#i just wanted to punch him in the face every time he appeared | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

asahicore · 2 months ago

Text

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.”

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!)

#enhypen x reader #jay x reader #jongseong x reader #enhypen fluff #jay fluff #enhypen fanfiction #jay fanfiction #enhypen au #enhypen imagines #enhypen scenarios

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yuujispinkhair · 11 months ago

Text

You are watching Sukuna. And Sukuna is watching his brother's girlfriend... Until he is watching you.

-> This is Part 2 of this drabble

Modern!Sukuna x Reader (female) Fluff + angst with a happy end. Word count: 4k. Angst, lots of pining, unrequited love at first, mentions of alcohol. There is no cheating. Sukuna and Reader get their happy end. Minors don't interact.

This small series was inspired by this beautiful art by @nayasch.

Also, for the best experience, I recommend listening to "Is there somewhere" by Halsey while reading this. I had it on repeat while writing. Divider @/hitobaby

It's a spilled drink that brings you closer to Sukuna.

Just a moment ago, you were holding your breath as you walked past the tattooed, pink-haired boy who makes your heart race, too shy to even look his way when you were so close to him. But then someone knocked into you, and now you are standing there like a deer in the headlights, your hands wet, your shirt ruined, staring wide-eyed at the big red stain soaking the front of your crush's white t-shirt.

You faintly hear some guy behind you apologizing. You have no idea if he is apologizing to you or to Sukuna. All you know is that Sukuna is glaring daggers at him,

"Get out of my sight before I punch your stupid face!"

And then those beautiful maroon eyes snap to you, and you forget how to breathe. You wished for Sukuna's gaze to find you, dreamed about it all the time. Hoped he would notice you, hoped that fate would hand you a chance to get closer to him. But now that it happens so unexpectedly, you don't know what to do. A muttered "S... sorry." leaves your lips.

Sukuna's gaze travels from your face down to your shirt, which is just as soaked as his. And that attractive lopsided smirk appears on his face, the one that gives you butterflies, especially now when he is standing right in front of you, close enough to touch. He shrugs,

"Wasn't your fault. I'm gonna change into a fresh shirt. What about you? Want one, too?"

You barely manage a nod before Sukuna starts walking away, and you quickly follow him to his room with your heart beating up to your throat.

He doesn't bother turning away but just pulls his soaked shirt off right in front of you, making your stomach flutter and your face heat when you see his firm abs and chest adorned with those sexy tattoos.

He laughs softly, probably seeing how flustered you are by his bare chest. But he doesn't comment on it and hands you one of his clean shirts, a white one like the one he was wearing before you spilled your drink over it.

He leaves the room after slipping into a fresh shirt, leaving you alone in his room so you can change in peace.

You sit on his bed afterward, pulse fluttering as you feel the soft fabric of Sukuna's shirt on your skin. You bring it to your nose to inhale its scent. It's fresh out of the laundry, so it mostly smells just of fabric softener, but it was in his dresser with his other things, and you can very faintly smell his cologne on it, making you close your eyes and sigh softly, overcome by a longing so bad it almost makes you choke up.

It's ironic. As if fate is taunting you. Here you are, sitting on Sukuna's bed and wearing his shirt like a girlfriend would. But he is already gone again, back to the party, where he will gaze at his brother's girl with the same longing in his eyes that fills yours, too, when you look his way.

Your hand reaches out to touch Sukuna's pillow, fingers sprawling over it, while you stare longingly at the dent where his head rests every night. What you wouldn't give to sleep in this bed with him. Feeling his strong arms around you, your body snuggled against his. Holding him, loving him, showing him that he can have all those things he longs for.

If only things were different.

It's hard to pull yourself away and leave Sukuna's room again. You feel a strange mix of emotions as you walk back to the party. Exhilaration upon getting Sukuna's shirt and being in his room, mixed with that familiar heavy feeling in your chest because you know he isn't yours, and he probably never will be.

You enter the living room and see him leaning casually against the wall in his fresh shirt, tattooed arms crossed over his chest, biceps flexed enticingly, head tilted back, a bottle of vodka pressed to his lips as his eyes are once again on his brother and his girlfriend, who are dancing in the middle of the room.

You leave the party shortly after to go home and crawl into your bed, still wearing Sukuna's shirt, hugging your pillow to your chest, wishing it was him.

Is he alone in his bed, too? Does he yearn, too? Does he, too, think about the one he craves but cannot have?

The thought makes your heart throb painfully.

Another party, another evening of watching the boy you secretly love from your safe space across the room. His gaze is unsurprisingly on the girl standing next to his brother. Yuuji says something to her, and she laughs happily and hugs him tightly, nuzzling her face against his shoulder. And you see Sukuna's jaw tighten, see his Adam's apple bob as he gulps hard, see the burning jealousy and pain in his eyes.

You blink against the tears threatening to well up in your eyes. His pain is almost palpable to you, but no one else seems to see it. No one seems to care enough to really look at Sukuna. They all just see Sukuna's mocking smirk and the arrogance and roughness he wears like armor. They don't see the pain in those beautiful maroon eyes. They don't see that his heart is aching.

Maybe you only recognize the signs because you feel the same way.

Maybe it is this all too familiar pain you see on his face that makes you brave tonight. And after all, you have a good excuse to walk up to him and stop in front of him, tilting your head to look up at his beautiful face, and say softly,

"Hey, Sukuna... thank you for the shirt you gave me last week. I wanted to give it back to you."

You don't really want to give it back. You have slept every night in it since last week, snuggling into it, inhaling the faint traces of Sukuna's scent, dreaming about having him in your bed, hugging him, feeling the warmth of his body seep through the thin fabric of the t-shirt.

But you reluctantly put it in the washing machine yesterday, folded it neatly, and put it in your bag to return it to him tonight.

You hand him the shirt, and Sukuna takes it, his large hand with the tattoos and various rings brushing over yours, sending the butterflies fluttering in your stomach like crazy. You know how nervous you must look when you smile a shaky smile at him,

"Thank you again. That was really nice of you."

There is surprise in his eyes as if no one ever tells him he is nice. Maybe he isn't. Or maybe people just don't see the small, nice things he does sometimes. Maybe he doesn't want them to see.

"No problem, princess."

You lie awake that night, in your own shirt this time, but with Sukuna's low, velvety voice playing over and over in your mind, calling you princess. You know it means nothing, but it still makes your heart race and a giddy smile lift your lips.

You clutch your drink tightly as you watch the boy you secretly love from across the room, just like you do every weekend. If only you weren't so shy. If only you were brave enough to walk over to him without needing a reason like giving back his shirt.

You sigh longingly as your eyes trail over Sukuna's face. Longing is what you can see on his face, too, as his gaze is on the happy couple at the other end of the room. Your chest feels so tight that it hurts.

I want to take the pain away from you, Sukuna. I wish I could be the one to make you happy.

But you are standing here, and he is standing over there with his eyes on someone else.

A sad love song starts playing and the air in the room feels suffocating all of a sudden.

Maybe you should leave.

What are you even doing at this party, where you are surrounded by so many people but feel more alone than at home, where it is only you and your bed?

What are you doing, coming here week after week just to stare at a boy you can't have? Hurting yourself when you see him looking at someone else. Drowning in desperation when you realize week after week that he is just as alone in his pain as you are and that you will probably never be able to break through his walls.

He is in pain, and you are in pain, and nothing will change about that.

Might as well leave and never come back. Stay away from those stupid parties. Find other places to go to. Maybe after some time, you will be able to forget about pink hair and black tattoos and maroon eyes.

Right when you push yourself off the wall, Sukuna turns his head. That beautiful maroon gaze lands on you, and all you can do is stare back at him.

Time seems to slow down as you and Sukuna look at each other across the room. You are sure he can see the tears threatening to spill over, can see the pain in your eyes, can recognize it for what it is because he carries the same pain in his eyes.

Maybe that shared pain is what makes him slowly walk over to you. He stops in front of you, his typical teasing smirk on his lips, but the same sadness still unveiled in his eyes.

For a moment, you think he will ask you to go to his room with him to fuck. And it fills you with dread because you know you would just be a rebound. You would just be someone he uses for sex to take his mind off the girl he really wants. It would mean nothing to him. And yet, you know that you would say yes. You would go with him, would lay down in his bed, would let him take everything he needs from you until you have nothing left. And in turn, you would take anything he is willing to give you, too, even if it was just meaningless sex. Because even if he just used you to distract himself, it would still be better than nothing. Even if it were just impersonal sex, without any feelings involved from his side, you would still go with him just to feel his skin on yours.

But to your relief, the question never comes. Instead, he says in that calm, low voice,

"You look like you aren't enjoying this stupid party either. Even the pizza tastes disgusting. I'll make something myself. Wanna join me?"

You follow him as if you are in a daze. Everything around you is blurred as you walk behind Sukuna's tall figure, following him to the kitchen, your head spinning, making you feel light-headed even though you barely drank any alcohol.

You sit on the kitchen counter while he cooks. Studying his beautiful face while he is focusing on the pan in front of him. The pain in his eyes is not as burning anymore while he stirs the vegetables and adds various spices. Maybe this is why he wanted to come here. Maybe cooking distracts him enough to ease the pain at least a little.

Those maroon eyes you love so much meet yours while Sukuna tells you how tired he is of those parties all the time and those people he cannot stand in his apartment. He doesn't say what he really means, but you know. How tired his heart is of the longing, of the pain, of having to pretend like he is ok.

You tell him he is a good cook when he hands you a spoon to try, and a smile flickers over his face. A genuine smile, not the typical smirk. And it makes you fall. Makes you tumble down an abyss that you know you will never be able to get out of again. As if you needed to fall even more for him. As if you weren't already too in love with him.

You know you are lost. Lost in everything that makes Sukuna Sukuna. You thought you knew him and already fell in love with what you knew about him on a surface level. But now you have caught glimpses of the boy beneath the surface, and it makes you fall even deeper in love with him. Makes your chest hurt even more. Makes your every fiber scream with longing.

He hoists himself up on the kitchen counter next to you, handing you a plate and grabbing one for himself, too. You sit in silence, eating side by side, while the sounds of the party dimly drift to your ears through the closed door.

You praise his cooking skills some more because you are too nervous to think of anything else to say and because you like the way his lips curl in a smile again and how the pain in his eyes is almost completely gone when he turns to look at you.

He tells you where he got the recipe, how he adjusted it over several weeks, and that he enjoys cooking a lot. The way he says it doesn't sound like he is simply doing small talk, but rather as if he is letting you in on a secret. As if this is a side of Sukuna that people aren't supposed to know.

And you smile softly at him, hoping it conveys that you are grateful that he lets you share this moment with him.

His thumb brushes over the corner of your lips to scoop up some stray sauce, making your heart beat so fast you think you will black out.

When you leave an hour later, you tell him that you really enjoyed yourself,

"Thank you for letting me try your food. It tasted delicious... and I..."

You want to tell him how happy it made you to spend time with him, just the two of you in the kitchen. That you will always keep those moments in your heart like a treasure. But you are too shy to say those words out loud, and so you trail off sheepishly, smiling nervously at him and nodding awkwardly.

"Bye, Sukuna. Have a nice rest of the night."

He watches you closely with those beautiful maroon eyes, a thoughtful expression on his face, saying nothing. But he holds the door open for you like a gentleman in those old movies.

You can still feel the ghost of his touch on your skin when you lie in bed with a smile on your face and a warm feeling in your chest for the first time after coming home after one of those parties.

You are standing in a corner, taking a sip from your drink as your gaze wanders to the tall figure leaning against the wall across the room. Tattooed face and arms, pink hair, and maroon eyes.

You are prepared to see his gaze glued to his brother's girl. You are prepared to see the familiar longing and pain on his face. But you frown when you realize Sukuna's gaze isn't staring at a fixed place but instead wandering slowly through the room, scanning it as if he is searching for something or someone, even though the object of his pining is right in front of him. And yet that gaze slips over her and continues to wander.

Until it lands on you.

It catches you so off guard that you spill your drink again. This time, only over your own shirt, but you cannot bring yourself to look at the mess. Your eyes are on Sukuna, watching wide-eyed as he walks toward you, brushing past the girl you thought he would look at without so much as sparing a glance at her.

He looks amused when he takes in the mess on your shirt. A raised eyebrow, a boyish grin lifting the corners of his lips, a long tattooed finger pointing at your chest,

"Need one of my shirts again?"

You are back in his room a few minutes later, changing into one of his clean shirts while he has his back turned to you, making your heart beat so fast that you fear he can hear it thundering in your chest.

He leans against his desk while you sit on his bed, finding it hard to breathe with how nervous you are. With how lovesick you are for him. The longing to hold him so bad that you feel dizzy from it.

And he talks to you, tells you about a new recipe he tried, about a cooking show he watched, about this and that. Like he wants to keep you here in his room. Like he wants a reason to stay here and not go out to the party again. Like you are his escape.

His shirt feels soft on your skin, his bed so tempting under you. You grab a small pillow to hug to your chest, and the butterflies flutter like crazy when you smell Sukuna's cologne wafting off it.

He jokingly asks you,

"Did you spill your drink intentionally so you could get one of my shirts again? Liked it so much, huh?"

And you chuckle and tell him,

"Well, the end justifies the means. That shirt you gave me last time was really comfy. I slept in it a whole week."

You feel your face heat up when you realize what you just admitted. But Sukuna just laughs, and those beautiful maroon eyes sparkle like two precious jewels.

He tells you to keep his shirt this time.

"So you have something to sleep in."

And your voice wavers nervously, but you still tell him:

"You are really nice, Sukuna. Do you know that?"

He scrunches his nose at that,

"That's something I've never heard anyone tell me before. Are you sure you got the right Sukuna?"

"Yeah. In my eyes, you are nice. At least when you want to. You give me your shirts, and you let me try your self-cooked meals, and you hold open doors and talk to me and... make me feel less alone on these parties."

The last part comes out in a whisper, your emotions threatening to choke you up as you are overcome by your feelings for him. Being so close to him, spending time with him, seeing him smile and joke around with you. Sharing those moments with him that seem like something special.

Sukuna's eyes widen, an emotion flickering over his face that you cannot place. Surprise, maybe, but also something else. Something much softer. He looks away for a moment, staring at his wall that is adorned with pictures of pretty landscapes and bright red shrines and an old man standing in the middle of two pink-haired boys.

When he looks at you again, there is a vulnerability in his eyes you have never seen before. His voice is soft when he tells you,

"You make me feel less alone, too."

Sukuna kisses you for the first time at a party two weeks later. And it is not a kiss in the middle of the party. It is not a kiss in front of his brother and his girlfriend. It is not a kiss meant for someone else. It is not a kiss to make someone jealous. It is not a kiss only for the show.

No, it is a kiss that is real. In his room, where he sits next to you on his bed. It is soft and slow. Sukuna's hand is cupping your cheek gently, his lips brushing over yours slowly as if he is scared to hurt you or hurt himself. As if he is scared that he is fucking things up. Or maybe as if he fears he doesn't deserve this.

It's a kiss that makes you fall apart and makes you whole at the same time.

You kiss him back as tenderly as he kisses you. Slow and gentle, your eyes closed, your hand landing on his neck and caressing the short stubble of his undercut. You kiss him like you are writing poetry for him with your lips against his, putting all the words you are too shy to say into this kiss, all your longing for him, all the tenderness you feel for him, all your love. And he kisses you like he is a drowning man who finally reached the saving shore.

You walk out of his room side by side. Sukuna holds your hand, tugging you along to the kitchen to cook another homemade meal he wants to share with you.

Your heart feels like bursting with happiness. No traces of pain are left in Sukuna's eyes when he hands you a plate of stir-fried rice. And that smile is lighting up his face again. He is so beautiful, and you tell him so without worrying that he will make fun of you.

He kisses you again when he walks you to the door, right there in the hallway where anyone can see, his lips lingering against yours before he pulls away as if he doesn't want to let you leave.

You smile at him and nod when he tells you to text him once you are safely home.

"I like you."

Sukuna tells you in a soft voice while you are straddling his lap, currently cleaning some food experiment gone wrong off his tattooed face with a wet kitchen towel.

Wide, terrified maroon eyes look at you as if their owner thinks he just handed you a knife for you to ram into his chest and twist in his heart. It makes your own heart throb painfully even as you feel elated to hear that your feelings are reciprocated. Seeing this rough boy so scared. Scared of his feelings, scared of admitting them. Scared what you will do with that confession. Because all he knows about love is that it is painful and that it hurts and never gets returned.

You want to cry for him. For the boy who, until now, only knew meaningless sex and hopeless longing for what he thought he couldn't have. For the boy who believed that love wasn't meant for someone like him.

The first tear slips out of the corner of your left eye as Sukuna's large hands sprawl over your waist possessively, and he repeats his words despite the fear so evident in his low voice, the words nothing more than a hoarse whisper,

"I like you so fucking much."

Your hand with the towel is hovering in midair, your lips twitch, and finally, you cannot hold back anymore, and the tears spill over, running down your cheeks in hot rivulets. A broken sob falls from your lips, followed by a choked-up sounding:

"I like you too."

Sukuna closes his eyes for a moment, long black lashes fanning over his skin, a beautiful image that makes you drop the kitchen towel and cup his cheek with your hand. Your thumb brushes tenderly over the tattooed lines on his skin when those beautiful eyes open again and look deeply into yours.

He is braver than you are. Adding more to his confession. Making sure you can destroy him fully, if you like,

"Do you know what I mean? I.. I think I am in love with you."

"Sukuna..."

Your voice is thick with tears, but you continue despite the fresh tears welling up in your eyes, despite how much you are trembling in his arms,

"I... I am in love with you, too. Have been for months. Or maybe I was in love with an idea of you back then. But now I know the real you, and I fell even deeper in love with you."

You can see in his eyes that he half expected to get turned down, and it breaks your heart for him, even while happy laughter bubbles out of your trembling lips.

You cling to him when he kisses you, never wanting to let go again. Filled with the need to show him that this love won't hurt. That it won't slip through his fingers. That love can be good and safe and give him peace. That he deserves love, too, and that you are here to love him with everything you have.

It's another Saturday, and you are at Sukuna and Yuuji's apartment two hours before the party starts, helping them with the preparations. Yuuji's girlfriend is there too. You feel a bit awkward, a bit uneasy when you see her. But she smiles a genuine smile at you and greets you with a hug.

You work next to her for an hour and realize that she probably never was aware of Sukuna's feelings. She might look at Sukuna, but she doesn't truly see him. She only sees Yuuji. Her gaze is filled with love when she looks at him with an expression on her face that lets you know she has found her person.

You turn around to glance at Sukuna, a mix of fear and hope in your heart. What you see makes your chest fill with warmth. Sukuna isn't looking at Yuuji's girl. He is looking at you. Looking at you with the same expression as Yuuji's girlfriend when she looks at Yuuji. And you know that Sukuna has found his person, too.

You wake up in Sukuna's bed with his tall, firm body behind you, just like you do almost every morning now. You feel his lips against your skin, trailing gentle kisses up and down your neck. His voice is still hoarse from sleeping when he murmurs,

"Mine."

His arms tighten around you and pull you even closer to him. And you answer with a smile audible in your voice,

"All yours."

Your cheeks almost hurt from smiling so broadly when you feel Sukuna's matching smile against your neck and hear his whispered:

"Just like I am all yours."

I cried so much while writing this and listening to the song and looking at the beautiful fanart and the sadness in Sukuna's eyes. This version of Sukuna is my Achilles heel. I love this broken mess of a boy so much. I want to love him so bad and make him happy :(( This story hit me so hard, and the kissing scene is one of my favorite scenes I ever wrote. I am so emotional right now, but also so happy to share it with you.

Thank you so much to everyone who commented on the first part of this story, wishing for a happy end. I needed a happy end too, and I am so glad I wrote this!! This story is very personal. I could relate to Reader 100%, and I got the impression that a lot of people could see themselves in her, too. So I hope you could enjoy your happy end with Sukuna, just like I did 🖤

#sukuna x reader #sukuna #sukuna x you #sukuna x y/n #jjk x reader #jjk x you #jjk x y/n #sukuna fluff #jjk fluff

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tender-rosiey · 5 months ago

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MY DEAR AND BEAUTIFUL ROSE<3. I saw that your requests are open and I wanted to ask about my husband (Sukuka cough cough) a scenario where the husband Sukuna saves the reader from the enemy, or someone tries to kidnap and hurt his wife! you write Sukuna's feelings so beautifully <3

fools' sentence — ryomen sukuna x f!reader

a/n: bro you're too kind ilysm; I really hope you like this too <3

if only you listened to that rude servant about not going out of the castle.

it’s a bitter thought really, but you just couldn’t let your pride be scarred by somebody who doesn’t even speak to you in a minimal amount of respect.

so, in a way, you’re okay with dying a proud queen who doesn’t let anybody disrespect her.

“oh, we are going to have so much fun with you, and that monstrous husband of yours will just see your mutilated body after we’re done with you,” the guy grins devilishly. you back up slightly.

okay, so maybe, you don’t want to die just yet.

“that impudent woman! she disobeyed me, and now, we are stuck looking for her, so we can find her before sukuna returns!” the servant complains loudly while walking the halls of the castle.

