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namfinessed · 5 months ago

Text

go around - j.hs.

genre: angst, fluff (childhoodcrush! brother'sbestfriend!) (8.2k)

summary: to everyone else, he was the sun but to you, he was always the moon, the light you grabbed onto when you could see nothing.

note: grief is something very close to my heart, i've always struggled with it but i'm slowly starting to learn to live with it, i hope everyone who's experienced loss feels like some kind of relief through this, thank you for reading <3

masterlist

hoseok was sixteen years old when it happened.

you were thirteen.

and he had thought he was too cool for you then.

you were sitting on the other side of the mary-go-round to him, it was the last but one day of the summer camp you were part of, and you looked at him as if he hung the moon in the sky.

and hoseok felt as high as the moon that night.

but he was also sick to his stomach.

"i like you," you didn't look at him as you said it but hoseok could feel that you meant it, that it took a lot for you to get on that mary-go-round with him, spin with him, build the moon in his eyes and then say the words that he believed were stuck in your throat since when you first saw him.

he knew that your brother wouldn't like that you were saying this.

but he knew, even as a kid, that this was the most honest thing anyone's ever told him.

but he was so cool and so close to your brother, who would kill him if hoseok said anything back.

so, he didn't say anything back.

hoseok pursed his lips and looked away. he swears that, to this day, the tears shining in his eyes were nerves and not the frustration that came with not being able to hold you to the moon too.

the silent rejection didn't yet hit your soft eyes and bare heart.

you kept looking at him, hands gripping the handles so tight that your knuckles changed shades between white and pink and your cheeks puffed, excited and nervous breaths still left your lips.

and hoseok didn't want to be cool for a second there, he didn't want to care about your brother at all, maybe he would just let you take him for a bit, just a bit.

but in your thin eyebrows, he saw your brother.

in your veiny hands, he saw your brother.

in your coily, curly hair, he saw your brother.

so, he got off the mary-go-round, he walked away quickly, not pausing to look at you and he sniffed his tears away, he hugged his jacket closer to his body.

tomorrow, he would be fine.

tomorrow, no one would look at him like he was the moon and he would be okay with it.

but hoseok turned around.

the biggest mistake of his life.

the moon you thought him to be, cast a glow on the tears gathering on your chin and his heart wrenched.

he would fix this, he told himself, he would fix all of this.

but the next day, your brother, his best friend, died.

and you never spoke a word to hoseok again.

everything was vibrant when hoseok stepped into your home.

the unkept gardens were now blooming with flowers.

the closed windows were now open and giving a glimpse into the light inside the house.

the home was back to being a home.

he’s seen the transformation take place with his own two eyes over the years and he could confidently conclude that the ten years that cloaked your family and home in darkness were finally nowhere to be found.

and hoseok felt both delight and unease at the development.

“oh honey, you came,” there were few people hoseok could recognize with how they breathed, and your mom, his second mom basically, was one of them.

he didn’t even get to greet her before he was wrapped in a hug that surrounded him with the scent of cinnamon, musky perfume, and somehow, still his best friend.

“of course i did, ma” he kissed the top of her head, his arms not letting her go even if he knew the time for an appropriate hug was up, and she knew it too but she stayed as long as hoseok held her.

and when he let her go, he had to look away from the tears touching her eyelashes.

he probably brought back memories of his friend, maybe he still smelt like his friend too, he doesn’t know but he’s glad if he does.

his best friend’s family was unlike hoseok’s, his own family was distant and cold, and when he became an adult, he cut off all ties with them, he simply couldn’t accept them as family and your mom never let him feel as if he didn’t have one.

“the place is really packed,” hoseok whistled, looking at all the new faces and your mom nodded, “she invited a lot of her friends, i don’t know them but it’s okay, they’re having a good time, you’re here, so it’s all good,” hoseok stiffened at your mention.

you didn’t see him once in the last ten years.

slammed the door on his face.

ignored him even when your mom screamed after you.

locked yourself in your room and never got out if it meant seeing him.

and hoseok learned to accept it, he wouldn’t hang out with him either, especially after what happened.

but it was your birthday and he was invited, by your mom or you, he has no idea but hoseok steels himself to see you at some point in the night.

then, he walks around, introduces himself, ignores the pity that people eye’s throw at him, ignores the sympathetic touches on his arm, ignores the pats on the back and the ‘he must’ve been wonderful to have as a friend’ and he nods because he can’t say that yes, his best friend was an incredible friend until he fucking died.

and suddenly, hoseok wants to punch his best friend, for leaving him with this room of people who didn’t know him but somehow had all the sympathy in the world to shove in his face, for leaving him with no option but to mourn and miss him.

but hoseok was never a good mourner, he was good at going about life normally, good at laughing, good at ignoring his feelings, hoseok wasn’t good at gathering tears in his eyes when he thought of his dead best friend.

after a while, hoseok excuses himself to the bathroom and finds himself in his friend’s room, which remains frozen in time. every poster he hung up, though peeling at the edges on the wall, still stayed, every photo he stuck on top of his bedpost was yellow and faded but again, they stayed.

he doesn’t know how long he stares at their photo, the one they took in the summer camp where hoseok’s head is too small and his arms too thin and wrapped around his friend.

when he ran his fingers over the photo, he didn’t feel anything, he was grazing over hazy memories that he was desperately trying to remember as he got older but they were all slipping away or holding on too tightly at times.

“what the fuck are you doing in jay’s room?”

and he snatches his fingers away from the photo.

as he turns around, he swears he feels his heartbeat in his feet, and no amount of time could ever prepare him to face you.

you’re standing at the door with your arms crossed so defensively over your chest that he’s scared to take a single step forward but something about you, as a sixteen-year-old back then and now, a twenty-six-year-old, always takes his breath away.

and you look so much like jay, from the eyes to the hair to the hands, that he has to look away to breathe again.

“hey,” is all that comes out of hoseok’s mouth and he knows he deserves it when you roll your eyes at him.

“you’re not going to slam the door on me?” he asks and to his surprise, you shake your head, “not this time, my mom might just kill me,” you say while entering through the door and hoseok awkwardly steps around the room to reach where you sit on the bed.

he’s not sure how to feel about your mom having to force you to meet him.

and he’s not sure if he will ever be ready to see you again.

maybe you should’ve slammed the door one last time.

“happy birthday, big numbers now,” hoseok sits five feet away from you on the same bed and he watches your face soften the slightest, “thank you, and yeah, twenty-four doesn’t feel real,” you weakly laugh, falling on the bed and letting your feet dangle off the edge.

“your friends seem fun,” he stayed alert on the edge of the bed, and you nodded half-heartedly, “i guess so, did you meet them?”

“yeah, i said hi and stuff,” hoseok played with his fingers as you sat up again, “they brought up jay?”

“um yeah, they seemed to be very...empathetic about it,” he said, he didn’t know how else to say that your friends' reactions almost made him want to leave the party.

“yeah, they don’t know how to react to dead brothers or best friends, they’re not too bad though,” you laugh again and hoseok just nods, looking away.

for a moment, there’s only silence.

there’s only your breath and his.

there’s only your heartbeat and his.

and hoseok had missed this, he had missed you.

“can you believe it’s been ten years?” he asks because he can’t, he still feels as if it was yesterday that he got the phone call from you.

“i can,” you whisper, “time has been slow for me, so i can,” you’re the one looking away this time and hoseok catches your eyes roaming on the photos stuck above jay’s bed.

“do you want to go downstairs?” you get up from the bed and meet his eyes properly for the first time since you entered the room and he can do nothing but nod.

just before you step out the door, hoseok grabs your hand, immediately dropping it as you stop, “a-are you okay?” he didn’t want to ask you the question that he knows everyone else did but he also wouldn’t sleep that night without asking.

but when you laugh and disappear downstairs, hoseok ends up not sleeping anyway.

“thank you so much for coming by,” hoseok shook his head at your mother with the broadest smile and sweat coating his forehead, “of course ma, you can call me whenever you need help,” he pressed a kiss on the top of her head as he passed her and she pushed her face into his arm.

your mom owned a local restaurant and usually, handled everything from deliveries to cooking to serving and hoseok had chastised her multiple times about it.

even now, looking at the full restaurant, hoseok knew he couldn’t leave her to it.

so, after pushing her into the kitchen, he manned the counter for a while and made light conversation with whoever came by.

it felt strange, after so many years, being back around jay’s family, being back in this restaurant where he spent many days and nights.

he shook his head, refusing to let the memories creep back in.

he was used to this, this was just a routine to him, he always helped out, and he knew jay would do it if he was here.

“she loves you a lot already, you don’t have to do all this,” your voice isn’t something he’s used to though, not here, and hoseok’s palms start sweating immediately.

fuck.

he didn’t even put on a good outfit today.

or even perfume, now that he thinks of it.

and he curses himself when you come into view.

“i do this because i love her a lot,” he says with a smile and you roll your eyes, “yeah i know, it’s annoying,” and he frowns, “why?”

but you just wave a hand at him and go into the kitchen.

and hoseok’s left with ten people waving their bills and money at him, so he plasters a smile on his face and continues working.

after some time passes, you come back out from the kitchen with a scowl on your face and hoseok knows this because he hasn’t stopped his eyes from flickering between the kitchen door and the counter in front of him.

“i’ve got it from here, move,” you bark at him as you reach him and hoseok’s frown deepens at you, “it’s only a couple of people, i’ll finish it, don’t worry,” he reassures you but it only seems to irritate you.

“this isn’t your job, hoseok, just move over,” the glare on your face makes hoseok throw his hands up in the air and step away from the counter.

and he goes to the kitchen, he hugs your mom goodbye and he doesn’t bother with saying anything to you while he leaves because he’s sure you will only curse at him. he’s too exhausted today.

but imagine his surprise when the clock strikes midnight, you are at his door with a few soju bottles, snacks, and a sheepish smile on your face.

what the fuck were you doing at his home?

“um, hi?” he adjusts his t-shirt as he greets you, suddenly too aware of his messy hair and pajama pants as his heart once again beats away from his body.

“can i come in?” you ask sheepishly, and he immediately moves away. as you look around his apartment, hoseok still finds it hard to believe that you’re here.

even as you set up the table with soju glasses and food, he can only follow you in a daze.

“come, sit,” you say as if it wasn’t his home, his table, and his chairs but hoseok obliges and sits down.

a few minutes pass with both of you just fidgeting, looking at and away from each other, scratching your necks, and rubbing your fingers together.

until you finally grab the soju bottle and inch toward him.

you take a deep breath in and hoseok lets one out, “i shouldn’t have been so rude at the store, it’s just,” you speak as you pour soju into a shot glass for him and he sits up in his seat, “jay used to be there all the time.” you swallow, moving the bottle away from him and pouring one for yourself too.

“i was there all the time too, you know that,” hoseok says gently, as if to a child and you nod, “yeah, but it was always you and him, not just you.”

always you and him.

not just you.

and the memories that hoseok tried so hard to keep in his head, started creeping their way onto his sneakers and jeans and slipping away like sand.

the nights they snuck in to steal the leftovers.

the days he spent munching down on snacks that your mom generously gave him and jay.

the evenings where they both fanned each other with rolled-up magazines.

the days he spent admiring you at the counter.

but he couldn’t remember the dates, he couldn’t remember the details like what he was wearing that evening when jay hit him with a wooden fan, what was jay wearing when he got dumped by his girlfriend and cried to hoseok, what would jay think of this moment right now, you in front of him with a couple of soju bottles that were bound to be empty soon?

he shifted in his seat, “i won’t come over anymore, i didn’t know you felt like this,” and you purse your lips, “don’t do that, hoseok.”

“do what?” his eyebrows draw closer and you put down your glass to stare at him straight, “be so understanding and nice, just tell me to fuck off and deal with my shit instead of taking it out on you, hate me a little bit because this isn’t fair to you and you know that too.”

hoseok is stunned to silence for a second.

and he has a feeling that these words weren’t just some sudden outburst, you never spoke without letting your thoughts settle so he knows you’ve felt this for a while.

when he catches your wobbling lip and the way you shove food into your mouth to stop the movement, he knows he’s right and his heart softens even more.

“i’m not going to hate you for missing your brother, y/n.” is all he says before he slides your glass towards him and pours you a shot too.

and for a second, you just eye the glass and then look at him with tears so heavy in your eyes that hoseok is surprised they haven’t rolled down your cheeks.

“i think you’re the only one who doesn’t,” you suck in a breath and take the shot, you barely feel the liquid burn down your throat or the tears that finally release from your eyes.

when he raises his eyebrows at you, you shrug with a sniff and look away.

for the rest of the night, hoseok tries to forget that this was exactly how you looked on the mary-go-around ten years ago.

tears on your jaw.

flushed cheeks.

the same coily hair.

for the rest of the night, hoseok stops himself from falling in love again.

“again!” your mom threw her hands up in delight after winning one more game of ludo that hoseok had brought over.

you groaned and complained loudly to her, face held up by your elbow and hoseok watched with warm eyes as you and your mom argued about the win.

but he also felt acutely, the empty cushion next to him.

“you’re just a sore loser, learn a thing or two from hoseok,” your mom brought him back to the world, unscathed from his best friend’s haunting.

and hoseok nods proudly, dissolving into giggles when you scoff at him and your mom high-fives him.

“you’re letting her win,” you stare pointedly at him as your mom leaves to bring more snacks and hoseok shrugs happily, “guilty as charged,” and ducks with a laugh when a shower of peanut shells gets thrown in his direction.

“i knew it!” you screeched and he fell onto the floor with a belly full of joy, “mom, i told you, he was letting you win,” you stomped into the kitchen and hoseok heard more sounds of an argument from the kitchen, he rolled his eyes in endearment.

that night, you drop him in your car, and the entire ride, you’re laughing, he’s laughing, you’re speaking nonsense, he’s speaking nonsense, you’re falling on the seat to cover your face and he’s pulling his hands over his eyes to cover his face.

and at his door, you look at him with a face so free of everything.

no lines of worry on your forehead.

no frown between your eyebrows.

no hesitance to smile.

just a hint of moonlight falling over the right side of your face and some of your hair.

and hoseok wonders if he looks the same, if he looks just as beautiful and calm.

but when you keep staring at him with those curious, those tender eyes that he feels you reserve just for him, as if he has the answer to everything, as if he was the answer to everything, hoseok’s heart races in panic and buried love.

both of you realize at the same time, that ten minutes had passed and you were about two inches closer than you were at the beginning of the ride.

he stumbles out of the car, you stutter a goodbye to him and he nods hastily, urging you to leave.

that night, once again, hoseok begs himself to stop falling in love.

you only called him once in the many years that he’s known you and it was to tell him that jay had died, it was a freak accident, no one could’ve done anything and hoseok had thought that it was all a dream but your voice, as always, rang true in his ears and he knew that his life, as it was, would change forever.

“hoseok, i-it’s jay, someone hit him with a bike, i don’t know what’s going on, they’re saying they can’t read his pulse, please just come here, p-please.”

your sobs had shaken him so badly that he stumbled out of his camp cabin in his pajamas and he held your mom’s hand the entire time they tried to resurrect jay in the emergency room but once jay flatlined, your mom crumbled in his arms and you ran out of the hospital, you refused to look at him after that night.

and he understands why, he should’ve been there for jay, he should’ve made sure that his best friend didn’t go out for a walk that night or he should’ve gone with jay and been the one to get hit instead.

but it was all over now, and all hoseok was left with was a heavy heart filled with enough guilt for all the years he would live.

so when hoseok’s phone rang in the middle of the night with your name flashing on his screen, his brain unearthed the entire tragedy, the entire night with its roots pulled out of him and he was gasping for breath as he answered.

could it be that something happened to your mom?

did something happen to you?

did something happen to him and everyone else knew but him?

