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asahicore · 2 months ago

Text

fast forward - pjs

pairing. jay x fem!reader

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

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

word count. 26.6k

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And that’s your business, because…?”

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

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

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

“I never said that.”

“You didn’t need to.”

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

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

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

“I’m sorry?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t-”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“At least you’re self-aware.”

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

“What are you-”

“Have you done the German homework for tomorrow?”

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

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

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

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

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

Then you see it.

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

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

Your heart sinks to your stomach.

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

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

“Y/N-”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It belongs to none other than Park Jongseong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“This is so good,” you mumble.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hm?”

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

“No. I have… things on my mind.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah.”

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

“...Jong?” you try.

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

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

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

“Will you be here in the morning?”

“Mh-hm. It’s Saturday tomorrow.”

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

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

You let out a shaky breath. “Okay.”

“I love you, Y/N.”

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

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

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

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

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

“What was it about?” Sunoo asks.

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

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

“Exactly!”

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

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

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

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

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

“Nowhere. Go on.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“None taken.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She had a dream that she m—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And your friends wondered why you hated him?

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

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

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

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

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

“No. Stop.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Jong, your textbook.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’re annoyed at how he makes you feel.

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

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

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

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

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

For now, you smile. “Get lost, Jong.”

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

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

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

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

you he’s not just another person!

sunoo okayyyyy i see you little miss repressed feelings

you i hate u

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You frown. “I don’t hate you.”

“Oh? That’s a recent development.”

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

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

“Back to hating.”

“Let’s start the assignment.”

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

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

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

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

“That’s not—”

“Let’s just focus on this.”

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

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

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

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

“Yes, sir,” you reply, embarrassed.

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

“Do you even know what chiaroscuro is?”

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

“Well, maybe if you didn’t-”

“Y/N, Jay, final warning.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sunoo, that’s disgusting.”

“Love? I know.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I never—When?!”

She shrugs. “The other day.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Dude…” Jongseong murmurs.

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

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

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

“Aren’t you cold?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t wanna talk about it.”

sunoo jay and y/n almost kissed earlier

kazuha WHAAAAT

you KIM SUNOO.

kazuha WHEN?????

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

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

kazuha i can’t believe i missed this fml

you YOU DIDNT MISS ANYTHING NOTHING HAPPENED

sunoo be serious u guys we’re standing inches apart

you were* and no we weren’t

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

kazuha sunoo…?

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

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

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

you …

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

kazuha cuuuute

you i resent these accusations.

sunoo istg if u dont kiss him next time i will

kazuha ???

you SUNOO?

sunoo WHAT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Y/N…”

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

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

jong so… guess who got a five-day suspension

you you idiot what did your parents say?

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

you boo-hoo

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

you … are you feeling better?

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

you oh did you ask chaewon to do that?

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

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

jong ykw maybe i should just ask chaewon

you i’ll see you tomorrow jong!!

jong :) see you tomorrow pretty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You smile. “Never.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Give me five minutes!” you call back.

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

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

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

He’s still Jong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In any case, he’s hiding something.

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

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

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

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

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

Your heartbeat speeds up and you have to look away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until you didn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You said so yourself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Did you guys sit next to each other?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, I thought I’d do it now.”

“Now?”

He takes a deep, shaky breath. “Now.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Really?” you repeat, and he chuckles.

“Really.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I think I did, too.”

“Yeah, you mentioned that in your letter.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Fifty years, huh?”

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

“I wasn’t planning to.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You smile. “I am.”

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

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

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taegularities · 3 months ago

Text

colour me in: the starry night | jjk (m)

Summary: You anticipated the trip to Jungkook's hometown with a thrilled yet nervous heart – and upon your arrival, your emotions prove justified: because as the days pass, you realise that gentle joy awaits just as much as ancient pain.

➳ pairing: Jungkook x reader ➳ rating: 18+ ➳ genre: fwb/f2l, fake dating; angst, fluuuuuff, smut ➳ warnings: fluff fluff fluffluffulfufluf, flirting, daddy issues, arguments with his father, his dad is pretty much an ass and almost as bad as oc's mom, but his mom and brother are <3, ria <3, oc being a light in the dark, oc learns many new things, cursing, fighting, a lot of crying/tears, neglect, mental breakdown, panic and anxiety, anger, insecurities, too many mentions of nostalgia lmao, jealousy, mention of therapy, nara, christian yu lmAO, WEDDING TIME!!!, oc is so pretty (that jk loses it), alcohol/drunk stuff, more confrontations, making up, he loves loves loves her, childhood coping mechanisms; explicit sexual content: kissing, making out, oral (f. & m. receiving), teasing, eating out against the wall, bit of wall sex, drunk sex, manhandling omg, impatient koo, big dick!jk, dom!jk but this timeeee also sub!jk lowkey!!, tears of pleasure, masturbation, fingering, handjob for a bit, squirting, creampie, literally their orgasms are a MESS phew it's kinda hot lmao, moany/whiny/super turned on jk; no 'the ending' warning this time… just the whole chapter 🥺 ➳ word count: 45.9k lmfao pls do still read it tho ➳ a/n: this was supposed to be 30k i can just never shut up lol sorry <3 but this chapter honestly got me good. i cried sm writing it and i love them and i never want this story to end :') i hope you love it, too. thank you for supporting me at all times <3 i can't wait to hear what you think 🤍 ➳ listen to: dance me to the end of love by the civil wars (alt. version) | full collaborative playlist 🤍

SERIES MASTERPOST | TAGLIST MASTERLIST | WIPs

It’s going to be okay — Jungkook’s hand gently clasping your thigh wants to convince you of this, you know.

But you can’t deny that the presence of the family you so long awaited is affecting you — your pulse is quickening to a heavily uncomfortable pace. You know his mom; you don’t fear his brother; but his father… his eyes are inscrutable.

They scare you to no end. There he is; the power continuously shattering your boyfriend’s heart. And Jungkook must be well conscious of your distress; because a mere moment later, he of all people, the one who's supposed to seek comfort, says—

“Angel? Breathe.”

Your eyes swerve to the side and remember to blink; you only now feel that you're jabbing crescent moons into your palm, just when you realise the sharp impact. You uncurl your fingers and nod, letting him cover the faintly scarred skin with his hand.

Sighing, you ask, “Are you okay?”

“I am,” he says, nodding, as if he’s practised and polished this answer over the years, “nervous, but… it’ll be okay.”

“Yes… I know.”

“Let’s go?”

You pull the handles on your respective sides at the same time, setting foot onto the stranger soil for the very first second in your life. You can’t quite discern your gut feeling right now, but you hope it’s not the last.

Waiting next to the car, you watch Jungkook round the vehicle, squinting your eyes; the noon sun is burning right above you. He heaves the suitcases with a faint groan and you join him right away to fetch the rucksack you brought.

Holding it between your knees, you flash his family a smile and a slight wave, awkward and unsure about what to do until his mother steps down the porch and towards you. She’s elated, and you see the same sprinkle in her eyes as in her son’s when she closes in enough for an embrace.

Her arms are comforting around you; somehow, you’re startled by it. Takes you a second to reciprocate the hug, hopefully not long enough for her to question your receptiveness. But then you put your chin on her shoulder, shutting your eyes for the briefest of seconds until you open them to a side hug between Jungkook and his brother.

In the slowly cooling weather, she feels warm, a motherly love that blasts heat to your cheeks until she lets go. “Finally a woman, huh?” she breathes, her voice so sweet and kind. “A great alternative to all the testosterone.”

“I can imagine,” you respond; the thought isn’t too much of a stranger to you. “I spent most of the week amongst men. They’re barbarians.”

She laughs, just in the moment that Junghyun, Jungkook’s brother advances towards you. He offers you his hand and a radiant smile that resembles your boyfriend’s. In fact, he does look quite a bit like his younger sibling. Lopsided smirk, fluffy dark hair, handsome features.

Not a lot older. Kind as he greets you with a, “Miss Novaura herself, yes?”

The name makes you beam, inundates you with pride. You appreciate that he doesn’t revert to Charmante as most people have done throughout your life, but sees you as what you are and what you do now. The manager of Novaura, damn it.

Yes.

Has he been keeping up with stuff?

“And Miss Novaura meets the second Jeon himself!” you respond, but as he grimaces, you bite your tongue immediately. What did you say?

“When,” he starts, overly dramatic, a little like Jungkook, yet somewhat more extroverted, “was I demoted to the second Jeon?”

“Oh, I’m…”

Jungkook clicks his tongue from the side, shoving his brother aside in the most sibling-like manner you can possibly imagine. Then, he threatens, “Don’t do this, or I’ll take her away from you guys again.”

“What’s that mean?” you ask.

“It means,” Junghyun interjects, “that everyone’s been dying to meet you. Mom and I even told Jungkook not to spill too much about you, so we can see ourselves.”

Oh, the pressure. The nervousness from the past couple of weeks skyrockets. Yet, your charming self conjures, “Then I hope I don’t disappoint.”

Jeon Junghyun speaks on, babbling something reassuring that you’re certain could warm your chest if you had the capacity to listen. But you drift off quickly as the side of your eyes follows a movement in the back: Jungkook timidly, almost fearfully nearing his father.

You’re alarmed and you can’t tell why — perhaps because you don’t truly know their situation yet. You haven’t seen them interact. But at this very moment, you’re surprised when Jungkook and his dad share a light side hug, too.

The occurrence is frigid, but somehow, you expected even more frozen behaviour. Rare glances, absolute ignorance. Your mind envisioned a world that harboured true enmity, but you don’t think that’s quite what these two have been maintaining over the years.

In some sense, it’s worse.

Because rather than pure silence, there’s a deep distance that is still disguised as a surface level of closeness in a family. Faking it might just be more difficult after all.

There’s no conversation between them. Nothing much as Jungkook comes back to his mother to give her a warm, genuine hug, a rainbow to a drizzle in comparison. As if to receive what his father didn’t provide.

You follow.

You’re not entirely keen on a too affectionate interaction between his dad and you, but you still smile when he lifts his hand, shaking it kindly. From here, as the corners of his lips raise, wrinkles around his eyes that he passed onto his next generation, he looks like a terribly nice man.

He gestures into the house and you follow, listening as he asks, “Was the journey okay?”

You nod joyfully, mustering up all kindness for somebody you know hurt someone you love for so long. After all, Jungkook has done the same for you, no matter how many times your mother shattered you.

And in the end, it’s still his dad.

“Oh, yes, pretty pleasant,” you answer, clearing your throat when you hear the formal tone in your voice. “We took turns driving. And since I fell asleep, I guess I can still seize the rest of the day… if you want to?”

You turn to Jungkook as the sentence fades out and he nods with raised, stirred eyebrows. “Yeah! It’s what we’re here for.”

His father smiles, a flat hand signalling towards the living room to invite you to rest for now. Matters seem normal so far; for a moment, you allow yourself to believe he isn’t so neglectful after all. Even with all your trust in Jungkook, you try to imagine a scenario in which he perceived his father’s distaste as something wrong.

You’re incorrect.

It doesn’t require more than a couple minutes and a bit more mingling until you recognise amidst the smalltalk that he doesn’t behave the same with his younger son as he does with Junghyun. There’s lightness in the way he converses with the latter.

Jungkook only moves around you and his mother; no particular intention to really connect with his dad. Understandably so. Their gazes barely meet.

Not even when his father’s tone drops as he approaches Jungkook, uttering a seemingly obligatory, “You alright? Is the job good?”

“Mhm,” Jungkook merely responds.

The interaction is awkward and quiet, yet too noisy for the lovely room. You focus on the homely furniture and small-town-vibed interior as you wait for the brief dialogue to conclude. You’re not at a place to intervene yet.

There are pictures of the family, yet fresher if you could judge. The ones showcasing memories are probably somewhere you can’t see yet; you’re buzzing to finally skim through his childhood pictures.

You listen in. Quiet again, conversation already at an end.

Jungkook’s fingertips graze yours, giving a short head tilt, wondering what you’re thinking about. His beam is different when he looks at you now, a much more blissful alternative to the timid words he voiced just a couple seconds ago.

But you can’t really answer when his mother emerges in the room to wave you towards the kitchen, eager to converse, yet suggesting, “If you want, you can freshen up before dinner.”

But you reject the idea kindly, flashing your best smile as you respond, “I’m excited to be here, so we can just talk a little for now. I’ll go wash my face after dinner!”

She nods slowly, politely, a the-guest-is-king-sort of gesture before you add, “How have you been?”

The family joins at the dinner table one by one; nobody interferes or barges into another’s turn. Only listens. You’re used to chaos from events and parties you used to attend, everybody dying to have the last word, to outsmart another.

This family is as patient at a conversation as you’ve witnessed in your boyfriend. They’re lively, interested; maybe there’ll be more of an ecstatic family tumult when you get used to them or when more people join. At the wedding, probably.

You’ve seen something like that with your friends, too. Especially on this vacation. You did fall into disorder quite often.

Yet, it differs from your usual experience. No discomfort. No fear of odd questions.

The Jeons aren’t out to reveal your little secrets, but to understand you as a person; so you appreciate the natural flow of the dialogue when Jungkook’s mother answers, “Just tired. The wedding preparations are tedious, and it’ll probably only get worse.”

“Yeah? You’ve been helping out a lot, yes?”

“Yes, somewhat. The bride… Gayoung, she’s close with us and relies on us a lot. And on top of that,” she shakes her head at this point; rolls her eyes as she turns on the stove, stirring and heating up some meal, “she’s getting cold feet.”

“Oh man,” Jungkook adds, chuckling a little, unsurprised, “wedding is definitely on, though. She always gets nervous. Almost missed her first day at work years ago,” he turns to you, “she’s a vet, and she was terrified of hurting the pets, but… everybody trusts her with their pets’ lives now.”

