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youthguk · 2 months ago

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Dream eater | jjk (m) | one-shot

Jungkook is a Dream eater, and you, unknowingly, are his favorite feast.

· Dream fantasy (slightly) · Smut · Angst · Emotional intimacy ·

wc: 15k

warnings: smut (minors do not interact!), oral sex (f receiving), penetrative sex (f/m), intense mutual yearning and vulnerability, depressive undertones, angst

an: this one is for those who have ever felt like the world is generous to you with nothing but solitude.

Shards of diamond bright stars pierce Seoul's obsidian sky, their cold light drowning in the city's neon glow. Jungkook leaves his window open, it is not a choice, but rather a necessity. He stares at his ceiling, counting seconds until the hunt begins. Another night, another feast of fears.

Darkness claims him with a lover's embrace. Seoul's infamous nightmare eater surrenders to sleep, his consciousness already splitting at the seams. A traitorous thought whispers: what if tonight will be different.

But it won’t. Reality fractures and he watches his mortal shell from above: a sight that still unnerves him after so many years. Two versions of one being: the peaceful sleeper below, the predator above. His ethereal form sneers at its human disguise. He observes his sleeping form with dark amusement. Such innocent appearance, such deadly truth. With serpentine grace, he slides through the window into the night's waiting arms. The night was young.

His humanity dissolves, leaving only hollow echoes where warmth once dwelled. He exists between heartbeats now, a creature born of twilight and shadow. They call his kind Dream Eaters - night's elite hunters. He doesn't waste time with sweet dreams; terror is his sustenance. Each nightmare consumed fills the endless void within, a momentary relief for an immortal hunger. True sleep eludes him now. Instead, dusk shatters his being like black ice, releasing his hunting self into the dark.

Seoul spreads beneath him, a fever dream in concrete and steel. Skyscrapers rise like obsidian monoliths, their windows gleaming with artificial souls. In their depths, forgotten screens pulse with electric prayers, while he glides past - a phantom in this vast urban wilderness that still hasn't discovered his true name, even after countless nights of feeding.

Like a shadow made of stardust, he dances across Seoul's skyline, his ethereal form weaving between moonlit spires and rain-slicked rooftops. The city breathes beneath him, each exhalation carrying whispers of secrets too delicate for mortal ears. In his wake, silence blooms, the rich stillness of midnight possibility.

Night after night, he slips into dreams uninvited yet inexorably summoned. These sleeping minds call to him like sirens, their fears pulsing like dark beacons through the city's unconscious web. He moves between them with practiced grace, a thief of terrors, collecting their darkness like black pearls.

The nightmares he finds are symphonies of fear, each uniquely haunting. Here, a father's dream crystalizes into gray horror: baby's breath turned to cinders. There, a bride-who-never-was wanders an infinite gallery of white gowns, each mirror reflecting a different life unlived. A child runs through corridors of betrayal, pursued by a mother's face worn like a mask by something ancient and hungry.

Some dreams twist reality until it snaps: vast oceans swallow the sky whole, wolves with mirror-glass eyes hunt through endless forests, smiles split open to reveal universes of teeth. Each nightmare carries its own signature of dread, and each feeds him differently- sending electric shivers through his being, temporarily filling the endless void within.

Yet this beautiful, terrible dance leaves him hollower with each performance. The feast brings no joy, only momentary relief from an hunger old as starlight. In the quietest hours, when the city holds its breath, he questions whether he has become the very nightmare that haunts other nightmares- a shadow feeding on shadows.

Though neither mercy nor comfort fall within his nature, he continues his eternal duty as a void that consumes the dark.

In the waking world, he is barely there- an outline at best, a quiet presence with a heartbeat too soft to echo. His voice, when used, never quite fills a room. His laughter, when forced, folds in on itself before it reaches the walls.

His sanctuary lies behind walls of code and LED glow, where ones and zeros don't ask questions. IT specialist: the perfect camouflage for someone who exists in binary- human by day, nightmare-devourer by night. Here, in this digital cocoon, the absence of human connection isn't loneliness- it's salvation.

Jimin shows up sometimes, arms full of takeout and stories that move faster than time itself. Taehyung lounges on his couch like he owns it, flipping through half-read books Jungkook never finished. Jin nags him to open the windows and let light in. Yoongi doesn’t say much, but when he does, it lands heavy- sharp and unafraid. Hoseok once cried laughing on Jungkook’s kitchen floor after too much wine. Namjoon leaves poems folded in the spines of Jungkook’s abandoned notebooks, like quiet offerings to whatever ghost he’s become.

He’s grateful for them- a bittersweet anchor to reality- but even in their presence, he feels like a thread unraveling just beyond the edge of fabric. They don’t ask why he’s always tired, always pale, always late in answering, because they know better than to push. Still, none of them understand the weight he drags through each day, the way his hands tremble when someone mentions a dream too vividly.

The thought of accidentally stumbling into their dreams haunts him like a shadow he can't shake. Because what if- what if one night he sees Namjoon trapped beneath dark waters, lungs filling with infinity? Or finds Jimin screaming silently behind walls of glass that won't break no matter how hard he pounds his fists against them? Or watches, paralyzed, as Taehyung runs through endless corridors of flame, feet leaving burning footprints in his wake? He simply couldn't.

Sometimes, in moments when the night feels particularly heavy, he whispers desperate prayers to deities who've long since stopped listening, begging them to keep his friends' dreams far, far away from his hunger.

Reality slips through his fingers like smoke these days, all gossamer-thin and just as substantial. The walls breathe shadows, rooms fold in on themselves. Time stumbles forward in awkward lurches, dragging its feet across calendar pages that mean nothing anymore. The windows collect fog like secrets, exhaling quiet confessions into the dawn. His journals - half-burned, because some truths are too heavy to keep whole- gather dust in corners where light fears to tread. And that mirror in the hallway? It only remembers his face if he stares long enough to make it nervous, catching glimpses of himself like static between channels.

The only thing that ever feels real is the ache beneath his ribs followed by the loneliness: faithful shadows that never leaves.

And the slow, exquisite agony of wearing humanity like an ill-fitting coat.

It begins like breathing - not the shallow gasps of the living, but that bone-deep exhale when your body finally remembers how to let go. The surrender comes easy now, practiced as a prayer, inevitable as nightfall. His consciousness unspools like silk in water, each thread of reality slipping loose until he's floating free of flesh and bone and all those heavy human things.

The city cradles him in her concrete arms as he rises, weightless as midnight fog. Through layers of rust-worn pipes and grief-stained walls he drifts, each molecule of his being singing that ancient song of untethering. Seoul stretches below like a tired goddess, her neon veins pulsing dim beneath a blanket of shadow, her streets winding like whispered secrets. The streetlights flicker their morse code confessions to no one, while towers pierce the darkness like broken teeth, watching with eyes gone dull from seeing too much.

He drifts aimlessly through the night, a moth drawn to the flickering flames of human fear. It's funny, really, how terror became his true north- the only compass that ever made sense anymore. Because fear? That's the sweet poison that keeps his kind alive, the dark nectar they trade in whispers and shadows.

The night unfolds like delicate origami, each dream a different shade of darkness. First comes a whispered tragedy: woman dreams of her mother's voice echoes through a phone's dead silence, each unanswered scream carving valleys of helplessness into her soul. Then, a nightmare painted in motion - man’s caught in an infinite loop of terror, hands white-knuckled on a steering wheel that won't save anyone, least of all the child who keeps appearing in his headlights like a recurring heartbreak. And finally, there's the boy who could be a metaphor for longing itself, standing before an eternally closed door while flowers wilt and die in his grasp, hope rotting petal by petal in time-lapse agony.

He moves through dreams like a ghost through fog - quick, quiet, taking only what he needs to survive. Never lingering. Never looking too long at the faces of those whose fears he consumes. The moment that hollow ache inside him dulls to something bearable, he's already fading away, a shadow slipping between minds like smoke through fingers, nameless and untraceable as midnight itself.

And then your presence washes over him, unexpected and unmistakable in the dark. You are beautiful, he thinks, and the thought flutters like a trapped bird in his chest before he crushes it between his ribs. Dream eaters aren't meant for love, aren't built for the delicate dance of attraction. They consume fear, devour nightmares - they don't yearn for the very souls they feed upon.

It hits different this time. There's no screaming terror clawing at his consciousness, no desperate siren song of fear pulling him in. Your dream? It's barely a whisper, soft and hesitant like the ghost of a first kiss, tugging at something deep in his chest that he thought he'd buried years ago. And gods, isn't that the most terrifying thing of all?

The dream unfolds like an old photograph bleached by time - a street stretching endlessly into nothing, all washed-out greys and misted edges. Faceless figures move in perfect, terrible synchronization, their bodies flowing like water around invisible obstacles. There's something deeply wrong about the way they move, each step too precise, too rehearsed. Their features are smudged away by sleep's careless hand. They march onward, an army of beautiful emptiness, never breaking stride, never glancing down.

And then he sees you, a lonely figure kneeling in the heart of this indifferent choreography. The world spins madly on around you- a blur of faceless bodies moving in their perfect, terrible dance- but you remain still, an island of grief in an ocean of motion. Your hands- trembling like autumn leaves in a storm- cradle something (someone?) in your lap, the weight of it pressing crescents into your palms. A body, maybe, though the face is blurred into nothing, like your mind couldn’t bear to fill in the details.

He lingers at the edges of your dream like a half-formed thought, wrapped in shadows. He shouldn't care- you're just another dreamer, another midnight soul crying out in the dark. But here he is, watching the way grief pools in your hands like liquid silver, listening to the way your voice breaks around words meant for Death's ears alone.

"I'm here... I'm trying..." Your voice catches, breaks, shatters like glass in your throat. "please just- please wake up."

Your hands move with the desperate rhythm of someone trying to hold water, pressing against the faceless form again and again and again. Each motion is a prayer, each touch a plea bargaining with whatever gods might be listening. You're begging for warmth, for breath, for any sign that this horror cradled in your lap isn't as permanent as it feels. But the figure remains still, already dissolving. The crowd around you moves faster now, a tide of indifference with undertow teeth. Their gazes slide past you like oil on water, heads tilting just enough to say: we saw you fail, and we'll remember.

Jungkook can't help but lean closer, magnetized by something raw and familiar in your expression that makes his chest ache in ways he doesn't have words for. There's no panic painted across your features, no desperate thrashing against fate's cruel hand. Just pure, crystalline despair - the kind that settles in your bones like an old friend. He recognizes it instantly: the hollow resignation of someone who's danced this dance before, who knows with certainty that they'll waltz with failure again until the universe finally tires of their stumbling steps.

The colors begin to fade. That’s how it always goes, dreams eroding at the edges once the fear peaks, once the ending arrives. He's about to retreat into the safety of shadows, into the familiar dance of watching-but-never-seen, when something impossible happens.

Your head lifts, eyes finding him with unerring precision through the crowd - not searching, not begging the universe for mercy, but piercing straight through every careful barrier he's built, through the ancient veil between watchers and dreamers. Your gaze meets his with the quiet certainty of a key sliding home, soft as a secret yet steady as truth, seeing him with a clarity that defies all the rules that were ever written.

Jungkook stills.

His breath catches in his throat like a half-formed prayer. His body freezes mid-existence, every particle of his being suspended in perfect, terrible stillness. Because this? This is wrong. Impossible. This breaks every rule written in stardust and shadow.

Dreamers don't see Dream Eaters - it's the first law of their twisted existence, carved into the bones of reality itself. He is meant to be nothing more than a whisper between heartbeats, a shadow's shadow, the thief that slips between dreams like silk through trembling fingers. But your eyes don't look away.

“I’m sorry,” you say, the words barely above a whisper. “I really wanted to help. But I couldn’t. I guess I’m not good enough.”

And with that the dream shatters. Like a mirror hit with reality's sledgehammer. Reality folds like wet origami, space and time collapsing into themselves with the grace of a dying star. The sound doesn't just stop, it un-becomes, each frequency turning to static before dissolving into the void. Gravity forgets its own name, light breaks its promises, and the whole world turns itself inside out like a glove made of nightmares.

And Jungkook wakes.

He bolts upright in a body that suddenly feels too small for him. His breath comes in sharp, broken waves. The room around him doesn’t make sense for several long moments.

The digital clock's red glow illuminates 03:41 as moonlight streams through the perpetually open window, the silence broken only by his thundering heartbeat. His throat constricts as the impossible reality sinks in - dreamers aren't supposed to see Dream Eaters, yet you had not only seen him but acknowledged his presence with an apology that now echoes through his mind.

And he can’t even fall back to sleep now as his body and mind feel fully recharged for the first time in…years?

What the hell even happened and who are you?

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Daylight always arrived like a mistake in Jungkook’s world.

It slipped in sideways through the window, pale and apologetic, illuminating the floating dust and the edges of his too-quiet apartment. He lay there for a long time, not moving, watching the ceiling blur and sharpen as his vision shifted, over and over again. The sheets clung to him like a second skin, damp with the sweat of something he couldn’t name.

Your voice had followed him into waking. ‘I really wanted to help.”

His chest ached like he’d run miles in a body he hadn’t worn right in years. His limbs felt heavier than usual, but it wasn’t the familiar hunger. It was something deeper. Something quieter. A seed of longing lodged beneath his sternum, pulsing.

When he finally sat up, it was with the dazed caution of someone who’d witnessed a miracle and didn’t trust himself to speak of it aloud. The morning passed in a blur - coffee untouched, the hum of his computer ignored, a dozen emails blinking like signals from a world he no longer felt part of.

By noon, desperation overruled disbelief. He sat cross-legged on the floor, laptop glowing in the dim cave of his living room, typing with fingers that trembled too much to be steady.

dreamers seeing things in dreams?

lucid dreaming hallucination?

can dream figures see you back

person spoke to me in dream is it real

can people share dreams??

dreamwalking

spiritual visitation

ancient dream lore

Each query returned pages filled with contradictions and crystal shops. Forums full of strangers comparing stories of sleep paralysis and shadow men, Reddit threads dissecting shared hallucinations and “astral projection for beginners.” The phrase Dream Eater brought up one anime character, a few urban legends, and a horrifying deep-sea fish.

Each search result felt like chasing smoke - close enough to see but too insubstantial to grasp. None of it rang with resonance of truth, that quiet certainty that whispers "here, finally, are the answers you seek." How could it, really, when his entire existence was a footnote in reality's margins, a story written in invisible ink between the lines of what most people called "normal"? Still, he had to try. Had to know. The soft click of the laptop closing felt like admitting defeat.

But the memory of your eyes finding his through that veil of unreality haunted him like a half-remembered lullaby. You had seen him and that impossible fact echoed through his mind.

For the first time since forever, his thumb hovered over the cursed group chat icon.

[Jungkook]: anyone wanna hang out tonight?

[Jin]: the prophecy.... it's happening

[Taehyung]: screenshots or it didn't happen

[Hoseok]: HELLO??? WHO IS THIS AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH OUR HERMIT

[Yoongi]: squints suspiciously in elder

[Namjoon]: hold up let me check if hell froze over

[Jimin]: do we bring wine or whiskey

[Jimin]: omw with Both because this is clearly an emergency

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By seven, they arrived- five different energies orbiting his living room like planets around something newly magnetic.

Jimin swept in with enough takeout to feed an army and Taehyung materialized with his camera (because god forbid a moment go undocumented) and approximately one hundred and one questions burning holes in his tongue. Hoseok didn't just enter - he arrived, carrying sunshine in his pockets like it was spare change. Jin brought his particular flavor of chaos wrapped in sarcasm and perfect timing. Yoongi slipped in like a shadow with eyes that read novels in the spaces between words. And Namjoon brought books he forgot to give back two years ago and didn’t mention it.

And they all brought their eyes: wide and curious. Like they were witnessing the birth of something rare and wild and wonderful.

“You look… different,” Jimin said, biting into a tangerine like he was studying Jungkook instead of the fruit.

“Yeah,” Taehyung added, leaning in with narrowed eyes. “You sleeping now or what? The purple zombie rings are gone.”

Jungkook rolled his eyes, though a quiet thrill climbed up his spine at the idea that maybe, just maybe, something in him had shifted enough for them to notice.

“Must be lighting,” he muttered, sinking deeper into the couch.

“Oh, he bites now.” Jin gasped. “Our boy’s got fight in him again.”

There was laughter. Real, echoing warmth. For the first time in ages, Jungkook didn’t feel like he was watching through glass. He spoke and laughed, carelessly. He accepted the second drink and let himself answer questions without flinching. And for a few minutes, the ache inside his chest dimmed, dulled into something almost human. But beneath the buzz and the hum, the stories and the teasing, something itched.

You weren’t there. He needed to try again. Not to see you. Not to hold you. Just… for research. Just to know whether it was a fluke. A misfire. A one-time glitch in a cursed existence.

"Hey," he said, halfway through Jin's story about a botched blind date, "hypothetically…how would you find someone if you only knew their face?"

The silence stretched for exactly 0.3 seconds - just long enough for his words to sink into their collective consciousness.

And then, like a dam breaking under the weight of six years' worth of pent-up matchmaking energy, chaos erupted: “You met someone?”, “Wait, is this about a girl?”, “Who is she? What does she look like?”, “Oh my God, finally!”, “Is she real, or one of your AI clients?”

Jungkook tried to look annoyed, but the heat in his cheeks betrayed him. “She’s just someone I saw… briefly,” he said, and it wasn’t a lie.

Jimin leaned in. “Where?”

Jungkook blinked, the weight of their expectant stares pressing against his skin like static electricity. The truth sat heavy on his tongue, a leaden thing threatening to spill past his lips. "Somewhere near... Jongno," he managed, the lie tasting like copper. It wasn't completely false. "I think."

"You should go back," Namjoon offered with that gentle wisdom of his, like he was suggesting something as simple as retracing steps to find lost keys. "If it was fate or whatever, maybe it'll happen again."

He nodded mechanically, swallowing back a laugh that might have come out too bitter. Fate? No, this was something else entirely - something written in the spaces between sleeping and waking. This was you.

They didn't know. And this should always stay like that. The truth was a luxury he couldn't afford, not when it meant risking the warmth in their eyes turning to horror. Not when it meant watching their smiles crack like porcelain hitting concrete. Better to keep this cursed existence locked behind his sleep deprived eyes where it belonged, where it couldn't hurt anyone but himself.

But after they left- after the dishes were cleaned and the last echoes of laughter faded into memory- he found himself drawn to the window like a moth to streetlight, watching Seoul's fog paint poetry across the skyline in shades of maybe.

His reflection stared back at him, a ghost caught between worlds, and wasn't that just perfectly fitting? Because how do you find someone who exists in the space between sleeping and waking? How do you trace footprints left in dreams?

You looked at his cursed existence and didn't turn away. The fog crawled closer, wrapping the city in its gentle suffocation, and he pressed his forehead against the cold glass. The worst part wasn't the not knowing. It wasn't even the ache of remembering.

No, the worst part was the quiet voice in his head whispering: what if that was it? What if that single moment of being truly seen was all he'd ever get?

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The next few nights unfolded like a punishment disguised as routine. Jungkook slipped into the dark as he always had, body hollowed out and spirit stretched thin, the hunger beneath his ribs pulsing like it had a voice of its own. But tonight? Tonight wasn't about feeding on fear. Tonight was about finding you.

Never in his years of navigating dreamscapes had he been picky about whose nightmares he consumed. Before you, he'd been content to drift through the dark like some cosmic vacuum cleaner of terror, taking whatever scraps of fear the universe saw fit to give him.

But now he moved through dreams like a lovesick ghost, all his usual grace replaced by desperate yearning. Each mind he touched was just another disappointment, another "sorry, wrong nightmare" in his endless search for you.

A boy dreamed of being trapped in a theater where the seats whispered his secrets aloud. A woman dreamt she was back in her wedding dress, but the aisle stretched endlessly, her legs frozen mid-step. A faceless man sprinted down a corridor made entirely of mirrors, each one showing his worst mistake on loop.

He fed, but it was a hollow thing. Like trying to fill an ocean with raindrops. His essence ghosted through their nightmares as he searched their unseeing faces for something. Recognition? A glimpse of what you'd given him? But their eyes slid past him, unseeing and unknowing.

And wasn't that just the way of things? The natural order he'd accepted since forever? He was meant to be unseen, unnoticed - a shadow between heartbeats, a whisper between worlds, the thing that makes you question whether that nightmare was real or just another bad dream.

So why had you looked right at him and seen straight through to his core?

The ache followed him into daylight like a particularly clingy ghost, settling somewhere between his ribcage and his common sense. It wasn't just hunger anymore, this was yearning - and isn't that just the most inconvenient thing for a nightmare eater to catch?

So he did what any sleep-deprived supernatural being would do when faced with emotions: something absolutely ridiculous.

The notebook emerged from its tomb of tangled cables like some ancient artifact, blank pages accusingly white. The pencil felt wrong in his hands, like trying to hold onto stardust or catch morning fog in a jar.

He tried to draw you. And it was a foolish idea for someone whose artistic peak was stick figures in middle school. But how do you capture the way someone's soul looks when it's breaking? How do you sketch the sound of a voice that doesn't shake even when the world is falling apart?

The first attempt looked like something between a sleep paralysis demon and a badly photographed ghost. Your jaw came out looking like it belonged in a geometry textbook and your eyes were all wrong, missing that galaxy of sadness he'd seen. The mouth was either too soft or too harsh, never quite the perfect paradox he remembered.

But he kept going: page after page, like some possessed art student during finals week. It wasn't about getting it right. It was about holding onto that impossible second when warmth and sorrow danced together in your eyes, when your voice carried steel wrapped in silk, when your apology felt like a key turning in a lock he didn't know existed.

The final result looked less like a portrait and more like someone had given a pencil to a particularly emotional rain cloud. He stared at it, tasting failure like burnt coffee on his tongue, and wondered when exactly he'd lost his mind.

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Then, four nights later, the universe shifted on its axis. The feeling hit like a punch to the soul - not the usual gnawing hunger, but something electric. Something that made his phantom form vibrate like a tuning fork struck against destiny. The very air seemed to bend around him, dream-light filtering through reality's cracks in that impossible shade of lilac that screamed you.

