#why dont you just say uni or college???

[megumi-fm]

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[stupidnaturals]

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[asahicore]

bad news first - sjy (m)

this work contains smut - minors please do not interact pairing. jake x fem!reader synopsis. From the moment you'd met at eight to the day he moved to South Korea at fourteen, you and Jake were inseparable. But after years of being apart, you've come to terms with the fact that at twenty, you and Jake just aren't what you used to be. That is until you get a text from him, and all of a sudden, he's back by your side, doing his year abroad at the university you study at, and all your feelings for him float back up to the surface. genre. college au, childhood friends to ???? to lovers, painful mutual pining, one bed trope..... a sprinkle of angst (my hand slipped) but mostly fluff i promise and smut (mdni!!!), also i made sunghoon really weird in this and idkw, this is set in scotland.. edinburgh uni rep!! word count. 23k author's note. everybody say happy belated birthday to @zreamy.. happy belated birthday zo!!! being 22 years and 6 days old is cooler than just 22 years old anyway.. hope you like it bestie... if you dont... well theres a building on campus thats 17 stories high sooo.. enjoy! i hope everyone else enjoys too, since this is a bday fic for zo she couldnt beta read so i had to raw dog this so if its terrible.. not my fault! lmk what u think!! i also made a playlist for this, do listen along!!

“Alright kids, good news or bad news first?”

You looked at your teacher, then at the boy next to you, then back at your teacher. “Bad news first,” you said in unison.

You were only eight, but you were both wise enough to know that hearing good news second would assuage the blow of whatever these bad news were. Miss Dawson sighed as she crouched in front of you. “The bad news is your bus driver is on strike and won’t be coming. The good news is that your parents have been informed and are coming to pick you up soon.”

Following her instructions, you headed to the gymnasium and sat there silently among the other kids. Not many kids in your class rode the bus home, and the ones who did seemed to have drivers not on strike, so it was just the two of you. You were used to that, though - over January and February, you had made a sort of silent pact to stand and wait for the bus together. You sometimes shared snacks, but you never spoke. For some reason, you felt at ease with this boy, even though you didn’t know much about him. You had heard he had moved to Brisbane just at the start of this year, all the way from South Korea. You were pretty sure his name was Jake.

You handed him one of your Twix bars. Then he spoke. “I thought a strike was when you did really well in bowling.”

“Same,” you replied, mouth full of chocolate and caramel. “I’m not sure why that would keep the bus driver from picking us up.”

Jake looked at you with wide eyes, distress clear in them. “Do you think he went bowling instead of picking us up?”

This made you frown. “That’d be really rude.”

“It would. I always make sure to go bowling on the weekends, ‘cause if I missed school that’d be rude to Miss Dawson.”

You nodded your head in fervent agreement. “For sure.”

That weekend, his mum called your mum to ask if you wanted to go to the bowling alley with them. From then on, for the next six years, you were stuck together by glue. 

--

Twelve years later, Jake’s name appearing on your phone screen has become such a rare sight, you don’t believe it right away. It takes you a few seconds of intense squinting at the letters to actually realise your eyes aren’t deceiving you.

jake.sim15 hey y/n!! you go to edinburgh uni right?

You type and delete three different responses before settling for a simple yeah, I am! what’s up?, hoping you sounded nonchalant even though you very much felt chalant. You thought that whatever you sent wouldn’t be as weird as taking forever to answer such a straightforward question. 

As you wait for Jake’s reply, you scroll through your previous shared messages, noting with sadness that for three years in a row, the only instances you’d texted were to wish each other a happy birthday or when he reacted with a fire emoji to Stories of your dog, Milo. Before that, your last conversation was to congratulate each other about getting into your top choice universities and to discuss plans for your respective futures.

Futures that used to include each other, you think. His reply appears at the bottom of your screen before melancholy can fill your heart.

jake.sim15 i applied to go there for my year abroad next year annnnd i got in !! heh

You shoot up straight from your seat on the lounge chaise you’d been sunbathing on, a loud “Oh my God!” involuntarily escaping your mouth. 

“What? What happened? Is everything okay?” Chaewon asks frantically, rushing over to your side. “Oh,” she says when she sees your phone. “It’s a text… from a boy?” 

This makes Yunjin, previously unbothered by your panic, rise from her seat and take off her sunglasses. “A boy? Show me,” she demands, snatching your phone from your hands before you can protest. Upon seeing the texts on your screen, she lets out a loud gasp. “It’s not just any boy! It’s the one and only Jake Sim himself.”

“Give that back!” you plead, hand reaching for your phone, but Yunjin is already walking away.

“And he’s coming to Edi this September, apparently. He says he’s sorry for not saying anything earlier, but he was waiting for an answer up until now.” She scoffs. “Leave it to our uni to tell someone they’re in less than two months before term starts. Oh, you’re the first person he’s told, Y/N! After his parents. How cute,” she coos, protesting when you snatch your phone back from her. “Hey! I was reading that.”

“Those are my texts, Yunjin. I’m the one who’s meant to read them.”

She shrugs. “You would’ve told us anyway.”

“What are you going to reply?” Chaewon asks. With the both of them hovering over your shoulders and watching as you type a response, a sort of stage fright comes over you, making you send what might be the most unoriginal reply known to man.

“Awesome? Seriously, Y/N?” Yunjin reads, disproportionately disgusted with you.

“That’s a lot of exclamation marks. It almost makes it look like you don’t mean it,” Chaewon says.

“I do mean it!”

“Well, he seems to like it. A smiling-with-teeth emoji is a good sign, right?” she asks in an attempt to make you feel better.

“He has automatic caps off. That man is run-through,” Yunjin says, shaking her head as she walks back to her sunbed.

“You were excited about him texting me just a second ago,” you reproach.

“Yeah, before I found out he was a whore.”

“Yunjin, you know we don't slut-shame here!” Chaewon exclaims. Before Yunjin can say anything even worse in response, your phone starts ringing, and Jake’s name appears on your screen. “He’s calling you?” Chaewon gasps, making Yunjin sit up with a start for the second time in less than five minutes.

“This man is insane,” she remarks with all the seriousness in the world.

You run away from your friends, finding refuge in the outside kitchen area out of earshot. They don’t need to hear your conversation with Jake. You love them, but they can be weirdly unsupportive in moments like these.

“Hey, Jake,” you greet, hoping he doesn’t notice the breathlessness in your voice. It was because you had just ran, of course - you didn’t want him to think you were so nervous about talking to him after such a long time, you could barely breathe. Because you weren’t. At all.

“Hey, Y/N!” he replies, and the excitement in his voice makes your heart melt. “I hope it’s not weird that I called, I just thought it’d be nicer than texting, is that okay?”

“Yeah, it’s fine, it’s nice to hear your voice,” you say before you can really think about it, and cringe at your own words. Years without talking and the world’s worst line is the first thing you say to Jake. Thankfully, before you start excruciating yourself, a chuckle pours out of Jake’s throat and blesses your ears.

“It’s nice to hear your voice, too. What are you up to?” 

“Oh, I’m on vacation with my friends. One of them has a rich aunt who owns a villa in southern Italy, so we’re just chilling by the pool right now.” 

“You always wanted to go to Italy! That sounds so nice,” he says. Your breath catches gently in your throat - he remembers, you note.

“Yeah, it really is. What about you, how are you spending the summer?”

Jake tells you about the local bookstore owned by a grandpa that’s always had a soft spot for him and that gave him a part-time job for the summer. “I’m trying to save up as much money as I can before I leave. If I treat you to a meal, will you show me around the city?” he asks, and you can hear the grin in his voice. It makes you realise how much you’ve actually missed him.

“You don’t need to treat me to a meal, I’ll show you around anyway.” 

Still, he insists, and you find yourself giving in quickly - because it’s Jake or because free food is on the table, you’re not sure. Probably both. 

You and Jake get to talking, but fitting years and years of catching up into one conversation is an impossible task, and before you know it, when you check your phone, you’ve been talking for over an hour. Yunjin is angrily waving at you, pointing at her stomach to indicate hunger like a caveman who’s just learned how to communicate. You apologise to Jake, telling him you have to go, and plan to meet during fresher’s week before you hang up.

A few hours later, you get a text from him saying it was nice talking to you and jokingly asking whether Yunjin was satisfied with lunch. It’s innocuous, but it opens a gate for more texting, which leads to long, rambling voice messages, which leads to late-night phone calls that remind you of when you were fifteen and still kept in touch. When August fades into September, you feel like you’ve got your best friend back. 

You remember why you were so in love with him at fourteen.

--

You see Jake before he sees you.  

Among the throngs of people, you manage to spot the dark, messy flop of hair on his head weighed down by a nice pair of wireless headphones. After a thirteen-hour flight from Seoul, a four-hour layover in Frankfurt and a final, two-hour flight to Edinburgh, he looks rightfully exhausted, using what looks like the last of his energy to spot the exit and the airport bus stop. Even wearing a simple denim jacket, white tee and grey sweatpants, he’s so gorgeous you forget what you came here for, until he almost walks right past you without seeing you. You put yourself in his path and hold your hand-written banner up, making yourself as obvious as you can as you call out his name. 

When he sees you, he stops dead in his tracks for a second, someone almost running into him before he remembers the crowd behind him. His tired features break out into a bright smile that has your heartbeat speeding up so much, you think it might run out of your chest. 

He had told you not to come, that it would be late for you and he didn’t want to bother you, but you had managed to get the information of his arrival before he forbade you from picking him up so you did it anyway, wanting to surprise him. After years of being apart, rather than waiting another day, you wanted to see him as soon as possible.

Jake briskly makes his way to you, dropping his bags next to him on the floor as he engulfs you in a hug, warm and tight as if he’s trying to make up for all those years. You hug him back as if someone would appear out of thin air and take him away from you again.

“This was the longest day of my life, I’m so happy to see you,” he says when he pulls away, and you’re so happy you can’t even say anything back, resorting to giggling and lightly swatting non-existent dust off of his shoulders. 

As you wait for the bus, he tells you about every trivial thing that happened to him on his trip, from how expensive a sandwich is at the airport to the German kid sitting in front of him that kept turning around to stare at him on his second flight.

“How did you know he was German?” you ask, amused.

Jake pauses. “Just vibes.”

Conversation on the bus is slightly disjointed as you jump from topic to topic with random pauses here and there before one of you finds something to talk about - but it’s okay, you hadn’t expected for the two of you to be as easy as before. It’s more awe at seeing each other after such a long time than awkwardness. Even though you’d caught up over summer, there was a world of difference between speaking on the phone and actually sitting next to him. You notice things like the shine of his hair, the creases that form on the sides of his lips when he smiles, or, unfortunately for you, the veins that run along his forearms and hands - things you hadn’t noticed previously thanks to the sometimes questionable quality of the front camera of his phone. Once in a while, your thigh brushes against his, and it reminds you that he’s really here. Even that he’s real, at all. 

In a tragic turn of events, Jake lives in the student accommodation you used to live in in first year, and coming back to it two years later is slightly traumatising. His three-person flat is in a different building as your old one, and you marvel at how it somehow still smells the same - like dusty, decade-old carpeting and the permanent stench of students’ dubitable cooking. He’s the first one to move in, which makes the place slightly eerie, but it means that you’re not bothering anyone by unpacking Jake’s stuff and cooking Shin Ramyun the previous tenants had left behind at 11pm. 

Your late dinner was meant for you to take a small break, watch a couple episodes of Friends which Jake had been shocked to learn you’d never watched, and you had been shocked to learn he was a die-hard fan of (since one year ago), then get back to unpacking. But the ramen sends an already exhausted Jake into a food coma so intense, he falls asleep on your shoulder five minutes into the second episode. 

You let him sleep as long as he needs, turning the volume down on his laptop and stifling your chuckles as much as you can. You feel like a cat has fallen asleep in your lap - you are now obliged by law to stay still until Jake wakes up. It’s not until an hour later that Jake’s uncomfortable sleeping position forces him awake, lifting his head off of your shoulder with a grunt. He looks around himself, at his room that’s not quite familiar to him yet, then at you, eyes still scrunched with sleepiness as a grin blooms onto his lips.

“Sorry,” clearing his throat of its grogginess. “What time is it?”

“It’s almost one a.m,” you reply, and his eyes go wide.

“You should’ve woken me up! Does your shoulder hurt?” he asks, much more alarmed than he should be, and it makes you laugh.

“It’s all good. But now that you’re awake, I should probably head home.” 

“I’ll get you an Uber,” he says, already pulling out his phone. 

“It’s fine, Jake, my place is a ten-minute walk from here. I live just up the road.”

Jake’s fingers on his phone pause as he looks up at you. “Then I’ll walk you home.” He lifts a finger in warning when he sees you start to protest. “And don’t fight me on this. You did so much today, it’s the least I can do.”

As much as you love the idea of spending more time with Jake, even if it’s just ten minutes, you still don’t want to bother him when you know how tired he is. “It’s really safe around here. I can just text you when I’m home, if you’re worried about me getting kidnapped or something,” you say, taking his jacket from his hands and placing it back on his desk chair.

He grabs it back, putting it on before you can take it from him again, and rummages through one of his suitcases for a black, woolly scarf. Neither of you speaks as he wraps it tight around your neck, even though the early September weather isn’t cold enough to warrant it. His hands stop briefly on the scarf and a small smile spreads on his lips. You hope he doesn’t hear your sharp intake of breath when your eyes meet. “It’s not about that,” he says simply, voice low and unlike you’ve ever heard it before. You don’t think his voice had quite finished cracking when he’d moved away back then. 

Suddenly, he steps away, grabs his keys, and heads for the door. “Let’s go!” he says, voice back to its usual cheery tone. You don’t find it in you to question him, so you just follow him out, welcoming the night breeze that cools down your burning cheeks with open arms. 

The walk to your place is mostly done in comfortable silence, but it still goes by too quickly for your liking. You keep your hands in your pockets to prevent yourself from doing something stupid, like reaching out for Jake’s hand that swishes back-and-forth as he walks. Instead, you bury your nose in his scarf and relish in the unfamiliar but comforting smell that his cologne has left behind on the fabric. You hug goodbye when you reach your flat, and you have to remind yourself to let go. He insists on you keeping the scarf. “My mum packed me, like, three, so you can have that one.” 

“Your mum still pack your things for you, does she?” you ask, tone playful.

“No-” he says, voice slightly whiny, before he realises you’re just teasing him. “Whatever,” he chuckles, ruffling your hair. You hope the streetlights aren’t bright enough for him to notice the flustered look on your face. The both of you stand there awkwardly for a second, before he lets out another chuckle. “Right. See you tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” you beam.

“Okay,” he says, but still doesn’t make a move to leave. “Okay. Yeah. I’ll be off then.” He gives you one last smile then turns around, burying his hands in his pockets, and you watch as he walks away.

“Get home safe,” you call out after a few seconds. 

He pivots on his heels, and, with a wave of his hand, says, “I will! Go inside.”

“Good night!”

“Night, Y/N!”

When you walk into your living room, Yunjin is sitting on the couch, arms crossed over her chest, gaze trained on the wall opposite her, one lamp lighting the otherwise completely dark room. She looks like a detective in one of those bad cop shows.

“Gosh, what’s all this for?”

“You’re back awfully late,” she says, neither looking at you nor answering your question.

“Yeah, I was with Jake,” you shrug, heading into the kitchen for a glass of water. She abruptly gets up from her seat, following you into the other room and staying close behind you.

“And?” she demands, mouth way too close to your ear and making you start.

“And what?” you ask. 

“What do you mean and what?!” she says, clearly agitated. “I want to know everything!”

“There’s nothing to say, really. He seemed happy I picked him up from the airport, then I helped him unpack. He lives in Riego, by the way.”

“Ew.”

“I know, it was awful going back there.”

The two of you stare at each other as you drink your water. “Well?” she asks.

“What?”

“Is that it?”

You fill your glass again to take it into your bedroom. “I don’t know, we just ate and watched Friends.”

“You hate shows with laughing tracks,” she states like it’s an accusation.

“It wasn’t actually that bad,” you reply, shrugging.

She tuts. “Love will do ugly, ugly things to a person.”

