangles a laugh out of the other.

They are both quiet as they eat more of their lunches, before he asks, ‘what’s the way to move up, now?’

“Well, the dream is getting assigned to a client team,” Seungmin looks up in the sky as if wishing on invisible lucky stars. “That’s the most common way now. Sometimes it's just people from accounting, but sometimes it’s inter-sectional with marketing or finance: those are the big ones. Changbin-nim and Minho-nim pick candidates for a team and you work with them until the case is resolved. It allows the little-guys, like us, to be seen as reliable by doing all the number-crunching and all-nighters and by doing that for a few years we’ll get chosen for more teams and eventually make a name for ourselves.”

“That sounds…” Jeongin wrinkles his nose. “Hard.”

Seungmin snorts, throwing his head back again. “It would be! That’s how Changbin-nim did it. Worked for ages and ages until he was finally noticed by Bang Senior-ssi.”

“Wow,” he replies, taking another bite. Maybe those years of suffering he went through finally explains his heartlessness. 

“Did Minho do that too?”

Seungmin shakes his head. “Nah, that was more a ‘high friends in high places’ thing, I’ve heard. He did business school and military service with Bang Chan-nim, that’s how he got his role as joint manager.”

For some reason that makes Jeongin’s stomach curdle, and he puts his unfinished lunch to the side. 

When Seungmin asks if he’s feeling alright, he just blames it on the kimchi.

He has work tonight. Well, ‘other’ work. A part of him is glad he felt a little ill during break because now that it’s nighttime, he can use the rest of his lunch for a late dinner without spending more money. 

It’s a late dinner for two reasons: the first one being that as ‘hot seat’ he’d been forced to stay back for three hours after five to help file papers. The second one was that when he’d gotten home he’d immediately fallen asleep only for thirty minutes until his phone alarm suitingly named ‘get shit done yang jeongin’ went off through his apartment. Then, he had spent an hour and a half learning how to properly use Excel because he couldn’t deal with Seungmin’s bullying anymore and tried to arrange this morning’s data set in it. 

Now at eleven-fifteen p.m. he was dressed in his Kaejung slacks and ready for the second half of his day to begin. His vacuum clanks against the train seat as he travels. As he eats his barely-heated-up food he stretches out a kink in his neck. Even though that nap had been short, it had still managed to completely screw up his muscles. 

I need a new pillow, he winces when he massages a particularly sore spot. Maybe if I cut down on water and heating this month I can buy an actual good one.

But seeing as he showered as quickly as he could each day, and only turned the heating on when he couldn’t feel his hands, he knew that even the thought was fruitless. 

“You’re on piss duty,” the head of the janitorial squad tosses his a cloth. And even though he’s been with Kaejung for two years, he’s still treated like shit because he’s the youngest. But he can’t complain. If he refused to be the back-breaker of this unit it would leave one of the mothers or grandfathers to replace him, to spend hours on their already brittle and aching hands and knees.

And as if they needed more stress in their lives. This burden was the cross he had to bear on solely his own shoulders because it was either they win by wiping windows and he loses by being on ‘piss duty’ or they all lose because they’re on ‘piss duty’ and he loses his job.

So he gets to work.

As he scrubs, his body aching at the now sixteen-hour workday, he almost laughs. 

Because he’s Yang Jeongin; the latest recruit at the elitist transnational accounting firm Bang and Lee Co, the business school graduate that out of over five hundred applicants, won the position. But he’s also Yang Jeongin who cleans schools at night to make ends meet, lives in a shoddy half-underground apartment with mouldy walls and broken faucets, wears too small sharpie-covered band-shoes to that prestigious dream job.

But those Jeongin’s are the same Jeongin when he tucks himself into bed as the sun comes up, setting his alarm to ring in two hours’ time, letting his broken body rest. 

But when he wakes up, blinks the sleep out of his eyes to head to the office, he’s only one of them.

Happy birthday to them both.

As the sun rises the next morning, gentle snow falling around him, he walks to the fish market. He’s the ‘other’ Jeongin this morning if it means anything. The smell brings back memories. Fond ones of sitting up on crates with the elderly workers doting on him as he waited for his mother to take him to school, then the not-so-fond ones of bullies taunting him about the scent that clung to his clothes at said school. He spots her easily; the hot-pink labour gloves he gifted her last holidays making her stand out. But he wouldn’t need gloves to know which one of them is his beloved mother.

“Eomma,” he barely has to make his presence known before the woman smiles at him, eyes crinkled into crescents. 

“Jeonginnie,” she croons, before stepping back to marvel at his suit. “My! You look so expensive.”

His toes in those too-small shoes ache. 

“Brand new,” he points to his brilliant bargain. “It does look nice, though, doesn’t it?”

He’s quite proud of his outfit – having finally found a long warm coat to wear over his suits that polished up well after a clean and an iron. It was so discounted due to the stain along the front of it that took almost three days to scrub out.

Most rich people wouldn’t bother with the effort.

He watches his mother’s face shift from adoration to a quiet concern. “You look tired, Jeongin.”

He falters, shifting in his place as the yells of workers overlap for a few moments and the waves crash against the bay. It seemed high-brand names and the concealer he bought last week couldn’t hide his weariness – not from his mother.

“I’m okay,” he forces a smile. “They aren’t working me too hard.”

His mother narrows her eyes. “You quit the cleaning job, right?”

Jeongin swallows, last night coming to his mind. “Yeah. I need some sleep.”

She takes the lie as truth. “You shouldn’t have woken up so early to see me.”

“Wanted to,” he shrugs, hands in pockets.

She smiles then, albeit a sad one. “Your father would be proud of you.”

And he smiles too. “I know. Thanks, Eomma.”

Twenty minutes later he’s headed to work for the eight-a.m. start. The plastic bag in his hand rustles and crinkles as it swings gently into his pant-suit leg. He’s nervous, more nervous than any given put-together adult should be when doing a simple task. Half of it’s the fresh seafood he’s carrying to bring as a gift to his co-workers – his mother insisted, yet the years of being called ‘Fish Boy’ stick in his mind. The other half is Lee Minho.

He tries to ignore both worries permeating his mind; both are equally as difficult to confront.

He swallows his fears, swiping his ID card to get into the glass building and walks up the flights of stairs to his office desk, cursing the damned broken elevator.

Seungmin and Hyunjin are hunched over, seemingly discussing something that by the unusual frown on Hyunjin’s face seems important, but stop talking when they see him.

“Hey, Jeongin,” Seungmin says, unnaturally quiet.

Hyunjin just crinkles his nose. “What’s that smell?” 

Watching Seungmin harshly jab the other in the stomach isn’t enough consolation for the wave of memories that threaten to drown him.

Immediately, Jeongin shrivels into himself, unconsciously hiding the plastic bag of fresh meals. “Um, I… my Eomma wanted me to bring this fish for everyone. It’s no preservatives and caught just this morning so… yeah.” 

“Fish, you say?” the booming voice of no one other than success story Bang Chan comes through the office and Jeongin jumps, plastering on a smile.

“Yeah,” he confirms, hoping to seem more confident than that humiliated child he was years ago. “Caught this morning… it’s uh – a gift. For everyone.”

“You know how to get on my good side,” Chan smiles – the pearly white of his teeth almost blinding. “I’ve been craving seafood all week – you must be able to read my mind.”

