#(idk how else to put it im really tired)
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A lot of people critique things not for what they are, but for what they aren’t. For example, a lot of the THG criticisms usually boils down to ‘it’s not radical enough’, ‘it ended with both sides bad’, ‘it sets a bad precedent for how to fight oppression’, ‘it had a lukewarm liberal take on anti-oppression’.
The issue here is that the people with these critiques are approaching the books as if they were meant to give a step by step guide for how to lead a revolution, how to fight against oppression. The books were never meant to be discourse on anti-oppression; they were anti-war.
#the hunger games#thg#suzanne collins#please let’s critique the books for what the author intended to do#collins first and foremost wanted to create a series about the realities and impacts of war#what constitutes a war#what justifies a war#she just used themes of anti oppression and revolution as tools to spur that conversation#am i making sense?#so when people say ‘oh the series wasn’t good at inciting revolutionary ideas#(idk how else to put it im really tired)#and it’s like. of course it isn’t#bc that’s not what collins wanted to do#thg books#thg analysis#thg meta
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Vent post
#ignore me lol#vent post#I am feeling extremely angry and frustrated and alienated#like of course I'm demotivated when I point out injustice and literally everyone just shrugs at me and tells me to get over it#“what are we gonna do about it”#put any thought into it whatsoever for starters#idk I want to give up#the same bitches that tell me not to kill myself are the same ones to vote my rights away#I hate living#I don't even get validation from participating in fan content anymore#im just anxious and feeling rejected all the time#except for like five very specific moots on here#but then I feel like a fucking failure for not knowing how to socialize or show them that I care without being weird and ugh#idk i'm tired#I feel like I put all this energy into making myself acceptable for everyone else and I go out of my way to be positive and compassionate#and then I get fuckall in return#post election blues ig#here's hoping I don't end up under a bridge#I think I would be a vastly different (better) person if everyone around me wasn't a bunch of complacent#selfish#wet blankets.#I'm getting really tired of being treated like I'm crazy for expecting better.#I can't talk to anyone because I don't want to hear that I need to get over it or that everything will be fine#it doesn't help or mean anything#things just get harder and harder and I'm just waiting around#I'm so srs if you read this far don't try to tell me nice things#im in an evil caustic mood and I will just continue pouring negativity in return
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ive spent like 20 minutes trying to world this eloquently but i give up; im a big fan of linebeck just. not being capable of watching over kids not the person to be the guardian of a group of young people he struggles to take care of himself at times and has so much shit going on that it takes about one conversation with oshus for the old man to realize that this guy is. not doing great
#this was gonna be like. a jokey post at first juxtaposing oshus’ expectations vs reality with linebeck but im too emotionally drained#so real linebeck talk in the tags bc idk if ive actually talked much abt like. the specific as on why. iwrite and see him the way i do#likr. off the bat i put him at like 19 in ph and im too fucking tired and just. done rn to justify that like whatever kill me if you wish.#like. hes. been throught a lit hes been abused neglected used ignored hurt ridiculed violated deceived hes so fucking tired#hes worn down over the course of ph it causes him to finally like. express his anguish over what hes been theough its cathartic#hes getting pushed but talking to oshus and being around link loosens him up and he fucking. cries properly yknow#he cries about everything and the last bit of ph hes kind of an emotional wreck but hes finally letting himself feel all that shit#he cries he struggles to articulate himself he has a violent public meltdown as he becomes fed up with his reputation#and it all culminates in bellumbeck just. being a really raw examination of what hes been through and how he feels and what to do now#he hates people he has people he wants to kill people he wanted to kill but after bellumbeck its just. hes tired. hes processed everythjng#and then he needs the post ph crew and everyone they meet along the way to just. be a fucking support system for the first time ever#like post ph hes rhe captain he runs the ship he keeps everyone in line he can do that. but hes softer more vulnerable more self doubting#hes kinder and more hesitant but trying new things and being more openly passionate abt his interests#and he keeps working through his trauma he finds out what else it causes problems for and everyone. supports him#hes not capable of like. being any kind of parental figure to link in ph his perspective on like. how to handle kids is fucked#because his perspective on what a normal childhood should look like is kind of a mess#his perspective on relationships is murky on love on adventure on self expression but post ph hes just. free. tired but free#he manages to take naps the group helps him eat properly he learns his physical boundaries and actually does what he loves#idk. im just. man idk. its still measy but like. my version of linebeck is. i really hate the idea that its so out of character its not him#like. idfk what to even say abt that. idfk what ‘in character’ looks like when you hc a character to be masking in canon#when you hc them to be lying and covering things up and just. subdued bc theyre working on stuff#that they lie and exaggerate their own traits on purpose but let the truth through some cracks like what rhe fuck then#i hate it bc i dont see anyone else think of linebeck anything like this so im scared im fucking wrong somehow#im tired. i recently learned that one of my cats has been burrowing under and chilling under a blanket we cover a couch with#its very cute
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becoming an adult soon and feeling weird about it
#weird and a little disheartening to think about how much of my childhood has been spent putting up w being disabled#i know turning 18 isnt actually a huge deal and it doesnt really mean ive lost much but#idk just weird to see everyone else my age going out to the movies or going to parties#or whatever else#and i sit at home in pain most of the time or too tired from pain to do anything#cause going out usually means being bedridden for two days#idk im getting closer to an actual answer and treatment but it took so many years#and im angry that i didnt get to do kid/teen stuff while i was still at that age#i know im young and i have stuff to do in the future when all this starts to get better so im not like incredibly panicked#im just kind of bummed. sort of angry#ive just had a really shitty year and it gets worse when it gets better lately#i am and will be okay i just feel like shit#i watch my little shows and find other stuff to be happy about but it sucks to have missed out#anyway not to get hashtag emo on main about having a birthday soon i just need to yell about it somewhere a little bit i guess#and hi to my friends im ok and im getting better in some places even though im upset about other stuff#i miss u n i love u and i hope the year has been okay so far <3#anyway i dont think i have to say it but dont rb im just angry at being disabled etc
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finlays will see a terrible abusive dynamic in ninjago and be like 'is anyone gonna think abt that daily' and not wait for an answer
#and i try to show emotion but my eyes wont seem to wet. and id love to tell u stories but i cant remember how they went#llorumiiiiiiiiiii [doing cat puke retches on the floor] THEY MAKE ME SICK.#i feel i do have to day this every time i dont actually supportttt the ships or whatever. they r just so intersting to me#ninjago has really fucking boring canon relationships cus they dont ever address any of the Weirdness#jaya cld be sooooooo juicy. but alas its sooooo nothing#llorumi etc r not good not healthy BUT they r juicy. there are many different angles to attack it from and they r actually. IN the show#and not just my head#personally heartttt the interpretation of harumi being too likeeee. idk . trapped. to ever change or challenge her beliefs#idk im crazy tired rn but oooiiaaahhh#vexane is also very juicy to me as a genuinely loveless relationship but instead one built on like. purelyyyyy zane feeling he cant trust#anyone else.#vex is very good at manipulating situations and zane is in the ultimate situation.#it puts him completely at vexs mercy and he stays under his paw for. 40 years. god. ok#i think thats the timeline right. Okay. man#its easy to see how zane cld end up where he does in s11#btw both of those r not even necessarily a romantic reading but gragghhhhh so intersting#ninjago has some crazyyyyyy deep relationships if u can dig and strike gold#btw the best dynamic in the entire show is garmabros (NOT ROMANTIC OBVS.) it sweeepssss the entire cast easy
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,
#im dead tired but i think i'll be okay. i think once i reconnect with myself i'll experience clarity again#regardless of how others are moving its not my problem but i need to be careful about absorbing the weird vibes they put off#its not really intentional but i definitely just pick up someones negative and it becomes my own. i kinda wonder if thats what got me all#freakin out the past few months was experiencing someone elses anxiety for a week LOL#but it really took me away from myself and its not really a cute habit. idk been doing a lot of reading#i was thriving when i wasnt letting myself be concerned with people i didnt know. i really am the sun. i just gotta be#i just gotta let my worries go. i need to remember what i first felt and knew to be true. because i think it might be
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You ever just try to laugh about something that’s happened to you with someone and then realize huh wait actually that’s not funny at all and is kinda super fucked actually 😰
#the klock keeps ticking#got on a small tangent with jackie where i mentioned a cousin whos my age and how everyone in the family takes him a lot more seriously than#me and treats him as more mature even though his ass doesnt even do his own laundry and meanwhile ive been taking care of myself#my entire life basically and i was like ‘lol yeah my parents clearly wish they had a son like him instead of me’#and its true i hear the way they talk about him and we dont have any pictures on our fridge but no joke#they recently put a picture of him on the fridge like damn lol the jokes write themselves here#but now im thinking about it and like. this is actually kinda shit#like ive known for quite some time im a disappointment its pretty obvious but idk just seeing my parents gush over some elses kid#it really highlights it huh#im passed the point of caring for their opinions of me way past it so im not like. sad about this or anything#im more just like huh. it really sucks that i get treated like this all the time#its tiring i wish i could escape this shithole can someone rescue me please
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If trans men are men, why should they be writing feminist literature?
...Because the vast majority of us lived for at least a decade as a woman, and thus have lived experience on the matter? And because men can write feminist literature in general, you don't need to be a woman yourself to understand why gender equality is a good cause, you just need to give a shit about other people. Also, many of us were identified by peers as gender nonconforming from an early age, even before consciously knowing it ourselves, and I think it lends us some valuable insight on how women police gender roles on each other.
Certainly, we often tend to have different experiences and feelings on gender than cis women do, especially if we realize we're trans early on, but you're bound to develop some relevant insight. I think cis men tend to treat us about the same as cis women, with some additional homophobia and maybe some more physical violence mixed in (because they think masculine people are OK to fight) but that cis women tend to have had very different experiences with each other than I have had with them.
But regardless, we all have certainly had to deal with misogyny at some point, if not in social situations than in the medical field, and feminism of course benefits us. I think if we're going to be affected by a movement, we deserve the ability to express an opinion on it. Whether you value that opinion or not is kind of up to you.
#I mean I will say... I identify as a man because I find it causes the most joy and least misery#It's not some kind of political statement or distaste for womanhood. If it didn't feel wrong to call myself a woman I'd just do that#And my belief in gender equality really has nothing to do with my identity#I'd very much be a feminist either way because I think sexism is wrong. Idk how else to put it#Idk. This is a weird ask and idk how it was sent so quickly after my post#If this is a mutual can you just message me? I'm always kind of just shouting into the void with my posts im#I don't really intend on or want to spark a public debate. It's tiring. I'd rather just talk
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Tag Team (Deadpool/Wolverine)
Description: Wade is distracted during a mission so afterwards all 3 of them fuck in the Honda.
Warning: Smut
Word Count: 1,773k
Request:
IM OBSESSED WITH WADE AND LOGAN AS A TEAM... May I request a smut where both of them fuck fem!Reader?
Idk reader could also be a hero and it happens during a mission, I trust your writing!!!
Wade had been distracted the entire mission. It was to the point that Logan was getting annoyed with him even more than usual. Y/N had no clue what they were fighting about but was also annoyed with both of them. “Can you guys shut the fuck up?” She growled at them. They both stopped arguing and looked at her, “Can you stop being so hot?” Wade asked. She rolled her eyes and put her finger to her mouth to shush him. “Yes mommy.” Logan looked at him with disgust.
Wade was a kinky son of a bitch but Logan never got used to it. They were trying to kill bad guys but Wade was about to ruin it. Y/N had been so into the mission she had failed to see both of them checking her out. She did have blood all over her but what was new? Wade and Logan both had it bad for the girl but Y/N was oblivious. Before Wade could say anything else the bad guys appeared and they had to kill.
Y/N shot at them, never missing. Logan clawed them up and managed to get more blood on them than before. Wade? Well he was still distracted and barely did anything, “WHAT THE FUCK, WADE?” Y/N yelled at him. She pulled him right out of his dirty thoughts. “Y/N and I just did all the work.” Logan added. “Well my bad that I can’t stop thinking about taking you both to a whole new world of pleasure.” Y/N stared at him with a blank look.
She was really tired of him acting like this, especially on a mission. “Well next time don’t come.” She said and walked away from him. Logan followed but not before growling at him. “Oh come on! You guys act like this isn’t hot as fuck.” He whined, catching up to them. “What’s hot about killing people, Wade?” “EVERYTHING!!” Y/N sighed and stopped walking. “Wade, I’m very flattered but now is not the time.” She said to him. “Wait so there’s a time?” He asked. She sighed and started walking again.
The Honda Odyssey was the only “bed” that they had which sucked ass but it had to work. They all reeked of blood and guts but Wade couldn’t stop thinking about fucking Y/N in it. “So about earlier, is now the time?” He asked. Logan rolled his eyes and Y/N sighed. She sat up in the backseat and stared at him.
He was still wearing his mask and Logan took his off. “Wade, don’t you wanna fuck in a bed?” She asked, looking around the car. “Honey, I would fuck you in a volcano.” Yeah cuz that was a turn on. She looked at Logan, “What about you?” She asked him. He opened his eyes to look at her, “I wouldn’t fuck you in a volcano but this is all we have.” She laughed at his words and put her weapons on the floor.
“Alright guys. Let’s have some fun.” Wade was out of the car and to the backseat before she could finish her sentence. Logan got on the other side of her and she looked between them, “I’m not sure how this will wo-” Both of them attached their mouths to her neck. She gasped at the sudden action of them and she never noticed that Wade lifted his mask. Their lips moved sloppily on her neck, leaving marks. She gripped both of their necks and pulled them closer. They both placed a hand on her upper thigh and she leaned back against the seat, taking them with her.
Her eyes were closed as they marked her neck until she had purple spots. Logan moved down to her cleavage and Wade’s hand brushed against her pussy. She gasped at the feeling of both of them. Logan kissed and sucked the top of boob while Wade managed to get his fingers in her body suit to her bare pussy, “Holy shit.” She breathed out and he chuckled. “Ya like that princess?” Wade asked as his fingers rubbed her clit.
She was soaked and had been for a few hours now. Logan moved from her tit to the floor and spread her legs. “Move your fingers you Merc.” Logan said to Wade. Wade whined but did anyway so Logan could feast on her pussy. “Take this off.” He demanded her. She undid her body suit and Logan helped her get it off until she was fully naked in nothing but gloves and her boots. Logan chuckled as he looked at her wet pussy.
He sniffed her and sighed, “Fuck darling you smell delicious.” He told her and licked up her clit. She threw her head back and moaned. Wade watched as Logan ate her out and got even harder. He looked at Y/N who had her eyes closed and her breathing was harder. He leaned back too and turned her head towards him and kissed her. She weakly kissed back and moaned into his mouth. Logan was eating her out like an animal eating its first meal.
It was everything. Her hands gripped his hair making him moan into her pussy. The vibration made her whine and Wade stuck his tongue in her mouth. She let his tongue explore her mouth and Logan’s explored her pussy. Her hips bucked into his mouth and she shuddered at how close she was, “I’m gonna cum!” She whined into the kiss. “Cum on his beautiful face.” Wade told her and that did it. She fucked her hips up into his face and came all over. Wade praised her as she rode her sweet orgasm.
Logan flattened his tongue as she did all the work until the pleasure was gone. He pulled away from her pussy and smirked at her. She loved the sight of him covered in her cum. Wade did as well, “Damn wish that was me.” Logan got back onto the seat next to her and kissed her, giving her a taste. She moaned into his mouth. “Fuck that’s so hot.” Wade said. Y/N pulled away from the kiss and moved to kiss Wade giving him a taste as well. While they were kissing she took his mask off and threw it on the ground. Wade was never insecure around them.
They made him feel loved. She broke the kiss and moved in between his legs. He looked down in shock as she pulled out his dick. “Kiss.” She told them and without protest they did. She smirked as she watched for a second before running her pretty fingers over Wade’s cock. He gasped into the kiss. She wrapped her hand around him and jerked him off a few times before taking him into her mouth. Her mouth was the best thing to fuck.
It was wet and warm and felt so good. She placed her hands on his thighs and gave him the best blow job of his life. Wade was the loudest one out of the three of them. He fucked up into her mouth as the car rocked. The windows steamed up as they kissed and she gave him the best blow job ever. “Fuck. Your mouth is amazing, baby.” He moaned.
Logan watched as his dick went in and out of her mouth. Sure her mouth was good but her pussy was even better. Logan and Wade stopped kissing once Wade got really close. He threw his head back and cried out as he came in her throat. She pulled off of him and pulled Logan down for a kiss. She let Wade’s cum travel into Logan’s mouth and he swallowed. Wade gasped as he had never seen anything like that before.
Y/N smirked at him and got back in between them. “So I want all or nothing. You both have to be inside of me at the same time.” She says and they both nod before getting naked. She got on the center console of the car and they both managed to get their dicks in her at the same time. Their car was small but it managed to work. Y/N gasped at both of them penetrating her at the same time. Logan tried to let her adjust to the size but Wade didn’t care and started thrusting.
Her moans were loud inside the car and it felt very hot. Her jaw was dropped and her bloody hair was wet with sweat as well. Wade laid his head on the head of the carseat and groaned out. Logan who had more stanamia than both of them was fucking her fast and hard. Wade tried to keep up but it felt better this way.
“Shit you both are so fucking good.” She whined as one dick would hit her spot and then the other would right after. “You’re one to talk princess, your pussy is so perfect.” Wade groaned. Her moans turned to screams as she started thrusting back on them. The perfect rhythm began and all 3 of them were making loud noises. The heat of the car made things more intense.
Logan’s hand that was gripping one side of her hip was squeezing to the point of bruises. Y/N wished more than anything that she could see how fucked out they both looked but that was the con with doggy style. Especially in a small car. Wade groaned as he felt her pussy squeeze them, “Fuck princess, I’m about to cum.” He announced.
Y/N smirked before moaning as she squeezed them tighter cuz a loud moan to release from Logan. He barely moaned but when he did it was amazing and hot. “Fuck sweetheart, If you do that again I’m gonna cum too.” “That’s the plan.” She whimpered and squeezed them. “Where do ya want it, pretty girl?” “Inside of me. Both of you.” She cried as she too felt closer to the edge.
Wade groaned loudly as he came hard inside of her pretty pussy. Logan was a few seconds later and stilled behind her as he came. Y/N helped them ride it out as she came next screaming their names. The car smelled of sweat and sex as they both pulled out of her. Wade collapsed back against the seat and sighed, “Man I do love a good tag team after a crazy mission.” He said. Logan glared at him, “You didn’t even help.” Y/N turned around to look at the two. “Boys don’t start.” She warned and got in the middle of them. “Maybe if you guys are good we can go for round 2.” She smirked and brought them both in for a kiss.
#deadpool and wolverine#deadpool 3#deadpool#deadpool smut#deadpool x reader#ryan reynolds#wolverine#wolverine xmen#wolverine smut#wolverine x reader#logan howlett#logan howlett smut#logan howlett imagine#logan howlett x reader#logan howlett x you#wade wilson#wade wilson x reader#wade wilson imagine#x men#mcu#marvel#marvel imagine#marvel x reader
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Feel like I can't win at work rn, if I'm peppy and smiley to try and get along people treat me like I'm being fake with malicious intent but if I show frustration and stop buffering every little message and email with pleasantries then they react like I'm picking a fight.
Feels like direct communication about problems is automatically seen as confrontational but when I put on a happy face to meet people halfway then that's somehow also bad since I don't mean it from the bottom of my heart. Am I supposed to be a monk with zero emotion whatsoever or what???