“she’s not letting us call her mom but she said your name, can you come to pick her up?” and twenty minutes later, hoseok pulled up to the only nightclub in the neighborhood to pick you up.

he struggled to hold back a laugh as he saw you draped over your friend’s arms, blissfully drunk, giggling, and utterly exhausted. when he started walking over to you, all of your friends began groaning and complaining to him about you which only made it harder for him not to laugh until your entire weight was shifted onto him and hoseok closed his eyes when you buried your face in his neck, savoring the tender moment.

just like every other minute that he’s alone with you, hoseok can’t believe this minute either.

“i’ve got her from here,” he says, carefully shifting your body to make you more comfortable and you hum in your drunken state, pushing your cheeks further into his collarbones and hoseok tries not to freeze.

“you should join us next time!” your friends all chime in together, their enthusiasm and kind intentions bleed around them and touch hoseok’s heart, maybe he had been too quick to judge them and hoseok gives in, nodding unsurely and they all erupt in cheers which makes him smile.

you had good people around you.

and that made him the happiest person in the world.

as he waves goodbye to them, his hands hold your body closer to him when you start to slide off and all of them exchange looks which hoseok ignores.

he carefully puts you in the passenger seat and pulls off the sidewalk.

he turned up the air conditioner, feeling his body get warmer and warmer as the seconds passed and he forces himself to look at the road and not you.

“hoseok?” the red light glowed on your face when he looked towards you, “yeah, it’s me, just taking you back home,” he doesn’t stop his hands from moving your hair away from your face and caressing your temples with his fingers.

how many years have passed with him missing you?

how many years of loving you has he missed out on?

he doesn’t know how jay would feel about this, maybe he would gag at hoseok’s tender eyes at this moment, perhaps he would tease him but he knows jay wouldn’t hate it.

hoseok pulls back almost immediately as you start to shift, only to relax when your face melts into his fingers.

if it didn’t feel so wrong, hoseok would’ve sat the rest of the night just looking at you and letting the rest of the world pass by.

“don’t take me to mom’s,” you whine and he laughs at your scrunched-up face, “okay, where do you want to go?”

“your’s,” you mumble, and hoseok’s face goes red, it takes him a few minutes and several cars honking at him to come back to earth.

when hoseok carefully lays you on the side of his body and takes you to his bedroom, he bears the torture of your arms tightening around his neck and the torture of your lips accidentally brushing on his skin.

“you like me, right?” you whisper into hoseok’s ear as he covers you with blankets on his bed and he freezes.

when he doesn’t respond, your eyes flutter open, still soft and fuzzy from the alcohol and you ask again, “hoseok, you like me, yes?”

and he’s taken back to the you that asked him out on a mary-go-around, the you that gave him the most honest confession of love in his life, the you that looked at him as if he ripped your heart out.

he nods, “of course i do, we’re family.” and you frown at him.

then, you sit up on the bed and lean forward to hold his face in your hands, hoseok starts sweating under the thin t-shirt he wore, and your fingers touch his face in places that he’s sure didn’t exist before, and every nerve of his melts and burns.

“i’ve always wanted to ask you something,” he says, now that there was no distinction between his breaths and yours and you nod, urging him to go on, “i thought i was always the one who had something to say,” you giggle, falling on his shoulder and hoseok laughs with you.

“why did you start talking to me again? after all this time? it can’t just be because of your mother,” and your laughter vanishes from the air around him, your touch too lifts from his shoulder, and hoseok’s confusion and curiosity grow.

he knows he’s asked the wrong thing, and said the wrong thing, he always does, but why would this question make you so upset?

he just wanted to know why after so many years of ignoring his entire existence, you suddenly chose to come to his home, and suddenly back into his life.

but he also loves that you’re back in his life.

“you don’t have to tell me, go to s-“ he gets up from the bed but is stopped by a hand grabbing his wrist tightly and he sinks back down beside you.

“my reasons are selfish, hoseok,” your tears come back and hoseok is rushing to wipe them away before they ever leave your eyes which only makes them gather faster.

“i don’t care,” he shakes his head and he really doesn’t.

“you should.”

“but i don’t.”

use him, don’t use him, throw him away, or keep him, he’s okay with it all.

your eyes search in his face, any trace of a lie, any trace of dishonesty and you find none that urges you to say, “i need you.”

a strange rush of warmth and bashfulness washes over hoseok as your words run him over.

“it hurts so much and i can’t do this alone, i need you, i just want it to stop hurting,” and hoseok’s heart stops at your broken voice because he knows what’s hurting you and nothing in the world can fix that kind of pain, “i don’t know how to live anymore, every time i come home, i miss him in the space next to my mom, i miss him in the counter that you stand at now, i miss him everywhere and i can’t say this to anyone.”

hoseok barely feels your hands grabbing his as your sobs climb up your throat, “except you, hoseok. no one knows what i feel, it’s pathetic that i miss him still but so do you, i know you feel this too, right?”

and he knows, he knows exactly what it feels like and he also knows that this was building in you since over the past ten years, the same way it’s been building in him.

that sense of loss that never goes away.

that sense of waiting for the relief that comes with moving on, that never came.

that sense of having nowhere to go and cry it out because the rest of the world doesn’t see what it’s lost, only he can and only you can.

“i do,” he finally choked out and your cries grew louder, hoseok winced at the volume and tapped your arms to calm you down but he was barely calm himself.

years and years of his grief catch up to him, run him over, trample over him and his mind ignites with every single second he spent with jay, every single he spent missing jay and then ignoring his memory.

all of it grabs him by the throat and chokes him but he lets your head fall onto his shoulder, and keeps his own tears away from his eyes as your body breaks on him.

when you were kids, hoseok had held you when you were laughing, he had felt your joy go through him, spread onto him, he could feel your happiness as if it was his own.

when you laughed in the car with him, the sound jogged his memory on how to laugh, on how to feel happiness again, he felt it go in and out of him in waves that he couldn’t control.

it was a miracle to him that just by touching someone, you can feel what they feel.

but now, holding you when you were crying, feeling every tear on his own skin, the burden of it all sunk him deeper than he could pull out of but he held you, he wrapped a singular arm around you and buried his head in your hair.

if anyone was going to know that he cried about jay, it was you and if anyone was going to miss jay with you, it was him.

and that night, he let himself fall in love.

the next morning, hoseok woke up with swollen eyes but a happy heart, a less lonely heart, he got up from the couch and entered his bedroom where he spent several minutes just staring at your face and stopped himself from kissing your cheek.

he stepped out of the bedroom quietly, padding his feet as gently as he could on the floor, and started preparing pancakes, hot chocolate, and everything else he could remember as something you liked as a kid.

hoseok couldn’t keep the smile off his face the entire time he whisked the batter, stirred the hot chocolate, and put out the plates. every moment that passed reminded him of you in his bedroom, it made him feel fuzzy and warm and ticklish, as if the sun had come to sit on his shoulder.

finally, his life was falling into place.

he almost jumped in excitement when the sound of his bedroom door creaking echoed throughout his apartment. he peeked around the corner to see you dragging your feet with even more swollen eyes than his and he stifled a laugh.

“good morning, pretty,” hoseok sang and giggled when your groan came as a reply.

“what’s all this?” your eyes barely opened to see the spread of food in front of you and he shrugged, “just some breakfast for you, did you take the aspirin beside the bed?”

you nodded and stood unsurely until hoseok got up and pushed you to sit down gently, “sit down, it’s all still hot, have it soon,” he kissed the top of your head and you stiffened under him.

hoseok quickly stepped away, laughing uncomfortably, and sat down as well.

for the next few minutes, he waited as you took in everything in front of you and his heart raced the entire time.

did he do too much?

was he moving too fast?

but he had already wasted so much time over the years, he wasn’t going to make the same mistak-

“why?”

hoseok frowns at your question, leaning forward to see if he heard it right but when he looks up, he sees your tear-filled eyes and he knows he’s fucked up somehow.

“w-what happened?”

“why are you doing all this?” he doesn’t know if you’re asking him or accusing him of something.

“what do you mean?”

“why.are.you.doing.this?” you punctuate every word with quick breaths and hoseok knows he’s pissed you off.

why or how he’s done that, he has no idea.

“i thought some food would be nice in the morning, especially with your hangover,” he stumbles over his words because he didn’t think he would ever have to explain why he made breakfast for someone.

you stay quiet.

he says your name.

once.

twice.

thrice.

then, you get up from the chair and look at him with both the most anger he’s felt in someone and also, the most pain, “i can’t do this,” you mumble and in the next minute, hoseok’s door is left wide open and your seat is empty.

he watches the food go cold and tries to hold himself together as he clears everything up, all the warmth he felt in the morning disappeared down the same drain that his food went.

and all he could was watch and let it happen.

weeks passed and hoseok dipped in and out of the restaurant, trying to see you, catch a word with you, and try to fix things, but whenever you saw him, you ran away.

whenever he waved to you, you would hesitantly lift your hand and then look away, engaging yourself with someone else.

whenever he called you, you wouldn’t pick up.

his messages remained on delivered.

and hoseok’s heart broke little by little as he saw you intentionally pull away from him.

he couldn’t understand why, you had such a beautiful night together, you had poured your heart out to him and he had done the same to you but somehow, it was as if that night didn’t exist to you.

maybe he read it all wrong?

maybe you just needed him as someone who felt the same as you, who experienced the same grief and here he was, his heart growing wings and the love he buried blooming again.

but you had loved him ten years ago.

and that confession was still fresh in his mind, still the most honest thing he’s heard in his life.

maybe he was stupid for ever thinking that you still felt the same love from ten years ago?

but as his mind replayed your words, ‘i need you’, it didn’t make sense to him that suddenly, you wanted to push him away.

“take these when you go home,” your mom packed him multiple boxes of side dishes and rice and everything else she could cook throughout the day and he nodded, thanking her with a kiss on her head, and headed for the door.

until he heard your voice.

his entire body froze at your presence.

but he’s had enough.

hoseok turned around and started walking with loud steps towards the kitchen, and when you came into his vision, he didn’t feel the warmth or the love or any of the good stuff.

he only felt the hurt that blinded him that morning, he only felt the pain spearing his heart as he threw everything away, he only felt the loneliness that played with him until the late hours of the night.

hoseok knows he’s not the best person but he also knows that he didn’t deserve that.

“you asked me that day, why i was doing all that. let me ask you now, why are you doing this?” he glared right at you, and in the corner of his eyes, he saw your mom glance between the two of you and then duck out of the kitchen.

he will apologize to her later.

in front of him, you tilted your head at him and tried to appear tough by crossing your arms across your chest and staring back at him.

but hoseok is past this, he’s tired of being lonely but he doesn’t want this, he doesn’t want to feel lonely when he’s in love.

“look, i don’t know what’s going through your mind and i never will until you tell me, but you can’t do this to me, you can’t push and pull whenever you like, i know you’re hurting somehow but i am too, so figure yourself out and then come to me because i know that i’m not alone in this feeling, i know you feel it too.”

with that, hoseok marched out of the kitchen, hugged your mom on the way out and went back to his empty home, where he might’ve felt lonely but he at least didn’t feel miserable.

you will hopefully find your way back to him.

but if you don’t, hoseok’s just going to have to find a way to be okay with that too.

days passed again and hoseok tried to move on.

you didn’t call or message or try to reach him and he took it as a rejection, which was still okay, he would still be okay.

he busied himself with his work, with your mom’s restaurant, and tried to learn how to cook, tried to liven up his apartment with knick-knacks, he took up arts and crafts.

hoseok did everything he could think of and for the most part, he really was okay.

but he also really wasn’t that okay.

he drifted through the days, pushed you out of his mind, and drank a bit from time to time to forget you only to hover his finger over your contact every night, he still kept the blanket you slept on in the corner of his room and not in the laundry basket where it should’ve been.

but still.

he was okay, he told himself, he would go back to some version of himself which was okay.

hoseok walked to the restaurant with his head down, earphones in and counted his steps because he had nothing else to do.

when he reached, he still didn’t look up, he continued to his counter where he removed his hoodie and put on an apron, humming to himself and cleaning the counter up.

until your mom’s shoes came into his view and by the time he looked up, she had grabbed his arm and started shaking him which made him frown.

he looked up to see her tear-streaked face and echoes of her sobs that traveled from her hands to him and the desperate shouts he could only see with his earphones in.

his hands shakily reached up to remove his earphones and then he heard it.

the heart-stopping cries and yells.

hoseok’s eyes went round with panic and he immediately grabbed her body as she fell onto him, he tried his best to soothe her but seeing her tears, was already choking him up.

he tried to keep his panic at bay as he patted her back and tried to make sense of her babbling.

what if something happened to you?

he couldn’t deal with that kind of grief; he wouldn’t survive it.

“she hasn’t picked up a single call,” something did happen to you, and hoseok bit the inside of his cheek to hold back his sobs.

“ma,” he grabbed her shoulders, forcing her to look into his eyes, “please breathe with me,” she nodded, timing her inhalation and exhalation with him and when her sniffles subsided, she told him, “she ran away this morning, i’ve looked everywhere and i’ve called everyone, no one has seen her, i don’t know what to do and the police aren’t doing anything until she’s gone for a day but you know her, she never does this.”

she rambled endlessly to him and hoseok held onto her the entire time, feeling only a bit hurt that she never called him but that wasn’t a concern right now.

at the end of it, he offered her a glass of water, removed his apron, and pressed a kiss to the top of her head before heading straight for the door.

“hoseok,” he stopped at her voice, “i only didn’t call you because i know you two aren’t doing well right now, otherwise you know you’re like my son.” and hoseok melted, he smiled and took her hands as he said, “don’t worry about that ma, we’re family, you keep calling people and i’ll try to find her.”

he didn’t know what to feel once he stepped out of the restaurant.

in the restaurant, he could focus on reassuring and comforting your mom, he could place all his energy into caring for her but now, he was alone and he didn’t know what to feel.

hoseok got into his car only to realize he didn’t know where to fucking begin, you could be anywhere by this time, even a different city but he has a feeling that you were not too far.

but he didn’t know that with certainty either.

every thought he had only put him in a chokehold as his mind reeled with every worst-case scenario.

nevertheless, he put his fears aside and started the car.

the next few hours, he drove in every street, looked in every club and café, kept checking his phone some one million times, and stopped at the entrance of his summer camp where his life seemed to begin and end.

jay would’ve had a panic attack if he was here with hoseok right now, hoseok smiled as he thought of how worried jay would’ve been and how he probably would’ve cursed you out after finding you, how he would’ve hugged you and hoseok in relief, how he would never let it happen again.

jay would’ve been so many things if he was still there with hoseok and that killed hoseok every day.

he kept staring at the entrance where he ran out of the day jay died, where he held back his tears and shook his head and told himself that it was all a lie, that his best friend was still alive.

hoseok threw his head back on his car seat.

grief was so unfair; it took away so much and left him with so little.

if it was so hard for him, he couldn’t imagine how much more angry or sad grief would’ve made you over the years.

and just as he blinks back tears, his phone rings and he runs his hand over his face to answer it, “ma, i’m still out, don’t worry, we’ll find her,” he starts reassuring only to hear nothing on the other end.