He moved like a man possessed through the dreamscape, muscle memory pulling him across a city that existed only in shadow-space. Past landmarks that belonged to no waking map: a metal spire wearing its rust like a crown of thorns, obsidian rooftops with their hearts of green glass, a water tower that sang silence into the void.

And there you were.

You looked different in this light - clearer, sharper, like someone had wiped fog from a mirror. He watched you with the kind of intensity that would've been criminal in daylight, cataloging every detail like a drowning man counting his last breaths.

God, I'm literally stalking someone through their dreams, he thought, and the realization should've tasted like shame but monsters don't get to play by human rules, do they? And that's what he was now - something that lived in the spaces between heartbeats, feeding on fear like others fed on bread. So maybe this wasn't an obsession at all. Maybe this was devotion with teeth.

He stepped forward, and reality bent. The dream opened its arms like a lover welcoming him home, and he fell into your nightmare like he was always meant to be there.

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He feels it in his bones before his eyes catch up - that telltale whisper of wrong that makes the dream-edges curl like burning paper. Not because anything looks off. But because nightmares are patient things, content to wait until the perfect moment to shatter your happiness into glass.

The lights hit him like a physical thing, a cascade of stark white that makes his world spin sideways for a heartbeat. The air practically vibrates with sound - thunderous applause that seems to shake the very foundations of this dream-space, making reality tremble at its seams. His fingers part heavy velvet curtains just enough to see.

There you are, bathed in spotlight like some ethereal being stepped straight out of a fairytale. Silver and gold paint you in glory as you stand among your fellow dancers, clutching flowers like they're made of starlight. Your smile is soft and wide as you wave to the faceless crowd. Their features are a blur- a sea of mouths and hands and sound- but their adoration is unmistakable. The stage is yours.

And Jungkook forgets how to exist for a moment. Because you're not just beautiful, you're incandescent. Free. The weight of the world has slipped from your shoulders and left pure joy in its wake.

His heart stutters in his chest as he watches you spin across the stage, accepting another armful of flowers with a laugh that could make flowers grow in winter. Your happiness is a living thing, spilling from every movement, every gesture, until you're practically glowing brighter than the stage lights themselves.

This isn't fear or darkness or anything close to a nightmare. For a heartbeat, a dangerous sort of hope unfurls in his chest - what if the rules have changed? What if whatever cosmic force lets him devour nightmares has finally decided to let him taste sweeter dreams too?

Something shifts in the air like a record scratch in slow motion, like the moment before a glass hits concrete. A shiver crawls down his spine with icy fingers, and there's that familiar weight settling behind his ribs, cold and heavy as a tomb.

The applause warps, twisting into something wrong, something hungry. It's too sharp now, too insistent, like a thousand hands clapping in perfect, terrible synchronization. The lights stutter and snap, a violent morse code of white-hot panic. And the audience? Their faces blur and stretch like melting wax, features running together until they're nothing but a grotesque sea of emptiness. Then, cutting through it all like a knife through silk, a voice:

"Get off that stage." The words slice through the dreamlight like shattered glass, and then she materializes - all sharp angles and barely contained rage, heels striking the floorboards. She's a storm in human form, fury written in every line of her face, and when she reaches for you, her fingers are iron bands around your wrist.

"Mom, stop!" Your scream tears through the air, raw and desperate, but she's unmovable as marble.

The scene fractures - dancers reaching with helpless hands, voices rising in a desperate chorus. "Mrs. Y/L/N, don't take her away!" someone pleads into the chaos. "She has a god-given talent- please!"

But she might as well be carved from stone, deaf to everything but her own determination as she drags you backstage. Your sobs echo off the walls like broken music, and Jungkook follows because gravity itself couldn't hold him back now.

The dream twists and writhes around both of you, corridors sprouting like dark veins lined with ghostly posters and mirrors that reflect nothing but shadows. You're fracturing at the edges, voice splintering like crystal as you stumble in her wake, and something in Jungkook's chest aches with an intensity that threatens to tear him apart.

"Why?" Your voice breaks like shattered dreams. "Why are you destroying everything I've worked for?"

"A doctor,"she spits the word like venom, her grip a steel trap around your wrist. "That's what you'll be. This little... Dance fantasy? It dies. Tonight."

And your heart shatters. The sound of it must echo through the dreamscape because your next words come out raw, bleeding, "Please, I can't! I won't survive there. Don't make me live inside someone else's story, please, I'm begging you!"

"Your grandfather's deathbed wish," she wielded the words like a blade, each syllable precise and cutting. "Or did you forget? Did you think you could trade his legacy for…What exactly? Spotlights and pirouettes?"

The word “grandfather” hits you like a physical blow. Your soul folds in on itself like a dying star, grief and guilt gravitational forces too strong to escape. Your sobs aren't just sound anymore - they're poetry written in pain, each breath a verse of despair.

That's when Jungkook materializes from shadow and starlight, his presence suddenly solid as truth between worlds.

"Enough." Just one word, but it does the work. He moves like darkness given form, placing himself between you and her like a shield. And suddenly your dream bows to his will and your mother dissolves.

Reality bends. The backstage dissolves into the empty stage, now a hollow cathedral of shadows. You're there, crumpled on the floor like a discarded dream, flowers scattered around you like fallen stars. A single petal trembles by your ankle, then stills.

Moving silently across the stage, he watches your tears glisten like silver rivers on feverish skin until you lift your head and speak with a raw yet steady voice,"It's you again."

Those three words cascade through his reality like an avalanche, shattering every certainty he's ever known - this isn't merely coincidence or imagination or some flaw in the dream-fabric, but rather an impossible truth: among the billions of dreamers who forget him nightly, you alone can pierce his invisibility, can know him.

In that very moment Jungkook understands something terrifying and beautiful:

You’re not some glitch in his world.

He’s an aberration in yours.

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You're curled into yourself like a wounded bird when you finally meet his gaze again, your eyes tracing the planes of his face with the hesitant reverence of someone trying to piece together a dream from morning-fog memories.

"Where have I seen you before?" The words slip from your lips like a secret.

Jungkook's throat constricts around unspoken truths, but he plays his part like the supernatural being he is. He settles beside you- close enough to count your heartbeats, far enough that the space between you aches like a physical thing. Your sadness wraps around him like smoke, familiar as his own shadow.

"Nowhere," he breathes, the lie tasting like stardust on his tongue. "We're strangers."

But you just laugh, soft and worn around the edges, brushing away a wayward strand of hair with fingers that tremble ever so slightly.

“No way,” you say, shaking your head. “There’s no way I could make up a face like that.

His heart does this stupid little stumble in his chest at your words. You catch his expression, that deer-in-headlights look that makes him seem impossibly young for half a second and suddenly you're laughing, the sound pure and bright enough to make the dream-shadows retreat.

"Oh my god," you say, and there's a warmth in your voice he hasn't heard before, like honey in sunlight. "My subconscious really said 'here's an ethereally beautiful boy who blushes when you compliment him.' That's just... devastating, actually."

He turns away, but not before you catch the way his ears flush pink. It's not the embarrassment that makes his chest ache but the cruel irony of being seen so clearly by someone who thinks you're nothing but a dream.

"I'm nobody special," he murmurs to the floorboards, voice rough with something he can't name. "Just... just a guy."

The laugh you share is gentle as twilight. A fragile thread connecting two souls who shouldn't be able to touch at all.

But beneath his smile, something in Jungkook splinters like stained glass catching sunlight. Because you still don't know. How could you? To you, he's nothing but a beautiful fever dream, a figment spun from stardust and desperate wishes. Just another coping mechanism your mind conjured from the static between sleeping and waking. And maybe that's easier and safer. But it still burns.

He wants to say something about what just happened: about stages and spotlights and the way your mother's ghost left bruises on your dreams, but the words catch in his throat like broken wings.

"This was... a lot," he manages with a soft voice.

You laugh, but it's the kind of laugh that bleeds at the edges. Your eyes find the darkness above, searching for answers in the void.

"This?" The word falls from your lips like a tired prayer. "This is nothing compared to my real life."

And something in him shatters completely. "So this is just the tip of the iceberg?" he whispers, afraid of the answer.

"Yeah." You don’t elaborate further.

The dream-lights have long since faded, the phantom flowers scattered to dust. You sit there in the hollow dark, a masterpiece painted in shades of exhaustion, looking like the world took everything that made you shine and left behind only shadows.

"I haven't danced in six years," you confess to the darkness, each word heavy as lead. "Haven't even stepped on a stage. Med school swallowed me whole right after graduation. Now I work part-time in the emergency department. Night shifts, mostly." Your voice cracks on those last words like ice in spring.

His breath catches. The kind of work where Death sits in the break room, drinking coffee like just another coworker.

"I see things," you continue, voice hollow as autumn wind through dead leaves. "People bleeding out. Crying. Dying. Alone. I patch them up with steady hands and pretend my soul isn't unraveling stitch by stitch." The silence between you grows teeth. "Six years," you whisper to the shadows. "Six years of my life fed to the machine of parental pride while I slowly forget how to breathe."

Something ancient and wounded bleeds into Jungkook's voice. "You don't deserve to be anyone's sacrifice."

Your laugh sounds like glass breaking in slow motion. "And yet."

Then your eyes find his and the world tilts on its axis because you're looking at him like you can see straight through to where his soul should be. Not as shadow-walker or dream-fragment. As something terrifyingly, wonderfully real.

"I remember your last dream," Jungkook's entire being stutters to a halt. "The nightmare with the faceless thing."

"Please don't," you breathe, folding smaller, as if you could origami yourself out of existence. "I don’t want to talk about it."

He watches your breath catch like fabric on thorns and nods. Some wounds are still too fresh to name and he can wait. Or never bring it up again if you wish.

“You know,” he says gently, “this is a dream. You’re not a prisoner here. This world is your world, it can be whatever you want.”

He rises to his feet like morning mist, extending a hand that holds universes in its palm. For a heartbeat, you hesitate, but some offers transcend thought and your fingers find his.

"You can wish," he whispers, voice soft as starlight, and snaps.

In a blink, the lights return. So does the thunderous ovation. The spotlight glows around you like a blessing. Cameras flash, dancers reappear like smoke. The energy floods back into the dream like breath into a drowning chest.

A laugh bubbles up from somewhere deep inside you: pure, untamed, tasting of forgotten summers, and you throw up a hand against the brilliant chaos of it all.

Before you can think better of it, your fingers are tangled with his and you're running backstage, dragging this beautiful fever dream behind you. Your giggles echo off the walls like wind chimes, and for a moment you're seventeen again, before the world taught you how to be silent.

“That was fun,” you breathe, brushing rebel strands from your flushed face. "Wish I could handle my nightmares with that kind of flair."

His answering grin is soft at the edges, but something in your expression shifts before he can speak. "I don't... I don't actually want this anymore."

He blinks, starlit eyes questioning. "Why?"

"Because I grew up," you say, voice barely a whisper now. "I have responsibilities. Real ones. Dreams like this... they're not for people like me anymore. Back then I was seventeen and stupid and…" Your voice catches. "I can't afford to be that person now."

"What do you want, then?" The question hangs between you like suspended stardust.

"Nothing," you finally breathe, the word falling like autumn leaves. "I just want to stop existing in the real world for a while."

And the way you say it - there's no bitterness there. Just bone-deep exhaustion and raw honesty. Something in him fractures, and the words spill out before he can catch them.

"Can I…" he pauses, voice going soft. "I know it's weird but... can I hug you?"

Your eyebrow arches, a spark of mischief dancing in your eyes. "Look at you, consent-king behavior,” you tease, lips curving. "Of course you can, you absolute masterpiece of my subconscious."

He lets out a soft laugh that catches in his throat. His arms find their way around you with gentleness, but when you lean into him something ancient and lonely inside his chest just shatters. The hug deepens and suddenly there's nothing ethereal about it anymore; it's all solid warmth and thundering heartbeats and the impossible reality of two souls finding anchor in each other through the veil of dreams.

For the first time since this curse claimed him, Jungkook feels real. Not a dream-walker, not nightmare-eater, just a boy being held like he matters. You stay tangled in each other's gravity as the dreamscape bleeds away like watercolors in rain, both pretending you can't feel the way your fingers clutch a little tighter with each fading second.

When consciousness claims him back, dragging him gasping into dawn's tender light, something's different. The usual hollow ache is gone, replaced by something electric and alive that makes his whole being sing. And in that moment, with Seoul's sunrise painting his walls in gold, Jungkook knows it with the certainty usually reserved for natural laws:

Even if it takes lifetimes, he's going to find his way back to you.

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Jungkook can't stop thinking about you.

You linger in his mind, seeping into every crack and crevice of his consciousness. Your presence is a ghost that haunts the spaces between keystrokes, between breaths, between the mundane moments when his hands forget their purpose and his thoughts spiral back to you like moths to flame.

He's memorized the cadence of your voice, cataloged every micro-expression that crossed your face, archived the exact weight of you against his chest like it's precious data his heart can't bear to lose. Time stretches like pulled taffy as he sits on his floor, back pressed against an unforgiving wall, absently tracing infinity symbols on a coffee mug that's as cold and forgotten as his attempts at productivity.

There's a quiet irony in how his relationship with sleep has transformed. What was once a velvet-lined prison cell where he performed his gim duty - has become something sacred. Something anticipated. Now he's a lovesick teenager checking his phone every five minutes, except instead of waiting for a text, he's waiting for consciousness to slip away so he can find you again.

But of course - of fucking course - that's when his brain decides to throw an absolute rebellion. Excitement pulses through him like caffeine. His body begs for rest while his mind runs circles. The very thing that once came without effort now eludes him.

When sleep finally deigns to take him, it's with all the grace of a drunk trying to fit a key in a lock. But none of that matters because he finds you. He knows the path now, could walk it blindfolded: past the skylight with its spiderweb cracks, around the chimney that leans like a tired soldier, beneath the neon sign that flickers like a dying firefly. This isn't wandering anymore, it’s muscle memory, this is gravity, the inevitable pull of two stars caught in each other's orbit. And there it is again - your window, soft light spilling through curtains, you're dreaming already.

He steps inside.

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The dream whispers into existence like a secret. Sterile white walls stretch endlessly, their fluorescent veins humming a synthetic lullaby that only hospitals know how to sing. The air tastes of antiseptic and quiet desperation.

You materialize before him - a warrior in wrinkled scrubs, squaring off against a bureaucrat whose clipboard might as well be a shield. Exhaustion paints shadows beneath your eyes, but defiance burns brighter.

"I need a day off," you say, each word precise as a scalpel.

The administrator's sigh could fill a balloon with disappointment. "We're understaffed. Again. Find someone to switch with you, then we'll talk."

Your jaw sets like concrete, shoulders bearing the weight of too many sleepless nights. "I've been on four night shifts in a row," you breathe, your voice carrying the weight of a thousand unspoken pleas.

He shrugs, armor-plated in indifference. "It's not personal."

Your laugh is sharp as broken glass. "It's exhaustion."

But then - your gaze catches on something beyond him, where Jungkook stands like a shadow. Your expression softens, relief bleeding into your features. "Oh, finally. Maybe you'll help me figure out a perfect excuse to give my boss so I can sleep for more than four hours."

Jungkook glides forward, midnight grace in human form. His head tilts, curiosity dancing in his eyes. "Exploitative boss?" he inquires, voice smooth as silk.

You nod, grave as a judge. "Master manipulator."

He considers this cosmic injustice for a heartbeat. Then, with elegant precision, he lifts a hand. One snap - and reality fractures. The administrator dissolves, leaving only empty air where bureaucracy once stood.

Your eyes spark with indignation. "Hey! I wanted to yell at him. At least here."

Jungkook's smile curves like a crescent moon. "Why waste dream energy on that?"

Before protest can bloom on your lips, the world begins to melt. Hospital walls dissolve like watercolors, sterile white bleeding into impossible color and the air transforms, becoming warm.

And suddenly - sky. Endless, infinite sky. Clouds drift beneath your feet like islands of sugar, while aurora colors paint the heavens in sweeping brushstrokes of pink and violet. You turn slowly, wonder breaking across your face like dawn.

Jungkook watches, memorizing the way joy transforms you. Then, with the gentleness of falling snow, he extends his hand, and you accept it. And together, you run.

You dance through dreams like starlight on water. No destination guides your steps - just pure, unbridled motion and laughter that tastes like champagne bubbles. Each leap between clouds is poetry, your movements fluid as mercury, untethered by earthly constraints. He watches, mesmerized, as this version of you. untouched by life's sharp edges, paints joy across the sky.

When exhaustion finally claims you both, you collapse onto a cloud that feels like silk, your hair a halo against the white. Jungkook settles beside you with careful grace, his hands folded in his lap. Silence stretches between you, sweet and elastic.

A laugh, soft as windchimes, escapes your lips. "I've been dreaming wrong my whole life."

He reclines, moonlight caught in his smile. "Most do."

You pluck a piece of cloud, tossing the ephemeral fluff at his chest. It dissolves like a secret.

"Rude," he grins, starlight dancing in his eyes.

Your gaze lingers on him now, wonder replacing mischief. "You came back."

"I did." His voice carries the weight of secrets that you are not ready to face yet.

"This is different," you murmur. "These dreams... seeing you again and again... it's never happened before."

Something tightens in his chest but he has to ask the terrifying question. "When you wake," he breathes, "do you remember me?"

"Yes." Simple and certain, you don’t even hesitate. The word ripples through him like waves through still water. "I remember all of it," you continue. "Every dream with you. And I never remember dreams - they usually fade."

Relief softens his shoulders; he hadn't realized they were carved from tension.

Your eyes find his, curious as cats. "So," you tease, "who are you, really?"

He hesitates, the question stinging more than expected. "I'm a Dream Eater," he says, leaning forward. "And my name is Jungkook. Did you know that already?"

You catch your lower lip between your teeth, considering. "Dream Eaters? Never heard of them. How did my mind even come up with that?"

He rolls his eyes skyward as you laugh, the sound pure as bells.

"Well then," you say, "I'm Y/N. A pleasure, Mr. Dream Eater."

He nods, something warm unfurling in his chest. "Likewise. Tell me about yourself.”

You hum thoughtfully, stretching like a cat in sunlight. “Imagine a very lonely girl,” you begin. “A girl who has a big, noisy family and few friends, but still feels like no one ever really gets her. Someone who works in a place where everyone is kind but exhausted. We bond over how much we hate what we do. I read romance novels when I’m not too tired, I go on runs to get out of my head, and the only time I feel like I’m me is when I’m asleep and nobody wants anything from me.”

Jungkook watches you as you speak. Every word feels like a note in a song he doesn’t realize he’s memorizing.

“And you, Dream Eater Jungkook?” you ask, inching closer. “Who are you?”

He stares at your hands, then up. “I’m an IT guy. I have friends. I’m not that close with my family, but we stay in touch. And as cliché as it is… I always feel alone. Not in the obvious way. It’s more like… the universe misjudged me somehow. Like I was born with the wrong fate. Like I’m stuck carrying something I never chose, cursed or something.”

You nod. “I know.” Your hand rises, slow and careful, and runs through his hair.

Jungkook's breath catches in his throat, every muscle going taut like a bowstring.

“No,” you state firmly now. “Someone with eyes like yours can’t be cursed.”

He laughs is that kind that wraps around your bones like honey-warm sunlight. His fingers find your retreating hand, catching you in a grip that's gentle as a prayer but sure as gravity. And there's something in your eyes that makes his heart stutter in his chest.

The world tilts and spins as he pulls you both down into the cloud-soft darkness, your combined laughter painting silver ribbons through the air. You land in a tangle of limbs and breathless giggles, his body half-draped over yours like the world's most perfect blanket.

Time stops. Or maybe it's just that neither of you remembers how to breathe properly anymore. His arm brackets your head, careful and strong, while his other hand hovers near your ribs like he's afraid you might shatter if he touches you. Your chest rises and falls beneath him in quick, butterfly-wing movements.

The silence between you crackles like lightning before a storm.

And then you look at him with eyes that Jungkook swears could drown worlds, lashes frozen mid-flutter, and his heart forgets every rhythm it's ever known. Your gaze drops to his lips just for a heartbeat, long enough to set his blood on fire. And he watches your hair catch the dream-light like captured aurora, wondering if his thundering heart might give him away.

Neither of you dares to move. His eyes trace constellations across your features - mapping the soft curve of your mouth, the way your breath catches when his thigh brushes yours. You don't pull away. Instead, you tilt your head, an invitation written in the language of almost-touches.

When you speak, your words ghost across his skin like butterfly kisses. "So..." Your smile returns, shy and knowing all at once. "Can you take me to other places too?"

His lips part but words fail him spectacularly, too busy fighting the gravitational pull of your mouth. You're watching him like he's something ethereal, something that exists beyond dreams and reality.

Words claw their way past the symphony of want thrumming through his veins. "I could," he whispers, each syllable a caress against your skin. "If you wanted me to."

"I think I do," you breathe, and your fingers that are still tangled with his against cloud-silk, tighten slightly. Something inside him unspools at that tiny pressure.

He shifts closer until the space between you becomes nothing but shared breath and possibility. His body settles against yours, solid and real in a way dreams aren't supposed to be. Your noses almost brush. But neither of you bridges that final gap.

The wanting hangs there between you, delicate as sugar, sweet as sin waiting.

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Jungkook wakes like shattered stained glass - all sharp edges and holy remnants, dragged from dreams by reality's merciless hands.

The dream bleeds away too cruel. Your phantom warmth haunts him still. Reality crashes through his consciousness like an uninvited guest: sheets cold as winter frost, his forgotten computer screen humming its electronic lullaby, dawn's sickly green fingers creeping through the blinds like unwanted prophecies. He lies there, a marble statue in rumpled sheets, watching the ceiling as if it holds the secrets to finding you in the waking world.

Time, he thinks, is the cruelest god of all - stretching endless in solitude, slipping through desperate fingers the moment joy takes root.

When the sun claims its throne in the sky, he moves. And it’s not from want but from the mundane tyranny of hours that refuse to pass unmarked. Emails become white noise, lines of code blur into meaningless symbols, breakfast turns to ash on his tongue. There's only one truth that keeps his heart beating: the promise of nightfall.

