"Guess you're gonna have to pick something if you don't want us to pick for you."

"Oh, fine. Before Hyun-jae and I were partnered I had a major crush on her and I spent the longest time pining and one day I got really drunk and made a fool of myself blubbering about my unrequited love in front of Tae-gun and Yoo-min and almost drunk dialed her to confess. I would've if Yoo-min hadn't stopped me."

"...you never told me that!"

"I thought you said they'd only met later," Jaeha says to Tae-gun.

"We hadn't met! I hadn't even ever said hi to her! That's why it's so embarrassing."

"I didn't want to get into the details since they weren't mine to tell."

"Now I'll pass the ball to—"

"Me! Me! Pick me!"

"Woo-young."

"—me?"

"You're the newest addition to the group other than Kang Jaeha-shi, and this clown here gets off on being embarrassed so it's no fun," says Juheon, hiking a thumb in Si-yeon's direction.

"Harsh but fair."

"...alright. There's... well, there's this person I like..."

Tae-gun gets an emergency dungeon notification.

Then Woo-young does, too.

Then Jaeha.

One by one, everyone else does, too.

"...ah, shit."

Tae-gun arrives home before Jaeha and he's so exhausted he can barely jerk off. He hasn't been taking the pills often at all, not since he and Jaeha partnered, but he has no idea how long Jaeha is going to be with how unpredictable confluence dungeons are, so he takes them this time and then waits. He's shivering, his body is hot all over and his skin is flushed, the stimulation of his erection trapped between his stomach and the bedsheets almost but not quite enough in itself to make him come, but he just doesn't have the energy for it right now.

The pills take the edge off, and by twenty minutes later he's fallen asleep.

Jaeha doesn't get home until a couple of hours later, and he's similarly exhausted. He doesn't even undress, just walks into their bedroom and lies next to Tae-gun.

He stirs a bit and snuggles closer in his sleep but doesn't actually wake up.

"...I like you, Lee Tae-gun," Jaeha murmurs. It's gotten to the point where he can feel it even when he's this deep in backlash. It's no longer just a giddy happy honeymoon romance, it's something that permeates every piece of him. The parts of it that remain right then are the possessiveness, the jealousy, the fear of losing him, the need—but he knows that's not all he has, he knows that his love is so much more than that, and that awareness also remains and carries him. "I like you far, far too much. I don't know what to do with myself. You're my everything."

Tae-gun smiles and makes a soft hmming noise but still doesn't wake up.

Yeah.

"Good night, Tae-gun-ah," he whispers, closing his eyes and drifting off to sleep, himself.

...it's the noises that wakes him up, because the feeling had worked its way into his dreams, steering them in a very different direction than they'd been going up until then. A much less pleasant direction than reality, though, because waking up to getting head from his boyfriend is hard to beat, dream or reality.

"Morning, Tae-gun-ah."

He pulls away to reply with a "good morning" and then he's back at it.

"Ah, fuck—" Okay, apparently it wasn't just the noises that woke him up, it was also how close he was to climaxing.

Heheheheheheheh