Changbin, beside him, just grunts. Jeongin’s always had the feeling the elder doesn’t like him much.

“I guess I’m just lucky,” he answers, abashed. “Please take as much as you like. It should be cooked before Monday.”

“I’ll have some tonight. If you could be so kind to place it in the fridge,” Chan dips his head. “Thank you for this. It’s very thoughtful of you – and your Eomma.”

And with a wink the Australian leaves, Changbin tailing behind him – the pair almost always together. Jeongin feels his heart lighten – watching that slightly tangled mess of blonde hair walk away. Dyed hair, especially ones that vibrant is usually reserved for idols or teenage rebellions, and yet Chan makes the slightly unprofessional carefree look of it so… fitting. So tasteful, so breezy, so uniquely powerful. When people think of ‘Bang Chan’ they usually think about his signature blonde curly mane of hair. Like a lion – calculating, courageous, innovative, prideful.

Simply powerful.

As he places the fish gently into a Tupperware box (to contain some of the smell and its freshness) and then into the fridge he can’t help the small smile on his face. That went better than he expected – not that he thought a group of adults would start chanting cruel names as he walked into the office or anything. 

And on Monday when Chan calls him into his office, once again thanking him dearly for the gift, talking about the ‘extravagant flavour’ and ‘exquisite freshness' of the fish, Jeongin feels his heart erupt again. How can one man be so grateful? So unabashedly happy in a place of tremendous stress and expectation? If Jeongin were ever to become the leader of anything – whether a project team or even a company, he hopes to be one as kind and put-together as Bang Chan.

(When he calls his mother, telling her about it, she is just as happy as he is. It makes his heart grow.)

It’s at night when he does it. He doesn’t know if it’s a strange burst of reckless bravery or the eighteen-hour sleep deprivation delusion that compels him to do it. But out of all things, he blames his phone.

‘Recommended profile for you : Lee Minho (@leeminho-sdd)’

More awake now at the Instagram notification he grabs his device, wincing at the bright light hurting his eyes. He blinks it away, reading the notification once more.

Lee Minho’s page is private, he discovers but the profile picture is enough to captivate him. A glorious side profile, moody eyes, brown knitted sweater hanging loosely over his frame, that sharper than a knife jawline.

The ‘request friend’ button is almost mocking him.

And as his finger hovers over the button, he wonders; what harm could it do?

And goddamn could it do a lot. 

As soon as the button turns blue ‘pending acceptance,’ he spirals.

Firstly, it’s four a.m. Four in the morning. Sure, did he just get off a Kaejung shift (he covered for his friend and although it was the right thing to do, his body’s soreness makes him regret it), yes, but no one knows about that – not even his mother. Lee Minho would wake up at a normal time and see the timestamp of his said ‘friend request’ and probably think that Jeongin was some sort of crazy person spending the whole night stalking him! At that rate, he’d never get an accepted request and Lee Minho would look at him weirdly tomorrow (today) at work and he’d think ‘this Yang Jeongjin is so weird, who the hell is awake on social media at four in the morning-’

‘Lee Minho has accepted your friend request.’

His jaw almost drops open. Lee Minho is awake at four a.m. on social media?!? Or… (God please no) had Jeongin’s request made his phone chime with the notification and woken him up?? 

He pales at the thought; mortified. Oh god, he had just completely decimated his literal boss’s sleep schedule and Lee Minho seemed like the type to stick to a rampant schedule seeing how clear his skin was every day there was no way he’d miss out on beauty sleep, yet he had just disrupted that and-

Stop spiralling Jeongin, he commands himself, turning the device off entirely. Just set the phone down and go to sleep. You have to be up in two hours; may as well make the best of it.

Just as he goes to plug his phone on charge, the meaning of the accepted friend request hits him. He can view Minho’s profile now. All his posts, all his pictures… and if they’re anything like the profile photo…

His curiosity will kill him one day.

The photos are… almost professional. There are pictures of him and other people (a cutesy one of him and Bang Chan at graduation posted years after – a throwback perhaps) but most of them are of himself. There’s one of him holding a cat, one of him holding a mug of what looks like green tea.

And then there’s the one that changes everything. Makes Jeongin’s already stuffy apartment heat up even more.

It’s that same brown sweater as in the profile picture – but taken on a different day. He can tell because in this one Minho’s wearing… make-up. Not a lot, but there’s some smudged smoky eyeshadow on his creases, his plump lips glossy with something more than a thin coat of saliva from his tongue. But the real catch is that stupid brown sweater drapes low enough that Jeongin can see a prominent collarbone, almost a strong pectoral muscle show through. It’s seductive, the look in Minho’s dark gaze, the crimson red on his godly sculpted cheekbones he can’t tell is a light coating of blush or an alcohol flush or-

Jeongin flips the phone faster than any human being should be able to move at four in the morning. Carefully placing a hand on his own cheek, he can feel its redness. Under his sheets he can feel his body… reacting to even the sight of the image.

Goddammit Jeongin, he splashes some cold water from his bedside glass onto his face. Just go to sleep.

And he intended to; really, he did. It’s just that three minutes after setting his phone down, forcing his body to relax and (unsuccessfully) trying to push the image of Minho’s cheeks, Minho’s collarbone, Minho’s eyes, out of his mind, his phone buzzes.

<What are you doing up >

Sent : 4:13a.m.

He almost dies on the spot. Nervously he bites his lip, opening the chat box, reading the message over and over again. Is this real? Or did he fall asleep and is this a dream?

<Why are you awake?>

Sent : 4:15a.m.

Typing bubbles appear then go. Jeongin waits.

<I asked you first>

Sent : 4:16a.m.

Jeongin types in his next message just knowing the man on the other side of the phone will hate his answer. (Which is why he sends it.)

<Well, I asked you with a question mark, making it a question.>

Sent 4:16a.m.

As the dots appear, his heart pounds.

<I’m your boss. You answer to me.>

Sent 4:17a.m.

Although it’s likely a joke, reality seeps in. Jeongin pauses for a minute; sets down the phone. What the hell is he doing? He’s messaging his literal boss at four in the morning! Especially after what… what happened to his stupid sleep-deprived body and mind, how can he do this with a clean conscious? Be in a moral state?

So, he throws his phone across the room, forces his eyes shut, and tries to fall asleep as the birds start their morning song.

(When he wakes up, groggy and irritated after his lack of sleep, he stumbles out of bed to silence the alarm he thankfully remembered to set the previous night. As he hits ‘snooze’ he groans. Across the screen is a thin line of cracked glass. That’s another hit to the very little of his savings.

Just another unlucky day for him.)

His luck turns worse. Of course, it does. Because can really, he Yang Jeongin, ever catch a break?

“Don’t be late tomorrow,” Changbin scolds, monotone as ever. 

“Yes sir, sorry,” he bows his head in red-eared shame. As he walks out of his senior’s office Seungmin pouts at him. 

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he plops onto his desk chair, opening up the stock market and his project files. “Just fell asleep on the train.”

“Well, you’re barely half an hour late,” his desk-mate shrugs, looking worried. “I came in an hour late one time and Changbin-nim didn’t pull me into his office.”

Jeongin sighs, depressed. “I think he hates me.”

The other looks sympathetic. “You haven’t given him a reason to, have you?”

