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auntie-histamine · 1 day ago

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My therapist just sent me this article, and I think it should be required reading for everyone who's feeling scared this morning. Tumblr won't let me put the whole article under a readmore, so I've included a shorter, edited version below. I highly encourage everyone read the full article, especially as I couldn't include everything here that I wanted to.

Please be aware that I will not be interacting with comments and/or reblogs, unless it is to help with directing to resources mentioned in the article. I am grieving too, like many of us, and I don't have the spoons to facilitate anything more. Read, share, and get organized.

The below are selections the article "There is hope - 10 ways to be prepared and grounded for another Trump presidency" by Daniel Hunter from Waging Nonviolence.

1. Trust yourself I started writing this list with strategic principles (e.g. analyze your opponents weakness and learn to handle political violence), but actually the place to start is with your own self. Distrust fuels the flame of autocracy because it makes it much easier to divide. We can see that in the casual nature of Trump’s rhetoric — telling people to distrust immigrants, Democrats, socialists, people from Chicago, women marchers, Mexicans, the press and so on. This is a social disease: You know who to trust by who they tell you to distrust. Trust-building starts with your own self. It includes trusting your own eyes and gut, as well as building protection from the ways the crazy-making can become internalized. This also means being trustworthy — not just with information, but with emotions. That way you can acknowledge what you know and admit the parts that are uncertain fears nagging at you. Then take steps to follow through on what you need. If you’re tired, take some rest. If you’re scared, make some peace with your fears. I can point you to resources that support that — like FindingSteadyGround.com — but the value here is to start with trusting your own inner voice. If you need to stop checking your phone compulsively, do it. If you don’t want to read this article now and instead take a good walk, do it.

2. Find others who you trust Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism” explored how destructive ideologies like fascism and autocracy grow. She used the word verlassenheit — often translated as loneliness — as a central ingredient. As she meant it, loneliness isn’t a feeling but a kind of social isolation of the mind. Your thinking becomes closed off to the world and a sense of being abandoned to each other. She’s identifying a societal breakdown that we’re all experiencing. Under a Trump presidency, this trend will continue to accelerate. The constant attacks on social systems — teachers, health care and infrastructure — make us turn away from leaning on each other and towards ideologically simple answers that increase isolation (e.g. “distrust government,” “MAGA is nuts,” “anyone who votes that way doesn’t care about you”). If Trump wins: Get some people to regularly touch base with. Use that trust to explore your own thinking and support each other to stay sharp and grounded. I’ve written an agenda for such gatherings right after a Trump win that you can use.

3. Grieve No matter what we try to do, there’s going to be a lot of loss. The human thing to do is grieve. If you aren’t a feelings person, let me say it this way: The inability to grieve is a strategic error. After Donald Trump won in 2016, we all saw colleagues who never grieved. They didn’t look into their feelings and the future — and as a result they remained in shock. An alternative: Start by naming and allowing feelings that come to arise. The night that Donald Trump won, I stayed up until 4 a.m. with a colleague. It was a tear-filled night of naming things that we had just lost. It wasn’t anywhere near strategizing or list-making or planning. It was part of our acceptance that losing a presidency to an awful man means you and your people lose a lot. Ultimately, this helped us believe it — so we didn’t spend years in a daze: “I can’t believe this is happening in this country.” Believe it. Believe it now. Grief is a pathway to that acceptance.

4. Release that which you cannot change Under a Trump presidency, there are going to be so many issues that it will be hard to accept that we cannot do it all. I’m reminded of a colleague in Turkey who told me, “There’s always something bad happening every day. If we had to react to every bad thing, we’d never have time to eat.” Chaos is a friend of the autocrat. One way we can unwittingly assist is by joining in the story that we have to do it all. Unaddressed, this desire to act on everything leads to bad strategy. Nine months ago when we gathered activists to scenario plan together, we took note of two knee-jerk tendencies from the left that ended up largely being dead-ends in the face of Trump: - Public angsting — posting outrage on social media, talking with friends, sharing awful news - Symbolic actions — organizing marches and public statements The first is where we look around at bad things happening and make sure other people know about them, too. We satisfy the social pressure of our friends who want us to show outrage — but the driving moves are only reactive. The end result wasn’t the intended action or an informed population. It’s demoralizing us. It’s hurting our capacity for action. Public angsting as a strategy is akin to pleading with the hole in the boat to stop us from sinking. Symbolic actions may fare little better under a Trump presidency. In whatever version of democracy we had, the logic of rallies and statements of outrage was to build a unified front that showed the opposition many voices were opposed to them. But under an unleashed fascist — if it’s all you do — it’s like begging the suicidal captain to plug the hole. Let me be clear. These strategies will be part of the mix. We’ll need public angsting and symbolic actions. But if you see an organization or group who only relies on these tactics, look elsewhere. There are other, more effective ways to engage.

5. Find your path I’ve been writing scenarios of how a Trump presidency might play out. The initial weeks look chaotic no matter what. But over time some differentiated resistance pathways begin to emerge. One pathway is called “Protecting People.” This might mean organizing outside current systems for health care and mutual aid, or moving resources to communities that are getting targeted. Further examples include starting immigrant welcoming committees, abortion-support funds or training volunteers on safety skills to respond to white nationalist violence. Another pathway is “Defending Civic Institutions.” This group may or may not be conscious that current institutions don’t serve us all, but they are united in understanding that Trump wants them to crumble so he can exert greater control over our lives. Each bureaucracy will put up its own fight to defend itself. Insider groups will play a central battle against Trump fascism. You may recall government scientists dumping copious climate data onto external servers, bracing for Trump’s orders. This time, many more insiders understand it’s code red. Hopefully, many will bravely refuse to quit — and instead choose to stay inside as long as possible. Institutional pillars understand a Trump presidency is a dire threat. Then there’s a critical third pathway: “Disrupt and Disobey.” This goes beyond protesting for better policies and into the territory of people intervening to stop bad policies or showing resistance. Lastly, there’s a key fourth role: “Building Alternatives.” We can’t just be stuck reacting and stopping the bad. We have to have a vision. This is the slow growth work of building alternative ways that are more democratic. Each of us may be attracted to some pathway more than others. Your path may not be clear right now. That’s okay. There will be plenty of opportunities to join the resistance.

6. Do not obey in advance, do not self-censor If autocrats teach us any valuable lesson it’s this: Political space that you don’t use, you lose. I’m not coaching to never self-protect. You can decide when to speak your mind. But it is a phenomenally slippery slope here we have to observe and combat. Put simply: Use the political space and voice you have.

7. Reorient your political map A Trump presidency reshapes alignments and possibilities. The bellicose, blasphemous language of Trump will meet the practical reality of governing. When you’re out of power, it’s easy to unify — but their coalition’s cracks will quickly emerge. We have to stay sharp for opportunities to cleave off support. Even if you don’t want to engage with them (which is fine), we’ll all have to give space to those who do experiment with new language to appeal to others who don’t share our worldview of a multiracial true democracy.

8. Get real about power In Trump’s first term, the left’s organizing had mixed results. It was elections that ultimately stopped Trump. This time will be much harder. The psychological exhaustion and despair is much higher. Deploying people into the streets for mass actions with no clear outcome will grow that frustration, leading to dropout and radicalized action divorced from strategy. Trump has been very clear about using his political power to its fullest — stretching and breaking the norms and laws that get in his way. The movement will constantly be asking itself: “Are you able to stop this new bad thing?” We're not going to convince him not to do these things. No pressure on Republicans will result in more than the tiniest of crumbs (at least initially). It will be helpful to have a power analysis in our minds, specifically that’s known as the upside-down triangle. This tool was built to explain how power moves even under dictatorships. In our country, pressuring elite power is reaching its end point. Power will need to emerge from folks no longer obeying the current unjust system. This tipping point of mass noncooperation will be messy. It means convincing a lot of people to take huge personal risks for a better option. As a “Disrupt and Disobey” person, we have to move deliberately to gain the trust of others, like the “Protecting People” folks. Mass noncooperation does the opposite of their goal of protection — it exposes people to more risk, more repression. But with that comes the possibility that we could get the kind of liberatory government that we all truly deserve.

9. Handle fear, make violence rebound Otpor in Serbia has provided an abundance of examples on how to face repression. They were young people who took a sarcastic response to regular police beatings. They would joke amongst each other, “It doesn’t hurt if you’re afraid.” Their attitude wasn’t cavalier — it was tactical. They were not going to grow fear. So when hundreds were beaten on a single day, their response was: This repression will only stiffen the resistance. Handling fear isn’t about suppressing it — but it is about constantly redirecting. Activist/intellectual Hardy Herriman released a studied response about political violence that had some news that surprised me. The first was that physical political violence hasn’t grown dramatically in this country — it still remains relatively rare. The threats of violence, however, trend upwards, such as this CNN report: “Politically motivated threats to public officials increased 178 percent during Trump’s presidency,” primarily from the right. His conclusion wasn’t that political violence isn’t going to grow. Quite the opposite. But he noted that a key component to political violence is to intimidate and tell a story that they are the true victims. Making political violence rebound requires refusing to be intimidated and resisting those threats so they can backfire. (Training on this backfire technique is available from the HOPE-PV guide.) We can shrink into a cacophony of “that’s not fair,” which fuels the fear of repression. Or we take a page from the great strategist Bayard Rustin. Black civil rights leaders were targeted by the government of Montgomery, Alabama during the bus boycott in the 1950s. Leaders like the newly appointed Martin Luther King Jr. went into hiding after police threats of arrest based on antiquated anti-boycott laws. Movement organizer Rustin organized them to go down to the station and demand to be arrested since they were leaders — making a positive spectacle of the repression. Some leaders not on police lists publicly demanded they, too, get arrested. Folks charged were met with cheers from crowds, holding their arrest papers high in the air. Fear was turned into valor.

10. Envision a positive future We’ve all now imagined storylines about how bad it might get. We would do ourselves a service to spend an equal measure of time envisioning how we might advance our cause in these conditions. As writer Walidah Imarisha says, “The goal of visionary fiction is to change the world.” In my mind if Trump wins, we’ll have to eventually get him out. There are two paths available to force him out. The first: Vote him out. Given the bias of the electoral college, this requires successfully defending nearly all local, state and national takeovers of elections such that they remain relatively fair and free. Winning via the path of electoral majority has a wide swath of experience and support from mainstream progressive organizations and Democratic institutions. It’s going to be a major thrust. In my scenario writing I’ve explored what that strategy could look like, including preparing electoral workers to stand against last minute attempts by Trump to change election rules and even stymie the election with dubious emergency orders. They don’t obey — and go ahead with elections anyway. The second strategy is if he illegally refuses to leave or allow fair elections: Kick him out. That means we are able to develop a national nonviolent resistance campaign capable of forcing him out of office. I’ve written several versions of this: One where large-scale strikes disable portions of the U.S. economy. If you recall from COVID, our systems are extremely vulnerable. Businesses running “just in time” inventory means small hiccups in the system can cause cascading effects. Sustained strikes would face deep resistance, but they could swing communities currently on the fence, like the business community, which already is concerned about Trump’s temperamental nature. Trump’s own policies might make these conditions much easier. If he really does mass deportations, the economic injury might be fatal. In another scenario I explore another strategy of taking advantage of a Trump overreach. Autocrats overplay their hands. And in this imagined scenario, Trump overreaches when he attempts to force autoworkers to stop building electric vehicles. UAW workers refuse and keep the factories running. Eventually he’s unable to stop them — but in the process he’s publicly humiliated. A very public loss like this can cause what Timur Kuran calls an “unanticipated revolution.” He noted many incidents where political leaders seem to have full support, then suddenly it evaporates. Kuran’s analysis reminds us to look at Trump’s political weakness. Political hacks like Lindsay Graham appear to be sycophants — but if given the chance to turn their knife in his back, they might. This means exposed political weaknesses could quickly turn the many inside Trump’s campaign against him. That feels far away from now. But all these remain possibilities. Practicing this future thinking and seeing into these directions gives me some hope and some strategic sensibilities. On the days when I can’t sense any of these political possibilities (more than not), I zoom out further to the lifespans of trees and rocks, heading into spiritual reminders that nothing lasts forever. All of the future is uncertain. But using these things, we’re more likely to have a more hopeful future and experience during these turbulent times.

