#but trust me that i will find a way to write him into something in the future

[delight-angelsbliss]

Can I get sonic, knuckles, or shadow trying to help reader dealing with an ed like annawrecksya or bullymia. Fan of either romantic or platonic <3

Precis: knuckles, sonic and shadow with a reader who has an ed (seperate) can be read as both platonic or romantic

Warnings: ED, anorexia, mentions of puking, hurt/comfort, Sonic feeling so guilty he starts to take mental hits, lowkey that happens with most of them but I won't spoiler

Notes: in the psychiatric hospital my roommate taught me unhealthy ways to lose weight like making yourself puke with a toothbrush or even puking up meds to not gain weight since usually in the hospital everyone gained weight and became a victim of this. Guys I swear I can write angst trust 🙏 also might of yapped a bit too much sry for the delay to the other requesters heh cuz I usually go from first to last request until the first one is finished!! Also yapped a bit too much with sonic heh I decided to only go with anorexia because that's what I know better but maybe I'll make one with bulimia if y'all want

Sonic (anorexia part)

Sonic is already pretty skinny (as everyone can see) , he's gotten many compliments and weird comments about it before. It never bothered him. He likes himself and how fit his body is, he doesn't see a reason why people would hate their body. That all changed when he met you, the moment he looked at you, he could tell something was off. You rarely ate and would always immediately go to the bathroom after, only coming back with somewhat shaking legs, your breath smelled like puke, and your eyes looked lifeless. It made him so sad knowing that's how you valued your health, purely based on how your body looks.

Sonic made sure to check that you've eaten your food, and stayed with you for the next few hours so you didn't have any way to puke it put, even if that didn't work most of the time. Sonic knew you could excessively exercise after, or even starve yourself for days if you so please. He knew there we're ways to prevent it, but damage was already done, Sonic tried talking to you, getting you to a hospital, therapy, ANYTHING to help you. Yet for some reason he never truly saw the happy image of you he used to have. You'd drink water and put on more layers when getting your weight taken, openly reassuring him everything is fine and twisting his words to make it seem like he's overreacting. He knew this was a hard thing to avoid, he couldn't just avoid his precious loved ones treating themself so bad! It felt like he was hearing the world on his shoulders. His world; you.

Sonic slowly started withdrawing himself from his friends and other events, he started hanging out more with you to make sure you were eating properly. Sonic would sometimes withdraw or act off when going on a mission and this is basically like a mission to rescue you! That was always his excuse when he spent countless nights thinking of you and going back to friends, he felt so guilty leaving you all alone to fend anorexia alone. He wasn't going to let you live like this, that's a promise. Sonic felt tired after weeks and weeks of getting his concerns dismissed; "she gained 2 kg when we checked last week! She might need to cut, haha" "didn't you see how bloated she was? That's because she's eating more food" he knew those were lies, water can easily pass and help weight loss while making most bloated from lots of water, he knew you could put on socks and extra layers to 'gain more' when getting weighed. Sonic started hiding your pills like fat Blocker to help you gain more weight, instead he replaces them with iron pills

He started seeing real differences, so did you. You knew you would blow your cover if you said anything, sonic knew that too, he backed you into a corner (with kabedon 👅) so there wasn't anywhere to run, you wouldn't be able to outrun him anyway. He will always find a way to help you. He was determined, he won't give up! No matter what pills he has to replace, what methods he has to use to talk to you, he will help you!

Knuckles

With the mountain of version of knuckles it's hard to find common ground but I tried to go in the middle of them all

When knuckles first met you, he saw you as a happy and healthy person, but slowly. Something shifted, he noticed your weird behavior when going out to eat, how everything always in your home looked full; food expiring/never running out. He thought it was odd that foods, especially snacks, were always there. It worried him beyond comprehension. Knuckles is already pretty muscular and happy with his body so why can't you be? It worries him that you have to deal with these kind of thoughts

Knuckles trying to talk with you, wanting to get you to eat more. It had some lasting effects for a week... Or maybe not-? He would hear you making yourself puke each time after eating, it made him sick, sad, betrayed. It all felt like a roller coaster of emotions that he couldn't escape, he tried distancing yourself. It's better for me! Is what he thought to himself, but he realized; he's hurting you more if he just leaves you to deal with it all, the guilt ate him. So he started subtly pushing back into your life.

When he did push back inside, he noticed how broken you seen. You haven't been taking care of yourself, you've dropped many kilos, your body looked so broken and he could tell you felt the exact same way. Knuckles knew this was not healthy, he felt every bone in his body go limp, he couldn't break down now and he knew it! He had to help you! It was just a time race at this point to get you to be healthy again, a healthy weight, healthy diet, and knuckles wasn't going to give up

Shadow

We all know Shadow is a loner, he hasn't met many people in general so seeing an anorexic one was surprising and concerning to him. Under the presumption you two already built a relationship (platonic or Romantic doesn't matter) Shadow knew what he was signing up for when being friends with you, he knew you could starve yourself to death any second, the thought made shivers run down his spine every single time. He didn't want to lose another. He won't let you die. In my head, I'd see Shadow be extremely difficult, protective, overbearing, and much more! He won't let you have privacy because he wants to ensure your safety, no matter how much you communicate with him, it won't help his thoughts ease up

Shadow isn't gonna get crushed that easy, he isn't a communicator and he certainly won't try in this scenario... Until he realizes just how uncomfortable you are, you won't shower, dress, eat or anything really when he's near, he slowly realizes just how uncomfortable he makes you. That's when he truly eases up, going to sonic and the gang for help to find ways to correctly help his loved one! That's when he gives you more privacy, trying to communicate (surprisingly) making sure you have a nice filling meal prepared and more stuff that should help promote eating

I know this is probably annoying, but he bans you watching movies or series that have even a glimpse of an ED. He doesn't want you seeing it on TV or anywhere else, no insecurities, no movies that make fun of insecure people! He might loosen up sometimes when he sees you watching it without any problems, but otherwise. You're always going to be in good care with him

[daryltwdixon]

also do u have advice for writing smut?! i really really want to make one and have a draft but i’m so so bad at describing the actual act as well as the build up towards it— like i know what plot i want to do and have a solid beginning typed out but it’s just so difficult going past that considering i’m so inexperienced with writing 🥲 thank uuu

First of all, it means so much to me that you trust me for writing advice! I am not a professional nor do I think I write smut as well as some of my fellow writers on here, but here is what I will tell you:

warnings: this post is nsfw below the cut

I think smut can be super overwhelming and hard to write well! Bringing a person into the sexual experience is tricky because there’s a fine line between “okay, now they’re fuckin’” and “oh my god, I feel everything they’re feeling, and it’s like I’m really there with them.”

One piece of advice I read once that really helped was to remember the five senses in writing. I find this especially important in smut!I

I kinda went off the deep end here cause you really got me thinking 🤓

Touch

What does their skin feel like? What does the reader’s skin feel like? What sensations run through the body?

Is he warm? Do his hands feel rough with callouses, or does he run smoother knuckles down my face as he caresses me?

Do I get goosebumps when he kisses my neck? What does his tongue feel like when he soothes the feeling of his teeth on my flesh?

Is he hot and sweaty, desperate? Or is this slow, gentle, and warm?

As someone who has had sex before, I often try to remember what something felt like when it was especially good—the way my thighs shake after coming down from an orgasm, how flushed my cheeks get, the ache in my muscles after being held just right.

Joel's hands are rough, broad, his fingers spanning the width of your ribs as he pulls you closer. There’s heat radiating off him, the kind that seeps into your skin, prickling up your spine. His palm drags down, calloused fingertips catching on the soft skin of your waist, like he’s memorizing the feel of you. 

Taste

This one is easy to forget but can seriously pull the reader into the moment.

When I kiss Joel, I taste whiskey or coffee on his tongue, the salt of sweat lingering on his upper lip from a long day.

When I kiss Daryl, I taste cigarettes, maybe even something metallic—he’s always biting the inside of his cheek.

When I kiss their neck, is it salty with sweat? Or do I faintly taste the Irish Spring soap they used last night?

Taste changes depending on placement—a dick in the mouth is gonna taste much more heady, salty, depending on cleanliness. Both of them would taste so masculine (imo, hot as hell) but in different ways.

Daryl's mouth is cigarettes and salt, the dull lingering taste of cheap beer still clinging to his tongue. When you kiss him deeper, there’s something rough beneath it, something metallic from all the times you saw him biting at his own lip, the taste of sweat and sun. He groans low in his throat, his fingers tightening at your waist, and when he pulls back, you can still taste the smoke, the heat, the grit of him.

Smell

This ties into taste, because our nose and mouths are often linked together to create one sense. Smell is also linked HEAVILY to memory, emotions, and attraction.

Instead of listing smells, describe how they affect the character. Does it make their stomach tighten? Does it trigger a memory? Does it make them dizzy with want?Layer smells together for realism.

Sweat doesn’t just smell like salt—it might mix with leather, gunpowder, or something more personal.

Use scent changes to track pacing—sweat, heat, breath, the lingering smell of sex afterward.

As you lean in, you catch the distinct smell of him, of your Joel. Warm skin, sun-baked sweat, and the lingering scent of sawdust and earth, it's enough to make your head spin with desire. He carries the scent of wood and sweat, the byproduct of long hours fixing fences, moving supplies, hauling weight over his shoulder. His shirt holds onto the faintest trace of laundry soap, worn thin from too many washes, but beneath it all is him—something clean, masculine, steady.

Sight

Of course, this is a big part of explaining smut. Sight gives the reader something to follow in a scene. It’s about body language, micro-expressions, the way desire changes someone’s face.

Don’t just say what the character looks like—show how they react. A character’s body tells a story. How their chest rises, how their hands shake, how their eyes darken.

Make use of focus. What’s the reader paying attention to? A clenched jaw, the way their partner’s fingers dig into their skin, the way their body tightens before they moan?

Daryl’s mouth is kiss-bruised, swollen from where you’ve been biting at his lips. His hair clings to his forehead, damp with sweat, his cheeks flushed, but his eyes—his eyes are locked onto yours, dark, sharp, hungry. His hands are gripping you too tight, like he’s afraid you’ll disappear, but when you roll your hips, his head tilts back, his throat bobbing as he lets out a breathless, wrecked moan.

Sound

other than dirty talk (of course my personal fave) what kind of sounds are we making?

Think about sound variety. It’s not just moans—it’s grunts, gasps, growls, the rustling of sheets, the creak of a bed, the hitched breath between words.

Use sound to show loss of control. We know Joel and Daryl are pretty stoic, quiet men. So when they start out just breathy and quiet but then eventually they make noises like whimpers, curses, groans and growling. Whewwwwwyyyyyy

Dirty talk is sound too. Think about how it’s said—breathy? Rough? Stuttered? Is their voice cracking?

He’s not loud. Not at first. But you feel every sound he makes—the way his breath stutters, the way his chest shakeswith every exhale. When you drag your nails down his back, his jaw clenches, his hips jerking up involuntarily. He growls, deep and low, his voice gravelly as he mutters, “That what you want, darlin’?” But when you clench around him, slow and teasing, he finally breaks—a wrecked, shaky groan, his head dropping forward, his forehead pressing against yours as he grits out, “Fuck.”

HOWEVER. Adding descriptive words like these only make sense if you have reasoning for them. What emotions do they tie to the experience for the reader x Joel/Daryl? Just like in any fic, sensory details in smut should serve a purpose beyond just making the scene feel “hot.” It’s not enough to describe touch, taste, and sound for the sake of it—those sensations should be tied directly to the characters, their emotions, and the tension between them.

For characters like Joel and Daryl, who aren’t overtly expressive or traditionally romantic, the way they touch, react, and move says more than words ever could. What they do, how they do it, and what they don’t do all carry weight. Sensory details should showcase their personalities, their dynamic with the other person, and the emotional undercurrent beneath the physical act.

Joel isn’t someone who spouts flowery praise or gets lost in the moment—he’s gruff, restrained, but deeply physical. His touch is deliberate, heavy, his body language always saying more than his words do.

Instead of just describing how he grips her hips, think about what that grip means—is he steadying himself, like he doesn’t want to lose control? Or is it possessive, grounding, a silent way of saying you’re mine because he won’t let himself say it out loud?

Daryl is rough around the edges, but there’s a quiet intensity to him. He doesn’t have the same verbal restraint as Joel (though I’d argue they are similar) but he’s gruff, hesitant in his own way, always balancing between rough and careful because he doesn’t always trust himself with softness. (Cries into pillow)

The way he tugs you closer isn’t just about proximity—it’s about need, about how he doesn’t always ask for things, but right now, he’s taking what he wants.

Smut isn’t just about bodies meeting—it’s about what’s being said without words. Whether it’s slow and reverent, rough and frantic, or taunting and full of defiance, the way they touch, hesitate, take, or surrender is what makes it feel real. The physical act is important, but the reason behind it is what makes it linger.

Whewyyyyy anon! Hope this got your gears turning and inspires some good smut!!! Love you!!

[sleepynoons]

jing yuan x gn!reader, 18+, not beta read

cw: yandere jing yuan (kinda unavoidable since this is a yakuza au), mentions of bodily injury and harm, ever so slight sexual tension

notes: i wanted to write smth wayyyy filthier with this au, so maybe... i'll follow up on this drabble with a pt 2.... hrm...

FOR A yakuza – and an oyabun, no less –, the man sitting in front of you is quite nonchalant. it's probably from his decades of experience and the trust he has in his men to properly protect him, but most wouldn't be able to discern either of those things by the way he looks. but you know that beneath his lackadaisical expression and his relaxed posture, there's a danger that you'll never fully be able to imagine or grasp the full extent of.

you didn't intend to put yourself in this position. you have no interest in interacting with gangs or yakuzas anymore, and you have a stronger distaste for exploitative schemes and bloodied money. it's quite ironic, actually. you were only trying to protect a little boy from a leering stranger in black, and somehow, you've ended up in the headquarters of a massive organized crime syndicate.

even worse, you've wound up receiving the thanks of jing yuan, an ex-member of a chinese triad who decided to employ his skills in japan. you've heard the rumors back when you were much younger. he can break necks with his bare hands, hold grudges until they're settled (permanently), and mask all of his cruel and sinister manners with closed eyes and a content smile.

you think you've learned your lesson. mind your own damn business, or else fate will find a way to drag you back into this hellhole!

not that you can say your thoughts out loud. instead, you take a sip of tea and keep your head bowed otherwise.

"you still haven't told me what you'd like in exchange," jing yuan muses. it seems he's trained his voice as well, with the way he speaks so gently yet so precisely. you're sure he's capable of pulling out classified information and dangerous secrets with that easy, seductive tone of his.

you're not sure how to refer to him, so you make do with something formal, something distant. "sir, i appreciate the offer, but again, i didn't save that child for something in return."

"i understand, but i'd like to give you a token of my gratitude anyway."

you've had this back-and-forth four times now. coupled with the silence in between your responses, you estimate that you've been kneeling in this tatami room for at least half an hour now.

this time, though, even if you don't want to notice it, you see jing yuan roll back his shoulders as if he's stretching, and immediately, the two guards standing beside the door pace over to remove the floor table separating the two of you. you expect the guards to return after they place the table elsewhere, but they never do.

it's just you and the oyabun, and you regret not wishing to be left alone as soon as jing yuan asked you the first time for what it is that you desired. you internally sigh, taking the last sip of your tea before the porcelain cup is emptied.

even though it's been a while since you've found yourself in a situation like this, you're grateful that your instincts and prior experience are kicking in. you're not frazzled, nor are you concerned. while it's possible that jing yuan is masterfully concealing his killing intent, you doubt he'd dispose of you when you saved his adoptive son. that means you might as well ask for something random and inconsequential so that this situation can quickly come to its end.

"fine, sir, since you're kindly insisting. how about a set of tea ware? the ones you have out are quite beautiful."

"of course."

you offer an appreciative bow and wiggle your toes, ready to get up.

but it seems jing yuan's not done. "anything else?"

you startle, but you know you must not show any weakness in front of a lethal predator. at best, from the outside, it seems like you're deep in thought.

you respond, "and maybe some tea packs along with it? otherwise, sir, i sincerely mean it when i say there isn't anything that i need or want."

jing yuan tilts his head. "i understand. however…"

the yakuza boss gets up, and you would follow along, except for the fact that he gives you the briefest of glances, enough to root you to your position. you watch as he pads over to you and sit downs next to you. the familiar prickle of heat at the back of your neck, along with the goosebumps that rake along the entirety of your arms, are clear indications of your alarm, and again, you wonder how terrifying jing yuan must be in violent encounters when he already exudes so much pressure just by lingering near you. somehow, even when you've been telling yourself to not to be tricked by his facade, your instincts have underestimated the yakuza leader, and you're suffering from the repercussions of your carelessness.

a warm finger settles underneath your chin, and you let jing yuan guide you until you're looking up at him. his eyes are sharp, glinting with a mischievous, ambrosial gold, and the black and red strokes of his chest tattoos, as if drawn by a large paintbrush instead of the needles and teeth of a machine, peek out from the flaps of his loosely tied kimono. he also hums, though it sounds more like a satisfied purr.

there's no use, you think. you can't win when it comes to mind games, and you most definitely cannot put up a physical fight.

"what do you want from me," you mutter with a shaky, wispy voice.

he purrs again. "i want you to answer my question."

"i said i didn't –"

"then i'll help you find what it is that you desire."

he places the pad of his thumb against your chin, holding your head in place, and leans close, so close that your lips are barely brushing against each other. at the same time, his other hand has enclosed itself around your wrist, and has pulled your arm up so that your palm is settled right over his heart, beating at a solid, steady pace, completely unperturbed, radiating a warmth that is unlike his lifestyle or nature.

you're not sure how much jing yuan knows about you – though it's probably more than you'd feel comfortable with –, but either way, his actions make you fume.

"don't act like you know who i am." you're seething, but because you cherish your life, you grit out those words as your teeth sink deeper into your bottom lip, to inhibit your lashing out. "if there's anything i desire, it has nothing to do with you."

"oh?"

you almost squint as his eyes flash with molten amber sparks, slight intrigue, and transparent amusement.

you figure you'd make yourself clear, right here, right now. and so, you growl, "you can't give me what i want. and you never will."

"i see."

you don't know how you make it home. all you can recall are staggered steps, an almost kiss, and several rude shoves to jing yuan's men.

–

two months pass, and neither jing yuan nor his men seek you out in any way. it doesn't seem like you're being targeted by anyone else from other organizations either. you're just relieved that you can resume your peaceful life.

on one unassuming saturday morning, when you're awoken by your doorbell, you rush over to find a deliveryman waiting outside for you. you open your front door cautiously.

"here's your package. can you sign this slip for confirmation?"

it doesn't seem like the man is a fraud. you also can't recall ordering anything as of late. you sign the slip anyway because it really does seem like the man is impatient to get to the next customer, and heave the box back inside to your living room.

you open it, as the exterior doesn't seem suspicious. but your body freezes when you see the contents: a set of teacups made out of fine china and several boxes of rose buds, dried chrysanthemums, and matcha powder. there's also a letter, signed legibly enough so that you can make out the sender's name.

you were never left alone in the first place.

[gyodragon]

POST GRIFFITH TORTURE RENASSIANCE!!! i keep staring at your art of griffith's broken stare with the bandages wrapped across his face and his emaciated little corpse beside guts...

I read this ao3 fic about his struggle with recovery in an aftermath where he doesn't go apeshit. *offers it to you gently* https://archiveofourown.org/works/609721

it made me think, as a certified griffith expert, what do you think his recovery may have looked like? could anything possibly have still made him happy after all of that... or at least minorly not-miserable? what kinds of things do you think he'd enjoy in such a state?

would he even try to grow out his hair?

The Renaissance that really constricts our hearts!! I remember when first learning Berserk, it was the transformation Griffith has after the torture that got its hooks into me and compelled me to read the series. The rest is history. Thank you so much btw! I've only drawn him a few times but it feels like more in my heart. Thank you for sending that fic my way! (I'm super into gen fic and that is a good one) *Certified Griffith Expert* AHH! That's sweet! I'd like a badge or something after this long LOL. First off, this ask has given me SUCH AN ITCH to pick 'Iron Hawk' back up (my fan project about Griffith being rescued from the Tower early and the aftermath of that. It's my baby) I'm thinking about maybe using a different, more sustainable format by writing multi-chapter fanfiction with accompanying illustrations. But I assume you mean a scenario about his recovery after the canon full year of torture. Interesting. I actually haven't put a ton of thought into that because, morbidly, I have a hard time imagining any outcome after that amount of trauma where he isn't doomed. So assuming this is a world in which he is able to make some progress in his recovery that allows him to regain some mobility and use of his hands, I could see a return of the bandit era. I could see Judeau with his ingenuity and the help of other Hawks working together to fashion him a kind of wheelchair. A Merlin chair wouldn't fit with the time period but you get the idea! Maybe he eventually uses a cane and back brace. He grows his hair out but it never comes back as thick or as long. He shows his face again but rotates a collection of partial porcelain masks to cover the worst of his scars. If his hands heal enough, he learns sign language, writes with the tip of his finger in people's palms and writes with a large pen or quill. (edit: I've recently been totally swayed by your post about him relearning to speak and whispering to his trusted inner circle. I'm SOLD) I think his band would continue to whittle down until only the most loyal remained. The core members who would inevitably transform back into his friends. He used to protect himself from 'friends' with compartmentalization when they were among the thousands of Hawks under his command. I think that Griffith's life during recovery would be hell but he could find happiness in his inner circle reducing to a small group. Like when he was a kid. I think with the deterioration of his body, it could be possible that his mind goes into overdrive. The frail, mute, mysterious general who is even more of a political/military genius. No more White Hawk. He is just 'Griffith' or 'General' or 'The prisoner'. After enough banditry and roaming, the group reclaims a comfortable position in a land away from political enemies. Griffith gives up on his dream and focuses on fulfilling the promise of his vision to just these few people. He is even able to preform Robin Hood-like feats in the countryside. Outlaw goodness, that sort of thing. He doesn't retire himself though. I have a dark outlook. I think he probably satisfies himself with this twilight campaign, sees his remaining friends in positions of security and wealth and when all is said and done he eventually claims his own life. I think Guts is the last one with him when he is finally finished.

[maskedcrawford]

Hidden Secrets

G-Dragon x Reader

Summary: Ji-yong told you the truth, but what's going to happen now?

Warnings: The usual, some angst but with fluff.

A/N: Thank you to everyone who has showed this series love and for all the follows and support. Y'all have no idea how much it means to me!

Requests are OPEN

Chapter 3

Chapter 4- Risk Takers

“Ji-yong,” your voice is barely above a whisper.

“I think we owe it to ourselves to at least try,” his voice is audibly worried you're going to reject him.

“I mean, can you honestly tell me you don’t feel anything, between us,” he’s standing in front of you now motioning between you. You look at the ground and feel tears prick your eyes. Could you take the chance with him? What if he broke your heart all over again?

“Aein,” he questions, voice slightly weaker.

“I’m just asking for a,”

“No,” you say and close your eyes tight. He’s taken aback.

“Wh-what?”

“Ji, I can’t, I can’t do it. I can’t give you that piece of me when you’ve all ready hurt the one you’ve had,” you voice is cracking but it’s the truth.

“I’m not the only one who’s done wrong here,” he tries to deflect.

“But you’re the one asking for more,” you say looking into his eyes, filled with sadness and despair.

“I swear I’ll make it right, I’m just asking for a chance to do that,” his own tears are in his eyes, and one slips over the edge and falls down his face.

“I know what you’re asking, but you don’t.” you sigh and turn to leave again.

“Then tell me,” he puts his hand on your shoulder and you freeze.

“You’re asking me to not only trust you, something I can’t do right now, but to let you in to an even more intimate place than I all ready have. Ji, this whole thing is so messed up. I mean, how the hell did we even get here?”

“Baby, please,” he can’t help himself. He falls to the ground in front of you. He wraps his arms around your torso.

“Just one chance, that’s all I’m asking.” He’s on his knees looking up at you. He wants to do right by you, to love you the right way, but you aren’t sure he knows how. Not without getting something in return. You pull him up off the floor and give him a soft kiss.

He tries to deepen it but before he can you pull away. He looks like a wounded animal, the pain and regret evident on his face.

“I need some time,” you utter, “to think about all of this.” You walk out of the room, it feels like you’re walking out of his life, and return to your work in the small studio.

Neither of you speak the rest of the day. You find yourself fighting an internal battle. You love him, you want to be with him, but he hurt you, used you for his own selfish needs. Granted you used him too, whether you liked to admit it or not.

You could hear him messing around with some music stuff that night while you were in your room. Different sounds coming from his in-home recording studio. Curiosity got the better of you and you couldn’t help but sneak into the door way. He’s so lost in the music he doesn’t seem to hear you walk up. You lean against the doorframe and watch him.

Ji-yong sits there, he can feel your eyes on him, but he doesn’t turn around. He can’t show you his puffy eyes, the way he’s been overthinking this whole thing, or the fear on his face that he’s lost you completely. He writes some lyrics down on a sheet and he gives it a few minutes, trying to see if you’ll walk away. He can’t help the sniffle that he lets out and silently curses himself.

You hear it, that tiny sound that lets you know he’s been crying. So had you most of the day, and while it didn’t make complete sense, you wanted him. You slowly stalk into the studio and slink your arms down his chest from behind him.

He freezes at your initial touch and his eyes close momentarily. He sits back in his chair for a moment, enjoying the feeling of your hands on his body again.

“We’ve both had a long day,” you say seductively in his ear. He nods his head and bites his bottom lip.

“Come on,” you whisper. You kiss the top of his head, a sweet and innocent gesture.

He stands up, almost zombie like and that’s when you see his eyes. Your heart hurts for him, despite how he hurt you. You pull him to you by the waist band of his pants and kiss him deeply. Everything you want to say and don’t know how to say is put into the kiss.

“Fuck, I missed you,” you breathe against his lips, “I want you,” you feel him stiffen under your touch and you pull away looking at him curiously.

“Ji,” you put your hand to his cheek and he, oddly, turns his face from it.

“Aein,” you say shocked, even when he was mad at you or upset he didn’t refuse your touch.

“I can’t have just this part of you,” he says and walks past you out of the room.

“What are you talking about?” You call after him as you follow on his heels down the winding hallway. He stops abruptly and he knows this is the rest of what can be said. It’s now or never.

“I’m in love with you, and I can’t just have you this way anymore,” he doesn’t look at you, just barely over his shoulder.

“It’s too fucking painful. This whole thing, its too fucking painful. I won’t stop you if you want to leave, but if you stay, we can’t keep this up. I physically can’t do it anymore, y/n,” you stand there shocked.

“Love? He loves me?” you think to yourself.

“What if I love you too?” you call as he’s about to go back to his room. He freezes with his hand on the knob. He doesn’t look at you.

“What if I’m terrified because of what we’ve been through all ready,” you ask. He stares at the floor.

“What if I’ve loved you for a long time and, and when we were together it wasn’t casual. What if,” you pause and you know this is the point of no return, “What if I’m afraid to let you in because of all of this? Because you hurting me is something I don’t know how to heal from and if it’s all ready happened this way, us really being together,” he walks up to you and cups your tear-stained face with his warm soft hands.

“At least let me try to make it right.”

“If I lose you, I can’t come back from that,” you sob. Your body starts shaking and he pulls you close, letting your head hit his chest. His arms are around your head and torso.

“Do you love me,” he asks quietly. You sniffle and close your eyes, as if not seeing him makes it any easier.

“With my whole heart,” you croak. He kisses the crown of your head.

“Look at me,” he mumbles against your hair. You look up at him and he’s offering you a small smile.

“Baby we can do this, you just have to let me in,” he rests his forehead on yours. You sigh.

“I’m broken,” you whimper out.

“Me too,” he sighs.

“But we can heal together if you’ll let us. If you’ll give us a fighting chance. I told you; I’ll make this right.”

“What if we fail, what if I lose you,” you sniffle again and look to him for answers.

“What if we succeed? What if we get married have 10 kids and,”

“I’m not putting my body through 10 kids, Ji,” you interrupt playfully but also seriously. He smiles at you and the mood lightens some.

“Then let’s start with this,” he rubs your cheeks with the pad of his thumb.

“What if we are the best person for each other? Y/n there isn’t much about you I don’t all ready know, broken pieces and all. I want all of it. The healed parts, the jagged pieces, if I’m going to fight for anyone, anything, Jagiya, it’s going to be us. Because I know we can make it. I just know we can,” his voce is confident, reassuring, and he pleads a good case.

He does know everything about you, the parts you don’t tell anyone else, the ugly secrets you hide from others, that time you went to band camp and your pants fell down in front of everyone. He knows it all.

You sigh and nod your head, “Let’s give it a shot,” you smile up at him and he kisses you passionately; you moan into it softly. Your arms snake around his neck and you gently tug at the hair at the nape of his neck.

He smiles into the kiss.

“You have an early morning; you should get some sleep.” He says against your lips. You whine quietly, “Then at least come cuddle me until I’m asleep.” You pull away from each other and you both walk into your room. Slipping under the covers you feel him pull you into him.

“I’m really excited to see you unveil your next piece. I’m so proud of you,” he whispers lovingly into your ear.

“Well, I have to be at the art gallery in the morning around 8,”

“I’ll make sure you get there personally.” You stiffen at his words slightly.

“What’s wrong,” his voice is unsteady.

“What about the public? I mean, do we want to give this a trail run before we tell people.”

“Nothing would make me happier than to scream from the roof top of the highest building in the city that you’re my girl,” he kisses the back of your neck.

“But if you want to wait, we can do that too.” You grin and scoot back a little more into him.

“I just, I want to keep this between us for a bit. Let it be ours before it’s everyone else’s to scrutinize and judge. I want us to be solid with each other first,” you try to explain.

“Then that’s what we’ll do. But I can still come tomorrow, right?” he quirks a brow.

“Yes,” you giggle, “Just not as my boyfriend.” He groans.

“Ji, it’s just when we’re out in public.” He moves his lips to your ear.

“And it was hard not to kiss you in public before all this,” you blush at his words and turn over to face him.

“I promise, as soon as everything is over, you can kiss me as much as you want.”

“I’ll take that deal,” he grins and gives you a soft kiss before you tuck your head under his chin and fall asleep.

If you enjoyed and would like to support me, buy me a coffee

Tags: @loveesiren @natalicss @mashtatosworld @nerdydoll-com @fleabagspurplewife @multifanxtvshows

[rebel-hunk-enjoyer]

Am I too late for the KalluZeb ask? I hope not and if I'm not could you do 27 (Craziest place they had sex?) and 19 (What do they fight about most often? (Alternative: what was their biggest fight?)? If it's too late just ignore this message.

It is absolutely not too late! I will lovingly answer every ask about these idiots because I just adore talking about them and talking about headcanons absolutely helps me in my writing process - thank you so very much for indulging me!! 🥺

27. Craziest place they had sex?

Oh, oh, oh! I am going to answer this with something from one of my WIPs: Up a tree on Yavin IV.

So, in this particular WIP, they end up getting together on Yavin IV after working closely around the base and spending time together in the jungle. So much time that they have a particular tree they like to climb together for the view. And then for making out. And then for doing each other nasty styles. Which I don't imagine is that difficult of a thing for a lasat, but Kallus gets bonus points for being nearly 40 and boinking that far off the ground.

Of course, it's the craziest place because I wrote the scene before I really got into the gritty details of what Yavin IV is like in Legends, only to discover that they were getting down surrounded by a jungle full of INCREDIBLY SCARY CREATURES -- including piranha beetles that attack prey in swarms. How the hell Zeb can get it up in a scenario where they can be attacked by a swarm of carnivorous bugs at any moment is ... well, it's actually one of the reasons this story is currently a WIP. I love the whole scene and the whole idea of them wandering off for alone time together, but I keep thinking about these damn bugs. 😂😂😂

19. What was their biggest fight?

(I answered the first part of this one here but saved the alternate for this ask! 🥰)

Their biggest fight is about adopting children once they retire. It isn't a huge outright argument with shouting like they'd do in the rebellion, just Kallus brings it up one day (and it's been a long time coming, he's been thinking about it a lot, they're both so good with Jacen and there are so many kits who need a loving home) ... and Zeb just immediately, vehemently, shuts him down: absolutely the fuck not.

And it's like being slapped in the face, because they've gotten so much better at talking to each other. Yes, they still bicker, but the bickering leads to honest discussion and consensus and agreement on a course of action, so Zeb putting his foot down without even pretending they can discuss it is not their normal. It's also hurtful. And Kallus doesn't know what to do with that, actually, after this many years of their own brand of healthy communication, so he ends up just sitting on it. And sitting on it. And Zeb is doing New Republic Defense Force stuff, suddenly, and it's like he doesn't even want to be home with Kallus since he made the suggestion and what if Zeb actually doesn't? What if this is just how their relationship ends, at the crossroads where Kallus wants a family and Zeb doesn't?

It all comes out in messy ways, eventually. In ways where Kallus refuses to bicker about the normal stuff and Zeb spends more time away from home and the garden falls into disrepair and all the old grannies at the market who used to tease them both about their relationship are now just quiet and looking concerned until one day it finally, finally implodes. Still, no shouting. Just a flat assessment of the situation because Kallus has worked out why Zeb won't start a family with him and it's of course because of his past, his involvement with what happened on Lasan, and how Zeb must not actually trust him - how Zeb is right not to trust him even after all this time - how he's just been on Lira San living a life that isn't truly his after doing something so horrifically unforgivable - and it's time that he stops pretending, that he goes back to Coruscant maybe and tries to find the kind of life a man like him deserves after all the destruction he's wrought -

And Zeb has to kiss him to shut him up. It's an awful kiss, too. Desperate and urgent and tearful, quite possibly the worst kiss they've ever shared, it's like they don't even fit together anymore and nothing makes sense but Zeb is trying to pour everything into it, everything he hasn't said and everything he feels and all the fear, the visceral dread in his gut that started this whole awful fight.

Because Zeb wants to start a family together, he desperately does, but the thing that's been eating him this whole time isn't the role Kallus played on Lasan, but his own. His failures - his inability to protect his people - all coming down to the realization that he could very well fail again, except he wouldn't just lose Kallus but their children, too, and he already hauled himself back from the brink after losing so much once, he can't possibly do that again.

It's like uncovering a hidden wound, finally getting all this out of his head and into the mess that's accumulated between them from not talking, so it - so he - can finally begin to heal. And he slowly does. Zeb scales back his NRDF role to be home more, they repair the garden together, the old grannies at the market breathe a sigh of relief when Kallus is back shopping for the ingredients he needs for Zeb's favorite food, and their family gradually becomes something they can talk about - even bicker about - until they reach a consensus and agree to adopt their first child.

[angelsdean]

ok actually. i am not asking. i am DEMANDING. we NEED more ronald in AU fics (or canonverse fics!). but like i have seen every character under the sun be AU dean's exes / pals but i have never seen ronald ????? dean likes him so much !!!!! ronald should be part of the charlie nerd squad in non-supernatural AUs he'd fit right in, they'd bond over doctor who and ron would talk abt the cybermen and his mandroid theories. UGH. put him in fics pls he deserves it !!!