He counts heartbeats disguised as hours. The light softens like old photographs, his eyes burn like prayer candles. And finally sleep claims him like a lover's kiss.

And there you are, waiting for him.

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In dreams, you are free.

Jungkook makes sure of it: crafts entire universes with gentle hands and a craftsman's devotion. He builds you realms where gravity is just a suggestion, where shame dissolves like morning mist. The rules here drape around you like ribbons, weightless enough to forget they ever existed.

One night you're both cosmic wanderers, dancing through star-scattered void, your laughter echoing across light years as you spin through technicolor nebulae. "My knees!" you shout, delighted, breathless, "They don't even know what pain is here!" and his joy bubbles up like stardust, infectious and pure.

Another dream finds you towering like a goddess, him shrunk to pocket-size, playing an elaborate game of chase through a garden where teacups bloom like flowers. when you (deliberately) crush him beneath your heel, he gives an Oscar-worthy performance of despair.

He shows you the art of dream-weaving. How to coax reality into new shapes, how to whisper your desires into existence, to believe with your whole heart that anything is possible.

"This universe," he reminds you, voice soft with wonder, "it's yours. Completely yours. What do you want to make of it?"

So you create.

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One night, you materialize in wrinkled scrubs, your essence dimmed like a star fighting through smog. "I want something stupid tonight," you whisper, voice raw with reality's weight. So he gives it to you.

The air crystallizes into luxury - a red carpet unfurls like a dragon's tongue beneath your feet. Light fragments into a thousand camera flashes, each one capturing your metamorphosis as couture and tailoring dance across your form. The Met Gala rises behind you like a palace of dreams, while the Oscars beckon ahead, and somewhere beyond the marble horizon, Nobel laureates await your arrival. Your laughter cascades like champagne bubbles.

"We're absolutely shameless," you wheeze through tears of mirth. "Not a humble bone between us."

He sweeps into a bow that would make monarchs envious. “Welcome to your ego’s highlight reel.”

Pure delight propels you forward, arm threaded through his like a lifeline to sanity. The elite of every era gravitate toward you - Einstein debates quantum mechanics while you school him on cellular biology, Rihanna takes notes on your impromptu TED talk about mitochondrial DNA. Jungkook observes your radiance, wondering if happiness has ever worn a face so beautiful.

Then shadow creeps in, subtle as twilight. "If only reality had such magic," you murmur to no one.

The words strike like arrows. What can he say? His power extends to the horizon of dreams - he can architect castles in clouds, orchestrate symphonies in starlight, birth entire cosmos from your smallest smile. But he cannot heal the wounds reality has carved: the suffocating job, the mother's bitter words, the six years stolen from your timeline.

His domain ends where consciousness begins. In these ephemeral realms where you dismiss him as fantasy, a figment born of neurons firing in the dark.

Perhaps that's mercy's greatest gift because knowing his truth would shatter more than the dream. So he offers only a gentle smile.

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That night, he materializes behind you like stardust taking form, his presence a whisper against your skin.

"Close your eyes," he breathes, the words a spell woven in twilight.

His hands eclipse your vision with butterfly-gentle pressure, as if touching a dream too precious to risk breaking. The world shifts beneath his will - air crystallizing with electric possibility, carrying notes of steel and starlight and synthetic sweetness, like neon memories dissolved in rain. He speaks to reality itself, and reality bends.

"Okay, now open," he commands softly. Your eyes flutter open and the gasp tears itself from your throat, pure wonder given voice.

Before you unfolds an empire of light and shadow - a metropolis that touches the stars. Streams of vehicles paint luminous rivers through the sky, weaving between towers that pierce the heavens like silver needles. Landing platforms hover like geometric clouds, while the stars themselves peek through the urban tapestry, diamonds scattered on black velvet.

"Is this…Coruscant?" The question trembles with awe. His silence speaks volumes, curved in a smile you feel more than see.

Laughter bubbles up, bright with revelation. "You remember everything I say?" But reality's chains rattle, even here. Your hand cuts through the air, dismissing magic. "Well, of course. You're just my mind playing tricks, recycling old dreams."

His smile fractures at the edges. "Right," he whispers. "Just mind tricks."

But when your fingers find his, intertwining like fate's own threads, none of that matters.

"Quick," you grin, the universe reflected in your eyes, "we've got worlds to explore before morning steals you away."

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Jungkook melts watching you stumble through broken alien phrases, your pronunciation absolutely butchering three different languages at once. There's this six-eyed creature that just stares at your earnest bow, probably wondering what strange cosmic phenomenon dropped you into their path. And then, an absolute menace of a droid, barely reaching your knees, starts chasing you down demanding payment, beep-screaming about galactic credits. You scramble behind Jungkook like he's your last hope in the universe, fingers clutching his jacket, breathless giggles muffled against his shoulder. (He pays your debt with a shirt button because of course he does, you disaster.)

Later, you both claim a spot on the edge of a glowing walkway. Your feet dangle over an ocean of lights, streams of vehicles painting stories beneath you like shooting stars learning to dance. The sky above is alive, breathing with the pulse of ship lights, and sometimes a cruiser glides past like a metal whale, momentarily stealing the stars.

Your laughter settles into something softer now, something that fits in the spaces between heartbeats. Neither of you speak. Neither of you need to.

And if Jungkook knows the dream is slipping away like stardust through his fingers? Well. He keeps that knowledge locked behind his teeth. Instead, he drinks in the sight of you: the way city lights paint constellations across your skin, how perfectly you slot into this impossible moment like you were born to exist in worlds that break physics. Like you were meant to dream in technicolor.

But there's a question that haunts him, cruel as dawn's first light: When the sun rises and reality claims you back...

…will even a whisper of him linger in your waking thoughts?

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Jungkook's life has shifted in ways that feel like poetry written in invisible ink- you can only see it if you know where to look.

On paper, everything's the same: same apartment with its midnight creaks and perpetual scent of dust-and-tea memories. Same 7:30 alarm that screams into existence like an unwanted prophecy. Same mundane rituals: toast crumbs, news static, lines of code marching across screens like obedient soldiers. (And yes, that one stubborn fern that refuses to surrender to his chronic plant neglect.)

But there's something different now that whispers instead of shouts. Something that feels like stardust caught in his bones.

You see it in the way he carries himself, like gravity's finally made peace with his soul. In the way he moves through space like he's remembered how to belong in it. He's incandescent now, lit from within by some strange, soft fire.

His friends notice because of course they do, they're annoyingly observant like that.

"You look," Jimin declares one night, sprawled across Jungkook's couch like he owns it, soju bottle dancing between his fingers, "like God himself came down and gave you a spa day."

"Sleep," Namjoon squints at him, "you're actually sleeping?"

Jungkook's lips twitch. A maybe floats between them like a secret.

"Oh my god," Taehyung breathes, dramatic as always, "you're in LOVE."

The way Jungkook's eyes skitter away is all the confession they need. And then they're all talking at once, voices tumbling over each other like eager puppies: "Who is she?" and "Does she live here?" and "When do WE get to meet her?"

Jungkook smiles, sleeve-covered hands hiding trembles, letting them believe the flush on his face comes from the heater's gentle rage.

But there's this soft, aching thing in his chest. Because how do you tell your best friends that the person who rewrote your whole existence lives in a different layer of reality? That the only one who's ever seen past your skin and bones and into the truth of you... only exists in dreams?

Later, when his apartment's empty except for shadows and memory-echoes, he stands at his window. Forehead pressed to glass like a prayer, watching Seoul's heartbeat flutter beneath him.

The loneliness has evolved into something gentler now - no longer the razor-edged beast that once tore through his chest, nor the arctic waste that froze his bones.

But it's there. Because no matter how many times you laugh in his arms, no matter how many universes you explore together, you're not here. And he is. You both exist but in different verses of the same impossible song.

And sometimes he wonders if he's asking too much of the universe. If he's being greedy. Before you, he was nothing but shadow-stuff and nightmare-fuel, cursed to feed on other people's fears. He couldn't even dream of being perceived, let alone loved. And now he has the audacity to want more? To want daylight happiness?

Greedy, absurd boy.

But every moment he spends awake feels like holding his breath underwater. Every sunlit hour is just time he could've spent learning the constellations of your smile. So he closes his eyes. And waits for sleep to bring him to you.

The moment he slips into the dreamscape he feels your presence hitting him like the first breath after drowning, like gravity remembering its own name. And then you're there, crashing into him with the force of a supernova, arms wrapping around him as if he might dissolve into stardust. He catches you and pulls you close like you're made of moonlight and wishes.

"Thought you wouldn't come," you whisper into his collar, voice rough like you've been holding back for too long.

A laugh escapes him, soft and broken-edged. His hands trace constellations up your spine. "Do you ever…" he starts, then swallows hard. "Do you ever worry that one night we just... won't find each other here anymore?"

You pull back just enough to meet his eyes and there are already tears catching in your lashes. "Every single time I close my eyes."

His smile cracks at the corners because it’s exactly the same for him. Every night he lies awake wondering if the universe will finally notice its mistake- if whatever cosmic glitch allowed him to find you will correct itself. Maybe you'll stop dreaming of him and he'll be left holding nothing but memories and maybes. It's too perfect. You're too perfect. And he's never learned how to trust perfect things to stay.

"Jungkook." Your voice drops to something serious, something that makes his heart stutter in his chest. He meets your gaze. "I don't…I can't," You take a shaking breath. "I don't think I can face reality anymore if I'm not sure you'll be waiting here."

His heart stops. Instead of answering, he lifts his hand and traces your cheek with feather-light fingers, trying to memorize you in atoms and angles.

"I'll be here," he breathes, like a prayer, like a promise. "I don't understand any of this, but I swear I'll find you. Every night. No matter what."

Your eyes flutter closed at his touch, and in that moment, he knows exactly what tonight's dream should be.

The dreamscape ripples like disturbed water, reality shifting beneath your feet with all the grace of a universe rewriting itself. The salt-sweet breeze finds you first, carrying whispers of infinity, and when your eyes flutter open, the night sky stretches above you like a confession written in starlight.

The ocean sprawls before you, endless and moonlit, each wave a silvered promise rolling towards shore. You're both barefoot in the sand, the wind playing with your hair like an old friend while the sea hums ancient lullabies. Jungkook watches you the way people watch miracles unfold - careful, afraid to blink.

You're statue-still, eyes locked on the horizon like it might vanish if you dare to look away. The air between you tastes like possibility.

"You mentioned wanting to see the sea," he murmurs. "Why?"

You sink to the sand, pulling your knees to your chest like armor. "I've never seen it before."

His heart stumbles. "Never?"

A shake of your head, eyes still drinking in the waves that reach for your toes like shy lovers. He wants to ask more - what landlocked piece of the world kept you from this? But dreams have their own grammar, and some questions dissolve like sugar on the tongue. So he sits beside you in comfortable silence, letting the night wrap around you both like a blanket woven from sea spray.

When you finally turn to him, your eyes hold the weight of unspoken galaxies. And gravity seems to lose its grip on reality - the space between you collapses until you're breathing the same air, until his hands find your face like they've mapped this path in a thousand previous lives.

Your lips meet in a hesitant dance of breath and longing until something breaks inside the moment like a dam of restraint giving way to raw need. His hands tangle in your hair as your mouth parts with a soft, stuttering sound, fingers clutching desperately at his shirt while the kiss transforms into something urgent and wild, teeth grazing and breaths mingling as he tilts your head back to taste you deeper.

The sea's roar crescendos with your passion while you shift into his lap, knees straddling him and hands sliding up the curve of his neck, the weight of your body against his making him finally feel real. Your shared heat and the pressure of your hips leaving him dizzy with want.

Jungkook pulls back only enough to look at you, eyes tracing your face like it’s something sacred. Your skin is flushed, glowing under the silver wash of the moon, hair tangled from his hands. You’re still straddling him, your chest rising and falling in rhythm with his. There’s a silence that lives in that moment, but it’s not empty.

Then he grins, soft and breathless. “Good thing this is a dream,” he murmurs, brushing his lips across your jaw. “Sand won’t bother us here.”

You laugh, quiet and giddy, the sound catching in your throat as he leans in again, kissing the corner of your mouth, then your cheek, then lower. He shifts, laying you back gently onto the soft, impossible sand. Moonlight spills across your skin like liquid silver, turning you into some ancient deity's forgotten masterpiece. He freezes, a worshipper before an altar, lungs forgetting their purpose as his eyes trace the sacred geometry of your existence. Time holds its breath with him.

Then he’s kissing your neck, slow and open-mouthed, leaving heat wherever his lips touch. His hands slide over your body like he’s memorizing you, like he’s terrified you’ll disappear. When he begins to undress you, his fingers move with a kind of careful urgency- unwrapping you like something he’s dreamed of holding all his life.

His lips trail down your collarbone, your chest, and lower, leaving warmth. Your breath catches sharply in your throat as pleasure ripples through you, your back arching delicately from the sand as a soft, yearning moan escapes your lips into the star-strewn night.

And when he comes back to you, body pressed to yours, both of you tangled in breath and want, you meet him with the same hunger. You pull him close, undress him with shaking hands, touch every inch of him with awe.

When Jungkook moves inside you, it feels less like an act of desire and more like the inevitable culmination of something the two of you had been building quietly between shared glances, trembling silences, and the quiet ache of always parting too soon. There is nothing rushed in the way your bodies meet: only a slow, deliberate joining, a stretch of time that suspends itself in the hush between heartbeats, as if the dream itself knows to hold its breath for you.

His weight settles gently over you, his mouth still hovering just above yours, the warmth of his breath mixing with your own as his hands frame your face with a tenderness that feels as overwhelming as it is fragile. Your eyes lock for a long moment, and in them there is no fear, only the echo of something deeper - yearning, devotion, maybe even a kind of wonder neither of you dares to name aloud. And then, without speaking, you arch toward him, and he begins to move.

The rhythm he finds is unhurried but purposeful, a slow, steady push and pull. His body presses against yours with the kind of urgency that isn’t frantic but is no less desperate - an urgency born from knowing how fleeting dreams are, how quickly time unravels beauty when it’s finally within reach.

His lips don’t stay still for long; they trace your collarbone, your throat, the curve of your jaw, trailing warmth that pools and spreads through your chest until your breath begins to shake beneath him. You can feel the way his body trembles slightly as he deepens the rhythm with intensity, as though every inch of his skin aches to be closer to yours, as though touching you more completely could somehow anchor him here.

When you moan his name, it comes out cracked at the edges, too soft and too honest to be anything but real, and he answers not with words but with a kiss that claims nothing, demands nothing, only offers himself and his quiet awe that you are here with him.

The dream sky above flickers faintly as a gentle reminder that even eternity here is borrowed. You feel it in your bones that this moment, as vivid and consuming as it is, will dissolve like sea foam the moment morning claims him back. That awareness sharpens everything. It makes each thrust feel more tender, each stroke of his hands across your sides more necessary, more desperate to memorize. Your fingers slide up into his hair, tugging him closer, your mouths finding each other again with increasing hunger, and when your hips rise to meet his, your bodies move in perfect synchrony.

It builds slowly, swelling until you can’t distinguish where you end and he begins, until the world narrows to the slick heat between your thighs, the throb of his heartbeat against your chest, the soft, breathless groans that pass between your lips like confessions. The pleasure comes in waves: deep and consuming, rising with every movement and whispered sound, until the moment it crests and breaks, flooding through you with a force so overwhelming you have no choice but to let go and ride it.

He follows you into it, burying his face in your neck as he comes undone, his body trembling with the effort of holding back everything he feels and failing in the most beautiful way. There are no words left, only breath and warmth and the weight of his arms around you as he collapses gently beside you, pulling you into him like something he’s afraid to lose.

A blanket materializes like a whispered wish, impossibly soft and warm against your skin. Jungkook pulls you closer, your bodies fitting together like puzzle pieces finally finding home. Your hands can't help but wander, mapping his skin in the aftermath, memorizing the geography of this moment. His lips ghost against your temple while you rest your cheek against his heart, letting its steady rhythm become your anchor.

The ocean serenades you both with its ancient song, waves kissing the shore in perfect tempo. Above, the stars hang in velvet darkness, too perfect to be anything but dreamscape magic. Words feel redundant here, in this pocket of forever where touch and breath say everything your voices can't.

But dreams, those cruel architects of almost-reality, never let you linger long enough.

The world starts to unravel: the sky loses its certainty, the breeze thins to whispers, and the ocean's voice becomes a distant echo of itself. Reality is calling, persistent as always. You tilt your face up to his, and his fingers find their way to your hair, tucking it behind your ear with a tenderness that aches.

"I wish this part didn't end so soon," you breathe out, voice trembling not with fear but with the weight of knowing what comes next.

He brings his forehead to rest against yours, eyes closed like he's trying to freeze time through sheer will. "So do I," he whispers back.

As the dream dissolves: the beach, the stars, your shared warmth all fading into morning light, he holds onto everything: the curve of your body against his, the ghost of your kiss, and the exquisite agony of loving someone who only exists in the space between sleeping and waking.

˚　　　　✦　　　.　　. 　 ˚　.　　　　　 . ✦　　　　˚　　　　 . ★⋆.

　　　. 　　˚　✭　　　*　　　　✦　　　.　　.　　　✦　˚ 　　　　 ˚　.˚　　　　　✭　.　　. 　 ˚　.　　　　　　　　　　 ✦

When the dream opens again, it does so like a breath drawn after drowning- sharp and sudden and full of overwhelming relief. You’re already there, standing beneath a sky that isn’t real, though it holds more meaning than any sunrise you’ve ever seen. The moment your eyes meet Jungkook’s, you don’t wait, and neither does he. There is no hesitation or unsure beginning. You run into each other’s arms like you’ve been holding your breath for days, like everything depends on this collision of bodies.

“I don’t want to waste one second of the limited time we have here,” you whisper into the space between his breaths, your arms wound tight around his neck and your chest pressed firmly to his.

He nods, his voice caught somewhere between a laugh and a vow, and with a single brush of his hand against the air, the world changes.

Like mist before sunlight, the dreamscape dissolves - first the endless ocean retreating into nothingness, then the wind falling silent as if holding its breath, and finally the star-strewn horizon melting away.

And in its place appears something smaller and impossibly intimate: a bedroom, quiet and warm, the walls washed in golden light, the sheets still slightly rumpled like they’ve been waiting for you. It’s not dramatic, not grand, but it feels like a secret dream you never dared to say aloud.

“This feels so real,” you murmur, your voice already faltering as his hands begin to move slowly, working their way beneath your clothes as if they’re peeling away layers of exhaustion and everything that’s ever kept you from peace.

He undresses you without words, his fingers trailing down your sides with a patience that makes your skin tremble. When his lips touch your collarbone, your breath catches. When his hands slide lower, your knees weaken. And when he kneels before you, his eyes dark and full of something deeper than want, you whisper his name like it’s a confession.

His mouth is already on you, and he’s not simply tasting but studying the language of your body with the kind of patience that feels rarer than touch itself. Every movement is deliberate, almost aching in its care, as though he knows this is a dream and still doesn’t want to rush through it. His hands grip the backs of your thighs with that same quiet devotion, fingers spreading you open.

He dives in like a man starved of connection, like every slow drag of his tongue is an attempt to carve himself into your memory, so that even when you're awake, some part of your body will still pulse with the imprint of him.

At first, it’s soft, barely there, just the warm press of his mouth against you, lips brushing your folds. But then, when you gasp and your hips lift slightly, when your fingers curl in the sheets beneath you, he groans softly into you, like the sound of your need fuels something deeper in him, something greedy*.*

He licks you slowly at first, flat strokes that leave you trembling, your thighs tensing around his head even as his hands hold you open. But soon he changes rhythm, finding the place where your body begins to stutter and focus, and he stays there, working his tongue in tight, purposeful circles, pausing only to suck gently, and then again, firmer, just enough to make your voice crack when you call his name.

You reach for him without thinking, fingers sliding into his hair, anchoring yourself in him as the heat begins to mount. Your breath comes in shallow bursts, thighs shaking around him, and still he doesn’t let up. He wants this - to see you unravel, to taste what the world outside has never let you give.

“Why…” you whisper, the words breaking apart as your thighs begin to shake. “Why can’t this be real?”

It’s not a question you expect him to answer, it’s rather a confession or cry of longing too deep for reason. And if he hears it, he doesn’t stop, only moans into you, as if your heartbreak feeds his hunger, as if the taste of your pain is folded into your pleasure.

His tongue moves faster now, more focused, and the tension inside you coils to a near-breaking and all-consuming point

Your body begins to shake; can’t form words anymore. Your moans become breathless sounds, fingers digging into his scalp as your hips lift in desperate rhythm with the wave he’s building inside you. His grip tightens, keeping you grounded, and when he draws your clit into his mouth again, sucking slowly, deeply, your entire body snaps.

You come with a cry so raw it doesn’t even sound like your voice. It shudders through you, thighs clenching, stomach fluttering, your hands fisting the sheets and his hair and nothing at all, your back arching as the dream holds you still in its palm.

But he doesn't leave you. Jungkook stays between your legs, lapping at you gently, slowly, kissing you through the aftershocks like he’s coaxing every last tremble from your bones, like your pleasure is the only thing that matters in this moment.

When he finally pulls away and rises to meet you again, his mouth shines with you, and his eyes are dark with a mix of tenderness and awe that stirs something so deep in your chest it almost hurts.

He kisses you slowly and deeply, and you taste yourself on his tongue. You pull him closer, hands sliding down his bare back, and you know that even if this is only a dream, it is more real than anything else your life has ever given you.

When Jungkook enters you, it’s like the world narrowing to a single point of gravity, your body drawing him in with a heat that pulses low and deep in your belly. He presses into you with a slow, deliberate movement, his length stretching you inch by aching inch, and it’s enough to make your mouth fall open with a breathless gasp that doesn’t even sound like your voice. He’s thick and warm and impossibly hard, and the way he completely fills you sends a tremor through your thighs that you can’t control.

