#lately Jay .. starts to disappointing me it's just feels like he loves to make or say problematic things

[asahicore]

fast forward - pjs

pairing. jay x fem!reader

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

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

word count. 26.6k

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And that’s your business, because…?”

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

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

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

“I never said that.”

“You didn’t need to.”

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

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

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

“I’m sorry?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t-”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“At least you’re self-aware.”

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

“What are you-”

“Have you done the German homework for tomorrow?”

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

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

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

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

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

Then you see it.

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

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

Your heart sinks to your stomach.

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

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

“Y/N-” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

It belongs to none other than Park Jongseong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“This is so good,” you mumble.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hm?”

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

“No. I have… things on my mind.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah.”

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

“...Jong?” you try.

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

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

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

“Will you be here in the morning?”

“Mh-hm. It’s Saturday tomorrow.”

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

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

You let out a shaky breath. “Okay.”

“I love you, Y/N.”

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

--

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

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

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

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

“What was it about?” Sunoo asks.

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

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

“Exactly!”

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

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

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

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

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

“Nowhere. Go on.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“None taken.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She had a dream that she m—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And your friends wondered why you hated him?

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

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

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

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

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

“No. Stop.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Jong, your textbook.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’re annoyed at how he makes you feel.

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

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

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

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

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

For now, you smile. “Get lost, Jong.”

--

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

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

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

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

you he’s not just another person!

sunoo okayyyyy i see you little miss repressed feelings

you i hate u

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You frown. “I don’t hate you.”

“Oh? That’s a recent development.”

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

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

“Back to hating.”

“Let’s start the assignment.”

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

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

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

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

“That’s not—”

“Let’s just focus on this.”

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

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

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

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

“Yes, sir,” you reply, embarrassed.

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

“Do you even know what chiaroscuro is?” 

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

“Well, maybe if you didn’t-”

“Y/N, Jay, final warning.”

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sunoo, that’s disgusting.”

“Love? I know.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I never—When?!”

She shrugs. “The other day.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Dude…” Jongseong murmurs.

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

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

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

“Aren’t you cold?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t wanna talk about it.”

--

sunoo jay and y/n almost kissed earlier

kazuha WHAAAAT

you KIM SUNOO.

kazuha WHEN?????

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

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

kazuha i can’t believe i missed this fml

you YOU DIDNT MISS ANYTHING NOTHING HAPPENED

sunoo be serious u guys we’re standing inches apart

you were* and no we weren’t

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

kazuha sunoo…?

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

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

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

you …

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

kazuha cuuuute

you i resent these accusations.

sunoo istg if u dont kiss him next time i will

kazuha ???

you SUNOO?

sunoo WHAT

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Y/N…”

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

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

--

jong so… guess who got a five-day suspension

you you idiot what did your parents say?

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

you boo-hoo

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

you … are you feeling better?

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

you oh did you ask chaewon to do that?

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

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

jong ykw maybe i should just ask chaewon

you i’ll see you tomorrow jong!!

jong :) see you tomorrow pretty 

 --

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You smile. “Never.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Give me five minutes!” you call back.

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

--

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

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

He’s still Jong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In any case, he’s hiding something.

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

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

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

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

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

Your heartbeat speeds up and you have to look away.

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until you didn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You said so yourself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

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

“Did you guys sit next to each other?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, I thought I’d do it now.”

“Now?”

He takes a deep, shaky breath. “Now.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Really?” you repeat, and he chuckles.

“Really.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I think I did, too.”

“Yeah, you mentioned that in your letter.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Fifty years, huh?”

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

“I wasn’t planning to.”

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You smile. “I am.”

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

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

[malarign]

who they were written by

contains: enhypen | genre: angst, comfort | tw! mentions of death, mention of major injury, lack of confidence, family problems, loneliness | wc: 1,0k

author’s note: let’s just say i chose violence 🫣 who the hell let me write this?

Lee Heeseung | 이희승

➶ an elder lady who reminiscents her past lover

Love never felt so blissful and serene as with him, making it hard to forget his small but meaningful gestures, like fresh morning coffee, his contagious laughter, and jokes that never failed to make her laugh. There was no day she didn’t miss him, death taking his beautiful soul too early, along with hers too. She felt like her life ended the day she lost him forever. Wanting to have at least a little substitute for feelings that accompanied their love she wrote Heeseung, who just like her late lover, is impossible not to love. Heeseung who is a pure example of chivalry and a true gentleman, who treats everybody with empathy and sympathy.

Park Jongseong | 박종성

➶ a man who regrets not letting his son pursue his passion

Watching how his son gets drowned in the huge corporate world that surrounds him. How there’s no sign of the spark in his eye that used to light up whenever he picked up his guitar. The boy who found such relief in playing his favorite songs and felt proud of mastering different riffs was long gone, now somewhat replaced by constantly tired and dispassionate about anything and everything. Regret filled his heart and decided to somehow find a remedy in creating Jay, who thanks to his burning love for music and the wonderful people surrounding him, achieved his dream, and performed his songs on big stages, igniting passion in his fans’ hearts.

Sim Jaeyun | 심재윤

➶ a boy who always felt lonely

Ever since primary school, he never had a friend to rely on, always feeling lonely and not heard. Nobody ever paid attention to him, neither at school nor at home. His parents invested their time mostly in his younger brother’s education and hobbies, driving him to his after-school football practices and maths tutoring and leaving the older one alone most of the time. To feel at least a tiny bit wanted and liked he wrote about Jake, as his older brother he never had, but always dreamt of. Days spent alone at home started to get more bearable and gradually he couldn’t wait to be left with him and his new best friend, with whom he played football and who helped him with his homework.

Park Sunghoon | 박성훈

➶ girl who lost her confidence in sport

Injury is the worst fear of any athlete including her, but once it happens it turns out to be much more. She never even imagined a day she would have to experience the pain of a twisted ankle, but now daily rehabilitation has become her reality. Even after complete recovery, her foot felt like it belonged to somebody else, not listening to her like before. Things that she had been doing easily now were her biggest enemy. All eyes of her teammates were filled with pity, and even her coach stopped spending her time helping her, increasing her misery. What helped her ease her mind was a boy she imagined named Sunghoon, who was the only male ice skater among all the girls, they isolated him by whispering to each other and watching his every fall. None of this stopped him from mastering every jump and technique he found hard in his tempo. If he was able to do that, she would too, even after a painful injury.

Kim Sunoo | 김선우

➶ girl who always wished to have a boy best friend

She always knew boy-girl friendships weren’t particularly the easiest - it’s easy to catch feelings and not every boy is trustworthy enough to be considered a friend. That’s why she desired it so much. Her every male friend ended up being a freak who had a bunch of weird opinions, turned out to be even misogynistic, or simply caught feelings for her when all she wanted was to have a companion. The more she tried the harsher the disappointment. To compensate, she started to imagine one, who she named Sunoo. Hanging out with him was just as she wanted, maybe that’s why she spent so much time in her head. Both of them had their weekly tradition of doing face masks and watching old romantic comedies, judging wrong doings of the characters but also simping to them, just like it happens in movies.

Yang Jungwon |  양정원

➶ a grandma who lost her grandson

Nothing could ever prepare her to lose him, who just like cherry blossoms sweetened her old days with his pure smile and eyes full of curiosity, after years of endless winter. But, the thing about cherry blossoms is, it doesn’t last long. Her grandson, contrary to pink petals, wouldn't be back in a year, he would be gone forever. That pure smile and curious eyes disappeared, or should I say, were ripped off her arms so brutally, so pitilessly. Her life came back to the excruciating dullness and silence. She couldn’t stop thinking about how her lovely boy would grow up, what hobbies he would pick up, and who he was going to love, since he didn’t have a chance to experience any of that, subconsciously creating Jungwon, who lived surrounded by love and gave it to others. Who never lost his pure smile and curious eyes, just like her grandson.

Nishimura Riki | 西村力

➶ girl who always danced alone in her room

She always knew her destiny was on the dance floor. Even her tiny bedroom she had to share with her two younger siblings. Or the daily nagging and lack of support from her parents. Even the fact that she had to do that all by herself. None of that stopped her from doing everything to achieve her dream of standing on stage, in blinding spotlights with crowds watching her moves. Her main inspiration was Riki, a boy she imagined had the same dream as her. In contrast to her, Riki had everything she ever wanted and needed to make things easier - a family full of great dancers, who also owned a dance studio and great teachers and mentors from whom he learned not only different techniques but also to love dancing.

thank you for reading! back to the masterlist

taglist: (open) @nicholasluvbot, @en-chantedtomeetyou, @skzenhalove, @kpoprhia, @redm4ri, @yenqa, @heesitation, @candewlsy, @jaelaxies

[riki-riks-chick]

Beneath The Desk ┃P.JS

CEO!jay x reader

A trip to Jay's office results in a risky situation

smut! oral (male rec), risky actions, teasing, face fucking (slight), public oral, agoraphillia

This is for this anon bc i finally got an idea

wdct: 1.4k

═════════════

Third Person POV~

Jay is your husband, but he's also a CEO, so sometimes work keeps him away from you. Late nights, broken promises, and sometimes even missed anniversaries, but you know it's out of his control and he makes up for it when he can.

Today he asked you to come see him at his office, and you were ecstatic. The last time you'd been at his office, you almost got into "trouble", but this time he assured you that it would be fine.

You got there, walking in as you stopped at reception, showing the badge Jay gave you before heading towards the elevator.

You scanned the badge for access to the floor his office is on before pressing the button.

After a short elevator ride, you made your way down the hall to Jay's office, your heels clicking soundly against the floor as you knocked on the door before letting yourself in.

"Jay?" You smile upon seeing him, he glances up from his work, gesturing for you to come closer. "Hey, honey..." He smiles brightly, pushing away from his desk as he turns in his chair, placing his hands on your hips once you were close enough.