“You’ve been in a loving relationship for the past two years.”

“This isn’t about me. Can we talk about how you’re still in love with the same loser from when you were ten?”

“I was fourteen, and don’t call Jake a loser when you haven’t even met him.” You ignore the roll of her eyes. “And I’m not. Not anymore. I’m just happy to have my friend back.” Yunjin gives you a look. “Okay, maybe I’m still a little bit in love with him. But it’s so little, it’s barely there.” Her expression is unchangingly unimpressed and you can’t help but throw in the towel. “Alright, fine. I still love him, what about it?”

“You’re pathetic.”

“I know that, no need to remind me.”

“Are you gonna do something about it?”

“My patheticness? I’ve tried, didn’t really work.”

“No, idiot, about Jake. You should go and get him! It’d be so sexy if you got together as 20-somethings after knowing each other since you were babies.”

“We were eight when we met. And I don’t know if sexy is the word I’d use here.”

“Anything is sexy if you try hard enough,” she says, and you have to laugh. “Anyways, you should confess your undying love and tell him you’ve felt that way since you met.”

“I wasn’t-”

“Guys might not show it, but they probably get all hot for stuff like that. Boosts their ego and shit.”

“Yunjin, I just got my friend back, I’m not gonna risk it. Plus, who knows, I might not actually be in love with him. It might just be my emotions acting up, like, seeing someone I used to like after a while. We’ve both changed so much, once I get to know him more now, I might not even feel the way I used to.”

“Notice how you’ve used the word might twice in ten seconds? You’re just trying to find excuses.”

You groan. “This is why I hate English Lit people.”

“You do English Lit.”

“I know, and I’m the only nice person that does it.” In your head, you add and Jake, but saying it out loud would only make this conversation worse for you.

“What’s that scarf, by the way? Did he give you that?”

You look down at the scarf like it’s a piece of incriminating evidence. “Can you stop grilling me, please? It’s late.”

“You’re not answering my question.”

You sighed deeply. “Fine. Yes, he gave me-”

“It’s not even that cold outside!” she exclaimed in an outrage. “Don’t tell me he also walked you home?”

You pause. “He did.”

She gasped. “He walked you home because he’s in love with you.”

“He walked me home because he’s a good friend that looks after me.”

“He walked you home because he realised how hot you’ve gotten and he wants some of that.”

All you can do is sigh. “Whatever. I’m going to bed.”

“If you weren’t such a coward, you wouldn’t be going to bed alone.”

“Whatever!” you say, shutting the door behind you, shaking that preposterous conversation out of your head. When you get into bed, it takes you at least half-an-hour before you can settle down, but you know your constant tossing and turning isn’t due to your inability to find a comfortable enough position to sleep in. Between your evening with Jake and Yunjin’s pestering, thoughts run wild and incoherent through your head. 

You want to tell her every little thing that happened with Jake tonight, but you’re afraid it might do you more harm than good. She is most definitely the type of friend who will take the smallest action a guy did for you or the most meaningless thing he might have said and turn it into a sign that he has the hots for you, which usually does wonders for your confidence, but right now, you don’t need that kind of delusion. Did seeing your childhood best friend you used to secretly harbour feelings for make you feel some type of way? Of course, but that doesn’t mean you still love him after all this time, after six years of being apart, the majority of those years spent with no contact. It wasn’t like you parted ways with resentment, or anything of that sort, far from it; rather, you drifted apart naturally, as two teenagers with over 7000 kilometres between them would. At first, you’d call frequently and even write each other letters - but as you became more preoccupied with school, friends, and extracurriculars, your phones gradually rang less and your mailboxes became gradually emptier. You don’t even remember who sent the last, unanswered letter. 

Tonight isn’t the first time you replay the moment Jake announced that he would go away, but it’s the first time it’s a bittersweet memory. It used to only be bitter - but now that you’ve reconnected, you can look back at it with fondness, wishing you could tell fourteen-year-old you the hurt would only last so long. 

It hadn’t started unusually.

“So, bad news first, right?”

In your six years of friendship with Jake, this had been the first time you’d really been wary of what he would say next. The look on his face told you that this bad news wouldn’t be as easy to shake off as usual. Your definition of bad news was things like I got grounded so I can’t hang out, I forgot we had a test tomorrow so I can’t hang out, my allergies are acting up again so I can’t hang out.

“I’m moving to Korea next month.”

I’m on another continent, so I can’t hang out.

You remember the words not quite making sense at the time. “Oh? How long are you staying there?” you said, taking a bite of your strawberry ice cream which Jake had insisted on paying for, even though you knew he didn’t get much allowance.

“Forever.”

You stopped chewing, and the ice cream melted uncomfortably in your mouth. You don’t know how long you stayed there, frozen as you stared at your best friend in disbelief. It wasn’t until he lightly shoved your shoulder, only meeting your eyes for a split second, that you remembered to swallow and to say something.

“Forever as in… You won’t live here anymore? At all?”

Jake shook his head. He kept his eyes trained on the vanilla-chocolate ice cream sandwich he’d left in its wrapper. In the blazing hot Brisbane summer, it had probably fully melted two minutes ago. “At all.”

“Oh,” was all you found yourself able to say. For some reason, you hoped that continuing to eat your ice cream would stop you from crying, but to no avail. Hot, salty tears quickly started raining down your cheeks, mixing with the sweetness of your ice cream when they reached your lips. 

“It’s my dad’s work. Same reason why I moved here when we were kids in the first place. They wanted him here then, they want him back there now. We just have to follow,” Jake explained, sounding just as upset as you felt.

“Right.”

“Are you mad at me?” Jake asked, worry clear in his voice, and finally turned to face you. At the sight of you crying, he let out a small oh, tears of his own pooling in his eyes.

You frowned. “Of course not. I’m never mad at you, you know that. I just… You’re my best friend, Jakey. It’s gonna be so lame around here without you.”

“It’ll be lame there without you, too.”

You attempted a smile. “Well, of course. But at least you’ll get to make new friends, see new places. You’ll be in a whole other country, I’m sure you’ll have fun there. I’m gonna be stuck in boring old Brisbane for the foreseeable future.”

“Do you know how offended our friends would be if they heard you speaking right now?” he asked, nudging your shoulder with his.

You sniffled and let out a chuckle. “They’re all great, but… I don’t like them nearly as much as I like you,” you said, staring down at your hands, hoping he wouldn’t realise exactly what you meant by that statement.

A weight was lifted off of your shoulders when Jake answered. “I like you the most too, Y/N.” You tried not to think too much about whether he’d meant it platonically or romantically - none of that mattered anymore. All that mattered was the feeling of his arms around you, his warmth enveloping your whole body, his familiar scent that you already missed. 

You felt him take a deep breath against you before he pulled away. He sniffled and did his best to put on a smile. “Right, enough of that. I’m not leaving until next month, so don’t think you’re rid of me just yet,” he joked, and it helped alleviate the weight on your heart, even if just a little. “You said you had something to tell me? Good news after bad news, and all that.”

“Oh. Right. I forgot about that.”

You thought for a second. Today was the day you had planned to confess your feelings to Jake - you’d only told him you had good news to share. But what was the point now that he was leaving? If he felt the same way, it would only make his departure that much harder, and if he didn’t, it would ruin your last moments together. It just wasn’t worth it.

Jake tilted his head, waiting for you to speak. In a split second, you made yourself forget your disappointment over having built the courage to tell him how you felt only for it all to fall through, and resolved to make the most of Jake’s last month here. You wiped your tears and mirrored his small smile as best you could. “Um, it wasn’t anything much. My mum made those cowboy cookies you like.”

Jake’s head fell back as he groaned in anticipation. “If she wasn’t happily married with three kids, I’d marry your mum. Let’s go right now.”

You laughed. “There’d be a bit of an age gap there.”

“We’d make it work,” Jake joked, throwing his arm around your shoulders as you walked towards your house. He beamed down at you, his bright, boyish smile that you loved to bits, and you beamed up at him as you grabbed the hand that hung off your shoulder in your own.

You walked as happily as you could. “Do you even speak Korean?” you suddenly asked.

Jake halted abruptly in his steps, a gravely offended look on his face. When you looked back at him in confusion, he rolled his eyes and started walking again, pulling you with him. “It’s literally my mother tongue, Y/N. I speak it every day at home.”

“Oh, right.”

At the time, you thought nothing could come between you and Jake. Not anyone, not anything, neither distance nor time. But they did. A week after he’d left, a boy from your class you’d talked to maybe once or twice asked you out on a date. You weren’t sure why, but you said yes. Then you said yes to being his girlfriend, even though you didn’t like him all that much, and you even said yes to reducing your texting with Jake because it made him jealous. When you’d broken up with him and wanted to catch up with Jake and apologise for your absence, you’d found that his new school in Seoul was a lot more demanding than yours in Brisbane, and he had to spend most of his evenings in academies if he wanted to get into a nice university. It’s when you learned that he’d be staying in South Korea for college that you decided to leave Australia too. Brisbane was a lot less fun without him there - why bother staying? You couldn’t go to him because of the language barrier and the cost of university there. If you were to essentially uproot your life, might as well go somewhere you could get a scholarship and understand the people around you. 

It seemed insane that someone you had thought would be by your side for the rest of your life, someone that was part of your most cherished memories, had been reduced to someone you casually texted once in a while. It seems even more insane that now that you’re finally done essentially grieving your friendship with Jake, he stands in front of you again, six inches taller but still donning those puppy-like eyes and smile of his.

For your sake, you just hoped you wouldn’t be as in love with him at twenty as you were at fourteen.

--

The next day, you show Jake around campus, which wouldn’t normally take more than ten minutes, but takes double that time because of the sheer amount of people there. Between the Societies Fair taking up most of the square, the tour guides leading freshers, walking slowly and taking in their new campus, and the pizza and drinks stands, freshers’ week always turns campus into what feels like the busiest place on Earth. You try not to let it hit a nerve for Jake’s sake, who’s clearly ecstatic at all the activity, but you like this place a lot more when it’s quieter. You walk through the Fair, laughing as Jake marvels at all the different clubs and societies at the Uni. 

“Gardening Society? Dungeons & Dragons Society? Wine society?” he exclaims, astonishment growing with every passing stand.

“And this is only the first day. They also have a Taylor Swift Society.” He grabs a flyer from about every society, even though you know he’ll join between two to zero of them. 

When you walk out, there’s a girl handing out samples of shampoo and conditioner, and you let her give you one, more out of politeness than anything. 

“These are so useless,” you start, and Jake chuckles, unaware of the incoming rant. “I had that job of distributing them last year, and we would get a tip if we gave them all out. So naturally I put a bunch in my bag, but then I had to use them for like two weeks.” You sigh. “First of all, my hair did not like it. And second, the ratio is so off. There’s way more conditioner than shampoo when it should be the other way around, so you have to condition your hair even though it’s not properly clean. So stupid.”

“Sounds terrible,” Jake says, laughing. “Is that why you’re not doing it this year?”

“Oh… Not really. I dated the guy that takes care of this promo stuff, so it would’ve been kinda awkward…” you trail, immediately wishing you could backtrack on conversation. Talking about your ex with Jake wasn’t on your to-do list for today. Or ever.

“You dated your boss?”

“The manager, yeah, I guess. He was only 24, though, don’t worry.”

“I’m more worried about the power imbalance than the age gap there.”

You shrug, looking down at your shoes. “It’s not like he was that high up.”

“So, what happened? Why did you break up?”

“Well, he acted like our four-year age difference meant he could treat me like a little kid. It was nice being taken care of at first but then I realised how condescending he was and dumped him.”

“How long were you together?”

You pause. “Two weeks,” you admit abashedly, making Jake chuckle. “At least he didn’t waste my time and showed his red flags early on.”

“Any boyfriends since?” he asks, and you wonder whether you’re making up the unsure tone of his voice. As if he’s curious, but doesn’t want to show it too much. You hope you’re not making it up.

“A few, but they never last very long with me,” you say, a meek smile on your lips. “Furthest I got was three months.”

“And why didn’t it work out with three-months-guy?”

“He started comparing me to his mum a bit too often.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah, I ran out of there without looking back.”

“Well, it’s nice to see you’ve got high standards. I would hate to see you date just any loser.”

You want to say, High standards or issues?, but you don’t want to make it weird, so you play it cool instead. “I would never. I have a mental checklist with everything a guy needs to have for me to date him.”

“A checklist? I have to hear about this.”

You sigh, debating whether you should tell him about it. Would he notice it’s based on him? Would he notice the only person that could tick practically every box was none other than him? Jake gently elbows your side, goading you on. When you look at him, he’s got a shit-eating grin playing on his lips, and you give in. You look off into the distance as you start listing your requirements. “Well, there’s all your basics like funny, taller than me but not too much, ‘cause I don’t want neck cramps, smart, takes uni seriously, has plans for his future, easy to talk to, not emotionally stunted and can actually have a vulnerable conversation. It’s also a bonus if he has a nice face.”

“How much of a bonus?”

You think for a second. “It’s more a dealbreaker than a bonus, actually. Nice smile is a must, definitely.”

“Okay. Got any more specifics?”

“I do have some particular ones. It’s nice if he’s a reader, but it’s terrible if it makes him think he’s better than everyone or if he tries to sound smarter than me. I like it if he has experience, I don’t want to have to teach him everything. But obviously I don’t want him to still be in love with his ex. Guys and their first loves, I swear… I also don’t really like picky eaters.” You look over at Jake and take a double-take. He’s typing away on his phone, but because of his privacy screen protector, you can’t see anything. You huff. “I also don’t like it if he has those protective screens on his phone. What’s on there that’s so important that I can’t take a peek? What are you even doing?”

The sweet sound of Jake’s giggles erases any trace of annoyance that you felt seconds ago. He turns his screen towards you, showing the list of mostly ticked boxes that he’s written up. “See? I check most of these,” he says with a proud smile. “Guess your standards aren’t that high.” You don’t tell him that your standards are high, he’s just that amazing. 

You do your best to look only amused at this even though inside, you’re all but freaking out. “Which are you missing?”

“Well, I clearly own a privacy screen. And I don’t have much experience. Not nearly as much as you, by the sounds of it,” he admits, somewhat sheepish. “But other than that, I’m practically the perfect man for you.” He looks down at you with a smile so bright, it makes you wish you had brought sunglasses. It takes everything in you not to scream right then and there. Yes, Jake, you are the perfect man for me, but I wish you wouldn’t say it like it was a joke.

You let out a stiff chuckle, and, rather than saying something stupid and possibly damaging, shift the conversation to him. “What do you mean by not much experience? Have you not dated anyone?”

Jake sighs. “Nope, not anyone. I went on a few dates, you know, went through a few talking stages and all that, but it never went much further. There was always something…” He glances at you then. “Missing.”

“I know that feeling,” you say with a chuckle, and he laughs too, a breathy sound.

“I don’t have a checklist to pinpoint what it is, though.”

You smile. “You should try, it might help.”

“I just… I guess I’m like you in that I also have high standards. But it made me not even want to give anyone a chance, especially since I knew it wouldn’t end up anywhere.”

“Don’t tell me no one has ever managed to reach the great Jake Sim’s standards?” you ask, trying to keep your tone light.

Jake smiles, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Of course someone has. She’s the whole reason I have standards in the first place. It’s not my standards I compare people to, it’s her.”

Jealousy has never made you feel as sad as it is right now. “And… it didn’t work out between you?”

Jake looks at you, eyes searching for something in yours but seemingly not finding it, and so he turns his gaze away. You don’t know why you feel so disappointed. “Nope,” he says, popping the ‘p’. “She didn’t feel the same way.”

Whoever this girl is, you can’t believe how stupid she is for passing up the opportunity to have Jake Sim. “That’s… It sucks, I’m sorry,” you say. You don’t think spitting on this girl would make him feel any better, so you keep those thoughts to yourself.

“It’s okay,” he says with a small smile. “It was a while ago already.”

“Doesn’t sound like you’re quite over it, though,” you say, and you’re surprised but glad to see his smile widen.

“That’s true.” His eyes meet yours again. “I don’t think I’ll be over her anytime soon, either.” You have to look away to shield the pain that flashes through your eyes from him.