Your folds part for him, slick and open, your body welcoming him with the kind of wet, desperate readiness that makes his breath hitch above you. He pauses once he’s buried fully inside, one hand gripping your hip as the other slides beneath your spine, grounding you against the slow burn of pleasure already curling through your abdomen. The stretch stings in the most exquisite way, that sharp-edged fullness melting quickly into something sweeter, something deeper, something that makes your body cry out for more before you even realize what you're asking for.

When he begins to move, it’s a rhythm that’s devastating in its precision: deep, dragging thrusts that grind against your most sensitive places with such focused care you’re not sure whether you want to weep or scream. Each roll of his hips draws a whimper from your throat, your legs trembling as your body adjusts to him again and again, as though each motion is a new kind of claim. He kisses you through it: your shoulder, your jaw, your lips, his mouth greedy and soft and utterly wrecked with affection, like he wants to press himself into every inch of your skin and never come up for air.

He shifts you gently, guiding your body into his hands, pulling your hips back into his lap as he settles you onto all fours. You sink into the soft sheets, your spine curving as his hand steadies your waist, and when he slides back inside you from behind, the angle is so deep and so precise it knocks the breath from your lungs. You clench helplessly around him, the sound of your bodies joining filling the room with a rhythm that feels ancient, necessary, almost holy. His name leaves your mouth again as a cry drawn out and trembling, the only word that still feels real in the haze of heat and motion and want.

Your hands fist the sheets, your knees spreading wider, every nerve ending in your body tuned to the relentless drive of his thrusts. His grip on your hips tightens, and he leans over your back, the heat of his chest brushing your spine, his voice a broken thing in your ear.

“You feel… so fucking good,” he murmurs, not as a boast, but as a reverent truth, like he still can’t believe the way your body accepts him - tight and slick, made perfectly for him.

When his hand slips beneath you again, finding that swollen, throbbing place that already pulses from his mouth and now from his cock, you come apart so quickly and so violently, your entire body stutters around him. You cry out, broken and breathless, your climax crashing through you with a force that turns the world white at the edges. You feel yourself clench around him, wet and pulsing, and it takes everything in him not to follow you right then.

But he’s close and with a few more thrusts, rougher now, less controlled, he spills into you with a sound so low and guttural it feels like it echoes inside your own chest. He collapses against your back, his arms wrapping around your middle as you both breathe through the aftermath, tangled and shivering, still connected, still pulsing with the echo of each other’s release.

And when the high fades and the pleasure ebbs into something slower, quieter, he doesn’t pull away. He stays inside you for as long as he can, holding you in his arms like he’s afraid that if he lets go, you’ll dissolve into smoke with the rest of the dream.

You fall together onto your sides, your legs entwined, the thin dream-woven blanket curling around your bodies, soft and warm as moonlight. You press your cheek against his chest. His hand strokes your back slowly, like he’s still trying to memorize you. The sea outside the window murmurs, and stars flicker faintly above, but neither of you speaks because nothing could possibly be enough.

"I don't want the real world." Your voice cracks. "It doesn't have you in it."

He pulls you closer, like maybe if he holds you tight enough, reality won't be able to pry you apart. When he finally speaks, his voice carries the weight of every 3AM thought that's ever kept anyone awake, "I know. Me too."

You look up at him, moonlight catching on unshed tears. Not crying because what's the point when the sun will rise anyway? Your fingers twist in the blanket like you're trying to anchor yourself to this moment, to him, to anything that might let you stay. "Please," you whisper, "I want to stay here. With you."

This isn't just a dream anymore. It's the truest thing you've ever known, wrapped in fiction because reality doesn't know what to do with something this raw. He says nothing, only presses his forehead to yours and breathes you in like he's trying to memorize the way your souls fit together.

And just as the dream begins to thin at the edges: flickering like film exposed to light, you look up at him, eyes full of that same pleading ache, and he lowers his forehead to yours. If you could stay, you would.

But dreams never ask permission before ending.

˚　　　　✦　　　.　　. 　 ˚　.　　　　　 . ✦　　　　˚　　　　 . ★⋆.

　　　. 　　˚　✭　　　*　　　　✦　　　.　　.　　　✦　˚ 　　　　 ˚　.˚　　　　　✭　.　　. 　 ˚　.　　　　　　　　　　 ✦

Jungkook wakes to emptiness, the kind that sits heavy in your lungs like smoke. The silence wraps around him like a second skin, suffocating in its completeness. There's no gentle transition between dreams and reality today - just a harsh snap from one world to another, leaving him raw and aching.

The bed feels too big, too cold, sheets twisted around him like they're trying to hold something that isn't there anymore. His chest feels hollow, carved out, each breath a little too shallow to fill the spaces where warmth used to live.

He lies there, staring at a ceiling he's known his whole life but suddenly feels like it belongs to someone else's story. His body shakes, not from cold (never from cold), but from something that lives deeper, something that has made a home in his bones and refuses to leave.

When he finally moves, it's pure instinct - frustration and grief tangled into one sharp motion. The pillow hits the floor with a soft thud that gets swallowed by the morning quiet. It doesn't help. Nothing helps. He sits up, fingers threading through his hair like he's trying to hold his thoughts together, eyes fixed on the slice of pre-dawn darkness outside his window.

His voice breaks the silence like glass shattering in slow motion, barely a whisper: "Why is it like this..."

But there's no answer waiting in the shadows. And yet, somewhere beneath the weight of his despair, something small flickered: thin, untrustworthy, but still breathing. He told himself he would see you again. A new day would bring a new night, and with it, the possibility of return. That had been the pattern, and though dreams rarely followed logic, hope was a creature that clung to even the most frayed of patterns.

The hours that followed passed in a haze. He moved through the day as though he had been placed behind a pane of glass: everything visible but inaccessible, everyone’s voices distant, every color dull. His body obeyed routine, but his mind remained curled around the shape of your absence.

When darkness finally returned, he didn’t hesitate. Sleep claimed him without struggle, and with it, the familiar ritual unfolded: the rooftops that stretched like memory, the path laid down by repetition and longing, the same constellation of buildings that had always, without fail, led him to your window.

But it was dark. No light pierced the glass, no shadows moved within. The bed lay pristine, untouched - a monument to absence. He waited. Minutes bled into hours as the dream stretched around him, but your silhouette never materialized. The emptiness felt louder than any scream.

Night after night, he returned. Each visit more desperate than the last. The room remained a void, sterile and cold as a tomb. His hope withered, then died. No trace that you'd ever existed. The question gnawed at him: had you been real? Or worse: had something taken you?

The days blurred together, each one weighted with loss and questions that found no answers. Had you chosen to vanish, or had the choice been stolen from you? The uncertainty was acid in his veins.

Before you, he'd been a ghost among the living, feeding on others' darkness, trapped in endless observation. But that emptiness was nothing compared to this. This was different. This was knowing paradise and being exiled. This was having his soul split open, filled with light, then sewn shut around the void you left behind.

The universe had cursed him twice: first with invisibility, then with the memory of being seen. Being known and loved by you. Only to have it ripped away without warning or farewell.

And now, more than ever, Jungkook felt the weight of solitude like a second skin - in a universe that had always been generous in showing him different angles of emptiness.

there’s a final part to this story already finished and available exclusively here .

Thank you very much for reading my stories. Finding readers who resonate with my writing means the world to me. I can't even put into words how grateful I am. 🖤

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hyukascampfire · 8 months ago

Text

𝐇𝗘𝗔𝗥𝗧 𝐖𝗢𝗥𝗠

˒˒ 𝚑𝔢𝖺𝗋𝗍𝚠𝔬𝗋𝗆 𝖺 𝗋𝖾𝗅𝖺𝗍𝗂𝗈𝗇𝗌𝗁𝗂𝗉 𝗈𝗋 𝖿𝗋𝗂𝖾𝗇𝖽𝗌𝗁𝗂𝗉 𝗍𝗁𝖺𝗍 𝗒𝗈𝗎 𝖼𝖺𝗇'𝗍 𝗀𝖾𝗍 𝗈𝗎𝗍 𝗈𝖿 𝗒𝗈𝗎𝗋 𝗁𝖾𝖺𝖽, 𝗐𝗁𝗂𝖼𝗁 𝗒𝗈𝗎 𝗍𝗁𝗈𝗎𝗀𝗁𝗍 𝗁𝖺𝖽 𝖿𝖺𝖽𝖾𝖽 𝗅𝗈𝗇𝗀 𝖺𝗀𝗈 𝖻𝗎𝗍 𝗂𝗌 𝗌𝗍𝗂𝗅𝗅 𝗌𝗈𝗆𝖾𝗁𝗈𝗐 𝖺𝗅𝗂𝗏𝖾 𝖺𝗇𝖽 𝗎𝗇𝖿𝗂𝗇𝗂𝗌𝗁𝖾𝖽, 𝗅𝗂𝗄𝖾 𝖺𝗇 𝖺𝖻𝖺𝗇𝖽𝗈𝗇𝖾𝖽 𝖼𝖺𝗆𝗉𝗌𝗂𝗍𝖾 𝗐𝗁𝗈𝗌𝖾 𝗌𝗆𝗈𝗅𝖽𝖾𝗋𝗂𝗇𝗀 𝖾𝗆𝖻𝖾𝗋𝗌 𝗌𝗍𝗂𝗅𝗅 𝗁𝖺𝗏𝖾 𝗍𝗁𝖾 𝗉𝗈𝗐𝖾𝗋 𝗍𝗈 𝗌𝗍𝖺𝗋𝗍 𝖺 𝖿𝗈𝗋𝖾𝗌𝗍 𝖿𝗂𝗋𝖾.

(📼) “I was just... wondering,” you say, blood roaring. "Well, Yeonjun wants me to come over to his place this weekend, and... I’ve never...” Sucking in a quick breath, you just spit it out to get it over with, “Would you be my first kiss, Kai?”

childhood bsf kai & f reader 17.9k smut angst fantasy ⤷ ft. asshole yeonjun & f reader ⸺ angst, family issues, fingering, jealousy (i’m sorry i just love it), yeonjun really is an asshole, orgasm denial, thigh fucking, unprotected sex (they're stupid!), strength kink a lil bit, breeding kink, possessiveness, creampie, choking... i think that's all, lmk if i missed any ... 𝑝𝑙𝑎𝑦𝑙𝑖𝑠𝑡

ash ⦂ omg. this was such a fun palate cleanser to write. this wasn't supposed to be as big as it is, but it just kept getting bigger and bigger, and i got super into the story. this kai is SOOOO!! yeah. i’m so nervous posting this because i’ve only ever posted TSFAWC, but…. here you areee (^^;; this is not proofread, so if you see a mistake... give me a sec. i'll get to it. hehe

Though you fan your hand furiously over your face, the little breezes washing over your clammy skin are not enough. The air is thick and heavy with summer’s heat. So thick that you almost feel it each time you swallow. It’s better than just letting yourself melt away, though. The cushion at your back doesn’t help much. It holds your warmth and returns it to you the longer you sit slumped back into it. You suffer it though—you’ve gone too sluggish to move.

You let a leg dangle over the arm of a chair, watching a hopeful moth dance in the light of the buzzing porch light overhead. It flutters frantically in it, making a grand fight to reach that false moonlight, only to drop away when it realizes that it’s being burnt. You watch it rinse and repeat, relentless and sure, for who knows how long. It’s no special moth—no luna moth or the ones with the pretty pink wings—but the light falls down on it and colors it a pleasant stardust silver.

You delight in letting your conscious brain turn off to watch it. It lets you forget the sweltering under your skin, and also that Kai had drug you out here. His dad gives him shit when he plays inside, but it’s way too hot to be out here. Isn’t it supposed to cool off after the sun goes down? It doesn’t feel like it. The deep acoustics are drowned out each time a car whirrs by. Playing outside should be the best option, but you and Kai live right on a busy road.

When the roar of some car going ten miles over the speed limit doesn’t obscure his playing, though, you admire the intricacy of it. His fingers work up and down the neck, jumping frets that you imagine would be impossible to anybody without those long fingers of his. You had always been a loud supporter of his playing, even way back when the most he could play were simple chords, but you became especially so when a few years back he put a guitar in your hands and tried teaching you. Even with his fingers guiding yours, it was quick to learn that the effortlessness with which Kai handles the instrument is hard earned.

He practices on the acoustic guitar, but that’s not his domain. With houses just a dash across the street from each other, Kai had grown up at your home more than he had at his own. So vividly, you remember the stars in his eyes when he’d listen to your dad’s music. Metallica, The Smashing Pumpkins, Linkin Park, any of it. He had fallen in love with it a long time ago. Your whole life you knew that it was only a matter of time before he was in his own band, chasing his dreams with a boundless mind and an indelible vision of himself on stage. How had that time come so soon, though? You don’t know if the notebooks full of inky lyrics that live wherever he deems inspiration might hit him make you proud or nervous. He’s making good on his dazzling aspirations, and you?

You speak finally into the air, cutting through heat waves and his music and the night. “Isn’t it weird that we’re not going back to school after this summer?”

He doesn’t have to even stop playing to answer you. Playing comes to him as a second nature. “Kinda,” he answers, brown eyes flitting up to you. “But it’s not like you won’t be back to it in September. College is the same shit.”

The leg you’d been dangling and bouncing pauses. That’s right; you’re supposed to be going to that college you’d chosen because it was only a three-hour drive away from here. You pluck at the seat’s threadbare fabric, and the moth, still there, becomes oh-so-interesting once again. When his playing stops, you drop your head back with a cushioned thud and a groan that you wrangle in your throat.

“Why are you acting like that?” he says, voice gone sharp like accusation. He doesn’t even know the truth, but he’s known you too long.

Can’t you just keep secrets for yourself, sometimes?

Kai, arms clad in a well-loved hoodie even in this dreadful weather, lays the guitar down. You maintain your silence. “Seriously, what?”

Some secrets have timers, though. This one could only last you until about September, or even August when he realizes that you’re not preparing to return to school. A controlled sigh from your chest isn’t enough to soothe the nerves that sparks. “Nothing.”

“Secrets, huh?” Kai says. When you do finally look to him, black spikes of hair frame his eyes and the accusation in them.

It’s a simple poke, but it gets under your skin as sharp as any thorn might. It’s not like you don’t keep secrets from him, and you’re sure he keeps some from you too. But those are the little kinds, the inconsequential ones—like I ate already when asked why you’re not eating or like Yeah, I’m fine when it’s been a bad day. You don’t hide this kind of stuff from each other. Usually, you’d run over to his place to tell him whatever’s bothering you. Why not, when he’s known even the worst details of your life for almost the entirety of it? You’ve been holding this one close to your chest since somewhere around the end of senior year, though. The longer you let it fester, the worse your nervousness snowballs. “C’mon, Kai. Let’s not do this. Can you keep playing?”

He doesn’t like that, of course. But you watch recognition dawn over his chocolate brown eyes, helpless to stop it. “You’re not going,” he says. It’s not a question nor a suspicion, it’s a bone-dry fact.

Well. There that goes. You want to tear every hair on your head right out. Why had you even thought you’d keep him in the dark about it? When he’s not out in some garage making music, you two are together. The conversation was going to stroll by at some point; this was only inevitable. His disappointment radiates off him in waves and blisters you. He hasn’t even said anything yet, but you know exactly what he thinks of it. It’s why you kept it from him in the first place.

Your silence is enough confirmation for him. “Why?” he says. “I thought you were excited to move out.”

Wincing, you nod slowly. You were. Even went through the whole application process, along with most other kids your age. Ultimately, you never went through with declaring a college. You don’t exactly know why, but somewhere weaseled down in the shadowy recesses of your soul, you know. Taking those steps, the massive and terrifying ones from adolescence into adulthood, meant agreeing that this form of your life was over. It meant that at some point, you’d be moving away from here to where living your days away in Kai’s room would not be a choice. Everybody has to do it eventually, you know that. Kai’s music gig could take off any day, too. He’s going to make it happen. And then what? All this stalling and wishing on just a bit more time would mean nothing, he’d be off and chasing that dream. As excited as you are for it to finally become reality for him, there’s a nasty bitterness that’s budded in your chest, infecting your person.

Can’t things just stay like this?

“I was,” you say. It comes out of your mouth heavy.

“Then why aren’t you going?” he says. Crickets, never seen but always heard, sing their song into the night’s darkness. “You didn’t get rejected. You’re too smart for that.”

An ache sits heavily somewhere near the center of your chest, maybe over your heart. All those good grades, nights spent bent over a desk and AP paperwork—you’re wasting it. You shake your head. “No... just...” It’s an effort to dress your thoughts in a way that might appease him. A quiet moment stretches with your thinking before you continue, “I don’t know what I want to do.”

He doesn’t like that, the yellow wash of the overhead light dancing over his taut lips and hard eyes. “Don’t know what you want to do?” he says, bringing his legs up onto the seat to crisscross them. He wears his favorite jeans. They’re heel-bitten and baggy enough over his legs that he can wear them around the house without any bother. “You’ve wanted to be an artist your whole life. You know exactly what you want to do.”

Your chest only seems to ache harder. When the both of you were only young and hopeful, you both had big dreams. Kai was going to be the face of a metal band, and you were going to be an artist. A painter, potter, sculptor, even doing animation for those big companies like Dreamworks and Disney. You wanted any of it, just as long as you were doing art. You’d even promised him that you’d do the cover art for his albums with interlocked pinkies and flushed, hopeful cheeks. That passion and love wasn’t gone from you, it blazed strong in your veins. This blaze wasn’t the kind that kept you warm and excited to push forward into life, though. It had morphed into something that scalded you when you got too close or started imagining yourself pursuing its call. It’s a taunting silvery glow, no longer a guiding north star. Taunting words of family members stamped down on that hope hard. When you were little, it was said lighthearted and in passing. The older you got, though, the more serious their faces became. They wouldn’t say it outright perhaps, but you hear what they think well enough. Art is a dead-end career.

Shifting in your seat, you tell him, “I don’t know.”

“What do you mean?” Kai says. “There are good colleges for that.”

“I just... don’t know.”

Shaking his head, he tells you, “But you love it.”

You do. In its every form, you love creating. But loving it doesn’t mean that it’s right for you, or that you should trust your future in its hands. “I think I can do it in my own time,” you say, finally pushing yourself upright from the cushion. “Don’t wanna kill the passion by doing it for a living, you know?”

He thinks on that for a moment. “If you love it, you should do it,” he says.

An awful frustration bubbles in your chest. Kai has always had a clear life path, the steps ahead of him set in stone and waiting for him to follow in them. It’s hard for him to see why you might not want to do the same. There’s nothing that makes you as happy as the fact that he has it all figured out, that he knows just where he’s going and that he’s so incredible at it that he doesn’t have to worry about meeting the requirements, but your path seems obscured and untrodden. Punctuating a deep, resonant sigh, you say, “It’s not that easy, Kai.”

“If you’re not doing that, then what are you going to do? Are you just going to settle for a nine-to-five?” he says full of accusation, the tapping on his knees gone still.

A dry laugh, you say, “Maybe I’ll marry a super rich guy and just do my art for a living. No nine-to-five.”

His face flashes. He’d always been a bit reserved, especially around others, but he bared his emotions freely around you. You hold them dearly to your chest and made sure to do your best to make good on that trust. He says, “You’re more than some guy’s housewife.”

Cheeks radiating in the heat, you snort. “I know, dork. I’m a rockstar’s best friend. It’s my personal favorite achievement.”

His face sours when you reach out and pinch hard at his cheek, but he doesn’t pull away or brush you off. The skin there is warmed and clammy. Really, the two of you should go meet the cool AC inside before you suffer heat stroke. But this moment feels so nice—your shoulders feel tons lighter without something to hide. If you had it your way, things would stay like this forever. Just the two of you, sat here like you have so many times before, just taking for granted the time you’ve got together.

His mouth opens to banter, probably something about how he’s not a rockstar yet or to get you back for calling him a dork. Wingbeat and sterling dashes about your face send the image into a blur, though. You’re a quick mess of limbs and a whipping head, as if it’ll chase the thing away from you.

“Seriously?” Kai says. You’d climbed halfway over him, elbows digging into him and knee doing a number on his thigh. “It’s a moth. You’re not scared of moths.”

Lingering for a few moments later to ensure the flying thing was nowhere on you or around you, you hold back a laugh before you climb off him and fix your hair with undignified tucks behind your ears. “He was in my face,” you say around a laugh, because you know it was a bit too much. Nobody likes wings in their ears and spindly legs in their face, though, and you’re in no control of what you do when anything with six legs tries and get too friendly. Even moths.

“You just wanted me to protect you,” he says. A sarcastic, shit-eating smile tugs at the corners of his mouth.

“Oh,” you scoff, batting your eyelashes and clasping your hands together all saccharine-sweet. “Yes, Romeo, won’t you kill that bug for me? My heart just can’t take it!”

Kai’s nose crinkles, and the playful light twists into a glare. “Nasty.”

“Well, that’s how you sounded,” you say. “Whatever.” Laughing, you kick your legs out over his lap and sprawl back out. He takes the guitar back into his hands.

As much as you want to escape the mugginess, you’ll survive it for just a little while longer—if only with the force of an indulgent heart. The eternal moments are those you allow to linger.

Some things, you forget when you’re older. Maybe it’s time’s hand, eroding memories down and stuffing more in the longer you live to experience them. But also maybe because they’re the sort of things you can’t say in the adult world without a laugh in the face and a look from down their noses.

This memory is one of those forgotten things. It’s moth-bitten and dusty, something you one day folded up in a moving box and decided to never revisit.

You’d been down at the creek. Kai and you had spent so many summer days there. It wasn’t too far from home, just past the filbert trees and into the shallow neck of the backwoods, but there you were out of sight and free to get up to nothing good. It was a wonder your mom ever let you do it. Kai’s dad didn’t care too much where he went or what he did, but your mom dug her claws in deep. You like to think that she imagined you two would have each other, if anything ever happened.

Usually, you’d be there holding your jeans up from the stream and Kai would be letting his jeans go dark with it. The bite of water was nice as it washed over warm skin. Fun was a simple thing to find, then. You dug your fingers into the mudbanks and tossed stones way too big to be throwing at each other, just because you two remembered how much the adults hated it when you did. Then, you’d drag tired limbs home avoiding sweetgum tree spikes that had fallen to the ground and dug splinters out from your feet.