“and who is that impudent woman you speak of? surely, it isn’t my wife you’re addressing in such a manner,” a voice—a very distinct and well-known one—says from behind the servant.

only then does she realize the shadow that suddenly was casted from above her.

she quickly falls to her knees and starts stuttering out her apologies and excuses, “o-of course not, my lord! how could I ever speak ill of the lady of the castle! her presence is to be respected, naturally!”

after she is done, she lets silence fill the room. assuming that sukuna has believed her, she lets out a sigh of relief, and her body relaxes ever so slightly.

however, an ear-piercing scream is ripped out of her throat when sukuna steps on her foot, so roughly that it breaks.

sukuna groans, annoyed at the incessant scream and wailing of the lady, and he throws a question, “where is your queen?”

the woman keeps on sobbing but tries to speak out nonetheless, “s—she, she,” she hiccups, but sukuna has no time to listen to her bellow.

“faster! where is she?”

she buries her face in the ground to quieten her sobs, but she doesn’t get the chance to respond to him when uraume appears out of thin air.

they kneel to the ground and speak humbly, “my lord, lady y/n has been taken as a hostage by a group of sorcerers.”

sukuna eyes’ widen, and he frowns.

he quickly turns to leave but not before making a command, “uraume, every servant who was careless and caused her disappearance is to be beheaded immediately.”

you thank god for men being prideful creatures who love speaking about themselves. you only asked them once about their accomplishments and raids, and they never stopped talking.

with a couple of positive encouragements from you, they talked and talked till the sun went down.

the doors of the room you’re trapped in slams open, and a fearful boy screams out, “sukuna—sukuna is here!”

“what?!” they all snap, and you grin. finally, you were going to be freed from this cage.

unfortunately, one of the men notices your beaming expression. his face contorts, livid, and he quickly fists your hair in his hand. you let out a scream, but he slams you against the wall.

he shouts, “shut up! you’re the one that lured him here! you stalled till he could find you! you wretched woman!”

“are you stupid?! you take his wife, and you expect him to stand idly by?!” you reply, voice hoarse, and unable to accept taking what he said lying down.

you can’t, however, control the dizziness that hits you, and you can feel blood trickling down your nose.

the only thing that comforts you is the sound of slashes and the calling of your name by your darling husband.

you smirk at the man above you and whisper, “ever saw sukuna in action?”

the man grits his teeth and before he throws a punch at your face, the door flies and gets crushed into pieces. the man quickly throws you away, so he can focus all his energy on sukuna.

but, sukuna instead moves to be right by your side and shields you from the ground.

he wraps an arm around you and pulls you a bit closer.

his eyes carefully scan you; he clenches his jaw at the sight of the blood. he carefully wipes it and moves your face towards him with one of his hands. he speaks up, “you alive?”

“don’t you ignore me, sukuna—” the man sneers, but he is quickly silenced. he sees his tongue flying to the ground. the sight scares him to the core, he starts screaming—or his attempt at one.

his knees feel weak, and he falls to the ground. his blood pools slowly on the ground.

sukuna shifts your focus back to him again, and you respond slowly, “alive and kicking,” raising a thumbs up. he nods and gently lays you down on the ground.

you wince a little and complain lightly, “this place is dusty.”

he hums, “wait a second.”

your husband rises to his feet and turns to the man. sukuna approaches the man, taking his time with each step. anger swirls violently inside of him, and his eyes looked down sharply at the man.

the sorcerer quivers and covers his mouth; he quickly backs up to the wall. he sukuna scoffs, “you’re still annoying even after taking your tongue out?”

the man’s pride almost causes him to retort back with a yell of his own.

but then sukuna snatches him up by the hair and stares him right in the eyes, “for every strand of hair you’ve touched on her head, I will make you bellow in pain till your vocal chords are ripped into shreds.”

you groan and stir lightly. you slowly open your eyes and examine your surroundings. you’re back in the castle; you smile and relax back into your pillow.

“so you’ve finally awaken?”

you turn to your husband with a grin, “hey handsome.”

“why did you leave the castle?”

straight to the point. you prop yourself up on the pillow and sit up. you look at him then look away, “it’s kind of embarrassing actually.”

“not your first,” he responds, and you pointedly ignore him.

“I wanted to greet you before you arrived at the gate,” you murmur then quip, “but I didn’t even go beyond the fence! I was still in the area!”

he listens quietly and sits beside you. he pulls you against his chest, “you do not need to do anything like that.”

you look up at him with a small smile and he finds himself letting out a small breath—of fondness?—he closes his eyes and speaks in absolute manner, “you should know that I will always come for you.”

taglist: @magenta-cat-drawingss@pompompurin1028@scul-pted@requiem626k@nameless-shrimp@sonder-paradise@jessbeinme15s-notebook @todorokichills @ginneko @missrown @shrynkk @simplyxsinned @beautiful-is-boring @starlostlaiba @izukus-gf @irethepotato @thekaylahub @dazaisbloodybandages @aeanya @sweetcloudsimp @moon-catto @the-midnightskies@pianopuppygirl @gojosblackqueen @kryscent @kunikida-simp @whoami-72 @mx-0-child @fiona782 @kisakitwister @imjustasimpxd @psychopotatomeme @dreamcastgirl99 @watyousayin @doobiebochana @laylasbunbunny @hojicha-expresso @4sat0ruu @nineooooo @chuuyasboots @alekssashka7 @rieejjyubi02 @satoryaa @nothisispatrick300 @fallencrescentmoon @etheviese @ho34gojo @the-mom-friend-dot-com @the-weeping-author @stray-npc @libbyistired @anon1412 @anakalana @maehemthemisfit @satorustar @b4nka1@sad-darksoul@ko-fi-heart@pumpkindudeishere@suyaaachin@babyqueen17@chaosguy352@murakami-kotone@sukun4ryomen@yumieis@hearts4itoshi@sleepyxxhead@dunixxd@sleepycrybbylaiah @imjustaduckwholikesbread @emilyyyy-08@spacebaby1@arabellatreaty@viscade @washeduphasbeen @janbannan @sugurubabe @enidths @mwtsxri @peppersapro @uranosbaaee

do not copy or plagiarize or I will write your name on the list I give to sylus

#sukuna x reader #sukuna x you #sukuna x y/n #ryomen sukuna x reader #ryomen sukuna x you #ryomen x reader #ryomen x you #sukuna ryomen x reader #sukuna ryomen x you #jjk x reader #jjk x you #jjk x y/n #jjk sukuna x reader

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insert-content · 2 years ago

Text

a summar(ule)y of 196 culture

since the tumblr veterans have been kind enough to introduce us newbies to their site and culture, i think it is only fair that we explain the culture of our glorious former home to any tumblr users who might be interested in the #196 tag. keep in mind, all these things are based on my perspective of the situation.

first of all, some general information (that you might’ve already heard):

196 (r/196 on reddit) was a subreddit with only one (official) rule; "post before you leave." it was mainly a meme/shitposting sub, but it cultivated a large queer and left-leaning community. in protest of the recent api chances in reddit, 196 has shut down indefinitely until reddit reverts these changes.

now for some culture/references that you might come across

spronkus kronkus:

spronkus is this yellow, rabbit-like creature.

they were the mascot of our subreddit. their appearance can vary from images to image, but as far as i’m aware, their full outfit consists of a bandanna in the colours of the trans flag around their neck, a gun labelled as such (other wise you obviously wouldn’t know what you’re looking at), and an axe also coloured like the trans flag.

r/place:

this is a rare event on reddit where the entire website gets a huge white canvas and can start creating pixel art on it. 196 participated by collaboratively creating our mascot, spronkus with "196!" written next to them.

this version of the pixel art was recreated by me as i couldn't find a nice image of it. there were some changes between the first version and the end result, so this might not be exactly how it looked in the end

post titles/"rule":

reddit forces it's users to title every post they make. as most of the posts on 196 spoke for themselves, many user instead titled their posts "rule", to indicate that they followed the subreddit's only rule. some people also tried to make puns with the word or tried to include it in words that shared some letters (example: wor(ule)d).

anarcho-stripperism:

as the amount of cropped porn jokingly posted to the subreddit increased, the moderators decided that porn would be banned from the sub, with one exception: anarcho-stripperism. she made food fucking videos, in which she jokingly tested the fuckability of different food items (fruits, pasta, etc.)

bigotry showcase:

bigotry showcase was a post flair (basically the reddit equivalent of tags) on the subreddit and was later restricted to only be used on saturdays. under this flair people posted instances of different forms of bigotry to make fun it.

eating babies/hungryposting:

at some point, the subreddit started to pretend to like eating babies, which started a variety of memes regarding the subject. even a post flair called "hungrypost" was added because of this

goblinhog:

goblinhog is the most prominent and well-known member of the 196 moderation team. besides this, on 196 he was mostly known for changing people’s flair if you enjoyed him enough about it.

flairs:

flairs are little tags that are displayed under your name in posts or comments, they are also subreddit specific. most subreddits give their users a palette of preset flairs and the option to make your own custom flair. however, in 196 you only had the option to customize your flair during special events. if you wanted to customize your flair outside of those events (which was basically the entire time), you had to ask a mod to do it for you.

punching nazis:

from time to time, the same gif of a person with a nazi armband getting punched in the face, and promptly falling to the ground, was reposted to the subreddit. this became a sort of tradition.

discourse/drama

wasp discourse:

the wasp discourse was a one to two weeks long heated discussion that generally divided the subreddit into two factions. one side said that they were justified in killing wasps if they were attacked by them, while the other claimed that since wasps are just animals, they aren't aware of what they're doing in the same way humans are, and therefore should be spared.

drama about the british:

there was a time when jokes along the lines of "ew, british" became pretty frequent on the subreddit. as a response, some user claimed that this was akin to racism and tried to get others to stop with the jokes. a debate over whether or not it was important or necessary to stop followed afterwards.

pillar discourse:

this was a debate over which type of pillar should be considered the best (ionic; doric; corinthian). i have seen the question "which pillar is the best?" being used as a sort of greeting between 196 refugees on here.

related subreddits

195:

195 was the predecessor to 196, and also was a social experiment with the same premise as 196 (one rule, post before you leave). as the creators of 195 ended the experiment, the community wanted something with the same vibe to continue posting, and thus 196 was born.

197:

197 is another part of the 196 ecosystem and is commonly understood to be the more politically right-leaning and bigoted as 196, as some people who were banned from 196 continued posting there. besides that, the subreddits were essentially the same in terms of how they functioned.

19684:

this subreddit adds a second rule which banned all mentions of sex (that’s why it’s name is a pun on 1984). some people took this as banning all discussion of sexuality, which resulted in a community that was slightly less accepting of queer people. it is currently still up and running as the 196 moderation team wants a way to stay in contact with the community.

amendments to the posts:

u/femboy_expert:

another well-known 196 user. as the name suggests they're an expert on the subject of femboys, with their flair on 196 reading "phd in feminine boys". as the subreddit was somewhat obsessed with femboys, it's no wonder that they became popular.

u/shitcum_backup:

this was the main account of a pretty popular shitposter on the subreddit. although i didn't see them as much in the last few months, i remember them sometimes having a unique speaking pattern, in which they referred to themself in the third person.

u/monko74:

this user commented "Every day I thank god for not making me a r/196 celebrity," which led to many users of the subreddit treating them like a micro celebrity. there are even a few subreddits solely dedicated to u/monko74.

691:

a sister subreddit that inverts the rule of 196, here you would be (temporarily) banned for posting. some time ago the members of this sub initiated a rebellion/revolution against the bot who performed all the bans (roomba).

u/Smart_Calendar1874:

this wasn’t necessarily part of the subreddit, but it was a pretty popular meme. and since it’s getting posted on here again, and i know enough about it, i’ll add it to the post. this user made a post to r/AskReddit titled "How would you get a small cylinder (5.1in length, ~4.5in girth) unstuck from a mini M&Ms tube filled with butter and microwaved mashed banana? [sic]" it was pretty clear that they were referring to their penis, yet they continued to claim "it’s a cylinder," in the comment section. this lead to comments like "it is imperative that the cylinder […] remains unharmed," in response to people’s advice of cutting the m&m tube.

it's going to be very interesting to see which aspects of 196 culture are going to survive the tumblr migration, and which aspects won't be applicable on this site.

i'm obviously not the ultimate scholar on 196 lore. if i’ve missed or left out anything, or said something wrong, please comment it.

#196 #spronkus kronkus #r196 #r/196 #196archive #tumblr migration #rip 196 #196 campfire #196 migration

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tojisun · 5 months ago

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!! minors dni; simon x cam girl f!reader; kinda sexting; UNEDITED and RAMBLING // divider by @/plutism <3

yall know those ‘ask me’ thingies in instagram and how theyre not anonymous? mmmprmn thinkin about simon finally giving in and sends cam girl! reader replies (he’s not tech savvy, forgive him 😔)

the questions are always fashioned the same way, he’s noticed. you only ever post those, anyway, when you’re in the middle of editing a new video but it’s taking too long so to keep your loyal viewers interested, you entertain them with little questions.

“which toy next?” you posted, showcasing four different sex toys splayed on your bed—a purple sucking vibrator, that bullet vibrator you’ve made multiple videos on, a rainbow-coloured dildo, and another one that squirts which is simon’s favourite if he’s being honest.

you always did cum the hardest when you’re being pumped full. simon wonders how much more intense would it be if you were properly fucked and filled; stuffed continuously, repeatedly, until your pussy’s all wet and sensitive. until it takes—

overtaken by his desire, he gives in and he types out his answer, “a real prick would look better in you.”

he didn’t expect you to see it, let alone for you to reply, but you did and simon reads it with a huff.

> ok troll

i’d volunteer myself, really. <

> yeah right. like i can trust you

what? you want proof that i can make you feel good? <

your reply doesn’t come in and he knows that you must want the whole interaction to end there, but simon won’t let you—doll, he’s finally managed to talk to the girl he’s been fantasizing about, did you really think he’d let the opportunity pass? you don’t even know how many times he’s fucked his fist to the videos of you bullying a dildo in your sopping cunt or the ones of you squirting while you ride that saddled vibrator that punches out guttural moans from the base of your throat.

jesus, just thinking about you mewling and creaming, your skin shimmering with your sweat, has simon chubbing up in his sweats.

so he gets bolder, changing his accounts—both this and the one he’s used to subscribe to your site—so that you know it’s him. he uploads pictures, exposing enough of himself that it feels real and authentic, and begins to tack on messages to every tips he gives.

it takes about two months until you finally caved.

> so… youre not a troll :(

why the sad face? did you want me to be? <

> course not!

> hby? what do YOU want

simon licks at his chapped lips, his legs unconsciously spreading already.

how about pics? show you what i was volunteering? <

> uh

> you wanna send a dick pic?

yeah. evens out the relationship, don’t it? after all, i just about know how your pussy looks and how it squirts. <

> youre soooo weird LOL

> but sure yea why not ig

simon snorts because try as you may, you don’t sound unbothered at all. after all, he knows you’ve been looking back at him—you followed him back in his socials, you even respond to all his tips and messages, and one time you even moaned his alias out loud during your stream. really, you’re not subtle with your own interest at all.

he pulls his sweats down and takes a pic of his half-chub. it’s a little blurry, and the angle captures more of the tuft of hair than the way his cock’s all flushed and filling-out, but simon knows what a decent dick picture looks like—they’ve all received numerous from mactavish—and this one looks good enough so he sends it to you and watches as his message goes from delivered to seen.

you don’t reply right away, nor after three minutes—he knows because the commercials ended and his game’s back on—and simon wonders if you’re back to ignoring him when—

> oh

> thats a good dick

he laughs, booming.

oh so you want it now? <

a speech bubble appears, then it disappears, then it appears again. this happens for a while and it’s somewhat entertaining to simon, mirth filling him up. then, you finally send your reply and this time simon couldn’t stop the barked out laughter that rumbles from his throat because you sent him your address.

simon’s out the door in minutes, his bike keys clutched in his fist.

#suns #simon ghost riley x reader #simon ghost riley #basically: i wanted a camgirl/viewer smau but my other phone is dead 🥲 so have this attempt!#''stranger danger!!"' yea but its simon :^( i'll let him do anything to me

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inkspiredwriting · 4 months ago

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The Diner of Destiny

Five Hargreeves x reader

A/N: I hope it won't be long before I can post proper Five x Y/n stories again. Before the whole mess with season 4, I wanted to post a story of y/n having a girls day with Alisson, Sloane and Lila, and then five picking her up later and seeing what a mess they made. But now I'm honest, I don't want Lila and Five together in a story anymore xD I know it's stupid but I can't change it

Warnings: spoilers for season 4 episode 5-6, angst

Five stepped out of the shadows, his sharp eyes scanning the familiar surroundings. He had been here before, but something felt different this time. The station seemed to pulse with an energy he couldn’t quite place, pulling him toward a small, unassuming diner that he had never noticed before.

As he pushed open the door, a small bell chimed, and the dimly lit interior came into view. Its walls adorned with old photographs and clocks that tick out of sync. But what caught his attention most were the people inside.

It wasn’t just any group of people. They were him—Fives, from various timelines and realities. Each of them wore a different expression, ranging from annoyance to outright anger.

One of them, stepped forward, his eyes narrowing at Five. “You finally made it,” he said, his voice laced with bitterness.

Five frowned, his mind racing to understand what was happening. “What is this? Why are we all here?”

“You tell us,” The other Five shot back. “We’ve been waiting for you to show up and face the mess you’ve made.”

“The mess I’ve made?” Five repeated, confusion giving way to irritation. “What are you talking about?”

Another Five, one with a more disheveled appearance, chimed in, “You had one job—find y/n. She was supposed to be your anchor, the one to keep all of us stable across the Timelines. But instead, you got distracted.”

Five’s heart skipped a beat at the mention of y/n. He had never heard that name, and yet it felt like a punch to the gut. “What do you mean, ‘distracted’?”

The other Five crossed his arms, his glare intensifying. “Lila. You got involved with Lila, and that was never supposed to happen. You were supposed to fall in love with y/n in the greenhouse. She was the one meant for you, for all of us.”

Five’s breath caught in his throat. The greenhouse. He remembered it clearly—throwing strawberries, the laughter, the kisses. But it wasn’t y/n he was with. It was Lila. And suddenly, it all made sense.

The other Fives began to murmur, their voices filled with resentment. “We all felt it,” one of them said. “The moment you chose Lila over Y/n, we all felt the shift. She started to fade from our lives.”

Brisket Five added, “And without her, everything is falling apart. Our timelines are unraveling because you didn’t stick to what was meant to be.”

Five’s mind reeled. He had always prided himself on making the hard choices, on doing what needed to be done to keep the timeline intact. But now, he realized he had made a grave mistake. Y/n was supposed to be his anchor, the one constant in the chaotic sea of timelines. But by choosing Lila, he had erased her from existence, not just in his life, but in every Five’s life.

“Why isn’t she here?” Five demanded, his voice trembling with a mix of anger and desperation. “Why can’t we find her?”

The other Five’s expression softened, though the anger was still there, simmering beneath the surface. “Because you erased her, you idiot. The moment you chose Lila, you erased y/n from all of our lives. The woman who was supposed to keep us grounded, to hold us together—gone. And now, we’re all suffering for it.”

Five felt a cold sweat break out on his skin. He had made a choice that he couldn’t take back, and now it was costing him—and every version of himself—everything. The weight of his actions pressed down on him, suffocating him with guilt.

“What do I do?” he whispered, almost to himself. “How do I fix this?”

The Five opposite from him sighed, his anger giving way to something more like pity. “That’s the problem. We don’t know if it can be fixed. Y/n was our everything, the one person who could make us feel human, no matter what timeline we were in. Without her… we’re lost.”

The room fell into a heavy silence, each Five contemplating the enormity of the situation. Five’s mind raced, trying to think of a solution, a way to bring y/n back. But every thought was met with the same bleak realization: he had broken something that might never be repaired.

Finally, Brisket Five spoke again, his voice low and resigned. “You can try to find her. But the truth is, we don’t even know where to start. You’ve changed the course of all our lives, and now… now we’re all paying the price.”

Five swallowed hard, his chest tightening with the weight of his guilt. He had always been the one to take control, to find a way out of impossible situations. But this time, he wasn’t sure if there was a way out. The woman who was supposed to be his guiding light, his North Star, was gone. And it was his fault.

The diner fell into a heavy silence, the weight of what had been lost hanging in the air like a shroud. The other Fives watched him, their anger slowly turning to resignation. They knew, as well as he did, that there was no fixing this. Y/n was gone, and with her, the stability and hope they had all desperately needed.

And as he left the diner, the weight of his actions bore down on him like a heavy burden, one that he wasn’t sure he could ever shake.