Pretending you don’t have feelings for your best friend and that you’re okay with him being in love with someone else is like riding a bike: even after years of not doing it, it only takes a few minutes for you to be able to do it perfectly again. Muscle memory, if you will. So you sigh dramatically and throw your arm around Jake’s shoulder, slightly pulling him down to your level. “Don’t worry. We’re going to have so much fun this year, you’ll completely forget about her. Promise. She doesn’t know what she’s missing. Yeah?” 

He smiles down at you. You want nothing more but that glint of melancholy in his eyes to be gone. “Yeah.”

--

Jake is only half-glad to see you haven’t changed much from your childhood and early teenage years. You’re still just as pretty, just as warm; it’s still as comfortable to be around you. You’re also still as dense.

Then and now, he did everything he could to make his feelings for you very, very obvious. Either you’re completely oblivious, or the idea of dating him is so horrifying to you, you understand but pretend you don’t. He really hopes it’s the former. 

He arrived in Edinburgh just a bit over a week ago, and you’ve seen each other almost every day. Out of those times, there isn’t a single one where he hasn’t tried to send something your way - something that says, hey, what if we stopped being friends and dated instead? Wouldn’t that be cool? Can’t you see how desperately I love you?, but you never latch on. The ball’s in your court, and he wants you to throw it back, but it’s been feeling more like a boomerang that always hits him right in the face when it circles back than a game of catch.

But he’s reminding himself not to be too greedy. Even if it’s just as friends, at least he has you back, so he’s satisfied with that. For now.

His first class of the year is on the following Tuesday morning, a ninety-minute seminar specifically made for exchange students called Discover Scotland. (He has Mondays free, resulting in a three-day weekend, which you and your 9am Monday tutorial are very envious of.) As interesting as the English Lit courses he’s taking seem, it’s this one he’s most looking forward to - except for the one class he shares with you, of course. Not even because of the seminars themselves, which will be about all sorts of topics on Scottish culture and history, but because of the coursework, as crazy as that sounds. It consists of a singular project, not due until the very last day of the semester, in which he has to travel to at least three different places in the country, research its background and provide a detailed account of his experience there. It can take any form: a written report, an in-class presentation, a podcast, anything. He could even film a TikTok if he wanted. Jake knew that being part of the Arts & Crafts club for two years in a row back in Seoul wasn’t for nothing - his scrapbooking skills would finally have their time to shine. 

That afternoon, he practically snatches you as you come out of your lecture, giving you little time to say bye to your friends, and makes you take him to the biggest stationary store you know in the city. If he wants to ace this project, he will need supplies. Many, many supplies. And it’s more fun shopping if you’re with him. You seem happy following him around the store, and when he asks you if you want to come on his trips with him, he can pretend it’s because you seem so excited about his project and not because he had thought of you accompanying him as soon as he heard about it.

As you stand in line at the till, you tell him that if he wants to start his project now, you could go to the beach together. You raise your eyebrows at him when he snaps your head towards you. “There’s a beach here?!”

“Did you not look at a map before coming here?” you ask, amused.

“I guess I didn’t…” he says, distraught at the new information. It only lasts a second, though. “Okay, let’s go now.”

“Now?” you echo, and he nods. “But-” you start, but are interrupted by your thoughts. “I guess there’s no reason not to. The weather’s nice and it’s not like I have any uni work yet. Let’s go,” you agree, looking up at him with a smile. You’re so pretty he almost forgets to look away, until the employee calls Next in a bored drawl. 

An hour later, you’re at the beach, barefoot on the sand and ice cream in hand. Strawberry for you and vanilla for him, he notes with a smile. Really not much has changed, he thinks. From the sand, to the water, to the promenade along the beach, Portobello is worlds away from the beaches back home in Australia, or those of Jeju Island. But it’s still nice, and because you’re with him, it’s even better. You’ve been walking around for an hour, splashing each other with water and mercilessly ruining sandcastles left behind before he realises you technically came here for his project. He writes down things he doesn’t want to forget on his phone and snaps a few pictures, sneaking a few of you when you’re not looking. He wants to tell you how beautiful you are with your hair blowing in the wind and the way the chill bites at your cheeks, but he keeps it a secret between him and his Notes app. 

Even though he lives two stops further down, he gets off from the bus with you, containing his excitement as best he can when you invite him up for a cup of tea. “Depends. What tea do you have?” he asks, trying and failing to play it cool. He’s just grateful he doesn’t have to come up with an excuse to spend more time with you.

You roll your eyes playfully as you unlock the front door to your building. “I can make you hot chocolate, Mister Tea-Is-For-Old-People.”

He chuckles. “Actually, I’ll have you know I started drinking tea at uni.” When you turn around to look at him, a surprised look on your face, he nods proudly. “Mh-hm. I got addicted to caffeine very quickly into first year so I started drinking black tea for the sake of my heart,” he explains.

“God,” you say breathily, sounding mildly horrified. “A caffeine addiction sounds intense.”

“It was, yeah,” he says, laughing as he follows you into your flat. 

Yunjin and Chaewon are sitting at the living room table, watching an episode of what he thinks is Gossip Girl, and they greet him as normally as these two can, but he wonders what the knowing look they exchange is all about. He’d met them the previous weekend when you had all gone for drinks together, along with Jay, Yunjin’s boyfriend, and they had all but grilled him on his relationship with you. He hadn’t thought much of it, chalking it up to your friends feeling protective of you, and truthfully, he was just happy to get to talk about you. But now, he was wondering if you had told them anything about him that made them so curious about him. If you did, he hoped it was something positive.

He stands awkwardly in the kitchen, chatting with you as you boil the water and get cups out, but he can feel their gazes burning the back of his head. Clearly, whatever conversation he’s having with you, he’s also having it with them. “How do you take your tea?” you ask.

“Um, three sugars and lots of milk, please,” he says, smiling innocently when you slowly turn to look at him, a mix of disapproval, disgust, and offence on your face. 

You sigh deeply. “I mean, I’ll do it, but I’m not sure that’s even tea anymore.”

“You’re one to talk, Miss Caramel Frappuccino,” he says, recycling your bad joke from earlier.

“At least I don’t claim to be drinking coffee when I order a frap,” you argue. “And this is how you battled your coffee addiction? You’ll be getting another kind of heart problem, Jakey.” He doesn’t know if you even notice your use of his old nickname - the first time you’ve used it since he’s been here - but you don’t make a big deal of it, so he doesn’t either. Not outwardly, at least. Mentally, he’s running laps around your small kitchen.

Jake laughs it off. “I thought I came here for tea, not a health check-up,” he says, smile growing wider at the sight of yours. 

“Right, sorry,” you say, giggling. “I’ll make your tea just how you like it,” you add in a sweet voice. Jake knows you’re just doing it as a joke, but it still manages to make butterflies erupt in his stomach. 

His tea tastes even sweeter that day.

--

A few days after your impromptu trip to the beach, you’re waiting for Jake outside of his class. He heard of this donut shop he “absolutely needs to visit” and is dragging you along with him - well, “dragging” is a big word considering you’d follow him anywhere. You got here a few minutes early, not needing much of a reason to leave the library, so you scroll through your feed until Jake calls out your name. You’re only mildly surprised to see Jay leaving the classroom behind him.

“Y/N! Can you believe that Jay and I are in the same class?” he says excitedly as the two boys walk toward you. You feel like a dog owner being greeted by their over-enthusiastic dog after a long day (about three hours) of being apart.

“I can believe it, actually. You two do the same degree.”

You exchange quick greetings with Jay before the three of you start heading out. As you walk, Jake throws his arm around your shoulders so casually, it almost throws you off balance. Physical contact always came easy to him, but there’s something about him doing it next to someone else that catches you off guard. It reminds you of walking somewhere with Jay and Yunjin as they discretely held hands. It makes you feel like it’s not the three of you, but Jay with the two of you. Like you and Jake come as a pair rather than as two individuals. 

All of that from a simple arm around your shoulders.

Jake asking you in a very unsubtle whisper whether Jay can come with brings you out of your head and back into the conversation. “Yeah, of course,” you say, smiling. It’s not a bad idea to have Jay along: hanging out with someone else might snap you out of your delusion.

Most of the walk to the shop is done in laughter as Jake and Jay realise how much random stuff they have in common, from their peanut allergies to the embarrassing Harry Potter phase they had as fifteen-year-olds. Grassmarket is really busy on Friday afternoons, and there’s a bit of a queue of other donut-enjoyers in front of the boutique, but you don’t mind. The sun is shining down gently on the square and it gives you time to choose your donut out of the ten or so flavours available. In the end, you go for white chocolate and raspberry, while Jake chooses Biscoff and Jay, tiramisu. 

“My friend Sunghoon would love this,” he says after taking a hearty bite. “He goes crazy over tiramisu. Like a cat with catnip.”

Jake chuckles, mouth full of Biscoff. “That’s funny, I also have a friend named Sunghoon who loves tiramisu back in Seoul.”

Jay punches Jake’s shoulder, eyes wide in amusement and shock. “Bro, that’s crazy. You have to be lying at this point,” he says, but Jake shakes his head fervently. 

“I promise I’m not. I’ve even saved his number with the tiramisu emoji.”

“There’s a tiramisu emoji?” Jay asks, already over questioning the existence of Jake’s Sunghoon.

The conversation circles back to the courses you’re all taking this semester, and Jake tells Jay about Discover Scotland and the trips he’s planned so far. “Well, if you really want to discover Scotland as a student, you need to go on a night out in Glasgow,” Jay says. Going by the look on Jake’s face, Jay’s idea seems to have struck a chord in him.

“Y/N?”

You nod, finishing your mouthful of donut before speaking. “Yeah, Glasgow’s really fun. We should go,” you say, laughing when the two boys high-five in victory. Between the train, the drinks and the club entry, going out isn’t a cheap ordeal, and getting to and fro also takes a while - even so, the smile on Jake’s face makes it worth it. 

He wipes some raspberry jam from the corner of your mouth, shooting you a wink, and you want to disintegrate right then and there, become one with the bench you’re sitting on and never have to face him again. The conversation resumes as Jay tells Jake about all the best places to go out in Glasgow, but you don’t hear a word - the feeling of Jake’s thumb so close to your lips takes away your ability for coherent thought.

“It’s decided, then. We’re going out tomorrow night,” Jay loudly announces. “Let me gather the troops.”

That’s how you find yourself in line for the club the next day, already tipsy from pre-drinking on the train and at the pub. It’s still warm enough for you and the girls to wear as little clothing as you want, but Jake insisted on giving you his flannel jacket anyway. If not for the warmth it brings, you’re glad to have his scent enveloping you.

The five of you work exceptionally well together. You, Chaewon and Yunjin have been a given since you met in first year, and Jay and Yunjin went so well together that he was but a natural addition to your little group. Jake’s only been here for over a week, but it’s like he’s always been around, and you couldn’t be happier about it. Him and Jay hit it off immediately, and although the girls needed some time to warm up to him (it’s not everyday that you meet your friend’s ex-best-friend she’s practically always been in love with; you understand why they might’ve been wary at first), they now tease him just as relentlessly as they do Jay. He takes it like a champ.

For a little while, you watch your friends speaking over each other, bickering over nothing, a smile on your face. Two pints of cider and some of Jay’s fancy vodka have made you more grateful than ever for them - if you drink too much in the club, you’ll be hugging them and crying about how much you love them. You’re not sure what that might look like around Jake, so you decide to keep yourself in check for the night. 

It takes about thirty minutes before you manage to get into the club. It’s not coat check season yet, so you head straight to the bar. “Sunghoon said he’d meet us here,” Jay says, lifting his head to spot his friend in the sea of drunk students. “Oh yeah, there he is! Hoon, hey!” 

You hear a loud “Jongseong!” being shouted from somewhere in the crowd, but you’re not sure who Jay is waving at until a boy whose face is mostly eyebrows is standing - well, standing as best as he can, with the copious amount of alcohol he’s obviously already consumed - in front of you. He gives Jay a hug and the three of you a nod of his head, a lopsided smile on his face. When he turns to Jake, his eyebrows lift first, then his face breaks into a wide grin.

“Jake, my man!” he shouts, taking a stunned Jake’s hand and bringing him into a hug. 

“Sunghoon? What the hell are you doing here?” he asks, chuckling and frowning in confusion. 

“I’m just partying, man! Same as you!”

“No, I mean here in Scotland, you dumbass!”

“You two know each other?” Jay asks, looking back and forth between his two friends.

“Jake’s my man!” Sunghoon exclaims, unhelpful and stumbling as he throws an arm around his man’s shoulders. Jake shoots you a distressed look but you just laugh at him.

“This is Tiramisu Sunghoon I told you about,” Jake says, helping Sunghoon stand up straight.

“God, what I would do for a tiramisu right now,” Sunghoon says, looking at Yunjin like she might relate. She chuckles awkwardly.

“I have no idea what he’s doing in Scotland, though. Hoon, I thought you were going to NYU for your exchange?”

Sunghoon pauses to think for a second, looking like he’s never heard of NYU in his life. “Oh, that! Yeah, I did an online orientation thing and… it did not go well. Let’s just say there’s someone in New York City who wants me dead,” he says conspiratorially. You all stare at him but he gives no further explanation. On your right, you hear Yunjin whisper what the fuck under her breath. “So I transferred here instead!”

“I didn’t know you were an exchange student,” Jay says, still looking just as confused.

“Yeah, man! But anyways, let’s not talk about uni right now. I’m on a bender, day three, baby! Do not talk to me tomorrow,” he says, chuckling until the smile suddenly drops from his face. “I mean that.” You look around yourself, glad to find everyone is just as baffled as you. “Let’s party!” Sunghoon cheers, intoxicated grin back on his lips. Jake and Jay follow, but you and the girls stay back for a second, taking in everything that has just happened.

“That. Is the most beautiful man I have ever seen,” Chaewon blurts, staring blankly at the spot Sunghoon stood in a second ago.

“Yeah, he also seems to be a raging alcoholic. And he’s what, twenty-one?” Yunjin says, a scowl on her face. 

“I could fix him.”

“Okay, let’s go,” you say, grabbing your friends by their wrists before either of them can say something worse.

Feeling generous, Sunghoon buys shots for all six of you, and you quickly down them before heading to the dancefloor. On your way there, a group of sober-looking girls hand Chaewon a giant, still almost full jug of red liquid, something that costs at least twelve pounds here. They say they’re leaving and don’t need it anymore, smiling as you profusely and astonishedly thank them. You look at your friends, mentally weighing the risk and drugging possibility this might present, but shrug and pass the jug around after taking hearty sips anyway. It tastes so much like fizzy cherries that you wonder if it even contains any alcohol, but sure enough, twenty minutes later, the three of you are spinning around on the dancefloor, screaming the lyrics to your favourite pop songs at the top of your lungs. Jake at a club is a completely foreign sight to you, and you can’t stop laughing at all the silly moves he pulls. 

You’re shaking your whole body to a Nicki song from the early 2010s when you suddenly feel a hand on your hip. Before you can turn around and slap whoever this random man is that thinks he can touch you, a familiar voice whispers it’s just me in your ear, and you simultaneously relax and tense up knowing that Jake is standing right behind you. “There’s a creep staring at you,” he explains, lips and breath gently tickling your ear as he speaks. You look around the room and quickly notice a man standing in a corner, drink in one hand and the other in his pocket, unmoving as he eyes you with a smirk so slimy it makes your stomach turn. To avoid his gaze, you turn around, but you’re not sure the sight you’re met with is much better for you.

Jake peers down at you, eyes slightly glossed over and cheeks flushed from the alcohol, jaw locked in annoyance. He glances at the guy in the corner, who you assume is still staring when you feel Jake’s hands brush along your sides until they reach your waist. His gaze returns to your face as he brings you a step closer to him. Reflexively, you wrap your arms around his neck. 

“Is this okay?” he mouths. All you can do is meekly nod. You watch as his eyes deliberately scan your face, going down and down. Time stills when they reach your lips and stay there. It’s like someone has put the booming music of the club on mute, and the only thing you can hear is your heart loudly beating in your ears. You suddenly feel very sober.

