dropofgoldensun

long flight

so i'm loving you more than last forever (gif credit: jaemtens)

166 posts

Hand Sanitizer | P.js.

hand sanitizer | p.js.

pairing: jisung x reader

genre: high school au, fluff

word count: 3.7k

warnings: none

summary: you just wanted to hang out with chenle and jisung and eat a bagel during class and enjoy the company of your classmates — and all three of those did happen, just not one after the other as you’d normally expected.

a/n: stay safe everyone!

Your break between your Friday classes is ten minutes, long enough to put your books down, grab a snack from your locker, and talk to Chenle before the teacher opens the class with an entertaining story about his three year old son.

But your usual teacher is not here today (he is at a wedding, after which your class can expect at least two stories about the experiences he had that day), and in his place is a substitute teacher, a mother of one of the students in your class who has brought your group some bagels to eat during the lesson. She is kind, and is at the moment reviewing some notes as you and Chenle catch up.

Chenle is animatedly recounting what happened in physics last hour, how him and Jisung were supposed to be making marble rollercoasters out of halved pool noodles and tape, and that Jisung kept dropping the marbles so often that him and Chenle had to switch jobs in their group.

“He really does have poop hands,” Chenle sighs, shaking his head at you as if to say, Can you believe this guy?

Jisung shrugs, not saying anything in response. You two aren’t close friends, but you both had befriended Chenle (actually, Chenle had befriended you both) and are now on good terms with each other.

He also has a tendency to make you nervous. Maybe it comes from his height, but it most likely is because he hangs out with the “in-crowd” and you don’t. It doesn’t stop the two of you, though, from politely greeting one another in the hallway, adding on to the other’s comments in class, and the like.

“You guys can go get your bagels,” the substitute teacher says, standing up from the desk and opening the box of bagels. “We have cinnamon… pretzel… plain… chocolate, is this chocolate? No, this is blueberry…”

You take a plain bagel and reach for the knife in the plain cream cheese, because original is best, right?

“Basic,” you hear Jisung whisper as he reaches past you to get his pretzel bagel.

“You can never go wrong with the original,” you reply simply, and you glance over your shoulder to gauge his reaction.

He’s smiling, obviously not meaning what he said to be taken seriously.

“Wait, guys!” Chenle makes both of you turn around. He’s standing by the shelf that has a container of hand sanitizer, made available to both students and faculty. “We should sanitize before we eat. Don’t want to…” He searches for the right thing to say. “Die.”

Jisung reluctantly sets the plastic knife down, as do you, before walking over to your friend.

“This is the biggest bottle of sanitizer I’ve ever seen,” says Chenle, pressing all the way down on the pump, causing the blue-specked liquid to pool in the palm of his hand.

“Probably from Costco,” you say, getting some of it yourself.

“Yeah, these are probably the biggest bottles Costco offers.” He gasps dramatically. “They’re the jumbo bottles! This is where all of the baby sanitizer bottles come from!”

“The mothership!” You have absolutely no reason to build on Chenle’s comment, nor do you feel like making a fool out of yourself in front of Park Jisung, but you digress. From your place a few ways away, you watch the two boys as they keep talking.

You’re surprised when Jisung adds on to the chaos. “Yeah stupid jumbo bottles, pew pew pew —” He punches the almost-full bottle, which comically seems to fall in slow motion, landing on its side with a thump.

You see the droplets flying from the nozzle but feel them before you can register what happened.

Your right eye stings, as if it’s being burned off, and you flail your arms in confusion, shouting. “Ah—ah Chenle! I need your waterbottle—!”

“What?”

“Waterbottle!” You wave your hand around, trying to find it while covering your eye. Chenle unscrews the cap, handing it to you, and you pour some water onto your cupped hand, dumping it onto your face.

“Oh—oh (Name)—Mrs. Han has a sink in her room, you should go there.”

You stumble your way around the table, through the door, and across the hallway to the science room. Behind you, Chenle whispers to a wide-eyed Jisung, “Poop hands.”

You burst into AP Chemistry, seven pairs of eyes on you as your heels cause you to slip and nearly fall onto the tiled floor. It would have been really funny if your eye didn’t feel like it was on fire. Yanking the sink handle, you lean over the sink and hastily splash water into your eye.

There’s a silence in the room, until Ryujin, your best friend, asks, “... Are you okay?”

“Oh my goodness (Name), what happened?” Mrs. Han’s voice is filled with sympathy.

“I just—” You blink a couple times, affirming that your eye is clear before turning the faucet off, and turn around to face her, water streaking down the right side of your face. “Someone from my class punched a bottle of hand sanitizer and some flew into my eye.”