He thinks then. Apart from the stupid interview and stupid Sydney-Seoul question that Minho had literally haggard him for, there should be too much of a reason for Changbin not to like him. 

“No,” he answers honestly. “I don’t think so.”

Seungmin smirks then. “Well, you did order that million-dollar bagel that one time-”

“Oh, don’t even go there,” Jeongin feels his ears heat up again. “It’s not like I knew the double smoked salmon would be that expensive!”

Seungmin just cackles (evilly.) And Jeongin can’t help himself from laughing a little too.

Maybe his luck does take another turn, this time in a positive direction. Because just as he’s washing his hands in the third-floor men’s bathroom, a very familiar face walks in.

“Jeongin,” the elder greets, unzipping his fly.

“Minho-nim,” Jeongin responds, hoping to keep the nervous wobble out of his voice as he very pointedly adverts his eyes from Minho to his own reflection in the mirror. As the tinkling sound from the adjacent urinal begins, Jeongin pumps more soap onto his hands, washing them a second time. Because it would just be rude to cut off the tap when Minho’s half-way through right? Then it’d just be awkward because the tap running is the louder sound in the bathroom out of the two very specific sounds and if the latter sound was the only sound then it’d just be-

“I didn’t know you used this bathroom.”

“I-” Jeongin washes his hands for the fifth time. “I thought I was the only one.”

A pause. 

“You didn’t reply to my message last night.”

Jeongin short-circuits and watches his own reflection seize up. “Oh, yeah um – I fell asleep.”

The flush cuts in between them and Jeongin gulps as the other turns around before zipping up his fly entirely – making it impossible not to see the royal blue boxers the elder man is adorning. 

“Am I that boring to you?” Minho’s voice is husky as he finishes buckling his belt and starts washing his hands beside him.

“N-No, Minho-nim,” Jeongin replies, eager to not-offend. “Of course not.”

The elder meets his eye in the mirror. “So, you’re interested by me?”

Jeongin bites his lip. “I – I didn’t say that. ”

“Well, the opposite of boredom is interest, isn’t it?”

Jeongin searches for a witty response, something to cover the ‘realness’ of the conversation. “Is this something to do with finances?”

Minho actually does laugh (as much as Minho ever laughs) – a quick-humoured huff out of his nose. “Interest. Funny. You are a quick thinker, aren’t you?”

Jeongin turns off the tap, wishing he used cold water instead of that gentle warm. “I try to be.”

“You do well here,” the compliment seems rare, even to Minho who for a split second seems surprised he even said it.

Jeongin swallows, voice quiet. “Thank you.”

They stare at each other for a few seconds. Minho’s eyes flitter from side to side as if searching for something that he doesn’t even know what. 

With a humble clearing-of-his-throat, the elder steps back, the tension that had been building dissipating. “You’d do better if you replied to your boss’s messages.”

Then, Jeongin voices the concern he’d been thinking about since last night. “So, it’s okay, then?”

Minho seems to understand the underlying meaning of his words, drying off his hands with a paper towel. “It’s fine with me.”

And it’s the answer that doesn’t answer even half of it.

“See you around, Jeongin.”

And with that, he’s gone, the door squeaking on its hinges being the only indication that Lee Minho was there at all.

They’re just walking up a flight of stairs when Jeongin murmurs it, curious. “I heard there was a rooftop bar here.”

“Really?” Hyunjin’s tone is high, passing the bagels he was sent by Chan to get from one hand to another. (Jeongin has barely seen the other all week, even if it’s only fifteen minutes of hauling bread up flights of stairs he’s grateful for it.) “Who from?”

“An article online,” Jeongin munches one of the said bagels (only one serving of smoked salmon and no gold flakes.) “ Bang and Lee’s top benefits and perks.’”

“Sounds like a great read,” Seungmin deadpans from behind them, juggling with a tray of take-away drinks.

Jeongin just snorts and grabs one coffee (Americano, iced, added stevia – who the hell gets stevia?) to ease the load. 

“It’s not open now,” Hyunjin answers the question Jeongin was inferring to. “Maintenance.”

He pouts, then playfully glares as Seungmin wipes a poppyseed off the corner of his mouth. “Do you think it’ll open again in time for summer?”

June is a little less than four months away now. Jeongin could only imagine the luxury he’d feel wining and dining on top of a skyscraper under the hot, rewarding sun.

Hyunjin shrugs and looks straight ahead at the oncoming door, behind it, a room of hungry, waiting employees. “Maybe.”

And it’s left at that.

It’s a regular Saturday night when Jeongin sighs into the phone, laptop in hand. “God, this data crunching is killing me. I wish we didn’t have to go into the office tomorrow.”

“You’re going to tomorrow’s meeting?” Seungmin’s voice is high-pitched over the telephone line. Jeongin doesn’t quite know when they started calling rather frequently, but Seungmin has every answer to (almost) every one of Jeongin’s problems.

“Are you not?” he frowns, scanning the forwarded email again. “Did you check your inbox?”

“Jeongin this isn’t a normal meeting,” Seungmin sounds almost wheezy - to the point Jeongin’s thinking of asking if the other has asthma or just straight up calling emergency services. “Only higher-ups attend these, how did you get invited?!”

Jeongin tries not to feel offended at the note of incredulity in Seungmin’s tone as he says ‘you.’ Instead, he scrolls down to read the attached message.

‘Got you a seat with the board, on the condition you bring up coffees. Please be prepared.’

Jeongin almost snickers at the last sly message, but he replaces it with an answer to the latter’s question. “Minho-nim invited me.”

“Seriously!? Minho-nim invited you to a meeting with Bang Senior-ssi!?”

Jeongin pales. Okay, he does know who that is – it’s Chan’s father. Oh god, wait this isn’t just a meeting, it’s the meeting. The reason why Hyunjin had been running around like a headless chicken for the entire week.

“Oh shit,” he mutters, reality settling in and leaps off his bed to scrub at the stupid stain on his best bargain suit. (Stupid avocado bagel-) “Wait, is Hyunjin-hyung going?”

“You’ll have to ask him,” Seungmin still sounds out of breath. “Although he organises it, his actual attendance is fifty-fifty – sometimes he’ll go and take notes for Chan-nim and sometimes he doesn’t have clearance – Bang Senior-ssi doesn’t like him much.”

“I can imagine,” Jeongin narrows his eyes at the stain, hoping his words don’t sound as cruel as he accidentally let them be. “I – I mean everything I’ve heard about Bang Senior-ssi is that he’s very… militant , or – or… tough.”

“You’ve heard correctly,” Seungmin doesn’t ease his fears. “He built the company back up after the Korean war, toughness was a necessity. I can’t wait to meet him in real life, you’re so lucky.”

And as they hang up, the only thing Jeongin feels ‘lucky’ about is the overtime pay.

The office is terrifying.

“Don’t screw this up,” Minho says as they walk to the penthouse office - doing absolutely nothing to assure him. 

“I won’t,” Jeongin fakes confidence, juggling the coffees he’s hoping will get him on the right side of the meeting. “By the end of it, I guarantee Bang Senior-ssi will like me.”

And Minho just laughs.

It takes three seconds for Bang Senior, a man who looks like he’s never laughed before in his life,  to quite literally despise him.

“Who’s this?”

He stands, polite. “Yang Jeongin, interim accountant, sir-”

“Wasn’t talking to you.” Jeongin freezes. “Chan, explain this nobody’s presence.”

