#i hope they turn this around next episode

[therealcocoshady]

Kinktober - Day 18 - Kneeling

Kinktober 2024 Masterlist

A/N : So... Here is the Kinktober episode for the Day 18 "Kneeling" prompt. It also happens to be a sequel to the Day 3 "Pet play" prompt. It is not necessarily smutty but it might actually be one of my kinkiest works so far... Anyway, I hope you enjoy it. And that you don't judge me too much either.

CW : BDSM - D/S Relationship - Kneeling

Before the « pet play » bet, you thought your life would go back to normal after you were done. Except it didn’t. There were a couple of reasons for that. First of all, you had found yourself finding the experience rather enjoyable. There was something about surrendering control to someone else. In your everyday life, you wear the kind of person who tried to stay on top of everything, often to the point of exhaustion. Allowing Marshall to take control over the simplest things had proved to be soothing. It had quieted the noise in your brain in a way you never thought would be possible. You never thought you’d be able to allow someone to boss you around, let alone find it enjoyable. But it was Marshall, someone you’d known for what felt like ages. Someone you were close to and trusted. Maybe he was the one who had managed to turn this into something enjoyable. 

You had been almost surprised at how caring he could be. Before that weekend, he’d been the kind of friend you made dumb jokes with, the one who put up with your chaotic energy. But seeing that side of him… it had felt special. He seemed in his element and, though he’d been in control the whole time, the whole thing had been intimate. So intimate, in fact, that it ended with the two of you in bed. The whole thing was meant to be platonic at first but something had shifted. Sure, there had been attraction before, but none of you had acted on it. You’d always told yourself that just because he was attractive didn’t mean it would be a good idea. But that weekend, the chemistry had been evident and you’d felt a shift, some sort of certainty that he might actually be able to handle you. And he proved more than up to the challenge. That night spent together had been amazing. For the first time in years - maybe ever - you had been in a serene headspace. No intrusive thoughts taking over in the middle of the deed, no anxiety, no feeling self-conscious… and actual pleasure. Unlike previous partners, that man had actually focused on you, attentive to each one of your reactions, able to interpret every moan, every whimper. 

For some reason, you had always thought he’d be the kind to be selfish in bed but you were happy to say that he proved you wrong. The whole night, he dedicated himself to pleasuring you. You had lost counts of your orgasms and, if you were honest, the night was kind of blurry. You mostly remembered the grounding feeling of his hand on your chest and him calling you a good girl. In the following days, the memory of these two words, spoken softly in his husky voice had kept you warm. His tone echoed through your mind and one thing was for sure : you wanted more of whatever it was that had made you feel so good. 

However, the next time you saw Marshall, it became clear that it was easier for him to go back to the way things were. You were hanging out with your group of friends and he greeted you as usual, made small talk the way he always had, and joked around as if nothing had happened. It almost broke your heart. You thought you had both felt that chemistry, but obviously, you were wrong. You were a little gutted, if you were honest. The way he had cupped your cheek right before saying goodbye the morning you left his place, right after a passionate night, had made you feel like he’d definitely want it to happen again. And you absolutely thought he’d make a move, a few weeks later, when he invited you to his place so that you could actually read his prized comic book. He did no such thing. A couple of weeks in, you were resigned : it had been a one time thing. And if you wanted to explore more, you’d have to look for someone else. You were a little intimidated by it, at first, but one evening, after a couple of glasses of wine, you got online and searched for more information. You quickly went down the rabbit hole and ended up spending two days browsing subreddits, before eventually signing up for some social media website that allowed people to connect over BDSM-related stuff. The idea was to connect with people from your area, with whom you might give it a try, but you couldn’t actually bring yourself to take part to the conversations going on there. You were very much an introvert and, though you’d given online dating a try, it seemed like adding a kinky component to it was too much for your nerves to handle. You were sure that you’d enjoy exploring submission further, that finding a dom would help quiet the noise in your head. After all, Marshall had done it. But the people putting listings online, advertising that they were looking for a submissive, made it seem like it required some ivy league-level qualifications. And though Marshall had done a pretty decent job explaining the basics to you, you didn’t feel like you had what it takes. You were ready to give up on the idea when you came across a post promoting a « networking » event in Detroit, in some underground club you’d never heard of. You considered going but, once again, anxiety took over. And it wasn’t exactly as if you could ask a friend to come with you. Unless… 

You mustered up the courage of asking Marshall a few days later, while you were hanging out at his place with a couple of other friends. He went to the kitchen to grab a drink and you decided to follow him, in order to have some privacy. « So… Do you have any plans for next weekend ? » you asked innocently as he grabbed a Red Bull from the fridge. « Nothing definite, yet. Why ? » he replied with a raised eyebrow. «  Well, there is, um, a thing, and I’m thinking of going, but I’m not sure and it’s kind of- I was actually wondering if you’d come with me. But, you know, if you have plans, that’s fine. » you nervously babbled. God, you felt ridiculous. You were a grown woman, trying to connect with people over kinky shit and there you were, asking your fiftysomething year-old friend to basically hold your hand because you were nervous. « what thing ? » he asked, obviously not getting what you were referring to. In his defense, you had done a pretty bad job at getting your point across. « An event » you replied. « What event ? » he asked again before taking a sip of his drink. « it’s a… um… well I suppose you could say it’s a munch » you almost whispered. He stared at you silently for a couple of seconds and you felt compelled to elaborate. « I wanted to meet a… well you know, a dom, but it’s so nerve-wracking and I figured maybe having someone who’s been there before would help » you hummed. He kept on staring at you, without so much as blinking and definitely adding to your nervousness. « But, well, maybe going there with a friend wouldn’t be a good look… I mean, I haven’t exactly researched the etiquette or dress code of these events so, I don’t know, really… » you eventually said. The remark made him chuckle and he gave you a smile, as well as a reassuring squeeze of your shoulder. « First of all, breathe. Also, how about we talk about it later, after everyone leaves ? » he said calmly. You swallowed dryly and nodded. 

For the next two hours, you stayed mostly silent. Maybe asking him to go with you was a mistake. Maybe he thought that you giving this whole thing a try was stupid. He was one of your closest friends but you knew he could sometimes turn into a judgy prick. As the others left, you remained on the couch, nervously biting your lip. He came to sit on a chair opposite from you. « So… you want to go to a munch » he said with a smirk. You nodded, though you avoided his gaze. « Well I tried signing up on a website to meet people but… it’s absolutely terrifying. And I thought that a munch might be better but I think that’s even worse » you admitted. He calmly nodded. « You’re too anxious » he said matter-of-factly. « I mean… yeah. It’s nerve-wracking, you know ? » you replied and he nodded. « So, um, how do you meet people ? » you asked. He gave you a smile and leaned back in his chair. « Well, not at munches » he chuckled. « I mean, obviously, I can’t take the risk of someone spotting me in that kind of event » he explained. « I didn’t think about that. I shouldn’t have asked… » you started but he cut you. « Don’t worry about it. Well… I met my first sub kind of randomly. Then I gave the online thing a try but I didn’t really like it so now I use a service » he explained. You raised an eyebrow. « a service ? » you asked. « Basically a matchmaker » he shrugged. You hummed, thinking to yourself that it made sense. After all, you knew how anxious he could get about going places and, since he wasn’t a big fan of technology, opting for a matchmaking service made sense. « So… how does it work ? » you asked with a hint of curiosity, wondering if maybe you should look into something similar. « I give my requirements and if they have someone that fits the bill, they take care of the whole thing for me. NDA, meeting… then, I can do my own vetting. » he explained calmly and you nodded. And before you could even talk, he answered your question. « That type of service caters to experienced people, though » he warned.  You hummed and he could immediately sense the disappointment. He placed his drink on the coffee table and stared at you. « Anyway. Back to you… you’re looking for a dom » he stated. « Do you know what you’re looking for exactly ? ». 

You stayed silent for a couple of seconds and shrugged nervously. « I’d like to give it a try. You know, when we made that bet, I didn’t expect to enjoy it, but… I did. Not the pet aspect but being guided. So, I thought I’d … explore. » you said quietly. As you spoke, you could see something change in his eyes, some sort of interest. « what did you like ? » he asked in a low voice. « I felt… oddly at peace. As if the noise in my head disappeared. And…I didn’t mind having someone directive in bed » you admitted. He let out a low chuckle and smiled at you. « How about having someone being directive out of bed ? » he asked with a grin. « well, I suppose my boss wouldn’t mind me being better at following orders » you said with a shy smile. « I see » he hummed. The way he looked at you, as if he could see inside your mind, had your heart racing. Mentioning what had happened weeks ago, how it made you feel, had you feeling nervous. « I guess I’m just scared I might not feel as safe with someone else » you admitted. « Why look for someone else then ? » he asked with a slight smirk. You stared at him, almost dumbfounded. « Well, I- you didn’t- I mean… I assumed you would have offered if- you know » you nervously babbled. He let out a small scoff and got up, before sitting next to you. « all you had to do was ask » he said softly. « Easier said than done » you pointed out as you looked down. He smiled and placed a reassuring hand on your knee. « Y/N, it’s me. You know I don’t bite. The worse that could have happened is me declining. » he said gently and you nodded, still looking down. « The reason I didn’t offer anything is because I didn’t want to turn what happened to my advantage » he explained. « But… you enjoyed it ? » you asked. « you know I did » he scoffed. You nodded again as memories of that weekend came to mind. You remembered the way he kissed you, the way he took the lead in the bedroom, guiding you, taking control while always making sure you were alright. « So… would you… be interested ? » you asked in almost a whisper. « Interested in ? » he asked with a smile. You sighed and looked at him dead in the eyes. He knew what you meant and you knew it as well. « I think it’s important that you learn to use your words. Say what you mean. Ask for what you want. » he added with a smirk. You rolled your eyes at him. « Would you be interested in showing me more… sir ? » you asked as you looked into his eyes. He let out a chuckle and eventually nodded. « Yeah. We could give it a try » he hummed. « you free next weekend ? ». 

You gave him a smile, reassured to know that he had enjoyed your weekend together as much as you did and was willing to explore it further. « I am. I’m also free tomorrow though » you said innocently, making him chuckle and shake his head. « Can’t, tomorrow. Also, I’ll need to prepare stuff. But come next weekend and I’ll show you…  more » he said with a warm smile. 

Next weekend couldn’t come fast enough. But when it did, you were both nervous and excited. Beforehand, Marshall had texted you to confirm that you were still up for it, and gave you a few packing instructions. So far, nothing kinky. He just told you to pack your toiletries, meds, pajamas, an outfit you felt comfortable in and another one that was dressier - preferably a dress with high heels. When you arrived at his place, he greeted you with a hug and led you to the dining room. « So, this weekend is going to be a little different from what we did last time » he warned. « Obviously, for the sake of the bet, we kept it simple and easy last time. But this time, you’re going to get a better picture of what being a sub is like. Meaning that it’s not going to be me taking care of you. I mean, I will, that’s part of my job as a dom. But as a sub, you’re going to serve me. » he explained. You nodded and waited for further instruction. « Obviously, both of us have the right to stop everything at any moment. But since today is about showing you more, I thought I would do what I usually do with the subs I’m vetting, so I’ll put you to work right away. That’s ok with you ? » he asked. You nodded again, though this time, you felt a knot in your stomach. You weren’t quite sure what he meant by ‘putting you to work’. He got up and grabbed an envelope that was already on the table, before handing it to you. « Your first assignment will be pretty simple : paperwork. There’s an NDA I’m going to need you to sign. Obviously, we’re friends and I trust you, but this is standard procedure for everyone I’m seeing, so subs are no exception. There’s also forms I want you to fill in. Take your time and come to the movie room when you’re done. And feel free to come if you have any questions, ok ?» he added. He got up and quietly stared at you as you started to inspect the paperwork. Before leaving the room, he cupped your face and gave you a smile. 

You quickly read the NDA before signing it. You didn’t give it too much thought. If anything, you were fine with paperwork protecting the both of you. Of course, the consequences of anyone discovering what you were up to would be disastrous for his reputation but, even though you weren’t a public figure, you didn’t exactly want anyone to know you were involved in something BDSM-related. Especially not with one of your closest friends. For some reason, signing the NDA made it clear in your mind that you were crossing a line in your friendship. And it became even clearer as you glanced at the forms. It was basically a spreadsheet you needed to fill, regarding what you were ok with, what you’d experienced before, as well as your limits (both hard and soft). The least you could say is that the whole thing was rather detailed. You took your time to fill everything, doing some occasional googling on your phone when you needed clarification regarding some of the practices listed. You felt a little apprehensive at the idea that Marshall would be seeing this. Of course, it made sense. He had made it quite clear that the whole thing about consent and safety. But the whole form-filling felt both intimate and clinical at the same time. After a while, you went to find him in the movie room, where he was lounging in front of some  random TV show. « All good ? » he asked. « Yeah. All good. » you hummed as you handed him the small stack of paper. « That was… Dense. » you observed. He chuckled and nodded. « Told you I was putting you to work. I know it’s not the most fun but that’s an important part » he explained. You nodded and looked at him with eyes full of questions. « So… Do I get to see your checklist too ? » you asked innocently. He shook his head. « No need. What matters is your checklist. I mean, if there’s anything on there that I’m not ok with, even if you said you were fine with it, we won’t do it. But as the dom, it’s my job to tailor the whole thing to you and your needs. Not the other way around. ». He stared at you intently, his gaze conveying a seriousness you didn’t see too often. « But…  I don’t get to know what you’re into ? » you asked with a smile and a raised eyebrow. « What you need to know, you will find out soon enough » he assured with a smirk. « But for now, we have something else to focus on. Something important, actually ». 