I'm really at a loss for what they want from me at this point. I just want a work personality which will cause the least amount of conflict and let me do my job in peace. I hate that I am finding it so hard to deal with people so often lately
#ughhhhh#venting this shit to the void cause its such a pain in the ass#this type of stuff is the biggest thing that makes me really wonder if im fucking autistic#i just dont understand how im always so fucking far off base with how everybody else is perceiving things#honestly if im doomed to be the asshole no matter what then i may start practicing not putting on my work face#what sucks is that even if the happiness and smileyness part is fake its actually harder to NOT do that#it literally just feels like its the personality/outward face i use for that particular social setting#to NOT use it feels wrong and worse to me#so is it fake or not??? idk#my main takeaway here is that work sucks and im tired
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i'll love you forever
pairing: park sunghoon x fem!reader
summary: you were sunghoon's first everything; first friend, first love, and first heartbreak. after years of quietly crushing on you, he was finally ready to confess. so ready to confess, that he told his parents the two of you were already dating! it was an easy enough lie to keep up and he kept it up for months, what could possibly go wrong? he thought. little did he know, you would have a falling out and stop talking for months.. and then, you'd both get invited to spend a week at home with his parents, who still believe you're his girlfriend.
genre: smut, fluff, angst, college au, childhood best friends to lovers, fake dating
warnings: minors dni, fake dating is pretty mild (sorry), she kinda doesn’t rate him at the start, these two kind of exist in a vacuum a little bit idk i had a self-enforced word count to stick to and broke it.. (im within the 10% allowance !), sunghoon in a vest, sunghoon arms, sunghoon
word count: 21,858
playlist: click here.. (for my non-spotify babes, the main song is light by wave to earth (which for some reason i put last.. whatever))
author's note: for silly @asahicore. happy birthday pooks i hope it's amazing and that u enjoy reading this when u have the time !!! LOL (lots of love) also im never writing without telling you things again this was so absurd.
to everyone else.. ok happy reading also emma did not beta read this so im sure it's missing its charm .. anyway it's for emma not you 😭 anyway i hope u enjoy regardless and lmk ur thoughts! omg this is the first fic im nervous about posting.......... please enjoy or else.
In the three years since Park Sunghoon moved away for university, he’d been doing a pretty good job of going home to see his parents. They’d welcome their baby back to the nest with open arms and wide grins. With a rehearsed level of indifference, his younger sister, Yeji, would say, “Oh, I didn’t know you were coming home this weekend.” when she saw him at the dinner table. Sunghoon pretended to only be marginally hurt by this.
In the last three months, he hasn’t so much as sent a text to his parents.
Or to you.
Ignoring texts from his mother is devastating. Between classes, he watches as, “Hi, sweetie, I love you 😍,” turns into, “Missing you, honey, know you must be busy but spare some time for your old mummy, no?” which turns into, “Getting really worried now, are you doing okay? Has something happened with YN? Talk to me, I love you, my baby boy!”
Ignoring texts from you is easy because texts from you never come.
Sitting at the end of his bed, Sunghoon rereads a text his mother sent a few minutes ago: Please talk to me, son. Really worried and YN isn’t answering calls either. What’s going on with you two?
When he leaves his room, he finds Jake lying on the couch, and with his keys in hand, Sunghoon says, “I’m going home.”
And the drive is great! At least, he tells his mum it is. In truth, the drive home without you was nearly impossible. Your ever-expanding home time playlist buzzed through the speakers in his car, but without you there to screech along to the songs, it wasn’t the same. He felt your absence the most when he stopped to get petrol and you weren’t there behind him struggling to carry enough snacks to feed a small family without offering to pay.
The look of worry on his mum’s face stirs a pit in his stomach. “Why are you so quiet these days? God, you look so tired,” she says, frowning. “Is it school? Or something with YN? It’s not like her not to text back.” Her brows crease as she whispers the word unless. She pulls him into a hug, her chin resting perfectly on his shoulder, and her comforting hand strokes the hair on the back of his head. “Breakups are never easy, honey. I’m so sorry, I know how much you love her.”
Breakups are never easy. The sentence hangs heavy over his head.
Whether she knows it or not, she’s handed him a get-out-of-jail-free card, the opportunity to set things straight, to end this mess once and for all. No further questions, and most importantly, no more lies.
For the first time since he left your flat three months ago, Sunghoon lets himself cry. He’d imagined this moment countless times, his first cry since you ended things. In his mind, it was always intense. Today, as it happens, only a few salty tears leak from his eyes, spilling onto the cuff of his sleeve, darkening the blue cotton in tiny indigo splotches.
“We didn’t break up,” he says in a small voice—for some reason. “I’m just having a hard time.” Neither statement is technically untrue, but the words taste rotten in his mouth.
The tightening grip of his mum’s arms around his body is what brings on the harsh, shoulder-racking sobs he’d been anticipating. For a while, they stand like this, Sunghoon weeping into his mum’s cardigan until she sends him upstairs to lie down, promising a cup of tea that never comes.
His childhood bedroom is chilly, so he changes into clothes he left behind and climbs into bed, pulling his duvet up to his chin. He turns his head to look at the walls and the room around him, everything is exactly where he left it in the summer. It should be comforting, but it’s weird to be home without you.
There are photos of you and him everywhere, growing up and around each other through different stages of life. The two of you together during the summer your family moved in next door, you wore glasses back then and were the first friend he’d made in his life. Sunbathing and sharing earphones at the beach, listening to music together on your iPod classic. Sunghoon in thick glasses with a stiff smile and your arm around him on the first day of high school. Wide grins at the start of this summer, the last time things were okay between you.
Overwhelmed, he stares up at the ceiling, only realising he’s crying when a hot tear slips from his eyes to tickle his ear. Because Sunghoon likes to upset himself, he screws his eyes shut and thinks about the night before you stopped talking.
Though he didn’t know it at the time, you’d left Yeonjun’s place to sit with him in a tiny restaurant on campus, the one you’d only visit to toast to each other’s heartbreaks. It had become a ritual — ever since your first year boyfriend dumped you after two weeks — to cry as much as you wanted and drink as much soju as your bodies could handle before stumbling back to your apartments.
Having spent years suffering from an unrequited crush on his best friend, Sunghoon was always the one to comfort you. But that night was different; you were there to comfort him. It was easy enough to play the part of ‘boy whose crush likes someone else’ because he spent your entire friendship in that role. He’d had no problem accepting his fate, but his composure started to slip when you met Yeonjun. It was the first time you’d dated someone who Sunghoon had reason to be jealous of. In every way, Yeonjun was better than him—taller, funnier, hotter. Sunghoon knew he didn’t stand a chance. He took it personally, you liking Yeonjun instead of him, and let his jealousy consume him from the inside out.
This jealousy led him to start telling you about Minjeong—lying to you about Minjeong, and his feelings for her. She was a girl from a college out of town that he saw on his Instagram Explore page. He followed her by accident, and by some stroke of luck, she followed back. Sunghoon didn’t really have feelings for her — he didn’t even know her — but she was a girl that you didn’t know, so you wouldn’t be able to meddle.
It only took a few weeks for Sunghoon to become so upset about your relationship that he couldn’t hide his emotions anymore. So, in a fit of tears, he told you over the phone that things ended badly with Minjeong, and he was in urgent need of a soju ceremony.
But the night was missing its usual comforts.
It was strange to be the one crying, to see you looking put together and ordering the food. To see you pouring the drinks and raising your glass to propose a toast to ‘Hoonie’s first heartbreak’. You were driving that night, so you only had a tiny sip of soju and let him drink as much as he needed, the way he always did for you, at the same table, in the same restaurant for years.
Hours later, in your car, you entertained his drunken rambles, though he remembers how your lips were set into a frown that he wanted to kiss away while you gripped the steering wheel like you thought it would run from you. Sunghoon was more drunk than he’d been in a while, drunk enough to let you sling his arm over your shoulders and keep him upright until you reached his flat.
The voices coming from Yeji’s room disrupt the memory. He’s thankful.
“Your brother’s going through something, so be nice to him this weekend.” His mother’s voice is her version of hushed—a loud whisper.
Yeji’s response is harder to make out, but he doesn’t miss the way their mum says, “I mean it, missy.”
A dramatic sigh rumbles through Yeji as she barges into his room without knocking. Sunghoon sits up, feeling an ache in his back and crossing his legs.
“Mum told me to lay off you today, which is fine, but before I do, I need to tell you something.”
Yeji pushes the door shut behind her, and the open window makes it slam, both of them flinching from the sudden noise. She pulls her hair out of a silk scrunchie and throws herself on the floor. A pang of irritation forms in his chest, knowing that he could immediately find the empty hanger in his wardrobe where the shirt she’s wearing used to live.
“I hate you and your perfect golden boy image, Hoon. Would it kill you to fail a class for once? I don’t know how I’m supposed to carry on your legacy.” She’s looking up at him, her chin in her hands and irritation written in the crease between her thick brows.
It’s impossible to know if it’s because of Yeji’s complete lack of boundaries or the fact that her ‘perfect, golden boy’ big brother is on track to fail three out of three classes and get cut from the hockey team, but Sunghoon immediately bursts into tears.
“Oh, uh.. I’m sorry?” Yeji offers. “I was kidding if that helps.”
“I’m alright, it’s okay.” The tears don’t stop stinging his eyes. “Why do you want me to change everything about myself?”
With a frown, Yeji pours out her frustration and mild resentment. She doesn’t understand how Sunghoon effortlessly conquers every aspect of life while she struggles. Neither do their parents, who had been baffled by her plummeting grades since she moved to boarding school, especially when Sunghoon’s academic performance has only soared since he left for university. The weight of this perceived injustice pulls Sunghoon’s shoulders down with guilt as she talks about the expectations he has inadvertently set for her.
“But other than that, I’m good.” She shrugs, sitting with her legs out, and leaning back on her palms. “How’s YN?” she asks. It’s clear from the brightness in her voice that she thinks she’s helping.
Sunghoon cries again.
Back on campus, he’s trying to scrape together what’s left of his academic career with the help of two of the smartest guys he knows, and their friend Jay. Though the word ‘friend’ feels a little strong at the moment given the way Jay’s goading him.
Sunghoon rolls his eyes, sitting back in his seat. “There’s nothing you can do that I can’t,” he says, meaning every word.
Jay scoffs, shrugging and raising his brow in a way that, over the years, Sunghoon knows to interpret as his ‘about to say something ridiculous’ look. “Pretty sure I could call YN right now, and she’d answer.”
There’s a pit in Sunghoon’s stomach as Heeseung turns his head in the other direction like he’s been slapped, trembling with stifled laughter. At least Jake doesn’t hide his amusement, throwing his head back in a fit of giggles that draw nasty looks from the other students in the library. Sunghoon doesn’t waste his energy trying to argue because Jay’s right.
Now composed, Heeseung turns back to the table, flipping through some of Sunghoon’s course materials to find whatever his class was doing in class that week. The English Literature class he’s taking — The Modernist Movement: Joyce, Woolf, and Hemingway — is the same class he had to send a million emails over the summer to get enrolled in, but it’s the same one Heeseung aced two years ago. Lucky for him none of the boys seem to be in the mood to make fun of him for trying so hard to have a class in common with you, and then practically failing out of it before the term had started properly.
“This class is, like, beyond easy, dude.” Heeseung pauses to sniffle and twist the stud in his ear. “Everyone in my class aced it. How are you doing so badly already?”
“I only took it because YN thought it’d be fun if we had a class together, but.. I kind of haven’t been going since we stopped talking.” Sunghoon shrugs, pretending to be unaffected.
As if the mere mention of your name has some sort of summoning power, like saying Biggie Smalls in the mirror three times, you appear in his eye line, rounding the corner with a furious stride. Your demeanour crumbles when Jay waves at you, and you grin, waving back, but as soon as you look Sunghoon in the eye again, the rage comes back, and you smack a hand on the table when you reach it, leaning over to him.
“Sunghoon, a word?” you ask.
He thinks you’re asking, but it’s hard to tell with the way you set your jaw afterwards, and the way the warmth of your signature vanilla scent hits him hard. Dazed, Sunghoon lifts a hand, pointing at himself. “Me?”
“Does anyone else at the table answer to Sunghoon?”
“Okay,” he says, somewhat pathetically, nudging Jay for laughing at him.
As slowly as possible, Sunghoon pushes his chair from the table and stands up, following you to the corner of the references section where only anthropology students in scratchy thrift store knits, and Jay, come to check out encyclopaedias by volume. You look good, save for the rage written all over your face—which, honestly, Sunghoon thinks he likes.
Sunghoon isn’t sure what to expect, so he says, “Hey.” He’s being cautious, waiting a moment to gauge your reaction. “What’s gooooood?” His cheeks burn as soon as he closes his mouth around the vowel, but you laugh. You laugh, and it’s beautiful and happy, and you’re laughing because of him—or at him, but he’s glad either way.
Annoyance quickly clears all traces of amusement on your face. “Were you ever going to tell me we’re spending next week at Mum and Dad’s?” you ask.
Sunghoon gasps dramatically, clicking his fingers. “I knew there was something I’ve been meaning to do.”
His attempt at lightening the mood falls flat, and you only nudge his shoulder gently, sighing. “Can you be serious? For once in your life, even for a second, can you please think about how the things you say affect me?” You’re frowning, crossing your arms over your chest and looking at your feet. “It’s not fair, Sunghoon. For you to keep saying things—making plans involving me and then acting like I’m the bad guy when I turn you down.”
“I don’t think you’re the bad guy at all,” Sunghoon admits. “If anyone is in the wrong, it’s me, I guess.”
You scoff, looking at him like you hate him. “You guess? Are you serious?” You look furious, but you sound hurt and Sunghoon hates it. Hates himself. “I can’t have this conversation with you right now. Tell mum I’m sick, and it’s contagious.” You roll your eyes and walk away, leaving Sunghoon alone with his thoughts and judgemental stares from students in crochet scarves so long they graze the floor.
He sighs, slumping against the wall. How does he keep getting it wrong with you?
Back at the table, Sunghoon manages to act like he’s not falling apart and makes some serious headway on his missing assignments with Heeseung’s help before they call it a day as the sun starts to set.
When he gets home, he lies down on his bedroom floor, spending hours poring over the conversation you had. Over the minute changes in your facial expression, the tone of your voice, and the endless list of things he should have done, rather than watch you walk away.
The moment feels familiar, both identical to and worlds apart from what happened after you left three months ago. When he managed to scrape the last shreds of his dignity from the kitchen table, he dragged his feet to his room and lay down like he is now, face to the rug. That day, he left his door open and lay so still that Jake thought he was dead. Sunghoon remembers wishing he had been.
For once in your life, even for a second, can you please think about how the things you say affect me? The words run on a loop in his mind, over and over, until he can’t remember the order of the sentence or where you put emphasis. They’re cutting all the same.
Sunghoon sighs into the itchy fibres of his black rug before rolling onto his back. In the diminishing purple light of the setting sun. he looks at the walls of his room. At the Fleetwood Mac poster, he stole from Jay when they moved out of their first year dorm, that curls away from the wall towards the ceiling—a diagonal strip of shiny tape being the only indication of the otherwise invisible tear through the face of Stevie Nicks.
He’s glad when his phone rings, cutting through the quiet, though the sight of your name and the anatomical heart emoji next to it only dampens his spirit. Reluctantly, Sunghoon answers the phone, holding it to his ear.
“I just got off the phone with Dad..” You trail off. Tangible silence follows, so thick it weighs on his chest. “I’ll go home with you.”
“You will?”
“Yes. Goodbye.”
Sunghoon reaches your flat at five in the evening. You don’t smile when you open the door for him, nor do you invite him in. Instead, you dump your bag at your feet and he cringes, looking from the floor to you. You’re aggressively beautiful and cosy-looking as you pull a jacket over the sweater you wore that night. Sunghoon’s heart aches in his chest and he wonders if you even realise. Suddenly, the memory of the last thing you said the morning after hits him like a truck: Then let’s not be friends at all.
A familiar weight lands on his shoulder—your hand. Concern lines your eyes as you ask if he’s okay.
With a lump in his throat, Sunghoon nods.
In the discomfort of his car, the two of you sit in silence while he starts the drive home.
“How’s Yeonjun,” he asks, eyes flicking towards you but regretting it immediately when he sees how you clench your jaw.
“No,” you say simply, shaking your head. “You don’t get to ask me about him.”
These are the only words you exchange until Sunghoon stops for petrol. He has enough fuel for the rest of the journey, but he feels like dying and thinks the fresh air might quell his thoughts of running his car off the road. Like always, the two of you get out and head into the kiosk, where he follows you wordlessly through the aisles, watching you debate on snack choices before settling on the same things you always get. Sunghoon pays for your snacks and you roll your eyes but don’t protest, mumbling thanks as you take them into your arms, leading the way back outside.
He knows he needs to tell you before you reach the house, but he’s not entirely sure how to say it—so he just does. “My, uh.. my parents think we’re dating.”
You stop so suddenly in front of him that he almost bumps into you. Stepping around you, Sunghoon keeps walking.
Over the top of his car, he watches your face cycle through all five stages of grief until anger comes back around in the loop as you scoff. “Why do they think that?” Your face is devoid of expression now, the blankness over your features dragging a sharp chill over his spine.
He stares blankly at you, processing. “Because I told them we’re dating,” he mumbles.
“Why did you.. do that?” You tilt your head, eyes pressing shut in a long blink. “What are you even talking about? Why did you.. What?”
A thin layer of sweat coats his palms despite the cold. Why did he do that? “We can stage a breakup during the trip or say we broke up right now,” Sunghoon offers. “Just one night, YN, please.”
The wind whistles by, ruffling your hair and jacket that you hug tightly to your chest. Behind you, Sunghoon takes note of the group of girls standing by the pumps, all five of them jerking their heads abruptly when they notice him watching, suddenly finding interest in the scattered litter and flickering halogen bulbs in the steel canopy over their heads.
You’re staring when he looks back at you, nostrils twitching with a sniffle before you sigh. “Or we could say that you’re a liar and end things there,” you say. “Or better yet, you go down there on your own and tell them the truth.”
Sunghoon’s gaze drops, his thoughts racing in his mind. He knows you’re right. At some point, his parents will have to find out, and it’d be better for them to find out now. Sunghoon sighs, nodding. “Alright,” he concedes. “I’ll take you back.”
An angry laugh comes out of you as you shake your head. “No need, I’ll walk.”
The station you’re at is neatly nestled in the middle of nowhere, on a road so narrow he’s not even sure it has a pavement. You’re halfway through the three-hour drive, so there’s no telling how long the walk would be, never mind the fact that the sun is already setting and it’s deep enough into October for the wind to sting.
“From here?” he asks, incredulous.
“Yes, open the boot so I can get my bag.”
Sunghoon can only bring himself to say your name, a desperate whisper.
“Open the boot.”
He repeats your name as if it’ll make a difference, he’s pleading with you, begging—though he doesn’t know for what.
You go to the back of his car where Sunghoon joins you, a pit in his stomach when you step away. With misty eyes, you look up at him and his heart breaks. “Please.”
Sunghoon knows you well enough to know that you’re not actually going to attempt the walk home but also knows that you won’t back down if he keeps challenging you. He nods, opening the boot for you and getting into the driver’s seat—your move.
You stand there, unmoving, and long enough passes that he thinks you’ll actually leave. The boot closes softly and you join him in the passenger seat. You sigh, buckling your seatbelt. “Let’s just get this over with.”
For the rest of the journey, you sit in silence as Sunghoon briefs you on the relationship, fighting a smile as he thinks about being your boyfriend—even if only for a night. You scoff when he ‘reminds’ you that you’ve been together for four months now and the only reason you haven’t been able to come home recently is that your schedules don’t match up very well anymore—which couldn’t be further from the truth as, before term started, you went out to celebrate the fact that your class schedules couldn’t be more suited for seeing each other.