#uspol #us election #trump #waging nonviolence #daniel hunter

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hwanghyunjinenthusiast · 1 year ago

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DON'T SWEAT IT. - l.jh

Today — the first time in a small forever that he forgot to check the battery on his earphones (and subsequently had them die on him mid-workout) — Jihoon is forced to notice you.

pairing; lee jihoon x fem!reader. content; fluff / gym crush au / strangers to lovers / kinda idiots to lovers / smut towards the end (MINORS DNI). w/c; just a breezy 18k- and some change? warnings; swearing, this is only proof read once because if i read it again i was going to lose my mind. please let me know if i've forgotten any. smut tags under the cut ( not sure that this counts as a warning but a heads up: the gym weight units, whenever mentioned, are in kilograms not lbs because i’m british and the metric system, am i right? sorry if there are any other british-isms, i try really hard to avoid them/catch them on a proofread but there are inevitably some that have slipped through the net. )

note; gym-selfie jihoon, you will never not own my ass. ( screaming internally this is the first fic i've written since my dan + phil youtube era. i don't know what i'm doing. this has been in my wips for about two months. it's a bit all over the place. that's. literally just me. bon appetite. <3 )

smut warnings: making out, grinding, fingering (f rec), oral (f rec), blowjob started/implied (at the end), protected sex (be safe out there gang), little bit of biting, no huge power dynamics? reader & jihoon are both switches (and simps), some use of pet-names (good girl/baby).

—————

He first sees you around lunchtime on an otherwise unassuming Sunday.

As you walk in, the gym is wonderfully quiet. A handful of regulars mill about, making full use of the rare freedom of the machinery. One of the club’s personal trainers is marching an impossibly steep incline on a treadmill. It could just be any other weekend session in this criminally over-equipped and under-used gym: the town’s worst kept secret. But when the door slams shut behind you, his head jerks up; it, in this moment, is the loudest sound in the room. It’s sort of the only one he hears at all.

Today — the first time in a small forever that he forgot to check the battery on his earphones (and subsequently had them die on him mid-workout) — Jihoon is forced to notice you as he sits with dumbbells rested against his thighs. He catches his breath as he wonders who you are, if you’ve ever been to this gym before, why he doesn’t recognise you. Are you a new potential regular, maybe? Or just visiting the area and making good use of the cheap pay-as-you-go rates? Maybe, he considers, lips turning downwards in thought… maybe you’ve been coming here for a long time and he’s somehow just always been so in his own head that he’s never noticed.

The last, he thinks, is sort of unlikely. No. He would definitely remember a face like yours.

His heart rate slows more than he usually lets it as he finds himself watching you fill up your water bottle at the fountain, taking a long sip on your way over to one of the stairmasters. His brain blanks out when he realises that he’s not just looking anymore, he’s sort of staring, and swallows the saliva on his tongue hard, looking back at the mirror. He doesn’t want to be that guy. He isn’t that guy – he just got distracted by the loud noise, and this is exactly why he checks the damn battery on his headphones before he leaves the house.

The only problem is that now, he can’t remember how many sets he’s done. He lies back and stares straight into a slightly sketchy light-fixture, neglecting to pick up the dumbbells that he put aside for his next set of pushes. Jihoon adjusts the position of his shoulders against the bench, arches his back off it slightly, digs his heels into the spongy floor beneath them and pushes the ones still in his hands until failure.

Today, he finishes his routine and leaves the gym without allowing himself so much as another glance your way.

He neglects to notice that your eyes are avoiding him right back.

—————

You smile at him for the first time on a Tuesday. Not the following one – a week and a bit later.

Seungcheol is with him tonight. Jihoon prefers to train alone nine times out of ten: this is a truth widely acknowledged, accepted and respected among his friends. Gym time is his down time, his equivalent of movie marathons and comfort food, of face masks and glasses of wine. But it’s not a hard rule: occasionally, someone will ask to tag along and use one of his guest passes, and Jihoon very rarely says no. There are two reasons. One, he isn’t actually rude, contrary to approximately eighteen running jokes in the group-chat. But also, it adds a little bit of variety to his otherwise very set-in-stone regimen, and mixing it up doesn’t hurt. Like tonight, for example. Seungcheol is pulling him into the studio off the main gym floor, his own gym bag packed with boxing pads and gloves for them to play with.

Variety.

Jihoon grumbles a little at the idea, at first. He has a very love-hate relationship with cardio, favouring a simple steady-state run over everything else, and it just feels a bit against his moral code to use gym time for something like this. However, he comes to discover very quickly that smacking Seungcheol’s hands is very therapeutic; Jihoon knows he’s maybe getting a little too into it when his friend asks if they can switch around, grimacing and shaking out his wrist after a particularly beefy punch.

He agrees, albeit reluctantly, tugging off the gloves he’s wearing and pulling on the pads instead.

This half of the activity is considerably less enjoyable for Jihoon; he starts to cool down and loses his flow almost straight away and after about thirty seconds, his breathing is back to normal and he feels ready to go again. Even so, he does what he needs to do to be a good workout partner, and goes one step further into ‘good friend’ territory as he allows Seungcheol to vent about the bad day he had at work in-between hits, offering murmurs and looks of disgust when it feels appropriate. Suddenly, the impromptu request to come to the gym tonight makes much more sense, as does the slightly bizarre choice of activity, but Jihoon tries not to ask about it in too much detail.

They swing at each other for a few more rounds apiece, working up a healthy sweat and getting out a few frustrations as the hour wears on. On the last set, Jihoon switches out Seungcheol’s hands for a punching bag, putting a lot more of his weight behind every hit and really tiring himself out. By the end, his hair sticks to his forehead and his cheeks have flushed bright red; he only stops when he gets that weird, metallic taste in the back of his mouth that says he’s probably overdone it. Again.

“Hit the shower?” Seungcheol asks breathlessly as he finishes his last set of Russian twists and lies down flat on the floor, equally sticky and flushed all over.

Jihoon pats his face dry with his towel, shaking his head. “You go ahead. I’ll have one at home.”

He doesn’t give Seungcheol much of a chance to respond, already cleaning down anything he’s touched or managed to sweat on and riding out the high of the endorphins flooding his veins. Secretly, he hasn’t had a cardio session this high energy or this satisfying in a long time. He isn’t going to readily admit to that though.

“Nah, I’ll do the same,” Seungcheol agrees. He starts packing the gear he brought with him into his bag and they leave together after, heading towards the exit.

That’s when he sees you again.

He doesn’t notice at first; you’re stowing your things into one of the higher lockers, and you have your headphones slung around your neck as he walks past. It’s the sound of a song he vaguely recognises through your speakers that makes his head snap over from the conversation he’s in the middle of. They walk past at the moment you drop down from your tiptoes, and you flash a small (but insanely pretty) smile at Jihoon.

By the time he manages to process this fact, he’s already walked past you and you’re headed over into the main gym area, so even though he turns around to try and catch your eye, all he sees is your retreating figure. He stumbles over his own feet, not looking where he’s going, and just barely catches himself on Seungcheol’s upper arm before he actually does fall over. His older friend glances down at his bicep before he adopts a look that Jihoon has seen many, many times before: just never directed at him. His cheeks heat up further and he looks away.

“What was that?” Seungcheol asks, one eyebrow so far up his forehead that it’s disappeared almost entirely under his soggy hair. He looks so smug, so incredibly entertained. Jihoon wants to smack that expression off his face, immediately.

“Nothing,” Jihoon rushes, managing not to act on the violent thought even though he wants to. He clears his throat. “No-one. I-... they’re new, I think. I don’t know.”

Seungcheol lets out a soft laugh, pushing the door open for them both to leave through. “Yeah,” he scoffs, eyes glimmering with something Jihoon doesn’t think he likes the look of. “Nothing, my ass.”

—————

Three days later, he hears you speak for the first time.

Granted, you aren’t speaking to him – at least, not at first. But that’s not really what matters.

It’s late, and it’s a Friday night. Fridays are usually Jihoon’s days rest days, but sitting around his apartment had him feeling impossibly twitchy, with far too much energy to burn and no way to do so without leaving the house. And he knows that he needs to take days off, now and again. He knows that they’re good for recovery and that it’s healthy to take time to himself that involves not lifting weights. But what he also knows is that if he doesn’t manage to shake the weird buzzing feeling in his muscles, in his joints, in his veins, he’s never going to get to sleep. So, here he finds himself at almost 10PM, walking down the street to get to the gym.

To begin with, he doesn’t know (or really care) who it is that’s coming up behind him. He can hear quite clearly that the mystery person is on the phone, and that they’re in the middle of what seems to be a rather heated argument: his brain latches onto occasional words, phrases, curses. Every now and again, their voice drops to a deep, frustrated mutter and he cringes slightly, making a point to keep his eyes forward and down so as not to draw attention to the fact that this presumably private conversation has become everything but.

He touches his entry fob to the sensor on the door as he arrives and pushes it open. Jihoon uses the opportunity to stand still, to glance back at whoever it is that’s walked behind him for the past four and a half minutes, and his eyes come to land on you. He falters, noting how your eyes are a bit glassy and your cheeks are stained with what he can safely assume are tear-tracks. In this moment, he wants to run; he doesn’t want anything to do with that, and he certainly doesn’t want to hear any more of your call. It’s none of his business, and he feels plenty weird enough already with what he has overheard. But, for some unknown reason, he stays in place.

“No – no, you don’t get to-...” you hiss into your phone. “It was our fucking anniversary, you asshole.” Jihoon’s face tightens at that, lips drawn between his teeth and his eyes blowing slightly wide. You pass through the door in front of him, flashing a small smile as you go. Another smile, he thinks to himself, but he’d be an idiot to compare them in any way; this one is so dramatically dissimilar to the first, he thinks it could almost have come from a totally different person.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing ‘insanely pretty’ about it this time. Your smile is tight-lipped and exhausted, slightly apologetic. Maybe even forced. He does try to return a warmer one to you, but he doesn’t know if you notice.

“Look, I’m at the gym – we’re not doing this right now. I’ll call you later.” You hang up the phone with the kind of sigh that groans in the back of your throat.

A small part of him wants to take this moment and use it to ask if you’re all right, but an even larger part of him doesn’t. It isn’t because he doesn’t care. In a weird way, considering this is only the first time he’s clearly heard your voice and he knows absolutely nothing about you, he does care. But there are a few things that stop him. Not only are you a near-complete stranger, not only would he have no idea what to say to you if the answer happened to come out as a ‘no’, not only is he already coming over a little bit clammy at the thought of having a conversation with you… Jihoon isn’t stupid. He knows from the sound of your voice and the way you’re rather aggressively typing a message into your phone that it’s a ridiculous question.

You’re walking into the gym at 10 o’clock on a Friday night, your eyes literally brimming with tears. Of course you’re not all right.

He’s still standing in the open doorway mulling all this over, but Jihoon only realises when a gust of wind slaps over his calves and sends a draught not only through the reception area, but up the length of his spine. He comes inside fully as you close the locker you’re using – he notices, but he isn’t sure why, that it’s the same one as last time – and throws his things into the one he always uses. Two below and one to the left of yours.

It’s quiet tonight: just the pair of you and one middle-aged guy. Jihoon recognises him as the friendly man who seemingly knows everyone who comes in here – including you, apparently, judging by the way he strikes up a short but energetic conversation. When the other guy walks away, you clamp your headphones back over your ears and return to what you were doing before, occasionally bobbing your head or moving your lips in time with whatever it is that you’re listening to. Jihoon steals little glances at you now and again when you’re in-between sets, watching how you breathe deeper, how your skin glows with sweat as you tap your fingertips against your thighs.

He almost drops the bar he’s holding when you catch his eyes in the long line of mirrors. He turns away, swallowing hard, completely missing how your own gaze lingers.

Jihoon becomes so obsessed with not being caught looking at you again that he doesn’t even notice when you disappear off the gym floor completely. It’s only when he pulls his headphones off at the end of his session and glances around that he registers your absence: your third companion is long gone, and he assumes you must have snuck out without him noticing too. He settles the speakers back over his ears before pulling on an old zip-up, flicking the hood over his head to shelter him a little better once he gets outside. But he’s in no rush to get home so he takes his time, resting his bag between his abdomen and the lockers, replying to a few messages and clicking his tongue at some of the nonsense being spewed into the group-chat.

He isn’t sure exactly how long he’s standing there for, but he does know precisely what pulls him back to the world outside of the device in his hands.