[lususnatura]

🎤 🎤 🎤

a song that i associate with my muse meme!

AHH, hey, ramone!! thank you for sending in this prompt :D since you sent in three of the mic's, i shall now be treating you to three songs that make me think of blamore when i hear them / that i associate with it. an explanation of why i chose them will be in the tags <3

hozier - who we are.

icehouse - crazy.

depeche mode - personal jesus.

[willyoubemycherryy]

“Who’s your new friend?” (Salesman x reader)

Summary: Your dad’s dark stranger is the one for you. Too bad about his cruel streak….

Contains: sit down chicas this is a LONG one, plot but gratuitous p+rn, dads!friend au, rough sex, edging, pussy spanking, he’s mean :( , choking, drugging, everything IS consensual bc I’m tired of everyone writing him as a domestic terrorlzing rapist, he’s still psychotic and unhinged tho, just not psychosexual because psychotic traits don’t always translate to sexual violence, your dad is sweet but trusting and naive, squirting, pussyspanking unprotected sex (don’t be a dummy, wrap your gummy) begging, degradation, praise, cursing, reader is a bit of a bitch, light dom/sub dynamics, his cock is stuuuupid fat bc I said so and have eyeballs, ur 22 in this period and he’ll spit in your mouth in the next installment of this series :)

A/N: Yeah, he got me y’all😔 Gong Yoo sexy, fine, tall, handsome ass got me😞I’ve been tripping out for 17 days straight over this man sooo…

┆ ° ♡ • ➵ _ _

_ ➵ ✩ ◛ ° . +

You knew your dad often had strange friends but this one takes the cake.

Raising a skeptical eyebrow at the tall man your father was currently introducing you to. Standing over 6 feet in a pitch black suit he was extremely easy on the eyes with full lips, perfectly styled hair, relaxed posture and not a wrinkle in sight paired with the darkest almond eyes you’d ever seen. You rove your eyes over him once more before looking back up to find him staring back at you…

Yes, he was perfectly lovely but was it too soon to assume something about him was..off?

You feel your face warm at how strong his gaze is but you stare back defiantly, mentally cursing your too trusting dad.

“…and since we chat almost everyday during our commute to work- would you guess that we’re both in sales and marketing?- I thought it’d be great to invite him over and talk more in a more comfortable setting!” Your dad says excitedly, smiling as he tells you all about his new friend. The man smiles alongside him, cheeks faintly dimpling and despite your distrust, you can’t take your eyes off of him as you feel your heart beat harder in its cage.

“I was going to call to tell you I was bringing company but you know I forget to use that thing.” ‘That thing’ being a modern phone to a man who was awful with tech. You scoff but nod to let him know you don’t mind (completely) and because you already know how your father is and he continues,

“Oh right! Speaking of forgetting, I don’t remember if I ever mentioned my daughter even though I know I probably did-“, you listen to your dad introduce you and the man smiles even wider as he steps forward, offering his hand to yours in a shake.

“How pleasant to meet you.” Holy shit. His voice is a lot deeper than you expected and you absentmindedly place your hand into his waiting one. The way it completely encases your hand due to its sheer size makes your heart stop before it melts down to a warm pool in your lower stomach, settling in your core like hot tea as you breathe out a shaky exhale. His hand is also rougher than you thought it’d be for a simple businessman as it squeezes yours and a quick flash image of that same hand around your throat has you snatching your hand back as you shoot him a tight smile.

“Right. Back at ya. Um, how old are you again?”

“Ah. Isn’t that improper to ask new people?”

“I’m just curious to how you maintain a career as developed as my dads because you seem so young.”

Oh. You’re quick witted; that makes things a potential hassle for him.

“Well, I’m much older than you. I’m certainly older than your father.”

“Ha! Are you also the Emperor of China-”, You’re cut off as your dad says your name in the way he does when you’re being rude but you ignore it, glaring at the man.

“Be polite! He’s older so you should speak respectfully”, you barely hide the roll of your eyes but your fathers new friend catches it and you swear you hear a huff of amusement from him, the low sound makes you shiver as you turn on your heel to go back upstairs, your dads scolding calling after you.

“Aish! Spoiled! Brat! You were so much cuter when you were younger!”

“Whatever!”

“Bellybutton lint!”

“Old man!”

“Oh yeah?! You won’t be 22 forever!”

The only response he gets back is the sound of your bedroom door slamming while you’re all too aware of the eyes on your back when you’d left. Your dad sighs as he runs a hand down his face. The salesman simply stands quietly, grinning as always as he observes your little spat. Something about it caught his attention though.

“She’s young.” And your father agrees, insisting that’s part of the reason for your behavior, you apparently were “much nicer” and he nods in understanding.

“College age is tricky. I met her mom around her age and things are so much more different than they were back in our day so I try not to be too hard on her but sometimes she’s so-!” He tilts his head as he waits for your dad to find the word.

“Difficult!”

Ah. How cute. A little attitude problem.

That honestly doesn’t surprise him because most pretty little things almost always had one- you were no exception. Though, you yourself were a pleasant surprise. He’d maintained a friendly relationship with your father on a mere whim, finding him to be…nice unlike most he considered nuisances, so when the man invited him over one day he accepted and as he trailed through the door behind him, taking in the warm tones of your house when he spotted you. Standing near the island by the kitchen in shorts so tiny the wide waistband made them look like a mini skirt, the words ‘PINK’ on the back and a snug white tee shirt, the blue of your bra peeking through, you walk towards them smelling of fabric softener and cold vanilla. Your hair was down as you stared at him like you were both scared and wanting with big eyes full of suspicion. The gloss of your lips shining back at him as your lips curl during your inspection of him, lightly arched brow raising as you gave him a thorough once over, eyes flicking back up to his when you were done. You were absolutely delicious to look at. Short, smart mouthed, pretty and prissy.

He didn’t mind the rude way you spoke to him- no- because your eyes tell. You were weary but interested; cynical in all the ways your father wasn’t but that was perfectly fine.

His smile slowly shifted into a smirk as he followed your father to the living room, humming whenever he would speak, but his thoughts were preoccupied.

Thinking of smooth legs on a cute face he’d love to see wet with tears as he spanked your smart ass raw.

•

•

•

When you went upstairs the first thing you did was grab your headphones and tune out.

What the fuck was your dad thinking??

You huff as you flop on your bed, scrolling through your favorite apps while you tried to slow your thoughts.

Everything is fine.

Your dad always has the most unconventional friends and acquaintances so this was probably just that and you were freaking out more than usual because he was unfathomably attractive. That’s it. You just needed to get a grip. But fuck would you love to ride him through the weekend if only he didn’t have such a concerning aura…and wasn’t pals with your dad of-course.

About 2 hours later when you go downstairs to get food and bring it back to your room-answering curtly when your dad asks if you want to join him and the hot stare of the suited man you’re trying to pretend isn’t there.

“Hard no. Do I look like a nurse? You two senior citizens can play amongst yourselves.”

You sigh when you get back up to your room, FaceTiming your friends as you eat, talking about whatever and whoever before you remember you need to organize some of your class notes and say goodbye before you hang up.

It takes less time than you thought it would so when you’re done, you go about your night routine. Teeth, skincare, oversized cotton shirt, lights off as you put on a movie you’ve seen a million times. It’s harder for you to fall asleep when you can still hear his deep voice through the walls talking and laughing with your dad, shaking your core as you toss and turn- physically fighting the feeling- until you fall asleep.

X

Another few hours later, you wake with a start. Something’s not right.

You can still hear the tv downstairs but no voices. The hairs on the back of your neck stand and as you turn your head towards your door- pulling the covers off your legs, the sight of a tall dark figure rips a blood curdling scream from your throat. In that same second the figure steps closer, the light from your tv illuminates him and your heart races as you stare back wide eyed at your dads suited stranger friend. You’re still gasping and reeling as he sits down on your soft bedding, watching with rapt eyes at you trying to calm down from the near heart-attack he almost gave you.

“W-what..what the fuck?!” He smiles as you get up to yell in his face, gesturing wildly.

“Why the hell are you in my-“, you cut yourself off as another realization dawns on you completely and he can’t help the compulsion he feels towards you.

“How long have you been in my room- wait where’s my dad?!” If you knew who he was and what he did for a living, you’d be much more agreeable…or maybe not and that’s what fascinated him about you. You were so unusual. Wanting to steer clear of him instead of on, even though he’d piqued your curiosity, you didn’t blindly follow like every other nuisance did; instead he was the inconvenience and the way you let him know via sharp words and distrusting looks was something he hadn’t gotten in a while. The way you brushed him and your hard working dad off with no more than a pretty glare while probably never having actually worked for anything in your life made him itch to correct you. Make you say sorry- break you back into the sweet girl he knew you could be.

“I swear to god- WHERE IS MY DAD-!“, before you can raise your voice anymore, turning to go find him yourself, he’s pulling you back by your wrist, covering your mouth with his other hand as he hooks his chin over your shoulder cooing at you to calm down - listen to him a bit.

“Shh. Your father is alright, had too much to drink so he’s passed out downstairs but safe nonetheless.” You feel your body relax against your will at his words but you still bite his palm for scaring the hell out of you. The pain that blooms up his wrist from his hand makes him hiss against your ear and you wish it didn’t sound so good before it trails off into a light chuckle.

“I’m going to move my hand. You won’t scream. Understand?” You roll your eyes but nod anyway and a few seconds later his hand is lowered but he keeps you sitting up against him.

“Look- if you’re some kind of extortionist or blackmailer, my dad only works for clean honest compan-“,

“I’m none of those things.” Huh. You’re even more confused but the silence that follows he doesn’t break instead he waits for you, enjoying your discomfort as you shift against him.

“Then what the fuck do you want? Nothing better to do in your ancient age on a Tuesday night besides creep around?” Your mouth would be the death of you and this might very well be the moment as you mouth off to a complete stranger who could be (and actually is) very dangerous but bravado was all you had. You’d seen and heard more than enough to know that an older man in a suit visiting a young girl he didn’t know in the dead of night never ended well.

“I want to chat for a bit.” You tilt your head a bit in confusion but he takes your silence as the go ahead, making your heart pound when he shuffles even closer causing you to feel his firm pecs through his expensive smelling dress shirt; the heady combination makes your pulse race as you fight yourself on whatever it is exactly that you’re feeling but shouldn’t be.

“When your father mentioned you, you sounded like such a nice girl…”, the low way he speaks resembles a purr, words vibrating his chest, thick arms holding you tight to him as his warm breaths coast across your chest and neck.

“Imagine my surprise when I meet you and you’re nothing more than an ungrateful little princess with a pretty face but very nasty attitude.” You feel your face warm in shame at the blatant way he calls you out, immediately defensive as you shoot back,

“What’s it to you? If you want to see some obedient thing then get a boarder collie-!” Enough of that. His hand claps down over your throat, squeezing not enough to hurt but enough to make you shut up as your heart rate spikes, nerves going haywire at the sudden cut of oxygen. You get dizzy quick. Blood rushing through your ears like a current of cotton, hand flying up on instinct to pull at his muscled forearm but it doesn’t budge and you whine- biting your lip as your heart beats liquid fire through your body. You were so fucked up, clamping your thighs shut as if that will stop you from getting wet but it’s hard to pay attention to that with a tight hand around your neck and mean lips against your ear.

“Didn’t your father tell you to respect your elders?” He tuts out and you nod desperately, willing to swallow your snideness if it meant getting air. He loosens his grip enough for you and you gasp so hard you nearly choke, the sound turning him on more than it should; he grabs your chin so you face him with teary eyes and he nearly groans at how weak you look. The sedatives he slipped in your dad’s drink would last for a while so for now it was just you and him.

“Answer me.”

“You first-“, you’re quick to shut your mouth as a smirk grows on his face. A fast learner.

“Smart. But”, he pauses to put you on edge before continuing, “because I quite enjoy your father and his company, I don’t like the thought of him being troubled by anything.” His words are sweet but they also fill you with dread because you know how much you intentionally butt heads with your father. Mouthing off at him just to amuse yourself sometimes. You never meant to stress him but messing with him a little was how you showed your affection.

“That includes you as well.” He rasps against your neck, nipping the sensitive skin there with more teeth than tongue and you choke on a moan, breathing hard.

“Okay. Got it. I need to be nicer-”,

“No, you need a firm hand.” Oh fuck. You bite your lip at that, watching through bleary eyes as he rubs his other hand down your chest, brushing your hard nipples through your shirt as he feels up your soft curves. The hand around your throat tightens when he feels you might move but when you don’t he doesn’t loosen it- instead he rewards you with wet, scalding kisses behind that spot under your ear, suckling down until he reaches your collarbones. Your eyes water from all the sensations as you try to rationalize what’s going on before you lose yourself to how good you feel.

The hand caressing over your body doesn’t stop, threatening to burn you alive with the heat it ignites in you. To make matters worse, you can’t even breathe deeply enough to calm down with the hold he has on your neck and you’re reminded of how pathetically wet you are whenever you move your legs as you’re completely naked underneath your shirt. So much is happening but it’s not enough. Fleetingly scarce touches is all you’re being given but you need more. You shouldn’t want this, want him- or anything having to do with him- but you do and that thought scares you more than any potential repercussions.

He watches you with an unreadable expression as you shift constantly, sliding a hand under your shirt to cup your tits, flicking and twisting the stiff nubs cruelly between his fingers. Laving his tongue over each bruise he’s left on your neck before choking you harder, making the veins on the back of his hand show and your mouth drops open, hoarse broken moans falling as your hips twitch upwards. This was how he liked you. Melting into him so obediently…

“You’re going to be a good girl now?” He asks like it’s a question but the even in hazy state you’re falling into, you know it’s an order. He loosens his grip again so you can answer, voice hoarse,

“..y-yeah.” The softened tone you use when you respond makes him hard beyond belief and he bites your shoulder with a satisfied groan and you swear your cunt has a pulse. The familiar burning ache is so blinding that you listen immediately when he tells you-

“Open your legs.”

He almost didn’t hear your sharp intake of breath. He barely noticed the way your hips snapped up to hump his hand… he was preoccupied with just how wet you were. Your arousal coats his fingers as he slides them between your sopping lips making you keen through shuddering breaths as you try to control yourself. A few hard circles to your clit shatters that control as you cry out, needy sobs falling from your gloss smeared lips while you beg prettily for him.

“Please! I-! I’ll-anything! Just-!” His hand collar tightens again as he slides two fingers knuckle deep in your spasming hole, immediately curling them towards him, grinding them against that spongy bundle of nerves inside you and the fire that’s been steadily burning inside you almost makes you black out from how quick it threatens to consume you. You’ve never felt more out of your mind, your cunt so soaking wet it’s audible. White-searing pleasure shoots electricity through every nerve and you’re screaming. Between the fuzz in your head from oxygen loss or the brutal way he’s fucking you with his fingers- the one thing you do know is that if you cum now, you’ll faint.

“Waittt- mm-! S-stopp!!” It’s the struggle of a lifetime to get the words out but you do and when you do, surprisingly- he listens. Taking his fingers out as the strings of your slick drip from them and you cry at the loss, the ache still there but you could at least breathe. You feel a nip at your ear and you only then notice the way you’ve rested your weight completely against him.

“Hmm? What’s wrong?” His voice is thick with arousal from how wonderfully you responded to him. So wet he could taste it in the air as you trembled and cried against him. The water in your eyes spilling down over as they rolled back into your skull. Your face was the perfect erotic expression of tormented bliss as he made you earn air and fight off an orgasm so strong it would’ve put you in a vegetative state.

The sound of your weak sniffles make his cock ache as he lays back on your bed, maneuvering your hips over his as he opens his pants, taking his length out he moans at the pressure relief. Swiping his fat head through your messy folds but not inside.

“Well? I need you to answer me. Or do I need to get it out of you myself?” You shake your head, lifting your arms when he moves your shirt up off you and now you’re completely naked while he’s still clothed. As much as his stare intimidated you, his attentions felt even better, moaning at the dirty kisses his cock gave your hole.

“Was gonna cum…but you didn’t say I could yet”, you reach up to use his arm as leverage while you wiggle your hips and your submission drives him mad with how much he wants to ruin you.

“Aw. That’s cute…but if you came before I let you, what then? Are you smart enough to tell me?” He asks sweetly but the condescending undertone makes you feel dumb as heat blooms in your chest and you will away the fuzz that’s making it hard to think so you can give him a proper answer. One that would please him. The fact that you even wanted to please him was something you’d have to get back to.

“I’d be in trouble?” You say it like a question and less of an answer and he finds your uncertainty so cute as he laughs indulgently at you.

“Close. It’s because you’re my good girl. And my girl only does as she’s told, yeah?” The same trickling tingle at the base of your skull is back again as you mindlessly repeat after him.

“Yeah.” He hums, lining himself up with your drooling pussy, sliding in with one thrust. Gritting his teeth with a heavy groan while you choke on a sob.

“Fuckin’ tight-!” Deep grunting in your ear overwhelming you in the best way and you lose it from how full you are. You could’ve guessed by his height and frame that he’d be packing but it felt fatter than you would have ever been able to accurately guess, pressing effortlessly against every spot that made you see stars.

You were everlastingly grateful your dad was knocked out because the sounds coming from you and your room were beyond incriminating. Even though he wasn’t moving, every-time you did, you could feel the deliciously heavy pressure against your slick walls. Shivers wracking up your body as wheezing fucked out moans left your mouth and you grind down in messy circles until the hand on your throat stops you.

“Look at you. Desperate n’ wet begging to cum. You’d do anything I tell you, huh? Just like a dog.”

A disgustingly pathetic warble is his reply but he wants more from you, choking you hard as he pinches your sensitive nipples.

“Uhhn! Yes!” The sheer desperation in your shaky voice gives him a sick head-rush.

“Open your legs for me.”

You obey before he even finishes his sentence. Thighs falling apart, cooled air over your center makes you moan wetly as you wait patiently. So patiently that the first heavy slap against your pussy winds you by the time the pain registers. As soon as the sting settles, warmth pools in its place, sensitivity heightened as you wail. The stricken sound makes his cock throb inside you.

“Wha-!”, another slap cracks down on your swollen lips, hitting your clit spot on and again and you try in vain to wriggle away.

“You still need to prove to me that you’re sorry for your behavior earlier.” He says, voice casual but no less mocking and you cry. Tears running down your cheeks as your body struggles to adjust and obey. Before you can shout out however many strings of apologies it’ll take for him to let you cum, he strikes your center again, hissing in pleasure at your screams. He feels it. That somehow you’re even wetter, dripping down his balls and smearing your slick all over the front of his slacks. He has half a mind to make you clean it up when he’s done with with you as he spanks your cunt again, biting your ear hard until it reddens.

“If you cum before I tell you, I promise I’ll make this the longest night of your life”, he groans darkly in your ear. You’re blessed that you can still hear him through the bass of your heart’s beat and the loud, wet connect every time his hand comes down. You were so close. The sharp sting and the pained pleasure of swelling warmth his heavy hand left behind was too much and your poor clit couldn’t take much more. Gasping through your tears, you scramble to find the right words.

“‘Lease- please! Ah-m’sorry!” Your raspy voice breaks halfway through when lifts you only to slam you back down on his fat length, flicking your sensitive nub when he meanly asks you,

“Sorry, I didn’t quite catch that. Try again, little girl.” You night just be in for a long night after all.

You could barely breathe from how hard he was choking you, swollen pussy enflamed from countless spanks, and your center was stuffed to the brim as he was so big that he didn’t even have to try to hit your spots. You scratch and wrestle with his hand until he loosens it, gasping and whining, you pray you don’t come from the instant relief it gives you. The rush settling over you like a fuzzy blanket. He shifts below you and you hurry to get the words out before he makes you come without his say-so.

“I’m- I’m sorry! So sorry! Please Sir, can I-!”

Sir. You called him sir.

It’s less of you apologizing but more of you submitting to him, acknowledging him by title that he held superiority over you that pleases him enough to let you cum. Cutting off your sweet begging with more mean, heavy slaps to your wet pussy, basking in your delighted wails as he fucks up into you.

His hand tightens around your throat and this time, you welcome the suffocating pleasure. Scratchy cries escape when they can but you’re so far on the road to ecstasy that you don’t even care how you look or sound, chest heaving as your eyes water. Your cunt feels like it’s on fire but you beg him in every way you can to keep going even though you can’t take it and he does, groaning against your ear as he rubs messily at your throbbing clit.

“So good, baby- you can cum. Make your little mess before I make you beg some more-”, he does not have to tell you twice as everything you’ve been holding, releases and you do make a mess.

Mouth dropped open as you sob and for the next couple minutes hot unending pleasure is all you know as the stinging slaps get faster, ending with harsh circles on your bud after each one and your hole gets even tighter before you go limp- liquid jetting out of you. He fucks you through it with a tight grip on your windpipe, using you like a snug fleshlight until he’s coming harder than he has in a while at the state he’s put you in. He waits until he catches his breath to slide out of you- who’s deadweight as he lifts you off him.

Rolling off the bed, the silence makes him look over at you only to see that you’re out cold. His eyebrows raise as he huffs out an amused laugh, fixing his pants before brushing his hand over your pretty face. He might have overdone it he thinks as he sees your face return to it’s normal, less flushed hue. Leaning down, on impulse he presses a kiss to your cheek, his gentlest touch of the night before getting up and covering your worn naked body with one of the many blankets on your bed.

“You’re a treat in more ways than you know.”

As he stands, before he opens your door to leave, he pulls a card out of his pocket and leaves it on your nightstand then heads back downstairs to get his shoes and jacket. Turning off the tv where your dad sleeps easily and quietly slipping out the door, smiling the entire way. Now he has even more fun.

You.

•

•

•

When you wake up the next morning, you turn with a pleasant ache and stinging between your legs as you stretch, sighing with a blissful smile until you remember why you ache and who caused it.

Pushing yourself up, you stop when you see a card on your stand, rolling to the edge of your bed, you swipe it off and raise it to your face. It’s a picture of lollipop, a simple circle on a stick but the words below it make your chest warm and you don’t even bother pretending to yourself that you aren’t interested in seeing him again.

“Next time I’ll make you even sweeter.”

In part 2…

Or 3…

[asahicore]

fast forward - pjs

pairing. jay x fem!reader

synopsis. After yet another romantic disappointment in the form of one Jake Sim, you go to the well you’ve always believed to grant wishes and ask for your one and true love to appear. That night, you go to sleep in your bed but wake up in a strange house. When you head downstairs, you find a man washing the dishes and telling you your favorite meal is waiting on the table for you. You’ve spent hours glaring at the back of that head, you could recognize it anywhere—it belongs to none other than Park Jongseong, your high school sworn enemy... and future husband, or so it seems.

genre+warnings. high school au, the type of e2l where they never really hated each other to begin with, they act like they're academic rivals even though they're not particularly academically gifted, jay has a thing about german the language, sunoo and kazuha besties, heeseung is a loser, jake and sunghoon are assholes sorry, ive liz is german, 02z get into a white-boy locker-room fight, attempts at banter etc, they're a little bit silly

word count. 26.6k

a/n. had the idea for this listening to fast forward by somi LAST SUMMER... and only wrote it this summer and only posting it now <3 i hope u guys enjoy reading this as much as i enjoyed writing it !!!!! jay is an absolute cutie here pls love him as much as i do.... as always let me know what u think and remember to vote for @zreamy president in the upcoming elections, shes the only one i trust to beta-read and hence to run a country <3 no it doesnt matter that shes scottish put this woman in the white house

There is only one thorn on the otherwise immaculate rose that is your life.

Every morning, you wake up feeling refreshed from eight hours of restful sleep. You go downstairs to the kitchen, a boiling cup of milky Earl Grey tea already waiting for you, and eat breakfast with your brother Jinwoo and father. Your mom dashes in, placing a kiss on your and Jinwoo’s foreheads, and on your dad’s lips, saying she’s late for work but will see you in the evening. “Have fun at school,” she bids every morning without fail. Your dad teaches Korean Literature at your school, so the three of you drive there together. He watches amusedly as you and Jinwoo bicker light-heartedly on the way there—even in the pits of his puberty, you and your brother get along like two peas in a pod. He still tells you about everything he learns at school and fills you in on the drama in his class, up-to-date with everything even though he pretends not to be interested.

You’re always one of the first to arrive at school, so you scroll through your feed or finish up some homework as you wait for your classmates to file in. Your friends circle your table and you chat about the last episode of the show you’ve been watching until the bell rings and they leave you for their assigned seat.

Class starts with your teacher handing out the math tests you took last week. “Jay and Y/N, great job, keep it up,” he says as he walks past you and the boy in front of you, and hands you your paper. Relief floods your body as you take in the bright red 82 in the top right-hand corner—not the best of the class, but enough for you to be satisfied. 

Good friends, good grades—nothing extraordinary, but it’s a life you dare say any high school senior would want.

There’s just that one thing. The thorn in your side that won’t stop poking.

You glare at it as it whips around in its seat and takes a peek at the grade on your paper before you get to snatch it away from view. It only gives you three seconds to rejoice over your grade. 

“Aw, Y/N. Good effort! Maybe you’ll do better next time!” Jongseong coos, holding up his test for you to see and glare even harder at. 85. Not that big of a difference, but it makes you want to punch the faux sympathetic pout off of his face. 

You’re about to spit something just as petty back at him, but someone whispers your name, and you turn your head in their direction. Beside you, Jake is smiling at you as he asks what grade you got. Your attention is swiftly taken off of Jongseong, whom you don’t even notice dramatically rolling his eyes, huffing in annoyance, and turning around. 

“82,” you whisper back, holding up your paper for Jake to see. His friendly, absurdly handsome smile makes your ears burn. “You?”

The corners of his lips fall down into a sad pout—the kind that makes your heart melt rather than gets on your nerves like someone else. “68,” he says. Leans in over the gap between your tables. Your heart jumps uncontrollably around your rib cage. “Do you wanna go over it together during the break? I think I need some help.”

One-on-one time with Jake Sim? You don’t need to be asked twice. You nod silently, almost mesmerized by Jake as his grin widens. He leans back in his chair. “Perfect. I’ll see you in the library, then.”

“Library, yeah,” you echo dumbly, but thankfully, your teacher tells you to all quiet down and starts the lesson. 

You’re antsy all throughout the rest of your morning classes and lunch break, so nervous that you barely manage to finish your yogurt. Of course, your friends, Sunoo and Kazuha, have a field day with this, and even you can’t help but laugh along as they jump between reassuring you that it’ll be fine, slapping your shoulders with excitement and making fun of your uncharacteristic quietness.

Jake arrives at the library five minutes after you, looking around the room before he finds you at the big round table in the back of the library. Your brain is too riddled with anxiety for you to make more small talk than “Hey,” “Hey,” “How was your lunch?” “Good, yours?” “Good.” And so you just jump straight into it.

You’ve only had a couple minutes of quiet explanation on your part and heavy nodding on Jake’s when Jay appears at the entrance of the library. He spots you and Jake immediately, and without any hesitation whatsoever heads towards you and sits down at your table, right across from the two of you.

“Hey, Jay,” Jake greets in a friendly manner, but Jay only responds with a nod of his head.

“Oh, don’t mind me,” he says when he notices you glaring. “I won’t bother you.”

As if he could be anything other than a bother, you think, but courteously keep to yourself. The childish rivalry you and Jongseong have got going on has no business spoiling a rare hour of alone time you get with Jake. As you go over the exercises he had the most trouble with on the test with you, your eyes often drift over to Jongseong as if to check on him—you’re cautious like he’s a spider in the corner of the room that might spring on you at any moment.

And indeed, the moment your gaze leaves him for more than a minute as you explain an intricate theorem to Jake, he’s out of sight, and panic shoots through you. Where the hell has he suddenly gone off to? you wonder, but not for long.

“There’s a much easier way to do this, really,” says a voice from behind you, and of course, it’s none other than Jongseong himself, quite literally butting his way into your tutoring session. Right between you and Jake, he bends over and rests his elbows on the table, taking Jake’s pencil from him and describing the theorem in a way that isn’t that much simpler. Your eyes shoot bullets into the side of his face while he, unbothered, explains this and that to Jake, who glances at you a couple of times but otherwise does not seem so perturbed by the sudden change of tutor. Either Jongseong doesn’t notice your glare or doesn’t care, because he doesn’t budge.

Just when they’re done with the exercise and you think you’ll get Jake to yourself again, another voice appears from behind, a much higher, girlier one. You notice the hand on Jake’s shoulder first, until slowly, your eyes drift to the face—you recognize Yunjin, head of the cheerleading squad, and she’s smiling at you, a smile that at once tries to cover and betrays her surprise at seeing you and Jake together. She doesn’t acknowledge you any more than that, gaze going back to “Jakey,” asking him if he wants to head to class together. You check the time—five minutes before the first bell rings. What do they need so much time getting to class for? It’s not like any room in this school is more than a three-minute walk away.

But Jake doesn’t even look back at you, just says “Sure!” with far too much enthusiasm for your taste as he packs his stuff. “Thanks, you two,” he says, looking at Jay first, then at you. You think his eyes linger on you for a second, but just like that, he’s gone, him and Yunjin walking side-by-side.

You watch them leave—they look good together, the cheerleading captain and the soccer team’s star. The white Vans she’s wearing have a bunch of red love hearts on them that look drawn on, and you think, Of course, Jake is the type to date someone cute, someone fun, someone who would draw on their shoes. Not someone like you, whose idea of a good Friday night is lighting up a scented candle and reading your favorite novel for the nth time. When they’ve left the library, you slump in your seat, crumpling the sheet of paper you had drawn a bunch of graphs and formulae on to make things clearer for Jake. Jay awkwardly clears his throat and finally returns to his seat, looking at you with his lips pressed in a tight line.

“Y/N?” he asks tentatively, and the sound is too much to bear, so you pack your things and head to your next class early, too. Your mind is racing with a million thoughts a minute—who is that girl to Jake, how come you’ve never seen them together before, how come he was so eager to leave with her, what was that smile she gave you about? In the fifty-five minutes of your biology class, which you uncharacteristically don’t pay any attention to, you’ve convinced yourself that they are crazy in love and that none of Jake’s actions or words towards you had ever meant anything, that you’d liked him so much you’d dreamt up the possibility of his liking you back, too.

Your next lesson starts—the smile Jake gives you as he walks into History is so bright, it dissipates any clouds hanging over your head. You do believe in male-female friendships, but despite yourself, you can’t help but think that anyone in a relationship wouldn’t give someone else such a perfect, warm smile. It just wouldn’t be right. And so, you reason with yourself that simply walking to a class together didn’t mean two people were a couple.

For an hour, you stare at the back of Jake’s head, and although you do eventually come to the more sensible conclusion that a smile may just be a smile, you also think it's unlikely that he and Yunjin would be a thing. If they were, why would they hide it? Jake is so nice, you wouldn’t be surprised if he’d exaggerated his enthusiasm upon seeing her. You’re sure you still have your chances. He even says see you tomorrow when class is over and slips out of the room to go to soccer practice. 

You feel like you’re walking on cloud 9 as you head from History to your next class—but when you remember that the next class is German, your mood drops significantly. Because the universe has it out for you, you and Jay are two of just ten students in your year taking German as your second foreign language option, everyone else having gone for either French, Japanese or Spanish. Your reasoning for it is that your dad has had an obsession with Germany since his year abroad in Bavaria, and twelve-year-old you had wanted to make him happy. Eighteen-year-old you regrets it slightly, but at least now your dad is ecstatic every time you tell him in German that the dinner he made was really tasty. Why Jongseong decided to take it beats you—he’s probably just insane.

But because you don’t really know anyone else in the class, and because it’s your last period of the day, you have no friends to run off with once the lesson is over, and he gets to bother you all the way from the classroom door to the staff parking lot. 

You’ve barely finished bidding Auf Wiedersehen to your teacher and Jongseong is already harassing you. “So, I didn’t take you as the type to be into guys like Jake Sim.” He says Jake’s name with such disdain, like he thinks he’s so much better than him, or like he hates him. It confuses you just as much as it annoys you; Jongseong didn’t seem to have a problem with Jake earlier at the library.

“And that’s your business, because…?”

You don’t look at Jongseong, who’s quickened his pace to keep up with yours, but you can feel the smirk on his face. It’s insufferable. “Oh, it’s none of my business. I’m just surprised, is all. You guys are so… I don’t know, different.”

You scoff. “If you think I’m not good enough for someone like Jake, I’d rather you tell me straight up, Jongseong. Or actually,” you say, looking up at him with a dry smile. “Keep it to yourself and leave me alone.”

He looks offended by your words, and it only adds to your already immense annoyance—he’s the one who just insulted you, so why is he looking at you with those stupid furrowed eyebrows?

“I never said that.”

“You didn’t need to.”

“No, Y/N.” He grabs your wrist and makes you face him, your stomach flipping in surprise that you quickly cover up. When he releases you, you cross your arms over your chest and wait for him to speak, keeping your eyes trained on a spot behind him. “I don’t think he’s too good for you.” 

This makes you look at him. You have to admit, your curiosity is piqued. Not like Jongseong to say anything even vaguely in your favor. “He’s just…” He sighs, searches for the right word. “Well, he’s just a bit of a dick, isn’t he?”

You freeze for a second. You’re so taken aback, your scoff comes out more as a laugh—Park Jongseong, king supreme of all dicks at this school, just called Jake Sim a dick?

“I’m sorry?”

He sighs again, as though you’re the unreasonable one. “He’s so… smug. A wannabe class clown and thinks he’s the shit because he’s on the soccer team. Have you seen the way he swaggers around school?”

You look at him with fake sympathy. “Jong, are you jealous?”

“Pfft. No way. I just think it’s a shame you keep going after these dudes who are not even worth your time, or whatever, so yeah…” he says, voice trailing off and looking down at his feet as he speaks. Hands in pockets and blank expression on his face, you can tell he’s trying to look cool, but the way he’s avoiding your gaze is a dead give-away. Even his ears have turned red. Jongseong is having one of those shy moments he has when he’s trying to be nice to you. Clearly, a simple act of kindness towards you is so hard for him that it radically changes the way he behaves. 

Like when you were fifteen and you just couldn’t get this stupid art project right, so he stayed behind for three hours after school with you, helping you draw and paint and cut and glue. 

Like when you were sixteen and your grandma just passed away, making you miss a week of school, and without a word, barely looking at you, he gave you a stack of handwritten notes of all the lessons you missed. To this day, you’re not sure how he did it—you weren’t in the same class that year.

Like when you were seventeen and Park Sunghoon rejected you in the middle of a crowded hallway. You’d run off to the girls’ bathroom to cry it out, but Jongseong quickly found you and spent the entire period cursing Sunghoon out instead of being in English, like you were both meant to be. He was uncharacteristically nice to you for a few days after that, never starting an argument for no reason or interrupting you when you spoke. When you snapped at him, telling him it only made you feel worse that he treated you differently, he smiled and told you how stupid you looked when you cried. It made you laugh more than it should’ve.