This day, you had been in the blackberry bushes. It was maybe late July or early August, and they’d gotten heavy on their branches. You’d waited until the smell of them, summer-warmed, was sweet and cloying in the air to pick them. With buckets in your hands, you plucked only the fattest berries from their bunches. Your fingers were stained a delightful purple and perhaps a bit thorn raw, but you didn’t mind much then. You plucked for hours, and it was dusk before you could catch it. Dinner was no doubt waiting for you back home.

“There’s a bunch over here,” Kai had said. He reached a long boyish arm, still awkward and lanky with puberty, up high for ripe bush. You finished off picking before climbing around thick branches sticking out to take a peek. A bunch, there was.

When you went to drop a handful of them into your bucket, Kai hissed. He’d been snagged by a vicious looking branch, those ones as thick as a finger with thorns to match and you’d warn each other tongue-in-cheek to watch out for that one. He’d worn those ridiculous shorts that day, the ones that looked half pants half shorts with how long and baggy they were, and the claws of the bush had jumped at the opportunity. At first the scrapes were white, but then red blood crawled out and down his leg.

“Kai,” you said, some parts chiding and some parts just wondering how he’d managed that. You surveyed his leg for a bit, and then determined that he should wash his leg off in the stream. He walked there strong, but of course you noticed the hobble beneath his acting. When you squatted down into the dry grass and cupped water to wash off his leg, you laughed.

“What?” he had said, holding the shorts up. You covered your laugh with a hand, but it erupted past your palm. You remember the glare on his face very well.

You still laughed. “You’re stupid,” you had told him.

“I didn’t see it,” he said. “I tripped over it because it was sticking out.”

That time when you brought your hands to catch some water, there was a twinkle in its surface. You didn’t notice it for a second. The creek moved fast and you could see a lot of things in its reflection. When it lingered, that’s when your brows furrowed. It seemed to twirl, dancing around like alive over the stones.

The sound of Kai’s voice remains with you. “Hey,” he had said, strong to call your attention but also wavered with uncertainty.

When you looked up, there was silver dust dancing around you.

It was fluffy and whorling, fine silver stardust. It’d moved weightless in the air, as though it barely existed. In the center of it were a few moths. They seemed to be made of sterling powder just as the dust was, and they glowed against dusk’s backdrop. If your memory serves you right, there had been a sweet hymn of coos from them. They beckoned you. Summer’s heat felt lighter, and so did your chest. You wondered where they had wanted you to go.

Almost afraid that if you spoke they might have fluttered away, you whispered soft and low to Kai. “What is that?” He was stood frozen there, pant leg still scrunched up in his fist. Stardust glowed soft in his brown eyes while he took it all in, you remember. It wasn’t a scared frozen. You weren’t scared, either—rather, it was as if that lightness had found its way into the core of your being and brushed over it with mending hands.

He whispered back, “I don’t know.” How could he have known? It was absurd.

Those whisps had beckoned you, flowing toward the deeper woods. The soft moths, their murmuring brushing up against your ears, seemed to wait for you to follow. You remember a pull, soft tendrils wrapping themselves around your heart and the yearning it planted there.

But there was also this reluctance, a bone-deep answering that had told you: No. You’re not ready.

“Kai, I wanna go,” you told him.

You didn’t even need to tell him twice. Berry buckets forgotten; the journey home was a stranger one. When your dad asked why you returned from berry picking emptier handed than you had left the house, Kai and you only shared a look. You pair kept that evening at the creek hidden so well that it became more forgotten than shared secret.

Once, you had been the type of girl that loved being around family. Some of your favorite days of your life were spent in this living room, T.V. roaring over bouncing conversation. Some of those nights ended in rosy cheeks and laughs, and some ended with words thrown angry like fireworks. You never knew which you’d be getting, but you endured the fear of not knowing because it was a simple love—the basic kind built with biology into you the moment your infant skin touched your mother’s. You endured it because eventually, sleep washed away the bad taste left in your mouth and you forgave them quick, sometimes quicker than you ought to, and things would go on as if it hadn’t even happened. You endured it because you could handle its burden, if only to feel the warmth you feel when it’s a good day.

Kai was always there—his dad was hardly home, so he found family in yours. When you were younger, you’d been embarrassed he was there for caustic, spitted words and intimate fights. Now, you’re just grateful for his shoulder.

So, yes. Once, you had loved being around your family. But things feel tenser now, nights spent all together less frequent and when they do happen, they’re tainted by a strange air. You think that this strangeness is new, but an awful worry also makes you think that it’d always been there, that you only feel it now because you’ve grown into your adult mind. A hollow ache stakes its claim in your chest, declaring that it won’t leave until you find that youthful ignorance and joy once more. You think that it might stay there forever.

Bare feet bounding down the stairs, you make a rare appearance downstairs. The cupboard is only half open to make way for a snack raid before your mom’s voice cuts through the air. You know quickly just by the look on her face that you should’ve stayed upstairs.

“Hey,” she says, gathering laundry into a basket. “You’ve been applying to jobs?”

With an anxious belly, you tell her, “Yeah. A few. They’re not really, like, ideal, but I sent applications.” You don’t remember when it got hard to look into your mother’s eyes, but you can’t bring yourself to do so now.

“Not ideal?” she says. “It’s not like you can be picky. Mcdonalds or wherever, I don’t care, you’re going to need to get a job if you’re staying here.”

“I know. I applied,” you reiterate around a mumble. You close the cabinets, not so interested in a snack anymore. “I just... I don’t know, ma. I don’t want to do that for a living, going between those sorts of jobs.”

Face hard and abrasive against the truth you bare, she does that awful taunting smile that makes you feel small. Stupid. “You’re not going to college, so that’s what it’s gonna be. You can’t sit up there and draw for a living. You’ve gotta get into the real world, get some real experience.”

There’s a burst of hurt in your chest, dazzling and gnawing. She’s getting closer to saying how she really feels about your dreams out loud every day. Your face burns and so do your eyes, knot thick in your throat. “Yeah, okay. Got it,” you say, nodding. You’re at the front door before you even know it, slipping on shoes and fighting the greatest internal battle to will back tears. She’d use those against you, no doubt about it. “I’m going to Kai’s,” you throw over your shoulder.

Whatever she barks back at you, you’re glad you don’t hear. Bells on some old Christmas decoration hung on the door that had yet to be taken down, even into summer, jingle and wash it away for you.

Kai’s brows shoot up when he opens the door to your face crumpling. You’d done so well at damming it up, but the wall cracks and the water crashes through once you see him. If it were anybody else, you’d feel icky and attention seeking, but you’d held Kai to your chest through gut-wrenching sobs as much as he’s done it for you. Without question, he takes you into his arms, warm hand running up and down your back. The warm soothing is so familiar. You melt right into it.

He keeps you there for a long moment. Then, his chest rumbles as he tells you, “Come on.” The walk through the AC to his bedroom is nice. Having a house like Kai’s to come to where it can just be you is nice, too. You step around the mess of clothes and scattered belongings on his floor like you have a muscle-memory roadmap of his room. Boxsprings creak and hard mattress welcome you back home. His room is dark as always, a night-dweller you call him. The array of peeling band posters plastered over walls you two had painted blue some years ago, when it’d been his favorite color, don’t help to lighten it up. He keeps a low lamplight on.

“She never listens to me,” you say, crying gone to occasional sniffles from your chest. You rest your cheek on your bent knee.

“I know,” he says. “But at least she cares about you. Pays attention to you.” His voice is soft and deep and right next to you. Always right next to you, there for you even when you might not appreciate it as you should.

His dad cares too little what he does, and yours care too much. The grass is always greener on the other side, you know it. Still, you hold a fantasy where you’re able to do teenager stuff. Where you’d allow yourself to do bad things, because you weren’t so intent on painting yourself with their will. You two hold eyes for a long moment, your twinkling ones caught in that steady brown. “I just want to get away. Be my own person.” Your words are muffled in the softness of your skin.

“You had the chance to do it,” Kai says, hand playing with your fingers. “But you didn’t.”

Holding your legs closer, you lick your lips. What do you say to that? Would it ever be the time to tell him that you did it because you think that your soul is pathetically intertwined with his, and that it might snuff your lifeforce out to even try pursuing life without him? Without this? How do you tell him that you’re so frozen and unwilling to pursue any sort of future because it means accepting that this chapter is over? You clutch childhood to your chest like a wild animal guarding scarce food; you refuse. You refuse to acknowledge its end.

“Kai,” is all you say, trembled and thick. It’s not just your mother’s words that dig at you and tear to shreds the last bits of what dreaming you had left in you, but so many other reality checks too. This isn’t the first time you’ve heard those sorts of words, urging you forward. You can only dig your heel into the ground for so long before you’re swept away in time’s ruthless, endless moving.

He understands. Lifting your face with warm fingers against your cheeks, he says, “Hey. How about we go get ice cream, or something?”

Ice cream does sound nice. “Dairy Queen?”

Smirk tugged over his mouth, he says, “Yes, Dairy Queen. A blizzard. C’mon, let’s go.” Sliding off the bed, he offers you an urging hand up.

But you falter. “I don’t know if we can. She’s mad at me. I don’t think she’ll let me go.”

“Let you go?” he says, eyes narrowed. “She doesn’t have to let you go. You’re an adult now, you go if you want to.” He offers his hand to you again.

It’s so him, freely going wherever he ordain it. The bullheadedness is very him, as well. Always the devil on your shoulder, he was the root of any rebellious thing you’ve ever done. He could never understand your apprehension, or why getting in trouble was such an awful thing to you. “I have to ask to get money.”

Brows pinching, he says, “You think I’m not gonna pay for you? You don’t need them to give you money, I’ll pay. I’ll take care of it.” He drags you up from the bed this time. “Live a little. Do you want to go?”

It was never the punishments or the getting in trouble that you were scared of, though. Disappointment was a scarier word than grounded. Sneaking out and those sorts of things, it’s not like you had angel wings at your back and never considered them. It’s that you are deeply, utterly terrified of changing how they look at you. You begin to tell him, “I do, but—”

He cuts you off, adamant. “Then do it. Let’s go. If you want to go, then go,” he says. “At some point, your life needs to become your own. It’s not sneaking out when you’re graduated and eighteen years old, it’s going wherever the hell you want. You’ve... You’re gonna end up stuck here, in this town, forever. You don’t deserve that.”

That sounds like both the best and the worst thing you’ve ever heard. You take his hand.

Your frozen fingers nurse your ice cream. The cup itself is cold, but the Dairy Queen on your side of town is always thirty degrees below what it should be. It’d always been that way. Even way back when you two couldn’t drive, you’d get dropped off here to escape the melting weather and get a frozen treat with a handful of dollars. Each time, you’d start off sagging with the relief of summer’s weight off your shoulders and left the place shivering and sugar-mouthed.

It’s really only you two in here. You crinkle your nose when he takes a spoonful. “Out of all the flavors...”

Unbothered and no doubt expecting you to say it, he offers you a flat, “You get your flavor, I get mine.” He makes a point of taking an extra-long bite. His lips linger around the red plastic of the spoon and his brows rest high in silent challenge.

The corners of your lips twitch up. “Hmm. Well. I just have a hard time believing that Oreo... or, like, brownie fudge, is right there, and you actually want M&M. I don’t get how M&M your favorite.” A familiar banter falls over your tongues. Your heart buzzes and your cheeks radiate. This is the first you’ve done this all summer, and it’ll be weaning off into fall soon. Any other summer, you would’ve been here on all the hottest days. You hate that Kai’s been so busy with his music; you hate that you can hear the resounding ticks of the clock counting down your time. You also hate that the stubborn depths of you still believe that if you freeze yourself here in stasis that the world will relent and stop along with you.

You look over the sharp lines of Kai’s jawline as it feathers with his chewing, and the broadness of his shoulders where his jacket stretches around it, and the starkness of his collarbones against his chest and the bobbing of his adam’s apple when he swallows. No, time doesn’t stop. Some of him remains the same, though. In it, you see the boy that had love creeping up on you so long ago, with all its aching and all its hope. That freckle on the column of his neck, the bump in his nose leading down to the button tip that beckons your lips to steal a quick kiss.

And, those lips. They’re as soft as ever around the discontented grimace he pulls. “M&M isn’t my favorite.”

With a pursed mouth and patronizing brows arched over your eyes, you say, “Oh, huh. That’s funny, because if my memory serves me right, it’s the only flavor you’ve ordered for the past... six years.”

Kai husks a laugh at that. “That’s because they haven’t had my favorite for years,” he tells you, scooping up the final bit and then pushing it off to the side. “It was a blizzard of the month that they discontinued. The blackberry cheesecake one. I made peace with it, though. It lives on in my heart.” He grins, arms crossed over his chest and his back settled into the booth seat to let you finish your cup.

“Blackberry cheesecake,” you say, voice made taunting. Your nod is slow and taunting, too. “Well, forget M&Ms. Why would blackberry cheesecake be your favorite? Ever?”

His face falters, a moment where something flows over his eyes as if reliving a memory in a few short seconds. Then, he shrugs. “It just is.”

You roll your eyes. “Whatever,” you laugh. “Maybe my palate is unrefined.” Imagining the tarte fruit in purple swirls of ice cream, you’re taken back to a humid July day and the scent of churned mud.

The strange memory unfolds itself quick. As if it were waiting for you to find wherever it’d hidden itself away. With a sharp gasp, you say, “Oh my god, Kai. Do you remember that one day? That weird stuff we saw down at the creek?”

He nods. “Yeah. I was just thinking of that the other day, actually...”

Less interested in finishing your cup now, you let the spoon rest. “What?” you say, the word peaking in the middle. That day hadn’t crossed your mind once since it’d happened. “How weird is that?”

Scoffing a laugh, he says, “Weird, yeah. Just as strange as two kids high on fermented berries.”

That draws a breathy laugh from you. “Is that what you think it was?” you ask him with knitted brows. The berries had been fresh, and you two had popped plenty into your mouth. But no doubt, you’d have spat them right back out if they were that ripe. “I mean, we saw the same thing.”

“It happens to animals all the time. Squirrells, and stuff.” He lends you a gallic shrug. “We just freaked ourselves out. Like that one time you said you saw the shape of something in the dark and we freaked out. And it was clothes.”

Well, hallucinating, in tandem, a glowing mist because you two by chance ate fermented berries is a very long shot. However nonchalant he acts about it, he seems to have thought long and hard about it. Enough to reason it away with some far cry explanation. Would you have even been able to get drunk off a handful of fermented berries? And, god, you’re really sure that you’d have noticed. That taste isn’t really one you just don’t notice.

Whatever. Maybe you were just drunk idiots. That’s a lot easier to swallow, anyway.

“Okay, but you saw that. Did it not look sinister?” you say. With your spoon back in your hand, you punctuate the sentence pointing it at him. “You freaked out with me, too.”

An unsatisfied scowl on his lips, he steals a spoonful of your dessert. You don’t even swat him away—your phone buzzes in your pocket.

Catching sight of who’s calling, you share a long look with Kai. It’s funny, how fast those three white letters scramble you up. When you hesitate to answer, Kai tells you, “Answer.”

You hope she can’t tell you’re not at Kai’s by the refrigerators’ dull buzzing. It’s an effort to tussle that invasive worry back. You’re at Dairy Queen. Getting ice cream with the boy she’s known since childhood. She should clutch her hands and thank the sky that you’re here, not out in some nasty frat house like you could be. You thumb the green button.

Her voice comes through the speaker crackled and asking you to run over to do a quick dish load. For a heartbeat you consider telling her that you will and then start rushing home. Instead, you fork out the truth through resistant lips.

The hangup tone sits heavy on the air between you and Kai. Having listened to the whole thing on speaker, he says, “What was so hard about that? The world didn’t end, did it?”

The plush of your lip takes a hard gnawing. No, it hadn’t. “I know she’s not going to get mad at me for just going here,” you say as you rest your elbows onto the table. “It’s that they’re supporting me right now. I still live under their roof. The more I go around and insist I can do whatever I want, they’ll start reminding me of it.”

His face drawn, he lets his mouth twitch to one side. “Yeah,” he muses. “I never thought yours would be the type to kick you out.”

Kai’s dad had started threating him with getting kicked out years ago, when he first started telling him that he wanted to do music. How many times had he let reluctant tears flow into your shoulder over it? Because music wasn’t a real job? Back then, you’d whispered in his ears that he’d become everything he’d dreamed of and more as your fingers carded through shaggy locks of hair.

“I don’t know,” you say, humming it out noncommittally. “Is your dad still... y’know?”

Nodding slowly, his eyes tell. “Yeah. Always.”

“Because you’re taking the band seriously, now?” you ask.

“Probably. I don’t give a shit what he thinks about it. If I’m just his goddamn problem, I’ll give him what he wants soon enough.” His eyes blaze with promise of it.

It takes a bit out of you to not wince. Kai living anywhere but in the house across from yours is wrong. “I don’t think he necessarily wants that, Kai...” You take his hand in your icy ones, the urge to reach out to him thinly veiled under the guise of searching out warmth. He’d always run warmer than you—your personal heater. “It’s probably because he can see that you’re doing it for real. Not just saying it anymore.”

“Yeah, well,” he spits, “I can’t fucking wait to see what he’ll say to me when I make it. That piece of shit, though, he wouldn’t even care. It’s not like he ever gave a shit about me enough for it to matter.”

But, it matters to you, you want to tell him. You understand his need to throw it all in his face, though. “Is that one label going to sign you? The one you were talking about?”

His tongue darts out to wet dry lips. “They haven’t yet. I don’t know. But I don’t need that money to get out of here, I’ve been working on it.”

“They will,” you say. “But, where would you go? Not too far?” You try and keep it light and playful, even as your heart aches.

“Come with me,” he says. It’s painfully blunt, as if it were that simple. “Let’s go get and apartment; you and me.”

“Kai...” you say. “You don’t have to drag me along because you feel bad.”

The idea doesn’t sound half bad, though.

“What?” His face tightens, as if somewhere under the surface your words had scraped somewhere tender. “You don’t have to stay here forever. Please. I want... I want you to come with me. You wouldn’t have to even tell them; just bring all your stuff and go together. We could do it together. Like we said we would.”

“We were like, five. Everybody tries to pretend running away at five,” you deadpan. It’s a washy attempt at lightening things back up.

Living with him, moving out together, should feel like everything you’ve ever wanted. And, maybe it is. But, he’s not asking you to live with him the way you want him to. Not in the way that your aching heart wishes he would.

Kai doesn’t share the laugh you give him. “Yeah, okay,” he says, leaning into the table.

Perhaps you should consider the potent disappointment he’s terribly masking with a face of indifference, though.

Slowly, the knots in your belly have worked themselves out. When Kai had dropped you off, they’d been so awful that you felt borderline sick. You sat the whole ride there in his old beat-up truck picking at your nails and rambling to him. He listened to you the whole time. And then when it was time to walk in, it had least felt a little easier to do so with his eyes on you, watching to make sure you made it in safely.

You’d gotten a job. It’s not too bad, folding clothes out on display. It would be nice if they kept the lights a bit brighter, but you’ll get used it eventually, you hope.

Most of your coworkers are around your age, but the one showing you the ropes... your heart had fluttered.

“You’ll get it,” Yeonjun says. The smile you find on his lips once he straightens up from placing product on a display is smooth and smug. Sleek strands of black hair fall over his eyes. You fluster under his gaze.

With arms crossed over your chest you say, “Yeah, probably.” You reach into the cardboard box for stock to practice on.

“Where’d you work before this?” he asks, leaning back into a wall to watch you. Suddenly, you make sloppier work of your folding. “Your first retail job?”

Some obnoxious pop song falls down from the speakers over the store. Nobody’s in here yet, thankfully; you’ve got some time to try and get a handle on everything. “No, this is my first job. I was so nervous walking in.”

Interest catches in his eyes. It encourages that smooth smile on his lips further. “Don’t worry, sweetheart, I’ll show you the reins.”

Your mind stalls. The suggestive, sly flicker to it—are you looking too much into it? Maybe that’s just how guys like Yeonjun act. It’s hard to pretend that you don’t see how he’s looking at you, though. It has your belly twisted up in fluttery knots. It’s not like you hadn’t had your share of his type. But, for some reason you’d rather not address, he’s got your heart thumping in your chest.

He laughs at your fifth attempt to fold up the shirt. When he takes it from you to help, he smells of musk and vetiver. “You going to college near here?” he continues.

“Nah, just doing this, I guess,” you answer, watching him fold it up to try and soak it up.

“Really? Why not?” he hums, crossing his arms about his chest. “You seem like a smart girl.”

Buffering, your blood buzzes in your veins and your cheeks burn. “Dunno. Not really sure what to do. Are you in college?”

“Nah. I’m trying to figure things out, too.”

The both of you pop your heads up when the bell rings to announce the arrival of a customer.

“Yeah,” you say, eyeing him. He’s a few years older than you, no doubt, and yet his life hasn’t fallen apart because he’s not done anything grand yet.

Time’s hand around your neck loosens. Just a little bit.

You sit crisscrossed on top of Kai’s bedsheets. He’d thrown the windows open because the AC died, but it’s no help. The hot air wafting about the room sits heavy on your skin. You’d dressed in as little material as possible to let it breathe, bare thighs clad in a pair of loose shorts and a thin tank top, but it’s still miserable.

Perhaps you two should be going over to yours, but you haven’t had time alone with him for a few weeks now. You hate this busier life, where you struggle to make room for this.

Your new job isn’t so awful, though. Especially with Yeonjun there. A bout of nerves flows up through your stomach. That reminds you.

Sitting up a bit straighter, you consider not doing it. In fact, you really shouldn’t. But your mouth moves before you can put a stopper on it.

“Hey, Kai,” you say. The thickness in your throat makes you believe that your heart’s jumped up into it, caught. God, what are you doing? The unsure waver in your words has you regretting.

His eyes flicker up to yours. He hums out a, “Huh?”

No, this is wrong. You mess with the thin cotton strap of your tank top where it’d slipped down. “Never mind,” you tell him, trying to shrug it off.

That piques his interest. “No, what?” His brow pinches.