“hello?” he frowns.

“hoseok?”

and he almost drops his phone in relief.

“god, are you okay?” he immediately sits up, starting the car again, “where are you? i’m coming to get you right now, what the fuck were you thinking?”

“why aren’t you home?”

“huh?”

“why aren’t you home right now?”

“are you at my place?” hoseok frown becomes even deeper and he knows your silence only means one thing, he sighs out, “stay there.”

and he’s turning the car, calling your mom to tell her the news, and feeling a hundred different emotions as he reaches the lane of his apartment.

right by his door, he finds you, sitting on the floor with your knees to your chest and the rocks slid off his shoulders, he feels air enter his chest at the sight of you, unharmed and safe and breathing and…alive.

he doesn’t know why he’d even thought as far as you being dead but he couldn’t help it.

it was midnight but the moonlight, as always, found you and your tears, and hoseok sat right next to you and stretched his legs out in front of him.

“why didn’t you say anything back?” he hears you mumble and he frowns, “when?”

“that day in summer camp, when i told you i liked you, why didn’t you say anything back?”

and hoseok sighs, the secret he’s held in his heart for as long as he remembers, starts crawling up his throat, “i like you too,” and his lack of using the past tense has you sitting up straight, tears now reduced to sniffles.

“you do?” and the way you ask it almost has him hitting his own head, how did he ever let you think otherwise?

“i would be crazy if i didn’t,” he smiles weakly at you, his heart suddenly exposed and raw and beating louder than it ever has before, and you fall back on the wall, “but you just walked away then.”

and hoseok knows he can’t hide it anymore.

“i didn’t say anything because i went to jay,” hoseok recalls how cold the night was, how quick his steps were to reach his best friend and he watches your face light up and fall, all in just seconds.

“i needed to ask him if it was okay, i needed to tell him that i liked his sister and that i wanted to take care of her, and he didn’t like it,” hoseok shakes his head, a strained laugh leaving his lips, “we fought all night, but i guess he saw how much i meant it, so he gave me his blessing,” he looks up at you and you’re closing your eyes, letting your head fall back.

“he gave us his blessing, y/n, he did and that’s why i’ve never given up on you, he was so dramatic about it, you would’ve hit him if you saw him say it,” he laughs, the memory still so fresh of jay hugging hoseok and whispering to him that he would be dead the next second if he ever hurt you, how jay stopped himself from smiling as he thought of you with him.

he kept that close to his heart and never told anyone about it, it was for him and jay until today but now, it was for you too.

every time he felt bitter over the years that you avoided him, hoseok reminded himself that he loved you and he always will, and jay would love that hoseok loved you.

and you’re holding back sobs that still escape and tear into the world.

“i’m sorry,” he hears you say and he hums before placing your head on his shoulder, he tries not to cry when he feels your sobs, he sniffles and looks at his feet.

“i was so scared that morning, i told you everything i’ve never told anyone the night before and you still treated me with love, i thought you would tell me to leave, that you would finally have had enough but you didn’t and it still scared me. you shouldn’t be in my life hoseok, i will ruin you,” his heart sinks and hoseok moves closer to you because he doesn’t know where he belongs if it’s not beside you.

“i don’t want to be anywhere else,” he says and presses his hand to the side of your head.

“i can’t stop missing him, hoseok, i don’t know what’s wrong with me,” you shake your head and he sighs, feeling his throat close up.

“i miss him too.”

“but it’s been so long and i feel like i should move on by now, i don’t know,” you mumble, your tears falling into his shirt and skin.

“jay’s not some ancient history but i think he would hate both of us for being stuck like this.”

“i don’t know another way to live.”

“neither do i,” he shrugs, he knows how lonely he’s felt, how solitary his life was but, “but it will always hurt, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, you lost a brother, a companion for life, i lost a best friend, my soulmate and it’s always going to hurt. but i don’t want either of us to be alone in that pain, we don’t deserve that.”

life can take everything away from him but if we had a few good people and he could love those people, that was enough for him.

“it’s about time we start living for jay, do everything he would’ve done, feel everything he would’ve felt, and keep him alive, don’t you think so?”

and when you nod, fall on his shoulder, and whisper your love to him, it’s just like the first time, the most honest words he’s heard in his life.

hoseok knows his life can sometimes feel empty but sometimes, like right now, it can feel so full that he wouldn’t know what to do with all the love he gave and received.

he whispers his love back to you.

until dawn, you cried on his shoulder, and in the morning, hoseok made breakfast for you, you kissed him and whispered your thanks, he kissed you and whispered his love again, and you smiled and ate the food he made.

and it was calm, normal, another day but everything had changed once again for hoseok.

because this time, he had you and you had him, and in both your hearts and minds, you had jay.

and you learned to live life again, with love, and not just regret, with happiness, and not just guilt.

you lived, not just to grieve and mourn, but to actually live and build a life, with hoseok right by your side. he lived, without

taglist: @blissingtaehyung @cuteipat @hobicorewhore @yoongleskitten @mrjeonghan @greenie-frog @avawants2havefun @an-ever-angry-bi @alyenorgondorwarrior thank you all so much for liking the preview, i hope you enjoy the full fic <3]

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hoseoksluna · 7 months ago

Text

CRANBERRIES | jhs ft. jjk

pairing: boyfriend!hobi x berries!oc (feat. ex-boyfriend!jk and... hyeonwol)

genre: heavy smut, angst

word count: 18.4k

summary: the final breaking of the curse hurts, but pain brings fruit.

pinterest board: cranberries / taglist: join

warnings: physical violence, fight, daddy issues, alcohol consumption, smoking, thigh humping, female masturbation, use of a vibrator, squirting, multiple orgasms, oral sex (f. and m. receiving), raw sex, conception, fears of infertility, finger sucking

note: THE FINAL CHAPTER OF THE BERRIES SERIES WHAT. i can't breathe, i can't speak. i wrote the moment i woke up and it's now 4pm. ran out of cigs. :( i was so emotional as i was in this world with them and i love them. so much. i'm so excited for you to read this. i had iffy feelings about this series in the beginning, but that has changed. i love every chapter, every detail, every moment. and i think i did a good job. so, enjoy this. i poured my entire heart into this. my issues, personal experiences, everything. it means a lot to me. i love you, guys. i'm happy to give this to you after two long weeks! HAPPY READING.

side note: please, do check out the pinterest board. i'll add pics of every place oc and hobi have been. <3 SPAM MY INBOX. I NEED TO TALK ABOUT THIS.

The sleep lines are paused shooting stars across his back. The dips and definition pools of refreshment for those dimmed lights and when you cross over the threshold with Hobi right behind you, with his finger hooked over the waistband of your ivory mini skirt, your own fingers gain feeling. Much to your dismay, they remember the sharpness of those lines, the stickiness of his sweat as his body boiled during any weather he slept through.

He must have been on the brink of awakening, for you didn’t wait long before he answered the door. His gray curtains are pulled in and Jungkook walks over them, invites in the light of the early afternoon. In your peripheral vision, you recognize that the easel, which holds the painting in all its glory, is right there on your left side, and you strain your eyes to remain fixed on his bare back, even as wrong as that is. Hobi’s word of advice regarding thinking twice before you look at the artwork are pink blossoms that begin to grow in your ribs, spreading down to your stomach—because whether you like it or not, the place you find yourself to be in used to be one of absolute safety.

It used to be your home, once upon a time.

Cold, cold home that only ever reached tepidity at best. It’s all you ever knew—as the home you grew up in with your parents invariably had the same temperature. The same energy, too, charged with silence, ignorance and very little care that seldom carried love.

Which brings a certain thought to the front of your head, just as Jungkook is bathed in light, arms extended as if he bore wings.

He never loved you.

Because if he did, then his home and the memories that are rushing in would feel the way Hobi feels.

And like Hobi carried the false beauty in his heart, in his life—in the form of the poetry book—you carried the false perception of safety. If Hobi wasn’t here, if the stability of his antique stature wasn’t a wall doused in rain-kissed humidity that you now feel your body gravitating towards, and even if his finger wasn’t hooked behind your skirt, you wouldn’t feel safe.

But on the other hand, softness coats Jungkook. Strange, strange softness that you haven’t seen in ages. Since the first days of your relationship, the first dates, the first kisses and touches, for everything you did with Jungkook was different each time, never the same until his life story shared with his childhood best friend ended on bad terms and the guy moved across the sea. It’s what triggered his mental issues that in the long run ended your story with him.

As it seems, Jungkook has been trying to write a sequel that was never meant to exist.

He bends over his coffee table and it is only now that you notice the clutter of crumpled tissues that he now picks up. Bile scratches your throat as needles prick it because it dawns on you fairly quickly what those issues served him for. A blanket is strewn over the backrest of his leather couch and a singular, flat pillow is propped against the armrest. He slept on it during the night; had a perfect view of the painting right across from him. And if your mind serves you well, he sent that picture in the middle of the night, in which he deliberately showed you that creating the message sexually thrilled him.

It’s not hard to pinpoint that he fist-fucked himself while looking at the painting. And by the number of tissues that he hides in his palms and throws away in the bin in the kitchen, it’s evident his gratification process took a long, long time.

You anticipate the bile pouring out of your throat again, but… it never comes. Oddly, it’s second-hand embarrassment that you sense swirling in the cranberry lumps of your bloodstream, its fumes drooping your pink blossoms, your veins thick and ghastly on your wrists. And while you should feel disgusted, for some reason you don’t.

The discovery added magnitude to the star of his softness, weightiness and substance. It made it more real, bigger. It envelops him, confusing your mind because the only way it allows you to remember him is through the pain he caused you, using the expression of his fury. He broke your heart. Degraded you. Handled you harshly. Threw away your vape. Made you lose the respect you had for him, the worship you carried in the back of your heart. This can’t be the same person, kissed by a good night’s sleep.

You don’t recognize him and you feel so out of place, standing in the middle of an obscure, amorphous dream that you’re trying to remember. A bizarre, uncanny feeling. You wish to run—as it lessens your form into that milky blue aura of smallness, but not in the way you like. Your body pleads to stand behind Hobi and clutch the back of his shirt in your fists while he steps in and makes order. But the energy around is too light, too gentle for a fight.

Which is why you’re not sure if it’s a good idea that Hobi should unfurl his plan here.

Hobi looks down at you as Jungkook answers his phone in the kitchen. You didn’t hear a thing due to the way you were lost in your thoughts and your confusion deepens as you regard the crooked furrow of his brow and the pinpricks of his pupils. Hobi wraps his arm low on your waist, tugging you flush to his side, kissing the plane of your head, lingering there for a second more as he inhales the natural scent of your hair. One you didn’t wash today, for he kept you busy. You fear he can smell your puke on you from earlier, despite the fact you almost sprayed the entirety of your vanilla perfume on yourself that you carry in your purse before you and him left together. You grow insecure, lessening furthermore.

“Do I stink?” you ask, hushedly, gazing up at him with intention, willing him to answer you truthfully. Hobi smiles down at you, tenderly, pleased with the hint of familiarity and normalcy in the middle of the battlefield. Inhaling your scent and touching you diminished the intensity of the bloodthirst in his eyes and you’re glad for it. You hope that he perceives the elephant in the room and doesn’t strike first, but knowing how smart he is, you trust that he will, if he hasn’t already.

Hobi doesn’t answer you. His smile falls as briskly as it appeared and his head swivels in the direction of the kitchen, features tight and startling. Your heart ceases its beat for a second before it speeds up, thumping painfully against your ribcage. What did Jungkook say over the phone? You weren’t paying attention.

He lets go of you and stomps over to the kitchen. His back faces you, bringing your consciousness into present time, shudders with long staccatos of breaths. He’s fuming. Concern crawls up your back, leaving goosebumps in its wake.

“So, that’s what you do? You traumatize my girlfriend while you have someone else on the side?” Hobi says, brusquely, placing his fists on his hips. “Does she know you paint degrading pictures of your ex in your spare time?”

A beat of silence. Your breath hitches in your throat.

Your blood freezes over and you don’t know how your legs take you over to Hobi, weak and tingling as they are. You can’t feel anything. Can’t feel your fingers as they hook over his back pocket, your inner child’s deepest wish infiltrating through reality.

Jungkook worries his bottom lip, his phone still held over his ear, and he exhales, shortly through his nose, dropping his gaze. “I’ll call you back.”

He throws the phone over the kitchen island, sliding his hands into the pockets of his sweatpants as he so often does, staring Hobi down.

There’s no doubt she heard it. Hobi said it loud enough.

Good.

Good of Hobi to take the ruination by its legs and launch it back at its creator. You change your mind by the shift of the energy, having foolishly forgotten the girl personification of the storm that you saw by Jungkook’s side in the museum. She has no idea how preoccupied he’s been with you, chasing you down ever since he laid his eyes on you after nearly a month. And you pity her. She doesn’t deserve this kind of unfair treatment, no matter the hostility she showed you and the fraction of the same emotion you felt towards her in return.

Jungkook had it coming, that’s what you’re sure of now—sowing the seeds of his downfall in your orchard. What he didn’t know was that by staying around, hurting not just you, but another vulnerable person at the same time, he would also reap its poisonous growth. You hope his hands are red and burning, pulling out the weeds and poison ivy.

He leans against the kitchen counter, the muscle of his pierced brow quivering with the onrush of anger. You find it so pathetic that you almost dryly snicker, backed by the continuous, fatherly act of Hobi standing up for you—your antique wall, the architecture of the old, Mediterranean times.

Strong and unwilling to break under pressure.

“My personal life is none of your business—”

“And mine is?” Hobi interrupts him, leaning forward due to the influence of his own anger and the sight is horrifying. If you were in Jungkook’s place, you’d be trembling like a sissy. Hobi laughs, scornfully, doing it for you and your heart rejoices. “You stalked my wife, touched her, painted that shitty—”

Wife.

“I didn’t stalk her,” Jungkook says, awfully calmly, as if he were bored, despite the tremor of his pierced brow that divulges the true face of his feelings. “Wife?” He laughs, humorlessly, and you bunch your fists, letting go of your private, personal link to Hobi. Even though you swore you wouldn’t raise them again when facing him, it’s all you want to do now for the way he mocked something so meaningful to you. Raise them and use them until they bruise.

The concern that hung over your back fades into a discomposure that slices over your skin with a blunt knife. Over and over, maddened by the incessant rampage to cause you pain, incited by his mockery. Won’t let up until blood pours out.

“Don’t talk over me, I wasn’t finished,” Hobi scolds and your second-hand embarrassment for the opponent doubles, abating your discomposure just like that.

The knife is lifted in the air, paused.

Jungkook’s jaw begins to tremble, disliking the easiness to Hobi’s overpowering tendencies, the way his stern words force him to become that aforementioned sissy that you’d be in his place. You think it suits him right.

“You shamed my—” Hobi points to his heart, like Jungkook did last night when he bared his feelings for you and your throat dries, unbelief peculiarly setting your discomposure free at the rightful turning of tables. “Wife for moving on with her life, for becoming the person she needed to become without you controlling her. Sent her a picture of your dick while you were at it, belittling her, using sex to lure her back to you as if she wasn’t smart, as if she wasn’t mine. You did all that and you think you’re gonna come out of this unscathed? Let your girlfriend see what you’ve done. What, you were going to hide that painting under your bed like a little bitch?”