“Awh,” you voice, “I can imagine how stressful that must be. I’m pretty good at managing stuff, though, so if you need any help—”

“No way, you’re not here to work. You can do something else?” His mother looks over her shoulder, pondering. “Paint?”

“Oh, I do paint sometimes, but I’m not very good at it.”

“She is,” Jungkook argues, hand lifting to rub your back, “but she’s an even better writer.”

His father chimes in, arms folded, “Oh, I think you can get a ton of inspiration here, then. There’s a flower field nearby if you’re interes— what?”

Stopping when Jungkook interrupts with an exhale, he tilts his head at his son, and you follow his gaze, watching thick eyebrows kiss. “I already took care of that, but… way to spoil a surprise.”

Ah. You see the hostility increase with each second. You wish you could diffuse the moment; tell Jungkook to ignore everything that might irk him.

Instead, you only sneak your palm to his knee, imitating his rub to calm his nerves. He must be tense. He always must be.

“I wasn’t spoiling,” his father argues, “was just an idea.”

“Oh, it’s okay,” you intervene, patting Jungkook’s thigh. He looks at you just briefly, but it suffices for some of his muscles to relax. “I don’t know much anyway. Spoiler-free zone!”

It’s the best you can do. So you keep trying; diverge the topic to other aspects of your life when Junghyun asks about your job and the efforts connected to it. About the joys and hardships of it. About how your parents are doing — burdensome topic, yet a must to master.

Then they speak about the passage of time in the city, and how it compares to this place; how the family perceived the differences and how their current life differs from their past here.

You learn that they still feel more connected to their hometown; obvious when considering the fact that they spent most of their years here. Initially uncertain about moving, they still decided to be closer to their children and the world’s opportunities.

The city called and it kept them.

You know it kept Jungkook the most; or maybe it was you who shackled him there, too.

“Apart from the obvious differences,” you start, “I can’t comment much on it yet, but… I’ve been really interested in being here. Super nervous.”

His mother coos, scrunching her nose the way he does, assures that there’s no need to be nervous; that this wedding might end up being the kindest you have ever been to. Adds, “Speaking of. Brought a pretty dress?”

“Oh, of course,” you say; your toes curl in excitement. “I’d show you right now, but I promised to keep it more or less a secret from Jungkook.” You wiggle your eyebrows at him. “He’s seen it, but not me wearing it.”

“Ah. Is it that pretty?”

“It’s pretty amazing.”

She steps closer as the dish simmers, playing with a couple strands hanging in Jungkook’s eyes. His lips twitch upwards, and his cheeks colour in a blush when she says, “Well, knowing this guy, you’re out to give my boy half a nervous breakdown, I see.”

“I’m trying to, really.”

Your answer is light-hearted, but a mere moment late. You can’t help but wonder what she means by knowing this guy. Then again, you presume a mother usually witnesses her children’s lives; watches them fall in and out of love.

You don’t like how the realisation makes you feel, but you smile it away either way.

And it doesn’t help when Junghyun seems to catch onto her statement, too, saying, “By the way… I’ve heard that at the wedding, we—”

But the interruption is sharp. Unnatural, abrupt, his mother’s voice strange when she interjects, “Ah. Listen. Let’s serve dinner, and we can talk more when we eat. A hand?”

You don’t know what it’s about, but you attempt your best to not be nosy. You can’t even guess it, so it’s probably easiest to let it go. To only stand up to help a little, Jungkook and you handing things around until you’re seated again.

She still scolds Junghyun silently, eyes wide when she sits next to him; perhaps it’s a surprise for Jungkook or for you.

You won’t spoil it. Focus on the food.

And despite the early tension, you survive dinner, albeit occasionally cut by things Jungkook’s father remarks and by Jungkook’s responses of retaliation. Like—

“Honestly, you not liking these is a perk,” Junghyun comments when Jungkooks puts the green beans aside, snatching them immediately.

His father is quick to deduce, “Didn’t you love them?”

Jungkook’s smirk is immediate, accompanied by a shrug and a click of his tongue, and a somewhat passive aggressive, “Yes. Fifteen years ago, though.”

It’s odd, the mixture of anger and fear. He reveals his agitation in his short answers, but he never extends them to something that might provoke a bigger fight.

His father then says, “I’ve never seen you put them aside.”

To which Jungkook mutters, “Should’ve looked more then, right.”

“That’s unnecessary.”

“Okay.”

Tense. Quiet. Gulping.

But you get it over with, breathe and touch through it all until the plates are cleared, stuffed in the dishwasher, the clock ticking. Jungkook leads you to the porch that his family greeted you at earlier. You intertwine your fingers deeper, hoping for some solace between the irate words exchanged.

His shoulders stand slightly higher than usual, eyes a little unfocused. You squeeze his palm, and he laughs when you bump your shoulder against his. Tapping his foot against the porch, he says, “This is where we were having a barbeque this summer. Remember when I called you?”

As if you could forget. Those calls got you through messy, forsaken summer days. He lets go of your hand to tug you into his side, tight in his embrace, and your voice grows a pitch when you answer, “Yeah. You were drunk.”

“I was.”

“And you still called me. Burned your finger, right?”

He scoffs. “I barely remember that. I just remember seeing you on the video call and… missing you really bad.”

You glance into his face, opting him to do the same. Eyes half on his lips, half on his pupils, staring to and fro, you ask, “You don’t miss me now, though, right?”

“Hm… I don’t hope I’ll ever need to again.” As he presses into your arm, you cuddle in. He nods towards the small front yard, “They were playing Linkin Park here. And way back, when I was like seventeen, I’d smoke here sometimes.”

Your eyes blow wide; you can’t imagine his gentle fingers holding a cigarette between them, but then again, you kind of can. He laughs at your surprise before he continues, “I know. Rebellious phase. It was stupid, because Mom would smell it right away and then ground me.”

“Damn, Kook.”

He nods, lifting a shoulder as if to say my bad, and then kisses your temple. Asks, “You feeling good?”

“Yeah. I really like it here so far.”

“Good.”

“Are you?”

“Yeah. It’s okay.”

“Good,” you echo, just for him to do it, too.

“Good. I think we cou—”

Pause.

Because the feast of interruptions continues still. A sudden, shrill call of his name reverberates across the streets, and you flinch, following the sound on the right before detecting somebody walking up to you.

You haven’t seen her yet, but she’s glowing; hair open behind her, just the top half held at the back with a butterfly claw clip. The breeze swirls her bangs, and just from the exhilaration in her voice, you can tell who it is.

Jungkook lights up equally when he squints his eyes and recognises her, loosening his grip around you as he exclaims, “Hey!”

“Helloooo!”

And then he lets you go. You watch the endearments unfold. He says, “Didn’t expect you here today.”

“Me neither,” she says, and he laughs; you join in, already curious. “I was going to binge some show, but Junghyun texted saying you’d arrived.”

She catches up with a somewhat heavy breath, widening her arms when Jungkook steps down from the porch and engulfs her in a firm, heart-warming hug. Loving, decades old.

They oscillate on the spot, and she rubs his back until they let go. She doesn’t waste a minute until her eyes drift to you; they’re so expressive, dark yet glimmering. They prove your assumption when you see her joy towards you immediately.

The moment begins a little awkwardly as the stranger approaches you with uncertainty about what to say, but then she asks, “Is it okay if I hug you, too?”

You giggle. Goodness.

“Gosh, sure!”

And you’re delighted to the bone. Her touch is warm, inviting. They all are. You’re not used to it; why does it make you sentimental? You don’t know her. You’ve never spoken to her. Why the clump in your throat?

Weird.

“Ria,” she introduces, “I’ve heard so much about you. Really, it’s a common thing to say, but I’ve been really excited like… man, why did you come so late when he was sooo whipped in the summer already and—”

Your face heats up impossibly; this thought of a passed summer that called upon a million unknown emotions and words and encounters and yearning… you might never get over it.

Jungkook gives her a playful whack on her clothed arm, eliciting a prolonged Owhhh. You lift a protective arm over her to jest back, and she gasps, infinitely pleased. It helps her open up more, because it seems that she doesn’t need more than this to suggest, “Can I take her?”

Wrinkles form on his forehead as he raises his eyebrows in confusion, and she, nearly jumping at her spot, explains, “Show her around a bit. We’re having dinner soon and then I won’t be able to move, so…”

Jungkook blinks, unsure, looking between her and you until you urge, “It’s okay. You drove most of the time, too, so try and rest a bit.”

Your reassurance helps; either way, you don’t think you would’ve gotten to much more today anyway, no matter how much you hoped to seize the evening. You’re beat from the last day and the terrible night and the tiring journey and the filling meal.

Taking a walk is all you can imagine to do right now.

Maybe he’s on the same wavelength as you, because the nods come slowly but surely. “Sure. Go. I’ll come later to bring her back.”

Ria places a sweet hand on your back, urging you forward and speaking back, “Gotta make sure I don’t kidnap her, what?”

Her house is nearby. The first of the conversation goes by similarly as it did in Jungkook’s house, but the moment she announces the arrival at her own home, your calm demeanour changes to a rather terrified one.

She’s not going to…

No.

Because she promises, “I’m not taking you inside, no worries. I wouldn’t overwhelm you like this.”

Your chest relaxes. You guess meeting one family officially, as if you’re being evaluated for marriage, might suffice. While sure her family’s as lovely as the other, you don’t want the overstimulation.

So instead of urging you inside, she takes you to the small cottage next to her house. Their property is a little bigger, the area spacier. You soon find out that the little house she’s taking you to isn’t some guest thing, but houses dozens of farm animals.

You didn’t think there was something to the cliché you heard about small towns; yet, the reality is much more endearing. How oddly cheerful the animals seem, even though you know the fantasy is just a fabrication of your mind.

You don’t know what they’re thinking or feeling.

One of the hens clucks as Ria picks it up, looking at you with big eyes as she says, “I thought you guys would come early in the night and then just sleep. I didn’t know you’d arrive so much earlier.”

“Oh yeah!” you say, hands in the back pockets of your jeans, “We left the hotel at noon.”

“That’s crazy.”

She bends, letting the hen go, and the little thing instantly rushes away. You flinch, stepping back. You’ve never done this before; you try to keep your cool, but you’re so inexperienced, mesmerised by your surroundings.

This place is so different, so much quieter, more serene. You understand the nostalgic vibe of romance movies set in towns like this. You’re suddenly thrown into The Notebook and into Footloose. Into everything that evokes warmth.

“What is?” you ask.

“Just. It’s so nice to meet you. We have so many guys here, so it’s cool to be with a girl for once.” She takes a deep breath. “And I love Kookie and I trust his judgement. So when he told me about you, I told him to get you here right away. It took you so long.”

Her tone is frisky, but you feel bad. Not quite because you let her wait, but because of why you waited yourself. Because of the breaks and pauses and the split hearts that you needed time for to sew again.

The weeks of insecurity and then the trials of life.

Something in the pit of your stomach stirs at the memories; you can’t believe you’re standing where he fell for you first, despite the distance. Where he reached for you through the rain and the clouds and the stars, and called to listen to your tears and your pleas to return.

You can’t believe it. In fact, yes, you believe it as little as her.

“I get it…” you say, “we have quite a few guys in our group, too.” You wait, watching her nod as she inspects the last of chickens running into the cottage. Then you ask, “What did he tell you about me?”

“What he told me? Mmmh. I mean, it’s difficult to say. He spoke of you highly, but I think his main focus was on not hurting either of you. Very, very worried about how things might play out.”

Yeah… yeah, it sounds like him.

You don’t answer; shift your eyes to the grassy ground. You hear her voice lift a pitch as she says, “Man, too many guys is simply too much, though, seriously. And then having to deal with Kook all the time must be so exhausting, too.”

Laughter erupts out of you, and you shake your head, “I mean, he’s a brat sometimes. But he’s the best man I know.”

“He is a good guy, yeah? I’m so glad.” She nods again, affirmative and positively confirming. “He’s always been. It sucks sometimes that he lives so far away.”

“I’m sorry,” you say, but she shrugs her shoulders, waves off your concerns. “I take it you’re not interested in living in the city?”

Her eyes narrow when she looks into the distance, met with the lowering sun as if it entails the entirety of her beloved town. It’s probably part of it, though; the one sun she’s known all her life, despite the same star rising and setting everywhere in your vast world.

“Not really,” she says, “I like it here… Even though so many left.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. Some people I knew…”

You can imagine. Two faces flash into your mind, at least. Not that you like half of the thought; but it’s automatic, and so is your statement, “I feel like I know at least two.”

She seems surprised. Tilts her head, blinking, hands on her hips. “Really?”

“Yeah, well…” You avert your eyes, fearing an abundance of transparency. “Jungkook and Nara.”

“Oh.” Ria’s blinking fastens. She didn’t expect this; neither did you. But in some sense, it was inevitable, dropping Nara’s name here. “You met Nara, huh?”

“You say it so… weirdly.”

Her hands lift and she immediately works on objecting to your assumptions, “No, I mean. She’s nice! I liked her growing up. I just wouldn’t have mentioned her unprompted. There’s no need…” She studies your face. “He doesn’t either, you know? Talks about you mostly.”

You don’t know what to say. You gathered this much; but a very strange feeling in your chest presses against your heart, and you can’t quite decipher why. You shove it aside as best as you can, and then breathe it out, thankfully admitting, “That’s relieving.”

“There’s no need to worry. I think he and you will have a good time here and bond more than ever.”

You nod. You don’t feel like responding; not because you don’t like her or don’t want to. Your throat is tied, and you can’t really think of or form a productive thought. So you just keep nodding, smiling until a hen pops out again.

Ria, pushing away a stray strand of her dark hair, points to the little, excited animal, wondering, “Hey, have you ever held a chicken?”