There was a moment of silence. He got up from the couch, paused the TV show and faced you. You were in the middle of the room, which was dimly lit, with shadows that danced across the walls. Just like the rest of his house, it felt cozy and luxurious. You’d been there so often that, most of the time, you weren’t even aware of your surroundings. But now, you seemed to notice every detail. Your heart was racing in your chest. Marshall placed a gentle hand on your shoulder. « Kneel for me, please » he ordered quietly. You stared at him for a second before doing as you were told. You knelt at the center of the room, your knees pressing into the soft carpet beneath you. He gently directed you, ordering you to rest your palms on your things and keep your head down. You could feel your fingers tremble slightly and you tried your best to steady your breathing. You could hear him pace behind you, his presence filling the room. You had both agreed that this weekend would be some sort of training, an opportunity for you to see more. Your thoughts were swirling in anticipation. You had no idea what was coming next but you trusted him. Finally, he spoke, his voice low and commanding, cutting through the stillness like a blade.

« Kneeling is more than just a position, Y/N, » Marshall said, stepping into your line of sight, his eyes fixed on you. « It’s a reminder of who holds the power, of who’s in control. » Your breath caught in your throat. His voice alone made you feel small, not in a way that diminished you, but in a way that made you aware of how much you were surrendering to him. It wasn’t just about kneeling—it was about giving yourself over to him completely, about letting go of your own control. Marshall crouched down in front of you, his eyes meeting yours for the first time. There was a seriousness in his gaze, but also a hint of something else—something that spoke of patience, of care. « When you kneel for me,” he continued, “it’s not just a physical act. It’s a symbol of trust. You’re giving me your submission, and in return, I’m giving you my protection, my guidance. Do you understand that? »

You nodded, your throat tight. « Yes… Sir, » you whispered, voice trembling slightly. He tilted his head, watching you carefully, a hint of a smile tugging at his lips, though the serious frown remained.  « Words are easy, Y/N. I need to know you feel it. That you believe it. » Your gaze faltered for a moment, your mind racing. You had wanted this—craved the sense of belonging, of purpose—but now that you were here, the weight of it all pressed down on you. You didn’t want to disappoint him. You didn’t want to fail. « Look at me, » he said, his voice softer now. You lifted your eyes to meet his again, and when you did, you saw the intensity in them—the same intensity you saw in him whenever you witnessed him at work, in the studio or on stage, in the lyrics he rapped with fire and conviction. But this wasn’t the Marshall the world knew. This was the man who was about to take you under his control, and the depth of his focus on you was overwhelming. « I need you to remember something, » he said slowly, his hand brushing along your jawline, making you shiver. « When you kneel, it’s a choice. You’re choosing to trust me. You’re choosing to give me control. But once you make that choice, Y/N, you don’t get to question it. You don’t get to doubt it. When you’re down here, at my feet, I am in control. Understand? »

His thumb traced your lower lip, the touch almost tender, and yet it held a kind of power that made your stomach tighten. You felt the weight of his words, of what he was asking of you. It wasn’t just about the physical act of kneeling—it was about giving him your mind, will and obedience. « Yes, Sir, » you whispered again, but this time, there was more certainty in your voice. « Good girl, » he murmured, his eyes never leaving yours. The praise made your heart flutter, warmth spreading through you at his approval. Just like that weekend, weeks ago, when you had played the role of his pet. Marshall stood slowly, towering over you as he resumed pacing, his presence once again commanding the space around you. « When I say kneel, you drop to your knees without hesitation. It doesn’t matter where we are or what you’re doing. When I say the word, you obey. No questions, no second-guessing. » You nodded, your body already responding to the firmness in his voice. You could feel the power shift between you, the way his dominance seeped into every word, every movement. « Right now, you’re learning what it means to submit to me, » he continued, stopping in front of you again. « And I want you to understand something important—this isn’t just about control. It’s about connection. When you kneel, you’re not just giving up your power. You’re giving me something precious. And in return, I take care of you. I help you thrive. »

His words were grounding, filling you with a sense of calm amidst the uncertainty. You weren’t just kneeling for him because he demanded it—you were kneeling because you wanted to. Because you trusted him to quiet the noise in your head. Marshall circled you, his fingers brushing over your shoulder as he passed, sending a shiver down your spine. « Keep your eyes down, » he ordered, and you quickly dropped your gaze to the floor again. He stopped behind you, close enough that you could feel his breath on the back of your neck. « You’re mine, Y/N. When you’re here, in this position, I need you to remember that. You don’t need to think. You don’t need to worry. All you need to do is obey. »

Your pulse quickened at his words, a mixture of anticipation and fear swirling in your chest. You could feel the weight of his dominance pressing down on you, but it wasn’t suffocating. It was freeing. « I’m the one in control, » he said firmly. « And when you’re with me, like this, I will always be in control. Do you trust me with that? » You nodded, your voice soft but certain. « Yes, Sir. » Marshall moved back around to face you, crouching down once more so that your eyes and his were level. His hand cupped your chin, tilting your head slightly upward. « Good. Then let’s begin. »

And with that, you felt the world around you shift. You were no longer just yourself—you were his. Surrendering to him, to his control, was the first step in a new journey and you could feel it.

[sugdenlovesdingle]

TK and Carlos meet Tommy and Buck for the first time since the crossover episode

I'm not that good with crossovers but I hope you like it

---

"So you met them fighting wildfires here in Texas? When we live in the wildfire state?" Tommy asked as they drove through down town Austin.

Buck shrugged.

"It was pretty bad. They needed all the help they could get." he quickly glanced at Tommy "Hen and TK's captain actually went missing. Their helicopter crashed. We stole a fire truck to rescue them."

"You seem to do a lot of that, don't you? I'm kind of hurt you've never stolen one for me." Tommy teased.

"Next time I steal a truck, I promise it'll be for you." Evan vowed and held up two fingers. "Scout's honour."

Tommy laughed.

"That doesn't count if you were never actually a boyscout."

"How do you know I was never a scout? I had a lot of hobbies as a kid."

"Hmm. I know. But Maddie would have shown me the pictures by now if you had."

Evan tilted his head in his direction to signal he had a point.

"I'm sure you would have been adorable in the uniform." Tommy told him and brushed a kiss over the knuckles of Evan's hand he was holding.

"Damn right I would have!" he joked as he pulled into a free parking space near an apartment building. "Ok this should be it." He double checked the address as they walked up to the front door. He was excited to meet up with TK again but also slightly nervous. "We've kept in touch via insta and text and stuff." he told Tommy. "But I've never actually met his husband. I was supposed to go to their wedding... but then I got struck by lightning."

"Which seems like a valid reason to skip a wedding." Tommy said, taking his hand. "But you are the most accident prone person I know. Even if you were a cat your nine lives would be close to running out by now." he joked.

Just as Evan was about to ring the doorbell, someone called out his name behind them.

They turned around and saw a guy of around Evan's age in some kind of uniform walk up to them, with a large Bernese Mountain Dog happily following behind.

"TK! Hey! Good to see you, man." Tommy hung back as Evan let go of his hand to hug his friend. "Are we early?" he gestured at TK's uniform.

"No, don't worry about it, it's fine. I just took Buttercup out for a walk first before we went up."

"Is he yours?" Tommy asked, scratching the dog behind its ears as it sniffed his pockets.

"My dad's. But he's away visiting family for a couple of days so he stays with us." TK explained. "And you must be Buck's hot pilot."

Tommy laughed and shook TK's hand while Evan's face turned an adorable shade of pink.

"Just Tommy is fine." He said and turned to Evan. "Just how many people have you told about me as the hot pilot?"

"I...Well... I just... I mean... Y-you are a hot pilot." Evan stammered.

"Hey, I get it." TK said, patting his shoulder. "I married a cowboy and a cop in one. A very hot one too."

They followed TK into the building and they took the lift up to their floor.

"Carlos is making ropa vieja from his grandmother's recipe. He's planned a whole three course meal."

"You didn't have to go through all of this trouble for us." Evan said but TK waved his comment away before opening a sliding door. "It's fine. He loves to cook. Babe, I ran into Buck and Tommy downstairs."

An attractive man Tommy recognised from the pictures Evan had shown him, came to greet them at the door. He kissed TK and unclipped the dog's leash before turning to Buck and Tommy.

"Hey guys, come on in. I'm Carlos, TK's husband. Nice to finally meet you. I've heard a lot about you. Both of you."

"I might have called TK for advice when I was freaking out before our first date." Evan explained.

"And looking at you two now, it was pretty good advice." TK pointed out and ushered them further into the loft.

The place was nice. Stylish yet homey at the same time. TK quickly changed out of his uniform while Buttercup decided Tommy was his new favourite person in the world and draped himself over his lap, and Evan ended up helping Carlos in the kitchen.

"Just push him away if he bothers you." TK gestured to the dog staring lovingly at Tommy while he pet him. "He can get a little clingy."

"It's fine, I don't mind. Our neighbours had a Saint Bernard when I was a kid, I was always over at their place to play with it. This one brings back memories, don't you buddy?" he directed the last part at Buttercup before glancing around the loft again, eyes landing on a large terrarium. "What's in there?" he asked and TK's eyes lit up.

"That. is Lou. Louis the second. He's our lizard. Well... bearded dragon." TK stood up and opened the terrarium, moving a few things around, and lifting a lizard up out of it. "Carlos bought him for me, even though he's scared of him."

"I'm not scared of Lou. I just didn't want a wild flesh eating lizard loose in our apartment."

"I feel like there's a story there." Tommy prompted.

"Carlos is overreacting." TK insisted but didn't elaborate."Lou is actually really friendly and smart. And he likes Buttercup."

"And Buttercup was scared of him the first time they met." Carlos added.

Tommy listened to TK talk about the bearded dragon and made a mental note to look into where and how to possibly get one in LA. He'd have to talk to Evan about it but he had a feeling he'd be on board.

They spent the rest of the night swapping work stories while enjoying their dinner, and making plans for the rest of Buck and Tommy's time in Austin.

"I'll text you the details for that club I mentioned. You can meet the rest of our friends." TK promised Buck as he and Carlos walked him and Tommy to the door.

"And we'll meet in the park at noon tomorrow for the yoga class. I have an extra mat if you need it." Carlos told Tommy. The two had discovered a mutual love for yoga and agreed to go to Carlos' regular class together.

"And we can sit back and enjoy the view." TK said, bumping his shoulder against Buck's. "I'll bring virgin mojitos."

[grilledcheese-savage]

Opposites Detract AU part 2

I left some things out but here’s a clearer picture of what the rest of the story would have been like.

Pls read the og post right here

https://www.tumblr.com/grilledcheese-savage/763805500110487552/new-au-idea-opposites-detract-i-came-up-with-this

For some reason it won’t let me link it normally

Ok so as you can see in the picture, Marinette is Multimouse… but is that all she is?

For the first “season” or less, she is a civilian. She is free to live her life normally without having to take any unnecessary risks. Until she runs into this old man (master fu) and helps him out. I always thought this would be during feast or a situation like that, where either he’s in turtle hero form and she acts as a shield for him, or helps him like the first episode as a civilian. Either way, Master fu remembers this. He tests her more than he did chat noir and la coccinelle because it turned out pretty poor last time. He has paranoia. But Marinette is a pure soul so he leads her to his shop and reveals the miraculous to her eventually, UNBEKNOWNST TO CHAT NOIR AND LA COCCINELLE. Because while he was hoping the next guardian would have been ladybug, he needed a person he could truely trust. And that turned out to be Marinette. She becomes the guardian for the same reasons in the original, it becomes to dangerous for him to continue and he loses his memory. But Marinette continues to work in his shop (a cover for guardian duties).

Lila and Adrien also “work” at his antique shop but neither of them know she’s the new guardian (yet) I’m not sure if they’d find out immediately after master fu has to quit, or Marinette keeps up the charade a little longer. I think it’s more fun to imagine her knowing more than she let on.