To begin with, he doesn’t notice you approach, lost completely in his screen. He doesn’t hear your footsteps, or the way you politely clear your throat to announce your presence so he can move out of the way. He misses your moment of realisation that he’s listening to music and has no idea that you’re standing three feet behind him. He doesn’t even see you walk up next to him, your hair still damp from your shower and sitting loose over your shoulders.

It’s only when you try to reach over him to grab the last of your things that he snaps out of his trance. The fragrance of your body wash hits him first, and oh boy, does it hit him. Sweet, and delicate. Then, he gets something beautifully fruity: it’s not a perfume (it doesn’t smell like a perfume), but it’s you. Your shampoo, maybe? A conditioner? He can’t tell. Whatever it is, the combination of fragrances has him feeling like he’s been slammed into by a damn freight train. He drops his bag to the floor, freezing for a second, and then finally moves away just as the little door swings open.

“I’m so sorry,” he says hurriedly, tugging his hood down and pulling his headphones off completely. “I didn’t even think you were still here.” He can’t shake the smell of you, nor the feeling of your warm frame leaning so close to his own. God, why is his heart pounding like he’s just finished a round of sprints? Why can’t he breathe?

“No – hey, no, don’t be,” you rush, shaking your head. You finally succeed in pulling your coat free and start trying to get it on; Jihoon wonders if you often struggle to find your sleeves like this, if you’re always chasing them around like a puppy after its own tail. He does it too, sometimes. He gets it. It’s cute. “It’s okay. I was trying not to disturb-... I’m sorry.”

“You’re fine,” he tells you. For the first time, he’s able to smile back at you properly.

Why is it so hot in here, all of a sudden? Do they shut off the air conditioning after hours or something? He’s breaking out in a sweat.

“Call it even?” you suggest shyly, extending out a hand now you’ve managed to get both arms through your sleeves. He looks down at your fingers for a second before reaching to shake your hand once, a semi-firm grip securing the ‘deal’. (He feels a bit like he’s been electrocuted after, but he tries not to make that too obvious).

It goes awkwardly quiet for a moment then, and Jihoon wishes deeply that he had it in him to say something. Anything. But his brain has gone completely empty and apparently, all he knows how to do is stand completely still like a fucking statue. He shifts his gaze from you, to the wall behind you, to the carpet beneath his shoes, all the while tugging at the collar of his sweatshirt as if it might bring him a tiny breath of fresh air. The gentle sound of you clearing your throat has him looking back at your face again though; he assumes for a second that this is maybe you about to announce taking your leave. All the while, he’s cursing himself out in his own head for being totally inept, and he’s not entirely sure that it isn’t written all over his face.

“Alone, today?” you ask, idly fiddling with your zipper and succeeding in taking him by surprise. He really didn’t think you were going to continue this. And yet…

“Hm?” he questions.

You swallow before answering. “You… the last time, you were with a friend?” you explain, and now it’s your turn to look away. He wonders if you’re a little warm too, if he’s right in what he was thinking about the air-conditioning.

“Oh. Right.”

He nods. An annoying train of doubt in his mind wants to know why you’re asking about Seungcheol; if maybe it was him that you smiled at the other night, even though he knows your eyes weren’t looking up at the man he brought with him. He thinks maybe he should be used to these turns in conversation by now – you certainly wouldn’t be the first person to ask if one of his friends is available, after all – but somehow, he isn’t, and he has a slightly bitter taste in the back of his mouth as he goes on.

He really didn’t have ‘you being interested in one of his best friends’ on his bingo card for tonight, that’s for sure.

“Yeah. I think he’s with his partner, or… I don’t know. I don’t really bring other people, often. That was a one-off.”

You nod silently and Jihoon can’t quite get a read on what that means. He wonders if you’re upset at the revelation of Seungcheol’s partner, or maybe that he doesn’t tag along to every session. Or maybe, maybe, you were just being polite, and you don’t really care what his friend is up to that means he isn’t here. But whatever it is that you’re feeling, you do far too good a job at hiding it; he’s suddenly very overcome with the desire to run, again, except this time he might just bury his head in the sand too for good measure.

“How much were you deadlifting, just then?” you ask in the lull, just as he thinks he might have perfected the best way to say goodbye that doesn’t make him come across as even more of a tool than he probably already has. It throws him off kilter, but somehow, he manages to answer you in reasonable time.

“Oh, God… uh, one… 160?” He says uncertainly. “That’s not… I can do heavier-...” In his mind, he slaps his forehead. “Wait, no, that’s-... I mean, it’s true, but I didn’t mean-...”

You bite back your smile as he talks himself in a circle but Jihoon is too flustered to notice, convinced that he now sounds like every arrogant gym rat on the planet. God, he’s given himself the ick.

“I guessed you could,” you say.

Oh boy, this freezes him. Mid-thought, mid blink, mid-breath: he’s completely stuck. What does that mean? What does that mean? He only just manages to unstick his now suddenly dry tongue from the roof of his mouth, looking at you with surprised, confused eyes and parted lips. There aren’t any words on them, though. Like a deer in headlights, he just… stares.

“I mean, okay. Come on.” Your eyes visibly drop as you look him over, gaze lingering at his shoulders, his biceps, his waist. “You can get another twenty on that at least, right?”

He doesn’t know how to explain what’s happening to him, but if he thought he was burning up before? It was nothing compared to this, now. And there’s no way you haven’t noticed how everything from the base of his neck to the tips of his ears has suddenly started staining scarlet. He bows his head and pinches his lips tight, wrestling away the train of thought that appears as you drag your bottom lip between your teeth momentarily, still eyeing his arms. God, he’s never felt so overwhelmed in his life.

“Something like that, yeah,” he strains. He’s trying so hard to be nonchalant, even though he knows all of his personal bests by heart. Deadlift, 195kg. He hit it a few weeks ago: a couple of days before he first saw you.

“Mm. You can tell.”

Jihoon tries to shake off the compliment, but he fails. In equal measure he wishes you’d stop (he doesn’t know how much more blood can rush to his cheeks before he keels over) and never wants you to stop talking. It’s all going straight to his stomach, though, and he doesn’t remember having felt this specific brand of nervous and excited and stupidly shy since he was in high school.

He can hardly keep up. This is the danger zone.

Maybe it’s a bad idea that he says the next thing that comes into his head in a desperate attempt to change the conversation away from how much he can pull. But somehow, his voice doesn’t break when he asks, “are you parked far away?”

What? It’s dark outside, and this part of town isn’t exactly known for its upstanding citizens and pretty flowerbeds.

“Oh,” you say, eyes a little wide. “I’m-... just staying close-by. I walked here.” The space between his eyebrows must crease a little too quickly because you immediately hurry to speak again. “Really. It’s like… not even ten minutes. All main streets. It’s nothing.”

“Ten minutes longer than I’d walk around here at night on my own,” he says lightheartedly. In tone, at least. He’s actually completely serious.

You laugh at that; he lets out a chuckle, too. Now, Jihoon doesn’t believe in fairies but he thinks that if they were real, they’d giggle just like you do.

With a smile still on your face, you say, “what? A strong guy like you? Come on, now.”

Do you have to keep doing that? Fuck, he’s absolutely done for.

He tilts his head forwards, eyes closed, trying so hard to stop the muscles in his cheeks from lifting in a grin that it becomes a workout in and of itself.

“I mean it,” he says, taking what he hopes is a subtle breath to settle the fluttering in his chest. The next thing he knows, he’s leaning one shoulder against the lockers, a little reminiscent of every douchebag in every teen movie ever made. If he doesn’t think about it too much, he won’t cringe into oblivion until he gets home and replays this interaction over and over in his head instead of going to sleep. “Maybe I’ve just lived here too long. I might be jaded, but it’s still true.”

“How long is too long?” you ask.

“All my life,” he tells you.

“No way?”

“Mm.” A beat. “What about you?”

“I’m just staying with a friend, right now.”

“Oh, right.” He falls quiet again as he remembers the first time he saw you, remembers making the list in his head of all the possible reasons he hadn’t seen you before. The second was true, then.

Why does that feel like the worst possible scenario? He decides not to unpack that here.

“Maybe-...” you start, glancing down at your hands, which have been twisting in front of you for a few seconds now. Your chest inflates, filled with the words you’re about to speak, but only a breath comes out when you shake your head instead of saying them. “No, don’t worry. Scratch that.”

“Are you sure?” he asks, because he thinks that whatever you were about to suggest, there’s not much he would have said no to. He feels like it’s only fair to give you another chance to say it.

But you don’t.

“Yeah, it’s nothing.” You pause. “I… should probably get going.” He glances over your shoulder at the clock mounted on the far wall, squinting to see the time. 11:45.

“Shit. Yeah, me too,” Jihoon agrees. He didn’t realise it had gotten so late, so fast: he’s hardly ever out at this time. Lord, he already knows it’s going to be an open inquisition when he gets back to his apartment. His neighbours, Soonyoung and Seokmin, are about to have a fucking field day.

But it’s already long past the time he usually goes to bed, so he asks his next question anyway. He still can’t shake the thought of you walking back on your own at this hour. “Do-… you need a ride?”

He’s not sure if you actually consider it, or just wait a moment before you answer just to be polite. Either way, you end up shaking your head.

“It’s okay. I’ve-… got a call to make, so.” Your voice is a little quieter, lips tweaking up into a regretful half-smile, and Jihoon curses in his own head. How had he forgotten about that? “Thank you, though. Really.”

“Don’t mention it,” he says. “Just… get back safe.”

You smile and nod, taking a step towards the door and Jihoon does the same. He reaches the exit first and holds it open for you; when you’re both out in the street, he suppresses a shiver and looks in the direction of where he left his car earlier. Feeling the full force of the cold, it crosses his mind to ask again if you’re sure about walking home, but you’re already pulling a beanie down over your still damp hair and tapping something into your phone, so he doesn’t say anything.

“I’ll see you around, uh-…” you start to say, only looking back up when you falter, realising that this is the first time you’re about to use his name and it occurs to you both, at the same time, that you haven’t done this part, yet.

“Jihoon,” he introduces himself, lips quirking into a side-smile. His gaze is expectant and you respond to it perfectly.

“Y/n,” you introduce yourself.

“See you around, y/n.”

You split off in the opposite direction to where he’s heading. Before he clamps his headphones over his ears for the short walk up to his car, the last thing he hears is the retreating sound of a dial-tone.

—————

He doesn’t see you then for two whole weeks.

For the first couple of days, he only idly notices; it’s not a big deal — it’s not like you’re always there when he is, and he’s sure it’s the same vice versa. But he notices your absence, nonetheless. By the end of the first week, he casually wonders if you’ve had a change in schedule. Maybe you’re on a different working pattern, something that means you can’t be there on Monday and Thursday evenings and at 11:45am on Sundays.

It’s not weird. He only knows this because prior to that first conversation, acknowledging you as you crossed paths by the free-weights became part of his routine. It’s fine that he sort of misses those little interactions, isn’t it?

Maybe you’ve decided to start training ridiculously early in the morning instead? He tried that once. Never again. It then occurs to him, in the middle of a self-enforced rest day as he sits in the dark nursing a headache, that perhaps you’re not well. He sort of wishes he’d had the guts to ask for your number the last time he saw you, now: he thinks he’d check in, see if you were okay, ask how work was going or something.

Deep down he knows he’d probably actually just be staring at a blank text thread with a ‘casual’ message typed, tweaked a few hundred times, and ultimately unsent. But that’s fine. It’s the thought that counts.

The next time he sees you isn’t even in the gym, at all. It’s a Sunday afternoon — he finished his morning session, went home, showered, and headed back out into town after some lunch with a few errands to run. He finds himself spoiled with the luxury of a spare few hours to kill and dips into his favourite coffee place, thrilled beyond belief to find that it’s not obnoxiously busy and that there’s only one other person in the queue waiting to be served.

Oh, he thinks when he looks up from his phone and sees a vaguely familiar set of headphones sitting on top of a definitely familiar mane of hair, standing right in front of him. Oh, shit. It’s you.

Jihoon goes back and forth with himself over it but ultimately decides he probably doesn’t know you well enough to just say hello out in the wild like this, so even though the urge to do so strikes, he holds himself back. It’s agonising, though. He really wants to.