#five hargreeves imagines #five hargreeves x reader #five hargreeves x you #number five imagine #number five x reader #the umbrella academy #number five #number five one shot #five hargreeves

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xzaddyzanakinx · 5 months ago

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Not That Kind of Guy

Part Eighteen: Stalker!Anakin Skywalker × femme reader series

Warnings: stalking, weirdo behavior, psychotic/delusional behavior, possessive/protective, sexism/misogyny, sexual content/fantasizing, pervy behavior, panty/scent kink, mask kink(Ghostface), gaslighting/manipulation, public/semi-public, spitting, cumplay, nude vids/pics, masturbation, oral, PIV, dick piercing, forced orgasm, bondage/blindfolds, biting/slapping/ spanking/cutting, rape kink, NONCON/DUBCON/CNC, Somno, blood, knife, GEN. SMUT, period sex, brief mention of cannibalism/maggots[All possible tags listed, all may not apply] warning: suicidal ideation

Info: Anakinnnn your misogyny is showing, he’s insanely manipulative like so much more than normal[diary entries from Ani] extremely not proofread.MDNI 18+

September 16th 4:00ish am

Anakin returned from the shower quickly, his dark hair being ruffled up with his towel as he walked into the bedroom where you waited for him, tucked in on your side of the bed with the tv still playing softly in the background.

“Ready to talk?” Anakin gave you a lopsided smile, crawling up on the bed and joining you under the covers. He leaned back against the headboard and pulled you close, up under his arm.

“Ready.” You nodded quietly, unsure of where this conversation was headed and if you even wanted to find out.

“You look a little green around the gills sweetheart, you okay?” He asked, petting your cheek with the back of his hand.

“I’m okay Ani, I’m just… anxious I guess.” You said softly, trying to reassure him with a small smile but only making him worry more by your reaction.

“Hey, don’t stress.” He said, kissing the top of your head, nuzzling into your hair. “It’s nothing scary.”

“Look, I know I should’ve told you this a long time ago.” He whispered, holding your hand and running his thumb over your knuckles. “I love you and I promise I’ll understand if you get upset after hearing this. You’ve every right to punch me in the face.”

“I’m not gonna punch you in the face.” You breathed a little laugh.

“That’s yet to be decided.” He sighed, squeezing you against his chest with his free arm. “So, you remember how my mom was all odd about stuff when you met her?”

“I wouldn’t say she was ‘odd’ about stuff.” You shook your head and opened your mouth to speak again, but you were interrupted.

“She was much more odd when she called me over for a side bar.” He chuckled, using his forefinger and thumb to tilt your face up by your chin. “She was pissed off that I hadn’t told you that I take a few daily meds.

“Anakin! What if something had happened and I didn’t know, you could-“

“I’m not a closet diabetic or anything, it’s nothing too serious, I won’t die without it.” He stopped you by rubbing his thumb over your bottom lip. “Cute that you thought of that though.”

“It’s cute that I worried my boyfriend could’ve died?” You huffed.

“From my point of view yeah.” He smiled, his dimple making an appearance.

“Back to the seriousness though, princess.” He said softly. “I take a mood stabilizer, I ran out and I have to go see my doctor to get the prescription refilled. I’ll have to start seeing them every month again.” He sighed, almost wincing in preparation for your response.

“That’s it?” You asked with eyebrows in a low confused swoop. “That’s what you’re worried I’d punch you in the face for? Anakin that’s not even worth a flick to the forehead.” You snorted.

“You’re not mad?” He asked, surprised.

“I’m annoyed, irritated.” You admitted, pulling your lips into a sideways frown. “You could’ve just told me. I wouldn’t have judged you for it. That’s silly.”

“You’re not mad, like at all?” He repeated himself as though he expected this to be an argument.

“No I’m not mad.” You shook your head. “Disappointed that you didn’t think you could tell me… yes.”

“Oh sweetheart it’s not that I-“ he groaned, pressing his hands over his eyes. “I wish I would’ve told you to begin with. It’s just that I’ve had some negative reactions before and I guess I wanted to make sure you were in it for the long haul… you know?”

“I just didn’t expect that I’d be having to tell you because I’ve been a fucking asshole.” He said apologetically. “I think that’s why I’m so surprised. Baby, I’ve not been myself but I promise I’ll be right back to where I should be after my appointment okay?”

“Do you want me to come with you?” You asked, trying to offer him support.

“What? Why would you want to-“

“Because you’re my boyfriend and I care about you?” You said a bit more sharply than intended, your hand on his chest.

“I… well,” he swallowed as though he were more nervous now than he was to begin with. “It’s just that I’ll have to you know; talk about stuff with my doctor.”

“Mhm, yeah that’s what you do at a doctors appointment.” You nodded with a smirk.

“Smartass.” He huffed. “Anyway, I suppose you’re owed at least that aren’t you? After not having known about it.”

“Anakin that’s ridiculous you don’t ‘owe’ me anything because of this.” You laughed tiredly. “If you don’t want me to go I won’t, I just wanted to offer support.

“You’re an Angel you know that?” He grinned, pulling you into his chest and wiggling around until he was laying on his back with your head tucked under his chin. “You can come with me. If you don’t mind sitting in the waiting room.”

“Are you kidding? I love waiting rooms, seven year old magazines, weird little old lady asleep in the corner, secretary who plays solitaire instead of working…” You grinned.

“Man you’re making me wanna trade places.” He clicked his tongue with a chuckle.

“So, what’s your diagnosis?” You asked after a silent moment, changing the subject back to the serious side of the topic.

“What?” He stiffened, shifting to look over at you, his chin tucked against his shoulder.

“Well you’re on a mood stabilizer, what’s your diagnosis? It’s not a big deal, my sister’s husband has bipolar.” You shrugged, noticing the way his energy grew colder.

“I don’t see how that’s any of your b-“ he started, stopping to breathe through his nose. “Sorry.”

“I just hate labeling stuff like that you know? There’s such a stigma around mental health. It’s a chemical imbalance in my brain, not a fucking mind controlling parasite or something scary like that.” He grumbled, lips in a thin line while he clenched his teeth.

“I didn’t mean to make you upset or-“

“I’m not upset!” He snapped and let out a burst of air from his nostrils. “I’m not- not upset. I just don’t want this to be a thing you know?”

“A thing?” You questioned.

“Yeah. A thing, an issue, a problem.” He clarified, rolling his eyes. “It’s always been something that everyone blames shit on. I wake up grumpy ‘Anakin did you take your medicine?’. I complain about standing in a line at the fucking coffee shop ‘Ani, sweetie, are you doing okay?’. I don’t answer the phone on the first ring ‘Ani! I was so worried. Do you need me to come visit? Take care of things?’. It’s just all a matter of time before-“

“Oh no sir.” You stopped him, a scowl on your face. “Absolutely not. Don’t you dare tell me I’m gonna start nagging you like I’m your mother.”

“That’s not what-“

“No, that’s stupid okay? Listen I know it sucks to be questioned like that but she’s only doing it cause she cares about you.” You said, propping yourself up on your elbow. “Now that I know… I trust you’ll tell me if there’s anything going on I should know about.”

“You don’t answer to your mother anymore and if she or anyone else has questions they can talk to me.” You said sternly. Anakin stared at you, lips parted slightly. Even in the dark you could see his pupils dilate a little more.

“That was hot.” He said, smirk pulling at the corner of his lips. “When did you get so bossy?”

“You are the company you keep.” You shrugged, a light smile on your face.

“Callin’ me bossy? Rude.” He chuckled.

“Maybe, maybe not.” You huffed out a little laugh.

”You know…” He whispered, breath warm as it fanned across your cheek, “I could be really bossy if you want.” His voice deep and rumbling in his chest, the vibrations resounding in your own, pressed against his.

”You did so good for me earlier, let me pay you back babydoll.” His husky words stoking the flame in your womb. He shifted, pressing his cock against your hip and grinding, one hand trailing down your back, over your ass and gripping the back of your thigh to pull over him, manhandling you until you perched over his throbbing member. You could feel the heat emanating from it even through your clothes, making your mouth water.

”Ani, it’s so late.” You whispered, nibbling the skin on your lower lip as you prepared to turn him down… again. “I can suck you off if you want.” You offered as an alternative.

“Are you fucking serious? ‘If i want’? You make it sound like a chore.” He groaned frustratedly, gently shoving you off his lap. “You know what? Never mind.”

”I’ll just do it my damn self, like I have been since you came back.” He snapped at you, getting up from the bed and slamming the bedroom door shut as he left the room.

He was much angrier about the denial than you expected, so angry that he was feeling spiteful. Stomping over to the couch he sat himself down and fumed for a moment before deciding a course of action. Looking down at his phone, the album of your many homemade pornos calling his name. He wanted to screen mirror it to the TV, curious if you’d recognize your own moans and sloshing pussy and come running.

He licked his top row of teeth, The devious thought now at the forefront of his mind and there was no stopping him. He grabbed the remote and screen mirrored his phone to the TV, something he’d done a shameful nuimber of times to these very videos without your knowledge. He turned up the sound enough that you could hear it, but the poor neighbors sharing his living room wall would be spared.

He selected one of his favorites and exited the album to prepare the rest of his plan before steeping into action. Anakin tugged at his boxers and spit in the palm of his hand, slicking up his painfully neglected dick, shivering at the feeling of the well deserved friction that you had denied him. Hitting play he watched as Ghost shoved you to your knees on your bedroom floor, wasting no time at all in shoving his cock down your pretty throat and brutalizing your delicate mouth.

He loved the view, being able to see himself doing such things to you. It was as close to an out of body experience he’d ever gotten. He firmly gripped his shaft, spreading his precum over his cockhead with his thumb. Groaning at the feeling of the calloused skin on such a soft, silky, sensitive part of himself. The beautiful noises you made, choking and gagging as you tried to breathe through your nose, it was like he was transported right back to that moment, seeing it in real time all over again.

This part was for him, just a warm up, just enough to get himself more needy than he already was. He wanted to look as pitiful as he felt when you came barreling out of the bedroom to confront him. He edged himself until he was sick of it, until he was so sensitive that his tip leaked, his balls tightened with every few strokes and he felt as though if he didn’t cum he might throw up.

He flicked over to the next video, another favorite, one he watched so often that if it were on DVD the damn thing wouldn’t play anymore. The one time Ghost stripped himself naked for you, let you feel the warmth of his skin against yours. It was dirty, sensual, dare he even say… romantic? He could feel the connection you shared through the screen each and every time he saw it. Imagining what was going on in that stupid little brain of yours when he hears the first gasp, your realization he was baring himself to you. He wondered if you were nervous, if the idea of it scared you, if it made it all the more real for you like it did for him. That barrier of fabric removed, nothing restricting your soft skin from touching his, he wondered if that’s the moment it set in for you that Ghost was more than a fantasy. He was flesh and blood just like you.

——————————————————————————

You sat in bed where Anakin had left you, unable to comprehend his reaction. You stared at the door, expecting him to come back in a moment after he’d cooled off. He’d apologize, you’d forgive him, everything would be fine. After all, you understood the awful mood swings now. This wasn’t entirely your fault. You were just that catalyst.

Though he didn’t come back. You checked your phone in hopes you’d see a message that maybe he was on the fireescape smoking and he’d be right back after his cigarette, ready to hold you as you fell asleep. That’s all you wanted, some comfort. On top of everything else that had happened this past week, you’d started your period. It was no wonder you’d been extra emotional, overly worried and over thinking every minuscule aspect of the goings on in your life. The hands of fate had decided you needed one more punch to the face in the form of blood and pain.

Poetic justice for the blood you’d spilt? Not likely, but it was in close enough in probability for it to have made you laugh the day before yesterday when you’d spotted in your favorite pair of panties.

You had almost calmed yourself from the stress of you current situation when you heard low grunting from the living room, paired with a lewd gagging noise. Porn. He was watching porn rather than taking you up on your offer of oral pleasure. Not only was it a slap to the face, it was a backhanded one at that, realizing it was too loud to be played on his phone. He was replacing you with a pornstar on the hi-def flatscreen in the living room, a perfect picture of a perfect girl that could never be you.

You had half a mind to go in there and ask him what the hell he was thinking, how could he be so cruel… but you stopped yourself. He was fully in his right to watch porn whenever he wanted. Who were you to tell him he couldn’t satisfy himself? That would be insane, it’d be a breach of privacy and a horrible misuse of trust. How awful would you be to tell him to stop when you’ve been fucking around behind his back for the entirety of your relationship?

So you sat and stewed, torturing yourself with images of him touching himself. His large hands, the ripple of muscle in his arm when he stroked his shaft, the noises he made, the way his pretty blue eyes would flutter shut as his head fell back, plump lips being bitten to keep quiet. It was all you could do not to burst into tears. Your couldn’t imagine someone else giving him that kind of pleasure. It made you sick. Even if it was only a woman on screen it felt like betrayal, even more so because he chose her over you.

“You’re a horrible, awful human being” You whispered to yourself, sucking in a breath as the crushing weight of all your transgressions impacted your fragile mind state.

The thought of him feeling this way was more than enough to break your heart. You had no right to cry, not after everything you’ve done. These weren’t your tears threatening to spill. These were Anakin’s. This awful stomach churning, head busting, throat closing pain; was Anakin’s, not yours. This is what he’d feel if he ever discovered what you’d been doing.

He would see the same images you did, only his torturous slideshow would be starring you. Your face scrunching up in pleasure, your mewls and whines as another man fills the sweet pussy he thought belonged only to him. He’d see the flushed face and embarrassed giggle you make when he stares so deeply into your eyes he feels his head swim… then it would be ruined by the thought of someone else doing the very same. Someone else making you cry out for more, someone else making you shake, someone else kissing away the salty tears he so loved to see stain your cheeks after he’d made a mess of you. Tainted, irreparably destroyed and desecrated in a way that could never be forgiven.

He wouldn’t be able to see anything else but your betrayal when he set his eyes on you.

Just as you were coming to terms with that fact, another hit you hard in the gut. Bile rising up in your throat and burning yout nostrils as you forced yourself to swallow it back down. What about Ghost? Is this how he has felt throughout it all? The room spun with the idea that you could’ve been causing him such agonizing pain for so long. He’d seen it all. He had been looking after you long before Anakin entered the picture. He had to watch from the shadows as you fell in love with someone else. He was subjected to the very things you’d just played through in your mind.

He had been watching another man touch the woman he loved. The woman he loved so much that he was willing to do anything and everything on earth to see you, keep you, hold you. The woman he treated like royalty in his own way, unconventional to most but… when he called you a goddess you felt like one. How else would you have been lucky enough to be loved by a man like him and to be loved by a man like Anakin at the same time? How horribly fitting.

A perfect example of the tragedies of old. Hubris of the gods always causing chaos for the weaker beings on the earth below. You’d been watching from a chaise in the clouds, peering down at the two heroes fighting for your affections. Only one having knowledge of the competition, a champion as they’re often called; a fighter who has the favor of a deity. A mortal with no knowledge of the battle they’re in… will most certainly befall a gruesome death at the hands of the devine’s champion.

You held your head in your hands, taking calming breaths. This is exactly the kind of thing you were reprimanding yourself for earlier. Overthinking. Over analyzing. Putting yourself and others in it, in a scrutinizing environment that would only lead to a downward spiral.

“It’s fine. I’m fine. Nothing is going to happen. Everything always works out in the end.” You promised yourself.

You shook yourself from the self inflicted suffering, thinking maybe a drink of cool water and possibly a retch over the toilet might help stop the icepick hacking away at your brain, pressure building behind your eyes to from the world’s worst headache. As you stood, you slowly became aware of the change in sound coming from the living room. It had went quiet a few minutes ago, but now it seemed…

”Are you fuckin-“ Anakin was watching another video. You’d wrongfully assumed the break in sex noises meant that he was finished and would come back to bed, though it seemed he had plans to stay busy for the next little bit.

You huffed, reminding yourself that its fine, everything is fine. Just take a deep breath, put one foot in front of the other, and-

“What the hell was that?” You thought, ears tuning into something intimately familiar as your hand hovered over the door knob.

There is no way. No possible way that Anakin could’ve gotten his hands on that footage of his own accord… right? This was it, this was the end of it all, the beginning of the fall of the greatest era of your life. Ghost had done it, he’d sent him the videos. How stupid could you have been to believe he didn’t have cameras here too? Did you really believe he wasn’t going to monitor the other man in your life?

He’d heard the argument. He’d seen Anakin storm off, watched as he… touched himself. Then used your own actions against you; this wasn’t a coincidence that the very night you searched for Ghostface porn, research purposes or not, that an explicit video of you with not your boyfriend ends up on the tv where said boyfriend is jacking off.

Surely you’re imagining it right? You’ve just worked yourself up into a tizzy and now you’re hearing things because of your overwhelming guilt. Yes, that’s it. It’s all in your head. You’ve heard Ghost speak so many times that it’d be silly of you not to be able to conjure up an exact replica of his voice and exact words you’d heard from behind his mask before. You know what your own moans sound like, of course you do. Doesn’t everyone?

You grab the door knob and twist it open, pushing open with more force than necessary and bracing yourself for the possibility that Anakin may be on the other side of it ready to kick you out and never let you come back. But the sounds you heard on the other side of the door didn’t sound like you and Ghost. It didn’t sound like porn of any kind. It sounded like… Dale Gribble?

”Ani?” You asked quietly, poking your head around the corner, your eyes adjusting to the different lighting to reveal him curled up in the corner of the sofa, wrapped in a blanket.

“Huh?” He sniffled. He’d been crying?

You’d imagined it. He hadn’t done anything at all. He’s been sitting in here, alone, sobbing over his bong and an empty beer bottle while watching Comedy Central. The poor boy had tried to take his mind off the subject of his weirdly behaving girlfriend by watching King of the Hill. You’d never seen someone close to rock bottom before, but Anakin looked like he had just booked an express ticket for the earliest train.

”Sorry, I uh… what are you doing?” You asked cautiously approaching him, your gaze flickering to the TV suspiciously.

”I’m just… moping.” He cleared his throat, hiding his burning hot face in the crook of his arm. “I’m sorry doll, I feel stupid getting so upset over this. It’s not fair to you.”

“Anakin, are you okay?” You asked as you sat down next to him, your hand on his chest to feel his rapid heartbeat and heaving lungs.

“Sweetheart, is there something you’re not telling me?” Anakin asked and your heart bounced out of your chest.

”What? I don-“

”It’s just… I can’t help but feel a bit insecure.” His voice soft and hurt. “You won’t give me a straight answer as to why you won’t let me touch you. I miss you baby.”

”Ani it’s got nothing to do with you I promise.” You whispered, wanting him to lay his eyes on you, but he kept them downturned.

”But its… It’s been since before your trip, I just worry. Are you sure I didn’t do something?” He asked, finally looking over at you with big watery eyes, the salty tears spilling over into a stream down his hot cheeks.

“Anakin, let’s not rehash this again.” You pleaded, taking his trembling hand in yours. “Yes I was upset when I came back from my trip, that made me less inclined to want to be… intimate.”

“So, so what’s wrong n-now?” He sniffled, swiping the heel of his palm over his cheeks.

“I’m not upset Ani, I just… I’m on my period and I just don’t fe-“ He sat up slightly and cupped your cheek.

”Babydoll, Why didn’t you just say so?” Anakin asked in a pained tone, like he was deeply perturbed you kept that detail to yourself. “I’ve been beating myself up thinking I’d done something to upset you or-or make me less attractive to you.”

”Oh, no don’t say that, no. You’re so handsome, hottest guy I’ve ever laid eyes on.” You gave him a small, reassuring smile. “I will never not be attracted to you.”

”I’ve just been so emotional and I’ve been cramping and everything hurts, I’m tired and period sex is so messy Ani.” You said as nicely as possible so you wouldn’t set him off again.

”Darlin’ you know I don’t mind a little blood,” he chuckled, sucking in a breath through his nose. “I’ve helped you with your cramps before, let me help now.” He said softly, rubbing your cheek bone with his thumb.

”Feel me sweetheart… it hurts me.” He whined, taking your hand to place it over his cock.

So hot, throbbing and covered in precum that you could feel the sticky wet patch where his cockhead rested against the fabric of his boxers. He felt so stiff that you knew immediately he hadn’t cum, maybe he hadn’t even attempted to take care of the issue hisself like you assumed.

“Anakin, I thought you… you know?” You asked quietly, eyebrows pinched in concern.

“I tried.” He sniffed, looking away with an air of embarrassment surrounding him. “Couldn’t do it.”

“Why not?” Your voice soft and warm, an attempt to soothe him.

“C-cause you were right there n’ all I could th-think about was y-you not wantin’ me.” He whimpered, his bottom lip in a pout as he frowned, taking in a choppy breath.

“Aw Ani, I’m sorry.” You whispered, reaching over to touch his face. “Let me see, let me help you.”

“It’s okay babydoll, I-I’ll just wait for it to go down.” He bit his lip, taking a throw pillow from the couch beside him to put over his lap, hiding his raging erection.

“No,” You shook your head, feeling awful for how you’d denied him for such silly reasons, you should’ve known better. “I want to. Please let me?”

“Y-you really do?” He asked with a pitifully hopeful tone that nearly knotted your stomach.

“Of course I do.” You said softly, nodding your head for his reassurance. “Just uh, I gotta go to the bathroom real quick to take out my tampon.” You said, almost bashfully.

“You’re gonna let me?” He asked with knitted eyebrows, his face twisted in a sense of surprise and maybe disbelief. “You’re gonna let me make love to you?”

“If that’s what you want.” You nodded, folding your lips behind your teeth before letting them roll back out.