Chan glances at him out of his peripheral before facing his father. “I thought it would be a good idea for new employees to observe the inner workings of the company, sir.”

Jeongin feels his back stiffen. What kind of father makes their adult son call him ‘sir?’

Bang Senior glares back at him, scowling. “There’s not enough time to waste on this any further, be seated.”

Jeongin obediently sits back down – next to Hyunjin (who’s luckily there too) and the wall – completely out of the way.

“Next time don’t make any decisions without consulting me first, yes?”

Jeongin stares down at the table, feigning ignorance of the illuminating moment.

Chan responds after a few languid seconds. “Yes… sir.”

The tension fades as the other office workers file in at the senior man’s invitation; all-in high-ranking positions on the lower floors - fewer stairs to walk up now that the elevator is in repairs. He’s pretty sure all Chan, Minho and Changbin were previously offered downstairs cubicles, but all declined. If Jeongin were them (as if he’d ever make it that big) he was pretty sure he’d decline too. There was something special about the ability to see all of Seoul right out his hypothetical window, see the cars drive along the wide roads - tiny like little ants. There was something ethereal about being so high up - as if he could reach out a hand and touch the clouds, feel them move between his lithe fingers. Something about power.

Power. The thing he definitely didn’t have at this meeting. No matter how much Minho’s good graces got him a seat it was most likely evened out by Changbin’s distaste of him if the higher-ups even gave a shit about their opinions. Something told him, they didn’t. That scared him.

“Alright,” Bang Senior dips his head. “Make sure he’s signed those NDA papers after this. Let’s start, shall we?”

A file gets passed around. He does not get to see its contents.

“As we all know, Kinyak pulled out in October,” no one seems surprised or happy about this news. Jeongin is, in fact, the former: Kinyak is one of the largest pharmaceutical firms in South East Asia. Exports to Japan, China, Thailand, hell – it’s even got a governmental contract with North Korea. It was one of the largest, if not the biggest, company Bang and Lee represented in all its financial matters.

Its withdrawal from the firm, after over thirty years, would be an extreme loss. No wonder its departure was so hush-hush.

“Bang and Lee cannot appear weak because of this,” the elder man adjusts his glasses. “In the financial climate, the globe and South Korea is in currently, upholding our reputation is paramount.”

The file is passed. Bang Senior clears his throat and adjusts his reading glasses as he scans it; sitting back in his chair to see the paper… better(?) before placing it down and leaning in again. 

“Taldox is leaving Park and Clineman after the data leak fiasco,” the man grunts with a sigh. “All our competitors are reaching for Taldox as its client so we need to seize it, we must win. With the company aligned with us, I’m sure we can maximise our revenue and profits. Once again reputation and profit are the most important things. Taldox will help us garner both.”

“I thought how we can help others and further stimulate the economy is the most important thing, sir,” Bang Chan speaks up and the room falls silent. Hyunjin looks close to panicking - something Jeongin’s never witnessed from the other before, even when talking about vomit or public transport at midnight had never done. Jeongin tenses up too, heart pounding in his ears as Bang Senior’s face slowly morphs into a disapproving rage. 

“Sometimes you really do disappoint me, Chan. Everyone apart from my son and his little posse, please leave.”

Jeongin goes to stand but Hyunjin quickly tugging firmly at his blazer makes him freeze. He waits patiently as the other company heads walk past, some sending Chan a pitying look over Bang Senior’s shoulder, some stone-faced and unapologetic as they exit.

Then it’s just the five of them Jeongin actually knows (including himself), trapped in the room with the man he now sees as a monster. 

Hyunjin looks scared shitless, quiet as a mouse. Changbin looks furious - about to explode as he shifts his weight in his seat next to Chan over and over again, fighting to keep his mouth shut. Bang Chan looks calm, like always. But there’s a part of him that looks so utterly defeated.

Minho has no distinguishable emotion on his face, eyes, nose, lips, cheeks, all a void of nothingness.

Jeongin doesn’t even know what he’s feeling. He’s just hoping he doesn’t look like a complete imbecile even if he feels like one.

It’s Minho that raises his arm.

When Bang Senior nods, he stands.

“Respectfully sir, I believe that if the reputation of the company is valued of the highest importance, then perhaps we could restart the pro bono initiative.”

Jeongin looks towards the elderly man for a reaction. In honesty, it seems like a good suggestion. Although maybe it wouldn’t help the profit side in the short-term, isn't running an already successful company all about the long-term? From what he understands, Bang and Lee drew its highest number of smaller companies in when the stories of those ‘saved grandmothers’ and ‘paying low-income rural student’s tuition’ were circulating the press. So surely if they started it again, people and companies would be more likely to sign the contract papers. Who knew, maybe even if the branch reopened Jeongin could be the one writing those papers-

Bang Senior’s face changes.

Then, the man just laughs.

The sound is so outrageously loud and jarringly opposite to the noise level and mood of the room seconds before and Jeongin literally moves closer to Hyunjin in some primitive needing-protection-fear-response technique. Minho looks surprised too, a human emotion finally expressed but Changbin and Chan still look the same. Somehow Hyunjin looks even more fearful.

“Open it-” the man splutters a hoarse cough into his plaid handkerchief. “Open it up again?”

And Jeongin watches the elder stare dead into Lee Minho’s eyes.

“The only reason it closed down was because of you.”

His heart stops. Time stops really because everyone freezes. Minho’s jaw drops for a second before closing into a firm line. 

Bang Senior stands up with his cane before taking one last long look at his son.

“Chan, sort out your team.”

And he’s gone.

He gets called for his first actual meeting on Saturday.

He can only hope it goes better than the last one six days prior. He still hadn’t recovered from it yet, although it seemed everyone else present had. Minho stays in his office. Changbin barks out orders. Hyunjin runs around to organise everything. Bang Chan does whatever Jeongin assumes Bang Chan would usually do.

When Seungmin asks what happened on Monday morning he kept his mouth shut. Even if he hadn’t signed those NDA papers with a shaking hand when a pretty woman served them to him as the five of them left the second floor, he still wouldn’t have said anything.

What he bore witness to just seemed so private. So uncomfortably personal he wanted to shrivel up and die on the spot.

But, of course, he couldn’t do that. And the words he hears next make him so glad he did not in fact possess the ability to instantaneously shrivel up and die.

“With recommendation from other sector managers I’ve hand-selected you eleven to join me in representing this case,” Changbin starts, and audible sighs of relief and excitement fill the room. “I know, you can all pop a champagne bottle tonight, but for now, don’t disappoint me or the client and listen up.”

Like a dog, Jeongin perks his ears, quite literally leaning forward as Changbin rummages around in his briefcase, only building the room’s rampant anticipation. Quickly he glances around at the other staff in the room (he can only recognise a few – two from marketing, one from the other side of his office, and the majority of people are older than him. He wonders if this is their first time on a huge case like this too, or if he’s the only newbie. Although he has a feeling, that from the excited faces in the room, no matter if it’s someone’s first time assigned to a case, it’s a major honour to be hand-picked for another one.)

They’re my team, he realises in awe – almost vibrating from it. People who I can learn from, share stories with, drink with on Saturday nights, celebrate and bond with… now I have a proper case, I can finally help the real world – real companies and people like I’ve wanted to!