When she meets master fu at first and starts training under him, she doesn’t get to keep a miraculous. She works under a lot more conditions than the others do since her job keeping secrets is incredibly important and fu still struggles to trust her. Eventually she proves herself of course, but the pressure of being guardian is so much to handle.

Adrien was going to be a guardian at first since he gained more of Fu’s trust than Lila, but since he has the Kwami of destruction, just like that other guardian man that I can’t remember the name of, they all have some kind of bias against them. He couldn’t trust him not to take the miraculous of the ladybug and grant a wish, even if he kept that from him. He also just doesn’t get along with La coccinelle at all, so he couldn’t have someone with a bias be guardian (he’s hypocritical).

More about Adrien: As cat noir he doesn’t get to be his flirtatious persona he originally has, instead he takes on a more serious altruistic approach since he is pretty hated unanimously by the public. His persona becomes more of a lie, as he tries to undo all of the hatred that came from the destruction of Paris that first day. Think of goro akechi in persona 5; he learns to distain his constant visual presence, the fact on and off the job he is constantly being watched. There’s not a moment that either one of his selves is on tv. And because he’s being filmed there are quick moments the news capture of him being kind to the public and turning around with a resentful face on. He doesn’t totally get to enjoy his freedom as chat noir since the police always try to capture him. But they fail to, and there’s a still a small few of fans of theirs that defend them.

Basically he gets cancelled a lot. 😅

La coccinelle is allowed to pick a miraculous to help her ONE TIME by Master fu, and she picked Chloe Bougeious with the bee miraculous. Chloe accepted and caused a lot of mayhem. Which was fixed. But after that was when he met Marinette and started planning defense and strategy with her. So the next time they needed help, he sent Marinette as multimouse which pissed Lila off because it made her think master fu still didn’t believe she could handle it. When really it was a mix of both not trusting her, and the fact that Marinette was prepared for a lot longer then she was.

This makes lila have a one-sided beef with multimouse, even though she’s secretly her civilian crush Marinette. Love square? Ehh. What Lila doesn’t realize is behind the scenes Marinette doesn’t hold any ill-will for Coccinelle. In fact, she defends her to master fu and convinces him to give Lila more freedom more often. But of course, doesn’t know this. And the unspoken beef continues.

Now, for Kagami and Luka’s place in this story.

While Marinette is a civilian she meets Luka and they become friends very quickly. Same with Adrien and kagami. But at this point in time, Adrien doesn’t really have a crush on kagami, since the slippery slope of coincidences caused Adrien to have a crush on Marinette first. Kagami however seems to be the only one who sees this darkness brewing in Adrien (emo I know, but I digress) Kagami, does in fact, gain a crush on Adrien because she thinks he’s like her- lost in this world, without a lot of friends to help.

Luka and Marinette however, still get together but after Marinette becomes a guardian. They don’t last very long because of this, because her constant work between the bakery, the antique shop, guardianship etc. makes her late to everything they plan to do together. Luka ends things believing that Marinette only likes him as a friend and that’s why she puts work ahead of him everytime. This breaks Marinette’s heart, even though she understands, so she accidentally ends up saying in front of Adrien that she’s not dating anymore, and is focusing on her career. Marinette is oblivious to the fact that both lila and Adrien have a crush on her.

Marinette sees that Luka is responsible and puts his feelings aside for the greater good and chooses him to have the snake miraculous part time. When she is multimouse, she’s pretty awkward around him since things left off kind of sad, but since Superion doesn’t know that Marinette is multimouse, he just assumes she’s shy or doesn’t like him. This is obviously not true. In fact, Luka becomes the more “chat noir” type in this, teasing the group and very lightly flirting with her. BECAUSE IT WOULD BE FUNNY AND UNPREDICTABLE. I see him being very suave with his harp. Like every musician is lol.

Kagami and Adrien don’t work out either, because deep down, even if he is getting more resentful of being pushed around and molded into a person he doesn’t know, he still is naturally kind hearted and knows that his resentment won’t last….. hopefully. And Kagami only has that, and fencing in common with him, at least in this universe so they stay friends. Plus she meets Felix anyways.

Speaking of Felix. He.. generally stays the same? Here’s the difference, when he say them on the news on day he judged them. Then when he saw/ met more of chat noir, he started to believe that they were like him and saw the world the same way as he did and starts to commit similar atrocities in the show with the peacock miraculous in hopes that since they were the same, they’d leave him be.

Since chat noir is growing increasingly disdainful, he more or less does want to leave him alone, but the part of him that knows it’s his duty wins every time since he is , still, a little more responsible in this than the show.

Also a reminder, Adrien doesn’t start out like this, he’s still the show’s version at the beginning, he just changes with every situation they find themselves in. So when Felix eventually comes to meet him, he assumes Adrien is the same as always- a goody two shoes who does what he’s told. That couldn’t be further from the truth 😂

Adrien is similar to Felix but still mostly tries to act like his old self, since it’s easier and gets him places. But when Felix comes over and is cold, Adrien gets frustrated and his resentful, chat noir self comes to life. Felix was so stunned by the slip up that he just, shut up. And left. Very confused.

Anyways I have many different ways of imagining Felix seeing the more contemptuous Adrien. He becomes much more interested in him. He wants to learn more, because maybe he’s not alone.

Idk what do you guys think? Should Adrien be the guardian? What would Alya’s role be? Pls reblog more ideas and add on to the AU!

Thanks!

[chelledoggo]

given the state of... things... i wanna really dissect the ending of episode 2 of TADC.

old news, yeah. but... i think the message of this scene hits harder in this time.

obvious spoiler warning below the cut!!! (also religion CW since i share a Bible verse at the end.)

so by now you probably know the ending all too well.

Pomni made a new friend in Gummigoo, hoping to help him find a better life in the circus... only to watch him be unceremoniously blasted into confetti by the well-meaning but completely tactless Caine.

and of course Pomni is understandably traumatized, going into absolute hysterics.

Caine, the oblivious godlike AI in charge of the show, believes he was just keeping things safe and in order, and shows no real empathy as he teleports himself out of the situation.

Pomni just stands there. dissociating. confused. God only knows what thoughts are going through her mind right now.

the ever-nurturing Ragatha, who's made it her mission to make sure everyone else is as happy as possible, tries to step in and raise Pomni's spirits.

of course, none of this is of any consolation to Pomni. like... how could it be? she watched her friend (presumably) die.

it's like those who believe in an afterlife watching someone die in front of them. even with that little bit of hope and comfort that you may one day see them again, that can't erase the horror you bore witness to.

Pomni stands there unresponsive. Ragatha feels helpless to comfort her.

Zooble approaches, letting Ragatha know that they've finished preparations for Kaufmo's funeral...

Ragatha turns to Pomni and extends an invitation.

this is enough to bring Pomni out of her traumatized stupor.

Ragatha explains the custom that the circus crew developed themselves. whenever a friend abstracts, they hold a "funeral" service to honor them.

now Pomni never knew Kaufmo. he abstracted just before Pomni entered the circus. they never had a chance to meet.

and yet Ragatha still invites Pomni to mourn him along with the rest of the humans.

Ragatha realizes that hopeful platitudes won't really do anything at this time. so instead she opens to her new friend a safe space to grieve.

Pomni accepts the invitation. she stands before the "casket" of a perfect stranger, unsure of what to think.

Ragatha takes her place next to the casket, allowing herself the rare opportunity to express vulnerability around the people she usually puts on a brave face for.

Pomni watches and listens as each of these people she'd only met yesterday share their eulogies for Kaufmo.

they share their experiences. their happy moments with their abstracted friend. and, most importantly, they share their grief and anguish.

Pomni obviously can't relate to any of these stories of Kaufmo. she never knew him.

but that's not the point.

the point is that she's witnessing the camaraderie of the humans in a way she never could before.

she's witnessing them in a vulnerable moment where they can break their goofy facades. and, more importantly, she's witnessing just how deeply these people love and care for each other.

brotherhood doesn't always take the form of trying to fix everyone's pain and cheer each other up. sometimes brotherhood is simply allowing those you care for to feel their feelings without judgement, and to hurt along with them.

and that's when it hits Pomni for the first time.

she's Not Alone

i think this scene hits harder after... recent events.

it's okay to feel the way you feel right now. it's okay to be anxious, scared, angry. it's okay, for right now, to feel... hopeless.

hope will come eventually. but oftentimes grief has to come first.

and that's okay. it's in the moments of communal despair that the seeds of hope are planted.

times of fear and suffering are inevitable. a perfectly happy outcome can't always be guaranteed. but comfort exists even in grief.

so take your time.

hope has no deadline. rest assured that it WILL come eventually, but don't rush or force it.

rest.

feel your feelings.

find those who can lament with you.

find those who need you to lament with them.

we should let ourselves hurt together today. and then we can hope together tomorrow.

"Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep." - Romans 12:15 (NRSVUE)

[highfiveheroes]

the only thought on the episode i will say tonight is this: i’m really disappointed that i’m supposed to be rooting for a set of bullies.

say what you will about the bad kids, they’ve been nasty this season, with a few standouts here and there—notably fabian, who has gone out of his way to make amends and friendships with people outside of the bad kids. but hearing the way they talk about other characters? the way adaine and kristen and gorgug were straight up bullying the rat grinders in a lot of situations? not saying the rat grinders weren’t being antagonistic in their own right, and i fully understand this is a comedy show of people sitting around a table making jokes and rolling dice. but compared to how much connection i had with the bad kids in say, season one or two, when they were going out of their way to be nice to people more often than they were being straight up rude and egging people on…

idk man. something about the bad kids this season isn’t sitting right with me anymore. and i’m sad.

[jq37]

Descendants: The Rise of Red is kind of a bizarre movie to talk about critically because, imo, it almost doesn't make sense to talk about it in the usual terms of good vs bad or enjoyable vs not enjoyable when the way more obvious tension is finished vs unfinished.

Because, more than any other movie I've ever seen, it does *not* read as a full movie. And I don't mean in a "this movie has a cliffhanger" kind of way. The Empire Strikes Back and Across the Spiderverse fit that description. They end on big dramatic cliffhangers that point to a resolution in the third installment.

But Rise of Red just sets all this stuff up and then...ends without concluding anything. It doesn't feel like the first movie in a trilogy (or duology). It feels like the first act of a two-act musical. It very specifically reminds me of the end of the first act of Into the Woods where all the main characters sing the song Ever After about how they all fixed their problems with magic and nothing bad will ever happen to them again and then the narrator ominously says "To be continued" before the curtain drops. But in Into the Woods you know there's a second act and this movie wasn't sold as the first act of a bigger story. Like sure, it has the, "You didn't think this was the end" tag at the end like all the other movies, but those movies were complete, self-contained stories even though they had sequels. This was NOT a full story. It's half of one story.

Like, if we're supposed to take this as a full story, there are so many bizarre choices:

Why did they make sure to mention that Cinderella and Charming fell in love at the ball at the top if it wasn't meant to set up Back to the Future style, "Oh no, I accidentally got my mom banned from the ball so she's not gonna fall in love with Dad and I won't be born" shenanigans?

Why did Maddox very pointedly have that bit about "you could lose your mom completely" if that was never going to come into play? Red never did anything to endanger Bridget or endanger her own birth so it doesn't make sense as a warning in that way.

Why was there all this focus on this Carrie on prom night moment for Bridget if we LITERALLY NEVER SAW CASTLECOMING? Why dance around this moment and talk about it all cloak and dagger with no specificity if they weren't building up to some big reveal that it wasn't as straightforward as it seemed? And like, they leaned in HARD with making Bridget the nicest, sweetest, cotton candy princess as a teen so I need WAY more than, "She got pranked by known bullies she's been enduring with a smile very handily up to this point" to buy that she went from that to "murderous dictator". And even if she did become murderous, I find it insanely hard to believe that she'd include her best and only friend on the list of people she wants to suffer unless there was a betrayal. I find it INSANE that there wasn't a falling out scene at any point in this movie with how thickly they were laying on the admiration and camaraderie.

(Note: And adult Cinderella def has guilty vibes re: the Queen at orientation. Which I know I'm not imagining because it's literally spelled out in the Jr Novelization!)

Before the time travel element of the movie started, I thought they were going for something like they go to the past and realize that Bridget was bullied not by the VKs but by the spoiled royals, and Ella ends up joining in the bullying once she gets with Charming, betraying Bridget and justifying her whole "Love Ain't It" philosophy. Or Ella ditching her at the last minute to be with Charming meaning she has to deal with the monster prank alone and it was the being alone rather than the prank itself that hurt her (though that is NOT a good enough reason to go all off with their heads on your subjects). The fact that, as far as we know right now, it literally was just a relatively mild and reversible prank that caused all of this is just, such flat storytelling, you know?