“Please.” He nodded, nearly falling over as he scooped you up and took you to the bedroom. “Thank you baby, thank you.” He whispered repeatedly as if he couldn’t express his gratitude enough.

“Wait I gotta-“ You let out a little giggle at his eagerness despite being the cause of it.

“Don’t care. I’ll get it.” His voice came out low and raspy as he lay you down with your legs hanging over the end of the bed. You tried scooting yourself upright and he stopped you, a gentle hand placed on your stomach to keep you were he wanted.

“Ani, please, let me go to the bathroom.” You whined, unsure about how you’d handle being so vulnerable with him. It’s one thing to be intimate while on your period but an entirely different matter when it comes to another person, even one you trust, to remove your tampon.

“I’ll be careful.” He whispered, tugging off your shorts and panties in one go, reaching behind him to pull over his small bedroom trash can that he kept near the closet.

Gently, carefully he very slowly parted your folds, giving him full access to your most intimate place. He licked his thumb, running it back and forth over your clit with his other hand poised to take action.

“Ready? I promise I’ll be so careful.” His tone made it seem less of a question and more of a finality. He was going to remove it regardless of your answer. He confirmed that prediction by tugging carefully on the string at your opening.

“So fuckin’ sexy.” He whispered into the plushness of your inner thigh as he placed soft kisses there to soothe you while removing it carefully as promised.

With it tossed in the trash, Anakin jumped into one of his very favorite things to do; feast on your pussy. His tongue snaked it’s way from your weeping hole all the way up to your clit. Letting out a low, wanton moan he buried his tongue as deeply as possible into your cunt, slurping and teasing your entrance before plunging back inside, repeating the process over and over again until he had you squirming.

“Pussy’s so sweet.” He mumbled, humming contentedly like he was prepared to do that for the rest of all time and throughly enjoy every sinful second.

His hands found your hips, elbows bent to keep your legs open for him. His thumbs gently pressing down in massaging circles meant to help relieve your muscles from cramps. You can’t deny that it does help, you’ve almost forgotten the real reason you’d been fending off his advances, almost angry at Ghost- yourself for being the reason you had denied yourself this pain relief.

“Relax pretty girl, you’re so tense.” He whispered pulling back to look up at you, “gotta enjoy this while you can… I can wait much longer.” He smiled apologetically, he hated not being able to take his time, but you understood.

“It’s okay Ani,” you panted, lacing your fingers through his hair to draw him back to where you needed him most. “y-you can-“

“Really? Thanks sweetheart.” He chirped, hopping up from his kneeling position and pulling you toward him as he stood at the foot of his bed.

He didn’t wait for you to finish speaking, he didn’t listen to your nonverbal cue, he simply ripped off his shirt and boxers; revealing his horribly red and irritated cock. The tip covered in precum, shiny and dripping a fresh bead that glistened in the lamp light. He really wasn’t kidding when he said it hurt, you almost felt a sympathy pain for him at the sight of it.

“Oh Anakin, oh I’m so sorry.” You whispered, propping yourself up on your elbows to take off your shirt that he’d left on in his rush. “I didn’t realize…”

“Shh, shh.” He hushed you, cleaning the bloody slick from his chin, running his palm across his skin to smear it on his chest. “S’okay. S’fine.” He shook his head.

Running the heated tip through your dampness, nudging your clit before pushing inside slowly as he shivered. The simple act of being enveloped by your warm, welcoming walls had him biting down on his whitened knuckles to keep himself from bursting then and there.

“So good.” He whined, rutting into you with shallow thrusts, bringing the crook of your knees to rest over his shoulders. “So damn good, wet n’ sloppy for me. S-so pretty, such a pretty red.” He whimpered, pulling out completely to stroke himself just once, gathering up the bloody mixture to lick from his hand with a disgusting fervidity.

“Ani.” You chided, a slight grimace on your face. You didn’t necessarily find it gross, but it was definitely embarrassing.

“I love you, every part of you.” He said, his voice needy and squeaky. “Even this.”

“Don’t stop me from doing what I love.” He said, gripping your thighs against his chest, leaning forward slightly to speed up his pace.

Anakin’s breathing was shallow and choppy, like he was having trouble remembering to breathe, as if the only thing his brain was capable of was keeping up with how hard and fast he was pounding into you.

“Ah-s-slow please.” You hiccuped, being jostled up and down from the roughness, bracing yourself by gripping the edge of the bed.

“Can’t.” He shook his head frantically, his bottom lip quivering as he bit down to hide it from you.

“You okay Ani?” You asked with concern through halted speech.

“Mhm.” He nodded, his face growing pink as he squeezed his eyes shut. Anakin was trying so hard not to cry. Cry from the overwhelming need to cum, the overstimulation he’d forced on himself, and from how his thousandth declaration of love seemed to fail at chipping away your defenses once again.

He wasn’t trying to please you in this moment, this was completely for his benefit. The release he so desperately needed was just within his reach and nothing and no one could stop him from claiming it. He’d waited too long, been uncomfortably suffering since he stormed out of the bedroom and now that he was back, he didn’t think you’d mind being a little… used.

“S-sorry doll, sorry.” He hiccuped, hearing you mewl and feeling your nails dig into his shoulders as you took the beat he so lovingly doled out. “Can’t help it, m’sorry.”

He dropped your legs to hang at his sides, sliding both his arms beneath you to press you against himself in a tight squeeze, one hand on your shoulder and the other on your hip, both gripped firmly in his strong hands, fully securing you in his arms.

“I wanna be close to you.” He whispered, nuzzling into your neck as his cock slid smoothly in and all the way out of your soaked pussy, just to repeat the movement again at an inhumane speed and depth. The tip not just kissing your cervix, but most certainly bruising it from the bullying motion. “Need to be close to you, s’not enough.”

“Can’t get any closer than this Ani.” You breathed out a light laugh after taking in a sharp gasp.

“Wish I could.” He sniffled, his hips stuttering as his stomach tightened and he was no longer able to hold his tears at bay.

“I love you.” He whispered, hot tears streaming down his cheeks and dropping in small puddles across your shoulder and collar bone. He tried to silence himself by kissing your neck, nipping lovingly but he was so shaky it was no use in trying to conceal his emotions so he let himself sob.

“I love you, I just want you to love me.” Anakin sobbed, loud and exhausted, his chest heaving against yours, sticky with sweat from his efforts. “I want you to love me, why don’t you love me?”

His pleas were pitiful, so raw and vulnerable. He was once again baring his soul to you and you had no idea how to respond. The first instinct is to say it back, say it and soothe him, help him reign in his tears. But you hesitate, knowing it wasn’t exactly right; even if it is true.

“Please.” Whimpering softly, audibly sniffing back snot after letting his heart bleed through his lips. “Please just love me, let yourself love me like I love you.”

“C-can’t.” He whined, hips snapping against yours as he reached between you to put pressure on your clit, the simple touch fogging your brain. “I can’t cum.” He hiccuped.

It was awful, seeing him so close, so wild and frenzied to climb to a summit he just couldn’t get to, the poor boy had been so frustrated for so long and now that he finally had you again it was practically torture to be within those satiny walls he would kill to live in.

“Anakin.” You said softly, shifting and wriggling in his tight embrace to gain use of one arm to gently push his chin up, making him look at you. He looked as piteous as he sounded, red faced and splotchy, luscious eyelashes heavy with salty tears.

“Anakin I do… I do love you I-“

“Goddamnit.” He choked out, his movements completely stilling save for the twitching of his cock and the rapid beat of his heart, he even stopped breathing. The halted air eeking out in a groaning squeak while he pumped you so full of cum that you could feel it overflow, leaking out without him even moving.

“I do love you Ani. I just wasn’t ready to say it and I was scared.” You said quietly, letting him collapse into a quietly weeping heap atop you, his hips rolling against you ever so slowly.

“Say it again.” He asked, so sorrowfully that you could deny it if you tried.

“I love you.” Your hand finding his head, holding him against your damp chest as you gently scratched his scalp. It was bittersweet to say it aloud. You’d kept it bottled up for months and it was a relief to finally admit it, but it also twisted that proverbial knife in your gut. You can’t truly love a man while another has a piece of your heart as well.

“Let me kiss my princess.” He whispered, leaning back to wipe at his mess of a face before coming back to meet your lips with his own. “I love you baby, I love you.” His voice soft and sweet, a light lilt that made your heart feel just a bit lighter.

Anakin started to thrust slow and deep, reaching every part of you with equal intensity. With one hand he pushed your right leg back against the bed, his other coming to run across your abdomen, caressing the skin until he reached the beautiful valley and hills of your breasts. He was taking his time now, but you knew it wouldn’t be long until you unraveled.

“I love you too.” You said, swallowing down the lump in your throat and giving him a soft, warm smile, blinking quickly to bat away the tears forming. You weren’t entirely sure why your eyes got watery but you knew for certain it wasn’t solely because of your confession.

Enveloping one of your nipples into his mouth twisting and pinching the other between his saliva covered fingers, Anakin stayed true to his promise that he’d make love to you. Everything he did now was focused entirely on you and your needs. He watched every twitch, every breath, every heart beat to stay intuitive to what you desired of him.

“Like that.” You nodded quickly as he angled his hips upward to put extra pressure on your sweet spot -only he could reach.-

“You like it sweetheart?” He rasped, looking down at you with lust blown pupils.

“Love it.” Mewling as you arched into his hand that snuck between your thighs.

“That’s what I wanna hear babydoll.” Anakin licked his bottom lip, carefully working you up to orgasm with his skillful touch and perfectly fitted cock.

“Gods… what a pretty pink.” He mumbled, looking down where your bodies met with a hunger that seemed insatiable.

Anakin didn’t want to stop his consistent and steady pace he’d set with his thumb. But, he just could not resist the temptation to taste the creamy pink blend of your slick, his cum and your sweet, sweet blood. Gathering up a dollop, he brought it to his mouth, sucking his finger clean with a ferocity you’d never expected. His knees buckled and his cock twitched; suddenly he was cumming again, powering through his unsteady thrusts to attempt to keep his pace for you.

“Fuckin’ hell doe-oll, doll, my babydoll.” He corrected himself, hoping you wouldn’t think anything of it.

You didn’t. You couldn’t think at all. You could hardly hear a single syllable from his plump lips, focusing all your attention and energy on reminding yourself to breathe as you clenched around his thickness. The sudden and unexpected sensation of him coating your gummy walls, simply from such a disgustingly delicious taste was enough to send you into an equally spontaneous orgasm. Your legs shook, a high-pitched whine escaped your chest and you squirmed beneath him while gripping the blanket beneath you so tightly you felt sure that you’d ripped a bit of the stitching.

“There’s my girl, my sweet girl.” He muttered, seeing your eyes fluttering back open as though you were regaining consciousness. In a way, you were.

“Mmhmm.” You nodded tiredly, your arms wrapping around his neck as he nuzzled against your throat, peppering kisses across your flushed skin. “Your girl.”

“I know.” He chuckled, tilting your head back to capture you in a gentle, sensually slow kiss. His tongue barely grazing your lip, just enough to leave you breathless before he pulled back and flashed you a smile you hadn’t seen for a few days. A real one.

Diary Entry: September 17th

I should be ashamed of myself, I’m aware. I just can’t be bothered to conjure up that emotion.

I’m taking this and fucking sprinting with it, I’ll hit Mach 10 before NASA does. You told me you loved me. Me. Anakin.

Yeah it might’ve been… coerced. Just a tiny little bit of course, you said it if your own accord. I simply pushed you in the right direction. Now. Don’t go thinking those tears were a sham. I swear they weren’t.

That embarrassing display was entirely real and justified in my opinion, though that doesn’t make it any easier to acknowledge that this was not the first time and won’t be the last time that I cry while balls deep in your heavenly body.

Insane isn’t it? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it every single opportunity that arises: it’s just further proof that you truly are a goddess. How else would it be possible to cause a grown man to fucking cry like that?

Date: September 16th 12:38

You stretched, yawning and groaning as your body adjusted to being awake. You’d slept late, as late as you possibly could because of how long you’d stayed up last night. You were still tired, not nearly as exhausted as expected but still sleepy enough that if you were to close your eyes for too long they’d stay shut for another few hours.

You sniffed and rubbed the sleep from your eyes, rolling over to your phone and seeing Anakin had texted you not too long ago. He was out getting groceries for the two of you and he’d promised to bring home your favorite icecream, knowing you’d gnawed through the very last of it and you desperately needed more. After sending a quick message to let him know you were finally awake, you rolled over again and stretched out like I starfish, enjoying the cooler temperature of the sheets on Anakin’s side of the bed.

Even going so far as to scooch yourself over and snuggle up to his pillow to breathe in his scent. A cold, hard object touched your cheek and startled you, the item making a slightly metallic sound in the dark room. You grabbed your phone and held the screen over the pillow, nearly choking on air when you recognized the offending object. You grabbed it, turning it over in your hands with a most confused expression on your face.

Ghost. He’s brought your hair pin over here, placed it on Anakin’s pillow for you to find. But why? He never did things without a purpose, so what on earth could he have aimed to do by leaving you this? Bolting upright you went straight to the light switch and flicked it on, blinking and shielding your eyes from the sudden brightness as you frantically looked around the room in search of anything out of place.

Once you were certain the bedroom was safe, you searched the rest of Anakin’s apartment and found that all was well in each corner of his home. So it must mean Ghost has left something for you at your own home. Or maybe he’s just trying to fuck with you? He’s been so confusing and it’s been so awful… maybe he’s just hoping to upset you. Even so, you found yourself walking across the threshold of your apartment just moments later.

Ghost has been here. He’s been here while you were away at Anakin’s and you’re not entirely sure what the point of his visit was. The cat food bowl was full, your floor had been vacuumed and your bedroom door was open.

Half expecting to find him in there, you walked in and surveyed the room. Disappointment flooding you when you realized he wasn’t there like you’d hoped. Though remnants of him were. Spread neatly across the top of your dresser were all the little things that you’d kept in your jewelry box. Trinkets and notes, along with a few other things. The tiny cameras. He’d taken them all down and laid them in a row for you to see.

He wasn’t kidding when he’d said he didn’t need them anymore. He was finished watching you, instead of relief you felt a painful sense of loss, like you were missing something intangible but feeling it physically. Anakin’s ring. The bullet. They were both lying there at the end of the dresser, the bullet laid inside the metal centipede. Odd. Odd enough to note it for further reflection if needed, but not odd enough to capture your full attention.

No. Your sights were set on a cardboard box lying atop your bed. You rushed to rip the lid off, seeing something unexpected inside. Underwear. A whole handful of panties, your panties. Pairs you’d long since assumed had been eaten by the shitty laundromat washers. Beneath them were a set of identical sheets to the ones on your bed at that very moment, you even lifted the edge of the comforter to confirm it.

The items only continued to grow stranger. Some things you didn’t even recognize until closer inspection, like reciepts, bookmarks, random odds and ends of things you’d lost or thrown out… things you didn’t understand why he would’ve wanted to keep. That was until you stumbled across one slip of paper tucked away inside the large ziploc bag of other crinkled papers. A phone number.

The yoga instructor. His phone number, all this time you’d believed you’d simply lost it. The truth dawned on you slowly as you spread out all those little scraps of your life, realizing some of them were yours and some were his. Theater tickets, restaurant coasters, stupid little things that held no meaning for you until now. He’d followed you far and wide, that much you already knew. You just didn’t realize how closely he was following.

He’d attended movies with you, he could’ve sat directly behind you and watched you instead of the screen and you wouldn’t have ever known. Your favorite coffee place, there were some of your receipts along with a slew of what must be his, considering you never ordered smoothies from there. Time stamped minutes before or after your reciepts were. You’d drank coffee, stood in line… never noticing him.

You wracked each corner of your mind in hopes of finding a familiar face sticking out in the recesses. Willing yourself to dig deep and fish out a common denominator. Was there a man who could possibly fit his physique amongst the crowds in your memories? Try as you might, there weren’t any faces coming up on your register that seemed suspicious or even slightly familiar.

Pictures. Close to a hundred pictures of you from all moments of life. Shopping at the grocery store, getting into your car, browsing the shelves of the library, chatting with your friends, or simply of you inside your home from outside your livingroom window. Even more unsettling were the photos without you in them. Photos of Luke’s apartment, your sister’s house, The Bluebird diner, your car.

Then at the very bottom was your copy of The Silmarillion, the one you’d been so horribly disappointed to lose. Not that it made you feel any better to have it back, not now. Not after everything. You opened it up and saw a sticky note inside with Ghost’s handwriting adorning it.

‘Sent with all my love, Ghost.’

That’s it? That’s all he had to say after dropping this bombshell off on you? You were so simply exasperated by the entire situation that you shoved everything back down into the box, then making a big sweep of your arm across your dresser to knock all the other pieces of Ghost into the box and shove it angrily under your bed. What is it exactly that he was trying to do?

Diary Entry: September 21st

I’m assuming you were unhappy with Ghost’s display. Was it not clear that I was trying to physically show you everything I’ve done for you? Was it not obvious that I love you more than life itself?

Or are you just terrified by that very fact I was trying to get across? Now that you’ve told me you love me, are you leaving Ghost? I suppose I should be respectful of the fact you’ve begun to ignore me. It seems you’ve made up your mind.

I thought you’d be happy with the lengthened leash I’d put you on. No more cameras to watch your every move, I have your phone to listen in when I feel the need to, that’s enough for me now that I’m graced with your beautiful face as often as I’d like to be. I get to see you through my own eyes, no longer forced only to see you through filtered lenses of my mask. Why bother with looking through the lens of a camera anymore either? It’s no where near as satisfying as being able to reach out and touch the flesh I’d yearned to feel for so long.

Diary Entry: September 22nd

There’s not many things I’m scared of, but this appointment is rightfully terrifying. I simply can’t imagine how you’d react if you happened to overhear any of the sensitive information I’ll be forced to share. I know that patient confidentiality and HIPPA are extremely important and very much required, but what if the walls are not thick enough? Will they have a white noise machine outside the door?

September 25th

You had been standing on the platform outside Luke’s apartment for almost ten minutes when his neighbor stepped outside onto the concrete platform, sitting himself down in a faded green lawn chair with a cigarillo pinched between his teeth. He regarded you with a slow nod and an uncomfortable head to toe scan, are middle aged men so completely unaware of themselves that they don’t grasp that they’re being creepy? Or do they just not care?

You gave him the obligatory ‘smile so you don’t ask me to’ half-assed toothless smile.

‘Ur creep neighbors out here again.’ You shot off the text to Luke, the fourth message you’d sent him in between loud knocking and shouting.

Luke was never late. He was always the earliest person to any gathering, he was always the most prepared, so unlike you. You’d gotten here three minutes past the time you’d promised to be at his door. You fully expected him to be waiting, tapping his foot with that disapproving frown he loves to grace you with.

“He’s not home.” A gritty, decades-long smoker’s voice crawled into your ear from behind.

“D-do you know when he left?” You asked awkwardly.

“Yeah.” He nodded, taking a long drag from his cigarillo that made him sputter and hack up smoker’s sludge that he spat over the railing. You hoped no one was unlucky enough to be walking past at that time in the parking lot below.

“Do you think you could tell me?” You huffed impatiently.

“Got yer knickers in a twist?” He snorted at your brusque tone.

“Y’know what. Nevermind.” You scoffed, turning away and making a quick exit for the concrete steps and onto the sidewalk below.

With a cautionary glance over your shoulder, you picked up the pace to reach your car. There’s no chance that man could catch up to you, but you wouldn’t put it past him to try his hand at it. You heard a sharp, song-like whistle from behind you and felt your stomach churn.

A familiar, clean voice rang out through the parking lot, shouting out your name. Snapping your head around, your body took a second to follow. It was Luke, finally. Finally he was here and although you were relieved to see him, it also enraged you.

“Where the hell were you? You need to answer your fucking phone!” You shouted, quick walking over to him to shove his shoulder.

“Jesus I’m sorry!” He squeaked, shaking his head in bewilderment at your frantic speech. “I was at the overpass and I saw-“

“Your disgusting neighbor was… he was being disgusting.” You whisper shouted, following Luke up the steps and hoping the guy was back inside.

“Mhm, yes that is usually what he does.” Luke nodded in agreement although sarcastically.

“Where were you?” You repeated yourself as Luke unlocked the door.

“Well I was trying to tell you.” He scoffed. “But you talked over me. You know I hate it when you do that it-“

“I’m sorry! Just-“ you paused, raising your eyebrows as Luke scowled at you. “Right. Interrupting.” You cleared your throat and kicked off your shoes while he locked the door behind you both.

“As I was saying, I was on the overpass and I saw the tiniest little kitten up there.” He said, holding one hand over the other to replicate the size of the kitten. “I felt bad so I got out and scooped him up.”

“You parked your car and got out on the overpass?” You said in a shocked tone. It was always horribly busy and crowded, entirely too terrifying for you to have done that… maybe you might be persuaded by a situation like this.

“I didn’t want the little guy to get squashed.” Luke retorted.

“I don’t want you to get squashed.” You laughed, surprised.

“I’m fine and so is my new buddy.” Luke said proudly.

