#what i get for showing up three weeks late

[spideyjimin]

Break my heart | jjk (teaser)

—  pairing: fuckboy!jungkook x female reader 

—  genre: college au, roommates au, friends to lovers, idiots to lovers, kind of friends to enemies, and enemies to lovers, fluff, angst, and smut 

— rating: 18+ 

—  summary: jungkook, a mask, and a party. three things that made you weak enough to break all the rules of friendship. you did with him what you usually do with strangers… but he was never supposed to be a one-night stand. there’s too much history. too much comfort. and now, the aftermath of that wild and steamy night has made living with him unbearable, but also impossible to walk away. because you’re falling. fast. deep. and maybe deep enough to let each other break your own hearts.

—  words: 535 for the teaser

—  warnings: tension, flirting, strong language, and implied sex

—  author’s note: soooo i've already worked on this & i'm posting the little teaser to give you a little taste of what's coming 🫣 this is the college au i teased you about some time ago & i've been working on it for a little while, but i don't know when it's going to be released. this fics is inspired by many shows and movies i've watched lately (because i've done only that for the past 2 months 😫) i hope you'll enjoy it ❤️

— you can find another teaser here

— join the taglist ✨

“Will you be home at two?” you ask as he walks past you.  

“Why?” he says, opening the fridge and grabbing the milk like he couldn’t care less.

“Some guy is coming,” you answer, your eyes following his strong figure.

You watch his muscles flex as he reaches for a glass. It’s almost unfair how someone so infuriating can look that good. Buff. Strong. Dangerous in all the right ways. If he weren’t such an asshole, you might just let him ruin you again.

“Who?” he asks without looking at you.  

“Why do you want to know?” you counter, eyes glued on him.

He avoids your gaze, pouring the milk like the carton suddenly became fascinating.

“Because you’re the one talking about it,” he mumbles

A devious smirk grows on your face as you step closer—dangerously close now. He straightens up, facing you, eyes finally locking with yours.

“Are you looking for a guy?” you ask, cocking your head with a teasing grin.

“What?” his scowl is immediate, and you try as hard as possible to repress the smile growing on your face.  

You almost laugh at his expression. It’s ridiculous how easy it is to rile him up. But you hold it in. No cracks. Not yet. You're about to push him further. Annoying him is your new favorite pastime.

“I didn’t know you were gay,” you tease him.

Thank God he wasn’t drinking his milk. Otherwise, he would have choked. His brows draw together, clearly caught off guard.

“I’m not gay,” he says flatly, casually even, but his tone is clipped.

“Jungkook,” you shrug innocently. “You can be whoever you want. I support you, bestie.”

He rolls his eyes and drinks a sip of milk from the cup. Despite being annoyed, his heart skips a beat when you call him ‘bestie’. He hasn’t heard that nickname since that infamous night. You’ve called him jerk, asshole, idiot, stupid, fuckboy, dickhead, and many other things like that for the past three weeks.

“Why are you insisting?”

A little mustache of milk forms on his upper lip when he removes the cup. He looks absolutely adorable, like a little boy trapped in the body of a man who could destroy you with a single touch.

“Because I get it,” you smile. “I like men too.”

He wipes the milk mustache off with the back of his hand, but this time, the playful glint in his eyes disappears. He’s serious now.

“Stop it, yn,” his voice is sharp, like a warning. “You know I don’t like men.”

“Me?” you pretend to be innocent. “I don’t know anything. You’re very mysterious lately.”

Without a warning, he steps closer—your heart hammers in your chest with this sudden proximity. The air thickens between you, and you feel his hot and minty breath against your cheek. This reminds you of that wild night in the ballroom

“Yes, you do,” he whispers, voice dropping into something husky. His lips graze your ear. “And if you’ve forgotten, I can remind you.”

His fingers brush your cheek, sending shivers down your spine.

“I can make you moan my name again…” he pauses for a split second. “Or scream it, if you’d prefer.”

[kxsagi]

hiiiiiii can i ask if you can write bllk x reader where reader loves food and eat everything and really is happy when food but when she don't eat at all means she's really upset and guys worrying about why she's not eating at all, can you do it w sae, rin, kaiser, hiori or anyone u want hihih

I genuinely love your works! Got me giggling and feet kicking in ungodly hour. :3 thank you

“𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐞𝐯𝐞�� 𝐚 𝐛𝐢𝐭𝐞? 𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐩”

a/n: HIII THANK YOU SO MUCH OMGGG LOVE YOUUU 🫶🏻

i am such a foodie so this was so cute and fun to write but i could NOT find a title to save my life

ft. itoshi sae, itoshi rin, kaiser michael, hiori yo

itoshi sae

sae’s used to you gasping dramatically at the sight of food like it’s a long-lost lover. 

“they have churros here?? SAE THEY HAVE CHURROS.” 

“okay. get like ten.” he doesn’t blink. 

he actually finds it really endearing. you eating happily is one of his favorite sights. he’ll sit there, bored and half-asleep, while you destroy three types of desserts and ask if you can eat the fries that came with his meal (he gives you a disgusted face the entire time, but he’s secretly dying from cuteness inside). 

so the first time you push your plate away during a dinner date in madrid, his fork halts mid-air. 

“... you full?” 

you shrug. “just not hungry.” 

red flags. sirens. DEFCON 1. 

he won’t show it outwardly, but he’s staring at you the entire meal. and when you say you want to go home early? 

he doesn’t let you go to bed without asking, “what’s wrong?” 

you try to dodge it. 

“you love food too much to leave that untouched. tell me.” 

if you cry? he’ll gently pull you in and kiss the top of your head while holding you against his chest. he won’t say much, but you’ll wake up the next morning with your favorite snacks on the kitchen counter and your favorite comfort show queued up. 

itoshi rin

rin doesn’t get it at first. why do you get so giddy over something as basic as food? 

but then he sees you twirl when you smell fresh pancakes, or do a little dance when your ramen hits the table, and he thinks: oh. 

it becomes something he secretly anticipates – how your eyes light up, how you always go “one more bite” and it’s twenty more bites. 

so when you go silent during lunch, poke at your plate, and don’t finish your drink, he immediately notices. 

“you okay?” 

you nod too quickly. “just tired.” 

lies. LIES. rin can detect those like a hawk. 

he doesn’t pressure you in public. but later, when it’s just the two of you, he’ll sit on the couch beside you and ask again. 

“did someone say something to you?” 

you: “no, i just…” 

he’s already pulling you into a side hug. “don’t shut down. talk to me.” 

and when you finally open up, he’ll listen quietly, rubbing your back, then mutter something like: “we’re getting takeout tomorrow. your pick. and you’re eating the entire menu.” 

that’s how he comforts, gentle, low-key, but dead serious about getting you back to food-happy. 

kaiser michael

he lives to spoil you when it comes to food. five-star reservations, late-night gelato runs, midnight pancake competitions in his penthouse kitchen. 

“liebe, you are divine when you eat.” 

he flirts even more when you’re biting into a croissant or sighing over truffle fries. sometimes he feeds you just for fun. 

so when he notices you ignoring your plate at a fancy restaurant he booked weeks in advance? 

full drama. drops his fork. 

“okay. who upset my queen.” 

you try to laugh it off, but he’s already leaning in, his voice low. “you didn’t even touch your steak. baby. talk to me.” 

he genuinely can’t stand seeing you look so dull and unbothered about food, it’s so un-you. 

will cancel everything to take you home. 

and when he gets you there? puts on your favorite music, wraps you in a blanket, and just holds you until you finally admit what’s wrong. 

“you don’t have to act okay. but don’t keep me in the dark, ja?” 

the next day he’s bringing you breakfast in bed with pancakes shaped like hearts. 

“you’re not leaving this bed until you’re full and happy again. doctor kaiser’s orders.” 

hiori yo

hiori is the most softly concerned of them all. he finds so much joy in watching you eat – it’s comforting, like a sign that things are good and safe. 

he even started learning how to cook just to surprise you with homemade meals. 

so when he makes something for you and you just… barely touch it? 

his heart kind of sinks. 

“is it not good…?” 

you quickly shake your head. “no! it’s amazing, hiori. i just… i’m not hungry.” 

and you see his expression falter for a second. 

he doesn’t say anything right away, but later that night, he gently brings you a cup of tea and sits beside you. 

“you don’t have to eat if you’re upset… but if you ever want to talk, i’m here.” 

he’ll rub your back slowly, his voice soft and careful. he never pushes, just lets you open up at your own pace. 

once you do, he’ll give you the warmest hug and thank you for trusting him. 

the next morning? fresh breakfast waiting. little notes that say “for my favorite foodie 💙” and “today will be better.” 

© 𝐤𝐱𝐬𝐚𝐠𝐢

[wendichester]

I know you literally JUST posted it but please part two to that angst Dean Drabble where you leave him and he realises that he still loves you when he starts to absentmindedly do things he used to do with you 😢😢

𓏲⋆ ִֶָ ๋𓂃 outta love²,

summary. dean's falling out of love.

pairing. dean winchester x reader genre. angst

wordcount. 917

notes / warnings. this angst isn't on me, right?... right? // emotional distress, shouting, swearing, intense heartbreak, relationship breakdown, unresolved angst.

⋆.˚ ★— read part one of dean’s version ; reader's version ; sam’s version 

He’s in the kitchen like nothing happened.

Like the air didn’t go still when he turned away from you last night. Like he didn’t take your goddamn heart and set it gently down just so he could walk away without crushing it himself.

He's pouring coffee. Humming. Like a man who still thinks he has the right to peace.

You stand in the doorway, arms crossed, mouth pressed into a line.

“You heard me last night,” you say, flat.

Dean freezes mid-pour. Doesn’t turn around. You see his shoulders go tense. Hear the breath he pulls in slow and measured.

“I did.”

You wait.

He sets the coffee pot back on the burner. Still doesn’t look at you. “Didn’t wanna lie.”

Your jaw clenches.

“That’s it?” you snap. “That’s all you have to say?”

Dean finally turns. His face is calm — but that dangerous kind of calm, the kind that comes when someone’s already halfway checked out.

“I didn’t want to hurt you,” he says quietly.

You laugh. Bitter. Hollow. “Well, congrats, Dean. That ship sailed.”

He winces at that, and good. Let it sting. Let him feel it.

“You couldn’t even lie to me?” you ask, voice sharp now. “Couldn’t even give me the fucking courtesy of a lie, Dean?”

He rubs the back of his neck, muttering, “I didn’t think you wanted one.”

“Oh, you didn’t think? That tracks. You haven’t been doing a lot of that lately.”

That gets his attention.

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me.” You’re already in the middle of the room, your anger a wildfire with no intention of being put out. “You’ve been phoning it in for weeks, Dean. Going through the motions. Acting like I’m this obligation you’re just too tired to shake. And I’ve let it slide. I’ve tiptoed around it like a coward. Like if I just didn’t look too hard, maybe it wouldn’t be real.”

Dean sets his mug down. Hard. “You think this is easy for me?”

“Oh, fuck off with that,” you snap, heat rising in your cheeks. “Easy? This? You made it easy. You stopped trying, Dean. You stopped showing up. You kissed me like I was a routine and held me like I was a stranger and when I finally asked you if you even loved me anymore, you told me to fucking sleep.”

He’s quiet, but his jaw is locked.

You step closer. “You don’t get to play the victim here.”

“I never said I was,” he growls.

“No, you just acted like it. Like this is happening to you. Like you didn’t start walking away three months ago.”

“I didn’t mean to—”

“But you did.”

That shuts him up.

You breathe hard, eyes burning, but you don’t let yourself cry. Not now. Not when it finally feels like you’ve stepped out of the fog. You’re angry. And underneath that, there’s grief — but it’s grief with teeth.

“I’ve been loving you alone,” you whisper, the words laced with venom. “I’ve been fighting for this alone. Carrying it alone. Every day I’ve asked myself what I did wrong. What I stopped giving you. Why the hell I suddenly felt like a ghost in your arms.”

Dean’s breathing is ragged now. His eyes flicker with something — regret, maybe. Or guilt. But not love. And that’s what breaks you all over again.

“So just say it, Dean,” you bark, suddenly louder. “Say it out loud. Say you don’t love me anymore.”

He looks like you punched him.

“I didn’t—”

“No.” You cut him off with a sharp shake of your head. “No more fucking deflecting. Say it. Let me hear the words so I can finally stop holding on.”

He doesn’t speak. His throat bobs like he’s swallowing glass.

You step even closer, furious now. “I am not a goddamn convenience, Dean. I am not some blanket you wrap around yourself when the world gets cold and forget the second you feel warm again.”

His hands are fisted at his sides.

You’re trembling.

“I needed you to fight for me,” you whisper, voice breaking, finally — finally—splintering at the edges. “And you just... didn’t.”

He shakes his head slowly, almost like he’s in a daze. “I didn’t know how.”

“That’s bullshit,” you spit. “You always know how when it’s Sam. When it’s the job. When it’s the car. But me?” You point at your own chest. “You just let me rot in the silence.”

Dean opens his mouth like he wants to argue — but nothing comes.

Because there’s nothing left to say.

“I would’ve burned the fucking world for you,” you say, softer now. “And all I ever wanted was for you to light a single goddamn match for me.”

He moves like he might come closer.

You step back.

He stops.

The silence between you now isn’t quiet. It’s loud. Deafening. Like a scream with no breath behind it.

Finally, Dean says, hoarse, “I never stopped caring.”

You nod. “That’s the problem. You cared. But you didn’t love. Not enough.”

He looks at you like he wants to fix it. Like maybe there’s a version of him that can go back and do it right.

But this Dean? The one standing in front of you?

He’s already let go.

So you do too.

You move past him, grabbing your jacket from the hook by the door, and you don’t look back.

He doesn’t stop you.

And that’s how you know — this love didn’t die.

He just let it.

ꔛ. navigation 𓂃˖ ࣪ all drabbles ; compatibility readings ; support my work .ᐟ

[cowboyemeritus]

I Will Make You My Angel (Papa V Perpetua/Reader)

“So, you feel like causing problems tonight,” he asks, which, in the language of your play, translates roughly to, “Ready to suffer?”

You just roll your eyes again. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Bring it.”

tags: brat taming, slapping, spanking, use of a belt, aftercare, daddy kink for a split second... dw about it

Read on AO3

Notes: this started out as a stream of consciousness post i made like a week ago... how did we get here

First, you didn’t give him a good morning kiss. Strike One.

Then, you didn’t hold his hand in the van to the arena. Strike Two.

Now, you’re ignoring him. He’s just wobbled his ass off in front of thousands of people, and you’re fucking ignoring him.

Strike Three. You’re out.

It’s late by the time the after party wraps. It’s even later when you arrive back at the hotel. Perpetua’s nerves are shot, worn thin by the long day and all the challenges it has presented. Logistical issues, technical difficulties, misbehaving ghouls; the silent treatment is the very last thing he needs. He would have liked to have had you on his arm tonight, to show you off to the sleazy music execs that had come to kiss his ass, but you’d chosen to be selfish, setting yourself down in a corner and scrolling on your phone for hours, hardly paying him any mind.

Your Twitter feed better have been interesting.

He flops down on the bed, a groan wrenching itself out of him as the tension in his body is finally allowed an escape route. You don’t acknowledge him, checking your phone again before setting it down on the nightstand and shuffling over to the closet. With your back to him, you start undressing for bed, and his blood boils just a little hotter. If you won’t engage with him, he should at least be allowed to ogle you a bit.

He should also rest, prepare himself for the next ritual, but the itch has taken hold of him and won’t let go. His skin crawls, thinking about everything that’s gone wrong today and everything that will go wrong tomorrow. This new life of his, it’s more than he ever could have dreamed of, but it’s just so much, all the fucking time. And he doesn’t ask for a lot, just that you show up, be present, give him a little support when he needs it. You’re normally so, so good for him. He doesn’t understand why-

Every racing thought in his head comes screeching to a halt when you unzip your dress, a sexy leather thing that hugs your curves just right, and pull it down. Perpetua watches carefully, pulse quickening, as the action exposes the purple silk and black lace beneath. The set is new and, as he suspected, it fits perfectly, the bustier giving your tits the perfect amount of lift while the garters and stockings make you look like something out of a 50s centerfold. It’s old-fashioned refinement; the good shit. His cock throbs at the sight, and for a fleeting moment he’s able to take pride in his excellent taste. He knows what suits you, often better than you do. Then, that feeling is replaced by seething rage.

You have the gall, the audacity, to wear his colors after how you’ve acted today?

“What is that?” He asks, heartbeat thrumming in his ears. At long last, you notice him, turning your head in his direction.

“Um, my underwear?” There is disinterest, even a little judgement, in your gaze, like he’s some old pervert creeping on you at a bar. Anger pangs in his stomach, like hunger.

“Yeah,” Perpetua says, trying to sound casual. “Looks good on you.” No response. “I wonder where you could have come across such a thing.” At this, you give an exaggerated roll of your eyes.

“I found it,” you state, the words barbed with sarcasm. His jaw tightens.

“How?” You blink at him, confused.

“What do you mean, how? I just-”

“Found it,” he questions, “with your eyes glued to your fucking phone all day?” Now you turn your body towards him, revealing more of the getup. Perpetua wants nothing more than tear it off and have you now, but there’s something to be said about taking his time, about making you really earn the punishment he so desperately needs to dole out.

“What are you, my dad?” You scoff, turning your attention back to your dress, putting it on a hanger and racking it next to a neat row of his shirts. “I don’t know why you’re being such a dick. The show didn’t go that bad.”

Before he knows what he’s doing, he’s up, stomping over to where you’re standing. He grips you hard by the shoulder, spinning you face him.

“So, you feel like causing problems tonight,” he asks, which, in the language of your play, translates roughly to, “Ready to suffer?”

You just roll your eyes again. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Bring it.”

In an instant, his gloved palm is connecting with your cheek. It’s hard, but not enough to leave a mark. Still, your head jerks violently to the side as he completes the stroke, the clap echoing off the walls. A heavy silence falls over the room, and it’s only then that he considers what this might sound like to a concerned neighbor. He doesn’t have time to dwell on that, though. You hang your head for a beat, take a few, steadying breaths, and then look back up at him. Your pupils are blown wide, and the way you’re pressing your lips together tells him you’re fighting back a grin.

This, of course, had been your plan all along: to get him riled up and then let him blow off the steam. You’re far too smart for your own good. You know him too well, can read his moods too easily, and like a little pixie, you use this talent to make mischief when he most desperately needs a distraction.

“That fucking hurt.”

He’d be lost without you.

“It did?” Still in a vice grip, he marches you across the room, throwing you down on the mattress. Delight curls in his gut at the sound you make, the breath knocked out of your lungs. “On your knees. I’ll show you hurt.” You remain motionless, glaring back at him. “Come on.” He grabs you by the hips, manhandling you into the desired position. His mouth waters as he takes in the sight of you, decked out in his colors, your ass in the air like it’s a prize and your face in the sheets to shut you up. “It’s late. You think I want to be doing this at two in the fucking morning?” You shake your head sheepishly. “Yeah, of course not. But if I don’t deal with you, who will?” He peels off his gloves and then reaches for his belt buckle, noting how your thighs press together. “Who will do a fucking thing if I’m not around?”

You smirk. “Heavy is the head that wears the mitre, huh?” As he’s pulling the band of leather through the loops, you let out a little laugh. “You know, you could always switch with Copia if you don’t think you can handle-”

The belt cracks against the back of your thigh. You jolt, crying out, and it’s as much an exclamation of pain as it is a moan. Perpetua looks between his hand, knuckles blanched around the leather, and where he’s just struck you. The skin is already welting up in a fat, pink streak, a few tiny, red dots blooming over broken capillaries. It’s such a captivating image that, for a split second, he forgets he’s supposed to be angry. Then you shift uncomfortably, giving him an expectant look, and he has to fight to come back to himself.

“Don’t-” He so badly wants to kiss that bruising flesh, to soothe the wound with his tongue. It takes a long, deep breath to steel him. “Dirty your mouth with his name again, and I’ll make you wash it out with soap.” He teases the folded end of the belt up your other thigh, brushing over your core, and you shiver. Princes of Hell, you’re already soaked through. “Got that, follettina?”

“Yes, Papa.” Perpetua scoffs.

“Now you feel like showing me some respect.” He shakes his head, pinching the bridge of his nose and encountering the warm metal of the mask. With his free hand, Perpetua reaches for the clasp at the top of his head, then, seeing you watching, decides against it. He glowers at you as his hand instead finds his scarf, pulling it loose, before undoing the top few buttons of his shirt. Beneath the layers of fabric, his skin is overly warm, bordering on sweaty.

“We go until I say we’re done,” he states, bringing the belt back to your buttocks. “You can still keep count if you’d like.” At this, you swallow hard, shuddering, and it fills him with a perverse sense of pleasure, heat flaring at the very base of him. He knows you’re just the tiniest bit afraid; in moments like this, it’s hard not to be, even when there’s desire in it. What he loves about you, though, is that you trust him, letting him guide you through the fear to the pleasure at its conclusion. That you’re willing to put your body and safety in his hands is an intoxicating feeling, and swept up in it, Perpetua finds that he’s done holding back.

He brings the belt down on your ass. You bury your face in the mattress to stifle a moan. He does it again, and this time it’s a scream. He strikes you one more time before the itch takes over and he no longer cares to keep track. Then, its blow after blow, the sound ricocheting off the walls like gunfire. His treatment is imprecise, uneven, striking wherever meets his fancy, until your ass and the backs of your thighs are red and criss-crossed with welts. You take each hit like a champion, hardly moving save for the arching of your back and an occasional buck of your hips.

He’s listening closely for it the whole time: miserere, the hard stop. You’ve never tapped out before, but maybe this is it. Maybe this time he’ll overdo it. The worry is always there, lingering in the back of his mind despite your assurances. But you’re resilient, far more so than he, and even when your yelps and moans turn to sobs, you don’t bend. You never do. You take it all, his rage, his pain, and you swallow it. You transform it into focus, productivity. Even now, his head already feels clearer.

You’re a martyr. Perpetua ought to have you canonized.

“That’s enough.” His chest is heaving, sweat beading under the mask. He’s so hard it hurts, every nerve alight with pleasure. It feels like he’s vibrating. It’s exhilarating.

You flop onto your side with a groan. You’re panting, sniffling, twitching a little, but there’s a blissed out look on your face, a grin spread wide across it. Tears stream down your cheeks, taking your makeup with them.

“Papa…” It’s all you can manage before breaking out into a fit of laughter. Oh, he’s gotten you good. You reach blindly for him, and in spite of the scene his heart skips a beat.

“I’m right here,” he coos, taking your hand and planting a gentle kiss on your knuckles. It flops back down when he lets go. Shakily, you bring the appendage closer to your face, cracking an eye open to examine it. There’s a smear of his black lipstick on your skin, and with a pleased little hum, you press your lips to the mark.

If he had a soul, surely it would leave his body.

“Oh, my love, look at you.” You’re utterly ruined. Unable to resist, he palms at himself through his pants. This does not go unnoticed, and you let out a needy whine. Perpetua snickers. “Yeah? You’re not done yet? You need me to fuck you, too?” A hungry look in your eyes, you nod. At this, he clicks his tongue, though he’s already reaching to undo the laces restraining him. “After all you’ve done today, you think you deserve that?” Your eyes go wide, then well up with fresh tears, and he feels his cock kick as he works to free it.

“Please,” you whimper, suddenly coherent again. “I’ll be so good tomorrow.”

Perpetua imagines you’ll spend most of the day recouping on the bus. There’s not much trouble you can really get into there, unless you rope the ghouls into your schemes. Lucifer save him if you do.

He lets out an embellished sigh. “How is it that you can be such a little shit, and yet I still let you walk all over me?” At last his cock springs free, flushed an angry red and pulsing with the beating of his heart. “You’re spoiled.” He gives himself a few slow, teasing strokes, making a show of pulling back the skin to reveal the head, already slick with precum. “Absolutely rotten.”

The despair on your face quickly transforms into a smug, satisfied grin. You giggle, batting your eyes coquettishly. “I know.” Perpetua just grunts, planting his free hand on your hip and shoving you onto your stomach. He makes quick work of unclipping the garters, then hooks his fingers under the waistband of your panties and tugs them down. You shimmy a little, assisting him in the endeavor. Letting go of his cock, he drapes himself over your prone form, planting his knees on either side of your body, and you hiss a little as the coarse fabric of his pants rubs against your skin. One hand threads into your hair, pulling your head up off the mattress, while he holds the other to your lips.

