8. Keep me
The first few nights after he deleted the account, Seungmin felt like a phantom. No more pings, no more flashing donation pop-ups, no more chat spam telling him what to do. The silence was louder than any applause he'd ever gotten.
At first it freaked him out. He would reach for his phone out of habit—thumb hovering over the app store, thinking maybe, just maybe, he could spin it back up in five minutes. Each time he did, there was a message waiting that made his thumb fall back to his side.
"Outside. Now."
No emojis. No small talk. Just a line straight and flat. Minho.
It didn't matter how he tried to avoid it—Minho had a way of showing up exactly when he needed to be stopped from making dumb decisions. A knock at the door, a cigarette stubbed out in the ashtray, the protective grunt from the other side of the hall. It was infuriating and, beneath that, steadying.
One wet night he came home sopping, the rain dripping from the hem of his hoodie and soaking his hair. He fumbled his keys and found Minho already in his living room with a bag of food and an extra hoodie draped over one arm.
"Walked back?" Minho asked, voice doing that thing that sounded annoyed and actually kind all at once.
"You're everywhere," Seungmin said, stomach tight as he shrugged out of his wet clothes.
"You shouldn't be walking in this shit. Eat." Minho dumped the hot container on the table and shoved the dry hoodie at him. It was a stupid move—one hand shoved into the sleeve, fingers fumbling—but it felt like a small rescue. Minho watched him eat with that same half-annoyed, half-watchful expression. No taunt, no leering joke, just presence.
That night the word "safe" made a quiet, foreign loop through Seungmin's chest. It wasn't the cheap thrill of a camera light; it was a plain, hard thing. Somebody actually staying.
A week later, a fever knocked him flat. He lay there, throat sore, phone blurred with notifications he didn't bother to open. It was Minho who came dragging in a bag of medicine, throat lozenges, and those dumb instant soups he pretended not to like but somehow always ordered. He caught Seungmin's lip in the corner of his mouth—more to check if he was alive than anything else—and arranged the blanket over him without a word.
"You sick?" Minho asked like it was the most normal question in the world.
"Yeah. Of course." Seungmin tried to sound irritable; it came out a croak. He wanted to say he didn't need this, that he could handle it, but he let Minho fuss. He let Minho fuss and found himself leaning into it like he'd been deprived for an age.
Minho stayed. He brought hot drinks, warmed the soup when it cooled, and once, in a small, ridiculous motion, he smoothed the hair off Seungmin's forehead and pressed a damp cloth to his temple. Those little, clumsy acts kept piling up until they didn't feel accidental anymore. They felt deliberate.
It was in the quiet repetition—Minho remembering the exact brand of cough medicine Seungmin tolerated, dropping an extra fifty into his wallet when rent was due, showing up at school because his bike broke down—that something settled in Seungmin's chest. People had given him attention before—fans, weird donors, the hungry strangers who wanted the persona. Attention was cheap and transactional. Minho's attention was not. It was sharp and tough and given only when he decided it had value.
Seungmin started to notice the difference. Fans never brought soup to your door at two a.m. Fans never sat up with you while your fever burned. Fans never showed up in the rain to hand you a hoodie like they were saving you from freezing. Fans applauded the mask. Minho caught the man behind it.
One night they were both hunched on the couch, a stupid movie playing with bad dialogue, the TV light making small shadows on Minho's jaw. Seungmin hadn't meant to say it out loud. It came out as a dumb, half-sober question.
"Why do you do it?" he asked. "Why do you keep showing up?"
Minho paused his cigarette, looked sideways at him. "Because I don't like you getting hurt. Because I like you around. Because... I don't want you out there for other people to chew up." He shrugged, like it was the most normal thing on earth.
The answer landed harder than Seungmin expected. It wasn't romantic fluff. It wasn't anything soft. It was blunt and selfish: Minho wanted him kept close. Wanted him safe under his skin, not performing for strangers.
Seungmin swallowed. "So what now? You're gonna keep me?"
Minho's smile was small, almost unreadable. He leaned forward, tugging Seungmin backwards into his lap, hands steady at the small of his back. "Yeah," he said. "I'll keep you. Don't make me sorry I did."
It wasn't a promise gilded in butterflies. It was a claim—sharp, territorial, oddly comforting. Seungmin felt himself relax against it. He closed his eyes and let Minho press a soft kiss to his temple, one of those domestic gestures that broke his heart open in the weirdest way.
Weeks turned into rhythm. There were nights of rough heat—still raw, still greedy—but there were also nights like this: Minho tidying the sink while Seungmin scrolled through job posts, Minho telling him to throw a jacket on, Minho slipping cash into his pocket without making a spectacle. The control stayed, but the edges dulled into something steadier: protection with possession wrapped tight.
On a rainy afternoon, Seungmin found himself smiling at something dumb and realized he was content in a way he hadn't been when cameras flashed. He looked over at Minho—sweat-dark hair, a smudge of dirt on one knuckle—and felt the strangest echo of relief. Not the cheap buzz of crowd noise, but a steady, human thing.
He thought of the night he deleted the account, the cold thumb on his phone as the last subscriber faded away. He thought of the humiliation, the fever, the first time Minho had watched him eat and not filmed it. He thought of how, in a strange flip, giving himself entirely to one person had unspooled something he hadn't known he needed.
Minho noticed. He nudged Seungmin's foot with his own, eyes tracking the small, private relaxation on his face. "You good?" he asked, but he didn't wait for an answer. He just curled an arm around him and pulled him in, possessive and content.
Seungmin let himself be held. He let go of the old safety—views, tips, anonymous praise—and let the rough, imperfect care Minho provided become his anchor.
It wasn't pretty love. It wasn't meant to be a fairytale. It was raw and sometimes ugly, but it was theirs. And for the first time in a long while, that was enough.
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