Finally, at Sunghoon’s childhood home, the two of you smile and laugh for his parents before going to bed. Your relationship has only made his mother more averse to the idea of you sharing a room under her roof than she had been when you were younger. He’s relieved about this, and in the solitude of his bedroom, he lies on the duvet of his twin bed, staring up at the ceiling and thinking about the last few hours.
With his parents, you’d sat up in the living room watching TV. They sat on the couch together, his mum nestled in his dad’s side, while you two sat on the couch opposite, mirroring their position. If your complete stiffness was anything to go by, you were less than comfortable with his arm around you and Sunghoon felt terrible for begging you to go along with this. It was after midnight when you all went upstairs and you let him kiss your forehead before all but slamming the door to the guest room in his face. His heart twirled and his mum beamed at him before saying goodnight again.
Now, at 3 a.m. he can’t sleep. Flinching at the knock on his door, he furrows his brows and goes to open it. It’s you. Standing there with your hair scraped away from your face in one of his t-shirts. Your eyes are red, brimmed with tears as you step into his room and sit on his bed.
He closes the door softly, heart aching at the sight of you so upset, and when he sits next to you, his heart tears apart because you move over, putting a distance between you. It falls out of his chest onto the floor when he realises you’re not wearing your necklace.
Sunghoon suspected you might have stopped wearing it, it only made sense that if you didn’t want him, you wouldn’t want the necklace he bought for you either, but at least earlier, your sweatshirt sat so high he couldn’t see if you had it on or not.
It was a gift for your sixteenth birthday, after your first heartbreak. He was so upset and angry that you let some loser hurt you that way, upset and angry that someone could be loved by you and fuck it up. Sunghoon was inspired by Jay, who’d gotten a pretty necklace for his girlfriend, and talked about her cute reaction for weeks, how happy she was to have a piece of him with her all the time. It was a locket, with a picture of Jay in one side and a picture of her in the other so the pictures would kiss when she wore it.
While at the jewellers with Jake, Sunghoon thought something like that might be a bit much for the two of you and eventually picked out an equally pretty piece with his first initial on it. He wrote a corny note to put in the box, something about how ‘boys come and go but Sunghoon is forever’ and gave it to you with trembling hands a few nights later—it was the first time he ever made you cry. Immediately, he thought he’d done something wrong and was ready to snatch the box and run back to the jewellers (even though he trashed the receipt). You hugged him and told him you loved him. Sunghoon’s been riding that high ever since.
Until tonight at least.
“Are you okay?” he whispers.
“I’ll do it, Hoon.” Your eyes lift from the floor to meet his gaze. “For as long as you need me to, I’ll pretend.”
As soon as the words leave your mouth, Sunghoon feels lighter, an unbearable weight slipping from his shoulders. You haven’t called him ‘Hoon’ in ages, and he can’t tell if you’ve said it out of vulnerability, or even noticed that you’ve said it at all, but it warms his heart nonetheless. However, he’s not fully at ease, still curious about your sudden change of heart and why you’re crying.
“What happened?”
You pull him into a hug, and his eyes bulge out of his head. “It doesn’t matter,” you say, the words muffled by the skin at the base of his neck.
For as long as he’s known you, you’ve smelled like vanilla, a sweet warmth that grounds him. Yet it’s only after these months apart that he’s able to put a name to the sensation: home. The realisation of how much he’s missed this feeling, missed you, floods him with a rush of emotion so overwhelming he can’t find the words to press the issue. A moment passes before he remembers to hug you back, his arms finally wrapping around you, pulling you close, and you sink into his hold. Months ago, he would have kissed the top of your head and mumbled reassurance into your hair, but tonight, Sunghoon settles for stroking the back of your head and hopes it’s enough.
“You can talk to me, you know? You can always talk to me.”
A heavy silence follows, sharp as a dagger—scraping his skin, making the hair on the back of his neck stand on edge and lodging itself between his shoulder blades. Sunghoon’s breath hitches in his throat when you cling onto him even tighter, shifting so close you’ve had to settle in his lap. His heart races in his chest, pounding a rhythm so loud it fills the room.
Finally, you speak, assuring him that you know and that you’re okay. At this, Sunghoon holds you as tight as he can, and neither of you speaks for the rest of the night. You fall asleep like this, in his arms, so deeply that you don’t even stir when he lies down.
Rubbing your back, he watches the clock on his nightstand, the piercing green LED digits cycling through two whole hours right before his stinging eyes until you wake up. Sunghoon presses his eyes shut, pretending to be asleep when you kiss his cheek and leave his room.
For the entire morning, you stay in your room, and although Sunghoon is concerned, he decides not to bother you. In the afternoon, he sits at the dining table with his mum, listening as she talks about work. When she asks him, he gets up to make a cup of tea for her. It’s at that moment when you finally come downstairs, looking so effortlessly pretty. Your hair is still damp from the shower, and you’re bundled up in one of his old sweatshirts. There’s a bright grin on your face that leaves his heart thudding.
“Baby!” you squeal when you see him, charging towards him and wrapping your arms around him from behind. “Good morning.” Your words are muffled against the back of his t-shirt, and the four-letter word, and the sugar coating it, make his cheeks burn.
“It’s great to see you too, YN,” his mum says with a smile. “My night was amazing; I slept very well and had no dreams.”
You let go of Sunghoon and walk over to the table, kissing his mum on the cheek and wishing her a good morning as well. “Sorry, mum, how are you?”
His mother doesn’t seem to have the heart to correct you either, allowing your 3 p.m. ‘good morning’ to go unnoticed.
Sunghoon carefully fills both mugs to the brim and, with extra caution, carries them to the table. He places a steaming cup of peppermint tea in front of his mum and a milky coffee in front of you. A warm smile spreads across your face as you mouth a ‘thank you’, and his knees turn to jelly.
The next day, after eating an early dinner with his parents at the table, the four of you go out on a walk along the bike path you used to take for school. His parents have gone ahead, not intentionally, but because Sunghoon can’t stop you from dragging your feet.
As with most things in the town where you grew up, nothing about the trail has changed. The leaves are yellowing in standard form for the season, and crunching under his feet with each step he takes. The only foreign experience is the silence that you’re determined to uphold. Everything Sunghoon says to you is met with either a hum, a nod, or no acknowledgement at all. At this point, he feels like he could drop dead at your side and the most you’d do is step over his body like a fallen branch.
After letting you go ahead, the weathered slats of the wooden footbridge sag in the middle under his tread. It’s been like this for as long as he can remember and he wonders how nothing has been done about it. The stream rushes under it, loud and unruly, the smell of wet grass both comforting and suffocating as you look over the railing. It’s like something from a postcard, the low-hanging branches sweeping back and forth under the breeze, the grass lush and green around the path, murky water thrashing against the mud and rocks underneath with you in the middle of the frame, peering over the edge.
You keep walking when Sunghoon approaches, leaving him alone on the creaky bridge with nothing but the ache in his chest. He looks up, staring at the grey clouds in the sky through the gaps in the leaves, and sighs.
Eventually, he catches up with you, grabbing your hand and locking his fingers with yours when his parents slow down. You stiffen, looking up at him with cut eyes and a creased brow. “What are you doing?”
Sunghoon matches your clipped tone. “Holding my girlfriend’s hand.”
“No one’s looking, boyfriend.”
“You think my parents aren’t going to wonder why we’re lagging behind?”
A scoff—your fingers remain defiantly stiff. “Do you think your parents are going to care whether or not we’re holding hands?”
“My mum might after the show you put on yesterday afternoon, baby.” Bitterness covers the word like a blanket, a stark departure from how you said it.
A long sigh rumbles its way out of you before you fix your lips into a strained grin. “Sorry, sweetheart, this is my first time pretending to be in love.”
As your words hang in the air, Sunghoon’s emotions brew like a storm within him. Frustration gnaws at his patience. All hopes for a smooth week are dashed, though determination simmers in his chest with a strong resolve to make this work, to fix your relationship. It doesn’t stop the sharp pang of hurt piercing his stomach—he knows you don’t feel the same way, he knows you’re faking, but the word ‘pretending’ hits him like a truck anyway.
“We held hands all the time when we were friends,” he points out.
Your smile drops immediately, hurt flashing behind your eyes. “Yeah, and now we’re not.”
If there was a competition for who could hurt Sunghoon’s feelings the most, you’d be a shoo-in for first place. With distinction.
“Exactly!” he says, feeling the sting of his own words. “Because now we’re dating.”
At the sight of his mum turning around, you switch up in an instant. Lock your fingers with his, wrapping an arm around his bicep, leaning into him, giggling. It’s forced but his parents are far enough away that all that matters is the curve of your lips.
“You two okay back there?” she asks.
“Perfect! I feel like a kid again!” you call back, beaming up at Sunghoon in a way that makes his stomach flutter even though it doesn’t meet your eyes.
The two of you don’t talk at all when you get home, with you hugging his parents goodnight and running up the stairs.
“She’s not feeling too well,” he explains, nodding when his dad tells him to make you some tea.
His parents spend the whole day at work, and you spend the whole day following him around like a shadow until the evening when they return. He doesn’t pretend not to like it.
Sunghoon helps you make dinner, turning leftover rice into fried rice with the help of some eggs and vegetables. It’s nice moving around the kitchen with you, watching you scramble eggs in his t-shirt and bump his hip with a playful frown when he eats some of the peppers you’re chopping.
His parents watch from the table, cooing over the two of you and he does his best to fight the blush forming on his cheeks and neck. Embarrassed, he hugs you from behind, hiding his face in your neck—the scent of your coconut conditioner mixing with your vanilla perfume doesn’t do anything to stop the flush.
Over a bottle of wine, the four of you eat together at the table, swapping stories about your days. Sunghoon tries to hide his surprise as you lie about the time you spent at the play park by your primary school, competing for height on the swings and spinning on the roundabout until you couldn’t stand up. You grin at him, and it meets your eyes as you hold his hand under the table, and kiss his cheek.
After eating, his parents head upstairs, leaving to clean up together. You hum a song he’s never heard as you load the dishwasher, carefully placing the plates and cutlery in the rack, shaking your head when he hands you the glasses you’d used.
“Leave ours,” you say. “If you want.”
Sunghoon nods, putting them back on the table, where you sit in the seat across from the one he was sitting in. He sits too, staying quiet rather than saying the wrong thing. You don’t speak either. It’s reminiscent of the past—the hours you’d spend in the same room, only speaking to share a funny post you’d come across or to ask if you were hungry.
His eyes track your movements—reaching for the half-empty bottle on the table to pour yourself another glass, filling it to the brim. Before putting it down, you offer him some, filling his glass too when he nods. The three glasses of wine he’s already had must be the reason he wants to reach across the table and hold your hand, run his thumb over the soft skin on the back of it.
Sunghoon doesn’t know why you’ve been so nice to him all day or why it makes his chest hurt.
“You know you don’t have to be nice to me when we’re alone, right?” The words come out before he can stop them.
Over the top of your glass, your brows knit together. A sound of confusion, a low hum, comes from your throat as you try to finish your sip. “What?” you ask finally.
“I only asked you to do this because of my parents, you know? You don’t have to sit or talk with me when they’re not around.”
Sunghoon’s known you long enough to recognise the look that flashes across your face. The way your eyes narrow and your brows tug together, the little pout that sets on your lips before you speak; you’re hurt.
“Why can’t I just be nice to you because it’s the right thing to do?”
Because it hurts, is what he wants to say. He wants to cry, to beg you to forget everything he said that day. “Because I don’t want to make you any more uncomfortable than I already have.” Is what he settles for.
Your face softens. “I don’t feel uncomfortable around you, Hoon. We were best friends for ages, I don’t think you could ever make me uncomfortable.” You pause to take a gulp of wine. “Why can’t I just want to be nice to you?”
Sunghoon has to chew on his cheek to distract himself from how much your word choice stings. The implications of were and all of your past tense. “I’m sorry,” he says.
“What for?”
“Everything.”
There’s a sadness in the way you run your fingers on the base of your glass. The way you chew on your lip, how your hair falls when you tilt your head and how it moves when you shake it. “It’s not your fault,” you say. “I don’t know anyone who would choose to have unrequited feelings for their best friend.”
Wow, he thinks. You’re on a roll. Sunghoon wonders if you’re meticulously choosing your phrasing to upset him. Wonders why you feel the need to remind him that his feelings aren’t reciprocated as if he didn’t live through and spend hours reliving the day he confessed.
“But I didn’t have to tell you about it. It was unfair of me to spring that on you when I knew about Yeonjun.”
“Did you.. did you think I was going to leave him for you?”
“Maybe?” Sunghoon chews on his lip—he has no idea what he thought would happen. “I think I thought I loved you enough for both of us, that you might play the part for fun or out of curiosity, and.. I don’t know, just learn to love me.”
“Hoon,” you whisper, frowning. “How could you even think about settling for something like that?”
Sunghoon shrugs. “It’s not settling if it’s you.”
Silence takes a seat at the table after he speaks, interrupted only by the ticking clock on the wall—a glittery mess of scrapbooking paper and washi tape layered over each other that Yeji had decorated at summer camp years ago. You’re picking at your fingernails, letting flecks of black polish fall to the table, stark against the varnished oak.
“I know it’s not my place to ask,” Sunghoon starts after a while, hesitant and only continuing when you nod. “But what did Yeonjun say when you told him? About.. everything?”
You take a long sip from your glass and sit quietly for so long that he thinks you’re not going to answer him—he doesn’t blame you.
“I didn’t.”
He waits for you to elaborate. You don’t.
Sunghoon nods slowly, deciding not to ask any follow-up questions. Instead, he takes another drink, scrunching his nose at the bitter taste. “He didn’t ask why we stopped hanging out?” he blurts out.
“I told him we fell out but I didn’t say why.” You shrug, but your posture is stiff.
“Where did you tell him you were going to be this week?” He knows it’s not his business at all, that he’s pushing your boundaries, but he can’t help his curiosity.
“Nowhere.”
“You told him you were staying on campus?”
“I didn’t tell him anything.” Your gaze shifts, avoiding his as you toy with the stem of your glass. You drum your nails against it, letting the dull clink ring out.
“So you just left?”
“Does it make a difference to you?”
Sunghoon nods.
For a while, you tug at the drawstrings on your hoodie, pursing your lips to the side, considering this. “Yeonjun and I aren’t together anymore.” Your admission is so shocking that Sunghoon’s jaw drops. He tries to cover his surprise by coughing, his tongue sticking out like a small child. “I didn’t want to say anything because I didn’t want you to think it was because of you.”
Sunghoon’s thoughts move at lightspeed, too fast for him to catch onto any of them and process this information. His emotions compete with each other—disbelief, guilt, and a painful glimmer of hope he hadn’t dared to acknowledge until now all at the forefront.
“Was it?” he asks. “Because of me?”
You scoff—an incredulous sound that doesn’t match the sad look on your face. “I don’t know, Sunghoon. Do you think my boyfriend used me to make his ex jealous because of you?”
He’s not sure what he expected you to say, but this is.. Complete disbelief eclipses him as his heart sinks in his chest, shock, and guilt bubbling in his stomach.
“I’m sorry,” he says after too long. “That I wasn’t there. That I haven’t been there.”
“You didn’t know,” you say, gaze softening as you look up at him.
“But I made you feel like you couldn’t talk to me about it.”
You shake your head. “I made me feel like I couldn’t talk to you about it. All you did was change the friendship, I’m the one who ended it.”
“I still should’ve been there.”
“You’re here now, right?”
Sunghoon nods, earnestly. “Always.”
Only one thing comes to mind when you repeat the word ‘always’ before taking a sip from your glass, downing its contents. Sunghoon gets up and crosses the room with wobbly steps to open the fridge, where he pulls out as many bottles of soju as he can hold in his hands and puts them down on the table. He goes back to collect some glasses from the cabinet, puts some of the leftover fried rice from dinner into the microwave, and brings it all over when it’s done, with bowls and utensils. You watch him with a fond smile as he opens a bottle and he hopes you think the flush on his cheeks is from all the drinking you’ve been doing.
“Is it bad that I’ve missed doing this?” You’re grinning now.
Sunghoon shakes his head, raising his glass. “To YN’s fifteenth heartbreak.”
You grin, clinking the rim of your glass against his. “To YN’s fifteenth heartbreak,” you repeat.
Both of you down the glasses, and Sunghoon refills them, pouring the soju with an oddly steady hand. As you eat spoonfuls of rice and sip your drinks, silence settles over the room. The soft glow of the kitchen lights forms a warm ambience, a cosy familiarity that brings up simple memories—doing homework together at the table while gossiping about your classmates, the first New Year after you were both eighteen and had your first drink with his parents.
For at least an hour, the only sounds are the occasional clinks of forks against bowls, glasses hitting the table, the faint hum of the refrigerator and the steady tick of Yeji’s clock. Sunghoon’s eyes meet yours, and he can’t help but notice the slight change in your expression when they do.
You clear your throat, running a hand through your hair. “This is my sixteenth, actually.”
“What?”
You take a small sip of soju, staring down at the table. “My fifteenth heartbreak was losing you. Yeonjun is my sixteenth.”
In the two days since your soju ceremony, Sunghoon finds himself sinking into the role of your boyfriend like a hot bath. But there’s no use pretending it doesn’t hurt. Pretending it doesn’t hurt when you kiss his cheek before bed, or when you reach out to push the hair out of his face or snuggle into his side on the couch; because it does hurt—a lot. It hurts to think that in three days when you put your bags in the boot of his car, you’ll sit in silence all the way home. When he drops you off at your flat, you’ll close the door in his face and stop talking to him again. These realisations are harder to confront when he’s alone in his room, like now.
About an hour ago, you asked if you could borrow his car, saying there was something you needed to do on your own. It seemed important, so he handed over his keys with no question. Sighing, Sunghoon gets up from his bed and heads to the shower, where he jerks off to clear his mind. On his way back to his room, he notices the light leaking from the open kitchen door that illuminates the landing.
He hears the lock on the front door clicking, and stands at the top of the stairs, dripping water onto the carpet while listening attentively. His ears perk up when he hears a gasp—his mother.
“What’s this for?” she asks.
“I just..” You trail off. “I know it’s not much, but I wanted to thank you both for always looking after me.” You pause, and Sunghoon holds his breath, waiting. Your voice trembles as you continue. “It’s been hard since my parents went back home, and I guess it was still hard when they were here, but you both supported me. I don’t think I could’ve managed without you guys. I want to make you guys proud, you know? And I’m trying, really, so this is me saying thank you. I’m sorry it took me so long.”
He grips the railing by the landing, digging his nails into the wood until they start hurting—an ache in his fingertips that makes him wince.
An odd feeling settles in his stomach, a bittersweetness tinged in his fondness for you, and the gentle shock of realising how much his parents have done for you. Growing up, you became an honorary member of Sunghoon’s family. His parents showered you with gifts during holidays and birthdays, which you often celebrated with them rather than your own family.
The memory of your parents’ sudden decision to move across the country still lingers, and Sunghoon vividly recalls the tearful conversation he overheard at the top of the stairs. Your parents understood the enormity of their request but had earnestly asked if Sunghoon’s parents could continue looking after you.
His chest tightens when you start crying.
“You don’t have to thank us for anything, sweetie. Just you being here and taking care of our boy is more than enough thanks. You never forget our birthdays, and you always come and visit when you can. You’re doing a great job, and you should give yourself some credit,” his dad says, a little choked up. “We’ve always been proud of you.”
Sunghoon’s eyes sting with tears and his skin gets dry in the spots where the water from the shower is evaporating. He presses his fingers to his closed eyes, forcing a few tears to fall and walks the rest of the way to his room with his eyes shut. He can’t hear anything through his closed bedroom door, which he decides is a good thing as he coats himself in moisturiser and swipes deodorant under his arms with intention to spend the whole night alone. Once he’s dressed, he gets into bed and pretends not to be bothered by the way his wet hair dampens his pillow. Under the duvet, he tosses and turns before sighing and heading to Yeji’s room.