“Spit,” he commands. “It’s all you’re getting.” With perfect obedience, you probe around in your cheek with your tongue, gathering as much saliva as possible, before letting it dribble out into his palm. Perpetua takes his shaft in hand again, slicking himself up with a few lazy strokes, then adjusts his position so that he can drag the tip through your folds.

“Baby,” you whine. You try to spread your legs enticingly, but you’re trapped under the weight of him, pinned to the bed like a butterfly. “Plea-” Perpetua cuts you off, burying himself to the hilt with a single, punishing drive of his hips. The sound that comes out of you cannot possibly be human, halfway between a moan and the yowl of a cat in heat. Still, he gives you no quarter, no time to adjust, before he begins jackhammering into you, chasing his pleasure with reckless abandon.

“I’ll fuck you, alright.” He tugs on your hair and groans, feeling your cunt ripple. Somehow, even after all this time, he’s still never quite prepared for the way you two fit so perfectly, like puzzle pieces clicking together. “But don’t think for a second that I’m letting you finish like this.” You let out a delicious sob, your entire body convulsing beneath him. Even through his clothes, he can feel the heat radiating from your mortified flesh, and the mental image of what your backside will look like in the morning is like a punch in the stomach. Pace faltering, he comes to the jarring realization that he’s not going to last very long. You must be able to sense it as well, because you press your ass into him with each thrust, trying to meet him halfway.

“God, you fucking-” He groans, gut twisting as you clench around him. “You little fucking whore, always causing problems.” The day’s events rearing their ugly head again, Perpetua feels his temper flare. Burying his face in the crook of your neck, he takes a deep breath, the sweet scent of your hair grounding him. “I missed you tonight.”

“I’m sorry,” you pant. “I’m so-” A particularly brutal thrust has the head of his cock punching into your cervix. You gasp beneath him, fists balling in the sheets.

“You should always be by my side. Always.” There’s never a moment when he doesn’t want you near. It’s maddening at times, how badly he craves you. “You looked so fucking good tonight. I wanted to take you right there, in front of all those fucking imbeciles, but you kept yourself from me.” He’s rambling, as he tends to do when his end is closing in. “How dare you. How fucking dare-” Suddenly, he’s tumbling over the edge. Hips jerking, his vision goes white, the ecstasy searing down his spine as he spills into you. It’s like every negative feeling he’s had over the last twenty-four hours is purged at once, leaving blissful nothingness in its wake.

He really, really needed this.

When the world comes back into view, Perpetua heaves a sigh. The fatigue in his bones is making its presence known again, a heaviness washing over him as the last traces of his climax ebb away. Feeling wobbly, he disengages carefully, rolling onto his back so that he doesn’t collapse on top of you. He lays like that for a moment, eyes shut, hands folded over his stomach. Fuck, what a night. What a day. What a week. What a life. He knows he needs to get up, drag himself to the bathroom and get the ointment for your ass. He needs to wash off his paints and the sweat that’s accumulated under the mask before he breaks out, but he’s so fucking exhausted, and sleep is already wrapping it’s velvety tendrils around his consciousness, pulling him down, down, down…

Your lips ghost against his hairline, and then the tip of his nose. Perpetua cracks his green eye open and finds you hovering over him, smiling gently as you brush a few locks of his hair away. He’s just beaten your backside black and blue, but there’s nothing in your gaze but adoration. Your eyes are still puffy from crying, your makeup smudged and running down your face, and he swears you’ve never looked more beautiful.

“Feel better?”

What you’re still doing with a nasty, selfish old thing like him, he’ll never know. In the beat silence that hangs between you, he thanks the Old One, any power that feels like listening, that you’re here.

“I do,” he says, propping himself up on one elbow to press his lips to yours. It’s the first time he’s properly kissed you all day and it hits him like a drug, a newfound energy coursing through his veins. “Thank you.” You chuckle softly, leaning in for another kiss. Your hands find the clasps at his temples, and under your experienced fingers they click open easily. When you pull the mask away, placing it gently to the side, it’s like a weight has been lifted off Perpetua’s shoulders. With you, he doesn’t have to perform, to be Papa. Himself is enough.

“Of course.” Another quick peck on his cheek. “Now, let’s get you to bed.” You start to get up but he quickly stops you, one hand finding the back of your head and pulling you in again. He nips at your bottom lip once, twice, before he’s licking into your mouth with a pleased little hum. You groan, squirming next to him on the bed, and when he ultimately pulls away, there’s a thread of saliva connecting you.

“Not just yet,” he purrs. You swallow, eyes darting over to the clock on the nightstand, then back to him.

“It’s late, babe. You don’t have to-”

“What kind of man would I be if I left you needing like this?” He barks out a laugh. “If the Clergy found out, I’d be excommunicated.” Perpetua sits up, putting a hand on your shoulder and guiding you to lay on your back. Then he slinks down to the ground, kneeling on the carpet as he grabs your hips and pulls you a little closer. “Relax. Let me take care of you.”

You nod. “Okay.”

Satan below, your cunt is a sight to behold, all slick and pink and throbbing just for him. His arousal echoes distantly at the sight, and for a moment, he laments the limitations that come with his age. A rivulet of his spend is already leaking out you, and the animal part of his brain screams that this is unacceptable. If he were a younger man, he could easily fuck another load into you, but those days are long gone. Time has given him experience, though, and he has other ways of keeping you full.

With his hands on your knees, he parts your legs a bit wider. Finally, he touches the tip of his tongue to your clit, giving it an experimental, little kitten lick. Your entire body tenses, like you’ve been shocked, and it sends a thrill through him.

“Oh! That’s…” He doesn’t give you time to finish the thought, sealing his lips around the bundle of nerves and sucking. Your hands fly to his head, fingers twisting in his hair as your hips buck up into his mouth. “Fuck, that’s good. Fuck, baby.” He doesn’t need the encouragement; the taste of you — both of you —  has him hooked already. Perpetua draws a few circles around your clit before he descends, prodding at your opening to coax out more of his seed. With his tongue he scoops up the mess, and when his eyes flick up, he finds you fixated on him, your lower lip caught between your teeth. Grinning, he opens his mouth, letting you see the evidence of his climax, and you shudder. Then, he works the appendage inside you, fucking his cum back where it belongs. The tip of his nose bumps against your clit while he does this, and the noise you make will surely result in a complaint, but he couldn’t care less. Anyone who takes issue with this can eat shit and die.

Eventually, he replaces his tongue with a finger. Your body accepts it greedily, pulling him in like you’re trying to become one mass, and so he gives you another. He crooks the digits just right, delighting in the way you sing for him, heady and full of want. You’re fluttering already, the cocktail of pain and pleasure helping you along nicely. A lock of his hair falls into his face, and before he has the chance, you brush it away for him. Perpetua’s heart swells. It’s a simple gesture, but the gentleness of your touch stands in such stark contrast to the earlier violence, it makes his head spin.

“You perfect thing, taking it so well. You’d let me do anything to you, wouldn’t you?” You hum an affirmative that quickly turns into a moan. He plants a sloppy kiss on the inside of your leg, leaving a smear of cum, spit, and paint behind. “My darling girl. Sei la cocca di papà, vero? Say that you are.” For all the needless bullshit the Clergy has put him through, he will be forever grateful to them for making him learn Italian. It’s become his secret weapon, a surefire way to have your toes curling in a matter of syllables. As expected, your back arches off the bed, thighs squeezing around him.

“I’m yours,” you gasp. “I’m your girl.” He rewards you by attaching his mouth to your clit once again, suckling and teasing it with his tongue while he attacks your sweet spot with his fingers. Your manicured nails dig into his scalp a little harder, battered legs quivering. “Oh, fuck. Fuck me, fuck-” With a breathy cry you come undone, thrashing wildly against Perpetua’s face. He works you through it, unrelenting until you tug on his hair, whining. One last kiss on the softest part of your thigh and he pulls away, his knees protesting as he gets up off the floor. Your chest is heaving, beads of sweat sparkling on your flushed skin, and Perpetua suddenly wants to take back his earlier declaration. The sight of you like this, a beautiful, fucked-out mess, should be for his eyes alone. Not even the Devil, he thinks, is worthy of such a privilege.

Your tired eyes flutter open once your breathing finally evens out. Catching his gaze, you smile, eclipsing the sun in your radiance. You start to sit up, but Perpetua is quick to push you back down.

“Stay here,” he requests. “I’ll be right back.” You nod, flipping onto your stomach while he tucks himself back into his pants. Then, he shuffles to the bathroom and gathers the necessary equipment: a wet washcloth, a glass of water, your makeup wipes, and the healing ointment. When he returns you’re naked and half asleep already, the rest of your undergarments strewn about on the bed. The bruising on your backside is beginning to set in, decorating your flesh with splotches of deep blue and purple. He stares at it for a few moments, face pulled into a grimace. Maybe he did take it too far.

“‘M just fine,” you mumble, reading his mind. “Really.” Snapping out of it, he makes tending to you the focus of his remaining energy, lest he spiral further. He hands you the glass and you accept eagerly, draining it in one long, slow sip. Then you take the wipes, attacking what remains of your makeup while he gets to work on your lower half. With the washcloth he cleans the mess of his release, paints, and your slick from the inside of your thighs. He’s overly careful, as if you’re made of glass, reluctant to inflict any more pain now that the scene is over. When that’s done he takes the tube of ointment and squeezes a generous amount onto the tip of his index finger, the herbal scent of it filling the air. You start a little with the first touch, but quickly relax as we works the balm into your skin, sighing with relief as it takes effect.

By the time Perpetua is finished, you’re asleep. He’s about ready to collapse next to you but forces himself up, dragging his feet back to the bathroom. He does a half-assed job of removing his paints, his eyes still rimmed with black as he strips off the rest of his clothes. Both of you (him especially) reek of sweat and sex, but a shower can wait until the morning. You have to hit the road early, but he’ll be a diva and make the whole crew wait if he has to. He has his priorities.

You grumble a little when he moves you to the head of the bed and tucks you under the covers, but otherwise don’t stir. After hanging up his shirt and jacket he flicks off the light, stumbling in the dark to join you. He’s finally able to indulge in the closeness he’s wanted all day, pulling you into his arms. The weight of you on his chest is a comfort after the long day you’ve both had, and soon, he’s slipping into the realm of sleep as well.

Without a doubt, tomorrow will have its own set of challenges, new problems for him to deal with. For now, though, he’s content, knowing that whatever comes his way, you’ll have his back. You always do.

[ramp-it-up]

Muse: Four

Muse Three | Muse Masterlist | Muse Five

Summary: This is the one. The one where decisions are made. Words are said. The end or the beginning of you and Ari.

Pairing: Art Curator! Ari Levinson x Plus sized model! Reader

Word count: 3 K

A/N: Muse will be a series of one shots featuring Muse and Ari, and this the second one. We’re gonna hear from them at least every week. 😏 . This AU is tangential to the Peach and Knock You Down verses. If this drabble makes you angry, let me know! I love reblogs, replies, asks and likes. Let me have it! :)

Warnings: 18+ Only, Minors DNI. SMUT! Read at your own risk; curate your own experience. Angst. Art Curator Ari. Plus sized model Reader, dating app life, casual sex, Dominant Ari, Missed connections, yearning, the green eyed monster, late night confessions, oral (f recieving), fingering, hint of breeding kink, size kink, nipple obsession, nipple play, protected sex, the 'L' word (finally).

I don’t have a taglist. Please follow @rampitupandread and turn on notifications to learn when I post!

I Do NOT Consent to my work being reposted, translated or presented on any other blog or site other than by myself.

--------

Two days later, you were shooting inside one of the most beautiful spaces you’d ever worked in. It was a gallery so beautiful it felt dangerous ot breathe. A curated reverence hung in the air, the kind that made you instinctively speak softer and move slower.

But you were on edge, because you hadn’t known the shoot would be here. 

No one had said Red Sea Gallery. The one owned by Ari Levinson. Just: White walls, natural light. Tribeca-adjacent. Minimal set.

When you put the address your agent sent you into your maps app and the name popped up, you were gobsmacked. You tried to prepare yourself in the two hours notice you had before the shoot, but you weren’t.

There were the standard issue floor-to-ceiling windows, along with the scent of clean wood, old paint, and history. What was unexpected was the way the afternoon light struck a sculpture in the corner, a piece too raw to be just decoration or inventory. 

It was too intimate not to notice.

You stared at it, knowing that he had chosen it, and how much more you understood about Ari because of it. There was something about the shape of the metal, the tension in the curve, the heat in the cold material. It was alive somehow.

It was you come undone.

Your stylist, Misty, snapped her fingers. 

“Hey. Earth to supermodel. Time to get into look number three.”

You nodded, throat dry. “Right. Sorry.”

But as you changed in the makeshift dressing area, pulling silk up over your hips, you couldn’t stop staring at the sculpture.

Couldn’t stop feeling him.

Ari had studied your face in the dark, and he’d whispered, “You don’t even know what you do to me.”

Yeah. Well, you fucking knew now.

You posed for the camera like everything was fine. Hip cocked, chin high, face set to neutral.

But inside, everything churned.

And then, you saw a flicker out of the corner of your eye. You turned your head just in time to catch a shadow slipping past the far end of the gallery. The figure was tall and broad with a confident stride. 

Ari.

You didn’t need to see his face.

Your heart rate spiked, your skin prickled, and your body betrayed you all over again. But by the time you crossed the floor barefoot and barely covered, the hallway was empty.

He was gone, just a ghost of cologne in the air.

The photographer called your name.

You turned back slowly, with one last glance at the metal sculpture, gazing at the raw emotion rendered in steel.

You hadn’t spoken to Ari in days.

He hadn’t texted. You hadn’t called.

And still, the city kept folding you into each other’s orbits.

Near.

But not enough.

—----

Ari hadn’t meant to stay, it was going to just be a fifteen-minute walkthrough before tomorrow’s showing, nothing more. But the moment he heard the shutter snap and then heard your laugh, Ari stopped breathing.

He knew that you were here in his gallery and in his world. That world tilted a little bit.

His adrenaline spiked as he ducked into the shadows between exhibits, watching you from there. You were barefoot, bare-shouldered and bathed in golden light, wearing a gown that clung to your body like a second skin.

You were fucking good at your job, and Ari was witnessing first hand the work that went into producing those gorgeous pictures. You were professional and poised, but he knew the passion that lay underneath.

Ari’s fingers became fists at his sides because he had touched that fire, he’d tasted it. And now, all he could do was watch as he starved for you, every nerve stretched thin, every breath hard to take.

It had been days, not weeks or months, but he felt too long deprived of the sight of you. Even though he’d decided not to contact you again after that night that felt like war.

You turned slightly, your hips angled, one hand at your waist, and the light hit you just right. Like you’d been lit by God himself.

Those lips. That jaw. That hourglass silhouette that curved into him like a puzzle piece, you were amazing.

His hands had memorized every inch of that body, but at the moment he couldn’t move to touch you, couldn’t speak to you, couldn’t even fucking blink your image out of his brain.

The photographer said something about “more edge,” and you smirked, dropping your chin just enough to make mischief with your gaze.

It wasn’t meant for Ari. But fuck, he felt it. 

Ari stayed in the shadows just long enough to carve your image into his bloodstream.

Then he turned and left, silently bleeding for you.

—--

You weren’t trying to be on your phone, but it buzzed three drinks deep at some rooftop party, where the music was loud and the faces were blurred by flash and too much champagne. 

The second your screen lit up, you sensed it.

A DM. Then another. You tapped through. And there he was.

Ari Levinson. Black sweater. Cocky smile. Calm, cool, and collected.

A woman with mile-long legs and too much lip gloss draped herself over him, laughing into his shoulder in the boomerang video.

Made so you could watch it over and over again.

Ari didn’t touch her; he barely looked at her. But he didn’t move away either. 

And that was enough.

You locked your phone, shoved it under your thigh, forcing your lips into a smile when your friend slid another drink your way.

“You good?”

You lied. “Peachy.”

It wasn’t rational. It wasn’t fair. You didn’t own him. You didn’t even call him yours.

But all you could see was him, the man who once kissed you so hard you forgot your own name.

The man who made you feel.

And now he was somewhere else and you were losing your mind in an Uber home, crafting and deleting half a dozen texts you’d never send.

you looked good tonight

Delete.

was she worth it?

Delete.

i can't stop thinking about your mouth

Delete. Delete. Delete.

—--

Ari left that rooftop party ten minutes after that girl posted him.

He didn’t even say goodbye because he hadn’t wanted to be there. He hadn’t wanted anyone but you. And when he saw your name light up his notifications, saw that you’d watched, well shit, it made him feel sick.

Because he knew what you’d think, and it wasn’t the truth. The truth was you were already under his skin; you were already it for him.

He didn't know why that was so important to him, but it was.

You were.

—-

The knock came at 1:42 a.m.

You were scared, because you knew it was someone who could hurt you.

You knew it was Ari.

You padded barefoot to the door, one hand trembling against the wood as you peeked through the peephole. Ari was there in a Tribeca Festival hoodie, his hands deep in his pockets and his jaw tight.

You opened the door and didn’t say a word. Neither did he. For a moment, the city noise poured in behind him and then you stepped back.

He walked in like he was home. And you let him.

—--

You didn’t speak.

Just closed the door behind him and walked into the kitchen like he hadn’t shown up at nearly two am with that whole brooding/penitent thing going on.

You opened the fridge, poured a glass of water and sipped. You should have been an actress.

Ari stayed where he was, near the door, hoodie pushed back, hands in his pockets, eyes never leaving you.

You didn’t spare him a glance.

“Thought you were busy tonight,” you said evenly.

He didn’t answer right away.

“I was,” he said finally.

You set the glass down, still not looking at him.

“Saw the party,” you added. “Looked like fun.”

Nothing in your tone gave you away. Not the way your chest was tight, not the sting behind your eyes, not the taste of jealousy in your mouth.

"Didn’t stay long," he said finally.

The laugh that escaped you was bitter and broken.

"Long enough."

You turned, and there he was, suddenly in front of you, so close you could feel his heat.

"You were watching," he said quietly.

You glared up at him.

"Is that why you’re here? Because I saw?"

"I’m here because the second I saw your name on that story, I felt like I couldn’t fucking breathe."

You stared at him and saw that he wasn’t untouched. He wasn’t fine. He was fucking wrecked.

"You think you know what I’m feeling?" you said, voice cracking.

"I know exactly what you’re feeling," he said, "because it’s the same thing I’m feeling."

The words landed because they were true. Because he was the one person who saw through all your practiced detachment and soft cruelty. Even after so little time.

It was lightning in the bottle, finding the one who looked at you, read your bullshit and still wanted more. On a dating app no less.

Fuck your life.

You walked past him toward the couch, brushing too close on purpose. 

“You think you know me,” you said, sitting down and crossing your legs slowly.

“But I don’t own you Ari. You're free to do what you want. And she looked like a good time.”

You shrugged.

“You showing up somewhere with her is none of my business.”

Ari bristled.

“I didn’t show up with her. I went alone. I left alone.”

You blinked as he crouched in front of you, his hands on the edge of the cushion, one knee brushing your thigh.

“And I’m here now. With you. Because all I could think about was you sitting here, alone. Wondering what it meant. Wondering if I was fucking her. Wondering if I’d moved on.”

Your lips parted, but no sound came out. He reached up, thumb brushing your jaw.

“I haven’t. I can’t. You’re in my fucking bloodstream," Ari said.

"And I can’t rip you out."

He bent and pressed his forehead to your knee and just breathed.

Your fingers hovered above his head for one breath. Then two. And then you gave in. They slid into the soft hair at the nape of his neck, and his whole body tensed, like he hadn’t expected you to touch him, like he was braced for a shove instead of tenderness.

But he didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. And when your hand tightened, just slightly, he looked up.

Those eyes. God, those eyes. Those eyes gutted you the way they looked at you like you were the one who might disappear if he blinked.

You leaned in just enough to make him meet you halfway. And when his mouth met yours, it wasn’t urgent. It wasn’t greedy.

It was devastating. You couldn't pretend any more.

You broke the kiss only to whisper, “I hated seeing you with her.”

His head dropped, breath ragged against your knee.

“I didn’t touch her,” he rasped. “I haven’t touched anyone.”

You tilted his chin up. “Why?”

His answer came without hesitation. 

“Because I can’t get you out of my fucking head. When I look, I can’t see anyone else but you. I don't want anyone else."

That was when you lost it. The dam broke. You grabbed his hair, dragging his mouth to yours. 

The kiss wasn't sweet. It was needy. It was desperate. Your teeth, hands, and mouths were ferocious, and still, it wasn’t enough; it would never be enough.

"Tell me you hate me," he whispered against your mouth.

You kissed him harder.

"Tell me you don’t feel this."

You gasped, "I can’t."

You kissed him again.

"I don’t want to feel anything.” 

“I know.”

“And I still fucking do.”

“I know that too.”

Ari groaned against your lips, the sound low and primal, and it shot straight through you. His hand found the hem of your tank top and found the warm skin underneath.

You shuddered and gripped the front of his hoodie, yanking him closer and when the kiss broke and you gasped for air, he pressed his forehead to yours.

"You are so fucking stubborn," he whispered.

"I know," you rasped.

His hand slid up your ribcage and weighed your breast, thumb tracing your areola.

"Still want you," he said. "Even when it hurts."

He pinched your nipple to emphasize his point. You grabbed his jaw, palm dragging over his beard.

"Show me," you whispered.

Ari groaned and peeled your top over your head with shaking hands, tossing it somewhere neither of you cared about. You stripped his hoodie and t-shirt off too, tugging him closer by his broad shoulders, breathing him in, burying your face in his throat for one dizzying second.

Ari turned and sat on the couch, lifting you onto his lap. Your knees sunk into the cushions on beside his thighs and your bodies crashed together. He kissed down your throat, stopping at your pounding pulse to bite down gently. And when you felt the huge ridge of his cock through his jeans, you moaned helplessly.

"You drive me insane," he  whispered into your skin.

“Can’t fucking breathe without thinking about you."

You whimpered and arched into his touch while his thumbs circled your nipples until you were gasping in his lap.

"Ari," you moaned.

He kissed every inch of you he could reach.

"I’m here," he said. "I’m right here."

He carried you up to your bedroom, and the way he looked at you when he laid you on your bed made your heart ache. When he slid your panties down your legs, he kissed the inside of your ankle, then your calf, your knee, working his way up your body like he had all the time in the world.

You tangled your fingers in his hair and whimpered when he kissed between your thighs.

"Need to taste you," Ari stated. And then he did.

His tongue licked into you as his hands pinned your hips down when you tried to buck them up into his face, feeling like a desperate slut for him. Ari was an expert at making you feel good; his tongue was perfect on your clit and licking inside your folds, and his fingers fucked you open, lighting you up from the inside out, over and over, until you were a trembling, trembling, moaning mess under him.

You came hard, gasping his name, nails clawing at the sheets, and he didn’t stop tasting you until you came down. Then, he kissed up your body, planting open-mouthed kisses along your stomach, your ribs, and your throat.

At this point you were beyond feral, and you yanked at his jeans, needing more, needing him. He stripped them off, pushed his boxers down, and there he was, thick, hard, beautiful, aching, and dripping for you.

"Condom," you panted.

"Fuck…. Okay, yeah."

He scrambled for his jeans, hands shaking, and you couldn’t help but smile; wild and wrecked looked good on him. He rolled it on, kissed you again and then he guided the broad tip of his cock to your snug, slippery entrance and eased inside you.

You both gasped. He was so fucking big. Ari destroyed you so good.

It wasn’t just physical. It was everything. All the denial. All the want. All the feelings. It all combined to have your cunt slowly pulsing around him already.

Once fully inside you, he stayed still, forehead pressed to yours, giving you, and himself, time.

"You good?" he whispered, his voice wavering as your cunt pulsed around him. He was so close already.

It had never been like this.

The question was strange. He'd never cared this much while he was fucking you. But this time, it wasn’t just fucking.

You nodded, eyes burning.

"Move," you said.

And he rocked into you slowly at first, like he was savoring every second. You clung to him, nails dragging down his back, thighs tightening around his waist, making involuntary whimpers and ragged gasps.

His fingers glided over your clit and the pleasure exploded in a rich, crazy rush.

"Ari," you sobbed.

"I know, Baby," he panted against your neck. "I know. Feels so damn good."