“No!” Ah. Good tactic to distract you, considering how many times you mentioned this minor wish in the past weeks. “But I want to! Told Jungkook like a hundred times.”

“Okay,” she waves you closer and you dare to approach, hoping to neither hurt the hen nor yourself. You have absolutely no clue about these things. “Come here then. It’s not hard.”

It’s not. In fact, the process sounds logical, facile; but your hands are shaking, and often enough, animals seem to understand negative emotions when targeted. But Ria proves a good teacher.

Shows you to near the hen calmly, moving slowly to not startle her. She instructs you to soften your voice as much as possible, kindly noting that you’re soft-spoken enough to not worry about it. And then, once close enough, she demonstrates placing a hand around the tiny body, securing the wings to prevent flapping.

You imitate. Or try to, at least. It doesn’t work right away, your nervousness intruding; but at some point, you manage. You use your other hand to support the body, lift the hen gently. Hold it close to your body to give her a sense of security, much as Ria lectured.

Ria is patient, amazing, despite having done this probably a thousand and million times. Adjusting to your lack of knowledge, praising you, acknowledging your effort.

Her giggle is mellifluously sweet as she watches and hears you gasp; she applauds, but stops right away when she detects the third presence amongst you.

She calls, “Ah! You’re finally here.”

Your eyes follow hers, heart lighting up as you hold up the chicken carefully and nearly shout in uninhibited excitement, “Kook, look!”

His hands are in his jeans’ pockets; his walk idle. One of his eyes is squinting shut until he steps into the shadow, a tender smile playing around his lips before you realise that it looks… sad. Doesn’t reach as far. No crinkles around his eyes.

“Aren’t you the cutest, munchkin?” he responds before dropping into a crouch next to you. He seems brighter upon seeing your face, but you still keep wondering… What just happened in the house?

You don’t know. You don’t want to ask yet either.

So you only set the hen down, lowering her until she’s balanced and waddling — waddling? — away. You wrap your arms around him, providing a flicker of warmth. You don’t know what made his face fall like this, but you want to at least attempt to lift his chin again.

God. What a start to the first day. Is it odd to feel scared?

“Wanna go?” he asks, a thumb brushing the corner of your lip.

You hum, “I’m getting tired, yeah…”

“Then we can go and rest? And sleep if you want to.”

It’s early… but laying down and staring at the ceiling doesn’t sound too bad right now. Maybe he needs it, too. So you agree, pressing Ria to your heart once more and promising to return to her.

She’ll be at the wedding, too. You guess you’ll see everyone multiple times anyway; but as rude as it may sound, the thought of warming into this man’s body doesn’t allow you to bother with the world right now.

His steps are slow as you walk to the house. Eyes drooping. He might not notice; he’s been here so many times. But his presence, combined with the things you see, make your heart swell.

Maybe because you want to be there for him; maybe because you still can’t believe you’re here. But you perceive everything as if for the first time.

The cosy garden and the flower beds. A small-town house sitting on a quiet, tree-lined street. It’s more on the simple side, painted in warm hues, a light beige. Charming. You remember everything being charming.

The snug living room, the tender, partly wooden and partly modern kitchen, the clearly old and handmade dishes. A fireplace. Wooden floors.

You haven’t seen the rooms yet, but as he leads you upstairs, you imagine him doing the same this summer as he approached his bed. He walked these same steps, a narrow and short hallway, opening the door to an inviting childhood bedroom with you present in his device.

Yearning.

But the man from the summer isn’t all you see. In fact, the place reminds of time travel; you soon recognise just how signature Jungkook everything is.

Because the moment you enter, you see him in everything. Like, in the soft quilts on his bed; he wouldn’t use them today, but you imagine a shy Jungkook and you imagine big eyes, small hands pulling the sheets over his body to cuddle into a warm night.

The window overlooks the backyard; the sunlight filters through the sheer curtains. It’s still just the middle of the evening. But you find it hard to want to leave this simple comfort. Lived-in, sweet.

Reminiscent of a youth.

Like a soft tune of a ballad. You don’t know what it is that makes you feel this way.

The cosiness? The pictures on shelves? The slightly tilted roof of the room? Or the posters reminding of a world a decade ago. It hasn’t been this long, if you think about it, but to you, all of this still tells a story.

“What’s this?” you ask, opening a random drawer and grazing rolled up paper, large, stowed away.

“Posters, I think? I haven’t seen or opened them in ages. Maybe we can—”

He pulls and rolls them out, glancing for a bare moment before he undos the action with a sudden bright red on his cheeks. You try to catch a glimpse, “What?”

He doesn’t answer, so you take the poster from him, only needing to open it halfway through to see a pretty face, followed by a swimsuit and a snatched body. Ah. Is this…

“Victoria’s Secret?”

“Shut up,” he instructs, and you hold yourself back, watching him, blinking until—

You puff out some air, nearly spitting as you laugh, teasing, “You were that type of guy, yeah?”

“Shut up,” he repeats, prying it out of your hands before he throws it into a corner. “I had this up for like two weeks. Forget it.”

“Never threw it away, though.”

“Never thought of it.”

He scratches the back of his head, a tilted smirk on his face, and you can’t help but want to keep annoying him. But he needs far more than this right now, and you’re not here to get on his nerves. So you walk up to him until determined arms wrap around his waist, kissing his chin.

“You okay?” you ask.

“Well…” He’s quieter than he’s been in the last few days and it disheartens you. Somehow fatigued, eyes halfway closed. “You know.”

You do know. Or perhaps, you don’t, but you can well imagine.

You’re not sure how he took all of this day in, day out for so many years, but you understand the weight of the situation a lot better now. Of course your mind would be rewired if you hurt this much all the time.

Whatever you’re seeing now is a fraction of what he experienced.

“It’s going to be okay,” you remind him again.

“Yeah.” He sniffles. “Hey. I have a little surprise for you tomorrow. It was spoiled a bit, but you’re right.” A peck to your nose. “You don’t know anything yet. But you’ll like it, I think.”

You don’t doubt it; you guess it helps, not being aware of much at all. Waiting for the surprise.

But then again…

When you look at him again, excitement flickering in those tired eyes of his and a hand pushing against the small of your back lightly, you think that you know a couple things at least.

“Okay. Hold on. You’re definitely going too fast!”

“This is too fast? You should’ve seen Junghyun and me racing years ago.”

You lower your head in an attempt to hide it from the wind, seeking his sweater; it’s impossible from this angle. You’re at the front, surviving between his arms as he navigates the bicycle recklessly.

The wind slaps your face, cooler this noon than yesterday. The bike writhes on the road, and you yell out, “Man, I’ll die!”

“Baby!” he exclaims back.

His laugh is louder than the gust as you hold onto his moving thighs and then realise it’s of no help. You shift your hands to the front of the cycle, wondering when it’ll hit an unforeseen rock and tip over.

“Hey,” he tries again when you only scream back, “have you never been on a bike before?”

“Of course I have!” You resist the urge to add a curse. He’ll kill the two of you. The streets are steep, probably a hill, going downwards. “Just never two people at once.”

“I did it a lot! With friends, and mostly with Gureum.”

Gureum… his dog. You have yet to meet him.

“Gureum?” you repeat.

“Yeah! He’d sit in the basket and… and enjoy the wind. Eyes closed.” He pants between cycling. “I told you, no?”

But your thoughts are elsewhere, chin dropping to your clavicles as if not looking could save you. “Fucking hell—”

“Okay. Okay…”

The bike stops abruptly, and you yelp, shutting your eyes tight and preparing yourself to die. But death doesn’t come; a tap to your hip does. His fingers hold you, calming you, words the opposite as he orders, “Alright. Get off my bike. You can walk the rest of the distance.”

Between the sniffling and the reclaiming of control of your trembling legs, you register the surprising command, and mumble, “What?”

“You heard me, sweetheart. I’ll wait at the flower field.”

You dare a look over your shoulder. His expression is serious, an eyebrow cocking. You want to retort something snarky, tell him you’ll stay on if he just slows down, for the love of God; but instead, you look ahead, and decode the view immediately.

The grass is high and the place wide. You’re right where the field begins, the road more narrow here, only really enough for cyclists and walkers. You roll your eyes, getting off as you tell him, “You’re terrible. We’re already here.”

He laughs, dropping the bike to the side carelessly before he reaches for your messed up hair. Fixes at least the front of it, flattening it in the back. You’re glad there’s no mirror around.

Then, he proceeds to grab your hand, a finger pointing to the place and says, “Look around.”

You do. It’s widely open and empty. A decent amount of flowers; you imagine a plethora of them in the summer and the spring. Now that fall is in full effect and it’s a little colder here than on your coastal vacation, you reckon that this isn’t usually all how the field looks.

But it’s beautiful. In the far, far back, you see the forest expand. Slightest traces of autumn foliage. The leaves will fall and entirely bare the trees soon.

“This is so pretty,” you say.

“Right?”

“Was this the surprise?”

“I mean,” he cards his fingers through his hair, but as he grabs the willow wicker from the larger cycle basket, the mane is blown back into his sight just a moment later, “yeah. But the actual surprise is a bit further down the field. Come.”

He guides the way, and you put your all into deciphering what he might be hinting at, only for him to say, “Don’t look so hard. You will see it in a moment anyway.”

The laugh he elicits is sweet, a thumb touching the back of your hand. Your shoulders drop in relaxation, and you shift your attention to the grass and the flowers, trying not to stomp on any of those that are still left for this fall.

A couple feet forward, you tell him, “You know I still need to meet Gureum.”

“I know. He was with Ria since we can’t really take care of him when we’re away.”

“You could take him to the city.”

“I’d do anything to be able to. But Gureum is… a free dog. He wouldn’t enjoy life in a smaller apartment after running around for so long.”

Ah… You feel the opposite still; jumped from a large cage into a homey, sheltered cube happily. But you get it; the freedom here doesn’t compare to a crowded city, does it?

“But,” Jungkook continues, “Ria said she’d bring him over this noon, so he should be there when we get home.”

“Damn. Why am I more excited about this than necessary?”

“Oh, you should be. I am, too… he’s my old boy.”

The oxymoron grants you a smile; to a parent, a baby stays a baby. Most of the time, at least. Jungkook feels something for Gureum, and even a stranger, lost and unknowing, could piece this bit together within a heartbeat.

“He’s old?” you wonder.

“He’s twenty years old. A bit slower now but… the same amount of love in his heart.”

One shall learn how to love and be kind from Jeon Jungkook. Then again, he’d be an excellent example, but a bad teacher. Wouldn’t know what to say. Wouldn’t be able to really pick out what makes him so pure-hearted.

He just is… He just is.

“I can’t fucking wait,” you say, inspirited.

The sight changes along with his expressions as you walk down the field. From happiness to a smile to excitement and then contentment. The flowers mostly disappear, giving way to something you don’t really recognise.

Orderly rows, bright green leaves and… more plants? As you inbreathe the air, however, you swear you recognise the sweet and fresh scent. Even from here, it’s distinct and special.

And when you trudge closer, finally glancing down, you understand.

Jungkook…

He took you strawberry picking.

You see them low on the ground, clustered, ripe and red. Pretty. Enough to warrant a dozen adjectives; yet, you only whisper, “Wow.”

He waits… then waits more. Lets your eyes scan the area and the fruits, permits you to take in what he probably reckons you’ve never seen before in this form. And he’s right — you haven’t.

“You like it?” he questions. “I was unsure, like… maybe you’re underwhelmed?”

Your head turns towards him at light speed. “What? I’m not. I’ve never seen anything like this before,” you confirm, repeating your thoughts, “I am definitely not underwhelmed. This is… this is something my younger self craved.”

“Oh— Really? How so?”

You hum. Think back to late nights in the back of your bed, a room larger than what you needed, yet smaller than your imagination. Smaller than your heart.

“I read stories,” you tell him, “fairy tales. Watching tales of love in the countryside. We don’t have these places in the city, do we?”

Jungkook’s hand, on your back a second ago, travels up to the back of your neck, touching it gently. “I guess you’d have to find a farm.” He stares ahead where you do, still standing there, unmoving. Then, “Angel?”

“Yeah.”

“You said you went on a field trip to a farm, right?”

“I… can only really remember once in school. Kids were shitty.” You spoke about this once; last month, he promised you’d see Ria’s farm, too. Funny that she actually did show you. “And my parents weren’t really interested in that stuff. Which I do kinda get because many city people aren’t.”

“Mhm, I can understand.” He shuffles his feet, presumably a little sad for you, regarding the long row of strawberries stretching to his right. You’re about to crouch and try without a clue what to do when he, instead of commenting on things much more, asks, “Okay, so. Wanna pick strawberries?”

“Yes!” You rub your hands, taking a step forward, but pausing again; you could start anywhere. “Will you show me how?”

“Of course.” He hums, looking for an easy spot with an accumulation of easy-to-pick fruits; then, he lifts his jeans by a couple inches and lowers his body. “Look. You can crouch or kneel.”

You give your clothes a lookover. Just some everyday jeans; they should be able to take some dirt. In actuality, though, you might’ve joined him on the ground anyway. So you do, kneeling with your hands on your thighs, obediently listening.

“You look so cute.” He chuckles, the back of his fingers barely grazing your cheek for a moment. As he sniffles, his chin nods towards the plants, hands reaching for them. “So. You gently pull the leaves aside and just pick the strawberries. Avoid those that aren’t red, though, okay?”

His pinky touches parts of an unripe strawberry still in the ground, and he explains, “You’ll know that one’s ripe when it comes off easily. Like this,” he tugs at it, “isn’t ripe. Won’t come off so well. Mmmh. Let’s try this one.”