In her absence, the room’s subtle transformation is stark. The sage green-painted walls, once a backdrop to the A3 faces of Wave to Earth and Beabadoobee, now bear the faint imprints of those missing posters. Tiny, shadowy rectangles are the only remnants of the 6x4-sized pictures of her and her friends, of her and Sunghoon, that she took away with her to school.
Her hairdryer is still on her desk where she’d left it for him to use and he sits in her stiff wooden chair, plugging it in. The airflow starts immediately, hot and loud, humming throughout the space as he runs his fingers through his wet hair, feeling cosy under the heat. His shampoo is fresh and soapy scented under his nose, and his reflection watches him in Yeji’s mirror, eyes red and concerned while his hair blows around his head. Sunghoon closes his eyes and finishes his hair, sighing as he lets his worries slip under the whir of the fan.
Finished, he shuts off the dryer and opens his eyes, flinching at your reflection in the doorway behind him with a soft smile on your face. “Mum and Dad are going to open a bottle of wine if you want to join,” you say, meeting his eyes in the mirror.
Sunghoon can’t find it in himself to speak, only nodding in response. You smile wider but don’t move. He unplugs the hairdryer and leaves it on the desk where he found it before crossing the room. Without giving himself a chance to think about it, he pulls you into a hug and kisses the top of your head, smiling into your hair when you wrap your arms around his waist, holding him closer.
You’re sitting on the edge of the bathtub, mumbling sleepily that you’re never going to drink again, and Sunghoon leans over the sink brushing his teeth, he’s glad you have the decency to cover your mouth as you speak.
“Brush your teeth and go back to sleep then,” he mumbles around his toothbrush.
You don’t respond.
Sunghoon sighs through his nose, spitting foamy toothpaste into the sink, leaving bubbly, blue splatters on the porcelain. “And quit staring at me, I can feel your beady little eyes on the back of my neck and it’s freaking me out.”
“But you’re so pretty,” you coo.
There’s a flutter in his stomach and he rinses off the sink and his mouth, buying himself some time. With a hand on the Listerine, he lifts his gaze to meet yours in the mirror and stops short. You’re still staring at him, features soft and glowing under the afternoon light. You look like an angel; a gentle smile spreading over your lips, and a sleepy glint sparkling in your eyes, wide and gorgeous as you watch him. Sunghoon gulps, mumbling his thanks and looking back at himself. He hopes you can’t see the flush on his cheeks.
“Go back to sleep,” he says.
“Will you come and lie down with me if I do?” Your voice is a sleepy drawl, coming out in a slow, high-pitched slur, and your eyes are closing on themselves.
Lying down doesn’t sound like a terrible idea, especially not if it’s with you, so he nods. “If you brush your teeth, then yeah, baby, I’ll lie down with you.”
You chuckle softly at Sunghoon’s agreement, the sound carrying a mix of exhaustion and genuine amusement, showing no repulsion to him calling you the B-word. He didn’t mean to, it’s been a confusing few days. You nod, saluting to him and getting up to join him by the sink, using your hip to bump him out of the way, but he feels like he’s glued to the spot.
“Move, baby,” you mumble sleepily, reaching for your toothbrush. “We can cuddle in my bed,” you suggest, to which Sunghoon only nods, taking your words as a cue to unstick his feet from the floor and go to your room, playing the word ‘baby’ on a loop in his head.
He stands in the doorway staring at your bed, the duvet is all crumpled in the middle, and the pillows are in an L shape at the top corner. He sighs, he can’t go on like this, can’t stand around hoping even a tiny part of you called him ‘baby’ and it meant something for you as it did for him. It’s not fair for him to project his feelings on you like this, but he can’t help it. You’re already pretending for his parents, so would it be so bad to pretend for his sake as well? Even if only until the day after tomorrow when you leave?
The sound of the bathroom door shutting behind you snaps him out of his thoughts, your bright smile making his heart race when you tug him by the sleeve to your bed where the mattress dips underneath you as you curl into his form, resting your head on his chest and falling asleep. You’ve shared the bed before, countless times, but he knows you’ve only asked him because you’re tired. Because your brain is foggy with drowsiness that clouds your judgement, not because you want him there, not because you miss him when he’s two doors down the hall, tossing and turning at night thinking about you. He wonders absently if you can feel his aching heart beating through his chest, a painful, yet all too familiar rhythm that pulls his own eyes shut, plunging him into a deep sleep too.
It’s dark in the room when he wakes up, the sun already down behind the curtains and the soft yellow of the bedside lamp casting a glow around the space. You’re staring up at him, smiling and you don’t look away when he catches you. “What is it?” he asks, voice thick with sleep.
“Nothing,” you mumble. “I just missed you.” Sunghoon has no time to respond or even register what you said before you clear your throat, speaking again. “Come on, dad’s cooking tonight, he’ll need help.”
Helping Sunghoon’s dad with dinner always looks an awful lot like Sunghoon eating snacks on the kitchen counter and staring at you as you help his dad cook. Tonight is no exception, he’s sitting on the island, and his snack of choice is a family pack of Chilli Heatwave Doritos his mum bought for Yeji. He’ll have to remember to replace them before leaving seeing as he’s reaching the halfway point.
You go back and forth with his dad about measurements, with you rummaging through the drawers for measuring cups while his dad says it’s best to trust your gut. Reluctantly, you nod, chewing the inside of your cheek as you watch him eyeball the seasoning.
The gas stove turns the kitchen into an oven, and you complain about it while opening a window, pulling your hoodie over your head and leaving it in Sunghoon’s lap. Time stops when you grin at him, the light from the stove hood illuminating the necklace you’re wearing, his initial resting on your chest and glowing under the light. He chokes around a crisp when he sees it, catching your attention with his coughing.
“You’ll spoil your dinner, snacking like that, baby,” you scold, using a hand to push his knee. “We’re almost done, I swear.”
All he can do is nod, cheeks burning as he folds the crisp packet over before putting it back in the bread bin where he found it.
“Wow,” his dad says, resting his hands on his hips and shaking his head in amusement. “Being in love looks good on him, he’d never have listened if I said that.”
It’s already your last day when Sunghoon picks up Yeji from school. She grumbles for the entire half-hour drive and all the way to the front door about why the two of you couldn’t have started the trip today instead of ending it, but all of her irritation dissolves when she sees you in the hallway, leaving the front door wide open to fling her arms around you. You and Yeji exchange compliments for a while — You look so pretty. No, you look so pretty. I love your hair. I love your hair. — as Sunghoon locks the door and watches with a smile.
“God.” Yeji sighs, holding you by the waist and craning her neck up to look at you, as you push some of her hair from her face, pinning back her wispy bangs with the palm of your hand. Yeji giggles. “I’m so happy you two are together, even though I have no idea what a girl like you sees in my loser brother.”
Sunghoon rolls his eyes, leaning back against the wall. Despite his mild irritation at Yeji’s words, he finds the sight of you with her so adorable his stomach flutters. Over the top of Yeji’s head, you look at him with a fond smile. “He’s not so bad.”
It doesn’t sound like a compliment, but Sunghoon takes it to heart.
Like always, Yeji manages to capture your undivided attention and the two of you giggle and whisper with each other all afternoon while Sunghoon watches, too enamoured by the sight to care about being left out. An hour or so passes like this, until his parents get home from work, excited to see Yeji after a few weeks, and you leave her side, coming to cuddle with Sunghoon instead.
It’s nice being home with everyone, laughing and sharing a meal before his family walks the two of you to his car with at least a month’s worth of cooked food for you to share at university. Yeji makes you pinky promise that she can visit you and waves with a pout on her face until the car is out of view.
Contrary to what he’d been expecting, the drive back is nice. Your playlist is on, and you’re telling him about all the new songs you added, catching him up on things with Chaewon and Yunjin, and all the things you got up to in the time you spent apart. You tell him about a new café that opened up near your place and how you’ll have to go together when he has the time, and Sunghoon bites his tongue before telling you that he always has time for you. The first half of the trip goes on like this but you start dozing off around the halfway mark, your sentences becoming few and far between, eventually turning into half-mumbled thoughts that end prematurely.
You’re still asleep when he reaches your flat, head propped up against the window with your soft lips parted, looking too pretty and cosy to wake up. Instead, he drives in circles around your block, deciding to wait for you to wake up on your own. It only takes a half-hour but you blink your eyes open, stretching your neck before looking around and out the car window, recognising the street. You don’t say anything, only smiling when you look at him, a small curve of your lips that makes his heart race.
He gets out of the car with you, opening the boot to get your bag before pulling you into his chest for a hug, liking the way your arms settle around his waist. “Thank you,” he mumbles into your hair.
Sunghoon doesn’t follow you when you take your bag from him, only watching from the back of his car. You don’t notice until you reach the main door, looking over your shoulder and frowning at him. “Aren’t you going to walk me up?”
The two of you walk in silence up four flights of stairs as the lift in your building is out of order. Your bag feels much heavier in his hand now than it did outside. At your door, he watches you dig around for your keys, sighing with relief when you find them.
“Do you want to come in?” you ask from your open doorway.
“I—uh—I have training in the morning and I’m already pretty tired, so..” He trails off.
Unfazed, you nod. “Right, of course. I had fun this week.”
“Yeah, me too.”
You smile at him, sweet and sincere. “Text me when you get home, yeah?”
Sunghoon nods, saying goodbye. Out of habit, he doesn’t leave your doorstep until he hears the lock click shut, and walks back to his car with his head down.
True to his word, he sends you a text to let you know he got back to his place safely and you read it immediately but don’t reply. It’s empty in the apartment, Jake is out with his football team and the space is larger than usual in his absence. Far too tired to even consider going out and joining him, Sunghoon goes through his night routine, putting his phone on the charger and stepping into the shower where he spends entirely too long wishing he could live in this week forever as he scrubs his body. With brushed teeth and damp hair, he goes back into his room where his phone lights up with a notification; a text, from you.
YN🫀: i’m glad you got home okay, i just got into bed :) i don’t want to make you uncomfortable or overstep or anything and you can say no (obviously).. i’ve been missing you so much and didn’t know how to reach out or if you wanted me to but i had soooo much fun this week and spending time with you again made me happy, so i’d like it if we could keep hanging out, like before yk? ik it’s a long shot ahahaha but just say you’ll think about it?
hoonie: You’re not overstepping at all, I’ve missed you too, so bad. I had soooo much fun this week as well and I’d like it a lot if we kept hanging out, thank you for agreeing and coming along 😚 If you’re free after Lit tmrw you could come over? Or we could go out and do something, whatever you prefer
hoonie: I missed you so much..
hoonie: 🤍
The texts greet you as the first rays of Monday morning light filter into your room, instantly lifting your mood. Your bright smile doesn’t escape Chaewon’s notice as you find her in the kitchen, bathed in the soft light seeping through the sheer curtains. The kettle is boiling with a loud rumble that fills the whole room and leaves her yelling as she speaks to you.
“Good trip?” she asks, coming over and hugging you. “Never leave me for that long again,” she mumbles into your shirt.
“It was a week, Wonie,” you say, rolling your eyes even though you missed her too.
She leans away, looking at you with knitted brows. “It was nine days.”
“The longest of my life.”
Chaewon pulls air through her teeth, tilting her head and releasing you. “That bad, huh?” she asks, walking back to her seat at your tiny square table and shooting you a look that tells you to join her.
During your trip, you gave her nightly updates over text, so you know she knows how much you enjoyed yourself, but you elaborate anyway, sitting across from her.
“No, not at all,” you say, shaking your head and trying to fight a smile. “I had fun.” As soon as the words leave your mouth, you have to bite your bottom lip to stop the grin curving them; it doesn’t work.
Chaewon raises a suggestive brow, crossing her arms over her chest. “How much fun?”
“You’re disgusting.”
“I didn’t even say anything!” she defends, holding her hands up. “I made an implication. It was only a matter of time, you two have that whole.. lifelong best friends to lifelong lovers thing going on, and it’s hot.”
“Shut up.”
“You’re telling me, you spent nine days playing lovers with Sunghoon and you still don’t want him? You’re a lost cause, people would kill for that chance,” she says, tilting her head. “I think I would kill for that chance.”
“Don’t touch him.”
“Oh?”
“Jesus, Chaewon, it’s not like that. Hoon’s too sensitive for your roster.”
“I never said it was like anything, you’re the one who’s dangling me over the ledge for saying I want to fuck your hot best friend.”
“Sunghoon isn’t hot; he’s..” You find yourself at a loss for words, unsure how to continue your lie. Of course, Sunghoon is hot, you’ve known since you were seventeen and spent the summer at your grandparents’ house, only to come back to find your previously scrawny best friend having ditched his LEGOs for dumbbells. You sigh. “Just leave him alone.”
Chaewon grins, eyes sparkling as she leaves the table. “Okay,” she says in a singsong voice, leaving you and the irritation in your stomach alone in the kitchen.
You sigh, pressing your eyes shut and trying to will away your discomfort. It’s not like Chaewon would actually try anything with Sunghoon. Right? Even if she did, it wouldn’t bother you, nor would it be any of your business. They’re grownups and reserve the right to explore their options. Still, there’s a nagging feeling you can’t shake, an uninvited guest in the back of your mind.
When you check your phone, you realise you have half an hour before you need to head to campus, so you leave to get ready and text Sunghoon back on the way to your room.
you: sounds good, see u later 🤍
After showering, you stand in front of your wardrobe, towel hanging from your body as you pick an outfit. For some reason, you feel under pressure, picking a pair of jeans that do the most for your ass and a low-cut top that Sunghoon once — drunkenly — said he loved on you.
You have the residual sting of mouthwash on your tongue, and one foot out the door when your phone vibrates in your hand.
hoonie: Do you want to head to class together?
you: sure! i’m omw out, where should i get you?
hoonie: .. I’m outside your building :D
Breathing a laugh through your nose, you don’t fight the giddy smile on your face as you make your way downstairs to meet Sunghoon. Through the glass in the main door, he’s standing at the edge of the pavement and kicking a stone between his feet. The top of his puffer jacket covers the bottom half of his face, and the draught nips your skin when the door opens. Two girls you vaguely recognise stumble in with smudged makeup and heels in their hands, smiling at you while holding the door to let you out.
“Hey!” you call out, jogging over to him.
Sunghoon turns around, his head poking out of his jacket to grin at you, holding a travel cup and an abundance of tinfoil in your direction.
“I wasn’t sure if you’d have eaten anything yet, you don’t normally in the morning,” he says, a sheepish smile spreading over his lips when you take it. “Matcha. Ham and cheese toastie.”
“Did you make these?” you ask, inspecting the familiar cup and appreciating the warmth it provides.
He hums, nodding his head.
You ignore the heat spreading over your cheeks and thank him with a hug, grinning when he offers to hold your drink while you eat on the walk. The toastie is still hot, the cheese coming close to burning your tongue as you chew, but you appreciate it wholeheartedly, humming contently with each bite. When you’re done, you shove the foil into your pocket, taking your drink from him and smiling around the sweet taste of a matcha latte as he tells you about his schedule for the day.
“I’m meeting with Coach after class to talk about my grades, but I’m all yours after that.”
“Talk about your grades? What’s wrong with your grades?”
Sunghoon groans, head falling back and highlighting the bump of his Adam’s apple. “My grades are.. I failed my coursework this month, so I have resubmissions during finals, and I think he’ll bench me if I fail again.”
He sounds like he’s being serious, and if the look on his face is anything to go by, he is. The news creases your brows because for as long as you remember, Sunghoon’s grades were your parents’ favourite point of comparison.
“Really?” you ask. He nods. “What’s up? Is something the matter?”
A humourless laugh slips out of him before he pulls air through his teeth. “Yeah, my best friend didn’t talk to me for three months.”
“Oh..” Guilt stirs your stomach as you look up at him. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not blaming you, it’s not like I was trying to talk and you ignored me.” He nudges your arm with his elbow, giving you a warm smile. “But if you feel as guilty about it as you look, you can tutor me for Lit.”
“Deal.”
Sunghoon grins, wrapping his arm over your shoulders and holding you close; the action itself isn’t unusual, but the increased heart rate it brings about is. “You’re too good to me,” he says, holding onto you for the rest of the walk to class.
At his request, you sit with Sunghoon in the back row, watching as the lecture hall gradually fills up in front of you. He seems well-prepared, with his laptop and a small notepad and pen neatly arranged on the desk in front of him.
Throughout the class, your eyes inadvertently track his every move. He diligently types up colour-coded notes, occasionally pausing to write things in his notepad before continuing to type or stopping entirely to listen. There’s something melodic about his actions and the way his fingers run over the keyboard.
During a five-minute break, you glance at his screen. What you find is more than just lecture content; it’s a document adorned with Sunghoon’s own musings about Hemingway’s style and carefully analysed quotations that go beyond the class discussion.
“How are your notes so good?”
“I picked up the book over the summer when you mentioned it,” Sunghoon replies with a shrug, a shy smile playing on his lips as he leans back in his seat. “I liked it.”
A slow nod is your response, though your thoughts swirl like autumn leaves in a breeze. The last time Sunghoon read for leisure, you were in primary school, buddy reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid. But this—this is different. You can’t help but stare at him, awestruck as you take him in. His eyes are wide, shining amber in the sunlight as he pushes some of his hair from his face, frowning when it falls back where it was.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he mumbles.
Sunghoon takes a new line in his document and points at the screen where you watch the cursor move through the words he’s typing: I would’ve read and annotated the Bible if you wanted me to..
There’s no time to digest what he wrote or the funny feeling in your chest as you reread it before he deletes the whole sentence, pressing his lips together and looking out the window. Speechless, you stare at his side profile, willing your heart rate to slip back to normal. Steep-sloping nose, plump lips flattened into a line, two points of the triangular mole constellation on his face. Analysis worsens your condition, breath hitching in your throat before stopping entirely. Warmth and trepidation blend within you, fuzzy enough at the edges to seem like one thing—a single force that makes your palm itch with desire, desperation, to reach out and run a finger over his features, feel the bump of the mole on his nose — the most prominent — against your skin.
You remain this way — silent, watching — even when your lecturer resumes the lesson, and Sunghoon starts typing, writing, and listening again. Polite enough to pretend he doesn’t notice your gaze searing into his face.
After class, and his meeting with Coach, you let Sunghoon lead the conversation and the way to your flat, where you find Chaewon and Yunjin sitting on the couch, whispering to themselves while the two of you study at the coffee table. It’s uncomfortable, an awkward height, too high for the way you’re sitting but you feel calm under the supervision of Chaewon and Yunjin—you won’t do anything to merit teasing in front of them, no matter how badly you want to feel Sunghoon’s face in your hands or stroke his cheekbones with your thumbs.
To the best of your ability, you answer the questions he has for you—he’d written a ton in his tiny notepad during class, his own concerns clear with each neatly-penned iteration of: How to see actions/dialogue for what they are and not what I want them to be? written in the margins and you try not to feel heartbroken for him.
Three hours have passed by when you walk him to the door, the two of you wrapped up in a bubble so secure you’re surprised to find Chaewon and Yunjin still sitting on the couch. They don’t say anything about Sunghoon in his absence, or the fact he’d given you his sweater when he noticed you were cold. You’re not sure why their silence disappoints you.
Instead, Yunjin asks you about trivial things like dinner while Chaewon sits in silence.
“What flavour for ice cream?” Yunjin asks, rolling her eyes when you tug on the blanket but not complaining. “And don’t say something ridiculous like mint chocolate, YN.”
“That happened once! And it was three years ago.. How was I supposed to know you hate fun?”
Chaewon leans into you, letting you curl your limbs around her from behind as you rest your chin on her shoulder, liking the way her clean scent tickles your nose.