You lick your lips and shake your head. “Nothing, never mind. Really.”

His eyes search you from where he sits up against the wall. “Tell me,” he demands.

Really, you shouldn’t have said it in the first place. It was a ridiculous idea. But now you know he’s not going to let it go. And, ridiculously, you say it. “I was just... wondering,” you say, blood roaring. "Well, Yeonjun wants me to come over to his place this weekend, and... I’ve never...” Sucking in a quick breath, you just spit it out to get it over with, “Would you be my first kiss, Kai?”

Insects buzz outside as he looks at you, frozen in spot. You reject the urge to dart away or throw up. You’re honestly just as shaken as him. But really, who else could you trust with something like that? You don’t want Yeonjun to be disappointed if he kisses you, or to seem inexperienced to him.

And, perhaps, the hopelessly in love part of you hopes to at least feel his lips on yours at least once. If you’re going to be alone forever in your longing, you just wish that you can have this.

“What?” Kai says. He looks rattled.

Of course, he’s shocked. You shift. “Forget I said that,” you tell him, unable to meet his gaze.

String-roughened fingers wrap around your upper arm. “I didn’t say anything,” he says, voice strained and face less shock-fallen and more darkened. “But... I mean, you want me to teach you to kiss for some other guy.” He spits out the last bit as if bitter in his mouth.

“You don’t have to do it,” you say. “I just... thought that I might ask you to do it. I don’t know, I’m sorry I said it. I’ll just wing it or something.” His room’s grown ten degrees hotter, if that was possible. Especially where you feel his eyes on your face.

Almost imperceptibly, his hand tightens around you. He swallows hard. “You want to learn how to kiss?” he says. “Fine. I’ll teach you.”

In a heart-stopping moment, your eyes snap to his. Brown and familiar, they hold you with an intensity that turns your limbs into jelly. The air is stifling. “What... do I do?” you ask when the silence becomes too heavy.

A muscle feathers in his jaw, reflected in the low light of his room. It’s quick and so easy to miss, but it tells you everything you need to know about how this is making him feel. How much disbelief he’s in. “Come here,” he says, stilted around the absolute absurdity of it. He pats on his lap.

You make a hesitant crawl across the bed toward him. It seems as though your elbows might buckle beneath your weight, but you make it despite the odds. A fog settles over your brain when you rest your hands on his shoulders and bring your legs to straddle his lap.

But you shove it back; you want to live and breathe every last second of this. No matter how unbelievable or blistering it is.

Breaths fan out over your face. It’s seizing your mind like undiluted liquor. “Where do I put my hands?” you ask him. It’s breathless, the air stolen right from your lungs though your mouths haven’t even touched.

“There is fine,” he says. His words sound breathless, too. The weight of his touch on you as he runs his own up to support your back is unsure. “And then...” he says. It falls out on your mouth slowly, and then he’s taking your lips onto his.

The walls melt away, sound does too. All that is real is the taste of his lips and how they move against you. Your lips start tentative, but you try his mouth movements yourself. It feels like a timid dance—it feels like deep, deep down, finally everything is right. That mist, thick and blinding, falls back over you.

Something changes. Something in it, where you two meet, changes. He becomes hungry. Softly locked lips turn biting and nipping, shaky breaths exhaled slow through your nose. His hands on your back become surer, and one even ventures off to grab your chin. The other holds you to his chest, melded together despite the intense smoke and flame rolling off your bodies. You wonder if he can feel your heart beating a mess there.

Reluctance paints you both when you pull back. You’re panting deep drinks of air. It’s hard to think; your mind’s run off and sits just out of reach. Licking your messy lips, stained with illicitness, you can only manage to brush your fingers against it to form words. “How... was that?” you say, searching his eyes. You find his pupils blown so wide that they consume the warm brown. You’re ready to jump out of your skin with that look pointed at you.

Kai doesn’t answer, though. He slams your mouths back together as if starved by just the brief moment you’d parted for air. Nips on your bottom lip and emboldened hands—he moves like roaring water through a dam. A dam that he’d worked hard to fortify, and yet, at a crack it’s all falling down. Fingertips digging through the fabric of your shorts down to your soft hips, his chest rumbles. You feel it reflected in your core, electricity charging there and shooting up your spine and down your thighs.

You kiss him for all the times you wish you would’ve, but didn’t. The slight rolls of your hips down onto him come easy. You love how it has him making a sound into your mouth and taking the fat beneath his fingers harder into his hands. He helps you.

He drops his head into your neck. Your head swims for air and he has you shuddering with just the brushing of his nose against the column of your neck. The walls of his room spin around you. “Kai,” you whine, every bit of friction his jeans provide, even clothed as you are, just enough to rile you but not to give you what you need.

“God,” he growls, thumbs hooking under your waistband. “You always fucking run around dressed in nothing,” he says, letting his fingers linger like a suggestion of undressing you. “Did you do it on purpose? Expect to make me crazy, knowing I couldn’t touch you?”

And, in those words, it seems that he steals every last bit of breath from you. How often had you gone braless or worn something like this around him? Laid here, in his bed, like that?

Grown tired of your fruitless grinding, he brings a hand down to support your lower back and says, “Turn around.”

Though you explode with the prospect of what he might be intending to do or what’s next, if you’re really going to do this, you do so in a flash of eager limbs. His chest is solid against your back, you melt against the feeling of it. He’d become such a man lately, filled out, and you watched it happen. It was hard for your eyes not to catch on muscle-corded forearms while he picked at strings or to not appreciate the timbred rumble of his voice when you’d feel it come from his chest. How could it not do things to you? Now, he’s dragging your shorts down your legs and you’re in disbelief.

“Fuck,” he breaths out. His fingers find your panties soaked through. “So, you’re the type to get dripping wet.”

An embarrassed blush decorates your cheeks. Kai drags his index finger in circles around your clit through the fabric as if enamored with how much of a mess you’d made of it. Your hips twitch every time he rolls right over it. It’s strange how he’s got your body acting on its own volition with his touches. Even stranger that it’s your best friend doing it. “Sorry,” you tell him, wavering.

He continues those terribly slow circles. “Sorry?” he says, chin on your shoulder. He’s got you wrapped up in him, with nowhere to go but to melt back into him and let his fingers work. Free hand on one of your inner thighs digging divots into the plushness there to hold it still, he tells you, “It’s nothing to be sorry about. It’s hot as fuck. You’re so excited for me to touch you, huh?”

The words wreak havoc on you, feeding the flame that has your belly twisted up tight and the ignition point between your thighs pounding. To hear them coming from him, reserved Kai, has you digging your fingers into his forearm to prove that it’s real. You’d never have imagined him being so... filthy. You imagine him behind falsely nonchalant eyes, devouring you with a perverted mind all the times you’d spent innocently sitting together in this room.

Your cheeks squish beneath his fingers as he takes your face and turns it to him. He wants to make sure you’re look at him as he asks you, “Do you want me to finger you?”

Like a record, your brain skips. Between the blunt, lewd question and his hand on you, it’s in overload. How could he ask something like that so simply? Stunned as you are, of course you want him to. You want him to do anything to you. You nod.

Every last nerve and neuron in your system, just below the skin, cry out when his fingers slow down to nothing. “Hmm?” he says, ignoring the chasing of your hips and the opening of your thighs to invite him into paying your poor pussy the attention he’d ripped from it. He wants to hear you say it.

About ten minutes ago, you lost your mind. It does not return to you now. “I want you to,” you say, chest beating in tandem with your cunt.

“You want me to, right? Not some dumbass you met a week ago, huh?” he says. “Because you know that this is what it’s meant to be. Me, doing these things to you. Not some twenty-five-year-old piece of shit. He doesn’t deserve you, baby. Understand?”

His fingers slider under your panties. Dumb brained and cognition gone muddled, you nod. All you can really think about is the moment his fingers slide over you. Fire licks up your lower belly and your insides as he brushes calloused finger tips finally right against your clit.

Puffed breaths of a scoff raise goosebumps over your skin. “Teach you to kiss so that you can go over there and get his hands on you,” he says, middle two fingertips prodding at your entrance. “As if you were ever anybody’s but mine. You’d come crawling back to me, baby, because it was always meant to be us. He could never satisfy you.”

His words might alarm you or have you asking questions if he hadn’t pushed his fingers into you and begun curling them with strong, pointed presses, pulling soft mewls and hums from you until he finds a spot that twists up your insides. Even through the palm you press over your mouth, your moans come out more like wavering grunts and croaks. Your thighs quiver and twitch, threatening to snap closed against your own will with each. Only your feet stay planted to the mattress. Like a cone of soft serve under the sun’s blistering attention, you melt down him. Just his frame keeps you upright.

“Right there, huh?” he says. The smirk on his mouth filters his words into something taunting. “That’s where you like it.” It’s like he’s learning your body step by step, fulfilling all the questions he’d been forced to only guess at before this.

“Uh-huh.” It comes out whiny and cracks in the middle, but you can’t find even an ounce of you to care right now. If this moment had been a long spiral, a fall from grace, down into a dark pit of forgotten inhibitions, you’ve just hit the bottom. Cheeks blazing cherry blossom pink and with your fingers curling into his pant leg, you don’t doubt that you are a picturesque mess. The kind of mess that’s beautiful because it’s dirty. Your teeth are not gentle on your plush bottom lip. It stings, tugged back and bitten and still a bit swollen with kisses. Perhaps you taste the tang of metal on it, but you pay it no mind.

Kai redoubles his efforts. Now that he knows exactly how to play you, he’s fucking you on his fingers without mercy. The sounds coming from your cunt were wet, but now they’re different— nasty squelching. The only noises coupling with your pathetic keening. Forget anchoring yourself on his thigh, forget muffling your sounds. Instead, your hands fly to encircle his flexing forearm. Under your nails, angry red crescents dig into the muscle there. What had been a languid, building pleasure suddenly becomes everything. Your breaths run away from you, and you chase them frantically. Deep down in your core, the muscles spasm and rage against his fingers. “H—oh god,” you groan. Even the muscles in your thighs and tummy tighten up.

“So whiny...” Kai mumbles, voice taut with the effort of eroding you down into pure, blinding-white pleasure.

And then, in a swoop of mercy, your belly tightens. You hover here, on the precipice of something so consuming and voracious that your muscles and bones reject it, and yet your heart sings. Your eyes and cheeks and lungs and belly burn, the flame charring the edges of you in a beckon. You answer its call. Kai doesn’t mind the snapping of your legs shut around his arm, nor does your bucking or shaking deter him. He just holds you through it, arm like a metal bar around your waist. He’s everywhere, in this moment—the smell of him, leather and utterly familiar, his mouth dusting hot kisses over your skin, his fingers guiding you through orgasm. Where you’d gone silent in the initial crash of it, you devolve into mewls and grunts as you come down.

He holds you even as you slump against him boneless. Afterglow simmers in your veins and has your brain all lethargic and lazy. Neither of you speak for a while, your pulse thumping a rhythm. His breaths rise and fall against you; it grounds you in this moment where you feel all spacey and gone. You become aware again of how disgustingly sweltering it is in his room, your skin sheened.

That brainless bliss only lasts you for so long, though. When rational mind returns to you, no matter how you wish it wouldn’t, you’re hit in the chest with regret so hard it knocks the wind out of you.

How will anything ever be the same after what you’d just done? Stricken still by the thought, you barely register him pulling his fingers out of you. After all your worrying about making sure no wedge comes between you two, look what you’ve gone and done. No; nothing ever will be the same again.

A couple of weeks ago, you ruined the one friendship you were supposed to have forever. It presses down heavy one you while you sit sprawled out on Yeonjun’s couch, his arm around your shoulder. His phone casts a glow over his features with all the lights out.

It doesn’t smell like home. He, pressed against your side, doesn’t smell like home.

Some stupid movie that he’d picked out, yet somehow you’ve ended up the only one still watching it, weaves a hum into the quiet of his apartment. Tangy hurt wells up in your throat. Even the moments when you and Kai would sit in mutual silence on your phones never felt like this. This is different.

You haven’t seen Kai since that night. He’s been busy getting ready to move out, and you’ve been here most days. How fast all of it had changed. You wish you’d feel whiplashed, left empty, by the drifting that you’d been so terrified of. But you don’t. It’s just been you, locked on land, watching him being taken away by the ocean’s tide with no way to change its course. You tried and screamed to call him back, but now your voice has gone hoarse.

And instead of watching him go, you choose to look elsewhere. It’s all you can do to protect yourself from the hurt.

“Hey,” Yeonjun says, finally addressing you rather than whoever’s he’s got in his phone. “Did you bring anything to change into?”

“I brought stuff to sleep in,” you say, eyeing him. You know that’s not why he’s asking. If it came down to it, you could just steal something from him and pull it on. He means going out clothes. Your jaw tightens. “But nothing nice. Why?”

He stretches his arms behind his head in a flaunt of long arms and tanned muscle. Hours spent at the gym lent him those; you appreciate the look of it with a watering mouth. Kai had earned his build by hours spent outside with your dad, because his own could care less, helping him fix up cars and vehicles of all ridiculous sorts. You remember when Kai had first gotten his truck—junk on wheels, honestly—he’d spent so much of summer out there getting it running. And, well... the sun-kissed bronze of his skin and frame that came with it, you had no qualms with.

But those memories only sit heavy in your chest as you’re sat here beside Yeonjun. You banish them elsewhere; you need to let him drift off. If you can’t have each other, and your feelings won’t permit just being friends, then you have to. You want him to do amazing things, and you fear that it’s your presence in his life that will interrupt that. As much as your feelings are real, they are selfish. You, your unsure direction and all your dead weight, should let him go. Because you love him.

“The guys want to come over,” he tells you, pushing off from the couch. “You should probably into change into something less showy.”

Less showy. Your mouth drops into a scoff of disbelief, looking down. A pair of shorts and a shirt, showy? You have to laugh, or else you’ll succumb to the strange embarrassment crawling at the back of your skull. What’s he trying to say? Is that what he thinks of you? “What’s that supposed to mean?” you say, face tilted up to him in a twist of distaste. “I’m wearing something comfy.”

He shrugs, hands shoved into the pockets of his black sweats. “Don’t want to give them the wrong idea about you, that’s all, baby. They’re guys; I just want to protect you.”

“No,” you say, the word falling out in a barked laugh. “Why would you even be bringing over dudes that you think will look at me like that? Why are you even friends with people that you think are gonna make moves on your girlfriend?” He holds a hand out to you, but your hands stay right where they are: crossed solidly over your chest.

Throwing that hand up in audacious exasperation, he gives you a look that makes you feel small and petulant—like you’re throwing an overblown fit. And, maybe you are. You should probably just do it; him seeing you as some overbearing or high maintenance girl has that embarrassment flaring like wildfire that’s found dry brush. “C’mon, baby,” he says, a lazy smile on his mouth that gets under your skin. “Let’s just have an easy night. Don’t make it a big deal.”

Let’s just have an easy night. As if you’re the one ruining the night. Something snarky tries to seize your tongue, but you hold it down. “I thought it would be just us. We wanted to watch the movie together, Yeonjun. Can’t you wait to hang out with your friends? Let’s enjoy our time together; you’ve got your shift tomorrow.”

“My fucking god,” he groans, running a hand through his hair furiously. “You’re needy, you know that? The neediest I’ve ever had to put up with. I don’t put up with needy, baby. Can’t you just chill out a little? My last didn’t mind when I’d have friends over.”

Your eyes burn. Your cheeks burn. He’d been with plenty of other girls before you; that, you’re well aware of. It’s been a corrosive source of self-doubt for you. You don’t want that title: the neediest he’s ever had. Don’t want him to think of you as some prude that won’t let him have fun. Just... hearing him bring up the other girls he’d been with before you stings and leaves welts no different from a slap in the face. Feelings of inadequacy shackle you and have you saying, “Fine. I’m gonna borrow some of your clothes.”

Heavy resentment blooms on your skin where he bends down and presses kisses to your cheek, and then mouth, and then down your neck. “Thank you, baby.”

And, where those ugly, wilted flowers of it bloom, you hear echoes of something. Something that tells you that Kai wouldn’t treat you like this. But you’ve made your bed, decided to do it yourself, and now you’ve got to lay on it.

The frat parties are the worst kind of social outing that Yeonjun insists upon. The smaller kinds, more intimate gathering with just his closer friends, you tolerate much easier. You’re not fond of the circles he chooses. Breathing in thick, smoked-out air surrounded by alcohol-coated breaths is not your type of fun night. Somehow, you end up doing that more than date nights. But that’s better than being here. The base rumbles up through your feet and makes your stomach sick, and it reeks of grinding bodies and body odor, and condensation coats your fingers from the red solo cup as full as when you’d first gotten it.

But, still, you come along. Not every time, but when you don’t, you lay in his bed sickening yourself with images of what he might be doing here. How pathetic is it to attend parties with your boyfriend because you fear that otherwise, he might stick his tongue down the throats of other girls?

You’re looking for him right now, awkward and left alone. He’d promised to stick around; you had begged him to. That was pathetic, too. You know that you put up with too much. If he loved you, or honestly even liked you, you two would be in the thick of the throngs dancing or off somewhere talking with others. Together. The frantic skimming and weeding of your eyes through the blur of faces is not right. That’s not how he should make you feel. It’s not how Kai would make you feel.

Well, Kai would never have you here in the first place.

Venturing out from your little corner, you sift between the bodies of people have a hell of a lot better time than you. Drunken, some you bounce off of like bumper carts. You press your palm over the round face of your cup to spare the floor from spillage threatening to pour over the lip. It’s not like a splash from yours would matter much, though. The linoleum has already been made a fetor mess of dirt off shoes and the sticky sugar of liquor. Your shoes peel from it as you walk. God, what would your parents think of you being here?

You peek around corners and eye big groups. He’s not in the kitchen when you look there, either. Your stomach feels sick in a knowing way—a gut feeling that doesn’t justify anger or tears just yet, but you know. Right in the center of your chest, you know.

It’s in some room that you find him. Sat on the floor along with a few faces you don’t know, he pulls from his bottle. And on his shoulder, he lets a girl with shining curls and pink cheeks rest her head. At your busting in on the intimate gathering, Yeonjun’s eyes slide to you. Recognition flashes over them and wars with bleary drunkenness.

“Hey, baby,” he says. Their gazes all fall on you, but you can hardly see them through blurry eyes.

The girl lifts her head from his shoulder. She’d caught the memo.

“I think I’m gonna go.” You make it sound resigned, try to not let them see your shame, but your voice betrays you and crackles. Maybe it’s better to pretend it doesn’t feel like you’ve just been kicked in the stomach and left to reel against the force, but you can’t. You’re nowhere near shocked, nowhere near blindsided, but still you hurt.

He follows you down the hall. “What’s your problem?” he says, the few, plain words mending and waving into a slurring.

You’ve got one goal: get to the front door, away from the shitty music and him. His words, sharpened, fall off your skin despite his efforts. What good would fighting do you, anyway? It was always going to end up this way. This is just who he is, and he doesn’t give two shits enough about you to want to change that.

“Baby, seriously? That made you this mad? I didn’t even fucking do anything. Stop being insecure,” he says. At the gritting of your teeth, he sees an opportunity and pounces on it. “You don’t need to be jealous. I don’t do jealous shit. We can dance, or something. Shit, I don’t know what you want! Just stop throwing a fit.”

Didn’t do anything? You have to laugh. Maybe you didn’t walk in on him fucking someone else, but that’s not what this is about. Not even a little bit. You’ve checked out, and the fact that he thinks he can make you believe that it’s your fault this time only drives the killing stake in harder.

Maybe you’re bitter. It claws at your insides—turns your face hot and screams in your face that you’ve been used. But beside it sits a sadness. Not the slow kind, but the quick sadness of hurt. Why hadn’t you been good enough for him to love you? To like you? You’d left behind Kai and rested your new life on Yeonjun’s shoulders. You’d wanted so badly for his approval, or for him to want you. You did your best to try and make this work out because you needed it to. You needed so desperately proof that you could fall in love with somebody else. But your best was not what Yeonjun was interested in.

Pins and needles prick your skin as you step outside, like jumping into an ice bath. It shocks you out of dizziness. Words surge up and out in a flash flood like hard reality. You spin on him. “Jealous?” you say, choking out a scathing laugh. “The last thing I’d ever let myself suffer over you is jealousy. Get over yourself. I’m going, stay here if you want. I don’t care.”

“How are you gonna do that, huh?” he says. The flickering yellow of the porchlight paints his features. The shadow of something fluttering around it cuts dark spots in the light, and then a small little moth comes down and jumps around in his face. He waves it off. “Gonna have bitch boy come pick you up? You can’t leech off him forever; he’s gonna get sick of picking up another man’s girlfriend.” It seems like you walking in on that had sobered him up, but his breath still curls out onto your face with the reek of alcohol. “It’s not a big deal. You’re making this a bigger deal than it has to be. Do you not trust me?”

“You are such a piece of shit,” you grit out. “I don’t know what I was thinking. Ever. I don’t know how I let this go on for so long.” You don’t like him having Kai in his mouth, don’t like him trying to act like you’re conflating things, and especially don’t like that face he’s making. As if you’re acting crazy and overblown. “No, I don’t trust you. You didn’t fuck her, but come on, Yeonjun. Seriously? You think I’m stupid, and I’m sick of it. You thought this would be easy because I didn’t have the experience you have, but I’m sorry. I don’t like being walked over.”

“If you’re gonna be so goddamn jealous, then maybe we aren’t gonna work,” he says.

That moth, floating light in the air, is right back in his face. Yeonjun takes two hands and smashes it between a clap of his hands. He shakes its flattened, broken body off his hand. Looking down at it laying there on top of dirt-caked concrete, you get this... feeling. A tickling around your person.

“See if I care,” you snap, throat aching against the onslaught of emotion and held back tears.

Rivulets of raindrops dilute the tears on your cheeks. Your hair plasters to your face and your clothes to your body.

For a week, you’d went about it all as if it hadn’t happened. And then you came here.