It’s Hobi who laughs now, the sound full of that same mockery Jungkook used to inflict pain. You wrap a hand around his arm, coming over to stand side by side with him, sliding your hand down to his, needing it and not being afraid of it. Not to his palm, but over the back of his hand, slipping your fingers through his. And together you clench that singular fist, stronger.

You thought all your life that you were stupid. Your own Father bashed you for it every chance he had; you, yourself, hated your being for it with all your might. Thought it was the root of the curse over your life, made strong by your bad decisions, bad actions, bad footfalls. Learning that Hobi doesn’t regard you as such cuts that majority of your life away from you. He binds up your wounds, cleaning them. And the fact he put two and two together apropos the meaning of the painting, the reason behind the punishment, using your recitation of the bizarre poem is a kiss to make the boo-boo better.

You weep, silently. Your love for Hobi trickles out of your tear ducts, doesn’t touch your makeup, doesn’t steal the attention of the two males away from each other. It dips into your ribcage through your chest, sprucing them until they can breathe again and fill your lungs with sweetened, poetic air, with a will to live on, reminding you that you have a future ahead of you that is beautiful and bereft of the curse and all you’ve ever known.

And you wash that breath, purposefully, over the bare skin of Hobi’s warmth. Remind him, too, as you press your lips over it. He squeezes yours and his united fist, hearing you.

Lifting your gaze, Jungkook crosses his arms over his chest, devoid of those sleep lines. His biceps bulge, but it does nothing to you. Hobi’s fixing of your dignity, heart and life has taken care of that, all via that sonnet of his that he spat in Jungkook’s face, one that contorts in envy upon seeing your intertwined hand with Hobi’s. He nibbles on his bottom lip, eyes wetting, but the following words he says sting as if his face never wore those softened emotions. And the discomposure returns in the form of a colossal spider on your back. A slimy, heavy, breathing spider.

You cringe, tensing your muscles, nuzzling your body deeper into Hobi’s arm. It only menaces your vivaciousness, but the fluff on your body stands on end, nonetheless.

“She came here to look at the painting. I don’t know what you’re doing here,” he mutters, crossing his leg. Double protection. He’s stuck in a peril—feels vulnerable and threatened, just like Hobi said. “She likes being spanked, being punished. That’s why she’s here.”

It takes two seconds for Hobi to release your hand and slap him like the little bitch he is. A fatherly discipline, that hard swoop of the back of his hand, a new line indenting his carmine face, one belonging to the ring on Hobi’s middle finger. Absolutely humiliating, that act you are a witness to—but you don’t feel a slither of pity for him. The joy from your heart springs to your eyes and you feel yourself blinking unorthodoxly—more briskly, serenely, femininely.

The spider jumps off your back, afraid of Hobi. You sigh in relief, willing strength into your knees as they signify their giving out on you, boneless as they are.

And Jungkook is afraid, too, once he recuperates from the hit, straightening, but not facing the king. His mouth rounds as if he were on the verge of crying, and maybe he is. He focuses on stalling the natural flow of his emotions, his pride forbidding him from being weak, even as he’s getting hit like a teenage boy.

But Hobi makes him look at him. He grabs his face, repeating the motion of last night; squeezing his cheeks until his knuckles turn white, although this time Jungkook doesn’t moan in pain. He scrambles the last of that pride of his, threading it into the stiflement of his reaction.

“Are you that dumb that you forgot about what I told you that would happen if I heard those words come out of your mouth again?” he seethes in his face. Jungkook sucks in quick breaths, a caged animal, furious. “You degraded her again. You’re asking for it at this point.” He slaps him again, harder this time, still with the back of his hand. Doesn’t give him time to shake it off. Grabs him in the same way. “I’ll let you know that those words you read in that little message? That probably made your dick hard? Those were my words, boy. I came here to break that painting, but I changed my mind. I want your girlfriend to see the work of your hands.”

Hobi told him the true story while he omitted the detail he could’ve used to inflict further pain on him. He could’ve said that he told you to write that message after he was done fucking your trauma out of you. He could’ve rubbed that in his face and you wouldn’t mind.

But he didn’t.

He respects you. Protects your dignity. Doesn’t need to flaunt his private life with you; isn’t insecure to do something like that. And along with joy, he installs something within you that you lacked all your life.

A respect, a high regard and an expensive love for yourself.

You stand straighter, all of a sudden.

Jungkook looks at you. A rawness of pain daubs his even softer eyes, but you recognize that it’s all pretense, a manipulation technique that you see right through. You lift your chin higher, interlocking your hands behind your back. A powerful, feminine stance. His eyes descend to your pride in the middle of your breasts, drench as he mumbles something your way that you can’t comprehend due to the way Hobi squeezes his cheeks harder, that moan of pain slipping through, at last.

You smile, sensing the end of this chapter. You can see the door to it, wide open, Hobi standing by it, gripping the doorknob. And he shuts it with his following words.

“Don’t even look at her. It’s over. The little game you’re playing? You lost,” Hobi says and lets him go. Jungkook grumbles, baring his teeth, his hand shaking as he lifts it to his jaw as if to rub away the pain, but he changes his mind at the last minute. Doesn’t want to show his weakness. His hand falls, flaccidly, to the side. Throws Hobi’s way a dirty look that makes you laugh.

“It’s over,” you intone along, lips stretched in a glinting grin, the crown of your victory. You’re the queen to your king. Jungkook gazes at you with a puppy’s sadness, for a mere second before Hobi pushes his head away from your direction with a poke of his fingers. His inhales are sharp and thunderous and you think he’d be a perfect match to his companion, that is if he were a good guy, deserving of her.

“Did you even see the painting?” he hushes out, head still turned towards the windows, and the redness on his face inflames in vibrancy, darkening. Why he thinks he needs to keep fighting, in spite of the way Hobi overthrew him, is beyond you. His head slowly swivels back to face you and tears cloud his eyes. It inspires no pity in you, no curiosity to look behind you at the painting. “I made the background an imitation of Monet’s waterlilies. The green ones, the ones you’ve always liked. Does that mean nothing to you? Can’t you see that I still care—”

“No,” you interrupt him and you bask in it, inhale the power. Your pink blossoms grow in abundance, becoming a collection of beauty and strength that will live on forever, never to wither. “I didn’t look at the painting and I refuse to because I don’t care.”

You open your mouth to continue, but he outruns you.

“So, you lied to me? Why are you here, then?”

The wheels seem to whirr in his brain, at last.

“My husband and I came here to make one thing clear,” you explain and you flick your eyes to Hobi just in time to catch him smiling at you, fondly, his loving pride bursting through his own pools. “It’s over. You’re not gonna bother me anymore; you’re not gonna text me, call me. In fact—” You pull out your phone out of your front pocket and unlock it, tapping on Jungkook’s contact and blocking him, deleting the number right away. “You can’t anymore.” You smile, satisfied with your decision. “I live a happy life without you and it’s going to stay that way.”

Jungkook’s posture slouches and he wrinkles his brows, mouth agape, downturned. “Husband? What the fuck is this?”

You only lift your hand in the air, for Hobi to take, dismissing him once and for all. “Let’s go.”

You take a step back as Hobi rushes to you in a comical, endearing way, a huge smile engraving crinkles by his glimmering, pearlescent eyes. He takes your hand and when you look at Jungkook one last time to say goodbye to him, he whimpers like a wounded animal.

Your heart constricts, not touched by pity, but by discomfort. It’s time to leave; you don’t want to be here anymore.

Hobi leads you towards the door and you follow him, but Jungkook’s final words halt your footsteps. Hobi’s too.

“I can be like him and better when he drops you. Don’t forget that.”

You frown at him, your mouth pressed in a tight line. “There’s no when to me and you. I never want to see you again. Goodbye, Jungkook.”

He mewls, the final kick to his bruised body and you leave.

You leave his life for good.

The air of the afternoon’s breath is floral. You thought the clouds would’ve smothered the last remains of the summer, but it is still, most strangely, in full bloom. You feel hot in Hobi’s linen shirt and the sun is scorching hot, balmy and paradisiacal on your bare thighs, though you wish you hadn’t worn your Nike’s. Your toes are asking for some sand, for the pecks of sea waves and the entanglement of seaweed around them like tropical adornment of toe rings.

You met the girl, the personification of storm, behind the door to his apartment. She was about to rack her knuckles on the wood like you did, but Hobi opened the door for her. Her breath hitched in her throat, hard and heavy like the wind during that storm she resembles so much, and you felt bad for her. So much that you told her to leave him, unabashedly and plainly, and didn’t stick around to hear her response.

But you did hear muffled sounds of vocal violence and you prayed, for the first time in your life, to someone in the sky, who has always been a witness to your curse and never did a thing about it, to guide her to break that painting in two.

Not for your healing, not at all. But for the curse to be unleashed on him, turned to him and fixed on him.

You’re not ashamed to carry such evil in your heart. You know, full well, that it will dull overtime. Your mother would’ve rebuked you, told you to forgive your enemies and wish them well, but bricking up your heart for him to feel safe is something she would never understand. Because if she did, she wouldn’t share the same home with your Father. And if she did, you would’ve never ended up with a guy like Jungkook that was the raw epitome of him.

It’s a good thing she’ll never learn of your secret. She never met Jungkook but she looks at his face every day, and you’re not so sure if the idea of introducing Hobi to her is pleasant. You sense the time you find yourself to be in is meant to be a solitary one, spent in a bubble with your husband, and there’s nothing you want more.

You and Hobi, alone.

For a little while before a little creature comes along.

The mountain peak is awaiting—you feel it profoundly in your bones.

Hobi opens the door to his car for you, places a hand on the edge of his vehicle so you don’t hurt your head as you sit down—like he did on your first date. But he doesn’t close the door and walk over to the driver’s seat. No, he straddles you. Pushes your seat back a little in order for you to have a perfect and comfortable view of him. You sputter out your giggles, felicitously confused by his actions, and when he props his hands by your head, his smile quivering in effort to not laugh along with you, your giggles rise in volume.

And then his gaze deepens on you, lessening the pitch. Seriousness shrouds the energy, your little giggles ringing, faintly, and you press your thighs together between his legs.

“I’m not fucking you here,” you whisper, the sound full of humor, your eyes feignedly widened, but Hobi is deep in thought, his imaginary wings furling and unfurling in the spaciousness of his car.

“How do you feel?” he asks, steeped in that earnest, warm and lightweight solemnity. It feels like home. That question, too.

You relax, your expression of joy fading into a comfortable silence and you take a moment to focus on what you’re feeling right now.

A graze of the pink blossoms on the inside of your ribs. Relief, a wave sloshing over them. Freedom, the sunlight that heats up that body of water. Joy—a full rainbow of joy after a century-long rainfall.

And you tell him.

“I feel free. Happy. I feel happy, Hobi.”

He smiles, fondly, that blush rolling over his cheeks like it always does. And you love him, irrevocably. You love him, you love him, you love him.

He did this, your God. It’s the creation of his clean hands.

And as he kisses the tip of your nose, you thank him with the same earnestness he brought in.

And you mean it. You would’ve died, had he not found you. You would’ve died, had you not taken him to that museum. You think about what your life would’ve looked like if you never suggested that place, but your mind stumbles upon a dead end. You can’t—there’s nothingness up ahead.

It was meant to happen this way. Along with the pain, the tears, the scars. If it never ached this much, it wouldn’t matter; it wouldn’t have the gravity, the substance, the meaning. It would’ve been plain and it wouldn’t change your life so devastatingly, so beautifully.

You wouldn’t have wings and neither would he.

You kiss him right back on that slender nose of his and much to your surprise, he gives his voice over to your heart.

“I love you,” he confesses, the pearls in his eyes wetting, and he cradles your face. Your heart stops and then beats differently—in a way you never heard it sing before. “Is it too soon to say that?”

Another surprise comes. A tear trickles down your cheek, a happy, elated, small rivulet that cleanses the last, difficult events that just ended. Down your cheek that stretches and aches, blissfully, as you smile up at him.

“Is it too soon to say that I love you, too?”

The song melts into another poetic stanza and Hobi kisses you. But he smiles as well, so the kiss is full of clashing of teeth and sudden hunger to express the fulfillment of that love. You and him try and try again until your lips mold into his and the hard kiss, filled with passion, respect and devotion, splits the curse in two.

Now the residue, the smithereens only need to be fucked out of you.

Hobi will do a good job, no doubt.

“Let’s celebrate.”

Hobi was eyeing a bottle of soju in a market nearby his house, but settled eventually for a bottle of spirits that he’s now popping open and drinking right from the lip of the tall, glass container. He’s sat on the ground of your bedroom, back propped against your bed, the bottle between his outstretched legs as he watches you strip out of the combination of yours and his clothes. A blackberry vape might be in your hand, the fume curling around the curds of cranberries that your blood still consists of, but a pack of cigarettes lies crooked on your bedding.

You told Hobi you needed something stronger after that happened. And he brushed a wisp of your hair away from your face and said he’d willingly have a cigarette with you as he still felt adrenaline coursing through his smooth bloodstream. Bought a pack of gold Davidoff’s for you, the ones you shared with him that you used to smoke until…

You haven’t voiced your panic, though. Not in the market, not in the car, not right now as you’re standing in front of your closet, searching for a lounging outfit to wear, similarly like Hobi did back at his house a few hours ago. Jungkook forbade you from smoking. Hated the sight of it. Hated it even more when you switched to vapes. And as you recollect his anger whenever he saw you with it, you can’t believe you let him do it. Can’t believe you stopped smoking just to please him.

And you can’t believe Hobi bought you a pack. With his own money, by his own will. To please you.

You should be feeling happy right now, but the panic… it stands behind you, the silhouette of Jungkook’s form, waiting for you to take that cigarette between your fingers and place it between your lips, daring you, taunting you, waiting for the right moment to strike, to rebuke, to untether its anger. It’s what keeps you planted on your feet, whisking your eyes up and down along the corner of your closet, where your comfortable clothes are neatly folded.

You’re afraid to turn around. Afraid to see Jungkook there—

“Come here.”

Hobi’s voice. Not Jungkook’s.

“I need to get dressed,” you say, softly, staring down a pink wisp of your sleep shorts.

You hear the sloshing of alcohol in the bottle. Hobi must be taking another sip.

“You don’t, really.”

You laugh through your nose.

“I don’t want to get pregnant here.”

Hobi lets out the same sound, making a smile curl on your mouth. “Come here, pup.”

It’s the gentleness sunk within his intonation that is a force of the same nature that turns your body around. Hobi is staring at you as if he were looking up at an angel—those pearlescent eyes of his bright and swimming, but not prematurely under the influence of the alcohol. They’re swimming with love.

You used to be an angel. Now you’re you.

And Jungkook isn’t standing there; Jungkook is gone.

You walk over to him with ease, the panic dispersing and flying out your wide open window, your rosy curtains guiding it out. You sit on his outstretched thighs and as your bum plops down, you take off his green beanie. Run your fingers through his hair, fluffing them. Cradle his face to your naked bosom as you inhale him, tracing patterns on his scalp.

Hobi begins to purr and you melt, becoming a liquid form of you, making his hands shine in the ever undying stark sunlight as he wraps his arms around your torso, tightly.