Like now, when he suddenly decides that Jake Sim is also a wrong choice for you. “Him and Sunghoon are good friends, you know that?” he says. “Birds of a feather, and all…”

So you know that Jongseong is not all bad. He has his redeeming qualities. He can even be nice sometimes, when he so wishes. But those moments are so few and far between that when he returns to his usual insufferable self, you wonder if you’d dreamt it all up. Which is why you can’t quite take him seriously right now. You roll your eyes and resume walking towards the parking lot, but of course, he continues to follow you. “Why do you even care who I go after?”

“I don’t-”

“You clearly do, otherwise you wouldn’t be bothering me like this.”

“Well, if all your attention is taken up by that douche, who am I going to go up against?”

“That’s what you’re worried about? That I stop arguing with you?” you say, disbelief clear in your voice.

“I’m offended, Y/N,” he starts, his sarcastic tone making you roll your eyes again. “That our little rivalry matters so little to you.”

“We’re not even the top students of our class, for God’s sake, we’re not fighting over anything.”

“I’ve actually got the best grades in German, thanks very much.”

“Whatever. I wouldn’t call it a rivalry so much as a mutual dislike of each other, because one of us woke up one day and decided to start going against everything the other said.”

“At least you’re self-aware.”

The exit to the parking lot now appears to you like the gates of heaven. You don’t even bother replying to him, thinking that he’ll just leave you alone now that you’re here. But as you step outside, he places himself in front of you and blocks your path, arms splayed out, eyes wide like he’s just seen a ghost.

“What are you-”

“Have you done the German homework for tomorrow?”

The sudden change of subject gives you whiplash. “What? No, Miss Schumacher assigned it just now-”

“Well, given your tendency for getting the word order all wrong, I can already tell you you’re not gonna have fun with it-”

You pinch the nose of your bridge, trying to calm yourself down before you lose what’s remaining of your mind. “Jongseong, were you actually dropped on the head as a baby? Go away. My dad’s gonna be here any second.” You try to walk around him, but he steps in front of you again. You peer up at him, undisguised annoyance in your eyes. Where are your dad and brother when you need them?

“I’m just saying, you’ll probably need help with it-”

“I won’t. And if I do, I’ll just use Google. Now get out of my way,” you say, and manage to duck under one of his arms.

Then you see it.

Well, actually, it takes you a second to understand what it is you’re seeing. At first, you think it’s one of those horny couples thinking they’re being really discreet by going to the staff parking lot to make out, when in reality they could be caught by any one at any time. They’re just far enough that when you do a double take, you realize that you do know the back of that head; that fluffy mop of brown hair. You sit behind it every History period, next to it every Maths and English period.

The girl is up against the wall, and you can’t really see her, what with her and Jake’s tongues being down each other’s throat and his body blocking her from your view, his hands on her hips, her arms around his shoulders. All the works. She’s wearing a cheerleader uniform, so she could be any of twenty girls—but you’re pretty sure only one of them wears a pair of white Vans with red love hearts on them.

Your heart sinks to your stomach.

You’re frozen in place when a whistle rings in the distance, and Jake and Yunjin separate, giggling to each other as they jog to wherever the sound came from. The sports field, probably. It’s Monday; the cheerleaders and the soccer team share the field for their practice. 

Jake spots you and Jongseong staring at them. He waves quickly, awkwardly at you, still smiling even when surprise coats his features. Yunjin tugs on his hand and just like that, they’re gone. 

“Y/N-” 

Jay’s voice fades in the background. You want to get away from this situation as quickly as possible—it’s embarrassing enough seeing the guy you like and thought you had a chance with kissing a girl that is arguably much more on his level than you are, but having Jongseong of all people not only witness it, but try to protect you from it, God knows why, makes it impossibly mortifying. You speed-walk to your dad’s car, huffing as you plop in your seat and slamming the door behind you. Your brother is already sitting in the passenger seat, and you don’t even argue with him about it. When you only give single-word replies to his questions, he shrugs and returns to playing Clash of Clans on his phone. 

The moment you get home, you fish a five cent coin from your purse, change into mud boots and grab your dog’s leash. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

After half-an-hour of trudging through leaves and soft ground, muddy from many a rainy November night, you and Pablo, your massive, fluffy airhead of a German Shepherd, find yourselves at the well in the middle of the forest. Ever since you were little, you have attributed magic powers to the well—not that anyone told you any sort of myth about it, but you remember reading a story about a magic well and decided that your well would be magical, too. You’ve never wanted to abuse its powers, so you’ve used your wishes conscientiously: things like getting a certain present at Christmas (when you were nine and the most important thing ever was getting the Monster High doll you wanted) or not stuttering during your presentation in class (when you really didn’t want to embarrass yourself in front of Park Sunghoon and his cool friends). Every wish you’ve made has come true. Whenever a faint voice of reason tells you that it’s because you always ask for very realistic things, you squash it and continue to believe in the well.

Because today, you’re not asking for something realistic. 

Today, you’re asking the well to show you the way to love.

You’ve grown up watching The Notebook and Pride & Prejudice. Your parents are high school sweethearts who are still, twenty-five years later, happily married. You devour romance novels and binge-watch Asian dramas, the more unrealistic and romantic, the better. You are convinced that soulmates exist, that love always finds a way, that it is there for anyone to see. That it can take form in a childhood friend, an archnemesis, a total stranger.  

But for some reason, it hasn’t shown itself to you yet, no matter how valiantly you’ve looked. 

You’re absolutely sick and tired of it. It is Jake kissing another girl, it’s Sunghoon leading you on for months and then rejecting you in front of everyone, it’s your ex-boyfriend-who-shall-not-be-named, your first love and first heartbreak, dumping you after a year and getting with the girl he had told you not to worry about a week later. At a party a few months later, he’d said, word for word, “At least I didn’t cheat on you.”

Coin lodged between your hands, you interlace your fingers and press your palms closely together, eyes screwed shut in desperation. “Hey,” you start simply, because you and the well are good friends. “It’s been a while since I’ve asked for anything, so I hope you can indulge me… This is gonna sound so cliché, but I’m really tired of getting fucked over by boys — excuse my French — and I just wanna meet the person who’s right for me, you know? Mom’s always reminding me that I’m only eighteen, and that I’ve got plenty of time to meet someone, but I just feel like if I don’t find someone now, I never will. And if I get fucked over again — sorry — I’ll just lose hope and write off men for the rest of my life. So help a girl out, will you? I’ll leave it to you how you wanna go about it, but… just show me that there’s someone out there. Please.”

When you open your eyes, you need a few seconds to adjust to the darkness. You toss the coin in the well. It doesn’t make a sound as it hits the bottom, as if it has been absorbed within the old brick walls. You know better than to question it—the well works in mysterious ways.

You’re quiet that entire evening, making up an excuse of a tiring day at school when your parents ask. Really, you’re just thinking about your wish, whether it’ll work, what might happen. You half-ass your homework—Jay was right, the German exercises throw you into a bout of despair, so you quickly close your textbook and bury yourself in your sheets, falling asleep hours earlier than you usually would.

--

For some reason, the first thing you notice when you wake up is that it’s still dark outside. It must be the middle of the night, you think. It takes you a few seconds to realize that you’re in a completely strange room.

Instead of your floral-patterned sheets, you find yourself covered by delicate silk sheets that your parents would never agree to buy you, no matter how adamantly you argued for the benefits of silk for your skin. If skincare experts online had convinced you of one thing, it was that silk would do wonders for your obstinate acne. You slide out of bed and find a pair of slippers on the floor, as if waiting for you. Even the pajamas you’re wearing are fancier, more grown up than the ones you have at home, a set composed of a pinstriped button-up and shorts. You look around, for some reason more surprised and curious than panicked. You could’ve been kidnapped, for all you know, but all you care about right now is this room. Rather than the pink and white walls that have surrounded you since childhood, covered with pictures of you and your friends, postcards of artwork bought at museums, and posters of your favorite movies, the walls here are beige and mostly bare, except for a painting of Japanese cherry blossoms above the bed and a family portrait on the opposite wall, above a wooden chest of drawers. 

The family portrait. A woman, a man, and what you can only assume are their children. They look like twins—two girls. Can’t be older than three years old. Out of the four faces, you recognize two of them. You recognize them far too well. One of them is yours, of course. You look slightly older, by a decade, maybe? You’re glad to know that you won’t fall off after twenty-five, like much of social media has led you to believe. 

The other face you recognize immediately, too, but it takes you a few seconds to truly believe it.

It belongs to none other than Park Jongseong.

A dry chuckle falls from your throat, as if someone has just made a very insulting joke at your expense and you have to pretend you find it funny. The well has a very odd sense of humor, you think. It’s probably just a prank, a magic-induced nightmare before the real thing. Except this already feels real, disorientingly so. The fabric on your skin, the picture, the room. It all feels too real, more tangible than any dream you’ve ever had.

You take a step closer towards the picture, as if looking at it harder will make Jongseong’s face fade into that of another man, the real man that will become your husband and father of your children. But alas, his features remain the same, frozen in time by the photographer’s camera. He, too, looks older—and not only does he not fall off after twenty-five, he becomes all the more handsome for it.

Is this how you find out that Jongseong was handsome all along? You stare at it until the familiar face becomes practically unrecognizable, like repeating a word so much it stops feeling like one. The straight nose, the almond-shaped eyes that seem to have softened overtime, whereas his jaw has remained as sharp as ever. Have his eyebrows always framed his face so perfectly? Has that dimple always been there? 

You look around again, and the bright numbers on the bedside alarm clock catches your attention. They read 9:57 p.m., but it’s the date that makes your stomach sink—today is still the 18th of November, but ten years later. You stare at the clock, at the unfamiliar number, a date so far into the future you can’t wrap your head around it. You could barely envision life after high school.

Downstairs, the sudden clang of pots and the sound of a tap running manage to rip your gaze away from the alarm clock. An overwhelming curiosity tells you to follow the noise. This is all a dream, so there are no consequences if you explore a bit more, right? 

You’ve never been in this house before, and you have no idea where your feet are taking you until you find yourself in the kitchen. It’s the only lit room in the house, and you’re creepily standing in the dark under a wide archway that connects the kitchen to what looks like the dining room. A man has his back to you, washing dishes and putting them out to dry on a rack next to the sink. He’s wearing a white cotton sweater, one that you feel you recognise without ever having seen before, and a brown apron is tied around his neck and waist. 

The first thing you think to yourself is Oh, his haircut hasn’t changed. In almost every class you share with him, Jongseong has made it a point to sit either next to you or right in front of you, so you’ve spent a lot of time glaring at the back of his head. You wouldn’t be surprised if he started developing two eye-shaped bald spots there. His hair is still short and spiky at the back and on the sides, longer on the top. When he lets it grow too long, it sometimes covers his eyes, and he obnoxiously keeps having to push it back like a heartthrob in an 80s movie. 

Something like a memory flashes through your mind, blurry like those images you aren’t sure came from a dream or from real life. Your surroundings are unclear, but Jay’s face is nestled against your neck, your hand in his hair. You can feel the softness of the close shave against your palm as clearly as if you were touching it right now. You ask him why he’s always kept it that way, and he replies that it’s simple to maintain. Then in classic Jay fashion, he adds, “And it makes me look awesome.”

Another memory, a clearer one, this time—this definitely happened. It’s halfway through sophomore year, a random Tuesday, and Jay walks in, holding his head high and looking smugly around himself. The bastard got a new haircut. Long gone, his messy, unorganized flop of black hair that looked like it didn’t know what it was doing; hello, sleek undercut. It accentuates all of his best features, which is terrible news for you. You had never even thought of Jongseong as someone having “best” features, but now they’re being thrown in your face. His nose. His jawline. His smile.

It ruins your day, and a few after that. You can’t quite put it into words when your friends ask what’s wrong at lunch—or rather, you don’t wanna face the humiliation of uttering something along the lines of “Park Jongseong looks good with his new haircut, and it’s bothering me.”

Here, it’s a familiar sight in an unfamiliar environment, the back of his head. Without really thinking, you take a step forward. Jongseong starts at the sound of your slippers against the marble floor tiles, but his face relaxes into a smile when he sees you.

“Oh, it’s just you, honey. I thought you were sleeping.”

Just you. As if the two of you being in the same kitchen is normal. You guess it must be, to this version of Jongseong. To him, you’re not the annoying girl he strives to best in every class—you’re honey. 

“I was,” you say, walking around the kitchen island to join him by the sink. Something in you needs to look at him, really look at him, maybe pinch yourself or pinch him to be sure you’re not going crazy. Maybe you caught wafts of some ancient algae that lives in the well and made you hallucinate?

“I left a plate out for you in case you woke up. Made your favorite. The girls weren’t so happy, seeing as it’s the third time this month,” he says with the special kind of smile reserved for parents talking about their children. The girls. A mention so casual, so obvious, your heart hurts. “But I think I got it really right this time,” he continues. “Honestly, it might even be better than the original.”

He goes back to washing the dishes and you watch the sponge in his hands as it scrubs away tomato sauce, the soap as it runs from the plates into the sink. A knot forms in your stomach, something like a deep sadness that overwhelms you all of a sudden, and tears form in your eyes, threatening to fall any second.

When you haven’t budged in almost a minute, Jongseong starts to say, in an intimate, almost worried voice, “Aren’t you going to eat, honey?” but when he sees your wet eyes, the tremble in your lower lip, he shuts the water immediately and dries his hands. With his thumbs, he wipes away the tears that have started falling from your eyes. “What’s wrong?” he whispers.

You can’t reconcile the man in front of you with the image you have of the boy that torments you in every class you share. You can’t reconcile the genuine concern in his voice with the snarky tone you’re met with every day. And yet, they respond to the same name, their features are identical, if not for the years that separate them, the stress of adulthood on one and the carefreeness of youth on the other. 

Your body reacts automatically to the soft touch—never in a million years would you let the Jongseong you know come near you like this, but here, nothing feels more natural than his hands on your face, your shoulders, your hair, as though they’re just as much his as they are yours. You realize the emotion in your stomach is not sadness—tears fall, but you’re not sad. You’ve never felt as home as you do now, and if one thing romantic novels have taught you, is that this must be love.

You look up at the man in front of you, eyebrows furrowed as you search his face for confirmation or some sort of an answer. There’s a tremble in your voice when you speak next. “I just… I think I love you, Jongseong.”

He chuckles. “Well, we established that a while ago, didn’t we? What with getting married and having kids. But I’m glad you still feel that way.”

The mention of marriage and children doesn’t faze you nearly as much as it should. You’ve only got one thing on your mind. “Do you love me too?”

You expect him to laugh—not out of cruelty, but because the answer is so obvious, it almost doesn’t deserve to be answered seriously. Like when your brother asks if he can have one more of your cookies and you tell him you’ll cut his hand off. Sometimes you think it’s easier to be sarcastic than be unabashedly nice to someone. Especially with Jongseong, whom you don’t expect kindness or patience from, you wait for him to stay something like, “No, that’s why I’ve stayed with you these eight years.” 

So when instead, he says, “More than anything on this Earth,” voice low and vulnerable, tears flow even harder. 

“Sorry, it’s probably just my period,” you say through sobs, although you have no idea where in her menstrual cycle this version of you is.

Jongseong chuckles again, pressing a kiss to your forehead. “You do get emotional around this time.” And you cry more, because you can’t believe someone other than your mother knows you so well that they know what your period symptoms are.

Rubbing soothing circles against your back and whispering soft words in your ear, he holds you for as long as you need to calm down. When you finally do, he tells you to go sit on the couch, that he’ll finish up the dishes then heat and bring your food for you. You think you’ve got your emotions under control, but the moment you bite the pasta, cooked to perfection with the most succulent tomato sauce you’ve ever had, sweet with a little kick of spice and a generous amount of parmesan cheese, tears start to fall again as if you had an endless stock of water behind your eyes.

“This is so good,” you mumble.

Jongseong smiles, his gaze full of affection miraculously directed at you as he tucks away strands of your hair so they don’t get in your eyes or in your food. “I’m glad, baby.”

You react to the nickname viscerally, words tumbling out of your mouth before you can even understand them. “You haven’t called me that in ages.” You widen your eyes at yourself, wondering how this was something you even knew. But when you look at Jongseong, all he does is smile more.

“You’re right, I haven’t. I guess I was reminded of college. You cried all the time back then. As much as it pained me, I can’t say I wasn’t happy to be the one you always came to for comfort.”

You haven’t been through college yet, so you should be unable to tell whether this truly happened or not—and yet, the memories of the body you’re in all confirm what Jongseong just said. But it feels impossible—going to university with him, letting yourself be vulnerable enough with him to not only cry in front of him but let him comfort you. Whatever could have happened in the years between the present you know and your time at university for things to change so drastically?

But before you can make sense of any of it, Jongseong speaks again. “Why? Do you like it when I call you baby?”

Your stomach flips. Heat rises to your face at his words, the tone with which he said them, the things he was alluding to—you know that having children means you’d popped your cherry at some point, that you’d had sex with Jongseong specifically, but to be confronted with the fact was something else. 

“Maybe,” you mumble, and proceed to stuff your mouth with pasta so that you can’t incriminate yourself further.

He puts on a recent movie, something you should arguably be paying attention to, since you’re literally getting a glimpse into the future of cinema—you could steal the idea, go back to your present and sell it for an outrageous price.

But Jongseong’s presence next to you makes it impossible to concentrate on anything but him. The warmth emanating from him, the scent of his perfume envelop you, give you a sense of just how real this all is—despite how comfortable being with him like this feels, you’re still not convinced you’re not just in an unsettlingly vivid dream. You take one of his hands in yours, examining each finger, turning his hand over, tracing the lines of his palm, smoothing your thumb over his nails—it’s an undeniably human hand. Warm against yours, slightly rough. He’s started using hand cream, you think, all these winters when his dry hands would crack because of the cold coming up to your mind, teenage Jongseong’s hard refusal to wear any sort of cream to protect himself. Memories bob up to the surface: fixing his cracked hands up with a plaster, your tear falling on his hand, the both of you in your school uniforms in what looks like the school infirmary; awkwardly gifting him some hand cream the Christmas of that year, not looking at him as you hand him the small package. Saying, “It’s a waste of plasters for something that could be fixed so easily.” Him treating you to warm, spicy tteokbokki because he felt bad for not having gotten you anything, even though this was the first time either of you had ever given the other one a present.

As your fingers trail up from his hand to his forearm, his shoulder, his jawline, more memories flood your mind. Clumsy first kisses; squabbles of the kind you were already used to; lazy mornings in bed; hours spent in your kitchen or his, before you shared one, cooking dinner together; the way you felt when he proposed, a feeling so intense remembering it is almost unbearable now. Your eyes and fingers examine his face in detail—even though you’ve seen him almost every day since the start of high school, this feels like the first time you really perceive him. The delicate bow of his lips, the strong nose, the softness in his eyes when he looks at you. Your heart beats uncontrollably as you hold each other’s gazes, but you feel inexplicably relaxed at the same time, two nearly opposing realities fighting each other inside of you—one in which you and Jongseong regarding each other with such affection is unthinkable, the other in which it is daily routine.

“Movie not to your taste?” he asks, voice gentle, breaking you out of your stupor.

“Hm?”

He nods towards the TV screen. “I see you’re not paying much attention.”

“No. I have… things on my mind.”

He raises an eyebrow, a smirk slowly growing on his lips. “Yeah?” You think your heart might actually flatline when he brings you in closer to his chest, and, face buried in your hair, says, “You know, I’ve been thinking that the twins might want a younger sibling to play with soon enough…”

You’re not sure whether he actually wants a third child or if this is weird dirty talk that apparently turns parents on—all you know is that this is something future you will deal with, not high school senior you. 

You whip up your head at him, eyes wide in panic that he mirrors immediately. “Or—or not. Later. Later?” You nod fervently, and the worry dissipates from his handsome features. “Okay, later,” he whispers, kissing the top of your head before returning his attention to the movie. 

A couple hours later, you’re laying in bed in the dark together—you can tell Jongseong is falling asleep by the regularity of his breathing and his stillness, but you’re wide awake. You don’t know how you’ve managed to spend all this time with him, acting like the wife he knows and loves, without imploding. But suddenly, the idea of waking up in your childhood bed, surrounded by your pink-and-white walls, going downstairs to be greeted by your brother and parents, sends a wave of panic through you. You haven’t felt this comfortable in a long time—Jongseong’s arm draped over your waist, the fact that you could reach over and feel his skin against your palm if you wanted. You don’t want to go back to a time where you hate him. In fact, you don’t know if you could hate him after this.

“Jongseong?” you say softly, the syllables unfamiliar on your tongue, even though the name rings brusquely through your head for the best part of every day.

It takes a few seconds, but he reacts eventually. “Hm? Did you just call me Jongseong?” he murmurs sleepily, as if you’d just called him Robert or Christopher and not the name his own parents gave him.

“Yeah.”

He chuckles. “Now that’s something you haven’t called me in ages. Makes me feel like you’re mad at me,” he says, turning over and burying his face in the crook of your neck. His hair tickles your skin, and one of your hands comes up reflexively to feel the softness of his close shave.

“...Jong?” you try.

“That’s a step up, but not quite what I want,” he mumbles.

You’re silent for a few moments. “Honey,” you say tentatively, voice a mere whisper.

“That’s better.” You can hear the smile in his voice.

“Will you be here in the morning?”

“Mh-hm. It’s Saturday tomorrow.”

“No,” you say, feeling out of breath. “I mean, will you be here?”

You’re aware you’re not making much sense—and yet, Jongseong needs no further explanation. “Of course, baby,” he starts, voice soothing. “I’ll be here tomorrow, and the day after that, and every day afterwards. ‘Til death do us part, remember?”

You let out a shaky breath. “Okay.”

“I love you, Y/N.”

“I love you, too,” you find yourself saying, and, more importantly, meaning. It’s the last thing either of you says before falling asleep.

--

Tears are streaming down your face when you wake up the next day. When you open your eyes, pink and white obnoxiously stare back at you. The clock reads 7:12, just three minutes before your alarm goes off, and unfortunately for high school you, the night hasn’t given in to Saturday morning—it’s Tuesday, and you have to go to school and act as if you hadn’t just had the weirdest, most realistic dream of your life. You don’t even get a weekend to shake this weird feeling in your stomach off, you’re going to have to face Park Jongseong full force. At least, this will become your friends’ favorite bit for the foreseeable future.

They’re already sitting in the classroom when you get there, animatedly chatting to each other. You plop down in your seat in front of them, and when they see the sullen look on your face, ask you what’s wrong.

“Did you wake up during the night to play Hay Day again?” Kazuha asks, eyebrows knotted with genuine worry.

“I’m not that person anymore,” you reply. “No, I just had a really weird dream. More like a nightmare, really. It feels like I didn’t get any sleep.”

“What was it about?” Sunoo asks.

Your eyes dart back-and-forth between the two of them as you brace yourself for their reactions. Not wanting anyone else to overhear, you lean in conspiratorially. They mirror you. “I was married to Park Jongseong,” you whisper. As expected, they burst into laughter immediately, and you lean back in your seat, crossing your arms in annoyance. “It’s not funny.”

“It’s very funny,” Kazuha retorts. “It’s ironic, even, considering how much you hate the guy.”

“Exactly!”

“But I guess even you know how ridiculous it is that you hate him, if your brain is able to imagine yourself being married to him,” Sunoo adds, shrugging. “It’s a good reminder that you’re literally the only person in this school with a vendetta against him.”

Kazuha nods energetically. “He picked up a pen for me, once. He’s a nice guy.”

You look around the room in panic. “Keep it down, will you?” you hush, despite the fact that no one is paying any attention to the three of you. You sigh, resolving yourself to telling them the entire truth. “But guys, I’m scared. I think this might be a sign.”

Their eyebrows perk up. “A sign that your hatred of him has actually been disguising a crush this entire time?” Sunoo asks, feigning innocence.

“No—what? Where did you get that idea?”

“Nowhere. Go on.”

“Whatever. Come here,” you say, gesturing for them to huddle again. “It’s the well.”

“Oh my God, Y/N, you’ve actually lost it,” Kazuha says, fascinated by your stupidity.

“I’m not going to tolerate any well slander, this is serious. I just wanted it to reassure me that there was someone out there for me. And then I had that stupid dream.”

Kazuha and Sunoo exchange a look like they’re parents trying to announce to their daughter that she’s adopted. “Y/N…” Sunoo starts.

“This is crazy. Like, love philters and writing Park Sunghoon’s name a hundred times are one thing, this is…”

“Crazy,” Sunoo said, nodding along. “This is crazy. There’s no other word for it. Your eighteen years of boyfriendlessness have finally caught up to you.”

“You guys don’t get it. What about that time I asked it to give me a good grade on our Literature exam and I literally came first out of our class? Or when I told it I missed Jung Hae-in and his military discharge announcement came the next day?” you say, aware that the look in your eyes is only confirming their suspicions—but you need someone to believe you, or at the very least understand you.

“One, you’re a good student. Two, that was pure coincidence,” Sunoo explains.

“But girl, if you want to marry Jay, that’s fine. You’ve got our blessing,” Kazuha says, shrugging.

“Yeah. He picked up her pen, once,” Sunoo adds.

“And you know, you guys clearly have some sort of chemistry.”

You scoff. “If you think that him refuting my every word and finding every opportunity to make fun of me, then yeah, I guess you could say we have chemistry.”

“You guys have banter,” Kazuha says as if it’s obvious.

“Oh, please. Banter is cute. I want to kill him every time he opens his mouth.”

Your friends both roll their eyes. “While I understand that most men are better off staying quiet—no offense, Sunoo—”

“None taken.”

“You have to admit Jay is not nearly as insufferable as you make him out to be,” Kazuha says.

“Are you kidding me? He’s always acting like a child. Rubbing it in my face when he gets a better grade, trying to start arguments for no reason, sucking up to teachers, stealing my erasers, for God’s sake, you’d think he’s twelve. I know that I’m not on the majority's side, but I seriously cannot understand how other people tolerate him at all.”

Sunoo sighs. “Because he’s nice to everyone. He never hesitates to help people, he’s even funny, sometimes, and—well, look at him.” He nods his head towards the door, and when you turn around, Jongseong is indeed walking in the classroom. “He’s not a bad-looking boy.”

“Gosh, Sunoo, maybe you should marry him,” Kazuha says, but since you laid your eyes on Jongseong, you’ve stopped listening.

You feel weird. You look at him, and you feel weird. It’s the same feeling you had during your sleep last night, a feeling that paralyzes you from head to toe, that starts in your stomach and spreads to your entire body, weighs you down in your chair. 

“Hey, guys,” he greets simply, and his voice wraps itself around your heart and squeezes. You can’t do anything but watch him as he takes his seat next to you, plopping his bag on the table and taking his notebook out. He looks at you, watches you watching him, then swivels around in his chair.

“What’s wrong with her?” he asks your friends.

“She had a dream that she m—”

“Do not finish that sentence, Zuha, if you want to live to see another day.”

“Yes, ma’am,” she replies, a satisfied little smile on her lips.

Despite yourself, you’re still staring at Jongseong, trying to figure out what the hell these emotions are that are raging up a storm inside of you. Instead of ignoring you, he turns to face you, resting his elbow on the table and his chin in his palm as he stares back at you, smirking. “What’s up, Y/N? Has it finally dawned on you how devastatingly handsome I am?” he asks, and you frown, because he’s not so far off from the truth.

“Please, kids, it’s 9 a.m., don’t flirt right in front of us,” Sunoo says, despair in his voice.

“She’s the one who started it,” Jongseong replies, still looking at you, his smirk growing.

For some reason, this startles you out of your trance, and you look away from him like you’ve been burned, preoccupying yourself instead with your notes for this class. “In your dreams, Jongseong,” you mumble.

“More like in yours,” Kazuha says, her and Sunoo giggling.

“Zuha!” you exclaim. Jongseong looks at you with raised eyebrows, and with his infuriating capacity to put two and two together, you’re scared he’s figured out what she meant, but you’re literally saved by your teacher who walks in at that moment and starts the class. 

The second the bell rings to signify the end of the class, you hurriedly pack your things and mutter an excuse about needing the bathroom, trying to get as far away as possible from the boy whose all-too familiar scent had messed with your thoughts all class, whose every brush of his arm against yours had made your heart race uncontrollably.

--

It hadn’t just been a dream. It couldn’t have been.

Just like there was no doubt the 28-year-old Jongseong from last night had once been the annoying boy you knew, the 18-year-old Jongseong was sure to one day become the husband of your dreams. A devoted partner and father, his presence comforting, his good looks indeed devastating, unwavering.

There was no mistake to be made. The well had worked its magic.

Whether you liked it or not, you would end up marrying Park Jongseong. You, of all people; him, of all people.

Was there already something of your future husband in the boy that snickered when you mixed up your genders in German class, or would he one day spring out of nowhere? Apparently, you’d be around to find out.

But for now, how to act around him? It felt unfair that you were privy to this knowledge of your shared future while he was ignorant of it. Blissfully, perhaps. You couldn’t imagine that he would rejoice much at this news.

Your mind is somewhere else the entire day. At lunch, your other friends try to get the thing that’s obviously bothering you out of you, but Kazuha and Sunoo are there to tell them not to bother. You’d needed to tell someone about it, but you don’t want the entire school to know about your marital premonitions. The two knuckleheads you call your best friends are already doing a good enough job teasing you about it—”There’s your husband, Y/N,” when Jongseong walks past; “So have you thought of baby names? Kayleigh and Mackayleigh, perhaps?” unsolicited, during Physics. You turn around to check on the culprit — because yes, Jongseong is the culprit here, you, a mere a victim — and when he notices you staring, nods at you as if to say, What’s your problem?, trying to look threatening in his white lab coat that’s three sizes too big and protective goggles.

It doesn’t help that Jongseong has a way of hovering around you. Even in classes in which your teachers assigned the seats for you, he’s never far from your seat. The two of you sit next to each other in German, your last class every Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. But today, the seat next to you is empty—what would’ve been a cause for celebration just yesterday is now a source of worry. You’d seen him just two hours ago in your previous class together, so where the hell was he now? He’s lucky that your teacher is an old German lady who always spends the first ten minutes of the lesson rambling about something in dialectal German no one understands but nods along to anyway. When he walks into the room, five minutes late, she just says, “Hallo, Jay,” and continues with her story. It’s about her first school trip to Berlin when she was fifteen and the country was still divided. You think.

He winks at you when he takes his seat and you roll your eyes. You pretend to listen to your teacher for thirty seconds, then hit him gently with your elbow. “Where were you?” you ask without looking at him.

He doesn’t answer immediately, probably surprised you initiated a non-hostile conversation with him for once. “I was just hanging out with my friends, something you clearly wouldn’t understand.”

And your friends wondered why you hated him?

“Still having imaginary friends at eighteen is really concerning, Jongseong. You should see someone about it.”

When you glance at him, he’s already looking right at you, smiling. You’ve never felt so conscious of your side profile. 

“Why? Were you worried?” he whispers, kicking your foot with his.

You look at him, horrified—where the hell had he gotten that idea? How was he so spot-on? You scoff, trying to diffuse the tension inside yourself. “No.”

He kicks your foot again. “I was five minutes late and you started to worry?”

“No. Stop.”

“I didn’t know you cared about me so much, Y/N.”

This time, you give him a harsh look, one that lets him know you really mean your words—“Stop it.” Finally, he relents, getting the assigned homework out now that the teacher has actually started the lesson. Your face softens—he looks hurt. Guilt tugs at your heartstrings.

Despite what you might say, you like the way things are with Jongseong. If some people always need to be crushing on someone, you always need to have someone you perceive as an enemy—it was Na Jaemin in elementary school, because he’d once made fun of your incapability to climb the monkey bars; Shin Ryujin, in middle school, for kissing your crush during a game of spin-the-bottle at your own birthday party; Park Jongseong, since freshman year, for simply existing. Your reasons for disliking him are trivial, you’ll admit. You weren’t sure you could even place a finger on what had first triggered your disdain towards him—one too many awful jokes, one too many times raising his hand in class and rattling off a perfect answer, then looking around himself proudly, one too many roars of laughter heard throughout the entire cafeteria. The fact that no one else seemed to be bothered by him only added to your aggravation. He just got on your nerves, and it seemed that you openly showing your dislike of him — him, who was so used to being loved by everyone around him, pampered by his family, praised by his teachers, popular among his peers — was enough to make him dislike you, too. So, after a few failed attempts at trying to be your friend, because Jongseong was unable to not be friends with everyone he met, he didn’t simply give up. 

If he couldn’t be your friend, then fine, he’d be your enemy.

At least, that’s how it appears to you, still now. It’s never gone dangerously far, but if there’s an opening to tease you or get on your nerves, he’ll do it. Not passing you the ball during soccer, or conversely, only aiming for you during dodgeball, not sharing his textbook with you when you forgot it unless you beg, loudly clearing his throat when you speak in class. And, lately, pouring salt on your wounds in the form of reminding you how impossible you and Jake Sim are. His motto must be if there’s a will, there’s a way. And when it comes to making your life hell, his will is infinite.

Everything is upside-down now. The question of how your relationship can possibly go from this to that obsesses you. It feels like you’re more capable of sharing a funeral, dying at each others’ hands, than a wedding. 

“Jong, your textbook.”

He squints at you. “Funny how I’m Jongseong when you hate me, Jong when you need a textbook,” he says, sliding his book closer to himself.

“It’s not my fault your name is a mouthful,” you retort, trying to pull it back to the middle of the table, but he’s quicker than you.

“Then maybe you should call me Jay, like everyone else on Earth.”

“Where’s the fun in that? Now give it here. Please?” you ask, mustering your best smile. Any other teacher would’ve scolded the two of you by now, but Ms. Schumacher is peacefully going on about the importance of word order and punctuation in the German sentence, oblivious to her two students bickering in the back row. Jongseong usually never sits at the back of the classroom—only here.

He gives in, smiling back, but there’s something behind it, something that tells you nothing good is brewing in his brain. “Only because you’re so pretty.”

Normally, this kind of remark would’ve warranted a slap on the arm or an array of insults, but if today is anything, it is not normal. You look at him like you’ve been stung, visions of your not-dream coming to you in flashes like you’re the titular character on That’s So Raven—the affection in your husband’s eyes, the kindness in his words, the sincerity in his smile. Again, you’re left to wonder if this man is already taking root inside of the boy next to you, if Jongseong’s future capacity to love you presently exists in his heart.

Does your future capacity to love him already exist in your heart?

You watch as his smirk softens into a grin, your flusteredness and lack of a response clearly amusing him, then as he circles the exercises Ms. Schumacher is assigning for the lesson. She seems to have forgotten there was homework due—Jongseong will be sure to remind her of it quickly.

He kicks your foot again, tells you to focus. His ears have turned red.

You wonder if those capacities haven’t existed from the start.

--

As much as you love a good friends-to-lovers story, characters hiding their feelings out of fear of ruining the friendship have never failed to frustrate you — just tell her, you dummy, it’s obvious she likes you too — and yet, you’ve never related more than now.

Whatever it is that you and Jongseong have, you don’t want to lose it. It adds entertainment to your otherwise average life. 

“Good thing she didn’t pick on you while we went over the homework, ‘cause you clearly put zero effort in. And I wouldn’t have helped you, even if you’d asked, by the way.”