You follow his movements until he settles for a particularly pretty and seemingly juice berry; with ease, he plucks it off by grasping the stem and twisting a little, and says, “See? You could eat this one right now. But… basket?” You shove it towards him and he throws the berry inside. “We’ll wash it before that.”

It’s quiet and sweet here as he works on explaining the process to you. An atmosphere you haven’t ever witnessed anywhere before. It’s probably different in the spring, but you’re alone here; even if someone’s around somewhere, you can’t see them from where you sit.

And it helps you focus: on how concentrated he looks, lower lip pouting, crouching easily with his sweater sleeves rolled up. It’s unusual how his tattooed hand works on the plants. Your first imagination of such a task always involves straw hats and dungarees.

“Try it, too,” he then instructs.

He puts a gentle palm on your back as you get up from kneeling, now crouching as he is, and cast about for a couple good pieces. Whenever you think you’ve found one, you seek confirmation in his eyes, repeating, “Is this okay?”

And he always promises, “You’re doing well. Look,” he inspects one of your choices, “picking the best even.”

“You’ll have to eat mine, then.”

“Sure will. I knew you’d be so good at this.”

You’re surprised; you never saw yourself doing this, even though you yearned for a life so different than the one you lived. Until you stepped off his bicycle twenty minutes ago, you had never come up with such an idea. All the more reason to be thankful to him.

But you do wonder why he’d perceive something like this far before you did, so you ask, “Really? Why?”

He uttered the words so casually, pupils fixated on the basket; he might not have noticed how immediately you reacted. Because he hums now, looking at you with immense eyes, matter-of-factly spelling out, “Because you’re gentle. This called for you.”

Because you’re gentle. Because you’re gentle.

The reasoning, so clear to him, repeats in your mind. It’s not as obvious to you; it’s been a while since you thought of your qualities, and in the last months, being gentle often meant the same to you as quietly enduring.

So you’re touched, silenced by the lump in your throat; such an easy sentence, but so filled with knowledge about a person that only truly occurs with the purest of affections.

As you stare at him, you feel the fondness spreading over your countenance as much as the leaves tickling your ankle; you hold the current strawberry delicately as you conclude, “That’s why you brought me here, yeah?”

“That too.”

Oh.

“What else?”

“You can’t do this every day,” he argues, “I want to show you new places and things.”

You graze the vulnerable skin of the strawberries collecting in the basket, watching it fill enough to feed a couple people. Grabbing it, you lift your body with a smile. For a minute, your knee aches from the crouching, and your brain gathers the sensations into one to create another core memory.

Lost for words, you merely tell him, “Thank you, Kook, I…” You heave the basket to your chest, touching his hand as he rises, too. “How do you even come up with all this?”

“How I come up with it? Hmm… I guess you make it easy to do.” He laughs, and you follow, reading your mind as he voices the same thought flashing through your brain. “I know I’ll be so nostalgic about this someday. In ten years, maybe.”

Cheeks hot despite the autumn wind, you register the butterflies immediately. Right under the basket, underneath your skin, like a swarm awaking from metamorphosis. The fact that he thinks ahead like this, paints a distant future with you… wanting you for this long drives you insane.

Jungkook’s voice always lacks uncertainty when it comes to you.

Mellow when he speaks to you, gentle even when he asks, “More?”

“Mmmh… yes. Can do a few more. And it’s fun.” So you do; picking and plucking until you can barely carry the basket anymore, already wondering what to do with the bunch until you pop the idea, “Can we eat some of these?”

“Now?”

“Yeah.”

“Of course. Gotta wash them, though.”

Which isn’t as easy as it sounds. It takes you a good moment to find a water tap on the wide field; one only crosses your way when you travel back to where the bike stands, proving as dysfunctioning and broken.

And only once you’ve reached nearly the end of the field and already detect the narrow path that you cycled along from afar, your luck strikes. You wash a handful of your harvest and place them neatly at the top of the rest, right above a handkerchief Jungkook whipped out from his pocket.

The grass isn’t high everywhere; you find an ideal spot for a brief, spontaneous picnic, pleasant and comfortable; a fluffy blanket of nature. You watch ladybugs and ants crawl over blades of grass; not too much more, considering the season.

Jungkook works through the content of the basket, soon holding a piece to your mouth, “Take this,” he says, pushing it through your parted lips; waits until you’ve chewn most of it. “And?”

The initial taste is good, but the aftertaste dramatically makes your world quiver. Whatever you’ve known about food and fruits so far must have been a hoax, because you can’t fake the way your eyes widen and your voice raises in pitch, delighted as you say, “This is… so damn good.”

“Right?”

“They don’t taste like this in the city!”

“Yeah,” Jungkook chooses a smaller one from the collection, throwing it into his mouth as a whole, “these are fresh. No bullshit berries.”

“No bullshit berries indeed. So good.”

“You picked good ones!”

“But this is a curse, too!” you exclaim, urging a laugh out of him that he transforms into a kiss to your temple, observing as you munch the strawberries as though encountering them for the first time. And you pout as you say, “ Keep me from eating them all. I want to take the rest home.”

“Sure, don’t worry. We can put them somewhere and take them back on the last day.”

“Hm? Oh. No, I meant today. Home, your house…” You realise your mistake. “Sorry.”

Only, he doesn’t deem it a mistake for a moment. He didn’t think you’d feel this cosy this fast — but it was what he’d hoped and opted for, so it’s a win either way. His family as your home, him as your home.

He thinks, you finally do feel at home. It took you years of endurance, didn’t it?

“Home, yeah?” he mutters. “An apology is the last thing I’d want, angel. You’re home, alright.”

You wish you had an equally meaningful answer; whatever you might babble now, you don’t think you could do justice to the soft tone he settled on. You can’t even outdo his gaze, so round, eyes so big on his otherwise clear-cut face.

What you can do is smile. Draw closer until your shoulders touch. About to taste the strawberry-flavoured, red tinted lips before a sudden motion drowns your plans.

The bunny flits over your feet; you’re sure it jumps onto yours for a moment and then uses them to push itself off into the grass, journeying on. The yelp it elicits out of you merges with the startled sound Jungkook emits.

His elbow lightly hits the side of your breast, and you pull your legs into your chest as self-defence. But it’s gone as fast as it appeared, and barely a second later, you’re watching it hop away, little ears disappearing in the distance.

“Well,” Jungkook breathes, “at least that’s normal. I’ll tell you about my snake encounters later some day.”

A hand on your chest, you exclaim, “Oh my God. You know what?” You calm down your lowkey panting, hand falling back into your lap, “Maybe you were right. We’re home for sure.”

“Oh… yeah?”

“Yeah! Totally looked like you… thought we were back home.”

Jungkook laughs out, head throwing back, and then, amidst his giggle, he throws a “Shut up” at you. The tackle nearly pushes you to the ground before his lips attack your face all over; making out on a countryside field wasn’t on your bucket list, but you sure as hell will add it only to tick it off.

His tongue really does taste like strawberries. His lips are sweet; the hand on your waist careful yet explorative. If the grass wasn’t this cruel, tickling all over your body, you’d probably remain here for the next hour.

Let him strip you bare. Kiss you into the earth. Nobody’s here; you don’t think you’ve ever fantasised of such a moment before, but suddenly, you don’t mind loving him right here.

But maybe he’s fostering the same thoughts as you, pulling back with a little groan when the blades prick his cheeks and closed eyes. Endurance isn’t easy right now; and you have a lot planned for the rest of the day anyway.

So you pull yourself together, and nod when he finally asks, “Wanna go?”

Somehow, it takes you a little longer to get home than it did to reach the field. Perhaps because he’s cycling uphill now, or maybe because the sun is at its zenith, warming the colder day. The comfort makes you want to stay in this moment, have his voice laughing next to your ear.

On a bike swaying when he loses focus, rolling dangerously to tease you on purpose.

And when you get back to his house, you’re greeted with yet another surprise. It’s fluffy and sweet and white like a cloud, living up to its name. A tongue sticks out, tail wiggling, right at the door when Jungkook opens it.

Gureum is small, smiling as far as you’re aware of a dog’s joy. You once heard that upon seeing their owner, the same hormone floods their tiny bodies as a human’s when they fall in love. Gureum must feel much like you do when Jungkook comes home.

You understand.

Understand when Gureum jumps up to Jungkook’s legs, licking his human’s face when your boyfriend picks him up. Jungkook’s voice changes so much that you barely recognise it; you’ve never heard him talk like this. Higher, lovelier, slurred to imitate the language babies speak.

The affection is unfiltered and crystal clear.

Jungkook’s smile brightens until it reaches its maximum, bunny teeth flashing, the laugh erupting so deeply from his chest. Authentic. Eyes nearly closed as he calls Gureum’s name, plays with his face, as if communicating with a child.

Twenty years, and he still thinks of him as his baby. Sometimes, all golden stays.

“Baby,” he says after a while once Gureum has stopped licking his face, introducing, “this is my Gureum.”

You set the basket down next to the door, reaching a careful hand to Gureum’s head; but he’s cooperative. Lets you easily. “Hi Gureum,” you whisper, “nice to finally meet you. You’re so cute!”

“He’s a little sick these days, but,” Jungkook gazes down again, kissing Gureum’s ears. “He gets through it so well, doesn’t he? Yes, he does.”

The laugh is real. The affection is real. Tender and deep-rooted. He smooches him again, and then puts a cheek to his warm fur. You’ve never seen him like this. You’ve never fallen deeper.

“I missed you so much, too, buddy,” he says, “so, so much.”

You swear you see Gureum cuddling into Jungkook’s chest. Doesn’t move even when you’ve settled in the living room, resting from the journey. You’d drafted plans for the rest of today, but it doesn’t seem they’ll separate, and you don’t want them to.

You can wait. Things can wait.

You sit by Jungkook’s side as he pets him, his head soon on your shoulder, one hand in the white fur, the other holding yours. It’s how you remain for a bit.

In hindsight, albeit never having plucked strawberries before, today wasn’t some grand adventure across the world. You didn’t strike a deal at work or fight off some paparazzi hiding in an unexpecting corner. And you didn’t climb a mountain.

But you guess that’s what you craved all your life. Somehow, this is better than any crazy escapade.

The serenity that comes with a mundane moment. A love that consumes you and a love that helps you commit the most casual of acts to memory.

Maybe this is enough. An old couch lightly creaking as you move; a cloud blinking as you caress its head. Surprises to help you experience saccharine afternoons.

You remain for a bit, and then remain a little longer.

Ria came through the door not too long after you’d returned, ready for the evening plans. She’d promised to accompany the two of you to the centre of the town, giving you a tour of the most important and ancient of places.

You learned about the town’s only drapery seamstress and the best flower shop. Much as it so occurs in 70s and 80s movies, you met the son of a mechanic. He told you he’d be inheriting the company one day, and that it was okay because he never intended to leave anyway.

Ria’s eyes suspiciously widened as she spoke to him, and she lingered for a moment longer than you did after your farewell. The guy had forgotten that there was work to do by the time she finally bid him goodbye.

Jungkook’s eyes squinted at the sight, but not even he could hide his endeared smile. Pressed into Ria’s shoulder with a teasing hum.

You rewarded yourself for the day’s many steps with some soft serve in front of the city hall, talking and delivering anecdotes until the sun started setting.

As the evening concludes, you’re the last to appear at dinner. His family is already sitting here, politely waiting and sweetly welcoming once you’ve washed up and hopped into the dining room with a vibrant smile.

You’re in a good mood. Evidently so; the scent of strawberries and the taste of his mouth still linger, and you’re still coming down from the high when you chime, “I’m sorry for being late.”

“Don’t worry about it at all,” his mother assures, “we just sat down.”

“I really wanted to help, though.”

It’s true. His mother has been nothing but the ultimate host. You wanted to prove productive and useful, but then Eun had called to check in on you and delayed your plans.

“Hmm, you know what?” his mother utters, pouring you some Jjamppong. “The wedding isn’t until one, so we could get up earlier and make strawberry jam in the morning? If you’d like.”

The wedding has been in the back of your mind constantly, slowly sneaking to the forefront with an intense nervousness. You’re timid because of how it’ll turn out, how people will perceive you, if they’ll talk to you. How Jungkook will look at you.

How much love might spread; how much certain people might tone down their resentment.

Learning yet another skill such as making jam might just be the best distraction. So you nod wildly, only interrupted when Jungkook asks, “Can I join, too?”

But you change the movements of your head to a shake, jesting about quality time and whatnot until he surrenders, “Alright. Way to shut out the boyfriend and son, I see you.”

“Speaking of food,” you say, pausing, slurping a big bite of noodles; they’re spicier than you’re used to from city restaurants. Better, too. You point your chopsticks to your dinner. “May I have the recipe?”

As his father and brother indulge in their food, acting as quiet listeners, his mother answers, “I’m sure Jungkook has it. I’m offended he never cooked it for you, since they had it a lot growing up.”

“Offended indeed. You learned this?”

“Oh, this?” Jungkook’s eyebrows, hitherto sporting a crease between them — a telltale sign of a well-eating Jeon — relax. “Yeah! I was learning when I was like, what, fifteen?” He seeks approval from his mother, who soon nods. “I fully butchered it when I tried it for the first time.”

Junghyun chuckles. “Even I remember.”

“Yeah, you refused to help!” Jungkook complains, whining when Junghyun hits his brother’s elbow with his own. “And I burned my wrist and had the wound for ages. Couldn’t do much in P.E.”

Much as yesterday, it seems his father hasn’t learned; because as you feared, it’s only now when he melts and intervenes. You almost surmise he’s provoking on purpose when he queries, “When you were fifteen when? I can’t remember any wounds.”

Jungkook scoffs. “Are you telling me I’m making it up again?”

“No, I’m just saying I don’t remember.”