You’re not going anywhere, the act says.

This is what deserves to be painted, you muse.

Listening to him emit that sound, your heart notices the absence of Luna and it craves her, awfully missing her. And the more you receive it through your ears and it settles within the chambers of your softened muscle, you realize that you’re holding her in the form of a human.

He’s so much like her. You recollect the way he tilted his head into your touch, join it to the memory of how she did it when you petted her head for the first time. And you test him—withdraw to pat his cheek and he does it. Leans into your touch, lingering there as you cup him.

He’s a God and a kitty. And you love him.

Hobi reaches for the bottle of vodka. Takes a sip as he locks his gaze with yours. Your hand slackens at the sight, dropping to the crook between his neck and his firm shoulder, and you can’t hold it. Like your limb, your eyes descend to the way his mouth is wrapped around the rim of the bottle, to the bottle of his throat as he swallows and doesn’t make a face. Lift back up to catch a glint bouncing off his wet lips and abruptly, you want a taste of that heady sting of your own.

He can read you, and fairly well—because he drinks again, but this time he doesn’t swallow. No, he pushes your head to his in one swift, brazen motion. Parts your lips by tugging your chin down with only his thumb while he cups your cheek and, sitting up so he can once again take advantage of the size difference, he pours the pungent liquid beyond the arc of your mouth. Remains there, a breath away. It seems as though he wants to feel you swallow, wants to inhale that sharp scent of the alcohol; wants to sense in his bones that principle of him giving it to you in a profound, private way.

And you swallow it, fixing your attention on the burn coursing down your throat, softened by his saliva. This—this was your first drink, a safe occurrence, watched over by your Father. The ones you had before in your past life didn’t have a sliver of the magnitude that you feel suffusing your lungs. This is your first life with him.

“That was so hot.”

You agree with him, liquid heat pooling low in your core, and you need that cigarette. And his dick impaling you as you take that deep, heavy drag that you haven’t inhaled in months.

And most peculiarly, there’s no panic, nor fear, as you snatch that pack of cigarettes from your bedding behind his head and look for the little flap that will help you open it. Hobi lifts his hand from your cheek, though, and steals it from you—finding the flap with ease and opening it as if he spent the last decade faithfully smoking.

Your panties are ruined, just like that.

Drenched when he pops the butt of the cigarette between his wet lips, rummaging in his pocket for the pink lighter that he got you along with the pack.

Soaking when he lights it up for you, blows the first smoke into your mouth, pecks you softly, and places the butt between your lips.

But he doesn’t place his hand back on your face—he keeps his thumb and forefinger on the body of the cigarette, the burning tip facing him, holding it for you as you take a drag. The thick smoke billows around his palm, milky blue in the golden light, and as soon as its heaviness caresses your lungs and you exhale it into the air, he returns the cigarette back to its original place. Puffs it one more time before he lets you have it, coughing a little, blowing the fume onto your bare breasts, lips opened halfway in a tiny circle. The warmth tickles and your body naturally curls forward in reaction, your arms pushing your breasts together. Hobi makes a sound that is a godly synthesis of a coo and a moan, uttered from his weakening grin, eyes gliding over your squished breasts.

Eyes that never darken when regarding your nakedness; eyes that remain full of that celestial, sea-kissed light.

Do they have the ocean in heaven? He must know, for he’d been formed by it.

And you want to be stuffed full in it.

Hobi must like the sight he sees because he takes a finger and drives it down the right side of your body. From your clavicle, down to your breast, your stiffened nipple that he stops at, pinching it, heightening the pressure until you squeak, the pool bursting in your core. At that sound, he continues on his path down your stomach and you let him feel the contraction of your muscles there as your body reacts to his touch. He ends his venture at the waistband of your panties and he tugs it towards himself, peeking inside.

“Someone’s wet,” he comments and you cough, embarrassingly, caught off guard, as you take a drag of your cigarette, not expecting him to say that. Hobi smirks and the growing moistness on that fabric becomes uncomfortable. He rubs your back, helping your lungs to quiet down, the waistband snapping back making you jump—and incredibly horny.

He steals the lung burner and you love it, your obsession with it construed by his apparent need to smoke in this heavily sexually-charged situation. You wonder if he’s holding himself back from breeding you right here and there.

He could, if you wanted him to do it here—all things are settled, after all. But you don’t. You don’t want to reach the peak in your bedroom, where Jungkook has been so many times.

You want it to happen at a place, where his footfalls never ventured.

“Someone’s wet from watching their man smoke,” you flirt, looking at him through your lashes, hips instinctually drawing closer to his crotch and beginning their dance. Back and forth, the rhythm of the sea.

“Don’t do that or I’ll fuck you,” he threatens, flicking his eyes to the rising peak of the cigarette ash and he bores them into yours with a challenge. “Be a good pup and get me an ashtray, please.”

Please?

Yes, Daddy.

Ashtray? No.

That would mean going to the kitchen and flipping it upside down in search of it. You stand up to your feet, your wetness flowing down your inner thighs with the movement, and you fetch the empty glass from your bedside table, lonesome and dust-scattered. You can’t really remember the last time you put it there.

Sitting back down, you straddle his thigh as you hold the glass for him to flick the ash there. And once he does, you start to move back to your original position, but he stops you.

“Stay here,” he says, enveloping an arm around your waist. “Ride it. Make a mess for me.”

You don’t hesitate to do so, your body begs you for a release, weakened yet enlivened by his command. But the question of why he doesn’t want to fuck you bothers you and you decide to voice it out, willfully. Unafraid, safe, comfortable.

You roll your hips forward on his thigh, which he flexes for you. The curves of his toned muscles hit the right spot and you throw your head back, using his throat for support, mewling little sounds that make him bite his lip, abandon his cigarette, let it fall into the cup that he forces away from your grip and sets it down. The smoke still billows out, twirling around your form, magnificently.

“Why don’t you wanna fuck me?”

Hobi sucks in a breath, leaning his head back against the mattress, hands following the movement of your hips. Drunk not on the alcohol, but on you.

“Because I’ve been nonstop fucking you and I don’t want your little pussy to be sore,” he says, truthfully, adding vigor to your dance with his words, even if he doesn’t realize it. “Which is why I want you to use me like this when you need me.” He breathes, raggedly, and you’re dazed. “And because—” He fists the front of your panties, squeezing the fabric between your folds, stimulating your clit with the pressure. “The next time I fuck you, we’re making a baby.” You cry out, your pleasure heightened, and, meeting your thrust, he slides the knuckles of his fingers down to your clit, letting you ride them, letting himself feel the swollenness, softness and wetness of your flesh. He moans along with you—the feeling divine. “You said you didn’t want it here. Tell me where.”

You can’t. Your orgasm quickens as do your grinding motions and you can’t see, you can’t speak, you squeeze your eyes shut—

“No, pup.” He stretches the fabric towards himself, essentially moving his hand away, and pushing your stomach back, your hips rolled forward, pussy throbbing and dripping in the air. You pant, gripping his hair at the crown of his head, eyes flung open, yet lidded. Terribly, terribly lidded. Sultry, dreamy, mesmeric. Despite the fact he ripped your orgasm away. “You don’t come unless you tell me where.”

He holds you in place, immobilizing you. You try to grind on him again, but to no avail. You expect him to click his tongue at your brattiness, but he doesn’t.

He does something else entirely.

“Take your time. I know. That was really intense.”

It’s a stark contrast to the restraint he has you in—your slowly sobering brain makes a note of that, only to dip back into the stupefying pool of your arousal.

And you whine, electrified by the pleasure that comes from all directions, that pushes forcibly against your neediness, heightening it.

You can’t take your time. You can’t tell him right now. You need to come.

“I can’t, Hobi.” Your breath shudders. “I can’t—”

“Breathe,” he rasps and you can see the way your neediness affects him, his chest heaving with almost identical staccatos, as though he was zapped with the delight he gets from it. His pupils are so dilated as his eyes melt into yours, a black pearl, but still enveloped by light. Cheeks flushed, mouth wet. The scent of patchouli, cigarettes and vodka, the remote corner of heaven.

You try to breathe, fluidly, as you take it in and Hobi helps you. Breathes with you, steadies the cadence of your recuperation. Doesn’t stop until he’s assured that your lungs are calm. And as a reward, he lets your panties slap back against your pussy, coaxing a moan out of you.

Doesn’t remove his hand from your hip, though.

A quid pro quo.

All right.

“I don’t want to get pregnant here. Not in Seoul, not in Korea,” you start, your lungs in a perfect rhythm. Hobi’s eyes enlarge as he listens, fingers spreading over your bum, just holding you there, squeezing the flesh every once in a while. The gesture soothes you, blesses you with tenderness that helps you continue with your words. “I want you to take me overseas, where I’ve never been.”

He hums, nodding, thinking for a mere moment, his eyes distracted on your belly button. And when he lifts them, he smiles. “Any particular place in mind?”

The country slips off your tongue, naturally, on its own, and you think that’s the one. Your heart spoke it, so it must be the place. You haven’t given much thought prior to it, just knew you didn’t want to conceive a child on this soil that remembers nothing but your pain and anguish. You held this within the chambers of your heart before you met Hobi—and way before you met Jungkook. And you figure that in the process it acknowledged itself with Hobi, studied his face, learned the ins and outs of his heart in such a short time, it riddled out the place, where the curse is meant to be broken in.

Once and for all.

“Turkey.”

You’ve seen the videos. Seen the dramas. The pictures. It met you and kept meeting you throughout your life, but you never gave much meaning to it. And now you perceive why.

You reckon that’s how life works. And it feels nice—to get to know life, to get to know its mercifulness.

“That’s a beautiful place, pup,” he whispers, taking his hands off of your body and cradling your face, pulling you closer and kissing you, lingering there for two, three, four seconds more. Your heart jumps, delighted to be validated, and you feel like weeping happily.

“You’ve been there before?” you ask, the wetness of your eyes gracing it with a glint that very seldom finds your usually saddened pools.

This is it.

“I’ve had business meetings with Turkish companies that do their job well. Good people, good atmosphere.” Hobi smiles, reminiscing on something private and his cheeks warm.

You wish, intimately, that he would tell you everything.

“Will you tell me about them when we get there?”

Hobi nods, pecking your chin. “Yes, and then I’ll fill you up.”

You grin as he lingers there beneath you, eyes so bright and big, becoming crinkly at the corners once he reciprocates the grin. He kisses the front column of your next, tasting the layer of sweat that has enveloped it during your oh so evident neediness and you dip your head in your pool of arousal all over again—as soon as he withdraws and slaps your thigh, signaling you to hump his thigh.

You can’t wait to get knocked up. Hope time passes quickly, transforms into a substance that lifts you up and carries you all the way to Turkey, mercifully, kindly.

It’s this notion that you focus on as your hips begin to roll forwards and backwards on his thigh, but this time, as Hobi watches you with intention, he pulls your drenched panties to your side, his hand coming over to your bum and doing the same thing there, so the fabric doesn’t get in the way.

You kiss him for it, hungrily, licking over his tongue, and he moans into your mouth, the sound traveling down your body until it roots in your clit, where it spreads and drums a hymn for your feminine titillation.

And the feeling is divine—the sparks of pleasure that shoot up your core while your bare pussy rubs against the fabric of his pants, darkening it ever so quickly with your wetness. The feeling that he enjoys it, even more so when he voices it out.

“This is what it does to me,” he murmurs so terribly close to your puffed lips, grasping your hand and leading it to the place between his outstretched legs that he speaks of. He presses it against his painfully hard imprint and your fingers automatically wrap around it as much as they can, as if they recognize it’s their own toy. “To see you get turned on like this. To watch you use me because of it. I’m crazy for you—”

His phone rings in his pocket and your heart stops—as do your motions.

And you fear, rottenly, that it’s Jungkook who’s calling him. That he somehow found his number and is back at it again, clutching the curse like a sword in his hand. Ready to ruin, ready to devastate.

The feeling paralyzes you enough that it dries up your pool of arousal and you can’t blink, you can’t breathe, you can’t move. Your mouth parts, but no breaths come out.

At the sliver of freedom and joy—

“Jung Hoseok speaking,” Hobi answers the phone, the device slender and way bigger than his monumental hand, gazing into your eyes. Unblinking, too.

He listens to the other side spilling information in and once you catch his mouth flattening, those dimples gouging something unpleasant onto the smooth surface above his top lip and the brightness in his eyes dimming ever so slightly, the cranberries of your blood crumble, uncomfortably, beneath the skin of your forearms.

You pull your hand away from his crotch, slipping out of his grasp. He stops you before you get up on your feet, holding your strayed hand as he listens some more.

It can’t be Jungkook.

Hobi wouldn’t listen to a word he said and that phone would’ve long been flung across the room, if it were him.

You sigh a breath of relief, your body relaxing and slouching. You run a hand through your hair, gripping it at the back of your head to will some feeling into your muscles—as there’s nothing to fear.

It’s over.

It’s fucking over.

No ruination. No devastation. No impending curse about to absorb your life.

Nothing.

“I understand what you’re saying and I appreciate your work and thought, but allow me to remind you that it’s Sunday and I don’t work on Sundays, neither do my employees—”

Oh, the big bad boss.

The person on the other side interrupts him and Hobi scrunches his brows, mouth parting at the disrespect. Then, a smirk crawls over his mouth and he rolls his eyes, directing that smile towards you as the brightness in his eyes blossoms back. Playfully, he rolls his eyes again now that he knows he’s got your attention—and silently, he mimics the words the other person is saying, mocking them.

You laugh, softly, your relief expanding in you and shifting you back into your comfort zone. Hobi’s eyes widen and, using his intertwined hand with yours, he presses his index finger to his lips to signal to you to be quiet.

And he shouldn’t have done that.

He refreshes your pool.

And he seems to be aware of it by the way his countenance grows serious. It does something to you—the way he’s listening, working essentially, while being attentive to your feelings and state of mind. It’s attractive, the splitting of his attention. And you don’t have to rock your hips first—he encourages you to do it by curtly nodding his head at your hips, untwining from your hand and guiding your pelvis to dance again.

Not for him.

For you.

And the pleasure is much bigger this time around.

You can’t stifle your noises.

“That sounds absolutely great,” he says, quickly, in order to camouflage the volume of your delight as you hump his thigh faster, more vigorously, your breasts bouncing and slapping against each other. Hobi watches them with a deep furrow of his brows and his bottom lip caged between his teeth. Tortured, absolutely tortured.

It only urges you on—and you find yourself in a vapor of horniness.

“Yes, Da—”

He clamps your mouth shut with his hand, your moan caught in his palm. That act alone drives you prematurely to the peak of your orgasm and you know, you know, that if your clit rubs against his toned, clothed thigh just once, you’ll be coming all over him.

But Hobi manhandles you, pushes you down, gently, onto the floor.

You’d think he was angry with you, hadn’t he smiled at you—and your vapor thickens, your hormones fucking with your brain. Hovering above you, he grips your throat, merely holds you there without any pressure, and he kisses the tip of your nose.

He fucking kisses the tip of your nose.

Your pool leaks onto the floor.

“Be quiet,” he mouths and does it again, more prominently, to make sure you understand what he’s voicelessly saying to you. “Yes, I have about five employees in that department who would be willing to work on that. Very diligent and dedicated. One of the best people I’ve ever had under me.”