You swear Jake’s face is slowly inching its way towards yours when you’re abruptly taken away. Yunjin has grabbed you by the forearm, leading you and Chaewon to the bathroom as she chants “Bathroom break! Bathroom break!”, clearly unaware of the moment she’s just interrupted.

Because of the queue for the girls’ bathroom and Chaewon’s decision to console this random girl who was in the middle of a breakdown, it’s not until half-an-hour later that you emerge back into the crowd. You spot the boys at a table, two empty shots each in front of them and all three with a beer in hand. They will not be happy checking their bank accounts tomorrow morning. 

“Y/N! You’re back!” Jake calls out happily when he spots you, and you can tell right away that he’s much drunker than when you left him. His whole face is flush, his eyes don’t open quite all the way, and a lopsided smile won’t leave his lips - even like this, he’s so pretty that you want to grab his hand and take him somewhere it’s just the two of you. 

Chaewon gets drinks for the three of you and then you’re dancing again. It’s already one am at this point, and the remaining two hours until the club closes, fueled with alcohol and good music, go by in a flash. Before you know it, the DJ is playing All of Me by John Legend and the lights have been turned on, clear signs that you’re overstaying your welcome. The few people that have made it to closing time stumble out of the club and into the street, heading for either the nearest subway stop or the next party of the night. Since there are no trains at this time, your group walks to the close-by bus station, listening to Jake and Sunghoon grumble about how the clubs in Seoul don’t close until at least five or six and how trains run all night there. 

The bus is already at the station when you get there, and the driver doesn’t seem too pleased about having six mildly drunk kids get on his bus, but he’s probably used to questionable people taking public transport at this time of the day anyway. Physically, Sunghoon is sitting across from you, but mentally, he’s off somewhere far, far from this bus. With his head against the window and mouth wide open, saliva pooling at the corner of his lips, he looks like he’s any second away from obnoxiously snoring. Jay and Yunjin are sitting somewhere you can’t see them, probably eating each other’s faces; she once told you they had their “most mind-blowing sex” when both a little drunk, and much to your dismay, you haven’t been able to get that piece of information out of your head since. Chaewon is on the phone to her long-distance bestie Sakura, for whom it’s a nice eleven in the morning right now. 

This means that you and Jake are left alone, both of you still tipsy and not tired enough to fall asleep. You drop your head on Jake’s shoulder, and not only does he let you, he also takes your hand in his, interlacing your fingers and placing them atop his thigh. Clumsily, because he now has to use his left hand, Jake slips his phone out of his back pocket and shows you the photos he took all evening. As the night progresses, they get blurrier and blurrier, so much so that towards the end, you can’t tell what he was even trying to capture, and you laugh at how inappropriate some of these would be to submit in a university project. 

When he softly says your name, you don’t raise your head, simply humming to let him know you’re listening. You close your eyes, cherishing the way your name sounds on his lips. It’s his tone, tentative and vulnerable as he tells you there’s something he’s been wanting to ask you, that makes you look up at him. He, however, won’t meet your eyes, and settles his gaze on the window, even though it’s so dark outside you can’t make out a thing.

“How come you never replied to my letter? I know it’s been ages, but… I still find myself wondering about it.” The question is softly asked and you know he by no means wants to hurt you, but it still feels like a punch to the throat. You hadn’t remembered who it was that had sent the last letter, while he’d been wondering all these years why his words had been left unanswered. 

He seems set on not looking at you, so you rest your head back on his shoulder. Your hand is still in his. “I’m not sure, Jakey. I’m sorry,” you say, aware it’s not a satisfying answer. You’ve thought about why you and Jake had stopped talking for hours on end; you’ve discussed it with your friends and your mum, looked at it from all sorts of angles, tried to come up with real reasons other than time pulling you apart. But now that Jake himself is asking you about it, the words don’t come easy. You’ve theorised that you were afraid putting effort into sustaining your friendship would only hurt you in the end, because it was just that - a friendship. You could fool yourself into thinking you were okay only being friends with him when he was with you, that putting your feelings aside was worth it since you could at least spend time with him. But now that he was away, you didn’t have that anymore - it just hurt. So what was the point? And how could you phrase all this without betraying your feelings for him?

“Our letters were so sparse anyway back then, even our texts and calls were getting less and less frequent… And whenever I had a new boyfriend, I’d get into the same argument about being too close to you over and over again, even though you were literally on another continent.” 

“You know, I always felt sorry about that.”

“About what?”

“Those boyfriends of yours. I felt like you waited for me to leave before you started dating-”

“It wasn’t like that!” you exclaim, lifting your head again. Finally, he meets your eyes, gaze softening upon seeing your affronted expression. “It wasn’t like that,” you repeat, relaxing your tone. “If anything, they were the ones that waited for you to be gone. I'm sorry I let their jealousy get to me.”

Jake smiles, the tenderness in his gaze making your whole body turn to jelly. He squeezes your hands. “It’s okay. I just… I felt like I was always in the way of your relationships, even after I left.”

“You don’t have to feel sorry about that. They should’ve had more trust in me.”

He pauses, gaze dropping down to your intertwined hands. “I would’ve been jealous.” When his eyes find yours again, there’s something in them that you quite can’t place. It creates a ball of nerves that pull at your stomach. “If I were dating you, and you had a guy friend you were as close with as we were back then, I’d be jealous. You know, I’d assume he had feelings for you. And that you might have feelings for him, too.”

Because I did, you think. I did, and I still do. You try to communicate that thought to Jake, but telepathy works especially bad when one has as much alcohol coursing through their veins as you do right now. So instead, you say the opposite of what you’re thinking, turning away from Jake to avoid his gaze. You watch the dribble of saliva trickle from Sunghoon’s lips. “That’s not a great view of male-female friendship.” 

Jake’s retort comes immediately. “But we were different, right?”

His words echo through your head until they make even less sense than they did initially. Different from what? From who? You’re not sure - but you like the idea of you and Jake being different, special. You especially like the idea of Jake thinking so. So you look at him and smile. “Right.” 

Slowly, his grin fades and turns into a worried expression. “Y/N?”

“Mm?”

“We’re still different now, aren’t we?”

You want to wrap him in your arms so tightly neither of you can breathe. You settle for running a hand through his hair and pinching his cheek. “Course we are.” Your whole being relaxes when his face breaks into a smile again. 

--

The next morning, you wake up to Yunjin plopping down on your bed unceremoniously, shaking you awake, and asking you if you want anything from Snax Café. On one hand, you’re grateful that she thought of you and that in thirty minutes’ time, you’ll have the greasiest sausage wrap and hash browns known to man in your hand; on the other, you’d like to think that she knows you well enough to know to order your regular from there without asking. But that’s probably the hangover talking.

You stumble out of bed, thanking last night’s you for having remembered to take headache medicine before crashing. Even if your stomach is very upset with the copious amount of alcohol it needs to rid your body of, and your throat is begging for water, at least your head doesn’t feel like it’s been split into two. As Yunjin barges into Chaewon’s room just as she had done yours, you head for the kitchen to get yourself a tall glass of revitalising tap water. You’re only mildly surprised to find Sunghoon passed out on your living room couch - it takes you a few seconds to remember that the three of you took pity on him when you learned he lived over an hour’s walk from the station, so you let him spend the night on your uncomfortable, cold leather sofa. While you down your glass in three gulps, you hear Yunjin shaking Sunghoon awake and asking him loudly if he wanted something from Snax.

“Fuck, I’d kill for a Snax right now,” he groggily says before he’s even opened his eyes. When he does, they dart around the room until they land on Yunjin, who's crouching in front of him. He looks like he thought her question was asked in a dream and not in real life. He also looks like he's not quite sure where he is, or who Yunjin is. It isn’t until Jay comes wobbling out of Yunjin’s bed to the couch opposite Sunghoon that the memories seem to piece back together in his head. The three of you watch him like he’s an unstable mental patient and you’re his doctors. 

“No need for that, I’m ordering it on Deliveroo.” He nods his head and goes back to sleep for the time being. 

Just as you’re about to text Jake, your phone rings with a call from him. His raspy morning voice as he asks you whether you slept well makes you want to put your head in an oven heated at 200 degrees Celsius. However, you resist the urge, and answer him with a smile, then ask him the same question.

“I slept pretty well too. I’d have slept in longer but one of my flatmates decided to have a Sunday fucking brunch and his friends are so loud. Can I come over?”

You’re very aware of the other people in the room, especially of Chaewon who has just walked in and is eyeing you suspiciously as if to say, Why are you smiling so hard at ten in the morning? You know the girls would jump at any opportunity to tease you about Jake, and with the added presence of Sunghoon in the room, you can’t have that. So you stifle the giggles bubbling in your throat and answer as nonchalantly as you can. It also gives you the chance to reflect on why Jake Sim asking you whether he can come over makes you want to giggle like a giddy schoolgirl so much.

(Maybe it’s because when it comes to him, you’re still the giddy schoolgirl you used to be.)

“Yeah, of course. I was going to ask you if you wanted anything from Snax, actually.”

“Snax? What’s that?”

“Oh my God, Jake, am I about to introduce you to Snax right now?”

Twenty minutes later, the six of you are sitting around your small living room table, all varying amounts of tired, dehydrated and famished as you dig into your breakfast. Given your current levels of energy, it’s fairly quiet; plus, the food hits such a spot that it’s hard to talk and eat at the same time. Jake eats like he’s never had a breakfast wrap and hash brown in his life. It’s an endearing sight if you’ve ever seen one. 

You spend the afternoon together, watching movies curled up in your bed, and you try desperately not to think about the implications of that - except that’s hard to do when Jake is right next to you, legs and arms ever-so-slightly brushing against yours, his warmth so close yet so out of reach. You purposefully let him pick movies you’ve already seen so that you don’t have to focus on anything but your own thoughts and the faint but dizzying scent of his body wash. The both of you had an innumerable amount of sleepovers as kids, so this shouldn’t feel weird, but it decidedly does, probably because you’re much more aware of him now in a way you weren’t before.  

As hard as you try to figure out what exactly he meant by “different,” you draw a blank. The only way you’ll understand is if you ask him, and you’re far too scared to do that. You don’t want to seem so hung upon a singular word he used when he was tipsy. It might be slightly dramatic, but you felt like some sort of balance had been restored since Jake was back in your life - the problem was it made you scared to do anything that might threaten this newfound equilibrium. It at least seems like different means a good thing to him, and that’s enough for you. 

You look over to him when the second movie comes to an end. He’s sleeping peacefully, lashes caressing the skin under his eyes and cheeks looking rounder than usual. It’d be so easy to reach a finger out and trace the line descending from the top of his forehead to his chin, gliding along the bump of his nose and feeling the plumpness of his rosy lips, but you settle for drawing that line with your eyes instead.  

You don’t think you’ll be able to fall asleep with him next to you and your heart beating so loudly in your ears, but you find yourself waking up a few hours later, the sun already starting to set. Jake is already awake, scrolling on his phone, one arm casually behind his head as if being in your bed is as comfortable to him as being in his own. When he sees you’ve woken up, his honey-coated smile washes warmly over you, and he makes a joke about how he keeps on falling asleep when he’s with you. “I feel that at ease, I guess,” he says, and you hope you’re not making up the small blush that spreads over his cheeks. 

--

Semesters are always a short and intense affair, but this one passes by even quicker with Jake by your side. Before you know it, it’s midterms already, and you and Jake have travelled enough for him to complete his project and make another one just for the hell of it. He had scoured the internet for the cheapest train tickets and most noteworthy sites, planning trips that lasted anywhere between three hours and a day for the two of you. All you needed to do was follow and trust him, which was the easiest thing anyone could’ve asked of you. 

You’ve gone back to Glasgow, during the day, this time, as well as St. Andrews and Aberdeen. You’ve practically visited every loch and castle in a one-hour train ride radius of Edinburgh, and Jake has more lined up for the second part of the semester. He’s even said that your trips should continue being a thing next term, and you couldn’t have agreed faster. With every new destination, every train ride spent looking out a window or laughing about everything and anything, any odd Scottish food you try for the first time, you somehow fall for him a bit deeper. You didn’t know your love for him could bloom any more than it already had - but Jake is the gift that keeps on giving, and, unwillingly or not, he always finds new ways to make your heart speed that much faster.

Attentionate, affectionate, sweet Jake who always makes sure you’re comfortable wherever you go, always gives you his jacket or tucks your hair behind your ear to prevent it from falling in your face. Who, as time passed, grew more touchy, would hold your hand, ruffle your hair, pinch your cheek, which was simultaneously devastating and elating. Who, you could tell, started to linger more, both in his touch and in his gaze. Questions of does he love me back or am I seeing what I want to see? nearly drove you mad. 

--

“I feel like at this point the only way she’ll understand that I like her is if I kill myself and write in my suicide note that it’s her fault for not loving me back.”

Jake has been pacing back and forth in Jay’s living room for approximately twenty minutes, with no end in sight. At least he’ll have gotten most of his ten thousand steps of the day in.

Jay sighs heavily. “Okay, I really don’t think you need to go that far.”

“Sounds romantic to me,” Sunghoon says, mouth full of salted caramel popcorn.

“I hope you never get a girlfriend,” Jay retorts, looking at his deranged friend with a scowl. He turns back to his (slightly more) normal friend and gives him a sympathetic smile. 

“I mean, I told her we were different. Different. That we weren’t like regular friends. I tell her she’s pretty every chance I get. I give her my jacket all the time, even though this country is fucking cold. I’ve even given her a t-shirt of mine, sprayed with my perfume and everything. And don’t get me wrong, I do it ‘cause I love doing that for her-”

“Simp,” Sunghoon snickers.

“But what the hell else can I do? Like, she has to be ignoring it on purpose at this point.” 

“You could always, you know… tell her?”

Jake scoffs, fixing his friend with a derisive look. “Wow. What a great idea, Jay, I never thought of that one before!”

A popcorn lands right on Jay’s cheek. “You’re so clueless, man,” Sunghoon says, a shit-eating smirk on his lips. As if he knows any better.

Jay looks back-and-forth between his friends, an expression on his face like he’s been disparaged. “Sorry, I didn’t know being straightforward and honest was such a bad thing. It would just make things a lot clearer for the both of you.”

“But… I’m scared,” Jake says. 

“Man up!” Sunghoon suddenly yells, punching the sofa next to him, making his friends jump. “How can she ever figure it out if you don’t tell her?”

“You were on my side just a second ago, man, what are you doing?” Jake asks, confusion written all over his face. Sunghoon’s eyes dart back and forth between the two boys, retreating into silence as he stuffs his mouth with another handful of popcorn.

“Just ignore him,” Jay says. “But for once, he did say something that makes a modicum of sense. You think you’re being really obvious, but you might not actually be. Which could be a good sign, you know. I heard girls were super aware of a guy liking them if they weren’t into him, but being totally oblivious if they did like him.”

“Where did you hear that?” Jake asks, an eyebrow raised in suspicion.

“...Instagram Reels,” Jay reluctantly admits, frowning at Sunghoon who bursts into laughter. 

Jake holds the bridge of his nose between two fingers like his head aches. “You’re both so useless, I’m never coming to you with my problems ever again.”

“I’ll pretend I’m not offended by that.”

“I’d rather you didn’t, anyway,” Sunghoon says. He’s smiling but Jake genuinely can’t tell if he’s joking or not.

“But seriously, if you think you’ve done everything, then just do one last thing that’s so obvious she can’t misinterpret it,” Jay says.

“Like what?”

“Like kissing her, or some-”

“Kissing her?!” Jake echoes.

“That’s wild, man,” Sunghoon uselessly butts in.

“It’s just an example, calm yourselves,” Jay says. “Or, again, just straight up tell her how you feel. It’s what I did with Yunjin, and it worked.”

“You and Yunjin are dating?” Sunghoon asks, bewildered.

Jay shakes his head at him. “Where the hell have you been, bro? We were literally cuddling on the couch the other day.”

“I just thought you were really good friends, or something.”

Jake groans, holding his head in his hands. Sunghoon was of no help whatsoever, and Jay was so on point that it annoyed him. Confessing was the only solution - but Jake was so afraid of being rejected and losing your friendship that he had barely entertained the thought. But he had found the courage to do it once, and even though his planned confession had fallen through back then, he could get himself together and do it again. 