“That’s because you were at work and didn’t pick up my many calls. Mom was sick that week… It's why I wanted to cook and learn at all.” He nods towards his brother. “Junghyun remembers because he went to a friend and then rushed home to bring me to the hospital. None of it sounds familiar to you, does it?”

Jungkook lists and narrates the happening with a flat voice, as if recalling items still left to purchase for tomorrow’s meal. He’s stirring his soup and his father is stirring everyone else’s, uncaring as he responds, “I didn’t know.”

“It’s fine. You probably didn’t care.”

“Nonsense.”

Another, “As much as the last years,” added to the mix, you opt for his hand under the table again, but he pulls away. You’re left dumbfounded, looking at him in surprise. This has never happened before; he’s never been upset in such a way.

As if to signal, “It’s fine. It’s whatever. Let me deal with this.”

But he can’t deal with it; you see the beginning signs of a rising chest and a decreasing appetite. Nobody just plays with the content of such a rich soup for this long; least of all a foodie like him. He’s busy looking at it, propping his elbow on the table.

You stare for a little longer, and then turn back to your food.

It sounds like it’s over. And it’s quiet; maybe you could interrupt with something else, change the course of the conversation. But his father isn’t done yet.

No. You notice everybody else’s irritation when he opens his mouth to speak again. They sigh, forming a line with their lips when he emits a question that leaves even you in disbelief, “Why are you saying this?”

“Come on,” his mother tries, wanting to ease the tension, but Jungkook is faster.

“What? I mean, I don’t know?” he starts, once again an equal amount of fear and annoyance in his voice. “I barely ever hear from you, Dad.” With each word, he grows more daring, at the end of his capacities when he eventually curses, “We live in the same city, for fuck’s sake—”

“Jungkook—” Junghyun interrupts.

“What? It’s true. Even the last hundred times, Mom visited alone. Could’ve at least come over and said Hi to my girlfriend.”

“I’m here now and saying Hi, though,” you try, weakly smiling.

“And he’s here, too. How grand of him.”

Fuck.

“Stop the attitude,” his father warns, “you could’ve come over plenty of times, too.”

“Are you hearing yourself? News flash, I did. I tried to talk to you, too. If I was still fourteen, I’d still be apologising. Oh, or is that what you want? Is it what you want?”

“What are you talking ab—”

“I’m talking about how I really wanted to tell you about a shit ton of things. Like when Nara and I broke up,” amidst the already tense moment, your heart pains for a second, “or when I graduated. Or when I was having a really fucking hard time this summer and needed somebody and then when I fell in love and needed to tell somebody, and… where are you all the time anyway? Who fucking knows — I don’t!”

It worsens and worsens. Crashes and burns; every word splits the air in the room. You don’t know how to save the moment anymore; maybe you’re not supposed to. You can only lend him courage. Perhaps he’s supposed to finally say all this.

But it’s hard to listen.

Because as the waterfall of grief cascades, you hear Jungkook’s voice quiver. He’s about to break. Right here, in front of everybody, you’re about to witness the woe this man inflicted on him all his life.

And you see it; see parts of this very torture when his father reveals who he’s become over the decade. The one Jungkook described to you; empty of empathy and understanding.

Because again, he renders you in shock when he speaks again. Fucking nasty, nitpicking and focusing on only one aspect, attacking somebody’s pride.

“Get a grip over yourself! You graduated in arts — you didn’t conquer the world. And you hold a grudge when—”

“I hold a grudge? I do? You’re the fucking one who shunned a kid because of a mistake and—”

“I do not want to hear about this. Not again.”

As their voices grow, so does your heartbeat. The anxiety is unbearable; you can barely imagine the one spreading through Jungkook’s chest. His face is red, neck hot, veins about to pop. If you could, you’d slap your hands over your ears.

But you can’t listen away; can’t ignore the panic, either.

“Please, stop,” you say, moving, but Jungkook frees himself of your grip again, stands. You attempt again, “Stop it, baby.”

But he won’t listen, mind somewhere else entirely.

“You won’t blame me for shit you did years ago, you can’t—” his father insists, but…

“Oh, fuck off.”

“Watch your mo—”

“Or wha—”

His father’s face, similarly scarlet as his son’s, grows a shade darker at the shameless counter, and his large hand lifts in slow motion for you. Comes down with a thump, intending to slap the wooden table, but hitting the edge of his small kimchi bowl again.

It flies up inches into the air before suddenly rolling off the table, aligning with you and soon falling onto your lower arm with a painful impact. It topples down onto your knee before it meets the ground and shatters into a handful of pieces.

You gasp and shriek, more out of surprise than pain; but Jungkook’s reaction is immediate. He bolts towards you, protecting you from whatever danger might be left. Pulls you off your seat and away from the shards as dead silence befalls the room.

It’s filled with your shaky breaths and the way his mother and brother shove their chairs back, hands reaching for you. Jungkook keeps you out of their reach. Looks at his father for a couple seconds; then to the kimchi on the ground; then back to him.

You can’t see him properly until you move to glance at him, wanting to keep his anger low, but… you don’t think you can do much anymore.

The fire in his eyes is blue.

And his voice is strained but furious when he finalises through gritted teeth, “You are fucking insane.”

This time, the man doesn’t answer. You hear his wife utter something as if scolding him before she speaks up and offers to clean up the mess. But Jungkook shakes his head, “No need. He can do it.”

Then, turning to his father, he repeats, “You’re fucking insane. You’re a terrible parent and we all know and only you can’t admit it to yourself. I just didn’t think you’d develop into a terrible person, too.”

Still long fingers around your wrist, he moves you towards the stairs, rounding off the fight with one more, “Don’t fucking get near me or her, do you understand? Fuck.”

So many words exchanged, but it was the stupid kimchi covering your pyjamas to make him topple over the edge. You feel guilty, but you don’t. It’s the man downstairs that has so fucking much to reflect on.

God. You wanted this vacation to relax Jungkook, to soothe you, to turn the first painful half of the year into something glorious.

But…

Then again, didn’t you expect this? Weren’t you scared of this?

Didn’t you fear the exact manner in which he now leads you to his room, in which the slamming of the door rings in your ears, his hands in his hair?

He’s let you go and stranded in his room. It’s odd, the way you stand here, clothes dirty and the grief dirtier.

You walk towards him cautiously, watching him shiver, and reach for his wrists in turn this time. It’s a featherlight touch, but you feel the tremble underneath your fingers. And you instantly notice when he starts coming undone. When his lips shake, too.

Even with his head lowered, you recognise the wet waterline, and how it takes a handful more heavy breaths until you hear the first sob. You hug him. You hug him right away. Hold him close and closer.

You make a weak attempt at pulling him to the bed, but he’s already in the process of breaking down, his body getting heavier, falling. The carpet offers solace as his knees suddenly hit the ground. His arms hold onto your hips and his face buries in your chest.

When his breathing turns irregular, so does yours; you feel like the world is splitting and the sky crashing down.

His leg comes in touch with your messed up clothes, and when he looks up into your eyes, he’s already crying. A trail of tears courses down his cheeks as his pupils suddenly shake, looking for something, asking you, “Did he hurt you, baby?”

“Kook…”

“Let me see, you must be hurt, you— you were just wearing these thin ass slippers without socks, right? The fucking bowl shattered and…”

“I’m okay, Kookie. I’m not hurt, I promise.”

“No, but… it fell on you, it must— did it bruise your knee?” he continues hectically, inspecting you, never seeing anything. He cradles your face, still crying and sniffling, shoving his pain aside to make sure, “Please tell me if anything hurts, ‘kay? I will get something, I’ll— dunno, fucking smash his fucking face, I’ll—”

His mind is going haywire. A proper downward spiral, and you don’t know how to stop it. What the fuck— what the fuck…

“Jungkook— Jungkook, please,” you try, lowering his hand, but he won’t stop searching for signs of injury. “Baby, please.”

“Why is he like this? I just… man, I am trying, angel.” His voice falls at the last word; your heart fractures at the same time as it tries to keep his intact. “I am trying so hard in life for him to like me, and you… you’re here, so I thought he’d behave and instead—”

“I know. It’s okay.”

It’s not, but you can’t say it. Can’t say how much the meaning behind your stained clothes hurts. How much it connects to what the weeping man in your arms feels; how he looked forward to this, planning ahead, a surprise for everyday without anticipating such ruin.

And he’s as clueless as you. More broken than you ever anticipated. Resembling the burst dish one floor beneath you, holding you like an anchor, crying into your chest.

He keeps repeating the same things as you repeat yours, soon mumbling his words of trying and trying and constantly trying. Of wanting to be loved. Attempting to understand if it’s too much to ask for. Is it?

Why can’t he love me?

And you whisper back, He loves you. He does.

It’s easy, falling into such misery. There were moments not too far in the past where you were on the receiving end of such pain, and he was your life vest. You don’t know if you’re keeping him above the surface as well as he did, because you keep susurrating the hopeful mantra to him.

But he keeps believing—

“No… no, he never fucking did. Wh—who treats someone like this?”

“Some people forget, you know… how to show affection. Sometimes, they deem their pride more important. It says nothing about you.” You lift his chin, heartbroken upon detecting his reddened eyes. “Everyone else in this stupid world loves you.”

“Your mother doesn’t either…”

“My mother? The woman who hates literally everyone?” You smile, trying to make him imitate it, but he doesn’t. You brush his cheeks and then his hair. “I do. I love you. I knew who you were even when I was unbiased.”

“Didn’t you… hate me, too?”

Once again, you try a faint smile. Not for him to join in, but because you’re reminded of a foolish friendship; it had already long bloomed into more when you’d finally named it one.

“Not for a second,” you say.

Break in discussion. He’s still shedding tears, snivelling. Stays frozen like this, all of him unable to move except for his lips. They mutter, “I don’t ever want you to get hurt. He can do whatever the fuck he wants with me, but…”

“Yeah. I’m okay. We’re okay.”

“I love you,” he maffles weakly, “I love you. I love you.”

“I know. I love you, too.”

You feel as though offering solace to a child. As if he’s shrunk into what he used to be, in the very room he used to sulk. The trauma still belongs to a kid, and when hurt, he’ll turn him into one, too.

You hate it. Hate that his sorrow still belongs to such a young heart. That he never processed it.

Before you came here, you spoke about it. And once you’re back in the city, you’ll have to figure things out further; the time constraints just before you drove away didn’t allow you to take much into consideration.

You can only cry now, can’t you? Detest the dampness in your own eyes. Stay right here until some sign occurs, lifting you up from the ground.

And it does fifteen minutes later.

The knock is gentle, just two of them, and you tell Jungkook to wait, that you’d be back in a minute. As you stand, his back is bent, his head lowered. As if he’s sleepwalking or slowly fainting.

You shut your eyes for a second; then open them again.

Behind the door, his mother awaits. In her soft hands, she’s balancing a tray holding some food. She lifts it towards you, tells you, “The two of you barely ate.”

Upon a closer look, you realise that her eyes are swollen, too. The view nearly forces you to tear up again, your face seethingly hot. You want to hug her. Want to tell her you’re sorry. Instead, you only touch her shoulder, and mutter a grateful thank you.

“It’s okay.”

She sounds so pained. You wonder if she said something to her husband. Reprimanded him, cried for his son, grieved a childhood and life that could’ve been.

But she doesn’t say any of it, and neither do you mention it. You only agree, “It will be. Are we still making jam tomorrow?”

“Yes. Tell Jungkook he can come if he wants to.”

“Yeah… I was thinking that, too.” You stare down to your food, never noticing how she peeks past your shoulder. Sees her son unmoving on the floor; she knows she can’t do more than you are right now. So she only nods when you repeat, “Thank you so much.”

You wish her a good night, bringing the food to where your boyfriend sits. Put it down in front of him.

“Sit upright, baby?” you ask him, crushed by the sight of swollen cheeks and red-rimmed eyes. His lips are parted, his breathing still stagnant; he only stares at his food until you push the tray closer to him and say, an attempt at a smile, “Let’s eat a bit. Mother-in-law brought it for us.”

No smile back, but a sniffle. The crying subsides just a bit as a shaking hand grabs the spoon, slurping the soup before he can even think of the noodles. He eats a little, slowly, surely. You help when he needs it, feed him a bite, encourage him to one more.

Every other minute, he cries again. You wipe the tears away, try to make him eat more.

His father fucked him up. You knew about the issues and demons Jungkook combatted. Of course his mentality suffered; of course there are parts of him that might never heal… But you never quite understood the full effect.

His father fucked him up good; got him so bad. Parts of both of them are so ultimately ruptured, aren’t they?

Whenever he winds down, you eat in silence, right there on the ground on top of the old carpet. When he can’t swallow anymore, still some left in his bowl — Jungkook barely ever doesn’t finish his food — you move up to the bed with him.

You kiss his hair repeatedly, as if it could heal him just a little, to even the tiniest percentage. You don’t know how much of an effective bandage you are to him, but you know you’re doing at least something.

Because he whispers another I love you before the gut-wrenching sounds of his sobs have finally faded out, still echoing in the room. His tiny, shrunk voice says, “I’m looking forward to tomorrow with you.”

And somehow, it pains you even more. The hopeful tone; the wish for a day to not hurt.

“Me too, baby,” you say, “it’s nobody but us, okay?”

“Yeah… yeah.”

And that’s it. It’s all you can do for now; understanding the heavy heart the night cursed you with.

But as you drift away, you keep pleading. Pleading and pleading and pleading for a better tomorrow without getting a promise back.

To your chagrin but least of your surprise, Jungkook doesn’t join your jam-making session the next morning.

When you stirred awake for a little bit, eyes still sleep-drunk and body falling, your phone flashed seven thirty in the morning. Not ready to start the day yet and doubting anybody else had gotten out of bed, you cuddled into his body, and he, while deep in his slumber, must still have noticed.