“Mint-cho isn’t that bad,” she starts. “It’s a little jarring, sure, but it’s kind of sweet. Like watching people come to terms with their feelings for each other.”
You nod your head, humming in understanding and furrowing your brows when Yunjin scoffs, staring straight at you. Her tone is equal parts cutting and loving, so you know she’s not trying to insult you, but don’t know what she means when she says, “It must be so nice to be as oblivious as you.”
Yunjin never elaborates, and you never ask, actually feeling the statement’s journey in through one of your ears and out the other when dinner arrives. The three of you share pizza, ice cream, and secrets — the three pillars of 20-something-teenage-girlhood — at the kitchen table, with Chaewon sitting in your lap and picking pepperoni from your slices.
It’s only hours after Yunijn’s gone home, that her words circle back to you, the statement and all of its weight perching on your chest with all the debilitation and persistence of a sleep paralysis demon.
“I think I’m getting sick,” you say as soon as she opens her door. “It’s been coming on for a while now, at least a week, maybe more.”
Unimpressed and exhausted, Yunjin looks down at you through half-closed eyes. “Do you..” She pinches the bridge of her nose, sighing. “Do you have any idea what time it is right now?”
“Yes. It’s three a.m.”
“Exactly. See a doctor if you’re sick, I’m going back to sleep.”
“This is an emergen—” Yunjin cuts you off by pinching your lips together. “It’s three in the morning,” she reminds you. “You can’t yell like that in my hallway, come in.”
You nod, crossing the threshold and taking off your shoes next to hers. “Sorry,” you whisper when the door is closed.
Using her hand, Yunjin lifts your chin, squinting as her eyes adjust to the light when she flips the switch to inspect your face. “You don’t look or sound sick,” she mutters, flicking the light back off and going to her room. “What are your symptoms? And why did you come here?”
You don’t have an answer for her last question so you ignore it, following her and tripping over a pair of her shoes in the process. “My cheeks start burning like crazy and my heart races, sometimes it gets hard to breathe.”
“You seem fine to me.”
A shoulder-slumping sigh slips from your lips. “That’s the thing. I’ll be fine and then Sunghoon shows up with his pretty smile and perfect hair and I feel like I’ve run a marathon.” You know how it sounds, choosing your wording meticulously to let Yunjin be the one to say the words out loud instead of you—it’ll be easier to confront that way.
From the doorway, you watch as she arches a brow, her interest piqued. “Oh?”
“I know.” You nod, head bobbing rapidly in furious agreement. “It’s only a matter of time before I cough up a lung and die in his bedroom.”
At your words, Yunjin doesn't reply, only lifting her duvet and getting cosy underneath. You feel like you’re glued to the spot, waiting for her to say something, anything, but nothing comes. All she does is pat the empty spot in her bed.
“What are you smirking for?” you ask, entering the room properly and closing the door.
Her response only comes after you’ve taken your jacket and hoodie off, sitting next to her under the covers. “It’s nothing,” she says, laughing.
“Tell me.”
Yunjin sighs, resting a hand gently on your shoulder. You think it’s meant to be comforting but it’s the opposite. “You’ll be fine, I promise. Lovesickness isn’t deadly.”
Feeling the weight of her reassurance, you settle down properly and sigh when your head hits the pillow. Lovesickness. Hmm.
Closing your eyes, you try to sleep but can’t help tossing and turning as Yunjin snores behind you. You pat blindly around the end table for your phone, grabbing it and wincing at the brightness of your screen. Chewing on your lip, you open Google, looking up ‘lovesickness’ and frowning immediately at the results. Endless negativity fills the screen, terrifying words like ‘unrequited love’ forming a pit in your stomach. There’s nothing negative about what you feel for Sunghoon, nothing unrequited—you think.
It was obvious during the trip, painfully so. In the way he’d tuck your hair behind your ear when his parents weren’t there to see, or how he slipped up and called you ‘baby’ in the bathroom, blushing when you said it back. You can’t fake something like that.. Can you?
Yeonjun did.
Shaking your head, you open Instagram to distract yourself. Jake’s story comes up first; he’s at a party where Jay is losing a game of beer pong, and at the other end of the table is Sunghoon grinning with a bright red lipstick kiss on his cheek. You lock your phone, using your hands to press on your belly to stop the stirring.
Oh, you think. Lovesickness.
When you wake up, the first thing you do is check Jake’s story again. The video is still there and that terrible stir in your stomach churns on, burrowing deeply into a pit of canyon-like proportion—so vast there’s a safety railing lining its edges.
You eat breakfast in silence with Yunjin, zoning out mid-chew to figure out the origin of these feelings and how to handle them. Suddenly, the moment hits you clear as day, vivid like you’re watching it on a screen—it was your third night at his parents’ house, after your walk.
You felt bad about how you acted, and what you said, so went straight up to your room. With nothing but the bedside lamp turned on, it was dimly lit, shadows cast on the walls as you sulked, replaying everything in your head. Guilt wrapped its long arms around your body, making you feel sick as you thought about it all. About the hurt etched over his face with every word you said, and the frown that stuck around for the rest of the walk as his hand clung limply to yours.
There was a knock at the door, so gentle you almost missed it, and Sunghoon was standing there when you pulled it open, chewing on his lip with a mug in his hand. Steam skated over the opening, a rich chocolatey smell hitting your nose but the real kicker was the mug itself. In its place on Jake and Sunghoon’s mug tree, it was unassuming, a regular white mug, but upon meeting hot water, the face of young Sunghoon appeared, grinning with his tiny glasses on. It was a gift from one of his old coaches and though he never used it, it was your absolute favourite cup in the world.
You felt soft around the edges when you looked up at him, his eyes wide and unsure as you met his gaze—he brought that mug three hours across the country so you could use it again. The thought shifted your heart into a comfortable position, settling in your chest with overwhelming warmth and an increased rate.
“Hi,” you said, clearing your throat.
“Hi,” he repeated, holding the mug out for you to take. “It’s still hot so be careful.”
Nodding, you covered your hands with your sleeves, taking the cup from him and asking if he wanted to come in. Sunghoon nodded, shutting the door behind him and standing by the bed, watching you set the hot chocolate on the bedside table as you sat down. The two of you stayed like that for a while, with him only moving when you patted the spot next to you on the duvet. Your train of thought escaped you as soon as he sat down, the warmth of his familiar fresh, citrusy scent taking over and becoming the only thing you could register. The smell of summers with him, long days at the beach and short nights spent on the couch at random parties, cuddled into his side with his arm over your shoulders. The smell you’d come to associate with comfort and home—with Sunghoon.
“It’s not fair for me to treat you like shit just because I’m annoyed, I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that earlier. I’m sorry.”
A crease ran over Sunghoon’s thick brows as they tugged together, he shook his head. “You don’t have to apologise. I roped you into this whole thing and didn’t even try to think about how you would feel. I’m sorry.” His eyes carried a mix of regret and sincerity, mirroring the weight of his words.
“Anyway, I only came to bring you that,” he said, pointing at the cup. “And to check up on you, I’ll get out of your hair for tonight.” Sunghoon wiped his palms on his pants before standing up, reaching behind him to pick up the cloth he brought. For a moment, he stood there, staring down at it in his hand while you thought about telling him to stay, telling him that you wanted him in your hair—whatever that meant. But he spoke before you had the chance. “You left this, at mine, after.. well, you know. I’m sure you left it intentionally, I mean it was folded up perfectly on the end of my bed, so I know you did, but it didn’t feel right keeping it, you always wore it more than me.”
Sunghoon extended his hand, holding it out to you and you knew exactly what it was as soon as the fabric touched your skin after so long. It was the shirt Jay bought him for Christmas in first year—they were roommates still trying to get a feel for each other. For a few weeks, Sunghoon had been pestering you about what he should get for Jay, saying it didn’t feel right not to get him anything, and you suggested a targeted t-shirt, one you’d been laughing at all day after seeing an ad for it on your timeline. Sunghoon was sceptical, but bought the red shirt anyway, hoping Jay would find BEING DAD IS AN HONOUR, BEING PAPA IS PRICELESS funny. He did. And Jay bought Sunghoon a targeted shirt too, your favourite. It was black and two sizes too big, with I NEVER DREAMED I’D BE A SEXY FIGURE SKATER BUT HERE I AM KILLING IT written over the chest.
“Goodnight, YN,” Sunghoon said, crossing the room to leave but hesitating before closing the door. He poked his head through the opening and sighed. “I really am sorry.”
That night, you fell asleep in the shirt, the thinning, yet cosy, fabric wrapped around you like a hug as your heart started to beat a new rhythm, one that eerily echoed the five-foot-eleven figure skater who you let break it.
This morning, Yunjin claps her hands in your face, seeming irritated when you look over at her. “You have class in an hour, what are you doing?” Before you have the chance to speak, realisation covers her face. “Oh, the feelings.”
You nod solemnly, too caught up in the butterflies raiding your stomach to come up with something to say.
At lightspeed, you scarf down the rest of your food, apologising for showing up so late as you head out the door. When you get home, you take the fastest shower of your life and feel grateful Chaewon isn’t around to tease you about the smile you can’t wipe from your face thinking about Sunghoon—you’ll text her later.
You run to campus, feeling the brisk autumn wind beating against your face while the rest of your body overheats under your jacket, hoodie and long sleeve. Despite the discomfort and ache in your lungs, you don’t stop until you reach the door of your lecture hall, huffing and puffing into the faces of classmates who don’t take any notice. Of course, in a stroke of pure luck, your lecturer is late, and you realise bitterly, that all of your huffing and puffing was in vain—you would have gotten to class with time to spare even if you walked.
It’s not a total waste though; you use the time to update Chaewon.
you: i have news wonie.. i like sunghoon
wonie: …………….. fork in the kitchen yn what’s the news?
wonie: OHHHH news to YOU.. can i call?
She calls you immediately. You answer without thinking because your lecturer still hasn’t arrived, and there’s no one sitting close enough to hear or notice you taking a call.
“Are you going to tell him?!” Chaewon’s voice is so loud you wince, pulling the phone away from your ear.
“I don’t know.” You shrug even though she can’t see you, still holding the device at a distance just in case. “I don’t have any confirmation that he still.. likes me. It’s been a while, and I was pretty mean that day.
Chaewon groans and you can picture her throwing herself onto her bed, exasperated. The rustling that comes through the receiver only frames the image, hanging it up. “Did you have to tell him to get a grip?”
“You know..” You trail off, chewing on your bottom lip. “In hindsight, probably not.”
A beat passes, she’s thinking. “Don’t worry,” she says. “I’ll help you.”
“I.. have never been so worried in my life.” You sigh, picking at your freshly painted nails. “But I know you’ll do something no matter what I say, so do what you want, Wonie, but please be subtle about it.”
Chaewon squeals down the phone. “I love youuuuu!” And it’s the last thing she says before kissing the mic a few times and hanging up.
Slumping in your seat, you don’t have any time to stress about Chaewon’s plans because your lecturer walks in, with a travel cup in her hand and a paperback tucked under her arm.
She apologises for being late, running a hand through her hair as she announces that you’ll be watching a film, an adaptation of a book you read at the start of term—Ian McEwan’s Atonement. You spend the first hour of the movie falling in and out of sleep until a text comes through from Sunghoon, and sheer excitement keeps you up.
hoonie: Wanna study together after class?
you: of course!!!!!!
hoonie: 🤍
The rest of the movie goes by in a drag, and you come away from it with a mild irritation towards Saoirse Ronan.
you: class just finished, heading to lib rn
hoonie: Shit, still in the locker room, sorry !!! Omw, can you get a table?
you: i’ll try..
It takes a while but you find an empty booth on the second floor, and set your bag on the plush green seat to take pictures of your surroundings to send to Sunghoon. You sit on the side facing the stairs so he can see you when he arrives. The thought of seeing him makes your heart race and you try out a few natural-seeming poses for when he’s here, cycling between resting your palm under your chin and sitting with your arms crossed a few times until the top of his head comes into view.
Seeing him knocks the wind out of you as he approaches the staircase, taking them two at a time with his damp hair clinging to his forehead and neck. It doesn’t help that he’s wearing a tight black vest, and his sweats are hanging low on his hips. A breath you didn’t realise you were holding slips out when he lifts his head, spotting you immediately as a grin spreads over his lips and he raises his arm to wave, the veins in his forearm peeking out to say hi too. You can’t tell if it’s his lack of winter wardrobe or your newfound appreciation for him that’s making his biceps look so huge but it’s hard to look away, even when he reaches the table.
“Are you hot?” you blurt out.
Sunghoon laughs, raising a brow and something about the way he’s looking down at you makes your cheeks burn. “Depends who’s asking.” He takes his backpack off, leaving it on the table as he sits down, dumping his jacket and hoodie in a pile beside him.
“I’m asking,” you mumble.
“Then, yeah, I’d hope so.”
Is he flirting? It sounds like he’s flirting. Flirt back! “Nice arms.”
He looks down at his biceps for a beat before looking at you warily. “Are you flirting with me?” He can’t fight the smile twitching at the corners of his lips but he tries his best, pressing them into a straight line.
“A little. They are nice though,” you admit.
Sunghoon grins. “Thanks, I’ve had them for a while now.”
You can’t come up with anything to say, too distracted by the way his smile reaches his eyes, lighting up his whole face and forcing a flustered heat to spread over your cheeks and neck. It’s only when you look away from him that you remember what you’re here for. It’s a study date, not a study date—there’s a difference.
You hand Sunghoon the material you’d printed for him over the weekend, excerpts from texts you’d studied in class, so he can practise close reading and proper citation. As he makes his way through them, you can’t help stealing glances, smiling at the way his tongue sticks out a little while he focuses, or how he twirls his pen in his fingers while he’s thinking. You aren’t making the best use of your time together, copying out the slides from class yesterday, but you can’t help noticing the way he watches you when he thinks you can’t see. The small smile on his face while he does so only flusters you, an odd weakness settling in your knees as your cheeks heat up.
After a while, Sunghoon sighs, running a hand through his hair. “Could you stop watching me?”
“If you noticed me watching, that means you’re watching me.”
He shrugs, chewing on his lip. “Well, yeah. I’m always watching you,” he says like it’s a given. “But you don’t normally watch back, it’s distracting.”
“You’re distracting.”
A playful smile curves his lips as he arches a brow, smugness painting his face. “Am I?”
Too scared to verbalise your response, you nod slowly, hoping you don’t look as wound up as you feel.
Sunghoon’s eyes flick over your face, flashing with something you don’t recognise. At least not from him. He sits back in his seat, assessing you and eventually shaking his head.
“You know,” he says, eyes glowing with something you do recognise: cockiness. “If my sexy arms are getting to you that much, I can always put my hoodie back on. Wouldn’t want my little tutor getting distracted, would I?”
Oh.
Your stomach turns with want, mind reeling from his tone and the way his gaze lands on your lips. Sighing, you roll your eyes and try to seem unaffected. “Sunghoon, I never said your arms were sexy.”
His phone starts to go off, buzzing against the table and he turns it over immediately, screen down on the surface as he shifts his focus back to his work. He chews on his lip while he does, eyes flicking back and forth between his phone and the words on the page. Curious, you lean over the table, elbows propped up as you rest your chin in your hands. He doesn’t spare you or his phone, which vibrates another four times, a glance.
“Are you going to get that?”
Sunghoon shakes his head. “It’s nothing.”
You hum, letting just enough curiosity seep into the sound that he’ll elaborate without being asked to. It doesn’t take long for him to deliver.
“It’s just Chaewon,” he says, running his hand through his hair and lifting his head. Sunghoon smiles. “We’ve been texting a lot these days.”
“Cool.” You nod a few times, aiming for nonchalance but hitting bobblehead as you wait for him to continue. He doesn’t, only humming in response, nodding too.
After a beat, he picks up his phone, angling it just high enough that you can’t see the screen. He reads the messages, an exhaled laugh coming from his nose as the tips of his ears redden—Fuck. This is worse than you thought.
Chaewon’s commitment to girl code runs deep—she’s been rebuffing Jake since first year when she overheard a girl she’d never seen before telling her friends she thought he was cute. So you know without having to read the texts that nothing she’s saying is even remotely flirty, you can smell the auto-caps and use of the word ‘buddy’ from across the table.
What you hadn’t counted on, however, was the potential for Sunghoon’s feelings to shift. If they really have been texting more, can you rule out the possibility that he might like.. her? Chaewon is a catch, beyond a catch, and you’d already turned Sunghoon down. Brutally. Of course, he’d move on, he has moved on.
The rest of the study session is spent manifesting, writing Park Sunghoon over and over in the back of your notebook. You fill three pages while brainstorming ways to snatch a lock of his hair until he suggests that the two of you call it a day. He walks you home, telling you about how Jake’s been bribing him with food to get a ride to the LEGO store across town for the new Marvel set.
“With or without the meals, I would’ve taken him, but his ramen is my favourite, so..” Sunghoon says, climbing the last step of your building and holding the door open for you. “He even brought a slice of tiramisu to the rink for me after practice.”
“You’re terrible,” you say, frowning up at him as you search for your keys. “Do you want to come in?”
Sunghoon chuckles, shaking his head. “I have a meeting with one of my lecturers soon, I’d have to leave in—” He pauses, rolling up the sleeve of his jacket to check the time. “—eight minutes.”
“I’m cool with that if you are,” you mumble, suddenly shy.
A bright smile spreads over his lips and he nods, following you in.
Chilled by the harsh wind, the only thing on your mind is a hot drink as you lead Sunghoon to the kitchen. He shakes his head when you offer him one, sitting on the countertop and exhaling into his palms before rubbing them together. You can’t help but frown at the sight, feeling guilty that you can’t change the weather to suit him. At your thought process, your brows raise. Wow, you think. Is this who you are?
You busy yourself with the selection of hot drinks you and Chaewon have accumulated, eyeing each container from top to bottom. A purple tub of Cadbury’s hot chocolate that you’re sure is on the brink of expiration, coffee—sachets of the instant stuff you’ve grown to like since leaving home, Earl grey from one of many brands, or the fancy silk tea bags Chaewon’s mum brought home from a trip—rooibos or plum-apple-cinnamon.
Craving something sweet, you settle for hot chocolate, pulling the heavy container from the cupboard next to Sunghoon’s head and setting it beside your cup. He’s on his phone, scrolling too fast to take in anything he’s seeing and he shakes his head when you ask if he wants something to drink.
On the dish rack, Chaewon’s mug catches your eye, so you pick it up to dry it off and put it down next to yours. “I’m going to check if Wonie wants any,” you say, wiping imaginary crumbs from the counter onto the floor.
Sunghoon only clears his throat, shaking his head. “She’s not home, one of her acrylics popped off so she’s at the shop waiting for a cancellation.”
The information itself isn’t jarring but hearing it from Sunghoon is. You put on what you hope is a neutral smile and nod, taking milk from the fridge and assembling your drink on autopilot while thinking of ways to redirect the conversation.
“If you knew you’d have to go back to campus so soon, why’d you walk me home?” you ask, watching your cup spin in the microwave. “I could’ve walked on my own.”
Sunghoon is already looking at you when you turn your head, his cheeks puffed out with air as he blinks slowly. Because I love you, is what you hope he’ll say. You think you need him to say it.
“Because you don’t have to do anything on your own when you have me,” he says instead, and it’s infinitely better.
The words seep through your every fibre, his intonation and lucid affection making a home for themselves in your heart, spreading warmth from head to toe. Your smile becomes a radiant grin, only brightening when he shakes his head, smiling down at his feet.
Sunghoon hugs you in the kitchen when it’s time for him to leave, his arms holding you tight to his chest as he rocks you back and forth. You inhale his scent, all warm citrus under freshly washed cotton and something exclusive to him.