“Hanjul Corporations,” Changbin slaps a file down on the table. “Getting sued for what the alleged ‘victims’ call ‘misinformation’ and ‘fraud.’”

Jeongin feels his gut twist uncomfortably at Changbin’s pointed, almost sarcastic tone. Although his excitement dims rather considerably, no one else seems to mind. So, like the ten others in the room, with no Seungmin or Hyunjin to back him up or gauge their reactions, he sits quietly, listening.

“They’re paying us to get them out of this little situation quickly and quietly,” Changbin changes the slide and Jeongin frowns at the familiar company emblem. “Then rebuild the company – reimage, reimagine, re-all-of-it.”

Jeongin feels himself go pallid, antsy along with it as a file is passed around, him receiving the last one. There’s a nagging feeling tugging at his heart like he should know something but doesn’t; like he’s missing something truly important.

And then it hits him in three words.

‘Hanjul Gambling Corporation.’

He feels his heart plummet from his chest on the seventh floor, all the way to the Earth’s core.

His brain fades out of Changbin’s words, his slideshow, his notes. All he does is stare. Stare at the unmoving file in front of him. Stare at those three words.

“Jeongin?” 

Dazed, he looks up, and sees the other staff members retreating from the glass meeting room. When had it ended? Had Changbin been calling him long?

“Jeongin.”

He blinks twice. Stares up at the elder until he finally gets his bearings.

“Oh, sorry, Changbin-nim…” he grips the file with white knuckles as he stands.  “I’ll just go now. Thank you.”

“Wait,” the other’s tone is sharp. It finally makes his brain stop from its fuzzy state and start to panic at the potential repercussions of what (involuntarily, he guessed) had done. “Sit down.”

Shit…

“Sorry, I don’t know what happened to me,” that was the truth. “Maybe I didn’t eat enough today.”

And that was a lie. He actually bought discounted bread as the bakery closed the night prior and had four slices this morning.

“Hyunjin told me you were talkative,” the other leans half on the table – towering over him despite his smaller stature. 

He did?  He feels almost warm from the praise, but swallows it down, overpowered by Changbin’s icy glare. “I – I… I don’t know what to say…”

Changbin doesn’t let up.

“Minho-nim confirmed it,” his unwavering glare makes Jeongin shrivel inwards. “Now, I don’t trust the guy as far as I could throw him, but I trusted him on this. He told me to choose you over other eager more experienced colleagues for this project. Over your friend Kim Seungmin who’s worked here for months without a case and has always been reliable. Lee Minho said, and I quote to ‘give you a shot.’”

Minho-nim said that? Is what his brain focuses on, rather than his manager’s perhaps-Freudian slip.

 “He said you were brave,” Changbin stands up tall. “Either they’re idiots and you’ve deceived them, they’re lying to me, or you’re nothing of the sort and just wasting my time.”

Jeongin opens his mouth to defend himself or apologise profusely, but nothing comes out.

“Tell me, Jeongin,” the other is truly terrifying. “Are you wasting my time?”

“No,” he blurts out, quickly correcting his tone and Changbin’s quirked eyebrow. “I’m – I’m not. I can promise that, sir.”

He watches Changbin soften, so slightly if it were not for the high tension between them, he would never have seen it. “Then tell me what the hell happened today.”

“I-” Jeongin bows his head, looking down at his hands, the paper, the words. “I’m sorry. I just… can’t work this case for you.”

“You’re declining it?” Changbin asks, incredulous. “I stuck my neck out on this for you – a rookie with no experience. I hired you here. Your name is on this case.”

And sure enough, it is. If he had just looked past those three words, he would have noticed next to the other staff’s names, Changbin’s one in bold as case manager, is his in small fine print.

“I am,” he instils the last of his dignity and pride into his tone; if he’s going to be a coward, he should at least try to project some strength into his refusal. “I’m sorry to disappoint you.”

Changbin scoffs, furious. “It’s Minho-nim and Chan you should be worrying about, God knows they had at least some faith in you.”

Jeongin balls his fist, angry at no one but himself. And yet he just can’t work this particular case-

“Why?”

Jeongin pauses, jaw hanging dumbly open like a mouthing fish. Shit, he’d said that last part aloud.

“It’s because-”

He’s sixteen again, working overtime at the restaurant to pay for family groceries.

“-Um - because-”

He’s eighteen again, holding his mother as she cries.

“-I just can’t do this one because-”

He’s twenty again, dressed in all black.

“-Because I don’t feel ready for a client team. I’m… feeling overwhelmed with even the data sets and predictions you’re giving me and - and those - like - aren’t even used really. I just feel like I need another month or so doing… my regular work.”

The manager is quiet for a moment. Jeongin feels his heart race, nervous for his boss’ response, almost gleeful he got away with it and-

“One thing you’ll come to know about me is that I value honesty.”

Jeongin feels his heart skip a beat. Changbin saw him. The real Jeongin, the half he kept hidden. Changbin saw through his lie, saw through him .

He dips his head low, about to turn tail and retreat to the main office space, but he pauses. He can’t fail so miserably like this – without giving a proper explanation for his refusal he just seems inadept, ungrateful, lazy . He needs to say something to redeem his own morals that stopped him from working this stupid case in the first place-

“Is there anything I can do?”

Changbin looks up from the file, eyes bold. “Sorry?”

“A-Anything else,” Jeongin stumbles over his words – fingers fidgeting over one another without that file to grip onto. “I don’t know, like a filing job, or – or crunching some numbers – anything you could find me-”

Changbin laughs then, clipped like he’s shocked, scalding, or a combination of the two. “You are the last person to ask me for a favour right now, Yang Jeongin. Get out.”

And with the last attempt to save his image or his morals, he bows once more before leaving the office space, embarrassed and miserable. His feet don’t feel like his own as he walks down the glass corridor back to his desk, his red seat. He meets Minho’s eyes through the glass wall and sees bewilderment underneath that cool, unruffled façade.

Seungmin’s eyes are a completely different story.

“What happened?!” the other’s hushed whisper is barely hushed at all. Jeongin swallows, looking away to see the entire office staff looking at him, expectant, before snapping their heads down to continue at work – caught. 

“You heard it all?” he can barely form the syllables.

Thankfully, Seungmin shakes his head, though his face looks astounded. “We didn’t need to. Although the walls are soundproof, they’re glass! Changbin-nim went off on you. What did you do?”

Jeongin just slumps in his chair. “I dunno. Ruined everything, maybe.”

“No, seriously what happened? Please tell me.”

Jeongin makes an attempt to meet Seungmin’s eyes and in them, all he can see is worry, distress, and fear. His heart tangs. God, he can’t brush Seungmin off – not like he did with Changbin – the other is one of his closest friends and God , Seungmin missed out on his chance to prove himself because of him. At least, he deserves an explanation.

So, he leans in, and lowers his voice. “I declined the position.”

Seungmin goes from red to white – all colour draining from his face. “What?”

“Changbin picked me for a team. I said no. He’s… really mad.”

Seungmin’s mouth drops open. “You don’t decline a position Seo Changbin chose you for! Why – What the – Why would you say no?”

Jeongin opens his mouth to explain, but just like before, he can’t. “Just… couldn’t do it.”

“Jeongin!” a flurry of actions snaps his gaze to his right, where he sees Hyunjin push past someone making their coffee towards them in a half-jog-half-walk. 