It was the day he had told you he was moving to Korea, which he himself had learned that morning. Originally, he’d texted you because he had news to share - good news. Or at least, he hoped they were good. He hoped the soft, lingering looks you gave him weren’t a figment of his imagination but rather the confirmation he needed that you liked him back. He hoped that like him, you cared too much about your friendship to make the first move into something else; that by confessing first, you’d be relieved of that responsibility; that his wish to hold your hand and kiss your forehead wasn’t one-sided. 

He decided not to prepare anything - just a couple sentences that he’d rehearsed over and over in his head. Declarations of love, bouquets of flowers, chocolate and couple keychains, all that could wait until after you’d said yes to being his girlfriend. He didn’t want to win you over just once, he wanted to show you every day how much he loved you. Fourteen-year-old Jake was absolutely head over heels for you; so imagine his disappointment when, as he was getting ready to meet with you, his parents called him downstairs, a tone to their voice Jake wasn’t familiar with, but that couldn’t mean anything good. 

“Your dad’s job is sending us back to Seoul next month,” his mom announced, not beating around the bush. He felt everything quite literally crumbling down around him. His friends in Brisbane, his school, his hobbies, but above all, you. He’d lose it all. And what was the point now in telling you how he felt? If you felt the same way, it would only make his departure that much harder, and if you didn’t, it would ruin your last moments together. It just wasn’t worth it.

What he had planned to be good news turned into the most awful ones. The thought of it happening all over again makes twenty-year-old Jake shudder. But he wouldn’t let himself be trapped by time again - sure, in seven months, the academic year would be over, and he would go back to Korea. But that didn’t mean that those seven months should be spent in agony, or the following ones either, for that matter. You would make it work. What was long-distance to someone who loved someone else as much as Jake loved you?

But he doesn’t want to get ahead of himself. He has to start by really resolving to do this, and in the off-chance that it actually goes in his favour, he’d start worrying about long distance then.

First, he has a trip to plan.

--

You should’ve known that a trip to the Scottish Highlands in the middle of November was a risky choice in terms of weather. The day started off nicely enough - no sign of rain when you woke up or as you watched the sunrise through the train window. Clouds turned the sky a bright white at first, then increasingly greyer and greyer. You feel the first drops of rain after lunch as you walk around a small village. By four pm, it’s pitch black and storming like you’ve rarely seen before. You head into a pub to grab a drink as you wait for the rain to subside, but subside it does not. You end up ordering fish and chips, one each, although one serving is enough to feed three. Even after taking your time eating, the bad weather does not let up. The last train, which is meant to be at eight pm, has been cancelled. Luckily, there’s an inn right across the road from the pub; you have no choice but to spend the night. 

The inn receptionist is sitting so low on her chair, you can barely see her over the desk until you’re standing right over it. Her face is hidden by a book and it’s only when you say hiya that she seems to realise you’re there. You had never heard of the book or of its author, but you recognized the cover design as that of those romance novels with repetitive plots and weirdly misogynistic love interests your mum and every other middle-aged woman was obsessed with.

Her smile widens as she looks between you and Jake. “Hi there. One room for the lovely couple?”

“Oh, we’re not-”

“Yes, please,” Jake interrupts, smiling down at her, then at you. “It’ll be cheaper if we share a room.”

“Our only room with two single beds is already taken, I’m afraid. One double bed okay for you two?”

You feel like you’re about to faint, so you’re glad Jake is there to answer. “Yeah, of course.” How the idea of sharing one bed with you is so okay to him, you’re not sure - granted, you’ve done it before, but this feels different. For all intents and purposes, this is a hotel room you’re staying in. And you’re staying in it with Jake. 

You try to calm your breathing as the receptionist guides you to your room, chatting casually with Jake on the way there. As she unlocks the door for you, she informs you that check-out must be done before eleven in the morning tomorrow, then bids you good night and leaves you to it, still wearing that smile you swear has mischievousness to it. The door clicks shut behind you, and it’s just Jake and you again, together in this small room until tomorrow morning. Your chances of survival are very, very low. 

Your room is a humble one, consisting of a desk, a cupboard, two armchairs, a small, separate bathroom and the infamous bed. Every surface seems to be covered with wood, from the ceiling, to the walls, to the old-fashioned furniture. Only the floor is a soft, beige carpet. Especially with the darkness outside, it makes for a gloomy room until you turn on the lamp by the entrance; it casts a warm, golden light in the room, one that would make you feel at ease if it wasn’t for Jake’s presence next to you. The implications of being essentially trapped in a barely-lit room with him are heavy on your mind, especially when he looks this gorgeous with his hair still damp from the rain and the soft lights playing on his face. 

His voice brings you out of your thoughts. “Right. Do you, um, do you wanna shower first?” he asks, setting his bag on one of the armchairs.

“Oh. Yeah, sure.” There has never been such an awkward tension between the two of you, but you know you’re not doing anything to ease it. You hope a shower will help you get out of your head and make you relax.

You feel the tension leave your muscles under the hot water, but your stomach is still in knots. You’ve never been this nervous around Jake before; back when you were fourteen and again in these past few months, you’d gotten so used to dealing with your unspoken feelings for him that you could almost forget about them when you were with him. They’d come back to you when you were alone and dwelling on the moments you’d spent together, on his words and actions you desperately tried not to read too much into but always ended up doing anyway. But right now, they’ve floated to the surface, becoming as obvious to you as a stain on your skin you can’t rub away. You’re scared Jake will notice it, and, in the worst case scenario you often thought about, would run away and never speak to you again. 

At least the raging storm outside would make that a bit harder.

When you step out of the shower, you curse yourself for not having worn more comfortable clothes on this trip. You definitely can’t wear these jeans and button-up sweater to lounge around. Thankfully, the inn provides two long bathrobes that you could wear over underwear and your tank top, but you wonder where on the scale of inappropriate this would be to wear with Jake in the room. He’s seen you in short pyjama shorts before, but this, like everything else that would usually be normal between the two of you, feels weird today. 

You wrap the bathrobe around yourself, tying it in place around your waist, and decide that it’d only be weird if you made it weird. And if Jake found the sight of your bare legs weird, then he was the weird one.

The scene you’re met with as you walk into the room makes you want to retreat into the bathroom immediately. Jake is lying on the bed with his upper half against the headboard, one leg extended and the other one bent, resting his head against one palm, using his free hand to scroll through his phone. His t-shirt has ridden up slightly, putting the waistband of his Calvin Kleins into view. Worst of all, when he sees you, his face breaks into a grin. 

Your stomach twists when he gives you a once-over, letting his gaze linger on your legs. “Did you bring a bathrobe with you or was it included?” he asks with an annoyingly handsome smirk.

You roll your eyes. “Yes, I bring a bathrobe with me wherever I go,” you say sarcastically. “Now shut up and go shower, you stink.” Reverting to insults is always the solution when you’re internally freaking out.

“Yes, ma’am.” 

He takes so long in the shower that by the time he comes out, you’ve dozed off in bed. As if you were a child, he wakes you up with a boop to the nose, crouching next to the bed and smiling at you. His wet hair falls on his head like that of a movie star in a shower scene, which you find extremely unfair, and his cheeks are red from the warmth of the water. 

“It’s still early. Do you wanna go grab another drink?”

“In our bathrobes?” you say, laughing. “Nah, I don’t really feel like drinking anyway.” Read: I’m not sure what I’ll do with alcohol in me.

“Okay, no worries. Um, I think I saw they had board games in the lobby?”

Your ears perk up at this. “Ooh, what kind of board games?”

Putting jeans on underneath his bathrobe, Jake slips away for a minute and comes back with Monopoly, Uno, and a deck of cards. “They didn’t have much for two players,” he says, dumping everything on the bed. 

You already knew that anything would become fun if you did it with Jake, but you definitely didn’t expect to spend almost five hours just playing Monopoly and card games with him. Neither of you stays put for very long, always switching from sitting criss-cross to laying on your stomach, making fun of the other’s bathrobe even though you’re wearing the exact same thing. You make each other laugh as you make up your own nonsense rules and disregard the laws of your games, attacking the other ruthlessly for a couple extra points or coins. Jake even makes you go get snacks from a corner store that’s miraculously still open because you lose the first round of Uno. 

After some time, Jake lets out a loud yawn, which in turn makes you yawn too. He checks his phone to find that it’s close to midnight already. “Time for bed?” he asks, and your nervousness that had finally dissipated as you played came rushing back. 

You nod. “Yeah, sounds good.”

The two of you clean up before brushing your teeth. Even that, with Jake by your side, becomes a silly affair as he pulls faces in the mirror and nudges your hip with his. You stay behind to use the toilet, and when you come back out, Jake’s already in bed, bathrobe tossed on one of the armchairs. This means that Jake is just casually in a t-shirt and boxers, waiting for you to join him in bed. Luckily, his back is turned to you, so you quickly take off your own bathrobe and slide under the sheets, careful to keep your distance from him. The sheets are cold underneath you, and you know it’ll take a while before your body heat warms them up - although you feel very hot and bothered because of the man lying next to you. 

“Gosh, I’m really sleepy all of a sudden,” he says, words distorted by a yawn. You only hum in response, and he reaches for the lamp to turn it off. Just like that, you’re in complete darkness, and Jake’s body is mere inches from your own. 

It’s eerily quiet for a while, and when you’ve managed to slow your heartbeat and regularise your breathing, you start trying to fall asleep. You toss and turn, unable to find a comfortable position until Jake’s low, sleepy voice breaks the silence. “Can’t sleep?” he asks, and you freeze.

You sigh. “No. I’m sorry for keeping you up,” you say guiltily.

“It’s okay. I can’t really sleep either. It’s a bit cold in here.”

You pause. “Right. Yeah, it is,” you say, even though you feel like you’re sweating buckets. 

The room plunges into silence again, long enough for you to think Jake has fallen asleep. You feel something cold against your foot, only realising as it slides up your calf that it’s his foot. “Jake!” you whisper-yell, withdrawing your leg as he bursts into giggles that warm your heart. “Your feet are so cold,” you say in-between chuckles.

“I’m cold all over,” he whines. “Have they not turned the heating on yet? It’s already mid-November.”

“People are used to the cold here.”

“Well I’m not. Can we cuddle?” he suddenly asks, and he must somehow feel the way you freeze in place because he stammers out a justification straight away. “For, I mean, just for warmth, you know. I don’t think I’ll sleep otherwise.”

His foot finds yours again and you can’t help but laugh. “Sure, fine,” you say with a sigh as if you were doing only half-heartedly for his sake. As if this was some big sacrifice you were making, and not something you’d daydreamed about one too many times before. 

Your heart is beating a thousand miles a second when you scooch closer to Jake, his hands finding your waist as easily as if they’d been there a hundred times before. He pulls you in much closer than you had expected, holding you tightly against his chest, one arm for you to use as a pillow and one hand resting on your lower back. You try to calm your respiration so that he can’t hear how short of breath you are, but based on his own breathing, he seems to be out in five minutes. It takes you longer to fall asleep, every shift of his body sending shivers down your spine, but you manage to relax after some time, letting his warmth envelop you as you drift off to sleep.

--

The feeling of waking up with you in his arms is so unreal, Jake thinks he might still be dreaming.

He looks down at your peaceful sleeping face and can’t stop the smile that spreads on his lips. Jake always thinks you’re pretty, but this is a sight he particularly wants to commit to memory. He watches fondly as the bright sun rays of the early morning hit your face, making you scrunch your eyebrows and bury your face deeper against him. You grunt softly, and when he feels you shifting and stretching your legs, he pretends to fall asleep so you don’t catch him staring. It seems like you’ve raised your head, chin tilted towards him - if he’s lucky, you’re watching him “sleep” just like he did seconds ago.

He contains a smile at the joke that forms itself in his brain before shooting his eyes open, catching you off guard during what you thought was a private, secret moment. 

“Shit!” you yelp, practically jumping off of him and rolling onto the other side of the bed. He bursts into laughter, proud that his little prank was effective. Before you can scold him, he makes his way to you, wrapping an arm around your waist and bringing your back against his chest. He thinks he feels your body tense; but then you bring your hand over his, swiping your thumb back and forth against his skin, and you relax in his hold. “You’re so annoying,” you complain, but your voice is tender, almost weak.

He buries his face in your hair, trying not to be too loud when he inhales there. “Sorry,” he says, the smile evident in his voice. “The opportunity was right there. Caught you staring, huh?”

“You’re such an idiot.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.” It’s quiet for a few minutes, and Jake is more than happy to enjoy this moment in silence, but there’s something burning the tip of his tongue. It’s been there for a while now, but he thinks he’s finally found the right moment. “Y/N?”

“Mm?”

“There’s something I couldn’t tell you last night, but I feel oddly okay saying it right now. Are you listening?” 

“I am, yeah,” you say gently, voice so soft it caresses his skin and draws goosebumps from it.

His chest expands and falls with a deep, shaky breath. With your back right against it, he’s scared you’ll hear that his heart is beating faster than it should. “Bad news first?” he says with a nervous chuckle.

“Uh-oh.”

“There’s no roundabout way to say this, so here goes, I guess.” He takes another breath. “I’m in love with you, Y/N.” You tense in his embrace, and he waits for you to say something, anything before he continues.

“Oh,” is all you say. He hopes it’s a good oh - even if it isn’t, he doesn’t let it deter him.

“Yeah. I really debated telling you this… I know you might not feel the same way. But I also know that if I don’t say anything and make the same mistake twice, I’ll beat myself up over it for the rest of my life.”

“The same mistake?” you ask, looking at him over your shoulder.

He gazes down at you tenderly, pushing hair away from your face with a gentle hand. “I already felt that way back when we lived in Australia. I was about to tell you but when I learned that I was moving, I didn’t wanna risk ruining the little time we had left together.”

The look on your face both breaks his heart and patches it up again. “Jakey…” you say, voice just a whisper. You turn around to face him and bury your face in the crook of his neck. The fact that you’re not saying much is making his stomach twist in agonising stress, but he takes it as a good sign that you’re still holding him tight and not running away.

“I think I’d be the luckiest guy on Earth if you felt the same way,” he says, hopefulness clear in his voice. 

And then he finally hears the words he’s been dying to hear all these years. “Of course, I feel the same way, Jake,” you say, eyes meeting his. “This isn’t bad news at all, it’s like, the best possible news ever.”

It takes him a few seconds, but when your words sink in, a bright smile graces his features. He feels tears coming up - tears of relief that you feel the same way, of sadness that it took the both of you so long to get here, of happiness that something new might start - he’s not sure. Perhaps everything at once.

“Of course?” he echoes, smiling wildly. “It wasn’t obvious to me.”

“Oh, gosh,” you murmur, burying yourself into him once more. “I can’t believe this is actually happening.”

He tightened his hold around you, bringing you to him as close as physically possible. “Me neither.”

The feeling of you tangling your bare legs with his and bunching up the fabric of his t-shirt in your fist awakens something in him - he had been in his head, thanking the heavens that you loved him back, reeling from his belated confession, but he was now very aware of his body. And of yours. He was reminded of Jay telling him to kiss you - although he hadn’t needed to go there to reveal his feelings to you, it was still a possibility. It was even more so now that he knew you felt the same way. 

He tries to be subtle as he brushes a hand up your back to the nape of your neck, gently grazing his fingernails against the skin there. He has to suppress a self-satisfied smirk when he feels you squirm under his touch, lifting your head to fix him with a scolding look. Your stern expression fades as soon as his eyes fall on your lips, however, and you quickly mirror his gaze. His lips part, and he feels his whole body shake as he takes a deep breath in. Who knew that you’d share your first kiss on a random Sunday morning in the fuckass middle of nowhere in Scotland?

Maybe you take pity on him, or you recognise the effort put into being the one to make the first move, or, as he’d like to think, you just really want to kiss him - either way, you’re the one who closes the gap and presses your lips to his.