Pulled you in more, smacking his lips and sighing a little, a warm hand at the back of your head. Secured in his embrace, you fell asleep again.

Only to awake two hours later without him by your side. You’re already washed up and somewhat sobered up from sleep, and you’ve looked on the first and ground floor. You can’t find him.

His mother informed you that she and her husband would be leaving to join the wedding earlier, to help out with the preparations and make sure the plans all sit. You offered your help, but she claimed they’d be okay, and that you can still use the morning after the jam lesson to rest.

Perhaps Jungkook has embarked on a journey then, using this time to do something in the early morning.

Once you’ve walked into the kitchen, greeting his mother with a smile and a good morning, you ask, “Nervous for the wedding?”

“Mmmh, kind of,” she answers, locking the phone she held, putting it aside to sip her tea, “but it should be good since we took care of most of the stuff pretty well. It’ll be wonderful. Except the damn Wedding March — we couldn’t settle on any song but this.”

“I can’t wait. I bet it’ll be beautiful.” You take a seat in front of her, hearing the sounds of the TV and quiet conversations. Among the voices, you recognise two, but his is neither of them. You’re not interested in joining. So you look at her, scratching your temple as you inquire instead, “Where’s Kook gone?”

Her forefinger points downwards, another blow to the tea and another swig. “Basement. I brought him some coffee, but he seemed busy and quiet, so I left him there. But,” her voice grows louder, enthusiastic, “you can go! Maybe he’ll be okay with that?”

Hmm…

“What did he go down for?” you ask.

“I think he was looking for something.” Now, she lowers her tone again, lower arms on the table. “He also just… did that sometimes when he was younger, or after a fight.”

After a fight.

Like the breakdown last night. You understand.

You should probably walk down and check — but then again, this has seemingly been a coping mechanism ever since he was younger. So perhaps, you need to let him be for a little; give him a chance to entangle his thoughts and regain some peace.

You repeat your decision to her and she nods in understanding, throwing a glance to a huge jar on the kitchen counter. You’re ready to deliver an answer before she even asks, “Want to help out then?”

“Sure!”

The process is a patient one. Reminds you of when Jungkook told you how to pick the strawberries yesterday; gently, sweetly, with a tender touch and an even more delicate voice.

Jungkook’s mother takes the fruits out of the jar with care, explains to you to mash them and cook the jam with absolute soothing composure. The minutes pass so serenely that you imagine preparing meals with her on a cold winter evening, pleasing your soul to ensure not only a good night’s sleep but lasting quiet of the soul, too.

You add the sugar and lemon juice to your mix, stirring and boiling the delicatesse before you put it in sterilised jars. She shows you how to sterilise them at all; you didn’t think or know that such a step was necessary at all.

The making of it doesn’t take too long; forty-five minutes tops. As you scanned the internet just before entering the kitchen almost an hour ago, it said it takes barely half an hour. But she demonstrated it all to you slowly, unrushed.

You’re thankful.

“Have you ever made jam before?” she asks as you admire your creation.

You shake your head. “No… I don’t think I’ve tried such a thing at all. It’s fun making things on your own. I mean, I do like to cook sometimes, but I’m nowhere on Jungkook’s level, I don’t think.”

She chuckles, nodding as if to confirm. Then clarifies, “Yes, he’s enjoyed being involved in the kitchen ever since he was a teen. Especially before he left town and realised he’d have to cook on his own.”

You giggle with her, like with a friend or a trusted figure. It’s so consoling, talking to her. Fun, smiles intact, still present when she asks, “How are the two of you doing? I mean, you did move in together quite fast, so I’m just wondering.”

Yes; she doesn’t need to spell it out. You get it — you’ve heard about this.

So-called relationship experts claim that taking decisions in the honeymoon phase isn’t too healthy, warping your sense of reality and perception of the other person. You don’t disagree, but you guess in this case…

“Honestly, it’s been good,” you respond. “We have a couple heated evenings where we argue about stuff, but… it’s been healing. And he offered to move in when I really needed it.”

“Yes, Jungkook told me.” Oh. “You weren’t at a very good place before. Please don’t mind.” You shake your head in reassurance, urging her to go on. It’s his mother; it’s fine to tell her if any of you is struggling. “I’m glad you’re there for each other because he wasn’t at a good place either.”

You nearly don’t dare to ask; in a way, she might know her son better than you know your boyfriend. Maybe; maybe not. You fear a disheartening answer when you ask, “Do you think he is now?”

But she, careful as ever, tells you honestly, “It’ll probably take time to get over things, but— it’ll be okay. Things seem a little better, though, if you want my neutral POV.”

“Ah… okay. That helps.” You play with the white-dotted red band around the jar. Your mind circles around a million questions that only she might be able to answer; yet, cautiously, all you query is, “Do you ever… have you ever spoken to him? Or his dad? About all the things…”

You reckon that if he’s talked about the two of you before, he probably mentioned spilling his secrets to you, too. At least from your perspective, it’s obvious that he entrusts her with his heart.

And once again, she affirms, “I have. Often. Even before the two of you came. It’s why I told you to take your time getting here.”

Ah… Makes sense now. So that’s why you had to roam the hotel until noon a couple days before. You sigh.

She continues, “It just doesn’t end well most of the time, so… And I’m not a good talker. I don’t know what to say anymore after so many years. Both want me on their side, though Jungkook never persists on it.”

She’s so wrong. Both she and him.

Jungkook has told you for months that he’s bad with words; yet, he comes in with every word ever written by any bard, singing poetry to you and bandaging your heart when needed.

You remember…

I’m not good with words, baby. And I don’t know how to ever properly verbalise something like this.

You sigh again. Tell her, “I understand. I also wouldn’t expect you to go against either of them.”

“Sure. But… It's difficult sometimes. Seeing how broken some of our bonds are.”

You’ve used and formed this word so many times before. Broken. For him, for you, for the world. Hearing somebody else share these sentiments and confirm your fears hurts.

And you’re out of words, wishing for a higher power to grant you a curing skill. If you could lift somebody’s burden with a single touch, just the way you’re reaching out for her hand now, you’d be busy circling the globe at all times.

“I’m so sorry,” is all, however, you can offer.

You hate how helpless she is. You urge to say something more, to hug her and promise that the world always regains its colours at some point. But you remain like this, watching the jam in the jars; hearing her say—

“You know. Jungkook has my number. I don’t know how much you and your mother still talk, but… you can talk to me, too, if you ever need to. I mean, I’m a mother.” She laughs at this part, raising a shoulder to her chin in pride, “And you’re part of him, so you can be part of us, too.”

Your eyes, locked onto the jar until now, flit up to her, and you blink to keep them dry, admitting without another thought, “I might actually cry.”

“Oh. Awh,” she voices, lifting her hand from underneath yours to cover it again. “Don’t. I didn’t mean to be all kitsch. I meant it.”

Gathering your prior thoughts into words, you puff out a breath, sporting a reprimanding look as you say, “You’re so wrong. You and your son, you always know what to say.”

Teeth flash again as she grins; she looks so innocent and pure. “Well, where do you think he got it from?”

Shit…

“Thank you…” you mutter, body already twitching, yearning to bolt forwards until you finally dare to ask, “Okay. May I… Can I hug you?”

“My goodness, love. You don’t need to ask! C’mere.”

You instantly tear up when she pulls you in. Last time you met, she left a fleeting touch. You barely knew her then; in some way, you don’t know her much now, either. But this… this is impactful.

The way she presses you into her; her chin on your shoulder. The slight pat and then the following rub up and down your shoulder blade. So warm; so salving.

One or two more pats, with a little more impact this time, she gently moves you back by your arms again, sucking in a breath as she suggests, “Alright. Wedding time, yes? We should start getting ready.”

“Yes. But…” You hesitate, wonder how much you can interfere. But then you diminish your mental concerns, and simply utter, “If you don’t mind. May I suggest something?”

You walk down the steps to the basement.

The light is on; other than what mainstream movies might suggest, they’ve set up the interior of the basement prettily. The few furniture — a table and a couch chair, as well as a couple common chairs — is a light beige, the wallpapers light, flowery.

He’s in the middle of the room, on the ground despite the many options to sit, sifting through pictures and objects lying around him. When he detects you, he flinches a bit, eyes big, moving suspiciously as if to hide something.

But you guess he’s just startled; and once he catches himself, he calls your name, wishing a sweet, “Morning, baby. Sorry for leaving the bed.”

“Oh, hey. It’s your house, you can do whatever you like. Besides, your mom and I had the time of our lives.”

He smiles brightly. You love, love, the wrinkles around his eyes. “Made some groundbreaking jam, yes?”

“You’ll see when you taste it.” You walk closer, recognising photo albums and frames. Yet, you ask, “What are you doing?”

“Uhmmm, just looking through old stuff.”

The pictures are flipped, upside down from where you stand, so you round his body, legs folded on the floor. You come to a kneel, and just when you’re close enough, you see the pure sugar spilled in front of him.

It’s in the form of fat baby cheeks. An open, surprised mouth. Then, in form of a photograph of a toddler crying. The same tremendous eyes and the same curve of his upper lip. A tilted smirk on one of them, just the one you know.

They’re adorable. You dissolve at the sight; at seeing him in a red vest, holding a half chewn corndog, tiny fingers forming a peace sign, and an unsure expression as if he’s seeing the world for the first time.

He does this often. Zone off like this.

Not rarely do you tease that he’s trudging through his first life, but he often refutes your theory with an immediate expression of shock. Chuckles back that it never feels like he’s loving you for the first time.

“Why are you looking at these, Kook?” you ask, hands on his shoulder before you settle your chin on one of them, cheek to cheek.

“Just so. I knew there was a picture of my cousin somewhere, too. Look.” He shoves aside some of the photographs on top, fishing out a very old one. “This is her. Gayoung.”

A lovely girl next to him, clearly older. They’re both holding car toys; he’s busy indulging in it, laughing, not noticing the flashing of the camera. But she’s staring right into it, caught off guard, eyebrows high and mouth open.

“I can’t believe she’s getting married today,” Jungkook says. “She’s like a daughter to my parents, but… I didn’t get to talk that much with her anymore when she grew into an adult. Was more with Ria. And then I moved, too. But… it’s still crazy. I still remember her as a young but older sister.”

“Of course. Time’s pace of passing is pretty strange. Very fast.”

“Yeah…”

He throws it back into the pile, shutting two of the handful of photo albums. Humming, he flips a couple pages of a third album; your eyes follow as he combs through them. You almost don’t notice when he pauses, and when you do, you understand why.

It’s another old picture, Jungkook tiny, mouth wide open to say something as he points towards the camera slash photographer. And he’s in the arms of somebody who’s undeniably his father. The man looks more like Junghyun than Jungkook.

But they seem happy here. His big hands are firm on Jungkook’s body, holding him lovingly and smiling at him with even further tenderness.

Jungkook remains on it for only a split second, but you get it.

You replay his mother’s words in your mind, and suddenly, you remember; a revelation clears up like a sunny day after a fog, and God… you remember.

And still, you act like you don’t. Like you haven’t understood that he’s here to reminisce about a life when things were still okay; when he still felt loved. Reliving moments when shit hurt less. Of course he’s here; it makes sense, so directly after a fight.

He seeks comfort in moments he barely remembers to escape the pain he recently suffered.

You’re out of damn words. This shouldn’t be happening to anybody.

You hug him from behind, arms around his chest. Attempting to ease his possibly disturbed soul, you ask, “Hey. Do you know that you’re the sweetest being alive? These pictures cause cavities. Good that you kept them from me.”

“Oh, yeah?” He turns his head slightly, lips grazing your nose, warm breath falling on it. “Coming from my munchkin herself.”

“I mean it! You’re so cute. And look at these cheeks,” your finger gestures towards a chubby baby, “they’re still so soft, by the way.”

You press your face against his, squishing his scarred cheek, and he states under a laugh, “You’re too much.”

“Too much of a fool for you, yes.”

He clicks his tongue, though playfully. You hear in his voice and see in his beam that he’s delighted, flattered, loving and loved. You ask, “Are you feeling okay now?”

To your relief, he nods. “I’m feeling better, I guess. Looking forward to the wedding. And your dress!”

“Oh, I am, too. I was going to show it to your mom just before, but… I want you to be the first to see it.”

“And then you say I’m not the luckiest man alive.”

“I just said Ashton Kutcher is. Mila Kunis is pretty cool.”

“Shut up.”

You pause, watch him tidy up; after a minute, you tell him, “You should’ve joined when we made the jam. Could’ve been fun, too.”

“Yeah… I mean I thought about it, but. Then I was like, maybe it’d be good for her to get to know you, like, unfiltered. She’s always careful not to be weird around me.”

“Ah. That’s kinda sweet, though.”

“Isn’t it?”

You nod against his cheek; then, drum lightly against his chest, a peck to his ear, getting to your feet a second later as you ask, “So… are you coming up? It’s a little after eleven. We should probably get ready soon.”

“Yeah, I’ll be up in some. You should go first, though. I’ll need a bit less time.”

You’re already taking steps towards the staircase leading up, but you can’t refrain from throwing one last tease, “You sure? Not sure with your skincare routine. Have you even eaten?”

“Yes, I did. Don’t be a brat.”

You lift your lips to a last provoking, tight-lipped smile before you ascend to his room. The dress is still almost flawless between your clothes. You heavily worried about damage in the few days you travelled, but aside from a few spots that need to be ironed out, it’s as gorgeous as ever.

Flattening out the creases with a borrowed iron, you soon rummage in your suitcase for the curling iron and the rest of your make up. You look at the mess scattered on Jungkook’s table, wondering where to start.

Make up, probably.