“You shouldn’t run in the office,” he mumbles out – pessimistic (great, he can’t even hide his own disappointment what a great person he is-) as he nods over to the cartoonish depiction of a man falling over on a sign next to the fridge.

“I heard what happened,” Hyunjin brushes that off completely, tugging both him and Seungmin out of their seats. 

“What?” he’s sarcastic – a terrible trait and lets the elder drag him to the fire escape staircase. “The ceiling above his office isn’t soundproof?”

“Chan didn’t dismiss me from his office in time before Changbin came in,” the other cringes at the recollection, closing the door. “He’s… well… furious. Why did you turn him down?”

“I didn’t turn him down,” Jeongin clarifies hoping to be able to draw a distinction. “I turned it down. The case.”

Seungmin balks, voice panicked and shrill. “That’s literally the same thing!”

“Well-” he goes to explain himself but Hyunjin cuts in.

“They’re not the same thing. But Changbin-nim won’t see it that way. Chan-hyung is… sympathetic to you, but he’s confused. And… he doesn’t have time to deal with… sorry to put it this way, but low-level disputes right now.”

Jeongin drags a hand down his face. “Maybe I can go talk to Minho-nim.”

Seungmin scoffs. “Why would you do that?! Changbin-nim and Minho-nim don’t agree on a lot but they have that same no tolerance for excuses type thing in common.”

Jeongin furrows his eyebrows. “Wait, why don’t they like each other? Changbin mentioned it while he was yelling at me”

“They don’t dislike each other,” Hyunjin cuts in, Jeongin only frowning deeper at the out-of-place comment.

“They had a big falling out in autumn,” Seungmin gushes, loving to teach anything. “Rumour has it they always fought before that though – but I still don’t know what over.”

“Maybe let’s not spread gossip,” Hyunjin cuts in again. “Let’s just focus on saving Jeongin’s career because that seems like the more pressing matter to me.”

Jeongin feels his face drop and Seungmin speaks (yells) his thoughts. “Wait, saving his career? Is Chan-nim going to fire him?”

“Look, Chan-hyung, likes you Jeongin, and – and so does Minho-nim who literally doesn’t like anyone! We have that on your side,” Hyunjin turns to him and Jeongin’s heart plummets again. 

“Oh my God,” he covers his mouth with one trembling hand. “I’m going to lose this job.” 

I’m going to lose everything.

“You’re not going to lose everything,” his mother’s tone comes through the line – a familiar mix between incredulous and comforting. “Any company would be grateful to have you working there, Jeonginnie, so this one’s not going to fire you over this.”

“I didn’t give them a reason,” his voice is hoarse from the tears shed in the private solace of the third floor’s bathroom. There was a bad stench from one of the urinals, so most people avoided it entirely. Luckily for him, he was used to the smell – his countertop no matter how much he scrubbed it was reminiscent of it. It made for a great escape.

“You don’t have to tell them,” her voice is softer now, but still with that underlying of gentle concern. “But…”

When the phone is silent, he quickly lifts it away from his wet cheek to make sure the call is still intact. “Eomma?”

“It’s nothing, Jeongin,” she sounds tired. “Nevermind.”

He comes into work on Monday to the sound of champagne bottles popping and cheers. 

“We got Taldox!” Seungmin celebrates, grinning from ear to ear.

“Oh?” Jeongin peers around in response. Everyone is out of their desk chairs, a glass of wine in their hands or a snack seemingly prepared on platters for them all. One glance over to Changbin the man seems in good spirits. Half of him hopes the manager has completely forgotten about his withdrawal from the case, but when the elder’s narrowed eyes meet his own, he can tell that hope was nothing more than a wishful fantasy.

Chan comes from his private ninth-floor office into theirs with another bottle. 

“We’ll celebrate properly tonight,” he proclaims with that charismatic dimpled grin. “All drinks on me.”

And Jeongin finds himself cheering along with everyone else.

He can barely wait until the clock hits five. Seungmin seems caught up in the ecstatic sensation too - fidgeting in his chair in a way that Jeongin interprets as… nervous.

“You okay?” he whispers to the elder as they walk in the clustered line from Bang and Lee headquarters to the bar. 

“Of course,” Seungmin replies, not really convincing him at all.

When they arrive there are already tables set up for them, lavishly decorated with streamers and a cake with unlit sparklers resting atop it. It’s a beautiful location, a beautiful scene - and yet it teeters on the edge of a regular ‘trashy’ bar with those cherry red booths and wooden exterior. 

“It’s perfect,” he overhears Chan remark, shaking the owner’s hand. “Thank you for setting this up on such short notice.”

“Anything for the son of Bang Senior-ssi,” the owner dips his head.

And for some reason when the heir to the company smiles again, it looks like it doesn’t quite reach his eyes.

But he doesn’t have time to dwell on that. Instead, the object of his interest is Lee Minho, dressed extraordinarily (in a forest green blazer oh my god he’s never seen the elder wear something so colourful-) as per usual. Perhaps because of this casual setting, the mood-lighting, it makes the man seem less serious, less like an idol. Instead, he appears like a regular man, someone still regal and beautiful, but less… unattainable.

At that thought, he snaps his head away to find familiarity in his actual friends there, but Seungmin is off networking with senior staff and Hyunjin is… touching the bartender’s hand? Curious, Jeongin heads over to the blonde male.

“Hey,” he greets before dipping his head at the tattooed man serving drinks. 

“Innie!” Hyunjin throws his arms around his shoulders, seemingly tipsy already. “Take a shot with me.”

Baffled, Jeongin looks toward the bartender for any sort of social cues.

“It’s all on tab,” the man replies, voice gruff and… undeniably sexy that it matches his ‘macho-man’ appearance. 

So, with nothing (especially cash) to lose, he grabs the shot glass, links arms with Hyunjin and tips his head back. Hyunjin’s excited cackle draws the attention of a few of the other Bang and Lee employees but the bartender just smiles, enamoured by the sight (who wouldn’t be, it's Mr. Angelic after all) and sets another pair of shots on the table.

Hyunjin takes it like water. Jeongin hesitates for a moment. Getting drunk at his first company night out would be a terrible idea. But why shouldn’t he loosen up? Have some fun? When was the last time he ever even went out … was it graduation? God, it was graduation - that’s an embarrassingly long time ago. 

He deserves to have a drink, or two, or three. Word hard, play hard, right?

So he accepts the offer and holds it to his lips, the alcohol burning as it goes down his throat. And when he sets the glass down, turning away from the bartender and Hyunjin’s flirting, the only gaze on him is the one owned by no one other than Lee Minho.

“Jeongin,” a voice snatches him away.

“Seungmin-nim!” he’s happy to finally see the other. “You were gone for so long.”

“I was gone for five minutes,” Seungmin frowns then notices the empty shot glasses on the wooden bar. “Let’s get you seated, alright?”

With a huff, he complies and lets Seungmin take his hand to drag him over to the main tables where they’ll eat. The other is right - he can’t be belligerent tonight. He can’t afford to make a mistake he can’t take back in the morning, especially surrounded by his seniors. 

Hyunjin seemingly has the opposite opinion - spending most time by the bar even when share platters of food arrive at their table. 

“I didn’t know Hyunjin-hyung was…” Jeongin hums quietly, so only Seungmin can hear. “-Well, I didn’t know he swung that way.”