But! All of this makes way more sense if this is meant to be the first act of a single contained story. And I don't wanna be all "Pepe Silvia, secret good 4th episode of Sherlock" about this but I did see this picture:

Which seems to indicate that this was written as a Part One. Which, if so, idk why they wouldn't advertise it that way but whatever. The point is, if that's the case then it means that we're potentially in bad pacing territory rather than straight up bad storytelling territory. Because this isn't a bad place to be halfway through your story:

The heroes, warned that time travel is dangerous, have gone back in time to change the heart of a brutal tyrant before she can stage a coup. They seemingly succeed in their mission and when they come home, everything is great! But then, the side effects of time travel start to catch up with them. Chloe realizes that, in breaking the vase, she prevented her mother from going to the ball and falling in love with her dad (who was conspicuously absent from the final scene btw) which means she's starting to be forgotten and erased from the timeline. And Red realizes that though this new version of her mom is as sweet and kind as the teen she once met, she's a complete stranger to her (fulfilling the Hatter's warning that she could lose her mom completely). So they have to go back in time once more to make sure the Ella and Charming fall in love again, perhaps at the cost of whatever bad thing that happened to Bridget happening again and bringing back the original version of her future self. But, now with more context of how her mom became that way, Red can now talk to her mother and persuade her to give people another chance.

Boom, that gives us time to go back and hit everything we haven't yet hit. We can pay off the time travel tropes that were set up but not explored. We can go to Castlecoming which feels so obviously set up to be the centerpiece of this story (like, come on, Back to the Future literally does the school dance thing. This is Time Travel Storytelling 101). We can actually get info about what the prank was and why it affected Bridget so completely.

(Note: This is a side thing but it really strikes me as so crazy that Bridget would so SUCH a big 180 here. Like, I know the Queen of Hearts is a silly, goofy, campy villain, but she straight up murders people and there's no way to get around that if we're taking her out of the surreal story she comes from and putting her in a (comparatively) grounded story. If I wasn't doing a betrayal plot, I would make the twist that the spell that turned Bridget into a "monster" didn't just have a physical effect, it had a mental effect and it magically twisted her personality to be the way it is now. So they broke the physical half of the curse, but neglected the other half and it's been festering the whole time, turning her as evil as she was sweet. Because like, a simple physical transformation isn't that big of a deal to have such heavy security--Bridget made cupcakes with a transformative effect and that was totally fine. I'm not saying that that's what's gonna be the case. I just think it would be an explanation that makes sense for why she changed so crazy much that makes more sense than a simple prank or even a betrayal. Her mom wasn't even evil! How did she go from zero to murder without even an evil mom to push her onto the path? But I'm super digressing right now.)

(Note #2: OK, one last thing. The trap on the book presumably would have hit the VK's and trapped them in Merlin's office regardless of what Chloe and Red did, right? That's like, net zero influence on the timeline. I genuinely can't tell if that's a straight up plot hole or set up to be like, "Oh no. Actually when she said that she was turned into a monster in front of everyone it was meant in a less literal way." Like she was just made to look bad and that was the real thing that pushed her over the edge. Like idk. It really feels like the only thing they really did that would change the timeline was get Ella banned from the dance and presumably out of the way where she couldn't hurt Bridget. OK NOW I'm done.)

Anyway, my point is that this is not how I would have structured my movie and I think this was a super weird way to go into the second era of Descendants movies, but they can still tell a complete story if that's their plan. I'm genuinely really curious to see if this pans out to be a fairly competently told story that just happens to be split over two movies or a complete fumbling of the narrative bag because it could really be either at this point and it's fascinating to me.

[rinbylin]

trying out the questionable, unpopular cdrama which was still in my ptw despite the apparent red flags solely bc it has all my guilty pleasure tropes then it actually turns out watchable and has more decent writing than many other popular cdramas I've tried??????

[kira-light0]

The prettiest princess

[genderqueerpond]

also I Do think we're getting season whatever-this-is backwards

[phagodyke]

woke up feeling ruffff but took my meds and went back to bed for a while n I feel a bit better

[nanaslutt]

Thinking about inexperienced Choso accidentally doing the knee thing during a makeout sesh

ʚ cont: afab reader, making out, dry humping, sexual tension, dirty talk, teasing, first time orgasming (Choso), cumming untouched, cumming in pants (Choso and reader)

MINORS AND AGELESS BLOGS DNI

°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ

You lay back against Choso's hard chest, his head on your shoulder and his arms wrapped around your torso as you lay on your bed together, catching up on some show the two of you have been watching. After watching about 4 or 5 consecutive episodes, the familiar "Are you still watching?" question showed on the screen, making you sigh.

"Whoever created this idea sucks, of course I'm still watching." You mumbled under your breath, beginning to lean your body off of Choso's to reach for the remote. Little did you know, Choso had been aching to kiss you all day. He knew the two of you usually ended up sharing kisses when you were alone like this, and each time it happened only increased his neediness for the next time you were together as he began to expect it as he did now.

Choso kept his arms tightly wrapped around your torso, preventing you from leaning forward. You were jolted back against his chest, your eyes going wide when you realized you were stuck. A smile grew on your face when Choso plopped his forehead down on your shoulder, burying his face in the crook of your neck as he blushed furiously, hoping you would catch on to what he wanted so he didn't have to say it.

You turned your head to face him and cupped his neck with your warm hand, pressing his face against you. "Cho, how am I meant to move when you hold onto me so tightly, huh?" You teased, pressing a soft kiss to his temple. Choso's eyebrows furrowed against your skin when he felt the familiar touch of your lips on him. He tentatively raised his head and looked into your eyes, his cheeks already a deep crimson red, eyebrows furrowed in a desperate look.

You kept your hand on his warm neck, feeling his pulse race under your fingertips. You smiled and licked your lips, staring back and forth between his eyes. Choso's breath was already picking up as the tension began to grow between the two of you. Choso swallowed hard as he looked between your eyes and your plush lips, looking like they were begging to be kissed. 

You leaned in ever so slightly, lips grazing against his, your body feeling hot when his arms tightened around your body as you did so. "Tell me what you want Choso." You whispered, your hot breath tickling his lips. Choso's lips were parted slightly expectantly, his breathing now more audible. "I wanna kiss." He replied, his fingers curling into your shirt that covered your stomach. 

You bit your lip, your nose tapping against his as you continued to tease him. "Yeah? You wanna kiss me?" You whispered, turning your head to the side as you readied yourself. Choso's eyes fluttered softly as he nodded, his eyelids already feeling heavy even without touching you. Choso let out a noise of surprise when you pressed your lips against his. His thighs twitched ever so slightly with the need to press his legs together, but you were between them, so he couldn't.

Choso felt his brain turn to mush as you massaged your lips against his, soft barely there sounds getting caught in your throat making him go crazy. Choso never broke the connection even when he released your body in his arms and slowly slid out from behind you, maneuvering your body so you were against the pillows he was just laying against. They were warm with his body heat, feeling welcoming as Choso placed himself between your thighs, on top of you.

Your chest rose and fell heavily as he dragged his large hands up and down your body, your shirt riding up as he played with your sides, touching you everywhere he could. Choso loved kissing, the sensation of his lips intertwining against yours combined with the feel of your body and the sounds you made when you kissed him took over his brain completely, trampling over and pushing out any and all other thoughts.

You wrapped your legs around his waist instinctually, making Choso whine at how good your body felt against him. His hands itched with the need to touch you higher up each time he caressed your torso. Your chest rose and fell heavily against him, your back slightly arching off the bed each time he overpowered his tongue with yours, making you feel dizzy.

Choso was a bit shy when it came to intimate activities, up until he was actively participating in them, then his instincts took over and he became more confident. You and Choso had been dating for a few months and had never gone past heavy petting and kissing, but you would be lying if you said your body didnt ache to go further with him.

You placed your hands on his shoulders and slowly slid them around to his back, grabbing the nape of his neck with one hand while your other disappeared under the collar of the back of his shirt. Choso's eyes rolled back in his sockets at the touch, even though his eyes were closed. He felt that same familiar ache build itself up deep in his stomach, and the position he was in was giving him no relief.

His pelvis was close to being pressed against yours, but it wasn't, leaving his unknowingly throbbing cock to twitch against the confines of his boxers with little to no friction. You lightly raked your nails over the skin of his back, feeling his hard muscles under your hands as the kiss increased in fervor, getting more intense. 

Choso took it upon himself to adjust his position a bit, sliding one of his legs to the side a bit so his pelvis was against the bed and the underside of your thigh. You smiled against Choso's lips, feeling how needy his tongue was getting against yours. You were caught off guard when you felt a strong thigh press firmly against your cunt, making your lips separate from his in an embarrassingly loud whine. 

Choso stopped kissing you to look at your expression, worried he might've hurt you. With furrowed eyebrows and a fucked out expression, you reached both hands between your bodies and pressed them agaisnt his thigh, trying to ignore how hard you were throbbing against his leg. "I'm sorry, are you okay?" Choso gasped, not yet realizing what had happened. 

"Choso, your knee." You whined out breathlessly, pressing against his thigh again, silently begging for him to let up before you lost control. You were already holding back enough. Choso's eyebrows furrowed in confusion as he looked between your bodies to see his thigh tightly against your cunt, and your hands pressing above where you were connected. 

Choso immediately pulled his leg back and apologized, slotting his leg back to its original position. You saw the muscles in his jaw bulge out under the weight of his teeth as he looked away in embarrassment, worried he had ruined the mood. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to.. touch you there." Choso apologized, darting his eyes back over to yours every so often.

You wrapped your hands around his neck and pulled him against your shoulder, forcing his head to be buried in the crook of your neck. This abrupt action surprised Choso, he placed his hands on your hips and waited for you to speak, focusing on how loud your heart was beating against him. "No, it's okay. It.. it felt good." You whispered, turning your head against his ear, your lips grazing his skin.

Choso felt that same familiar heat build-up in his tummy again at your confession, it was getting unbearable. This is usually where the two of you stopped when he felt a little too worked up for his own good. But this time, he didn't want to stop, he wanted to see where this would go. "It felt... good?" He questioned, staring at the bedsheets in front of him as he lay on your shoulder.

You nodded, pressing a kiss to the shell of his ear that sent a shiver down his spine. "You can put it back if you want." You suggested, making Choso shut his eyes and take a deep breath. He didn't know much about pleasuring others or even himself, but he knew the type of "good" you were talking about was much like the one he felt when he pressed his crotch against the sheets, or your leg when you kissed.

Choso pulled his head up from your shoulder and brought his face agaisnt yours, a hair length away from your lips. You grabbed his face and looked into his eyes for a moment before you pulled him against you by his cheeks, forcing your lips together in a kiss. The kiss was just as needy and hasty as before as the two of you opened your mouth against one another in a sloppy makeout. 

Choso swallowed hard before he started moving his leg again, trying to remember the position he had it in. When you felt his thick thigh press against your throbbing clit again, you gasped into his mouth, a sound he eagerly swallowed up, his face growing redder at the sound.

You felt dizzy as your back arched against him, your hands once again wrapping around his neck for support. You squeezed your legs around his thigh and relished in the feeling of your clit getting stimulated from the pressure alone. Choso could feel he felt something twitch against his leg, but he had no idea what it could be, all he knew was that it made his own problem feel ten times worse.

Choso started kissing you more intensely, his own cock being stimulated against the sheet and the underside of your leg once more. You whimpered into his mouth, your hips twitching agaisnt him, ever so slightly rubbing your cunt against his leg. "This feels really good." Choso gasped into your mouth, feeling the heat in his tummy boil up within him.

You nodded, making a sound of agreement into his mouth. You felt like you were seconds away from cumming, you couldn't believe how aroused you were. Your whole body burned with pleasure and arousal as you sloppily kissed into Choso's mouth, the kiss being more tongue and teeth than anything.

You felt that familiar pressure build up in your abdomen, making your thighs twitch and your body curl against him. Choso increases the pace of his kissing, his lips now moving jerkily and unceremoniously against your thigh. "Choso-" You whined against his lips, both of you now panting and whining into the other's mouth. Choso felt like something was going to happen, and he didn't want to stop, he needed to feel whatever this was leading to.

His fingers dug into your hips as his lips started parting against yours, as did your own against his. Both of your moans and pants grew silent as you gasped against the other's mouth. It was only still for a moment before the two of you came crashing down. Your body shook with pleasure as you came in your panties, your abdomen curling in against Choso and twitching as you orgasmed on his thigh.

Choso's head fell into the crook of your neck as he came, hot spurts of cum being released into his pants. With each rope of cum he released, his hips would cant involuntarily against your own. Choso groaned and gasped against you, his head going numb as sheer, white pleasure wracked through his entire body and overwhelmed all of his senses. 