“You’re keeping him? Oh my god Luke did you leave him in the car?” You gasped, looking down at his empty hands before turning to walk to the door.

“No! No you idiot.” He huffed, smacking your shoulder. “I’m not that oblivious. I dropped him off at the vet’s office. You remember Jalen?” He asked.

“Sure, why?” You asked, pulling a face. Jalen was Luke’s shortest and worst crush from his player stint.

“He works there at the clinic now!” He explained, going to the sink to wash his hands, then trudging off to his room to change clothes. “I told him I was in a rush so he emailed me the registration papers and went ahead and put the kitten in one of those wall cages.”

“Wall cages?” You asked, standing in his doorway, facing the opposite direction so he could have a bit of privacy.

“Yeah, you know, the little kennel things.” He said quickly. “Anyway, I figured I’d fill it out once I got home so give me a minute or two and then we’ll chat m’kay?”

“Does Han know you’re bringing home a baby?” You asked teasingly.

“Yes of course. He’s practically my husband of course he knows.” He scoffed, tapping your shoulder to make you move. He plopped himself down on the couch and patted the spot next to him for you to do the same.

Luke mumbled to himself as he filled out the online registration, it was quick considering he had zero prior information about the little kitty. “Hey, would it be stupid to put ‘pitiful and abandoned’ in the Reason For Visit section?”

“Was he pitiful?” You asked.

“Yes.” Luke nodded, pursing his lips. “Before you ask, yes he was also abandoned. You’re so right. Perfect. Mm, also crusty goopy eyes.”

“Yeah, I’d probably put crusty, goopy eyes first.” You said, crossing your feet at the ankles and resting them on the coffee table.

“Too late.” He shrugged, hitting send and almost immediately getting a confirmation email from Jalen.

“Did you mention that you are in a very committed relationship?” You asked, finding the quick response a tad odd.

“No. Why would I do that? It was quicker and my new friend got into the safety of the little cage before the ugly old scrungly pug that came in right before us did.” He snorted. “I have pretty privilege, Han will understand.”

“You’re awful.” You laughed, covering your mouth as you snorted loudly. “What if you made that scrungly pug late for his very important appointment?”

“Appointment for what? Cremation?” Luke clicked his tongue, hiding a smirk and holding in a giggle at his own joke.

“Shut up.” You snickered, taking a deep breath as you dropped your hands into your lap. “Anyway. I needed to t-“

“Aren’t you going to ask me what I’m naming it?” He cut you off, looking offended.

You sighed, rolling your eyes and clasping your hands. “Luke. What are you naming your kitten?” You chirped.

“Art the second.” He said with a small smile.

“Nuh-uh.” You grinned, remembering the old scruffy cat he’d begged his parents to let him keep.

The poor old elderly tomcat had wound up on their front porch during a rainstorm and he was almost mistaken for a lump of wet newspaper. Once he got dry, he looked ten pounds heavier from all the fuzz and knots. He lived out the rest of his years being pampered better than the Queen of England.

“I miss Art.” You sighed, smiling fondly at the memory. He was a grumpy old boy but he was the first cat you’d met that you actually meshed well with. You’d joked that you wanted split custody in the event y+ou and Luke ever had a falling out.

“I miss Art too.” He nodded, laying down on the couch and shuffling until he’d laid his head on your thigh. “But Art the Second will live a long happy life. The life Art the First should’ve had.”

“Don’t get sappy please. You know how I feel about that stupid cat.” You huffed, letting out the air with puffed cheeks. It was the first pet death you and Luke had experienced, you thought you may never recover. Obviously it was still a touchy subject.

“Fine, I’ll cry about it later.” He sighed, waving it off before tucking his hands beneath his arms. “Alright, what did you desperately need to talk to me about?” He asked.

“Okay, please promise you won’t yell at me.” You whispered, petting his hair comfortingly while you pulled out your phone and turned it off. This conversation absolutely could not be monitored by Ghost. Your new paranoia making you survey the area to see if he’d somehow placed cameras in Luke’s house as well.

“Wow, I love it when you start a conversation so ominously. I can’t wait to yell at you.” Luke quipped, snorting softly as you glared down at him.

”I’m serious!” You huffed exhaustedly, already tired just from thinking of how too begin your story without revealing too much. “So you remember when uh, someone followed me home from-“

”Please don’t.” Luke sighed, reaching up to squeeze your upper arm. “Babe, I thought you moved past that.”

”Would you shut up and just listen to me?” You grumbled a bit louder than intended, though it seemed to startle Luke into obeying. “Someone did follow me home. I promise. I swear I’m not crazy.” You said almost pleadingly.

”It’s not… not as bad as it sounds okay? Just hear me out.” You looked down and saw Luke was obviously conflicted. Part of him wanted to stop you right there and call Anakin to come get you and the other really wanted to trust you on this.

”I’m listening.” He agreed begrudgingly, nodding for you to continue your tale.

“I lied.” You whispered, hoping, praying, that this lie would come to as naturally as all the others you’d told since then. “I lied and I’ve been lying ever since.”

”So there wasn’t someone following you?” Luke asked confusedly, his eyebrows furrowed and lips parted.

”There was but I… I knew him.” You said, looking away but reminding yourself that Luke of all people would know if you were lying simply by watching your mannerisms. “I lied cause I knew him and things were going- are going so well with Anakin.”

”I told Anakin I loved him.” You said in a softer but no less anxious.

”What? Oh my god that’s great news! Oh god I owe Lauren so much money.” Luke’s words started off strong but ended in a bit of an astonished dissatisfaction.

”Please would you stop betting on my love life?!” You scoffed smacking his shoulder before grabbing it and holding him in place. “I’m serious okay? But you shouldn’t be so happy. Not until you hear everything.” You sighed, rubbing your face.

”I need you to hep me Lukey. Please?” You asked, leaning forward to implore him. “I’ve messed up so bad.”

”You’ve been cheating on Anakin? Haven’t you?” He asked, standing up abruptly to putting one hand on his hip and the other in a fist on his forehead. “ What the hell is wrong with you?” He asked quietly.

”A lot.” You whispered, ‘if only you knew.’ You thought.

”S-so what do you need my help with, huh? Covering for you?” Luke asked in exhaustion, looking at you with an expression you’d never seen before. You’d seen him angry, you’d seen him disappointed, but this was much different.

”No, no not at all.” You whispered, swallowing and looking away from his glaring eyes. “No, I’d never ask you to do something like that I was-“

”Good. Because I like Anakin. He’s good to you, he makes you happy. He loves you. This is the only boyfriend you’ve ever had that I have thought highly of and I will not lie to him.” Luke said sternly, his tone so sharp and serious that it caused you to jump in surprise, readjusting your seated position.

”So you need my help telling him about your adulterous behavior then?” He continued, his lips pursed as he looked down his nose at you.

”No. I need you to tell me how to get rid of the other guy. Just… delicately, he’s very uh, touchy?” You said in an unsure manner, unable to convert the meaning you wanted to without using much stronger, more terrifying descriptor.

“Oh really?” Luke huffed. “He’s touchy? What about Anakin, huh?”

”I-I know Luke! I know that!” You stood up and started pacing nervously.

“You think he won’t fucking kill this guy over you? Cause he will. I’ve seen the way he looks at you.” Luke said in a low tone, walking over to you with a purpose. “Drop this other guy. Obviously he’s so unimportant that I have never even heard of him until you needed my help for damage control!”

“Luke, no it’s…” You whispered, shaking out your hands anxiously. Luke had never ever yelled at you like this and he was surprisingly intimidating. “It’s complicated and I… I’m so sorry.”

”You’re sorry? You’re saying sorry to me?” Luke laughed in contempt. “I’m not the one you should be saying sorry to.”

”Lukey I’m trying okay? I’m trying to fix this.” You said, nearly in tears. You hadn’t expected this kind of reaction at all. It was not at all as easy to take this side of the conversation as it was to dole it out during Luke’s fuckboy days.

”I love you. I care about you, I want the best for you and the very first time you’re close to making the right decisions… you’ve fucked it up.” Luke scoffed, shaking his head.

”I came to you because you are my best friend and I trust you.” You yelled back. “I’ve been there for you when you were in my position-“

”Don’t remind me okay?” Luke said, his voice falling flat. “I understand, of course I do. But I found Han and I am never going back to that because he is my person. Isn’t Anakin meant to be your person?”

”Yes.” You nodded sadly, feeling a sense of shame that ran so deeply within your soul that it was nearly suffocating.

”So do what you’re supposed to do.” Luke said sharply, pointing you toward the door. “Don’t come back until you have proof you’ve driven this asshat off the bridge.”

September 28th

Anakin nervously paced the waiting room for what felt like the hundredth time since you’d arrived; he’d sit, stand, stretch, walk, repeat. You wondered if he was like this at every appointment or if it was because you were present at such a sensitive one, even if you were only going to wait outside.

”Ani, please come sit.” You sighed, patting the stiff and uncomfortable chair beside yours.

”I’m sorry, I’m just nervous.” He said, refusing to sit but at least returning to your side to stand in front of you, holding both your hands and rocking from the ball of his feet to his heel.

”It’s alright, just take a breath. You already know your doctor, so it shouldn’t be much different from all the other times, right?” You said, trying to reassure him.

”I know, I know.” He nodded, finally deciding to plop himself down beside you, sinking low in his chair to slump and lean his head back against the wall with his hands folded on his stomach.

“Skywalker?” A feminine voice rang out through the waiting room, a younger woman had appeared in the doorway that lead back to the various offices of the therapists and psychiatrists.

”You’re not my doctor.” Anakin said, standing up and shooting you a panicked look.

”No, I’m here to do your intake.” She gave a polite smile and waved him forward. “You’ll be back with Dr. Richardson for your next appointment. It’s policy to go through an intake when a client has taken a hiatus from treatment.”

”You’re a psychiatrist?” Anakin looked her over suspiciously, giving you another worried uptick of his eyebrows after he’d assessed her. “I don’t- I don’t want a lady doctor.” He said quietly to you.

“It’s just for one appointment Ani, it’ll be alright.” You said as you gave him a light squeeze to his hand. “I’m sure she’s great.”

”No, you don’t understand I-“ Anakin was cut off by the woman calling for him again, looking at him with a bit of confusion as she tried to determine why he was acting so oddly.

��Is there a problem?” She asked when Anakin finally complied and began following her down the hallway, leaving you with once last look over his shoulder as the door shut behind him.

”Isn’t there anyone else to do my intake?” He asked, fiddling with the chunky rings on his fingers.

”No, it’s just me.” She responded, pushing open her office door and letting Anakin walk through first. “I’m Dr. Amidala, but you can call me Padmé If you prefer.”

Anakin scoffed, taking in the scenery of her office. She was very clearly the type of woman who thought highly of herself, exactly why Anakin did not trust her in the slightest to provide him with proper care for his condition, perhaps not even just to take the notes she’d be taking to hand over to Dr. Richardson. She had a picture of herself in front of her college framed in a shadow box along with her diploma, the room was decorated in ugly neutral colors, the occasional splash of green from a potted plant, and an essential oil diffuser that Anakin knew would leave him with a headache by the end of the session.

”How long have you been practicing?” Anakin asked, sitting down in the large squishy leather chair designated for clients while she took her place behind her desk and computer.

“Two years.” She responded, presumably pulling up Anakin’s previous medical history, which Anakin believed to be a bit unprofessional. She should’ve already read up on him before the appointment.

”Great.” He sighed, new psychiatrists always seemed so intimidated by him and his diagnosis and it was already uncomfortable enough for him considering this pretentious lady wasn’t his doctor.

“Feeling anxious?” SHe asked him, looking away from her computer screen for a moment. “I understand that, it can be int-“

”I’m not intimidated by you. I’m irritated because no one thought to mention this little change in policy.” Anakin cut her off and it seemed to startle the woman slightly, due to the abrasive nature of his tone.

”Right, well I appreciate your honesty.” She said, raising an eyebrow. “Let me tell you a bit about myself, perhaps it’ll make you a bit more comfortable.” She offered.

”I’m only seeing you once, right?” Anakin asked, crossing his arms and sinking down into his seat.

”Yes that’s correct.” She nodded, typing on her keyboard as she spoke.

”Then I don’t need to know anything about you.” Anakin said plainly, receiving a curious ‘hmm’ in response.

”Well lets jump right into the meat of it then,” She sai, spinning in her chair and taking the keyboard with her to type while being able to glance up at Anakin when she needed to. “Why did you decide to stop attending your appointments with Dr. Richardson?”

”Because I didn’t feel like I needed to keep going. I don’t need therapy, I just need my medicine.” He sighed.

”Well, that brings me to my next question then.” She stated, opening her mouth to speak again.

”I didn’t pick up my meds because I was out of town at the time and I had forgotten to call ahead.” He interrupted as he anticipated her next inquiry. “CVS put my meds back up because I didn’t get there to pick it up in time and then I kind of just decided maybe I’d be fine without it, but I’m not.”

”What makes you think that?” She asked, eyebrows furrowed.

”I’ve been quick to irritation and anger, having arguments with my girlfriends over stupid shit. Not her fault though, mine.” He said, shrugging his shoulders. “I just need my pills and I’ll be back to my normal self.” He added.

”WHy did you wait so long before calling for an appointment when you know it’s legally mandated for you to keep up with these treatments?” She asked, typing rapidly.

”My girl didn’t know I took any meds, she didn’t know I saw a shrink.” He said, quickly speaking again before Padmé had the opportunity to pose a follow up question. “She didn’t know because it’s not something she should be concerned about, my diagnosis has never affected our relationship up till now so it didn’t seem like I needed to mention it until I was ready to.”

”Your girlfriend, is she in the waiting room?” She asked, getting a simple nod in response. “Why didn’t she come back with us?”

“Because it’s private information and not anything she needs to hear.” He snapped, obviously feeling defensive of where this lady doctor was going with this line of questioning. “She’s sensitive and I don’t believe my past is appropriate for us to discuss.”

“Is that why you were hesitant to speak with-“

”With you? Yes, I don’t think women should be in this field of work.” He said firmly, sitting up a bit straighter in his seat. “Other patients with my kind of history can be volatile. It’s not safe.”

”You say ‘your kind of history’ and ‘other patients’. What do you mean by that?” She asked, quickly typing as Anakin spoke over her.

”My kind of history as in criminal history.” He said, rolling his eyes. “Did you not read my file? There’s a reason this shit is court mandated. I might be reformed but that doesn’t mean that everyone who keeps up with their treatments are.”

”I see, so you are ‘reformed’? In your opinion?” SHe asked skeptically.

”You really didn’t read up on me did you?” He scoffed. “I am reformed. I’m a productive member of society, I have a stable job, I have a stable relationship with a woman I love, I have a friend group, I have my own place, I’m in control of my finances. I’m doing better than most regular people.”

“Not to mention I haven’t had a single run in with police or law enforcement of any kind since before my time at the state school.” He added proudly.

”No run-ins? Does that mean you’ve still been committing petty crimes, just not-“

”No absolutely not. Don’t twist my words.” He snipped at her, cutting her off before she could finish the offending question.

”I’d appreciate if you’d allow me to finish speaking from now on.” She said politely even though she was off-put by his behavior and agrees I’ve speech.

”I’d appreciate if you’d not judge me based on other’s behavior. Like I said, I’ve been reformed. I just need my prescription.” He sighed, trying to reign in his attitude. He’d noticed the way she was furiously typing and it worried him.

”Then lets finish this quickly, yes?” She said plainly. “I assume you’re well versed in the mandatory questions.”

”Yes.” Anakin nodded, clasping his hands in his lap. “My sleep schedule remains unchanged, I’m a bartender so I get to bed late but I get plenty of sleep. Little to no anxiety when I’m regularly taking my pills, no suicidal thoughts so long as I’m taking my meds either.” He continued listing off his memorized answers to the same damn monotonous questions he’d come to expect and when he finished, he stood as though ready to leave her office.

”I’m sorry, just a few more things Anakin.” She said, not looking up from her typing. “It’s concerning to me that’s you’ve failed to share your past to it’s full extent with your partner. Don’t you think it could cause future problems if you continue to hid this from her?”

”I don’t think that’s any of your business. If I decide to tell her anything, it’ll be on my own time, not because some bi-“ He took a deep breath and stopped himself before saying something he couldn’t retract. “I will share it with her when I’m ready. She will handle it well I’m sure, considering she’s taken this with grace so far.”

”How long have you been in this stable relationship and is this your first serious commitment?” SHe asked, still typing before she switched over to her mouse and scrolled. “I’m not seeing any mention of former partners.”

”Unoffically we’ve been together almost a year.” He said with a slight hint of a smile, “But officially its just been close to six months or something.” He said before adding: “Yes she is my first real girlfriend, I’m fully committed. I plan on marrying her.”

“Well congrats then.” She said with a small smile, happy to see that at least one thing seemed to consistently bring him joy. Even if it was slightly concerning. “I assume you live together?”

”No, but basically. I’m her neighbor. We live in the same apartment complex, I’m right across the hall from her. That’s how we met.” He nodded, his mood lifting considerably and she made a point to note that.

”Have you put any thought into why this is your first committed relationship?” She asked.

”I was waiting for the right person and I found her.” He said simply with a firm nod and smile.

“If in the event this relationship doesn’t pan out the way you believe it will, what would you do?” She asked, fingers poised to type.

”That’s not going to happen.” Anakin said sharply, gripping the arms of his chair tightly. “This isn’t a therapy appointment, you’re meant to focus on my life currently and my medicine management. You’re not my doctor and you’re certainly not entitled to ask these types of questions.”

”I understand, perhaps I should’ve explained. I’m asking simply because it’s important to see how you react to inavasive questions while you’re unmedicated. Dr. Richardson mentioned you seem very defensive and-“

”And what? You couldn’t have asked me that question directly?” Anakin asked, annoyedly.

”Well in most other cases I would, but it’s been noted that you are a chronic liar.” She stated plainly, turning her computer screen toward him and highlighting the note previously made by Dr. Richardson.

”I want a copy of my full medical history.” Anakin said with clear irritation at the fact he’d been called out so efficiently. “Notes, previous prescriptions, all of it.”

”You’ll have to sign a release of information form.” She said, pulling out a stapled packet from a filling cabinet and handing it over to him with a pen and clipboard. He quickly signed and slapped the clipboard back onto her desk before she handed him another one. “I assume you meant full history as in your records from your time in the state school as well, That requires a serperate form if you’d like for us to collect those files for you as well.”

”Fine, whatever.” He huffed, scribbling in the designated spots that had been pre-highlighted. He tossed the pen down when he was finished and was relieved to see the doctor stand and collect the freshly signed paperwork.

”Follow me please, I’ll drop these off with the receptionist.” She said, ushering him through the door and back down the hallway to the waiting room. She stopped, handing over the paperwork and watching as it was faxed and filed as it should be. “Your patient file for your treatment here will be ready by the end of the day, I’ll send in the script for your meds immediately, the pharmacy should call within a few hours. Dr. Richardson will contact you with the information for your next appointment.”

She skirted around Anakin and approached you with her hand out, standing up, you met her halfway and shook her hand, introducing yourself.

”I always like to get in a few questions with the family if I’m able, would you be willing to come back to my office with me?” SHe asked, her voice friendly and sweet.

”Oh I don’t mind it’s just-“ You started but Anakin stepped in, putting a gentle hand on the small of your back.

”You don’t have to, it’s not mandatory right?” He asked.

”No of course not, it’s just beneficial to get opinions from all involved.” She smiled reassuringly. “It’s common practice in the mental health field.”

”I’m not comfortable with her going back to your office alone, if you’ve got questions for her, I want to be there.” Anakin said firmly, looking down at you in hopes you’d agree with him.

”I usually like to take family back alone for privacy reasons.” She said apologetically.

”Well, if Anakin’s uncomfortable and its not mandatory then I-I’d rather not, if that’s alright.” You said, giving Anakin a small smile to show you were on his side. It was his appointment after all.

”Of course, it’s no problem.” She smiled, bidding you both goodbye before she turned on her heel and click-clacked her way back to her office.

”What was that all about?” You whispered as Anakin opened the door and led you out into the parking lot.

”Hell if I know. I didn’t like the bitch and I’m glad I’ll never have to see her again. Fuckin’ ridiculous.” He huffed, helping you into your side of his car and shutting the door for you. “I sent in a records request for all my notes n’ shit. I didn’t like the way she was looking at me when she was talking and typing. Dr. Richardson never typed that much during our appointments.” He muttered, starting up the car and backing out.

”You wanna get some lunch? Before we go shopping?” You asked, trying to take his mind off what was clearly a stressful appointment for him.

“Absolutely princess, I’m fucking starved.” He said, reaching over to squeeze the back of your neck gently while he kept his other hand on the wheel.

Diary Entry: September 28th

I’ve been livid and trying my very best to suppress it. That fucking bitch and what she wrote about me was ridiculous. I don’t give a flying fuck if she thinks any of it is true.

Dr. Richardson is a truthworthy guy. I’ve seen him for years and I’m pissed off he’s went and ruined my day by letting this idiot do my intake. Why the hell would I need to do an intake anyway considering I’ve been a patient of his since I graduated? What new information could he have possibly needed? Stupid. It’s fucking stupid.