Seungmin seems to bite his lip for a second. “Well, I do too.”

Jeongin stops chewing the shrimp he plucked off a plate. “Oh.”

He feels Seungmin tense beside him and turn to him with a wary challenge in his eye. “Do you have a problem with us then?”

At his surprise being completely misconstrued for judgement, Jeongin quickly backtracks. “No! No, of course not - I actually - um - am gay… too.”

He watches Seungmin’s face morph from anger to acceptance. “It’s cool that all three of us found each other then, huh?”

“Yeah,” he agrees and shares a small smile, a quick moment, with the other man, sitting next to each other with newfound camaraderie in their hearts.

Hyunjin’s laughter breaks through the room again. Everyone else at Bang and Lee seemingly has found a way to completely zone it out, but both Jeongin and Seungmin look towards the elder man, still chattering beside the bartender.

“He’s a bit…” Seungmin seems to struggle to find his words. “...Ditzy around guys he likes. I think he acts dumb around them which just makes him look worse.”

Offended on his friend’s behalf, bristling, he frowns at Seungmin. Usually, he’d speak up; stay true to his beleifs that calling someone ‘dumb’ was inherently wrong. But this is a company. Seungmin has been here longer, is ranked higher than him even if they share the same job title. And because he’s two shots in and feels that heat of unfair heat of irritation settle in his body, he forces his jaws together in silence.

“That sounds bad,” the latter quickly adjusts himself, before glancing at Hyunjin once more. “But it’s not a lie.”

Seungmin blunt honesty sticks with him. It curdles like spoilt milk in his stomach and leaves a bad taste in his mouth the more he ponders it. When Bang Chan, the saving-grace that he is, gives him an opportunity to stand and get away from the offender, he does; raising his glass for a toast.

It’s there as the man speaks, then when some more high-ranking people he doesn’t know continue, he notices Minho again. More specifically Changbin shuffled in next to him. Neither of the pair look particularly happy to be standing there, pressed up against each other like sardines in the tiny booth. To his credit, Minho’s face is that perfect nonchalance only through several hours of staring Jeongin has managed to find indications of his true feelings in. Changbin’s face… tells all really. Eyebrows knit together, shoulders hunched and lips drawn into that seemingly-permanent scowl.

As soon as the ‘hurrah’  is over the shorter man immediately leaves his co-manager’s side, escaping to check in on Hyunjin and then standing solidly beside Chan as he talks in smaller circles. Jeongin’s gaze travels back to Minho, only to find those cat-like eyes trained directly on him.

He finishes his champagne in one swig. Still holding eye contact, he watches the man across from him do the same. Like magic, another is quickly pressed into his palms by a server. 

He takes that down in one go too.

Thank god his genetics don’t make him too much of a lightweight.

“Jeongin,” there’s a hand on his wrist, and he follows the fingers, to the wrist to the arm and finally the head of Seungmin. 

“What?” he sounds rude. He doesn’t care. He might regret his tone in the morning, but at the same time Seungmin needs to know what he said about Hyunjin isn’t acceptable.

“I-” the dark-haired boy seems taken-aback at his harsh tone, but his cheeks burn red from something Jeongin knows isn’t alcohol, but shame. “You’re right. I know you didn’t say it aloud, but you’re right. It’s wrong of me to judge Hyunjin-hyung for his actions not only when he isn’t there to defend himself, but at all.”

Seeing the elder in such a state of disarray makes his heart hurt, but he continues his disapproval. He knew exactly what the other had been bordering on, alluding to, in the words ‘ditzy around men.’ It had meant coy, foolish, playing hard-to-get-but-easy-to-deliver. 

It had meant ‘slut.’

“It’s just-” Seungmin seems to struggle with his words, and Jeongin stays mute so he’ll continue. “I think uh - actually - I’m just… a little envious of him, really, not critical.”

And that surprises him. Sure there’ve been nights he’s sat in bed and been covetous of Hwang Hyunjin himself, wishing for his stable long-time career, wealth, appearance (he’s Mr. Angelic for a reason) but mostly his freedom. Freedom in expressing his most true self and freedom from caring about onlookers’ judgement when he does so - in all his life he’s never met someone so true to themselves as the blonde man.

At Seungmin’s quiet confession, and relevance to his own deep unspoken desires, he feels the frown he barely knew was on his face turn into empathy. 

“Hyunjin is so… confident in everything,” his friend continues, looking everything but as he speaks, his hand still wrapped around Jeongin’s wrist as if it is his only tether, his lifeline. “In his words, and his appearance, and his personality… he’s especially confident in getting what and who he wants… I’ve just… never been like that really - the ‘who’ part. I’ve only come to terms with my sexuality in the past year or so, and still, I’m so afraid of it coming out, and what people will say about it. Even with South Korea’s conservative views, especially in corporate fiance, Hyunjin just… doesn’t care… I wish I could be more… forward with who I want… ya’ know?”

Carefully, he takes the elder’s hand. “Yeah, Seungmin-nim, I understand. I think everyone all around the world can learn a thing or two from Hyunjin-hyung, me included… You know what? I think tonight we’ve discovered a lot more about each other tonight, don’t you agree?”

But before Seungmin has a chance to answer, a bright glow in his eyes, the cheer of a drunk girl in the public area, only a room away from their private hire, cuts them all off.

Somebody, a young man perhaps from the advertising sector, probably one-too-many drinks in holds up a bottle. “Let’s party!”

There are a few hollers from the younger staff and polite ‘I’m-over-my-clubbing-days’ applause from the elder and Jeongin feels his body get pushed around by a small stampede of Bang and Lee workers heading towards the party room. The grip of his wrist is ripped away and Jeongin is spun (okay admittedly that’s probably the champagne) to face the exit door.

And that beautiful man, with that green blazer, is already out the door.

Through the open wall, he can see purple neon flashing lights and a dancefloor. 

It calls him.

So, he follows.

There’s no bar tab out here on the main floor. It’s okay because, with the pumping music he can feel from the vibrations of the wooden ground all the way into his old-band-shoes which leaves his very bones rattling, those downed champagnes hit him.

Hard.

One hand on the toilet he begs his stomach not to throw up, not to waste those amazingly skinned cocktail shrimps, and it doesn’t. Thanking the heavens he always kept mints in his blazer pocket (no, he’s not going to comment on when he purchased and started to carry them and no, it’s not because of Lee Minho-) he pops one in his mouth and straightens his tie, staring at his reflection (strangely the bathroom is empty so no one is around to judge him for being a narcissistic psychopath at his pause.)

 He looks… good. He thinks. He has eyebags down to his toes from Kaejung shifts and his hair might need a wash, but other than that he… likes what he sees. The biggest change is his eyes. They shine bright in a way that they haven’t for years. Starting at Bang and Lee did that for him. He looks good because, despite the worries of dropping out of Changbin’s case or his father’s debt, he’s happy. 

And that’s what boosts his appearance better than anything, even if he could look like Mr. Angelic for a day.

At the sound of the bathroom door opening he quickly recomposes himself, movements feeling too fast and simultaneously too slow in his slightly-drunken haze, to prepare to look as normal as possible for this stranger’s arrival into the shared space.

But no stranger greets him in the mirror’s reflection. 

It is, instead, Lee Minho.