The two of you gasped and whined heavily as you came down from your highs, fighting to catch your breath and recover. Your bodies were limp against each other, but you still held each other tight, not wanting to separate just yet. "That felt so... so good," Choso whined into your neck, a shiver wracking down his spine. You nodded against his shoulder, raking your hands through his messy hair. "Uh-huh...so good." You replied, equally as fucked out as you nodded dumbly, breathing heavily with Choso's full weight resting against your body.

[asahicore]

fast forward - pjs

pairing. jay x fem!reader

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

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

word count. 26.6k

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And that’s your business, because…?”

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

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

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

“I never said that.”

“You didn’t need to.”

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

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

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

“I’m sorry?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t-”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“At least you’re self-aware.”

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

“What are you-”

“Have you done the German homework for tomorrow?”

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

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

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

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

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

Then you see it.

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

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

Your heart sinks to your stomach.

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

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

“Y/N-” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

It belongs to none other than Park Jongseong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“This is so good,” you mumble.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hm?”

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

“No. I have… things on my mind.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah.”

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

“...Jong?” you try.

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

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

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

“Will you be here in the morning?”

“Mh-hm. It’s Saturday tomorrow.”

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

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

You let out a shaky breath. “Okay.”

“I love you, Y/N.”

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

--

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

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

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

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

“What was it about?” Sunoo asks.

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

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

“Exactly!”

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

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

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

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

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

“Nowhere. Go on.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“None taken.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She had a dream that she m—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And your friends wondered why you hated him?

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

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

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

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

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

“No. Stop.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Jong, your textbook.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’re annoyed at how he makes you feel.

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

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

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

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

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

For now, you smile. “Get lost, Jong.”

--

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

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

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

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

you he’s not just another person!

sunoo okayyyyy i see you little miss repressed feelings

you i hate u

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You frown. “I don’t hate you.”

“Oh? That’s a recent development.”

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

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

“Back to hating.”

“Let’s start the assignment.”

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

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

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

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

“That’s not—”

“Let’s just focus on this.”

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

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

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

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

“Yes, sir,” you reply, embarrassed.

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

“Do you even know what chiaroscuro is?” 

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

“Well, maybe if you didn’t-”

“Y/N, Jay, final warning.”

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sunoo, that’s disgusting.”

“Love? I know.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I never—When?!”

She shrugs. “The other day.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Dude…” Jongseong murmurs.

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

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

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

“Aren’t you cold?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t wanna talk about it.”

--

sunoo jay and y/n almost kissed earlier

kazuha WHAAAAT

you KIM SUNOO.

kazuha WHEN?????

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

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

kazuha i can’t believe i missed this fml

you YOU DIDNT MISS ANYTHING NOTHING HAPPENED

sunoo be serious u guys we’re standing inches apart

you were* and no we weren’t

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

kazuha sunoo…?

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

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

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

you …

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

kazuha cuuuute

you i resent these accusations.

sunoo istg if u dont kiss him next time i will

kazuha ???

you SUNOO?

sunoo WHAT

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Y/N…”

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

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

--

jong so… guess who got a five-day suspension

you you idiot what did your parents say?

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

you boo-hoo

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

you … are you feeling better?

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

you oh did you ask chaewon to do that?

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

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

jong ykw maybe i should just ask chaewon

you i’ll see you tomorrow jong!!

jong :) see you tomorrow pretty 

 --

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You smile. “Never.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Give me five minutes!” you call back.

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

--

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

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

He’s still Jong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In any case, he’s hiding something.

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

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

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

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

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

Your heartbeat speeds up and you have to look away.

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until you didn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You said so yourself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

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

“Did you guys sit next to each other?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, I thought I’d do it now.”

“Now?”

He takes a deep, shaky breath. “Now.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Really?” you repeat, and he chuckles.

“Really.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I think I did, too.”

“Yeah, you mentioned that in your letter.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Fifty years, huh?”

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

“I wasn’t planning to.”

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You smile. “I am.”

© asahicore on Tumblr, 2024. please do not repost, translate, or plagiarize my works. support your creators by reblogging and leaving feedback!

permanent taglist: @zreamy @sunghoonmybeloved @lalalalawon @sd211 @w3bqrl @raikea10 @wntrnghts @moonlighthoon @4imhry @rikisly @loves0ft @iamliacamila @theboingsuckerasseater9000 @chaechae-23 @baekhyuns-lipchain @hyuckslvr @vernonburger @amorbonbon @fluerz @jakeflvrz @enhastolemyheart (ask to be removed/added!)

[i2sunric]

𝐒𝐎𝐀𝐊𝐄𝐃 (hyung line)

𝙬𝙖𝙧𝙣𝙞𝙣𝙜𝙨: fivesome. unprotected sex, hair pulling, blowjob, rough sex. masturbation, handjob, double penetration, pet names (angel, baby, doll) lmk if more. NOT PROOFREAD → PART 2

a/n: based on this ask from anon! hope you like it <3

It wasn’t that Heeseung was oblivious about the stolen glances his members gave you whenever you came over to the dorm, for goodness sake, he was a man as well and knew what was the effect to see such a pretty girl.

He would’ve asked them to stop or at least try not to show it— if he hadn’t noticed the way you just craved their attention. He sees how you unbutton your shirt or bend down shamelessly. And it should’ve angered him, it should’ve pissed him off.

But maybe, his contorted desires matched with yours, which was why he decided to test something out by taking you right in the living room. He lied, telling you the members had a schedule about a en o’clock episode he didn’t have to do and lured you inside the lion den, touching the spots he knew would make your head spin until you gave in and started sucking his cock.

The nasty sounds filled the dorm, you were so busy trying to pleasure him you hadn’t even heard the front door opening and now the three men watching the pornographic scene happening in front of their eyes.

“Looks like we have public, angel.” You blinked, puzzled as you took him out of your mouth to turn around.

Widening your eyes at first, they soon fell on the evident hard-ons your boyfriend’s best friends wore under their pants.

Heeseung smirked and caressed your cheek, making you turn around “You want more cock, mh?” He grasped your chin and made you turn around as well.

“Here you go baby, they’re all here for you.” And it didn’t take much for you to be laid down on the sofa with Jake’s cock shoved inside your mouth as you stroked Jay’s one with your free hand.

Sunghoon was rutting his hips inside of you, his huge cock filling you up to the brim. Your moans echoed in the room while you maintained eye contact with Heeseung.

He was slowly pumping his shaft at the sight of you being pleasured by his band mates, so pretty and so sinful.

“Pussy s-so good.” Sunghoon groaned, gripping your hips so tight they would’ve probably be bruised by the next day.

“Taking my cock so well.” Jake pleased as he grasped your head, fucking your mouth, hitting the back of your throat as you gagged.

“Careful there.” Jay nagged at Jake for being so rough, the feeling of your hand around his dick bringing him close to release.

“Fuck I’m so close.” Jake threw his head back “Can I cum in your mouth baby, mh?” He asked but his gaze turned to Heeseung who shook his head.

Jake groaned but complied with his wishes, pulling out as he pumped his cock fast to cum all over your chest– But as you saw precum leaking, you whined and pulled him back inside your mouth.

The warm feeling was enough to make him cum, hot seed dripping down your throat, tasting him.

Heeseung watched you shocked, the mere view of his best friend cumming down your throat was enough to make him cum undone as well.

In the meantime, Sunghoon’s thrusts turned maniacal, his cock hitting your cervix with all of them. You squeezed your eyes shut and stopped moving your hand to help Jay, your own release approaching fast.

Jay groaned in complaint and moved to raise your back from the sofa. He positioned himself behind you and when Sunghoon understood what he wanted to do, he stopped thrusting.

You opened your eyes, a little oblivious to what was happening around you until you felt stretched so wide it was so painful. You let out a whimper of pain and both men turned to look at Heeseung.

“Ask her.” He said sternly “It’s not my body you’re using.”

“Baby, can we fuck you at the same time?” Jay asked, rubbing his thumb on your waist “It’s gonna feel good, I promise.”

“Yes, doll.” Sunghoon nodded as well, “You just need to relax.” He slowly circled your clit to relax you.

You took deep breaths, in and out and slowly got used to the feeling of both of them. They thrusted at the same time, slow and steady.

You turned your face to look at Heeseung and Jake that had joined his side. Your boyfriend gave you a warm smile and you reached your hand to him.

Heeseung took the clue and moved closer, pulling you into a heated make out session. Your moans died in his mouth as the two other men picked up their speed.

“Ngh— S’good.” You rolled your eyes back, gasping on Heeseung’s lips.

“Look how you’re taking their cocks so well.” Heeseung praised “My angel is doing a perfect job, mh?”

The pair of Jay and Sunghoon let out deep growls, signalling their were close “Don’t you cum inside of her, got it?” He said, his tone dangerous. “I’m letting you fuck her but only I get to breed her.”

His words were enough to send you over the edge, making you clench around the big dicks. Sunghoon pulled out and jerked on your stomach, his seed coating your skin.

Jay kept thrusting to ride you out of your orgasm and as he felt you relaxing, he pulled out to cum between your ass cheeks.

You pulled Heeseung back into a kiss, sloppy and needy as his best friends whispered sweet praising to you.

Jake walked behind Heeseung and you looked up at him as if to ask for permission. Your boyfriend nodded, a little reluctantly, but he let you have a make out session with him.

Needless to say, the aftercare was awesome, all four men treating you like a princess, serving you and pampering you with cuddles.

“When’s next time?” You asked that night as you were snuggled on Heeseung’s chest.

“Am I not enough for you?” Heeseung scowled, a little offended. You pecked his lips and chuckled “Of course you are, baby.”

You leaned into his ear and whispered “But I saw how you enjoy when I get used by your friends.” And maybe you were right. Maybe he had a kink.

[iluvloganhowlett]

I need more hugh and reader PLEASE he’s so cute pattotie which is such a contrast from Logan lmao

CUTIES ✮⋆˙

in which ryan reynolds has a private snap story where he secretly films cute moments between you and hugh

warnings: none, just fluff!

do NOT ask how i thought of this…

the camera started by showing ryan, a bit too up close and personal for the average person’s liking. “hey nerds, welcome back to ‘i-spy with ry-ry.’ today, i just saw hugh and y/n make their way to hair and makeup together so we’re gonna follow them and see where the wind takes us. hopefully that won’t be to a small, crappy bathroom stall..”

alas, the camera flips and you and hugh can be shown skipping off to hair and makeup, babbling about whether or not a tomato should or should not be considered a fruit.

“baby when have you ever heard of tomatoes in fruit salad or in a fruit smoothie or when have you ever asked for fruit and were handed a cup of tomatoes?”

“never… but-“

“so then i rest my case, thank you very much.”

you squeal, running a little to catch up to hugh as he rounds the last corner to hair and makeup.

“hugh!” you call, landing a soft and playful punch on his back, causing him to swiftly grab you and tickle your sides.

as you giggle uncontrollably, the camera flips back to ryan, who unexpectedly has tears welling up in his eyes. “i’m sorry it’s just- god they’re adorable. they make me wanna have more children.”

your giggles can still be heard in the background, and for the next chunk of time, all that is shown is a rather unflattering angle of ryan watching you and hugh.

as soon as your voice can be heard again, ryan flips the camera back.

“y’know it’s not very nice to hold others against their will like that,” you mutter, looking up at hugh with a playfully-angered look.

he shoves you, causing you to lose your balance ever so slightly, “aw get outta here! you love me!”

you tilt your heard, grabbing hugh’s hand as the two of you swing your joint arms back and forth, “maybe.”

hugh’s head snaps toward you, brows high, “maybe?!”

you only smirk, “maybe.”

he shakes his head, “you’re a little shit i hope y’know that.”

“eh you love me,” you repeat, stealing his words.

ryan zooms in on your faces, and hugh can be seen clearly as his eyes—full of nothing but love and adoration—flicker between your eyes and your lips.

you close the small space between you two, leaning up on your tippy-toes and pressing your lips to his. the kiss is slow and passionate, making ryan squeal out loud; louder than he thought he had.

you two break apart, heads darting to wherever the sound came from.

“ryan what the hell?!” you exclaim, a bright smile on your face as you tilt your head.

hugh can be seen with a twisted face, looking his best friend up and down.

“alright i can explain-“ ryan pleads as if he’s in a movie, but hugh has already made his way towards the camera, snatching it out of ryan’s hand.

you follow suit, hugh’s hand on the small of your back to guide you. you lean up, almost choking when you read the title of the story, “ryan are you fucking forreal? ‘i-spy with ry-ry?”

“i-“

“you’re a strange man…” hugh states, wrapping his arm fully around you waste now to guide you the opposite direction from ryan, actually making your way to hair and makeup.

as soon as your backs are turned, ryan flips the camera to himself, “alright everyone, that’s it for todays episode of i-spy with ry-ry, stay tuned for-“

“ryan shut ya damn mouth, man!”