Wiping the smile from your face feels impossible. You don’t let go when he does, and a sweet laugh — a giggle, you think — tumbles out of him as he mumbles that he really has to go. Still, you cling onto him, taking clumsy steps backwards, with your arms locked around his waist, to your front door, smiling as you watch him put his shoes on.
“You don’t have to walk me downstairs, honestly,” he says, looking down at you in the doorway.
“I want to.”
His lips quirk up at the corners, a full smile breaking through and causing your stomach to flutter with so much force you’re sure it’s visible through your shirt. His eyes fall to your lips, lingering, before he clears his throat, looking away.
“I’ll text you when I get to the door, promise.”
You lock your pinky with his. “Send a selfie, just so I know it’s you and not someone else using your phone.”
Sunghoon’s head falls back in a laugh. “Should I just call you? That way you can make sure I get back to uni in one piece.”
You nod.
“That wasn’t anything with Chaewon earlier, I just needed advice on some girl stuff..” He trails off, searching your eyes. It’s obvious that he’s telling the truth, that he wants you to believe him. You do. “I wasn’t sure if that was something I could talk about with you.”
Girl stuff. Hmm. You try not to read too much into it and look at the bigger picture instead—your best friend is going through something and doesn’t feel like he can come to you about it.. You squeeze his pinky reassuringly, a flutter in your stomach when he smiles.
“You can talk to me about anything,” you say, meaning it.
Sunghoon presses his lips together, humming and unlinking your fingers. “Next time,” he says after a beat, waving at you.
You shut the door, locking it while watching through the peephole, he leaves as soon as the lock clicks shut. In the kitchen, your hot chocolate is cooling down, and your phone rings in your back pocket. Sunghoon’s calling.
Hanging out with Sunghoon. Making sure he sticks to the time-blocked schedule you made for him. Quizzing him on biology terms until he gets restless. If the last two weeks were an episode of Family Feud, those would be the top three answers to the question: Name something YN is doing right now.
Thankfully tonight, it’s the first one.
You’ve been sitting on the couch for so long, Jake has both left for football practice and arrived from football practice. Conversation ebbs and flows—an hour or so of nonstop talking, followed by another hour or so of comfortable near silence.
It’s during a quiet hour that Sunghoon sits up straight, clearing his throat before saying, “Let me ask you something. He retreats to the other side of the couch, turning to face you with his whole body. “I don’t want things to be weird after I ask, so no matter what your answer is, I won’t bring it up or ask again.”
Arching a curious brow, you nod. “You can ask me anything,” you say, meaning it.
Sunghoon’s face is impressively blank—minus the motion of sharp teeth worrying plush lip, there’s absolutely nothing behind his eyes that seem to stare right through you.
Eventually, he asks, “Can I kiss you?” He says more. Big, scary words like for closure and moving on, but they don’t register. They don’t matter.
Your heart pounds at the base of your throat as you find interest in your hands that sit in your lap. Even without looking at him, you can’t get over the slight crease he had in his brow and the slight tremor in his hands.
“For closure,” you repeat, though your voice doesn’t sound like it’s coming from you, muffled under the thump of your heart.
Sunghoon nods. “For closure.”
A humourless laugh sneaks past your throat as you look at him. You shouldn’t have. In the lamplight, Sunghoon is golden and glorious. Warm light casts one side of his face, diffusing gently over the steep slope of his nose, highlighting his moles and the look in his eyes, gentle and curious all at once. Unwillingly, your gaze falls to his lips, parted, tempting.
One firm nod of your head brings Sunghoon’s hand to your face, his palm cupping your cheek with soft skin as his thumb traces your cheekbone. You grow anxious under his stare, under the drag of his eyes over your features, taking them one at a time like he’s committing them to memory.
Leaning in, your eyes flutter shut as your lips meet his and he freezes, mouth completely still on yours. Delicately, your tongue traces the seam of his lips, soft and plump, until they part for you, moving with yours. Sunghoon’s kiss is unpolished when it reaches you. It’s hesitant but tender, clumsy but sweet, he’s trying and he’s perfect; your favourite.
The kiss is.. it’s everything. It’s the racing of your heart, the thudding, the vibrant buzz you can hear, feel humming against your ears. It’s a rush of blood to the head, a lightness all over that pulls you out of your body. It’s Sunghoon’s soft lips curving into a smile against yours, his gentle hold on your face never letting up as he holds you as close as he can manage, and it’s every bit as lovely as the rest of him.
Palpable is the heartbeat of your friendship, beating to a lull under the surface of the kiss, fizzling out into nothing, a steady silence, flatlining to give way to something more, something bigger.
Every brush of your lips against his is a revelation, a confession. You’re all I’ve ever wanted, you tell him with your kiss. You’re everything I need. His free hand finds yours, locking your fingers and squeezing, the action timed well enough to make you think he hears you, to make you think he’s saying, we’ll be okay, I still love you.
With that, he pulls away, a delicate tension piercing the air. Blown eyes and laboured breathing—he’s beautiful, fuzzy around the edges with warm orange and all of the love in your heart. Breathless, you chew on your lip, cognisant of Sunghoon’s hand in yours and the sparkle in his eyes as he looks at you.
Belatedly, you squeeze his hand back, smiling. “Was it everything you ever dreamed of?” you whisper, part teasing, all curious.
Abruptly, Sunghoon stands up, letting go of you in the process. “I have to go.”
You want to stop him, you think you’re supposed to. To grab him by the arm and kiss him again, to yell in his face that you love him until he understands. But you don’t. Instead, you stay seated, staring at Sunghoon’s back and following him with your eyes out of the room and down the hall until he’s out of sight.
It’s your first time being so upset after a kiss, and you can’t tell if it’s his leaving or the mention of him moving on that’s tripping you up so much. That’s causing melancholy to crawl from the shadows, sinking its jagged nails into your skin to pull you under.
You love him. He’s gone.
Eyes stuck on the doorway, time stretches over the room around you, thick and malleable, wet and cloying—clay stuck under your nails for days as the fire in the kiln rages on.
Sighing, you get up and wait at his door. You ball your hand into a limp fist, knocking weakly. Sunghoon doesn’t reply. You try again, harder. Still nothing.
Barging into the room, you find him sitting on the end of his bed with his face in his hands.
“Don’t move on.” The words come out before you realise and Sunghoon lifts his head, squinting at you.
“Huh?” He tilts his head, watching closely as you approach him, tipping it back enough to meet your eyes when you stand over him.
You take a breath, holding it until your head starts to spin. “I don’t want you to love someone else, Sunghoon. Please don’t move on.”
The stillness that follows is disconcerting, a long quiet you can feel on your skin, amplifying the blank stare on his face as he looks up at you. His eyes flash, a spark of hope behind them so bright it stings to look at.
“Do you..” He trails off, his lips moving to form the next word though stopping short.
“I do,” you whisper, nodding. “I’m sorry for taking so long.”
An exhaled laugh comes from his nose as he grins, shaking his head. “You like me?” he asks, excitement and disbelief fighting for authority over his voice, his hands holding your waist and pulling you down into his lap.
“I love you,” you admit, settling on his thighs.
“You do?” His eyes are wide and gleaming, searching every feature on your face before settling on your own.
You nod. “So much.”
Sunghoon’s chin tips up, his lips pressing against yours, excited pecks that can’t turn into much more for the smiles on your faces. You rest your arms on his shoulders, hands clasping behind his head, nervous fingers playing with the hair at the nape of his neck.
“So.. will you be my boyfriend? For real?”
Tilting his head, he tries and fails to fight a smile. “I will. I’m a little bummed though.”
“Why?” You raise a brow, and the word tips up at the end with it.
“I wanted to be the one to ask you.” Sunghoon’s honesty warms the room, endearing you completely.
You grin, loving the heat spreading over your cheeks. “Ask me anyway.”
“Please can I be your boyfriend?”
In the weeks that followed, it became immediately clear that boyfriend Sunghoon operated on a pendulum swinging between sexual ferality and terror. He’d get distracted during study sessions at home, finding more interest in biting at your neck than stream-of-consciousness prose, but closed his eyes if a sex scene came on TV. He’d buck his hips against yours while making out but flinch at the sight of condoms in the store.
He wasn’t ready to have sex and didn’t know how to tell you, so you took matters into your own hands, asking if you could wait until after his results for resubmission came in, saying you didn’t want the distraction for either of you. Sunghoon agreed, pecking your cheek and holding you tight to his chest.
The only thing was that your lecturer hadn’t given him an exact date, so every morning, you held your phone in a vice grip waiting for Sunghoon to update you, and every morning, you got the same text: Nothing today, baby ☹️
This morning, you’re brushing your teeth when he texts you, in all caps: NO FUCKING WAY I GOT A 98 !!! LOOK !!!
When the picture comes through, it’s of him in the mirror and you choke on mouthwash at the sight. He’s smiling, bright and beautiful, in a black vest that he’s holding up a little to show his stomach, though his palm is in the way of his toned abs, and it cuts off right at the top of his grey sweatpants.
Your mouth goes dry as you click on it, fixating on every little detail you can find: the thickness of his fingers against his phone, the dip in his collarbones, the breadth of his shoulders and the cinch of his waist. In a fit of desperation, you try swiping at the bottom of your screen, willing the picture to magically extend. It doesn’t.
hoonie: Finger slipped.. You like?
you: mm..
you: 98??? HOLY SHIT, LOOK AT YOU!!!
hoonie: All you.. do you like the picture?
you: i love it………….
hoonie: My girl 🤍
Another picture comes in, and sure enough, through the glare of his laptop screen, you see: Course name: The Modernist Movement: Joyce, Woolf, and Hemingway. Marks Awarded: 98.0.
you: well done baby !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
hoonie: Thx 😁
hoonie: Can I have my prize now ha ha .. haha 😈
you: just for that emoji, no you absolutely cannot.
Your resolve isn’t strong enough when it comes to Sunghoon, because purple devil emoji and all, you show up at his door with condoms in your bag and a bouquet of lilies behind your back.
The door creaks open and Sunghoon greets you with a grin. “Hey, gorgeous. You proud of me?”
You beam at him, holding out the flowers. “I’m very proud, Hoon, well done.”
“I don’t want to ruin the moment,” he starts, taking the bouquet from your hands and sniffing the flowers with an approving smile. “But hearing you say you’re proud of me is awakening something I didn’t know existed.”
“A good something?”
“Mm,” he hums, arms finding your waist before he pecks your lips. “A very good something.”
Sunghoon’s words hit your lips and your core, a desperate heat flooding your stomach as he kisses you deeply, his body pressed tightly against yours while he pulls you into his apartment. He kicks the door shut with his foot, slipping his hand under your jacket to settle in your back pocket, not quite squeezing but holding your ass as gently as he can manage.
He breaks away from you, love in his eyes as he stares down into yours, catching his breath. “I don’t think we own a vase.”
In his kitchen, you rifle through cupboards to find something to hold the flowers, eventually finding a whiskey decanter in the cupboard under the sink, and holding it up for Sunghoon to see.
“Oh, yeah,” he says. “It’s Jay’s. It’ll work right?”
You nod, taking it to the sink to rinse it. Sunghoon wraps his arms around you from behind, resting his chin on your shoulder watching you fill the decanter with water and flower food before grabbing the bouquet. He presses open-mouthed kisses to your neck and you struggle to stay focused as you cut down the stems on the flowers, arranging them neatly.
“Can I take a photo?” he asks when you’re done.
He’s smiling when you turn around to look at him, a soft curve of his lips that makes your heart race, a deep tenderness in his eyes when you meet them. You smile too.
“They’re yours, baby, do whatever you want.”
“A photo of you with the flowers,” he clarifies.
Warmth settles in your chest, a grin spreading over your lips from ear to ear. You nod, taking the decanter in your hands when he lets go of you, holding the flowers up beside your face and smiling for his camera. As his phone shutter clicks away, you steal glances at his face behind it. He’s watching the screen with a smile, telling you how beautiful you are.
“I want pictures of you too,” you say, handing the flowers over.
“I’m yours, baby, do whatever you want.”
Sunghoon poses for your photos, smiling sweetly in some and sniffing the bouquet appreciatively with closed eyes for others. He’s glowing and he’s beautiful and your heart triples in size while taking picture after picture until your phone tells you it has ten percent.
“Thank you, YN,” he says. “I’ve never gotten flowers before, I love them.” His arms settle around your waist, lips pressing against yours before you have the chance to respond.
You try anyway, mumbling against his lips that you love him. In response, Sunghoon grins, but the feeling of his cock growing hard against you is distracting, a lust-coated thorn in the side of the butterflies fluttering in your stomach. With locked lips and uncertain steps, the two of you bump into corners and trip over your own feet, stumbling to his room and parting only to tear his hoodie over his head.
Breathless, you pull away, eyes trailing over him and picking up on everything, from the tremble in his hands to the lust-addled worry in his eyes. He’s nervous, you think—though it escapes you, the last word coming out like a question.
Sunghoon scoffs, his hands resting on your waist under your shirt, skin clammy against yours. “Of course, I’m nervous.”
“You don’t have to be.”
“I just want to be good for you.”
“Don’t worry about that, let me take care of you, Hoon.” Your palms drag up his torso — firm abs through soft cotton, defined chest over racing heart — to rest on his shoulders. “Sit,” you say when he nods.
He gulps, taking a seat on the end of his bed under your gentle push, eyes widening when you sink to your knees between his legs and reach for his drawstring, pulling the ends to untie the knot.
“Wait,” Sunghoon says, breathless, scrunching up his face and dropping his head. “Let me calm down, baby. At this rate, I’ll come just seeing your hand on it.”
You giggle, resting your head on his thigh and wrapping the drawstring around your finger.
“I’m serious, YN,” he mumbles, laughing as he takes his vest off. “I need a minute.”
Sunghoon’s eyes are pressed shut as he tries to collect himself, lips pouty and kiss-bitten, slightly parted with ragged breaths slipping out. You wait patiently for him. He’s so pretty like this, with the crease in his brow and the pretty pink flush dusting his cheeks as his chest rises and falls. You can’t help but smile, leaning into his touch when his hand rests on top of your head, his blunt nails grazing your scalp. After a while, he seems more at ease, his eyes finding yours and he smiles shyly, telling you he’s ready now and lifting his hips from the bed to let you pull his sweats and underwear down.
Free from the constraints of fabric, his cock slaps his stomach with a wet sound as the tip meets his skin, leaving a pearlescent streak over his abs. The sight makes your mouth water and you can’t look away. “Pretty,” you whisper.
Wrapping a hand under his tip, you swipe it with your thumb, taking time to memorise the flutter of his eyelids, the bobbing of his Adam’s apple, and the soft sigh he lets out. You stroke him slowly, liking the way his breath picks up as his brows knit together before you take him in your mouth. It’s a tight fit but you do your best, spurred on by the way he tugs at your hair and stutters through a holy fuck as you take as much of him as you can.
Sunghoon goes silent, only squirming when you use your hand to stroke him near his base. Self-conscious about his lack of vocal affirmation, you look up at him through your lashes, and the pure bliss on his face is unbearably attractive. His eyes are rolled back under furrowed brows, his mouth hanging open as he throws his head back.
“Am I doing okay?” you ask, using the moment to catch your breath.
He nods, inhaling shakily and screwing his eyes shut while his hips buck up into your fist. “I’m.. You’re doing such a good job, baby, so good.”
Satisfaction courses through you from the praise, a high that dulls the ache in your jaw. Still watching him, you massage his balls in your palm, pressing open-mouthed kisses to his tip when he whines. You tongue at his slit until he thrusts back into your mouth, tip hitting your throat, and he gasps when you gag, his arm coming up to cover his eyes. A belated apology slips from his lips, mumbled as he strokes your hair with a shaking hand and goes quiet again. When you speed up, his breath stutters, the muscles in his thighs contracting around your head as you suck and lick and drool on his cock.
A moan of your name, and his hand holding your hand down, are the only warnings you get before Sunghoon comes, spilling his load right down your throat. Whining, his hips buck up against your face, pushing further and further until he falls back onto the mattress.
Your throat is hoarse and aches while you use the back of your hand to wipe at your lips, enjoying what’s left of his taste on your tongue. Deep red tints his neck and chest, a pretty flush gleaming under the sheen of sweat on his skin. He’s mesmerising, as he tries for air through swollen lips and looks up at you through squinted eyes. He reaches for you, cute grabby hands tugging your shirt and pulling you down so you’re lying next to him with your head on his chest.
“You’re amazing, baby, so good for me,” Sunghoon whispers, eyes fluttering shut as you drag your nails over his torso, feeling the subtle heave of the slick, sculpted muscle over his stomach and chest.
Pride heats your chest, satisfaction rolling over you like a wave. “Really?”
He hums in affirmation, nodding his head.
“You were so quiet, I couldn’t really tell,” you add, hungry for more praise.
“The walls are so thin in here, I just got used to being quiet,” Sunghoon says, frowning. Hand meeting your chin, he tips your head up towards him, pressing a soft kiss to your lips and mumbling, “I’m sorry. You were perfect, I swear.”
It’s a sweet kiss. Until lips move harder and hands get lower, desperate as he thumbs the top of your leggings, palm unmoving but a dangerous heat blooms in your stomach anyway.
“Can I..” Sunghoon pinches you softly through the material, unsure eyes boring deep into yours.
You nod. “You can.”
Slipping under your waistband, his fingers skate across your skin dipping between your thighs. He grazes your slit, satisfaction clear in the groan he lets out as he feels the wetness there, pulling it over the length of your slit to cover your clit. Your breath hitches, a strangled gasp, pleasure and surprise meeting in your throat under the pressure of his thumb on your clit, the gentle sting of his finger pushing into you.
What Sunghoon lacks in experience, he makes up for with the sheer length and thickness of his fingers. It’s almost jarring, it’s enough to force your eyes closed and bring a sigh rumbling out of you, ache and relief settling between your legs, where he curls a finger against your walls and drags slow circles over your clit.
“Can you take these off, baby?” he asks, hand away to touch your leggings.
You don’t waste a second, sitting up to pull them off, throwing them and your underwear across the room. Sunghoon licks his lips, tugging at the hem of your shirt.
“And this? If you want..”
You nod, pulling it off immediately to let it join the rest of your clothes in a heap on the floor. The way he gulps is a confidence boost, his dilated pupils taking in every inch of your body, though his gaze always pulls back to your bra—white and lacy, thin enough for your nipples to push through the fabric and Sunghoon can’t seem to get enough, though he waits until you’re lying down again to touch you.
Sunghoon props himself up on his elbow, leaning over you. “You’re beautiful,” he whispers, dragging a finger over the lace at the top of your bra, toying with the material and the little bow sitting between your breasts. His eyes flick up to meet yours. “So beautiful,” he repeats.
Hiding your face in his chest, you mumble, “Thank you,” into his skin while trying to ignore the heat spreading over your body wherever he touches you. His hand trails from your arm to your waist, resting on your hips to slip over your ass for a beat, where he grabs and squeezes the flesh there before coming back around to slot between your legs—you lift one of them, resting it over his body, and he’s smiling sweetly when you look up at him.
Sunghoon’s movements are unchanging, though the sensation is heightened by the unbridled desire in his lidded eyes that urges white heat to lick over every inch of your skin—this time he pushes two fingers into you.
It doesn’t get better than this, you think. But it does, quickly.
Leaning over you, his eyes flick across your face, one feature at a time as he chews on his lip. Reaching up, you push some of his hair from his face, holding it back and saying, “Relax, baby.”
“Don’t want to hurt you.”
Moving your hand, you blink when his hair flops back over his forehead, tickling your eyelashes. His eyes are focused now, staring straight down into yours, want and worry flashing behind them.
“You won’t, I promise,” you say, locking your pinky with his, feeling relieved when he smiles.