You hum absent-mindedly as you put your notebook and pencil holder in your bag. Are you sure that these are even your feelings in the first place? Just because the well put a silly idea in your head doesn’t mean you have to believe it like it’s scripture. If what you saw is real, then it will happen in its own time. Things don’t have to start changing right this instant.

“Gosh, Y/N, what’s up with you today? You’re so boring,” Jongseong continues, following you out of the classroom. 

“Just tired,” you reply. Wouldn’t it be unnatural if you were to radically alter the way you behave with Jongseong? Love should come about organically. Sure, his presence has always provoked some kind of reaction within you, but that’s usually been annoyance. Whether he’s stealing the fifth eraser you’ve bought that month or running on the soccer field, beads of sweat running down his temples, hair sticking out everywhere, victoriously smiling when his team scores—you’re annoyed. Whether he’s sticking up his hand higher than yours or going to the school dance with Ahn Yujin—you’re annoyed. When you learned that she’d been his neighbor since infancy and that she had a boyfriend, who went to another school and only trusted Jongseong to take her to the dance, you were still annoyed—this time at yourself for feeling even the tiniest bit relieved that nothing was going on between them.

And this — his quick steps trying to keep up with yours, his dumb story about yogurt coming out of Heeseung’s nose today at lunch when they were laughing too hard — yes, you’re still annoyed. But you realize you’re not annoyed at him.

You’re annoyed at how he makes you feel.

“Y/N?” he says, but you’re too deep in your thoughts, only vaguely registering the sound until he repeats it, louder this time, and grabs your hand, making you abruptly stop walking. “Are you sure everything’s okay?” he asks with genuine concern in his voice. “You’re barely listening to me. I mean, it’s not like you usually really do, but you’d have told me to get lost, like, five minutes ago now…”

He chuckles self-deprecatingly, but despite his words, you’re focusing on something else yet again. His hand on yours, his loose hold on your fingers. Your brain is yelling at you—hold his hand, hug him. It’s like there are still traces of the 28-year-old version of you you visited yesterday, urging you to behave like her and not 18-year-old you. 

So, the well had let you know that you need not look much further to find what you wanted. Here it is, in the form of a boy you have convinced yourself you hated, and hated you, and yet, he’s holding your hand, asking you if you’re okay, worry knotting his eyebrows together. 

Hold his hand. Hug him. Instead, you retract your hand, let it fall limply by your side. Jongseong’s eyebrows shoot up.

He’s so close, the supposed love of your life. You don’t know how to reach out to him.

For now, you smile. “Get lost, Jong.”

--

you guys how the hell do i act around jongseong now that i know our fates are romantically intertwined

kazuha i think not treating him like the number one public enemy would be a good start

you so what… be nice to him? how do i do that

sunoo oh my god y/n when she has to treat another person like a regular human being

you he’s not just another person!

sunoo okayyyyy i see you little miss repressed feelings

you i hate u

kazuha just don’t roll your eyes at everything he says anymore and don’t start arguments for no reason

you he’s the one who starts them… but okay i’ll try

--

“Let’s pair up for the reading analysis today. You can stay with your deskmate or pick a partner, I don’t mind as long as you get the work done. I’m talking about you, Chaewon and Yuri. This is English class, not a gossip session.”

The second your English teacher has finished speaking, Jongseong swivels in his chair. “Let’s partner up, Y/N?”

“What about me?” Jake asks, eyes darting back-and-forth between the two of you.

“You can partner up with Minju,” Jongseong replies, pointing to the girl he’s usually seated next to. “Look. You guys will be great together. Say hi, Minju.” Minju waves shyly at Jake, braces on display as she smiles ecstatically. It’s not everyday that she gets to talk to one of the most popular guys in school.

Jake reluctantly switches seats with him, glancing back at you and Jongseong who just grins at him, fake friendliness plastered on his lips, until he turns around again. Your new partner’s smile softens and reaches his eyes when he looks at you. “Hi.”

You have to look away—you feel your face burn under his gaze. “Hi, Jong.”

He tilts his head. “What? Do you hate me so much that you can’t even look at me now?” he asks, and you can’t tell whether he’s joking or genuine.

You frown. “I don’t hate you.”

“Oh? That’s a recent development.”

“I guess,” you mumble after a few seconds. Is it really? You suddenly can’t remember if you ever really hated him, or if you’d exaggerated your own feelings.

His smile widens. “Well, good. I mean, you were going to have to realize at some point that I really am funny, smart, endearing, handsome-”

“Back to hating.”

“Let’s start the assignment.”

You agree on reading the passage first, but you realize halfway through that not a single word has been absorbed. “Hey. Why did you switch seats with him?” you ask, whispering so as not to be overheard.

Jongseong shrugs. “I thought you wouldn’t want to work with him, considering…”

“Right.” You’re silent again, but only for a bit. “What’s it to you?” you mumble. 

He scoffs. “Sorry for trying to be considerate.”

“That’s not—”

“Let’s just focus on this.”

His sudden coldness vexes you. You know you should let it go — don’t start arguments for no reason, and all that — and you know it’s childish, but you can’t help yourself. You have certain reflexes you’re not particularly proud of when it comes to one Park Jongseong. “Let’s just focus on this,” you repeat, mocking his grumbling tone of voice and shaking your head like a puppet.

He glares at you. “Can you not act like a toddler for once?”

“Can you not be a dick for once?” you bite back.

“Y/N, Jongseong, I’m sure you’re having a fascinating conversation on the use of chiaroscuro in the text?” your teacher asks, a look of warning on his face.

“Yes, sir,” you reply, embarrassed.

“Yes, so much chiaroscuro,” Jongseong mumbles, resting his cheek on his knuckles. When the teacher has turned away, he kicks your foot. “See, you’re getting us in trouble.”

“Do you even know what chiaroscuro is?” 

He hesitates. “That’s not the problem here. You are.”

“Well, maybe if you didn’t-”

“Y/N, Jay, final warning.”

“Sorry,” you both say at the same time. With one last glare at each other, you finally get to work.

So your plan to start getting along with Jongseong isn’t in full-force yet. On the drive back home that afternoon, you reassure yourself that these things take time. When the moment is right, the two of you will grow closer.

--

But increasingly, it feels as though the right moment will never come.

Two months have passed since your visit to the well, and things between you and Jongseong have not changed. Not really, at least.

You still bicker like cat and dog — it goes without saying that you’re the cute puppy and he’s the heartless cat — and he gets as much on your nerves as ever, especially now that you know that the potential to be nice to you, to love you, even, exists somewhere inside him. Somewhere deeply hidden perhaps, but somewhere nonetheless. Of course, after telling yourself that what must come will come of its own accord, you haven’t done much to change the dynamic between the two of you. But if you used to see your retaliations against him as necessary to your survival, you now find some sort of enjoyment in them—some might call it Stockholm Syndrome, you perceive it as a step in the right direction. You’ve followed one of Kazuha’s pieces of advice: you don’t roll your eyes at him anymore, simply because you don’t feel the need to. You argue with him with a smile on your face, his attempts at insulting or annoying you have started to make you laugh.

He doesn’t say anything but seems to gladly welcome this change. If you get a lower grade than him on a test, he doesn’t try to stick the knife in further, but genuinely offers to go over it with you later. If you give in after two hours of tearing your hair out over a German exercise and text him for help, he doesn’t make fun of you. If he says something particularly arrogant or makes a really bad joke, all you need to do is give him a look, and he’ll mumble an apology. 

Could it have been like this the entire time? you wonder, watching him across the schoolyard as he and Heeseung hunt for Pokémon. Just a couple months ago, you would’ve scrunched your nose at the sight, making fun of him for his childish interests. Now, you notice the way he laughs, audible all the way to where you sit with Kazuha and Sunoo, the way he jumps excitedly and points at things only he and his friend see, and all you feel is endearment.

“Look at you, look at that,” Sunoo says as he hits you on the forehead with his metal spoon, startling you. He tuts. “You’ve got love dripping from your eyes, sweetie.”

“Sunoo, that’s disgusting.”

“Love? I know.”

“No, your spoon. Your saliva’s all over that,” you say, and all he does is eat another mouthful of his yogurt while staring wide-eyed right at you. When you look back at Jongseong, he’s high-fiving Heeseung. You wonder which creature he’s caught now. In the library yesterday, he spent thirty minutes showing you every single one he had captured so far instead of revising for the upcoming Physics test.

“Yeah, we know you’d like someone else’s saliva more,” Kazuha chimes in, and the two of them snort.

“It’s not like that,” you say, biting into an apple slice.

“Oh yeah? What’s it like, then?” Kazuha asks.

“We’re… becoming friends,” you say, but you’re not sure who you’re trying to convince more.

“Y/N, I’ve had to watch the two of you giggling to yourselves in the library one too many times to believe you’re friends. I know your homework’s not that funny,” Sunoo argues.

“Friends can giggle with each other!” you exclaim, but your friends are inflexible.

“I would tell you to get yourself together if you giggled at me like that,” he says.

“I saw you twirl your hair the other day,” Kazuha adds.

“I never—When?!”

She shrugs. “The other day.”

You deflate, crushed under your friends’ accusations. “I wouldn’t twirl my hair…” you mumble. You decide to busy yourself with your apple slices, not even bothering to find out what Kazuha and Sunoo start snickering and elbowing each other about.

“Hey,” a familiar voice greets, making you look up. Jongseong smiles at you and steals an apple slice from your tupperware as he sits down next to you, Heeseung across from him.

“Hi, Jong,” you say, sitting up straighter. You offer a piece of fruit to Heeseung but he declines, saying he doesn’t like apples without peanut butter.

In front of you, your friends exchange a look, and you’re immediately terrified of what they’ll do next. Leaning in, they place their elbows on the table, and Kazuha starts them off. “Jay, you and Y/N know each other pretty well, right?”

Jongseong glances at you, eyes wide. “Uh, sure.”

“Have you ever noticed her, say, twirling her hair?” Sunoo asks, tilting his head innocently at the poor boy by your side.

You’ve never seen him look so confused. “Um, yeah, she does that when she’s concentrating on something, sometimes…”

They lean back. “Huh,” Kazuha says, studying Jongseong’s face.

“Interesting. Very interesting,” Sunoo says, slowly nodding.

You glare at your friends. “See, that’s different,” you tell them. “I was concentrating on something, not doing… whatever you guys had in mind.”

Jongseong looks at you. “What did they have in mind?”

You answer before either of them can dig your grave any deeper. “Nothing. It’s nothing. We were just having a stupid conversation.” You muster your most convincing smile, and the subject is finally dropped.

No one says anything for a few moments, until Heeseung decides to speak up: “You should’ve seen Jay earlier, Y/N. He caught this super rare version of Pikachu earlier, it was awesome.”

“Dude…” Jongseong murmurs.

“What?” Heeseung asks, his enthusiasm quickly dissolving into confusion. Jongseong just shakes his head. Thankfully for all of you, the bell rings then, and you head to class. The three of them walk in front of you while you and Jongseong fall back a step.

“Why were you guys sitting outside? It’s freezing today,” he asks you. Walking side-by-side like this, you can’t help but notice the inches he has over you, the broadness of his shoulders in comparison to yours.

“They turned the heat way too high in the cafeteria, so we came outside for some fresh air,” you explain. He’s right, the air is chilly today—it’s a few days into December, and the temperatures have been accordingly low.

“Aren’t you cold?”

Your heart skips a beat. One of the side effects of not being at each other’s throat anymore was that you got more and more often to be privy to this side of Jongseong—attentive, considerate, kind. What you once thought were his moral attempts at not being so mean to you all the time, you found out was actually his real nature. He wasn’t a prick who was sometimes nice, he was a nice person who turned into a prick with you. Whether the fault lay on him or you was another debate.

“No, I’m alright,” you say, but your body decides to betray you and makes you sneeze three times in a row.

“Bless you,” Jongseong says, laughing. “Here.” You try to stop him, pushing his hands away, but he takes his gloves off and forces them in your palms.

“I’m going to be inside for the next four hours, Jong, I’ll be fine. Keep them.”

“No, it’s okay. Just so you can warm up quicker.”

You eventually give in, putting the gloves over your hands, laughing at the extra fabric that hangs off the tip of your fingers. But when you look at Jongseong’s now-bare hands, something catches your attention. Stopping in the hallway, you grab one of them, examining the cuts on his knuckles. “You need to wear hand cream, Jong, your hands are too chapped.”

He lets you turn his hand over, smooth over his skin, do the same thing with his other hand. “Men don’t wear hand cream,” he says, a grin on his lips.

You burst out laughing. “I think that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

“Seriously, though, I don’t like the way it feels. Too sticky.”

“You just need to get a quick-absorption one.” Then, you make the terrible mistake of looking up from his hand and meeting his eyes—you gasp silently, his gaze and soft smile transporting you right back to that night, the images of 28-year-old and 18-year-old Jongseong mixing into each other, becoming indistinct from each other. Your gaze drifts down to his lips — chapped, too, when they’re usually plumper, rosier — and his hand, still in yours, balls into a fist. The second bell rings and you both take a step back, eyes meeting again for a brief moment before looking down at the floor. With uncharacteristically shy, embarrassed words of parting, you make your separate ways to your next classes.

“That was beautiful, Y/N,” Sunoo says, waiting for you by the door, and you walk past him without so much as a glance.

“I don’t wanna talk about it.”

--

sunoo jay and y/n almost kissed earlier

kazuha WHAAAAT

you KIM SUNOO.

kazuha WHEN?????

sunoo right before class after the lunch break y/n was sooo embarrassed afterwards lol

you we did NOT almost kiss you’re talking out of your ass

kazuha i can’t believe i missed this fml

you YOU DIDNT MISS ANYTHING NOTHING HAPPENED

sunoo be serious u guys we’re standing inches apart

you were* and no we weren’t

sunoo oh stfu it was autocorrect i saw it w my own eyes y/n… you WERE literally holding his hand and staring into those beautiful eyes of his

kazuha sunoo…?

sunoo what can’t a man acknowledge another man’s objective attractiveness if i was y/n i would’ve folded the moment i saw him

you literally one of the first times he talked to me was to make fun of my handwriting

sunoo yeah he’s on his tsundere shit i fw it

you …

sunoo anyways zuha you shouldve seen it when the bell rang they practically leaped away from each other and u didnt know what to do w yourselves afterwards likeeee it was so obvi what you both were thinking of

kazuha cuuuute

you i resent these accusations.

sunoo istg if u dont kiss him next time i will

kazuha ???

you SUNOO?

sunoo WHAT

--

Something happens a few days before the start of winter break.

Ms. Schumacher is absent, gone off to Germany to visit her family there—she has enough seniority in the school that they let her abandon her responsibilities as a teacher once in a while. A week is too short a period of time for them to bother finding a substitute. It’s usually your last class of the day, but you have to wait around for your dad to be done working, so while most of your classmates have gone home early, you sit with about six other people in the unsupervised study room, absent-mindedly jotting down tid-bits of dialogue for your new story idea, too preoccupied with Jongseong’s absence to really pay attention to anything else. It’s fifteen minutes after the hour, but he’s nowhere to be found, although you know for a fact that he takes those weird Molecular Gastronomy cooking classes your Chemistry teacher offers for extra credit every Thursday after school, so he should be here. And anyways, if he’d gone home, he would’ve texted you something like, Have fun sitting around for an hour, I’m gonna go do awesome stuff with Heeseung, even if awesome stuff meant playing Mario Kart or drinking Sprite and holding a two-person burping contest.

You’re so engrossed in your own thoughts that you pay no mind to the sudden ding of a phone in the room, followed by some gasps and heated whispers. The exchanged words go through one ear and out the other—There was a fight? In the locker rooms? It must be bad if they were sent to the nurse before the principal… Huh? Over who? So he took both of them on? Damn, I didn’t know Jay got like that. He seems so well-behaved.

Your head whips up at the mention of your friend’s name. “Jay? Did something happen to him?” you ask out loud, the whispers dying down immediately as everybody stares at you. 

Gaeul, who was in your class last year, is the only one who answers you. Holding up and waving her phone, she says, “They say he got into a fight.”

Jongseong? A fight? It sounds like a practical joke. He admitted to you he once started crying watching Heeseung playing Call of Duty, it was so violent. You shake your head. “He-he did? With who?”

Gaeul and the girl next to her exchange a concerned, almost guilty look. “Jake and Sunghoon.” The crease between your eyebrows deepened. You don’t need to ask anything else before she adds, “They’re at the nurse’s station. It sounds pretty bad…”

That’s enough for you to leap out of your chair and run to the nurse’s station. It seems the news has spread impossibly quickly among your year group—even Kazuha and Sunoo are already blowing your phone, asking you if you’ve heard, if you know how Jay is. You ignore them, reminding yourself to text them back later, until one message from Sunoo in particular catches your attention: It apparently started because Sunghoon said something about you, Y/N. They’re saying Jay got angry.

The nurse is busy on the phone when you get there, her back to the entrance, so you’re able to slip in unnoticed. You head to the adjoining room where the beds are, all three of them taken—you walk by Sunghoon first, his arms crossed over his chest and pointedly not looking at you, then by Jake, who calls out your name. You glare at him and pull on the white plastic curtain that separates his bed from Jongseong’s. They’re already going to hear you, you don’t need them seeing you on top of that. 

Jongseong sits up with a grunt when you appear at the end of his bed. The sight of him makes your stomach flip, and not in a good way, for once—his left eye is swollen and circled by a deep purple bruise, shiny with ointment, there’s a cut on his cheek, his lower lip is busted, his right hand is wrapped in bandages. “Oh my God,” you whisper as you help him up, voice breaking. He stares at his hands, jaw locking when you gently place one palm on his good hand, the other on the side of his face, moving it this way and that so you can take a better look at his injuries. He winces, and you let go, resting your hand on his shoulder instead. “What the hell got into you?” you whisper vehemently, unable to decide if you’re worried or angry or both as tears form in your eyes.

He tries to shrug, but even that seems to hurt. “Don’t shrug, Jongseong, tell me what happened.”

“I’m Jongseong again now?” he says, attempting a smile, but only one corner of his lips rises.

You sigh. Even in this state, he has to be a smart-ass. “You’re Jong when I need a textbook, Jongseong when you get into stupid fights,” you reply, and he smiles wider but immediately winces, hand coming up to the cut on his lip. You notice that his hand is still riddled with cracks, and whether they’re due to their dryness or to this fight doesn’t matter—”Wait here,” you say, and go rummage through some drawers for plasters. “She forgot some spots.” You feel Jongseong’s eyes on your face as you patch him up to the best of your abilities.

“I don’t want to tell you what happened. I’ll do the job of hating these idiots for the both of us, so don’t concern yourself with them,” he says, apparently not caring that the idiots in question can hear his every word.

He keeps his promise—you never hear another word from him about the cause of the fight. 

Later, you find out through other means, namely Sunoo’s questionably remarkable ability to unearth any and all gossip, that in the locker rooms after Phys Ed, someone had started Jake on the topic of Yunjin, who had been recently revealed as his girlfriend. They’d apparently kept it secret because it was just fooling around at first, and only later had gotten serious enough for them to parade around the school as the couple. 

It had been an unremarkable conversation until Jake said, “You guys know Y/N from our class? She saw us in the staff parking lot once, and I was sure we’d be busted then. But she didn’t tell anyone.” And just like that, the conversation turned to you, someone who was usually never a topic among these boys, jocks, soccer players, “the kind of people who peak in high school and still have a superiority complex at forty,” as Sunoo describes them. 

He has a harder time explaining what happened next, can’t quite look you in the eye as he recounts what was said. “So, this is what they say, apparently someone said that you used to be obsessed with Sunghoon, then with Jake, and Sunghoon said you… Well, he said you were pathetic, that asshole, and that you had been so easy to lead on, then Jake joined in, saying the same things, basically, how funny it was seeing you so obviously in love with him when he would never give you a chance…” He looks at you worriedly, but you tell him to go on. “And so that’s when Jay got up and just straight-up punched Jake in the face. And while Jake was trying to figure out what happened, Jay punched Sunghoon, and then they both got on him, pushing him, but when he wouldn’t stop throwing punches, they started fighting, too. I think they all got some good ones in before the other boys were able to break them apart and the P.E. teacher arrived…”

But that would be later. Now, sitting with Jongseong in the nurse’s station, tears falling onto the plasters you place on his hand, nothing matters but him. You don’t need the details—he’s hurt, he got hurt over you, you feel as though every cut on his body may well have been done by your own hand. You’ve never felt so guilty for something you didn’t do. Your voice trembles when you speak; you’re unable to look at him, at his busted eye. “I just don’t want you to get hurt for me.”

Without missing a beat, he says, “What else would I get hurt for?”

You can only meet his eyes for a split second. Even like this, he manages to look at you with the same softness that has haunted you since the night you met 28-year-old Jongseong, that has rendered all thoughts of anything other than him meaningless since the day your gaze drifted down to his lips just weeks ago. “Jong…” is all you can mutter as you look down at your hands holding each others’, your lips trembling.

He raises his bandaged hand, still not used to his dominant side being ineffective for now, then lowers it when he realizes. Clumsily, he pats your hair with his left hand. “Don’t cry, please…”

Jake’s head pops out from behind the curtain. “Y/N, I’m really sorry—”

“Not right now, man,” Jay quickly interrupts. Jake pathetically disappears behind the curtain again.

“Just promise me you won’t do this again.”

“Y/N…”

“Promise me,” you say, more demanding this time, sticking out your pinky finger. Jay, hesitant, looks between your outstretched finger and your face a few times, but eventually gives in.

The nurse, upon coming to check on the boys, catches you with Jongseong and chases you out immediately. You sulk back to study hall, where everyone’s head perks up the moment you walk in. “They’re okay,” you reassure vaguely, and unenthusiastically answer their many questions. It’s only a few minutes until the bell rings, and you’re free to go then.

--

jong so… guess who got a five-day suspension

you you idiot what did your parents say?

jong they’re not happy i have to do all the household chores for a month

you boo-hoo

jong not sure why i came here thinking i’d get some comfort…

you … are you feeling better?

jong a little bit the nurse gave us some really strong painkillers but i’m okay because there’s a pretty girl that’s going to drop off the homework for me after school every day :)

you oh did you ask chaewon to do that?

jong um no i was talking about you ..if that’s okay

you haha i know i just wanted you to say it straight up

jong ykw maybe i should just ask chaewon

you i’ll see you tomorrow jong!!

jong :) see you tomorrow pretty 

 --

The months that separate your return to school and graduation come and go in the blink of an eye. Jongseong can’t come to school the last day before the holidays or the first four days after, and he’s grounded in-between. Things change bit by bit with every day you visit him—To give him the homework, you tell his parents, although there isn’t much to do when the semester isn’t in full swing, and you could’ve easily sent him pictures. The first time, you spend more time scouring the pictures and trinkets in his room than actually talking to him, and awkwardly give him a half-hug when he tells you he won’t be able to hang out at all during the break before practically running out of his house, your heart beating a thousand miles a minute from the innocent contact. By the fourth time, you lie together on his bed and talk about your plans for college, your hands sitting centimeters apart on the navy sheets. You haven’t dared touch his hand since that day in the nurse’s station.

You’re window-shopping with Kazuha when you spot the hand cream you had seen yourself gifting Jongseong in your well-given vision. Buying it is one thing, actually giving it to him is another, an awkward, stuttery situation in which the wrapping done by the store employee suddenly seems over-the-top and out-of-place. But Jongseong seems to like it—it’s the last day of his suspension, his black eye is now a yellow-ish color, he can smile without risking splitting his lip in two. He applies it immediately, tells you he’ll make sure to wear it every day until the end of winter. You find yourself wishing there was something you could give him for every season so he wouldn’t go a day without thinking of you. When you leave, he bashfully thanks you for making sure he doesn’t fall behind and says he’s excited to see you at school the next day. You hardly know what to do with yourself, so you squeak out a “me too” and slip out the door.

His first day back is a Friday. It starts with Mathematics, a class in which you sit by each other. You remember the first week of classes when Kazuha and Sunoo had ran to sit with each other, expressly because they knew that if he saw you were sitting alone, he’d take the seat next to you, just to better torment you all year. You’d resented it then; it couldn’t make you happier now. Your body is humming with nervous energy, your foot tapping relentlessly against the tiled floor. When he appears in the doorframe, you wave at him as if he’d forgotten his seat in three weeks of absence. His elbow brushes against yours as he sits down.

Between the two of you, friendship blossoms over these months. To the detriment of everyone around you, you continue to bicker as you always have, but it’s now clearly done out of habit, out of affection, even, than out of actual dislike of each other. He and Heeseung slowly integrate your small group of three, and before you know it, it feels as though there have always been five of you. Together, you welcome spring.

In January, to thank you for helping him to pick out his mom’s birthday present, Jongseong treats you to some tteokbokki, which you said you’d been craving all week. He orders the spiciest one, then has to take a sip of water between every bite. You laugh at his teary eyes and red face while you devour the bright red rice cakes easily. 

In February, he makes a show of giving you and Kazuha and Heeseung and Sunoo some homemade chocolates, saying it’s a friend thing. You find out that evening that the others each have five in their box—there are twenty in yours. It’s one of the things that makes you second guess what sort of feelings he has for you. For years, you’ve been convinced he harbored strong feelings of disdain for you; now, he seems to enjoy your friendship. You’re scared to read too much into anything, because if Jongseong is well-liked throughout school, it’s for a reason: he’s nice. To everyone. Even to you, too, nowadays. But if nice is giving five chocolates, what is giving twenty?

A sudden realization hits you in March—Jongseong appears at your door, drenched from the rain, a bag of your favorite snacks in hand. “You weren’t at school today. I had to find out you were sick from Kazuha,” he says as if she was a random classmate of yours and not your best friend, as if he should be the first to know about these kinds of things. Your mom rushes him in, finds him so charming in the five minutes they converse that she decides he should stay over for dinner, and as you watch him laughing with her, you think, I haven’t thought of 28-year-old Jongseong in ages. I’ve only thought of you. And although you can trace the start of your feelings to that dream-like experience you had, you can now say with confidence that it’s not the only reason for them.

College application results come out in April, right on his birthday. The five of you celebrate together at an American-style diner, gorging yourselves on crispy bacon and chocolate chip pancakes. Kazuha is going back to Japan, almost a decade after moving to South Korea—”I’m gonna miss you guys, but I miss takoyaki and my grandma more right now.” Heeseung has been accepted into the Engineering department at the country’s top university. You, Sunoo and Jongseong are all heading to the same place: you for Screenwriting, which you’ve known since you were one of the winners of the scholarship contest last October, Sunoo for Communications, whatever that is, and Jongseong for European History and Literature with a minor in German, that freak. It’s a good university, and it’s not far from home. The way Jongseong tells you about his acceptance sticks with you: he doesn’t say, They accepted me, too, or, I’m going to the same university as you. He says, We’ll be together.

May is filled with afternoons at the park when you should all be studying for exams. Your mom keeps asking when she’s going to see “that wonderful boy” again. Your friendship with Jongseong has given him new ways of teasing you—after four years of near-kleptomaniac tendencies, he’s finally stopped stealing your erasers and has instead started to let his gaze linger on your face, to call you pretty when you least expect it, to tuck your hair behind your ear. You hate it most when he asks you whether there’s something from your romance novels or movies that you want him to recreate. “Is there a field big enough nearby that I can walk through at the break of dawn, Mister Darcy-style?” he’ll say, or “I’ve always wanted to try that upside-down kiss from Spider-Man. It’s a classic, really.” 

Summer comes early in June. You need to bring a two-liter water bottle and a hand fan to your exams, and you’ve never felt such relief as when it was all over. After endless pictures with your parents and siblings, just your parents, just your siblings, then Kazuha and Sunoo, together, then separately, then with Heeseung and Jongseong as well, Kazuha forces you and Jongseong together, watching with a smile as he shyly wraps an arm around your waist and you awkwardly throw up a peace sign. It’s your first picture of just the two of you.

In July, you and Jongseong unlock a new first: saying goodbye. He’s leaving to stay with his American family as he does every summer. You show up at his house the day before at four p.m. “to help him pack,” you say, but it’s Jongseong, and he finished packing two days ago. So instead, you sit on his desk chair, he on his bed, and you fight back tears. “You’re coming back, right?” you ask, like he’s leaving to go to war and not Seattle. Amusement and affection flicker in his eyes. “Of course I am. I wouldn’t throw four more years of being a pain in your ass away, would I?” he says, and you smile, because you know it’s going to be much more than four years.

But he doesn’t just leave you with a few nice words. Avoiding your gaze, he hands you an envelope. Inside is a single ticket, a two-month membership for your city’s arthouse cinema that you can only go to when they have student deals or when your parents have had enough of your begging. You can’t even begin to imagine how much this must’ve cost. “Jong…” you murmur, in awe at the thin slip of paper between your hands. “This is incredible. Thank you so much.”

Jongseong looks down at his feet, fighting a smile as he kicks the invisible rocks that obviously litter the floor of his bedroom. “I thought you’d get bored without me around, so, that way you can entertain yourself, I guess… And if you run into any film bros next year, you’ll have seen as many pretentious movies as them.”

You burst into laughter then, and, without thinking, wrap your arms around his neck, thanking him over and over again. It takes him a second, but he wraps his arms around your waist and says it’s no big deal.

As you walk down the path from your house, he calls out your name. “Don’t be a stranger,” he says.

You smile. “Never.”

So, he’s not here for summer. Kazuha is working in her parents’ ramen restaurant to make some money before leaving, even Heeseung leaves two weeks into July for Seoul to visit some relatives there and get accustomed to life in the big city. You only get to laze around with Sunoo, but even he eventually leaves for his grandparents’ house by the sea, making you promise you’ll come visit him at some point, otherwise he’ll “die of boredom.” 

It’s August now, and your brain and body alike buzz with restlessness. You go to the cinema almost every day, making the best of your subscription. If you’re not going around your house looking for spider webs with your vacuum cleaner, you’re riding random bus lines and discovering parts of your town you’ve never set foot in before. If you’re not making your way through your never-ending pile of unread books, you’re creating your own stories, finally taking the time to properly outline and draft the one-line ideas you’ve had sitting in your Notes app, preparing yourself for the start of your degree. Your mind is taken up with love stories. From Romeo & Juliet to Dirty Dancing to Book Lovers, you can’t get enough of the genre. You become particularly obsessed with stories involving time travel, rewatching After Time and Lovely Runner like they contain some precious knowledge. By the end of the month, you’ve turned your life into an eight-episode TV series—a desperate girl makes a wish on a star only to discover she is fated to marry the one boy she hates most. You know you’d watch that. You send Sunoo and Kazuha the pilot, and after calling you insane numerous times but also heaping on praises, Sunoo says this: lol your going through jay withdrawals.

It shakes you so much you’re not even compelled to message back you’re*.

But he’s not wrong. The more you let yourself admit it, the more you realize how true it is: you miss Jongseong. You text once in a while, you’ve even stayed up late talking on the phone a couple of times, but you miss him, his corporeal form, having his gaze on you, having the possibility but never the courage to touch him. Every day, there’s something you want to tell him about. The cats huddling around a young neighborhood kid as he pours milk into a bowl, the clearance sale at your local library, most books for one buck only, the actor from an 90s Hong Kong film you swear has the exact same smile as him. You don’t want to bother him, so you write letters instead. Some you send, some you don’t—the ones you keep hidden in your drawer usually hint too obviously at your feelings for him. Some of them don’t just hint and contain lines of your declarations: I miss you, everything I see reminds me of you, I want to check that your bruises have healed completely even though the last trace of them faded months ago. You keep these letters a secret, even from Sunoo and Kazuha, who would never let you live down such woebegone, down bad behavior.

You do it because it feels good, getting all of your feelings out on paper. You’re a romantic at heart, so you’re prone to over-exaggeration when it comes to things like these—but everything that you write remains based in truth. You’d started with a postcard of your hometown, jokingly writing, Don’t forget where you came from. How is it over there? and he’d actually replied with a postcard of his own, filling it from top to bottom. You easily went from these small postcards to multiple pages of stream-of-consciousness-like writing. You think it’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever done—although you’re not sure he feels the same way, considering he still writes to the German pen pal Ms. Schumacher had assigned him in your first year of high school. No one else’s correspondence had lasted more than four months because she’d immediately forgotten to make sure you kept in touch regularly.

I ran into Jake Sim at the city library, you write one day. You’ve replied to everything in his latest letter, so you’re now catching him up on your recent adventures. He was checking out some books about Linguistics, of all things—he bought me bubble tea afterwards and told me that the injury he got last April was actually a relief. Did you know his father was a big name in soccer here? Apparently, he never wanted to be a soccer player that badly, and he wants to do Linguistics and Social Anthropology, who would’ve guessed it. He’s like Troy Bolton if High School Musical was about Humanities and not singing. Anyways, you probably don’t want me to go on and on about him, so I won’t, but we did talk about that fight you guys had back in December. He apologized for it, to you and me both, although he didn’t go into much detail — Sunoo is still the only one who’s had the balls to tell me exactly what happened, and he wasn’t even there! — and I was reticent at first, but he seemed genuine. He said he didn’t even hang out with Sunghoon or Yunjin or any of those people anymore, that it was only out of convenience really, and that he hopes starting university will be like turning over a new leaf. Well, he could be full of shit, who knows. As I sat there listening to him I wondered what it was I used to see in him. He’s nice enough, but we only spoke about him for the entire hour. He asked me no questions that weren’t “and you?” so it was a bit exhausting. 

But it got me thinking about your fight again. Reflecting on it now, I can say that it was a turning point for me in my perception of you.

You look at your words, smiling to yourself—this is one of the times where you find yourself erring from the topic at hand, instead indulging in sappiness and nostalgia. You write about how your opinion of Jongseong has changed over these months, how it wasn’t seeing him as your husband in all those years that had really shaken things up, but rather that day in the nurse’s station, the frightening colors around his eye, his attitude like it was natural that he would get hurt like this for you. You write, Have I been wrong about you this whole time? I thought you harbored the same negative feelings towards me as I had you since the moment you’d laid eyes on me, but all of a sudden, here you were, bloody, bandaged hand holding mine. Even with your busted eye, you looked like an angel next to all that white in the nurse’s station. I’ll never forget your words that day. Would you really not get hurt for anything else, Jong?

“I’m going to the Post Office for a package soon, Y/N. Are you done with your letter?” your mom calls from the staircase landing.

“Give me five minutes!” you call back.

You forage through your drawer for a new sheet of paper and re-write your letter, making sure to leave any compromising parts out and fold both letters into neat squares—one that will cross the seas and reach Jongseong, one that will live out its days in the darkness of your crowded drawer. You’ve run out of envelopes, so you go look for one in your parents’ office. Your mom calls out your name again, impatient to leave — if she sends her package off before twelve p.m., it will get to the receiver tomorrow, and she’s hell-bent on getting perfect five-star Vinted reviews — so you hurriedly put your letter in the envelope, close it, stamp it, and write Jongseong’s name and address on the back. The other letter you absent-mindedly throw in your drawer with the dozens of other letters in which you’d crossed the line.

--

A few weeks later, like an apparition, Jongseong stands before you again.