You cup his chin, tilting his head upwards as you place a gentle kiss on his lips. "How's your day going?" You notice his face fall at your question, his eyes pulling away from yours.

"What's wrong?.." You ask, and he simply shakes his head. "It's nothing really, just the annoying people I have to work with... How's your day going, love?.."

"It's going well.. I'm glad I get to see you.." You can't stop smiling, and when he smiles back it makes you weak. His hands squeeze tighter on your hips as he continues to stare up at you. The moment gets interrupted when his office phone rings.

He sighs, turning towards the desk as he answers the phone. You watch his face twist with every muffled sound on the other end. When he finally hangs up, he lets out a long sigh, furrowing his brows. "I'm so sorry, baby."

"Do you need me to leave?..." You ask, trying to hide your disappointment as he nods. "I wanted to take you to lunch, but the Chairman is coming down to talk.. I'll have to take lunch later."

"What if I didn't leave? What if he just didn't know I was here?.." You asked as Jay raised his eyebrow in a confused stance. "Honey, it's not like I can hide you..."

He looks around, gesturing towards the open space of his office. You simply smile, caressing his cheek. "I'll just hide under the desk."

"Baby... I don't want you sitting on the cold floor under my desk. Plus there isn't a lot of space there." He responds, only to completely shut up when you push his chair further back, sitting beneath his desk.

"Honey, are you sure-" He's interrupted by a knock on his office door. He decides to let you stay, since he really has no choice. He yells "come in", trying not to look so stiff as he feels you lean against his knee, your fingers toying with the hem of his perfectly tailored pants.

You quickly grow bored as Jay converses with the Chairman. It's almost too quick how fast you come up with an idea to cure your disease of boredom.

You sit up straight as possible, not too much to avoid hitting your head on the wood of the desk, and you slowly begin to trail the expanse of Jay's thighs with your fingertips. Just barely skimming over the fabric of his suit.

From your spot on the floor, you can smell his cologne beautifully. It fills your senses so wonderfully, and you can only think about Jay in that momment, not even bothering to pay attention to his conversation.

You eventually slide your hand up his crotch, palming him as he immediately grabs your hand, glaring down at you.

You ignore him, continuing your assault on his now tented bulge as he grips your wrist, obviously trying to still himself.

As soon as he starts talking, you palm harder, stroking the line of his cock through the thin fabric of his pants. You could hear the slight stutter in his voice, but you were sure the Chairman wouldn't notice.

Your next course of action was unzipping his pants. Once you did so successfully, you freed his cock from the restraint of his boxers, giving it a few light tugs.

You watched as Jay's eyes darkened, he was clearly trying his hardest not to alert the man in front of him.After all it would be detrimental for him if you got caught.

You continued with your ministrations, stroking him slowly as you gave his tip short little licks, teasing him.

His hand is cupping your jaw as you do so. He's clearly aching for your attention. So, you take his length into your mouth, going as far down as possible while stroking the rest.

Each movement was slow, but pointed, and Jay was loving it. You noticed how he leaned back in his chair, his hand over his mouth to make him look like he was concentrated, but really just to muffle any sounds he might let out.

You watch him twitch every now and then, hearing all the quiet sounds he lets out just for you.

At this point he's rushing the conversation, wanting nothing more than to be alone with you right now. You pull off of his cock, kissing his tip as you press your palm flat against it, rubbing against him harshly.

You watch him squirm, tapping his foot against the tile to make it look natural. He's breathing hard, beads of sweat beginning to form on his forehead.

He grips your wrist, a silent plea for you to stop and you do, because as much as it thrills you to think of being caught, you know that getting caught isn't an option.

You hear the Chairman ask him if he's got lunch plans, to which Jay responds with a yes, apologizing and offering to treat him to lunch some other time. Once the man finally leaves, Jay lets out the loudest sigh of relief.

"Honey, are you serious?" He pushes back in the chair, allowing you room to come out of the cramped space as you sit on your knees in front of him, still stroking his cock.

"You looked so cute trying to keep still.. trying to keep quiet.." You tease, running your finger over his tip as you watched his hips jerk.

"Well now that he's gone, why don't you finish what you started?" Jay suggests, cupping the back of your head as he pulls you closer, pressing his tip against your lips. "Do a good job and then we'll go to lunch together, huh?"

You simply smile, taking his tip into your mouth as you swirl it with your tongue, teasing him before fully committing to sucking his dick.

His hand is on the back of your head, probably messing up the updo that it took you almost an hour to do, as he pushes you further down, holding you in place as his hips buck upwards.

He's letting out small groans and moans, his tip hitting the back of your throat with every movement.

He gives you a second to breathe before continuing. It's clear he's close to release. His hips stutter, and he's now holding your hand with his free one, squeezing it ever so lightly.

"Baby... I'm so close..." His words come off with a low moan, and you simply hum around him, drawing yet another moan out of him.

You add more pressure, pressing your tongue flat against him as you stroke the rest. He's no longer bucking his hips, unable to focus on anything other than you.

"Fuck... Baby." He moans slightly louder, coming undone as you swallow around him, still moving your mouth on his cock to make him squirm.

"Please, stop.." You pull off at his words, standing up from the floor as you straddle his lap, pressing your lips to his. His hands are on your waist, hugging you close as he melts into the kiss.

You grip his cock once more, stroking it slowly and closing your fist around the tip each time you came back up. He let out a whine against your lips, grabbing your hand to get you to let go.

He pulled away from the kiss, signing as he leaned back in the chair.

"You're really something else..."

═════════════

[lueurjun]

- ͙۪۪̥˚┊❛ 𝗍𝗁𝖾 𝖺𝖿𝗍𝖾𝗋𝗆𝖺𝗍𝗁: 𝗃𝖺𝗒 𝗎𝗉𝗌𝖾𝗍𝗌 𝗒𝗈𝗎

⋮ — in which feelings are hurt, and jay needs a little bit of assistance figuring out what on earth he did to make you so upset with him

annoyingly jay doesn’t know what he’s done to make you so mad

which evidently only seems to piss you off even more. it feels like he doesn’t care enough to review his actions and that hurts you more

but he does care, more than you know—he’s just a bit… clueless sometimes

you have never been fond of the silent treatment, that sort of feels slightly toxic to you, so you stick to short answers and snippy comments which is probably the same level as silence but jay prefers it

he loves your voice and if you were to ever take it away from him… oh my, he would die

though he certainly would rather hear your angelic voice praising and giving him love like usual, the disappointment you display strikes him hard

but he just can’t for the life of him figure out what he’s done

and when he asks? even more hurt and annoyance from you

jay just wants everything to be resolved

but he has no idea where to start

and so he bites down his pride and enlists the help of the ever so charming jungwon and his puppy like companion jake

“what did you do this time?” jake asks the moment jay steps into the room with a guilty expression

though it morphs into an offended one rather quickly

“how do you know i’ve done something wrong? i might just want to hang out”

he’s met with two ‘be serious’ looks which makes him slump his shoulders

“i upset y/n… and i don’t know how’

much to jay’s surprise, jungwon nods

“yeah they called me not long ago”

jake avenges you by slapping jay silly with some rolled up newspaper

“silly boy”

“did they say what i did wrong?”

you did

you told jungwon everything

“mhm. but i’m not going to tell you what it is exactly. however, i will tell you that it’s something important and you’ve forgotten it”

jake hadn’t been told the full story, but he understood what jungwon was hinting at instantly — he gasped dramatically

and jay felt worse because he didn’t have a clue what jungwon was talking about

he’s a smart boy… just lacks practice when it comes to the relationship area

you’re his first real partner, and he doesn’t want to mess it up

seemingly taking pity on him, jungwon sighs

“the date, hyung! check the date!”

he does as he’s told, and in a matter of seconds it all clicks into place and jay is dashing out the door

leaving the teasing remarks of his friends behind him

in an attempt to salvage the remains of the day which happens to be your two year anniversary he rushes around gathering supplies

he collects all of your favourite things and returns home out of breath

you’re sitting on the couch when he arrives, hair damp from a shower and one of his shirts draped over your body with a pair of sweatpants

yet still, you look remarkable and he finds himself stumbling over his own feet at the sight of you

a reaction only you can provoke from the park jongseong

he’s sheepish at first, the bag of goodies behind his back and a dark crimson dusting his ears

and when you finally look up at him, his mouth runs dry

“evening”, you greet with a small nod

and it pains him — no hug, or kiss as usual? he’s really messed up

then, your eyes flit to the bag you can see behind his back, between his slightly patted legs

“i take it jungwon reminded you…”

“i’m so sorry. there’s no excuse. i forgot, and i own up to that but i love you so much and i know it’s probably much too late, but i’d still like to celebrate what’s left of the day if that’s okay…”

you’re not completely happy but the puppy dog eyes he’s giving you as well as the genuine apology he offered managed to butter you up enough to throw him a smile

and then, you’re patting the spot beside you

“you have a lot of grovelling to do, but this is a good start”

jay rushes to your side almost immediately, emptying the bag on the coffee table making you gasp

“goodness that’s a lot!”

“it’s not enough to make up for how much of a dumbass i am”

you merely smile, and reach over to kiss his cheek but jay seems to clock what you’re about to do and turns his head immediately

your lips meet the corner of his mouth and he smirks

“i believe you missed”

“unbelievable” you grumble, but nothing can stop you from pressing a chaste kiss to his lips

jay grins, leaning in to press an innumerable amount of kisses all over your face

and though you’re mad at him, you can’t help but feel a rush of warmth through your body

your boyfriend finishes his attack with a sweet peck to your nose

“happy two years, my love”

“happy two years, jay”

and to many more!