Your lips. So soft, so delicate against his, absolutely perfect. It’s a simple, tentative touch, but he’s craved it for so long that it makes his head spin. He frowns, despite himself instantly needing more than this feather-like feeling of your lips brushing against each other. His mind tells him to calm down and take it slow, but his body takes over, urging him to grab the nape of your neck a little harder, to hold you a little closer to him, to kiss you a little stronger. Thankfully, you let him do all of this and more, hands finding purchase in his hair and returning his intensity tenfold. 

He doesn’t know what’s better - the fact that you’re kissing him or the kiss itself. The way your lips move against his is intoxicating; it wraps itself around its mind and leaves no room for thoughts that aren’t of you. You seem to want him as desperately as he wants you, to have waited for him as long as he did for you, and this is what drives him crazy. You press your body against his and he sees stars; you let out a moan against his lips and he kisses you deeper, ready to do anything to hear that melody again. 

Unfortunately, the only melody he gets to hear is that of his phone alarm, informing you that it’s quarter to eleven and that you have fifteen minutes to leave. Check-out at eleven am had sounded nice yesterday; now, he would stay in this dingy inn his whole life if it meant he got to keep kissing you. 

The both of you reluctantly break apart, bursting into giddy laughter when your eyes meet. As said before, Jake always thinks you’re pretty, but with your pupils blown and your lips plump from kissing, this might just be the prettiest he’s ever seen you. 

“You know, I like you a lot, but I’d like you even more if you could stop time,” you say.

He looks down at you with a smile, pushing away the strands of hair that had fallen on your face. “Sure, I’ll learn how to control time for you.”

“Thanks, Jakey.” You peck his lips, lingering, and he closes his eyes to savour your sweetness. 

“Anything for you, baby.” His eyes widen at the nickname slip, but you erupt into giggles.

“Baby?”

“Would you look at the time, we really got to go,” he says, detangling his limbs from yours. He pauses for a second. “Baby,” he repeats, pressing a quick kiss to your forehead before bouncing from the bed.

You get ready together, and the mundane tasks of stripping sheets from a bed and packing bags become the funnest things he’s ever done. You’re all over each other, attacking the other with kisses and hugs; Jake doesn’t think he’s ever felt quite this happy. 

And this is only the beginning.

--

There’s a glint in the receptionist’s eyes when you check out of your room, as if she knew something you and Jake had been oblivious to all along. It’s the only one in town, so you go back to the little pub for a full breakfast with eggs, hash browns, haggis, and sausages. You get coffee so strong you think you might not sleep for the next four days, while Jake drinks tea that is equal parts sugar, milk, and actual tea.

From the moment you leave the pub to the moment you arrive at your doorstep, Jake’s hands barely leave yours. When they have to, like when you’re searching for the perfect seat on the train or when the controller checks your tickets, they’re back together within a minute, like two magnets that can’t stay apart for too long. The rain has long subsided, leaving place to a bright blue sky and wet blades of grass that shine in the sun. 

Now that your mutual feelings don’t need to be kept secret, you tell each other about everything you had to go through, like you pretending your good news was your mum having baked the cookies Jake liked and him seeing your new boyfriends every two months on your close friends story. He tells you about all the hints he’s dropped, causing you to facepalm over and over again. It feels like two friends catching each other to speed on all the latest gossip, except the topic of that gossip is you.

The juxtaposition of your familiarity with Jake with the novelty of behaving like a couple, of not having to hold back with your touches or gazes or words, is nothing if not jarring. But you have a feeling you’ll get used to it in no time. 

As you unlock the front door to your building, you don’t ask him if he’s coming up - to you, it’s a given that you’ll be spending the rest of today and every day after that together. So when he doesn’t follow you, staying still on the threshold, you turn around with a questioning look on your face. 

“There’s something I need to do this afternoon,” he says, taking both of your hands in his.

“Can’t I come with?” you say. Jake wavers for a second, but sadly, he stays firm in his decision.

“Sorry, baby, it’s a surprise. I’ll be back at seven with takeout?”

You can’t possibly be mad at him when he calls you baby and offers food in the same breath. “Only if you bring takeout.”

“You only love me because I feed you, don’t you?” he asks, a smile on his face.

“Yup,” you reply. You’re standing on a step, so you bend down to kiss him - you intend for it to be a peck, but when your lips touch, you’re unable to pull away. You let yourself get lost in the feeling of his lips on yours, in the warmth that takes over your body and makes your brain all fuzzy. 

A loud, affronted gasp from behind you makes you jump from Jake, and when you turn around, Chaewon and Yunjin are standing in the stairwell, staring at you with wide eyes and gaping mouths. 

“So this was a sexcapade?” is, much to your horror, the first thing Yunjin says.

Thanks to Chaewon, neither you nor Jake have the time to dwell on this sentence as she comes running down the stairs and pounces on you. You don’t know how a woman so small can have such force, but her hug is so tight you can barely breathe, let alone hug her back properly. “I knew you could do it!” she exclaims. When she pulls away, she seems so moved, it looks like she’s about to cry. “You finally popped your Jake cherry,” she whispers, but it’s loud enough for Jake to hear. A bark of laughter escapes his throat.

“Okay, thanks, guys,” you say, escaping this awkward situation and going up the stairs. “I’ll see you later, Jake!” you yell over your shoulder. The girls seem to be on their way out, and you’re more than happy leaving him to deal with them on his own. God knows you’ll get the worst of it when they come back. 

As soon as you get to your flat, you make a beeline for your bedroom, plopping on the bed. You’re the same person, and this is the same room. But something within you feels entirely different, like a scar that you had been carrying around had, without you even noticing, healed so well you could barely see it anymore. You lifted your hands in the air, looked at the back of them, then at your palms. They were the same old hands that had been with you your whole life, and you were almost shocked that there wasn’t something utterly different about them after having held Jake’s hand for so long. Just to be sure, you sniffed your right hand, but it didn’t smell any different, either. But you still felt Jake’s hand on yours, like headphones you’d been wearing for hours and still felt on your ears after taking them off.

Yunjin and Chaewon are back from their shopping half-an-hour later; they got you a chocolate fudge cake from Tesco to congratulate you. “You guys are acting like this is my birthday…” you say, eyeing the cake greedily as Chaewon cuts it into three equal parts (even though it says serves eight on the packaging). 

“This is more important than your birthday, Y/N,” Yunjin states as she pours oat milk into three cups of Earl Grey tea. “This is, like, the moment of a lifetime.”

“Are you saying a girl’s importance depends on her having a boyfriend?”

“Yes, Y/N, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Especially when said boyfriend is the guy she’s been pining after for all of her teenage and adult life.”

You sigh. “Well, he hasn’t exactly popped the boyfriend and girlfriend question yet.” They both turn to look at you, an annoyed look on their faces. You stand up straight, uncomfortable under their gazes. “What?”

“Usually, I’m all for clarity on this issue,” Chaewon starts. “But isn’t it pretty obvious here?”

“You’re still gonna have to tell us everything in minute detail, but Jake’s already told us what happened. He had no qualms referring to you as his girlfriend, so I really don’t think this is something you need to worry about. What you should worry about is when and where you’re going to hop on that dick.”

Chaewon bursts into laughter, and you can’t help but follow suit. “Gosh, Yunjin, you really do have a way with words.”

“I know. This is what having a Jane Austen hyperfixation at fifteen will do to you.”

Following Yunjin’s orders, you tell them about the events of the previous day and this morning over tea and cake. They ooh and ah and gasp in all the right places, ask you very specific questions and even make you draw a picture of the room you stayed in. You’ve talked to them about Jake so many times that there’s only so much to say now - but still, you talk for hours on end, deviating off-topic so often you end up talking about something else entirely. 

You’re in bed reading for your Middle English Literature class when the doorbell rings. It’s seven on the dot, so it can be no one else other than Jake. It’s been mere hours, but you’ve missed him enough to last you for weeks. 

He brought takeaway from the Indian place you’d raved about a hundred times but hadn’t brought him to yet. Somehow, your heart grows even fonder as you watch his reaction to the food, the raise of his eyebrows, the widening of his eyes, the excited shimmy of his shoulders. When you ask him about his afternoon, a wide smile breaks out onto his face, like a lightbulb illuminating a room. Without a word, he scurries to your room, bringing back some sort of book with him. He hands it to you  with a shy smile and curious eyes, eagerly anticipating your reaction. The cover reads Y/N and Jake in his clumsy but endearing handwriting, with the date of his arrival in Edinburgh and an em-dash scribbled underneath. “I haven’t booked my flight home yet, so I’ll add the second date later,” he explains. 

When you flick through it, you’re met with photographs of you and Jake on all of the trips you’ve done so far, as well as the various adventures you got up to in the city. There’s even one of you sleeping in the library at two am during midterms when you had forgotten about one of your essays, due at midday. Jake had come with coffee and words of encouragement, and now he could brag that the high mark you got was thanks to him. It’s not only photos - it’s also ticket stubs, receipts, stickers, and even a dried flower you had found pretty on your trip to St. Andrews. He’s also written quite a lot, from diary-like entries about what you got up to that day or songs that reminded him of you. 

“You misspelt right here,” you say, pointing to a sentence that reads This is the café write next to the hotel where the last Harry Potter book is said to have been written!!! under a photo of you drinking a massive cup of hot chocolate. The more you look at the typo, the more it makes you laugh, until you have tears brimming in your eyes.

Thanks to Yunjin’s messiness, pens and pencils are strewn over your coffee table. Jake, flushed red in embarrassment at the small mistake, snatches a pencil and aggressively erases write, spelling it correctly the second time around. “This is the level of today’s English Lit undergrads,” he murmurs under his breath. His frown disappears when he looks at you and he laughs along.

You continue looking through the album until you land on a page titled Why I love Y/N. From top to bottom, left to right, it’s filled with Jake’s tiny handwriting. You can tell he put effort into making it neat. There’s a singular photograph of you, one that dates from the first days after Jake’s arrival when you were walking around in the Meadows, the park right next to campus. The sun shone down on you and you smiled brightly at Jake behind the camera.  

You’re not a quarter through reading when tears swell in your eyes, rendering your vision blurry. You wipe them away before they can fall and stain the page. Jake has detailed every last thing he loves about you. It can hardly get cornier than this, but the fact that he wrote this about you makes your heart so full, you’re afraid it might explode in your chest. It ranges from basic things like the way she makes me laugh or her pretty face when she falls asleep in the train (or anywhere, for that matter) to more you-specific things like the strict pastel colour-coding she uses for her notes and her perseverance when eating spicy food even though she can’t take it. He mentions things about you that you didn’t even know, and that feeling of being known in-and-out, of being really seen by someone else only brings more tears to your eyes. Your favourite line comes at the end - the way she makes any place feel like home. A proper sob pushes past your lips at this, and Jake, who had been watching you with an anxious smile, rests a palm on your knee and inches closer to you.

“Why are you crying, is- Did I write something bad?”

You shake your head fervently. “No, no, Jakey, this is… It’s perfect. I’m just…” you trail, letting out a half-sob, half-chuckle. You look at him with a smile before pulling him into a tight hug. “I love it so much. I love you so much.”

You can feel Jake relax against you. “I love you too, baby. I’m glad you like it.”

You pull away after a small while, and turn the next page over. It’s a picture of you over breakfast this morning, with words WE’RE DATING!!!! written underneath it, and those simple words make you so happy, your cheeks ache from smiling. But every page after that is empty. Jake scratches the back of his neck. “I, um, I thought we could fill the rest out together. I debated just doing it myself and giving it to you at the end of the year, but I thought it’d be more fun doing it together.”

“It would. This is such an amazing idea,” you say, flicking back through the pages.

“I thought of it because of that project I had. When I started working on it, all the photos I wanted to include were of you, but I wasn’t sure how much my professor would appreciate that… So I decided to make one more personal. One for us,” he says shyly, shrugging like it’s no big deal.

“Thank you so much, Jakey.”

He smiles. “It’s no worries.”

“Did you do it all this afternoon?”

“I had started it before, but I added it most of today, yeah. Which, by the way, awful timing. I wanted nothing more than to spend today with you.”

Your heart leaps. You’re not sure you’ll ever get used to hearing such words from Jake’s mouth.

Sometime later, you’re laying in bed with Jake between your legs, watching the most recent animated Spiderman movie. With the tips of your fingers, you draw random patterns on his forearm, and if it wasn’t for his occasional chuckles, you’d think he had fallen asleep. You chat for a bit after the movie, but you find that after such an emotionally-packed day, you’re ready to call it a night fairly early. But when the lights are off and it’s just you lying against Jake’s chest, his fingernails grazing your scalp and his familiar, comforting scent clouding your judgement, all thoughts of an early night are thrown out of the window.

You shouldn’t feel so nervous - you had fallen asleep in his arms last night, and it had gone well. Really well. 

“This is different from yesterday, isn’t it?” Jake suddenly says, breaking the heavy silence with a low voice. It’s like he read your mind.

“Yeah,” you whisper against his skin.

No other words are needed. You brush the tip of your nose along his neck until you reach his jawline, pressing soft kisses there and delighting in the increasing shakiness of his breath. The feeling of your lips meeting is so intense, so all-encompassing, that you don’t know if you’ll be able to handle anything more.

This is still new territory, but you’re both so eager to discover it that it makes for a messy kiss, lips moving against each other ravenously, tongues beckoning moans from the other. It’s a kiss that somehow leaves you breathless and breathes oxygen back into your lungs at once. 

In a matter of seconds, Jake has flipped you on your back and is hovering over you, one hand holding him up and one hand free to roam your body. He slips it underneath your t-shirt, brushes it along the side of your waist, his touch leaving behind a trail of fire blazing on your skin. It’s so distracting, you can’t even kiss him back properly anymore. Jake doesn’t seem to mind. At first, when he starts pressing hot kisses to your jawline and your neck, you think he’s giving you a respite - but when he gently sinks his teeth into the skin there, leaving marks that will later remind you tonight wasn’t a dream, chuckling as you squirm and whine under him, you understand that this is anything but a respite. 

You curse your earlier decision of not wearing a bra, because it gives you no preparation whatsoever to the sensation of Jake brushing his thumb against one of your nipples. With a loud gasp, your back arches off of the bed, which only aids Jake in raising your t-shirt up over your breasts. 

He takes a minute to admire the sight of you panting and half-naked underneath him. It makes you feel shy, and you want to do something so that he stops looking and starts doing, but his gaze holds you in place. His pupils are blown with lust, eyes raking over your body and taking everything in. You have a hard time wrapping your head around the fact that it’s you he’s looking at with those eyes. 

His soft lips attach themselves to your nipple while his fingers continue their work on the other one. You’ve never felt this sensitive, never felt this on edge, like you might fall apart at any second even with so little simulation. Your core throbs, impatiently waiting to be tended to, but you’re already trembling so hard from Jake’s attention to your breasts that you don’t know what will happen to you once he actually touches you down there.

“You doing okay, baby?” he asks, the rasp in his voice making you want him impossibly more. You grip his hair and he looks up at you, a tender smile on his lips. You nod your head yes and he laughs. “Yeah? You want more?” You pause at his question. You do want more, but is it worth your sanity?

It takes you a second to decide that it’s worth that and more. You nod again. 

Jake seems to have sensed your hesitation. He tucks a strand of hair behind your ear. “You sure you’re okay?”

“I am. It’s just a lot.”

His expression of worry softens into a smile. “I’ll take it slow for you, love. It’s a lot for me, too.” He leans in to press soft kisses to your cheek, and some of the tension in your body diffuses. Whatever happens, Jake will be there to take care of you. “But it feels good, right?” he asks, lips moving against your ear, sending shivers down your spine.

“So good, Jakey,” you reply shakily.

“Good.”

You can tell that Jake really does want to take it slow - his movements are more deliberate, gentler. But eagerness, both yours and his, soon takes over, and a minute later, he’s trailing kisses down your body until he reaches your lower stomach. Your breath quickens as he hooks fingers underneath your leggings and underwear, sliding both garments down your legs and leaving you bare to him. You think the feeling of his lips on the fleshy parts of your inner thighs is what might actually do you in, make you lose your sense of reality forever - but then his tongue darts out against your clit, a barely-there touch, and your whole body flatlines. 