“bye-“ *camera cuts*

ok i’m actually satisfied with this bc 1) it’s veryyy original 2) tumblr deleted this whole thing and i had to rewrite it from memory🤦🏽‍♀️

taglist!!

@velvrei @spazwayy @oatmilkriver @sseleniaa @mei-simp @wittyjasontodd @wolverinesangel @realsimpbitchshit @pickuptruck01 @keigohawks @thereallchristine @zeeader @pink-jello-fish @twinky-wink @malfoys-demigod @seamlessepiphany @withafoll @lulawantmula

[nightingale-prompts]

Wrangling Batboy

First | Previous | Next

Dick already knew Danny was taking his nap. Just like he expected he found Danny hanging from the trapeze.

Dick looked up at his son as the boy wrapped his wings snuggly around himself chirping in his sleep. Dick would be worried about how he'd get down but Danny had finally mastered gliding. They still weren't sure he'd ever fly at this rate.

Dick pulled out one of Danny's favorite fruits. A pomegranate. Dick didn't know why but Danny goes crazy for these things.

Dick cracked it open and waited. Even in his sleep, Danny could smell the fruit and his eyes immediately opened. The bat let go of his perch and free-fell until he spread his wings and dived for the treat.

Danny ate the pomegranate in an almost gore manner. The bright red juice almost looked like blood and it stained the boy's fingers pink.

"Guess where we're going today?" Dick said eating the other half of the pomegranate.

"Nowhere hopefully. The Hex High marathon is on later." Danny said suspicions of Dick's next words.

Hex High is a show Danny had gotten obsessed over recently. Its a about a group of monster girls at a school for monsters. It's a high school drama with lots of love triangles, broken promises, and scheming but every week the girls make up and are friends again. Expect for season finales where there is as a huge shift in the dynamics.

Danny refuses to miss an episode. Especially since Stephanie and Cassie watch it too. Damian pretends not to watch it with them.

"Actually, we are going to Titan's tower. You're going to meet the Teen Titans. Exciting right? You'll meet other metas finally." Dick hoped Danny would be more excited about meeting the Titans than seeing the season finale of his show.

"But its the season finale today." Danny whined.

Yep, that was exactly what Dick expected.

It was not any easier to get Danny to go. He chose to protest by shrinking like he always does and turning as furry as possible and becoming more bat like. Wings, claws, tail, elongated ears, and fuzzy white collar of fur.

"Calm down baby Nosferatu. You know you can't get in the car this small. I don't have a car seat." Dick sighed tilding Danny.

"Oh, no. Guess we can't go." Danny smirked.

Dick instead pulled out his phone and ordered a car seat.

"Remember we're rich Danny. And still part of the Wayne family." Dick laughed smugly and within 10 minutes the car seat arrived and Dick set it up.

The drive to the tower and the quick change of clothes went smoothly. As smoothly as it can be with a raging toddler.

Dick rolled Danny into a blanket and took the elevator up to the living space.

"Remember Danny, you brought this on yourself." He said ominously.

Danny huffed his ears flicking as they scanned for sound.

As the doors opened Dick held the boy up.

"I brought the baby!"

[soft4gguk]

yearning | jjk one shot

the one that finds you in Jungkook's doorstep after a night out...

Description: idol!jungkook x reader, fwb 

Content: porn with loads of plot!

Word Count: 7.5k

Warnings: oc smokes 1 cigarette lol, they’re so flirty ouch, so much kissing, cutest little dynamic, dry humping (a personal fave in this house), fingering, protected sex (they’re so smart!!), loads of spanking, jaykay ass man forever. 

Author’s Note: i once sworn to never write idol aus because… i know nothing about this man ok? i do not claim to know what he’s like in a relationship or a situationship or in his personal life!! so please thread carefully when reading <3333 that being said, his lives last year and these first couple of episodes of “are you sure?” have me feeling very delulu so here u go!! hope you enjoy xo

★ masterlist ★

This is a work of fiction. Please respect the members and their privacy. x

The moment you exit the club, a gust of summer breeze engulfs you. It makes you wrap your arms around your body, but it amounts to nothing, the little black dress that you’d made the executive decision to wear, in the name of fashion, betraying you. The tequila shots you'd downed before leaving the house sure had deceived your senses, too.

Needless to say, you regret said decision, a shiver running down your spine all the way to your legs, making you jump a little in place as you tipsily look around you. You’d cut the night short. Your friends had found another lonely pair they’d quickly gotten cozy with, leaving you to drink one too many gin & tonics all by yourself. You hadn’t minded it for the first two hours, enjoying the music, sparking conversation with the bartender from time to time and entertaining the occasional stranger. Eventually though, it became boring, predictable, and you’d be lying if you said it didn’t make you feel a little shitty about yourself. 

It was all getting repetitive. Friday nights, the same faces, small talk, ice breakers. Even the strangers you met had a similar M.O., making it all seem predictable. It made it feel like a waste of self, more than a waste of time, and it ate at you in moments like these, where it was strange to feel lonely amongst a sea of people, unable to shake the feeling.

The bright city lights illuminate the night, lacing it with something livelier than your mood and you smile. At least the scenery is always pretty. Pretty places. You hear the laughter of a group of people that stand a couple of feet away from you, they seem happy in that genuine way that reflects in pure, unadulterated beauty. Pretty people. 

You think of him. 

It’s rather instant. Or perhaps instinctive. The very own butterfly effect of your thoughts because to you, he’s the prettiest of them all. He’d been since the very first day, and as you lose focus of the pretty sights the more you stare into the city lights with him on your mind, you can’t help but think nothing will ever stand close. 

A girl stands next to you, audibly shivering as she exits the club and the air greets her with the same fate it did you. She holds a cigarette between her red lips, the fire from her pink lighter shining on her red hair. It makes you crave one, too, rummaging through your bag for your own. You smile when you remember how he would tease you for smoking “the skinny kind” as he would call them. Calling you a bit of a snob, but all in lighthearted nature. After all, he could. He knew you enough to let your closeness turn into inside jokes, banter. 

Perhaps giving into a vice could prevent you from falling into another. 

“Can I borrow your lighter?” she smiles at you before she’s handing it over. Her nails are pink, too. 

The fire feels pleasant for all of five seconds, warm against your face as you take the first drag. You give into one instinct so as to distract yourself from the one that’s tugging at your heart and senses, begging you to make a reckless call. 

You check the time. 

2:32 A.M.

~

Jungkook scrolls through the endless list of channels aimlessly. Small snippets from whatever’s playing that he cuts short, not really giving it much thought. He settles on one, solely so he can stop putting exertion on his thumb and go back to leaning against his couch – fully relaxed. He sighs. On the screen, some drama he hasn’t gotten around to watching plays, and the story seems to be developing quickly. He doesn’t care for it, if he’s honest, simply content with the white noise it fills the room with. 

Bam leaves his dog house, standing right in front of him and they seem to start an unspoken staring contest. He smiles, patting the spot right next to him on the couch and the pup rushes to take the place excitedly. He gets cuddles and kisses simply for existing. For keeping him company – his presence giving Jungkook more peace than he’ll ever know. 

“Hey, Bam, should we, like, meet up in our next life as well? Perhaps I’ll be the dog in that one and you’ll be my owner.”

Bam simply stares and Jungkook swears if he could, he’d let out a deep sigh right now. This makes him laugh. 

“Hey, don’t be jumping of excitement at the idea, man.”

At this, he attacks. With kisses, that is – wet, sloppy kisses that have Jungkook giggling and pushing back, though it is no use, his dog is that determined to give him love.

“Alright, you win. Let’s go get a beer. For me, not for you. You’re still too young. One day, son.” His voice takes on a lower tone, imitating his father. Or maybe Yoongi’s, he can’t tell anymore. 

He retrieves a cold beer mug from his freezer and cracks the can open, nodding his head at the sound it makes, the fizziness bubbling up before he pours it in the cold glass. He takes a sip as he walks back to the couch, blissed out in leisure.

He doesn’t mind being alone, specially not on nights like this when sleep leaves him and everything but seems more tempting. He likes the way everything slows down at this time of day, the ease of it all. No one to see, no texts to reply to. As for what the world is concerned for, he’s asleep. It’s peaceful, just being. 

Plopping down on the couch, he rests against the pillows, making himself comfortable. He must’ve spoken too soon, he thinks, because it’s not thirty seconds after this that his phone buzzes on the coffee table in front of him. He ponders on the possibility of simply ignoring it, let it sit there, facing down. But something tells him he should check the message. It could be important, or not. The pull isn’t necessarily violent, just a quiet voice that tells him so, like a little nudge. He leans forward, setting his beer on the table before he’s taking a hold of his phone. 

He gets it now – the pull. 

From ___: jungkookie, u awake?

To ___: no

From ___: can I call?

He smiles – so fucking big he almost hates that he does, slightly flustered and embarrassed you have this quick of an effect on him. And before he can talk himself out of it, he calls you. 

~

Seeing his name flash on your phone screen does more to you than anything you’ve deemed exhilarating tonight. The simple prospect of hearing his voice rushes more excitement through your body than any of the mindless conversations you had this evening. Than any of the conversations you’ve had all week perhaps. You smile and there’s no doubt that he can hear it in your voice when you say,

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

There’s a moment of silence and you can hear the smile on his face, too. It’s warmth – he’s warmth, even far. How far is he, you wonder. Did you happen to demand of him at a bad time? Will the end of this call find you disappointed?

You cut to the chase. 

“What are you up to?”

There’s a pause and you can hear the way he sinks into his couch. “Can’t sleep so I’m having a beer and watching some TV with Bamie.”

He’s home and a giddy giggle escapes you. “Ahh,” you say.

“You? It sounds busy in there.”

“Yeah, I’m outside the club.”

“Fun night?”

“No.” You don’t lie, you never lie to him. Don’t have the need to, or the want to. Everything about Jungkook is comfort – the kind that welcomes. 

“Yeah, had a feeling. It’s not really your scene, is it?”

Your head leans to the side, eyes closing for a moment. He knows you in ways most people don’t, and it’s a simple remark but it gets to you. The fact that he doesn’t see you for the parts of you that feel the emptiest settles on your heart. It’s good, you think, to be seen by someone who observes.

“I want to see you.” There’s all the point in the world to be honest right now. 

“Come over. I’ll make you ramen.”

“Will you show me your cat?”

There’s a pause. You picture him smiling, biting his lip, running a hand through his hair. 

“Yeah, that too.”

~

You sway from side to side, a little drunkenly and a whole lot excited, as you stand in front of his door. It’s brief, but as you wait you make a little reflection on your emotions. What exactly do you feel right now? It’s been so long – probably not that long – but long enough to make you happier than usual to be seeing his face. Anyone else would make you nervous, and perhaps he does, too, if only a little. But it’s a different kind of nervous. It’s laced with sweetness, as opposed to anxiety. And the minute he opens his front door, it’s replaced by something sweeter. 

Yearning. 

He stands there, glasses and black sweatpants on, signature oversized shirt – something so very home about him. Your eyes widen as you take in his hair, it’s grown significantly, giving you a rough idea of when it was you last saw him. Two, three months ago. He looks good; rested, fresh, beautiful. You can smell him before you even touch him and it makes you smile. He returns it. 

Yeah – yearning. 

“I like your hair,” you say, because anything else would give you away. 

“Yeah?” he runs a hand through it. “I like you.”

“I like you, too.” Let it give you away, you think. Who cares?

“Alright, well- it was nice seeing you.” He says, closing the door in a too casual, yet dramatic manner and you laugh, simply standing there – a little flustered because, oh does it feel good when Jeon Jungkook flirts with you in that boyish, teasing way only he knows how. 

He doesn’t close the door all the way. Instead, he leaves it open far enough for you to see the way he peeks his head out, nose scrunch and toothy smile to signal just how proud he is of himself right now. 

“Come here,” he tells you, reaching his hand out from the little gap and pulling you closer as you yelp, squeezing through the nearly closed door. “I missed you.”

You’re in his arms again, and the moment he closes the door behind you, his lips are on yours. It’s a soft kiss, one that says I missed you because you know him well enough by now to understand the things he says with his lips, and his eyes. With his hands, too.

“Mm,-“ you don’t want to pull back to get your words out, so you don’t. “Me more.”

Jungkook was always a happy coincidence – or at least that’s what you told yourself in a futile attempt to tame the feelings down. But the truth was that being back in his arms felt like fate, in that gentle way that doesn’t come in a movie-like encounter or in some sort of catastrophe bringing you together. Just being here. Anywhere, with him, felt fateful. You opt to believe in angels right this second just to thank them. 

“How are you,” his hand cups your cheek, pecking your lips before you can answer. 

“Good- better now.” His kisses muffle your words and you think you could live with this interruption for the rest of your life. 

“Yeah, me too.”

You wrap your arms around his neck, bringing him closer as he circles his around your middle. You take him in, not one for big displays of affection yet this one you could never deny, could never not welcome. 