[songbirdseung]

Can you do one of Ariana grande new songs for sunghoon ? Please! (Supernatural or intro or fantasize (please this one where he thinks she is singing the lyrics for someone or even better one of the members bc she started to get close to another member!) if you are still taking requests that is if not please ignore this

supernatural / park sunghoon

pairing: sunghoon x reader

warnings: doubt, insecurities, cheating?? accusation??, lmk if i missed anything

wc: 1.8k

requested by: @laylasbunbunny

You had been singing Ariana Grande's "Supernatural" non-stop for the past week. The catchy tune had become your go-to song around the dorm, and you sang it everywhere — in the kitchen while making breakfast, in the living room while watching TV, and even softly to yourself as you walked down the hallway. Sunghoon loved hearing you sing, but lately, the lyrics were starting to bother him.

You are in the kitchen with Jay, cooking a meal together. The kitchen is filled with the delicious aroma of spices and freshly chopped vegetables. As you stir the pot, you can't help but sing under your breath, the catchy tune keeping you energized. Jay hums along, occasionally joining in with his own voice.

Just need you right here You're like the only thing that I see

Meanwhile, in his room, Sunghoon hears you singing the familiar lyrics. Curiosity and a hint of worry make him leave his room to see what’s going on. As he approaches the kitchen, he hears both you and Jay singing together, your voices blending harmoniously. He stops at the doorway, watching as you laugh and sing, completely immersed in the moment.

Jay grabs a spatula and uses it as a microphone, singing the lyrics about feeling an electric connection and something supernatural. He spins around, bumping into you playfully, and you both giggle. Neither of you notices Sunghoon standing there, a mix of emotions crossing his face.

Sunghoon clears his throat loudly, making his presence known. You and Jay turn around, surprised to see him. "Oh, Sunghoon! I didn't see you there," you say with a smile.

"I just came to get some water," Sunghoon says, trying to keep his tone neutral. He walks over to the fridge, grabbing a bottle of water. His original plan to join you in the kitchen fades as he watches you and Jay together, feeling a pang of jealousy and hurt.

Jay, noticing Sunghoon's expression, tries to lighten the mood. "Hey, Sunghoon! Want to join us? We're making your favorite dish."

Sunghoon forces a smile, twisting the cap off his water bottle. "Maybe later. You two seem to have it under control." He takes a long sip of water, trying to push down the uneasy feeling in his chest.

It wasn't that he disliked the song; in fact, he thought your voice was beautiful. But there was one thing that was nagging at him: the way you seemed to emphasize certain lyrics. Specifically, the lines about feeling an "electric connection" and something "supernatural" were making him uneasy. He couldn't help but notice that you had been spending more time with Jay lately, and his insecurities were starting to get the better of him.

-

It’s a sunny Saturday afternoon, and you’re in the living room, flipping through a magazine. Sunghoon walks in, a hopeful smile on his face. "Hey, Y/N," he says, sitting down beside you, "I was thinking, maybe we could go to that new café downtown? The one with the amazing pastries."

Just as you’re about to respond, Jay enters the room, looking excited. "Y/N, I just found out about this cool art exhibit that’s opening today. It’s all about modern sculptures. Wanna check it out with me?"

You hesitate, caught between two great offers. Sunghoon’s suggestion sounds cozy and relaxing, while Jay’s idea seems interesting and different. You think for a moment, then make your decision. "Jay, the art exhibit sounds really intriguing. I’d love to go with you."

Sunghoon’s smile falters slightly, but he quickly masks his disappointment. "That’s cool. You’ll have a great time."

Sensing his feelings, you reach out and hold his hand. "Sunghoon, it's not that I don’t want to spend time with you. I just really wanted to see this exhibit. Why don’t you come with us?"

Sunghoon shakes his head, forcing a smile. "No, it’s okay. You two go ahead. I’ll just check out the café another time."

You squeeze his hand gently, trying to reassure him. "Are you sure? We’d love to have you with us."

"I’m sure," Sunghoon replies, standing up. "You guys enjoy the exhibit. I’ll see you later."

You watch as he walks away, feeling a twinge of guilt. You wish he would join you, but you understand his need for some space. Turning to Jay, you give him a small smile. "Let’s go see those sculptures."

Jay nods, his excitement evident. "It’s going to be awesome, Y/N."

As you leave for the exhibit with Jay, you can’t help but think about Sunghoon. The art exhibit is fascinating, filled with creative and inspiring pieces. You and Jay discuss each sculpture, sharing your thoughts and interpretations. Despite enjoying the exhibit, a part of you wishes Sunghoon were there to experience it with you.

Later that evening, when you return to the dorm, you find Sunghoon in his room, reading a book. You knock gently on the door frame. "Hey."

He looks up, a small smile on his lips. "Hey. How was the exhibit?"

"It was amazing," you say, sitting down beside him. "But I missed you."

Sunghoon closes his book and takes your hand. "I missed you too. I’m glad you had a good time, though."

You lean in and kiss his cheek. "Next time, we’ll do something together. Just the two of us."

Sunghoon nods, his smile growing. "I’d like that."

-

One evening, Sunghoon decided he couldn't keep his feelings to himself any longer. He found you sitting on the couch, scrolling through your phone, and sat down beside you.

"Hey," he began, trying to keep his tone casual, "you've been singing that Ariana Grande song a lot lately."

You looked up from your phone and smiled. "Yeah, it's just stuck in my head. It's such a good song, don't you think?"

Sunghoon nodded, but his expression remained serious. "Yeah, it is. But… can I ask you something?"

"Sure," you said, putting your phone down and giving him your full attention.

"Is there a reason why you're singing it so much? I mean, the lyrics… they seem kind of… personal."

You raised an eyebrow, confused. "Personal? What do you mean?"

Sunghoon took a deep breath. "It's just… the part about feeling an electric connection and something supernatural. You've been spending a lot of time with Jay lately, and I can't help but wonder if… if maybe you're singing about him."

Your eyes widened in surprise, and then you burst out laughing. Sunghoon felt a pang of hurt, but you quickly reached out and took his hand.

"Oh, Sunghoon," you said, still chuckling, "you're so silly. Jay and I have just been working on a project together. There's nothing romantic going on. I sing that song because it's catchy and fun, not because it reminds me of Jay or anyone else."

Sunghoon felt a wave of relief wash over him, but he still felt a little embarrassed. "I guess I was just being paranoid. It's just that I care about you a lot, and I don't want to lose you."

Your expression softened, and you leaned in to kiss him gently on the lips. "You have nothing to worry about, Sunghoon. You're the only one I feel that 'supernatural' connection with."

He smiled, his heart swelling with affection. "I'm sorry for doubting you."

"It's okay," you said, snuggling closer to him. "Just remember, no song lyrics can ever change how I feel about you."

As you sat together on the couch, Sunghoon felt the last of his worries melt away. He knew that your bond was strong and that nothing — not even a catchy song — could come between you. And with you by his side, he felt more connected than ever, truly experiencing something supernatural.

-

Sunghoon wakes up to the soft hum of a song playing from his phone. Groggily, he reaches out to turn off the alarm, but he’s surprised to see you sitting on the edge of the bed, smiling brightly.

"Good morning, Sunghoon!" you say cheerfully, leaning in to give him a quick kiss on the forehead.

"Good morning," he replies, a bit confused but happy to see you. "What’s going on?"

"I have a surprise for you," you say, your eyes twinkling with excitement. "Get dressed and pack a bag. We’re going on a little adventure."

His curiosity piqued, Sunghoon gets up and quickly gets ready. You help him pack, making sure he brings everything he’ll need for a couple of days. He keeps asking questions, but you just smile and tell him to wait and see.

Once you're both ready, you grab his hand and lead him outside, where a car is waiting. "Our ride is here," you say, opening the door for him.

As the car drives off, Sunghoon looks at you with a mixture of excitement and curiosity. "Where are we going?"

"You’ll see," you reply, holding his hand. "Just enjoy the ride."

After a couple of hours, the car pulls up to a beautiful, cozy cabin nestled in the mountains. The view is breathtaking, with lush greenery and a serene lake nearby. Sunghoon’s eyes widen in surprise.

"Welcome to our little getaway," you say, stepping out of the car. "I booked this cabin for us. We have the next two days all to ourselves."

Sunghoon is speechless for a moment, then he wraps his arms around you, lifting you off the ground in a tight hug. "This is amazing, Y/N. Thank you so much."

You laugh, hugging him back. "I’m glad you like it. Let’s go inside and get settled."

The cabin is even more beautiful on the inside, with a warm, rustic charm. You’ve already stocked the fridge with his favorite foods, and there’s a cozy fireplace with a stack of firewood ready to go.

For the rest of the day, you and Sunghoon explore the area, taking a hike along the scenic trails and enjoying the fresh mountain air. You have a picnic by the lake, complete with all of Sunghoon’s favorite snacks. As the sun begins to set, you head back to the cabin, where you cook dinner together, laughing and talking as you prepare the meal.

After dinner, you light a fire in the fireplace and snuggle up on the couch with a blanket. Sunghoon looks at you, his eyes filled with gratitude and love. "This is perfect, Y/N. I can’t believe you planned all this."

You smile, leaning your head on his shoulder. "I wanted to do something special for you. You deserve it."

Sunghoon kisses the top of your head, holding you close. "Thank you. This is the best surprise ever."

The next morning, you wake up to the sound of birds chirping outside. Sunghoon is still asleep, looking peaceful and content. You quietly get out of bed and make breakfast, wanting to surprise him one last time. When he wakes up, he finds a delicious spread of pancakes, fruit, and coffee waiting for him.

"This is amazing," he says, sitting down at the table. "You’ve thought of everything."

You sit down across from him, smiling. "I just wanted to make sure you had the best time."

For the next two days, you and Sunghoon enjoy every moment of your getaway. You hike, swim in the lake, and spend hours talking by the fireplace. It’s a perfect escape from the world, and you both cherish the time together.