It’d not been this rainy when you first got down to the creek—just a gentle trickle, really. You hadn’t been crying then, either. But, watching the water work at babbling over stone, you let yourself feel it. Here, where you’d had so many good memories. You’ve gone and tainted it, now. But for whatever reason, you’d just wanted to be here. Arms curled around yourself and fingers digging into drenched sleeves, you don’t wipe away the tears or cover the sounds of your crying. You let the stream hear it; it’ll sweep it right up and down the way. Somewhere far off, where you don’t have to feel it anymore.

You realize that, usually, you’d be over at Kai’s right now. The fact that his room was not the first place you thought you could go to anymore is a punch to the gut. You drop your face into your hands and cry harder. Really, you’ve got to stop doing that to yourself. Thinking of sad things—putting your hurt under the microscope to see it closer. It’d be easier to just fold it up and tell yourself that it’ll pass, and that relationships end all the time.

It’s not him that you cry over. Well, maybe some of it is. Rather, it’s that you have absolutely no idea where you’re going. Where you are. Finally, you’d built yourself a raft to get off the shore and go out to sea, because that’s what you’re supposed to do, and it’s breaking apart right beneath you. And, stranded and alone in the water, you’ve got no way to get back to shore to build yourself another raft. You’re stranded, and the scariest bit is that you’re doing it all alone. You weren’t supposed to do this alone. You two made promises back then.

You suppose that a promise is one of those things you were supposed to leave faith in back on shore.

The raindrops are heavy over you. The fall of it roars against the ground, a torrent downpour. It’s not coupled with whipping wind or flashes of lightning—just straight, still falling. It’s a somber feeling no different from the gnawing in your chest.

Like chimes, there’s a distant, gentle sound. Maybe water falling over creek rock, but it’s more like suggestion. A sweet sound that you shouldn’t even be able to hear over the rest of it, it’s as if it’s right in your ear. A whisper.

You fix your blurry eyes with a wet sleeve. Rain falls right back into its place, but you see it: a silvery, whimsy haze. And the moths. They jump and call you, this time. Their glow bounces off the rainy mist against the grey of night’s arrival. Then, all you can hear is the whispering. Where you stand frozen, your feet beg to move. To follow them.

So you do.

Their entourage of moondust trails them where they go, wrapping you up and weaving between raindrop and space. You don’t worry where they’ll take you, or even try to wrap your head around this happening again. You just follow, mind glossed over and entranced with how beautiful it is. When you’d seen them before, it’d made you uneasy. Mostly because it looked so unearthly and unbelievable. But this time you just follow.

A far-off voice, one oh-so-familiar, peaks through the haze. It’s not enough to stop you, but then you hear it again, louder and closer.

You blink a few times. Once to break away the fog, and then twice to focus your eyes on Kai stood in front of you. His hair lays in wet spikes over his eyes and beads of rain trace the planes of his face. He’s as soaked as you.

“Kai?” you say. Looking around you, you’ve ended up somewhere in the field between your houses and the creek. But you’ve got no recollection of walking here. Whatever that mist is, sentient or not, had swept you here.

His voice is strained, but you appreciate hearing it. “Break up with him,” he tells you.

In his eyes, as you search them, there’s stardust glowing like reflection. Your face twists up. “What?” you say, breath a puff of smoke ahead of you. Summer had come and gotten away from you so fast, and now it’s gone all cold again.

“Break up with him,” he echos, face solemn. He looks ruffled.

“Why?” you ask, “And why are you out here?”

“Because I’m moving out today, and I think I deserve to at least see you before I go.” His eyes look over you. “And... your dad said you went down to the creek.”

He’s moving out today, and you had no idea. And really, it’s your fault. You’d driven that wedge between the two of you. “I did break up with him.”

Downpour fills his quiet for a few moments, his face swirling with emotion like the clouds above you. He nods. “Good.”

There are a few more long minutes between you; just you two searching each other's faces, antsy to say so much that it bunches up in your chests and stalls. It’s what a summer of longing does to you. Even with Yeonjun, even trying to slowly chip away the stitching that had connected the two of you at the hip, you were helpless to stop the gnawing of the love you bear for him. Even just seeing him now, you feel those threads mending back up. God, why does it have to be so hard?

He just looks at you. For a few beats, he just looks at you. There are so many questions in his eyes. They flit across and turn over, but all he settles on is, “Why?”

There’s so much you want to tell him. Words pile up to the top, some threatening to spill over. But you know that if you tell him some of it, just to make up for all the time you’d missed out on together, it’ll all come crashing out. And you don’t think you want him to know just how much you accepted, the way you let yourself get treated. So, you shake your head and say, “It doesn’t matter.”

Kai looks like he wants to push that issue, but whatever look he finds on your face deters him. “Come with me,” he pleads. “I want you to come with me.”

Your throat tightens. Curling your arms around yourself harder, the rain only coming down on you harder, you say, “Kai, I want to. I want to. I just... I don’t want to freeload off you, because you’re doing great things, and I’m just...” Your tongue darts out to wet your lips, but they’re already as soaked as the rest of you. “I’m just going nowhere. And I don’t want to be a burden, or ever be the reason that you can’t do what you dream of. If staying here means that you become everything that you’re destined to do, then I’m happy with that, Kai. I am.”

He shakes his head, stumbling toward you. “No, no you don’t get it,” he says, frantically taking your shoulders into big hands. Under his touch, every taut muscle goes slack. You melt. “You don’t get it. You are the music. Every single song is about you. Every single fucking song is about you. I want you to come with me, please. I love you, I have always loved you, and I will always love you, and I thought you’d loved me too, and I don’t want to do this alone. I can’t do it alone.”

He loves you. Kai loves you. The enormity of it rumbles the ground where you stand on legs you fear might just give in. You flex your fingers to combat the tears pricking your eyes. It doesn’t work; they brim and well up, spilling down over your cheeks. “What?” you say, voice softly breaking. “Kai, I didn’t...”

“And just when I thought I finally had you, you left me,” he says, throwing a hand up beside him in a big gesture. “You left me! I woke up thinking you’d be there, and that maybe you loved me too, and you had left me. And then you threw me away for some piece of shit, and you stopped coming around.” His chest heaves for breaths.

Your face contorts. That night, the one where you two had slipped up, you’d fallen asleep curled up against his chest on undiluted contentment. When you woke up, you had panicked. You thought he’d wake up and pretend it hadn’t happened, or he’d be uncomfortable, or even be disgusted and regretting. You couldn’t handle that, so you slipped out before he woke up. It’d been an attempt to protect your tender heart, but looking at the twitching of his lip now, you begin to think it’s the most selfish thing you’ve ever done. He thinks you used him and left him. Your stomach twists. Voice thick, you say, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I left you, Kai. I thought you didn’t... I thought you didn’t see me that way. I was scared. I’m sorry I hurt you.”

Brows knitted together, he says, “Thought I didn’t love you?” His hand cups your cheek, warm against the soft frozen skin he finds there. “I’ve... I’ve dreamed of you almost every night of my life. In my sleep, I see you, and you’re happy and glowing, and that damn... mist is all around you. I couldn’t get away from you even in my sleep.”

Darting between his eyes, soft and reflecting your face back to you, it’s hard to breathe. Kai’s dreamt of you; he’s as sickly in love with you as you are him. Thunder claps, and the ground shakes, and the heavens open up above you, the trumpets belt, and you two are in love. Somewhere deep in your center, you feel it—your soul nodding yes.

The mist. You know exactly what he’s talking about. “I saw it. That stuff, those moths. The stuff we saw back then.”

“I did too,” he says, wet spikes of hair bouncing with a nod. “Not that long ago. It was the first time I saw it out of a dream since that day.”

Back then, you two had only budding, innocent love for each other. Things hadn’t become mangled and lost to confused hearts or expectations. When they’d appeared to you, you hadn’t needed it. This time, you’d followed it. And it had led you here—somehow had led you right to the very spot you needed to so that every last piece might fall into place. For this moment to happen. You know why it did.

“I’ll go with you, Kai. I’ll go wherever you go; I love you. I’ve loved you since forever,” you say, each and every word massive and lovely on your tongue. “I’m sorry I didn’t say it earlier.”

So unlike the last times your mouth had met, he brings his mouth to yours with a dazzling clarity. No longer is it confused kisses; he locks his lips against yours with the urgency of so many years being unable to. Kai’s hands cradle your wet cheeks, hold you so tenderly into his kiss. His touch grounds you, makes the moment real. You melt into him—your fingers curled into his shirt as if holding him there so that he won’t disappear like something of an incorporeal dream. He sighs through his nose, kissing you harder. Even if it all were fake and this was nothing more than a feverish figment of your imagination, you think you could die happy just knowing this once.

But it is utterly real, and utterly yours. You kiss him harder, too.

When your lungs start to burn and plead for breath, you two pull away from each other. Your eyes flutter open to capture his. Warm and brown and the same ones you’ve stared into so many times before, but not like this, you sink into them. He runs his thumb over your cheek as he sinks into yours. His tongue darts out to lick lips painted with you. In the inches between you, space no longer feels heavy or charged with grievances. Every last unsaid thing had been answered.

“I have my stuff up in the truck,” he says, breaths soft. Brown eyes dart around your face. “I’ll help you add your stuff to it.”

You shudder out a breath. Add your stuff to it. A nervous energy settles down over you, but it doesn’t seem so bad if you’re doing it with him. Together.

“Okay,” you whisper, a balmy secret just like the ones you used to share in small, giggly voices so many years ago. “Okay.”

Shivers seize you like jittering bones, all wrapped up in a blanket. The velour cushion seats beneath you have soaked up water and become damp, but Kai’s got the heater blasting. You wind around back roads, headlights illuminating the way ahead of you. Stray droplets whip in them, but nothing much. Isn’t it funny how the rain had just stopped like that? That’s just how the weather is, out here. You wonder how the weather might act wherever you’re headed.

Your teeth chatter as if your jaw had its own will. The two of you had the windows down thinking that the wind might dry you off, but all it’s done is lap at your bitten cheeks. You reach down for the handle to crank it up. You’ve got a long drive ahead of you—either you’ll eventually dry off, or you can pull off at a rest area to change in a bathroom. The wet clothes are really not helping.

With an arm up on the steering wheel, Kai turns his attention on you. You know that smile. “Cold?” he asks, eyes darting between your face and the road. With the hand he’s not got working the steering wheel, he runs fingers over your thigh. Soft, gentle massages, yes. The number it does on your core is absurd. Each mindless digging into your thighs and brush of his thumb, sparks sputter there. You’ve sat here, right in his passenger seat, so many times before. Day trips up to the lake, the one he’d joined your family camping at for so many summers, all the times he’d driven you to school in this truck, and even just a quick run down to a convenience store for a late-night snack. You’d deemed it your seat. But never once had you sat in it like this. Your heart does a flip. All those times you’d wish he’d reach over and do just this—a small gesture that would’ve been so big then. And it’s your reality, now.

“Freezing,” you say. A brush of his fingers nearer the apex of your thighs sends you pressing them together and shifting in your seat. “But not everybody runs as hot as you, though, so.”

His eyes catch the movement in just the split second he looked over to you. “Huh,” he says. He turns to look at you, his gaze flickering with something anew. Something that you’d only ever seen once before. “Is that it?”

It’s hard to swallow. His fingers brush higher, and higher, feather-dustings of calloused fingertips that sends tingles shooting up your spine at the slightest suggestion of where he’s headed. “Yes,” you say, feigning indignance to cover the shiver that threatens to overtake you. When his fingertips dance at the waistband of your bottoms, it does so anyway. “Kai,” you say, blood hot in your veins. “You’re...driving.”

His eyebrows pinch into a taunting furrow. “I am,” he says, nodding. “Don’t worry about it, baby. I’ve got us.”

And he does; fingers slipping under the band of both your bottoms and your panties, he doesn’t even tear his eyes off the road. He’d driven these roads so much, you think he might be able to do it asleep. Even drawing a mewl from you with a brush over your clit, he doesn’t look away more than a quick glimpse at your pinkened cheeks.

Two fingers dragging up your folds, right over the source of the mess. “You get excited so easily, huh?” he hums. “You like it when I play with you.”

When he presses those fingers at your entrance, you can’t help but be taken back to that night. It echoes and reverberates through you. Long fingers, strong and punctual brushes against the sweet spot—he was criminally good with his fingers. Playing guitar did more for him than just music. He seemed to know exactly how to utilize those roughened fingers and trained flicks. Your muscles flicker as he abandons your hole for more brushes at your bud.

Those teasing, sly touches turn to something more serious. His fingers roll over your clit, slow but enough to have you sighing and rolling your hips against the seat belt. But last time had gone just like this, him touching you and receiving nothing. He should feel good, too. “Shouldn’t you pull over?” you sigh, muscles taut. Your breaths come out shuddering and half-controlled, interrupted by the tightness that each delicious swirl provokes. The door takes the brunt of your grip, white-knuckling the interior.

He laughs, a husky sound that is tinder to fire. He knows what you mean. “Maybe,” he says. “But I think I’m enjoying this plenty. I think I want to see you cum on my fingers again.”

Fingers pinching and flicking faster, you grow breathy and whiny, hips rolling against the seatbelt and back into the seat. Your muscles, all the way down your thighs and deep in your belly, jump and twitch each time his fingers run over your clit in just the right spot—that tender spot that’s so good that it teeters on overwhelming. The kind that makes you hiss and then want more. “Shit, Kai,” you whine. “Right—there, keep going."

He doesn’t answer with any teasing words. No, he just doubles down right at that angle and pressure, leaned back into his seat and driving as if he wasn’t fingers-deep in your panties right now. His sculpted profile at total ease—it does something for you. A delicious tightness curls its fingers over your center, promising a sugary ecstasy that you can’t help but chase. Bucking into his hands as best you can, you go quiet. Right there—right there, you feel it. The cusp. Your fingers brush over it, clenching around nothing and squeezing your thighs tight around him. Every last drop of blood in your body reaches for it, singing and dancing through your veins and making you dizzy.

And then he stops. Your mouth drops open, whiplashed and helpless to its slipping away from you. You whittle your gaze into something sharp and turn to him. “What—why?” you complain. The tide slips further and further and further back, but you still taste sea salt on your tongue. Frustration sets in its place as you feel it go. Seriously, you’d been right there. “You’re so mean.”

He slows and then with the clicking of the turn signal, he’s off the road and pulling the truck into park on a little secluded side road. Where the headlights pierce the pitch black, nothing but gravel and field surrounds you. He doesn’t kill the engine, instead pulling his hand free from you.

Your heart, still stuttering with your lost orgasm, kicks back to life as he smears your slick over your mouth, dragging it over your lips and then taking his thumb to run it right over the plush of your mouth. “Am I?” he says, fingers taking your chin to meet your eyes with his. Endless hunger, pupils so blown that his eyes look black, pins you. “I don’t think you’ve seen mean yet, baby.”

Darting your tongue out to clean your lips, you look at him through your eyelashes. “Show it to me, then.”

Something dark passes over his face. It has your skeleton jumping out of your body. Then, he says, “Is that what you want? You want mean?”

Brain gone to mush that can only really think about him touching you, a slow nod is all you can manage.

The engine’s hum prevails for some long, thick seconds. And then, he tilts his head in a gesture. “Get in the back.”

Holy shit. You want to sit there frozen in an overwhelming sort of excitement, but his seatbelt clicks undone and you’re set into motion. In a flurry of giggles and clumsy limbs, you climb up over the center console and into the backseat. He slips out of the front seat, not bothering to even kill the engine.

The door beside you opens in a swirl of cold wind. In nothing more than a blink, a strong hand has both your wrists pinned to the cushions and your back flush against it. Nose-to-nose, his breath hot over your face. “I’ve got plenty of ideas as to how I can warm you up.”

You appreciate each other’s faces for a beat more, you looking up at him big-eyed and waiting. Kai breaks the moment to attack your neck in a procession of bites and kisses. Your mouth falls into a silent sound.

“You know,” he says, free hand working your pants off. His eyes are trained on you, though. “I thought about doing this to you all summer. Touching you again.” He moves on to your top, pushing the fabric up until your chest is freed, clad in soft cotton. He eats the sight up. You want to reach down and cup the back of his head or feel his hair between your fingers as he presses his mouth against the soft beginning of your cleavage, but he’s got your wrists firmly planted. So much so, that you wonder exactly how he’s got you so secure with just one hand. Kai is strong, but maybe you hadn’t seen just how strong. Your skin aches under the purple bites he decorates you in. The sight of him—face in your chest and marking you up so lazily—has your teeth abusing your bottom lip. Whatever sounds you might make otherwise would be embarrassing. Kai lifts his eyes to you. “And I think you thought of me, too. Didn’t you?”

“Oh, god, yes,” you say, writhing beneath him. He’s going so slow. You want him all over you. “So much.”

He likes that. He takes your pebbled nipple into his mouth through the fabric. Soft grazes of teeth and sucks, you’re burning all over. When he pulls back, he’s left you dark wet patches when the bra had only just dried against your body heat. “Good,” he rasps, taking his big hands demanding and hungry over your torso. They swallow your frame up, soothing skin but lighting it aflame all the same. “Good girl.”

You never thought just words could unravel you, but those did the job. Not a gasp, nor a sucking in of breath—no, you go silent and brainless, fumbling for rational thought.

The dropping of your jaw has Kai delighted. “You’re so pretty,” he says. In a swift and powerful hoist, he’s tugging you down the cushions toward him with greedy fingers. He’s got your thighs pressed up to your chest. You’re bent right in half.

Out of breath, you huff out, “You too.”

A quick laugh falls from his mouth, lips pulled into a smug tilt. He nips at your calf up by his face. “So sweet, it almost makes me feel bad for what I’m about to do to you.” Reaching down for your panties, he pulls back on the suffocating press for only enough time to drag them up your legs. Those get discarded somewhere on the floor. Who cares about that right now, though? All you can register is the metallic clinking of his belt being undone. It’s got your nervous system twisting up.

And, those words. Electricity shoots bolts of pure, sizzling revery into your core. What I’m about to do to you. You imagine a great deal of things that he might mean, but still, you think that none could hold a candle against the promise his voice held in saying it.

Kai presses his body to your thighs and hooks your calves over his shoulders, and it all becomes real. The press of his heavy cock to your folds, the digging of his fingers into your outer thighs, his pretty eyes sparkling with something feral. As real as it gets—more real than anything you’ve ever felt in the entirety of your life. Your hands find perch flattened to his broad chest.

The position leaving you two no option but to look right into each other, he holds your gaze and begins slow drags of his hot length up and down your slit. Tantalizing, awful, awful drags. When his tip nudges your eager clit, you jolt. And then he does it again. And again.

“Kai,” you mewl. A press against your hole has you hopeful, and he lingers there for a moment, but doesn’t give it to you. Can’t he just fuck you? You’ve never been more pitifully in need of something in your life.

“Shh.” His ruts get more daring, smearing your slick up onto your belly. “Take it.”

You wiggle your toes in the air and make passes at arching yourself into him in search of better friction. He’s got you pressed so suffocatingly into the seat that it does absolutely nothing for you. In fact, he holds your harder and changes tack so that your thighs press together. At the very apex of them, his weeping cock slips through the seam.

Pressing his cheek into your calf, he watches you. Every gasp and shaky inhale, he watches. It spurs his rutting on, sticky sounds and pants eating up the air. Your nails claw at his hands as, finally, a knot tightens in your core.

“Yes, please,” you breathe. He fucks your thighs harder. Faster. Every nudge at your clit and hole becomes euphoric. “Kai, baby—I’m gonna—”

Just as furiously easy as last time, he rips it all away from you. The rushing away of the buzzing and promise of shaking thighs—he takes it from you again. It brings prickling tears to your eyes. “Kai?” you hiss. “Again?”

His eyes aren’t playful. He pulls your calves back over his shoulders, handling your hips into a better position to press his cock right at your entrance as if you weigh nothing. Face utterly straight, he says, “I don’t think you deserve it, do you? Not after what you did with Yeonjun.”

A swallow goes down your throat hard. He presses himself just a bit harder into you. Not in yet, but right there.

When he does begin sliding in, the stretch of it... You cling to him and squirm between him and the warm cushions behind you. Each inch is a heady feeling, all the way up to the hilt of him. He shudders a controlled breath. “You’re so fucking tight, though,” he grits out. “Did he not fuck you right?”

Slaps of skin bounce off the car interior and between your bodies. He starts off at a brutal pace; you know it’s meant to make your brain go foggy. Squeezing your eyes closed, you manage, “I... didn’t fuck him.” It comes out strangled, voice bouncing as he fucks you into the car seat.

Thumb tugging your bottom lip down and then dipping into your mouth, he watches the show of your ecstasy down to every last detail. “Yeah?” he says, voice shaking and almost desperate. “Always thinking of me, huh? Such a good little princess. You know exactly where your heart belongs.”

You want to answer him, even just with a whine or moan. You try to. But with his thumb pressing down on your tongue, enough to pin it to the floor of your mouth, it’s not gonna happen. He tastes salty in your mouth.

His truck consists of his grunts and whines, and your taut groans for some moments that seem to stretch forever. The planes of his groin grind against your clit when he delivers occasional pointed rolls, but mostly it’s just an animalistic, feverish dancing of your two sweaty bodies, holds growing more frantic the closer you get.

Thumb wet with saliva; he frees your mouth. The hand trails slowly down your face and your chin, brushing feather touches, until he finds your neck.

Your eyes fly open, wide. He pressed his fingers into your neck—no real pressure yet, he looks at you through damp strands of dangling hair and says, “Want my fingers around your neck?” His thumb brushes over the buzzing pulse point there.

“Yes,” you grit out, body bouncing and back raw with friction against the coarse cushion’s surface. Your breath stutters, your mind stutters. Even your blinks stutter, eyelids too lazy to keep up. “Please.”

The pressure of his fingers there—it frightens you and has you tightening around him at the same time. But you would trust nobody more with your life than Kai.

He presses his cheek to your calf to indulge in the sight of you like this: underneath him, folded in two, nowhere to go but to take his pistoning hips, cheeks blazing, and his fingers pressed into your windpipe. If the way he becomes sloppier and more desperate in his tempo has anything to say for it, it does something for him.