It’s a sweet moment but the pull turns hasty soon enough the more your lips become familiar with one another yet again. You run your fingers through his long hair, rejoicing in its softness and length. His hand travels down, slowly but a bit desperately, squeezing when they meet your ass. 

What has a promising ending is cut short by none other than your rumbling stomach. It’s rather loudly and you both hear it, laughing in the middle of the kiss you two seem to refuse parting from. 

“You hungry, baby?”

“You promised ramen. And something about a cat.” Your lips part and you look at him, a pretty smile on his equally pretty face. 

“Mm, yeah. I did. I’m all stocked up on ramen but the cat…,”

“I prefer Bamie anyways.” 

You leave his arms, a smile on your face as you walk towards his beloved child’s crate. The moment he sees you, he hesitates for a moment, not yet having Jungkook’s command to leave his space but he’s excited – you can even make up his little tail wagging from side to side. 

“Come here, baby.”

He runs to you and nearly tackles you, settling into the floor to give him the proper cuddles he deserves. He steps on you the way he did when he was a puppy, sitting down on your knees as you scratch under his ears. 

“No one’s allowed to tell him he’s grown up. He’s little forever.”

Jungkook laughs. “He’s Jiminie’s height.” 

You sneer at him, shaking your head at his joke. He stands there, staring at you with a fondness he reserves for certain things that bring him that kind of comfort that’s gotten rarer over the years. He’s grown up, matured and gotten real about a lot of things but not you.

Never you. 

You’re still the innocence he kissed you with that very first time and the little bit of fear it wouldn’t go further than that. You’re the excitement he had when it did. You’re the flirty teasing and the falling in trust, opening himself little by little. You’re still something he once dreamt about – he still does. You’re the thing he has and doesn’t at the same time. You’re you. 

Your loud giggles as Bam licks your cheek wake him up from his little daydream and he winces at the sloppy kisses he’s leaving. You don’t seem to mind though and he knows that if it were up to you, you’d stay there til dawn. No ramen, no cat. 

“Alright, alright. Daddy’s getting jealous now. You can’t have her all to yourself.”

Your cheeky smile tells him you’re up to no good. “Daddy, huh? Have we ever tried that?”

“What haven’t we tried?” He genuinely ponders on his own question. 

“Pegging!” You say, a little too quickly and excitedly for his liking. 

“Absolutely not.”

“Mean.”

“Come on, let’s feed you.”

You smile. “Okay, daddy.”

~

It’s a chaos in the kitchen in between distracting kisses and your tipsy antics, munching on Jungkook’s leftover fried chicken as you scavenger hunt his cupboards for anything that could satisfy your alcohol induced need for sweets and carbs. You’d begged for pancakes, but he didn’t have any honey, and what’s pancakes without honey, really? 

“Ramen. Enoki and spring onions.” He says, convincing himself more than he convinces you.

“Okayyyyy. Ramen, enoki- what else did you say?”

His thumb and pointer finger rest at his temples in mock exasperation, making you giggle. “Hey, why don’t you go shower? This’ll be ready when you’re done.”

“Will you be able to work a knife with the thought of me all wet and naked in your shower?” 

“I’ll get you wet and naked later. Go sober up. Quick, quick!”

You laugh, kissing his cheek loudly and ruffling his hair before you leave the kitchen, making your way to his bedroom with familiarity - like you’ve done it hundreds of times and perhaps you have if you were to count. 

You know where he keeps the towels, that it’s the left tap that opens the hot water, the way his soap smells and what brand of shampoo he uses. His face wash and moisturizer are familiar to you because it’s the same brand you use. You’d left them here once and never got the bottles back. He began purchasing them after they ran out. 

You put on the same black Carhartt shirt you always do. It feels and smells the same. It makes you yearn and when you miss him, you smile in the comfort of knowing he’s in the kitchen, probably eating ramen from the pot as you take your sweet time in the bathroom. 

All clean and cozy, his house always being the perfect temperature with the add on warmth that swarms your insides at knowing you’re with him, you make your way back to the kitchen. He’s reaching for bowls, back to you and your voice startles him when you say,

“Don’t get dishes dirty, let’s eat from the pot.”

He turns to you, a boyish smile forming on his lips at the sight of you in his comfy, oversized shirt. He’s seen you in it more times than he can count but it still makes his insides tingle. Butterflies, dare he say, is what the sight gives him. 

“You sure?”

“Aren’t you? Afraid of exchanging saliva?” You poke your tongue at him and he grabs your wrist, pulling you swiftly towards him. 

“Not the funnest way we’ve exchanged juices, but it’ll do for now.”

“Juices.” Your nose scrunches at his words.

“Mm.”

He kisses you, ramen getting cold in the pot as your lips make him forget all about his hunger in the first place. Your stomach doesn’t, though. Interrupting your heated little moment yet again. 

“Feed me.”

“On your knees, then.” He teases, lips still on yours. 

“That sounds more like a treat than a threat.”

He smiles, passing you the chopsticks. “I knew you’d say that.”

“Am I that predictable?”

“With me. Yes. Just me.”

His words are selfish, of this much he’s aware. He knows exclusivity is too much to ask for. He knows the baggage he comes with and the hesitation that shines through your eyes whenever you find yourselves slipping into comfort and familiarity a little too much. How he can almost tell he’s about to go a season without you, just by this comfort alone. But he can’t help but want you, all to himself. He can’t help but say you’re his even if he’s just saying it. And when the smile on your lips meet your eyes in an almost nostalgic way, he knows you feel the same. 

“Yeah. I am.”

“I am with you, too.”

“I’d say I tried to talk myself out of texting you tonight, but I’d be lying.” Your chopsticks play with the noodles, eyes not meeting his. 

“Why would you talk yourself out of texting me?”

You shrug. 

“Don’t.” His voice is firm and your eyes finally look at his. “I’m always- I always want to see you, ___.”

“I know, it’s just- you know.” You say, and he does. He knows what you mean and he’s glad you don’t voice it because he doesn’t think he can bear the words that would only add insult to injury to the way your gaze falls, that spark threatening to dim its light.

“Yeah,” he gets closer, but it’s almost careful. His thumb caresses your cheek and you lean into his touch. “But you’re here now. I want you here now. Come back to me.”

You stare into his big eyes, smiling at him not because your heart isn’t breaking but because you wouldn’t dare break his with the reality of the situation. So you lie, but it holds truth. “I’m always with you.” 

As you two eat, in bursts of comfortable silences and mindless yet meaningful conversations, you start to get used to him again. You’re too tired to fight it, and when you welcome it, it’s sweet. 

~

The pot is empty, your bellies full. You lean against the counter as he puts you to date, catches you up on what his life has looked like for the past two months or so. Trips to L.A., New York, photoshoots, late nights in the recording studio, music videos, long flights and a Calvin Klein campaign you shamelessly admit to swoon over every time you pass by it. He asks about you and you keep your updates mostly work related. Long flights, long meetings, long days. Short bursts of inspiration and even shorter waves of motivation. You omit to tell him about the things you’re maybe not so proud of. The partying, the drinking on a wednesday night, the way your friends don’t feel like your friends anymore, more like acquaintances that keep you around when they deem convenient. You think his words could help, provide comfort and advice, but at the same time you fear the reality of the situation could burst the bubble of bliss you find yourself in right this moment. 

So you talk. You catch up. You play friends for a while, feel real mature when he shares snippets of his life that involve other people, other girls. People in his radar, his line of work, the love interest in his music video. Jungkook does, too. Feels like perhaps he’s come a long way when you tell him about trips you’ve taken with friends, new restaurants you’ve tried, galas he knows you haven’t attended alone. It’s all fine, it’s good. Total control of your feelings as you take each other in. 

Bam interrupts him mid-sentence, a sleepy whine in half protest he lets out as he walks inside the kitchen. 

“Aw, Jungkook,” you coo, “he’s sleepy.”

“Time for bed, Bamie?” He smiles, reaching down to scratch under his ears. “I’ll be right back.” 

“I’ll be here.” 

You smile, well aware that he keeps his dog bed in a cozy room in his house, quite literally puts him to bed every night. It makes you think about how good of a dad he’ll make one day, how much love is stored inside of him, how he likes to be needed and shows affection through acts of service. Your smile drops a bit, a feeling taking over you that you don’t like but have grown used to over the years. 

You snap out of it, busying yourself as you begin to tidy up the kitchen, sliding his pink rubber gloves over your hands before you start washing the single pot, knife and chopsticks he’d used to make you dinner. It doesn’t take him long to be back, though, walking back inside the kitchen and smiling at the sight before him. You hum a song he can’t make up, hips shimmying to the beat as you scrub the pot. Your shirt rides up a little and he cocks his head to the side, smiling at the way your underwear peeks from underneath the fabric. A black and lacy thong that has him nodding his head in boyish satisfaction. 

“You don’t have to do that,” he tells you, making you jump in place a bit at the sound of his voice.

You turn around, bringing a gloved finger to your lips as you shush him before you’re pointing it at the couch and shooing him away. “I’ll only be a second. Wait for me there.”

“‘Kay, boss.” He army salutes you, turning around and walking back to the couch, sitting down and sinking further into the cushions, legs spreading as he scrolls through his phone, a bit impatiently, missing you even though you’re so close. 

And to Jungkook’s great fortune, he doesn’t have to wait for much longer. Wrapping it up in the kitchen, you give it one last glance to make sure it’s back to its pristine state before you’re making your way towards him. He looks up at you, throwing his phone to the side and following you with his eyes, smiling when you’re in front of him.

“Thank you for dinner,” you say, voice sweet and low, eyes a bit hazy.

“Come here.” He takes your hand in his, pulling you closer to him, bottom lip getting caught between his teeth as you throw your legs at either side of him, straddling him. 

“I needed this,” you admit.

“Me too,” he breathes. “I’m glad you called.”

You pout, eyes looking up for a second as you ponder. “You called me.”

He chuckles, not a single ounce of desire to deny you. “I’m glad I called.”

You giggle, arms wrapping around his neck and fingers getting lost in his long hair. His head draws back as your nails massage his scalp gently and he relaxes at your touch, goosebumps adorning his skin. His hands travel under your shirt, promptly finding your hips, waist, and then threatening to go higher but Jungkook wants to take his time tonight. He wants to stay in the sweet state of wanting you for a bit longer. When his eyes are back on yours, you kiss him. He sighs against your lips, bringing you closer to him by the waist, letting his tongue taste your bottom lip before he’s tasting your mouth. It’s slow, a bit sloppy and lazy, holds the quality of anything that happens in the middle of the night, when no one’s watching and time stills for the two of you. 

“Your skin is so soft,” he says, lips still on yours. 

“It’s your body lotion.” You roll your hips over his, smiling when you pull a low groan straight out of him. 

“Yeah,” he says, hands traveling down before he’s squeezing your ass, guiding your hips into his. “You smell like me. I like it.”

“I like it, too.” Your words get caught up in a moan as the outline of his cock parts your slit perfectly. 

You pull away a bit hesitantly, hands coming to rest at his shoulders as your hips pick up the pace. You go slow but sink deeper into him with every roll of your lips, eyes never parting from his as you take in the way his face starts to contort in pleasure, mouth parting slightly as his breathing grows heavier, little grunts leaving his lips with every push and pull. His hands travel back down to your hips, squeezing a little at the soft flesh, guiding them as you move over his cock. He’s so hard, can feel you through the layers, can bet on the fact that you’re wet and pulsing for him right now. 

“That feels good,” he sighs, gaze dropping as he rides your shirt up a bit at the front. His eyes fixate on the way the thin, lacy fabric of your panties bunches up every time you throw your hips back. 

“Brings back memories,” you say, voice a bit shaky when a particular roll of your hips has the tip of his cock hitting right against your clit. 

Jungkook smiles, mind hazy but perfectly able to picture the memories you refer to. “Mhm,” he sighs, so entrapped by the feeling he swears he can feel you pulse against him. He likes the way you consume his senses. The way everything around him stills and all he can think about is you. His hands squeeze at the flesh on your hips before he says, “turn around, baby.”

“‘Kay.”

Jungkook feels the loss of your warmth as you stand up before him once again, smiling at him before you’re turning around and sitting on his lap. You press your back to his chest, letting your head fall to his shoulder, your lips meeting his cheek in an open mouth kiss. His hands travel up your body, palms closing around your tits, thumbs playing with your nipples over the thick fabric of your shirt. You circle your hips, chasing the same friction from before but it’s not enough in this position. You bring your body forward, hands resting on his thighs as you throw your ass back at him, your pussy perfectly aligned on top of his cock, making you both moan at the same time. Jungkook’s gaze drops to your ass, enthralled by the way he feels, by the way you look. He rides your shirt up your back, exposes you to him and it only eggs you on, moving against his cock at the perfect rhythm. 