[forlovvers]

( always )

pair: ex!jay x gn!reader | genre: fluff/angst idk | warning(s): none! | wc: 800 ish | synopsis: in which you and jay see each other for the first time in three years. 

lynne’s notez🗒️: jay is very always by daniel caesar coded

your late nights consisted of grocery shopping because you never had time to make the trip during the day. you think you prefer it like this; quiet and unoccupied, just some older ladies here and there. 

you walk down the aisles, shopping cart full of miscellaneous items. you reach into your jacket pocket and rummage around to pull out a crumpled letter and your grocery list. huh. you hadn’t even realized you had had that in there.

regardless, you stuff the letter back into your pocket and unfold your grocery list. you read down your list and make a mental notes of the few things you needed left. you make a turn into the next aisle and see the next item you need at the top-most shelf. 

you internally groan. top shelves were your number one enemy.

you outstretch your arms and as best as you could, you just barely touch the item. you let out a big huff and try again.

“do you need help?” the familiar voice asks, and you want to turn to look at who it belonged to but the man gently grabs the sides of your waist and moves you aside. the action is short, but it leaves you feeling a little dizzy.

“here you go,” he turns to you to hand you the item when his voice trails off. you’re met with the kind eyes of jay park. his hair is tousled and blonde. he looks the same for the most part, just a bit more into his features. his oversized bomber jacket really sticks out and his sleeves are rolled up to reveal his arms.

it had been three years since you last saw him. you remember the day clearly when you told him you were leaving for the states and didn’t plan on coming back. jay had been in your apartment, making dinner when you dropped the news. you remember him asking “did i do something wrong?”

in fact, it had nothing to do with him. and everything to do with yourself. he didn’t even say goodbye at the airport when you left, but when you got on the plane, there was a small piece of parchment stuck in your wallet. it was a love letter, signed off by jay.

beating yourself up over losing the love of your life was your routine for the next three years. most of your days in the beginning consisted of wondering what he was up to, did he think about you like you did him? eventually, you had to let him go. 

but here, in this grocery store, jay stands tall before you.

“i didn’t know you were back in town.” jay laughs awkwardly, handing you the item. you accept it and his hands brush over your skin, sending shockwaves to your brain. 

“yeah, i got back a week ago.” you say, for some reason you can’t look him in the eyes. he nods profoundly and when you turn away to start walking, he follows. his steps soon fall into sync with yours.

“how long are you back in town for?” jay asks, his voice honey like you’d always loved.

“i’m not sure. i wanted to see my parents.” you respond. you pick something off the shelves and place it in the cart to distract yourself from your thundering heart.

“ah,” his voice is thick with disappointment. jay can’t help but stare at your profile, and suddenly it feels like you’re both seventeen again. “i wrote that song you were always convincing me to write.” he says, diverting the attention away from the topic.

“oh really?” your words are piqued with interest and for the first time since that night three years ago, you look him in the eyes. you knew jay loved music. it traveled in his veins and pumped his blood, but he wasn’t too sure on pursuing it. you were always trying to get him to go further with his music, although he never quite got there.

“what’s it about?”

“oh um,” jay sheepishly rubs his nape. “it’s about you.”

you swear time slows and jay stops and turns fully to look at you. your breath hitches, yet he continues. “i was losing my head over you and needed to get it out.” 

“look y/n, it’s really great to see you again, and all i’ve done is think about you for the past three years.” jay steps forward, closer to you. “but i can give you time and space, just let me know if you want to talk things out, because i still love you.” there’s a fond smile on his lips as he opens your hand and places a small crumpled piece of paper, written in messy handwriting his new number and,

“i’ll always be here.”

[serafilms]

song 23! try hard (5sos) + park sunghoon (spotify wrapped event)

she’s so out of reach, and i’m finding it hard ‘cause she makes me feel, makes me feel, like i try, like i try, like i’m trying too hard

happy birthday sunghoon! wrote this one especially without being requested because 23 is his jersey number and i wanted to celebrate him today :) hope he has the best day + year

Today starts out just like any other: Sunghoon wakes up thinking of you. Actually, technically his first thought was ‘Wow, I’m one year older today,’ but his next thought was about whether or not you’d wish him a happy birthday, so it still counts.

He checks his phone and fights his disappointment when he doesn’t see a text from you. Instead, he’s flooded both in the group chat and his private messages with well wishes. He sends polite ‘Thank you’s’ to his relatives, tells the guys to ‘fuck off’ in their group chat, and laughs at Jake’s very lengthy and emotional private text, which Sunghoon is sure his friend cried while writing.

Riki facetimes him seconds after seeing that he’s awake and tells him he’d better have his house ready for their joint birthday party tonight.

“Seriously, if your backyard is a mess when I get there, I’m going to clog your toilet so people piss in the yard and then you have to clean everything properly.” Ah, what an angel. “Happy birthday, by the way.”

“Thanks, Riki.”

Then the younger hangs up, leaving a promise that he and the others will arrive before lunch for their planned ‘pre-party group only birthday pizza party’ and to help set up for the ‘real party.’ Sunghoon looks around his bedroom. It’s a little messy, because he lives in it so of course it is, but he knows the rest of his house is in order.

He already obsessively panic cleaned the whole place three days ago, when Jay confirmed that he’d sent you an invite. Man, he hopes you show up tonight. Not that he cares that much, of course (he cares very, very much). Because caring too much is bad, Sunghoon thinks. He can’t show his weakness, even when he is extremely weak. He wonders if he really has gone too far in his delusions and might now be descending into madness.

You care about him, or at least he thinks so, but you always seem so far above him, out of reach (“Is Y/N out of my league?” he asked once, chewing on his burger. “Yes,” chorused his friends. Lovely).

Sunghoon sighs and looks around at his room then begins to clean it up. He can’t have you seeing this mess (not that he’s being presumptuous in assuming you will be in his room or anything! This is Purely Hypothetical).

It’s only after he’s finished, and opened his presents from his family, and received the cake that his mother had delivered for him and the guys to enjoy that he finally opens the door and sees their faces.

Jake immediately tackles him in a hug, and Sunghoon feels like he can’t breathe as he squeezes him and shakes him around. His chest warms with happiness though, and through Jake’s shaking he glimpses Jungwon, Riki and Sunoo in front of him. Jake finally releases him and speaks.

“Sorry we’re late! We stopped for churros.”

Sunghoon furrows his brow. “You brought churros for the party?”

“No, I wanted churros,” Sunoo says, then takes a big bite. “Wan’ some?”

“I’m good,” he replies.

Riki pats Sunghoon on the back, then barges past him into the house and immediately begins examining it like some sort of teenage home inspector.

“Happy birthday,” says Sunoo, then follows Riki inside and immediately throws himself on the couch to finish his churro.

Jungwon repeats the sentiment then adds, “Jay and Heeseung are picking up the drinks and pizzas, they’ll be here soon.”

Thank god I made friends with Jay all those years ago, Sunghoon thinks, feeling very touched, Who else is rich enough to fund their friend’s birthday party?

“Very cool,” he replies, then drags Jungwon and Jake inside.

The other two arrive soon after and they enjoy a nice party without interruption for about 20 minutes until Sunghoon checks his phone and feels himself frown at it being void of notifications.

Are you busy, or did you forget his birthday? Do you just not care about him? If so, you should. He wore ripped jeans to impress you. He bleached his hair in the hopes you’d notice him (though that was also because he lost a bet with Jay). Is he just trying too hard?

“What’s up with you?” Heeseung asks him as he slaps a slice of pizza on top of another to make what is effectively a pizza sandwich.

“Nothing,” he mumbles.

Riki snatches his phone out of his hands and looks at the screen, where Sunghoon’s texts with you are open. “He’s pissy his girlfriend hasn’t texted him yet.”

“She’s not my girlfriend,” Sunghoon says sadly, and Jake gives him a pat on the back in consolation.

“Don’t even stress,” says Sunoo airily. Sunghoon doesn’t like how unaffected he seems. Shouldn’t everyone wallow in his despair with him since it’s his birthday?

The younger continues, “I asked her yesterday and she said she’ll definitely be here. So we just need to make sure you look super hot tonight.”

He feels a flicker of hope arise in him.

“It’ll probably take a lot of work, but we’ve got time.”

The flicker sizzles and dies. He glowers at Sunoo. “Gee, thanks.”

However, true to his word, Sunoo makes sure that Sunghoon does look super hot. It’s actually insane how hot he looks. He admires himself in the mirror. Maybe being a try hard isn’t such a bad thing if he ends up looking as gorgeous as this.

The party starts without a hitch and is soon in full swing. His friends are all starting to get very drunk (except Jungwon and Riki, because Riki is waiting until midnight for the sake of integrity and Jungwon is a Good friend who is waiting with him) and Sunghoon feels himself getting a little cloudy minded too. But as he stumbles a little through the hall, he still can’t see you.

But there is someone who looks just like you at the end of the hall and in the kitchen right now. He walks towards them, squinting a little and hearing them laugh and say goodbye to someone who’s evidently leaving the kitchen. Wow, they even sound like you. As he enters the room, the person perks up and greets him, and when he blinks the blurriness out of his eyes, you appear in front of him.

Oh. “Hi Y/N,” Sunghoon says, flushing.

“Hey Sunghoon, happy birthday.” God, your smile is pretty. Your outfit is pretty too, and your hair and your face and your hands, where…

There’s a wrapped box in your hands, and you follow his gaze down to it, then start in surprise as if just remembering it. “Oh, yeah, this is for you! Where should I put it?”

Sunghoon is still trying to comprehend that you’re really here and talking to him as he tells you, “Just on the table is fine.”

Okay. This is his chance. Now or never. “Do you want to go to the backyard for a bit? I need some air.”