He kissed your jaw, your temple, and your mouth like he couldn’t get enough. You rode his thick cock as his fingers spun your climax higher and higher as you tipped over the precipice again, crying out, your cunt locking down around him.

He groaned and thrust harder, losing control. It was the quickest he would ever come with you.

"Can’t…fuck…can't hold on..." he gasped.

You grabbed his face, made him look at you.

"Come inside me," you whispered. "Please."

This wasn't about the condom. It was the sentiment.

Ari's brain blanked, his whole body shuddered, and he buried his face against your throat and let go, hips jerking, mouth open in a silent cry.

You held him through it. And when it was over, he didn’t move. Just stayed pressed against you, still inside you, breathing hard.

"Don’t leave," you whispered into his hair.

He made a broken sound,  half a laugh, half a sob.

"I’m not going anywhere, Muse." he said.

"Not anymore."

—---

You woke tangled in Ari, your cheek pressed to his bare chest, his arm heavy across your waist, his breath steady against your hair. For a second, you just laid there, afraid to move. But then, his fingers moved up and down the curve of your spine.

You swallowed hard and shifted slightly, feeling him stir against you, realizing that he was hard again.

God, you were wrecked for him. Beyond reason. And beyond pride.

You tilted your head back to look at him, and saw that he was already awake, watching you. You opened your mouth to say something, something stupid. Something defensive. 

To make a joke. To make it light. To pretend it didn’t mean everything. But Ari beat you to it. 

His voice was rough with warning.

“Don’t run from me.”

It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t a plea. It was a command.

Your chest hurt because God, you wanted to run.

It would be safer. Easier. But you couldn’t run from him anymore.

You dragged your hand up his chest, feeling the rough patch of hair and the steady thump of his heart.

“You make it really fucking hard to breathe,” you whispered.

Ari smiled and kissed the corner of your mouth. Your cheekbone. Your eyelid.

And then he rolled onto his side, pulling you with him, keeping you locked against him as he wrapped his arms around you, pulling you even closer. You buried your face in the curve of his neck, breathing him instead of air.

And then he said it, the words that split the world wide open.

“I’m in love with you.”

Like it was simple. Like you could just say shit like that.

You froze.

But he didn’t flinch, backpedal, or give you a single out. He just held you.

Like what he’d just said wasn’t terrifying.

And now you were crying, hot rivulets of your tears running down his neck.

You pulled back just enough to see his beautiful, stubborn, stupid face, and you gave him the only thing you had left.

You whispered it back, trembling and scared.

“I’m in love with you too.”

-----

oh. my. god. wbu?

Muse Five

[wlw-imagines]

Vending Machine Coffee - Addison Montgomery x Reader (Grey's Anatomy)

a/n: i promise one day i will manage to publish maybe even a whole week of fics that don't feature a hospital in any way (this is a lie i am sure of it)

summary: At first, it’s just a hallway, a vending machine, and two doctors out of place. But late-night coffees turn into quiet rituals, and shared silences grow into something deeper.

Now, the vending machine coffee is still terrible but it’s yours. What started as a way to feel less alone becomes the beginning of something real.

Part of the May Prompts: Day Four, vending machine coffee

You see her long before you know her. Her long coat fluttering, heels tapping a steady rhythm on the linoleum of Grey Sloan’s west hallway. She’s elegance in motion, head held high, hair pulled back in a style that says she doesn’t need approval. You try not to stare. You fail.

Later that night, you find her again, alone, oddly out of place. Her blazer is draped over one shoulder, hair looser now, strands slipping from their careful arrangement. She stands in front of the vending machine like it’s a philosophical puzzle. A brow furrowed. A hand hovering.

You walk up beside her, cup of cheap coffee already in your hand. “Tough choice?” you ask.

She huffs a quiet laugh, not looking at you. “I don’t drink this stuff. I just stand here and pretend I don’t feel out of place.”

There’s something about her voice, smooth, a little tired. The kind of tired that’s lived a thousand lives and doesn’t quite know where it belongs anymore.

You glance at the machine, then at her. “Well, I do drink this stuff,” you say, nudging a crumpled dollar into the slot. “So let’s be out of place together.”

She turns to look at you properly this time. Eyes sharp, amused, measuring. You wonder how many people she’s intimidated with that look. It only makes you smile more.

“I’m Addison,” she says, accepting the paper cup you hand her like it’s a peace offering.

You nod. “I know.”

And that’s how it starts.

It’s unassuming. It's a shared moment in the dull hum of the hospital night shift. But it becomes a rhythm. Every evening, like clockwork, one or both of you ends up at the vending machine. Sometimes there’s coffee. Sometimes just conversation. Sometimes just silence.

She tells you about New York once, in a passing breath. You tell her about your first solo surgery, how your hands shook so hard you thought you might faint. She laughs, then admits she threw up before hers. You both pretend it’s funny.

The thing is is that she’s brilliant. Everyone says so. But she also looks at people like she’s waiting for them to disappoint her. Except with you, sometimes, her guard falters. You see it in the way she tucks her hair behind her ear when you talk. The way she leans in, just a little too close, when she laughs.

You don’t ask for more than this, more than these stolen moments, this quiet routine. But every time she shows up beside you, pretending to agonise over whether to get black coffee or hot chocolate, you feel something shifting in your chest.

You’ve stopped pretending you don’t look for her in every room.

She hasn’t noticed.

But she will.

xxxxxxxxxxxx

Addison’s only supposed to be at Grey Sloan for a few weeks. A consult here, a surgery there. Help out with some OB-GYN cases, offer her expertise, then disappear in a flash of designer heels and enviable confidence.

But she doesn’t leave.

Not after two weeks. Not after three. She extends her stay, citing unfinished cases and 'teaching opportunities', but you’re not entirely sure it’s about the cases anymore.

She starts shadowing your surgeries, curious, insightful, always one step ahead. She asks questions in scrub caps and surgical masks, her voice smooth and controlled through the OR noise. At night, she finds you at the vending machine. Like always.

She doesn’t always drink the coffee. She still pretends to think about it every time.

One night, you're both leaning against the wall beside the machine, steam curling from your cup, silence stretched between you. It’s not awkward. With Addison, it never is. She has a way of filling silences without saying anything at all.

You break it anyway. “So, how long are you staying now?”

She shrugs. “A little longer.”

“Because of the groundbreaking surgical techniques? Or the vending machine company?” You joke, but there is vulnerability in your question. A question where you only really want one answer.

That earns you a rare, soft laugh, one of the good ones, the kind that escapes before she can catch it. “It’s definitely the vending machine,” she says, smiling down into her cup. “You’re part of the charm.”

It’s easier after that. She opens up in bits and pieces. She talks about New York more. About old friends, old mistakes. About how she never meant to end up here but somehow, it doesn’t feel so bad.

Then, one night, the conversation shifts.

It starts with a patient. A complicated labour. A healthy baby in the end, but only after hours of uncertainty. You’re both drained, leaning against the vending machine like it might hold you up if the walls don't.

“I was married once,” she says suddenly.

You glance over. Her expression is unreadable.

“Twice, actually,” she adds. “And yet I’ve never been in the right place at the right time.”

You say nothing at first. The hallway is quiet. You sip your coffee and try not to sound like you’re about to say something reckless.

“Maybe this is the right time,” you say finally, quietly.

She doesn’t look at you. She stares ahead, at the rows of candy bars and drinks, like they might offer her an answer.

When she speaks again, her voice is smaller. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I think I do.”

She goes silent then. Doesn’t say goodbye when she leaves. Just nods once and disappears down the hall.

You’re left standing beside the hum of the machine, your coffee going cold in your hand. Unsure if you have completely wrecked a good thing.

But she comes back the next night.

Of course she does.

xxxxxxxxxxxx

You know the moment the case goes sideways. You feel it in the pit of your stomach, that sick, heavy twist that only comes when everything starts slipping through your fingers.

A young mother. Complications. A baby born too soon. A decision made in seconds, and still not fast enough.

Addison had been running point. Cool, confident, precise.

Until she wasn’t.

Now, the room is quiet. The baby in NICU. The mother stable, but not safe. There’s no celebration. Just the lingering question... could we have done more?

You don’t see her for hours after. Not until you wander the hospital halls in the low glow of night, half-wild with worry, until you find her.

She’s in the on-call room. Curled on the cot like she’s trying to disappear into the wall. Her heels are kicked off. Her coat is crumpled in the corner. Her face is turned away, but you see the outline of her profile, too still, too quiet.

You don’t say her name. Just ease the door shut and sit on the edge of the cot beside her.

A long moment passes. Then, softly, she says, “She was twenty-three.”

You nod. You remember.

“She looked at me like I could save her,” Addison whispers, voice cracking on the edges. “Like I was magic. And I couldn’t do anything.”

You shake your head, gently. “You did everything.”

“It wasn’t enough.”

You reach for her hand, not expecting her to take it. But she does. Clings to it. Her fingers are cold.

For a long while, neither of you says anything. Some colleague's footsteps patter past. The wind rustles. Somewhere down the hall, a monitor beeps.

When she finally moves, it’s only to sit up. To press her palms to her eyes, like she can erase the day by sheer force of will.

You don’t offer empty comfort. Addison Montgomery doesn’t want soft words that lie. She wants truth. So you give her yours.

“You’re allowed to fall apart.”

She exhales, shaky. “I don’t know how to. Not in a way that makes sense.”

Later, much later, you find her standing at the vending machine again. Same old dance, hands on her hips, eyes scanning the rows of junk food she’ll never buy.

You approach quietly, coffee in hand. You don’t say anything. Just stand beside her, shoulder to shoulder, like always.

She turns to you. And for the first time, she looks… tired. Real. Not the woman who owns the room, but the one still fighting to believe she deserves to be in it.

She takes the cup from your hand. Doesn’t drink it. Just lets her fingers close around yours where they meet at the paper rim.

“This is starting to mean something,” she says, barely above a whisper.

You don’t flinch. “It already does. To me.”

Her fingers tighten, just a little. Enough to say she hears you.

Enough to say she might believe you, too.

xxxxxxxxxxxx

The next few nights, she doesn’t come.

You linger by the vending machine anyway, coffee cooling in your hands, hope unraveling thread by thread. The ritual had become your favourite part of day, quiet, simple, grounding. And now there’s nothing but the clunk of the machine dispensing a drink no one wants and the echo of her absence in the hallway.

You try not to take it personally. She’s busy, maybe. Caught in surgery, in meetings. Maybe she’s just tired.

But you know it’s more than that.

Something shifted the night she took your hand. The moment she admitted, softly, almost fearfully, that it was starting to mean something. The warmth of her fingers curled around yours still lingers like an echo, like a ghost.

And now she’s pulling away.

You tell yourself not to chase her.

You fail.

You find her by accident, two days later, in the elevator. She’s already inside, arms crossed, eyes distant. The doors are just starting to close when she sees you and doesn’t bother to press the button to stop them.

You step in anyway.

Silence falls between you as the elevator hums and sinks. You stand close, too close. The way you always do. But this time it feels different. Like standing on the edge of a cliff with no idea if she’ll catch you if you jump.

She doesn’t look at you, not at first. But she speaks.

“You know I’ve been married,” she says, voice low, words careful. “Twice. And still I find myself doing the same thing. Running.”

You glance over. Her eyes are on the buttons. Anywhere but you.

“I scare you that much?” you ask gently.

Her lips quirk, sad and amused all at once. “You scare me because you’re kind. Because you make me feel seen. Because I want to believe there’s still time for this, whatever this is.”

The elevator dings at a floor no one needs, then closes again before either of you moves.

“I’m not asking you for everything,” you say, voice steady. “I’m just asking you not to walk away before we even begin.”

She turns then, finally, finally meeting your eyes.

“You make it sound easy.”

“I know it’s not.”

Her expression crumples just slightly. “I want to want this.”

“You don’t have to want it all at once. Just… maybe want it with me.”

Another pause. Then she nods, slow and trembling. Like maybe, for the first time, she’s letting herself hope.

“I do,” she says quietly. “I do want it. I want it with you, no one else.”

The elevator doors open again. A nurse peers in, then quickly backs out, apologising.

Neither of you moves. The moment is suspended, fragile, precious, real.

You smile. “Then let’s figure it out. One cup of terrible coffee at a time.”

She lets out a laugh, breathless and unsure, but full of something like relief.

“Okay,” she says. “But I’m not drinking that stuff alone.”

You smile, “I’d never let you.”

xxxxxxxxxxxx

A storm traps everyone in the hospital.

Thunder growls outside like something restless and wild, wind battering the windows hard enough to make the lights flicker. The backup generators kick in with a low, steady hum. It’s late, past midnight, and the usual chaos of Grey Sloan has stilled into a hush of sleeping patients and tired staff riding out the night shift.

You wander, empty coffee cup in hand, until your feet carry you exactly where you always end up.

The vending machine hums softly in the quiet. There’s a light flickering inside the machine. A half-empty snack rack. And her.

Addison’s already there, like she’s been waiting for you.

She’s in scrubs and a sweatshirt, hair tied up messily, strands falling in front of her face. She looks tired. Human. Beautiful. She doesn’t say anything when you approach. She just offers you one of the two steaming paper cups sitting next to her.

You take it. She doesn’t take hers.

You both stand there for a long moment in the hush, sipping coffee neither of you actually likes, warmed by routine and presence and the thunder rolling overhead.

Then she sets her cup down on the machine behind her. Turns to face you fully.

No smile. No sarcasm. No shield.

Just her.

Her hands come up slowly, gentle, hesitant, as if asking permission even now. One settles at your jaw, the other finds your waist. And then, softly, like she’s afraid you’ll vanish if she rushes it, she kisses you.

It’s not a dramatic moment. No swelling music, no grand declarations. Just two people in a dim hospital hallway, finding each other after too long of being afraid to.

Her lips are soft. Warm. Tasting faintly of cheap coffee and something unmistakably her.

You melt into it. Into her.

The storm outside rages, but here, in this tiny circle of light and quiet, the world is still.

When she finally pulls back, her eyes are shining. Your breath mingles in the narrow space between you.

“I’ve had worse coffee,” she whispers.

You manage a smile, your chest aching in the best possible way. “You’ve never had better company.”

A laugh breaks from her. It is low and breathless, full of something light you haven’t heard from her in weeks. Maybe longer. Her forehead presses gently to yours.

“I’m still scared,” she admits. “But I don’t want to run anymore.”

“You don’t have to,” you whisper back. “Not if you don’t want to.”

She shakes her head, nose brushing yours. “I want this.”

“Then we’ll figure it out.”

Another kiss. This one deeper. Certain.

When the storm finally breaks and morning starts to blush against the windows, you’re still there, two coffee cups abandoned, the vending machine beside you.

And Addison’s hand in yours, like it belongs there.

xxxxxxxxxxxx

It starts like always, Addison leaning against the vending machine, two cups of questionable coffee perched on top, her head tilted in mock elegance.

“I saved you the worse one,” she says as you approach.

“You always do,” you reply, taking the less-scorched cup and sipping with exaggerated drama. “Mmm. Burnt plastic with... what is that? Notes of regret and college debt?”

“Ah, vintage vending machine,” she muses. “2007 was a good year.”

You both laugh. It’s effortless now, the way you orbit each other. The way you lean into the space you used to avoid.

She watches you over her cup, eyes warm and glittering. “I still hate this stuff.”

“You drink it every night.”

“I drink it with you.”

Something in your chest goes soft.

You take a step closer, bump her gently with your shoulder. “You don’t have to, you know. We could upgrade.”

She gasps. “Betray the machine?”

You raise an eyebrow. “I’m just saying, there’s better coffee. Like… actual coffee.”

Addison pouts, nudging your foot with hers. “But that coffee doesn’t come with you.”

You smile and set your cup aside. Pull her close by the hips.

“It'll always come with me,” you murmur, before kissing her slow, deep, right there in the middle of the hallway.

Someone whistles in the distance. You both ignore it.

When you break apart, she rests her forehead against yours. “You keep kissing me like that, I might start thinking this is serious.”

“It is.”

“Even with the terrible coffee?”

You grin. “Especially with the terrible coffee.”

She snorts and shakes her head. “Well then, you got sugar?”

You hand her a packet of a few you keep in your scrubs pocket. “Always.”

You drink. You kiss. You laugh.

And when she tucks herself under your arm, like it’s second nature, you realize something very simple and very true:

This isn’t just a ritual anymore.

It’s home.

[shuastar]

KISS 'ER UP (HVC) pt. 2

pairing: baseball player!vernon x fashion designer/fan!reader wc: 10.9k warnings: SMUT (minors DNI), oral (f receiving), p in v (wrap it b4 u tap it even if vernon doesnt), boob worship?, heavy-ish make-out; unrealistic meet-cute, vernon being cute a/n: guys holy shit this took so long but its FINALLY done. i feel like i always end by long fics with smut but at least it ends well.......... anyways, send me requests now that i'm done w kiss 'er up!!! as always, ty guys sm for reading this <3

previous ; masterlist

In 3 weeks, you go to 6 home games. 

Which, in retrospect, is absolutely crazy because that’s averaging two (2!) games per week in the brunt of design finalizing and fashion week scrapbooking and planning with your team. 

And now, the one you’re sitting at seems to up your count from six to seven games in 3 weeks. Which means that your assistant will be calling you sometime next week asking if you ever finished finalizing the fashion week scrapbooks and tulle selections (only one of which you’ve actually finished. The other…. Well, let’s just say that it won’t be seeing the light of day for a while). Which also is part of your explanation to why you are busy multitasking between texting Yena, your assistant, on the last flap stitches for your fold-over bag for the F/W collection, gluing pieces of fabric and drawing cut-outs and print outs and colors down onto your scrapbook, and watching the actual baseball game and participating in half-assed and quarter-minded fanchants that seem to have no soul in it. 

All in that exact order. 

And it’s even harder to balance (especially your phone that teeters precariously off your knee because your actual table is too full of food, beer, and your scrapbooking trash pile) when your phone chimes with a familiar notification. 

new message from vernon⚾️🐈

You almost choke on your beer that was travelling half-way down your esophagus, coughing violently and trying not to get drops of Cass onto your scrapbook. 

For the first time in almost fifteen minutes, you raise your head, swiveling to try and see where the hell Vernon is texting you from because not only is it the middle of the seventh inning but it’s also the middle of his game. 

And he never goes on his phone during games. 

vernon⚾️🐈 yo u see that last play?

You roll your eyes at his text. Yo? Really? But also, typical Vernon. Almost three months – texting, calling, showing up to games, post-game chicken runs, and the occasional late-night movie theater run at Coex – made you accustomed to his rather nonchalant way of saying hi. Those including (but definitely not limited to) yo, hey, bro, dude, whats up, lol, and show cat now as in your actual feline pet, not your pussy (which you thought at first was what he was implying and almost blocked him before he clarified with a photo of his own cat that you were too scared to open for the first three minutes, thinking it was an unsolicited dick pic). 

You pause before you reply, placing the glue stick down. 

you yea obv

It’s a lie. A blatant one at that. But you feel bad telling Vernon hahaha no lol was too busy working on my pfw scrapbooking and model calls to be focused on ur game im at. 

So yeah. You lie.

But Vernon texts back in record time. 

vernon⚾️🐈 no u werent

You roll your eyes. 

you i was watching

vernon⚾️🐈 liar!! too busy lookin down @ ur sketches to watch me hit that ball outta da stadiummmm

you ur literally lying

vernon⚾️🐈 no im not but u wouldnt know bc ur too busy

you i have pfw stuff to sort out sue me

vernon⚾️🐈 ah so u admit that u werent paying attention

You don’t get a chance to reply before the speakers above your head crackle to life, stadium static breaking over the announcer’s booming voice:

“Now up to bat, our very own number twelve, VERNON CHWE!” 

All of the vowels in his name are stretched way too long but most of the call of his name is drowned in the thundering cheers and applause of the Diamonds fans crowding up the stadium. 

You jolt at the sudden screams, blinking up from your stupid silly grin at your phone. 

And just like that, the messages stop. 

Your phone is still perched on your thigh and the glue stick is loosely rolling under the pressure of your palm, face-down. Vernon’s already walking to the plate, bat slung over his shoulder like it’s just another Tuesday. You should focus back now. On the deadlined layouts and layering. But you can’t. Not when it’s Vernon batting.

He’s got that practiced swagger – not cocky, just calm – like he knows exactly what he’s doing, like he knows he’ll hit that ball well enough for second base. If not second, then definitely first. Under the stadium lights, the noise, the pressure, the blaring commentators, none of it touches him. His helmet shifts slightly when he adjusts his grip. From where you’re sitting tonight, just behind the catcher – the peripheral of all batters – you can see his neck tilt  as he grounds his feet. And you think, for one half-second, his eyes flit towards your section. 

You swear he sees you. 

You swear he knows. 

It’s annoying. 

It’s gut-wrenchingly annoying how good he looks standing there, chewing his gum like he’s in no rush at all. How he looks straight out of a baseball webtoon with his chestnut brown hair, tapping his bat once, twice, against the plate before he takes his stance. 

You pause your unconscious gluing. Your thumb sticks to a piece of lace organza. You don’t notice. 

The pitcher winds up. 

Vernon never flinches. 

And then

CRACK!

The sound is loud. Clean. Like the air itself snapped in half. 

You can see Vernon grin. 

You don’t even register the crowd erupting until half a second later, after the ball flies – high, hard, fast, promising – slicing through the humid air like it’s trying to give Vernon more time to run.

And him? Vernon? 

He doesn’t jog. He sprints. 

But you can see it – the calm – in the way he lets his helmet tilt back just a bit as he works his legs, pumps his arms. You can see it in the way he lays down his bat before he’s off. Calm again, like he knew – oh, he knew – that he’d make it. Like he saw the ball arcing across the midfielders’ heads before he even swung the bat. 

He rounds first so quick even his teammates cheer. 

He glances to the dugout. 

And you swear you see him glance at your section. 

A calm grin. Wide, so Vernon. 

Yeah. Definitely glances towards your section. 

Second base. 

He slides a little as the caught ball soars through the air from the outfielders towards second base. As his cleats touch down, it kicks up dirt, staining his white uniform. 

The ump signals safe. 

The crowd roars in approval, losing it. A couple of girls in front of you are screaming his name, hands shaking as they zoom into his victorious face, still on the ground, dusting himself off. 

You blink again. It hits you how much you’ve been staring. 

You shake your head, as if that will force your brain to refocus. 

You glance down at the mess of notebooks, pens, glue sticks, scissors, food, and beer on your table. 

The sigh is almost reactive. 

So is the blush that creeps onto your cheeks when you look up at Vernon, inching towards 3rd base, ready to steal, and his face is suddenly projected on the jumbotron, lips tilted up, helmet pulled down over his eyes as he looks determined. 

____________

Your home studio is a mess. 

Your apartment is a mess, actually. 

Not, like, a mess-mess, but the kind that only happens when you realize that you’re three days past a deadline, too stubborn to ask for help, and still choosing the color layering for a dress you told Yena you would have finished last week but technically still working out. 

Fabric swatches from the one Myeongdong fabric shop are draped across your studio couches, your coffee table in the living room is covered in opened sketchbooks, torn-out magazine pages, a slightly crusting bowl of tteokbokki you swore you would clean up after you scarfed it down last night. You haven’t. And until this color layering problem and the PFW designs start coming together, the most it’ll move and clean is probably just sit idly in the kitchen sink. 

There is the familiar bi-bi-bing!! of the giant JBL speaker in the corner of the living room as you cross your house to get to the studio-slash-sewing-slash-design-slash-procrastination room. Your playlist automatically hums to life in the background, WOODZ’s voice humming through the surround sound. It’s familiar – the same song you always put on when you’re trying to feel like a calm, collected, creative designer instead of a sleep-deprived maniac fighting for your life against the Fall/Winter collection because you’re indecisive and fashion, right about now, feels like the worst possible career choice you could have ever made. So many decisions! So little time! Yet so many deadlines!

You’ve lost your jean shorts for thin wide-leg sweatpants the moment you entered. The house is cold, like it always is, because you tend to forget to turn the AC off before you rush off to another meeting. And your off-shoulder crop top has already been decisively exchanged for a baggy shirt that you think is from your college ex-boyfriend but you’re not too sure, which is why you still have it. Your hair is barely holding in a claw clip, but you can’t bring yourself to waste ten precious seconds of your fingers not gluing, sewing, cutting, or slamming down against the table. 