He hooks a finger down the side of your panties, letting it travel down, smiling lazily at the way you trap his knuckles between your pussy and his cock, moaning as you grind on them. He can feel how wet you are, dripping for him already even though he hasn’t touched you yet. “Want my fingers, baby?”

“Yes, please,” you plead, voice shaky as you look back at him. 

He’d usually tease you, make you beg for it a little longer, but tonight Jungkook obliges. It’s been long – too long – and all he can think about is being inside you, feeling you around him, making you feel good. He takes his time simply so he can savor the moment. So he can memorize it well enough to store it somewhere inside of him, just in case it’s another three months until he sees you again. 

He pushes his middle and ring finger inside of you, hissing at your warmth, cock jumping inside his sweatpants in anticipation and a little big of neglect. You close your eyes, pleasure taking over you as he begins to thrust his fingers inside of you slowly, arching expertly every time they hit your g-spot. His free hand squeezes around your ass cheek, groaning when the hand that fucks into you pushes down on his cock, aiding at giving him some much needed friction. You feel lightheaded already, all-consumed in his hold as he takes over your every sense. Your body relaxes and you can feel the way your tummy tenses right away. 

“Fuck, I think I’m gonna cum,” your voice is faint but he hears you well enough. 

“Already? That was fast, baby.” You don’t miss the cocky tone his words hint at. 

“Shut up and don’t stop,” you say, looking back at him playfully. 

You see the way he smiles at you before his gaze is dropping back down, fingers moving expertly inside of you at the same pace, applying a bit more force as he pushes in, massaging that spot with the tip of his fingers. The added pressure has you mewling in no time, nails digging into his thighs, teeth biting at your bottom lip to ground you back into the moment as you let go. 

“Fuck,” he says as he feels you cum around his fingers, sweet moans filling the space around you and he so badly wishes he could look at your face right now. “Yeah, baby, that’s it.” He feels the way you contract around him, hips circling over his hand as you ride the waves of pleasure. 

You come down after a minute, mind still hazy as you fall back into him, lips finding his the moment he turns his head to the side. You kiss him, breathing into his mouth, smiling in your fucked out bliss. “That was so good.”

“Yeah?”

“Mhm,” you say, pressing your forehead to his. “I need you to fuck me now.”

“Want it?” he asks, and you nod your head. “You can have it.” 

“Yeah, want it so bad, Jungkook.” Your voice is needy, holds a dreaminess to it that Jungkook doesn’t miss – one that makes him melt into your words, your touch, your lips as you kiss him again. 

Jungkook presses his hips into you, raising them a bit as he pushes his sweatpants down. You help him take them off, hand reaching back before you’re wrapping it around his cock. He’s hard and pulsing for you and if you weren’t pulsing for him, too, you’d probably want him in your mouth right this second. He feels heavy, big and thick in your hold, a grunt leaving his lips when your thumb circles around the head. You love how sensitive he is, how receptive. 

“Condom,” he says, before he runs out of blood in his brain and it all falls down to his cock. 

“In my bag,” you say, reaching to the side and pulling it towards you. You rummage around it for a second too long – a second that has Jungkook’s mind betraying him. He shouldn’t. He knows he shouldn’t. But nonetheless he can’t help but wonder where you’d be right now if he’d been asleep and hadn’t seen your text. Perhaps in the same position but with a stranger. Or maybe a stranger only to Jungkook. Perhaps he hadn’t been the only person you texted tonight. “Here you go, baby.” 

Your voice dismantles his worries and he’s warm again, all thoughts vanishing and it’s back to you and him. He leans forward, kissing your lips as he takes the condom from your hand. It makes you blush slightly, biting your lip in anticipation as you watch as he rips the foil of the packaging with his teeth. You watch the way he smirks as he rolls the condom on. 

“Why are you smiling?”

“Just thinking,” he says, smile growing wider, cheek dimples making him look cute but something about his voice begs to differ. 

You hum. “Thinking about what?”

He smiles. “July 14th, 2021.”

You both crack up, laughter filling the air the moment the words leave his mouth because of course you know what July 14th, 2021 meant. You’d been in a position very similar to this one, perhaps a bit more hazy minded, the true meaning of the heat of the moment finding you the minute you’d realized neither of you had a condom. You’d looked into each other’s eyes and made the silent agreement to be a little reckless and put a whole lot of trust on birth control and Jungkook’s pull out game. 

He said he’d never forget that day. 

“Long live, July 14th, 2021,” you say. 

“Shhh,” he says, squinting his eyes and bringing a finger to his mouth. “Don’t remind me.”

“You reminded yourself,” you bite back. “Now, can you fuck me? Pretty please.”

“Yeah, baby, come here.”

You push your ass back at him, looking at him from over your shoulder, biting your lip in anticipation as he strokes his cock once, twice, before he’s lining himself against your entrance. His hand comes to your hip, pulling you down towards him as you push him inside of you. You both sigh, moaning as he bottoms out, so deep and warm it has Jungkook throwing his head back against the couch, sinking further into it and pushing impossibly deeper into you. 

“Fuck, Jungkook,” you whimper, nails digging into his flesh. 

“Fuck me, baby,” he says, running a hand through his long hair. You nod, circling your hips a couple of times as you adjust to his size before you start moving your hips into him, ass bouncing with every push and pull. He hisses at the sight alone, bringing his hand down as he delivers a hard slap against your cheek, making you moan. “Shit, just like that. You’re so hot, ___.”

“Jungkook,” you whisper.

“Yeah, baby?” His eyes are back on yours, threatening to close in pleasure at the way your pussy feels around him. 

“I missed you.”

“I missed you, baby. So much.”

You fall into his chest, kissing him as he wraps his hand around your throat, not applying any pressure, just simply holding you. You gasp into his mouth when his other hand travels down and finds your clit, drawing lazy circles against the sensitive bundle of nerves. You whine and he moans when you move your hips to the rhythm of his touch.

“I don’t wanna be on top anymore,” you say, pouting into his lips, frowning when you feel his chest shake in laughter. 

“Of course you don’t.”

“I’m an awful top.”

“You’re not a top.”

“Hey, I was a good top that one time,” you protest.

“Mm, yeah, that was hot. You got all bossy on me.”

“Oh, but that’s regardless,” you tell him, pushing your lips into his once more and straightening your back, smiling as you look back at him. He wipes said smile off your face in a second, hand meeting your ass in another hard slap. 

“Stay there,” he says, holding firmly onto your hips. 

“Okay, daddy.” That earns you another slap, though you can’t say it wasn’t exactly the goal in mind. 

“Behave.”

Your face grows pliant as you nod at him and Jungkook has to fight to keep up the front because if he’s being honest, the sight alone drives him crazy, threatens to break him down completely and leave him a needy, whiny mess. He holds you in place, legs raising you up a bit before he starts pistoling his hips against you, fucking you hard and fast and even though you saw it coming, it still takes you by surprise. The force of his thrusts, how good he feels as the pain translates into pleasure, the noises he makes – it’s all too much but fuck, you don’t want him to ever stop. Your mouth parts in a silent moan, eyes closing as your face contorts in pleasure before the sensation ripples through you and you’re crying out. Your hand holds onto his arm and the firm grasp you have on it let’s him know.

“Fuck, I’m cummin,” you breathe out.

“Fuck yeah, baby. Cum all over my cock.”

“Oh my God,” you say, voice shaky and faint as you throw your body back into his. 

“Fuck, I love your pussy.”

“I love your cock,” you say, fucked out giggles escaping your lips. 

It takes you both a minute to steady your breathing and regain your strength. Jungkook kisses your neck, snaking a hand inside your shirt and squeezing your boob as you arch your back at the feel. “Let’s get you to bed, princess.”

“Music to my ears,” you say, giddy and excited. 

Your knees buckle a bit when your feet touch the floor, the both of you laughing at your loss of balance, Jungkook a bit more cockily than you. He slaps your ass softly once, then twice as you begin to walk towards his bedroom. Once inside he takes his shirt off and when you turn around, your eyes scan over his body, metaphorically and possibly physically drooling over him. Your hands find the hem of your t-shirt before you’re pulling it off your body and tossing it aside until it’s landing on top of his. Your tits bounce as you do, and he nods his head at you, a satisfied pout adorning his lips. The pout turns sour the moment you turn around but is soon enough replaced with a smile when you start to crawl on top of his big mattress, finding the perfect spot over his pillows and laying down comfortably. 

“You’re so perfect.” Jungkook says, because anything else would downplay it and he’s not in the mood to run away from the truth. You giggle, soft and sweet and he feels the way his heart aches for you inside his chest. 

“Come to me,” you say, arms outstretched towards him. He makes his way to you, letting himself hover over you for a minute as he takes you in before he’s falling perfectly between your legs. You kiss him, letting your fingers get lost in his hair, breathing into the kiss and you swear this moment is laced in pure, unadulterated bliss. “Want to feel you inside me.”

“I’ll give it to you, baby. I’ll give you anything you want.”

There it is, yet again, and without a fail. It’s so common you nearly miss it – the way the moment turns tender. It’s mostly soft, this unspoken agreement you’ve fallen into with Jungkook. It’s friendship and attraction, good sex and years of exploring each other. It’s trust and communication. It’s understanding. It’s soft at the beginning and tender halfway through. It’s so tender it feels tangible, like the moment itself could fit inside the palm of your hand and feel ripe to the touch as you hold onto it. It’s tender when he looks into your eyes, it’s tender when his voice says your name, when you kiss his lips. It’s tender when the lust borders on something else. It’s tender when it lingers, when it threatens to fall. 

He fucks you, hips moving against yours slowly, pulling moans out of your lips that get caught between his own when he kisses you. 

“You feel so good,” you whisper into his mouth, words that only he could hear even if it weren’t just the two of you. 

“Fuck, baby, so do you,” he whines, supple and yours, even if for that moment. “I’m not gonna last much longer.”

You smile, hand running through his hair before your fingers are pushing a strand behind his hear. “Cum for me, Kookie. Wanna feel you cum for me.”

Your words throw him over the edge, falling blissfully into you. It feels so fucking good. Your fingers running through his hair, down his neck and then back up again. The way your pussy clenches around him, cock throbbing for you at the wake of his release. Your lips are soft and the rise and fall of your chest falls into perfect sync with his. His hand squeezes at your breast before it’s traveling down your body, squeezing at your thigh before you’re wrapping your legs around his waist, flushed to him. Every little thing you do heightens his senses until all he can breathe, think and feel is you. His face falls down the crook of your neck and you breathe out a moan into his ear, unraveling him completely.

“Fuck, I’m gonna cum, baby.” His hips slow down before they still completely, a moan passing his lips as he releases into the condom, your nails softly running down his spine. His body feels spent but he doesn’t miss the way it relaxes on top of you, blissful and peaceful, growing sleepy right away. 

“Feel good?” you ask, your fingertips running down his back in what feels like a feathery whisper. 

“So fucking good,” he mumbles against the skin of your shoulder before his eyes are finding yours again. He kisses you. He kisses you because in moments like this he wants to say something else, something that makes more sense to his heart than anything his brain could say.

You kiss him back, afraid your heart will betray you, too. 

~

You stare at him as you make your way back to his bed. He lays on his tummy, cheek pressed against the soft pillow, his pretty hair framing his face in a way that makes him look dreamlike. He doesn’t move an inch when you pull back the covers, if only for a second, to get back in bed with him. You lay on your side, eyes still fixed on him and your heart grows a new kind of tender at the sight of his sleeping form. He’s pouty and soft and so, so peaceful. Something sinks in your tummy, but it’s not in a way that signals bad news. Perhaps it’s the butterflies settling, perhaps the heat of the moment has began to cool down. 

Your hand comes to his face, fingers gently pushing his hair out of his eyes before you let them wander down his face. His cheeks are soft, his ears cold and when it tickles, he frowns. Your thumb travels up again, smoothing his brow bone and he relaxes. Your eyes follow your touch as you trace the bridge of his nose, slowly, softly, as if you were being quizzed on it later. Wanting to take everything in, afraid that even blinking could take away from the moment. And when your finger lands on his lips, you trace that too the way your own did only minutes prior. 

His eyes begin to flutter, a failed attempt to open them but you know he’s partially awake from the smile that pulls at his lips. You feel it on your finger before your eyes meet his gesture and when they do, you close them instinctively, leaning over and kissing him. His body can’t respond to his brain right now, exhausted and more asleep than he is awake, but he hums in satisfaction, lips puckering as he tries to give into his instincts. 

“Let’s have breakfast together tomorrow,” he mumbles against your lips. “I’ll go buy honey and make you pancakes.” 

You smile, though he can’t see, and perhaps it’s for the best. Your voice is a whisper when you say, “deal.”

His smile is the last thing you see before you fall asleep.

~