Maybe he’s hallucinating a little because of the alcohol (or delusion) but he swears you blush. “Sure.”

You follow him out to the back. He’s surprisingly steady for someone who’s had as many drinks as he has, and stops out on the back porch, turning to face you.

You clear your throat as he tries to get his pounding heart under control. “So how’s your day been so far?”

He can hear it beating in his eardrums, and hopes you can’t hear it too. “Yeah, good, good. Um, can’t really complain. I ate pizza.”

Sunghoon is really not sure what to say now. But apparently the alcohol in his system does, as he’s speaking before he’s even processed the words.

“Can I kiss you?” he says at the same time as you say, “I have another present for you.”

The both of you stare at each other for a moment, not having heard the other’s words. “What?” you ask.

Sunghoon feels his stomach churn and hears an alarm go off in his head. “Um, it’s nothing. You go first.”

You look away shyly for a second. Yep, you’re definitely blushing, he thinks. “I said I have another present for you. I was kind of waiting for the right time to give it to you.”

He’s surprised, if nothing else. “You didn’t have to get me two presents.”

He’s also curious. “So what is it?”

“Can you close your eyes?” You’re avidly avoiding his gaze.

Sunghoon obeys, and the darkness behind his eyes makes him all the more aware of the sound of his heart. He’s nervous and scared and anxious and frightened, and then all of it is melting away because your lips press themselves to his and you’re kissing him. You’re kissing him, and he’s kissing you. Sunghoon’s stomach flutters and he brings his hands to your waist. It’s a very good kiss, and he can taste a little bit of cake on your tongue as it deepens.

Then you’re pulling back and Sunghoon is metaphorically and literally breathless. You kissed him. He kissed you.

“Happy birthday, Sunghoon.”

Sunghoon’s face breaks out into a grin and he takes your hand, lacing your fingers together. He tugs you into his chest and looks down at you. “Thanks.”

And he kisses you again.

[icy-watch]

Well, that was certainly an ending to a season.

I can tell what inspired the Hageman Brothers for the ending of Rise of the Titans (2021). It’s pretty much the same ending beat for beat.

I'm not really sure what I was expecting, but it wasn't that.

I really don't have too many thoughts on the finale, it's mostly just "at least this was the ending to the season, and not an entire series". Was it the best? No. Was it the worst? No. Just meh.

Had I seen this 2 or 3 years ago, I might have felt differently, but RotT really did a number on me. (If you haven't seen any of the Tales of Arcadia series, please consider yourself lucky. It started off very well but ended Badly.)

I'm glad the the sky pirates turned out to be pretty ok in the end. I really grew to actually like them. I'm going to be sad if they don't show up again.

And Echo! Oh, gosh Echo. Sweet baby boy. I loved the little bit of time we got with him. I hope he comes back again.

I haven't looked to see what the next season will be called yet, but I'm hoping we learn more about the previous Elemental Masters. We've been getting a little bit here and there, but it feel like there's more to their story than we've been told so far.

Tomorrow, I'll be watching the Day of the Departed, and maybe the Wu's Teas shorts, if I can find those. Until tomorrow!

@ninjamelissajulien

Below the cut are the predictions I got right and wrong.

Correct

The ninja will be caught at some point by the po-po. And get thrown in a jail cell with one bed.

Nadakhan will pick them off one by one.

The wedding is inevitable. It sure was something.

Mutiny from the crew. Better late than never.

Jay will recruit Echo Zane to help him rescue everyone. He did and he got more friends.

I'm going to cry bc of the wedding thing and everything surrounding that. I cry at things very easily, so this wasn't really a surprise on my end.

Incorrect

Cole will get cured of being a ghost this season. He sure didn't.

Pixal will get a new body. RIP queen.

Nadakhan is going to use Wu to draw out the ninja and make them retrieve the Realm Crystal. This is such a great AU idea.

Going The Mummy (1959 & 1999) route to raise a loved one from the dead -- to bring back Delara. She was brought back via wish, not an entire sacrificial ceremony.

Nadakhan will be trapped in the sword once he's defeated. *disappointed noises*

Flintlocke had a thing for Delara. I'm actually surprised that this wasn't a little subplot. It actually felt like something they would have done.

Jay will be forced to help piece Djinjago together. There were other plans.

Cole, Nya, and Lloyd are going to spend the whole episode planning on how to save Jay. The used that time to try to leave the island. I completely forgot that was something they needed to do in order to even start planning for a rescue mission.

Ronin will help in the rescue mission for Jay. He really didn't.

Jay knowing the ins and outs of the Keep will help them navigate their rescue mission. Yeah. He did all that cleaning for nothing.

Flintlocke swiped the poison and the dart from Clancee. Clancee told Jay where he hid it.

Partially

No one from the Cursed Realm will come back. Sort of? Clouse wasn't in the Cursed Realm when it collapsed, but he was a resident there for a while.

They won't lock Misako up. The didn't even get a chance to finish questioning her before she was kidnapped by Nadakhan.

Kai will be needed to collect the Tiger Widow Venom, and without him the team will struggle. They did struggle without him, but I'm not sure how much help he would have been given the circumstances.

We're going to learn how Jay lost his eye. Sort of? But not really.

[boyfridged]

hey! i absolutely adore your work! the robin jay that lives in my heart is most closely only reflected in your work and in the work of a few of my friends. he lives in barr's run, some other issues here and there and means the world to me. he's been my pillar for 7 years now almost. i don't think i'll ever cherish a character in comics as much as i do him. thank you for expressing your love for him so wholeheartedly on this hellsite <3 now, with that being said. DONT READ ROBIN LIVES #4. DONT DO THAT TO YOURSELF. DONT EVER TOUCH IT. JUST. IT MADE ME MORE NAUSEAOUS THAN ZDARSKY'S CHEER WHICH WAS SO HORRENDOUS ITSELF I WAS GOING TO DRINK A FORMALDEHYDE MERCURY CONCOCTION. now. this. this. THIS. THIS. THIS??? MAKES ME FEEL LIKE A STONE AGE BARBARIAN IN NEED TO PICK UP STONES AND A LONG STICK AND START KILLING PEOPLE. I can't even begin to describe it. Botulinum toxin, one of the most poisonous biological substances known, is a neurotoxin produced by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum. Issue 4 was equivalent to that. I died facing all the symptoms of it. My ghost sends you tons of love <3 your work is beautiful, willing to wait around 50 years for the fic series you and noa are working on <33 do not die as i did <33 thank you, dear <33

hi!

almost 7 years! jason todd veterans, unite... he's been my favourite character for more than a decade, and i sometimes get terribly bored seeing all the fandom talking points recycled and dc writers competing to do the worst. so it's wonderful to know some people who are interested in my ramblings have also been around for a while... we're in this hell together.

unfortunately your warning came too late. and i can only agree with your classification. i was expecting to be disappointed, but even i did not think it would end with that sort of vapid cliche...

thank you for your sweet words! i hope i will somehow find more time to write and deliver... the failures of dc are at least somewhat motivating. they remind me what jason content i would actually like to see (and there's no way for it to come to be but to write it.)

[boydepartment]

Enhypen as Taylor Swift songs

THIS HAS SCENARIOS W THEM MATCHING THE SONG TOO

fun fact abt me, i sang taylor swift in my schools talent show as a kid <3 i love taylor swift still foerfnerjkge

MASTERLIST

Jungwon as New Romantics-

You probably ran into Jungwon at a coffee shop or something cliche like that. You both are busy people but you want to be crazy and still feel young and stupid. Both you and Jungwon will sneak out of your dorms and do late night walks which end up into races to the random playgrounds. You don't need expensive things to show love for each other, and that means the world to the both of you. Jungwon promises to himself one day he will show everyone how much he loves you.

Heeseung as Everything Has Changed-

You've known Heeseung for years. A lot of time spent training super late at night. All that work has gone to something though- both your debuts. Everything changed from late night ramen to waves from across the red carpet. He still feels like home to you, just like you feel like home to him. But everything has changed and you weren't predebut anymore, you were idols who now had boundaries. You weren’t kids anymore with a dream, you were adults who still build up their dreams.

Jay as Love Story-

In this case, you are Romeo, he is Juliet. He is PROTECTED by his parents heavily. You've known this since you were kids and you accidentally smacked him with a soccer ball. They want the best for him and they did not see you fit. Jay was a prince to everyone but you. That bothered his parents, but Jay loved it. He loved how you teased him and poked fun at him. Jay loved being able to tease you in the kitchen when something messed up. He wanted to marry you more than anything, so he was thrilled when you asked him after practically begging his parents to finally give you a chance to love their son forever.

Jake as Fearless-

im biased i am so sorry-

Oh boy okay. You did not have any good experiences with romance. You did not know how things were supposed to go, he had no clue either but Jake will always act like he does! You are both terrified that you are going to do something wrong, neither of you ever do though. After a really important test, he drove to a secluded area, Jake knew you were stressed. This was both your spot you’d go to think. You were unsure of everything, did you fail? Are you going to disappoint your parents? Did all that work Jake did to help you study go to waste? You were ranting wildly. When you finally stopped to breathe and he leaned in to kiss you. All your fears washed away. Everything felt right, everything was going to be okay.

Sunghoon as Back to December-

He pushed you away, Sunghoon didn't mean to and he didn't even really want to. Life just got in the way and he felt like he was holding you both back. No matter how much time passed by though, he was still in love with you. No amount of time will make that go away. So here he is, calling you back to meet at the tree where you both first met. You started laughing when a pile of snow fell on him, he will never forget that day in December. Sunghoon is hoping as you stand in front of him, now in the summer heat that you will take him back. He is hoping you still have the same feelings you harbored for him Back in December.