It’s methodical, the way you work now, far away from the game and thus, as an extension, from Vernon: cut, glue, sew (if needed), stare at your work for ten seconds, drink your whiskey, realize it’s empty (again), pour yourself another sip because if you pour yourself more than a sip, you’re going to end of drinking yourself to miss another deadline. 

The drink burns, just enough to make your brain hum, and you pretend that the slight buzz will help you make your choices. 

You lean over the sketchbook laid out on top of your work desk, tapping a pencil against the edge of the page. The problem really has never been about the silhouette – you’ve had that nailed for weeks. It’s the layering. It’s always the layering. The trench you thought would be the centerpiece looks too heavy for the fall piece of the collection and too thin for the winter piece. So you switched it out with the asymmetrical drape coat. Except then, the metallic piping doesn’t translate to print. And you still haven’t decided on whether the main F/W bag should be a fold-over or a cross-body tote like the MiuMiu one three seasons ago. And don’t even get started with the color dilemma. 

Yena begged you to pick either beige or cream. You decided, in a fit of uncontrollable indecisiveness, to pick beige and cream. Now you’re stuck and beige is starting to look like cream and cream, beige. 

You flip the page, irritated. Try sketching something else. A structured jacket? Maybe another wool cape? Fur? But everything feels too soft. Too already-done. Nothing that makes you feel anything. Nothing that would stop someone mid-video at a show and look. 

You glance at the folded-up ticket stub from the game earlier, thrown carelessly on your desk with your phone and singular credit card when emptying your pockets. 

You haven’t heard from Vernon since he texted you a 👍after the Diamonds won 13-2. 

Not that it matters. 

But it does. 

And you do think about him as you sketch – completely unintentionally, which makes it like three times worse. As your pencil glides across the bumpy sketch book, your brain wanders to how calm he looks when the stadium is the loudest and even your heart is pounding. How, last week during the media conference after a game, the sleeves of your S/S line jacket looked, pushed up his forearms as he waved the reporters good-bye from the locker room. How he paired the platform knee-high boots and the slightly cropped leather jacket, all from your F/W line last year, almost perfectly with some ragged jean shorts and the most enticing little striped shirt that did nothing to hide his god-given collarbones that you couldn’t help but imagine on the runway. 

He’s got this way of showing up in your head when you’re just starting to forget he exists. Like now. In the quiet. With the whiskey sitting in the warmth of your stomach and your body wrapped up in your own tired, tangled, teasing thoughts. 

You sigh. 

Your pencil pauses over the page. Your eyes flicker down and you want to almost scream at the sketch that grins up at you. It’s him. Except, not the eyes, nose, mouth, or any of his facial features, actually, but still, him. The way his hair messes up in the front, his silhouette etched so gracefully onto your sketchbook page – the wide shoulders, sloping waistline. 

You curse under your breath. 

Another sip of whiskey that burns down your throat. 

Your phone buzzes against the hardwood desk. 

You ignore it – probably Yena.

Then, it buzzes again. 

You reach over slowly, ready to roll your eyes at Yena’s incessant texts. 

Until you don’t. 

Until you see his name, blinking up at you like the broken streetlight from your not-date-date three weeks ago. 

vernon⚾️🐈 u awake?

You stare at the message. Then at the clock. 

It’s 12:04 AM. 

vernon⚾️🐈 wyd?

you designs 

And then against all notion of rational thought, you snap a photo of your sketchbook. 

[attached]

Vernon responds in seconds. 

vernon⚾️🐈 wait  thats lwk really cool

you nice to know my work is appreciated

vernon⚾️🐈 would u ever design smth for me?

Your fingers hover over the keyboard. The whiskey sits too warm in your stomach now. 

you why? u tryna be a fashion icon now/?

vernon⚾️🐈 smth like that j think ur designs look cool

There’s a lull there. You’re not too sure what you’re supposed to respond with. A smiley face? A thank you? A heart? 

Another buzz. 

vernon⚾️🐈 r u still up?

you its been like 5 min yes ofc

vernon⚾️🐈 im at the batting cages

you okay….. and?

vernon⚾️🐈 do u wanna maybe come

You stare at the last message longer than you mean to. The cursor blinks in the text box as your thumb hesitates above the keyboard. 

It’s stupid. 

It’s so stupid. 

So so so stupid. 

It’s past midnight, you’re barely sobering up from the whiskey, you’ve been sitting cross-legged on your studio floor for hours surrounded by scattered swatches, rejected sketches, the remainders of your brain. You should say no. 

You should absolutely completely say no. 

But. 

But the memory of him late at night during the not-date-date still lingers in your mind, cruising around your nerves to send the scent of his cologne down your spine. You can’t mistake the way you wait for his text like a dog for food. It’s pathetic, really. 

And you can’t help it. 

you address??

vernon⚾️🐈 [location shared!]

You’re scrambling now. First for a better shirt – a Ganni one that’s a size too big on you but you refuse to return because it was the last one left in stock in-store. Next for shoes – vintage Nikes that you bargained for in Japan. And then for the smallest purse that fits your wallet, lipstick, and your phone. And your car keys! 

The door slams behind you and you’re in the elevator even before you can fully hear your door lock beep. 

It’s a little past 12:30 AM when you arrive at the batting cages. It was more of a battle trying to find a parking spot than squeezing your Range Rover through the narrow alleyway. The city streets are quiet, though, and the night air is cool against your skin as you step out of the car, the low hum of the city lights and Gangnam in the distance. The flickering lights from the batting cages cast long shadows, their glow almost surreal in the emptiness of the night. 

You take a deep breath, listening to the steady thwack! of baseballs connecting with a bat. 

Vernon’s the only one there. 

He’s caged inside one of the batting cages, bat in hand, duffle bag thrown against the bench. He looks focused as he takes another swing. The Adidas zip-up is loose on him, riding up when he swings, waistband of his boxers showing bolded words: wasted youth. 

His body moves with fluid grace under the bright lights, the way he lines up each shot is almost hypnotic. You pause for a moment, watching him, fingers curled around the openings of the metal cage. Watching him – the way his body shifts, the subtle flex of his arms as the bat connects with the ball, the way he frowns when it doesn’t hit just right. The sound of it is satisfying, the crack echoing in the quiet night air. The zip-up hands from his shoulders, the fabric moving with the flow of his motions and you can barely make out a black undershirt – a tank, probably. 

For a few seconds, you forget why you’re here. Why you’re watching him hit ball after ball, too focused on the bat to realize you’ve arrived. It’s just him, bat in hand, hitting ball after effortless ball – and you admire it: how smooth he looks, how natural it seems, how he seems made for this. 

But then, he falters. 

Notices you standing behind him, eyes training on his body. 

He pauses mid-swing, letting the ball die in the machine. His eyes flick over you quickly – your oversized shirt, your bag that swings from your shoulder, your hair. He doesn’t say anything but his mouth curved up into the smallest of smiles – of smirks?

“You actually came,” he says, voice carrying a playful tone, like he wasn’t entirely sure you would. 

He sets his bat down in the bat rack, the soft clink of the metal against the wood the only sound between you two. 

He wipes his hands against his black sweatpants. 

You roll your eyes, tossing your bag on the bench when he opens the cage door for you. “You texted me in the middle of the night. Worried you were going through a mid-season crisis or something.” You bite the inside of your cheek as you grab a smaller bat that sits next to his now. “You’re lucky I make all my bad decisions after midnight.” 

Vernon chuckles, low and easy. “Nah, not a crisis. Or a bad decision. Just wanted to see if you could make contact after all that high talk.” 

You give him a look, rolling the bat in between your hands. 

He’s tall. Close. Built. His shoulders hide the other cage’s light from hitting your face and he grins down at you like he’s known you for your whole life. 

You shoot him a flat look. “Has anyone ever told you that you talk way too much for someone who’s supposedly nonchalant?”

He just grins, hands in his pockets, shrugging. 

You sigh, moving your hands to the grip of the bat, walking up to where the fake grass turf was the barest. You’re familiar with the weight of a bat. You’ve been a baseball fan, even though Vernon acts like he’s teaching you everything from scratch. 

The machine whirs when Vernon flips a switch, and from the dark hole of the pitching machine, the first pitch comes launching your way. 

You wait. 

Swing. 

Hit. 

Crack!

The ball soars into the net, the thwack! echoing in the empty batting cage. 

It’s quiet for a moment. You think Vernon’s switched the machine off again. Or maybe it’s a lull the universe has granted. 

Vernon lets out a low whistle. “Not bad.” 

You glance over at him, brow raised. “Not bad?” 

He lifts a shoulder, teasing grin. “You could do better.” 

You scoff, turning your attention back to the machine, now whirring back to life, for the next pitch. The rhythm of it is steady. You can understand why Vernon does this. Ball after ball, the occasional miss, the occasional perfect hit. Every crack! thwack! makes you feel like every ounce of stress in your body leaves your pores in spindles of smoke – evaporated. 

Vernon stands in the back, letting you hit and hit and hit. 

Then, after a particularly good hit, he finally speaks again. 

“Here.” 

You barely register him stepping forward, machine turned off now, befor ehe’s suddenly behind you. His presence is like a magnet, pulling you closer as his hands move to adjust your stance. 

And you try to focus – you really, really do – but it’s hard when he’s standing so close to you – chest brushing against your back, warm, solid. 

“Try shifting your stance a little,” he says, voice low. And his hands are moving from his sides to your sides, inching up your waist before you can react. His touch is gentle, fleeting, adjusting your posture with the slightest pressure. His touch is steady, unhurried, but it sends a shock and tingle up your spine anyway. 

You swallow, trying to focus on gripping your bat so that it doesn’t clatter to the floor. “I’m already hitting fine,” you mumble. You’re scared to look up. 

“Could be better,” he retorts, and you don’t have to turn around to know that he’s ear-to-ear grinning. 

His hands move up from your waist to your shoulders. Down your bare arms to rest on top of yours on the grip of the bat. His hands are warm against your skin and you hope to God that he can’t feel the goosebumps that rise with his touch. The pressure of his hand around yours is mind-reeling and his breath is warm near your ear as he murmurs

“Relax this a little. You’re too stiff.” 

You squeeze your eyes shut, trying to ignore the flutter of your heartbeat at the proximity, at the feel of his broad chest pressed against your back as he reaches around. He’s so focused on your swing, helping you improve, but all you can think about is how he feels against you. 

His hands leave yours to your shoulders, gently pressing down. “Relax.” 

“Maybe I like being stiff.” 

Vernon huffs out a quiet laugh. “You sure about that?” 

When he sees your hands tightening against the bat, he puffs out a sigh of air, leaning in again. His cologne is subtle but warm – something clean, fresh, with a hint of pine? Musk? Vanilla? Something that lingers. It mixes in with the scent of your detergent and it’s all you can think of. 

His fingers slide down, adjusting your grip over the bat. His hands are infinitely warmer, covering yours completely, and the way he’s guiding your movement is too natural for your brain to wrap around. You feel your breath get lodged in your throat. You don’t know what’s happening.

His chest is flush agaisnt your back, body pressed against yours, mumbling something into your ear but you can’t bring yourself to comprehend it properly. His hands on your waist, wrist, his height, build, it completely envelops you. The proximity of him makes your pulse race and your lungs tighten and you pray that he can’t feel your beating thumping heart through your wrist pulse point. 

“Better?” he murmurs. 

You try to say yeah, but your voice barely comes out. So you just nod instead. 

You can feel his breath against the back of your neck, and something inside of you screams – in want, desire, guilt, something in between? His hands hesitate for just a fraction of a second – one on your hip, the other on your wrist. 

And you’re not too sure how the next part happens. But somehow, between his fingers brushing against yours and the way he’s angled just slightly towards you, breath hot on your neck, cologne invading your senses with no mercy, you turn your head at the same time he glances down. 

Or maybe he was already looking down. 

His eyes are dark, soft in a way that makes your throat tighten. His lips part, a breath leaving him that you can’t quite make out. It’s not a sigh, not quite a word. It’s something in between, laced with an emotion heavier than the tension that stretches taut between you. You don’t know if he’s waiting for you to pull away, stumble out of his grasp like he’s burned you, or if he’s looking for a sign to make the next move – stoop lower to move forward, not hold back. 

Your heart stutters. 

The moment stretches thin. 

His eyes flicker down to your lips and then flicker back up to your eyes. They’re hesitant, as if he’s wondering if this is the right thing. 

You swallow. “Vern–”

Your eyes widen in surprise, name cut off before the breath in your lungs even leaves you completely. 

Because he’s leaning down, lips crashing down on yours, slow, deliberate, soft. It’s slow at first, tentative, like he’s giving you the chance to pull away. 

You would be crazy to pull away. 

Instead, you melt into it. The bat clatters to the floor with a muted th-th-thack! and on hand goes to tangle in his hair, pulling him down further. The angle is awkward – you’re half-turned around, one arm stretched up to pull him down, one hand resting against his that sits on your waist, lingering. He’s pressed up behind you, chest against your back, slouching down to fully reach your lips. 

And then something clicks. 

You twist to face him fully, hands finding their way to the collar of his jacket, fisting the fabric as you rise on your tip-toes. 

Vernon doesn’t hesitate anymore. His hand slides from your waist to the small of your back, so slowly that it raises the hair on your skin and sends shivers up your spine as he pulls you in closer, flush against his chest. His other hand cups your jaw, thumb brushing over your cheek. Once. Twice. Three times. 

He kisses you like he means it. Like he’s been waiting to do this. 

And you don’t have any more thinking capacity left in you to be embarrassed when you let out a breathy little sound from the back of your throat that sounds a little too much like a whimper, hands finding their way to the back of his neck, pulling him down more. Now both of his hands are on your lower back, your waist, grip so firm, so warm, as he pulls you in, lips moving in sync with yours. 

Everything else fades. The far-away sound of the bat hitting the ball, the dying hum of the machine, the soft murmur and chirp of the night – everything becomes – feels – secondary to the feel of his lips on yours. You can taste the faint tang of the lemon electrolyte drink he was drinking on his lips, feel the strength in his arms as they basically hold you up on your tip-toes like he’s not letting you go. 

You break apart. 

You don’t want to. 

But it’s getting harder to hold your breath. 

So you pull back, back down on your feet, breaths coming out heavy, now eye-to-eyes with Vernon’s collarbones. You look up. 

Vernon looks down at you with this expression that you can’t quite place. His pupils are blown wide– dark against his hazel rings – lips parted slightly as he catches his breath. You’re still pressed so close to him that you can feel the heat radiating off him, his chest rising and falling with steady breaths. You swallow. 

And then Vernon lets out a small little laugh, lips stretching to paint the silliest smile on his face, forehead meeting yours. His big hands are warm and calloused against your flushed cheeks, thumb tracing over your skin. 

His forehead stays pressed to your for just a beat longer. You feel like passing out when he whispers fuck, y/n, under his breath like a secret – barely a whisper, barely above a breath, like saying it any louder might break the moment. 

You’re still catching your breath, dizzy from how fast everything shifted, how the entire world seems to narrow down to just the space between his lips and yours.But when your eyes flutter up to meet his – dark, hooded, unwavering – your breath gets harder to inhale. 

When your gaze drops to his lips again, Vernon moves – pounces, almost. 

He surges forward, lips on yours again. Except, this time, harder – needier. There’s no hesitation now – no caution, no prudence in the way he grips your hips, body moving you – walking you – backwards until you feel your back hit the cold metal of the batting cage. It startles you, eyes fluttering open because when had you gotten this far, and you gasp, the noise stuck in your throat. 

Vernon doesn’t stop. 

His tongue swipes against your bottom lip so carefully, so softly, teasing. Nd when your mouth parts slightly, it’s like something inside of him snaps. 

Suddenly, his head is tilting, hands cupping your jaw as yours scrunch his collar, deepening the kiss – messy and hot – his body caging yours against the cool chain-link fence. 

You can’t think. Can’t breathe. Can’t do anything but let him devour you. His tongue dances with yours – slides, twists – deliberate and sure. And when your hands move to tangle your fingers through his slightly wavy hair, slowly trailing down to the nape of his neck, clutching like you need him to keep you upright, he groans. Deep and low and rumbling in his chest, eaten up and swallowed by your greedy mouth. 

It’s visceral, the way you grab at each other. The way his body presses into yours and yours against the fence, like he can’t get close enough – like the two of you might combust if even an inch of air dares to exist between you. A ball of heat knots deep in your stomach as his hands roam – one firm against your waist, the other sliding up the curve of your back, underneath your loose shirt, fingers kneading against the flesh. He kisses you like he’s starved. Like every pent-up look and almost-touch finally snapped him clean and the wire-tight tension – now he’s unraveling. 

When his teeth bite down gently against your bottom lip, you whimper. It’s soft, barely even heard because his kisses mute it. But Vernon hears. He curses softly – muffled against your moving lips – as he tilts his head, insistent on coaxing just another sound from your throat. It’s instinct now – how you arch into him, how his hands are strong to support you as you start to get tired of standing on your tip-toes, how your hand slides up into his hair and tugs. 

Vernon groans. It’s louder this time, coupled with a breathy little whine. 

And suddenly, his hands are just lower than your hips, his lips separating from yours for a second to whisper 

“Jump,” against yours

before he’s kissing you again. 

And you do. Jump, that is. 

And when you jump, legs wrapping around his slutty waist, his hands are under your thighs, pressing you firm against the fence. You can’t stop yourself. You’ve already crossed some invisible line, and all that matters to you is him. Vernon Chwe. The way he feels, the way he presses up closer against you, the way he’s just as desperate – maybe even more desperate – for this than you are. 

It helps that you haven’t had any sort of sexual relationship for a year and a half now. 

Now pressed up against the fence, your arms steady around his neck, Vernon’s hands tangle in your hair, pulling you deeper into the kiss. His hold is firm, possessive, with a hint of softness and tenderness that sends a wave of heat through you. With a gentle tug, he has you looking up at the open night sky. His mouth moves from yours to your neck, lips trailing messy kisses along your skin. It has you letting out soft gasps as his teeth graze your skin, lightly nipping, pressing open-mouthed kisses afterwards to soothe. The sound of your heart is a rhythmic thud in your ear – everything is building, growing, more desperate. Especially as Vernon lightly bites against your ear. 

You can feel the firmness of his chest as it presses against you, breath hot against your skin, and every move he makes – shifting you further up, pressing another kiss, whispering something you definitely do not have the brain capacity for – sends another thrill down your spine.

“Vernon,” you murmur, voice echoing in the empty cages. 

At the call of his name, he pulls away from decorating your neck with the hues of the darker side of the rainbow, looking up at you with dark and hooded eyes. You can almost see the desire swirling through them. But his lips curve into a faint smile. 

“Hm?” 

He gives you a peck on your lips before kissing down your jaw. You swallow, head thrown back still against the fence, body supported by Vernon and Vernon alone. But when you don’t respond right away, he pulls back again, hands moving to hitch you up more securely, fingers brushing your bare waist where your shirt had ridden up during the mess of kisses. When you look down, he’s staring up at you with furrowed, worried brows. 

“‘S this okay?” he asks quietly, voice rough and strained. 

You bite the inside of your cheek, hands moving from his shoulders to brush through his hair shakily. You let out a breath that feels more punched out of you than anything. “Yeah,” you mumble, leaning forward so that your arms drape over his shoulders, bottom lip trapped between your teeth as you rest your cheek against your arm. You feel Vernon’s hands tighten around your thighs. 

“You sure?” he asks. You can hear his heartbeat. Almost. 

You nod. “‘M fine. This,” you let out a small laugh, “This is more than fine.” 

Vernon is quiet before he speaks again. And you can’t quite see his face, you can imagine his small smile. 

“Okay, okay, okay. Cool, Cool. That’s – um – that’s fire,” he mumbles. Rambles, actually. 

He’s cute. 

You let out a laugh – a loud one – at that, tapping his arm to signal to let you down.

“Fire? That’s all you have to say to that?” You tease, landing back on the floor with shaky legs, still clinging to Vernon, arms winding around his neck. You stare up at him and he looks down at you like you just dotted stars in the night sky. You’ve never had someone look at you like this. 

His voice is lower when he finally speaks again. “More than fire.” He grins, forehead coming to rest on yours as his arms wind around your waist. “Definitely more than fire.” 

You giggle. It’s weird how quickly he makes you feel like a schoolgirl and not a fully-grown adult with a life outside of swooning over him. But your teeth take your bottom lip prisoner again. “Yeah?” 

Vernon exhales a short breath. “Yeah.” 

When you giggle again, Vernon groans – half in embarrassment, half in he doesn’t know what. “You drive me crazy,” he mumbles under his breath, detaching himself from you with great reluctance. 

When he steps away, letting your arms fall to your sides, you watch as he sets the bats back on the rack, shouldering his duffle, shoving his phone into his pocket. He glances at you, a small smile playing on his lips when you cross your arms, waiting. For what? You’re not too sure yourself. Maybe for him to kiss you again? Maybe for him to lead you out and drop you off at home? You stand there awkwardly now, not quite ready to leave, not quite sure how to stay. You stand there, pretending you don’t wish his lips are back on yours. 

Vernon walks up to you, the swing of his duffle bag lazy, eyes soft but unreadable under the dim lights of the cage. He stops right in front of you, not touching (and good thing because if he did touch you, you wouldn’t be able to let go), but close enough that you can still feel the warmth of his body. 

“You drove here, right?” he asks quietly, glancing back at the nearly empty parking lot behind the fence. 

You nod slowly, your voice soft. “Yeah.” You glance down at your feet, embarrassed now for some weird reason. 

He hesitates, lips parted like there’s something more he wants to say. Then he shifts his weight, eyes flickering from yours to the path out of the cages. “You okay to drive?”

You shrug. “I mean… probably.”

That earns a soft, knowing chuckle from him. “That’s not reassuring.”

You’re still floating a bit. Still warm from his hands on your skin, his mouth on yours, his voice in your ear. Still trying to remember how to stand on your own feet. And Vernon looks unfairly composed in comparison. Like he’s turned the volume down on whatever chaos just happened between you – but it’s still written in his flushed cheeks, his tousled hair, the way he keeps looking at you like you’re a goddamn fever dream.

He steps forward and reaches for your hand, threading his fingers through yours like you’re dating or something. “C’mon,” he says, tugging gently, “I’ll walk you to your car.”

The night air is cooler outside of the cages. The heat of the moment is behind you as you walk towards your car, parked rather haphazardly by a streetlight, hand-in-hand, Vernon glancing down at you every once-in-a-while. He has this silly little smile plastered on his face that makes you smile too. Makes you smile more. 

When you finally reach your car, Vernon lets go of your hand, stepping around to the passenger side. When he opens the door and peeks in, for a split second, you think he’s about to jump in, drive with you back home. 

But then he pulls back, grinning, shouldering his duffle, hands in his pockets. 

“Messy,” he comments. 

You click your tongue, pulling open the driver’s side, sliding in. Your hands hover near the handle before you grip it. 

You don’t want to say anything else, lest you break the moment – heavy, thick with everything that just happened. 

So, naturally, Vernon does. “You’re okay to drive though?” 

You smile, nodding. “Yeah, I mean, unless you wanna file a police report about a girl you were making out with in the cages.” 

His lips twitch and you know he picked up on your tone. He leans against the driver’s side. “Think it’d hold up in court?” 

You laugh. “Depends. I might argue that you instigated it.” 

Vernon scoffs, one arm on the top of your car. He’s so close again. “Can’t. Won’t hold. I clearly said jump. That’s consent and delegation.” 

You snort. “Okay, lawyer.”

“Okay, criminal.” 

You both laugh, tension broken, and it feels good. Cathartic, in a way. But overall, good. His smile lingers longer this time, teeth catching on his bottom lip like he’s trying not to say something. Or like he’s trying not to leave. 

“You sure you don’t want me to drive you back?” he asks. His voice is gentler now. He hesitates before his hand darts out, fingers gently brushing the fallen strands of hair from your face. “I can follow you, even. Just to make sure you get home okay, y’know?” 

Your heart tugs a little. It’s so stupid how sweet he is. Stupid, stupid, and so so so endearing. Even if it sounds just a little bit creepy.

But you smile, grabbing his hand before it gets shoved in the depths of his pockets again. “You tryna be my stalker now?” 

Vernon shrugs, fingers folding over yours sweetly. “Eh. Takes one to know one, right?” And then he smiles – all teeth and boyish with ruffled hair – and it makes you laugh. 

“Are you calling me a stalker?” 