“Funny finding you here,” Jeongin blurts out immediately because he’s stupid and drunk and flustered and oh God no is he horny? Five standards always did that to him, or maybe it was just the handsome man staring back at him that made him this way.

“Yeah,” Minho clears his throat, and washes his hands, without even using the urinals or stalls. Okay… that’s weird. 

To keep up the pleasantries, Jeongin opens his mouth with a more nuanced question. “Enjoying the night?”

The man meets his gaze in the reflection, drying off his hands. “Sure. Are you?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“I saw you arguing with your friend earlier.”

Jeongin pauses. “Seungmin? Uh - we’re okay now - just a… miscommunication.”

“That’s not good,” Minho's voice is deep, deeper than he’s ever heard it before. 

It makes him shiver, and he bites his lip. “Arguments aren’t always bad.”

The elder quirks an eyebrow now turned fully towards him. They aren’t playing with mirror reflections anymore, they stand face to face, toe to toe, and like this, Jeongin feels like he can truly see him.

“What makes you say that?”

“Well,” his heart quickens under the burn of Minho’s stare. “Without an argument, we wouldn’t have met.”

Minho takes a step toward him. “Without it we wouldn’t be close, like this?”

Jeongin licks his lips, everything feeling hot in this tiled bathroom no one has walked into, no one has interrupted. This moment feels untouchable, like a dream, but he knows this isn’t his drunken mind playing fantasies with him, he knows by the hammer of his heart, and the heat of Minho’s body, that this is real.

“We wouldn’t be,” he breathes, stars in his eyes, in Minho’s eyes.

Gently a hand caresses his cheekbone then falls to the bottom of his chin. 

“Is this okay?” Minho seems just as breathless as he is, voice deep and husky, and hot.

He thinks back to their last interaction, in a bathroom just like this. “It’s fine with me.”

The elder’s eyes waver again, dart to-and-fro as if they’re searching for something, something Jeongin thinks may be permission. So, he reaches out, presses his palm on Minho’s chest, under that green blazer, onto that loosened tie and pulls.

When they connect, it feels like heaven. Lips smashing, teeth clacking, tongues dancing. The hand on his chin travels to the nape of his neck and brings him in closer and in it all Jeongin lets out a feeble exhale. 

Minho tastes like whiskey. He thanks God for having that mint earlier. He surrenders himself to Minho like this; cold tiles on his back from the wall he’s pushed upon, hot radiance of Minho’s clothed chest under his fingers. 

“Shit,” the other breaks away with a groan when he lowers his hands to his abdomen and Jeongin feels heat rush through his body again. He’s not powerless, not entirely. In a way Minho has surrendered himself as well; to lust and to togetherness.

He’s about to make a joke, but before he can even utter the words Minho’s lips meet his again, demanding and hungry. A hand travels down his own body and he gasps when it meets his navel, tipping his head back to the blinding light as the sensation ripples through his being.

When he looks back down, he finds that cocky, sultry, smug smile. And to erase it, to erase that confidence he tugs the man closer again, fighting for power, fighting to give him pleasure.

This kiss, this man, Lee Minho is delicious, mind-blowing, ludicrously spectacular and erotic .

Maybe using the same descriptors for his lover and bagels isn’t such a good thing.

Minho breaks away first. When Jeongin leans in again he turns his head. For seconds they stand there, panting, taking each other in. Red-bitten lips, seductive narrowed eyes, burning red fish, hair tousled and clothes disturbed. 

They’ve done this to one another.

And Jeongin wonders how long he had really waited for this moment, wishing it to happen even if he didn’t consciously realise it. He wonders if, or how long the elder has been waiting for this to occur too.

“Your friend will be missing you,” Minho steps back, running a hand through his hair. “Get home safe, alright?”

And before Jeongin has time to say goodbye, say anything then he’s alone in the bathroom once more.

Trying to pretend everything is normal the next day is a difficult task.

It’s even more difficult when Hyunjin begs him to do bagel delivery because he ‘left Chan’s keys at hookup-hyung’s place and he has to go meet him right now before Chan realises they’re gone and maybe get a five-minute session in-’

Great. Just great. 

“Have you eaten, Minho-nim?” he knocks on the open glass office door.

The elder startles like a deer at the question, relaxing, then regaining composure almost immediately that if Jeongin were not looking so quickly, he would have missed it.

“Yes,” Minho nods, sure of himself, then after another moment, beckons him inside.

Jeongin waltzes in, the meal in hand anyway. “Not hungry even for bagels?”

Minho wrinkles his nose as if offended. “I don’t eat carbs.”

“Really?” Jeongin pulls out his own smoked salmon avocado combination and wipes his mouth meekly when sauce drips onto his chin. “I didn’t realise you had such self-restraint.”

Although his tone is light when he meets Minho’s eyes, they are dark, swirling with intensity and the gaze makes him feel self-conscious about something. It reminds him of last night, their shared complete lack of self-restraint and he hides his face behind his bagel.

“M-Minho-nim?” he asks and hates how he stutters. “Sorry! I shouldn’t have food in front of you if you’re dieting, I’ll just leave-”

“No,” the man stops him with a single word. Jeongin turns to face him, already off the chair and halfway out the door.

Minho looks almost ravenous. “Stay.”

And just like last time, Jeongin obeys.

Yet he has to ask.

“Is this about last night?”

The elder seems to deflate then, setting down his paperwork. “Yes… About that Jeongin I wanted to apologise-”

“Don’t.”

Minho’s eyebrows furrow. Just before Jeongin’s mind scrambles to catch up with his mouth - his mouth that just gave a clipped, rude demand to his higher-up - Minho interrupts.

“I was intoxicated,” the other seems calculated - like he’s rehearsed this before. But then his eyes shift, look soft - almost insecure, and so does his tone. 

“I’m… I’m your boss, Jeongin and I.. took advantage of you.”

“You-” Jeongin forces his mouth shut before he blurts out anything without thinking. “You didn’t take advantage of me.”

Minho’s expression goes back to that distant cold. “You were drunk, you are younger, and it’s… inappropriate conduct. What I did to you.”

“I wanted it.”

Minho’s eyes go wide. Welp, there goes his do-not-blurt-out-anything plan.

So the other can feel his honesty, he leans over, staring straight into those dark depths. “I wanted it, Minho-nim. I wanted-”

You.

What goes unspoken isn’t so quiet. Jeongin watches as his boss’s face seems to filter through a million different emotions, before landing on an almost confused acceptance..

“Well,” the other clears his throat, readjusting his tie. “That’s… good then.”

Do you want me too? His brain screams the question now he is too nervous to ask, heart pounding in his chest in an anticipation he’s never felt before in his life. 

Instead, he asks; “It’s… good?”

Minho’s smile turns to something almost cocky, something sly, something that says more than words ever could.  “It’s great.”

And his heart almost explodes.

“Next Monday will mark two months since your arrival,” the sound of poured whisky cuts through the private office, the smell of it tangy in the air. 

A cup is pushed towards him, golden liquid at the bottom.

Minho raises his glass, an offer, a proposal. “Let’s make these next months great together, shall we?”

Hand trembling lightly, he lifts his own glass to meet the other’s; a ‘clink’ resounding across the sky-high room, cars and life moving swiftly below. 

But all time stops when he looks at Minho, looks into his deep, seductive, honest, brown eyes.

The cold glass meets his bitten lip - fighting back a smile. “We shall.”