He cringes, realizing the wrong string of words he used in that silence, and you burst out into laughter—one he has to silence by clamping your mouth shut again, looking away to focus on a fixed point somewhere in your bedroom while smiling himself.

And you get his attention right back at you when you lick his palm. You expected him to be repulsed by it, but his eyes enlarge and his mouth falls agape as strange feelings wash over him. Then, he ruts against nothing and plunges two of his fingers, index and middle, into your mouth.

Your slick is warm as it trickles down your flesh and onto the floor; your body hot all over from the situation, the secrecy, his dominance and his fingers alone. His eyes deepen when they slide over your full mouth and you can see, even through your thick vapor, the way he’s swallowing down his growls. He strokes your tongue, barely, softly, plunging them further until he hits the spot that makes you gag. It sobers him quite rapidly, the sound. Swearing—still voicelessly—he starts to pull out his fingers, but you wrap your hands around his wrist, keeping him there as you suck on those long, slender digits, focusing on not making a sound.

His eyes lid, heavily, at your diligence.

“Three months, you said?” He tugs his fingers out, that anger evident, but not towards you—towards the other person. And he lets it out by ripping your panties away from your body in a blink of an eye. “Can we make that two?” He caresses the silky skin of your mound with his knuckles, without venturing downwards, and you shudder, needing him there. “Rub your clit,” he mouths and you gasp, even though you don’t know why. You’re so overwhelmed by the respect he emanates, horny and sensitive that any word he’d throw your way would make you react this way. You feel like a schoolgirl; small, submissive, breedable. And you want to please him, make him proud, do as he says. But you don’t share the same hastiness as him—because before you can get to the end of your thought process, he takes your hand and places it on your pussy.

He must be getting the same thrill out of it.

You rub your clit, obeying him, and watching him watch the work of your fingers as you twirl them on that swollen, little flesh—it’s nothing you ever experienced before. Your pleasure quickens, as hasty as Hobi to get you to your peak, and you have to lift your fingers in order to not come quick, your lungs heaving, your mouth letting out short breaths that make him absolutely feral.

“Oh, pup,” he mouths, the wrinkles on his forehead divulging the depth of his torment and pleasure from the sight. “Good job. So good. Yes.” He nods, encouraging you—and you almost come right then and there, but you lift your fingers just in time. Fists clenched, you throw your head back, frustrated but pleasured just the same. And you can’t take it anymore.

Neither can he.

He runs his hand down the middle of your body, stopping at your thigh, wrapping your leg around his torso.

“If you can’t make that work in two months, then we have nothing to talk about,” he bites, panting, but he hides it well, his voice untouched by it. Firmness and respect coats it, strengthens it, gives a new instrument to the hymn of your clit. “I have things to do and places to be outside of Korea and I can’t afford to be held back by three months. I’m sure I can find business partners who’d be able to make everything work in just one—”

Seething, he leans over, grabbing your vibrator. He turns up the intensity, the sound growing louder and louder and you shriek, soundlessly.

You’re going to explode if he uses that on your tortured clit—

“Apologizes for the noise.” Hobi spits on your clit, the long string of his saliva plopping onto your flesh, making you quiver and moan, quietly. “There’s construction work outside. I guess you’re not the only one working on a Sunday.”

The bitterness, the snide comment—you feel like screaming, in the most delicious, exhilarating way. And you do, when Hobi places the vibrator down on your needy clit.

He moves it, rapidly, from side to side while he’s still talking on the phone, but his words are a blur that you fail to understand, your whole being fixed and concentrated on the adrenaline blended with fireworks of intense pleasure that create an orchestra of passion. His imaginary wings unfurl and beat in the air, opulent and dusky black. His eyes never falter their hypnosis as they bore into yours, coaxing your orgasm out of you, while his mouth keeps silently telling you to be quiet, praising you to motivate you.

And you do explode.

In his face when he explains something you can’t comprehend.

And you come again when he takes a deep breath, stopping short in the middle of his sentence, shocked, zestful, wet and ecstatic. You sprinkle his chin and his neck, ruin, most beautifully, his polo shirt and devastate, even more so, his pants.

And he’s grinning, so awfully pleased.

Lifts the vibrator. Doesn’t turn it off.

“I’m sorry. I’m getting an important call from a family member, who comes first on days such as these. Please, don’t hesitate to contact my secretary and make an appointment with me. We will discuss further on the matter. Have a nice day.”

And he’s smart.

Ending the call, he turns off the vibrator and tosses both things sideways. Props both arms beside each of your shoulders. And the flush that was stifled during the entirety of the work phone call now peeks through the surface, the petals of roses licking across his skin. Your own flush promenades hand in hand with him in this close proximity, your golden aura, gained from your exquisite orgasm, bathing you in holiness.

And you still can’t speak, tongue-tied.

He sweeps away your flyaways matted to your glistening forehead, brushing his knuckles down your face. And when he reaches your jaw, he cups your chin and kisses you, tenderly. Gives you a hundred more. Little, hungry, yet pure kisses.

“What did we just do?” He laughs, softly, in disbelief, shaking his head. You laugh along with him, your still lingering and heightened vapor causing you to nearly levitate underneath him.

He kisses you again, deeper this time, more slowly. Your nectar gets smeared on your cheek from his with each voracious movement of his mouth, his head. And it’s an element that makes this become real for you. That helps you fathom that you just experienced an adventurous event that wasn’t a part of the curse—that was good, through and through.

And it’s yours.

No one else’s.

And he makes it even better when he shares the details of his phone call with you. Lifting you up and carrying you into the shower, he tells you of the way the “motherfucker” tried to keep him from breeding you for three months. Was cocky enough to promise him he won’t find a better business partner to work on a project that Hobi’s been passionate about for weeks—a way to get older children better education in schools in terms of things that aren’t normally taught: surviving skills, basic medical skills, cooking skills and life skills regarding various of things that they will need during and after high school. His organization also offers a form of preschool and elementary babysitting, therapy, library, game activities, singing, dancing, language learning—anything to keep those kids busy and away from their phones. It’s a place of rest, a place of safety and comfort and Hobi works hard to maintain that.

The guy offered his premises and means of educational materials, even though Hobi makes do just fine—but it wouldn’t be available for at least three months. He explained that he needed them for the semester, wanted to elevate his ways, which is why he sent out a word.

He told you all this while washing you clean in the steamy, hot shower. And it wasn’t until a week later that you found out the guy truly wasn’t able to make it happen sooner, but upon talking with him in person, Hobi was so satisfied with him and his work ethic, that he was willing to risk it. What he didn’t tell him over the phone was that he specializes in a group of orphaned children, homeless, and those who live in children’s homes. And Hobi’s mind was blown, his heart moved and softened, enough to shake his hand and start working on this renewed, expanded project. He put the kids that weren’t his first—and you fell in love with him deeper than you ever had before.

And it wasn’t until spring came about and the first heat waves of the sun caressed your skin that he booked the flight, paid for a luxurious hotel resort in Antalya, paid for your mani, pedi, your Shein order and shopping sprees in malls, where he found you the simple dress he was apparently going to marry you in, and held your hand the entire way there. It took half a year to fulfill his longing and his biggest dream—and half a year to break your curse. You spent it visiting him in the office to bring him snacks, eye patches and face masks, distracted him with quick fucks, strip-teases, blow jobs underneath the table while he kept his suit on, smeared makeup and lipstick on his face and collar whenever you were in the mood to make out with him.

It took such a long time, but you didn’t mind at all—because at night, you and him would pretend. Hobi didn’t want you to get on birth control; cared enough for your well-being by not wanting to confuse your body for a few months. Settled for the play of pretending—for condoms and nutting inside, going through the motion that there’s no latex preventing his longing from erupting. And during the day, you got to know him on a more meaningful, profound level.

He loves to dance. Has danced with you in the living room on multiple occasions. Slow dancing, bachata, lambada. He wasn’t shy; enjoyed every minute of it and you watched him shine like the heart-shaped sunlight he is. You found the core of him, like a seed within a cherry, when you had your arms locked behind the nape of his neck and he led your hips into the rhythm of the sensual song.

He loves children because he was loved right as a child himself. Wants to pass that on. Wants the kids to know that love exists, no matter what they’ve done. You broke down when he shared that with you and wished a place, like his organization provides, existed in your forlorn girlhood.

Maybe you wouldn’t have been so broken. So prone to bad decisions, imbecility. So liable to the poisonous kisses of curses, to their tempting touches and their manipulative sounds of sweet nothing.

Hobi had given you a promise ring right after he told you that there was to be a long waiting period for the baby. And when the time came and spring opened their buds of flowers, Hobi proposed to you. A grandiose diamond ring on your finger; plane tickets and more wons that you ever held in your hand, safely tucked in a white envelope. That’s how he announced it to you. And he didn’t get on his knee on the beach, where you glued your heart together.

Not in Seoul, not on the island of Jeju.

He proved his devotion to you and his irrevocable love for you amidst the surrounding mountains in Juwangsan national park by the Yongchu waterfall, five hours away from Seoul. Scraped his leisure pants because for a while you were paralyzed before you burst into tears and started running around, your first reaction of shock dispersing and turning into a holy euphoria you never experienced before. He laughed as did many people who were witness to the engagement, his hands that still held the ring box shaking as the audience clapped and cried along with you. Your white, linen dress billowed in the warm, spring-breathed wind, but you didn’t care much for it—because when you gained feeling in your muscles and your hunger to kiss him overpowered you, you stole and drew all of his patchouli-filled breath.

You made it yours as he became yours, too, eternally.

And when you gave him your yes, the mountains glorified yours and his love, exalted your unified souls, worshiped your hearts that beat for one another. Sang the praises of your unborn child.

You inhaled it, with gratitude and great importance, and it swirled within you even as you continued on your hike. Even as you visited the Daejeonsa Temple, where you spent the most time, dwelling in that thankfulness. You took in the beauty of the greenery, fresh air and mountains differently, more thoroughly and tremendously because you sensed they were there for you. Flaunted their earnest opulence and fervency for your happiness, for they knew you were looking back.

Life gained feeling, too.

And Hobi wouldn’t stop fondling your ring while he held your hand.

It’s what he does now as he presses the hotel room card against the device by the doorknob, a half month later. And it’s not lightness that is intertwined in his shoulders, but immense heaviness. Your flight was delayed by two hours and you waited another two hours for your luggage. Hobi didn't have to say a thing—it was written all over his countenance and figure, the weight of his perturbation. From his solemn look, tense features, lack of speech to his slouched shoulders, slightly shaking hands and deep breaths.

You don’t want to poke the beast, but you do want to pet it—make it feel better. Because despite the misfortunes, you don’t consider them setbacks or ruination. You are here, with him, engaged and about to get filled with his baby. No troubles can take that away from you and they can try as hard as they want.

You are about to carry his berry baby, conceived from the orchard he built in you, in the middle of Antalya, Turkey.

Nothing could be better than this.

Thinking about it, it paints a smile on your face. Hobi plants your suitcases on your king-sized bed, paying very little attention to the swan, made out of towels, sitting prettily in the middle of it, surrounded by rose petals, the ones that live beneath his skin so joyously and most comfortably. Feeling pity for him, because you know why he feels the way he does, you take his arms and slink through them, hugging his torso from behind, nuzzling your face in his oversized shirt-clad back that he wore for the first time in your presence.

Hobi? Oversized clothes? Strangely, it works, even though you’re so used to his suits, his well-fitted classic clothes that accentuate his buff figure.

He sighs, running his hands down your sides like he always does. You kiss his spine, without fear as you chose to wear zero makeup for the flight, but then he clasps your hands in his—right there in the center of his chest—and you swoon, tender and in love, appreciating the gesture, even though he’s done it many times before.

It’ll never get old.

“I can’t breathe in this room,” he murmurs, sighing a little louder this time around, and you furrow your brows, a wisp of worry curling in your gut.

You’re about to let go and open the balcony doors to let some fresh air in, but Hobi acts faster. He swivels halfway, takes one step back with you, and turns on the air conditioning. Waits a little bit, stares at a fixed point on the ceiling—only to discover that it’s not working.

Hobi punches the wall, startling you.

“Hobi?” you call out his name, the wisp fading into a strong wind that moves your organs to and fro.

He pinches his forehead, seething, and your instinct is to put a stop to it. You take his hands, notice they’re trembling, and the wind is knocked out of you.

Trembling hands… What are they portraying? Anger? Anxiety?

You sit him down on the bed, coming to stand in between his legs, and you cradle his face. Even the muscles in it quiver. Feebly, but they’re there. Pity constricts your heart.

“What’s going on?” you ask, searching for his eyes, and when he meets you halfway, there’s unbelief that paints a murky landscape across his darkened pools. The brightness is dimmed. Your heart laments it.

“Everything is going to shit. I wanted this to be perfect for you, but the air conditioning isn’t working. We waited for hours at the airport—”

You kiss his forehead, silencing him, and you linger there, even as you reassure him. “I’m so happy to be here with you that I couldn’t even give two shits about that.”

The unbelief deepens and you figure he expected you to be as disappointed and as cranky as him. He doesn’t understand that the time you’d been graced with, the absence of your ex and the opportunity to be in a place your heart had quietly dreamed of conquers any obstacles that have tried to get in your way.

You can’t be shaken.

Not anymore.

“We’re not at the airport anymore, we’re here. You can make a call to the reception and they will send a guy to fix it. It’s already perfect because I’m about to hear your English, first of all. And second of all, you’re gonna—” Your tone lowers to a whisper, “—breed me. Do unspeakable things to me here. Are we gonna fuck in the ocean? Oh, my god. I want that so bad. We can go to the beach at sunset with very few people around and you can nut in me. We’ll have a sea baby.”

This time, his sigh is dusted with relief and he slides your thighs over his, making you sit on his lap. The brightness in his eyes begins to flicker, shining through the murkiness, making its way back, and you’re happy to see it—relieved just the same. Though, you note something else, something new appearing in those pools.

The moon. Night-caressed pearls. The waves of the turbulent, passionate sea at midnight as they wash out that terrible landscape.

The same moon he carved into your thigh on your first date. The same moon that you hope will be lining your skin once he smothers you in his longing.

“I’m so grateful to have you. I’m so grateful to have you as my wife. No one compares to you,” Hobi says, the moonlit pearls in his eyes wet as he’s overcome with emotion. He rests his head on your bosom, hugging you tight. “I love you, pup.”

You bury your face in his silkily soft hair, reveling in the fresh undercut he got for this baby-making vacation. He purrs, happily, like a kitten, when you gently scrape your long acrylics upon that gritty surface.

“I love you, too.”

It’s time for dinner by the time you both come out of the shower, sharing one humongous towel. You push him down onto the bed and massage his back, helping him unwind on a deeper level—until his body is light and soaring, his eyes drowsy and lidded. Arm shading the lower half of his face, he studies the way you make love to your body by lathering it in shea butter lotion, then dressing it in a skin-tight, pale green, sleeveless dress with a slit in the back, its hem almost reaching your ankles. You put on some Aretha Franklin and open your clear makeup bag, reciprocating the eye contact in the mirror in front of the bed as you squirt foundation on your flushed cheeks.

You didn’t realize he was watching you.

“No panties, no bra?” he asks, his tongue dry as he licks his lips, still naked, glistening in the sundown from your lotion. Your eyes wander to his lower regions and find him hard.

You smile, tapping in your foundation with your beauty blender.