Sunghoon pushes in slowly, his name slipping from your lips when he exhales shakily, head falling forward. The sting, the pleasure, make it hard to breathe, molten desire taking hold of your lungs as he carves out a place for himself as far as you’ll take him, all the way to the hilt as slow as he can manage.
A moan tears out of him, lewd and whiny as his hair tickles your collarbone, head falling into the crook of your neck. His skin is hot and damp against yours, his breath burning your shoulder as he tries to calm down. It’s difficult to register much else, tethered only by the sound of his voice when he asks, “Am I hurting you?”
“Hoon,” you whisper.
“Can you look at me, baby?” He lifts his head, resting a hand on your cheek. You blink your eyes open, gaze locking with his, where concern pushes through his desire. “Am I hurting you?” he asks again. “Are you okay?”
You nod. “I’m okay, just..” You sigh. “Full. Need a minute.”
Sunghoon kisses you, lips moving gently with yours, passing breathy whines between your mouths until you feel yourself relaxing. Pulling his plush bottom lip between yours, you suck on it, nodding. “Want you to move, baby,” you mumble.
He scans your face, eyes meeting yours as he pulls his hips back. He’s slow, so slow with his thrusts that your belly turns with want, your fingernails sink into the taut skin of his back, and jagged sobs fall out of you with each drag of his cock along your walls.
Everywhere his skin touches yours is set ablaze with scorching heat, goosebumps pushing past the surface as his breath fans your neck and his sharp teeth graze your skin. He bites hard enough to sting, and you wince as his tongue flicks over your bitten flesh to soothe you.
You were so worked up earlier, writhing against the sheets and coming undone in his palm, so bliss quickly pushes through the ache between your legs. “Good, Hoon, feels so good,” you manage, struggling to convey how perfect it is.
“Just want to make you feel good.” His words melt into each other, vowels soft and elongated as they curl around each other. He’s working up a steady rhythm, his tip consistently nudging you where you need it—the spot that makes the room blur around you. “That’s all I want.”
Before long, the knot in your stomach pulls you up from the mattress, arching your back towards the ceiling. Mouth to mouth, chest to chest—it’s the closest you’ve ever felt to someone else, the closest you’ve ever been. The thought alone knocks the wind out of you, and his persistent whining does nothing to help.
Your want and adoration for Sunghoon run bone-deep, inching up your spine and creeping over your shoulders, intertwined with an all-consuming pleasure that turns the heat in your stomach molten as a shudder zips through you. Even though you can’t find the words to let him know, he lifts your hips from the bed to fuck you deeper, harder, into the mattress until shaky orgasms pull both of you under.
You let him fall into you, fingers curling around his hair, whispering I love you into the skin of his neck as he comes, most of his weight on top of you while you catch your breath, relishing in the fullness you feel as the last waves of your high pull back. You stay like this for as long as he needs, his head coming up from the crook of your neck to smile at you before pressing his lips to yours. A sleepy haze fills the room around you, tongue swiping tongue as you giggle happily into his mouth.
After a while, he gets up, tying the condom to throw it away and comes back with his shirt. He uses it to clean up—gentle between your legs, pressing kisses to your calves while he does. Sunghoon’s tenderness wraps around your heart, and love clouds your vision, forming a blurry trail that follows all of his movements, glowing like something from a dream, ethereal, an apparition.
The bed dips beside you, his arms around you, pulling you in so his chin rests on your head. You push your cheek into his chest, hoping the two of you will meld into one—the thought makes you warm all over, a fuzziness that reaches every part of your body while he presses kisses into your hair, rubbing your back.
“I love you,” he says, voice as soft as the rest of him. “I’m glad I exist.”
mama park: Hi lovely 😍 missing you lots, wondering when you’ll be home for Xmas………..love ma
Sunghoon stirs, nose scrunching as he snores softly into the quiet of a winter morning. His chest rises and falls steadily under your head and he doesn’t move when you sit up. The lamp on his desk is still on — neither of you could be bothered getting up to turn it off last night — and under its dim glow, you admire him. Perfect lips gently curved—long lashes kissing the skin under his eyes.
Love hits you from all angles, warmth all over from head to toe despite the chill in Sunghoon’s room. You can’t help but grin, leaning up to nose along the underside of his chin, his natural scent so soft yet dizzying as you nuzzle into him. He stirs again, turning his head this way and that before resting, you feel a bit bad, deciding to leave him be and text his mum back.
you: hi mum !!! missing you sooooooo much :((( will be home asap
mama park: BTW Sunghoon told me everything. I raised such good actors LOL make sure he looks after you and keeps you happy!
you: i’m so sorry we lied to you..
you: but i’m really happy with him and he loves me a lot
you: i love him so much .. never been so sure of anyone in my life
© zreamy (2023), all rights reserved. do not repost, translate, or plagiarise my work. do let my know your thoughts !
permanent taglist: @asahicore
#sunghoon smut#enhypen smut#enha smut#enhypen scenarios#sunghoon scenarios#sunghoon x reader#park sunghoon smut#park sunghoon x reader#enhypen imagines#enhypen oneshots#sunghoon oneshots#sunghoon imagines#enhypen hard hours#fic.sunghoon
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daisuke x fem reader where they’re both super awkward and swansea is tired of them being oblivious to the way they feel for eachother that he makes both of his interns work on a project together
omg i totally loved writing this even tho i hcent written in a while so it might look weird? im really sorry its been a long time… (and its pretty short sorry abt that) also swansea is probably a bit ooc (i think u say it like that? idk) cause i have really bad memory so sorry abt that too…
this is set before the crash
No matter how many times the two interns tried to communicate it would always end up being awkward since everyone but them knew about their obvious crush on each other.
Nobody cares enough to help them realise that, except their boss Swansea.
That shortly explains how the three of them are now repeating the bases of engineering.
“So is that clear?” The older man looked at the young adults as they nodded.
“Great, i don’t have to repeat myself for once. Now to see how much you’ve understood try to fix this.”
He said taking an old radio that sat behind him and handed them the needed tools. He then proceeded to leave but not before giving a smirk to his interns that blushed as a reaction.
Daisuke was the first to speak up. “I didn’t actually understand all of it.”
Y/n giggled at the boy and he soon joined too. “Don’t worry… I barely managed to take some notes. Swansea isn’t really the best teacher…”
“But we don’t really have much of a choice”
“Right, so here. You can read some of my notes and umm… i guess start working.” She said handing him her notebook. He started quietly reading all of it as the girl got slowly closer and closer to read with him.
After a while Daisuke stopped and thanked her, then realised how close she’s gotten to him. Y/n panicking apologised as she didn’t notice the close distance between them.
He quickly straightened himself. “No need to apologise! We’re supposed to work together so that eventually would’ve happened, not that i mind anyways…” He muttered the last part.
Y/n raised an eyebrow at that but didn’t question it. “We should get the work started now.” She said as he nodded happily.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
It has been around two hours when the two finally ended their work and were now chatting.
“Sooo… would you be free after dinner tonight?” Daisuke asked nervously, Y/n blushed at the question then smiled. “I mean… there’s not much else to do so yes. Why do you ask?”
The boy grinned and answered. “Well, i’ve been meaning to ask you this for a while now. Would you like to play on my gameboy with me? We can take turns! And then we can eat all the sweets that i have and stay up all night!” He exclaimed out of breath.
Y/n was surprised to hear the boy so excited and soon replied. “Sure, we can do that. We’ll just have to make sure to be quiet or else we’ll wake the captain up.” Daisuke happily nodded as he watched the girl get up and wave at him.
When she left he let put a puff of air he didn’t know he was holding. “Holy moly. She’s like super cool!”
i took the gameboy idea from a daisuke fanfic on here but i dont remember the tag. sorry this is kinda short as i said i have to get used to weiting it’s been like 2 years since i last did it. maybe i’ll write about that sleepover soemtime!! (i swear this looked longer whem i wrote it on my diary)
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Hey since your requests are open, could you maybe draw Hal? Doing anything, I don't really care what (only if you want)
day 96
YES i actually got 2 thinking about hal today thanks to this post (and my tags even passed peer review yippee thank u) ANYWAY. in addition to all of that. I HAVE ALWAYS THOUGHT he and aradia would be friends.
ok i wrote all this out and it got long and kinda rambly bc im tired so im putting it under a cut lmao HALRADIA FRIENDSHIP RANT IN THE READMORE
i think there would be.... maybe a little tension given that aradia eventually ended up in Her Own Flesh And Blood Body and hal would presumably not have that option?
but overall i think after the way her friends treated her as a robot, and the experience of going from experiencing life as a living breathing organic person to a bodiless entity to HAVING a body but that body not being the same as the one you remember.... idk! it's like EXTREMELY EXTREMELY SPECIFIC AND MORE THAN A LITTLE TRAUMATIC and they could share it with each other!! how fucking lovely is that.
not to mention they both kind of have a history with equius?? (assuming this is post arquiusprite in some way. i certainly have an extremely self-indulgent "everyone lives" au for this scenario where they're able to safely separate into their pre-sprite components and then hal and aradia become buds.)
REGARDLESS i think it would be interesting for hal (who has ostensibly nothing but positive shit to say about his connection to equius) and aradia (who has some truly fucked things to say about her experiences with equius) to Talk Through All That.
not 2 mention the parallels that can be drawn between dirk/hal's perception of their relationship with jake being this kind of... Manipulative Pining Weirdness, and aradia being on the other side of somebody else's Manipulative Pining Weirdness and sharing that perspective without even knowing about all of that dirkjake backstory OUGH im tellin u it is all a very complex and wonderful scenario to consider and like, im not even much of an alpha kid aficionado tbh. hal experts chime in on the comments i know youre out there and i wanna hear your takes.
#day 96#year 5#aradia megido#lil hal#homestuck#im not kidding btw HAL ENJOYERS WHAT IS THE VIBE HERE#also to clarify i think hal's confusion is largely due to the. Hey How Did You Get A Flesh Body factor more than anything#aradia's situation is uhhhhh Strange
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Pretty - Shota Aizawa
word count - 3K synopsis - shota aizawa would do anything for you, even if it meant going past his comfort zone. warnings - she/her reader, drunk! reader, aizawa is the king of consent lets be real, coercion, reader is a horny mess but so is aizawa, aizawa is S-O-F-T for reader lemme tell you, some kissing, grinding, heavy petting (maybe?), dub-con if you squint, idk this was entirely self indulgent im not gonna lie to you minors do not interact
It's not like this was the first time he'd seen you utterly shit-faced. No, not in the slightest. He's known you for years, since high school when he was just a floppy haired emo boy and you were a goddess that decided three dorks were her best friends. He's seen you drunk countless times over the years, thanks to Mic and his ability to make you forget you are a grown up. A Pro-Hero at that. But you were too persuaded by your friends' efforts to have a good time. Shot after shot after shot- Aizawa lost count after the fifth double shot that you pounded back, giggling with Mic as Aizawa watched you wipe the liquor that was trailing down your chin. He should have known right then he was in for a hell of a night.
"Okay, just..shit.. okay.." He's struggling, he really is, between your limp body held to his chest by his strong arm that's wrapped around your waist and the effort it took to get you here, in his apartment, he's more than happy to tuck you to sleep in his bed and call it a night on the couch. Expect you're not only drunk, you're high. High off some dank smelling stuff Midnight pulled out of her purse while you were all waiting for the cab. Aizawa loves his friends but sometimes he loathes them so completely it drives him mad. Face pinched tight, the tips of his ears blushed a deep crimson. That's how he looked standing beside you outside the bar as you swayed and laughed as you hit the thick blunt Mic passed you.
He drops you as carefully as he can onto his large couch, winded and tired as he tosses his keys on the coffee table and loosens his tie. You lay there giggling to yourself as you stare up at him, your eyes redder than his at this point. His hair is tucked back in a loose attempt at a half up bun, the strands that normally lay over his eyes tucked neatly behind his ears, and his face is clean shaven and flushed from lugging your nearly limp body up the stairs.
"You're so pretty." You coo and fuck if it doesn't make his stomach flip- but you're drunk. Completely wasted in fact and he knew it when you had told Mic before the two of you had left that you thought he was an amazing singer. Aizawa knows for a fact that's a lie.
"Yeah, yeah. You're so fucking gone. How does your body even handle that much alcohol?" His voice is gruff but there's a fondness in it. Because of course there is. He loves you. Has loved you since said emo days. It's never stopped, never ceased in the slightest. Why else would he deal with your excessively drunk ass?
You stretch, either completely ignoring or just not hearing his words, stretch nice and big with your arms thrown over you head and your back arched sharply. A hollow moan rumbles out of your mouth and through his apartment and his eyes flicker to the velvet skirt of your dress that has fallen so dangerously close to exposing you. Aizawa looks at the ceiling, jaw clenching, fist balled up in the pockets of his black slacks.
"So pretty.." Your voice is far off, a gentle murmur to yourself as you keep staring at him like he put the stars in the night sky.
"Don't be ridiculous." He says about your comment because.. yeah, you're definitely beyond drunk right now. "You need to sleep this off, gonna feel like shit tomorrow."
It's like you dont even fucking hear him.
"Mm, but I mean it. Think about you so much." You smooth your bare foot down his slack covered thigh, your mouth parted and pretty as you say, "So pretty and kind and strong, drive me crazy, Sho."
Aizawa can't fucking breathe. Heart pounding in his chest as he looks down at the sight of you, looking so fucked out but he hasn't even touched you. No, this was all your own doing.
No. This was the alcohol. The weed. You didn't mean it, you were just fucked up.
"Angel." His voice is a warning and fuck if he can't see the way it makes your whole body shiver. Oh, this isn't good. "You are way too drunk and I am way too sober to have this conversation right now."
"I'm not that drunk!" Expect it's all slurred words and mashed teeth and if you weren't looking at him like you might consume his soul he might have laughed at that. "Don't you want me, Shota?"
God, his face is burning, dick twitching in his slacks and it washes deep shame through his body. He feels like he's fucking short circuiting, his resolve wobbling like your bottom lip as you look up at him with your most appealing doe eyes.
"How about, uh, I.. I make you something to eat and then you can sleep this off?" His voice is held together by a wavering thread, words filling his dry mouth as fast as he can form them. He can't do this right now. He needs you to carry your ass to sleep so he can go take care of the massive problem you've brought to life in his pants.
You sit up, teetering only slightly as you lean you head against the back of the couch and groan, rubbing your thighs together and fuck, Aizawa is doing everything he can to not think about that. You're so….needy.
"I don't wanna eat, I want you." You peer up at him, and he knows what you're about to do before you even do it. What's worse? He knows he's gonna fucking fall for it. Like he always does. "I guess you don't want me though.."
Your voice is pathetic, breathy and wounded, and your face is so downtrodden, that frown so deep it sends a pain through Aizawa's heart like a dagger.
He sits on the couch quickly, locking his gaze on your watery eyes. Fuck, you were actually crying about this. Aizawa wants to die when his dick twitches at the sight of a lone tear tracking down the pretty apple of your cheek. You do things to him, things that no one else is able to do and the worst part is you don't even have to try.
"I didn't say I didn't want you." He says cautiously, thumb wiping the tears away as you turn to him with that fucking pout that never fails to work on him.
You lean into the warmth of his hand, your own fingers coming to wrap tight around his wrist to keep him there.
"But.. you keep saying no." You pout and he wants to kiss it off your face.
"No. I'm saying you're drunk and I'm not gonna take advantage of my best friend because she's drunk. That's not me." His voice is stern. Resolute. But then your mouth parts and the tip of your pretty pink tongue swipes over the tip of his thumb and he almost loses his shit right then and there.
"You're not taking advantage of me if I want it." You say so coyly and Aizawa snatches his hand back, points an accusing finger at your wicked smiling face.
"You can't want it if you're drunk, Angel. Stop fighting me on it. The answer is no." He's steady and authoritative on the outside but on the inside his heart is pounding, cock aching within its confines. All Aizawa can really think is "What the fuck is going on?" He'd never seen you act like this before.
"Okay." You sigh sadly, voice small. You seem to curl in on yourself as you sit next to him but then your head pops up and the hair on the back of his neck stands on end when you press him with the most innocent look. If he didn't know you, he might have fallen for it, but he does know you. Knows that you're a manipulative little shit when you wanted to be, especially when it's to get him to do something he doesn't wanna do.
"What about.." You start and he's about to cut you off before you can even say whatever ridiculous shit you've managed to think of in the messy state you're in, but he's not quick enough. "Just one little kiss, please Shota?"
"No, absolutely not." But his stomach does this stupid little flip just at the thought and he can't not look down at your lips. You catch him, eyes glinting as you scoot a little closer. You may be a Pro-Hero but you are a fucking evil women. Sinful in a way that Aizawa isn't sure he can stay away from, no matter his moral compass.
"Just one itty bitty kiss and I'll go to bed like a good girl, I promise, Sho." You look so good saying it, and sound even better. But Shota Aizawa is not a fool and Shota Aizawa has known you far too long to let something so hormonal ruin one of his most treasured friendships, even if he did want you so badly it was tearing him up inside.
You shuffle closer, right hand coming down softly on his thigh and his whole body freezes. His eyes slant as he looks over to you.
"I said-"
"You won't be doing anything wrong, Shota. I know you'd never take advantage of me." You lean in, ghost you breath across his neck and Aizawa seriously can't fucking breathe. "You're the best friend a girl could ask for, Sho, I know you'd never hurt me "
Your voice is honey dipped venom and Aizawa's chest seizes when your thumb starts stroking a soft line up and down his thigh.
No, no, no, no, no. Fuccckk.
Your lips look so soft, bitten and shiny with your spit and so close. He imagines you taste like whiskey and cherries and the spearmint chapstick you made him put in his pocket so you didn't lose it.
"I…I.."
"I promise I'll be so good, just for you."
"Only one." He says and….wait what the fuck did he say? His brain has betrayed him, or maybe it was his dick, doesn't matter when there isn't anytime to process what the fuck he's just agreed to.
You're pressing your lips to his as his mind flounders, your nails digging into the meat of his thigh as you taste him for the first time after all these years.
You moan so loud and lewdly, it ricochets around his living room, and his head, and his heart. The sound sends a shiver down both of your spines. You taste just like he thought you would, plush lips pushed against his own. The kiss wasn't anything special but because it was you it was the hottest kiss Aizawa has ever had.
Only one. Only one. Only one.
No, he can't, he has to stop this. You taste too sweet, the little moans and whines escaping your throat are doing too much for him. He wants to hear more. Needs to hear more; but not like this. Not when you're drunk. He'd be a horrible friend, a horrible person, if he let this continue. So he pulls away, leaning back, eyes fluttering open, mouth beginning to speak.
He can't get a single fucking thing out when your pushing back towards him, your hands grabbing his face to hold him still. It's him that moans this time, a shocked gaspy moan that you swallow without a second thought. You toss your leg over his lap, grind yourself down against the hard line of his cock beneath his pants.
This kiss was miles away from the other. Teeth biting against his bottom lip, your tongue licking into his mouth, your hands ruining the bun he had his hair in as you yank the black tie out. And your hips, they won't stop grinding against him, it's so hot but so wrong and that stomach bubbling shame makes its appearance again. He braces his hands on your hips trying, in vain, to stall you but you only work faster. Rutting and whining and whispering his name.
Oh fuck, oh fuck.
He separates your mouths, bites at his lip when you settle for licking a fat stripe up his neck, sucking just below his ear.
"We can't, we gotta stop." He doesn't know how he manages to get the words out and somehow he's unsure if they even came from him. He's never sounded like this before. What the hell are you doing to him?
You pin his hands against the back of the couch, something that felt so strange considering he could have you wrapped up in his scarf in barely a second. Except, he doesn't have the scarf at this moment and you've driven his willpower straight into the mud.
"I'm so sorry, Shota." You whisper into his ear, licking at his ear lobe. "I'm sorry, I just need you so bad."