After we left she continued with her notes, even knowing I would be reading them very, very soon because you bet your ass I went and picked that shit up the moment I got the call it was waiting for me. The audacity she had was staggering. Calling me controlling and aggressive? I’m sorry? In what way was I controlling? Where’d she get the gall to say that about me? I don’t control you.

She’s just not used to a man telling her what to do and how things are gonna be. She’s not like you. She’s exactly the type of woman that needs someone to knock her down a few notches.

I just can’t imagine how she’s kept her job this long, or how she even fucking graduated. I even looked up her college and through the class list for her major and it’s honestly shocking someone so stupid could keep a high enough GPA to graduate. She had to have been fucking several of her professors.

No wonder she was so unprofessional, she doesn’t even have a fucking profession. She’s got a useless piece of paper and a shit attitude that she thinks makes her better than me. This is exactly why I hate seeing women as a doctor. All of them. Mental health or the fucking dentist, I don’t care.

I mean, I’d prefer you not work at all. But at least you have a job meant for ladies. You’re a waitress, that’s perfect for you. Your sweetness, the pretty smile, the cute caretaker instincts you’ve got.

This girl though? Someone ought to shove her behind the desk to replace the receptionist. She’s in no way capable of doing her job accurately. She was too busy thinking about shit that didn’t even matter. I just needed my fucking medicine. I didn’t need her to tell me I’m a chronic liar. How dare she? So what if it’s true? Or at least used to be. I don’t technically lie very much anymore I just omit the truth. No harm done.

If I wasn’t so opposed to killing women I might just find her house and snap her neck. But that would be unfair, I’m stronger, bigger. She’d have no chance. At least with men I’m sometimes, rarely, occasionally: equally matched. If they’re not as fit as me it’s not my problem, it’s theirs for not being able to perform a basic masculine task.

So I’ll just visualize it over and over again until I get tired of hearing that imaginary crunch and squeak.

October 4th

After the intital miffed attitude from his upset at the doctors office, he had slowly calmed after getting some much needed food in his belly. Almost like a cranky toddler, sometimes he just needed a yummy snack and a smooch to get him back on track or at least back to his ‘normal’ unregulated behavior. Though you skipped your trip to the mall for your shopping trip, rescheduling for later in the week after he had time to readjust. Halloween was a month away after all, costumes could wait.

His records were printed much quicker than you expected, especially after seeing the size of the stack. You knew he saw a therapist as a child so you assumed it was his complete history, including regular doctors as well, not just mental health files. It had to have been almost two inches thick and held together by three large binder clips. Atop the stack was a blank sheet of paper, save for his name, presumably for privacy reasons. Unfortunately for you that meant you couldn’t even catch a glimpse of it before he shoved it into the dash of his car and locked it away.

It seems the doctor was good for getting his prescription filled in an expedited manner, considering it only took two hours when you expected it would be late afternoon before the pharmacy called. You couldn’t help but wonder about what had happened behind those doors, what he’d said, what she had said; to make him so agitated. You assumed whatever was said had caused her to put a rush on his prescription refill.

The very moment he was handed the bag through the drive through window he shoved it into his door pocket to avoid you seeing the medicine’s names and doses. It made you feel like he might not trust you fully, considering how oddly he was acting about it. What kind of pill did he take that he’d assume you didn’t need to know about? It was all very frustrating though you tried your best to support him through the ordeal in the hopes that he’d share more when he was back on his medication.

He hadn’t yet, despite the quick turnaround. It’s been a week and his mood has finally stabilized and he’s back to his doting, loving, caring and helpful self. You didn’t realize how much he’d truly changed during the short period of time he was unmedicated, but after witnessing his improvement it was quite clear. You though often over those days about the conversation you’d had with his mother all that time ago. The look she’d given you, thinking it was so strange of her to have acted that way when thinking back on Anakin’s childhood… but now you began to understand he must’ve been more than a handful during his younger years. Piling on the stress of growing up, school, friends, it must’ve been nerve wracking to raise him.

His teasing comments and sly looks had returned with fervor, his touchy, wandering hands felt you as often as they could, his lips met yours during every lull in conversation, every quiet moment and tender embrace. Your boyfriend had returned to you and you wanted to make sure he never, ever went away again. Not for your benefit, but for his. Yes of course you’d prefer him to be this way, but seeing him suffer like he had been was just awful. Pulling on your heartstrings in the worst way, even as he was getting used to the medication again. He’d complain of headaches and being tired, needing extra comfort and love that you happily handed over without a qualm at all.

Now you sat in a heap on his lap, his hands in your hair and his lips gracing your bare shoulder with soft occasional kisses, resting his cheek there in between them. He’d been glued to you for hours now, like he had been touch starved or perhaps finally realizing just how distant the two of you had been recently. It was a wonderful feeling to be back in the swing of things, back to your normal, happy time together.

“What do you wanna watch next?” He asked quietly, twisting a lock of your hair between his forefinger and thumb, brushing the end across your cheek to grab your attention. “Movie’s almost over.”

“How do you know?” You asked, turning to look at him and scoot more comfortably to nestle yourself between his legs that were propped up on the footrest of the couch, a pillow behind your back to cushion you against the armrest.

“I’ve watched this movie a billion times.” He grinned, sighing as he moved to rub his arm and pull up his short short sleeve to point out a tattoo that you’d seen so many times but never really thought much about. “It’s from the movie.” He chuckled, watching you trace the words ‘Run Rabbit’ in his ink. “You didn’t notice?”

“No I guess I didn’t really connect the dots.” You admitted with a small, bashful smile at your lack of awareness. “You really like this movie that much?” You laughed.

“Hell yeah I do. Love Rob Zombie, I wish he’d make some more movies honestly.” He said with a nod, pointing to the screen and hushing you playfully. “Watch.” He grinned.

You did just that, turning your attention to the screen as Baby repeatedly stabbed one of the poor girls in the movie, over and over again until she finally sputtered and fell silent. As if it couldn’t get gross enough, Baby licked the knife clean.

“Oh nasty.” You laughed, making a gagging noise even as you remembered doing the very same for Ghost, it wasn’t gross then, certainly not gross now… it made you- no. He’s not speaking to you. You don’t miss him.

“You know, that’s his wife in real life.” Anakin said matter of factly as he gestured to the character.

“Who’s wife? Rob Zombie?” You asked to clarify.

“Yep, Baby’s his wife.” Anakin nodded, reaching over to grab the neck of his beer bottle and chug the remain few gulps before sitting it back down with a clunk. “I suppose you could say she’s his muse.” He added, for a moment you thought you saw his lip curve up.

“That’s… kind of sweet I guess.” You said with a slight laugh, grabbing a few chips but returning them to the bag as you caught a glimpse of a half eaten body on screen.

“Squeamish?” He teased, nipping your neck and poking you in the ribs to make you giggle.

“I’m sorry, I can’t munch on my salty snack while watching a man being devoured.” You snorted.

“Well I can, hand ‘em over.” He laughed, making grabby-hands toward the chip bag just out of his reach. He crunched them loudly on purpose just to try and annoy you, but it honestly wasn’t so bad considering the horrid stench you imagined would be suffocating the girl on screen as she waded through maggot infested sludge.

“You never answered my question sweetheart.” He reminded you, feeding you a chip.

“I don’t care, you pick.” You said with a shrug, chewing with your hand covering your mouth.

“Paranormal, slasher, thriller, monsters… what? At least give me that.” He chuckled wiping his hands off on a paper towel he’d stashed on the side table.

“Slasher.” You said without much thought, taking the chip bag back and rolling it up to set it aside.

“Let’s go with a classic.” He hummed, grabbing the remote as the credits rolled. “Been a while since I’ve seen Scream.”

Part Nineteen

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perlelune · 1 year ago

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no body, no crime | Coriolanus Snow | iii.

Your childhood friend returns from his exile in district 12, but he's not the sweet, quiet boy you once knew anymore.

Warnings: NON-CON, Plinth!Reader, Gaslighting, Drugging, Murder, Forced Marriage, Forced Pregnancy, Loss of Virginity, Somnophilia

This is a dark story. Heed warnings before reading under the cut.

𝖘𝖊𝖗𝖎𝖊𝖘 𝖒𝖆𝖘𝖙𝖊𝖗𝖑𝖎𝖘𝖙

After a few weeks, you’re forced to acknowledge you were wrong about Coriolanus.

His mere presence assuages your hurt, and none of his actions bear a hint of impropriety.

He’s simply being a friend, comforting you and supporting you in a time of need.

His visits grow more frequent.

You’re amazed he even finds time between the University and his apprenticeship with Dr. Gaul. Still, Coryo never misses tea time with you, sometimes even bringing books and sweets. You’re thankful for the time he spends doting on you, even if you hate keeping him from his studies. You know how eager to succeed he’s always been.

But you can’t deny you missed the feeling of having a brother, of having this person who cares for you, looks out for you and protects you unconditionally.

And while you’re aware Coriolanus isn’t your actual brother, having him besides you helps alleviate the weight of grief and loneliness. Being with him makes you feel closer to Janus. You’re also solaced by the knowledge it’s what your departed brother would have wanted.

There is one person however who isn’t too keen on the rekindled bond between you and Coriolanus Snow.

“You’ve been spending a lot of time with him,” William notes, tracing the lines in your palm.

You’re both lying on the couch in the sunroom, your back against William’s chest, fingers interlaced with his. Sunlight spills from the stained glass in the ceiling, painting your fiancé’s brown curls in bronze hues.

This is a moment of tranquility you’ve longed for, a sliver of calm amidst the storm and chaos wedding planning has turned out to be. You reckoned it’d be easier than it has been. Instead, it seems nothing ever goes right. Between incidents with the cake, your wedding dress somehow being lost by the store, and the venue perpetually being booked…you’ve grown disheartened and exhausted by the entire process.

It’s almost like some higher force is trying to prevent you marrying William. It’s ludicrous, of course. But the ceaseless string of bad luck is beginning to drain your hope that your wedding will happen before the year ends.

You and William even had to push back the date. There was no choice as hurdles kept emerging.

So you bask in your fiancé’s presence, soaking his warmth and familiar smell, reminding yourself why you’re going through so much trouble. Marrying William is worth it.

“Yeah. He’s my friend,” you state casually.

“Your friend. Baby…” There’s a brief pause during which William appears deep in thought. When he speaks again, it’s with a softer tone. “At the risk of sounding jealous, the way he’s looking at you…are you sure that he knows that?”

His words make you sit up straight.

“William,” you admonish, taken aback by his preposterous insinuation.

Coriolanus’ a gentleman. He hasn’t made any moves towards you and he wouldn’t. Sejanus trusted him and you trust him too.

Scratching the back of his neck, he sighs.

“I’m just saying. We’re getting married soon, and everything’s been so…tumultuous. I just want to make sure that you won’t…”

You search his forest gaze. Shock fills you at the doubts you find lurking there.

“That I won’t what?” You give a light punch to his chest. “Get cold feet? William, are you mad?”

His shoulders slump. “I know your parents wish I was from a great house like him.”

William looks away and you put your hands on his face, drawing his focus back to you.

“It doesn’t matter what my parents think. I love you.”

He smiles, that beautiful sunny smile that blows a warm breeze through your chest every time.

He grabs your hands and kisses them.

“I love you too, sweet girl.”

“William, you’re good and kind and caring. You’re all I’ve ever wanted.” You hold his eyes. “He’s just a friend, I promise you. You…You’re my future.”

William studies you, love and devotion illuminating his features. His lips then collide with yours. He nudges you down on the plush beige upholstery, humming low in his throat.

When his hands find their way below your skirt, you push against his chest.

He immediately stops.

Your hot, rapid exhales mingle as you steady your breath.

“You know I’d rather we wait for our wedding night,” you mutter apologetically. It’s not the first time things got hot and heavy between you and William and you slowed them down. You know how frustrating it has to be for him and you commend his patience. “ I know it’s old-fashioned but I…”

He quiets you with a tender kiss on the forehead.

“No, it’s okay,” he says, holding hands with you. “I’m the one who’s sorry. I got carried away.” Pink dusts his cheeks as he adds, “You just smell so good and you’re so beautiful.”

A smile breaks across your face. “You’re not too bad yourself, pretty boy.”

He tilts his head and laughs.

“How am I supposed to keep my hands to myself when you talk to me like that?” He bites his lip, his lids dipping to half-mast. “Can I at least get another kiss?” he whispers suavely.

“Hm, we’ll see about that…” you mumble, closing your own eyes.

“Apologies, hope I’m not interrupting anything?”

Coriolanus’ sharp inflection shatters the spell, making you leap away from William.

Heat nestles in your cheeks as you rise to your feet, hastily smoothing the wrinkles in your dress. Your fiancé clears his throat and runs a hand through his tousled locks.

“No, we’re…William was leaving,” you stammer, struggling to meet Coriolanus’ stark blue gaze.

William’s brows squeeze together at that. But you shoot him a glare that pulls a deep sigh from him. He nods and pulls you to him one more time.

He kisses you but you note it lasts much longer than usual, his fingers curling around your waist possessively.

Embarrassment flares inside you that this is happening right in front of your friend.

When he releases you, you’re breathless.

“Coriolanus,” William greets stiffly as he brushes past the blond.

“William,”Coriolanus replies, his tone somehow icier.

Once your fiancé has left, a weary exhale floats from your mouth.

“I don’t understand why you two can’t just get along. You both matter to me.”

Coriolanus smirks. “Oh, princess. You wouldn’t understand.”

“What wouldn’t I understand?” you inquire, blinking up at him curiously.

His tight-lipped smile expands as he gauges you.

“Nothing.”

You scrunch your nose, displeased by his answer. He’s always so cryptic. A chuckle peels from his lips at your sour expression. His knuckles sweep over your cheek.

“There should never be a frown on such a pretty face.” He digs inside his satchel before retrieving a slim, leather-bound book. He places it in your hands as you gape at him, puzzled.

“Here, I brought you this. This will cheer you up.”

You examine the book. Surprise mingles with elation when you notice the words on the cover. The engraved letters spell out a familiar title. It’s one of your favorite books from when you were younger. It bewilders you that he even remembers. As if no time has passed.

“Oh my god! How did you…” An excited squeal leaves you. Then your voice lulls to a whisper. “It’s a first edition, Coryo.”

“It was printed and bound before the war,” he explains. “It wasn’t easy to dig up.”

Your brows rise. “An antique. You shouldn’t have.” You cradle the book against your chest. “You’re too good to me.”

His mouth quirks lopsidedly.

“Anything for you, princess.”

You both sit down for tea, cakes and macaroons. Time flies as you chat about everything and nothing with your friend. As always, you do most of the talking as he dutifully listens, only interjecting to ask you to elaborate on a particular point.

No matter what you jabber on about, his interest never appears to wane.

You eventually land on the matter of your wedding planning. You share all the troubles you and William have had and Coriolanus hums in response.

“I’m very sorry to hear that.” He sips from his cup of Earl Grey. “How…unfortunate.”

He then pauses, seeming to ponder something. “I have a proposition.”

Your brow arches in question.

“Clemmie is throwing a party tonight. Let me take you, get your mind off of all this.”

Your lips part. Clemensia? A party? None of it sounds enticing to you.

“I’m not sure…” you trail off, your eyes finding the floor.

“What better way to cheer you up than a party, princess?” Coriolanus’ voice mellows as he adds, “You can’t stay cooped up here forever.”

Words falter on your tongue as your eyes swell with unshed tears.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, concern oozing from his gentle tone.

You shake your head.

“You’re crying,” he insists, reaching over the table to lift your chin.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” he says sternly. “Talk to me.”

His unwavering inflection nudges you to admit, “I’m just scared.”

“What are you scared of, princess?”

You suck in a shaky breath.

“Every part of this house, every nook and cranny carries a memory I have with Janus.” You glance about the sunroom. Here alone you can count so many hiding spots from games you and your brother played when you were kids. “It’s easy, keeping him close here. It’s just that…”

“You’re scared to move on,” Coriolanus finishes for you. His thumb glides over your cheek, collecting a tear you didn’t realize had spilled over. “But you have to.”

“Sejanus wouldn’t want you to wilt away in this house like one of your roses.”

You mull over his words. You suppose he’s right but you’re still not convinced. Parties like the kind Clemensia is fond of hosting aren’t exactly your scene.

A lame excuse flows from your lips.

“I don’t even know what to wear.”

“Then I’ll choose for you,” he replies without hesitation.

“What?”

“Let’s go to your room.”

Before you can protest, he seizes your hand and drags you upstairs.

“Wait, Coryo…”

He ignores you, making his way to your room with brisk strides you can barely maintain pace with. Once he’s there, he rummages through your closet. You let him do it, half-skeptical, half-jaded. Most of these garments weren’t picked by you anyway, but by your mother based on whatever fashion trend raged in the Capitol at the time. And those trends change every other season. You since long gave up on trying to keep abreast of them.

“Hm, this one is perfect,” he announces, drawing a red number from the closet.

You gape at the dress he chose. It’s a slip satin dress the color of blood. The waist is cinched with a thin belt and the lace sleeves, adorned with embroidered flowers, flow elegantly.

It’s beautiful, radiating a timeless elegance…but the neckline is low, displaying more cleavage than you’re used to.

Your cheeks warm. “Are you sure?”

“Just trust me. Try it.”

Your eyes bulge but you relent, something about his tone curbing your impulse to argue. “Okay,” you quaver.

Trying not to squirm beneath his intense stare, you grab the dress from him and slip behind the wooden divider screen.

Chewing on your lip, you peek above the folding screen.

“Maybe you could…get out while I change?” you suggest while fumbling with the lace strings of your day dress.

Coriolanus casually sits on your bed, his crimson coat pooling around him. He leans back and spreads his large hands over your bed sheets. A small smile dances along his pink lips.

“I won’t look, I promise. Don’t you trust me, princess?”

“I do but…”

“But what?” he challenges, cocking his head in question.

Stumped, you come up short of a decent answer. “Nothing,” you mumble.

You shed your clothes quickly to try on the red dress. The whole time, you can feel the weight of Coriolanus’ unnerving scrutiny on the other side of the wooden screen.

He gives you a sluggish onceover when you step out from behind the screen. Your skin prickles as you shake.

“Hm nice, twirl for me.”

His blue eyes sparkle when you do as he says. He gets to his feet. He slowly strolls towards you.

Once he’s in front of you, he also arranges a few wisps of your hair in a way that he likes.

“Gorgeous,” he lauds when he’s done.

He tilts your chin up, his gaze corralling yours.

“See? All you have to do is to trust me, princess.” His deep voice dips to dulcet tones. “Just trust me and, I promise you, everything will work out exactly the way it’s supposed to.”

“You came,” Coriolanus points out, that signature smirk of his adorning his lips.

“I promised I would,” you defend.

He snorts. “I’m glad. Saves me the trouble of having to drag you here myself, princess.”

Nervous laughter peals from your lips at his strange joke and the intent way his eyes rest on you. For a while, he doesn’t say anything, drinking in the sight of you in the crimson dress. The very same one he picked himself.

He then loops your arm around his, bending near your ear to whisper,

“Let's re-introduce you to everyone.”

You look around yourself, curious as you’ve never been to Clemensia’s house. The atmosphere is more intimate than you expected. The only source of dim light in the Dovecote’s sumptuous living room emanates from candelabras scattered all about, the wobbly candlelight casting twisting shadows over the damask walls. The crackle of the logs burning in the gigantic fireplace mingles with the soft piano tune filling the living room.

“Coriolanus, did you bring a ghost to my party?” Clemensia jests when she sees you. Her expression then turns serious as she studies you. To your utter surprise, she wraps her arms around you and hugs you. You freeze, too stunned to return the gesture. The two of you were never close, the opposite in fact. It all stemmed from the way she and her friends ostracized you and your brother in school. Maybe it’s all water under the bridge now that you’re older. “Oh, you poor thing,” she laments. “I’m here for whatever you need, okay?”

You nod stiffly. “O-Okay.”

Coriolanus hardly conceals his amusement at the interaction, mirth swaying in his cobalt orbs.

He and Clemensia keep introducing you to people. Some you recognize; some you don’t.

It makes you realize how much you missed.

After a while, faces blend into each other. You end up nodding and smiling to most of the small talk, your attention span dwindling by the minute.

Eventually, you decide to retreat to the bar to take a break. The barkeep nudges a drink your way and you thank him quietly. You swirl it in your hand, your thoughts drifting. Maybe this is what a return to normalcy must feel like. Slightly strange and overwhelming.

You gasp as Coriolanus appears at your side. “Are you alright, princess? Too much?”

Your startled reaction draws a chuckle from him.

A slow exhale drops from your chest.

“A little,” you confess. “But…I’m glad you took me. A change of scenery is nice.”

It occurs to you that you haven’t had time to wallow in your sadness, too caught in conversation with other people. However frivolous the topics, it did keep your mind off of things. No thoughts of dead brothers have crossed your mind tonight.

It might not be much but it’s a start, you suppose.

Coriolanus’ brow curves teasingly. “See? This is why you should trust me.”

“Don’t push it, Snow. You’re on thin ice.”

A laugh bursts from his chest but, as he peers down at your drink, all humor vanishes from his face. He swipes it from you and sniffs it.