Okay. you have one, two chances max to try what you want to achieve. The goal is to remain casual, natural and humble; considering your dress, you cannot overdo it. You don’t want to look excessively over the top. Want to keep your essence under the make up.

So you keep it lowkey, pretty much content with the results before you slip into the dress.

And when you look into the mirror, you nearly squeal. You don’t struggle with your appearance. But while you’ve largely been satisfied with how you look, you did occasionally find things to possibly improve.

Normal. Doesn’t everyone deem certain spots flaws, regardless of whether they actually are?

But today… today you’re sparkling. You’re happy; in love with what you accomplished.

If you could, you’d immediately rush down to him again, show you the results. But it seems you don’t need to — because half a minute later, you make out his voice outside. He’s talking to his brother, laughing about something; seems the rest of the family is leaving. The door shuts just before you hear him moving up the stairs with quick steps.

And… when he finally opens the ajar door to his own room, his body locks at the spot, as if somebody screwed his feet into the wooden floor.

The reaction is easily imagined; most often seen on TV. You didn’t know how real it was, but then again, clichés always have an origin in real life, don’t they?

You’re surprised, a little shy by how he looks at you. And how he looks in general — black trousers hugging his snatched waist and well-formed hips. The white dress shirt is still in progress, collars up, suit jacket not yet on.

And he’s olding something in his hand that you can’t recognise.

He looks breathtaking and mesmerising, despite missing half of the preparation still. Fuck… fuck, fuck, fuck.

Does he feel the same about you? Probably.

Because he curses, “What the fuck.”

Like a statement, not a question. You touch the silky soft material of your dress, widening your eyes as your quiet voice asks, “What?”

“What are you even?”

You burst out into a brief, fleeting laugh at the question, repeating, “What I am?”

“Like, a fairy or something. Shit, it’s as if I’m getting married.”

Another near-squeak falls out of you. But you can’t blame him this time; you chose this attire carefully.

The sheer chiffon fabric, light and airy, sparkling; it called your name the moment you saw it. Floor length, lavender, spilling to the floor like a waterfall; a spicy slit on the side that Jungkook’s eyes remained on for just a tiny heartbeat longer, you know.

And off-the-shoulder sleeves; most of the back bare.

Sheepishly, you ask, “So you like it?”

“Like, I—” he starts, yet stops. He blows a raspberry. “You’re so pretty. You’re the prettiest. Oh my God,” he exclaims, dramatically touching his forehead, “I need to keep other’s eyes off you. Look at you!”

You laugh out loud, a hand on his wrist to keep your balance, no other productive response in your bright pink entangled mind than, “Babe—”

“No, seriously. Okay, I concur. It was right for me to wait to see you in the dress. Getting a heart attack as we speak.”

Your cheeks still glow brightly when you wiggle a finger at him, disappointed that there is no reality show camera pointing at you to hear you say, “If your boyfriend doesn’t react like this, girl, you don’t want him.”

You instinctively move to the buttons of his sleeve, helping out, resisting the urge to give in and fix his collar, too. You want to see the end result so badly, but he’s still missing the tie and the jacket.

So you settle on merely touching the buttons over his chest, nodding as if approving before you say, “You already look so good, too. You know, maybe it’s you who should hide behind me today. What if some middle school girl crushing on you jumps you?”

He chuckles. “They can try.”

“They? Well, shit.”

“I’m kidding.” He lowers his chin, bringing your knuckles to his rosy lips, kissing one or two of them. “Hide me, then.”

“Mhm… Do you need help getting ready? With the tie or something?”

“Oh, it’s okay. You can lean back for a bit, tell me a story or something? I shouldn’t take too long.”

It’s a ritual of sorts. Sometimes, when you wait for the other on a date or dinner night, the faster one acts as the night’s entertainer. Sings songs or tells stories or plays DJ or serves the latest, hottest work tea.

You tell him, “Okay. But before I do,” your hand wanders down to his; it’s stubbornly closed around an object, dangling on his side. You uncurl his fingers. “What’s that you got there?”

“Oh, I…” He comes to life, as if he forgot that he was holding it at all. He lifts it between your faces, straightening his palm, and presents you something incredibly sparkly and nostalgic. “It’s part of the reason I went down at all. With my mom’s permission since she wore it at her prom…”

Damn it. Both of them deceived you.

“You were looking for it?” He nods; your heartbeat accelerates as you urge, “And…”

“And I got it for you.”

Words, you notice, are only your specialty when you’re jotting them down and narrating a story from within your mind. When it comes to answering to the grand gestures he always makes you fall in love with, you’re such a zero.

Odd, considering how he, in contrast, has claimed over and over again that he’s not as eloquent as he’d like to be. But you’ve long figured out that if he was to preach the truths he holds in his heart to an audience, the stage would drown in a flood of tears within minutes.

You reach for the shiny, pearly, flowery accessory. It’s rose-gold, a little vintage, clearly older, and so strikingly beautiful. It looks like…

“A comb… for me,” you say. Not the one to untangle your hair. The decorative type; fancy and gorgeous. He nods again, lets you take it between your fingers. “Why?”

“Just,” a shrug of his shoulder, “I wanted to give you a little something to remind you of this place and the love you got here. Besides, it’d look so pretty on you.”

A reminder that you’re loved. You wonder — who thinks of these things? Does anyone else in this universe heat up their girl’s chest like your boyfriend does?

They can tell you what they want; you’re the luckiest being alive. And in return, you want to love him as much as nobody has ever loved before.

You whisper, “Thank you, Kook… Your mom is okay with this?” Another enthusiastic nod of confirmation. “Thank you so much. I— I wish you could see yourself the same way.” You squeeze it in your hand to feel it properly, then open it again. “This is so pretty.”

“It’ll suit you.”

“Yes?” Softly, you hand it back to him, turning to the mirror, with him right behind you. “Do you want to put it in?”

“Ah… I can try.”

“Right there?” You point to the back of your head; to the braid in your loose half updo. “Near the hair pins I used. The comb might hide them well, too.”

And he does his best. Regards your hairdo focused, eyebrows knitting in concentration, so gentle with it. No getting stuck, no intentional tugging.

“Wait,” he then says, tapping his trouser’s pocket, and then fishes out his phone for a picture. He shows it to you; the accessory sits there perfectly, not crooked or ruining a single wisp of hair. “How’s that?”

“You did it so well. Thank you, Koo.” You face him again, smile bright and endless. “Your turn?”

“Yes.” He rubs his hands, looking around. “Let’s get this over with. Give me feedback, okay? And tell me a story?”

You take a seat at the edge of his bed prettily, coming up with a short tale about personified instruments and what they’d symbolise. The guitar for the heart and the love in it, the drums for thunder and the excited pulse of the soul.

“The flute for the breeze and dreams?” Jungkook adds.

And you urge in a thrilled tone, “And the violin for the rain and longing. They’d learn from each other, right?” You sigh. “I’ll think about the piano, too. Can’t figure it out yet… it could be a lot.”

Jungkook nods, distracted and interrupting the story when he asks for brief comments on his progress. Barely any feedback, though; praises largely.

You watch as he slips into the rest of his clothing and gels his hair back — it’s grown quite a bit since the press conference in September. You get to your feet, amped up when he finally claps and rubs his hands in anticipation a bit later, announcing that he’s ready to leave.

And you’re still euphoric when you jump into your car, letting him drive through the streets he knows much better. His fingers wander to the passenger seat every now and then; minutes after the last scolding, you keep reminding him to keep his hands on the wheel.

I want to kiss you so bad, but your damn make up won’t let me today, huh?

A tease here, a flirt there.

You feel like you could do anything. The sky's the limit. And it soon proves that the statement has never rang truer, even if in a vastly different context now.

Because once you reach the wedding — your metaphorical sky —, Ria is already standing at the parking lot, waving the moment she spots the two of you stepping out of the car. From afar, you already see the wedding’s venue; a lake in the back, a huge tent and a field at the front.

The parking lot right next to it, but still a couple minutes of a trek away.

Ria’s parents indulge Jungkook in a conversation about something you barely register right away, and she gestures towards herself, hugging and greeting you with an odd half-smile.

“You look so pretty,” she says, and you beam benignly, returning the compliment.

She’s rocking a dark blue dress, sleeveless, her hair in a loose bun. Wavy strands frame her face. But somehow, she looks demotivated. Worried to the slightest, though still mostly cheerful. So you ask, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah! I just wanted to tell you something. But don’t freak out, okay?”

Well, shit. Doesn’t start as you imagined, does it? You glimpse over to Jungkook. He’s laughing from the heart, button nose crunched; why is she not telling him, too?

Your chest feels tighter; the usual human response to a menacing statement such as hers. You upright yourself, take a deep breath, ground yourself as you encourage, “Yes? I won’t. What’s up?”

“Well… we’re in this town and like, people know each other. And since we’re all in a very close circle here, I just wanted to say that,” her face changes; she kind of grimaces, as if apologetic for something, “Nara came, too.”

Ah.

Ah…

The sky's the limit, and you reached it, and now you’re kind of crashing.

Well. You never thought about this; but it makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? Of course she’d be here. She was part of this town and Jungkook’s life for so many years, so naturally, she’d be familiar with his relatives, too.

Besides, even if she hadn’t been with him… Didn’t Jungkook and Ria already establish with you just yesterday, when you were inhaling your ice cream, that this small town strives on familiarity?

Meetings at the town hall, the shop owners’ affection for most of their year-long customers. The Stars Hollow vibe you already recognised.

Ahhh…

So that’s what Junghyun might have been trying to tell you on the first day, too. You remember his mother interrupting.

How annoying. You did not want to feel annoyed. Maybe it would’ve been better if Ria hadn’t told you; if you’d bumped into Nara randomly and suffered the temporary heart attack. Or perhaps, you wouldn’t have seen her at all…

Come on. Unrealistic.

Fuck, you feel childish. There shouldn’t be any burning in your chest or an uncomfortable warmth in your cheek. You shouldn’t be feeling the urge to run over to Jungkook, to actually hide him behind you.

To rush to his ear, whisper your worries, make him promise that he only loves you and won’t ride into the sunset with her.

Delusional, paranoid concerns that you wouldn’t entertain on any normal, sane day; then again, the news Ria delivered wasn’t going to leave you unbothered anyway. This whole thing around exes really sucks.

“I… I shouldn’t spiral, though, right?” you answer, your voice a little weaker. Ria immediately nods, though still not relaxing the wrinkle between her eyebrows. “I mean, of course she’d be here. This is her place, she was born here and…”

Ria takes your hands in hers, assures, “I promise you it’s nothing too bad, okay? Nara and Jungkook have been here at the same time before and literally nothing happened.”

What? When?

“When?” you echo.

“Uh, like last summer? He only came down for a couple days, though. College exams and stuff.”

Ah… you wouldn’t even know. Back then, you’d only encountered him once, at the blurry frat party that you spent in locked rooms and on tiled roofs. When you sang together and spilled your hearts to each other.

For the very first time.

Whatever he did before or after that… how would you know?

Only, you feel even sicker at the thought that after that party, and after he allegedly met Nara here again without anything literally happening, he still linked with her back in the city. Still shared his nights and sheets with her.

Does this count as nothing happening? What if the time here evoked something? What if it happens again?

Fuck, what if it happens again?

“I’m going to panic,” you tell Ria.

“What? No,” she exclaims, though instantly lowering her voice, rubbing your arm soothingly, “it’s okay, I promise. He didn’t even think of it. Either that or he doesn’t care ‘cause he didn’t mention her once.”

“But now I might keep thinking about it.”

“Seriously. Fuck, I feel bad for saying it—”

“No… no, it’s okay. You should’ve.”

“Okay, look. It’s honestly fine. She’s nice, she won’t do anything shady; not if she knows about y’all.” Another caressing touch to your shoulder. “I just wanted to warn you. Please don’t feel startled. I’m here, okay? I’ll smash his nose if anything happens.”

She looks to the side. The other conversation has seemingly ended, too, and you swallow as Ria’s parents wave her over. She says, “Okay. Gotta go, but I’ll meet you guys inside and reserve seats, okay? There’s just limited assigned seating.”

She pats your coat-clad arm, and then walks away.

Well. Okay.

You guess you’ll have to get over this one way or another. You focus on your clothing. Focus on how you look, how Jungkook looks. The weather, the tent many many feet away. Your boyfriend’s gaze on you as he walks back to you, offering his hand.

He pauses when he sees you, asking, “Is everything okay?”

“Hm?” you hum. “Yes. Just nervous, I think.”

“Me too.” He flashes the sweetest grin known to mankind, genuinely excited, childlike joy. Tilts his head at you. “You seriously look so fucking pretty. Like really, really.”

You smile.

Okay…

It should be alright. Jeon Jungkook is so in love with you; damn it, he even peels your oranges for you when you don’t feel like doing it. You need to trust the process; need to hold onto your excitement.

Okay.

You glance at the event warming up in the far. Halfway through, people have gathered, standing on the grass or the man-made path. There’s still a bit of time; so naturally, they’re still busying themselves with conversations.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

You’ve met her before. This isn’t different.

You look down to where his and your fingers intertwine; put particular attention to the way he holds you. Firmly, as if protecting and loving and keeping you close at the same time.

His smile lifts your spirits a little, the wind enclosing your mind and easing it. You nod only slightly, telling yourself it’ll all be good — and then, let him tug you towards the wedding.

The wedding is as bustling as you expected. It’s bright, colourful, flowers draped over the place in abundance. Even before you enter it, the huge tent leaves you breathless, gasping.

They put so much effort into this; it’s clear as day. Jungkook’s mother isn’t around, but the moment you lay your eyes on her again, you’ll praise her for what she helped mount. Somehow, the beauty nearly makes you forget that you’re among pure strangers.

But that at least one familiar face is roaming here somewhere.

You take a deep breath.