Sunoo as The Way I Loved You-

You used to tease him a lot, he used to do the same to you as well. It was a mutual teasing. Everyone didn't see it like that though, and they blamed you (sound familiar?) You pulled back from being around him even behind closed doors. You truly believed that you were in the wrong here. Never in your life would you be malicious towards him. People made you believe that you were horrible. Sunoo was totally in love with you, and he missed that fire you used to have. He missed you teasing him. Sunoo just MISSED you.

Ni-Ki as Mean-

Whenever Riki would have people being horrible to him. You always reminded him that he was going to end up being successful while they are going to be stuck being miserable. You were always there to bring him up, so when he finally made it. Riki made sure to never forget your advice. Even when you both haven't talked since you were both kids, he still remembers the way you were always there to remind him to stay confident. You watch from the sidelines proudly.

[to-the-stars8]

Learning to Love Slowly

Jason Todd x Reader All Chapters AO3

45-Phone Calls and Roses

Jason watched as you fingered the petals of the roses he had brought you with a sweet smile. Casually, he put his arm around you and scooted closer, braving the sense of anxiety that came with him making the first move. When your eyes looked up at him through your lashes he felt something in his heart and dick (something he would not be proud to admit). 

“You look really pretty tonight, Jay,” You said cutely. 

He chuckled, looking away because, damn, he was supposed to lead with something cute like that. It was amazing how well you managed to disarm him. Again, before he could say something, you pressed a feather-light kiss to his lips. “You treat me so well, honeybee.”

“Well, uh,” Jason choked. Fuck, the way you were looking at him would definitely be something he’d jerk off to later. “You know I’d do anything for you.”

Like you had done it a thousand times, you maneuvered your way onto his lap, straddling him and leaving the roses behind on the couch. “Anything?”

“Yeah—yeah, of course.”

You looked down at his lips, making him think that you were going to kiss him, but instead sat back on his thighs. He was going to say something—of course, he was, but he when your fingers traced the armor of his suit. The wheels were turning in your head, Jason could see it so clearly, and he wanted to know what you were planning. Yet, he knew he couldn’t drag this out any longer, no matter how much he wanted to.

“Babe,” He said. 

“Yes, my darling?”

“I’d love to do whatever the hell you’re thinking—”

Your smile gave him such happiness. “Then let’s do it. Right here, honey. I don’t think I can wait.”

Jason was practically in tears on the inside because he was so excited to do whatever you wanted. Unfortunately, with his amount of luck, Bruce’s name popped up on his phone as the call rang through the air loud. The sound must have dried up whatever desire was there because you moved off his lap with a groan. 

When he glanced over at you before hanging up the phone to talk to you. You were more important right now, Bruce could wait. He moved his body to lean over yours, capturing your wrists in his hands. 

“I hate this as much as you do, but—” The phone started to ring again, and Jason glanced at it before continuing to ignore it. “Once I get back. I promise.”

“Jason,” You cooed. “You’ve been late before. You can’t stand to be late this one time?”

It was tempting to just say fuck it, but he promised Bruce. “I can’t. I’m sorry, sweetheart.”

You sighed, disappointed. “It’s okay. Just know, once you get back you’re using that pretty tongue on me…if you feel comfortable with that.”

Jason grinned. “I think I’ve had a dream or two about doing that.”

[sooniessoulmate]

𝔥𝔞𝔩𝔩𝔰 𝔬𝔣 𝔥𝔞𝔡𝔢𝔰 - 𝔠𝔥.13 - 𝔪𝔲𝔩𝔱𝔦-𝔰𝔱𝔞𝔫 𝔰𝔢𝔯𝔦𝔢𝔰

𝔠𝔥𝔞𝔭𝔱𝔢𝔯 13 : 𝔦'𝔪 𝔫𝔬𝔱 𝔧𝔢𝔞𝔩𝔬𝔲𝔰

𝔠𝔥.12 | 𝔪𝔞𝔰𝔱𝔢𝔯𝔩𝔦𝔰𝔱 | 𝔠𝔥.14

“That’s just…” Y/N started.

“So romantic, right?” Ryujin interrupted. “I told you he was in total love with me.”

“But Ryujin, he used you, fed on you, killed you, then forced you to kill your best friend,” Y/N argued.

“Yea I was there,” Ryujin snarled. “But he did all of those things so we could be together forever.”

“I don’t know,” Y/N sighed.

“You can think what you want but I know the truth,” Ryujin snapped. “We’re madly in love and I’m starting to think you just might be jealous.”

“I’m not jealous,” Y/N argued. 

Ryujin looked up at Y/N with her eyes black, “tell me the truth, do you have a thing for Jay?”

“Oh my god NO,” Y/N gasped. 

“You better not be lying,” Ryujin snarled.

“I swear I’m not lying,” Y/N said, with a high pitched voice, hoping her roommate would take her word.

“Good because friends don’t like their friend’s boyfriends,” Ryujin stated as her eyes went back to normal.

Y/N smiled, “we’re friends?”

“Of course we are,” Ryujin returned her smile. “It’s starting to get late, maybe we should try to get some sleep, we have a big day tomorrow.”

“We do?” Y/N wondered.

“Tomorrow is our annual carnival and then its the masquerade ball,” Ryujin explained. “Speaking of that, have you figured out who sent that dress to you?”

Y/N let out a sigh of disappointment, “no nobody has said anything about it to me.”

“I asked Jay about it and he didn’t know anything so I don’t know either,” Ryujin sighed. 

“I guess we’ll just have to wait and see who shows up under the clock,” Y/N said.

“It’s kind of romantic though,” Ryujin smiled. “Don’t you think?”

“I mean, maybe,” Y/N nodded. “Under normal circumstances I would probably think it’s a little romantic but lately nothing good seems to happen so I kind of think it’s a little nerve racking.”

“You’re just being paranoid,” Ryujin sighed. “Now let’s get some sleep. You look like you could really use some beauty rest.”

“Thanks alot,” Y/N laughed, getting up off of her bed to go to the bathroom to get dressed in her pajamas.

When she returned to the room, Ryujin already appeared to be asleep. She was hoping she would have the same luck and be able to fall asleep rather quickly too. Her anxiety did seem to loosen up and she was no longer on the verge of having a mental breakdown. She crawled into bed, thoughts racing through her mind as she slowly drifted off to sleep. 

Halfway through the night, Y/N heard someone whispering over by her roommate’s bed, disturbing her peaceful sleep. She rolled over, only slightly opening one eye, wanting to still appear to be asleep.

Jay was sitting on Ryujin’s bed, gently moving her hair out of her face. “Baby wake up,” he whispered.

Ryujin opened her eyes, smiling once she saw Jay in her bed. “Jay,” she said. “I missed you.”

“I missed you too,” Jay sighed, smiling. 

Ryujin lifted the covers up, scooching over to make room for the boy to crawl in. “Get in,” she offered.

“No,” Jay stated. “Not here.”

“Why not?” Ryujin wondered, confused.

“I’m gonna make you scream and I don’t want the audience,” Jay explained with a smirk on his face. “I have something special for you.”

“Ooooh what?” Ryujin asked excitedly, sitting straight up in bed.

Jay lightly caressed her face with his hand, “come with me and I’ll give it to you.”

“Ok,” Ryujin smiled.

“That’s my girl,” Jay said, standing up and placing his hand out for Ryujin to grab.

Ryujin didn’t hesitate, she placed her hand into Jay’s and they disappeared out of the room just as quickly as Jay first appeared.

Y/N shook her head while rubbing her eyes, turning over to attempt to go back to sleep when Jungwon appeared out of the shadows.

“Y/N,” he whispered, causing her to nearly jump out of the bed. “Calm down, it's just me.”

Once Y/N realized who was in her room, she scowled, “what do you want?”

“I’m sorry,” Jungwon sighed. “If I hurt your feelings in any way, I’m sorry.”

“If?” Y/N repeated. “That’s a really shitty apology.”

“You know you hurt my feelings too,” he snapped.

“What are you talking about?” Y/N said. “I didn’t do anything to you. You’re the one who decided to make out with another girl right in front of me.”

“I only did that because you decided to go on a lunch date with that wolf,” Jungwon snarled, trying not to let his emotions get the best of him.

“It wasn’t a lunch date,” Y/N argued. “I was so upset about things and he was just being nice to me. Felix is my friend.”

“I don’t like you being friends with wolves,” Jungwon announced. 

“Well that's too bad because you don’t get to tell me who i can and can’t be friends with,” Y/N snapped.

Jungwon sat down alongside Y/N on her bed, “I wasn’t trying to tell you that.”

“It kind of sounded like you were,” Y/N argued. “And then you punished me for not listening.”

“I’m just trying to look out for you,” Jungwon snapped. “Felix is the worst of them wolves.”

“Why do you even care?” Y/N asked.

“Well I… I… I kind of… well you’re my friend,” Jungwon sighed.

“Oh,” Y/N said, looking down at her hands a little disappointed.

“What’s wrong?” Jungwon asked, lifting Y/N’s chin up with his hand, forcing her to look at him. “You seem a little disappointed.”

“No,” Y/N denied. “It’s not disappointment, I’m not sure what it is though.”

“Maybe this will help clear things up,” Jungwon smirked, leaning in and pressing his lips firmly against hers.

Y/N instinctively kissed him back, but forced herself to stop and pushed him away.

“Jungwon stop that,” she ordered. “I’m not going to be your toy.”

“What are you talking about?” Jungwon snarled.

“I don’t want to be like Ryujin. I am not going to be into you only to have you play with my emotions every chance you get,” Y/N snapped.

Jungwon let out a little chuckle, “is that what you think happens between Ryujin and Jay?” he asked.

“Yea she told me how he turned her and that’s just awful. He uses her and she’s too blinded by love to see it,” Y/N argued.

“You are sadly mistaken,” Jungwon smiled. “Jay loves her too. He just shows it in his own way.”