You step forward to order and he’s typing out a reply to a message in his, Seokmin and Soonyoung’s three-way group chat, in which he’s literally been fighting for his life as of late. He made the mistake of mentioning you in passing a few days ago and ever since, he’s had to vehemently deny that he has developed his first gym crush, insisting that actually, he’s just made a friend. They don’t believe him, because of course they don’t. That would be far too reasonable. Seokmin says that Jihoon wouldn’t be blushing just from saying your name if you were really ‘just a friend’. Soonyoung argues Jihoon wouldn’t have mentioned you at all.

“I’m so sorry — bear with me, just-…” your voice is quiet but Jihoon hears you apologising to the cashier in front of you, and it snaps him clean away from the tiff he’s having with the men who live in his building. He glances up and you’re elbow-deep in the bag over your shoulder, red in the face with your bottom lip pulled between your teeth. He turns his head slightly and sees the small hand-written sign that says the card machine isn’t working, and they’re cash only, today.

He can hazard a guess at your predicament.

After another few seconds of you trying to find whatever it is you’re looking for in your bag, he starts feeling bad for you. This, right here, is his own worst nightmare. Should the roles be reversed, he thinks he would’ve just turned around and walked out. It’s exactly why he doesn’t bother with backpacks and satchels day-to-day: if it doesn’t fit in his pockets, he doesn’t take it out with him. The system isn’t perfect but it has saved Jihoon a decent amount of public distress.

But the roles aren’t reversed, and he has his wallet already in his hand, so… he only gives himself a few seconds to wonder if it’s appropriate before he does the stupid thing anyway.

“Don’t worry — I’ve got it,” he says, stepping around you, pulling out the cash to pay for your order. You’re dumbstruck when you look at him, head tilted to the side. The person stood behind the counter glances at you, then at him, and back at you; you don’t see this, however, because your eyes haven’t left Jihoon’s face since he appeared — as far as you’re concerned — out of thin air.

“I can’t ask you to…” you start to protest, but your hands have stopped fishing around and he’s moving the cash further towards the barista, who hesitates just a second longer.

“You’re not asking. I’m offering. I’ve got you.” He says this with such finality that you quite literally can’t argue with him. The lady behind the counter accepts the cash and you nod, shyly, mouthing a thank you. He orders his own drink — an Americano, nothing exciting — and you both go to stand at the other end of the counter while you wait.

“Hi,” you finally say, and Jihoon can’t help but give a small chuckle.

He doesn’t have anything hugely witty or creative in his arsenal, though, so he comes back with a matching, “hey.”

“How… have you been?” you ask.

“Can’t complain, really,” he says. “Are you okay? I haven’t seen you around for a few weeks.” Oh, God — the second the words are out of his mouth, he wishes he could take them back. Why did he have to add that last part? Why didn’t he just leave it at the question?

“Yeah — about that,” you breathe, ducking your head to conceal the heat that’s spreading over your cheeks. “You know how I said I was staying with that friend?” He nods, and you continue. “I was waiting for some stuff to get sorted out with an apartment and it all finally got resolved, so… I’ve been moving my stuff over to a new place.”

Jihoon feels his heart sink for a moment, but he keeps his expression pleasant and engaged. His fingers threaten to give him away as they fiddle with the aglet on the drawstring of his sweatpants.

“Sounds tiring,” he says lightly, and you laugh again, nodding. It’s odd, having his heart taking residence low in his stomach and somehow also in his throat, all while hammering away at a mile a minute. All the caffeine in the world couldn’t have this effect on him. “Is it going okay so far?”

“Yeah.” You nod. “It’s a process, but… it’ll be worth it.”

The barista behind the counter announces herself by clearing her throat and slides your drinks across the marble surface with a little glimmer in her eye. Jihoon picks them both up, extending yours out to you. There’s a pause (in which he swallows a large helping of self-doubt) as he glances to the door, working through several combinations of his next words in his mind before he looks back at you.

“Do you… maybe have ten minutes to sit with these?” He asks. You light up immediately, not even checking the time on any of your devices, nor the wall clock behind your head. He doesn’t let himself think about why it makes him giddy that you’re accepting the offer, just like that.

“Yeah — yeah, sure.” You smile, walking through the lines of tables and sliding into one of the big, comfy chairs by the window. He unzips his jacket and slings it over the arm of the other chair before settling in himself, his long fingers wrapping around the to-go cup. The drink warms his perpetually cold palms and he sighs sweetly.

“You must be excited to get into the new place, then?” he asks after taking a sip, letting it heat him up from the inside. It could be argued that this job is already being taken care of, but Jihoon is not about to go there.

“Oh, God yes.” You nod, relaxing back in the seat with your own cup. Jihoon subconsciously leans a little forward in tandem. “It’s been fun staying with my friend, but…” You pause, lips slightly parted, before going on. “Okay, a warning: I’m a terrible person for this, I know. She’s done me a huge favour, letting me stay there — but I can’t deal with how untidy she is. It’s driving me nuts.”

A chuckle bubbles in Jihoon’s chest, cheeks starting to ache as his smile grows and grows. It hasn’t fallen since he sat down opposite you, and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, any time soon. “That bad?” he asks.

“You have no idea,” you groan, covering your face with one hand. He wishes you hadn’t — he thinks you look quite lovely when you’re all lit up like this. “She doesn’t clean her dishes after she eats — she piles them up in the sink for like, three days. I don’t think she’s used the vacuum the entire time I’ve been there. I keep finding wrappers and packets and mismatched socks everywhere —”

His snort of laughter rolls off the back of his throat rather ungraciously and he settles back into his chair. You gently bump his ankle under the table with your foot, beaming at him. “I’m serious! I can’t live like this, Jihoon. I can’t!”

The more you speak, the less he can control the fits he’s descended into, and his abs start to ache after a while; there’s desperation in your voice but it’s just wrapped up so cutely in your lighthearted frustration and decoratively tied together with your sunshine smile… he can’t help it — he’s in pieces. It’s okay though, because you’re laughing too: it makes him think of fairies again, and he can picture you with dainty, intricately patterned wings under the soft lighting in the café. He wipes the corner of his eye with the heel of his hand as he starts to calm down, taking a few deep breaths all the way into his stomach.

“You’re so much stronger than I am,” he says.. “I couldn’t deal with that.”

“You know, I had a feeling you’d be a clean person, too,” you say, sipping at your coffee again. “I mean… I’ve never seen you use the gym showers, so I wasn’t sure, but…”

“Hey,” he says, mock-defensively. “I don’t trust the locks, okay? I shower at home!”

Your cup is lifted to your mouth and he can only see you from the nose upwards, but by the creases at the corners of your eyes, he knows you’re concealing a smile behind it as you nod back at him.

Ten minutes turns to twenty and then somehow becomes thirty — Jihoon starts feeling like you’re someone he’s known for years, and not just the person he accidentally ended up paying attention to in the gym just a couple of weeks ago. He bounces off you and you bounce off him. Both of you have long-since finished your drinks, too: there’s no real reason for either of you to still be here.

Except the obvious.

“So, the apartment,” Jihoon says, leaning forwards again with his elbows resting on his knees. “Is it…?” He makes a few circular gestures with his hands with which he tries to imply something to the effect of ‘local’, or ‘nearby’, but he can’t quite bring himself to say that out loud. You seem to catch on though. Somehow.

Then again, you did say — a few subject changes ago — that Jihoon is on your wavelength. Maybe that’s it.

“About… a fifteen minute walk from here? Give or take,” you say, and his eyebrows shoot up his forehead so fast it’s like they’re on strings, being controlled by someone else. He doesn’t realise for a few seconds, by which point he isn’t even sure how to relax them.

“No way?” he says, trying to feign nothing more than an idle interest. Obviously, he’s soaring.

“Yeah. I’ll want to get back training soon, too, so there’s some incentive to get this done quickly. I miss it,” you tell him.

Jihoon comes out with what he says next without thinking. His mouth is moving before fully engaging his brain. It’s the coffee jitters. Apparently.

“Well, if you need any help with anything, I’ve got a car.”

“You’re too sweet,” you say. “I really couldn’t put you out like that, but…”

“You wouldn’t be,” he assures you with a shrug. “If I’m not working or in the gym… I’m never really that busy. It’s up to you, but-… I’d be happy to.”

You bite the inside of your lip for a moment, apparently mulling this over, before wiggling in your seat to pull your phone out of the front pocket of your jeans. You unlock the device and hand it over on a ‘new contact’ screen.

Jihoon goes completely stupid: he thinks his brain stops functioning as he takes it to put his number in — for a moment, he’s staring dumbstruck, struggling to even remember the order of the digits now he’s under pressure, but it comes back to him eventually. His thumbs dart across the screen and he checks, double checks and triple checks that he’s typed it right before placing it back in your waiting palm.

His fingertips brush against yours and it tickles, sending small shockwaves up his arms and straight into his chest. You smile down at your phone before glancing up at him.

“You need an emoji,” you tell him, and he raises an eyebrow at you.

“Huh?”

“Everyone in my contacts has one — I’ve been doing this since I was in high-school. You need to pick one, too.”

“Oh, uh-…” Jihoon swallows, and for some reason he’s completely forgotten every single little emoticon option there is. He draws a blank. “I can’t — you pick one for me. I don’t know.”

You narrow your eyes at him for a second, pouting your lips as you seem to scroll through the endless options. Now and again, you look up at him, as if trying to see what best fits him before you continue your search. He waits. And waits. And waits. He’s about to throw in an admittedly useless suggestion of some sort of boring animal when you turn your phone around to show him what you’ve chosen.

Jihoon, the contact name reads. And there’s the little angel face next to it.

“Oh, come on,” he says, blushing deeply. “You can’t be serious.”

“I totally am,” you say proudly, turning it back and pressing to save it. He hides his face in his hands. “If you won’t pick your own, you get what you’re given. You did this to yourself.”

“Wow,” he chuckles weakly, sliding his hands up into his hair and raking it back off his face. Your eyes move quickly across every inch and boy, does he notice. You shrug in response and test it, sending the same little emoticon to him. He blushes harder when it comes through and he saves your number into his own phone before placing it face-down on the table.

More than an hour after buying your coffee, Jihoon stretches his arms above his head and checks the time on his watch. He frowns slightly, not sure how the afternoon got away from him so fast, and lets out a sigh.

“I think I need to get going,” he says reluctantly. Leaving you is absolutely the opposite of what he wants to do, actually. Alas, “I have some friends coming over tonight.”

“Yeah — yeah, of course,” you smile, leaning to one side to pick your bag up off the floor. “No worries.”

You both move to stand up and he throws his coat over his arm, leading the way out. He holds open the door for you to leave first, then follows you outside into the afternoon sun.

“It was really nice to see you,” you say, turning to face him.

“You too,” he agrees. “Text me if you need anything, okay? But actually do. Don’t just say you will?”

You laugh sweetly. Fairies. His ears might have actually caught fire this time. “Okay, okay. I promise. I’ll text you — thank you.” There’s a pause, but only a tiny one. “And for the coffee, too.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he insists, waving it off. You shake your head. He thinks your hands are twitching when you stuff them into your pockets but he can’t be sure. Your breath definitely stutters, though.

“No, really. Um… next one’s on me?”

He blinks, and blinks again. Next one? The next one? He feels like he’s malfunctioned and been forcibly rebooted. The next one?

“I-…” he starts, his throat dry. “Yeah, okay. If you’re sure.”

“I’m sure.” You nod, smiling with — what he doesn’t realise is — relief. “I’ll see you around, okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah — I’ll see you, y/n.”

—————

Jihoon has no choice but to admit defeat to the group chat that night when Seungcheol and Jeonghan come over for a takeout.

Within minutes, his oldest friend is asking about the girl from the gym — he’s been just as relentless as Seokmin and Soonyoung in quizzing Jihoon, except it’s slightly harder to deny to Seungcheol because he did witness, first-hand, the way you had his friend tripping over his own feet with a single smile. At first, Jihoon tries to shrug it off. Play it down. Change the subject. He doesn’t mention that he’s actually spoken to you since he and Cheol trained together, or that he accidentally bumped into you and paid for your coffee, or that you stayed talking with him for as long as you did. He definitely doesn’t say that you exchanged phone numbers.

He absolutely won’t confess to being smitten.

All Jihoon willingly admits to is that from what he’s seen of you around, you seem nice, and with a roll of his eyes he does agree that he thinks you’re attractive. He gets a bit of a glare later in the evening when Jeonghan asks if he’s thought about where he wants to take you on your first date, and Jihoon tells him to stop asking stupid questions and eat his chicken before he eats it for him. But all in all he thinks he evades the worst of it pretty well. For now, anyway — he knows their pestering isn’t going away any time soon.