Your reaction eggs Jake on, who, more confident now, takes the sensitive bud in his lips and alternates between sucking and licking motions. A knot ties itself embarrassingly quickly in your stomach, a knot that tightens and tightens as Jake flattens his tongue against you, licking up your juices from your entrance to your clit; a knot that threatens to come loose when he slides a long finger inside of you. You can’t take more than thirty seconds of this.

“Jakey,” you say, voice practically a moan. Your brain is fuzzy and it takes a distressing amount of time to form a simple sentence. “Can you come here?”

“Is something wrong, baby?” he asks breathily, sliding his finger out of you and coming back up so that his face is right above yours. 

“No, just… I want you.”

Any trace of worry on Jake’s features dissipates as he cocks an eyebrow, one corner of his lips tugging up into a smirk. “Is that so?”

This kind of boldness would usually have you rolling your eyes, but here, it only makes your core throb more violently. It’s almost humiliating how much you want this man. It’s definitely humiliating, how easy it is to swallow your pride and play into his game. “Yes, please,” you say, eyes pleading with him.

He smiles almost giddily before burying his face against the side of yours. “My baby’s so polite,” he says, pressing a kiss to your cheek. “I’ll give you whatever you want.”

“Take this off, then,” you say, grabbing the bottom hem of his t-shirt. 

“So she says please and gives orders,” he jokes, quickly obliging anyway. 

Not once in your time apart had Jake posted any sort of beach trip or pool photos, so this was the first time you saw his bare chest. God, was it one for the history books. You trace the defined lines of his muscles with a finger and wonder how he had managed to get even more perfect. He lets you marvel at him for it, clearly proud that you’re gawking so shamelessly, but your mind drifts back to more urgent matters when he presses himself into you, his clothed cock, hard and hot, brushing against your folds. “Fuck,” you sigh, bucking your hips into his to feel him over and over again.

It’s so much, but it’s not enough; Jake instantly gets your message when you hook your fingers under the waistband of his boxers, pulling him to you and kissing him feverishly. Your lips don’t part as he slides his boxers off, and you drink up the nectar that are his moans as you take him in your hand, pumping him a few times.

“Condom?” he asks, but you shake your head.

“I’m on the pill. And even so… I usually always use a condom, but I don’t want to now. Not with you.”

Jake closes his eyes as he takes a deep, stabilising breath. “I feel totally normal about that. Not crazy at all.”

You giggle, and he opens his eyes, a wide smile gracing his lips before he bends down to kiss you. “You ready for the night of your life?” he asks against your lips. “It’s gonna last five minutes, tops,” he says, making you laugh again. “I’m sorry, baby, I can’t do anything about it. I think I could’ve cum just from eating you out.”

“That would’ve been hot.”

“Really? We’ll make it a challenge for next time, then.”

When Jake plunges into you, it’s unlike anything you’ve ever felt before. He fills you up, slow inch by slow inch, until he’s buried to the hilt inside you. You both need some time getting used to the feeling - Jake drops his head in the crook of your neck and lets out a sound between a grunt and a moan, something you’ve never heard from him before. You grab onto his shoulders, fingernails digging into his skin as you try to tether yourself to him. You hold him so tight that he has no choice but to let his body rest on top of yours, his arms coming to circle your waist and bring you even closer. 

His movements start out halting, the pleasure so overwhelming that it makes it hard for him to move steadily. In time, he falls into a torturously slow rhythm, but it’s the perfect kind of torture, the kind that has tears brimming in your eyes. It’s so hard to take, and yet you want more. You’re brought closer to the edge with every thrust of his dick into you, especially as he picks up the pace and lifts your hips to meet his. The new angle has his tip brushing against that spot deep inside you that makes it hard to breathe. 

You can tell he’s just as close as you when he loses that steady rhythm he had found, his motions growing more desperate, harsher, quicker. Conscious of your roommates, you slap a hand over your mouth to muffle your moans as your orgasm washes over you, your whole body on fire, so sensitive that the few more seconds Jake needs to come undone himself drive both your body and your mind into overstimulation. Even the feeling of him pulling out, drops of hot liquid dripping out of your entrance, is too much and makes you let out a small, tired whine. 

Jake peppers your face with kisses as he holds your waist tightly, brushing his thumb back-and-forth on your warm skin, sticky with sweat. “You did so well, baby. So good for me.” You think you might be ready for a second round if he keeps talking to you like that. “I love you so much.”

You sigh deeply, as if you were just told disconcerting news. “Okay.”

“Okay?!” he echoes, looking up at you with an outraged expression on his face.

“I’m sorry, I love you too, I just- I’m not used to this yet! You can’t just tell me you love and expect me to be normal. You have to warn me first.”

“Can I just warn you now that I’m going to tell you I love you every time I get the chance?”

You sigh. “I guess.” 

“Can I tell you now?” he asks, and you hum. “I love you.”

“I love you more.”

Jake tuts. “I highly doubt it, but whatever makes you happy.”

You hold Jake close to you, one arm around his shoulders and the other hand playing with his hair as you come down from your high. You think he might’ve fallen asleep, and you’re close to drifting off yourself when he speaks. “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do this. Not just the sex, although that has been on my mind for a while now,” he says, making you laugh, “but all of this. Being together, getting to be in your arms like this, kissing you whenever I want. Calling you my girlfriend.”

“Me too, Jakey. I waited so long I didn’t think it would ever happen.”

Jake chuckles. “How stupid were we not to have noticed we felt the same way?”

“Very stupid. I think we felt so sorry for ourselves that we were stuck in one-sided love, that we didn’t even realise the other was going through the exact same thing. But at least we’re now.”

“At least we’re here now.” You and Jake yawn at the exact same time, making you burst into giggles, giddy with sleep and love.

“Let’s sleep, baby,” you say.

Jake hums, burying himself deeper against your body. “Sleep well, my love. I’ll be here.”

--

After years of pining after each other, you and Jake find it a bit hard to keep your relationship to yourselves, or your hands off of each other.

At the beginning, all of your friends had been happy for you, but that quickly went away when your and Jake’s honeymoon phase never died down and the PDA just kept on going. If the glue you were stuck with previously was metaphorical, this one was pretty close to being real. Superglue kept you together, your moments together rarely spent without some sort of physical touch. Yunjin fake-gagged so often, you were afraid she might actually vomit one of these days. It took Sunghoon two weeks longer than everyone else to clock you and Jake had started dating.

This meant that in private, there was truly no holding back. Jake back-hugged you any chance he got, to the point you started to think he was more koala than human - although that’d imply he saw you as a tree. Make-out sessions were a particular favourite of yours - how could they not be when your boyfriend’s lips seemed to have been carved by God himself, soft and plump to the heavens, like they were made to be kissed. Really, you were just honouring God’s will when you kissed Jake.  

The goodbye that comes at the end of the year is not an easy one, and the month spent at home before you fly to Korea seems to never end. But you get there eventually, and as nice as it is to catch up with Jake’s parents after so long, you feign sleepiness after lunch as an excuse to get some time alone with your boyfriend. Ironically, this “time alone” is spent so intensely that you do end up falling asleep afterwards. 

You have to admit, you really did a number on your boyfriend this time - what can a girl do when she missed her boyfriend this much? Jake is still passed out when you wake up from your nap, so you slip out as discreetly as you can from his embrace and get out of bed. You head for the closet first and swipe the comfiest looking sweater of his that you find there so you can stay warm as you look around his room. A pang of melancholia hits your chest - most of the pictures and objects on his walls and shelves are parts of his life you weren’t around to witness. Friends you don’t recognize, places you’ve never heard of, phases you’d never known he’d gone through. But then you see the frame on his desk, a faded photo of the two of you at ten years of age, eating ice cream on the bench outside of your house. Milo is sitting at your feet. Jake’s family hadn’t adopted Layla yet. You realise that even if there’s whole parts of your life you didn’t get to share with each other, nothing could touch your memories, or your future.

You want to go back in time and tell fourteen-year-old you that no matter how painful it might seem at the moment, it will all be worth it for the sight of Jake Sim slowly drifting into wakefulness, patting the bed next to him, and noticing you’re missing with furrowed eyebrows. When he opens his eyes and they settle on you, a sleepy smile will grace his dazzling features, and he’ll say, “Come back to bed.”

You’ll be even more in love at twenty than at fourteen.

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[sukunasweetheart]

I have a idea‼️mutual pining and miscommunications with sukuna: Reader having huge crush on sukuna but she thinks he has a thing with uraume so she kind of gives up but it turns out sukuna likes her too

Reader is close childhood friends with yuji so she usually hears about sukuna and uraume going places from yuji. Imagine reader asking yuji if sukunas going to prom and yuji tells her that he's probably going with uraume!!! So readers gets all sad and gives up, so she spends the rest of the year focusing on herself

Timeskip a year later they're all in college and they get paired together on a assignment. And reader ends up telling him that she had a big crush on him in highschool but since he was dating uraume she gave up. And sukunas just sitting there like "wtf are you talking about😧🤨⁉️"(he still has a fat crush on her so he's shocked) and he doesn't let her leave until she understands that he liked HER the whole time. So they both just sit there mad asf that they could have started dating a long time ago. (and sukuna mad at yuji for making reader think he was dating anyone)

This ending is almost as bad as the last one sorry🙏

OMG!!! i adore this tension so much..... the awkward, teenage love that never gets resolved bc of uncertainty from both parties.... and you focusing on yourself probably got him misunderstanding that you had no interest in him, and he'd probably been wondering why you felt so distant all of a sudden, but had no courage to ask why...

and how neither you or sukuna would've been so open about your crushes on each other so nobody else would've known :( and you would've easily missed sukuna's cues that he liked you bc youre too preoccupied with ur own feelings to notice </3 the same for him as well

misunderstanding that he was with uraume, you probably would've shut down anytime he tried to approach you, which discouraged him more- and you know sukuna's not the type to pathetically cling to someone who clearly "doesn't like him", so he leaves you be, lingering around bc though you dont seem to like him back, he can't get rid of his own feelings still, and wants to at least see you from afar

neither of you know whether to be happy or not about being partnered up for a uni assignment... and then you impulsively, and jokingly talk about how you used to have a crush on him bc you want to try and let go of the past now, only for him to turn to you with wide eyes and say that he felt the same since highschool??

"i don't have that kind of relationship with uraume--"

"but- but- yuuji said-"

"FUCK what that brat told you! i liked- i like you! this must be a joke..."

such a conversation probably draws the attention of a few classmates. curious eyes land on the scene and you feel embarrassed, happy and confused all at the same time.

"the fuck are you guys looking at? piss off."

the professor notices the small commotion and tells all of you to quieten down.

class then continues and while you're facing the front, sukuna puts his hand over yours and whispers "we're talking again after class."

then after things are settled, sukuna probably dashes over to yuuji to throttle him or something, due to being the main cause of the misunderstanding (poor yuuji)

he probably gets uraume to convince you that their relationship isnt what you think it is at all, which still feels a little jarring for you, especially after you've been believing it for a while now...

but, it's college, and you're all still pretty young! it's late but not too late. you start dating sukuna immediately, and as if to make up for lost time, the relationship develops with ease. happy end!

[alottiegoingon]

hc!lottie spoiling her gf &lt;3

lottie matthews x fem!reader

summary: how i imagine you and lottie in a relationship with her spoiling you all the time

all characters are aged up and in college!!

warnings: pretty much just fluff, daddy issues if you squint, established relationship, characters are aged up, nsfw content (mdni), fingering and oral (lottie receiving)

at first, the idea of letting lottie buy you stuff was absurd. yes she was your girlfriend but why would you let her spend her money on you?? didn't she have other things to spend with? (no)

it first started when you two had just started dating. on the very first day, she met you outside the uni so you could walk inside together and she had a small bag on her hands

you look up at her feeling embarassed cause you didn't buy her anything and didn't even know that you were supposed to

"dont worry baby, its just a little something that reminded me of you while i was going home yesterday!!" she has the cutest smile ever and kisses you on the cheek before giving you your gift

she didnt buy it while walking home. she has been looking desperately for it ever since you guys started to hang out as friends and paid a ridiculous amount of money for it

you open it up to find the collector's edition of one of your favorite books, little women. you know how expensive it was, you had been wanting that special edition book for ages ever since you first read it when you were thirteen

lottie was nervous while waiting for you to open with her arms practically glued to her body and rocking her body slowly from one side to another. then she sees the surprise and happiness expression on your face and immediately relaxes. shes smiling from ear to ear and looking at you like a puppy with shiny eyes, come on :((

lets be honest, lottie was not a popular girl like jackie!! everyone knew that her parents had money but that girl was just an awkward lesbian girl failure with daddy issues and didnt know any better than showing her love without buying things until you showed up

it was saturday and you two were just hanging out in the mall one day and she noticed how your eyes were sparkling while staring at a cute dress from a very expensive clothing brand. you were scared to even look at the price tag. you didnt say a word cause you knew that lottie would buy it for you in a blink of an eye but she noticed it

lottie would always pay attention to you and read you like a book, she knew you too well

"thats such a pretty dress, look y/n!" she says excitedly while dragging you by the hand into the store "i need to try it on!"

you sighed in relief knowing that it wasn't for you this time

you watch lottie try the dress in fitting room and you can feel yourself drooling at how stunning she looked (so real of you)

"you look so hot, lott..." you say and the next thing you remember is burying lottie's panties onto her mouth and pinning lottie against the mirror

she was very tall so it wasnt very hard for you to get on your knees and shove yourself right between her legs. you held her thighs by placing your arms under them and were eating her out like a starved woman

lottie's head would have gone through the other side of the glass if it was possible due to how hard she was leaning her head backwards. she had her hands tightened to your hair and the dirtiest and whiniest muffled sounds would come out of her mouth, especially when you inserted two fingers at once inside of her very easily

in less than five minutes you were wiping your mouth with your forearm while lottie was still recovering from her orgasm. her chest was rising as fast as it was falling down and her legs were so sensitive that she needed help to stand up for a few minutes

safe to say that shoving her own panties in her mouth wasn't a very safe option. the message was very clear when you left the fitting room and a bunch of mid aged women that looked like had enough money to buy an entire town were looking at you with death stares

surprisingly (or not), lottie ended up not buying the dress. you two would never come back to that store ever again!!!

the next day you wake up to find a package from that same fancy store on your front door with a note saying "sorry for not being there to see your beautiful smile, i had to buy it online :( hope you like the dress, angel."

and then you remembered that you and lottie had the same body type. oh she was smart.

god, you were already scared for her bank account when your birthday month comes up.

[bananaactivity]

JAY AND BEN REDSIGNNN

The Boyssss

I’m working on a Benjay tragic romance fic and I had to design them right quick.

I like themmmm I’m gonna do Mal and Evie next then I’ll have the core four finished. They are 21 and 22 respectively. Ben’s always the youngest in my eyes.

I’m not getting rid of the beard idc. I’m adding more scars to Jay next time I draw him because why does Chad have more scars then an isle gang member, and know that half of them are because of Harry.

They have one specific nickname for the other,

Jays is Jay Jay, and Ben is Dumbas- I mean Benji

Here’s some context for there tragic relationship:

Mal and Evie get together after the Sea VK Battle on Harry Hooks boats instead of Ben and Mal. Thus the core four minus Jay are nervous that Ben will retaliate to this by kicking them out of Auradon Uni and off Auradon as a whole. Ben meanwhile has been raised in such a way that he is absolutely terrified of being alone. Jay has just just had to grapple with the fact that he had feelings for Harry beyond a really intriguing rivalry and he can't act on that because of Harry and Umas relationship that was already a steady under current and bloomed even more during the VKs 1st year tenure at Auradon Uni. As well as dealing with all his friends slowly separating in college which is typical. So Ben and Jay are both dealing with feelings of abandonment and stress, neither of them want to think about that pain and would do anything to mask it. Jay is much better equipped to handle this enough to at least seem functional to his friends, but he's teetering on the edge. Jay ended up being the first person to speak with Ben ,who was an absolute wreck, after he stayed holed up in his very fancy prince dorm for many weeks. They already had good chemistry with one another prior and Ben comes onto Jay. It feels good to both, and it's doing what they want in regards to ignoring the bigger deeper issues at play. It's also a secret because obviously a heavily charged and unhealthy relationship like that would be heavily discouraged. Warning, this is not gonna end with a healthy relationship. Some feelings are real like they don't want to actively use and hurt each other, but the emotions at play and the rough start to the relationship DO NOT lay solid ground to foster a good long lasting relationship.