“Hm, what’s wrong?”

A frown puckers his forehead.

“Who served you this drink?” he rumbles.

You shrug. “I don’t know. It was just…brought to me.”

“There’s something in it.”

“What?” Ice spills in your veins. “Oh my god.”

Your mind whirls as you peek at your surroundings, paranoia creeping in. You wonder who could have done this and why. Just to mess with you? Or maybe even worse…

Your gut sinks. Thank god Coryo put a stop to whatever awful thing could have happened to you.

He puts his hand on your arm reassuringly. “I’ll bring you a clean one.”

“T-Thanks,” you stutter. “Just nothing with alcohol in it, please.”

“Of course.”

He returns with a brand new drink in a jiffy.

“Thanks for looking out for me,” you beam before taking a sip. You were starting to get a little parched.

“Always, princess.” He grins at you while you take another sip.

A wave of queasiness suddenly hits you.

The room starts to spin around you, blurring into crooked shapes and colors. You try to stand but your knees buckle instantly.

If it weren’t for Coriolanus swiftly catching you you’d be a heap on the floor.

“Coryo…I’m not feeling so good,” you slur, struggling to speak. Cotton seems to fill your mouth, the mere act of forming words demanding great effort.

“It’s okay, lean on me,” he says, slipping his arm around your waist.

“Head…heavy.”

“You’re alright. Just hold on to me, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Good girl.”

In a daze, you stagger along as he escorts you through a series of hallways and up a flight of stairs. You grow so weak that you slump against him. With ease, Coriolanus hoists you in his arms, carrying you bridal style the rest of the way.

You fall onto something heavenly soft that sinks under your weight. Like fluffy clouds.

Your thoughts collapse, muddy and haphazard as you blink up at the ceiling. An antique chandelier hangs from it.

“You just need a little bit of rest.”

Coriolanus’s voice is warped, disembodied almost.

“Rest…” you echo.

But as soon as your eyes begin to close, the feeling of your dress hiking upwards tugs you back to consciousness.

Befuddled, you look down. You’re welcomed by the sight of Coriolanus wedged between your parted legs, hands clasped around your thighs. His waistcoat and white blouse are gone, exposing his pale, broad chest.

“Coryo, what is happening-”

His soft lips cover yours, stifling your protests. His tall frame pins yours to the bed. He purrs against your lips, framing your jaw when you feebly pivot your head to the side.

When his lips free yours, your mouth still tingles with the forcefulness of his bruising kiss.

He returns to the space between your thighs.

You lie back, your bones like jelly, as you feel the delicate material of your panties sliding down your legs.

Your brows twitch. “Coryo…”

His blue eyes glow strangely in the darkness. A chill slithers through your core.

“Shh, don’t worry about it, princess, just sleep.”

You want to move. You feel you have to. But you can’t.

“I…”

The syllable dies in a sharp gasp as Coriolanus’ cool tongue drags down your slit. Long fingers spreading you open, he traces wet circles around your bundle of nerves. He rasps against your center and the vibrations rock through your core. Your breath hitches. Your chest tightens. Heat builds in your stomach as he makes you dangle off the cliff of pleasure. He soon adds a finger and you cry out.

Coriolanus pumps in and out of you, gauging your expression as he grazes a particular spot that has your toes flexing. You writhe over the sheets, eyes blindly rising to the ceiling.

You clench around his finger, your cunt clinging to him reflexively.

He sinks a second digit inside you and you whine, back arching at the abrupt stretch.

Short, chaotic breaths rush through your lungs as he works you open. His slow, meticulous drags have your chest rising and falling rapidly.

Your legs quake as the coils in your belly grow unbearably tight and hot.

He stops as you’re on the cusp of your undoing. Your boneless frame sags onto the sheets.

He leans back and you hear the rustle of his pants coming undone. You get a faint sense of wrong trying to pierce through the haziness, but you can’t grasp at it.

Still, your fingers stretch towards the edge of the bed, your body rolling to the side. The meek attempt is interrupted as Coriolanus yanks you back onto the sheets, snatching your wrists and pinning them above your head. His frame drapes over yours. The scent of roses coats your senses.

“We’re not done, princess,” he murmurs, his warm breath caressing your face.

A painful pressure starts prodding your entrance. He grunts, hovering above you as he pushes past your tight ring of muscles.

You feel as if you’ll tear as more of him buries inside you. Every second is agony, your core burning at the blunt intrusion.

A sigh of pleasure floats from his mouth when he reaches the hilt of you. He stays there a while, seeming to bask in the feeling of you around him.

When he starts to move, your eyes flutter open. He sets a steady pace right away, thrusting inside you as if his life depended on it. Wordless screams rip from your throat. He releases your wrists, his long fingers latching onto your waist instead.

Each of his slow, deep thrusts sparks warm tingles through your body.

Sweat collects between his brows as he grunts in pleasure.

“I knew you’d feel just perfect around me,” he rasps, delighted.

His cadence quickens, his hand digging bruising grooves over your hip. Choked moans spill from your throat. His other hand crawls beneath the thin satin of your dress, fondling your breast and flicking your pebbled nipple. His hands feel everywhere at once and that sense of wrong rolls over you again.

“Ever since I saw you in this dress, I’ve been dying to fuck you in it,” he confesses, lust bleeding in his fevered tone.

The mattress squeaks as he relentlessly rams into you.

A uniquely sharp thrust has your slick walls tighten around him. His cock stirs, a throaty moan pouring from his chest.

The repeated friction against your soft spots has you seeing stars.

A feral glint bounces in his blue eyes as he admires your panting form, lost in the throes of pleasure. Strangled shouts escape you as another wave of pleasure crashes over your frame.

His pace slows, sloppier than before as his cock twitches between your walls. His eyes roll back as he sighs, tension draining from his muscular frame. Hot ropes spill inside you, overflowing until you feel the warmth dripping along your thighs.

Your mouth wobbles, silent tears streaming down your face.

Coriolanus cradles your face, kissing away each of your tears with tender brushes of his lips.

“Shh, don’t cry,’ he mumbles. “It’s okay, princess. I’ve got you.” His cock stiffens inside you once more. He lifts you and snaps his hips viciously into yours, drawing a broken whimper as he bottoms out. A lopsided smile blooms on his lips when he begins to move inside you. Helplessly, you lie back as he takes you again.

“I’ve got you, and I’m not letting you go.”

#dark!coriolanus snow #coriolanus snow #the ballad of songbirds and snakes #coriolanus snow x reader #hunger games #tbosas #tbosas fanfiction #dark!coriolanus snow x reader

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bnecaz · 6 months ago

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HEADCANONS ᯓᡣ𐭩

Art Donaldson x Fem!reader

warnings: Infidelity(tashi doesn't give a damn) I mentioned tashi more than I would like!! Smut

₊˚⊹⋆ Can't help but get clingy with you even when you're around tashi

₊˚⊹⋆ Who already knows that Tashi noticed the way his pupils dilate whenever you appear in front of him and don't say anything

₊˚⊹⋆ Who spoils you and recognizes this, always being mocked by Patrick about how you commented about wanting a watch and the next day having it in perfect condition on your wrist

₊˚⊹⋆ He insists on having you in the front row, so you can see him win or lose, as long as you have the best view

₊˚⊹⋆ He started winning more games after you started watching him play, Tashi doesn't complain and doesn't even hesitate to invite you when she can to watch him

₊˚⊹⋆ That he can't help but be worried when you leave without warning, calling you, sending you messages and even thinking about the possibility of coming after you, wherever you are

₊˚⊹⋆ He's an idiot and every time he finishes playing he comes to hug you, no matter how sweaty and disgusting he is, he knows the difference in strength between you and him, and he knows that you would never be able to get out of his grip (he just doesn't hug Tashi because he knows she would punch him

₊˚⊹⋆ begs you to try playing tennis, which doesn't happen because even though he plays weakly with you, you can't catch the ball at all

₊˚⊹⋆ He loves to grab you, no matter if you're in public or alone, when he sees you he just runs to your small body in contrast to his, and hugs you, your face hitting his chest

₊˚⊹⋆ Can't even hide how he hit the tip of the racket against him crotch every time you leaned over to get something he needed

₊˚⊹⋆ Who started winning over and over again after you started rooting for him, always looking at you and looking for validation and a thread of pride in you, like a puppy wanting its owner's attention.

₊˚⊹⋆ Who spied Tashi telling you that if you were having sex, or he was in love with you, it didn't matter, as long as you supported him in whatever he was doing because only then would he be able to win

₊˚⊹⋆ Who gave subtle hints that he wanted you to wear shorts and tight skirts, making a point of buying from the best brands and giving them to you as gifts with some stupid excuses like "Tashi had seen them in a store and gave me the idea of buying them for you" you don't even bother to pretend that you believed it, how are you going to believe it when he is stuttering, while his fingertips turned white from squeezing the straps of the bags with different short clothes

₊˚⊹⋆ That every time he wins a very important match he runs to you and Tashi and casts glances in silent permission to hug you

₊˚⊹⋆ begged you to join his team, Damn, he had money left over to hire 10 helpers but he insisted on hiring you to do what? get him water, accompany him?

₊˚⊹⋆ Who is noisy, you've always known that, and he knows that, always whimpering when he kisses you, and it was worse when you had sex, feeling tears streaming from his eyes whenever he was close to cumming, as he grabbed your waist and put his face in your neck

₊˚⊹⋆ Who needs to hear or tell you every minute that he loves you while he fucks you so hard and squeezes your wrist so hard that you know it will leave ugly marks that are difficult to hide

₊˚⊹⋆ During the day, he calls you different pet names like darling, baby, candy, or something so outdated that you'd want to vomit if he wasn't the one saying it, but while you're fucking he gets worse, whines for hours about how you are so good to him, and how you are the love of his life

₊˚⊹⋆ he is the definition of "make love" he doesn't curse you, and he treats you so well that it hurts

₊˚⊹⋆ loves eating you out, he simply gets drunk on your pussy, pulling you to his face and eating you like he's been hungry all week

₊˚⊹⋆ Always comes up behind you and rubs the visible bulge in his shorts against your ass, he has no shame on his face

₊˚⊹⋆ He rolls his eyes and moans very loudly when he cums, he simply can't control it and his body has a life of its own

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banj0possum · 8 months ago

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Sweet Hero Of Mine

Yandere! Antihero x GN! Hero! Reader

im back little stinkers <333

Edit!! Nsfw mentions removed! Replaced with..Elias being a dork ?

CW: Stalking, Creep behavior, Suggestive talk about reader, slight masochism

🪲 Elias was never into the whole Superhero thing.

🪲 He hated the constant swarming of reporters and fans screaming for his attention. He didn't want to be treated like a celebrity; he just wants to fight crime where people refuse to help.

🪲 That's why he avoided ever displaying himself like that. He preferred to stay in the shadows and kept his deeds out of the picture, but there are always rats scurrying around ready for another big scoop.

🪲 He could only scoff amusingly as he sees his little escapade last night being reported on tv with a blurry photo of him on the rooftops with the words "Mysterious Vigilante Strikes Again!"

🪲 He can admit, seeing them being so absorbed in what he does is pretty entertaining, he can feel his ego go up a bit.

🪲 Soon enough he gets tired of the incessant yap of interviewees talking about him and reaches for the remote.

🪲 His body freezes though when the reporter mentions some 'new hero' and he turns back to the TV.

🪲 His eyes are blessed with the cutest sight of a person dressed in a hero outfit with a logo on their chest. Their warm smile seems to radiate happiness as they talk to the reporter. Is this the new hero they've been talking about recently?

🪲 They ask for their opinion on the vigilante situation and he almost melts over their soft voice.

🪲 "I believe this guy has good intentions. Which is great and all but if it's endangering people and their properties, I think it's time they think about how running around and punching people in a suit isn't being heroic, it's being obnoxious!"

🪲 There goes his ego..

🪲 And perhaps his clean pants..

🪲 He starts researching all about this new hero. Who do they think they are?! This little brat has to be taught a lesson!

🪲 He stalks your social media, every fan account, every news atricl about your deeds, everything.

🪲 For for blackmail of course! Maybe he can find some dirt on you..in this fan account that makes thirst edits of you..

🪲 Soon enough he starts tracking you and your appearances. Every fight with a villain or any burning building with people that need saving, he's there with a high-grade camera that can snap all the rips and tears in your suit...for blackmail!

🪲 He's real happy that he wore a trench coat to your most recent battle or else everyone would have probably seen his growing boner whenever you throw a punch that connected to your opponent.

🪲 He's combing through the photos he took of you and shivers over your sweaty form and aggressive face.

🪲 He imagines meeting you, perhaps having a battle of his own, being pinned down by you, having your arms grappling and squeezing on his body. Perhaps you'd even say something degrading to him with that sweet voice of yours..

🪲 So that's what he does.

🪲 You were doing some last-minute night patrols after a long day of crime fighting and interviews when you hear a deep gravelly voice behind you.

🪲 "Hey there hero~"

🪲 You look back and see a large muscular man in a suit that looked like the armor of some insect.

🪲 "Huh, didn't expect to meet you here vigilante!" I joke.

🪲 "Oh please, call me Beetle~" He smirks as he walks closer to you. God you're even cuter in person..

🪲 "Well, Beetle, you are aware that you're kinda sorta wanted for a lotta stuff right?"

🪲 "Is it worse than the shit those pieces of scum done? Unlike youre pretty little ass I'm actually gettin bad guys off the streets.~" He teases, putting a hand on the wall and leaning close to your face. He's trying not to swoon over your stern face.

🪲 "Unlike you, I'm keeping people safe! Although I do commend your...unique sense of justice.."

🪲 *internal squealing*

🪲 He's a little surprised that you're so nice, unlike some other douchey heroes he knows.

🪲 He lets out a chuckle "That's new..Thanks goody-two-shoes.."

🪲 You give him a teasing face "Hey I'm not that much of an angel!"

🪲 "Oh~? Well o me you are, sweet hero of mine~"

🪲 You two become quick friends, even having missions together.

🪲 His obsession got worse from there.

🪲 Riding in your superhero vehicle, he rarely looks anywhere but at you driving, explaining to him the mission that he barely cares about other than the fact that it's an excuse to be with you.

🪲 Every time you take his hand to lead him somewhere, he makes sure to burn the feeling into his mind. Oftentimes he's the one doing whatever it takes to have physical contact with you, but it's way better whenever you initiate it.

🪲 You love taking pictures together. Of course he never smiles when you take one but when he's back at home, he's staring at it with the biggest, goofiest grin.

🪲 He loves taking pictures too, only he prefers ones with you and you alone. Sometimes it would be things you like so he wouldn't forget.

🪲 You blush, flattered over him remembering your favorite drink.

🪲 He'd memorize anything you say and put it in a top secret file named "My Love"

🪲 Oh my god please degrade him jokingly.

🪲 Bully him, push him around, be playfully rough with him!! Sure it's all in good fun but he's feeding his guilty pleasure whenever you treat him like shit while also being so sweet to him.

🪲 Pull him down suddenly by his suit's collar whenever you want to whisper something to him or show him something, he loves it. Although be warned, he might moan a little..

🪲 He's crazy for you, insane even, bonkers almost!!

🪲 He comes home seeing you in a superhero gala at one of the fanciest buildings in the city.

🪲 The bone-breaking grip on his beer bottle almost cracks the bottle when he sees you being accompanied by some other hero.

🪲 They're being all close with you and making you laugh, he can feel his jealousy rise within his body at the sight of your adorable smile, one that wasn't because of his jokes, his company!

🪲 Maybe it's about time he gives this superhero thing a try..

1K notes · View notes

fullsunstrawberry · 2 months ago

Text

SCREAM FOR ME

synopsis: Jisung orders a Ghostface costume after hearing you confess how hot masks are on guys.

pairings: Jisung x reader

warnings: SMUT, a little bit of CNC, Blind fold, Use of a knife, mention of handcuffs (not used), cream pie, cunnilingus, chocking, no condom mentioned, grinding, grinding on jeno/jaemin, drinking, swearing, and probably more lol

word count: 5.3k

a/n: happy halloween <3

You and your friends have always looked forward to Halloween. It was the one time of year when you could dress up and let loose. This year, you were especially excited. Drunkenly admitting why you were excited for Halloween this year to one of your friends, Jaemin, seemed like a fun time in your tipsy brain.

“I’m telling you, Jaemin,” you said, swaying slightly in your seat, “it’s not about who wears the mask. I just want someone in a Ghostface mask. I don’t even care who it is. I’d find it so hot.”

Jaemin laughed, leaning back in his chair. “What’s wrong with you but I get it, masks are hot!”

Secretly, Jisung, who had been quietly observing from a corner of the room, had heard every word. His heart skipped a beat. Jisung, being shy, had always admired you from afar. He knew you were older and had never seen him as anything more than a younger friend. But hearing your wish sparked something in him.

But he was too shy to execute it, right? Maybe he’ll just order the costume just in case…

“A cheerleader, huh? How original, Y/n,” Renjun teased, rolling his eyes.

Haechan nudged Renjun with a grin. “Come on, she looks hawt! You’re the one dressed as a children's book.”

“Moomin’s cool,” Renjun mumbled defensively.

“Cool? You’re just wearing a white shirt and ears!” Haechan retorted.

You laughed at their playful banter and glanced around to see what the others were up to. Jeno, sporting dog ears and a collar, was carefully draping fake spider webs around the room. Bunny eared Jaemin and basketball player Chenle were setting out snacks, and Jaemin kept stealing glances at you, a smile playing on his lips.

“What’s so funny?” you demanded, marching over to the table and pointing at Jaemin.

Jaemin raised his hands in mock surrender. “Just admiring your costume, that’s all.”

“Sure, and what’s the real reason?”

Jaemin chuckled, “You’re really putting in some effort to get laid tonight.”

A mischievous smirk appeared on your face as you twirled around. “Am I giving off the perfect victim vibe?”

“WHAT THE FUCK?” Chenle yelled, his eyes wide in disbelief.

The room fell silent as everyone turned to look at you and Jaemin. Jaemin’s laughter erupted uncontrollably, while you shushed Chenle with a grin.

“What’s happening?” Spider-Man Mark asked as the rest of the group gathered in the dining room.

“Y/n’s on the hunt for someone in a Ghostface costume,” Jaemin explained between laughs.

“DAMN IT, I should’ve worn a Ghostface costume!” Haechan said huffing at his cowboy outfit, only to wince as Renjun playfully punched his shoulder.

“Stop talking about my love life!” you huffed. “But if any tall, attractive Ghostfaces show up, send them my way!”

The guys laughed and shook their heads before returning to their tasks.

“Oh, where’s Jisung?” you asked Chenle, noticing his absence.

“He’s running late. Said he’d be here later,” Chenle replied.

Jaemin smirked, “Probably just trying to avoid setting up,” he joked.

You chuckled, shaking your head before turning back to finish arranging the party.

The house quickly became alive with the sounds of laughter, music, and the buzz of conversation. People in all sorts of costumes filed in: animals, witches, superheroes, and a lot more. But no Ghostface in sight …

You moved through the crowd, catching up with friends and admiring their costumes. As the party gained momentum, you started to let loose, dancing and laughing with Jaemin and Haechan.

Every so often, though, your thoughts drifted back to your earlier conversation. Your friends had laughed it off, but a tiny part of you wondered if a Ghostface would actually appear tonight. You shook your head at the silliness of it all and got back to enjoying the party.

“Y/n, come take a shot with me!” Haechan called, dragging you over to the kitchen.

Smiling, you clink your glass against his and downed the shot, feeling the warmth spread through you.

Just as you placed your glass down, the door creaked open, and a tall figure stepped inside. The partygoers around you barely noticed, but your eyes were immediately drawn to the white mask. Ghostface.

You couldn’t help but smirk, nudging Jaemin who stood beside you.

“Look,” you whispered.

Jaemin raised an eyebrow, glancing at the new arrival.

“Who is that?”

“No clue,” you admitted, heart racing a little. “But they’re definitely hot as hell.”

The figure remained near the doorway for a moment, scanning the room with eerie calm. Then, slowly, the Ghostface started making his way through the crowd, but his gaze—hidden behind the mask—was locked on you.

Each step he took felt planned, like he was taking his time to make his approach. Your stomach twisted, was he really making his way over to you?

“He’s coming over here,” Jaemin muttered, clearly amused.

“Looks like your wish is coming true.”

“Shut up,” you whispered, though you couldn’t hide the shy smile on your face.

The Ghostface finally reached you, standing just a foot away. The mask tilted slightly, as if studying you. You crossed your arms, trying to appear unfazed, though you could feel your pulse quickening.

“Nice costume,” you said, breaking the tension. “Going for the silent type?”

The figure didn’t respond, only tilting their head again in that unnerving, playful way. Then, without a word, they extended a gloved hand toward you.

You glanced at Jaemin, who shrugged, clearly entertained by whatever was happening. With a deep breath, you accepted the hand.

The Ghostface pulled you closer, and you found yourself standing just inches away, your heart racing faster than you cared to admit.

Whoever was behind the mask leaned in slightly, their movements slow. You couldn’t see their face, but you could feel the intensity in their gaze.