“How did that even—what?” Jeongin, your seatmate from calculus class, looks at you, concerned.

“I don’t know.” You blink again. The pain is starting to return, only a mere tingling at the moment, but it could get worse anytime soon. Your eyesight is still relatively normal, though, good enough to read the words “PERIODIC TABLE OF ELEMENTS” on the wall opposite of you.

The sound of the door opening catches your attention. Jisung slowly pokes his head in, biting his bottom lip nervously as he surveys the damage done to you. He looks embarrassed, apologetic, and upset.

“Jisung,” Ryujin begins, “did you punch the hand sanitizer?”

He nods, his gaze flitting to you and the water that’s dripping off of your chin. You immediately rip off a paper towel and dry your face carefully.

Your best friend sighs. “Park Jisung… why?”

“I don’t know, I was just being dumb, and I’m really sorry—” He glances back to you. “I’m really sorry,” he repeats, this time a bit quieter.

“It’s fine,” you say out of habit.

As if it was fine. But you weren’t mad at him, you might even call yourself sorry.

It was true that he was one of the more popular kids at school, someone who could do as he pleased, but he wasn’t a jerk about it, especially to people less popular than him and his friends (such as yourself).

Yet the dynamic made you want to apologize, too: “Sorry, Jisung, I got in the way of your hand sanitizer. I shouldn’t have been standing there.” He could run into you in the hallway and cause the contents of your pencil case to skid across the floor, and you would still be the first to say sorry.

“Oh, (Name), I have the eyewash station over here.” Mrs. Han walks over to where you have propped yourself up against the sink and pulls out a bottle from a plastic mould on the wall. “You’re the first one to use it,” she adds, ripping off the plastic covering around the cap.

Your best friend golf claps for your minor achievement and you smile—almost laugh — in spite of yourself.

“Go to the nurse’s office and she’ll help you, okay?”

“Good luck!” says Jeongin, and the other five students chime in with their “Bye (Name)!” and “Come back and learn chemistry with us ~” and “Don’t die!” (Ryujin, of course).

You’ve forgotten that Jisung was at the door until you reach it. He holds it open for you and makes sure that it’s closed before asking, “Do you want me to go with you?”

“Do you need to go to the nurse, too?”

“No, I just—I can walk you there and back. So you don’t have to go alone…” He’s rambling, and he knows it. “I want to do something to make it up to you.”

His answer almost makes you stop completely. Popular student Jisung? Asking if he could walk you to the nurse’s office? If he could spend time with you, even though you two are in different friend groups? If he could do a favor for you?

“Are you trying to skip class?” you ask skeptically, clutching the bottle of eyewash with both hands because it starts to feel heavier.

“No… no!” He puts his hands out, stretching his fingers as if to say “stop”.

You finally spin around and stop walking. “Then you should go back,” you say, half-smiling. “There’s bagels.”

He walks to the classroom, but his hand stays frozen on the door handle as he stares at your retreating back.

He really is sorry about what happened.

The nurse fills a shallow cup with the eyewash solution and teaches you how to hold it. “Stand near the sink,” she says, “and blink a few times so that it can get into your eye.”

You do as she tells you to, feeling a cooling sensation replace the burning from earlier. “How many times?”

“However long it takes for the pain to completely disappear.”

You stand there for a minute or two as the nurse takes down your name and grade in the recordbook, marking that you were in her office today, that you had gotten hand sanitizer in your eye (you weren’t sure if she wrote how it happened, and you hoped she wouldn’t, after the explanation you gave while leaving out Jisung’s name), and that you used some eyewash to help reduce the pain.

Once your eye is okay, you tell the nurse and dump the remaining liquid down the sink, throwing away the cup and thanking her as you pick up the bottle of eyewash.

You were eager to get back to class (and to your bagel), so you go back to the science room and—

You slip in the exact same spot as before.

You don’t even fall, you just flail your arms around as everyone stares at you. You hear your Ryujin saying “(Name) are you actually okay?” as you stabilize yourself at the sink.

Giving her a thumbs-up and smiling at Mrs. Han to show that, you were, in fact, okay, you set the eyewash bottle in its rightful place on the wall.

“You’re alright now, (Name)?” the teacher asks.

“Yeah, thanks for the eyewash!” You exit the class laughing good-naturedly at your clumsiness, and the AP Chem class laughs as well, not at you, but with you.

And now back to your own classroom.

You walk in and Chenle’s head turns so fast you thought you heard his bones crack. “You good?”