“That’s what she says too, but I’m not stupid and I have eyes,” Y/N sighed. “I see how he treats her. You don’t treat someone you love like that.”

“Did she tell you what happened after he turned her?” Jungwon asked.

“How he made her kill her best friend? Yes, she did tell me that,” Y/N snapped. “And that’s just sick.”

“No, not that part,” Jungwon said. “The part about her dad?”

Y/N stared at Jungwon, without saying a word and shook her head no.

“I didn’t think so,” Jungwon smiled. “Ryujin was worried about her dad not knowing where she got to. So Jay took her to see him. When they walked in and he saw her with a boy he lost his shit. He started degrading her and calling her everything under the sun which made Ryujin upset and forced her to cry. Even though her father treated her awful her entire life, it was still her father and she loved him and wanted him to love her in return. Jay couldn’t stand seeing her hurt by this man. He killed him out of rage and this binded the two forever.”

“Jay killed her father?” Y/N repeated.

“Jay has a weird way of showing his feelings but honestly he does love Ryujin and would never let anything bad ever happen to her,” Jungwon explained.

“But he treats her awful,” Y/N insisted.

“That’s only in public,” Jungwon continued. “He doesn’t like anyone to know that he has a soft side but when they’re alone, it’s completely different.”

“He doesn’t even admit they are dating,” Y/N pointed out.

“He doesn’t have to,” Jungwon added. “Everyone knows they are and knows not to disrespect his girl otherwise they’ll have to pay the consequences.”

“Is that what you want with me?” Y/N asked, instantly regretting letting those words slip out of her mouth.

Jungwon laughed, “what do you mean?”

“Do you only want to be nice to me when we’re alone and then ignore me and treat me like shit in public,” Y/N explained.

“Not at all,” Jungwon smiled. “But to be honest, I don’t have a real answer of what I actually want.”

“That’s not enough for me,” Y/N sighed.

Jungwon ignored her words, leaning in and briefly pressing his lips against hers again.

“I think I might like you,” Jungwon whispered. “And I think we should explore those feelings.”

“This isn’t how we should be doing that,” Y/N argued.

“What do you mean?” Jungwon smiled. “This is the best way I know to explore any feelings.”

He pushed Y/N down onto her bed, laying on top of her body, kissing her once more. He pulled away, gently placing a strand of hair behind her ear. “But I’ll respect you, if you’re not ready,” he whispered.

Y/N wanted to say she was, but she knew that this whole situation was wrong. It didn’t matter that her body was screaming at her to say yes, it didn’t matter that her heart was saying yes. Her mind knew she had to be smart and if he was serious then he would be ok to wait for every part of her to be on board.

Y/N shook her head, “Jungwon this isn’t right. I can’t do this.”

Jungwon sighed, leaning down and kissing her once more before disappearing out of her room, leaving her alone in her bed.

𝔭𝔯𝔢𝔳 🌕 𝔪𝔞𝔰𝔱𝔢𝔯𝔩𝔦𝔰𝔱 🌕 𝔫𝔢𝔵𝔱

𝔱𝔞𝔤𝔩𝔦𝔰𝔱 𝔬𝔭𝔢𝔫

[sydsaint]

Love my goofball headbanger 💜💚🤟🤘🤟

Summary: The reader starts to lose it after Jay and so many others have left her. But Riley reminds her that he's still around, and he's there to stay.

It's late into the evening when you catch Jay packing his bags in the locker rooms. Confused about where he's going with all his stuff when it should be at the hotel, you confront him.

"Jay?" You catch his attention. "What do you have all your stuff packed up for?" You ask him.

"Y/N." Jay freezes and turns around to face you. "I didn't know that you'd be here, love." He chuckles nervously.

You nod, still confused about what Jay is doing here. "Yeah. But again, are we going somewhere and you forgot to tell me?" You ask him again.

"Not exactly," Jay replies. "Y/N...I'm catching a flight back home." He explains.

"Back home?" You reply. "What? But what about work? Is this about the thing with Hikuleo? Because we can't just give up now." You insist.

Jay shakes his head, clearly not on the same page as you are. "I lost the damn match, Y/N. What the hell else do you want me to do?" Jay raises his voice at you, hands balled into fists at his sides.

"I want you to fight!" You shout back at him, face red with anger. "What? Hikuleo beats you once and you just give up? That's not the Jay White that I know."

Jay scoffs, his ego getting the better of him. "Whatever. I'm Jay White, I do what I want." He insists.

"Well excuse me, mister high and mighty." You sneer back at him. "But I was under the impression that running away like a little bitch wasn't something that 'Switchblade' Jay White was capable of."

"Oh, screw off, Y/N." Jay's fists tighten at his sides. "I'm leaving, and that's the end of it. And If you want to stick around just to hold onto what little sliver of nostalgia for how things used to be, well that's your problem. But I'm done." He turns on his heels and storms off.

"Coward!" You shout back at him as he walks off.

You stare until Jay is out of sight, then your anger slowly begins to fade into disappointment and sadness. You were sure that if you pushed him enough, then Jay would stay. He's always been stubborn. But not this time.

Defeated, you head back to the hotel. When you get to your room, Riley is back from the gym and waiting for you and Jay to return. "Hey, Y/N. There you are." Riley greets you when you come through the door. "Where's Jay at? I texted him like four times, but he won't answer me."

"Jay's gone." You reply, emotion absent from your tone as you walk over to your bed.

"Gone?" Riley replies. "Well, when is he going to be back?" He asks you.

Anger starts to well back up in your throat. You whirl around to Riley red in the face again. "Damnit, Riley! He's gone! Gone, okay!" You shout. "...And he's not coming back."

Riley flinches slightly at your outburst. But he's seldom seen you angry before. Especially not like this. "Oh." He replies to your outburst quietly with a nod.

"Riley..." You look at him with an apologetic look on your face. "I'm sorry." You sigh. "I...It's just. Why? Why'd he have to go? Why does everyone always end up leaving me?" You finally break down and fall back onto your bed in total defeat.

"Awe, Y/N." Riley hesitantly walks over to your bed and sits down on the edge of it. He sets a gentle hand on your leg, afraid that you might get the wrong idea and snap at him again. "Jay's a cunt for leaving." He attempts to make you feel better. "They all are. But you're not alone, okay? I'm still here, aren't I?"

You sniffle and slowly rise back into a sitting position. Riley remains in place at the end of your bed with a sympathetic smile on his face. "You're planning on leaving too, aren't you?" You shake your head. "I know that you and Finlay have never gotten along." You remind him.

"Leave?" Riley snorts in an attempt to lighten the mood. "Are you kidding me? I'm your ride-or-die, sweetheart. You can't get rid of me that easily, Y/N." He teases you. A hint of a smile creeps onto your face at Riley's joke and he chuckles. "There's that pretty smile."

Riley reaches forward and lifts your chin with his thumb gently so you're looking him in the face. "I've got your back, baby. Always." He promises you.

"Promise?" You reply sheepishly.

"Til death do us part" Riley nods and before you know it, he's leaning in.

Your eyes flutter shut and you feel Riley's soft lips on yours, his stubble tickling your face. You lean forward a bit and Riley pulls you into his chest gently.

"What would I do without you, Riley?" You sigh into his neck.

"Be very very sad." Riley jokes and kisses the top of your head. "Now don't you worry about David Finlay. I can handle that maniac. All you need to worry about is you and me, baby." He assures you.

You lean back up straight with a small smile on your face. Riley reaches up and wipes a stray tear from your cheek with a cheeky grin. "Screw them all, right?" You giggle. "It's the great El Phantasmo and Y/N against the world."

"You know it, gorgeous!" Riley chuckles and leans forward for another kiss.

[i-spaced-sorry]

Running Towards Something

I have this headcanon (that @gregorygerwitz helped me flesh out! ) So the headcanon is that Jay fell into the wrong crowd growing up and maybe was picked up a few times before an Army Recruiter spoke to his class in high school and changed the trajectory of his life. 

From that: This one shot was born! Hope you enjoy.... I put it under the cut! It does touch vaguely on his mom’s Cancer and has tiny other headcanons included like: I think Will didn’t really party or hang with the wrong crowd til college when he was out of Canaryville. I think the dad worked in construction. I think the mom had cancer when Jay was a kid, but maybe it was more agressive when he was an adult.

To Jay, growing up on the South Side of Chicago meant that you either stuck your head in a book or were an athlete and got out when you turned 18 and never looked back; or you fell into the wrong crowd and felt stuck in the cycle forever. Jay knew from day one which route his older brother, Will, had taken. But what he hadn’t realized - until it was too late, was he took route two. 

At first it started with petty crimes, like shoplifting a candy bar from the 7/11 down the street. Then it was pickpocketing the poor sucker on the ‘L’ who kept their wallet in their back pocket exposed. Somewhere between the time his dad took on more hours at his construction job and his mom making frequent trips to the hospital, he began pocketing more “big ticket” items, like the time he and his “friends” decided to steal from 5 different high end stores on Michigan Avenue during the Festival of Lights Parade. Sometime around this time, the police started picking him up and returning him to his home in Canaryville. He can still remember the disappointment etched on his mother’s  face when the police showed up for the 5th time that week and claimed the next time he would spend the weekend in Juvie. 

It didn’t click that maybe just maybe he was on the wrong path, until one day an Army recruiter came and spoke to the junior class about a career in the Army. They claimed that most kids from the South Side are running from something and they should try running towards  something for a change. They talked about how the Army can provide  underprivileged kids with the means to go to college. The words that clicked for Jay were ‘run towards something’. Jay didn’t see college as a viable option for himself, since he had spent his days, since middle school, reeking havoc on the streets. Will was much better suited for the lifestyle of college anyway. 