He’s tanner from months under the Washington sun, from afternoons spent at his family’s lake house, on their boat. His hair is slightly shorter and suits him even better; you don’t recognize any of the clothes he wears. He grumbles as his mother goes back-and-forth between hugging him, staring at him worriedly and reminding him to call at least twice a week while his father unpacks the trunk. “I’ll only be a thirty-minute train ride away, Mom,” he says. 

He’s still Jong.

You moved in yesterday, and you’re now waiting for your new roommate, who, after five minutes of deliberating whether she should bring a jacket or not and finally decided against it, changed her mind the minute she stepped outside. 

It’s been two months since you last saw him. Shortly after sending your letter, you’d gone to stay with Sunoo’s grandparents for a week, just a day before he was set to come back from Seattle. Amid packing and other preparations, you haven’t had time to see each other. Is it okay if I respond to your letter in person? I think I’ll be too busy these two coming weeks, he texted you. You replied that it wasn’t a problem, you told him which dorm you’d been assigned and found out his was the one next door.

When he notices you staring, he does a double-take. You wave at him, and even from this distance, you see the blush that creeps up his neck and takes over his face as he shyly waves back. You’ve never seen him like this—he’s always been either arrogant or friendly, never… flustered. He makes a motion as if to say, I’ll text you, and heads inside the building with his parents and all of his luggage.  

Indeed, he texts you some hours later while you’re sharing a piece of strawberry and matcha cake with your roommate Liz, whom you find out is half-German—Jongseong and your dad would probably love her for that simple fact. Some of the first things she’d asked you were what your astrological signs were and whether you wanted her to pull tarot cards for you when she was all done setting up her side of the room. Between that and her dyed blonde hair, you’d felt comfortable telling her all about Jongseong, the well and your dream. Unlike your skeptical and sarcastic friends, she’d nodded along to your every word, a serious expression on her face. “A sign from the universe,” she’d called it, and she gasped in excitement when his name appeared on your screen.

He sends you a link to a freshers’ week event, some potted plant sale happening on the main campus square, and asks if you’re free to go with him tomorrow. I need something to liven up that depressing room, he writes.

So that’s how you find yourselves among green plants of all shapes and sizes, searching for one that’s both low-maintenance and appealing to the eye. You’re glad that you have something to actually do—if you were just sitting at a café and having a conversation, you’re not sure you’d be able to stand the awkwardness. You’d chalked up his behavior on the day of his move-in to nerves, or to surprise upon seeing you so unexpectedly. But apparently, it wasn’t a one-time thing. He keeps clearing his throat as if he were sick with some cold, won’t look into your eyes for more than split seconds at a time, and in complete opposition to his usual confident, deliberate speech, talks in a quick and disorderly manner. And he’s either really caught a cold, or his ears have just permanently turned red. You ask him if something’s wrong a couple times, but he violently shakes his head, says, “No, what could be wrong?” then looks at you as if you might tell him what’s wrong.

When you’re alone again, you wonder what on earth could have happened over the summer that could make him change his behavior with you so radically. Did something happen in Seattle? Maybe he met someone there and doesn’t know how to tell you. Maybe you went overboard with your letters, he doesn’t want to be friends anymore, he wants to let you down easy but doesn’t know how to tell you. Or maybe—maybe you got impossibly pretty during those two months, and absence does make the heart grow fonder, as they say, and every thought you have about him, he has about you, but he doesn’t know how to tell you.

In any case, he’s hiding something.

The theory that he might want to stop being friends soon falls flat—the invitations to other freshers’ events keep coming, be it free wine & pizza taster sessions from the Wine Society, karaoke nights with the Taylor Swift Society or a shark movie marathon with the Bad Film Society, and he never turns you down when you tell him there’s something you want to visit in this new city of yours, even when the thing you want to visit in question is a bakery you have to queue in front of at seven a.m. if you want to get a pain au chocolat. In your defense, they turn out to be the best ones you and Jongseong have ever tried—although, to be fair, neither of you has been to France.

Things progressively return to normal. He’s able to make eye contact for more than three seconds again, he listens carefully and laughs along when you tell him about your week by the sea with Sunoo, he fills you in on what Heeseung’s been up to. One thing remains different, however—when you throw quips at him, he usually would’ve delighted in coming up with a better, wittier response, but now, he’ll roll his eyes at best, look at you amusedly and stay silent at worst. “Won’t you even entertain me?” you ask him once, to which he replies that you’re doing a good job entertaining yourself as is. 

Instead, he becomes more earnest. As per usual you badger him with questions like Aren’t I so pretty right now? or Isn’t my outfit so cute today? to get a reaction out of him, and if during your high school days he’d either fake a puking sound or look you up and down and grumble I guess, he now smiles and simply says Yes, you are, Yes, it is. It seems impossible to keep track of his attitude: one day, he’s one thing, the next, he’s another person entirely. 

It annoys you. You take his changing demeanor to mean that now that he’s a college student, he won’t indulge in your childish squabbles anymore, as though he was above all of that now, when just three months ago he was stalking your parents’ Facebooks to find unfavorable photos of you from when you were thirteen and using them as reaction pictures in your friends’ group chat. You think of your graduation day, of the box he’d given you, all done up in wrapper paper and a bow—he had filled it with every eraser he’d stolen from you over the years, he’d even gone so far as to date every single one of them, from the second of October freshman year to the twenty-eighth of November of your senior year. You didn’t count them, but there had to be at least a hundred. At the time, you’d just thought it was funny—but what if the gesture had meant something deeper than you’d realized? What if he was marking the end of something with that box? No more playing around, we’re adults now. But classes have barely started, you don’t know your way to the off-campus library, you aren’t a different person to who you were just weeks or even months earlier. Why is he acting like he is? You look at him, and you see the boy whose fault it was you had to buy a new eraser every week—who knows how many books you could’ve bought with that money. But when he turns to look at you, too, and your eyes meet, you’re suddenly assailed with the memories of that night, the kind eyes, the soft smile. 

Does his future capacity to love me already exist in his heart?

Your heartbeat speeds up and you have to look away.

--

From your letters, it seems to be much hotter back home than in Seattle—you talk of sunburns, of afternoons spent inside with the fan on maximum speed, of ice melting instantly and watering down your Coke Zeros, whereas Jay can walk around the city pleasantly and needs to bring a jacket if he’ll be out until late after sundown. And yet, as he reads your latest letter, his skin prickles feverishly, from the top of his head to the tip of his toes. He’d excitedly torn the envelope open the second it arrived in the mail, heart thumping as he counted the pages, at least three more than usual — he was always happy that you wanted to talk to him at all, so the fact that you had this much to tell him sent him over the moon — but he would have never expected what was awaiting him inside.

With a smile on his face, he read your replies to the questions he’d asked you last time, your reactions to everything he told you about, the live Mariners game, the lake house, the rides on the boat. He imagined you as you sat at your desk in your room he’d only seen once, when you’d held a small party for your birthday and he, having arrived first, was honored with a tour of your house. He imagined your smile, the way you played with your hair when you focused on something, wondered whether you pondered every word before you wrote it down as he did or whether you poured your thoughts out onto the page without hesitation. His smile faltered when Jake Sim’s name appeared in your neat handwriting, but he was relieved to find out your description of him now was miles away from the one at the start of the school year. 

Then you start writing about him. Him, Park Jongseong, and your words startle him so much, it’s like he’d forgotten he was the recipient of this letter in the first place.

But it got me thinking about your fight again. Reflecting on it now, I can say that it was a turning point for me in my perception of you. 

He’s been lying comfortably in his bed, but he sits up the moment his eyes take in these words. If there is one topic the two of you have practically never broached, it’s this exactly: your relationship, the changes it’s gone through this past year. Except for a few mentions made in jest here and there, you’ve always conveniently ignored the fact that not so long ago, you were at each other’s throats. At least, you were at his throat, and Jay let you be, let you think the hatred went both ways, when in reality all he wanted was to keep you close one way or another. To him, anything was better than indifference.

But here you are, writing about how you feel about him, not in hints, not in jokes, but actually telling him black and white what goes through your head when you think of him—in other words, everything he’s been dying to know ever since he met you and especially ever since you started warming up to him a few months ago.

I have never told you about that night because I know it’ll just be more fodder for you to endlessly tease me, and I haven’t even mentioned it in these letters that I write and don’t send. Sometimes I debate the ethics of it—if I know something about our futures, isn’t it right that you know, too? But then again, I still hesitate whether what happened was real or not. As with anything, the more time passes, the more I forget about it. What kind of cheese you’d put on the pasta, the movie that played in the background, whether the stairs were carpeted or wooded—these details have evaded me by now. All I clearly remember is your face and how I felt, seeing it then, seeing it the next day at school, ten years younger, the same exact person in what felt like a different universe. As much as I tried to deny it, I know now that it was no coincidence—I was talking about it with Sunoo and he said that sometimes, we want something so badly, we conjure it up for ourselves. He’s not always a dimwit. And he’s right, the kind of love I felt from you in that dream — or not-dream — I’ve yearned for it ever since I first watched Pride & Prejudice, the 2005 film to be precise, when I was ten. But with you? That was what I couldn’t believe at first. I don’t think I need to explain why—you were there, I think you knew how I felt about you for over three years, it’s not like I tried to hide it.

Then you turned up and the sight of you was enough to bring back all the feelings from that dream. You must’ve wondered why my behavior with you switched so suddenly—well, a glimpse into marital bliss is sometimes enough for a girl to make some changes in her life. Yet I valiantly tried to convince myself that any flutter of my heart around you was due to this stupid dream, to a version of you my brain had conjured up because it was starved for affection, and you happened to be at the forefront of my mind, even if not for the right reasons. But it was no use. I had entertained the possibility that this future was really mine, and I couldn’t go back to seeing you as the boy who annoyed the living daylights out of me.

But Jong, if you weren’t you, I would’ve been confused for a week and then I would’ve gotten over it. I stayed confused for a while, and everything you did only served to confuse me further. I started to notice you more, to see you for who you were and not for the idea I had constructed of you in my head, I stopped taking note of only the things that reinforced this idea. And that changed everything.

Let’s get it out of the way: as much as I hate to admit it because it proves you right, I saw that you are indeed devastatingly handsome. It devastates me every time I have to look at that stupid, wonderful face of yours. And if aging is something you’re worried about, don’t be. I’ve seen you at 28, and let’s just say that your jaw somehow only gets more chiseled. I’ve realized that you don’t just participate in class to be a prick — except for when you contradict me in Literature, I know you only do that to piss me off, and yes, it works — but that you actually care about what we learn and that you don’t want the teacher to feel like they’re talking to a classroom full of students made out of bricks. I’ve also realized that you didn’t specifically pick German to be the one subject where you must beat me at all costs, you just actually really like German, even if I’m still undetermined as to why. And I can finally admit to myself—you are funny. Sometimes. There were so many times I had to stop myself from laughing at one of your idiotic puns because I could not bear to give you the satisfaction. That feeling when the worst person you know makes a funny joke, and all that. And as much as I’ve mocked you for it, I do actually like your laugh. I like that you’re only loud when you laugh, or sneeze, or get excited over something. You don’t scream, you don’t get angry, and I think that’s a lot for a boy fresh out of puberty. Or for any boy, really. 

But above all, you’re kind, Jong. I think it’s the best thing about you. I think it’s the best thing anyone can be. I see it in your patience with Heeseung when he starts one of his rants better reserved for Reddit than real life, I see it in the way you took Sunoo and Kazuha in stride, even though they’re a bit rough around the edges sometimes, I see it in the way you guide the freshmen at the start of every year, when all anyone does is complain about them, I see it in the gentleness with which you let down the girls who confess to you, even the more persistent ones. I used to think they were crazy, but I understand them more than ever now. I also used to think that all those kindnesses meant that the ones you occasionally showed me meant nothing more than that—occasional kindnesses. You were just a nice guy, occasionally so to me. But you sort of ratted yourself out when you gave me those twenty chocolates for Valentine’s.

Or, really, what made things clearer was that fight in December. I guess I was wrong—you do get angry. I remember a thought I had at the time: just when I think I know you, you do something to shake it all up. You punched two of the star soccer players of our school in the face because they said some mean, unimportant things about me. Thinking about it now, I still don’t understand it. Was it another one of your acts of kindness? 

And then I thought of those other times you helped me out. Do you remember them—the art project, the handwritten notes after my grandma passed away, you tearing Park Sunghoon a new one in the girls’ bathroom. I’m sure there are many more that I’ve dismissed simply because I did not want to see you in any other light than the one I’d decided to shine on you. 

Maybe I’m rewriting the past here, but I’ve been thinking about something lately. The theme today seems to be honesty, so I’ll lay myself bare and tell you something I haven’t told anyone yet, not even myself. The more I write, the more I become aware of its truth. I like you, Jong. I think I have for a long time, longer than either of us thinks. Maybe that’s why I kept buying erasers.

I don’t have the best memory — I suspect iron deficiency, it runs in my mom’s side of the family — but I do remember this. The first time I saw you. I haven’t noticed your face changing in real time, but I’m sure I’d laugh at how much of a baby you looked back then. Although I didn’t fare much better, I’m sure. Well, you’re the one that has all these embarrassing pictures of me, you freak, so I’m sure you could tell me. Moving on… 

I found you really cute. You were chatting to the person next to you, maybe it was Heeseung, I didn’t look properly—I only looked at you. Don’t laugh at me. It was the first day of high school, there was a nervous energy in the air, but you seemed happy to be there. You know I don’t have hordes of friends like you do, I don’t walk through life with people naturally gravitating towards me. I’m okay with it now, but it was something I struggled with back then. Kazuha, Sunoo and I have had each other since our elementary days, and I never needed more than that—but fifteen is the prime age for comparison, and as the weeks passed and we got used to being high schoolers, I listened to everyone sing your praises, I watched as you talked with all of our classmates, even our teachers, like you were old friends. But we sat next to each other in a couple of classes, and you wouldn't talk to me outside of partnered work. I, who wanted to be easily charmed by you like everyone else was, who thought maybe you’d help me come out of my shell. But it felt like sitting next to me was torture to you, like the boy whom I watched speak with ease to everyone else disappeared when I was around. And so — and I’m not proud of this — every smart remark in class, every joke that had the entire class roaring, every high five you gave out in the hallway, I started to despise them. And by association, I started to despise you. After that, it was easy to find fault in everything you did, my contempt was only enhanced by everyone’s admiration. But I’m not alone here. It went both ways, didn’t it? I don’t think you liked that I didn’t like you and openly showed it, so used to being everyone’s favorite person you were. I remember how you showily tried to be nice to me after that, maybe you just wanted another friend, but I didn’t let you. I don’t blame us for how we acted, only for taking so long to get our heads out of our asses.

(I have to say, I also have a thing for hating people. Remind me to tell you about Na Jaemin and Shin Ryujin one of these days.)

Anyways, I think it’s because I had liked you so much at first that I could then seemingly hate you so much. But I never hated you, Jong, not really. I’m sorry if I gave you that impression. Can I take it all back now? 

Now that we’re entering university soon, I can’t help but look back on high school. This is what I want to know, but I’m not sure I’ll ever have the courage to ask you, because if your answer is the one I suspect, I don’t know how I’ll handle all the regret in my heart.

Have I been wrong about you this whole time? I thought you harbored the same negative feelings towards me as I had you since the moment you’d laid eyes on me, but all of a sudden, here you were, bloody, bandaged hand holding mine. Even with your busted eye, you looked like an angel next to all that white in the nurse’s station. I’ll never forget your words that day. Would you really not get hurt for anything else, Jong?

Your letter abruptly ends here, no concluding remarks, no wishing him a fun time in Seattle and looking forward to his next letter, no sign-off. It was as if someone cut you off before you could say everything you wanted, but then why send him this seemingly unfinished letter? It is all the more bizarre since your letters are usually meticulous: you write on every other line, it looks like you take your time with every single letter, the only disturbance in your otherwise perfect handwriting is your going back-and-forth between cursive and script s’s. But this particular letter looks rushed, your lines are sloppy, some words need to be read a few times over to be understood. What kind of state had you been in, writing these words? Jay’s heart swells, thinking that you were as moved writing as he was reading. He even looks through your letter again, wishing to find a tear stain somewhere, but there are none. Maybe he’s been watching too many of these romantic period dramas you always go on about.

He has to pace his room when he’s done reading your letter, but he feels trapped inside these four walls, so he dashes outside, saying that he’s getting some air when his relatives ask him where he’s off to in such a rush, and walks around the block five times. When he’s back in his room, he rereads your letter, eyes taking in each and every word slowly and carefully, making sure he doesn’t misread anything.

You like him. You, Y/N, like him, Jongseong, it’s a fact, it’s real, you said so yourself, you went into quite some detail about it, he can’t believe it, but it’s real, it’s written right there on the page, if anyone dares tell him he’s fooling himself, he can prove them wrong, you’re the one who said it.

The smile doesn’t leave his lips for the rest of the day, he can barely eat, he’s already full of happiness. He reads your words over and over before falling asleep, committing them to memory, dreaming about them, about you.

You. How should he respond to this? Are you even expecting a response? You seem to know he’s not impartial to you, either, although that’s an understatement. 

In the following days, the thought that you hadn’t meant to send him this letter nags at him. The abrupt ending, the absence of your usual Love, Y/N. The fact that this had come out of left field—none of your previous letters had even a romantic undertone, no matter how he tried in his own to hint at his missing you, the most reference to seeing each other again you would give him was It’ll be better to show you this in real life. The act of sending letters itself didn’t feel very platonic, but you never went there, so he didn’t, either. He had secretly yearned to have you this close all these years, he would never forgive himself if he ended up chasing you away now with his over-eagerness.

You had landed on something very real in your letter: I don’t think you liked that I didn’t like you and openly showed it, so used to being everyone’s favorite person you were. I remember how you showily tried to be nice to me after that, maybe you just wanted another friend, but I didn’t let you. He cursed his fifteen-year-old self, that idiot who couldn’t even speak to a girl no matter how much he wanted to, just because she was so pretty, he was afraid of saying something stupid and messing it up before it even had a chance to start.

On days when you’d had particularly nasty or petty arguments — it could get pretty bad, at the start, before you both started maturing and realized how ridiculous you were, especially with your classmates telling you to keep it classy — he’d stay up all night, wondering why you hated him so much in the first place, what on Earth he could’ve done to warrant such vitriol. Now, finally, he knew, and he could only resent the fact that no one had invented time machines yet, so he could nip his useless ego in the bud; so he could tell younger Jay not to take it personally, that you had your reasons for disliking him, that even if you hadn’t, the world won’t end if someone doesn’t like him like everyone usually does. 

Because, he hates to admit, that was what had done it for Jay. He couldn’t stand that someone — not just someone, but one of the prettiest girls he’d ever seen, a girl he’d been hyping himself up to talk to every day, but never found the courage to — didn’t immediately fall for his charms. And not just that, but even showed just how much she disliked him. You looked him up-and-down with disdain, made disgusted faces at his jokes, rolled your eyes when he spoke up in class. It made him burn with anger, but he also weirdly enjoyed it—at least, you were paying attention to him. So, he amped it up. Talked louder, laughed louder, hovered around you. He even stole your erasers, wrote the date on which he’d taken them, kept them in a box on his desk that he looked at every time he studied at home. He aimed to beat you in every class you shared, even though neither of you cared that much about grades—the annoyed look on your face when he boasted about the two points he’d gotten over you was enough satisfaction.

All in all, he behaved like a child, and you reciprocated in like.

Until you didn’t.

It was a random Tuesday when something in your attitude towards him shifted. It wasn’t a complete 180, but he noticed everything about you, so even a slight change of your tone was obvious to him. You started using your nickname for him more often than his full name—he never told you, but of course he loved that you didn’t call him Jay like everyone else, that you had your own way of addressing him. It was a sign to him that the two of you had something special, even if it was on the opposite end of the spectrum of what he wanted with you.

He again spent sleepless nights wondering what had caused this change: was it something he had done, or something within you? It was a welcome change, that much was sure, but he was initially too confused to take it in stride. He’d long made peace with the fact that he’d never have you the way he really wanted, so he was fine with whatever this was—but now, you were changing, your interactions were tinged with something like shyness, the distance between you felt greater than ever. He tried to keep up his smart-ass appearances around you, but you only indulged in your old habits once in a while, as though you had grown tired of arguing with him, even of giving him the time of day.

So he resolved himself to adapting his behavior to yours. If you stared at him intently like his face was a puzzle you were trying to solve, he let you, rested his head on his palm and smiled as he stared back at you. Finally, he had an excuse to look at you without you threatening to punch him or saying a picture would last longer. He knew they did, he’d had to resort to scrolling through Sunoo’s and Kazuha’s Instagrams to find any photos of you. Yours was private and at the time, you would’ve probably cursed him out if he’d sent a follow request. If you seemed too annoyed or upset over something, he’d leave you alone, he’d do something nice to let you know you didn’t need to have your guards up at all times around him. If you seemed to silently call for a truce of hostilities, he easily complied.

Then, after a few weeks, your petty arguments resumed, but those too were different—if before they felt filled with real disdain and irritation, they now seemed to be a comfortable habit to fall back on, almost like a fun hobby. Those, too, Jay readily welcomed.

And so things changed in a direction Jay had never thought would one day be possible. You gave him no explanations, nor did he ask for any, and soon he stopped losing sleep over the why’s and the how’s and simply let himself enjoy the fact that you now had the semblance of a friendship, that he could compliment you and pass it off as amical teasing, that he could learn things about you like what you spent your weekends doing, what your relationship with your family was like, whether you were a dog or cat person, whether you wanted to visit his farm in Stardew Valley. 

Unsurprisingly, this only enhanced his already pathetically strong feelings for you. He worried over how to make sure this wasn’t some sort of 30-day friendship trial you had wanted to test out. He reveled in the fact that his top university of choice was the one you had already been accepted to. He now knew what it felt like to have you smile at him, smile because of him, and he never wanted again to live in a world where this was not a daily occurrence. 

He now sort of has an answer—your letter doesn’t make it very clear, it makes him think again that you really had not meant to send it, but you seem to have had a dream. A dream of him, 28-year-old him, to be precise, of your life together—he’s not sure. At this point in time, he doesn’t care much, either. Whether it was a dream or a real vision of the future that you had, all that matters is that it allowed you to see him in a new light, a light which he had hoped for years would one day appear to you, and it had changed things. And now, you liked him.

You said so yourself.

He’s at a loss for words. He can’t concentrate for long enough to put all his thoughts in order, he can’t make himself calm down and write his feelings down. He has to pack to go home, once he’s home, he’ll have to pack for university. But it’s only two weeks from now to the day you meet again, and it’ll be better to say what he wants to say in person, anyway.

Is it okay if I respond to your letter in person? I think I’ll be too busy these two coming weeks, he texts you.

And then those two weeks pass like two seconds and you’re there, a few meters away from him. All the speeches he’d prepared in his head, from grand declarations of love to laid-back admittances of Yeah, I like you too, you’re cool, I guess, they all vanish from his head. For fourteen days he’s been going through scenarios upon scenarios of your reunion, what you’d look like, what he’d say, how you’d react. But now that he can actually see you, now that he would just have to walk a few steps if he wanted to touch you, hug you, kiss you — hoping that was something you wanted to do — he freezes. He forgets how his body works, the part in his brain that’s meant to manage language ability fails him. HIs mom calls him over, urging him into his new dorm building, and all he can do is wave back at you like an idiot.

When finally he musters the courage to text you, what he hopes will be the day that starts your romantic relationship turns into the day Park Jongseong realizes how much of a loser he is. For the first hour, he can’t look at you, he can’t get through a sentence without stuttering out half of his words, he runs out of things to say in record time. All he can think of is how easy it’d be to grab one of your hands, hold it in his and walk around this stupid potted plant sale as if the two of you were two halves of a whole. He doesn’t even want a potted plant, his roommate already has five, he just wanted an excuse to see you. He steals glances at you when you’re looking elsewhere, and he notices everything about you tenfold now that he can, now that caring about you doesn’t need to be in vain any longer. He tells himself that he just needs to calm down a bit, even when you have the confirmation that the person you’re about to confess to already likes you, revealing your feelings to someone is always nerve-wracking, the two of you haven’t seen in each other in a while, he’ll talk to you once his heart gets out of his throat.

But you’re acting normal. Suspiciously so. You’re acting like you never told him you liked him, like nothing has changed between you. He rereads your letter the second he gets back to his dorm. He’s not crazy, it’s written right there, I like you, Jong. I think I have for a long time, longer than either of us thinks. He knows the words by heart now, but he checks them anyway. So why are you acting like you never said anything? Had you really not meant to send that letter? Did Jay actually intrude on your private thoughts by reading words that had never meant to be seen by another soul?

You continue to behave as you usually would around him, but if he couldn’t go back to vicious bickering when things changed the first time, he can’t go back to friendly bickering now that things — for him — have changed a second time. He doesn’t even want friendly to be in your shared vocabulary anymore. 

So he stops giving in. If you make fun of him, he just stands there with an unimpressed if amused look on his face. If you pedantically correct him on something, he just nods his head and accepts it. He can tell you’re bothered by it, but he needs to show you that he doesn’t want to go on being just friends with you—he wants to compliment you without having to pass it off as teasing, he wants to stare at you with hearts in his eyes without having to look away when you catch him, he wants to spend every waking second of every day with you, he wants to hold your hand, hold you. 

He could wait for things to change slowly again, but why wait when he could help things along?

--

It’s nine p.m. on a Saturday and you’re sneaking Jongseong into your dorm. Liz is away for the weekend, gone back home to celebrate her aunt’s birthday, so you have the room to yourselves. It took some convincing to get him to come — What if we get caught coming in, What if your T.A. sees us, What if I get reported to campus police — and so when your verbal reassurances failed to work, you resorted to blinking up at him through your lashes and that did the trick.

Jongseong was in many ways unlike any other man you’d ever met; in some other ways, he was the exact same.

Plastic bag of the tteokbokki you’d asked for in hand, he looks around the deserted hallways like someone might jump out of nowhere and beat him to a pulp at any given moment. At this time of the week, everyone’s out partying or holed up in their dorms, presumably either to rest or because of a lack of friends so early on in the semester. You grab his free hand and hurry him along to the elevator—once inside, it takes you a few seconds before you realize you’re still holding it, and you retract your hand quickly while he just smiles. 

You settle yourselves on the floor—comfort is not worth getting gochujang sauce on your white sheets. You sit criss-cross in front of each other, the food between the two of you, and catch up on your first week of class in-between bites of spicy, gooey rice cakes and fish cakes. You wonder, if one day you and Jongseong are no longer friends, how long you will keep associating tteokbokki with him.

When you tell him that you and Jake share a class, Introduction to Film Studies, he gives you a look. “What’s that face for?” you ask.

“Did you guys sit next to each other?”

You chuckle. “Of course. We only knew each other in that room, it would’ve been weird not to.”

He continues to stare at you. After a while, he muses, “You’re not…?”

You halt in your tracks, rice cake at the end of your plastic fork hanging in the air, halfway between the container and your mouth. “Whatever you’re thinking, the answer is no.” Still in love with him, interested in him again, you don’t know the exact details of Jongseong’s thought process, all you know is he has nothing to worry about—if it’s something he worries about.

When a smile slowly grows on his lips and he nods, saying, “Okay, good,” you let yourself think it might be.

Later, you’re ten minutes into a senseless blockbuster movie when he suddenly pauses it. It snaps you out of a trance—his hand was awfully close to yours, so is his shoulder, his thigh, his knee, everything, really, and you haven’t been able to concentrate on anything but the warmth radiating off his skin and the intensity with which you crave to feel it intentionally rather than accidentally. When he speaks, there’s something serious in his tone that makes you nervous. “Y/N,” he says as he turns to you, and now his face is awfully close, too. There’s still many centimeters separating you, but in this tiny, barely lit-up room, he feels closer than ever before. “Do you remember when I said I’d reply to your letter in real life?”

You tilt your head. “Yeah, that was ages ago.”

“Well, I thought I’d do it now.”

“Now?”

He takes a deep, shaky breath. “Now.”

And then those safe centimeters suddenly disappear, and Jongseong’s lips are on yours. It’s a brief, chaste kiss, so quick you wonder if it even happened when he leans back again.

“I like you, too,” he says, and your heart stops.

“W-what?” is all you can say back, eyes wide like he’s just admitted to killing someone rather than reciprocating your feelings.

His confident facade quickly crumbles. “God, this was so much cooler in my head, I-I’m sorry.” He pulls something out of his sweatpants pocket, pages folded over and over into a tiny square. As he unfolds them, you recognize your paper, your handwriting—but what do your letters have anything to do with him kissing you, of all things? “I don’t think you meant to send this. But I’m glad you did.”

He hands you the pages and your eyes skim over the words, not detecting anything out of the ordinary, until—But it got me thinking about your fight again. Reflecting on it now, I can say that it was a turning point for me in my perception of you. You remember this line, because you had made sure to strike it and everything that came afterward out when you rewrote the letter that you would actually send Jongseong. So how was he giving you this? 

“I-How do you have this?” you ask, voice trembling. You feel as though your heart overflows with all kinds of emotions, and so your eyes follow, tears staining your lower lashes. 

But Jongseong is not one to let you hide things from him. “Hey, no, it’s okay,” he says, warm hands coming to cup your face. “Look at me.” You have no choice but to oblige—his gaze is somehow both soft and stern, a mix of concern and determination. “Did you mean what you wrote in here?” You nod. “Then everything’s okay. You don’t know how happy I was reading this.”

The tension in your body slowly starts to fade. “Really?”

“Really. I cherish every single word in there.”

“Really?” you repeat, and he chuckles.

“Really.”

Your heartbeat speeds up as you gaze into his eyes, as you let yourself bask in the affection and endearment you find there. You can’t quite comprehend what’s happening. The letter, the kiss, his confession, your inadvertent confession, it’s all a mess in your head; so sudden, but such a long time coming at the same time. You never imagined that things would change so quickly—less than a year ago, you thought Jongseong was the most irritating person on this planet. After meeting his 28-year-old self, you thought it’d take ages for the two of you to be on such good terms. But now, just a week into your first semester of university, belly full of tteokbokki and Sprite, you like each other enough not only to be in the same room without hurling insults at each other but to actually be smiling at each other, willingly at that.

Your eyes drift down to his lips, just like in the hallway all those months ago, and the words slip out before you can stop them. They’re a mere whisper—”Kiss me again.”

Jongseong doesn’t need to be told twice. Still cupping your face, he bridges the gap between the two of you again, and this time, when your lips meet, they don’t come apart so quickly. It’s your first kiss, and it’s nothing short of magical, better than any romance novel could’ve prepared you for. His lips are warm and soft against yours, moving slowly, gingerly; as if he’s scared to take any wrong step, he lets you control the pace, follows every tilt of your head this way and that. It’s a relief that he seems to know as little about this as you do—his hands haven’t moved from your face, yours are on his knees, all you can do is focus on the movement of your lips, to think of anything else at the same time would be overwhelming. 

“I’ve liked you from the start,” he suddenly says, face still so close you can feel his breath on your lips as he speaks. 

“Hm?” you hum, body reeling from the kiss.

“I’ve liked you from the start,” he repeats, grinning—he looks relieved, like he’s been waiting to say these words for a long time. “I can’t believe this is happening after all these years. Or at all, really.”

“I think I did, too.”

“Yeah, you mentioned that in your letter.”

Your eyes widen and you bury your face in your hands as Jongseong laughs. “You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?” you mumble.

He smooths over your hair with one hand, brings your face back up with the other. “Don’t worry. I won’t ever make you regret this.”

Your brain and heart are too all over the place for you to come up with a coherent answer, so you lean in and reconnect your lips to his. It’s already becoming your favorite sensation, feeling him smile into the kiss, threading your fingers in his soft hair.

Time passes delicately like this, the two of you on your single bed, in the sheets that you bought three weeks ago. A lot of it is spent kissing and learning how to fall into each other’s rhythm, but you also spend hours talking, comparing situations and how you’d experienced them. You thought his occasional acts of kindness were done out of guilt, evidence that he did have some morals; he was trying to show he cared about you. He thought you’d despised him from the moment you saw him; you reiterate in more detail than your letter what really happened, you say you wish you knew then what you know now. 

“But I never hated you, Jong. I think I wanted to believe that I did, but I never actually did.”

“You glared at me everytime I walked past like I killed a member of your family.”

You groan, ashamed of yourself. “I did, didn’t I?”

“You did,” he says, chuckling, placing a kiss on your forehead. His arms are around you, your head rests atop his heart—you’ve never felt more comfortable in your life. “But it’s okay. We’re here now, and I don’t want us to have any regrets about high school. We had a good time, didn’t we?”

You tilt your head up to look at him. “I’m sure you did, stealing all my erasers.”

He lets out a hearty laugh. Clearly, he’s very proud of his feat. “Hey, I gave all of them back.”

“And what am I going to do with a hundred erasers, Jong?” you ask, laughing too, pecking his cheek aggressively—your way of punishing him for a grave deed.

“Keep them as a token of my love for you,” he says, and your breath falters at the mention of that word. “In fifty years, it’ll be a sign that I’ve liked you since the beginning, I just had a funny way of showing it.”

“Fifty years, huh?”

He grins. “Fifty, a hundred, whatever. You’re not getting rid of me.”

“I wasn’t planning to.”

You’re both smiling so wide, you can barely manage a kiss. He trails kisses from your lips to your ear. Holding you close, he whispers, “It’s always been you, Y/N. Always and only you.”

There may be thorns on the otherwise immaculate rose that is your life, but Park Jongseong was never one of them—all along, he was a bud waiting to bloom.

--

The more time passes, the more you wonder whether that night you had seen in your vision will ever come. There’s been evenings similar to it—crashing the minute you came home from a long day on set, telling yourself you’d take a fifteen-minute power nap only to wake up three hours later and coming downstairs to find your husband cooking dinner, cleaning the kitchen, taking care of your son or simply watching TV, but waiting for you, always waiting for you. He seems as happy now watching you come down the stairs as he was then finding your face among all the students flocking out of lecture halls. 

The details are blurry now, but many small things seem to be different from what you’d seen. He still tries to recreate your favorite meal, but it’s not pasta all'arrabbiata, it’s laksa, because your first date as an official couple was to a Malaysian restaurant, not an Italian one. He’s still the best father you know, but you have one son, not twin girls—although that offer to “give him a younger sibling to play with” is always on the table. Even the house you live in is different from the one in your dream, which has now become nothing more than a funny anecdote you share with people when they ask you the story of how you and Jongseong met.

You think of Sunoo’s words from all those years ago: Sometimes, we want something so badly, we conjure it up for ourselves. Had 18-year-old you been in such denial over her feelings for Jongseong that she’d had to convince herself a magical well had bestowed a crazy dream upon her to admit that, yes, there was something there, something other than childish hatred?

It doesn’t matter anymore. Months pass without you thinking about that well, anyway. 

Tonight, you come home late from work after having had to do last-minute changes to the script for your current project, a movie that starts shooting in a few days. Jongseong texted you that he was going to bed an hour or so again, so you’re greeted by a plate of japchae covered in film paper. The post-it note stuck to it reads, I’m afraid of the repercussions of too much curry consumption on our son, so no laksa tonight my love. Hope you like it. Come to bed quick. You were starving a second ago, but you decide food can wait—other things can’t.