“Nah. You’re my Kiss Cam partner. ‘S a little diff’rent.” A pause. “I’ll still follow you though,” he says, a little quieter now. “Not all the way – just out the lot. Make sure no one’s creeping out here this late.” 

You squint at him dramatically. “Is this your creepy way of saying you want to make sure I don’t crash my car?”

“It’s my gentlemanly way of saying I don’t trust you behind the wheel when your brain’s still halfway up that fence.”

The laugh that is forced out of you is as dramatic as incredulous. “Vernon Chwe!” You blush red under his laughter. 

He watches, one hand still on the frame like he doesn’t want to walk away just yet.

Before he closes the door for you, you glance up and grin. “Hey, if I do crash, just know my ghost is gonna haunt you in a very flirty and inconvenient way.”

Vernon laughs, full and warm this time. “Can’t wait.”

He shuts the door gently, taking a step back. You turn on the engine, stealing one last glance at him through the window, now rolled down. 

He watches you for a second. “Text me when you get home?” His request is quiet, small, almost like he expects you to say no. 

Your foot leaves the gas pedal. 

You look at him. Really look at him. And you know if you don’t kiss him again right now, you’re going to regret it.

You reach out, fingers curling into the collar of his jacket, and you tug him down to you. He doesn’t resist. His lips meet yours again – this time slower, but also faster. A peck. Small, short, and sweet. Just in case you get too addicted too quick. 

When you break apart, he looks dazed. Like you just punched the breath out of him. 

“I’ll text you,” you whisper. 

You steal one last glance at him before rolling up your window.

He waves you off with a crooked grin, walking slowly back to his own car as you back out of the lot. And even in your rearview mirror, you can see him watching, waiting until you’re safely out onto the road.

You pull away, your cheeks still aching from smiling.

Five minutes later, at the first stoplight, your phone buzzes in the holder attached to the AC. 

vernon⚾️🐈 text me back when ur home j so i know ur ghost isnt gonna flirt me into crashing too 

You bite your lip, smile stretching wide and helpless across your face. And you can’t control the incoherent squeal that leaves your lips. 

God, you’re so screwed. 

----------------

It’s almost 9PM when you get his text. 

vernon⚾️🐈 u @ the studio?

you sadly yes how did u know r u stalking me or smth

vernon⚾️🐈 maybe  i j finished training j checking in

His little typing… bubble doesn’t go away for another couple of seconds and you just know that he probably deleted what he was going to send to you. 

you im j working how was training?

vernon⚾️🐈 the same did u eat?

you …no BUT im fine deadline mode

vernon⚾️🐈 what kind of monster forgets to eat

you a very talented one that also missed her deadline last week? making a masterpiece rn

vernon⚾️🐈 so dramatic

The conversation lulls when he doesn’t send anything for a minute or two. You curl yourself against the armrest of your work chair, sewing and fabric forgotten on your work table. 

vernon⚾️🐈 do u want me to bring u food?

you only if it comes with radish!! this time!!!

You hope the exclamation points hide how red your cheeks are and how your body almost vibrates with nerves – or maybe excitement? – as you reread his text. 

vernon⚾️🐈 u think id mess that up twice?

you call it intuition

vernon⚾️🐈 wow no faith in me

you i have complete faith in ur batting avg j not ur side dish memory

vernon⚾️🐈 cold i hit a homer AND remembered ur drink last time

you ok fine ur batting .500 in food service tbh thats hall of fame numbers

vernon⚾️🐈 lmao im omw w surprise food dont sew ur hand off!!!

you ur coming NOW??!

vernon⚾️🐈 lol yeah unless u dont want me to.. i can hang the food on ur door and go

you u can stay IF ur not annoying

vernon⚾️🐈 roundabout way to tell me to leave..

you no u can stay depending how good the food is

vernon⚾️🐈 depending on how good u look in wtv ur making rn

you bro vernon

vernon⚾️🐈 👀 do u call every guy u make out w “bro”

you omg shut up and hurry up

--------------

You’re bent over your work table, one knee pressed close to your chest, the other crossed flat against the seat, when you hear the quiet doorbell to your studio echo through the empty rooms. 

In the quiet of the studio, above the city hustle and bustle, the doorbell rings loudly, decrescendoing into a whisper of an intrusion. 

You don’t turn immediately – hands busy pinning fabric on the mannequin in front of you. But you know it’s him. He texted ten minutes ago that he was almost there and knowing Vernon, he probably stood stock-still in front of the door, maybe pacing, trying to psych himself up to press the doorbell and double checking if he was at the right address for five whole minutes. 

“It’s unlocked!” you call, voice only slightly muffled by the pins in your mouth as you (attempt) to thread a thin leather string through the bodice only to have it bunch on one side. You hear the door click open, hinges creaking quietly from down the hall. Soft footsteps that stop right in front of the raised entry-way are followed by a couple of shuffles as he takes off his shoes, sliding into the slippers that you set out an hour before. 

When you finally glance over your shoulder, he’s standing in the middle of the entry hallway with a plastic bag in his hand, a black hoodie half-off, slinging off his shoulder, over an ab-showing workout shirt, and cap flipped backwards. 

A ridiculously loud laugh is torn from the back of your throat and you almost fall off your chair at the way Vernon’s face twists in confusion. 

He lifts a hand. 

“Hey,” he greets, low voice soft in the quiet of the studio, mingling with your playlist playing through the speakers. 

“Hey,” you say. 

His eyes sweep over you, then the chaos you’re sitting in – bolts of fabric stacked and pushed away to the dark corner next to your desk, three sewing machines pushed up against the right wall, your own sewing machine humming with a lazily blinking lights, and unfinished sketches taped to the window in front of your desk, a flood-over from the wall-taped sketches. 

He lifts the bag in his hand with the cutest grin you’ve seen. If you were a weaker woman, you would have blushed. “Saved your life. Again.” 

You roll your eyes, motioning him inside your main studio. “Maybe save the gloat for after I eat.” 

He steps inside, brushing past the hanging yards of tulle that you thought you would use but never ended up actually using so you hung hurriedly on the fabric rack bolted high against the wall. He pads over to you and when he sets the bag down on the nearest slightly-clean table, you can smell the scent of his cologne – clean, vanilla, a little spicy and musky. It’s faint, like he put it on hours ago, but the way it still lingers makes your head hurt because he smells exactly the same from that night. He glances around your studio like he always does when he comes here, like he’s trying to memorize all the new wall-taped sketches and discarded fabric pieces. 

He points to a sketch taped on the window, right above your table. “I like that one. Is it new?” 

You pull your hair back, twisting it up into a bun before clipping it off with a claw clip. “Maybe. It will be if I actually finish it.” 

He looks down at you with his brown eyes that look a little bit darker in the dim lights of the studio. It’s a beat too long. You feel it. Like there’s something unspoken sitting right behind his teeth and he’s not too sure whether he’s allowed to say it or if you would both benefit from him swallowing it down whole. 

You can’t stand his gaze – not if it feels like he can read your mind (even the thoughts that are definitely not suitable). So you open the bag to distract yourself. 

The first thing that greets your hungry eyes is two packets of cellophane-wrapped containers of white radish. 

“Okay,” you hum, unwrapping the cellophane carefully, “you did remember the radish.” You lick a droplet of radish juice off your thumb, glancing at Vernon with a grin. “Color me impressed.” 

He shrugs, sitting on your work bench like he’s done it a hundred times. “What can I say? I’m learning,” he mutters, leaning back on his hands. He watches as you open containers, throwing plastic lids into the large garbage can by your desk. The soft pop! of plastic lids fill the space and you can’t help but push some containers of o-deng and pajeon towards Vernon to let him open those as you crack apart two sets of chopsticks, (un)gracefully moving to the floor. Your chopstick shovels a good chunk of crab meat and egg fried rice even before your crossed legs can touch the hardwood floor. 

It’s quiet, aside from the music in the background and your murmurs of holy shit this is so good in between rapid bites. 

Vernon watches you for a while in silence, legs spread out in front of him, leaning back on his hands. His chopstick is untouched – like he takes more pleasure out of watching you eat than eating it himself. 

“You okay?” he asks eventually, noticing a stall in your hurried shovelling of food. 

You glance up at him from your half-empty fried rice bowl. You blink. “Yeah? Just tired.” 

He nods, eyes dropping to your bare legs tucked under you, the way your quarter-zip dips too low on your chest. He clears his throat and looks away fast – too fast. 

You bite the inside of your cheek, setting the bowl and chopsticks down, studying him in all of his post-training, showered, deliciously-smelling glory. You can’t help but stare – at his face, his arms, his chest, everything. And then at his slightly-drooping eyes and slight dark circles that seem to shadow over more in the dim studio lights. 

“You don’t have to stay,” you say softly, poking his leg. “You probably have practice tomorrow.” 

His response is as immediate as it is confident. “I wanna stay.” It makes you blush – the way he says it like he can’t lie to you even if he tries. 

You hum, legs pulled up to your chest and try not to stare the way his forearm flexes when he runs a hand through his hair. It’s shorter, now that you focus on it. Maybe he cut it. Or maybe he’s training you for his inevitable decision of buzzing it all (he mentioned it to you in passing once and you had laughed at him). The silence stretches again, comfortable, but pulsing, like something’s about to break through the thick wall. 

Vernon looks away to the side, mouth opening. “I’ve been thinking about you,” he says suddenly, like it somehow fell out. 

Your breath catches. 

He’s looking down at the floor now, jaw tight. His legs move to sit criss-cross, like this is a serious conversation. “Since the cages,” he starts out quiet – more quiet than you’ve ever heard him – “It’s been…” he pauses, “kinda driving me crazy.” 

You swallow down the breath caught in the back of your throat. “Yeah?” 

“Yeah,” he says, finally glancing up. If this were any other conversation, you could have giggled over how blushed his cheeks are. “And I didn’t wanna – fuck – I didn’t wanna make it weird, y’ know?” He searches your eyes like it’ll have the words he needs to finish his sentence. “But then you didn’t really text me after – no, like you did but not really – and I thought, I dunno, maybe – maybe – I–”

Before you can even understand what’s going on, you’re on your knees, leaning forward so that you’re staring him in his eyes with some sort of unfamiliar ferocity. 

“You didn’t mess anything up,” you say, hand lingering on his knee. Your quarter-zip falls off your shoulder from the sudden movement. “Vernon, I just didn’t know what to say. Hey, I missed an entire traffic signal because of how good you kissed me seemed a little cliche and stupid.” You crack a grin. 

Vernon lets out a soft laugh, ears tinting pink. When he looks up at you, brows pulled, lips parted like he’s trying to figure out if this is real, it gets harder for you to breathe. A shaky hand goes up to touch his face – fingers brushing his cheek, thumb grazing under his eye, lingers on the sharp cut of his jaw. His fingers curl around the hem of your quarter-zip, pulling you forward, steadying you with firm hands on your thighs when you jerk forward, falling into his lap. 

“Oops,” Vernon murmurs, but the shadow of a smile ghosting his lips gives him away. And it makes your heart beat out through your ribs. 

“You…” you never get to finish that sentence because you find yourself leaning down to kiss him. 

And when your lips meet his, he melts into it. 

It starts slow. Softer than it was the first time. His mouth opens under yours, and he tastes like the strawberry drink he brought for you, like the past week of restraint cracking open. You sink into him, arms circling his shoulders, and he shifts to pull you onto his lap.

Your legs wrap around his waist, and you feel his hands hesitate at your hips. He pulls back just enough to look at you.

“You sure?” he asks, voice low, slightly hoarse.

You nod. “More than sure.”

And then it unravels.

He kisses you like he’s waited years, not days. Like he memorized the shape of your mouth from that night and has been replaying it on loop. Your hoodie is tugged over your head, and his lips trail over every inch of skin he can find. He leaves kisses down your chest, over your ribs, as you unbutton his shirt with fumbling fingers and way too much anticipation.

You're still perched on his lap, his hoodie long gone, your fingers tangled in his hair when he starts kissing down your neck again – open-mouthed, biting. The low hum of the studio surrounds you — the soft buzz of the desk lamp, the rustle of fabric under your knees, the faint warmth from the space heater in the corner.

"Vernon," you whisper.

He groans softly against your collarbone, your name dragging from his lips like a prayer. His hands skim up under your quarter-zip, fingers grazing your sides with a reverence that has your spine curling. His hands inch up, up, up until he meets the softness of your–

“Fuck, no bra?” Vernon groans, hands stilling on your chest. His lips part from your neck for a second. 

You giggle, leaning into his touch. “Maybe I took it off when you said you’ll come,” you whisper into his ear, watching in sinful delight as he blushes at your words, pushing your quarter-zip up until it’s up over your head. When he throws the quarter-zip to some random corner of the studio, he freezes, eyes frozen on the way your nipples harden in the open air, your hair as it runs down your shoulders, hands kneading your tits like they are made for him. 

“Fuck, you’re gorgeous,” he whispers. His mouth goes down before you can even respond with anything, lips circling a nipple as two fingers go to tweak the other one. His tongue is warm against your skin, rolling, lightly biting, sucking. It’s crazy – the way he knows what you want before you even say anything. It drives you absolutely crazy. 

"Wanna taste you," he murmurs, voice low, thick.

Your breath catches. Your eyes meet his. There’s something unshakably tender about the way he’s looking at you — like this has been haunting him. Like he’s starving and you’re the only thing that’ll fill him.

You nod.

That’s all it takes.

His hands are slow, tender, trailing down your sides as he eases you onto your back, bare skin meeting the plush fur of your carpet. A scarf — forgotten on the floor — is swept aside, discarded like all other distractions.

The round carpet you brought home from Taiwan softens the ground beneath his knees. You’d chosen it because it reminded you of moonlight, round and pale and slightly worn. Now it presses into the bones of his legs as he settles between yours like he's found the only place he's ever needed to be.

He leans in close, breath ghosting warm over the sensitive skin of your thighs. And then he begins.

One kiss. 

Then another. 

And another.

Soft at first — reverent, almost — each one carefully placed along the inside of your thigh. His mouth is warm, and his lips linger like he's trying to imprint the shape of you onto himself. He pauses to breathe you in, lashes fluttering against his cheeks as his hands smooth up and down your legs. One hand wraps beneath your thigh, thumb rubbing small, grounding circles while the other curls possessively around your hip.

Every kiss climbs higher, closer, and your hands instinctively grip at his hoodie, still bunched around his arms — the fabric wrinkles between your fingers, grounding you while everything else begins to blur. He looks up once, eyes dark and earnest, gaze locking with yours like he’s checking if you're still with him, still his. You nod, a breathless motion, and he smiles — just barely — before ducking his head again.

When his tongue finally finds you, it’s slow — intentionally slow. One long, deliberate lick that makes your breath stutter and your back arch from the couch. His mouth settles against you like a man starved — greedy, hungry, but still worshipful. The way he moves feels like he's memorizing you with every stroke — cataloging the way your thighs tense, how your breath catches, the exact sound you make when he sucks just right.

You whimper his name, and his body reacts — shoulders twitching, hips shifting, a soft gasp breaking against you like he feels it too. His fingers dig into your hips as if anchoring himself, but you can feel the restraint — like he’s holding back from tearing the rest of your clothes off and burying himself inside you.

“Don’t stop,” you whisper, desperate, the words barely coherent.

He doesn’t. 

He can’t.

When your thighs start to tremble, he groans — the sound guttural, animal — but he doesn’t slow. His arms tighten around your legs, pulling you in closer, locking you into place like you’re the answer to every prayer he’s never dared to say aloud. Your hands slide into his hair, nails scraping gently against his scalp, and his response is immediate: a full-body shiver, a muffled moan into your skin that makes your toes curl.

And when your warning comes — a breathy, broken gasp of please or I’m close, you’re not even sure which — he holds you tighter. He pushes his tongue deeper, faster, more insistent, drinking down every sound you make like he's parched.

You fall apart on his tongue, crying out his name as your whole body tightens, then trembles, then shudders in release. He doesn’t stop. Not right away. He keeps his mouth on you, gentler now, lapping at the aftershocks like he wants to make sure every last wave of pleasure is felt. You twitch beneath him, hypersensitive and dazed, and finally — finally — he pulls back.

His chin is wet, glistening. His lips are pink and swollen, slightly parted like he’s still catching his breath. There’s a dazed, wrecked look in his eyes — the kind of haze that only comes from witnessing something divine.

He blinks up at you like he’s trying to remember where he is, and then, with a hoarse little laugh that barely makes it past his throat, he wipes the back of his hand over his chin and whispers, “You taste like fucking heaven.”

But it’s more than just lust in his eyes.

He looks at you like he’s just been undone. Like your pleasure unstitched something in him he can’t sew back together. And for a long moment, neither of you speak. The only sound is your breathing — still uneven — and the soft rustle of fabric as he leans in, kissing the inside of your thigh again. Slower this time. Calmer. 

Like a benediction.

Like thanks.

You lean up, breathless, cheeks a deep red, tugging him by the collar of his shirt. "Bed," you whisper. "Come here."

His pupils blow wide, as do the rest of his eyes.

You giggle as you grab his hand, scrambling up to your shaky feet, and pull him toward the bedroom — the small tucked-away space past your sewing machine and half-stuffed closet. The lights are soft inside, fairy lights strung in lazy arcs across the ceiling. The bed is already messy, the comforter folded halfway down, pillows too soft to hold structure, the rest of the room packed with machines you don’t need this season and bolts of fabric that didn’t really pass your test. 

He pauses just inside the doorway, hand still in yours, taking it in.

“Holy– the hell?” he mutters.

You blush. “Take your hoodie off.”

He does — slowly, deliberately — and lets it fall to the floor as you sit on the bed, pulling him between your legs. He cups your cheek and kisses you again, deeper now, heavier. And when you lie back on the comforter and he climbs over you, settling into the space between your thighs like he was made for it—it feels like every part of you says finally.

The bed dips under his weight, comforter cool against your back, but the heat radiating from Vernon is all-consuming.

He’s still above you, kissing you like he’s trying to memorize your mouth — hand braced next to your head, the other dragging up your shirt so slowly it’s unbearable. Your skin prickles under his touch, goosebumps chasing every inch he reveals.

"Can I?" he murmurs, thumb brushing just against the waistband of your now-ruined panties. His voice is low, a little wrecked already.

You nod, but your voice is thin. “Fuck, please.”

His eyes hold yours for a moment longer before he pulls your panties down slowly, your legs going up to let him trail his fingers down your bare thighs to throw the panities to a random corner of the room. You reach up, tug at his waistband — a silent demand — and he complies, standing just long enough to strip down to his boxers. When he returns to the bed, all warm skin and toned muscle, you think, this is going to ruin me.

He kisses down your chest, slow, reverent. Your brain is gone in seconds, and then his mouth is on you — warm, wet, tongue swirling in lazy circles that have you arching off the bed. One of his hands grips your waist while the other moves between your legs, pressing over your soaked panties with a hum.

"You're shaking," he whispers.

"You’re taking your time," you shoot back breathlessly.

He chuckles — and then shifts lower. And then… he just looks at you. Drags his hands up your thighs and stares like he’s seen God and she’s spread out on her own damn bed.

"Fuck," he mutters. "You’re beautiful."

You reach for him again, desperate, and he finally gives in, grinding down against your bare core with a low groan. His hips rock once, twice — and you both hiss at the contact. Then he pauses.

“I don’t— I didn’t bring—”

“S’ okay,” you breathe. Your fingers reach for his, eyes never leaving his. “You’re clean, right?” 

He nods almost dumbly, staring at you with toussled hair and parted mouth. 

You gasp in a breath, smiling. “S’ fine, then. I have an IUD.” 

And then it’s like something clicks into place in his brain because his eyes bulge a little as he leans down, biceps shaking, brushing hair out of your face. His next words are almost reverent. “Raw?” 

You hum, kissing his jaw greedily. “Raw,” you whisper teasingly into his ear. 

And then he’s kissing you hard. His hands are a little shaky — not with fear, but with need. Like he’s been dreaming of this for months. Like if he doesn’t get inside you now, he’ll die wanting.

And when he finally does — when he pushes in, slow and careful, your legs wrapping around his waist again — you both go still.

Vernon buries his face in your neck.

“Holy fuck,” he whispers. “You feel— fuck, you feel so good.”

Vernon pauses once he's fully sheathed in you, a low, guttural breath escaping his lips.

"Shit—" he mutters, his voice trembling as his arms brace tightly around you. His forehead presses against yours. "You okay?"

Your legs are wrapped around his waist, your fingers locked at the nape of his neck, body trembling beneath him. It’s a lot. He’s thick and long, stretching you more than you remember, and the sudden fullness has you gasping for air, your walls fluttering around him.

"It’s… it’s been a while," you whisper, biting your bottom lip. "You're just—bigger than I thought."

He groans — actually groans, a sound pulled straight from his chest, jaw clenched like he’s trying not to lose control.

“Fuck—don’t say that. I’m already barely holding it together.”

You laugh breathlessly, cupping his cheek. “You don’t have to move yet. Just stay.”

And he does.

Vernon stays perfectly still, despite the way his hips twitch against yours every few seconds, like his body is begging for friction. One of his hands gently cradles your jaw, the other slips between your bodies to softly stroke your waist, grounding you.

“Just tell me when,” he murmurs, eyes locked on yours.

You focus on breathing, adjusting slowly. He kisses you — slow, deep — his lips pulling moans out of you with nothing but gentleness. And all the while, he whispers against your skin: "You’re doing so good." "I missed you." "You feel unreal."

Your body slowly opens for him, easing into the stretch. The sting dulls into something that makes your toes curl, the kind of pressure that has your thighs trembling with need again.

Finally, you nod, pulling him closer with your legs. “Okay… Move.”

He groans again, this time low and wrecked. He starts to rock his hips, just the smallest roll — and you moan, sharp and high-pitched. His hands tighten on your waist instantly.

“Still good?”

“Don’t stop,” you breathe.

He listens — slow thrusts at first, hips rolling in a deep, steady rhythm that makes your eyes flutter shut. His movements are fluid, controlled, like he’s making love to you with everything he’s held back for months. The stretch is still there, just enough to make every motion feel heady and overwhelming, but now it feels good — so good, it makes you tremble.

Every few strokes, he stops just to kiss you again — like he needs the anchor, or maybe just can’t believe this is real. His mouth trails over your neck, down to your chest, over the curve of your breast.

When he bites gently at your collarbone, you arch, your body clenching around him without warning.

He chokes out a moan.

“Fuck, you keep doing that and I’m not gonna last,” he warns, sweat dampening the strands of hair at his temple.

“You feel—” You gasp when he shifts just right. “—so deep, Nonie.”

Your hands claw at his back, and he picks up the pace just slightly. He’s still holding back — you can feel it, the way his body’s taut above you, trembling like he’s restraining every instinct.

But it doesn’t matter — every slow, deliberate thrust drives you wild.

“Touch yourself f’ me” he murmurs. “Wanna feel you fall ‘part f’ me.”

Your hand slips between your bodies, fingers circling your clit, and the added pressure unravels you. Your moans get louder, body jolting beneath him, and he watches, completely entranced — pupils blown wide, lips parted, sweat glistening across his chest.

Then, you tighten around him again, crying out his name — and he curses, loud, hips stuttering.

“You gonna come?” he pants.

“Close— I’m so close, just—don’t stop.”

And he doesn’t. He fucks you through it, deeper now, pace unrelenting but still somehow careful — so damn attentive even when he’s right at the edge.

You break first.

The orgasm hits you like a wave — your whole body curling, vision blurring, mouth open in a silent cry. Your thighs clamp around him, and you shake, pulling him down with you.

And that’s all it takes.

He lets go, hips slamming into you one final time, face buried in your neck as he moans your name against your skin. His arms wrap tight around you, holding you as he pulses inside you and white hot fills you, so thick and heavy that when he pulls back just slightly to brush a kiss against your sweaty neck, dribbles of white roll down your thighs and it has you whimpering into Vernon’s shoulder. He’s panting through it like he’s never come that hard in his life.

The room goes quiet — just heavy breathing, soft whimpers, and the distant hum of the fairy lights above.

Vernon doesn’t move for a long time. Just holds you. Kisses your cheek. Your shoulder. Your lips.

When he finally pulls out and lies beside you, you take pride in the way his eyes linger at the mix of cum that you can feel run down your thighs. 

He nuzzles you. “Sorry. Clean you up in a bit, yeah?” 

You just hum, wearily moving to wrap your arms around him, nodding. 