Especially not when, on their way out, Seungcheol leans close and whispers that whatever is going on with his gym crush, it suits him. Jihoon jabs him on the arm and the two men leave, laughing brightly.

It’s about an hour after his friends have gone home, having washed the dishes and cleaned up his apartment that Jihoon is sitting on his living room floor doing a few lower body stretches before he turns in for the night. He finds himself tapping into your text thread — not for the first time this evening — and skimming over the short conversation you had earlier. You messaged him when you got back to your friend’s place to thank him for the third time, and Jihoon replied back telling you that if you didn’t stop being silly, he was never going to respond to you again. Your reply came in the form of a “:(“ and his was a simple “:)”. That was it, but he’s been thinking about the exchange ever since.

He’s not sure why. Nor is he certain what about that has him looking down at the messages and grinning like a fool in his apartment, alone, at 10:30pm on a Sunday night. He could probably take a stab in the dark at what it means, though. He rubs at the back of his neck with one hand as he changes conversations and types out a short message with the other.

jihoon: fine. you’re right.

seokmin: ?

soonyoung: probs true, does need context

jihoon: about the gym girl. you’re right.

soonyoung: OH

seokmin: Hahahahahaha

seokmin: Yeah, you’re definitely the last to know, dude

soonyoung: fr even chan and hansol know atp lmao

jihoon: they what?

jihoon: how do they know?

jihoon: they don’t go to my gym! i haven’t seen them in weeks!

soonyoung: because we told them?????

seokmin: So, we might have told everyone

jihoon: blocking both of your numbers immediately.

seokmin: Hey! We’re just glad you’ve accepted it

seokmin: When do we get to meet her?

jihoon: blocked.

Well, great, Jihoon thinks as he fights the urge to lay face down on the floor and let the laminate cool his searingly hot cheeks.

At least he’s admitted it now.

He’s vaguely confirmed in writing that maybe he has a bit of a thing for you — it’s out in the open and at minimum, two of his friends know that it’s real. Straight from the horse’s mouth. Fingers. Whatever. No doubt by morning, all of his friends will have found out. The point stands that he hasn’t confessed to something like this since he was approximately sixteen years old, so whatever you’re doing to him, whatever this… is, it matters.

So, he asks himself, standing up off the hardwood floor and stretching his spine, arms locked behind him and pushed back as far as they can go. He turns off all the lights, checks the front door, goes through the motions to get himself ready for bed. So… what the fuck am I supposed to do now?

—————

Come Monday evening, he’s about ready to hit the roof.

As far as bad days go, Jihoon thinks he’s in the running for one of the worst ever. He slept awfully, tossing and turning through the night despite the usual winning combination of freshly washed bed sheets and his white noise machine drowning out the occasional disturbance from the street below. He wakes up two minutes before his alarm is due to go off, only to discover he fell asleep before plugging his phone in to charge overnight, and it’s sitting at a very risky 13%. The gel he uses to keep his hair off his face at work has gone weird and only does half a job, strands tumbling back in front of his eyes the second he goes to leave his apartment, very nearly forgetting his keys. Then, to really put the cherry on top, he sees that — at some point between getting home yesterday and now — someone has scraped his car while parking up next to him. There’s a large scratch right down the passenger side, with no note nor reliable CCTV in his apartment’s parking lot to confirm who it was, and of course, the space is currently empty.

All this before he even gets to work.

He fundamentally knows that starting the week off with a bad attitude will only lead to a really shitty remainder, but when Vernon sends his routine ‘Monday Motivation’ booster message — “you’re going to have a great day, today!” — into the group chat, Jihoon responds with a crude photo of his middle finger, right in front of the massive scuff on the bodywork of his Hyundai. Jeonghan replies with an ‘oof’, Wonwoo with a ‘yikes’, and Joshua, ever the comedian, sends a picture of Garfield lying face-down captioned ‘Mondays’ that nobody replies to. All responses feel kind of appropriate. But he pockets his phone without sending anything else, sighing again; he locks the car and checks the handle just in case before he finally heads into the building.

It’s going to be a long day. He just has to get through it.

Things don’t necessarily improve. He ends up in and out of meetings all day, so when 5 o’clock rolls around and he’s on his way out the door, he’s feeling a bit like he’s done nothing of actual value. Just, for some reason, thinking about you and tapping out a catchy beat on the top of his desk as he pretends to pay attention to useless presentation after useless presentation. But it’s still somehow been exhausting on his brain and on the drive back to his apartment, Jihoon feels so drained that he contemplates skipping the gym altogether and going straight to bed. This internal argument takes up most of his journey, but it does keep him occupied during the rush-hour traffic if it does nothing else.

Nothing has ever been fixed by ruining a perfectly good routine, however — so no sooner than he’s back in his apartment, he changes out of his button-down and trousers and into his regular gym gear. His protein shaker is ready on the counter for when he’s home again, the lights are off, his bag is on his shoulder and the door is locked. He pushes against it a few times, checking out of habit, despite the fact that his only neighbours on this floor are Soonyoung, Seokmin and an elderly couple with a cat they’re not technically supposed to have. Nobody tells, though, because Boots has become everyone’s emotional support animal. The only actual security threat is Seokmin maybe stealing something from his fridge, but he’s only ever satisfied after the third test anyway.

A quick warmup and a few easy stretches later, Jihoon sets about his business. Mondays are for training legs (and often, as a result, incapacitating himself for the rest of the week), and these workouts are always some of his most intense.

So intense, in fact, that he’s sweating buckets and cherry red when he steps away from the squat rack, tugging up the hem of his t-shirt to dry his face, a brief flash of his toned abdomen on full view. He’s just about catching his breath when he glances in the mirror, and his knees nearly give out when he sees you walking in. You lock eyes and smile at him in the reflection as you start to walk towards him.

It’s not just any smile, but he’s way too flustered to notice.

He spins around to face you, mortally embarrassed that you definitely just saw that, but in a weird way… kind of elated? You drop your headphones to sit around the back of your neck to greet him as you get closer. He pushes his hair back off his forehead and tries to act as cool as he can, but Jihoon suddenly becomes incredibly aware of everything about himself in this moment: his posture, how his arms hang by his sides, the exact positioning of his feet. The fact that he’s breathing pretty deeply, that his pulse is so loud in his ears that he can see your lips moving but can’t quite hear what you’re saying.

Shit. Shit, shit, shit — you’re talking. Focus. He needs to focus.

“Sorry — what was that?” he asks, eliciting a soft laugh from you.

“I like your shirt,” you repeat, a fraction clearer. Jihoon glances down at himself, at the same sweatpants and tight black workout top he wears in here several times a week, and looks back at you with a raised eyebrow. God, he lets himself think for half a second, entertaining his own stupidity with the idea that you’re finding this as hard as he is, too. Maybe I’m not alone in this.

“Oh?” he says. “Um — thank you?”

“How’d it go with your friends last night?” you ask, hardly skipping a beat, and he’s a little thankful that you skim over his poor attempt at gratitude for a compliment he isn’t sure he deserves. Instead, his confusion wraps itself around the fact that you actually remembered what he was doing last night. Hell, even he’d forgotten in the heat of the day he’d had, but you remembered. He’s sweating over it a little and briefly wonders what the chances are of the gym floor opening up and swallowing him whole.

Slim, he decides. But not zero.

There’s hope.

“Yeah — yeah, it was nice,” he says, internally kicking himself for overthinking this so much that he’s apparently lost his ability to speak. In the space of 24 hours, he’s gone from giggling over coffee with you to completely weak just at the sound of your voice. It should be easier here, if anything — this is home turf for him. His comfort space. He supposes the tight fit of your gym clothes accentuating your hips and thighs isn’t helping matters, and neither is the wide neckline of your own t-shirt exposing your throat and a collarbone. But still. He’s not a teenager. He should be able to handle a little bit of skin.

He clears his throat, rolling his head side-to-side. Focus. “Sorry — I’m-… I just didn’t expect to see you back here so soon.”

“Yeah,” you chuckle. “I-… couldn’t stay away. Missed it a little too much.”

“I get that,” he concurs, willing his eyes not to drop down your frame to a newly exposed area of skin just around your waist, your t-shirt riding up as you adjust your bag on your shoulder. “It’s good to-… have you back, anyway.”

“Good to be back,” you agree. “Hey — can you leave that set up for me, when you’re done? I’m on legs today, too.”

Jihoon doesn’t want to say that he knows Mondays are your leg days, as well, so he doesn’t. Even if it is true. He wonders if you would find it odd that he’s remembered. “Sure,” he says with a small smile, which you return. Just as you’re about to walk off to drop your things into a locker, he pipes up again. “I mean — hey, if you wanted a spot, or to-… do, you know… anything…”

“Are you asking me to train with you?” you ask, eyes bright and smile wider than he thinks he’s ever seen it. This is torture. He’s not even lifting anything and his heart is about to burst out of his fucking chest — God, maybe this was a bad suggestion.

“I-…” he starts, but he lets the breath out of his lungs and shrugs his shoulders. “Yeah. I am.”

“Give me two minutes,” you agree, hurrying off to put your stuff away and fill up your bottle.

He manages to squeeze another set of squats in before you get back, which is sort of a miracle seeing as how his knees have gone completely weak ever since you arrived. He’s scrolling through his playlist as you cross the gym floor on your way back to him, but he looks up and smiles as you approach.

“You go ahead — I’ve just finished.”

He knows he’s really fucking done for when, after the first round, you add plates onto the bar to out-lift him. All before he’s even positioned himself behind you to be a good spotter.

Jihoon doesn’t go down without a fight though, and things get a little competitive from there. Both of you throw some of your favourite (see: most agonising) exercises into the mix over the course of the hour, taking it in turns on the equipment and creating a session that just about has him able to move by the time you’re finished. You talk to each other when you’ve got the breath to do so, otherwise focussing on your workout with more intensity than either of you remember training with for a long time.

And so what if he has to turn away from you once or twice to compose himself when breathless whines spill from between your lips on your last few reps, the sheer effort of the movements pushing your muscles to their absolute limit? So what if he feels his entire body run a thousand degrees every time you sweetly encourage him to manage just one more? So what if his palm stays tingling for fifteen seconds every time you high-five him for a set well done?

You slide out of the hamstring curl machine with a deep breath and legs like two sticks of jelly at the end of the session, and he holds a hand out to steady you as you regain your ability to weight-bear.

“You okay?” he asks, and you nod, patting what’s exposed of your chest and neck with your towel.

“Yeah. Yeah — just… fuck.” You laugh, laying your hand over the top of his and squeezing. Only for a second — not even, only for a breath — and really just to let him know that you’re okay to stand on your own, but Jihoon feels a bit like he’s been electrocuted straight up his arm all the same. “You don’t come to play, do you?”

“Says you,” he scoffs, only now moving his hand from your upper arm. “I was wrong about you — you’re insane. Clinically insane.”

Using the paper towels he went to gather while you were finishing up, he wipes the machine clean as you stretch out your now slightly exercise-swollen thighs.

“I was just gonna finish up on one of the stairmasters,” you tell him, taking a long sip of your water. His eyes widen to the point of comedy, eyebrows high on his forehead. You snicker at his horror, the rim of your bottle hovering tantalisingly over your bottom lip. “What?”

“That’s-… got to be a form of masochism,” he says, exhausted just at the idea of marching up the never ending staircase even for a minute. You almost choke on your mouthful of water, only just swallowing it in time before a sudden, uncontrollable laugh erupts from your chest.

“How?!” you ask, covering your mouth with your hand. Just like yesterday, the urge to pull your arm away, to reveal your hidden smile strikes him. He doesn’t act on it, but he wants to.

“What do you mean, how? Why would you put yourself through that after what you’ve just done?” It’s completely lighthearted, and the rush of heat on your cheeks intensifies at the cocktail of shock and awe in his gaze.

You shrug your shoulders once. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m just better than you.” The way the tip of your tongue teasingly sits between your teeth as you grin at him sends bullets of adrenaline through his veins and Jihoon runs his hand over his face.