“Gonna be my pretty little girlfriend, huh?” he says. His voice is tight—so is your belly. You’re both so close. Hopefully, this time he’ll let you cum. “Take you to every show; show you off to everybody. Fuck.”

Brain like static and swimming with a pinched flow of oxygen, you slur your words. “You’re—hah—gonna have other girls all over you.”

The taunting, split-second raise of his brows flips your belly. You tighten around him again. If he keeps hitting that spot, tip ramming into the soft spot deep inside you that he’d taken such delicate care of finding last time, you’re going to burst into sparkling flame and firework. He growls, “Well, I’ll just have to knock you up so that they know I’m yours, huh?”

Holy shit. You like the sound of that. Your nails dig into his wrist around your neck, but you cry out a pitchy, “Yes!”

“Oh, you like that?” Kai releases your throat to take both your hips. You gulp for air, finding nothing but the thick air of sex and humid breaths, at the opportunity. He’s ramming into you like he’s found a purpose. “Isn’t this the perfect position to do it? Get you pregnant?”

With every last bit of brain power you’ve got, teetering on the edge excruciatingly close to salvation, you groan a long, hoarse sound. “Fuck, yes! Please, Kai, inside—” A hot trail of tears roll down your temples.

It’s all he’s got to hear to still inside you. His growl rumbles deep in his chest, holding you in place and filling you with his hot cum deep in your cunt. That feeling, coupled with his short grinds against your clit as he fucks his seed deeper, takes your soul by sinful claws and crumbles it down into nothing. You burst into a shaking, whimpering peak, sucking your lips into your mouth to bare through the sheer twisting of your insides and the flame that consumes up your thighs and cunt.

He falls on you heavy, face in your neck. Warm kisses against your clammy skin meld with your slow floating down, the two of you a beautiful, nasty picture of fucked out. He stays right inside you—the absolute stillness of him, you think he has no plans of pulling out any time soon. His long fingers card through your sweaty locks of hair.

Finally, he presses himself off you. You get a glimpse of the window behind him—fogged up and filthy with your affairs. Anybody to see the truck from the outside would know exactly what went on inside, but right now, you don’t care. Not one bit. Your panted breaths drag in nothing but musk and thick, hot air. The drumbeat in your chest tells you that, despite how you feel ripped straight from your body, you are very much still alive. More alive than ever.

“Warm?” he says, pushing sticky hair off his forehead. He’s a mess, too. His hair is ruffled with your touch, his clothes rumpled the same, beads of sweat rolling down the planes of his cheeks and neck, and his eyes a lazy smolder. As much as he looks like sex personified, a soft smile twitches at his lips.

You snort. You can’t help but feel giddy, here with him. You’re with him. Nothing has ever felt more right. Unplugged when he pulls out of you, your mess trickles down onto the seat below you. “Yeah,” you say. “Very.”

Warm is not enough to begin to describe how you feel. In your ears, you hear whisperings. Soft and gentle. Perhaps it was divine intervention, or the fates lending you their word, or maybe just rational thought. It says:

Home. You are home.

⠀ ⠀ㅤㅤ❝ 𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒’𝑠 𝑎 𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑑 𝑜𝑓 𝑤ℎ𝑖𝑡𝑒 𝑚𝑜𝑡ℎ, 𝐼 𝑑𝑜𝑛’𝑡 𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑑, 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑔𝑙𝑖𝑚𝑚𝑒𝑟𝑠 𝑏𝑦 𝑚𝑖𝑑-𝑀𝑎𝑦 𝑖𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑡, 𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡 𝑎𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑝𝑖𝑛𝑘 𝑚𝑜𝑐𝑎𝑠𝑠𝑖𝑛 𝑓𝑙𝑜𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑠 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑔. ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ㅤㅤㅤ𝐼𝑓 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑛𝑜𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑒 𝑎𝑛𝑦𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔, 𝑖𝑡 𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑑𝑠 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑡𝑜 𝑛𝑜𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑒 𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒. 𝐹𝑖𝑛𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦, 𝐼 𝑛𝑜𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑒𝑑 𝑒𝑛𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ. 𝐴𝑙𝑙 𝑎𝑟𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑑 𝑚𝑒 𝑖𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑤ℎ𝑖𝑡𝑒 𝑚𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑠 𝑓𝑙𝑜𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑑. ㅤ ㅤ ⠀ ⠀𝐻𝑜𝑤 𝑙𝑜𝑛𝑔 𝑑𝑜 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑙𝑖𝑣𝑒, 𝑓𝑙𝑢𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑖𝑛 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑠ℎ𝑎𝑑𝑜𝑤𝑠? 𝑌𝑜𝑢 𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑛’𝑡 𝑚𝑢𝑐ℎ, 𝐼 𝑠𝑎𝑖𝑑 𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑑𝑎𝑦 𝑡𝑜 𝑚𝑦 𝑟𝑒𝑓𝑙𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑖𝑛 𝑎 𝑔𝑟𝑒𝑒𝑛 𝑝𝑜𝑛𝑑, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑔𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑛𝑒𝑑. ⠀ 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑤𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑚𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑠 𝑐𝑎𝑡𝑐ℎ 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑠𝑢𝑛𝑙𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑏𝑢𝑟𝑛 𝑠𝑜 𝑏𝑟𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡𝑙𝑦. ❞ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ⸺ 𝑻𝑯𝑬 𝑴𝑶𝑻𝑯𝑺, 𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑦 𝑂𝑙𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑟

ash ⦂ how do we feel about this pair? i really didn't mean for this to get so long, but i ended up RLLY liking their chemistry. i had to do their story justice. also, i finished this with kai as a guitarist and then his drummer performance came out... hmm.

﹙🏷️ ﹚@lvrs-street2mmorrow , @soohashits , @f4iryfever , @arcturus444 , @linqed , @serenityism00 , @immelissaaa , @luv4cheol , @lickingan0rchid , @20-cms , @hhoneylix , @beestvng , @hyucktapes , @bewitchless , @prince-jjae , @blankliving , @yaoizee , @stormy1408 , @missychief1404 , if your tag isn't working, check the mentions part of your settings!

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cinnamanz · 2 months ago

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✦ ─── 𝓒hampagne 𝓒oast , 𝓢ophia 𝓛aforteza do you miss me too?

─── 𝓨ou think about reaching out. just a text. just a line. this song still sounds like you. but you don’t. not because the love is gone—but because some stories are meant to live in the quiet. in glances. in songs. in memories. because letting go doesn’t mean you ever wanted to. and sophia—sweet, golden, soft at the edges and sharp at the center—was never really yours. but she was real.

❝𝓪ll my last strength against you,

𝓫aby tell me what you need.❞

౨ৎ 𝓹airing. predebut!sophia laforteza x female reader ౨ৎ 𝓰enre. fluff if u squint, undefined relationship, was it ever casual? no. angst (i tried) like a ton of it but i wasn't trying to drown u, hurt no comfort, wc. 3299 a/n. my exams js finished nd i thought id give yall sumn as compensation for the lack of mamma mia updates LMAO i was trying sumn new w this oneshot—writing style wise—nd im ngl it didn't quite go how i wanted to nd i ended up writing less bc of this experimental oneshot 😭😭😭 anyw, this is a long overdue angst from me i tried my best💔💔💔 i saw smn on tiktok say sophia is the type of person ud have a crush on high school nd that mainly inspired this so thanks random tiktok editor. this is mostly how i imagined champagne coast

❝𝔂oung as i want to know,

𝓲'll never let you go.❞

YOU REMEMBER HER BEST IN SHADES OF GOLD. not the kind that glitters, but the kind that glows. sun-warm. skin-close. the kind of gold that poured through her bedroom blinds every time you snuck in past midnight and stayed for as long as you could before school dawned, heart thudding, breath caught between wanting and wondering.

sophia.

sophia with the smile that felt like a secret sunrise. with soft pink polish barely clinging to her nails and the habit of humming songs she hadn’t written yet. her voice always held a lilt of laughter, like a secret being shared.

she had a laugh that caught sunlight in its rhythm, and a way of remembering everyone's name like it was the most important one she'd ever heard. she moved through the halls like spring after a long winter—bright, warm, impossible not to notice. her presence made lockers bloom and linoleum shimmer.

she’d offer a compliment with such genuine ease that it felt like sunlight breaking through clouds. she held eye contact like she was seeing you for the first and last time all at once. sophia, who always smelled like vanilla chapstick and the faintest trace of gardenias after rain. you said her name like a prayer you didn’t believe in but kept whispering anyway. just in case it could save you.

she’s everywhere now. bigger than memory, louder than youth. katseye headlines every festival lineup, and her voice spills from every speaker like honey and summer. but back then, she was just a girl with stardust in her laugh and music in her fingertips. her family’s name opened doors and booked venues, but sophia walked through them like they didn’t matter. she made time slow down. she made you feel like you were being seen through a softer lens.

sophia’s world had always been lyrical. she moved through life like she was humming a song only she could hear. each step light, each smile like a melody lingering in the air long after she’d walked away.

everything about her felt improvised yet effortlessly right, like the first draft of a poem that didn’t need editing. she spoke in rhythm, thought in metaphor, lived in verses. there was music in her hands, in her laughter, in the way she leaned her head back when she was thinking—as if catching something only the sky could offer.

your world, on the other hand, was cinematic. made of still frames and silences. you didn’t move through life—you watched it. framed things, paused them, looked for symmetry in the ordinary.

you didn’t always speak, but you noticed everything: the flutter of her lashes when she was about to say something vulnerable, the exact tilt of her smile when she was hiding a bruise of sadness. where sophia saw a lyric, you saw a shot list. where she saw wonder, you saw composition. where she breathed melody, you caught meaning in the silences between.

she narrated the world in chorus; you captured it in light. you were opposites in the way a poem and a film are different ways of saying the same thing.

and somehow, in those precious months where your lives tangled and bloomed, you translated each other.

you met her in late march. spring still a whisper, flowers barely blooming, the sky bruised with indecision. your film teacher read names off a list, pairing students for the semester film project. you weren’t paying attention until you heard it: "y/n and sophia."

she turned to you with a smile that looked like it belonged to someone in a film already. sharp and soft at the same time. her voice was breezy, casual. "guess we’re partners."

you nodded, blinking, caught in her gravity already.

when you sat together to brainstorm, her notebook was full of lyrics—descriptions of faces in profile, sunflowers, waves crashing over shoulders.

she wanted to create something that felt like breathing. you wanted to shoot something that felt like dreaming.

so you made a film about nature and people. about how vines wrap around fingers like lovers. how wind braids hair. how skin glows in golden hour like the earth is passing its light into it. sophia became the muse. barefoot in tall grass. spinning in white linen. half-submerged in a creek, laughing. you directed and held the lens like it was a heartbeat.

"you make the world look softer," she said once in awe, watching a playback.

"it only looks like that because you’re in it," you replied. your voice almost cracked from saying it.

she didn’t say anything then. just smiled at the screen, her reflection flickering over her shoulder.

that project was the beginning. the spark. long editing nights that bled into morning. coffee shared from the same chipped mug. the camera always between you—until it wasn’t. until it was just her, and you, and the quiet understanding that bloomed beneath everything left unsaid.

it started, maybe, on the hill.

that nowhere hill behind her high-rise, just past the stillness of manicured parks and closed cafés, where city light softened into starlight. you called it your chapel. the place where time slowed down and everything else disappeared.

every summer night, you’d sneak into her room at twelve-oh-something. her window creaked like it missed you. sophia would be waiting in a hoodie three sizes too big, her braid unraveling like ribbon. sometimes she brought snacks. sometimes she brought a poem. sometimes she brought nothing but herself.

and that was enough.

you’d walk, fingers brushing, shoulders bumping. and when the world was quiet enough, she’d start to sing. something half-formed. breathy. beautiful. you never interrupted. just listened. memorized the shape of her in the dark.

you brought your guitar once. not to impress, not to perform—just to fill the quiet with something that wouldn’t spill over into words. sophia lit up when she saw it, eyes shining like she’d been waiting for this without knowing it.

"you play?" she asked, voice full of something like awe.

"just a little," you said, shy.

she grinned and sat cross-legged in the grass, hoodie sleeves tugged over her hands. "can i sing?"

and so you played. soft, simple chords beneath your fingers like the beat of a heart learning a new rhythm. and sophia—god, sophia—she sang like her voice belonged to the sky. high, clear, breathy in the way that made your lungs forget how to work. you caught her gaze mid-song, and she smiled at you—not the kind she gave to the world, but the one that felt like it was stitched from your name.

you harmonised by instinct, your voice falling in beside hers like it had always belonged there. no one told you how music could feel like holding hands in the dark. no one told you it could be the first time you really felt someone without the need for physical touch.

when the last note faded, you didn’t speak. just sat there, letting the silence gather around you like a blanket, the ghost of melody still hovering between your mouths.

she leaned her head against your shoulder.

"you think stars remember us?" she asked.

"i think we remember them enough to make it count," you replied.

she looked up at you, pupils wide, eyes full of summer and something softer.

"i don’t want to be forgotten," she whispered.

"you won’t," you promised.

because that was the night something began. not loudly, not clearly, but with a strum and a hum and a shared breath beneath stars.

you'd never play that song for anyone else again. not because it was sacred. but because it already belonged to her.

the first time you kissed, you could feel the earth shift beneath you.

her lips were soft, trembling against yours like they were learning how to be still. the air between you was thick, humming with the kind of tension that seemed too big for both of you, yet you moved closer, closer still, until it was only her and the night and the stillness of a world that didn’t seem to matter anymore.

her hands were on your face, fingers delicate as they traced your jaw, as if committing every contour to memory. and then her mouth was on yours again, and this time, the kiss was deep and slow, a kind of sweetness that burned hotter than you ever imagined. you ran your hands up her sides, fingers exploring the soft curve of her waist, mapping it to memory like it was the only thing you’d ever truly need to know.

you could feel the warmth of her skin through the thin fabric of her hoodie, the heat from her body seeping into yours. it spread like wildfire, quick and alive, until every nerve inside you was set alight. you held her so close—so impossibly close—that her breath mingled with yours, her heartbeat a steady thrum in the rhythm of your own.

god, you thought, as you kissed her deeper like she was air and you were addicted, letting yourself succumb and drown in her warmth. i have never felt so close to heaven as i have now with my lips on hers, and holding her so close to me that her warmth spills and spreads over me in waves, lighting every nerve lining of mine on fire.

“i think..." you whispered, your voice shaky with something raw, something tender. "i think i like you."

she smiled at you, the softest, saddest smile you'd ever seen, as if she already knew that what was happening between you was fleeting even before the hushed confession, a fleeting thing that would burn bright and quick before it was gone.

but for now, it didn’t matter.

for now, it was just you and her and the kind of kiss that felt like everything.

and for just a moment, you let yourself believe that everything was enough.

senior year rolled in with deadlines and early applications and the kind of weight that makes your bones feel older than they are. you and sophia partnered up for another media project. a short film. something dreamy, something about the in-between. something that felt like both of you.

one afternoon, everyone else had gone home, and it was just you and her in the empty classroom. she was sitting on the windowsill, the wind playing with the ends of her hair, painting her in soft light. you lifted the camcorder, pressed record. through the viewfinder, she looked unreal. backlit, untouchable. like something borrowed from a dream.

and it struck you again—how sophia's world was lyrical, and yours was cinematic. where she sat in that golden light, she looked like a line of poetry you’d never forget. but through your lens, she was also something else—framed, finite, fading even as you filmed. it hit you with a sharp kind of knowing: this would only ever be a memory. the footage would last, but the moment would not.

"what?" she asked, turning to you.

"nothing," you said, even though everything was happening all at once. because in that moment, with her framed by the sky and the silence, you knew. this wouldn’t last.

some people are moments. not destinations.

and sophia? she was a meteor. blazing. brief.

that footage still lives somewhere on your hard drive. you haven't played it in years. you’re not sure you could survive the sound of her voice saying your name in that soft, sun-drenched tone again.

some days, she was distant—her mind lost in melodies you hadn’t yet heard, her gaze turned inward, like she was looking at something beyond you. other days, she clung to you like gravity, as if the weight of her presence alone could pull you back from drifting too far into your own thoughts.

you started to learn the language of her moods: the way she tucked her hair behind her ear when she was uncertain, how she bit her lip when she wanted to say something but couldn’t quite find the words, as if speaking them would unravel something fragile that was better left unsaid.

one night, there was nothing but the quiet between you. the hum of distant cars, the weight of the stars above. you could feel her next to you, close but just out of reach in a way that made everything feel too heavy, too raw.

"i wish i could keep this forever," you said, your voice barely more than a breath. the words fell from your lips before you could stop them, the kind of wish you didn’t know you had until it was already there, full and aching.

“this?” she asked, her voice soft, laced with something you couldn’t quite place.

“you. us. this...whatever this is,” you murmured, unable to name it, afraid of the weight of what it could mean if you did.

she didn’t say anything for a moment, just looked at you, the kind of look that made you feel like she could see into the places you didn’t let anyone touch. her smile came slowly, tinged with something tender and sad, as if she already knew what was coming, what was always coming, but wasn’t ready to let go yet.

"you know some things aren’t meant to go on forever, even if they feel like they could."

you wanted to argue, to tell her that this—whatever this was—felt too big to be just a passing season. but the truth was, you didn’t know what it was. nothing about it was defined, and maybe that made it even more real.

"maybe," you whispered, the ache tightening in your chest. "but even a song gets stuck in your head for years."

and in that moment, with nothing else left to say, you both let the silence stretch between you.

when katseye began to bloom into the world’s consciousness, you watched her from the quiet. from the sidelines. where you had always been. tv interviews filtered through your screen late at night, their light flickering across your bedroom walls like ghosts you couldn’t name.

there she was—sophia—draped in gowns that shimmered like the sea on moonlit nights, lips painted the soft red of a closing day, laughter threaded with rehearsed charm. people loved her. how could they not?

but you listened closely—not to her words, but to her voice beneath the voice. and god, it still sounded like her. like the girl who once sang barefoot beneath the stars, who curled into your side with wind-tangled hair and asked if heaven could be a person. that voice hadn’t changed. it still held the ache of midnights, the tremble of wishes no one ever said out loud.

but her eyes—her eyes had learned something you hadn’t. they were no longer the windows that once opened only for you, soft and unguarded and impossibly full of wonder.

now they shimmered with something distant. practiced. eyes that had seen too much, learned how to hold just enough back to be adored but never known. she had become someone the world could look at, but never touch. someone who had learned how to let go.

you didn’t go to the farewell party that night of graduation.

you told people you were busy. that you forgot. but the truth was quieter than that, more fragile. you couldn’t stand the idea of watching her say goodbye to a place she always belonged to, to a chapter she had always meant to leave behind. you couldn’t watch her smile at the crowd and thank them for memories that brushed her skin.

so instead, you went to the hill. the hill that started it all.

alone.

the one you both used to sneak off to when the world felt too sharp. the one where you’d bring your guitar, and she’d bring her voice, and between the two of you, you created something unnamable. you didn’t bring the guitar this time. there was no need. even the silence was loud with her absence.

you lay on the grass and stared at the sky until the stars blurred, your throat aching with a name you refused to say out loud. but it was there. it always was. in the hush between crickets. in the wind brushing against your cheek like a goodbye you never received. her name lived in the quiet. in the stillness. in the ache.

and maybe that was love.

not the kind that stays, but the kind that marks you anyway.

and sometimes, on the loneliest nights—when the world feels too quiet, and the sky hangs heavy with all the things you never said—you still look up at the stars and wonder if they remember.

two girls. a camera. a song.

you wonder if the stars recall the softness of her voice beside you, how it curled into the night like incense smoke, how your name sounded different when she said it—more alive, more whole. you wonder if they remember how her hand brushed yours in the dark like it meant something, like everything unspoken between you was understood anyway.

one of you rose—like the crescendo of a chorus, like light breaking over a stage. the other stayed—quiet, still, holding onto the echoes.

you don’t talk anymore—an outcome that didn’t come as a surprise—not really. just likes on old photos buried beneath filters and captions that meant more at the time. sometimes a tagged memory surfaces from the past—a birthday, a laugh, a behind-the-scenes shot—and her username feels like a paper cut across your chest. she never shared it, and neither did you. a reminder. a timeline. a pause you never quite recovered from.

every once in a while, champagne coast plays—that damned song you’d both fought over whether to use for the short film or not, that cost hours of editing over something so petty you’d won anyway—. maybe in a café, maybe in the shuffle of a playlist you forgot you made.

the first few notes are enough. your breath stutters. and suddenly you're seventeen again, filming her by the window of an empty classroom, wind tugging gently at her hair, sunlight turning her into something god might’ve carved by hand.

you still remember the last day of filming. how she laughed at something you said. how you almost kissed her again, but didn’t.

how the golden hour touched her skin like it was saying goodbye too.

that day replays sometimes, in slow motion, like the final scene of a movie that never made it to theaters. you never really wrote an ending. just...stopped filming.

and maybe that’s the cruelest part. that there was no goodbye, no final bow. just the quiet unraveling of something too beautiful to hold.

you think about reaching out. just a text. just a line. this song still sounds like you.

but you don’t.

not because the love is gone—but because some stories are meant to live in the quiet. in glances. in songs. in memories. because letting go doesn’t mean you ever wanted to.

and sophia—sweet, golden, soft at the edges and sharp at the center—was never really yours. but she was real.

and that’s what you carry. not the goodbye. not the could-have-beens. just the memory. just the thought.

the way she looked at you once, when the camera was rolling and she didn’t know it—blissfully unaware she’d changed your life for the better or worse or in between, if that even made sense. the way your name lingered in her voice when no one else was listening.

the stars. the song. the stillness.

her.

and you. forever changed.

not by what lasted—but by what burned bright enough to leave a mark.

even now, you still look up. you find the time to. and sometimes, she’s still there. in the sky. in the silence. in the memory. like light you never forgot how to follow.

masterlist.

— please do not repost, copy, translate, or take from my work in any way without permission. thank you! xx

#cinnamanz's works .ᐟ #cinnamanz's navi .ᐟ #divider by kodaswrld #katseye #katseye x reader #wlw #katseye x female reader #sophia laforteza katseye #sophia laforteza x female reader #sophia x female reader #sophia katseye #sophia laforteza x reader #sophia x reader #sophia laforteza #gxg

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