All these people know each other. They probably grew up together, know the ins and outs of the town, have gathered at weddings and funerals and school events. You don’t know how well you’ll be able to integrate, but you do hope for their support.

It’s not too much to ask, you reckon.

At least not when Jungkook pulls at your hand and the two of you into certain directions, coming to a stand multiple times when he sees a person or two calling him to them. Some are old school friends; some adults he knew when he was a child.

Candy store owners. Somebody who sold him his first scooter. Or a pal he used to share his banana milk with.

The sentiments are clearly there and they bask in them, but none of them ever forgets about you. Jungkook introduces you, tugs you into his side, enskies you with praise. And they respond with kindness and interest; tell you he’s mentioned you before.

You remember. Jungkook told you how his friends spoke about you or saw you on TV, eager to meet you — they react according to the excitement he foretold, and you reciprocate it with ease. Very sweet.

Yet, it seems that even in a small town, or especially in a small town, enmity runs just as deep as affection. Some people remember friendships, others still resent rotten memories.

You soon meet the first one of the latter kind.

He’s standing near the entrance of the spacious tent; you glance inside, unsuspecting, not a single familiar face in sight. You don’t notice him until Jungkook does, coming to a stand, walk interrupted as the guy exclaims, “Jeon Jungkook! My goodness, Jungkook—”

You meet thick eyebrows, long-ish dark hair, full lips. He’s handsome, his smile bright.

And his voice is mellow and sweet, and at certain tones, it reminds you of Jimin’s; then again, some syllables come out much deeper. You don’t know who he is; of the pictures Jungkook has shown you, he wasn’t in any of them.

“Hey,” Jungkook greets, somewhat distant. You don’t think standing here is his first choice, but your boyfriend is as polite as can be. Even waves towards the guy, and tells you, “This is Christian. Barom, but he lives in Australia now, so.”

“Hi,” you reach out a hand, “nice to meet you.”

The accent is heavy and somehow cursive when he responds, “Likewise.”

Jungkook is definitely not delighted about him. Follows the touch of your hands, then your gaze up to Christian’s face. You notice it before Jungkook can probably even think of it: the odd look the stranger throws at you.

Up and down. Smile telling. Uncomfortable.

And when Jungkook suddenly does catch it, he intervenes, “You came all the way from Sydney?”

“Yep. And you came over from the city?”

“Yeah,” Jungkook answers. You barely register it, but you’re certain he’s been pushing you behind him inch by inch; but you remain at your spot. You can deal with this. “We were on vacation before, but I was gonna come anyway.”

“Nice. And wait, sorry, you were…?”

You recall never introducing yourself; but you’re positive he’s figured out your relationship to Jungkook just by the steadfast grip around your palm. But Jungkook still officially voices your name and informs him, “My girlfriend.”

Christian must be seeing or hearing something you aren’t — strange since it was him who asked — but he laughs, teasing, “You’re being defensive.”

“I’m not. I literally just told you she’s my girlfriend.”

“Lucky. You look pretty together.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

You have not a single clue what’s going on. Jungkook is never really rude, so there must be something about this Barom or Christian — he’s never mentioned him before.

Then again, you guess growing up in a tight space comes with all sorts of relationships. Christian is probably the sort that never earns a mention until actually met with the person themselves.

It’s funny though — in some way, the rejection seems one-sided. As if Jungkook is still holding something against him and Christian remains uncaring; while it might not be a universal truth, you’ve experienced that those utterly calm are often the ones at fault.

And Jungkook isn’t an angry human being. He’s kind. Patient. Needs a reason to be mad.

Christian doesn’t take the hint when he smiles, a heavily tattooed hand patting Jungkook on his shoulder as he suggests, “See you later then? Let’s take a picture or get a drink afterwards.”

Jungkook only stalls for the tiniest seconds, but you know him — he’s probably already made up his mind. You look between the men, baffled by the nearly visible bolts shooting from one pair of eyes to the other.

“Sure,” Jungkook eventually says, your hand still in his, and works on moving to the coat check and then to the chairs without adding anything else.

You don’t inquire yet what this was about as you walk, catching glimpses of the priest, of the stranger guests and of the people lingering at the front of the tent. You’re busy gauging Jungkook’s eyebrows, observing as they relax more the further he gets away from the guy.

And neither do you need to pop the question when you’ve settled somewhere in the middle-ish, you on his right side, Ria on the other. Next to her, her parents that you briefly met when you brought her home yesterday.

Previously turned on her seat, she now uprights her body, hooking her arm with Jungkook’s as she whispers to him, yet clearly enough for you to hear, “Was that Yu Barom?”

Jungkook nods. “Christian Yu now. Yup.”

“Right.”

They nod, understanding each other wordlessly, but you’re still floating in between a couple theories and the actual sentiments. So you lean in; you’ve become one of the gossipers at a wedding, you guess.

“Okay,” you start; the two of them stare at you with the same big puppy eyes. “You don’t seem to like him.”

“Oh, we don’t,” Jungkook bluntly admits.

“Why?”

Jungkook smacks his lips. Eyes drift to the roof of the tent, the polyester fabric swaying in the gust. Then, they shift to his cousin, presumably seeking approval, because she shrugs her shoulders, gesturing with her hand and says, “Oh, go ahead.”

So he explains, “His little cousin was a constant problem for Ria. Same age… harassed her and all. Constant flirting and phone calls and didn’t take the hint, just an uncomfortable dude in general.” He pauses, shaking his head. “I had to threaten him for him to get lost. And Christian didn’t like that.”

Okay, now you definitely feel like somebody indulging in tittle-tattle. Some more and you’ll be one of the aunties. Your mouth gradually opens as he speaks, and you emphasise, “No way.”

“It’s true— the guy was on a break from college for just a month and decided to argue with a fifteen-year-old.”

“What? Did you get into a fight with him?”

“Nah.” He pauses when a group of random three girls in green dresses walks along the aisle, even though they’re barely facing you, sending a perfumed breeze towards you. Then, “Not a physical one. But it was a bit messy. Didn’t like that night.”

“Me neither,” Ria confirms.

Of course he didn’t like it.

He’s largely non-confrontational. You’ve learned this much in the time you’ve known him, and have given the fact utmost sense ever since he revealed his innermost fears. Jungkook keeps quiet; he dreads repetitions of a direful past.

Yet, initiating and risking a conflict for his baby cousin increases the respect you harbour for him.

People are cruel; but Jeon Jungkook is good-hearted to his core, no matter how flawed.

You touch the back of his hand, caressing it when he says, “Stay with me tonight, okay? And if you can’t, then do come to me when he nears you.”

“Okay.”

His eyes meet yours, concerned but also suspiciously fiery when he states, “Because like, I really didn’t like how he was looking at you.”

Ah…

“Hm?”

“You didn’t notice?” he asks, his voice higher, thick eyebrows closing into each other again. You lift a thumb, clearing the crease and his stress. “I almost plucked his eyes out.”

Of course you noticed. You just didn’t think it irritated Jungkook to this point.

“Oh— Kook—”

“No seriously,” he stresses, turning his hand to get ahold of two of your fingers, “guy was sweet half his life and then tried stuff with so many girls. I wouldn’t be surprised if he approached you again, so please stay away from him, okay?”

“Yes, baby. But I wouldn’t let him do shit anyway. Don’t worry.” You nudge his shoulder. “And don’t be jealous. Have you seen yourself?”

He rolls his eyes at the accusation, but there’s a sliver of a smile on his face and relief in his gaze. You guess hearing you say it does wonders to him; sometimes, you truly praise the connection between you, based on a clear foundation of trust and communication.

Well… at least now.

“I’m not jealous,” he insists, “it was just gross how he looked at you. Fuck this. Not with my girl.”

You can’t help but break into a chuckle, way too loud for your row. You slap a hand over your mouth, careful not to ruin the lipstick, and nearly give into the urge to release his pout. But it’s too sweet — it can linger for a second.

Removing your hand, you near him until your mouth grazes his, assuring, “I love you,” before you peck his lips curtly. He still looks a little grumpy, though. Your man. “It’s okay, baby.”

The grip around your hand intensifies. It doesn’t seem it will vanish for the rest of the night. You sure hope it doesn’t.

And you’re immensely grateful for the luck you’re enjoying. Not only because of this place’s beauty and the palm holding onto yours — but you haven’t seen Nara either. In fact, you become hyper aware of how much you’ve been thinking of her.

Like; what is she wearing? How is she doing? Is she thinking about Jungkook; expecting him here; feeling a sort of way? Is she imagining his smile and how she saw it in this very town so many times, dedicated to her?

And did Christian ever flirt with her, too? Did it irritate Jungkook?

You’ve been thinking it all dead.

Unnecessarily so if Jungkook hasn’t even mentioned her, never sought her out. Instead, he’s busy protecting his girl from past bullies.

In all honesty, you’ll probably cross ways with her still. The guest list isn’t endless; the place vast but not infinite.

But for now, you forget about her, trashing all thoughts and possibilities. Shake your head. Breathe it out. Relieve your chest.

You diverge into conversations about anything and everything, reminiscing about yesterday and the places you saw. Listen into stories Ria and Jungkook tell: about injuries, about pleasant nights and about the fights they had.

Ria was like the sister Jungkook never had; Junghyun was a good older brother, but when seeking another opinion, she was on speed dial. Sometimes, growing up in a certain environment makes all the difference — hearing a girl’s thoughts at all times might have made Jungkook the way he is.

Thoughtful, respectful. You have encountered sexism a million times — not to mention just minutes ago, checked out so shamelessly — but you don’t think Jungkook has such a notion even in any crevice of his heart.

You’re fond and happy when they laugh together; her crinkles match his. Their laugh contagious.

It still echoes and fades, slowly and lovingly when the tent quietens. All heads turn, but you don’t see much from here. Maybe a couple moving bodies at the entrance. Someone coughs, interrupting the silence and lowering their head, and the moment allows you a peek at the sensation.

The bride is waiting, holding a bouquet. Her father is touching her veil to fix it despite having nothing to fix; but she doesn’t notice.

Gayoung is glancing ahead, breathing in. Everyone’s eyes remain on her, but your head turns to follow her eyes. The groom is already standing there in a standard groomesque position, hands folded, upright like a post.

He looks insanely nervous. His shiny boot taps the ground, lips parting and unparting. And he’s blinking; then forming a circle with his mouth, releasing the pent-up tension.

She hasn’t moved yet. The ceremony is yet to begin.

But even before all that, as people indulge in the sight and wait for their eternity to start, Jungkook has already mimicked your turn, fingers still intertwined. When he speaks, you flinch; you didn’t notice his voice this close.

He’s looking at the groom, too, before he settles his gaze on you. Stares with affection in his gems that bursts your heart, splinters your ribs and implodes your chest. You know he’ll say something to fade out the entire crowd before he actually says it.

“Can I tell you something mainstream?”

You hum, “Hm?”

He regards your digits, plays with them. “If you ever choose to marry me…” Your heart stops. “I’ll look just as tense as him.”

“Would you… want to marry me one day?”

“It’s just a thing people do, right?” he questions. “Whether it’s like this or in any other way— I’ll spend my life with you anyhow.”

I’ll spend my life with you.

Not a question. Not a need.

But a confession. A goal. A plan.

You don’t get to answer when the first tunes of a guitar play. It’s a song you recognise; paints a smile onto your face. The melody is soft, slow, so gentle. They didn’t choose an orchestral track or the usual Wedding March after all.

It’s a song.

Jungkook’s eyes blow wide, and he immediately seeks yours. Mutters into your ear, “Do I know this?”

“You probably do.”

“Wait—” He listens in. Pupils roll up as he ponders. Then, “Didn’t someone sing this in the lobby this week?”

Almost. It’s why it delights you so. You already had half an idea back then, and you managed to somehow incorporate it into this wedding without really being part of these people.

“Yoongi played it on the guitar,” you clarify, “I suggested it to your mom this morning. I guess she liked it enough to forward the request so spontaneously.”

“You did? Then she must’ve…”

You can’t decipher what he’s thinking. His stare is fixated on the passing bride, her slow steps, the beam she wears as she nears whom she’s decided to be the rest of her life.

You can’t peep into his brain, but you notice when he tilts his head. See the tiny gap between his lips and the way he catches the groom blink away tears the moment you do, because Jungkook smiles at just the same moment as you do.

Gayoung lowers her head when she comes to a stand in front of his still-fiancé, and then delivers the most magnificent, most mesmerising grin. She’s happy, you know. You don’t think you’ve seen this intensity of joy a lot of times in your life.

You recognised it when Jungkook woke up still in your bed after the blue night. When he opened up to you, vowed to stay, brought you to his home. When you announced to the world that you’d be his to remain, that you’d do what you enjoy.

When you got home that evening, and he kissed you right against the door, deemed you crazy, deemed you his.

You haven’t seen this very happiness much in your life, but you’ve seen it in him. And you’ve felt it in your chest. Growing, blossoming, never wilting.

The couple at the front speaks its vows like a song. The words are melodic, poetic, and you’re almost entirely sure that they’re not rehearsed. It’s all real. The love in them and the memories in them, accompanied by the liquid bliss swimming in his and her waterline.

No, you haven’t experienced this too many times before. You’ve felt it. He’s felt it.

And you don’t need to know much more than this; don’t need to know what he’s thinking to understand what he means when he says—

“This… this is it.”

THE CHAPTER ISN'T OVER YET!! PLS READ 👇🏼

1k block limit as always!! you can read the second half of the chapter in this reblog!! the reblog begins with a new scene <3

#jungkook smut #jungkook fluff #bts smut #bts fluff #jeongguk smut #jungkook x reader #jungkook x you #bts x you #bts imagines #jungkook fic #bts angst #jungkook angst #jungkook

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