For about three seconds, he tells himself he isn’t going to take the bait. He’ll lose, he’ll admit it — he’ll put his hands up and say you’re absolutely, definitely better than he is, if it means he doesn’t have to push through a round of cardio after surpassing every single one of his physical limits. But God, he thinks you look completely irresistible standing there challenging him like this, your hands on your hips. His eyes don’t leave yours and yours don’t leave his; both of your chests stutter, just a little bit, and he can see your smile grow in his periphery.

How the fuck is he supposed to walk away?

“Ten minutes,” he concedes, matching your footsteps as you start to walk backwards towards his least favourite line of equipment in any gym, ever. “And you’re definitely getting the next coffee, now.”

——————

That Friday, you finally text him again.

His muscles have just about returned to a working state and Jihoon is quite proud to say that he has regained the ability to sit down without needing something to hold onto. He got home from work, showered the day away and has just settled down into the sofa to start on the book Wonwoo has been on his ass about reading when his phone vibrates on the side table. He reaches over for it, trying to figure out which of his friends might be trying to get hold of him early evening on a Friday, and already going over excuses in his head as to why he can’t go out to do whatever they’re inviting him to. But when your contact name flashes up on the screen, every single thought disappears from his brain.

y/n: hey :)

y/n: just out of interest, how good are you at assembling furniture?

He furrows his brows at this. There’s a very obvious answer, which is that he’s not. He doesn’t want to reply saying so, though, so he goes for what he thinks is the next best thing.

jh: well…

jh: what are you trying to put together?

y/n: a bed :(

y/n: today’s your rest day, right?

y/n: can i bribe you with dinner after? :)

Oh? His brain stalls, fingers hovering over the keypad. He can literally see your face forming a little pout before growing into a hopeful grin in his mind’s eye. He doesn’t see how he could ever say no.

jh: apparently yes, you can.

jh: text me the address? i’ll leave in 5.

He changes out of his basketball shorts and hoodie in record time, abandoning Wonwoo’s book on his couch in favour of attempting to look at least somewhat presentable for you. He tugs on a pair of jeans that he hasn’t touched in about 6 months and one of his nicer t-shirts instead, even going as far as to spritz aftershave on the column of his throat. You’ve sent him your address and he makes to leave, doing his regular essential item pat-down on his way out the door. He puts your new apartment into his phone as he crosses the parking lot, stupidly delighted to discover it’s only 7 and a half minutes away from where he lives, and settles into his car with a series of deep exhales.

The breathing exercises don’t achieve much. His head is still spinning when he parks up in the street by your new place and lingers just outside the building. He sends you a text to say he’s arrived and you reply saying you’re on your way down. You appear in the lobby just a few minutes later.

“Hey,” you greet him warmly, crossing the space and putting your arms around him in a hug. He goes limp for a fraction of a second before his arms slide around you, too. God, he hopes you can’t feel his heartbeat right now. He thinks that the effect you have on him should be considered dangerous. But whether you can or not, you tighten your arms to squeeze him once before you unwind them from around his neck and step away.

“Hi,” he says, feverish from the tops of his ears all the way down to his toes. His hands find his pockets as you take a few more polite steps back.

“Thank you so much for this.” Your bottom lip finds temporary home between your teeth before you’re nodding back towards the stairwell. “I’m on the third floor. Follow me.”

He does. He walks up the stairs behind you as you ask about his day at work, and he tells you that he thinks today has probably been one of the best he’s had in about 2 months. When he asks how your day went, you turn your head back to look at him and stumble on the next step, gently laughing and saying that you think you’re at your tether’s end with D.I.Y, but it’s been pretty good otherwise. By the time you reach your floor, his thighs are aching, a bit of residual fatigue from your session earlier in the week making it a little harder than it ought to be. He can’t imagine how you’ve coped every day since then; if his own building didn’t have an elevator, Jihoon thinks he’d have been sleeping in his car.

You give him a little tour of the apartment, and he stands next to you at the window as you point out where you were staying with your friend a few blocks away. He thinks the view is seriously pretty in the evening light, enchanted by how he can see the tops of the slightly lower buildings and the street below, lined with neon storefronts and currently alive with shoppers and bar-goers, but… He cringes at himself for thinking it, but the view through the glass is nothing compared to the one he has inside.

You’ve started to put up a few decorations and knick-knacks around the place too. He doesn’t know you very well, but he still thinks it’s very you — all of it, and he likes them. Even with the room full of boxes and half-unpacked cases, there’s so much personality in it already. Charm. He brushes off your attempts to apologise for the ‘mess’, as you called it, despite everything being neatly pushed out of the way of the main space. It’s easily tidier than any other mid-move apartment he’s ever been in.

“Did you want a drink?” you ask him, walking over to the refrigerator and resting a hand on the door. “I’ve got wine, or-… anything, really.”

“Just some water would be great,” he says appreciatively, and a few seconds later you’re handing him a bottle, turning another one over in your hand. “I really wouldn’t be much help after a couple of glasses, trust me.”

“Does this mean you are good at it, then? Before a drink?” you ask him. Is it hope in your voice? Or do you somehow know how hopeless he is, and are you teasing? He can’t tell. Regardless, clearly his evasion earlier wasn’t quite as successful as he hoped it would be.

“About that…” He chuckles, taking a sip from the bottle and glancing sideways at you. “I’m sure between the two of us, we’ll figure it out.”

“My knight in shining armour,” you say with a laugh, closing your fingers around his wrist and leading him through the door to your bedroom. You’ve managed to separate all of the individual pieces, but you haven’t made any real progress otherwise. He settles himself down on the floor and reaches for the assembly manual, pursing his lips as he looks at the little baggies of screws and bolts and various other things he doesn’t know the names of.

“Okay.” He frowns, looking back up at you where you’ve kneeled down a couple of feet away. You’re grinning innocently back at him, but Jihoon’s lips are more aligned with a pout. “You maybe should have mentioned that the instructions are in Swedish.”

——-

Ignoring the fact that you can’t understand the directions printed on the flimsy little pieces of paper, you get to work. It’s… an interesting process, but somehow between the pair of you, you successfully manage to assemble the bed in just under two hours by mostly following the diagrams (and having to backtrack several times because Jihoon managed to miss a few steps). At three minutes to nine, you’re both finally standing up off the floor, stretching out stiff joints and tight muscles; the bed is fully assembled and made up with your sheets in the centre of the room, headboard against the back wall, the lamp you set on the dresser casting a pleasant orangey glow on every surface.

“We did it,” you say, a little in shock, a lot exhausted, and absolutely starving. At least, that’s what he assumes you’re feeling, because it’s what he is. “We actually did it.”

“I mean, you did most of it,” Jihoon says. It’s true; at a point, he was just handing you the pieces you asked him for and holding parts steady so that you could fit them together. But if you want to call it a joint effort, he isn’t going to stop you, and the roll of your eyes tells him that you do want to call it that.

“Shh. You helped,” you scold him, bumping his upper arm with your elbow. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“If you say so,” he chuckles, taking another sip of his water. Jihoon isn’t sure he believes you, but the way you’re challenging him to argue further with your tongue pressed against the inside of your cheek scrambles his brain. Any remaining argument dies on his lips. “We make a good team.”

“We do,” you agree, expression shifting into a shy smile, bumping his arm again, your elbow lingering against him for a second longer. “Come on, I think I promised to feed you, too. What are you in the mood for?”

A movie has been playing in the background for about an hour by the time your food arrives and you’ve eaten everything. Jihoon relaxes back against the cushions of the couch and you’re settled comfortably next to him: there’s plenty of space on either side of you both, so there isn’t really any need for you to have your upper arm basically pressing against his, but Jihoon is too comfortable to say anything and you certainly aren’t making any attempts to move away. You shift your legs after about ninety minutes, bringing them up underneath you so your thigh is pressed against his now, as well, and you’re twisted slightly so you’re physically facing him but your head is still turned towards the TV.

Everywhere your clothed body touches him is scorching, and he wonders if maybe he should’ve worn a thinner t-shirt, or at the very least something a little less heavy on his legs. His jeans, slightly tighter around the thighs than perhaps would be their peak level of comfort, are clinging to him everywhere and he’s so aware of himself, so aware of you, of your sweet body wash, your fruity shampoo, every single one of your breaths… He’s cursed people out for breathing too loudly around him before, but he thinks he could replace his white noise machine with an eight hour track of just this and he would sleep like a fucking baby.

One of your elbows is propped against the top of the cushions behind you and you’re resting your head in your palm, and (not for the first time this evening) he glances sideways to look at you. They’ve been fleeting glances thus far, only stealing fractions of a moment before he turns his attention back to the TV. But this? This is the wrong moment. Entirely the wrong fucking moment because as his head turns, so does yours, and you catch him in the act. Fuck, if he thought he was burning up, before? He’s pretty sure he’s somehow just descended straight to the second circle of hell, greeting all the other lusty sinners like old friends. Several of his thoughts tonight have been considerably impure, and in this half second of blistering eye contact, they all come rushing back.

The universe is really testing him this evening, and Jihoon is stumbling. It feels like any minute now, he’s going to explode.

He straightens his spine and looks back at the TV, trying to force his eyes to focus even though he’s completely swallowed by the feeling of your arm straightening across the back of the couch, your fingertips grazing over the skin at the bottom of his hairline. He can feel your eyes still on him, your gaze burning into his cheek, no doubt following as his tongue darts out subconsciously over his lips. But he can’t quite help himself, can’t get the image of how sweet you looked out of his head; he clears his throat quietly and looks over at you again, coming over almost completely blank the second he notices the glimmer your eyes hold when they’re trained on him.

Any. Fucking. Minute.

“Jihoon, I-…” you start to say, and he turns himself a little bit so that he’s facing you better, completely forgetting about the movie now. That’s not a great loss: he couldn’t explain the plot even if he tried. “I don’t know if-… you can tell me if I’ve read you wrong…”

“You haven’t,” he hurries. Relief starts to ease the tension between your brows, before you scrunch them again and cock your head to the side. “I’m sure you haven’t, I mean.”

In this new position, one of his legs is bent and sitting up on the couch beneath him and you’ve adjusted your own posture to accommodate. Your knee sits just over the top of his, more of your impossible body heat radiating through his clothes, and he glances down at the site of contact before he looks back at you.

“I just-... I don’t know, I think I knew I was interested in you from the first time I saw you, but the last few weeks especially…” You’ve been rehearsing this. He can feel it. It’s written in your eyes, holding the weight of the words you’re struggling to say, and behind them he can see cogs turning as you try to get the words in the right order. (He knows how that goes, because he’s been trying to figure out how to tell you, too.) He nods, urging you to keep going.

“I can’t get you out of my head. I really like you.”

He short-circuits, then. Even though part of him knew what you were going to say, hearing it out loud flips a switch inside him and he stops functioning. Blinking at you slowly, lips parted, heart racing – he feels as if his brain has been sucked clean out of his ears and is floating somewhere way above his head. Way outside of a contactable range, way beyond any level of rational decision-making. Jihoon knows what he wants to say, of course – he knows that he wants to say that he likes you, and that he has for a while, and that maybe you should let him take you out on a date or something, but all of that sits just behind the barrier of his teeth, so…

He leans forward and kisses you, instead.

He almost can’t believe that he’s only wanted this for as short of a time as he has; it feels like it’s been building inside him for so much longer. Relief floods through his veins, the emotional dam finally breaching. It only lasts a few seconds, but with his lips pressed to yours and yours pressing back, the static in his brain goes quiet, the movie falls silent: everything stops, except you. He thinks you could’ve been carved from stone around each other — he thinks something just feels so inexplicably right. Your hand tightens in his hair and he gasps softly as he pulls an inch back, eyes heavily lidded and looking straight at you through his lashes. You move forward, leaning your forehead against his, and the feather-light hold he has on your chin slides up to your cheek instead.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know how to-…” he says after a long, long moment of remembering how to breathe, how to blink, how to exist in your space without combusting on the spot. He still isn’t sure he knows how to do any of those things, especially not now he can see every single line of your face this close. He’s trying, though. “But — shit, I’m crazy about you.”

You kiss him, then, harder than before, colliding in a mess of half-finished breaths and bumped, stinging noses. His other hand comes up to sit against your rib cage, yours pressing into the material of his t-shirt over his chest. He smiles and parts his lips as yours move against them, your tongue gently sweeping into his mouth, finding his own; a soft, low moan tickles the back of his throat, his fingertips curling slightly to tighten his hold.