He curls around you instantly, one arm slung over your waist, the other brushing your hair off your face.

You’re both still trembling.

“Was it okay?” he whispers again, quieter now. Almost scared.

You turn your head to look at him. “It was perfect. Worth the wait.”

He exhales, relieved, and buries his face in your neck again — smiling against your skin.

“…You sure it didn’t hurt?”

You snort. “I’m a big girl. I can take some good dick.”

Your pulse speeds up when he laughs loudly.

Your breathing starts to settle before his does.

Vernon’s arm is still around your waist, skin sticky against yours, his chest rising and falling fast as he stares up at the ceiling like he’s trying to replay every second in his head. You can feel the tension still lingering in his muscles — not from arousal anymore, but from something softer. Almost nervous.

You turn your head slightly, your cheek against the curve of his shoulder, and whisper, “You okay?”

He lets out a breath. A beat too long of silence follows.

Then—

“I just… don’t want you to think I came here for that.”

You blink.

When you look up, his face is flushed again — not from sex this time, but embarrassment. His brows are pulled slightly, lips parted like he’s not sure if he should’ve said anything at all.

“I know it was kinda fast. And maybe it doesn’t make sense but—” He pauses. “I like you. I mean, I really like you. And this—tonight—wasn’t about just… getting in your pants.”

You can’t help the tiny smile tugging at your lips, even through the exhaustion threading through your bones. If Vernon was any closer, you swear he could hear the way your pulse pounds in your ears from sheer delight. You nudge him gently with your nose, closing your eyes blissfully. “If you were just trying to sleep with me, you wouldn’t have held me like that.”

Vernon goes quiet again. His arms tighten around you just a little.

“…Okay. Good.”

You laugh softly and press a kiss to his chest — right over his heart. It’s racing, still.

He exhales through his nose and shifts onto his side, finally facing you fully. You melt into it without hesitation, curling up instinctively in the circle of his arms as one hand moves to brush your hair back from your forehead.

But now that you’re still — fully come down, the adrenaline gone — the weight of everything else starts creeping in. Your eyelids feel heavy. Your limbs ache in that dull, familiar way that says too many hours, too many nights, too much caffeine, not enough sleep. That and your lower back protests every time you move even a millimetre, which you can probably blame on Vernon.

Vernon notices.

He tilts your chin gently and looks at you closely.

“Hey… when was the last time you properly slept?”

You hesitate. Then mumble, “Don’t ask me that right now.”

He frowns immediately.

“Baby.”

You decide to keep the way you internally scream and your heart races in your chest at the pet name a secret from him forever.

“I didn’t forget or anything,” you lie poorly, burying your face against his collarbone. “I just had deadlines. And fittings. And I didn’t know you were gonna show up and ruin me—”

“Ruin you?” he says with a breathless laugh, even as his hand cups the back of your head. “I wasn’t trying to ruin you.”

“You did,” you murmur, yawning mid-sentence. “But not complaining. Maybe all I needed was to get dicked down to stitch the rest of the sequins on that fucking skirt.”

“You’re ridiculous,” he mutters affectionately, pulling the comforter over your shoulders. “But you hafta sleep.”

You hum softly, letting him shift so he’s slightly propped up, your head resting on his bicep. He runs his fingers down your spine — absent, steady, soothing — and your eyes flutter closed despite yourself.

“I was gonna leave after I dropped off the food,” he suddenly says. “Swear to God. But then you opened the door looking like that and all my good intentions evaporated.”

“Your fault then,” you mumble sleepily. “You seduced me.”

He chokes on a laugh. “I seduced you?”

“Mhm.”

There’s a beat of silence. His hand stills against your back.

“…You really tired?”

You nod, the motion barely there. “So tired.”

He kisses the top of your head and pulls you even closer, like he’s trying to wrap himself around you completely. Your bare legs are tangled, bodies pressed together under the covers. The fairy lights above your head glow softly, the only thing illuminating the room aside from the moonlight slipping through the sheer curtains.

“Whaddaya want in the morning?” he whispers. “Something warm? I’ll order before I leave for training.”

“Training?”

“Yeah. We have morning training for the game tomorrow night.” He pauses. “You coming?”

The slight uncertainty in his voice makes you smile. “‘Course. Wouldn’t miss my boyfriend’s game for the world.”

He laughs again, but this one’s softer, his chin nudging the top of your head. 

“Boyfriend?” he asks, brow raising. 

You nod. “Mhm. Think you deserve a title after dick that good.” 

Vernon lets out a loud laugh that echoes through the room – all high-pitched and throaty. “God.” 

And then he turns quiet. 

“You know,” he murmurs after a few seconds, “this bed’s really small.”

You nod against him. “Told you.”

“And we barely fit.”

“Mhm.”

“…Kinda like it though.”

You peek up at him with one eye, a smirk playing at your lips. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” He presses a gentle kiss to your nose. “Means I get to keep you close.”

You nuzzle in again, your heart suddenly too full for your chest. Safe. Sleepy. Wrapped up in the arms of someone who likes you exactly how you are, late nights and all.

“I’m glad you came,” you whisper.

He squeezes your hip. “I’m glad you let me in.”

And then, just before sleep takes you under:

“…You drooled on me a little.”

“Well, you came in me so I think that makes us even,” you retort, already falling asleep, especially with the rhythm of Vernon’s hand patting your back. Before you know it, everything – even Vernon’s soft breaths – goes mute, your body relaxing against Vernon’s firm hold. 

The next morning, you wake up to an empty bed, still vaguely warm, congee in the microwave, and a messily-scribbled note on one of your cat post-it notes you keep on your work desk. 

morning babe. i’m off to practice. i know you told me to wake you up but thought you’d appreciate more sleep than a kiss goodbye from me (gave u one tho). i’ll see you later, yeah? call me when you have time. 

- HVC

You press the note close to your chest, eyes welling up in tears that you’re not too sure are from hormones or something else. Your emotional parade is cut short when your phone buzzes on the nightstand. The screen lights up with a name that has you laughing out a watery laugh. 

vernon⚾️🐈 is calling…

: ̗̀➛ ​🇰​​🇮​​🇸​​🇸​ ❜​🇪​​🇷​ ​🇺​​🇵​ @astrobebba ; @ayupfrogg ; @steamyjaehyun @chwenott ; @toplinehyunjin ; @syluslittlecrows ; @itsclda ; @luminouskalopsia ; @kiachiako ; @81evermore ; @daaaph-lol

[sl-ut]

Can you please do a Jesse x Miller Reader smut where Joel and Tommy catch them and Ellie comes in like 😨 then starts mocking them THANK YOUUU🫶

the thing

omg i’ve had this request in my inbox for like two years :’(( so sorry but i’ve been really digging the actor for jesse in the show so here we are! it’s not specific to the show so you can imagine it as live action or game jesse! i also went kinda off track from the request but has similar vibes only it's tommy teasing them and not ellie. also there's no real smut but i would def be open to doing a part two with some!

pairing: jesse (tlou) x fem!miller!reader

description: jackson was not a very big place, so why did it take so long for them to connect?

warnings: slightly nsfw towards the end but no smut, swearing, slight au but it doesn’t really change anything (joel and ellie don’t interact in this but in my mind it’s important that they have made up), reader is referenced to not fit into jesse’s clothes but there’s no indication of whether its too big or too small so that’s up to your imagination, alcohol and weed use, mentions of violence and r’s shitty ex but neither actually appear.

words: 4.8K

date posted: 6/5/25

Jesse found himself tapping his foot repeatedly against the pavement, eyes flickering down to check the faltering watch on his wrist, always a minute behind no matter how many times he rewound it. Oh well, he was one of the few in Jackson who had the luxury of owning a watch while everyone else relied on wall clocks alone. Still, no matter how slow the moving hands of his watch were, the girl was now at least ten minutes late.

“Good afternoon,” her voice chirped as she rounded the corner with an easy grin on her face and her preferred horse following in tow, expression betraying absolutely no remorse for her tardiness, “you ready?”

“I was ready ten minutes ago,” he told her, rolling his eyes, “you know, when we were supposed to head out? What’s your excuse this time?”

The girl scoffed, “I was in the bakery all morning, you know how Penny gets–you don’t leave ‘til she says so.”

His head tilted to the side for a moment; as far as her past excuses went, this was probably the most believable, especially since he caught a whiff of warm cinnamon as she came to stand next to him. 

“Alright,” he nodded, “I’ll let you off this time. Let’s just get moving, we’re already behind schedule.”

“Sir, yes sir,” she saluted him, turning to climb atop her horse with ease. 

Until recently, the girl was not someone that Jesse would have considered a friend. He knew her from around town, of course, and they generally ran in the same circle (which was basically just a group of people within a three year age range), but they had only spoken a handful of times prior to being assigned to patrol together. He’d actually been the first to make her feel welcome within the younger crowd in Jackson when she’d first arrived, but she soon started dating a boy named Keegan, who Jesse particularly did not like, while he had started hanging out with Ellie and Dina more once he and Dina had started dating. 

Now that they had been spending more time together a few times per week, Jesse wondered how they hadn’t hit it off from the beginning. He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t initially attracted to her, as he’d always thought she was very pretty, and she was impossibly easy to talk to. His only flaw was the fact that he had given her space after she had arrived bruised and battered and clearly so clearly mentally drained by whatever she had faced out in the wild, though it had been for that very reason that she became so easily attached to Keegan. He was the first one that she had felt personally close to when she arrived in town, which had translated to a lingering sense of protection, even when he wasn’t always the nicest to her. 

The patrol had gone relatively easily, coming across only a small handful of infected along the way, which the pair of them were able to take out within seconds of spotting them, and they had been able to make up for lost time. Conversation flowed easily between the pair–random questions, town gossip, and just about anything that either of them could think of. 

“Are you going to the thing tomorrow night?” 

“The thing?” Jesse hummed teasingly, “Which thing?”

“I mean, it is the only thing going on tomorrow night,” she joked, “you know, the thing!”

“Oh, that thing,” Jesse snorted, “the one at the Bison? Tomorrow night at seven o’clock sharp?”

She giggled, “Yes, that thing at that specific time and place. Are you going?”

Jesse shrugged, “Dunno. I was gonna go, but I think Dina is and we haven’t really been on the best terms lately. I feel like I’d just be looking for trouble.”

“Oh shit, I feel like every time I hear about you two it’s something different.”

Jesse watched her from the corner of his eye for a moment, eyes following the sunlit glow as it traced her features. He sighed, “Yeah, well…I don’t even know what to say about that. I care about Dina, a lot, but I don’t know if I see this going on for much longer. I feel like I need someone a little more mature, less prone to drama, and she needs someone that…”

“Doesn’t have a stick up their ass 24/7?”

His head whirled to the side, catching her beaming face as she fought back a laugh at his own shocked expression, “Excuse me? Don’t make me report you to Tommy for insubordination.”

She scoffed, “Oh please, like he’s gonna do anything.”

“You’re right about that,” Jesse rolled his eyes, “I’d probably get in more trouble for it than you would, kiss ass.”

“I am not a kiss ass!” She argued, “He just loves me more than he loves you. Maybe you just need to try harder.”

“Maybe I just need to be related to him. That worked out easily enough for you, didn’t it?”

Those who had any sort of personal connection with Tommy Miller had heard tell of his older brother, the one who hadn’t been the same since the end of civilization and had been his inspiration to branch out from the QZ and seek some sort of better life, whether that would be with the Fireflies or not. The last he’d seen him was back in the Boston QZ months before he had even arrived in Jackson. No one would have expected him to ever hear of him again, let alone for the older Miller to turn up at Jackson’s gates with two young girls at his side. 

They had all made their own impacts on the community. Joel had become a trusted councilmember and quickly became someone that people saw as a strong leader, while Ellie had become known for her fiery temper and headstrong attitude. The third member of their party, however, had become a central figure in Jackson’s social scene, quickly becoming popular among the younger crowd while also making an effort to maintain familiarity with as many other members of the community as possible. She was often responsible for the parties that took place and seasonal celebrations, often being seen as a goody-two-shoes to most while also having a tendency to party with her inner circle. Jesse often wondered how she had the energy to do it all, and he was not the only one who found it so surprising to discover that the girl made of sunshine was the daughter of Jackson’s resident grump himself, Joel Miller. 

She didn’t answer him, huffing quietly as she rolled her eyes. She was not angry with him, not truly, but it was difficult to not feel irked by his comment considering that some around town often criticized her father and uncle for giving her and Ellie special treatment. Of course, they felt more of an attachment to the two young girls, as would anyone else for their own children, but she did not feel that either of them let her off any easier than anyone else when she landed herself into trouble. 

“You’re going with Keegan, I assume?” Jesse asked, suddenly self conscious by her silence, “To the thing, I mean.”

She snorted a laugh, “You assumed wrong. We broke up two weeks ago.”

“Oh,” he swallowed, unsure of how to proceed. He’d never heard her sound so annoyed in the entire time that he had known her, “Sorry to hear.”

“It’s fine. I just realized one day that he treated me like shit. I’m over it. Though, I’m surprised you didn’t already know. Last I heard he’s been spreading it around town faster than the clap.”

Jesse choked out a laugh, “Don’t tell me…”

“A rumour I heard after we broke up,” she chuckled, “but he’s apparently shacked up with Emily, Theresa, and Melissa since then, so it’s not out of the question. Honestly, doc says I didn’t show any signs so I don’t really care.”

“Fair,” he nodded, “so are you still going?”

“Dunno, I guess I am the one who planned it…” she thought for a moment before a small smirk appeared on her face, “I’ll go if you do. We can drink and endure the presence of our exes together.”

Jesse sighed, “That’s a hard bargain you’re driving.”

“Some call me a businesswoman by heart,” she shrugged, “what do you say?”

He turned his gaze back to her, feeling a small stutter in his chest as their eyes met. She offered him a soft smile, melting his weak attempt at playing cool away until he found himself relenting, agreeing to attend the thing together despite his innate desire to avoid his ex-girlfriend at all costs. The grin that split her face made his limbs feel like jelly and brought a scarlet flush up the nape of his neck and across his cheeks. They continued on in silence, only sharing a few more words throughout the rest of their patrol route until the gates of Jackson came back into view. 

He dismounted his horse once they were inside, offering a hand up to the girl as she did the same. He was glad that the weather had been warmer that day, meaning that he had gone without gloves for patrol and he was able to feel the warmth of her hand against his own calloused flesh. They walked side by side as they led their horses back to the stables, occasionally bumping shoulders and sharing small smiles before they met Tommy and Maria at the gate of the stables. 

“Hey kiddos,” Tommy greeted them both, leaning against the stable door as they filed in one-by-one, “how’d things go?”

Jesse began a review of their patrol, what they saw, what they didn’t see, how many infected they’d taken out, what sort of changes in the landscape they might have noticed, while Maria moved over to help the younger woman unsaddle and brush her horse. He could overhear a few words and giggles from the next stall over where the two women discussed the event taking place later that evening. Finally, she appeared next to Tommy to interrupt his report.

“I gotta head to help set up for tonight, but did you want to just meet at my place and go together? I was gonna go a bit early if that’s okay.”

Jesse’s ears burned at the look of surprise on Tommy’s face, his large brown eyes flickering between the young man and his niece, “Uh, yeah sounds good.”

“Great! See you later, then.”

Maria took her place as she disappeared out of the stables, sharing a look of amusement with her husband as they turned their attention back to the young man before them who seemed to wish he could shrink into the floor beneath him. 

“Something you wanna tell us?” Maria asked with a grin. She was a no nonsense woman for the most part, but she couldn’t help the entertainment she found in the love lives of Jackson’s young people. 

“Uh,” Jesse hesitated, “no. We–uh, we’re just going to the thing tonight.”

Tommy let out a deep chuckle at the discomfort on the younger man’s face, “I see. And I assume you asked Joel’s permission before you asked his daughter to the thing?”

“She asked me,” Jesse argued, “I wasn’t really expecting it.”

“So you’re telling me you only accepted because you didn’t wanna hurt her feelings?” The older man crossed his arms over his chest with mock aggression. 

“No!” Jesse blurted, “I just didn’t know she saw me like that.”

“Mhm,” Tommy hummed, stifling a laugh, “Well I suggest you head over and have a conversation with Joel about this before he finds out through someone else, AKA me.”

Maria swatted his arm, “Give him a break, Tommy. She’s a big girl now, she can take care of herself.”

“Oh I don’t doubt that, I’m looking out for Jesse here. Not sure if he’ll be able to take care of himself if Joel walks into the party tonight and catches this one pawing at his daughter.”

Jesse sputtered in response, his usually cool facade completely broken under the pressure placed by the girl’s uncle, especially now when he considered that the pressure would be applied tenfold when Joel found out that he was now pursuing his daughter. He and Joel had been close ever since he had arrived in Jackson, and especially since he had started hanging out with Ellie, but his relationship with Dina had been famously unstable and he didn’t want Joel to suspect that it might be the same way if Jesse were to start dating his daughter. So, as soon as he was able to escape the clutches of Tommy Miller, he set out in the direction of Joel’s “office”, which was one of the older and uninhabited homes in town that he used as a headquarters for the construction crew he and Tommy had assembled. 

Joel seemed surprised when Jesse began his speel, explaining how he genuinely cared about the girl, and that it may seem soon after their respective breakups but it felt right in the moment, and finally ending it by giving Joel his permission to hurt him if he did anything wrong. Joel was silent for a few beats, watching Jesse through narrowed eyes before he took into a roaring laugh, fist slamming down on the table as he took in the nervous state of the normally confident young man. 

“Well,” Joel cleared his throat as he composed himself, “I can tell you I wasn’t expecting that today.”

“So…” Jesse shifted uncomfortably, “is this a good sign or…”

“Listen,” Joel sighed, “I’ve come to learn that she’s not gonna listen to me when it comes to these things, but I do appreciate this. You’ve already got a step up from that ass-hat Keegan, but that’s not saying much. Oh, and if you hurt her, I’m not gonna be asking permission before I lay hands on you. Understood?”

Jesse gulped, but his nerves began to lessen, “Yes, sir.”

That night, Jesse found himself climbing the front steps to Joel Miller’s house at six-thirty on the dot, a small smile finding its way onto his face as he found his date seated on a patio chair with a book in her lap. She turned her face up to offer him a similar expression as he greeted her, sliding a piece of folded paper between the pages of her book to save her place before setting it aside.

“Hey,” she greeted in return, standing up to meet him halfway, “you’re right on time. You trying to impress me, or something?”

“Something like that,” he shrugged, eyes taking in her patch-work sundress and dark brown boots, “you look nice–pretty, I mean.”

She glanced down at her dress, smiling bashfully, “thanks. Hey, can I ask you something before we go?”

He nodded, “Yeah, sure.”

“Is this a date?” She blurted, wringing her fingers together nervously, “I mean, I didn’t mean for it to be, but then my dad said you came to ask his permission to take me out, and then I realized that I sort of want it to be, but I didn’t want to assume anything because I’m the one who asked you, and–”

Jesse wanted the earth to swallow him whole. This entire time, he’d been shocked but elated that she had asked him out, especially considering that he didn’t think it was likely that he was going to muster up the courage to ask her on his own, only to discover that she had only asked him as friends?

“Oh god,” Jesse groaned, “oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make things weird between us. I just thought, since we were talking about Keegan and Dina and then you asked me that maybe–holy shit, I’m an idiot.”

The girl grasped his forearm tightly, regaining his attention from the physical touch, “No, no, I just… I didn’t know you saw me that way. I do like you, Jesse, I just think I didn’t want to admit it until I knew you liked me too.”

His heart continued to race, only now for an entirely different reason, “Well, I do. A lot.”

She grinned at him, leaning up to press a gentle kiss to his cheek, “Well I like you too. A lot.”

The pair stepped closer to one another, his eyes falling to her lips as his cheek burned from the affection. She tilted her face upward, an invitation for him to invade her space even further, which he had no issue in obliging as he dipped down to meet her in a soft, curious kiss. It was only a peck, and then another, and then another before their lips met in a solid, proper embrace, each of them gaining familiarity with one another as his hands slid around her back, bunching in the fabric of her dress as he pulling her even closer, her own running through his silky black hair. 

The sound of a throat being cleared forced them apart, their hands flying off of one another in seconds as they turned to find the source of the noise, finding both Miller brothers at the foot of the stairs, one wearing a deep frown while the other could barely contain his laughter behind a shit-eating grin. 

“Jesse,” Joel grumbled, climbing up the step slowly before he turned to square himself up to the younger man, “glad to see you found your way. Now if you don’t mind taking this off of my porch–and never let me see that again.”

“Dad.”

Joel turned his stern stare to his daughter, raising his eyebrows at her before pressing a kiss to her temple, “I mean it. Don’t need to see this meathead pawing at you all the time.”

“Leave ‘em alone, Joel,” Tommy chortled, “we’ve just gotta get you set up now. Lots of single ladies around Jackson.”

Joel snorted, turning on his heel and entering his home without another word. Leave it to him to flee at the first mention of his dating life. Tommy patted Jesse on the back, pausing to kiss his niece on the head as well before he followed his brother inside with a teasing farewell to the young couple.

They stood there for a moment, each of them bathing in the embarrassment of being caught making out by her father and uncle before she turned back to him, breaking the silence.

“He doesn’t think you’re a meathead, if it’s any consolation. He really likes you.”

“I think that was before I was dating his daughter.”

She tilted her head in confusion, “Do I have a sister I don’t know about?”

“Uh…” Jesse stammered, “not dating, I just meant–”

She laughed, punching him on the arm as she pushed past him and slipped down the steps. She glanced over her shoulder as she called back to him, “I’m messing with you. You don’t gotta ask me anything just yet, but don’t let me catch you looking at other girls.”

Jesse breathed out a laugh. The Miller family would be the death of him, that much he was sure of. He jogged to catch up with her, allowing her to slip her fingers through his own as she dragged him off in the direction of the Tipsy Bison.

Just over an hour later, the bar was filled to the brim, laughter and chatter echoing around the building over the sound of the folk music being played by the small ensemble off to the side. Jesse leaned against the bar, eyes scanning the crowd in search of his date. He’d gotten sucked into helping Seth with loading crates of liquor into the building, reluctantly leaving her side for only twenty minutes and now he had completely lost sight of her in the crowd. 

“Looking for someone?” 

Jesse turned his head to the side, finding his ex-girlfriend leaning onto the bar next to him with a glass of whiskey in her hand, “Oh, hey.”

“Hey,” she narrowed her eyes at him, “so, are you looking for someone?”

He shrugged, “and what if I am?”

“Then I would like to hear it from you,” she stated, “look, I get it, we’re broken up. Just be honest with me.”

He sighed, but nodded his head as he finally spoke the girl's name, “We’re here together.”

Her eyebrows rose instinctively, but quickly dropped into their natural position, “Can’t say I’m that surprised. I always knew you liked her.”

“Dina,” he groaned, but she cut him off.

“I’m not looking to start anything,” she told him, “at first, I figured we’d get back together, we always do. But, we honestly should have broken up a long time ago. I’ll always care about you, but I’m happy that you’re happy.”

He was surprised by this, considering that his ex-girlfriend had always taken rejection poorly and usually found a way to turn situations in her favour, but she would have had to have been blind to ignore the glaring issues that they had endured in their relationship, “Thanks, Dina. It means a lot. But maybe now that we’re over, you could give Ellie a chance. She’s been into you for as long as I can remember.”

Dina turned her attention to where Ellie was laughing with Maria across the bar, a small smile growing on her lips, “You think so?”

“God, she’s definitely considered killing me just to get to you,” he joked, “don’t rush into it if you’re not ready, but keep it in mind.”

She flushed, nodding her head as she placed her hand over his on the bar for a moment, squeezing it one final time before she pushed away from the bar and headed off in the direction of Ellie, eagerly pulling her away from Maria and onto the dancefloor. 

“What did she want?” 

He turned his gaze back to where Dina had previously stood, finding the narrowed gaze of the girl he’d previously been in search of, “Nothing, she was just asking about you.”

“Really?” She crossed her arms, “That’s it?”

“Why?” He smirked, turning his body to face her, “You jealous?”

She shrugged, “Should I be?”

“No,” he leaned closer, taking her hand in his, “she said she was happy for me, and I told her to go talk to Ellie.”

She glanced over, finding the two smiling girls on the dancefloor as her expression softened, “Oh. Yeah, Els has been mooning over her for years.”