“I made the mistake of accidentally ordering extra small instead of small, so it’s tight on my body,” you explain your lack of underwear, your mouth ends quivering as he just keeps looking at you with bottomless devotion. “So I don’t want any panty lines or straps.”

“I think that’s no mistake,” he says, his hand gripping his shaft for a moment before it relaxes, concealing his weakness for you. “I’m gonna rip it off of you with ease once your belly’s full. And I’m gonna make it fuller.”

You bite your lip, blending your concealer, feral. “Careful, or no dinner for you.”

Hobi chuckles, his body twitching, and you sink your teeth deeper into the pillow of your bottom lip. “Why?”

Cream bronzer—you suck in your cheeks, making him suck in a breath. “If you keep talking, we’re skipping dinner and I’ll force you to make good on that promise.”

He scoffs, the sound full of humor. “There’s no forcing when it comes to you.”

You put on cream blush for nothing as your own natural blush resurfaces under that layer of makeup. “Your game will never not get to me, Hobi.”

He hums in response, a tinge of embarrassment coloring that sound, and you coo, finishing your make-up with a thin eyeliner, mascara, brows and a brown lipstick. You brush out your hair, letting it cascade down your back. Put on some gold hoop earrings. Spray on your perfume. Crawl over Hobi’s lap to show yourself to him.

“What do you think?”

He fails to cup himself now that he’s turned on his back, with how long he is, and you pry his hand away, kissing his palm, marking it with that brown shade.

“Beautiful,” he breathes out and your smile aches. “I’m gonna fight anyone who looks at you tonight.”

You laugh, softly, leaning over to plant that same mark in the middle of his chest—just like he marked you all those months ago. “No need to fight for me. Are you gonna get dressed?”

His shyness comes through, his flush reaching his neck and collarbones, and you salivate.

“I’m hard,” he says, nearly pathetically, and you coo, endeared by him. Grasp him with your left hand, purposefully, and his eyes flick to your ring, moaning. “Oh, pup.”

“What are we gonna do with you? I just put on my lipstick,” you whine, pouting feignedly, and Hobi whimpers, enveloping your hand with his fist, leading you to fuck him in a fast rhythm, the left over lotion on your palm making it slick and easy.

“Just lick my tip and stroke me like that,” he croaks out and you feel your folds soak with your nectar. You were fine with him marinating your makeup, but this is better. “You don’t have to suck it. Just lick it with that tongue of yours, pup.”

You swear, moaning, darting out your tongue and kitten licking the ridge of his head like he asked, twisting your wrist as much as he lets you in the deathly grasp he has over your hand.

“That’s it, baby. You know how to do it. You’re my smart girl. My smart wife,” he praises, throwing his head back as he takes the pleasure you give him, going as far as hollowing out your cheeks on that sensitive part of him, despite the fact he told you that you didn’t have to. He groans, deeply, lifting his shoulders from the bed and gripping your hair, his hand trembling all over again. “Fuck, you make it so hard for me not to fuck your mouth.”

You moan around him and he pulls you away from his cock and smashes his mouth against yours, kissing you so devastatingly ravagedly that you can’t breathe and you grow slack in his hold, sinking onto your knees on the floor.

He holds your face as he lets you go, your foundation and lipstick smeared all over his chin, lips and cupid’s bow. You gasp at the sight, gulping.

“I’m sorry, pup. You’re gonna have to redo your makeup. I couldn’t help it. You’re just so good,” he apologizes and you can see it on his face, how serious he is about it. “You deserve to be kissed like that. Hm, you’re such a good pup for me.”

You mewl, missing his lips already, and you quicken your pace around him. He lets you, matching you, and his sounds rise in volume.

“I’m gonna come so quick for you, just because you look so good like this.”

You hiccup, squeezing him. “Like what?”

He hums, licking his lips, tasting your girlishness, and he grins, lopsidedly. “So pretty on your knees for your husband with your makeup ruined, knowing he did it because you sucked him so well.”

The third person. You die—you die a beautiful death.

“Oh, fuck, Daddy.”

“Yeah, baby. I know. So good. Like always with you.”

And you come back to life.

You moan, giving him your all through your motions, sucking him, licking him, going even as far as taking his balls into your mouth, spreading your noises all over them, divulging how much you love that part of him. And he warns you before he comes. Doesn’t want to ruin your dress. And you watch as he spurts his cum all over his stomach while you milk it out of him—bedazzled, in love, fucked out and absolutely mesmerized.

And you rub his cum into his skin in the way you’ve noticed he likes to do on yours. Dig a grave for all the negative things he had to go through because of you and for you. You didn’t do that all those months ago, focused as you were on forgetting. But now that you��re healed from it and so is he, you dig that grave deep. Throw in his rightful anger, your ex, the painting. Sweep the soil back over it. And never look at it again.

He thanks you for taking care of him. Tells you that it was all because of how beautiful you are. Cleans the little you left behind of his own nectar while you fix your makeup. Dresses himself in black pants and a shirt that makes you laugh so hard that your stomach hurts.

A black and white shirt with a pattern of condoms.

“What?” he asks, but laughs along with you. “We’re saying goodbye to condoms once and for all, pup.”

You blush, terribly. He leaves the top buttons undone, letting all eyes see the way you marked him with your brown lipstick.

And he gets stared down at dinner. Cares very little, as smitten as he is with you—can’t lay his eyes off you as you walk, even as you eat and drink your Turkish tea, as you sway your body to the live, foreign music while your cigarette smoke dances along with you. Can’t stop touching you either—has to have his hand on you under all circumstances. On your forearm, the back of your hand, your knee or your thigh under the table.

Your belly, after all that food.

“I’m gonna marry you,” he says after a long moment of balmy silence. The spring wind, drifting from the palm trees, chilly ever so faintly, brushes your hair away from your face, caressing so coolly your freshly washed body, and you’re obsessed with the feeling. With his reminder that he’s gonna marry you. With him. With the fact you’re here with him.

There’s no other place you’d rather be.

“I know,” you intone, shyly, grinning, so terribly happy that its sparks detonate on your face, your thumb mindlessly playing with your ring. “I feel at home here.”

He seems to be touched by that. But you didn’t understand the gravity of his words.

Not until later.

Two strong cocktails in, the night falls. The musicians gather their instruments to leave, but Hobi, with a mind of his own, pulls you up to your feet to dance with you to the song of that balmy, restful silence. And the ardent dance, filled with twirls and sways, catches the eye of one of the musicians. An elderly man, with ebony hair, mustache and tender wetness in his eyes, picks up his decades-loved violin from its case and starts playing a song unheard by the night. A song made, intimately and privately, from his own gentle, but kindled heart for you and Hobi. The fervid song, tied with the fire of a passion shared between a husband and wife, moves you to tears and once the man sees them, he weeps along with you.

With your face pressed against Hobi’s, he barely leads you in the dance as you still ever so slightly to listen to that expression of love and marriage, paying your full attention to it. And if there ever were any forgotten crumbs of cranberries in your blood, the man’s mastery and Hobi’s touch smooth it out, completely. Order it, wordlessly, to swim out of your tear ducts.

The man ends the song and you and Hobi clap for him, bowing in all respect and sincerity. He sends you a heartfelt kiss and a thumbs up Hobi’s way, pointing at his shirt and you wave him goodbye, laughing.

No need for words.

All was said.

And Hobi senses it, a changed man. Because when you walk up to your hotel room and he sets you down on the bed—he doesn’t rip your dress away from you like he promised he would. No, he takes his time, revealing your skin little by little, kissing and licking every inch that opens for him. He’s that embodied passion and he unravels himself on your body, sucking on your perked nipple as he holds the rim of your dress beneath your breasts. Sighing, humming. Circling the tip of his tongue around that sensitive trigger. Your moans echo around the spaciousness of the room and he answers each and every one of them with his own.

“Do you want it now? On your first night here?” he asks, pools whisked to yours, grazing your nub with his teeth. You cry out, spreading your legs as far as the tightness of your dress lets you while Hobi’s body compresses them down with his weight.

You want it every night, every day until you have to return back to Korea. Want to be so full of his nectar that you’ll still feel it, even at home.

“I want us to try every day,” you say, stroking his hair, shuddering as he rolls his tongue up and down on that nipple of yours, nuzzling his face in your breast as he sucks it. Makes your brain malfunction a little bit. “Do you think they sell pregnancy tests in that little shop? I should’ve brought some from home.”

Hobi grows serious, popping your nub free. His puffy lips search for yours, enveloping them in a deep kiss. And he spreads tiny kisses on your cheek and jaw as he responds. “We can say fuck it and take that test when we get home.”

The same seriousness closes down upon you. “What if we fail? What if there’s something wrong with me that I don’t know about?”

He cradles your face, his thumb fondling your skin, your black eyelashes, sturdier than they usually are due to your mascara. “You’re young, you’re healthy. You have nothing to worry about. I’m older. What if my swimmers are blind, hm?”

Your eyes wet at the thought, but a sweet reminder seizes you—the softness you saw wrapping around him when he told you about the renewal of his work project, the amount of poor children without parents or homes that have won over his heart. And your answer is ready on the tip of your tongue.

“There’s always the children from your work. We can adopt. As many as we want.”

Hobi looks into your eyes, deeply, for a long time. And you don’t catch the drenching of his pools, nor the tender glint, the wetness of the pearls. No, you catch a single rivulet trickling down on each of his cheeks, plopping down onto your chest. The hard sucking in of his breath due to that softness swathing him all over again. The tremble of his lip. The petting of his hand over your hair as he exudes gratefulness.

“I love you, you know that?” he whimpers and you burst, your own tears dripping down the sides of your face as you take him in. The raw, compassionate and humane version of him that only few, selected people are allowed to see. You, his mom, his dad, his sister and… little Luna. And you sob, your whole body warm from the amount of love that boils in you for him. “You’re my good little pup. I love you so much.”

“I love you,” you whisper, your voice broken owing to the intensity of your feelings. Hobi kisses your neck and your hand brushes down his back, scattered with myriads of condoms. Try to feel for his wings. Want them as sensitive as his heart. “Your swimmers aren’t blind. They have 20/20 vision.”

Your little joke causes him to chuckle, adorably, and he makes that sound travel down your throat as soon as he kisses you again. Slowly, carefully—as if engraving the shape and the feel of your lips deeply into his brain, into his system that he will give to you. You want more of him, the intangible things as well as the tangible ones. All of him, all that put his being together; all that helps him get up in the morning and lay his head down at night.

And it invigorates you, the knowledge that you will get just that—once he fills you up with his nectar and his swimmers find you, perfectly. Yours and his berry baby will grow amidst the orchard he will continue to take care of; and you will have him.

Eternally.

Beyond death. Beyond the end of time.

You will have him—and you will have a little him as well.

“I want you,” you whisper onto his lips, perking up your breasts for him by squishing them together and he sees you, sees what you’re doing and he licks your nipple again, both of them at the same time in fact, torturously slowly, humming. “And I want a little you.”

Lifting his head to kiss you, nastily, he groans. The smack of yours and his mouth, the ridding of your dress—still slow, still sensual. He studies your body for a moment, shuddering, full of longing for him and his nectar, ready for him with the way it’s glistening in sweat and arousal. And he sighs, differently this time.

The sound is coated with as much longing as your body is.

You love being looked at by him; love the knowledge that he’s looking at something that’s his. Always been his to transform, make new, clean and heal. Always been his to love.

And he kisses his pathway down your tummy as if he thought about the same thing, his hands following every inch of your skin, fondling the places he kissed, licked and sucked. Not hard enough to create a mark, but lovingly enough to moisten you even more, to make your heart swell—and something else, too.

He stops at your navel. Squishes the lower belly fat, biting it as he coos—and you can feel how much he loves that part of you; always has. Because of that, there’s no insecurity tightening your lungs or worrying your brain. Only balminess, the sound of cicadas, the dance of the palm trees as the wind blows through it, the faraway sea sloshing upon shore and his noises caked with yearning—for you, for the baby.

“Our baby is going to live right here,” he says, as if he was coming to terms with it, now that he’s about to make it happen, and you soften, running your hand through the tufts of his windswept hair. “It’s going to grow and feel our love. Feel how much I love him or her. How much you do.”

You nod, a liquified softness. “Do you want a boy or a girl?”

He gazes at you through his lashes and butterflies zap your stomach. “I want a baby that looks like you.”

Your heart, too.

“So, a girl?”

He rubs his face in your tummy, breathing evenly against it. “Even a boy can have your features. Your hair. Your hands.” He takes it, the one closest to him, and drifts his fingers through yours. “I want to hold their hand and know I’m holding yours. And I want to give them the love I have for you.”

A film flashes through your mind. A little boy, sitting on a sofa next to resting Hobi, watching TV while his Daddy absentmindedly plays with his small fingers, kissing them, biting them playfully to make him growl in that adorable way. The same little boy growing into a young man, having been watered by the love Hobi has for you and the new, fatherly love he gained for him. One that does not cease even as he’s older.

A boy, a man loved by his Father—ceaselessly.

Something you never had, but your child will.

You don’t realize you’re crying until Hobi wipes your tears away. Your heart thumps so rapidly against your chest that you believe it could poke through the flesh.

And you fall for him, all over again.

“That’s the most beautiful thing you ever said to me,” you whisper, high on your heightened feelings for him, high on him. “Besides, ‘will you marry me?’”

Hobi smiles. Moves you so your head reclines on the pillows, knocking towel swan off the bed, making you giggle. And he sits on his legs, clutching your waist, thumb rubbing circles on your tummy, squished and overspilling in your position as you wrap your own legs around him.

Comfortable, safe, elated.

“Two days from now, I want you to wear that dress I bought you,” he says, his smile blossoming wider and your lips mimic the same movement for some reason, despite the fact your brows furrow in confusion.

“What dress?”

He slides his hands up your highs. “The white one. The one I told you I was gonna marry you in.”

A soft gasp leaves your lips and a mist of tears thicken in your waterline, understanding what he’s saying. “Are we—?”

“Yes, pup.” A stream, not a rivulet, cascades down his cheeks and you break, you break beautifully and happily. “We’re getting married in two days. I prepared everything. Your parents and mine are flying in. I paid for their plane tickets. A small wedding with the closest. My sister slapped me when I offered to pay for hers—”

An alarm rings loudly in your sternum and you don’t think before you voice it out. Hasty in a way you don’t like, but it’s due to a certain fear that you feel expanding throughout your body.

“What did my Dad say?”

Hobi’s smile doesn’t fade and it spurs a fragment of ease to shoot down your form.

“Your Dad gave me his blessing.”

A brand new shrub begins to grow in your orchard. The final one. A shrub of goji berries, healing, beneficial to your Father complex, the very means that will treat your scar caused from it, rejuvenate the skin that bears his ignorance, lack of love, care and attention.

And you can’t breathe.

Hobi lays the front of his body against yours, propping his chin against your chest, holding the side of your face in his hand, tracing your shock and unbelief with his thumb.

“He looked at me as if he wanted to kill me, but once he heard that I mean well with you and that I make good money at my job—actually, once he heard that I work with children, his whole demeanor changed—”

“He loves children,” you blurt out, your vision unfocusing. “He just doesn’t love me because I grew up. It’s some kind of block in his body, I don’t know.”

Hobi pauses for a moment, thinking about your words, his thumb now tracing your lost eyes—your eyelids, your eyelashes.