You nod and silently take your seat next to him, breaking off a bit of your plain bagel and chewing it as you glance at his messy notes to capture what you’ve missed.

And you deliberately do not look at Park Jisung. Maybe because you don’t feel like dealing with him right now, or maybe because you can slightly see him in your peripheral vision and you notice that his entire face is covered in a fierce blush.

As for Jisung, he notes that your eye looks a bit red, and he feels so incredibly guilty that he can’t bring himself to look back at you.

The teacher asks how you are doing, and you recount that Mrs. Han let you use the eyewash, and that everything went smoothly, and that you were fine now.

Your classmate Taehyun leans across the table, speaking directly to Jisung. “Don’t you have something to say, Jisung?”

The boy in question covers his face and blurts out, “I’m sorry, (Name)!” before burying his head in his arms. The class laughs and resumes as per usual. Your eye doesn’t bother you for the rest of the period.

Jisung apologizes to you again outside of the classroom, trying to see if your eye is still red, before hearing you accept his apology and disappearing to his next class.

He finds you once more after school, asking what your favorite flavor of milk is, but you wave him off.

Yet he insists that he really wants to make it up to you, he feels so terrible about it. He’s in the middle of asking about crackers when you realize he won’t stop feeling guilty until you let him do something about it.

An idea suddenly comes to you: “Do you like frozen yogurt?”

Jisung stops in the middle of his sentence. “If you like Dorito’s I could—what?”

“Do you like frozen yogurt?”

He crosses his arms. “But I’m trying to figure out what you like.”

“I know. I like frozen yogurt, but if we’re going to get some food then I need to ask if you like it, too.”

“But—”

“You really don’t think you’re going to walk in there and buy me something without getting anything for yourself?” You raise your eyebrow, watching the wheels turning in his head.

“So we go together?”

No, Jisung, we go at different times. “Yeah… we just need to figure out when. See you.” You mentally curse yourself at your method of ending the conversation, but if you had to deal with him longer you might—

“What — what about today?” he suggests, barely audible. When you turn around to look at him, he’s fiddling with his hands and avoiding your eyes.

You’ll be the end of me.

Twenty minutes later, the two of you are at the dessert place a few blocks away from school. You try not to think about those twenty minutes, which you spent in near-silence walking next to each other.

Neither of you say what you’re thinking:

This feels like a date.

You get your choice of yogurt and toppings, noticing a bin of chocolate wafer straws and putting one of them in your dessert. When you were younger, you used to stick them in milkshakes and try to suck your drink through it, complaining after ten minutes or so when the straw started getting soggy. And then, once you’d gotten a bit older and learned that putting wafers in milkshakes wasn’t a very good idea, you started to mature, meaning that you’d break them into four pieces and pretend to smoke a chocolatey cigarette. But over time, your parents eventually stopped buying them for you, trying to steer you away from unhealthy snacks of that kind.

I haven’t had one of these in forever…

You add another one to your cup.

Jisung’s chocolate and pink lemonade and a second helping of chocolate are already on the scale. You place your cup next to his, comparing the two and feeling relieved that he got more than you did (if it had been the other way around, it could seem greedy, as if you were trying to take advantage of his kindness…).

He fiddles with his phone, about to pay, but stops after seeing how much you got for yourself. “That’s all?”

“Um… yeah.” You smile awkwardly at him and he focuses his attention solely on paying.

The girl at the counter is looking between you and Jisung, possibly trying to figure out what’s going on. You don’t miss her once-over of you, nor her lingering gaze on him.

And you don’t know how to feel about that.

“Back off, he’s mine”? Or “could you please not”?

Wait, what am I doing? We aren’t even friends.

And you almost wish that it wasn’t the case.

You choose to sit outside, away from the girl at the register, claiming that the weather is too nice not to.

Jisung eats his first spoonful and makes a face.

“What?”

“The gummy bears are hard…”

“Yeah, gelatin hardens when it’s cold,” you say, as if it’s obvious.

He groans, mumbling something that sounds like, “I hate science.”

You get some chocolate chips in your spoonful of plain yogurt, and he straightens up.

“They had cheesecake?”

“No, this is plain.”

“Plain?” The corner of his mouth lifts as he digs his spoon back into his cup. “So basic…”

“Excuse me?” You jam your utensil in your yogurt so that it sticks straight up. “I’m basic?”

“I should have guessed plain, of course,” he says, pretending to ignore you while watching your reaction. “Plain bagel, plain cream cheese, plain ice cream—”

“This isn’t ice cream, it’s frozen yogurt!”