“I know,” he laughed, “just like you have been for me.”

She turned to him with a growing grin on her face, “Oh please, you’re the one who asked my dad for permission to take me to a public function.”

“Oh don’t remind me,” he dropped his forehead to her shoulder to hide his embarrassment, “I thought he was gonna mount my head on his wall.”

“He still might,” she shrugged, “just depends on how long it takes you to get me a drink.”

He stood back to his full height, an easy smile finding its way across his features, “Yes, ma’am.”

After three drinks and a quick trip outside to take advantage of Jesse’s harvest from Eugene’s stash, the pair found themselves twirling around the dancefloor for hours on end before they finally bid their farewells, giggling their way down the torch-lit streets of Jackson hand-in-hand. His heart thrummed in his chest everytime he glanced over at her, already finding her wide, glossy eyes staring up at him as they walked. 

“Can I stay with you tonight?” she asked, a soft twinkle in her eyes as she rested her head onto his shoulder. He maneuvered his arm to wrap around her shoulders without ever letting go of her hand, now interlocked and resting against her collarbone. “I’d say we could go to my place, but I think it’s too early on for my dad to catch you sneaking out.”

He laughed as he pivoted their direction to head towards his own lodgings, a small apartment above the seamstress’s place, “Yeah, I’d like to keep my head for a little longer.”

“I would like you to, too.”

Jesse’s apartment was fairly bare, furnished with just the basics, but decorated just enough to make it feel like his. He shared it, of course, with another guy a few years younger than them, but he had yet to return from the party and if things went well with the girl he’d been dancing with all night, Jesse was hopeful that he wouldn’t be back until morning. 

“Wanna watch a movie?” Jesse nodded to the small box TV in the corner, then to the small shelf containing a handful of VHS tapes, “choices are limited but I think we have a little bit of everything. I think we even have a chick-flick around here somewhere.”

She nodded silently as he guided her to his room, fishing around for a baggy t-shirt and shorts for her to change into before leaving her to change. He set the movie up, selecting one that was just interesting enough that it was watchable, but just boring enough that neither of them would be opposed to missing out on parts of it. He popped one of the windows near the ratty old couch open, digging out a bag of hastily rolled joints and his trusty lighter, leaning back on the couch as he waited for her to emerge from his room.

She looked cute in his shirt, though he was surprised when his eyes were met with her bare legs up to her thighs, having foregone the shorts that he had set aside for her. She smiled bashfully as she settled into the couch next to him, “The shorts didn’t fit. This is okay, though, I think it covers enough.”

He shrugged, taking a slow drag from the joint, “You look cute in my clothes.”

She snuggled into his side, accepting the joint as he offered it to her and turned her gaze to the TV, “what’d you pick?”

He held the VHS sleeve up, “Dude, Where’s My Car?. It’s alright, I’ve seen it a few times.”

“Never heard of it,” she spoke as a puff of smoke escaped her lips, handing the joint back over to him, “but sounds okay to me. At this point I just keep watching Star Wars over and over. We have two of them, and they’re set like twenty years apart so I have no idea what’s actually going on.”

The movie was easily forgotten. At first, they had sat in silence while passing the joint back and forth before dazed conversations took over. She laughed at almost everything he said, snuggling closer and closer until he was entirely reclined against the armrest with her curled into his chest. Her chin rested against his pec as they spoke, giggling at one another as an easy silence took over, their eyes meeting as the mood in the room shifted. 

Her eyes flickered from his down to his round lips, watching in anticipation as he ran his tongue across his bottom lip nervously before she scooched herself forward until she could comfortably press her lips to his. It wasn’t rushed or heated in the beginning, instead falling into a slow, but slightly messy rhythm as her hands came up to take hold of his dark hair while his own slid across the expanse of her back, one settling on the curve of her spine while the other gripped the back of her thigh to hike it further up against his waist. 

She let out a small whine against his lips, pulling away for a moment to focus her attention to trailing her lips across his cheek, over his jaw, and down his neck. A low grumble rolled through his chest at this, her name falling from his lips with a quiet moan.

“We don’t have to–” his hands gripped her waist tighter as he struggled to keep his composure.

She returned to his lips, pressing one more long kiss to them before pulling back with a wicked grin splitting her face.

“Take me to bed, Jesse,” she whispered.

And who was he to deny her?

[justreckin]

20 questions for fic writers

alright @emonydeborah said hey there's a thing and i say yes (ages later)

1. How many works do you have on Ao3? 6

2. What’s your total Ao3 word count? 28,070

3. What fandoms do you write for? Honestly, whatever's catching my fancy in that moment. Of the things I've posted, The Librarians is the only fandom that I've ever even posted more than one fic for.

4. What are your top five fics by kudos?

Raising Harry (Harry Potter/Underworld) Where Selene comes across Harry playing at the park alone at night and decides that the best idea is to sorta adopt him.

Never Say He Isn't Grateful (Agent Carter/Captain America) Howard realizes he owes Peggy big time and the best way for him to repay her is to go rescue Steve.

5 Times Ezekiel Called Eve Mum and the Time They Made it Official (The Librarians) 5+1 what it says on the tin.

Second Time Around (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) Coulson went in on the Bahrain mission, May died. Oneshot re-write of the first episode that I considered expanding and have actually written other chapters for but... 🤷‍♀️

How Apep got Ezekiel Grounded for the Rest of his Natural Life (The Librarians) Season 3 Finale in the same universe as the previous Librarians fic that has a second chapter I have yet to write...

5. Do you respond to comments? I certainly try to. I'm not the best at it, but I love getting to have a conversation with anyone who likes the same things I do.

6. What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending? Heh probably I'm Not Your Mother but even then it's a) not really all that angsty and b) mostly that I dropped a mean bomb on characters and then ran away because I have no idea what else to do with it.

7. What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending? ...everything else? Look, canon is already regularly very mean to characters. I am here to live in my happy little fantasies where everything works out.

8. Do you get hate on fics? Not hate per se but I'd left up an unfinished multi-chapter fic at one point and someone commented that I was the reason they'd lost faith in authors with unfinished works and is maybe more responsible for me not posting any of the myriad of things I have on my computer than I want to admit.

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind? Nah. I write more family than relationship stuff, really.

10. Do you write crossovers? What’s the craziest one you’ve written? Yes. Uh... it's not posted, but maybe the Harry Potter/Song of the Lioness that I hashed out at one point.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen? Don't think so.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?  Don't think so.

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before? Ha! @emonydeborah and I spitball all the time (it's wonderful) and she absolutely gets credit if that parent trap fic ever gets finished, but I don't think I'm up to the group project that would be co-writting a fic.

14. What’s your all time favorite ship? the Enterprise NCC-1701 dash nothing! All jokes aside, it genuinely is the only ship I go back to on a regular basis.

15. What’s a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will? Uh... honestly, I don't know that I'll ever finish half the things in my WIP folder.

16. What are your writing strengths? Probably dialogue. I feel I'm pretty good at getting the character's literal voice down.

17. What are your writing weaknesses? Anything happening around the dialogue. In my head these people are always moving around and doing things, but it always feels so clunky if I try to put that onto a page.

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic? Maybe an individual word or two for a curse or endearment. I know enough Spanish I'd probably be comfortable writing in it. But that'd be about it.

19. First fandom you wrote for? Uh.... Star Trek? One sec, must check files. Yeah, pretty sure it was a short TOS thing. Hmm might need to take a look at that again, clean it up, repost...

20. Favorite fic you’ve written? Posted? Probably Ezekiel calling Eve mum. Not posted? Nah, actually, don't know that there is one that's not posted.

.... @the-redhead-in-a-dress and @sun-lit-roses did you do it yet, did you do it? I wanna see 😁

[rangersoup]

I’ve decided. Turn and Burn (the Carlos horse girl fic) is gonna get a rewrite/revamp once I’m done with The Lone Ranger. It’s gonna be the second installment of my Rangers spinoff fic. It will be both a direct continuation of the Lone Ranger and set up for some other stuff on down the line.

[skrunksthatwunk]

household enemy to the yyh watchthrough number one is the olympics. it's taken us a week to get two episodes into the gamemaster fight

[booasaur]

Something really amazing happened in France, and I think it'd help us in the US to learn about it. Forgive the long read, but I think this is genuinely great both because of what happened and how.

So as some of you might have seen, in a decision historians will debate for years (mostly to figure out just WTF he was thinking, even though he is alive right now and can be asked), the French president, Emmanuel Macron, currently in power and THREE YEARS before the scheduled election, seeing the far right rise in popularity decided to dissolve the assembly and hold snap elections.

577 seats were up for grabs. Remember that number. Since half of that is 288.5, 289 seats are needed for a majority.

The first round happened last week and boy, was it bad. The far right made HUGE gains. It won or was in first place in so many races. And Macron's party ended up third!

Overall, this is how things ended up after the first round:

Far right bloc: 33%

Left bloc: 28%

Macron's centrist party: 20%

Conservatives: 7%

The way the French system works is that if a candidate gets over 50% of the vote, they win outright, and some of the far right did manage that. But, many races went to a runoff.

Immediate projections after were that the far right bloc might win anywhere from 240 to 310 seats, a catastrophe.

A shameful swing to the far right leading to the first time they'll be in power since the 1940s? Yes, but maybe not??

This is where things get interesting.

Unusually, a lot of these runoffs are 3-way, instead of a simpler 2-way choice. And in pretty much every case, that helps the far right.

So on June 30th, the night of the first round, this is how things went down:

Immediately, the left parties put out the call: anywhere they were third, they withdrew and their voters would go over to whoever was running against the far right candidate. Their goal: form a "republican front" to block the far right. The far right cannot get 289 seats.

Macron's bloc was not so...motivated. Different people put out different instructions: in some places, if they were third, they should drop out, but only to help the center left, not far left, in other places, see how far you are, only then drop out, that kind of thing.

The conservative party simply said they won't drop out and won't give their voters instruction either way in races they're not involved in.

Late night developments:

More people in Macron's party are now beginning to realize the situation and starting to coalesce around whichever candidate can beat the far right one. Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, from Macron's party, says clearly the priority is to block the far right. BUT, some Macron spokespeople on TV say they'll form a coalition only with the center left and conservatives, splitting the left bloc if needed. Some individual Macronists still saying they won't drop out, even if there's no hope of winning.

Lol.

So, now July 1st:

Only half so far. In one race, where the sister of Marine Le Pen (the far right leader and the face of their movement) was leading, the third place Macronist refused to bow out.

Excellent quote from another Macronist:

Perhaps realizing the same thing, that Macronist in the race against the Le Pen sister now drops out.

In some places, third place Macronists are dropping out DESPITE Macron bewilderingly telling them NOT to?

Halfway through the day:

Of the 311 3-way or 4-way runoffs, the number is down to 135 because of these candidates dropping out: 121 Left, 56 Macronists, 1 conservative.

Oh, there was this, in case people had any doubts about how terrible the far right are:

And to show the selflessness of the left:

July 2:

The deadline to decide if they want to stay in a runoff is today.

A dozen new third place Macronists who said they'd stay in have now dropped out. One got a call from both the PM Attal AND Macron to drop out, signalling the dawning understanding of the importance of this moment.

Even some conservative party members are now backing the left candidate who faces the far right.

A Macronist who had 30.55% of the vote in the first round and came in third to the far right's 33.11% and left's 32.73% and who would have been tempted to stay has dropped out.

The deadline to stay in or not has now passed.

Look at these far right shenanigans!

Macron still being a freaking loser:

July 3rd:

In the end, of the 311 3- or 4-way run offs, only 91 left. Some polls come out that have the far right getting between 190 to 220 seats.

July 4th:

New polls say the balance of the voting itself isn't transferring between the left and center and predictions have risen for the far right, now predicted to get between 210 and 250 seats.

July 5th:

New polls again, left voters now predicted to do better transferring vote to the centrists, decreasing the far right projections again.

However, scandalous reporting emerges: while Attal was trying to fend off the far right, Macron was not only NOT taking the far right seriously, he was undermining efforts to defeat them. His team shrugged off the first round results and celebrated a BIRTHDAY as the results were still coming in?

July 6th:

A few runoffs happened yesterday, nothing much unexpected, some left and center wins.

July 7th:

The day of reckoning. At this point, the expectations are that the far right won't come close to that 289 number but could still easily have the most seats.

GUYS.

It's over and the left are in the lead!

A LOT of cases where a leftist or centrist was 2nd in the first round and now won.

Amazing:

SO many lessons to take from this.

First, you have to vote! You have to. You can't do anything without voting. The freaking French, who'll protest for anything, are showing up to vote. If you're trying to achieve any kind of result and it's not going to happen by January 2025, you have to vote now.

But just as importantly, the left and center (and even conservative) parties made very key decisions. They were all lucky that Attal, who Macron chose, saw the big picture, bigger than indeed Macron could. A stupid selfish centrist leader could have still ruined everything if it were up to him.

TL;DR: After a disastrous first round in the national French elections where the far right was on the cusp of taking power, the left and center formed a strong coalition and through the power of voting and unity, overcame the far right AND their selfish centrist president to win.

[missdynamighttt]

hehehe sooo.. pro hero, husband! katsuki not being able to spend time with you took a toll on his agency, so someone said... you two needed to bone.

it had been weeks since katsuki had a proper night at home. pro hero work never let up but lately, it felt like it was eating him—late nights at the agency, barely any sleep, reports, patrols, meetings.

you understood. it was his job, his responsibility, but his stress showed in the way he snapped at people more often, his fuse shorter than usual.

and today? he was especially pissed.

the whole office refused to confront dynamight about it, until some dumbass sidekick, probably sick of his rage-fueled outbursts, muttered under his breath, “tch. man just needs to go home and bone his wife.”

the room went silent.

dead silent.

katsuki stopped mid-step, shoulders going rigid. his head turned slowly toward him, eyes burning like he was about to set the entire building on fire.

"the fuck did you just say?"

the sidekick, to his credit, had the audacity to look innocent. "i mean, you’re obviously tense, and i'm sure she’s—"

he lunged at him. it took three other sidekicks to hold him back as he damn near flipped his desk over.

“YOU'RE FUCKIN' DEAD! BONE?!” katsuki roared, struggling against his coworkers like a wild animal. "say that shit again, i dare you! you think i’m pissed ‘cause i ain’t fucking my wife enough?!”

the whole agency floor collectively held its breath.

the poor sidekick scrambled for an excuse. “n-no! i-i just meant—uh, stress relief! yeah! y’know, intimacy is good for—”

katsuki grabbed a random clipboard and hurled it across him. he missed by a centimeter. “you think i don’t wanna fuckin' go home to her?! huh?!”

“sir—”

“i wanna go home so bad! i wanna see her, i wanna kiss her, i wanna lay on her tits and sleep for the whole fuckin’ day,” he ranted, voice cracking from pure frustration. “BUT NOOO! i’m stuck here writing reports and dealing with dumbasses like you!”

the office was dead silent.

it took a solid ten minutes for him to cool down, grumbling and seething as he rubbed his temples.

but his mind did wander.

to you. to the way he missed your voice. to how fucking long it had been since he held you properly.

to the way he always found you asleep by the time he got home, curled up on his side of the bed, waiting for him.

… fuck. maybe the sidekick did have a point.

katsuki inhaled sharply. then, with wild determination, he grabbed his his stuff, and stormed toward the exit. the agency could handle itself for the night. he had better things to do.

“fuck this. i'm goin' home to my wife."

meanwhile, you had barely settled on the couch, ready to enjoy a quiet evening alone, when the front door slammed open. you jolted, turning toward the entrance just in time to see katsuki storming in—looking like a man on a mission.

“katsu—” you barely got his name out before his mouth crashed onto yours, hot and urgent, like he’d been starving for this. you gripped his shirt as he pulled you impossibly close, practically lifting you off the floor.

you gasped against his lips as his hands cupped your cheeks, tilting your head as he deepened the kiss, pressing his body against yours.

strong hands cupped your face, rough but desperate. his lips were everywhere—your cheeks, your nose, your jaw, the corner of your lips—like he was making up for lost time.

and when he finally let you breathe, his forehead pressed against yours, panting slightly, his hands still gripping your waist like he was afraid you’d disappear.

you were breathless, blinking up at him in shock. “what the hell?”

katsuki exhaled sharply, his forehead resting against yours. “i missed you.”

your brows furrowed. “you left for work this morning.”

“exactly,” his lips brushed against yours again, softer this time. “should’ve come home sooner.”

it was then you realized—he was home way earlier than usual. normally, he'd get caught up in work, buried in reports or dealing with patrols, but tonight…

“wait, why are you home so early?” you asked, still dazed.

katsuki huffed. his fingers slid down to your waist, gripping you tightly. “tch. dumbass sidekick at work said i just needed to fuck my wife to fix my attitude.”

your jaw dropped. “excuse me?”

his lips brushed yours again, softer this time. “so i left early to prove ‘em right.”

your face burned. “katsuki!”

but he was already leaning in again, smirking against your lips. “better get comfortable, sweets. i’m makin’ up for lost time.”

and when katsuki stepped into the office that morning, something was… off.

for the first time in weeks, he didn’t stomp in with a permanent scowl, barking at everyone the second he crossed the threshold. his usual sharp glare was dulled, his shoulders weren’t tense as tense.

instead, katsuki looked, dare they say it—relaxed. his jaw wasn’t clenched, his brows weren’t furrowed, and the usual aggressive boom of his steps was noticeably tamer.

hell, the man even had a post-nut glow so obvious. skin clear, posture loose, and zero unnecessary shouting.

no explosions. no immediate death threats. no one getting yelled at for breathing too loud.

everyone noticed.

by the time he made it to his desk, his coworkers were already exchanging looks, whispering amongst themselves like they’d just seen a miracle.

"uh…" one of his sidekicks was the first to cautiously approach. “sir. you good?”

katsuki just grunted, rolling his shoulders before cracking his neck. “feelin’ great, actually.”

and that’s when it clicked. a murmur spread through the office as realization slammed into them.

“you boned last night,” he stated, like it was the discovery of the century.

katsuki just smirked, grabbing some files off his desk. “what’s it to ya?”

the room erupted.

“holy shit, i forgot he could be normal—”

“i haven’t known peace in months.”

“oh my god, mrs bakugo katsuki, if you can hear this—thank you for your service!”

someone started clapping.

then, the entire office cheered.

‎‧₊˚✧[ it's me, kia ! ]✧˚₊‧ ｡ﾟ•┈꒰ა ♡ ໒꒱┈• ｡ﾟ ‎‧₊˚✧[ more of katsuki ! ]✧˚₊‧

⋆˚࿔ kia's note ˚⋆ i think y'all know where this is inspired from but js in case, its from a sitcom named brooklyn 99 where this girl tells her boss he needs to bone his husband lmao😭 hope yall enjoyed!!

[urdreamgirls-dreamgirl]

“vickie!” eddie practically screams from his kitchen, rage coursing through him as he stares down at the tabloids spread out in front of him on the counter. “get in here! now!”

eddie’s had an issue with his rage lately. well. he’s had an issue with a lot of things, since he got famous, really. but that’s not his problem right now.

his problem is he’s looking down at image after image of himself on the covers of people and us weekly and entertainment tonight being dragged out of last night’s night club by his own security team with blood pouring from his nose. he looks angry. he looks crazed.

just then, a stranger walks into his kitchen.

“who the fuck are you?” he blurts out at the man, who’s wearing a dark green sweater vest over a white t-shirt and tortoise-shell glasses.

“i’m steve,” the weirdo stalker says, smiling brightly. he has surprisingly swoopy hair for an insane fan. “i’m your new assistant.”

“where’s vickie?” eddie asks, rubbing at the sore spot on his nose. thank god it’s not broken.

“you fired her,” steve tells him. “two days ago.”

“i fire her all the time.”

“ok, well… i guess this time it stuck,” steve shrugs. “chrissy hired me.”

“fucking chrissy,” eddie says under his breath, rolling his eyes. he pulls out his phone from the pocket of his sweatpants and speed dials chrissy. “chris, what the fuck?” he doesn’t even give her the chance to say hello.

“good morning, eddie. i’m doing really well, how are you?”

“not fucking well, that’s how i am!” eddie practically yells into the receiver. “what the fuck? did you see the pictures? and who the fuck is this guy in my house?”

“yes, eddie, i saw the pictures.” eddie can hear the eye roll in her voice. “we’re handling it. nancy’s already on it with the team. what was the other thing?”

eddie knows she’s fucking with him and that pisses him off even more. “who is this freak in my house wearing a goddamn sweater vest?!” he feels like a blood vessel in his eye is about to pop.

“hey,” steve protests softly from across the kitchen where he’s started to pull shit out of eddie’s fridge. he didn’t even know there was anything in that fridge.

“that’s not a very nice way to talk about your new assistant,” chrissy’s voice comes loud and clear through the phone.

“christina fucking cunningham, you know i have final say on all hiring decisions when it comes to my assistants.” he rubs at his sore nose again.

“you had final say on all hiring decisions until you fired vickie for the thirteenth time and she refused to come back, even with a three hundred percent raise. we’re going in a different direction now.” chrissy sounds entirely too pleased with herself.

“well, i fucking hate him,” eddie grumbles and watches steve to make sure he’s heard him. steve doesn’t even react, just continues doing whatever the fuck he’s doing with the frying pan he’d found in the cabinet.

“you don’t even know him, eddie. give him a chance. anyway, i have to go, i have brunch plans with my very beautiful, very intelligent, perfect fiancée,” chrissy tells him, gloating, before hanging up on him.

eddie wants desperately to throw his phone across the kitchen, but if he breaks this one that would be his fourth phone in three weeks and he couldn’t bear to have to ask this steve person to go buy him a new one. he settles for squeezing it in his hand until it creaks while taking several deep breaths through his nose.

“what are you doing?” he grits out.

“are you always this rude?” steve asks, ignoring his question.

“to weirdo freak strangers showing up in my house unannounced? yes.”

“it’s not unannounced, chrissy wrote it on your calendar.” steve gestures toward the paper calendar hanging on the side of the fridge where chrissy writes his major life events and which eddie mostly just ignores before sliding a plate full of food toward eddie.

“what is this?” eddie sneers.

“it’s an omelette with cheese and mushrooms,” steve replies, smiling. he’s always fucking smiling.

“i’m allergic to… omelettes,” eddie says, just to be a dick.

“no you’re not. you’re allergic to blueberries and dust.” steve doesn’t stop smiling pleasantly.

“did you get access to my medical records? that’s a violation of my… whatever rights.” eddie waves a hand through the air.

“no, i didn’t go look at your medical records, jesus. i’m not a stalker. chrissy told me when she hired me.”

“whatever. i still fucking hate you.”

“okay,” steve shrugs again. “eat your breakfast.”

eddie has every intention of leaving the kitchen, full plate of food and all, but. he is hungry.

so he eats.

and he’s pissed that it’s actually good.

~*~

eddie spends the rest of the day being a general nuisance to steve any time he tries to do his job. when steve answers the phone before handing it to eddie, eddie “accidentally” hangs up on whoever it is on the hand off & makes sure to blame his new assistant when the person finally calls back. when steve has to drive him to his meeting with nancy and the pr team, eddie tries to give him the wrong directions, but steve’s too smart for that. when steve has to do the grocery shopping, he makes steve go to the erewhon all the way across town during rush hour because the one down the street “just doesn’t have the same vibe, steve.”

and all the while, steve just does his job, still smiling, not getting angry at all even though it’s beyond obvious eddie’s being a little shit to him.

which honestly just pisses eddie off more than anything else today.

“here’s some aspirin,” steve says, placing two white pills on the coffee table in front of eddie, along with a mason jar of water. eddie, lounging on his big squishy couch, pulls the ice pack away from his nose, which has started throbbing again. “you didn’t have any glasses.” steve shrugs when he sees eddie’s arched eyebrow looking skeptically at the jar of water. “if you don’t need anything else, i’ll take off for the day.”

it’s past 8pm already, long after steve should have left for the day except that eddie had made him stay to organize his extensive tshirt collection by color, shade, and design before he could even think about going home. it was an emergency, after all.