Your Father played with you when you were a little girl. Took you on walks around the city. Bought you McDonalds. Taught you how to count money when you were struggling, unsure if you had enough from the paper Wons he gave you. But once the sadness of your girlhood absorbed your life, his presence in it shifted and moved away.

And never returned.

“He does love you, he just doesn’t know how to express it. That’s what I sensed,” he whispers, his hand descending to your neck, and you wonder if he feels the twigs of those goji berries underneath that skin—that quickly they grow. “If he didn’t love you, he wouldn’t have listened to a word I said. He wouldn’t have asked me if there’s anything I needed from him in terms of the wedding. And he wasn’t mad about the fact that it would be non-traditional and in Turkey, though your mom insisted she’d wear a hanbok anyways.”

You’re so overwhelmed that you can’t speak, the notion that your Father always knew you strayed away from your heritage and preferred the West sneaking into your heart. He accepted it; and he accepted Hobi.

You reach within yourself, pluck a goji berry and feed it to the emptiness that lived within you for too long. And you do it again and again—until there’s no hollowness that eats at your insides.

You’re whole.

“Thank you for telling me,” you murmur, brushing your knuckles down his cheek and Hobi leans into your touch like he always does. “That healed me. I can’t wait to marry you.”

Hobi mirrors your softness and kisses you with it. And it’s now that the dip of the scar in your skin replenishes—through each and every moment of his mouth against yours and through his shifting to the place between your legs once you coyly ask for him there. He eats you as if he were starving, and it has great meaning to you—the fact it’s someone you love that is consuming you and not your emptiness anymore. Your feet slide across the pattern of the condoms on his back and it quickens your orgasm in the middle of his sucking and finger-fucking, all owing to the fact that Hobi made order in your life; healed your Father’s complex and now is preparing you to impregnate you, only to marry you two days later.

You come so hard that you don’t sprinkle him, but drench him whole, your nectar painting him in glimmering light that becomes holy in the moonlight that streaks through the balcony.

He heaves, ferally, kissing your clit over and over again—so hard that he’s essentially sucking it and you cry out in overstimulation.

“Taught you how to squirt, didn’t I?” he growls, hovering above you as the drops of your nectar pitter-patter on your chest and within your shyness due to his words, you’re ready for him.

He did teach you that. Since the fateful day of his work phone call, before and during which you edged yourself so painfully that when he pleasured you with your vibrator, you exploded just the same, you aren’t able to have dry orgasms. He has triggered something within you, using his businessman voice and respect, that rains for him and it has changed your sexuality once and for all.

“You did,” you try because of your shyness, your hands instinctively popping the button of his pants open, and Hobi hums, wiping his face clean and pushing his soaked fingers inside your mouth.

You didn’t expect it and the loud moan that slips out of your throat comes as a surprise to you. Hobi’s length twitches beneath your hands and twitches again when you suck on his fingers, just as loudly.

“I love it when you squirt for me, but pray to God, pup, that you don’t squirt around my dick because I’m not pulling out, you hear me?” he rasps, his voice deep and solemn, causing your walls to clench tightly and your heat to reach a boiling temperature. Your hand, mindlessly, slinks to your pussy to rub your clit and he tips his head, noticing it. “Move your hand.” You do, your heart bouncing in your ribcage. Hobi begins to thumb your clit and you writhe your body against the mattress, following each circle with your hips, the pleasure faint but so good. “Do you think you can hold your orgasms for me once I fuck you, hm?”

You whimper, regarding the idea impossible, knowing how well he does it. Impossible and rapturous. “No.”

He chuckles. Stops his circles. Lets you use his thumb. “I’ll make you, then. I can stop anytime.”

You roll your eyes back, his dominance-tinged words better than the stimulation of your clit. “Can you?” you bite back, playfully, your shyness vanishing.

Hobi bites his lip, intoxicated by your new confidence. Pins your hands above your head, leaning his weight on them. Brushes his lips against yours. “Don’t go bratty on me now. Don’t do it to the baby.”

You choke out a curse and Hobi digs his half-moons into your forearms. The moonlight anoints them, purifying the atmosphere.

“I’ll be good for the baby,” you whisper, curling your hips to feel more of his manhood, eager for it. “And good for you.”

Hobi growls, kissing the skin beneath your jawline just once. “A good what?”

You know what he wants you to say and your eagerness lengthens. “A good pup.”

Shifting so he can hold both of your wrists in his singular fist, he glides the tip of his cock along your feminine flesh—up and down, up and down.

“That’s it. A good Mommy for the baby and a good pup for me.”

He buries himself in your heat and it’s the breaking of the curse upon your life, for the intention is there. The final installment to your healing of your Father’s complex because you’re not a little girl anymore, walking in the withering forest of your saddened girlhood.

You’re a tender woman and you’re being made love to.

There’s respect to the languid and dionysian movements of his love, no matter the hardness he uses. A breath is choked out of you and he inhales it, letting your hands free to cradle your neck, pressing his forehead against yours as he moans. Your mouth is parted and Hobi plays with your tongue without closing down his lips on yours, which causes you to mark your nails down his lats. Goosebumps decorate his skin at the feeling and he speeds up, beckoning out your whiny noises as you take it.

His cock, the healing, the respect, the love.

“I love you,” he murmurs, consuming your noises as soon as he kisses you. Doesn’t stop ramming into you. “I love you, my pup. You’re my life.”

You cry out and he rips the coil of your orgasm by filling you to the hilt and lingering there, stimulating your clit by giving you fast, little strokes that makes his mound rub against it. And the orgasm overtakes you, your whole body limp and delighted as the heavenly pressure courses down every nerve ending, spreading that healing, respect and love, sealing it there.

“God, that was beautiful,” Hobi comments, stunned by the explosion of your pleasure, and he begins to give you long, hard strokes that empty out your brain and try to push out your sudden guilt for coming when he wanted you to hold back your orgasm.

“Oh my God, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”

“No, pup,” he groans, the muscles around his eyes tightening as he pants. “You’re good. Just keep coming for me. I was only kidding, pup.”

He takes your nipple in his mouth, his back strong and monumental and you sink your nails into it, marking him with the same half-moons, blushing, joyful. Hobi returns to your neck, your jaw and lips and you whine at the principle of him returning.

The feeling of it is so enormous that you come again.

“Yes, pup, that’s it. Come for your Daddy. So pretty, yes. I’m so close. I’m right there with you. Gonna make you a Mommy.”

The words that are true, at last. Not a pretense.

And then he’s fast, fucking you into the bed. Changing his mind at the last minute and lifting your hips into the air, slamming into you so hard that you have to hold onto his forearms, scattering your half-moons there and you take it all, ravenous, yet tender as you are. The squelching noises, his growls melting into soft mewls as you squeeze around him and it’s him who can’t take it.

Who can’t take the distance.

Who places your hips back down and eats your mouth, plunging his tongue inside while keeping up his rhythm. Never once faltering, nor wavering. He kneads your breast, sucks on your lip, bites it. Holds you by your throat, pushing his thumb inside your parted mouth and you have a feeling, amidst the haziness of your mind, that’s your trigger. One of them, at least.

“Suck on it.”

You clamp down on his length, obeying. Your orgasm inches closer, your fourth one of the night.

“Good pup,” he husks, closing his eyes for a split second, slowing down, rolling motions. “Are you ready to become a Mommy for our baby? Daddy’s so close.”

The sound that leaves you is of such a desperate kind that he grunts, delighting in it. Buries himself inside you to the hilt, stopping there, giving you tiny strokes that scramble your brain, plays with the haziness. Your arousal and your yearning is so raging and feverish that the pain of his tip osculating your cervix feels divine. And all you can think about is how it’s going to widen over time for yours and his baby.

“Yes, yes, please. I want it. Give it to me, please, please, please,” you beg, your lungs and your pulse quickening, muscles taut and Hobi moans in a way you’ve never heard him before.

The longing at its peak, sensitive, delicate and frail—yet he still remains as strong and monumental as he is. His Achilles’ heel has been struck and he begins to twitch inside you.

“Oh my God, pup, I’m coming so hard for you.” Long strokes, whimpers. “Are you gonna take it like the good little wife you are?” The ultimate hard thrust—the blooming of his longing, your agreement, and it’s happening. He comes. “Fuck, fuck, yes. It’s all yours. It’s all yours, pup.”

He paints you anew with the warmth of his nectar, fucking it deeply into you. And the title you utter is not one construed out of your lack, but it’s a crowning of his new role.

“Daddy.”

The final breaking of the curse.

The conclusion.

He continues to ram into you, softly, his thumb finding your clit—and it’s over.

Everything.

You step into a new life with him while you’re still connected and he keeps coming for you, his swimmers antsy and desirous to find your egg. And crossing the threshold, you come—devastatingly intensely, your body trembling and his mirroring the same shakes while he gives you the last of his all and a kiss that lasts a lifetime.

A clean slate, a clean heart, a clean body.

A clean life.

An orchard, brimming with fullness and ripeness.

Ready for your berry baby.

He looks at you for a long time, then, grinning so widely that you can sense the entirety of his joyful heart in it. His eyes wet and his smile softens as the gravity of what just happened washes over him. You feel the same process collapsing over you, splendidly, and you think that you and him must have become one.

“We did it,” he whispers, a tear pouring down his cheek and another one following.

You nod, your cheeks stained with the same tears. “We did it.”

And the newness of your life and being feels natural—just as though it has been there the whole time.

On the day of your wedding, bright early in the morning—after Hobi woke you up with his sensual The Weeknd playlist and ate you out so calamitously that you had to give it back to him by riding him into oblivion—you sit down for breakfast and discover something about him that almost makes you call it off.

Hobi put strawberry jam on his butter toast with scrambled eggs.

The Turkish sun envelops him bewitchingly, makes his tanned skin glow in its light as he enjoys, provocatively, every bite of his strange breakfast, focusing all of his attention on it. His eyes never leave it and his mouth smacks so loudly that it as irks you as it makes you laugh.

Your unbelief towards that combination is so strong that it took you some time before you could speak up.

“What the fuck, Hobi?”

His eyes flick in your direction, innocently, cheeks full and squirrel-like, layered in sweat. His hands hold a half of the toast, despite the fact you and him just sat down. Does he really enjoy it that much? He inhaled it.

“What?” he asks, mouth full, and you chuckle.

“Jam and eggs?”

He swallows, making a sound that divulges just how much he loved that bite. “Pup, it’s so good.”

You widen your eyes. “I’m not marrying you today,” you say, but you don’t mean it. You’d marry him even if he forced that abnormal toast down your throat.

He’s not one bit perplexed by your sentence. Stares you down as he runs his tongue over his teeth, mouth closed. “Be quiet.”

Heat comes apart in your body and you blush, squeezing your thighs together under the table.

“How could a combination of eggs and jam be good?” you ask, standing your ground, despite your feelings.

Hobi smiles. “One time I accidentally put sugar instead of salt on my scrambled eggs and it changed my life forever.”

Your eyes might pop out of your sockets. “What?”

He laughs, extends his hand towards your face. The sweetened, yet buttery smell of the toast hits your nostrils and your repulsion towards it dissolves. “Try it.”

You don’t trust it, though. “I’d rather die.”

He tightens his lips. “Be quiet and take a bite.”

Taken aback, your instincts win and you don’t realize your head is leaning towards the toast until your teeth sink into the crunchy tastiness. You take a small bite and thoroughly chew, the mixture of sweetness and a little bit of saltiness, wrapped around the crispiness of the toast and the slight mushiness of the eggs creating something metaphysical in your mouth.

Hobi watches you with a proud, lopsided grin. Knows you like it before you say it.

“What the fuck?”

He bursts into laughter and lets you have it, places it on your plate before devouring his second one, your liking for it elevating his.

And you devour it just the same.

“Life changing, isn’t it?” he intones, smacking his mouth in all the pleasure of the world. “Expect this kind of breakfast every morning when we get home. After I eat out your little pussy.”

You choke on it and hide your feverish face in your hands, your stomach doing somersaults. “Oh my God, Hobi.”

He laughs again, tenderly, and the sound travels all the way to Cappadocia, where he marries you at sundown.

On the rooftop of a cave hotel, overlooking an immeasurable amount of kaleidoscopic hot air balloons that magnetically travel to the heat of the orange sun, the mountains and volcanic peaks darkened by its overpowering magnificence. It encourages the sleepy walk of camels and tightens the hearts of the witnesses below and the hearts of your parents, parents in law and Hobi’s sister.

The simple dress Hobi bought you ripples in the compassionate late afternoon wind. Silky, pearlescent like his eyes in a certain light, caressing your tanned skin. So very akin to the one you wore on your first date with him, but longer, sleek, homeric in its significance.

And he matches you, all white, in his tuxedo, a stark contrast against his bronze skin and black hair, a wispy strand softly being blown sideways from his forehead by the wind. He holds his tears back in the same way he holds your hand—with all his might. And you do the same.

You share your vows.

He shares his, intertwined with the first poem you recited for him.

“I’ll carry your heart with me ‘til my last day on this Earth and I will fear no fate because you are my fate.”

Through your tears, you can see the way he’s stifling his habit of saying your pet name. And when he catches your quivering smile, he breaks into more tears.

And when you proclaim that you do take him as your husband and when he proclaims that he takes you as his wife, your tears conjoin as do your souls in a kiss that makes the mountains quake. The heat of the Turkish sun perpetuates the act of love.

The audience cheers.

Your Father weeps.

And you believe no sadness, no ruination will ever come close to you again.

You and Hobi celebrate. Dance throughout the night to foreign, passionate music that your heart seems to know. Fly in a hot air balloon, where he gets drunk and kisses you until your lips get numb.

Almost throws up all the dark liquor he drank once he sees how high from the ground he is.

And you can’t stop laughing.

Not as he takes you to the Valley of Love the next day to look at penis-shaped rock formations that nature apparently formed out of the blue.

Not as you give birth nine months later and he makes his sound effects as you push out his child.

A baby boy that has your hair, your hands, your mouth and your chin—and a whole lot of Hobi’s pearlescent eyes and slender nose. A delectable, heavenly concoction.

And certainly not as you take the five-year old boy to the Yongchu waterfall, where his Father proposed to you, and he starts sputtering out uncontrollable giggles when Hobi tells him that you ran around when he popped the question and precisely, with utmost detail, shows him how.

On your way back, when little Hyeonwol’s legs hurt and drowsiness weighs him down, he surveys the mountain peak, transfixed by it. You and Hobi notice it at the same time and share a look that could never be described through any poetry, through any beauty of words, not even the ordinary kind.

And it’s automatic, a silent, collective and simultaneous decision to break Hyeonwol’s spell by kissing each of his cheek.

The dream came true.

All dreams have, even those undreamed.

And you believe that even as you grow old with Hobi, you’ll never stop laughing.

You’ll never stop eating strawberry jam toasts with scrambled eggs with him.

With Hyeonwol, too.

And you'll never stop feeding the berry boy the fruits from the orchard that Hobi continues to take care of within you.

HYEONWOL — HYE-ON-WOL

賢월

Meaning: worthy moon

This name is given to a worthy person who is as precious as the moon.

𓂃 ౨ৎ LOVE-KISSED BABIES: @tkslovechild, @jjk7k, @parkinglot-nights, @bethvar, @Sexytholland, @yoongibaybee, @crystaleah,@fennecnco, @lil-kpopstan.