You tiptoe up the stairs and into your son’s room, breathing in the scent of his hair and placing a kiss there. His hair is still worryingly sparse, but if he’s anything like his dad, it’ll come in a bit later than the other kids. You always thought babies with a full head of hair were freaky, anyway. He doesn’t budge a bit, sleeping like a log—his dad is another story, shuffling in bed the moment you step into your shared bedroom. He opens his arms wide, a silent invitation.

“You’re home,” he says as you attach yourself to his body, your leg hiked up over his, your face buried in the crook of his neck, your thumb caressing the start of stubble on his cheeks.

You smile. “I am.”

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[wcnderlnds]

opposites attract | choi su-bong (thanos)

・❥・ summary: he's chaotic and loud, you're shy and introverted but he can't help but be intrigued by you ・❥・word count: 1.3k ・❥・warnings: mentions of death bc squid game, nam-gyu is mean to reader (im sry), female reader. ・❥・ authors note: i love writing this chaotic man <3

Of course the second game just had to be one where you had to interact with people and find a team. Talking to people, approaching them – it was your worst nightmare. As you stood there in the sea of people all talking and teaming up, you timidly stayed in place, your hands pulled into the sleeves of your jacket giving yourself sweater paws. Since the first game, you had kept to yourself. You had even voted to leave. Why would anyone want to stay in a place like this where people were getting killed for losing children’s games? Unfortunately, the majority had decided to stay even after a heavily heated debate where player 456 had declared he’d been here before. While it was all kicking off, you had hid behind the crowd. Conflict was something you avoided. People were usually something you avoided but when a salesman came up to you with promises of money, how could you say no?

So, as you stood there, too shy to approach, you accepted the fact that you were probably going to die. There was no way you had enough courage in you to find a team. Even if you did, who was there to ask? The only person you might consider approachable was player 456 but he already had a team. There was no point going over there, asking and risking embarrassment as they turned you down. Aimlessly you wandered around the room, fingers toying with the ends of your sleeve – a nervous habit that you’d had since you were a child.

Guess you’d just have to accept your fate. You were either going to get killed because you couldn’t find a team or end up in a team who didn’t want you. Just as you were about to sit down and give up entirely, someone cleared their throat behind you. Spinning around, you came face to face with the infamous player 230. His purple hair was unmistakable, you’d seen him when he’d been fighting some other boy yesterday.

“Senorita, excuse me,” he said, his hands clenching his jacket to his chest. Your eyes landed on his multi-colored nails first before daring to glance up to look at him. Eyes met his dark ones for only a second before looking back down at the ground. He noticed instantly, tilting his head to the side as he looked at you. “Team with us.”

“R-really?” You dared to glance back up. He seemed serious but the look his friend was giving was anything but friendly. It looked like he’d rather team with anyone but you.

“Yeah, really? She’s kind of weird,” Nam-gyu looked you up and down, pulling a face then turning back to Thanos. “We can find someo-”

“Shutup,” he held his hand up in front of his friend’s face, his eyes solely focused on you. “Team with us. I’ll keep you safe.”

It wasn’t like you had any other options so you nodded. Thanos seemed thrilled, throwing his arm around your shoulders in a side hug. Your instinct was telling you not to trust him but at the same time there was something slightly comforting about him. After all, he had ignored his friend to solely talk to you. Why on Earth he was so adamant to have you on his team baffled you but it saved you from getting eliminated… if you made it through the game anyway. 

Turns out it was five mini games in one. As the rest of your team argued about who would do what, Thanos’ eyes were fixated on you who was looking at the ground. There was something about you that intrigued him. The difference in your personalities was more than noticeable. He was loud, crazy and obnoxious while you, on the other hand, seemed shy, insecure and quiet. Maybe it was true. Maybe opposites really did attract because for some reason, he wanted to get to know you more. He actually wanted to know you. That rarely happened with him. Usually he was the type of guy to get a crush, fuck and then move on to the next one. It was rare for ‘Mr One Night Stand’ to really want to get to know someone. To be honest, he wasn’t sure he liked the feeling. The pounding in his chest as he tried to examine you with his eyes. It was impossible to really get a good read on you.

“And, the loser over there can do Gonggi,” Nam-gyu’s voice echoed through your ears. Panic struck, you leaned forward, speaking before you even thought about it.

“I-I don’t know how to play Gonggi,” you mumbled.

“Better learn quickly then, huh?” Nam-gyu smiled fake-sweetly at you.

“Hey, stop it,” Thanos stopped his silent beat boxing to chime in, leaning forward to glare at his friend. “Leave her alone… What are you good at?”

“I can do spinning top. I played it a lot with my friends…” you tried to speak with a bit more confidence, a pink hue tinting your cheeks. Thanos noticed, grinning at you.

“Spinning top for you then. You’re cute, by the way,” he winked, causing your cheeks to only redden more.

Somehow, someway, the team had managed to survive. A lot of teams seemed to struggle with Spinning Top but you had got it the first try – Thanos almost blowing out your eardrums with the loud cheer of celebration when you did. Now, back in the main room, you were sat with the team. If it was up to you, you would have gone to sit by yourself but Thanos had insisted you sit with them. It seemed like he wanted to keep you around. It wouldn’t be too bad to have some friends, right? You sat beside Thanos, a space between you. While he was in a world of his own, DJing some invisible show in his head by the looks of his hand motions, the rest of the team were arguing. Your knees were pulled up to your chest, chin resting on them.

Watching everyone talk with each other so easily – even if it was arguing – made you feel slightly jealous that you couldn’t. It wasn’t that you didn’t want to because you did but the mere thought of striking up a conversation with anyone brought you too much anxiety. It was just better to keep to yourself. If you had to be the weird, quiet girl then so be it.

“They’re idiots,” the deep voice beside you said. Turning to look, you’d noticed Thanos had closed the distance between you both, his shoulder touching yours now. “You good?”

“Uh, yeah, thanks,” you smiled, tucking a stray piece of your hair behind your ear. “Thanks for letting me team with you.”

“No problem, Senorita. Told you I’d keep you safe, didn’t I?” His toothy grin made your heart skip a beat. Oh boy. That was the last thing you needed.

“Y-yeah,” you laughed, tearing your eyes away from him yet again.

This time, his finger gently reached out, tilting your chin to look at him. His eyes pierced yours, a look of intrigue on his face. “You have pretty eyes. It’s a shame you think the floor deserves to see them more than me.” He leaned in a little closer, his hot breath fanning against your face. Being close to someone wasn’t new for you. It was something that didn’t happen often but you’d had your fair share of encounters with people. “Meant it when I said you were cute, babygirl. Stick with me through these games and when we survive, let me take you out for a drink. Maybe I can get more than a few words at a time out of you.”

Once again, he winked at you, removing his finger from your chin and turning his attention to the argument going on in front of him. Meanwhile you were in a daze, your heart beating against your chest so much you were sure it was about to beat out of your ribcage. Yeah, this man was definitely going to be trouble.

taglist: @angelofbooksworld @ldydeath @taivantaylor @sherlocke3d @djarindroid @justsisse @sassyyoyo @lillyysgirlblog @mysatnin @basquiat-top @urmomsg1rlfreind

[inmaki]

number one sorcerer (and virgin) .

synopsis: req! in which your boyfriend — notorious for boasting about how good he is in bed — turns out to be all bark and no bite (until you give him some guidance, at least).

pairing: virgin!switch!gojo x f!reader

wc: est. 6k?

incl: unprotected sex, pull-out method, lots of dirty talk, a bit of teaching gojo, petnames, manhandling, size kink, clit play, praise kink, edging (himself), teasing, mocking, fingering, oral (f + slight m), cum swallowing

a/n: ty for awakening smtn in me anon it was nice to be writing a full fic again!! hope im not too rusty,, this is straight up filth tho so mdni

back when satoru and you were just friends, he liked to make it very clear to your circle of peers that he wasn’t just good at sex.

no, according to himself, he was some kind of sex god — to match his power level in sorcery, of course.

and obviously, who was anyone to think otherwise? the great gojo satoru; such a cocky and confident demeanour paired with angelic white hair, piercing blue eyes, and a tall sculpted body that other guys at the gym double-take at. him..? a virgin? hah! good one.

satoru believes that he’s done a rather spectacular job at keeping his reputation sky-high.

the only problem was.. now he had a girlfriend with high expectations to please.

since the day you’d gotten together — going multiple months strong — satoru was starting to sweat more and more knowing that his rather crucial fabrication was bound to be brought up sooner or later. you had your needs just like him, and satoru wouldn’t blame you if you were a bit worried about why he hasn’t initiated anything; y’know, since he was supposedly eros in human form and all that.

little did you know your boyfriend felt equally frustrated. for slightly different reasons.

“bro, it’d be hot if she was a virgin, but me?!” flopping back against the armrest, gojo lets out a theatrical groan while his best friend — the only other person to know of his dark secret — snickers against the cushions nearby.

“everything’d be fine if you didn’t pretend to be some incubus that makes girls cum with a snap of his finger,” geto quips unhelpfully.

satoru lifts his head, sneering when he realizes that the raven-haired man was much too busy scrolling on his phone to notice how he’s resting a pair of dirty shoes on his white couch. “that would be pretty cool..” when he only receives a disgusted glance, he huffs, suddenly feeling a bit vulnerable as his thoughts wander further. “how’m i even gonna tell her? what if she doesn’t trust me anymore?”

at last, suguru looks up with a hint of sympathy in his eyes. “you know y/n isn’t like that. just.. wait for her to initiate something and go with the flow,” he advises, lips curling into a knowing smirk.

“you find a way to be good at everything, anyway, toru. she’ll be begging for you in no time.”

as usual, geto knows him too well, because those last few words have gojo shooting up from the sofa with a grin. “ya think so?”

“hell yeah, man.” the two idiots end the discussion by dapping each other up, a confident gleam in both of their eyes.

only a couple days later, satoru discovers that going with the flow isn’t as easy as suguru advised. with your plush lips sucking his bottom one through occasional moans, along with a delicate pair of nails scratching perfectly at his undercut, he already felt himself getting breathless and aroused like a teenager.

perhaps you’ve put him under a spell; how is it that he lasts through prolonged battles while barely breaking a sweat, but having your cute hand move to rub up on his abs and pecs send his nerves into overdrive? it wasn’t like making out wasn’t uncommon for the two of you, this time it just felt so passionate with the way your hips moved to straddle his, tongue practically begging for entrance while the movie on screen was left long forgotten.

gojo can’t help but groan as your muscle explores his mouth, core ever so smoothly grinding on his bulge and igniting heat through his entire body. even as you pull away to take a breath, his grip on your waist remains stable as if you’d disappear at any moment— growing even tighter with the way you bore into his eyes hungrily. “satoru..”

your unusually seductive voice makes him audibly gulp. “y— yeah?” he whispers, glancing to the hand thats now moving down over his grey sweats. shit, this was too much, was he dreaming? he should do something, pinch himself before—

“touch me, please?” as you voice your request, you squeeze his dick so nicely that satoru swears he nearly explodes in his boxers.

he swallows, words getting lost in his throat. “i— i uh...”

for the first time in history, satoru has been rendered speechless, and you visibly panic at this realization. yet when you try to carefully maneuver off his lap and give him space, the clutch on your waist intensifies. “what— are you okay? what’s wrong?” you murmur, brows creasing with concern.

though you never brought it up, satoru’s worry about your confusion was correct; you’d been expecting him to jump your bones a week into your relationship, but seeing how he never forced anything and remained respectful was cute.. at first. after a month of rejection and being pushed away whenever things got too heated, insecurities were bound to start brewing inside you.

he better have a damn good explanation.

“i’m fine,” he reassures, “it’s just— i should probably tell you something..” refusing to meet your eyes, the sorcerer resorts to drawing shapes against the skin under your t-shirt. in other situations, this would feel soothing, relaxing even — but currently, his lacking and lingering touch made you want to rip the hairs off your head.

all you wanted was to finally get a taste of your steaming hot boyfriend. what could he possibly need to say right now? you ponder, hasn’t he been dying to finally show off how amazing he is in bed?

“yes..?”

“it’s actually a funny story, ahaha..” he stalls, chuckling nervously as you turn his jaw to make eye contact. a feeling of impatience and neediness pulls through you, but you contain yourself with a deep breath.

“spit it out, satoru.”

there was no going back now, right? “so.. i’ve uh— i’ve never actually done this before.”

you blink.

“you’re a virgin?”

it was difficult to believe your own words; it sounded wrong no matter how hard you tried to wrap your head around it. satoru being inexperienced? the satoru with a rock hard 6 pack? the satoru with biceps that bulge out of his shirts and a face sharp enough to be sculpted by aphrodite herself? your satoru?

it sounded ridiculous, but the ugly pout rising across his lips tells you that it wasn’t a prank after all. “hey, don’t call me that, now it sounds way worse!”

a sigh escapes your lips, arms folded across your chest. “so all those never have i ever games and stories you told about one night stands were— mph!" before you know it, a large hand is covering your mouth.

“listen, how about we talk about this after having some fun?” a surprisingly determined gleam shines in your boyfriend’s icy blue eyes, making your thighs clench together in excitement.

who were you to say no to that?

—

next thing you know, pillows support your back as a shirtless satoru lies directly in front of your clothed crotch, hot breath making you wiggle around impatiently.

“jus— just take it off me, toru. so damn slow—“

“baby,” he scolds, looking genuinely upset, “this is my first time seeing a pussy in real life and you’re ruining it with your lack of patience.”

you can only roll your eyes and groan, head flopping back against the cushions in boredom. there was no way to predict how satoru’s first time would go, but you never expected it’d be this agonizing on your end — nor that he’d be so bossy.

though luckily, after another deep breath, your panties are gently tugged down your legs, and satoru can only inhale as he watches your poor hole clench around nothing. it only made sense that after all that dry humping and making out that your neediness increased, and it didn’t help that you could clearly see the way satoru was not only rock hard, but much bigger than average through his grey sweats.

“ooh.. oh shit..” like the invasive pervert he is, satoru moves even closer to the point where your thighs rest on his muscular shoulders before taking two fingers to spread your lips apart. this way, he has a clear view of the place that needs him most, and it makes a furious blush blossom on your cheeks.

“s— satoru.. what are you doing?” now you felt like the virgin, desperately attempting to shut your legs with no avail. damn this big idiot and his strength.

suddenly, his piercing eyes snap up to you, a feral look in his gaze. “shit, how’m i gonna fit in this little hole?”

you can’t deny the way his dirty words does something to you — not that you’d ever admit it. “that’s why you gotta prep me, toru. y’know..” you gulp, “fingering, or like.. eating me out.”

in response, you get a cheshire grin. “sounds fun. show me how you do it, sweets.”

“w-what?”

satoru leans back, attemping to hold in a mischievous smile. “how else am i gonna learn?”

even masturbating alone makes you flush in slight embarassment, so doing it in front of someone else — your cheeky, shamleess boyfriend no less — had you drowning in nerves. the bigger problem was that his words held a strong point; you’re supposed to be teaching him for his first time and ensuring it’s as enjoyable as possible.

these reminders make you mumble out a gentle fine, breath stuttering as you spread your legs further for the man in front of you.

satoru is now resting his weight on the palms of his hands, looking laid back and relaxed, but evidently still focused at the way your fingers move to unclasp your bra with skill. “damn..” as your tits are freed, he finds himself needing to adjust his sweatpants and nearly letting out a pathetic noise you would definitely tease him for.

you gulp, trying to ignore his blatant gawking. “it’s good to.. y’know, tease a bit before getting straight to it. makes it feel better — for me, at least,” you explain while massaging your chest, hiding surprise at the way he sternly nods in understanding.

now that you think about it, something tells you this is the most focused satoru has ever been in a learning environment.

after a bit more pinching and fondling, your hands slide down to your stomach and thighs, trying to get your breathing to relax. having gojo watch you do something so private was.. surreal, but you know for a fact you’ve never been this wet before, if that meant anything.

once you finally move down to your most intimate part, satoru takes a deep breath. he watches as you use your fingers to reveal a small bundle of nerves, pulsing and desperate for attention. “this is the clit, toru. s’very important.”

his eyes light up. “oh, i know that one!” he announces proudly, “i remember suguru saying i have to.. uh, worship it or something.”

you snicker at the thought of geto giving out sex pointers. “mhm, sometimes penetration isn’t enough, so you need to give it attention or i can’t really finish.”

gently, you start massaging the bud in circles, humming at the feeling of finally getting some type of relief. you move down to your hole to collect some of your wetness before bringing it back up, letting out a moan in satisfaction.

the way satoru licks his lips as you finally plunge a finger into your wetness has you shivering, but you remind yourself that for now, this was simply a demonstration and that you’d get a taste of him later.

after adding another, you attempt to reach your sweet spot by curling upwards, but it seems that even your hopelessly inexperienced boyfriend could tell that it was getting nowhere.

“aw,” he pouts teasingly, “lil’ fingers can’t reach anything, huh?”

“shut— shut up, satoru.”

before you know it, he’s moved onto his stomach again, face to face with your pussy and gripping your now soaked fingers. “you use these pathetic things when y’masturbate, huh? imagining my dick while having such tiny fingers up your cunt? kinda offended, babe..”

you feel your tummy flip, where did he learn to talk like that?

“do you have to be so vulg—“ you’re cut off by a choking gasp as a warm, wet muscle licks a stripe from your hole all the way to your clit.

“thanks for the lesson. ‘think i got it from here,” is all satoru says before he’s diving in, slurping up as much of your essence as possible before latching his plush lips right onto your poor little clit.

you can’t help but wiggle around at the jump in stimulation, but that only lasts about five seconds before a muscular arm presses you firmly against the mattress, rendering you trapped and unable to escape to his ministrations.

“hey, slow down!” your words are coincidentally yelped out right as he wiggles a much bigger finger into you. it explores your insides eagerly, caressing and feeling up what satoru believes will be his new favourite place.

“wow..” sluuurp, “so warm n’ soft in here..” he happily mumbles against your pussy. the vibrations of his now deeper voice shoot through you like electricity, eliciting another choked whine from your throat.

it felt like he was just toying with you; looking way too content drinking up everything you offered, fluid rushing down his chin and nose pushed firmly against your pelvis to inhale your scent.

suddenly, he’s jabbing his fingertip right into that pocket of sunshine that makes your eyes roll back, a loud whimper leaving your throat before you could stop it. “satoru, right there!” he swiftly seperates from your clit just to mumble out a here? in confirmation, prodding your sweet spot over and over in record breaking speed.

when you nod, he grins smugly, now adding another finger to stretch you further. “mmmph, this is pretty fun. could lie here all night.”

luckily, you barely process his words, much too busy enjoying the best finger-fuck of your life — and this was only his first time, you remember, what will the bastard do to you once he’s got some practice in?

a shaking hand tumbles into his snowy locks, attempting to pull him back weakly. “wait, m’gonna cum, toru—“

gojo growls almost animalistically, tugging your hand back onto the sheets. “then fuckin’ do it,” he demands. “c’mon, i’ve earned it, right?” then, he sucks even harder, fingers slamming and curling and making the loudest squelch you’ve ever heard.

“see?” he continues, “lil’ cunt wants to cum so bad for me. knows who 'er owner is already.” his filthy words definitely take part in the way your orgasm hits like a train, body shaking and toes curling as you let the feeling of bliss take over you. you flinch at how swiftly his tongue licks up everything you give him, the fingers in his hair tugging harder in overstimulation.

���toruuuuu..”

he simpers, tasting his cum-covered lips. “yeeees?”

“this— this is your first time, i should be making you feel good.”

slowly but surely, your eyes reopen, meeting your boyfriend’s relaxed gaze as he rubs your thigh affectionately. “dunno what you’re talking about, i felt pretty good just now.” when you only pout further, he snickers, pushing some of his bangs back smoothly. “c’mon, there’s lots of time for you to get me off later. m’ too excited for the main event..”

at last, he reaches for his sweatpants, more than excited to tug them down and finally give his aching cock some freedom. satoru doesn’t think he’s ever had a more painful boner in his life, but it was all worth seeing you release all over his tongue and fingers.

right as he finishes untying the knot, pale fingers drifting up to the waistband, you’re smacking him away to make room for your own hands. he watches with an open mouth as you pull his boxers down along with his pants, leaky, hard cock springing free and nearly hitting you in the face.

shit, of course his dick is perfect too. with a bit of white hair at the base, bulging veins adorned the entirety of his massive length, and the tip — shit, the tip was even bigger than the rest, mushroom shaped and angry red. his balls looked equally agitated and full — the epitome of breeder balls, and you gulped at the thought of him filling you up with everything they had.

now his question from earlier made sense, and he seems to be enjoying the realization on your face from his spot kneeling on the bed. “like what’cha see?” he coos, one big hand lowering to relieve the aching in his balls.

“toru, i don’t know if you’ll even fit. why— why do you have to be so big?” it’s annoying, you want to say — but the white-haired man has already laid back and manhandled you onto his chiseled stomach, a yelp escaping you at his suddenness.

he’s smiling so hard at your little dilemma that it’s almost sick, hands resting behind his head cockily. “tell me more while you ride me, baby.”

after processing that all you’ve been doing is feeding his size kink and inflating his already massive ego, you frown. “i’m serious, toru!”

“what!? i’m serious too!” the man defends with fake innocence, blue eyes shining in glee. “you’re the expert here, remember? ‘supposed to be teaching me how it’s done.”

all you do is grumble whilst moving down to sit between the sorcerer’s thighs, lightly prepping him with your fist and a dribble of spit from your mouth that has the white-haired male biting his lip. “fuck..” satoru can’t recall how many times he’s masturbated to the mental image of this exact moment, but now that it was finally happening, he promised himself to savor it as much as possible.

when you move to finally straddle him, hole hovering just above his length, he begins bucking his hips up desperately. “hurryyy…”

“are you in heat or something?” you snort, giving him a dirty glare as if you weren’t about to let him inside you.

“for you? yeah.” satoru offers you a cheesy wink and grin that dissipates the second your warmth encloses his aching tip. his hands slowly move up to grip your waist, jaw clenching in an attempt to not slam you down to his balls right then.

“ngh… fuuuck, baby,” he groans as you ever so carefully move down another inch. “jesus.. you’re sooo damn tight. dunno’ how you’re even taking me..”

you squeeze your eyes shut in attempt to bare the discomfort for him, a slight crease growing between your brows. “satoru, fuck— hurts..” he immediately reopens his eyes in worry, searching for a way to take your pain away.

yes, he could already tell that he enjoyed being meaner with you in bed — but it’s never fun if you don’t feel good as well. though he luckily recalls your lesson from earlier, moving a soft thumb down to massage your clit in tight circles.

when you jolt and nearly faceplant into his neck, he only grins proudly, now using one veiny hand to help push you further onto him. “theeere we go.. aw, feel better?”

“mhm, feels full..” you mumble back, looking down to see that you — unbelievably — still had a couple inches to go.

satoru feels like he’s about to burst on the other hand, thriving in pure ecstasy at the feeling of your walls massaging him just perfectly. he can’t help but thrust up and force his last inches inside you, an echoing smack! of skin against skin singing through the room and eliciting a startled yelp from your throat.

“toru!” despite your scolding, you can’t deny the perfection in which his tip kissed your g-spot effortlessly. his hands felt ever so soothing, comfortingly running up and down as you sat impaled on his cock, wiggling around to get comfortable and ruining him in the process.

just as you start to adjust, you feel yourself being lifted up. “m’ sorry sweets..” gojo suddenly voices, “i can’t..”

“huh? what do you m—ah!” you’re flipped onto your back before you know it, knees resting on the shoulders of your boyfriend who has a gleam in his pupils that you’ve quite frankly never seen before; he looked feral.

satoru carefully pulls out until only his tip is encased in your warmth, and everything is calm for a moment. you both take a deep breath, and he smiles down at your already fucked-out face with pride. “satoru—“

then he’s pushing back in with all the strength his massive hips can produce, and you think if it weren’t for his hands wrapped around your thighs, you would’ve got pushed off the bed entirely. you unintentionally let out the loudest sound of the night, and this sets him off.

now he was getting brutal, bullying your cunt with hit after hit against the spot that has drool dripping down your cheek and eyes crossing. you can’t even stop the pathetic noises and symphonies of right there! that leave your lips, no matter how hot your cheeks flush in embarrassment. it felt as though every time his dick jabbed back in he was right up in your tummy, veins pulsing and ensuring your pussy is molded to the perfect sleeve for him.

“toru, shit— nghh, faster, please! feels s’good!”

“nghh, toru, faster! ahaha..” he mocks you — of course he does, but picks up the pace nonetheless — now holding your lower body up so that your knees dangle higher over his shoulders and each stroke is angled exactly where you want him. “so cute when you’re gettin’ stuffed full, baby.”

he leers as you send him the harshest expression you can manage, reaching down for your clit and giggling as you start squirming in an attempt to escape the overwhelming pleasure. this bastard is having way too much fun, you realize, moans being forced out of you almost tauntingly.

tonight you discover that satoru’s way of fucking is rather animalistic, frantic, thrilling, and with the sole purpose of making you both feel as good as possible. if you want him to go slow or make love to you, you’d probably have to ask beforehand — or perhaps tie him up so you could have your fun in peace.

if your insides weren’t being rearranged, you’d grin at the thought of your boyfriend restrained and at your mercy. another night, you promise yourself.

“tightest pussy ever f’my first time baby.. haah.. can’t believe i’ve been missin’ out on this.” for once, something praising comes out of his big mouth, breathes getting cut short every time you involuntarily squeeze him harder. he swears there’s no better feeling then what you were giving him right now, not even singlehandedly resurrecting himself using the reversed curse technique.

and while no injuries have ever left a scar on gojo satoru, he decides that the claw marks you’re ruthlessly digging into his back will stay as long as his body allows — why should he hide how good he’s made you feel despite being a virgin an hour prior?

maybe if he’s in the mood to brag, he’ll show them to suguru later.

“feels good toru, fuckin’ me so good,” you feel the way his whole body reacts to your praises, a deep growl melting from his lips as the sounds of skin slapping increasingly grows in volume.

“babyyy,” he pants, legs being held higher while he digs deeper into your guts, “m’gonna cum.. need you to cum with me.“ the twitching of his length inside you gave away the fact that gojo has practically been on the edge ever since he pushed into you — and while he knows it’s completely normal to cum prematurely on your first time, when has he ever not gone above expectations?

in a split second you’re flipped onto your hands and knees, veiny hands pushing you into a deep arch while your boyfriend gives his body a moment to relax, pinching his base (a rather perverted method he’s learned by edging himself while masturbating) between his thumb and pointer.

when you needily wiggle your hips in an attempt to find his cock again, he grins boyishly. “lookin’ for this?” he sings the words right before plunging his entire length back into you, abusing your g-spot while a lanky finger impressively finds the bud between your legs right away (a skill that most ‘experienced’ men you’ve previously been with fail to achieve), circling and pinching in a frantic attempt to make your orgasms arrive in sync.

“fucking hell.." you whine, the new angle making his tip bump against spots that have never been rubbed before. “can feel you so deep..”

“oh yeah?” his bicep pulls you up so your head rests on his broad shoulder, now victim to the filth being whispered directly into your ear. “m’ i doing good? fuckin’ this lil’ pussy nice and deep like she needs?”

when you nod, he beams like a maniac, seemingly encouraged to pound you even harder as his hips pick up the pace. “damn, ‘think i’m already a pro at this, huh?”

for the sake of your sanity, you ignore his bragging. “toru, don’t stop. i’m— i’m gonna..”

“you’re gonnaaa?” he derides, kissing the corner of your lip sweetly. “tell me, baby.”

“gonna cum for you, please.” satoru almost decides to fill you up at those words, but his self control is just a bit stronger. he feels the way your cunt is pulsing, body practically shaking as you get closer and closer to release, and he’s determined to help you reach it.

his thrusts get a bit sloppier, and you’re too busy basking in your own pleasure to see the eye-candy that is gojo biting his swollen lips, sweat dripping down his temples all the way to his solid abs, snowy bangs a tad bit moist against his forehead. he looked like the definition of temptation; straight out of a wet dream with stamina that seemingly never declined.

“me too, baby. c’mon, cum on this dick. s’all yours to ruin.”

you moan as you allow yourself to let go, toes curling and nails digging into his toned forearms ecstatically. “thaaat’s it, good girl.. ahah.. such a good girl f’me.” he talks you through it as if he’s done so a million times, both of you looking down to watch your release coat his dick and the crumpled sheets below.

at his praise, you squeeze him just a bit tighter, making his lips curl up in interest. “my girl likes being praised, huh? yeah.. doing so good makin’ a mess on me..”

he pulls out, carefully lowering you to the mattress before tugging on his dick in hopes of reaching his own peak. satoru forces himself to open his eyes just enough to admire the view of you fucked out below him, body shaking slightly as you recover from the intense waves of your orgasm.

“y/n,” he abruptly whines, patting your shoulder with a subtle urgency in his voice.

“..mhmm?”

“where can i cum? quick baby— please, i’ve been holding this for way too long—“ this has your body moving, eyes popping open as you swiftly bend down so your mouth hovers directly in front of him.

you replace his fist with yours as soft lips move to suckle harsly on his leaking tip, and now it’s gojo who has his eyes rolling back; whimpers flying out of his throat every time your tongue massages the delicate underside, sending visible shocks through his body. “fuck!” he can only curse and run his fingers through your hair for support while you pump him dry. “just like that, good.. haah.. good fuckin’ girl, shiiit.”

you’ve never seen your boyfriend — the strongest — look so pathetic and desperate, but it only spurs you on further, enjoying the way he continues to blabber about how pretty you are and how he’s gonna fill your mouth like he would your pussy. in response, you greedily hum around him, licking through his slit as if you were pleading the little hole to give you what you deserved.

and only moments later, satoru’s words become reality; though he attempts to keep revelling in the feeling of your warm lips and hands, his body stills in place instinctively, one last warning tumbling out of his throat as your mouth is flooded with rope after rope of bitterly sweet fluid.

it seems like your accusations about his breeder balls were correct, because once it starts it seemingly never ends; cum now overflowing from the corners of your lips as you struggle to swallow frequently enough to not choke on how much he deposits.

meanwhile, gojo feels like he is quite literally ascending, everything becoming unimportant next to you and the feeling of pleasure being forced through him like an overwhelming earthquake, pulse after pulse as you suck him for all he’s worth.

“thas’ right.. take every damn drop, baby.” when satoru looks down and earns a glimpse of the white fluid trickling down your chin, his dick twitches in your mouth. “god, you’re so sexy..”

once he was done, you both flop onto the bed in exhaustion, and while the vulnerable moment has utmost potential to become something cute and memorable, a certain blue-eyed bastard decides to open his mouth once again.

“what’re you huffin’ and puffin’ for?” he sasses, shamelessly eyeing the way your tits rose and fell with every breath you took. “all you did was lie there while i had a full body workout!”

you take a very deep breath. “i just let you put your dick inside me. shut the fuck up.”

at your reminder of what’d just occurred, he grins like an idiot. “you’re right, thank you.” they’re soft, but he ensures his words are as audible and genuine as he can make them.

satoru isn’t exactly the best with words, but he knows damn well that — despite all the bullshit he'd spouted at those parties — you’re the only person he wanted to have his first time with, and the fact that you allowed his wish to become reality is something he’ll forever be grateful for.

“i love you..” you soften. “even if you’re a pillow princess.” you stiffen again.

nothing could stay lovey-dovey with him for too long.

a fake cry is pulled from his lips as you rudely smack his shoulder. “i tried to ride you but you flipped me over after ten seconds!”

“it’s not my fault you're as slow as a fuckin' snail!”

somehow, you both make it to the washroom despite all the banter. just as you bend over in hopes of starting the shower up, a mean spank is delivered to your ass.

when you turn to meet the culprit, he only narrows his eyes at you playfully. “round two, m’lady?” it’s almost like his voice lowers on purpose, dirty words rumbling in his throat, knowing what it did to your body.

you do your best to send him a disappointed glance anyway. “day one of not being a virgin and you’re already the horniest man i know.”

after following you inside, his fluffy hair flattens from the steamy water before nudging you back, encasing you between him and the solid wall.

“i might be willing to overlook the fact that you know other horny men if you agree to some very loving, extremely intimate making out,” he requests with a smirk, sleek nose poking yours in a much gentler way than expected.

you still send him a distrusting raise of your brow. “only making out, huh?”

the dirty smirk he sends you is all you need to know, along with his hardened dick pressing against your thigh as he moves in to kiss you.

what have you gotten yourself into?

mlist! gojo showing off his back scratches! <- if you enjoy silly virgin gojo pls lmk in the reblogs, comments, or asks <3

© inmaki on tumblr. all rights reserved. do not cross-post, translate, copy in any way, etc.

tags: @gojoallmine @allofffmypeaches @haitaniholic @pandoraium

[roturo]

SUCCESSOR -`♡´-

summary: He believes he’s going to die soon, and the idea of leaving the Kira case unfinished gnaws at him. The thought of his legacy fading away too soon is unbearable. He needs a successor. And soon.

warnings: A LOT of breeding, smut, unprocteted sex, overstimulation, multiple rounds, pwp, tummy buldge, mentions of cum, mating press, virgin!L, obssesed!L, mentions of forming a family, not proof read and sleepy while writing this. and more.

a/n: ik this is going to have as much support as my other works, but it's def one of my best and favs writings, so please show me your support with a comment and reblog! it means a lot for me!

You've been part of the task force for a while now, ever since L handpicked you for his elite team. As a regular member, you've earned your place and trust within the group. The necessity of keeping your identity hidden has diminished, thanks to the expanding team, but you still opt for an alias during meetings, maintaining a veil of secrecy around your true connection to L.

L’s mind is a labyrinth, each thought of a winding path leading to an unknown destination. His strategies are always a step ahead, his deductions razor-sharp. Yet, despite his brilliance, one specific thought has been haunting him lately:

He believes he’s going to die soon.

This isn't a paranoid delusion but a calculated assessment. L understands the immense dangers tied to the Kira case. The complexity of the situation has grown, and he suspects an external force at play, one that eludes even his grasp. This unknown entity has shifted the balance, making the case more perilous than ever.

L is determined not to let his legacy end prematurely. He has dedicated his life to solving the world’s most challenging mysteries, and the idea of leaving the Kira case unfinished gnaws at him. The thought of his legacy fading away too soon is unbearable.

He needs a successor.

And soon.

Finding someone who can match his intellect and tenacity is no simple task. The successor must be able to understand his intricate methods, to carry on his relentless pursuit of justice. The urgency of this mission weighs heavily on him, as he prepares to identify and groom the next guardian of his legacy.

You were the perfect match for him, and his calculations confirmed it. There was an 86% probability that having a child with you would result in someone with a higher IQ than his own, combined with the social skills he lacked. In the realm of interpersonal relationships, L was inexperienced, never having had a relationship or intimacy before. Recently, he had been contemplating how to propose this idea to you.

Should he ask you outright? Should he try to make you fall in love with him first? No, this wasn't about love. It was a precaution, a step in his investigation, a way to ensure his legacy continued if the worst were to happen.

