The knock came early, before the house had fully woken up.
"It's open," Tae-hyun's voice called from behind the bathroom door, muffled under the sound of running water. "Who is it?"
"Cleaning service," Min-woo said, letting himself in with the cart of folded towels and cleaning supplies balanced against one hip.
"Okay."
That was it. No further questions, no suspicion, just the easy trust of someone who had apparently decided, somewhere over the past week, that Min-woo belonged in his space without needing to think too hard about it.
Min-woo shut the door quietly behind him and got to work.
The room looked the same as it had the first time he'd stepped into it—guitar propped against the wall, sketchbooks stacked in uneven towers, a hoodie thrown across the foot of the bed like gravity had simply given up trying to keep it anywhere else. He moved through it with the kind of practiced efficiency he'd built over the past couple of weeks, straightening the blanket, gathering stray mugs, lining up the pencils scattered across the desk into something resembling order.
By the time he reached the stack of books, the water in the bathroom was still running, steady and unbothered.
He picked the books up one at a time, squaring their edges, setting them back down in a neater pile than the one Tae-hyun had left behind. The last one slipped from his grip halfway through the motion and hit the floor with a soft thud, pages splaying open against the carpet.
"Careful," Min-woo muttered to himself, crouching to retrieve it.
It was the sketchbook. Thick, worn at the corners, the cover soft from handling. He was about to close it without looking—habit, mostly, some instinct that said other people's private things weren't his to linger over—when something caught his eye on the inside of the back cover.
A name.
Carved in, not just written—pressed hard enough into the cardboard that the pen had nearly torn through in places, gone over again and again until the letters stood out bold and deliberate against the surface.
*Min-woo.*
He stared at it for a second longer than he meant to.
Then, slowly, a smile spread across his face, equal parts delighted and calculating, the kind of smile that belonged to someone recalculating an entire plan in real time and liking the new numbers better than the old ones.
*Well, that makes this easier.*
He was still smiling when the phone on the nightstand lit up and started ringing.
Min-woo glanced over out of pure reflex. The screen glowed with a single word above the number—*Hyung*—and beneath it, digits he recognized immediately from Jae-min's endless notebook of routines and schedules.
Jihan.
"Who is it?" Tae-hyun's voice carried through the bathroom door, raised slightly over the water.
"Your brother," Min-woo called back, already moving.
"Leave it, I'll call him back—"
But Min-woo had already crossed the room.
He wasn't thinking, not really—or maybe he was thinking too fast for any single thought to fully form before his hand had grabbed the pen off the desk and his other hand had turned palm-up, the phone still buzzing on the nightstand while he copied the number down in quick, uneven strokes across his skin. His pulse was loud in his own ears. The ink smudged slightly at the last digit where his hand shook, just barely, but he didn't stop to fix it.
He capped the pen, dropped it back onto the desk exactly where it had been, and straightened up just as the bathroom door opened.
"What are you doing?"
Min-woo's whole body went rigid.
He curled his hand instinctively into a loose fist, turning half away from the door, heart slamming so hard against his ribs he was almost certain it was audible from across the room.
"Oh—I. I was—" His voice came out a full register higher than he intended. "I was arranging the books."
It was, technically, not a lie. It just wasn't the truth either, and the gap between the two felt enormous standing there with wet ink drying on his palm.
Then his eyes drifted upward, and every coherent thought in his head simply stopped.
Tae-hyun stood in the doorway with a towel slung low around his waist, nothing else, damp black hair falling messily over his forehead, water still tracking in a slow line down one shoulder and disappearing beneath the towel's edge. He wasn't posing. He clearly hadn't thought twice about walking out like this—why would he, in his own room, with someone he'd apparently already decided to trust—but that only made it worse, somehow, the complete lack of self-consciousness in the way he stood there.
Min-woo's gaze moved before he could stop it. Shoulders. The faint line of collarbone. Down.
He swallowed, hard, and dragged his eyes back up to Tae-hyun's face with what he hoped looked like composure and almost certainly didn't.
Tae-hyun crossed the room slowly, unbothered, and stopped close enough that Min-woo could smell the clean, warm scent of soap still clinging to his skin. Min-woo's free hand found the edge of the desk behind him and gripped it, leaning back slightly, putting whatever fraction of distance the furniture would allow between them. His other hand—the one with Jihan's number drying across his palm—slid into his pocket without him fully deciding to move it there.
Tae-hyun tilted his head, studying him.
Min-woo's heart was doing something entirely unreasonable in his chest.
For a second neither of them said anything. The room felt smaller than it had five minutes ago, the running water from the bathroom still dripping faintly somewhere behind them, the morning light cutting a pale line across the floor between his shoes and Tae-hyun's bare feet.
Then Tae-hyun's mouth curved, slow and unreadable, and he stepped back.
"Alright," he said, like whatever he'd been looking for in Min-woo's face, he'd found—or decided not to chase any further.
Min-woo didn't trust himself to say anything smart. He grabbed the cleaning rag off the desk with more force than necessary and moved toward the door at something just short of a jog.
"I'll—finish the hallway," he managed.
"Sure."
He didn't look back, but he could feel Tae-hyun watching him the entire way out, and it took every ounce of willpower he had not to trip over the doorframe on his way through it.
---
He made it to the stairwell before his legs gave out on the ambition of walking any farther. Min-woo braced one hand against the wall, the other pressed flat over his own chest, breathing like he'd just finished a full sprint instead of walking twenty feet down a hallway.
"What the hell was that," he muttered, to no one, to the stairwell, to the universe in general.
He could still feel the ghost of that look—Tae-hyun's eyes on his face, unreadable and far too close, the towel, the damp hair, the way his whole chest had gone tight and stupid for absolutely no reason he was willing to name out loud.
He shook his head hard, like that might dislodge it, and finally glanced down at his palm to check the number.
His stomach dropped.
The last digit had smeared into a formless blue smudge, the ink rubbed thin and unreadable where his hand had been pressed against the desk—and against, he realized with rising horror, more or less every surface he'd touched in the last three minutes.
"Shit."
Min-woo stared at his own palm like it had personally betrayed him.
Nine numbers. Nine perfectly legible numbers, and the tenth one gone, smudged into nothing, the entire point of the last five minutes dissolving into a faint blue stain across his skin.
"What—" He paused, trying to recalled the last digit he wrote in a hurry. "What was the last number?"