When Jay’s 3 year enlistment contract came up, he had fallen in love with the job! He had found friends who had accepted him and his flaws. He really did feel like he had a sense of purpose - he had climbed his way up to an elite Ranger! - and he felt like he was making a difference in the world around him. So it was no surprise when he re-enlisted for an additional 3 years. 

When tragedy struck and he and Mouse were the only survivors from their IED Humvee accident, he was forced to come home on a medical discharge. He felt lost. He found himself back on his childhood home couch - they had converted his bedroom into a healing space for his mom, who was going through round 2 of the big C and was unfortunately terminal this time around. -  He found himself turning to drugs, alcohol, and sex to help fill the void in his heart. 

As much as he enjoyed his little bender, what he was truly missing was on the tip of his tongue, he just refused to let it out. Until one day he was on an ‘L’ platform in the city, when he saw a sign advertising the Chicago Police Force. Their tag line was ‘have a purpose and make a difference in your community.’ Reading those 2 lines, is what made it click for him! The next day - after he was sober for more than 24 hours - he walked into the 21st district and applied for the Academy. 

He had been a detective for over 10 years! In the most elite unit. He had slowly been losing the purpose that gave him a drive everyday to come to work and go home to his wife. He felt himself slipping and losing a sense of who he was. So it was no surprise when a case revolving around an ex Military Veteran, he would get attached. He learned that there was a spot open for someone to lead a team of enlistees. The last time he felt a genuine sense of ‘purpose’ was when he was in the Army. So it was a no brainer when he signed up and shipped out to find who he once was.

On the plane ride there, he thought back through his life and realized that the Army recruiter had saved him that day. He propelled his whole life in a new trajectory with the few simple words ‘run towards something not away from something’ 

[whats-wild-to-you]

“do u even love me” angst (the girl says it)

with a reconciliation plz 👉🏻👈🏻

I knew you was spoiled by Jay when he was with me everyday. I had convinced myself it was by choice even though I knew the pandemic was to blame for it. But once he started traveling, he was away a lot. I felt bad in the beginning, wishing he’d ask me to join him.

The trips had gotten longer too. While initially he traveled in and out of a country in less than 24 hours, he now stayed away for days. I hated it, acting like a spoiled little girl, but only because I missed him. He didn’t seem to know. Or care.

‘I have to do this! I have a lot to make up for.’ He would then say and change the subject.

I wanted to scream ‘Take me with you!’, but I knew I was being unreasonable.

It had to come from him. And apparently he was completely fine leaving me behind.

Get a grip!, my inner voice said. It’s work! Why would he take you with him?

But when summer rolled around he did exactly that. Adding vacation days to his overseas trips. I felt like an ass for complaining, he absolutely deserved a day or two off but I was mad that it never occurred to him to ask me to come along. My job allowed it so why was he hesitating?

Doubts started bubbling up inside me. Was he not inviting me on purpose? Was he fed up with me, did he need time apart?

All signs pointed to ‘yes’ and I was dreading the confrontation we’d likely had to have.

Clearing my throat to make my presence known, I leaned against the door watching him pack his bags for yet another trip.

“Leaving again?” I tried to mask the disappointment in my voice as he yet again failed to tell me about it in advance.

“I’m going to the States for some business and then I’ll fly to Seattle for a few days. I’ll be gone a week tops.”

I debated with my inner self, then sighed. The irrational, emotional part of me won. “Do you even love me?”

His hands stopped mid-air and he threw the previously neatly folded shirt into his suitcase. He was angry.

“I thought we talked about this. There are certain things I have to do. It’s part of my job.”

“I understand that. But lately it feels like I’m being left out on purpose.”

“I’m sorry if you feel that way, but I can’t stay and soothe your ego right now. I have a flight to catch.”

He zipped up his bags and practically ran out of the room. No hug, no kiss goodbye. I scoffed loudly but even that didn’t phase him.

Hours passed before I realized I had been sitting in the same spot on the bed.

I should just pack my things and leave too. Give him a dose of his own medicine. See how he likes it.

But I couldn’t. I loved him. Even though his own feelings for me might be fading, it didn’t change a thing about my feelings for him.

Curling up into a ball, I cried myself to sleep that night. But the next morning I got out of bed, promising myself to not drown in melancholy. I’d sit down and talk to Jay once he returned. Until then I’d waste no thought on him.

That day came sooner than I expected. He had said he’d be gone for a week, but then returned after four days.

It was already past midnight. I had been unable to fall asleep, as the nights before, so I decided to read something. The familiar melody of the key lock alerted my senses and I sat up on the bed. Then I got out of bed and sat down on the stool of my vanity.

Listening in, I realized he went to the guest bathroom to wash up so he wouldn’t wake me up and something tugged at my heart.

He cares.

I waited until he slowly pushed the door open and mumbled a silent hi when our eyes met.

He kept something hidden behind his back and approached me slowly. When he stood in front of me, he dropped to his knees, revealing what he had hidden behind him.

A giant bouquet of pink and violet flowers appeared an inch away from my face and I hesitantly took it. Jay looked remorseful, but knew that simply looking sorry wouldn’t be enough.

“I’m sorry.”

It wasn’t a blanket apology even though it sounded like one. We both knew exactly what he was apologizing for.

Now it was my turn to admit my wrongs.

“I felt neglected and lashed out. I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry too!”

“You had every right to be mad. I’m an idiot. Please forgive me?”

Although I toyed with the idea of making him wait a little longer, in the end I knew I could stay mad at him.

��Let’s just go to bed.” I said, grabbing his hand. He squeezed my hand and a smile appeared on his face. “I haven’t been sleeping well since you left and I’m exhausted.”

“Me, too!” He whispered while he pulled back the covers.

“How come you’re back early?” I asked, finally nestled in his warm embrace.

“I realized what an idiot I was and took the next flight home.” He said, planting a firm kiss on top of my head. “Sleep now! I have no schedules tomorrow and I plan to spent the day here with you.”

“Here, here? In bed?” I chuckled in delight.

Jay didn’t answer, just hummed after a few seconds and I knew he was drifting off to sleep.

Breathing in his familiar scent, I, too, allowed myself to be lulled into sleep.

[hyunsuks-beanie]

Enhypen Hyung Line Reaction to Their S/O Having Had Worked in the Porn Industry

Tw: Mentions about the porn industry

Mellow speaks: This is my first time writing such a reaction, and while I know all professions are equal as long as they remain legal, I need to say that this topic may be sensitive to quite a few people. So please dni if you're uncomfortable with this, I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. That being said, I hope this meets the expectations of the anon who requested it, and that everyone enjoys reading!! PS. I went with "Having had worked in the porn industry" bc I felt like that would be easier to write. PPS. I'm almost done with my prior requests, so do send some new ones in!

Heeseung

The two of you would probably be watching porn together late at night (A/N: it's scientifically proven to be good for a relationship), when you would suddenly comment on how wrong the portrayal is in the film you're watching. "That's not how you do things," you would say, proceeding to explain the correct way of "doing things" to a very confused Heeseung. Once you're done, he would ask, "How do you know all that?," only to have his mouth fall to the floor when you tell him about having been in the porn industry prior to meeting him.

Don't get him wrong, he definitely wont judge you, but will be a tad bit surprised by the information. He would start feeling nervous about how you could have been disappointed in in sex you have with him all this while, seeing as how he often gets ideas from such films.

You will probably have to reassure him that he's great at pleasuring you, and once he has calmed down, be ready to answer a ton of questions about the industry. He has always been curious about how such films are actually made, and will not rest until you've satisfied his thirst for knowledge.

Jay

He will probably be the most chill about the whole scenario. You would just be going about your day when he randomly comes up to you, showing you a porn video on his laptop. "Isn't this you?," he'd ask, a smirk already visible on his face. When all you do is nod nonchalantly, he will pose his next question. "So when were you gonna tell me?," he smirks, loving the way you get flustered at his teasing. He will be surpringly calm about everything, simply asking you general questions about the time you used to work in the industry.

"So, who was your favorite partner?," would be his next question, the smirk still not leaving his face as he takes in your expression. You, of course, would quickly understand where his curiosity comes from, and will use it to your advantage, telling him about how amazing things used to be back then, and enumerating all the best features of your partners.

Your plan would quickly work, causing him to panic. But he still would do his best to keep up his nonchalant demeanor, only to fail miserably you lean closer to him, whispering in his ear that now, he has become your favorite partner.

Sunghoon

Cheeky as always, the moment Sunghoon comes to know that you used to work in the porn industry, he would start exclaiming about how cool the whole scenario was. "My partner used to work in the porn industry," he'd say, his signature smirk on his face, "Now that's something worth boasting to the guys about." He's only joking of course, with no intention whatsoever of making you uncomfortable. But still, he will say that it must be the reason why sex with you is always so amazing, giggling when he sees you blush.

He too, will keep pestering you with questions, genuinely curious to know the type of work you used to be involved in. "Last question, I swear," he'd say before every question, earning a whack from you every time a new question makes it way past his lips.

Once he's satisfied, he will come up with a new tactic to annoy you, hugging you from behind and bringing his lips closer to yours. "Why don't you teach some new techniques, huh?," he'd whisper, smirking when he feels you shudder.

Jake

He will genuinely be the most confused one at first, thinking that the person he's seeing on his computer screen is a lookalike of yours. You can't blame him though, it's just that the thought of you ever having worked anywhere other than your current field never crossed his mind. He will recover soon though, becoming curious about your past employer. He too, will shower you with questions about your work, taking care not to cross any limits. "You're so much more experienced than I am," he would say, a hint of insecurity in his voice as he looks at you with big eyes.

It will be up to you to reassure him as best as you can, and once he is calm enough, he would get back to his curious self, his questions becoming subdued as he allows you tell him more about your past, the fascination clearly visible in his eyes.

He will probably ask you to teach him more about your favorite positions/techniques, his shyness easily making your heart melt while you tell him about them.