The atmosphere in the headquarters was tense as always, the dim lighting casting long shadows across the room. You sat at your desk, engrossed in your work, when L’s quiet footsteps approached. His presence was magnetic, his aura of mystery and intellect always palpable. He paused beside you, his gaze fixed on the monitors displaying the latest updates on the Kira case.

“Can we talk?” His voice was soft, almost hesitant, a rare departure from his usual confident demeanor.

You looked up, surprised by the uncharacteristic uncertainty in his tone. “Of course, L. What’s on your mind?”

He shifted, glancing around the room as if searching for the right words. “There’s something I need to discuss with you. It’s… personal.”

Your curiosity piqued, you nodded, giving him your full attention. “I’m listening.”

He took a deep breath, his eyes meeting yours. “You’re aware of the importance of my work, of the dangers we face daily. The Kira case has made me realize that I must consider contingencies I hadn’t thought of before.”

You nodded, waiting for him to continue.

“There’s a… statistical analysis I’ve conducted,” he said, his voice becoming more clinical as he explained. “It suggests that if I were to have a child with someone of your intelligence and social capabilities, the child would have a higher IQ than mine and possess the social skills I lack. This could be crucial in continuing my work if anything were to happen to me.”

The gravity of his words hit you like a ton of bricks. L, always methodical and rational, had approached this highly personal matter with the same analytical mindset he used to solve cases. You could see the logic in his plan, yet the implications were overwhelming.

“So, you want me to… have a child with you?” you asked, trying to keep your voice steady.

“Yes,” he replied, his eyes unwavering. “But understand, this is not about emotions or personal desire...I think” He whispers to himself before he continues– “It’s a precaution, a part of my contingency planning. I’ve never experienced a relationship or intimacy, so I’m uncertain how to approach this.”

The room seemed to close in around you as you processed his request. It was a cold, calculated proposition, yet it carried a weight of vulnerability and trust. L was placing his future, his legacy, in your hands.

“How do you expect this to work, L?” you asked, your voice tinged with both curiosity and trepidation.

“I’m not sure,” he admitted, his facade of invincibility cracking slightly. “I’ve considered different approaches. Should I simply ask you directly? Should I try to make you fall in love with me first? But this isn’t about love. It’s about ensuring that if I am no longer here, someone capable can continue my work.”

A silence fell between you, heavy with unspoken thoughts and emotions. L’s eyes searched yours, looking for understanding, perhaps even acceptance. You could see the conflict within him, the struggle between his logical mind and the unfamiliar territory of human connection.

“I need time to think about this,” you finally said, your voice gentle but firm.

L nodded, a flicker of relief crossing his features. “Of course. Take all the time you need. This is not a decision to be made lightly.”

Finally, you made your decision.

One evening, you found L in his usual spot, hunched over his laptop, eyes glued to the screen. The dim light cast shadows across his face, highlighting the intensity of his focus. Taking a deep breath, you approached him, your heart pounding in your chest.

“L,” you said softly, breaking the silence. He looked up, his piercing gaze meeting yours.

“I’ve thought about what you asked,” you continued, your voice steady despite the turmoil inside. “And I agree.”

For a moment, L simply stared at you, processing your words. Then, slowly, he nodded, his fingers tapping lightly on the edge of his desk. “Understood. Thank you for your cooperation.”

You took a seat across from him, the air between you charged with a new sense of purpose. “How do we proceed?”

L leaned back, his thumb brushing his bottom lip in thought. “We need to ensure this doesn’t disrupt our work or compromise the investigation. The task force must not be aware of our personal connection, as it could create complications.”

You nodded, understanding the delicate balance that needed to be maintained. L’s expression remained impassive, but there was a flicker of something in his eyes. “I must admit that emotional connections are not my area of expertise. This will be… a learning experience.  Should… we do it tonight?”

“Ah- Ah- Slow down, L-Lawliet!” you gasped, your voice breaking with a mix of pleasure and urgency.

L’s thrusts were sloppy but fast, driven more by instinct than experience. His movements lacked rhythm, a clear sign of his inexperience. He had come twice already without withdrawing from you, his body responding purely on primal urges.

He had done his research, concluding that a mating press might be the most effective position for this purpose. But he never anticipated how overwhelmingly good it would feel. Was it like this with everyone? Or was it something unique because it was you?

His thrusts grew more erratic, almost desperate. Small whines escaped his mouth, each one tinged with your name like a prayer. You could feel every twitch, every movement inside you, the raw intensity of his desire almost too much to bear.

“L,” you whispered, trying to regain some control. “You need to… slow down.”

He nodded, a bead of sweat trickling down his forehead. “I’m trying,” he panted, his voice unsteady. “It’s just… so overwhelming.”

His usually sharp, calculating mind seemed lost in the haze of sensation. Every thrust, every brush of skin against skin, was a new experience for him. You could see the conflict in his eyes, the struggle between maintaining control and giving in to the raw pleasure.

He moaned at the familiar, overwhelming sensation of climaxing again, and you could feel your own release approaching. The intensity was almost unbearable when he grabbed a pillow and slipped it under your back, angling you into an even deeper mating press. His thrusts became more deliberate, his cock somehow reaching deeper, hitting your g-spot with precision over and over again.

The pleasure was so intense, so all-consuming, that all you could do was chant his name like a mantra, each syllable a prayer of ecstasy. “L-Lawliet,” you breathed, your voice trembling with the force of your impending climax.

He watched you with dark, hungry eyes, his own pleasure driving him to thrust harder, faster. “S-shit,” he gasped, his breath hitching, “I think—” His words dissolved into a whine as he came again inside you, his release flooding your womb with a desperate, addictive need.

This wasn’t just about producing a successor anymore. It was about the raw, primal satisfaction of filling you over and over again. He was captivated by the sight of your bodies joined, the way your mixed arousal leaked from where you were connected, glistening in the dim light.

“Lawliet,” you cried out, your own climax hitting you with the force of a tidal wave. Your body tightened around him, milking every last drop of his release as he continued to thrust, his movements erratic and needy.

He whimpered, the sound vibrating through his chest as he pressed his forehead against yours, his dark hair falling in a messy curtain around your face. “You feel… incredible,” he whispered, his voice rough with emotion and exertion.

He groaned before pressing his lips to yours, the kiss deep and fervent. His cock remained erect inside you, pulsing with an insatiable desire. The feeling of having you this close, of being connected so intimately, was overwhelming. In that moment, he lost all sense of reason and the initial purpose behind his actions.

His mind, usually so sharp and focused on the Kira case, was now clouded with visions of a future he never thought he'd consider. He imagined how adorable you would look, carrying his child, a baby with his eyes and your smile. The idea of having a family with you consumed him, pushing all thoughts of logic and strategy aside.

Without realizing it, he began thrusting again, the movement instinctual and desperate. Each thrust was deliberate, fulfilling the small bump of cum inside you that was already visible through your tummy. He watched in awe, fascinated by the sight of your bodies joined so intimately, the tangible evidence of his desire and your shared pleasure.

“L-Lawliet,” you gasped against his lips, your hands clutching his shoulders as he moved within you. “What... what are you thinking?”

He pulled back slightly, his eyes locking onto yours. “I’m thinking… I’m thinking about us. About a future I never allowed myself to dream of.” His voice was rough with emotion, a raw edge that you rarely heard.

Your heart swelled at his words, the vulnerability in his usually composed demeanor striking a chord deep within you. “Lawliet,” you whispered, your fingers tracing the contours of his face. “I never imagined… I never thought you’d want this.Want me”

“I didn’t either,” he admitted, his thrusts growing more purposeful. “But now, with you, that's all I can think about. The idea of you carrying my child, of us having a family…you in general… it’s overwhelming.”

He kissed you again, more gently this time, savoring the softness of your lips against his. Each thrust sent waves of pleasure through you, the sensation heightened by the emotional intensity of the moment. His hands roamed your body, memorizing every curve, every detail.

“Do you… do you want this too?” he asked, his voice trembling slightly.

“Yes,” you breathed, the admission freeing a weight you hadn’t realized you were carrying. “I want this. I want us.”

His eyes darkened with a mix of relief and desire, and he kissed you harder, his movements inside you becoming more urgent. The room filled with the sounds of your shared pleasure, each moan and gasp a testament to the bond growing between you.

As he continued to thrust, you could feel the tension coiling tighter within you, each movement pushing you closer to the edge. He seemed to sense it too, his rhythm intensifying as he chased his own release.

“Lawliet,” you cried out, your climax hitting you with the force of a tidal wave. Your body tightened around him, every nerve ending alight with sensation.

He groaned, his own release following closely behind, filling you once more. The feeling was addictive, the raw intimacy of it all-consuming. He held you close, his forehead resting against yours as you both caught your breath.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” he whispered mostly to himself, his voice filled with wonder.

“Neither can I,” you replied, your heart pounding in sync with his. “But it feels right. It feels perfect.”

He nodded, a small smile playing at the corners of his lips. “It does.”

You stayed entwined like that, savoring the afterglow and the newfound depth of your connection. The Kira case and the outside world faded into the background, replaced by the warmth of each other’s presence and the promise of a future together.

Eventually, as the reality of your situation began to seep back in, you knew you had to return to your duties. But the bond you had forged would remain, a source of strength and comfort in the days to come.

As L gently pulled out and helped you adjust, he pressed a tender kiss to your forehead. “We’ll figure this out,” he said softly in a small whisper. “Together.”

“Together,” you echoed, your heart filled with a certainty that no matter what challenges lay ahead, you would face them side by side.

[spxllcxstxr]

Being in an Established Relationship with Jayce and Viktor • Headcanon

(Gif not mine)

Request: I am desperate for more Jayce x Viktor x Reader content! Would I be able to request headcanons for what an established relationship with them would be like?? 🥺 -- @spatialwave

Warnings: gn!reader, first time writing arcane and jayvik so I hope it's all good!!

A.N: Andy (@spatialwave) has inspired me so much so PLEASE go read their beautiful writing! You need to understand I got this request LAST NIGHT, I just had to bang it out I was writing like a FIEND. I loved writing this so much, I hope to write more in the future!! Hope you enjoy!

•

Being in a relationship with Jayce and Viktor is like being a part of an old married couple that simultaneously bickers all the time and is just falling in love all over again every day

Jayce is like a ray of sunshine on a summer afternoon

He's clingy--but not overwhelmingly so. Jayce just has to have some sort of body part on either of you at all times (except in the lab unless he's feeling especially in love that day)

He loves putting his arms around your waist, chest pressed up against your back and lips ghosting over your neck. Jayce is a bit more subtle with Viktor, since your other partner prefers smaller touches, so their fingers are always tangled together. Some days Jayce will even sneak his hand into Vik's back pocket, making the slimmer boy light up red from the neck up

Jayce is also the type of boyfriend that will always have you two on his mind. He picks a flower from someone's garden to give it to you because "the vibrancy of its color reminded me of your eyes," or buys a little knick knack for Viktor because "I thought you would find it hilariously stupid" (Viktor will put it on his already cluttered desk at the lab because Jayce was right, it is stupidly funny)

Jayce will always get an A for effort because even if he can't remember how you like your coffee or tea, it's the thought that counts

Has bigass puppy dog eyes and he fucking knows how to use them against you two

All he has to do is look between you and Vik with those golden eyes are you're both putty in his hands

Speaking of being putty in hands, Jayce is the cuddler of the relationship

Which is good because he is also the space heater of the relationship too

Will basically have Viktor curled up on one side and you on the other. His face will be buried in Viktor's hair, placing sleepy kissed on his scalp. His fingers will rub circles on the small of your back. Jayce is the best pillow and blanket in all of Piltover AND Zaun

Viktor, on the other hand, is like the moon at midnight

He loves the both of you in a slightly different way than Jayce

While Jayce is more touchy and exuberant with his love, Vik is certainly more subtle, though that doesn't mean he loves you two any less

He is actually exceptionally smitten with you and Jayce. It's like his walls come crashing down whenever you two are with him. He could come back from having a disagreement about a project with Heimer, with his jaw clenched and brows furrowed, and then he'll spot you and Jayce in your shared apartment and it all melts away

Viktor isn't carrying the world on his shoulders with his partners around him. He knows that you guys will lift the hefty weight from his shoulders

While Viktor isn't as touchy ad you or Jayce, he shows his presence in other ways.

Viktor will always have at least one eye on you at all times. It's not that he doesn't trust you two (on the contrary, you two are the only people he trusts with his life), he just needs to know his lovers are ok

Jayce could be tinkering with something in the lab and 50% of Viktor's attention will be on him. Making sure he doesn't shock himself or mix the wrong chemicals together. And if that does ever happen, Viktor drops everything to help him. He masks his worry with wit, but the mask is transparent for you and Jayce

Viktor is also the one with the extreme attention to detail. Your coffee or tea is always right and always the right temperature in the morning. A scarf is always hanging on the coat rack near the front door on chilly days for you. Puts a bookmark in the book you're reading when you unexpectedly fall asleep reading on the couch

He is so big on being a gentleman. Will open doors for you two, pull out seats during a nice dinner. Also is the type to lift up your hand so he can kiss your knuckles (he knows this drives you wild and he struggles to hide a smirk at your heated face)

The three of you are witty and biting and funny in your own ways, quips are basically thrown around every hour of the day. The day isn't complete without someone rolling their eyes. Teasing knows no bounds--the apartment, the lab, a fancy dinner, in front of councilmen and women--doesn't matter

Every day you feel lucky to have these two as your partners, you really hit the jackpot with them. They're caring and attentive and loving in ways no one else is

And they feel the exact same way

•

[mephisto-reporting]

Hearbreak Anniversary with Rafayel

Summary: It was your anniversary with Rafayel. One year of togetherness. But what if he does not show up when you expect him to? What if he was spending it with MC? Pairing: Non MC! Reader x Rafayel Note: MC in this fic goes by the name Lina (my name... so if you are angry, you can be angry at me :3). This oneshot was based on this request. I will write this for the other LADS men too. Content Warning: Fear of abandonment, self worth issues, angst, hurt and slight comfort, Rafayel grovelling, Rafayel POV

The soft glow of the sunset filtered through the gauzy curtains of Rafayel’s studio, painting the space in warm hues of gold and orange. The place smelled faintly of him—a mix of turpentine, salt, and the faint trace of his cologne. You had spent hours here today, your hands busy arranging the decorations you’d so carefully prepared for this special occasion. Sea shells, shimmering like iridescent pearls, lined the edges of the room, their opalescent beauty a nod to the ocean he once called home. Candles flickered softly on every surface, their flames dancing to an unseen rhythm. You’d even managed to find strands of silken seaweed and glass ornaments, hoping to evoke the beauty of his heritage, the beauty of him.

Every corner of his art studio had been dusted, tidied, and then transformed with touches of magic, warmth, and care. You even placed the tiny trinkets and mementos you had kept from your shared moments—little souvenirs from your adventures together, knickknacks that held meaning between the two of you. You wanted him to feel at home, to feel the same sense of belonging that you had with him. You even wore your best clothes, the ones he had once complimented.

Today was your first anniversary. The thought alone sent your heart fluttering, and you’d poured all that love into this space, into this moment.

A few months ago he had told you this was just another day for him. A god’s sense of time was different, fleeting, perhaps even insignificant. But to you, it meant everything. It was a celebration of love that had somehow defied the odds—of a mortal heart tangled with one belonging to something far greater. So you ignored the whispering doubts that crept into the back of your mind, choosing instead to focus on trust. Rafayel had chosen you, not her. No matter how many stories tied them together, no matter the whispered inevitability of their connection, he had assured you. It was you he loved now.

But as the hours passed, that fragile trust began to tremble.

You sat in the chair by the window, smoothing down the dress you’d picked especially for today. Time crawled. The soft golden light of day gave way to a dark, yawning sky, and still, Rafayel didn’t come home. The anniversary dinner, meticulously prepared and carefully plated, sat untouched on the table. Each tick of the clock became a cruel reminder of his absence.

Worry gnawed at you. What if something had happened to him? Perhaps the art sale ran late, or he was caught up with his patrons. But he always came back home, right?

Your heart twisted as you reached for your phone, dialing a number you didn’t want to use but needed to.

“Thomas?” you asked hesitantly, your voice trembling.

“Oh, hey,” Rafayel’s manager greeted casually. “Everything okay?”

“Is Rafayel still at the sale?” You tried to keep the panic from seeping into your tone, but the silence on the other end was damning.

“Uh… no, he left hours ago. Said he was going to grab dinner. Lina was with him.”

Your grip tightened on the phone, your knuckles turning white.

Lina.

The name struck like a knife.

“Thanks, Thomas,” you whispered, hanging up before he could ask anything more.

You sat there, staring at the flickering candles, their light casting long shadows across the studio walls. He was with Lina. On your anniversary. You had trusted him, convinced yourself that you were enough despite the insecurities that had clawed at your heart since the day you met him.

But now, they came roaring to life.

You had known, of course, who Lina was. She was the one linked to the sea god, his past, his history—his heart. You tried not to let it affect you, tried to bury the insecurities that rose whenever she came up in conversation. Rafayel always assured you there was nothing between them. But then why was he with her, of all people, on your anniversary?

Tears blurred your vision as your chest tightened painfully. Lina.

She was everything you were not. Strong, beautiful, a part of Rafayel’s past, his first love. How could you compete with that? How could you compete with someone who had shared so much more with him, someone whose bond with him was carved in the very fabric of his existence? She was a part of him, woven into the his story, while you were… just someone who had stumbled into his life, someone insignificant in comparison.

Lina... The woman who was forever tied to his past. The sea god's bride. The one he’d loved for so long, the one who had always been there, time after time. You had told yourself, time and time again, that it was nothing. That Rafayel was different with you. He had assured you that there was nothing between them anymore.

But if it’s nothing, why is he with her now? On our day.

Your fingers trembled as you held the phone to your ear, but you couldn’t even bring yourself to ask any more questions. The answers were irrelevant now. His absence, her presence, they were all you needed to know.

Tears pooled at the edges of your vision before spilling over, streaking your face like tiny rivers tracing paths through dusted cheeks. It wasn’t fair. Nothing felt fair. He had promised you. He had promised. But promises were like ocean tides, weren’t they? Sweeping away whatever they could, leaving only bits of broken shells behind.

Lina was everything you could never be. She was strong, beautiful, powerful—everything that Rafayel deserved. She had the sea god’s heart, had always had it, and here you were, just a fleeting ripple on the surface, barely a mark to him. She was woven into the fabric of his past, his future. What are you to him? What have you ever been?

The memories of your relationship, the quiet moments of closeness, the laughter shared under the soft, flickering light of his candles, all those moments seemed so... fragile now. Fragile and fleeting. You were nobody. Just a distraction, a place holder. Nothing more.

You stood up abruptly, the chair scraping against the floor like the scratch of claws on stone. The studio, his studio, filled with remnants of him, was suffocating. His scent lingered in the air, the faint trace of his cologne mixing with the oils and paints scattered everywhere. His taste still clung to your lips from the last time you’d kissed him, the memories of his touch branded into your skin. It was all too much. Too much. The studio, so full of him, was now a suffocating reminder of what you had lost. You didn’t want to stay. You couldn’t.

You tried to hold the tears back, but it was useless. Every doubt, every fear you’d bottled up over the months came crashing down, drowning you in their suffocating weight.

This wasn’t love. This was a cruel game, one you couldn’t win.

You couldn’t breathe. You had to get out.

Your legs moved before your mind could catch up, carrying you toward the door. The wind hit your face the moment you stepped outside, cool and biting, but it wasn’t enough to quell the storm raging inside you.

You ran.

The streets blurred into one indistinct smear of light and shadow as you ran aimlessly, your feet pounding against the pavement, carrying you farther and farther from that studio. From him.

Eventually, the pavement gave way to sand, and the sharp tang of the ocean filled the air. The moon hung high above, casting a silver glow over the beach. Your chest heaved, your lungs burning as you collapsed onto the sand, letting the waves crash against the shore in a soothing rhythm that mocked your turmoil. You kept running, further and further away from whitesand bay, along the beach.

You stumbled, falling to your knees in the sand, clutching your arms around yourself. Your chest heaved as the tears fell freely, the sound of the ocean mixing with your sobs. Lina. You could picture them together, her hand in his, the same way they had been for so many years before you. The seagulls cried above you, indifferent to your pain. And in that moment, you realized that the world didn’t stop for you. It never had. You stared out at the endless sea, the dark horizon stretching in front of you.

How could I have been so blind?

The waves crashed against the shore, each one louder than the last. You are nothing to him. The thought echoed in your mind over and over, relentless, until you could barely breathe under the weight of it.

And just when you thought the world couldn’t get any colder, the tears started again. They fell freely now, salt mixing with the salt of the sea.

You had wanted to be enough. But maybe that was a joke after all. But even as your body trembled with the weight of the heartbreak, you knew one thing: You could never go back. Not to him, not to that studio, not to any of it. You were just a wave, crashing onto the shore, and he was the sea god.

The night wrapped itself around you like a suffocating blanket. The cold air bit into your skin, but it wasn’t enough to numb the ache clawing at your chest. Each crashing wave seemed to echo the bitter truth you couldn’t escape: you were never going to be enough for him. You curled tighter into yourself, trembling as the tears continued to flow. The sand clung to your dress, to your damp hands, but you couldn’t bring yourself to care. The world had narrowed to the storm raging inside you—a tempest of betrayal, doubt, and misery.

The sharp chill of the ocean breeze whipped your hair against your tear-streaked face, but it was nothing compared to the icy grip of despair coiling around your heart. Every promise he’d made, every word of reassurance, felt like shards of glass now, cutting into the fragile hope you’d built. The waves surged closer, the cold spray dotting your skin. Your sobs mixed with the crashing tide, swallowed up by the vast, indifferent sea.

You hugged yourself tightly, your body shaking as the cold seeped deeper into your bones. Yet, you stayed there, rooted to the spot, as if the ocean could somehow wash away the ache inside you. But no wave could reach that far, no tide could touch the place where your heart ached. You wanted to scream, to shout at the world for the injustice of it all, but the air in your lungs wouldn’t let you. You were too small for this world, too insignificant for him. You would never be the sea. You were just a small wave, lost in the expanse of the tide.

Rafayel’s POV

The door to the studio swung open, and Rafayel stepped inside, laughter trailing after him. “You should’ve seen the look on that shopkeeper’s face when I said we’d take both cakes,” he said, his voice warm and light. He turned to Lina, who chuckled softly as she followed him, holding one of the carefully boxed pastries. “He probably thought we were insane.”

Rafayel kicked the door shut behind him, balancing his own box of confections, his grin still in place. “I can’t wait to see my cutie’s face when she tries these. She’s going to love them.”

But the moment his gaze swept across the room, his laughter faltered and then stopped entirely.

The studio was transformed. Soft candlelight flickered, casting golden hues across the walls. Seashells glimmered like scattered pearls, carefully arranged along the edges of the space. Strands of delicate seaweed draped like garlands, their green silkiness catching the light. Trinkets, small but unmistakably meaningful, dotted the surfaces—each one an ode to moments he had shared with you. The table was set with plates of untouched food, lovingly prepared, and the air held a faint, tantalizing aroma that now felt unbearably heavy.

He froze, the pastry box slipping slightly in his grip. His throat tightened as his eyes roved over every detail, taking in the love and care you had poured into the space. The decorations, the mementos, the effort—it was overwhelming.

“Rafayel?” Lina’s voice broke through the silence. She stepped forward, her brows knitting in concern. “What’s wrong?”

“I…” His voice cracked, and he set the box down on the nearest surface with trembling hands. “I fucked up,” he whispered, barely audible. His fingers grazed one of the seashells, its surface smooth and cool. He trailed his hand over a string of seaweed, the soft texture almost mocking him. “I fucked up bad.”

Lina’s concern deepened. “What are you talking about?”

Rafayel turned toward her, his expression stricken. “The anniversary. Our anniversary. It slipped my mind.” His voice was a low, shaky whisper as he glanced back at the table, the untouched plates, the flickering candles. “She did all of this… for me. For us.”

He called out your name, his voice echoing through the space. “Are you here? Cutie?” His steps quickened as he moved through the studio, searching. The bathroom. The bedroom. The small corner where you sometimes curled up to read. “Are you asleep?” he called, though he knew better. Each empty room was another blow to his gut.

Panic clawed at him as he returned to the main room, his gaze darting to the table again, the small trinkets, the soft glow of candles still burning. The room felt haunted, filled with the ghost of your hope and effort.

“Shit,” he muttered under his breath, running a hand through his hair, gripping it tightly. He grabbed his phone and immediately dialed Thomas.

“Thomas, did she—did she say anything to you? Did she mention where she might go?” Rafayel’s voice was taut with desperation.

Thomas hesitated. “She called me earlier. She asked if you were still at the sale. That’s all she said.”

The weight of Thomas’s words slammed into Rafayel like a wave. You’d called, searching for him, only to learn the truth he had tried to ignore. It had slipped his mind completely. He didn’t know you were setting all of this up. For him. For the both of you.

“Thanks,” Rafayel muttered, ending the call and immediately dialing your number. He paced the studio, his heart racing as the line rang once… twice… three times—

And then he heard it. The faint buzz of your phone, abandoned on the sofa near the window.

“Shit!” Rafayel cursed, grabbing the device and staring at the darkened screen as if it could offer him answers. “Shit, shit, shit!”

He collapsed onto the chair you had once sat in, his head in his hands. Where were you? His gaze drifted to the table again, the untouched dinner, the carefully arranged decorations.

How could he have been so blind? So careless? You had given him everything, and he… he had been too wrapped up in himself, too foolish to see what truly mattered.

Lina hesitated before taking a few careful steps toward Rafayel, watching his every move with growing concern. She’d never seen him like this before. His usual confident, almost cocky demeanor had vanished, leaving only raw distress in its place. He sat slumped in the chair, his phone clutched tightly in his hands, his chest rising and falling with each shaky breath.

"Rafayel..." she began softly, her voice gentle but concerned. "What’s going on? What happened?"

Her hand brushed against his shoulder in an attempt to comfort him, but the instant her fingers made contact with his skin, he flinched as though struck. His body jerked back, his eyes flashing with something wild—something dangerous.  His eyes, usually a mischievous swirl of pink and blue, flared into a startling, unearthly bright blue before he clenched them shut, his jaw tightening.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered, his voice hoarse as he pulled away, his fists curling. “Lina, I—sorry. I didn’t mean to—” He forced himself to inhale deeply, reigning in his emotions as the scales receded and his eyes returned to their usual hue. “I’m fine,” he lied, though the tension in his shoulders betrayed him. “I just... I need to find her.”

Lina’s hand hovered uncertainly before falling back to her side. “Rafayel,” she began gently, “her phone’s here. Her purse. Even her car keys. Where could she have gone?”

“I don’t know,” he snapped, the sharpness in his voice born of self-directed frustration. “And that’s what’s driving me insane.” He ran a hand through his hair, tugging at the roots as if the pain could ground him. “She’s out there somewhere, without her coat, without her phone... and it’s freezing tonight.”

Lina straightened, crossing her arms. “Then let me help—”

“No.” His interruption was immediate, his tone brooking no argument. He turned to her, his expression pained but resolute. “This is my fault. I need to fix this myself.”

“But—”

“Please, Lina,” he cut in, softer this time. “If she’s out there, you’ll hear from me. Just… if you see her, let me know. But I have to do this alone.”

After a long, hesitant pause, Lina relented, her lips pressing into a thin line. “Fine. But don’t do anything reckless. I’ll keep my eyes open and let you know if I find anything.”

Rafayel nodded, murmuring his thanks before grabbing his coat and storming out into the night.

The cold air bit at his face as he ran through the streets, his breath forming short puffs in the frigid night. He clutched his phone tightly, the screen glowing as he swiped to a recent photo of you, showing it to every passerby he stopped.

“Have you seen her?” he asked a bewildered man on the corner. “This woman? Please—it’s urgent.”

The man shook his head, muttering an apology before hurrying off. Rafayel grit his teeth, suppressing the wave of panic threatening to consume him. Where are you?

The thought repeated like a drumbeat as he made his way to the beach. The icy wind off the water made him shiver, but he pressed forward, searching desperately. He called your neighbor, pacing along the shoreline as he waited for an answer.

The voice on the other end was soft, a little worried. “No... the lights are off. The door’s locked. I haven’t seen her since this afternoon.”

His heart skipped a beat, the silence that followed pressing like a weight on his chest. Where were you? Where could you have gone? You were working so hard fore him, for the both of you since the afternoon and he wasn’t even there to experience it with you together. He could imagine it, the smile on your face as you placed those shells, the excitement in your movements as you cooked his favorite food. His eyes darted to the horizon, a dark line of water stretching out before him, and his legs moved faster, pushing him toward the shore, toward the place where you sometimes went to escape.

The beach was empty when he arrived, the wind biting at his skin, the waves crashing softly against the sand. He scanned the shoreline, dread filling him as he searched. There was no sign of you, but his heart refused to let go of the hope that you might be here.

He walked for what felt like hours, the weight of the cold creeping into his bones as the night deepened. The autumn air turned chillier, the first hints of winter brushing against his skin. You hadn’t taken your coat. You hadn’t taken anything. What was he thinking? You’d never leave without saying something. So why was he—

His breath hitched as his gaze landed on something ahead. A small lump on the sand.

His heart stopped, the world narrowing down to that single, fragile form crumpled against the cold ground.

“No!” he whispered, his voice raw with emotion. He ran towards you, his legs moving faster than they ever had before, fear propelling him forward. His feet barely touching the ground as he pushed forward, his every step frantic. He reached you within seconds, his pulse hammering in his ears. He knelt beside you, his hands trembling as he gently touched your shoulder.

“Cutie?” he called, his voice cracking. His knees hit the sand as he reached you, and his heart twisted painfully at the sight. You were curled in on yourself, your arms hugging your knees, your face hidden. Tear tracks glistened on your cheeks, even in the dim moonlight, and your body trembled from the cold.

“Shit,” Rafayel hissed, his voice barely a whisper as panic surged again. You were cold, so cold. Damp from the wet sand, your skin pale as if the very life had been drained from you. He pulled off his jacket, draping it around you as gently as he could, his hands still shaking.

Why didn’t I see it? Why didn’t I see how badly she needed me?

He slid his arms around you, his heart aching as he pulled you into his lap, cradling you as though you might break into a thousand pieces. He brushed the strands of hair from your face, his thumb gently caressing your cheek as he whispered your name over and over, praying that you would wake up. That you would hear him. “Fuck,” he breathed, feeling a wave of guilt crash over him. “What did I do? What the hell did I do…”

But he couldn’t. Not now. Now, all he could do was hold you, his arms wrapping around you protectively as he rocked gently, trying to warm you, trying to make everything okay.

“I’m here, okay? I’m here. I’m so sorry, cutie.” he whispered, his voice breaking. His mind raced, but nothing could erase the hollow ache in his chest. The thought of losing you, of failing you—he couldn’t bear it. He wouldn’t. “I’m sorry,” he choked out, the words tumbling from him like a confession he had never intended to make. “I’m so sorry. I fucked up. I messed this up, I—I’m here now.”

He clutched you tighter, trembling with the weight of his regret. The wind cut through the beach, but he barely noticed, too consumed by the sight of you—so still, so fragile, in his arms. His mind raced, scrambling for something, anything, to fix this

Your eyes fluttered open weakly, barely meeting his. You were too exhausted to respond, your body utterly spent.

“Hey,” he whispered, his voice unsteady as he gently tucked his coat tighter around you. “I’ve got you. I’m so sorry.” His thumb brushed the tear-streaked curve of your cheek, his chest aching at the evidence of your heartbreak. “You shouldn’t be out here. It’s too cold...not like this. Not alone,” Rafayel murmured, his voice thick with emotion. His hands trembled as he tried to warm you, his arms sheltering you from the relentless chill of the wind. “I should’ve been there. I should’ve—” He broke off, his throat tightening painfully. Words felt so useless now, but he couldn’t stop them. He needed you to know. “I’m the biggest idiot in the world. I forgot something so important, something that should’ve been at the center of my mind.” His arms slipped beneath you, lifting you effortlessly despite your protests—if there were any.

Your lips moved faintly, but the sound was lost in the cold wind. He leaned closer, his ear near your mouth. “What is it? I’m here. Please... say something.”

“I thought... maybe you'd care,” you whispered, your voice barely audible. The words struck him harder than any physical blow ever could. He felt the sting in his chest, his breath hitching as guilt twisted the knife deeper.

“I do care!” he exclaimed, his voice desperate. “More than anything. I was just... I was so caught up in everything else, and I—I didn’t realize how much you needed me. How much you’ve always been there for me. I messed up, cutie. I know I did.”

You shivered against him, and he shifted to shield you better from the biting wind. “Let me take you home,” he pleaded, his voice softer now. “We’ll fix this. I’ll fix this. I’ll make it right, I swear.”

For a long moment, you didn’t respond, and his heart hammered in his chest. Finally, you gave the faintest of nods, your head resting against his chest. You shivered in his arms, your eyes fluttering shut again, too drained to muster a response. Panic surged in Rafayel as he felt how cold your skin was against his. He shifted, standing with you carefully cradled in his arms, his coat wrapped tightly around you.

“Hey, hey, stay with me,” he pleaded, his voice urgent but soft. “I need you to hold on, okay? Just a little longer. Let’s get you somewhere warm.” He pressed his cheek to your temple for a moment, as though the simple touch might reassure you—and himself—that you were still here with him.

Rafayel didn’t waste a second. He scooped you up gently, careful not to jostle you. The warmth of his jacket wrapped around your frame and the steady rhythm of his heartbeat seemed to soothe some of the tension in your body. He murmured quiet reassurances as he carried you, his voice a constant presence in the cold, empty night. His normally cocky demeanor had shattered into shards of raw vulnerability, replaced by a frantic urgency to get you home—his home. Your breathing was shallow, your limbs slack in his hold, and every uneven step he took felt like walking a tightrope with everything he valued most precariously balanced in his grasp. He adjusted his hold, cradling you tighter against his chest. “Look, I know I’m an idiot sometimes. Fine, most of the time,” he admitted, his words a jumble of nervous energy and shaky humor. “But this isn’t the time to prove me wrong, alright? Just hang on a little longer. I’m taking you home.”

By the time you reached the studio, the candlelight had dimmed, but the room still held the warmth of the love you had poured into it. Rafayel carried you inside. By the time he reached the threshold of his room, his shirt clung to him, drenched from sweat and your tears. He nudged the door open with his shoulder, careful not to jostle you, and hurried inside.

The room was cold and dimly lit, the heater long dormant. He set you down on the bed, fumbling with the blankets to cocoon you in their warmth. Your body trembled, and his chest constricted as he watched you stir faintly before slipping deeper into unconsciousness.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, barely audible at first, as if the walls themselves might condemn him. Then louder, more desperate, his voice cracking. “I’m so damn sorry. I was stupid—so, so stupid. I should’ve seen this coming. Should’ve kept you safe. Should’ve—” He stopped himself, biting down hard on the inside of his cheek to stifle the sob building in his throat. His eyes flickered between his usual hues and that unearthly blue every now and then.