“Okay, I have to admit,” you said softly, trying to maintain some control over the situation, “this is kinda hot.”

The Ghostface’s shoulders shook slightly, as if laughing silently, and then, without warning, they twirled you away, leaving you standing there, stunned and a little breathless.

As they disappeared back into the crowd, you turned to Jaemin, who was grinning ear to ear.

“I told you,” he said smugly, “tonight’s gonna be fun for you.”

You laughed, though your mind was still reeling from the encounter. Who was under that mask? And why are you already so hot and bothered.

As the night went on, you couldn’t help but scan the crowd, looking for any sign of the mysterious Ghostface.

The interaction had been brief but left a strange, exciting feeling buzzing under your skin. You found yourself drawn into conversations, but your mind kept drifting back to that masked figure.

At some point, Jaemin nudged you again. “You okay, missing your killer?”

You shrugged, trying to act casual. “I haven’t seen him since.”

“It’s weird seeing you this horny over some guy in a mask” he teased, wiggling his eyebrows.

Rolling your eyes, you playfully shoved him away. “Stop. You’re making this weirder than it has to be.”

But in truth, Jaemin wasn’t wrong. You couldn’t shake the feeling that whoever was behind that mask knew exactly what they were doing, playing into your earlier confession. It was kind of scary— but you were enjoying it way too much.

As you made your way toward the back of the house, needing a breather, you passed by Renjun and Chenle, who were deep in conversation about some horror movie.

The sliding glass door leading to the backyard was slightly open, and you stepped outside, welcoming the cool night air. The distant hum of the party continued inside, but out here, everything was quieter.

You leaned against the porch railing, staring at the dark sky, when you heard soft footsteps behind you. A glance over your shoulder revealed the masked man, standing at the edge of the patio, just watching.

“Seriously?” you muttered, though there was no real irritation in your tone. If anything, it was curiosity.

The Ghostface took a few more steps toward you, closing the gap, but still maintaining that frightening silence. The party noise from inside seemed to fade as you locked eyes—or rather, your gaze locked on the mask.

The figure took off their gloves slowly, stuffing them into their back pocket, and for a split second, you wondered if they would finally reveal themselves.

“Okay,” you said, turning to fully face them. “You’ve got my attention. What now?”

Without a word, Ghostface reached out and, gently but firmly, took your hand. This time, there was no hesitation. You let them pull you closer, so close that you could hear the faintest sound of their breath behind the mask. Your heart pounded in your chest.

In the dim light of the backyard, it felt like the world had shrunk down to just the two of you. The Ghostface raised their free hand slowly, brushing a lock of hair from your face with surprising tenderness.

You opened your mouth to say something, but before you could, they lifted their mask just enough for you to catch a glimpse of their lips, and your breath caught in your throat.

Whoever it was—they were about to kiss you. Time seemed to freeze in that moment, your mind racing with the mystery and excitement of it all.

But then, just as you thought they would make their move, the sliding door burst open with a loud thud.

“Y/n!” Haechan yelled from inside, half-drunk and waving a beer bottle. “Come on! We’re about to do shots!”

You blinked, the heat of the moment shattering as you turned toward the noise. When you glanced back, Ghostface had already lowered their mask and started backing away, disappearing into the shadows of the yard.

You stood there for a moment, dazed. Wondering if you would ever see him again.

Haechan stumbled out onto the porch, throwing an arm around your shoulder.

“What are you doing out here? Come back in! The party’s not over yet!”

“You sure know how to ruin a moment,” you muttered, glancing over your shoulder one last time. But the yard was empty, The mystery Ghostface was gone.

“It’s party time!!” Haechan was too drunk to even understand your words.

Back inside, your friends gathered around the kitchen island, laughter echoing through the house. Jaemin raised an eyebrow when he saw you return.

“No Ghostface this time?”

You shook your head, pretending like you didn’t care.

“Looks like he got bored.”

“Wait, there’s really a Ghostface here?” Jeno teased, nudging you playfully.

You nodded, sighing. “Yeah, but he’s been stringing me along this whole time.”

Jaemin smirked. “Why not make him a little jealous, then?”

“I doubt that’ll even work,” you said, shaking your head. “I never actually see him around the party.”

“Trust us,” Jeno grinned, grabbing your hand. “We’ve got this.”

Without another word, he pulled you into the

crowded living room, playful determination in his eyes.

Jeno tugged you into the living room, where the music was louder, and party goers crowded the space. Jaemin followed closely behind, a mischievous grin spreading across his face.

“Alright, Y/n,” Jeno said, spinning you around to face him.

“Let’s make sure Ghostface knows what he’s missing.”

Jaemin smirked and nodded toward the group of people dancing. “Just go with it. If he’s been watching you like you said, this’ll make him show up.”

You shot them both a skeptical look, but before you could protest, Jaemin slipped his hand onto your waist, and Jeno grinned before pulling you into him. The three of you swayed to the beat, your friends fully committed to playing along, their movements exaggerated as if trying to draw all the attention in the room.

Jaemin leaned in, his voice low near your ear. “You said you wanted the perfect victim vibe, right? Let’s give him something to chase.”

You laughed, shaking your head at how over-the-top they were being. But as the song picked up, you let yourself get swept up in their antics, moving with them and enjoying it. Jeno twirled you once before pulling you close. Jaemin pulled and spun you back toward him, his hand lingering a bit longer on your waist.

Suddenly, you felt that familiar tingle of being watched. You scanned the crowd but couldn’t immediately spot the Ghostface. However, the weight of someone’s gaze followed your every move.

Jeno noticed your eyes darting around. “He’s watching, isn’t he?” he murmured, leaning close.

You nodded subtly. “Yeah, I can feel it.”

“Good,” Jaemin whispered, tightening his grip on your waist. “Let’s keep it going.”

The three of you kept dancing, playing up the flirtatious act just enough to make it obvious that something was happening. Your heart raced—not just from the dancing, but from the excitement of what might happen.

Would the masked man reveal himself, or was he just going to keep watching from the shadows?

Then, out of the corner of your eye, you saw it: the white mask, half-hidden behind a group of people near the far wall.

He was there, standing perfectly still, his attention fixed on you. Your pulse quickened as your eyes connected through his mask.

Jaemin followed your gaze and smirked. “There he is.”

Jeno didn’t waste a second. “Alright, let’s give him something to really think about.”

He pulled you even closer, his hand sliding around your waist as he pulled you into him. Grinding into you as he placed small kisses on your neck.

As you look back to the far wall, you caught another glimpse of Ghostface—this time, he was shaking his head.

You felt a pang of something—disappointment, maybe—twist in your stomach as the Ghostface broke eye contact and turned away, disappearing down the hall toward the spare bedrooms.

Jeno’s playful touch felt distant now, your attention completely drawn to the masked figure who had just walked away.

Jaemin, noticing the shift in your expression, leaned closer. “Looks like he doesn’t want to have any fun tonight.”

You stepped back slightly, disentangling yourself from Jeno’s hold. “I’m going to get a drink,” you muttered, your voice clearly showing how disappointed you were.

Jeno raised an eyebrow, “Hey don’t think about him anymore, just let loose and have fun.”

With one last glance at your friends, you made your way through the crowd, slipping past dancing bodies and the noise of the party. The music and laughter grew muffled as you moved down the hall, the atmosphere growing quieter, more intimate. The spare bedrooms were tucked away at the end of the corridor.

Your heart raced as you reached the first door. It was slightly ajar, and you hesitated for a moment before pushing it open. The room was dimly lit, the shadows stretching across the walls, but there was no sign of the masked man.

You stepped further inside, your breath catching as you scanned the room. Just as you were about to turn back, the door clicked softly shut behind you.

You spun around, and there he was—Ghostface, standing in the doorway, silent.

“You left,” you said, your voice quieter than you intended.

“Why?”

He didn’t respond. Instead, he stepped closer, his movements slow, deliberate. The air between you was filled with tension, and you felt the weight of his gaze behind the mask.

Your heart raced, “Are you really going to keep this act up the whole night?” you asked, tilting your head as you held his gaze, your voice steady despite the pounding in your chest.

Ghostface’s hand moved to his mask, and for a split second, you thought he might finally reveal himself. But instead, he paused, his fingers trailing over the edge of the mask before letting his hand fall back to his side. He took another step forward, closing the distance between you, his body inches from yours now.

You swallowed, “Say something,” you whispered, your voice barely audible.

Instead of using his words, he grabbed your hips and pushed himself onto you. You could feel his erection pressing against you.

You gasped slightly, caught off guard by his sudden movement. Your heart raced, and you felt a mix of surprise and heat as you tried to process everything.

His grip on your hips tightened, and he moved against you, his masked face hidden in your neck. You could feel his chest rising and falling quickly.

You hesitated for a moment, unsure of how to react. Then, slowly, you wrapped your arms around his neck, your fingers playing with the soft fabric of his mask. A small part of you wanted to uncover his identity, but another part of you was okay with the mystery.

As you pressed yourself against him, he groaned softly, his voice deep as his gloves fingers dug into your skin.

“Please, more” you breathed into his ear, your heart pounding in sync with his.

His grip on your hips tightened, and he moved against you more urgently now, his breathing becoming even faster.

As he continued to grind against you, your own urges started to take over. You couldn't help but get lost in the moment as his hands roamed your body, exploring every curve and edge.

“Pease,” you whispered again, your voice barely above a whisper as you softly grabbed onto his mask.

He shook his head firmly, gripping your hands as his eyes scanned the room. Spotting the dresser, he reached over, pulling out a pair of fluffy handcuffs, letting them dangle in front of your face.

“I’m not going to let you handcuff me…I don’t even know who you are!”

You protested, but there was a hint of teasing in your voice. He chuckled softly, the sound sending shivers down your spine.

Turning around, back to the same dresser, he pulled out a long knife. Did he plan this?

Tension hung heavy in the air as he turned back to face you, the knife glinting in the dim light of the room. Your heart pounded frantically in your chest, fear and adrenaline coursing through your veins as you took a step back, your eyes fixed on the sharp blade in his hand.

“What are you doing?” you managed to choke out, your voice trembling with confusion. How did things change so quickly?

The masked figure remained silent, his masked face giving away nothing as he took slow, deliberate steps toward you. The gleam of the knife seemed to shine, sending a chill down your spine.

Instinct kicked in, and you turned to bolt for the door, but before you could take more than a few steps, he lunged forward with surprising speed. Grabbing at your waist and putting the knife near your neck.

You gasped, your eyes widening in terror as you felt the cold steel press against your skin.

As he pressed the knife to your skin, you realized that it wasn't sharp, it was dull.

You started to giggle, the absurdity of the situation hit you all at once, and the laughter bubbled up uncontrollably, filled the room

The masked figure’s grip loosened slightly as he seemed taken aback by your sudden laughter. His masked face tilted slightly, almost as if he was confused by your reaction.

“No, please don’t kill me, Mr. Ghostface, I wanna be in the sequel.”

The masked figure's shoulders shook with silent laughter, and slowly, he lowered the knife, his posture relaxing.

“Wait, did I ruin the moment?” The masked figure shook his head, brushing your hair with his gloved hand.

Slowly his hand rested on your cheek, and then slowly made its way to your neck. His touch was surprisingly gentle, a stark contrast to the fear you had moments before. You stared into the eye holes of the mask, searching for any idea who he was.

Suddenly he put pressure on your neck, his touch firm but not suffocating. You froze, the lack of oxygen felt so good.

You gasped for air as his hand tightened around your neck.

His masked face hovered close to yours, his gaze only on you. The room seemed to shrink around you, the only sound echoing in your ears being the hammering of your heart.

Just as you thought you couldn’t take it anymore, he released his grip on your neck, his hand falling away as he took a step back. You stumbled slightly, falling onto the bed.

Your breaths came in ragged gasps as you looked up at him. His gaze never left yours as he went back to the dresser and pulled out a blindfold.

With a mixture of hesitation and thrill, you allowed him to place the blindfold over your eyes, slipping you into darkness.

You heard shuffling and felt his gloves as he grabbed your hands that were searching for him. Pulling your hands to his mask, feeling how warm it felt.

You fiddled with the fabric of it, as a silent way of asking for permission to take it off. He doesn't do anything as you pull his mask off slowly.

Once finally off he takes you into a deep kiss, a kiss he’s been waiting for this whole night. His lips moved against yours with a hunger that mirrored your own.

His hands roamed your skin, tracing patterns of fire along your curves. As you were tracing his features with your fingers, trying to figure out what he could look like.

Lost in the heat of the kiss, you felt him pull away slightly, his breath mingling with yours. There was a softness in his touch now, unlike before.

As you leaned in for more, your lips seeking his once again, he chuckled softly against your mouth before pulling away completely.

You heard rustling in the distance, you try to pull the blindfold off your face to see what was happening.

But strong hands stopped you, holding the blindfold firmly in place. You felt a warm breath against your ear as he whispered,

“Not yet.”

The voice was deep, kind of familiar but you were too lost in the moment to really place it. The sound of footsteps echoed in the room, growing louder and more distinct.

You strained against the blindfold, trying to hear what was going on.

Suddenly, you felt a pair of lips press gently against your neck. You couldn’t help but let out a moan. You felt a shiver run down your spine as the lips trailed along your neck.

“Fuck, I need more, please!” you begged, your voice shaking.

You reach for him, expecting to feel the cloth of his costume, but instead you are met with his soft skin. He was lean and you could feel he had a bit of muscles.

"Are you ready for the next part?" he whispered, his lips brushing against your ear.

You gasped and nodded, your heart pounding in your chest as you waited for his next move.

His kisses started to trail down, his tounge gently tracing a path along your skin as he moved further down.

As he reached the sensitive skin just below your waist, you let out a soft whimper. His fingers traced delicate patterns across your skin.

Suddenly, you felt the warm sensation of his breath on your skin, followed by the gentle pressure of his lips. A soft breath escaped your lips as his tongue traced delicate patterns on your heat.

You were lost in the sensation, your mind hazy. You gripped at the sheets beneath you, your body arching to meet his every movement.

“More, please, need you.” you whispered, feeling the words catch in your throat.

He responded by cupping your heat with his hand. With one hand, he gently spread you open.

Your heart pounded in your chest as his fingers stroked you, driving you crazy. You felt him slip a finger inside you and then another, stretching you in the best possible way.

His thumb rubbed against your clit, sending a shockwave of pleasure through your body.

Each touch sent another wave of pleasure crashing over you, building you up higher and higher.

"I’m so close," you begged, your words barely coherent as you clung to the sheets for dear life.

He responded by increasing his pace, his fingers pounding into you with a rhythm. Each thrust sent a jolt of pleasure through you, the sensation overwhelming. As the pleasure built and built, you couldn’t handle it anymore.

"I'm going to cum," you cried out, your voice shaky. "I'm gonna cum."

His fingers never stopped their relentless pace, driving you closer and closer to the edge.

“Cum for me, baby.” His voice normal, no longer changing his voice.

You knew that voice.

Your heart skipped a beat as the realization dawned on you. "Jisung?" you gasped, the blindfold still firmly in place.

No response came from him as his fingers continued their pace, driving you higher and higher towards your release.

“Oh my god, Jisung!” You cried out as you finally reached your climax. Your body arched against his touch, you moans ringing through the room.

Panting and gasping for air, as you lay there, you let a smile spread across your face.

Your hand reaches up to grab the blindfold, already knowing who the mystery masked man is. But Jisung grabbed your hand, stopping you, again.

“Wait,” His voice filled with insecurity. Not knowing how you were going to react to seeing his face.

You can feel the warmth of his skin under your touch and you can tell that he's tense.

“Jisung, I need to see you, please…” You pleaded, and for a brief moment, he seemed to hesitate. But then he quickly regained his composure, taking your hand and gently removing the blindfold from your eyes.

You squint for a moment as your eyes adjust to the dim room, taking in the sight of Jisung's maskless face. He looked at you, you could tell he was worried. He wasn’t making any eye contact.

You can't help but smile at the sight of him, still panting from your intense orgasm. You reach up to trace your fingers along his jawline.

"You look so hot right now," you whisper, your voice still heavy with lust. "Even hotter without the mask."

He chuckles softly at your comment, an appreciative smile spreading across his face. "I'm glad you think so," he says, his voice confident and husky.

You took a long look over his body, taking in every detail. His chest heaved with each breath, beads of sweat glistening on his forehead. You traced your fingers down his chest, feeling the definition of his muscles.

Your eyes locked onto his again, a smile playing on your lips as you crawled towards him. He watched you intently, watching how your body moved towards him. .

As you straddled him, you leaned in close and whispered, "I want to feel you inside me."

He nodded eagerly, his hands immediately reaching up to undress you further. He helped you out of your clothes until you were both naked, skin touching skin.

You positioned yourself above him, feeling the warmth and hardness of him against your heat. You couldn't help but moan slightly as you felt him ready to enter you.

"Are you ready?" he asked, his breath hot against your ear as he waited for your response.

"Yes," you whispered, your voice breathless with desire.

"I'm ready."

With one swift movement, he entered you fully, filling you completely. You both moaned as he began to move, thrusting into you with a rhythm that made you shiver.

Your eyes locked onto his, making your heart race. You felt him hit a sensitive spot inside you, each thrust hitting the same spot.

"Oh god, Jisung," you gasped, your voice shaking with passion. "You feel so good."

He responded by increasing his pace, driving deeper and deeper into you. His hands gripped your hips firmly as he moved, each thrust sending another wave of pleasure. You could feel your core starting to tighten.

“You like that baby?”

"So good," you moaned.

His hands gripped at your hips, his fingers digging into your skin ever so slightly.

As you rose to meet his next thrust, he groaned softly, his eyes locked onto yours. He looked like he was in a zone, completely focused on pleasing you as much as he was being pleased himself.

"More," you begged, feeling pleasure building up inside of you. Your breath was ragged from how good he was making you feel.

Jisung responded by increasing his pace even more, his movements becoming more aggressive. Your body arched against him.

His hands gripped your hips tighter, holding you close to him as he moved. You could feel every inch of him inside you, driving you closer and closer to your climax.

"I'm going to cum again," you cried out, your voice shaking with passion. "I'm gonna cum!"

“You feel so fucking good.” He groaned. His pace quickened, his movement became more desperate. He could feel his own climax building.

"Cum for me, baby," he groaned, his eyes locked onto yours. His words were the final push you needed, and you let out a long, loud moan as you reached your climax. Your body tensed, every muscle straining.

Jisung's movements became erratic as he felt you cumming around him, the pressure building up inside of him threatening to take him over the edge.

Finally, he could hold back no longer. "Fuck im going to cum," he groaned, thrusting into you one last time. His body tensed and then shuddered, his cum filling you completely.

Your body shuddered and your eyes fluttered shut. You clung to him as the intensity of your orgasm started to fade, you felt him soften inside you. His weight pressed against you, his breathing heavy and uneven.

You laid there, panting and gasping for air. Your body still trembling.

Jisung's arms wrapped tightly around you, holding you close as he caught his breath. His breathing gradually slowed down, his heart rate returning to normal.

Slowly, your eyes opened, fluttering to look up at him. You smiled.

"That was... amazing," you whispered, your voice barely audible.

Jisung smiled back at you, a proud grin that made your heart flutter. “I’m glad I overheard your conversation with Jaemin.”

You giggled, "That’s how you knew I liked masks?"

He chuckled, his hands pulling you closer to him. “I was afraid you wouldn’t like me.”

"But I do like you," you said, looking deeply into his eyes.

"A lot."

Jisung's smile widened, and he pulled you even closer, his lips brushing against your forehead.

You nestled closer to Jisung, feeling safe and secure in his embrace. His fingers gently traced patterns on your back as the two of you lay there in the afterglow.

He leaned in close, brushing his lips against yours lightly.

"I want to do this again... and again," he whispered.

"Me too," you responded, your voice filled with satisfaction.

You traced your fingers along the curve of his shoulder, as you relaxed into him.

The room was quiet except for the sound of both of your breathing, the steady heartbeats, and the music continuing on outside. Laying there for what felt like hours, but was probably only minutes.

Finally, with a sigh of reluctance to end such a perfect moment, Jisung pulled away slightly.

“We should get cleaned up.”

You nodded in agreement, slowly disentangling yourself from each other's embrace. As you stood up, Jisung's hand reached out to help you steady yourself.

"Let’s take a shower," he said, offering you a hand to help you up.

As you reached the bathroom, Jisung started the water. You stood there, taking a moment to compose yourself before stepping inside. The warm water washed over you felt relaxing.

As you let the water drip down your skin, you felt a sense of peace wash over you. This was definitely the best Halloween.

Jisung joined you in the shower, his arms wrapping around you as he kissed your neck gently. You leaned back into him, enjoying the warmth of his embrace as the water fell down both of your bodies.

“What are we going to tell everyone?” you asked as Jisung rinsed your hair.

He chuckled, his hands moving gently through the water. "The truth, that you’re mine.”

interacted with preview: @jwiloves @yeosin16

Dream/General Taglist: @haechansbbg @lostinneocity @talkingsaxy @naqkja @haolovre

#jisung #park jisung #park jisung smut #jisung smut #nct #nct dream #nct dream smut #nct dream jisung #jisung x reader #jisung imagines #jisung x you #jisung x y/n

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