He rolls his eyes and licks his lips like it’s second nature—which you might even consider attractive—and you can’t tell if he’s doing it to tease you or make you suddenly very aware of what very nice lips he has oh no—“Same difference.”

“I—” You sigh, shaking your head and returning to your yogurt, trying to get the fresh image of his eye roll and lips out of your head. “I give up.”

You haven’t touched either of your chocolate straws yet, so when you pick one of them up, Jisung notices them for the first time. His eyes go wide and his mouth forms an “oh”.

“Wafer straws?”

“Mmhm.” You bite the end of the one you’re holding and savor the taste of plain yogurt melding harmoniously with the chocolate.

Jisung gives you a pleading look and holds up a long finger. Just one, please.

“I only have two,” you say in a half-sincere warning tone, biting off another piece.

“Just a little bit of one? Please? I didn’t know they had them.”

You sigh but smile, handing him the other wafer, tipped with a soft point from where it had been separated from the rest of your yogurt. “One each,” you explain cheerfully before he can say anything in response.

He looks at you in amazement before whispering a “thank you”, nibbling on the end of it thoughtfully.

Jisung sees your hands resting on the table, and realizes that they’re so small when he compares them to his own. He wonders what it would be like to hold them, and to hold you (almost; he stops himself before he can go on).

He stares at you, taking in every detail, trying to memorize what color shirt you’re wearing and what other kind of yogurt you got yourself besides plain and he loses track of what else, only later finding himself thinking about your eyes, they intrigue him as to knowing the person—you—behind them.

Jisung catches sunlight being reflected off of them and he suddenly can’t stop thinking about what if he was crazy enough to say all of this out loud to your face, what if his hands wouldn’t stop sweating and he could take yours in his and turn your gaze towards him, or even if you would just look up to meet his own eyes—

You look up. “What?”

“What?”

“You’re staring at me. Is there something on my face?”

“No… no! I was just looking at your eyes,” he blurts out, immediately regretting what he had said, knowing that it probably sounded weird.

You blink. “… Why?”

“Well they don’t seem to be red anymore, which is good,” he lies quickly, and luckily for him, you buy it.

“Park Jisung, I’m fine,” you say, nearly laughing at how anxious he is. “The nurse took care of everything.”

Jisung had originally anticipated that, despite getting way more frozen yogurt than you did, he would finish first (because his appetite is a bottomless pit and everyone knows that). And, not factoring in the time he didn’t know he would spend staring at you, he was the person to finish last.

Before he throws his cup away, you notice that he’s left all the gummy bears at the bottom. “You’re not going to eat those?”

It takes him a second to understand what you’re referring to. “No, they’re still hard.”

“I can eat them,” you offer.

“Hard gummy bears don’t deserve to be eaten,” he says, casually dropping his cup and spoon in the trashcan. When he sees the look on your face, he adds, “… And I spat one out earlier while you weren’t looking, but I don’t remember which one it was, so…”

Now you really laugh, now Jisung’s eyes form little moons as they greatly worsen his vision.

“I can’t see,” he says, trying to catch his breath, his cheeks starting to hurt from smiling for so long.

“Sounds like a personal problem,” you say quietly, not expecting him to hear it.

“Hey!”

He walks back with you to school and stops when he reaches the front stairs.

“We should do this again sometime.” The words spill out of his mouth before he can think about what he’s saying.

But to his surprise, you nod your head and agree. “This was fun.”

“Well — that —” He tries to hide how much he enjoyed it. “But — um — also because I feel like this wasn’t enough to compensate for the fact that I got hand sanitizer in your eye —”

“Ah, Jisung, just get over it,” you say. “I’m okay now. And besides, I…” You pause. “… Want to do this more often.”

And then Jisung says something he instantly wishes that he hadn’t said: “Like a date?”

Your cheeks flush and you try (and fail) to compose yourself. “Yeah, yeah I guess so,” you muse.

“Um…”

You glance up and you have never seen anyone look so embarrassed, Jisung’s ears are a bright red and his neck seems to be sweating. “Yeah?”

“Um… never mind.”

Your heart beats faster and you sincerely hope you know what he was about to say, but you don’t say anything, saying goodbye to him and receiving a “see you around” as you turn and leave.

It is at that moment you make up your mind that you’ll definitely go on that second frozen yogurt outing with him, and you’ll make sure he gets enough chocolate wafer straws, and maybe then, next time, one of the two of you will be able to find the courage to say the words that, this time, were unable to be said.

I like you.

Hand Sanitizer | P.js.

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