His hands hovered over your face, fingers trembling as he brushed damp strands of hair from your skin. “You’re too good for me, you know that? Too good for someone who screws up as much as I do. But I promise—” His voice broke, the words spilling out in a frenzied rush. “I promise I’ll make it up to you. Il love you, cutie. I love you so much.” And then, because even in his rawest moments he couldn’t help himself, he added with a weak, self-deprecating chuckle, “I am lucky I’m this charming, or I don’t think you’d ever put up with me.”

He turned on the heater, pacing back and forth as he muttered under his breath, berating himself in every way he could think of, his brattiness peeking through as he cursed the broken world that had led to this moment. He glanced at you repeatedly, as if reassuring himself you hadn’t vanished, that you hadn’t slipped through his fingers.

When you stirred, your eyelids fluttering open, he froze mid-step. His usual confident smirk was gone, replaced by wide, guilt-stricken eyes. “You’re awake,” he blurted, his voice filled with relief but tinged with apprehension. “I know I screwed up,” he admitted quietly, his lips brushing against your temple. “But—seriously, who let you do this to yourself, huh? Oh wait, that’s me. Fantastic job, Rafayel. Bravo.” He huffed out a shaky laugh, but it didn’t reach his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, sitting at your bedside. The words spilled out before he could stop them, over and over again. “I’m so, so sorry. This—this isn’t how it was supposed to go. You’re supposed to be mad at me, not like this. Not…” His voice cracked, and he scrubbed a hand down his face, frustration bubbling beneath the surface.

Then, almost instinctively, the mask of bravado slipped back into place. “But, hey, look at you, stealing my bed like it’s your right. I mean, sure, I offered, but still.” His smirk faltered, his voice softening. “You better not make a habit of this, you know? Making me worry this much.”

You shifted, your eyelids fluttering completely open, and the sight of your weary gaze meeting his nearly unraveled him.

“Raf?” Your voice was weak, barely audible, but it was enough to snap him upright.

“Hey, you’re awake!” He forced a grin, though it couldn’t hide the guilt pooling in his eyes. “Good, because I was just about to start serenading you with an apology song. Don’t ask for a refund… the lyrics are terrible.”

You tried to sit up, but he was on you in an instant, gently pressing you back down. “Whoa, whoa, no sudden moves, alright? Just... stay put for once. Let me handle it for a change.”

"Handle what?" you asked, your voice edged with exhaustion and confusion.

His grin wavered, giving way to something more honest, more afraid. “Everything. All of it. I... I screwed up, okay? I’m the idiot who let you get like this, who didn’t see—who didn’t stop—” His words tangled, and he exhaled sharply. “I’m sorry. I’m so damn sorry, and I’ll keep saying it until you believe me. Or, you know, until you tell me to shut up. Whichever comes first.”

Your lashes fluttered weakly again, and a barely audible sound escaped your lips. “...Rafayel...?”

His heart soared and broke all at once at the sound of your voice. “I’m here,” he said quickly, leaning closer so you could hear him clearly. “I’m right here. I’ve got you.”

Tears welled in his eyes as you looked up at him, your gaze heavy with exhaustion and something he couldn’t quite name—hurt, maybe, or disappointment. It cut him deeper than any blade ever could.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, his voice a choked whisper. “I know that doesn’t fix this, but I swear, I’ll spend every moment making it up to you if you let me.”

For a moment, silence hung between you, broken only by the hum of the heater and the soft whistle of the wind outside. Finally, you whispered, your voice trembling, “I waited...”

“I know,” he whispered, his tears falling freely now. “You shouldn’t have had to. You deserve better than that, better than me—but I’m begging you, please give me another chance. Don’t give up on me yet.”

Finally, your voice, though weak, broke the quiet. “You forgot... something that meant so much to me.”

Rafayel’s throat tightened, but he nodded, accepting your words. “I know. And I’ll spend as long as it takes to make it up to you. I’ll show you how much you mean to me. I love you,” he whispered against your skin, the words soft but raw with sincerity. “More than anything. More than I can even say. I don’t deserve you, but… please, let me try. Let me make it up to you.”

“Don’t leave me,” he repeated, his voice a breathless whisper, “Not like this.” His voice cracked on the last word, and for a moment, you could see the mask slip—just for a second. Rafayel was scared. Scared of losing you. Scared of failing you. It was the one thing he had never let you see, the one thing he kept locked away in the deep recesses of his heart, but now, it was clear as day.

As you looked at him, something shifted between the two of you—an understanding, perhaps. You could see his desperation, the way he clung to the edges of his composure, trying to hide the vulnerability he never allowed anyone to witness.

I thought... I thought this was everything I could give. Everything I could be..." your own voice cracking.

He shook his head again, his grip never loosening. “You’re so much more than all of this. I’ve been blind, cutie. And now I can see it—see you.” He gently cupped your face in his hands, his thumbs brushing over your cheeks as if to erase every doubt that had taken root there. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for making you feel invisible.”

You closed your eyes for a moment, the tears still staining your face, but the weight of his words was a strange kind of relief. He was here. He saw you now. The storm of emotions inside you hadn’t dissipated, but his presence, the raw sincerity in his voice, made you feel something close to safety.

Rafayel kissed your forehead softly, the gentle pressure of his lips a tender promise. “I’m here, cutie. And I’ll do everything I can to make this right. You won’t feel invisible again.”

You nodded slowly, the tears still flowing, but there was a flicker of hope, however faint. "Just... don't forget again," you whispered.

“I won’t,” he promised, his voice firm, but his eyes were full of vulnerability. "I won’t. Never again."

You didn’t respond immediately, your eyes closing as if you were too weary to respond. But when Rafayel reached for your hand, intertwining his fingers with yours, a faint squeeze answered him. It wasn’t forgiveness, not yet, but it was enough—a thread of hope that he clung to with everything he had. For now, you didn’t pull away, and that was a start.

AN: reblogs, feedback and opinions are appreciated!

[eupheme]

— double the pleasure, triple the fun

[part iii of come on and show me | masterlist]

logan howlett x f!reader x wade wilson

rated e - 5.6k

tags: MMF threesome, mutual pining/crushes all around, dirty talk, poly relationship, multi-tasking, the world's worst romantic porposition, oral sex, vaginal fingering, ass play (fingering & rimming), double penetration, creampies, fluff and feelings

a/n: massive thank you to the wonderfully talented @avocado-writing, who kindly beta'd this for me! 💖

“Are you asking me out?” It comes slowly, in a rough rasp. 

It’s you that turns then, your eyes finding his. Your smile is sweet - a swirling heat of hope in your belly, “Depends on your answer.”

There’s something dark in his eyes. A curl of his lips, as his head dips. A kiss pressed against your spine, then lower. 

“Come on Wilson.” Logan husks, “Let’s get our girl ready.”

(Or, your two becomes three.)

“God, I want him to put a baby in me.”

Wade’s sigh rumbles beneath your ear, where your head cradles against his chest. 

Legs entwined as you stretch out together on the couch - a late-night wind-down after your boyfriend spent the evening picking out his To-Do List at Sister Margaret's.

To kill. Not fuck, apparently. Something he was quick to clarify.

“What are you watching?” Your eyes pull away from your own phone - seventeen chapters into an enemies-to-lovers slow burn you haven’t been able to put down all evening. 

A little stretch, as your head tilts to face him - knuckles propped under your chin, “That video has been looping for like, ten minutes.”

“And yet, still not long enough,” He sighs, flashing the screen at you, “Sir Mix-a-Lot, you never miss.”

The video flickers, a quick and skillful transition of clips - your eyes squinting at the screen from your angle.

“Is that... Logan?”

“Close, baby girl.” His finger boops against your nose, “Huge Ackman.”

There’s a little shake of your head, as your shoulder lifts, “I don’t know who that is.”

“And thank god,” He grins, letting the phone drop onto the cushions. A shift, as his hands dips against the small of your back, “If you did, you would divorce me so fast-“

Your eyes roll, as you bite back a grin, “I wouldn’t.”

“Definitely, maybe.”

Wade grunts as you push yourself with a huff - head dipping to press your lips against his. A low swirl in your belly, as his eyes go soft and his smile goes dopey. 

“I love you, Wade Winston Wilson,” You grin back, “New fake boyfriends and all, apparently.”

He hums, head tilting.

“And what about not-so-fake boyfriends?”

Your brow furrows.

“You are talking about Logan now, right?”

Wade’s knuckles brush your cheek, the humor in his eyes turning searching, “What do you think?”

And what a question it is. 

You’ve talked about it often. The occasional partner had cycled in for a night or two, but there had never been someone that struck you both like Logan had, arriving in your lives like a storm of thunder and lightning.

And you can’t deny that there’s feelings. Obvious ones, apparently, with how you acted in the past. Wade was still teasing you about your jealousy - you never had a handle on that emotion in the way he did. 

That innate knowledge of how he felt about someone, trusted them. Flirting was easy, but you’ve seen the way he looks at Logan, too.

It was different. Special.

“Two musketeers becoming the full set,” He holds his fingers up in front of you, two and then three, “Only unlike them, we’re fucking.”

You let out a sound of dissent, with the lift of a shoulder. 

“Oh, worm?” His brow raises, “Guess Disney wasn’t ready for that, either. Dibs on the religious one, then. I am a man of the cloth.”

“It’s a bad analogy, there’s four of them.”

He chuckles indulgently, “Okay, now I think you’re making things up-“

Now it’s your hand reaching, a finger tapping against his lips.

“I’d like that. I think Logan being our… boyfriend-” The word sends a rush of heat to your face as you stutter over it, Wade’s eyes gleaming.

“Oh my god, you are so fucking cute.” He crows, “We’ve fucked nasty-style and you can’t even say boyfriend-”

Your face buried in his chest, his name a muffled whine. A beat as the laughter still rumbles in his chest, before you peek at him.

“Do you think he wants that, too?”

“Oh, absolutely.” Wade hums, “That man is at least a 6 on the Yearning Richter scale. Felt by all, many frightened.”

You brighten at that prospect - your brain is already slipping ahead, “Do you think we should like, plan something? Ask him together?”

“Oh, don’t worry, gorgeous.” Wade grins.

“I’ll handle it.”

It's strange, seeing Logan in your space.

A good strange. A strange that feels nice - the subtle sweep of his eyes, as he takes in your apartment. The bag slung over his shoulder already tucked in your room, set on the ottoman at the foot of your bed.

He fits in, you think. Tucked into your couch as you put the finishing touches on dinner. Too used to being in their shared space at Wade’s. Of stolen moments when Althea was out. Hushed moments when she was home, muffled moans and bitten-back sighs.  

It will be nice to be able to take your time. 

They had arrived together, and there had been a certain thrill to that, too. 

Wade's knock that mimics the opening beats of "Smooth", before the door burst open. Funny to think about them crammed in a car together - they took Althea's, Wade tells you, when you later asked if they'd walked.

How he was already turning to you to referee, as you tip your head to kiss his cheek. 

"All I'm asking is if we're both sheathing our swords in the same scabbard, then why is he getting his panties in a twist about me putting my clothes in his bag?"

"Ignore him, sweetheart," Logan softens, leaning into the matching kiss you press against his jaw, "Been doing that for the last two months. It's good to see you."

And it is. Good to see both of them, something warm glowing bright in your chest.

The round table that always felt a little big for two feels perfect now - tucking between each other as dinner passes in a warm jumble of savory aromas and comfortable conversation. 

Smiling at the way they're both as engaged with your stories about your day, as you are about the work they've been doing together.

"-absolutely vaporized. It was disgusting, babe." Wade grimaces, "I was fine of course. Red, and all. But Lo here, eeugh. Still scrubbing the blood out of the nooks and crannies."

Logan makes a grunt of acknowledgement, "Had worse."

"Worse? Worse than getting gut-mist blasted across your chest?"

"I'll help, if you want." You offer, "Haven't seen your new suit yet."

At Wade's request, you try to keep out of his mercenary business - other than the stories he shares, the occasional repairs of his suit, or a late-night tryst. Doesn't want his life mixing, not after what's happened in the past. 

Dutiful boyfriend by day, mercenary by night. And also sometimes, by day. Evenings, weekends.

It’s an unsteady schedule, but it's one you've grown accustomed to. Maybe that’s what helps make this easy, the way you’ve already adjusted to mutant-regenerative-boyfriend-life. 

But it doesn't mean you're not curious. That you don't appreciate certain aspects when they’re offered for you explore - especially when they come in tightly wrapped in leather and lycra. 

And when you eventually rise to collect dishes, it's Logan that beats you to it. A finger sternly pointed towards the couch, Wade's hand at your back - already guiding you towards it, as you protest.

"Least we can do, sweetheart," Logan smiles, "Can't remember the last time I had a meal this good."

"Excuse me," Wade gasps, as he slips on elbow-length mis-matched gloves,"Did my midnight toaster strudels mean nothing to you?"

It's your turn now, to sit on the couch. To watch, as Wade supervises. The quiet talk that swiftly turns to bickering. A yelp and a splash of hot water, before he's retreating.

Sinking down on the seat next to you, as your thoughts swirl. Soft memories of past shared evenings, and the planting of something that you’ll tend to carefully, hoping it will flourish. 

"You're looking at him like he's got balls on his neck," Wade’s arm slings around your shoulders, tone knowing, "Got something on your mind, gorgeous?"

Your nose wrinkles at the visual, but then you turn thoughtful.

"Just like seeing both of you here." Your smile is soft, "It feels right, you know?"

He hums in agreement, and you glance his way, "Do you feel that way too?"

"Feels as right as Ryan Reynolds playing me in my upcoming biopic."

That has you cocking an eyebrow - whatever reference he's making flying over your head, "And that's... good?"

"Yeah, baby." He grins.

"Really fucking good." 

The hunger follows you into the bedroom, after. Your question about dessert gets swiftly turned around on you - hands catching at your waist. 

Threats and promises  to devour you instead - that the ice cream you bought can wait - as lips press against yours. Another mouth at your neck, in your slow and often-interrupted journey to the bedroom. 

Ganging up on you again, almost as if it were planned. 

And you’re not sure if it was, or whether they’ve unconsciously become more in-sync, between their hours together at the apartment and in their work. 

More alike than they are different, at their core - something you’re not sure you’d be able to convince them of, even though you see it.

It’s sweetly familiar, when you finally fall into bed together. Clothes already stripped off, a messy pile mixing together against the woven floral rug as you fit together. 

Spit pools on Logan’s tongue, as he sucks on his teeth. A low tilt of his head before his lips are parting, letting it drop where he has your thighs nudged apart, belly pressed down against the bed.

Warm, where it hits the cleft of your ass. His hand follows - a broad palm curving against soft skin, tugging you open. 

“What do I have to do to let me have you here?” Logan’s thumb smears his spit against the tight ring, voice low and honey-smooth. 

It makes you jolt, a soft sound pulling from your throat. Squirming, as his thumb comes back - rolling the pad against you. 

“She, shit-” Wade groans, as your mouth leaves his cock - the tip glistening as it drops against his belly, “Only lets people she’s dating fuck her ass.”

“Wade!” You whine, as your thighs try to close - Logan’s spreading to keep you open. 

A low rasp of a laugh, “Is that right?”

“Not me though. If you’re curious.” Wade hums, his arm still slung under the pillow, “Sometimes even a first date is too slow.”

Dark eyes drag up, to the shift of hips. Over the leaking cock, lying flushed and hard against Wade’s belly - something like hunger in the slow sweep up to the pulled-wide grin.

“This is you handling it?” You hiss.

“You’re acting like the man invented the elevator.” Wade shrugs - shifting to push himself up on an elbow, “Trust me, there is nothing more romantic than a ‘what are we’ conversation slipped into a discussion about double penetration. We’re multi-tasking, gorgeous.”

Some of the tension eases, with the way he smiles at you. There’s not an ounce of worry in his expression, only the dark shadow of desire, highlighted with humor. 

Waiting until you smile back, before he fixes Logan with a pointed look. 

“Look. I’m gonna level with you,” He sighs, as if divulging something imperative, ”Until you’re ready to commit to being Mr. Y/L/N, then fifth base is just gonna be out of the question.”

There’s the shake of a head, a low huff behind you. The slight stroke of fingers against your skin.

“Are you asking me out?” It comes slowly, in a rough rasp. As if putting pieces together. 

It’s you that turns then, your eyes finding his. Your smile is sweet - a swirling heat of hope in your belly, “Depends on your answer.”

There’s something dark in his eyes. A curl of his lips, as his head dips.

A kiss pressed against your spine, then lower. 

“Come on Wilson.” He husks, “Let’s get our girl ready.”

A moan rips from you. First, from his words - the jolting butterflies in your belly, a pooling warmth. The sound lengthening, as his tongue flattens where his fingers had teased. Your back arches as Wade pumps his fist, before throwing a filthy “I-Told-You-So” smirk your way.

It glances off you. Your fingers curled in the sheets, as Logan shoulders your thighs further apart. A wet swipe that travels from your cunt to your hole, smearing your slick and his spit against your skin. 

A finger nudging against you, as Wade leans - hand fumbling for the handle of the bedside table. 

“You think you can take both of us?” Logan purrs, as he carefully works you open. A fingertip sinking inside you, as you whine. 

”What, you think we were joking about role-playing?” Wade scoffs,”Why did you think all the dinner knives were missing? Lost ‘em all beneath the bed.”

There’s a shuffle, as he works himself further beneath you. A bottle of lube dropped on the bedspread, as his fingers reach - petting against your clit.

“Tried two before, didn’t we gorgeous? Me and the Pulverine, as we call him.” Wade coos, “Not as big as you, of course. But definitely a lot more sparkly.” 

“Toy’s not the same thing,” Logan hums, as you clench around him. Sinking deeper, slowly pumping, “‘s gonna be a tight fit, baby.”

The sensations are already overwhelming. Wade’s fingers slipping down - fitting one, and then two fingers inside your slick pussy. His thumb nudging against your clit, teasing.

Logan’s weight against you, shifting as his hips grind into the mattress. The messy swirl of his tongue, more spit added to the mess. His thick finger already feels like a lot, pressed down to the knuckle. Slow in the way he works you open, the hot embers in your belly roaring brighter.

“I want it.” You moan, “Want both of you.” 

Wanted it for a while now. Wondered if they’d take you like this. If you’d be able to take them, stuffed so full you could barely draw breath. Wanting to know what it feels like to come, with both of them pressed to the hilt inside you. 

Words fail you, soon after. There’s the cold smear of lube against your skin, a second finger notched. Your cry muffled with the press of Wade’s lips, tilting your face to his as their fingers find their rhythm together.

That steady swirl against your clit. How you’re clenching around them, your arousal slick on Wade’s palm. The sharp rhythmic slap ringing through your ears as you pant into his mouth. Logan’s teeth against the soft curve of your ass, a muffled groan as he fits a second inside you. 

It’s a mimicry of later, but it’s enough. Something bright burning in your belly, fueled by their desire. Hot breath against your skin, Wade’s cock grinding into your hip. 

“Come on, gorgeous.” He murmurs against you, “Let me feel you come with his fingers buried in your ass.”

You choke on your moan. Hips shifting, pushing one deeper and then the other as you chase the building high. The sharp stretch long spooling into pleasure, twisting around your guts, shimmering. 

“‘m gonna-” It’s breathed out, your eyes screwing shut. Focused on the countdown  that’s begun inside you, swiftly approaching with each crook of their fingers, “Fuck, I’m-”

Logan shifts, his breath ghosting against your spine, “Come for us, sweetheart.”

For us. 

Your face buries against Wade’s shoulder, as they bring you over the edge together. Working in tandem to take you apart, and they haven’t even really begun - fingers crooking and curling as a bright pleasure blooms in your belly. 

Wade had been right - it’s not the first time you’ve been full like this. But Logan was right, too. It’s different - the way you can feel them move together, as you whine. The orgasm ripples through you, the sensations drawing out as kisses are dropped between your shoulder blades. 

Soft crooning in your ear, but it’s all muted - barely aware of the palms that run across your skin. The press of mouths against your heated skin - until the pulses in your core fades, the room coming back into focus. 

They slip from you - first Wade, and then Logan. You’ve felt empty before but never like this, already missing the weight inside you. Craving more.

There’s a shift on the bed, Logan shouldering himself next to Wade, who you’re still stretched out on. 

“C’mere, baby. Fuck, need to feel you.”

Hand at your hips, coaxing you up. Encouraging you to straddle his thighs, but then Wade is tsking - reaching for you, trying to turn you around.

“Annnd I just gave myself a promotion to Director,” He adds with a long-suffering sigh, “When you want something done right, gotta do it yourself.”

Logan growls, as your weight leaves him, “The fuck you talking about?”

Wade’s brow arches, “The fuck I’m talking about is you doing this all wrong, peanut. When was the last time you partook in the devil’s threeway? Was it this century, at least?”

Hand gentle as he guides you to face away from Logan, your ass settling against the cradle of his hips.

“There you go,” He coos, “How am I going to give your pretty little kitty the attention she deserves if you have her all hidden away?”

Logan’s hard cock nestles against your belly, as your knees press into the mattress. Breath hitching as you gauge the size of him again. Hoping that the prep he did was enough - the soft buzz beneath your skin certainly has you feeling more than ready.

Slicking your fingers with more lube before they wrap around his shaft - a rough hiss sliding from his throat as they circle around, squeezing. Smearing it against swollen flesh, thumbing over the leaking head as you line yourself up. 

Wade shifting to watch, his head tilted against Logan’s shoulder, his fist already wrapped around his cock as you start to slowly sink down. 

“Sit on it, sweetheart, there you go.” Logan growls, as he breaches you. 

A sharp, inhaled breath as the tip sinks inside you. The building pressure and then the give - as you try not to clench down.

Pulling a rough sound from him. Fingers twitching at your hips - set on only steadying you. A rough edge creeping into his soft encouragement, “Nice and easy, baby.”

Another inch, but it feels like double. Sweat beading along the nape of your neck, as you stretch around him.

“Doing so good,” He rasps, “Take it slow.”

“Taking it like a fucking champ, baby.” Wade interjects, “Couldn’t have done it better myself, and Levy knows how often I thought about it.”

Your nails bite into his thighs, but it only makes his hips flex. Twin moans when it nudges him the rest of the way - your breath stolen when he’s seated flush inside you.

Not that different than when Wade’s fucked you, even with the length he’s got on Logan. But it’s the girth that has your lips parting - a ragged moan with the experimental roll of your hips.

“Pretty fucking sight.” Logan groans, through gritted teeth. Palms slipping around, gently tugging you back towards his chest.

His growl low in your ear, as his hips lift in an experiment thrust.

“Gonna stuff you full, gonna let us do the work.” He husks, a hissed breath when you clench around him. “Make you feel good, alright?”

Palming at your tits, as Wade shifts into position. Swallowing your begging, whined out “please-” as he kisses down your throat. 

Over your breasts. The back of Logan’s hand, against the curve of your belly. His fist still working at his cock, an audible moan of appreciation when he settles between Logan’s thighs.

“You look so good full of him.” It’s mumbled out against your hip, “God, I want to jerk off to this and let you use my cum as lube.”

Logan’s fingers tighten - pinching a peaked nipple as you moan, as kisses are peppered against your mound.

“Fuck us into your tight ass.”

You cry out, when his tongue flattens against your clit. Fingers teasing at your hole, dipping inside to test how full you feel. 

“Soaking wet, baby. You feeling good?” Wade croons, “Or does your greedy little pussy need more?”

“Wade,” You keen, desperate. Rocking into the slow pump of Logan’s hips, his breath harsh in your ear.

His fingers crook, and curl.

“You want us to take you there and back again to pound town?” 

“I swear to god,” You pant, desperate, “If you don’t get inside me, I’ll-, I’ll call Nate.”

His eyes gleam, “That right? Still thinking about riding the ol’ Cable car?”

It’s Logan’s added growl that finally gets him moving. A smile still pulling wide, as he slips from you. His own desperation betrayed by the wet smear against his belly.

The slick tip of his cock, as he ruts against your folds. Your breath held, as he notches himself.

His dark eyes on your blown-wide ones, as he starts to sink in. It has your thighs trembling, as you whine. Clenching down without meaning to, as Logan groans.

Feeling the way he inches into you. What little space left filled as your pussy makes room for him. The tight clutch of your walls, a moan at the way he can feel Logan through the thin layer of skin between them.

A choked-out moan punched from his chest. 

“Made to take us both. Weren’t you, gorgeous?” He murmurs, as his hips move, “Goddamn perfect fit.”

They both move inside you. Stilted thrusts, off rhythm as you squirm between them. Logan getting impatient - throwing a glare Wade’s way.

“Stop moving when I do.”

It’s met with a laugh, as Wade’s hip snap a little harder. Filling you, the force jolting you against Logan, as your nails bite into his biceps.

“I’m driving this thing.” He counters, “Call me Sandra Bullock, because I’m not about to let this bus dip below 50.”

His hand catching Logan’s wrist - resistance when he tugs, but then it’s going with him. Fitting the curve of his fingers against the base of your throat.

“You do what you do best and be the anchor. Keep her still for me, will you?” 

Logan’s fingers flex, but he grunts - the slightest pressure against your chest. 

A pat against your hip, with a wink, “Let Daddypool do all the work.”

You huff, but the sound turns strangled as the sets the pace. Hands at your hips, tugging you to meet his thrusts. Fucking you back on to Logan, when his weight presses into you.

“There we fucking go. How you feeling, baby?”

“Feels so good,”You gasp, as the movement gets familiar. The slick slide of them inside you, the back and forth as they stroke your walls, as your arousal gleams against their cocks. 

“Know it does.” Wade grins, “They don’t call me DP for nothing.”

Logan grunts beneath you. Something biting held back - distracted, as his other hand wanders. Slipping across your hip, then down.

Tracing over your mound. Feather-light against your folds, feeling how you stretch open each time Wade goes balls-deep. 

Your moan coming out ragged, when he teases your clit. Soft strokes with the pad of his finger, before two press and circle.

It makes you jolt, his laugh low in your ear.

Finding that familiar rhythm. Feeling the way your hips flex, seeking out his touch. How easily he’s able to wind you up now, from the times he’s taken you apart. 

How it’s almost overwhelming, with the stuffed-full pressure of them inside you. With the saw of Wade’s hips, as his cock nudges against the spongy spot inside you.

A rough hum when you clench down. Unable to do more than take what he gives you, with the way Logan cradles you against his chest.

It only adds to the surge of pleasure inside you. A near-divine pairing of sensations that has your fingers reaching, Wade’s name a soft cry on your lips. 

He flattens against you, to meet the way your mouth tips up. It’s messy, open-mouthed as his hips slow to a grind. Hands skating up your body, against hips and waist.

Letting him in when he deepens it. A groan as he licks against your teeth. Needy presses of his mouth, spit smeared across your lips when it breaks. Another kiss  peppered against your jaw, where Logan groans into your ear. 

A unconscious shift of his head, and then their lips are brushing.

Logan’s cock throbs inside you, as Wade goes stiff and still. It’s softer than it should be - no more than a shared breath, before Wade pulls back. 

The hand at your neck flexes. Loosens, as it slips between you. Wrapping around the back of Wade’s neck as he yanks him back down.

A growled out “fuck” when they meet again, insistant this time. Vicious with the scrape of teeth, the wet swipe of tongue as Logan’s nails bite into skin.

Messy, as they pant into each other's mouths. Calloused fingers drifting down from your clit to split against your folds. Teasing where you’re filled, as Wade’s moan turns filthy.

A matching sound escaping from Logan, long held back. 

“Fucking holding out on me,” Wade mumbles, when the kiss breaks, “Haven’t been this wet since Cap’s beard reveal.”

Eyes dark, when he feels how Logan moves inside you. Forgetting himself, as he chases the pleasure that threatens to peak inside him.

“Bet you love knowing you’ve been in all of our girl’s holes. Don’t you, handsome?” Wade grins. Eyes still watchful - catching the clench of a jaw, as his lips return to yours.

The kiss is sweeter this time, even as he begins to drive into you. Each of your breaths coming in a whining gasp, pleasure once again winding inside you.

His mouth running away from him, determined to send you both over, ”Should let me into some of yours. You know I’d treat you right.”

“Shut the fuck up. C-Can’t come with you running your mouth.” It’s panted out - half-hearted at best, and Wade’s eyes gleam.

“Fucking liar.” He crows, “Bet you jerk it all the time to the thought of us screaming your name.”

Voice pitches up then, in a mimicry of yours, “Oh, Logan. Fuck me right there with your monster dick-”

Logan strings tight beneath you with a snarl, as he tries to bury himself in your ass. The hand at your neck dipping to grasp at your hip, as the practiced rhythm turns sloppy.

Wade shifts - his weight leaned into your hips. Pinning you both down as he fucks into you, stroke after stroke.  

Logan’s touch is sloppy against your clit - but with the way your boyfriend’s cock pounds against that spot inside you, it’s enough.

You don’t even realize you’re whimpering. The way their names string together, the “please, please, please-” that catches in your throat.  

“You gonna come too, baby?” He coos - thrilled, “You’re both so fucking easy, aren’t you?”

Logan moans in your ear when you squeeze around him, fingers pressing harder. A little faster, and with the next plunge of Wade’s cock - you shatter. 

It’s all white noise, the faded star stickers on the ceiling becoming swirling the sky above as you’re pulled under. 

Helpless, with the way you’re pinned between them. Coming again with the tight swirls against your clit, with them fully sheathed inside you. 

The tight pulse of your orgasm around his sends Logan over. 

Even with Wade’s weight his hips still lift as he bows off the bed. A wounded groan, as he comes with you clenching down around him. Grinding himself into your hole as his cock throbs, emptying himself into you. 

There’s a sing-songed and muted “money shot” that has you groaning. Half-exasperation, half-mindless pleasure, as Logan’s hands roam. Holding you against him, ragged breath against your neck as you milk him empty.

Keeping you stuffed full, hilting his cock deeper when you squirm. Leaving Wade to catch up.

Shameless in the way he watches now, as molten pleasure thrums in your veins. Leaning back to see how you take them both. Picturing how you’ll look after, thoroughly-fucked holes that will drip with them until morning. 

Doesn’t notice when his breath turns short, but you do. 

“Wanna feel you come, baby.” You coo, your smile soft and pleasure-drunk. 

Hands tracing over his, overlapping and squeezing. The shallow lift of your hips to meet his thrusts, purposely squeezing him when he inches out - trying to keep him in.

“Make a fucking mess, Red.” Logan growls - joining you, “Let me feel you come inside her.”

“Jesus Titty-Fucking Christ,” The rough laugh turns into a groan, “Think I’m going to blow two loads at once-”

Hands overlapping, grasping on, holding you, as his hips pump faster. Head tipping - fitting between yours and Logans - as his back bows. 

Coming inside you with a muttered out “oh fuck. fuck yes-”, cock jerking with each needy rut of his hips. The sound turns into a whine when teeth sink his neck, hard enough to bruise. 

Yours on the other side, your soft moan in his ear as you feel the way he throbs as he spills into you again, and again. 

Intense, in a way you’ve never felt before. A connection that loops through you - from the press of your mouths, down to where you fit together. 

It’s fortunate that Logan’s hands still fit at your hips, with how fucked-out and boneless you feel. Trading one cock for another was one thing, but this - being claimed by both of them, the phantom ache as Logan withdraws- it’s something else entirely. 

Your head dropping back to rest against his shoulder, eyes heavy-lidded as you wait for your pulse to stop galloping. Logan’s nose ghosting against your temple, an arm still thrown around your hips. 

A hiss, when Wade slips from you. You can feel the mess they’ve made, sticky against your thighs. How they drip from your fucked-out holes, when you clench around nothing. 

It must do something to him, the way Wade moans when he sits back. Fingers raising - mimicking a camera, complete with the click of his tongue as the shutter. 

“If that doesn’t win me an academy award,” He hums thoughtfully.

“Then I don’t know what the fuck will.”

Time slows down, after. The low hum of artificial rain from a device on your dresser, layering with the muted city outside. Doesn’t know if it’s minutes or hours since he last moved, and he really can’t bring himself to care.

As long as it’s still dark, then he knows they’ve still got time. 

“So are you going to bake us a sex cake?” Wade yawns, “You know, for completely rocking your shit.”

“A what?” You stir against him - an eye cracking open. 

Logan grunts, his face buried in your shoulder. A hand splayed across your belly, a tug as he pulls you closer.

“Oh my god,” Wade chuckles to himself, “There I go, mixing up timelines again. I infinitely prefer this one, by the way.”

Logan lets the two of you bicker, his eyes slipping shut again. 

Your apartment is quieter than Wade’s. The bed comparable to the one they shared last time. Can’t remember the last time he’s felt a warmth like this. 

Soft, where your back tucks against his chest. His hand shifts to your hip, curving against soft flesh. Wade’s hand rests close enough to touch, fingers just brushing. Facing you, thighs twined together as he sandwiches you between them.

The shower had been nicer, as well. Snug, when you had pulled them in with you. Taking turns under the warm spray. He had commented on it - a way to drag out the scratch of fingers through his hair. The swirl of soap against his skin, and he had been too blissed out to bother with the facade when a second set of hands grabbed his ass. 

Staying just a little longer, as their hands found their way between your thighs. Wade thumbing at your clit as his own fingers fucked the cum deeper into your cunt. Twin marks sucked into your neck, as your legs threatened to give out - still shaky from before.

You stir against him. Words heavy with sleep.

“Wade didn’t say it earlier.” You yawn - shuffling, so you can help over to face him. 

Logan’s brow rises, as you clarify.

“There’s a caveat to our earlier question.”

“Good word choice.” Wade hums, “11 points, and I bet you were a real pleasure to have in class.”

A low chuckle, when your hips press back against his in warning - as your eyes flip up to Logan’s. 

“It’s a two-for-one deal,” The corner of your lips tug up, “It’s both of us, or nothing.”

“All for one, and one for all,” Wade’s chin hooks over your shoulder, ignoring how you elbow him, “And can you really afford not to take that?”

Supposes it’s cute, that you think you have to tell him this. That his eyes haven’t equally wandered, even if it’s only half-admitted. Too caught on wondering if the only something good he had will change, if he truly allows himself to want something. 

That it’s not only the feeling of your mouths on his cock that he revisits, though he does think of that often.

There’s other moments as well. Squeezing hands and smiles and the way you both look at him. The toothbrush that you had ready tonight, just incase he forgot his. The handle blue, when he slipped it in the cup - tucked next to red and purple.

Your words still spark brightly in his chest, settling low behind his ribs. It quells an uneasy twist that’s been lingering there for the past few weeks. 

Something unsteady, finally finding purchase. 

“Don’t know why you’re clarifying though, gorgeous.” His cheek rubs against yours like a cat. Those brown eyes meet his as well, and it’s hard to bite back the low inhale of breath.

“Considering he tongue-fucked the shit out of me earlier, I think he’s good.”

He huffs in reply, but he can’t bite back the curve of his lips. Not anymore - and he finds that he doesn’t want to.

“Yeah.” Logan agrees. That something turning soft inside him, the smile pulling just a little wider. 

“I’m good.”

thanks so much for reading!! 💖 there's a couple more moments I'd love to explore with them in the future! (but in case I'm not able to, I wanted to end it on this sweet note between them all. )