In that second, with your mouth and hips dizzying his brain, he finally realizes something.
He wasn't taking advantage of you, you were taking advantage of him.
The realization hits him so hard he gasps; or maybe that was because you picked that moment to swivel your hips just so that he could feel the way your lips parted under your lace panties and slotted over him. Even through the layers he could feel that wet hot heat.
"Gotta stop." Was he even trying? "Angel, we have to stop. We g-gotta go to sleep before this gets out of hand." He tries once again to push you away but you only shake your head and clinge tighter, fingers lost in his hair as you chase the release that's been slowly building in your stomach.
"No." You grit out between this little gasp that has his hands clenching in the skirt of your dress. He doesn't move them, they just sit there gripping the fabric as he thinks about how much of a pathetic weak man he is for letting you trick him like this. "Don't wanna sleep, want you to fill me up. Wanna feel you deep inside me, Shota." You punctate his name with a high pitched whine and that's it, that's all it takes.
That wavering thread, his moral compass? Gone just from the way you say his name.
He lunges at you, wraps his hand around the column of your throat and for the first time since you jumped him your hips finally still.
"You are such a fucking brat." Aizawa growls, squeezing your throat just tight enough to make your head fuzzy. You wanted to play dirty? Fine. He could be dirty too.
He reaches his hand behind you to blindly drag the zipper on the back of your dress down, snatching the front off your shoulders and down your arms. He pulls it down until your bare chest is exposed to him, nipples pebbled in the cool air of his apartment, let's the dress settle around you waist before he's balling his fist in the material and using it to drag your hips against his.
"Fuckk." He groans, letting his head fall back against the couch. You whimper as you watch him use you now, all that confidence and control gone as you tremble with every grind and rut. He's pushing his hips up into you now, no longer holding back, and the feeling is mind-blowing.
"Shota.." You begin to whisper but he's quickly silencing you with his lips, hungry and searching, as they attack your own.
"Fucking evil women." He smacks the supple skin of your ass, hard. So hard it has you falling into his chest, burying your nose into his neck. Aizawa grabs the back of your neck with his big hand, presses hard enough that you know that's your place now. You were no longer running the show.
"Drunk off your fucking ass," he bites out before actually biting into the skin of you shoulder. You whine pathetically, suddenly embarrassed of the sound of your wet soppy cunt humping against his nice trousers. "Can't take no for a fucking answer. Thought you were gonna be a good girl, Angel? What happened to that?"
You can't speak, your body quivering as you orgasm approaches, a hot white heat that tingles from your head to your toes. You manage to grit out a weak "I'm sorry, Sho.", but it's just about as pathetic as you feel right now.
"So fuckin' impatient. Why couldn't you have waited till tomorrow?" He grits out, his head spinning. He wouldn't fuck you tonight, that's too far. He knows despite this little performance you've put on that you are in fact still inebriated and he'd never forgive himself if he did something that sober you wouldn't have wanted. But this? If you want to get off so badly, he'll make it happen.
Because you should know by now- Shota Aizawa would do anything for you.
"Please." You whimper out even though you're not really sure what you're asking for. But that doesn't matter, because Aizawa knows.
He slips his hand down between the two of you, thumb finding your clit pressed roughly against the wet lace of your panties. He rubs tight, teasing circles over your sensitive nub, kissing and sucking at the soft skin of your chest as he peers up at your pleasure stricken face. You look so beautiful like this, it's addicting, something he's dreamed about for years. To finally experience it though? It was unlike anything he'd imagined, especially when your eyes clamp shut, nails digging into his shoulder as you cum- hard.
"Fuck, Shota!" You gasp around a steady chant of yes yes yes's. "I love you, oh my god, I love you so much, Sho."
You collapse into his chest, body trembling and jerking every now and then from the small aftershocks that rush through you. He rubs your back as you catch your breath, his lips pressing the sweetest most adoring kisses to your forehead.
"I mean it." You say, breathing heavily through your nose and Shota hums in response as he looks down at where you're cradled to his chest.
"Mean what?" He asks and his breath is ragged, rough sounding. You huff a bit as you adjust your weight in his lap.
"I'm not that drunk…and that you're pretty…and that..I love you." Your voice is so shy now, so unsure, such a stark comparison from the girl that jumped him only fifteen minutes ago.
Aizawa feels the heat that rushes to his cheeks, the heavy thud of his heart. He loves you more than you can ever know and hearing you finally say it back, especially while you were grinding against him, was enough to make him cum in his pants.
Which he did. Like a fucking high school kid. It was honestly kinda ridiculous the way you molded him however you wanted to, how he let you do it. He couldn't imagine letting anyone see him the way he allows you to. Only you.
Always you.
"Can we go to sleep now, Angel?" He asks into your temple and you answer with a yawn and a nod, sleepy eyes fluttering shut.
#shota aizawa#shouta aizawa#aizawa x reader#mha aizawa#eraserhead#bnha aizawa#shota aizawa smut#shota aizawa x reader#mine
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blind date
pairing : changbin x gn!reader
summary : when you’re set up on a blind date and it turns out to be your ex boyfriend from two years ago
wc : 1.6k
cw : nonidol!au, they’re exes your honor, fluffy, cutesy, not proof read that much idk what else
a/n : wrote this on my phone again so sorry for any mistakes! i don’t really know how to feeeel abt this fic, not my best work but i hope you like it!
you let out a nervous sigh as you enter the restaurant, a cold shiver traveling down your spine as the hostess leads you to your table, one your friends reserved on your behalf. you were starting to regret agreeing to this blind date your friends, hyunjin and felix, set you up on, but they were so insistent on it and said they found the ‘perfect’ match for you. you weren’t sure if you could trust them that much, but you knew at the very least, whoever it was wouldn’t be some creep like your other unfortunate dates.
hyunjin and felix were some of your best friends, ones you made in the last two years since you moved to the city due to a new position you got in your company. you met them by chance through a few coworkers, and since then, the three of you have been inseparable. they were incredibly supportive people, but they were tired of hearing you complain about shitty dates every weekend, so they decided to take matters in their own hands, stating they know this really cool guy through some other friends who was ‘totally’ your type. and apparently this new guy just moved to the city a few months ago too, so you would be the perfect tour guide for him too.
regardless of your nerves, you decide to put your trust in your friends as you patiently wait for this mystery man to arrive. you were curious to know what those two boys believed your type was and what made them so hellbent on making you go on this date, but perhaps curiosity killed the cat.
“hey, sorry im late!” a voice you were all too familiar with rings in your ears, the man before you rushing into his seat across from you with an apologetic smile as your mouth hangs open in utter shock and surprise, goosebumps making themselves known all over your body.
once he sits down, he looks up to meet your flabbergasted expression, the smile on his face falling once the realization hits him. his faces pales, almost as if he just saw a ghost appear right before his very eyes.
“changbin?” you ask incredulously, still not able to accept the ridiculousness of the situation.
“y/n?!” he mirrors your tone, except he was far more boisterous than you, causing a few heads to turn as he flashes a sheepish and apologetic grin to the other patrons around you two.
“i… uh, you’re my blind date?” he questions in a lower volume with raised eyebrows.
you sigh, an astounded chuckle escaping you, “i guess so…”
“i see… since when did you move here?”
“uhm, a little bit over two years ago. i ended up taking that promotion my company offered me,” you respond, a hint of anxiousness trembling through your words.
“oh, so, basically after we broke up..?”
“mhm,” you hum in confirmation, your body feeling tense due to the awkwardness that hung in the air between you two. “felix and hyunjin told me you just moved here, right?”
changbin nods, “yeah, one of my old friends needed a roommate and i just kinda wanted a fresh start, so i took my chances. how do you know hyunjin and felix?”
“coworkers,” you reply shortly, not really sure what to do in this situation.
“oh, cool! they’re old high school friends of mine, we only reconnected recently,” he smiles gently, biting his lips due to his nervousness, “i’m sorry if this is awkward.”
“ah, no, it’s okay. it’s no one’s fault, this is just some crazy coincidence,” you reassure him, “we don’t have to go through with the rest of the date, it’s okay to end it he-“
“no, no!” he interrupts, a dusting of pink appearing on his cheeks, “if you’re okay with it, we can just use this to catch up, no? it’s been awhile since we last spoke.”
you let out an uncertain sigh, “i’m fine with it, it’s just that we really didn’t end on the greatest of terms, did we?”
changbin’s face grimaces as he reflects back on the last months of your relationship, ones that were filled with constant fighting and disagreements over the littlest of things, which ultimately led to a very over dramatic break up since you both had become sick of each other over time. “no, definitely not,” he chuckles, “but we can catch up like old friends, no? unless, you wanna miss out on a lovely time with me, then that’s your decision,” he teases, the old changbin you once fell in love with slowly peaking through.
you roll your eyes playfully, “right, it would be a shame if i missed out on something like that,” a smile breaks out onto your face, a sudden wave of butterflies and shyness overtaking you. “sure, let’s catch up. i don’t mind.”
“great,” he clasps his hand almost as if he was celebrating this small victory, an embarrassed smile taking over his features, “well, i guess hyunjin and felix weren’t lying when they said this ‘mystery date,’” he lifts his hands to do air quotes, “would be my ideal type.”
you shake your head, laughing at his statement, “right, they weren’t wrong at all. maybe they were a little too spot on.”
somehow, those two hit the nail on the head and somehow paired up two former lovers through some miraculous twist of fate. there was no denying that your heart still had room for changbin, a piece of it feeling empty since your relationship with him ended. at the end of it, you had chalked it up to right person, but bad timing, as each of you were far too engrossed in each other’s career goals that inevitably took time away from the other. it wasn’t the right set of circumstances for either of you, as nether of you were at a stage of life where you could nourish a healthy relationship. he was once the person you imagined to spend the rest of your life with, but at that time, you thought if you weren’t able to bear hardships with him, then maybe he wasn’t meant to be that person. it was easier to accept you two were never meant to be, but your heart knew better than that. your heart knew he was the one, but that life just cruelly got in the way of your relationship with him.
eventually, the waiter came around to take down your orders, briefly interrupting the flow of conversation you and changbin were having. in some strange way, talking to changbin against was incredibly refreshing, as you missed the sense of safety and familiarity he brought with him. he was still the same sweet and endearing changbin you once fell in love with all those years ago, and maybe those feelings of love never truly left your heart as each time he would giggle, your heart would thump out your chest. you found yourself having to resist the natural urge to hold his hand, or to reach over and pinch his cheeks like you use to do back when you were together.
you missed this, and you missed changbin more than you could’ve ever imagined. his very appearance was enough to rekindle old flames of affection you once held for him, ones you never thought you’d be able to experience again. you both were enjoying every moment together, laughing and poking fun at each other as if nothing had ever changed, and before you knew it, two hours had gone by in the blink of an eye.
changbin insisted on walking you to your car, matter-of-factly informing you it’s what chivalrous men like himself do, which sent you into a small fit of giggles.
a gentle breeze bellows through you both, a comfortable silence filling the air, the awkwardness from earlier no longer to be found. you look up to the night sky, taking a chance to admire the full moon that glistens above you.
“you know, whenever i look at the moon, i still think of you,” changbin confesses in a hushed whisper, a longing look in his eyes as if he was looking off into some distant memory. you turn to him with a quizzical expression, urging him to go on. “you use to always tell me to look how pretty the moon was nearly every night. even if we weren’t together, you would text me to go outside and look at it,” he reminisced fondly.
“you always looked too,” you smile.
“honestly, i didn’t really get it at first,” he laughs, “but i loved you and it always made you happy whenever we looked at it together, so i made sure to look at it every night. even if we were fighting and weren’t with each other. even now, i still look up and think of you.”
your face grows hot as his words fluster you, the unexpected vulnerability catching you off guard, “thank you,” you respond gently, “for doing that for me. it always made me feel very loved.”
“i still do it. i think part of me will always love you no matter what.”
your breath hitches, your eyes widening as he looks away bashfully, not expecting or planning for those words to ever leave his mind. you let out a soft exhale through your nose, a shaken smile taking over your features, “i feel the same way too.”
quietness returns, neither of you sure how to continue the conversation as you reach your car, “well, this is me,” you break the silence, pointing to the car next to you, “thank you for today, it was… fun. i had a lot of fun.”
he nods, “me too,” taking in a deep breath, “do you… do you want to do this sometime again?” he asks meekly, fearing your response.
“yeah, i’d really like that, changbin.”
“okay, great. it’s… it’s a date?”
“it’s a date.”
#cinnamostar writes#changbin x reader#seo changbin x reader#skz changbin#stray kids changbin#skz x reader#skz fanfic#skz fluff#skz imagines#skz scenarios#stray kids x reader#stray kids scenarios#stray kids imagines#stray kids seo changbin
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would rather kms than make my only winbre post be about Suo's stupid ass, so it's time to talk about Nirei cause i love him. i read a post and my blood started boiling i dont fuck around so now i gotta defend him with my life. also cause im sick and tired of him not being deemed marketable enough to be included in merch and collab illusts when he's a whole—if not the most important—third of the main trio. (theres something to be said about Tsugeura too, considering they don't use him but love using Kiryuu, but that's a different conversation.)
anyway, on Nirei and the exceptionality of being ordinary.
manga spoilers btw also disclaimer im not eloquent at all i just say things.
there's something about Nirei that just simply isn't special and i think that's wonderful. not in a mean-spirited sense; Nirei is the most regular out of anyone in Furin, so much so that he had to buy an ugly shirt he didn't even like to stand out. he's just a kid with a notebook and a simple backstory trying to follow a hero's example. he's nothing extraordinary, especially seeing the people he's surrounded by. physically, he's very limited, which he knows and doesn't ignore at all, so he can't do much in fights. no one is more acutely aware of his own limits than Nirei. i was reading the first couple chapters again and it breaks my heart to hear his efforts be dismissed as "playing hero," because Nirei is the biggest hero in this whole manga.
it's true, yeah, he can't fight. he's more like another average citizen of Makochi than he is a Bofurin member sometimes. he lacks fighting abilities, his diplomacy isn't particularly the best, and he's two seconds away from going into cardiac arrest at almost all times. but it's not like he gives a shit. every single time he gets beaten into the ground, he picks himself back up immediately. he takes hit after hit, time and time again, because no matter how battered or defenseless he is, his drive to stay and protect the town is ridiculously strong. he does go down when he can't take any more (keel), but it's with improvement and training that he manages to throw his first—albeit useless—punch (noroshi or whatever this arc is called idk). improvement that, mind you, comes from recognizing his own limitations.
some have called him reckless (Suo), but i disagree, because Nirei is right. i know the kids would rather look out for him and have him uninjured by the end of a scuffle, but he doesn't need to be coddled. everybody else jumps into a brawl and gets a broken nose regardless of their fighting skills. Nirei isn't any different. he knows he's limited, he knows he can't fight, he knows he's nothing special. he risks it all anyway, because even though he wasn't built for fighting, he's more than prepared to try over and over again until his efforts are enough to make a difference. he's looked at Sakura's back and thought he couldn't match him, that Sakura gets back up even when he's almost fully tapped out, that he's not needed because Sakura's stronger and will be okay without him.
maybe he's right about this, too. i'm inclined to disagree, but i understand where he's coming from. Nirei chases, Nirei can't stop running because he'll fall behind all these phenomenal beasts that can hold their own. i'm so glad the conclusion he reached was "okay, i gotta step up my game," but i'm not really surprised. this is Nirei Akihiko we're talking about and, i think Suo put it best, he wants to become stronger more than anybody.
he's been at a disadvantage this whole time, "playing hero" rather than being an "actual" hero, but he has a goal. if he has to tear himself apart to stand next to Sakura, he will. he doesn't have to, of course, he's already more than useful the way he is, but when you're so ordinary that you get lost in the crowd, standing beside someone so exemplary makes you want more.
honestly, Nirei's fucking wild. lil bro's actually crazy. we've seen characters go apeshit, but no one in this entire manga is nearly as insane as he is. i appreciate Suo telling him to slow down and chill out, cause he was fully intending to kill himself learning how to fight with zero foundation. my guy was more than ready to actually fight Endo. he meant that. it's a good thing he's properly learning how to defend himself, considering he probably lacks the muscle to go on the offense. those are his limits and he knows that. it frustrates him, but it definitely does little to stop him, because look how big his back is. i hope somebody tells him, after all of this is over, that he's doing more than enough, more than great.
to be fair, fighting isn't even where he shines, and that's okay. he's not strong enough to beat anyone's ass and he doesn't need to be, either. he doesn't need to be a leader like Sakura or a devotee like Sugishita or mimic whatever the fuck Suo's got going on. in the words of my favorite pink curse, the real heroes are the ones who support from the back, and that's exactly what Nirei does. he's said it himself, he wants to guide Sakura all the way to the top and he can, because he thrives in being another citizen of Makochi. he's a regular person and i think that's what makes him so compelling and important.
there's something so fascinating about his simplicity. he really is nothing more than just an ordinary kid. put him in a normal high-school classroom and he'll pass his midterms with a 75. he recognizes what he's good at, of course, he knows the town inside out and it's very useful, especially to Sakura. he's amazing support. it really doesn't seem like it and people love to completely dismiss him, but i wanna be outrageous and call him the backbone of these kids. he was Sakura's first friend and he continues to be the one pushing and prodding to make sure he stands back up every single time. he's more necessary than anyone gives him credit for. i have no doubt in my mind that, if it weren't for him, Sakura wouldn't be able to do half the things he's managing. even Suo, who's out here acting like he knows the secrets of the universe, has to stop and reorganize his ideas when Nirei talks.
if Suo is the heart (debatable, but okay, whatever bro says) and brain, i'd like to think Nirei is the spirit and the soul. there's no chance the kids would work so smoothly without Nirei around—which, yes, arguably the same could be said of all of them, but i've seen Nirei be dismissed as a Zenitsu looking ass gag character and i've never had to hold back a kys so hard. idk for sure what the general consensus on him is cause i've only ever seen him used in the context of ships and never on his own, which honestly makes me a little sad. especially after seeing the popularity poll cause he didn't even make it into the top 5 with not even 1k points personal offense tbh i need a word with the voters. what i've gathered is that aint nobody gaf about his ass im devastated Suo has to fuck off (13k votes is crazy gang come on). which i don't understand. take him out of the equation and everything falls apart. Sakura's the sword, Suo's the strategy, and Nirei is the ambition, the desire, the force, the feelings.
there's much to be said about how he's treated, not only in-universe, but also by the people consuming the media and the pr team. i don't fuck with shipping, but when i'm scrolling through my timeline, Nirei only exists in the context of somebody's favorite ship. and don't fucking get me started on the mischaracterization. look me in the eye and tell me Nirei doesn't have more conviction than any of these dumbass kids. yes, he gets scared and he's fucking horrified most of the time, but motherfucker he's fighting. he's out there in the frontlines, making himself useful, biting more than he can chew and then some. i dare you to treat him like wittle baby that needs protection.
if not for his uniqueness, look at him for his regularity, because i find it endearingly wonderful. i think there's something so special about the ordinary. he deserves a lot more than what he's getting so these mfs better put him in all collab illusts cause if i have to see Kaji in his place one more time i will personally book a flight. okay thank you thats all i promise ill never come back here have day.
#wind breaker#nirei akihiko#sakura haruka#suo hayato#defending nirei on the internet is not enough i need a gun#id say nirei get behind me but no. nirei go beat someones ass#shoutout to kisaragi nanao btw my favorite pink curse#i love you nirei you deserve so much better#youre my sunshine my only sunshine you make me happy when skies are grey youll never know dear how much i love you please dont take my suns#no cause it makes me so upset#hes right there are you fucking kidding me#what is it about him that makes people not wanna include him i dont get it#thats not true i do get it he looks too much like a child and you cant justify in your head wanting to fuck him#media literacy devil
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