Jihoon isn’t sure how you end up on your knees, straddled astride his legs with one of his hands tucked between your thigh and calf, the other on the curve of your ass — he just knows that he doesn’t mind one bit. You’re warm and comfortable, the arch of your back pressing you into him deliciously. He’s kissing you like his life depends on it (he really fears that it might), and you’re doing the same back, licking against his tongue and rocking slightly with every separation and reconnection of your lips. He feels your fingers brush at the hem of his t-shirt and slip just underneath at the same moment as you pull away from him, and he’s so dazed, so fuzzy, so lost in you that he can only tilt his head back to stare up at your face. In your current position, you’re towering over him. It’s easily the best view he’s ever had.

“Can I-…?” you ask breathlessly. The new roughness to your voice goes straight to his cock and he has to restrain himself from bucking his hips upwards.

“Yeah,” he says, leaning forward slightly to try and aid you. Your hands tug at the bottom of his shirt and peel it up over his chest: he raises his arms slightly and soon, you can toss it to the unoccupied side of the couch. He shivers slightly as he relaxes back, both at the chill in your unheated apartment and upon noticing the way you’re staring down at him. It’s addictive.

“Oh my God,” you whisper, jaw a little slack, smoothing your hands over his shoulders to feel every ridge of hard-earned muscle. You travel down his arms, over to his chest, down his stomach… Jihoon sucks in a breath, your warm hands absolutely searing against his skin, and his abdominals tighten beneath them. Tilting your head, you press a line of kisses down the side of his neck, your lips brushing against one almost unbearably sensitive spot when you continue. “Fuck, you’re so hot.”

He smiles bashfully, rolling his head to the side and giving you all the access you want. Your lips tickle euphorically against him as he tugs you flush against his chest, both his hands now tightly pressing against your ass, fingers kneading the muscle concealed by your pants. You’re sitting right over his clothed cock and he’s reasonably sure he can feel your pulse between your thighs, letting out a soft grunt when you roll your hips deliberately down into his own. Your kisses travel to the swell at the curve of his shoulder before moving back up to his lips, where he meets you with a fire that he’s never kissed anyone with, before.

“Says you,” he murmurs into your mouth, your teeth clashing, his hips pushing slightly up off the couch. Just enough to make you sit back from him, just enough for Jihoon to open his eyes and look at you. His hair, thoroughly scrunched up and pulled around by your desperately gripping fingers, fans out at all sorts of angles and his chest has taken on a rosy hue since you last looked at it. With swollen, shiny lips, glossy eyes, breathing deep, he looks completely blissed out, like a man who could unravel beneath you if you moved just right. All from a little tongue action. He’d usually feel embarrassed, but it’s hard to when you’re the person on top of him; to be honest, neither of you would mind much if he did.

You’re pushing yourself up and off him before he can really get his bearings and an audible whine of despair parts his lips at the loss of your weight against his cock. Fuck, these jeans were a bad idea: he’s straining against the denim so much that it hurts, and there’s a near perfect outline of his hard-on. He stops pouting the second you take hold of his hand and tug him upright, though, your eyes dark and determined and intense. He thinks he might faint, actually: from standing too fast and feeling as though all the blood in his body is pulsing through his aching dick, he has to take a moment to stop the edges of his vision going dark before you’re pulling him through to your bedroom.

Something flips inside him the second you have him there. Jihoon, who was more than happy to sit beneath you and let you take all the control in the living room, is pushing you back onto the mattress by your shoulder and slotting himself between your parted thighs the moment the door is closed behind him. He’s past the point of wanting you, now: he needs you, and he needs you to need him, too.

And God, do you. You prop yourself up on one elbow, staring at where he’s now leaning over you with wide eyes and your bottom lip drawn between your teeth. He bends down and kisses along your jawline in response, nipping gently just below your ear. Your back arches up and in a flash, one of his hands is beneath you, snapping open the clasp on your bra with a few slides of his fingers.

“Wh-…” you start, giggling and panting at the same time. He smirks against your pulse point.

He flattens his tongue against you and licks a salty bead of sweat off your skin. “What?”

“Had no idea you could-…” You’re cut off by a gasp as one of his hands slides under your sweater, slipping beneath the garment he just unfastened. His fingertips graze over your breast and a pleading sob escapes you. His smile grows even wider. “You were so…”

“So what?” he prompts, pinching your nipple between his thumb and forefinger. Another one of those beautiful sounds breaks the air above you. He does it again, massaging your breast with the palm of his hand. “Come on… talk to me.”

“So good,” you gasp, lying down flat and tilting your head back against the pillows. He rocks forwards to press his cock against you again and your thighs tighten around his hips, one leg hooking around his to keep him there. “So-… fucking good.”

You’re so impossibly irresistible to him, especially like this, and he sits up, settling on his knees to look down at you. Jihoon doesn’t even get the chance to move his hands towards the hem of your sweater to tug it off you though: you’re already grabbing it yourself, crossing your arms to pull it over the top of your head. He can see your bra now, and hell, it’s pretty even if it is just hanging off you. Baby pink and lacy. He thumbs over the material as he helps you pull it down your arms, briefly letting himself wonder if-…

“If only you’d been patient enough to see the set together.”

Oh, so you can read his mind now, too?

You glance down to the small space between your bodies and his eyes follow, lips slightly parted, a heavy sigh on his breath. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck — he wishes he had. Even imagining it, he’s throbbing.

“You wear all this for me?” he asks, hands creeping up the insides of your thighs. You nod up at him and he smiles down at you. “Fuck. I bet you didn’t even need my help tonight at all, did you?”

You’re bucking your hips now as his thumb brushes, agonisingly slowly, over your clothed cunt. One arm has come up to cover your face: for the first time, he acts on his impulsive need to see you shy, see you needy, and leans over you to gently pull it away and pins your wrist down against the mattress. He kisses you, his fingers on the other hand pressing slightly more firmly to where he’s pretty sure your clit is.

“Y/n, you’re so pretty. Let me see you.”

“I didn’t,” you admit, voice wobbling as he works you up so much you’re actually soaking through not just your pretty underwear, but the leggings you’ve had on all night, too. He can feel it against the pad of his thumb and he raises his eyebrows for you to continue. “Just… really wanted you to come over…”

“Mhm. I know,” he soothes, bending low again and kissing down towards your chest. His lips purse over one of your nipples and he sucks it up into his mouth, flicking his tongue over the bud. He releases your wrist with the hand currently taking most of his weight and leans on his elbow, teasing your other tit with his fingers. The weight of it in his palm has him murmuring soft praises against your skin, telling you over and over how good you feel. You push up onto your elbows to try and press him closer — when his teeth tug just slightly, you’re about ready to beg.

“Jihoon, please,” you murmur. He short-circuits, again. Goes blank. His name has always sounded so much sweeter on your tongue, but this? This? Oh, he doesn’t know if he’s ever going to recover. That sound is going to stick in his head for days, months, forever, if he has anything to say about it. But even if his brain isn’t working, his body moves on autopilot: he sits up and hooks his fingers under your waistband, pulling your pants down your legs and discarding them onto the floor.

He’s staring between your thighs with zero functioning brain cells and literal galaxies in his eyes, trying to figure out what cosmic miracle brought someone like you into his life, how on Earth he’s ended up between your thighs. The question is so overwhelming in his mind that he barely notices that you’re moving, at first. Jihoon doesn’t know what causes you to try and bring your thighs together — if it’s shyness or arousal, desperation, a search for friction? — but he stops you as soon as he realises, laying a hand on each of your legs, pinning your knees down now, instead.

“Keep your legs wide for me?” he asks, to which you punctuate a nod with an assenting hum. “Good girl.”

You’re so wet that when he strokes two fingers over your covered pussy, pressing the fabric of your panties into your heat, they come away thinly coated in the arousal that’s seeped through them. He brings his fingers to his lips then, eyes fluttering as he licks your slick off them. You taste otherworldly and he doesn’t hesitate to tell you so with a groan.

“God,” he murmurs, tugging at the waistband of your panties with his other hand. His eyes ask if you’re ready — if you’re sure, and when you nod down at him, he pulls them off completely too. His middle finger slips between your folds, collecting the wetness dribbling out of you, and he drags it slowly upwards towards your clit. He repositions himself again, leaning down over you with his head at your neck, the heel of his hand resting against your lower abdomen. He draws small circles over the bud, laying open-mouthed kisses at your collarbone and listening to the gorgeous sounds you make, learning what you like, following each gasp and moan and chasing as many of them as he can draw out of you.

At the same time as you start rocking your hips up to meet his hand, your nails scratching gently against his scalp again, Jihoon slips his finger down from your swollen clit to press it inside you. You gasp, high-pitched and needy, your cunt spasming around his finger and pulling it in deeper. He’s only in up to his second knuckle but the way you keen for him has him pushing further until it’s buried inside your pussy completely.

“S’this okay?” he asks, but he knows your answer thanks to your vocal responses to him already slowly easing his finger in and out, in and out. You nod your head almost aggressively as he glances up at your face, your eyes squeezed tightly shut, jaw tense, throat bobbing as you swallow hard.

“More — please,” you say not long after. A breath hitches in your throat when he does exactly what you ask, pressing the heel of his hand against your clit and positioning another finger at your entrance. He flexes his wrist slightly to get comfortable, pumping both fingers into you now, and he curls them upwards at just the right time to make your back arch off the bed. “Fuck — mhm, just like that—…”

He moves down your body slightly, reattaching his lips to one of your nipples as he fingers you deep and slow. He’s in no rush: Jihoon thinks he could do this all day and just deal with the RSI later on. You look so unbelievably hot with your face scrunched in pleasure, your thighs quivering as you fight to keep them apart like he asked you to, with your hips twisting down against his hand to try and get his fingers deeper and faster. When he lowers himself all the way down, settling completely between your thighs, he flicks his tongue out over your clit and your back arches up off the bed with a gasp.

“Don’t stop,” you whine, all high-pitched and rushed, both syllables merging into one hurried sound. “Fuck, fuck — please, don’t stop.”

“I’m not going to,” he murmurs, keeping pace and rhythm as he works you towards your high. God, he thinks there couldn’t possibly be anything in the world more sexy than watching you come undone from this angle. Your chest rising and falling in stuttered breaths, your hips rocking down against his hand, your pussy right on his mouth. Just the thought of it has his cock jumping in his boxers. “You gonna come for me, huh?”

“I-…” you start, releasing your death-grip on the bedsheets to bring a hand to cover your face. He clears his throat deliberately — perhaps it’s sort of closer to a growl than a cough — and he thinks maybe you really can read his mind, or maybe you’re learning that he wants to see every inch of you (especially like this), because a second later, it’s tangled up in his hair and holding him in place. “Y-yeah, fuck, I…”

“Good girl,” he coos again, and that breaks you. Your pussy tightens around his fingers and you feel yourself convulse, muscles clenching and releasing as you go over the edge with a cry. He eases you through your climax, tongue laving over your clit, fingers slowing but not stopping inside your cunt until your thighs close around his head in your oversensitivity. He takes the hint, then, and he slowly pulls away, sucking his fingers clean of your arousal while you take a few breaths to recover.

“Oh, my God,” you sigh as he moves back up and starts pressing small pecks over your chest and collarbones, your fingers lacing through his hair again to pull him up to kiss you. You groan softly at the taste of yourself on his lips, and can’t blame you. He still isn’t over it, either.

“You’re so gorgeous,” he tells you in-between kisses, one hand supporting the back of your neck to keep you close. “So pretty. So sweet. So good.”

“Shh,” you giggle, but he doesn’t. Just about every adoring adjective Jihoon has in his arsenal is murmured against your lips until you’ve gathered enough strength to get up on your knees and push him back onto the mattress, fumbling with the button of his jeans.

He groans at the relief as you tug them down over his hips and thighs. “We don’t have to do anything else if you’re—”

“Shh.” This one’s a little more insistent, and he makes a show of clamping his lips back together. “You wore the tightest jeans on the planet, had your cock on-fucking-display for me all evening, and you think I wanna stop now?”

His jaw falls slack at the words that come out of your mouth. The incredulous way with which you say them has him involuntarily bucking up into nothing. Your expression matches his when you finally get his jeans all the way off and his thin, black boxer-briefs are the only barrier between you. The outline of his cock strains against them, tenting the fabric: Jihoon doesn’t miss the way you lick over your lips before glancing up at him through your eyelashes. It’s your turn to give him the look, now, asking that this last part is okay, with your fingertips hooked underneath the elastic waistband. He nods feverishly up at your heavy gaze.