“i’ll have to check the t-shirt closet first,” eddie replies, before swallowing the aspirin dry. steve shrugs again and rolls his eyes. eddie would say something about his blatant rudeness, but he’s too exhausted.

eddie pulls himself off the couch and makes his way down the hallway to his “t-shirt room.” it’s so stupid, but he has all this space and he’d started collecting the tshirts so long ago. they’re not worth anything, they’re just his wardrobe but… they remind him of wayne and the thrifting they used to do every saturday morning.

the organization eddie had been having steve do was entirely arbitrary. it’s not like eddie plans his outfits. he mostly just pulls whatever out of wherever, unless it’s an event and then he pays someone to do the deciding and dressing for him anyway.

but. steve’s organized the t-shirts by genre and subgenre and then by band alphabetically and finally color. more than eddie had even asked him to do.

eddie had come in here fully prepared to rip steve a new one, but even he can be shocked into appreciation.

steve notices eddie’s silence and grins.

“can i tell you something?” steve says pleasantly and then continues without even letting eddie respond to the question. “i know i look like a nice polite guy next door that moms totally love—it’s the sweater vests, i think.” steve plucks at his top. “and that’s true. i am a nice polite guy and moms do love me. i’m awesome.” his grin widens. “but i got kicked out of my parents house when i was 18 and i lived in my car for a while. i’ve been on my own for seven years. i made a life in LA out of nothing. so you can throw your little temper tantrums and tell me how much you hate me. you can make me go to the erewhon all the way across town and you can make me look incompetent to my colleagues. but i need this job. i’ve worked hard for this job. this job pays more than any other job i’ve ever had combined. and you’re hardly the biggest asshole i’ve ever met. so you can continue trying to make my life miserable—hell, i’ll even give you my dad’s number, you guys can swap ideas!” steve laughs at his own joke before turning serious for the first time all day. “but i’m not vickie. you won’t make me cry. you can’t fire me. i’m not going anywhere.” he claps his hands together. “anyway, i’m gonna take off, since i have plans with my actual friends. but hey, i’ll see you tomorrow, huh?” and he smiles again, giving eddie a small waggle of his fingers, before heading out through the door.

eddie’s still just standing there in the middle of his tshirt room when he hears the front door slam shut.

part two

[asahicore]

fast forward - pjs

pairing. jay x fem!reader

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

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

word count. 26.6k

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And that’s your business, because…?”

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

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

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

“I never said that.”

“You didn’t need to.”

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

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

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

“I’m sorry?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t-”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“At least you’re self-aware.”

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

“What are you-”

“Have you done the German homework for tomorrow?”

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

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

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

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

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

Then you see it.

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

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

Your heart sinks to your stomach.

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

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

“Y/N-” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

It belongs to none other than Park Jongseong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“This is so good,” you mumble.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hm?”

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

“No. I have… things on my mind.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah.”

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

“...Jong?” you try.

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

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

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

“Will you be here in the morning?”

“Mh-hm. It’s Saturday tomorrow.”

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

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

You let out a shaky breath. “Okay.”

“I love you, Y/N.”

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

--

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

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

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

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

“What was it about?” Sunoo asks.

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

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

“Exactly!”

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

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

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

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

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

“Nowhere. Go on.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“None taken.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She had a dream that she m—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And your friends wondered why you hated him?

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

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

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

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

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

“No. Stop.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Jong, your textbook.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’re annoyed at how he makes you feel.

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

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

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

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

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

For now, you smile. “Get lost, Jong.”

--

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

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

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

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

you he’s not just another person!

sunoo okayyyyy i see you little miss repressed feelings

you i hate u

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You frown. “I don’t hate you.”

“Oh? That’s a recent development.”

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

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

“Back to hating.”

“Let’s start the assignment.”

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

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

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

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

“That’s not—”

“Let’s just focus on this.”

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

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

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

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

“Yes, sir,” you reply, embarrassed.

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

“Do you even know what chiaroscuro is?” 

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

“Well, maybe if you didn’t-”

“Y/N, Jay, final warning.”

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sunoo, that’s disgusting.”

“Love? I know.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I never—When?!”

She shrugs. “The other day.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Dude…” Jongseong murmurs.

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

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

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

“Aren’t you cold?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t wanna talk about it.”

--

sunoo jay and y/n almost kissed earlier

kazuha WHAAAAT

you KIM SUNOO.

kazuha WHEN?????

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

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

kazuha i can’t believe i missed this fml

you YOU DIDNT MISS ANYTHING NOTHING HAPPENED

sunoo be serious u guys we’re standing inches apart

you were* and no we weren’t

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

kazuha sunoo…?

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

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

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

you …

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

kazuha cuuuute

you i resent these accusations.

sunoo istg if u dont kiss him next time i will

kazuha ???

you SUNOO?

sunoo WHAT

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Y/N…”

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

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

--

jong so… guess who got a five-day suspension

you you idiot what did your parents say?

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

you boo-hoo

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

you … are you feeling better?

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

you oh did you ask chaewon to do that?

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

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

jong ykw maybe i should just ask chaewon

you i’ll see you tomorrow jong!!

jong :) see you tomorrow pretty 

 --

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You smile. “Never.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Give me five minutes!” you call back.

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

--

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

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

He’s still Jong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In any case, he’s hiding something.

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

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

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

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

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

Your heartbeat speeds up and you have to look away.

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until you didn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You said so yourself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

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

“Did you guys sit next to each other?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, I thought I’d do it now.”

“Now?”

He takes a deep, shaky breath. “Now.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Really?” you repeat, and he chuckles.

“Really.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I think I did, too.”

“Yeah, you mentioned that in your letter.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Fifty years, huh?”

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

“I wasn’t planning to.”

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You smile. “I am.”

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[pearlessance]

I'll Crawl Home To Her

summary: all the ways joel miller loves his pretty, little wife. and all the ways she loves him right back.

pairing: husband!joel miller x wife!reader

warnings: explicit sexual content MDNI, traditional gender roles, pussy eating, vaginal sex, semi-public, exhibitionism kinda, dom/sub undertones, car sex, biting, dirty talk, joel is a certified munch, feminine reader, a whole bunch of tooth-rotting fluff

wc: 4.1k

note: something soft and sweet, tysm for reading, let me know what you think! <3

[masterlist] [read on AO3!]

Being Joel Miller's wife was, in short, marital bliss.

He loved taking care of you, and it showed in everything he did.

Joel always woke up earlier than you. On days he had to work, his alarm would rouse you just enough that you’d roll over to his side of the bed the moment he vacated it, soaking up his warmth and his scent, snuggling into his pillow. He’d kiss your forehead and tuck you in tight, and you’d fall asleep seconds after he whispered, “Have a good day, baby girl. Love you.”

And once you did finally roll out of bed, sunlight leaking in through the kitchen blinds, you’d find a fresh pot of coffee and your favorite mug sitting on the counter.

He worked long hours, but you could never fault him for it. He was doing it even in his old age to grant you the freedom to do any and everything you desired. Supporting you in all your endeavors no matter how fleeting.

When you’d picked up the hobby of gardening, Joel had taken you to three different greenhouses in one weekend and helped you till a section of the backyard to plant your seeds. And later that week, he’d come home with the back of his truck full of pretty white bricks to outline your garden with.

You’d mentioned once with your hands covered in suds how the dishes were your least favorite chore. You hated how they piled up so quickly, hated leaving them in the sink, how they felt never-ending.

“I can do the dishes, darlin’,” he’d said. “Just leave them for me an’ I’ll do ‘em after work every day.”

You loved him for the offer but refused. He already spoiled you enough as it is. You couldn’t imagine watching him standing at the sink every day after working for ten hours. “Are you crazy? No, I’d never let you do that.”

“Don’t bother me none,” he insisted. “S’only fair, considerin’ how good dinner is every night.”

The compliment made you flush, but still, you stood firm. Even when he’d come up behind you with a dish towel in hand, ready to take your place. You’d slapped his hands away. “Joel, no. Let me. Please.”

“Alright, fine,” he said, setting the towel on the counter. His hands found a new way to occupy themselves, though. Slipping beneath your skirt, squeezing at the softness of your thighs. “But at least let me get my desert.”

He’d had you bent over the countertop that night with your panties around your knees. He’d hummed his I love you’s against your spit-soaked clit in the middle of the kitchen and you’d felt like the most spoiled girl in the world. 

Even more so when he’d come home from work early the next day. He and Tommy walked through the front door with a brand new dishwasher in tow and spent all night assembling it.

Once, you’d been late coming back from the grocery store. Janet, the older woman who lived two houses down from you and Joel, had been berating the cashier for not accepting an expired coupon.

Confrontation had never been your strong suit, but it felt less like conflict and more like second nature to step in and defend a teenage girl just trying to do her job. You attempted to reason with Janet, explaining that it wasn’t the cashier's fault, that the use of her coupon perhaps just wasn’t meant to be. You’d even offered to pay for her entire shopping haul if it meant a break for the young girl. 

Of course, this wasn’t what Janet had wanted to hear, and she instead turned her anger on you. Your cheeks had warmed in embarrassment as she yelled your name aloud for all the other customers to hear, telling you to ‘keep your nose where it belonged.’ 

The whole interaction had frazzled you. But more than that, it had made you late. And while being screamed at so publically had certainly thrown you off kilter, the straw that broke the camel’s back was seeing Joel’s truck in the driveway when you got home. 

He had mentioned once how much he loved having someone to come home to. Had explained how seeing you standing there with a smile on your face waiting for him on the front porch every day made the long hours and unbearable heat worth it. But because of Janet, you weren’t there. 

Joel, your Joel—who always takes care of you, who would do anything for you, who puts your happiness above his own, the most selfless man you’ve ever known—had come home to an empty house. Worked twelve hours beneath the Texas sun to come home to absolute silence.

It didn’t matter that you’d left a note on the kitchen table, you’d meant to get back before he could ever read it.

The tears had come quickly. The embarrassment, the frustration, the anger you felt on that young girl’s behalf, came rushing to the surface all at once.

He’d left the door unlocked for you, like usual, and the moment you stepped inside you could hear the familiar, heavy sound of his boots on the wooden floor. “Hey, sweetheart. How was your—?”

Before he could ask any questions you’d flung yourself into his arms, needing comfort, needing to show him how much you loved him. To prove to him that you weren’t home but you wanted to be, more than anything. “I’m so sorry,” was all you managed to choke out. 

Joel, who valued your safety above all else, immediately stiffened yet pulled you closer, wrapping his big arms around your shoulders, his warm hand splayed across the small of your back. “Hey, hey—shh, what happened? Talk to me, sweet girl. C’mon.” 

He cradled your face in his palm, holding you gently as if you were the most precious thing because, to him, you are. He wiped your tears away with the rough pad of his thumb and listened as you explained, “I—I wasn’t here waiting for you! I’m sorry—I…I tried to come home as fast—as fast as I could but—!”

“S’okay, baby. I know you’ll always come home to me, alright? I’m not mad. Could never be mad at you, y’know that.” He pressed a kiss to your forehead, to the arch of your brow, to the bridge of your nose. He rubbed soothing circles into your skin until your tears slowed and your breaths found their normal cadence once again. And then, because he knows you, he asked, “What really happened?”

And you tell him. Every detail. And Joel stands there, holding you, listening with bated breath. 

When you finish, he pulls his shoulders back with a newfound objective. “M’gonna go talk to Lee,” he said.

Janet’s husband was a good man, you knew. Similar to Joel in the way of being a nurturing sort of husband. A hard-working man with never a bad thing to say about anyone. “You don’t have to,” you tell Joel. “What she did was wrong but I’d rather she takes it out on me than a kid at their first job.”

He shakes his head. “Can’t just let it go,” he said. “She disrespected my wife. Not the kinda thing I can turn the other cheek to.” 

“Joel—don’t…don’t—” You weren’t sure what you were asking. His insistence didn’t surprise you in the least, but you didn’t want to start anything that would disrupt the peace the two of you’d spent so much time cultivating.

He seems to understand you despite your lack of vocal explanation. “Just gonna have a word with him, sweetheart. That’s all.”

Before he walked out the door, he asked very specifically for the Mediterranean chicken dish you’d made for him last week. Which was strange only because he never asked for anything specific; he simply asked you to cook whatever you felt like, and insisted that somehow you knew his cravings better than he himself did. 

It wasn’t until fifteen minutes later, as you put the chicken in the oven that you realized he’d done it to distract you, to take your mind off the situation at hand while he went and handled it. Helping you without even being in the same room.

When he came home, Joel answered all of your questions at the dinner table and said that he and Lee had shared a beer and talked it over. Warned you to expect an apology the next time you and Janet crossed paths. 

And sure enough, that weekend there was a knock on the front door. 

Joel stood behind you, a looming, protective presence at your back. A safety net as your neighbor apologized for her actions and offered a plate of chocolate chip cookies as amends.

You forgave her, of course. Even invited her in so the two of you could talk about it over a glass of freshly squeezed lemonade on the back porch. She compliments you on the roses growing in your garden and you clip a couple off to send her home with.

Problem solved. Amends made. 

All because of Joel. 

Your closest friends even teased you about it from time to time, making jokes about how spoiled you are, and about how much he cares for you.

When you’re out having a girls' night with the three of them, you share laughs and chips and salsa and have one too many glasses of wine. They all discuss sharing an Uber, but you interject to say, “No worries. Joel will make sure we get home safe.”

And they tease you about that, too, telling you, “You’ve got that big man wrapped tight around your little finger.”

But you’re not wrong, and you suppose your friends aren’t, either. Because he shows up at the diner ten minutes after you send him a text message, and deals with four drunk young women with such grace it’s almost astonishing. Even pulls a soft, secret smile as he listens to the group of you giggle together at something that’s probably not nearly as funny to him.

You asked him about it later, about that gentle amusement he wore, and he explained simply, “What makes you happy makes me happy, darlin.’” 

And you understand exactly what he means. Understand how your happiness, your frustrations, your love is mirrored perfectly in his heart. Because you feel it, too.

It’s why whenever he says he’s craving something, whether it’s fast food or some elaborate dish, you’ll always find a way to get it onto his dinner plate that night. It’s why you make an extra stop during grocery shopping to get that local ground coffee he likes. 

He’d said once how much he loves the way pale blue looks against your skin, and every time you shop for clothes you find yourself gravitating towards the shade. 

You do his laundry and put a towel in the dryer every time he steps in the shower so it’s warm when he gets out. You teach him about skincare and he sits dutifully in bed every Sunday night with a face mask on and a pore strip on his nose. You schedule his doctor and dentist appointments and have never once been successful at fighting off your wide grin as you tell the receptionist on the phone that you’re his wife and they refer to you as Mrs. Miller for the remainder of the call.

Give and take, push and pull—the two of you fit seamlessly together. You take care of him, and he takes care of you, and whatever was left each day you figured out together.

So, when you make your way to the kitchen one early morning to see his lunch still in the fridge, untouched, and his coffee mug in the sink and not the dishwasher, you know something must have gone awry. Something to disrupt his morning routine.

You find your phone only to read a text message he’d left you at six this morning. 

Good morning, sweet girl. Slept through my alarm, might have to stay over today to finish. Love you.

Joel’s an independent man, you know. Perfectly capable of taking care of himself. And you know he’ll likely buy lunch for himself and Tommy, likely some gas station pizza and a soda. But you don’t like the idea of him needing to do that. Don’t like the idea of him eating anything you don’t make for him just the way he likes.

So, you spend the morning getting all dolled up. You wear that pale blue sundress he likes. You curl your hair, coat your lashes in mascara, and spray that expensive, vanilla-scented perfume he got you for your birthday last year. 

And then you grab his lunch from the fridge and make your way to the construction site. You find Joel’s truck easily and park beside it. You’re not sure why, but being here makes your heart race. 

You’ve met the majority of the guys on his crew, and they all know who you are. Countless times you’ve forced Joel to bring in containers full of cookies and pastries you’d bake the night before to share. He’s even brought a couple of them home for dinner before, and invited their wives and kids to fill your home with a little extra love and laughter for the evening.

But for some reason, this feels…different. Like you’re encroaching on their territory, invading space that doesn’t belong to you.

They’re working inside some big structure that has only the framing and roof finished, wooden beams allotting space for each room. You can hear them shouting at each other and the sound of hammers striking nails into place. Somewhere a little further into the building, there’s the mechanical whirring of a drill, but you see no face you recognize.

One of the younger-looking men up in the rafters notices you first. “Well, hello there pretty little lady. Did you need some help?”

You open your mouth to speak, to ask where you might find Joel or even Tommy. But then—

“Dean, you look at my wife like that again and it’ll be the last time you have eyes to look at anyone.” Joel rests his hand on the small of your back as he saddles up to your side. You turn to face him, and can’t help your smirk upon discovering the intimidating scowl on his face that he directs to Dean. “Understand?”

“Yes, sir. Sorry about that, Mrs. Miller.”

“It’s alright, Dean. You didn’t know,” you insist. But Joel narrows his eyes even further and doesn’t stop until you playfully hit his bicep. “It’s fine.”

His expression softens considerably when he looks at you, deep frown turning into a warm smile instead. “Hey, baby girl.” Joel pulls you close, pressing his lips to yours, kissing you softly. Nothing out of the ordinary for him, nothing you don’t expect. But what you don’t expect is for his hand on the small of your back to sink lower, grabbing a lewd fist full of your ass.

The surprise has your lips parting, but Joel only takes it to his advantage, tongue slipping between them to glide smoothly against yours.

When he finally pulls away your face is flushed and he wears that satisfied smirk like armor. He glances up at Dean, whose ears are now red-hot even though he tries very hard to pretend like he’s busy. “I’m taking a twenty. Be back in a bit.”

He takes your hand in his and leads you back outside, and once he opens the passenger door of your truck he’s quick to put his hands on your hips and lift you to help you inside. 

You expect him to close the door and round the front of the truck to get in behind the wheel, but he doesn’t. Before you’re even able to turn and tuck your legs inside, he’s pushing you back against the leather seats and sliding his calloused hands up your thighs beneath your dress. “Joel,” you say, but you don’t attempt to stop him. 

The passenger door’s propped open, just enough to shield him from view as he stands behind it. “You’re so pretty,” he murmurs, thumbs hooking into the waistband of your panties. He tugs them down and peppers open-mouthed kisses across the exposed skin of your chest, teeth nipping at your cleavage. But then he’s biting you—hard, and pressure pools low in your belly as his tongue flicks over the hurt to soothe. “Always take such good care of me. Had such a rough morning but seein’ you changes it all around.”

You’re giggling uncontrollably, overwhelmed by his sudden need, basking beneath the warmth of his praise. Your hands find his hair, tugging lightly at the ends. “We shouldn’t,” you say. “Someone will see. You’re crazy, old man, do you know that?”

“Yeah, crazy for you.” Normally you’d scold him some more, accuse him of being the absolute cheesiest man that you’ve ever met. But you don’t have the chance before he’s pushing your knees apart and pressing those hot, wet kisses to the inside of your thighs. “Can front all you want, but I’m not dumb, baby. Think you got all dressed up and came all this way for nothing? Nuh-uh.”

This hadn’t been your intention in the slightest, but now that you’re here, and his head’s between your thighs… “I just brought your lunch!” 

Joel smirks. “Fuckin’ right you did.”

You have to cover your mouth to quiet your laughter. “But…seriously. Aren’t you hungry?”

“Starving, sweetheart,” he says. “Now spread your legs.”

You do. Of course you do. 

And Joel makes quick work of you, wasting not a second before his tongue slides through your wet heat with expert precision. He hooks his arms around your thighs and drags you to the end of the leather seat, pressing his face against you. Your clit pulses with need and he takes care of that ache for you, too. Sucking it into his mouth, lapping at you with the flat of his tongue, ratcheting your pleasure to an almost unbearable place.

It doesn’t take long before your back is arching off the leather, hands tugging desperately at his hair, pulling him impossibly closer. You’re whimpering his name and he’s letting out these deep, throaty groans that have your toes curling in your high-top sneakers.

In just a couple minutes he has you right there—right on the edge, so close to your orgasm you can taste it, and then he pulls away. You’re whining immediately, desperate whimpers falling for your lips. 

“Shh. S’alright, baby girl. I’m comin',’” Joel tells you. And then you watch through bleary, tear-filled eyes as he undoes his tool belt and sets it on the floor of his truck. 

The clink of his belt buckle reverberates through your ears, and you whimper again but before you can start begging he’s got his cock in his hand and he’s pressing the big, heavy tip into you. “Oh my God,” you cry, breath stuck in your lungs. 

It feels so good—he always does. He says, “C’mere, baby,” before gripping the front of your dress and pulling you up towards him. He hooks your legs around his hips and sinks into you slow, real slow. Gives you time to adjust to the size of him, time for your pussy to make room for it. He kisses you hard, and out of the corner of your eye, you can see the men on his team working thirty feet away. 

Your heart races in your chest and you think about warning him again that this might be a bad idea, but then he’s sinking his cock alllll the way into you, pushing against that sweet spot inside, and everything else fades into nothing. 

There’s nothing but Joel—your gentle, safe, loving husband, who always takes care of you and always will.

He pulls out slowly, moaning low, and then slams back into you. Again and again and again. He sets such a punishing pace that your eyes roll back and you have to sink your nails into his shoulders just to ground yourself, his gray cotton t-shirt soft and familiar beneath your fingertips. “Fuck, fuck, Joel.”

“Pretty pussy’s squeezin’ me so fuckin’ good, baby,” he says. “Know just what to give her. Know just what she needs.”

You can feel your slick coating the inside of your thighs, your orgasm creeping right back up your spine as if it’d never faded in the first place. He squeezes your thighs hard enough to bruise but it only brings you higher, gets you closer. Your clit pulses and you swear you can feel his cock throbbing inside you in tandem, a perfect man made just for you.

His hips slam into you, bringing you closer and closer and closer, until finally— “Joel, Joel, I—oh my god, shit—!”

“Ohh, sweet girl…you gonna cum for me? Hm? Feels that good? Needed it that bad, didn’t you,” he says, and it’s not a question because he just knows.

“Yes, yes, please—Joel, I’m gonna—!”

He takes a hand and grips the back of your neck, forcing you to look up at him. “I know, baby, s’alright. Give it to me. Yeah, that’s it. There you go.”

Your orgasm hits you hard, makeup smearing as your eyes water. Every nerve ending flares on end, euphoria washing over you and pulling your senses taut. “Cum with me, cum with me, oh god.”

He fucks you through it, and it only takes a couple more meaningful strokes before his hips are stuttering. Joel presses his forehead to yours and kisses you gently, spilling inside you with his cock pressed into you as deep as he can get. He cums with you and the words that leave his mouth as he reaches the summit give you goosebumps. “Love you, sweet girl. Love you so fuckin’ much.”

When he finally comes down, Joel’s panting breaths are in perfect sync with yours. He kisses your cheeks, your nose, your forehead. And when you start giggling he breaks out that soft, gentle smile and it turns your insides to mush.

You wince as he slowly pulls out of you and stuffs himself back into his jeans, pulling on the leather of his belt and fastening it back into place.

“Still have a couple minutes before you have to get back,” you say, cheeks warming as he helps you slide your panties back up your legs. “You really should eat something. Like, actual food. Sustenance.”

“Oh, I’m plenty satisfied,” he jokes. But when you unzip his cooler and sift through it, pulling out the turkey, tomato, and cheese sandwich you’d made him last night, he takes it from you with greedy hands. 

He eats quickly and you watch him in awe, unbelieving that he’s real, and much less that you’d somehow convinced him to love you. A perfect man, all your own, so beautiful and kind and selfless. You don’t think anyone’s loved anymore more than you love Joel.

Playfully, he taps the tip of your nose as he wolfs down the last bite of his sandwich. “What’re you thinkin’ about?”

“Just you,” is your answer.

“Me?”

“About how much I love you.”

His smile widens and he reaches his hand out, cradling your face, running his thumb along your cheekbone. “I don’t deserve you, sweetheart.”

You press your face into his hand, bottom lip jutting out. A part of you wants to beg him to come home early, to use a sick day, and hold you for hours. But instead, you kiss the palm of his hand and jump out of the truck, gravel crunching beneath your feet. “You should probably get back. Don’t want you staying any later than you have to.”

Joel lets out a heavy sigh but nods his head in agreement. He closes the door of his truck and opens the door to your car instead. “Get home safe, alright? I’ll try and get this done as soon as I can. You want me to pick something up after for dinner? Kinda cravin’ pizza.”

“Let me know when you’re leaving the site and I’ll call and put in an order for pickup. Get one for Tommy too so he can take it with him. Wanna make sure he eats. Sound good?”

He kisses you hard and nods. “Sounds real good. See you at home, baby girl.”

“I’ll be waiting on the porch,” you promise.

Like you always are. Like you always will be.