“Please,” he groans, lifting his hips so you can pull them off. His length springs free the moment they’re pulled low enough, slapping back against his abdomen, sitting pretty against his toned muscles, thick and veiny and red-tipped. Desperate. His underwear joins the pile of clothes down the side of the bed as you throw one leg over him; sitting across his thighs, you take his cock into your hand, giving it a few gentle strokes. He fucks up into your palm when you squeeze your fingers around it.

“I need you so fucking bad,” you murmur, head spinning, and Jihoon isn’t in much of a better state himself; he’s fighting to keep his eyes open, fighting to keep his breaths coming. He sits upright, one arm behind him for support, and kisses you hard as you continue to tug at his length.

“Need you, too,” he breathes, shifting so he has both arms around you. In a swift movement, muscles rippling, he lifts you off him and turns you over so he has you sitting on your now impossibly scrunched comforter.

He finds home back between your legs as you reach over into the drawer at your bedside and fumble around for a few seconds. He hears a little clatter and a rustling and when your hand resurfaces, you’ve pulled free a small foil square. You don’t even give him a chance to lean forward and take it; you’re ripping it open and looking up at him with the biggest doe-eyed stare he thinks he’s ever seen. He nods at the silent question, a grunt tumbling free as you roll the condom down his length. This is the most pathetic little bit of contact and he’s fighting demons.

“Okay?” he asks, shuffling back a little and giving you space to lie down flat on your back. You nod up at him, already wrapping your arms around his shoulders.

“Mhm, just-... take it slow?” you ask him, anticipation rendering you already a little breathless. “S’been a while.”

A grin blooms all the way from his lips to his eyes and he leans down to kiss you again, positioning his tip at your hole and pressing forward just enough to tease.

Your thighs tighten around his hips and he pushes himself further inside you with a stuttered groan, agonisingly slowly, inch by inch. He stills every few seconds, both to give you the time to adjust and so that he can take a steadying few breaths and not collapse at how good you feel wrapped around him; he stops pressing his hips forward before he’s fully sheathed inside your pussy and you let a whine slip, the stretch slowly easing.

“You can move,” you tell him, laying a kiss to his chest. “I’m okay.”

Jihoon gives a soft laugh. Oh, he wishes this was just to be polite, but no. He’s in real danger of losing control any second. “Yeah, this isn’t for you, baby.”

“Oh?” you ask. You clamp around him and he gasps at the tightness, hips jerking forward until he’s buried up to the hilt. Fuck, there’s a bruised cervix if you’ve ever had one; a high-pitched whine erupts out of your lips and he ducks his head down to your ear.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “You just-... fuck, you feel so good.”

“Mm, says you.”

It’s another moment before he thrusts with intent, though. But when he does? When he pulls out halfway before sliding all the way back inside you, losing and regaining the feeling of your heat enveloping him entirely, hearing your gasps against his collarbone? The invisible reigns holding him back unravel and he settles into a slow but intensely deep rhythm, guiding your legs around his waist. You hook your ankles behind his back and somehow, you suck him in deeper still, your bodies touching everywhere they possibly can, so impossibly close.

The arm not holding his weight slides beneath your hips and raises them just a little. Now, at this angle, every time he rolls into you he grazes against your sweet-spot and you’re reduced to an incoherent mess within a few minutes. Good, he thinks, because he’s not doing much better, himself.

You hug him tighter after one particularly well-angled thrust, sinking your teeth into the muscle of his shoulder. He hisses at the sting, and your lips part as if you’re about to apologise but he doesn’t give you the chance to; he bumps your nose with his own to ask you to lift your head slightly, before he bends down and kisses you hard.

“Do that again,” he gasps, almost all of his weight against you as the hand not around your hips comes up to rest on your cheek. When your brows tighten, he swipes his thumb over your spit-covered, swollen lips. “Please. ”

So, you do.

Maybe not as harshly as the first time, but your teeth find his collarbone and you suck a bruise into his skin, drawing from him the highest pitched sound you think he could possibly make. He squares his jaw, ducking his head back down, biting on his bottom lip before he has no choice but to speak.

“I’m close, y/n,” he confesses, fucking into you slower, trying to stave it off for a few more seconds, his hips stuttering. “Can-... can you give me one more…?”

You nod, the knot in your stomach already growing tighter and tighter with every movement he makes, and when one of your hands unwinds from around his back to slide between your sweat-slicked bodies, he moves slightly away, letting you reach down.

It’s the sight of two of your fingers finding your clit and rubbing your favourite movements out on yourself that takes him past the point of no return, his cock sliding in and out of you messily, desperately, chasing the high that he’s right on the brink of. He kisses and nips just below your ear, breathy groans tickling your neck, and your high-pitched whine tells him you’ve hit your orgasm just as he starts to spill his into the condom, gushing around him, your walls fluttering and milking him for all he’s worth.

—

You offer for him to shower first – an offer he gratefully accepts. While you’re taking your turn afterwards, Jihoon hunts down a fresh duvet cover in your room; he changes it, grabs you a glass of water for when you’re done, and sits on the edge of his bed with just the towel wrapped around his waist, scrolling through his phone. He looks up with a bright grin as the door opens and you emerge through it in your pyjamas, glowing from the light behind you, stray droplets of water clinging to your arms.

You pause gently rubbing your hair dry with the towel, eyes brightening when you see him. “You didn’t have to do all this,” you say, and he pushes a hand through his own still damp hair with a laugh.

“It was the least I could do,” he counters. You raise your eyebrows at him, crossing the room to sit opposite him. He drops his phone down onto the mattress. “I couldn’t leave and make you change them yourself.”

“Leave?” you ask, picking up one of his hands and playing idly with his fingers.

“I mean, it’s getting pretty late, so…” he says. “I probably need to get going at some point.”

“Or…” you say, tongue darting out over your lips. “Maybe you don’t.”

Jihoon looks down at your hands, then back up at you. Are you suggesting what he thinks you are, or has he still not quite come back to himself from earlier? It’s hard to say if the look on your face is hope, or something else.

“Are you… asking me to stay?” he asks.

“Only if you want to,” you tell him. He lifts your hands up, pressing a kiss to one of your knuckles, then using it to tug you closer to him until he can plant one on your own lips. “I’ve probably got an old t-shirt you could sleep in.”

“Of course I want to.”

So you slip away from him to go rummaging through your drawers, trying to find the promised article of clothing. The whole time, he’s awestruck. Jihoon can’t take his eyes off you.

——————

He wakes up next to you for the first time on a Saturday morning. His sleep-fogged brain registers lying on an unfamiliar mattress, tucked beneath new bedsheets, eyes fluttering open to take in a room he doesn’t quite recognise at first. Part of him wonders if he’s still dreaming. When he rolls over onto his side, and his eyes land on the curve of your shoulders, the fall of your hair down your back, he has to ask himself the same thing again.

All of last night must’ve been a dream, he muses, smiling shyly to himself and watching your frame rise and fall with every slow breath you take. There’s no way you really told him you liked him, too. There’s no way any of it could have really happened.

“Y/n?” He asks in the gentlest of whispers, only wanting to stir you if you’re awake already. When there’s no response, he moves a tiny bit closer to you, hesitating before he slips his arm around your waist and settles with his chest pressed against your back. A wildly insecure part of his brain tries to argue that just because you wanted what happened last night, that doesn’t mean you want all of this now. Maybe you only wanted to sleep with him, or maybe you’ll have changed your mind somehow now the sun’s come up. He considers moving away again, lying on his back and staring at the ceiling until you wake up and he can have a real conversation about where both of your heads are at with everything, but he barely gets a chance.

Those thoughts are silenced almost immediately, his brain falling quiet the second you roll over in his arms. You bury your head in the valley between his pectorals, tucked away from the world beneath his chin. His arms tighten around your sleep-warmed body.

“What time is it?” You ask. He contains a shiver at the softness of your voice, bliss running the length of his spine. Jihoon thinks that he could get used to this.

“I don’t know. Early, I think,” he murmurs, and you whine softly, burrowing deeper against his chest. “Go back to sleep.”

“Not if you’re awake,” you say. He’s not entirely convinced you can stick to that promise, though, with the way you yawn and he feels your eyelashes fluttering.

“Don’t worry about me,” he tells you, the tips of his fingers ticking against your side. He ducks his head, pressing a kiss to your hair. A soft hum rumbles in your throat and he can’t hold back the smile that spreads over his lips. “It’s okay. I don’t mind.”

True enough, you fall back asleep curled up against him and Jihoon, to the sounds of your slowing breaths, drifts off too. A few hours later, at a far more reasonable time, you wake him up with a press of your lips to the tip of his nose.

Innocent, exploratory kisses grow heated in the warmth of the sun that streams through your blinds. Hands start to travel, sleep clothes get discarded, and you have him lying on his back, pressing kisses down his chiselled stomach when his phone starts to vibrate on the floor next to the bed.

He groans at the distraction, again as you shuffle up to sit on your knees and look at him expectantly.

“Are you gonna answer that?” you ask, the tips of your fingers grazing his thighs. He shakes his head, no. “Come on, Jihoon. It might be important.”

“Not important enough,” he sighs.

“At least see who it is,” you laugh. Despite a huffed protest, he props himself up on one elbow, leaning over the side of the bed and glancing down at his phone screen.

Seungcheol.

The arrangement to go for a run this morning comes rushing back to Jihoon, who slaps a hand to his forehead and reaches down to grab his phone off the floor, looking at you apologetically.

“Give me two seconds,” he says, and you grin wickedly up at him, ducking low to press a kiss to one of the lines that disappears down into his boxers.

“Take all the time you need.”

He answers the call frowning, flopping his head back against the pillows.

“Hey, look – I’m really sorry,” he starts to say, but Seungcheol’s voice cuts him off almost straight away.

“Jihoon, where the hell are you? I got to your apartment and your car wasn’t here, and Seokmin said he didn’t hear you come home last night. We all thought you’d died,” he hurries. Jihoon can picture the expression on the other man’s face perfectly, which is pretty unfortunate seeing as how you’ve moved to start palming his hardening cock through his briefs.

“I stayed out,” Jihoon says, a little wobbly. “I can’t make the run, someth-... shit.” You press an open-mouthed kiss to the outline of his length, the heat of your breath through the fabric sending him into overdrive. “Something came up-...”

The line goes silent for a second, and his breath stutters as you do the same thing again. Each press of your lips is euphoric agony, and he’s really not hiding this as well as he wishes he could. One look down at you tells him that you’re very proud of that.

“Dude,” Seungcheol gasps, snickering suddenly. “Tell me you’re not with a girl right now.”

“Shut up. Go away,” Jihoon grunts. “I’ll call you later.”

“Oh my God, is it gym girl? Did you finally-...”

“Bye, Cheol,” he hurries, hanging up before his friend can say anything else. He drops his phone onto the mattress, fake-glaring down at you and shaking his head. “You’re the worst, you know that?”

“Yeah?” you ask, pulling at the waistband of his briefs to tug them down his legs. “Let me make it up to you, huh?”

#oh please this is so cute #i love shy infatuated jihoon so much you don't understand #this has skyrocketed to one of my favourite jihoon fics #partly because i think i experience crushes in a very similar way to him (the blatant denial and dismissing of feelings and feeling like I'm #being set on fire when they interact with me)#same king #lmao not reader almost literally sending him to his knees with a smile #also not joshua being ignored in the group chat 💀💀 it's what he deserves actually 😌#i love soonyoung being the annoying but supportive friend #one of my favourite archetypes for him because it's true lol #the coffee shop scene #what if i was kicking my feet and giggling #not me experiencing butterflies like i was on a date with jihoon 💀💀💀 i am so delusional and lonely anyways #READER IS ME #minus the gyming regularly because i cannot relate #also side note jihoon is right cardio is hell on earth #anyways reader is me #inviting someone over knowing damn well you don't really need help with something #peak me #rj core honestly #men who can barely hold it together as soon as they push in >>>>>>>>#also bruised cervixes are not fun lmao would not recommend #however i would let jihoon bruise my cervix so 🤷��‍♀️#why would he pick up Cheol's call 😭😭😭 asking to be caught #exhibitionist jihoon agenda let's go #oh also the fighting demons line made me laugh lmao #woozi smut #seventeen smut #lee jihoon smut #jihoon smut

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