I’m also going to add one fic I wrote from Ben’s Perspective beware it’s not done:

Being a Prince was a tough job. There was so much pressure on him to be a great future king. One major aspect of that was his future spouse; his mother was always bothering him relentlessly on the topic as he grew up. “ Benjamin, Darling you must choose a good spouse, it is imperative to the people's perception of you.” his mother would often say. The constant narrative of “dont be alone” was always pressed on him so hard in fact that he couldn't bare the thought of being alone. It got so bad that that he went with the first present options of someone to court. It was stressful when he and Audrey were courting, the constant trailing during dates stressed him out as well as the media coverage analyzing their every move. Aubrey herself seemed more concerned with the respect that comes with being a queen. Nobody really liked her very much, but she was pretty and she was sweet during those first years. Unfortunately that all faded as the years went by and he felt there was no way out. He couldn't be alone. Then came Mal, she was beautiful and sweet. But she was hopelessly in love with her best friend and her best friend felt the same. It almost became this rush to him to wed her before she could leave and yet he felt so bad about it. He didn't want to be alone. But he pushed it and was alone anyway. The big ass walls in his dorm felt like a cage. What was he to do but sit in his room and cry. And he was alone, which he didn't want to be. Then Jay showed up. Jay handsome, good at Tourney, an excellent swords-man and his closest friend. Looking into his concerned brown eyes, he remembered leaping into his arms. There wasn't much conversation to be had as he was a bawling mess. All he could remember from that night was staring into those eyes for as long as he could and making a move that even he didn't expect. He kissed his best friend. And it felt good, really good. The best part of this situation was that the amazing feelings completely washed over the awful ones that led him to that very moment.Until Jay moved away, he was expressing concerns about the sudden atmosphere; yet he was into it. He had kissed him back and moved his face to kiss him again once they got over that little hurdle. The time spent felt… really nice. It was more intense than anything that had happened before for him. But maybe that was because he had thrown himself so totally into the sensations at play so that no semblance of sadness could worm their way back into his heart.

It was such a drug that they both implored to keep it up. He defended this continuous indulgence with the belief that it was allowing him to show his face on campus.Spending time suffocating in his fancy prince class: “ Kinging 101: The study of Class Disparity” waiting for the pleasant feeling of rough calloused hands pushing him into the corridor just near the lecture room. Every time he felt those hands he breathed a sigh of relief.

If you want to read more check out the pinned post on my blog which has 18 pages of my Descendants AU.

[scriptnoir]

SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN.

you develop a strange friendship with the pretty college girl who visits your library.

pairing. olivia hayes (jessica alexander) × female reader

length. 12.9k words

themes. smut, uni student!olivia, librarian!reader, legal age gap, praise kink, pet names (princess, ma'am), fluff, angst

warnings. homophobic and blackmailing antagonist, age gap, smoking, get even spoilers, maybe ooc olivia but NO ONE GETS HER LIKE I DO DON'T @ ME

author's note. HAPPY PRIDE MONTH!!!! yall dont know how special this fic is to me. i started this in september, continued writing it in february (!!!) after being down bad for jess then, after watching get even, revised it to be for my baby olivia hayes :) also my first fic on this blog ! olivia hayes and get even in general are pretty niché in fics, but i hope you'll give this a chance </3 also, i will be writing for more female celebs so stay tuned !!

There was a library - a nice, wide place located in the smaller parts of the university. It’s where the students seldom went to study for their exams, perhaps find a little reprieve from all the youthful stress that curled around them. They’d lounge on the sofas with a textbook in their laps, or hide behind an aisle of novels to make out. That didn’t matter to you - what you cared about was that your second home was a safe space for them, just like it was to you, where nothing else was out to get them but the smell of new books.

That’s where it all started.

It was all supposed to go so normally, but then she came in. 

Suddenly you weren’t so safe anymore.

Oh, but could she do any naught? You heard and dismissed rumors, but she was just a schoolgirl - well, the better and more guiltless term was perhaps college student. Still, you're a handful of years older than her with a degree she's using the end of her teens to fight for. She was young. Innocent too, with those bright, casual eyes that passed around the library fascinatedly. But it was far from easy to remember that when those long legs strode confidently in your vicinity, underneath that short skirt which ought to get her in trouble with the dress code. But why? It was standard uniform - it wasn’t her fault she was beautiful. Ah, and one couldn’t forget the socks, simple white ones yet looked painfully beautiful on her with how they wrapped around her thighs like a present. 

When she looked at you and smiled, it was a cut straight to the bone. No remedy here. Stitches couldn’t save you.

In the second minute since she arrived here, you realized that she was familiar. That was the kind of face you never forgot - engendered into the ripples of your brain forever, a flame of memory kept alive. Because she was just a college student - many years your junior - but she was so goddamned beautiful that it ached your tongue and left it numb.

“Hi,” she said softly. From one word you could tell that curled preppy accent - something that teetered between an heiress’s and a sweet friend - was natural. From one word you were left breathless.

“Olivia Hayes.” You mentioned her name without thinking and with too much a realization, and now it sounded as if you didn’t know her, and oh, how rude that was. How dare you be rude to a girl like her, known and adored by everyone, a princess? You wanted to say you just recognized her, that you knew her already - which wasn’t false - but she’s already smiling.

Her smile, sweet with tender full lips and her eyelids reaching for their other halves, was something you could swim in forever. Oh, you’d drink from her, too - she was a saltless sea that tasted of nectar instead.

“That’s me,” said Olivia, beaming. “I’m the president of the student council. I think that’s where you remember me?”

Of course. She was the pretty face that always led a group of giggling schoolgirls to the hallway; the pretty voice that spoke at auditoriums for the school’s events; the pretty body that flexed as it twisted to send a ball that’s just as small as her head over the net. While you weren’t a professor by any means (you had tried to be, but that dream was whisked away quickly), you were a frequent presence for the student activities. The one who always, always stood out to you was her.

You suddenly found it very, very hard to gulp down another rough bout. She was beautiful in a way that was impossible to perceive without falling for her. When she had that relatively tall yet slender form all compact and tight in her uniform, with lips that became her brand - (because the other girls would always gossip and say how they wanted lips that full, and maybe you were jealous too) - and had their glossed signature, it forged a path that only led to wanting her.

“Yes, you’re right.” You collected yourself. “Anything I can help you with Ms. Hayes?”

“Do you have anything about Greek mythology?” 

That was the lilt of tone she used with her close circle of friends, fondly. Were you a friend to her now? Oh, but you had just met. Not just, perhaps, but this was the first time you actually talked to her lengthily. But she knew you - she’d said your name, and she, with the allowance of you basking in her sweet voice, considered you as someone trustworthy.

But you were far from that. A trustworthy individual did not reach desperately after a kempt schoolgirl like her, or fantasize about doing away with that skirt and scheme to watch all that royal composure dissolve from the princess that she was.

It was only now that you came to the realization that you had always, after all this time, wanted Olivia Hayes.

“Ma’am?” she asked, and all you could think was, oh, it’s the end. It was the beginning of the end the moment she was a polite girl and called you a name that was as innocent as her. It was of no ill intent when she called you that - she was merely asking for your help - but your fist curled up and your throat was tight.

“Yes. Yes, of course.” 

You had to act before you did anything stupid, like make her use those perfect lips on you, put them to good use; get your hand all up in that golden-brown hair. Instead of acting upon all those sinful fantasies, you placed a book she might like, the one you recommended for her only, and brushed the old crumbs of bookshelf dust from its cover. Because you’d hate to see those long, pretty fingers get stained. 

As you handed her the book, which she accepted with a smile, you asked, “You read a lot I presume?”

She giggled. “I try to,” she said. “Haven’t got time for it lately. But I have to.”

“Doesn’t matter. You’re excellent,” you told her, not being able to help yourself. It wasn’t like it was a lie - Olivia Hayes had a lot of potential in her. A great leader, having watched her create the rules to keep the students in line; a great actress, having seen her perform at the theater with emotions that shook you to the core; a great person in general.

“Oh.” Olivia’s cheeks filled with pink. And you found out that when she got shy, her ears flushed too. You ought to smile. “You think so?”

And this was the kind of schoolgirl sweet you pictured her as. She found everywhere but your eyes to look at, and her legs began to sway to and fro, shifting her weight from here to there to stabilize herself. Olivia Hayes - president of various important clubs, prom queen and honor student - could also be . . . adorable?

The rumor mill claimed she wasn’t such a sweetheart. A real fucking snob, a boy claimed after leaving her classroom with tears on his face. Stuck-up bitch. Too arrogant for her own pretty good. 

You never believed them. You . . . .did, perhaps? But it was not a belief you held to defame her. 

You actually found the roll of her eyes, the snide of her scoffs and checking of her perfect nails a little hot. 

But the pink on her face was how you realized that she’s the type of girl who’d melt if called anything remotely complimenting. It’s what she was used to; what revolved her world. 

“I know so.”

“Ah,” she mumbled, nodding thoughtfully as she looked down at her black Mary Jane shoes. “Thank you.”

Quietness settled into your humble library. It was what you insisted upon hearing, but there was something about Olivia - how she rolled her words, giggled when she was nervous, spoke softly but easily - that made you want to break your own rules. And several others.

“You have a library card?” 

“I don’t.” You envied how she managed to recollect herself before she melted more. You could never say the same thing about yourself. Suddenly her chin was up again, and a small smile played on her lips. “Is it alright if I read here for a while Ma’am?”

What else could your answer be?

The day became night, the moon stark in the sky from behind your library windows. All the students had filed out. It was time to close.

You looked at your log book. Plenty of people came in today. You were happy about that. As a librarian (you taught too if that meant anything), you were naturally passionate about books. Having a job related to them was a dream right from the start. When you were young, you wanted to be a librarian. When you entered high school, you wanted to be a librarian. When you finished college, you became one. The pay was nothing close to meager which was enough for you. You wanted this job and not one day passed that had you upset about it.

Mostly, people came here to hang out or hide. That didn’t matter to you, but what struck you was Olivia. Ever since dismissal time, she was in that corner reading. A pile of books sat on the table with her. All of them were about mythology, whether novels or retellings or anecdotes. 

You pretended not to notice her as you rearranged books and disposed of unattended belongings. It kept you busy. Sometimes nobody cared about the system you ordered your books in, or the tidiness overall of your little place. So it took a while, one you were pleased about, until you walked over to Olivia.

She was on the four-hundredth page of the novel. Her thumb pressed above the high number on the foot of the page. Didn’t she just start that? And she was still going. 

“You’re a fast reader,” you remarked, fascinated. 

She looked up in surprise. A sense of calm passed over her features when she realized it was you. “Y-yes I am. Other days I finish books in like a year, but I guess this isn’t one of those days.”

“Same here.” You liked how you had that in common with her. She was pretty already, but a voracious reader? That was the key to your heart. 

You picked up her bag beside her chair and placed it on the table. She returned to scanning the book, the pages crisp between her manicured nails and eyes bright and thoughtful. In her lap was a notepad. Her writing was tidy and smooth. Small letters spelled details about Odysseus, gods, and fables.

“You have a quiz about Greek mythology?” 

“Oh no.” She shook her head. “I’m doing research since I got the part in a play about this stuff.”

“Let me guess: Aphrodite?”

It was a basic line - so easy, actually, so obvious. But it fit so well and her ears started to color again. She covered her mouth to giggle, then sat up straighter. The form of her back was like a duchess's: composed, slant, smooth. But she wasn’t a duchess. No - perfect lips, eyes shimmering; she was something more. Something else.

Olivia pursed her lips before smiling softly. “If I were naïve Ma’am” - there was that word again, sweet and faultless but making you pent up, as she considered you with a serious gaze - “I’d think you’re trying to flirt with me.”

“Too quick for that, don’t you think?” you backtracked. You had to be appropriate. Yet you reeled forward again: “But you’re a beautiful girl, fitting for the part.”

You normally didn’t go for the model-in-the-making girls, much less ones who were younger than you. But she had this different aura about her. She was quiet, sweet, and incredibly polite while maintaining her popularity and schoolwork. She was each one of those but people still chose to put her down. You wondered how she dealt with everything. What was behind that pretty, pretty face?

“Unfortunately, being pretty doesn’t free you from my rules.” You pointed at the clock. Regret filled your heart as you informed her. “It’s 7 PM. According to school regulations, I was supposed to close twenty minutes ago.”

“Why didn’t you close then?” A smile creased the corners of her eyes and emphasized her lips. “I thought being beautiful didn’t exempt me?”

There it was. She knew how to reply, how to send back a maimed question with a bigger bullet. This was why people liked to deem her an intimidation.

She was smart, cunningly sweet. You never doubted Olivia’s intelligence but it still surprised you. She looked at you knowingly while you flustered. You searched for an answer when all you searched for was the hike of her skirt up her thighs. She knew your game, and she was not afraid to play it.

Olivia was a tactful, patient pupil. She sat with her hands folded in her lap - like a good fucking girl - and waited for your response. You mustered nothing. It felt stupid to stand there and wordlessly admit you got cornered by a nineteen-year-old.

“It . . . does now.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

Fuck.

“You know you can take these books back to your dorm? All you need is a library card.”

“Oh!” Delighted, she stood up and beamed with a light that always was with her, even in the night. “When can I get one?”

“Here tomorrow. Like I said, library hours are done.” 

Olivia didn’t take your sternness to heart. She picked up her bag and slung it on her shoulders. She began to leave. 

She was simply following orders but you hated to see her go. You were already yearning for her. You would have wanted to like her in a purely pure way, but you weren’t a good woman. You yearned for the slip of her stockings down her knees, the prop of her neck, the flight of her hair as the wind pushed past her.

She turned to you at the doorway. Did she read your thoughts? Did she forget something?

“Well,” she said, “if here’s where you want me to be.” 

Then, in a low voice and the final smile of the day, “Ma’am.”

Plenty of students came in after her. They were either the ones who didn’t have friends to eat lunch with (you didn’t enforce the no food rule for them) and the ones who were rowdy, using your sanctuary as a place to yell and make jokes (you tapped the silence rule taped to your desk.) Everyone signed their names in your log book, but the words flew past your notice. All those days gone and your eyes still remained on Olivia.

Everyday she sat on the loveseat with her legs crossed. She didn’t speak one word. Olivia simply read and read and read, occasionally pausing to rest and take notes. Her nose was buried in the book, but you could see her brilliant eyes above its edges. They disseminated, observed, analyzed. The rest of her face was covered and you still found her beautiful. 

“Ma’am,” spoke a student nearing your desk, “can I get a library card?”

The background blurred. You looked at the student and realized you were staring at Olivia for too many an hour. You had to focus. Ogling at a student was inappropriate, and not what the private university paid you for.

Also, the title didn’t sound as nice as it did if it came from someone who wasn’t Olivia Hayes.

“Of course.” You rose from your chair as you took his ID. 

“It’s free, right?”

“Yes, no charge.”

You typed in his name. It wasn’t long or a unique one but you had to read it several times over to ensure its correctness. Typical procedure. Ronny. Soon, his library card was laminated and printed. You placed it on your desk for him to take.

Thanking you, Ronny picked behind his ear. “I couldn’t help but notice,” he began, “you were looking at Olivia for a bit there.” 

You swallowed. Were you that obvious? You hated to think so. The last thing you wanted was your ogling at the girl to be something controversial. (It was.) You were doing it for days, ever since her initial visit. 

What did you say to him? What did you do?

“Oh, uh. No. I just space out a lot.”

He saw through your lie. His easy grin made you uncomfortable. Why? He was just making conversation. “I mean, I understand. She’s really pretty and popular, but she doesn’t have many friends.” 

You turned to look at Olivia. She was still reading. The whole time she was quiet and preserved, not taking time to speak to others. She liked to keep to herself for a girl who was the talk of the campus.

“Doesn’t she?”

“She needs someone to talk to,” he told you. His words were overly friendly, like he was lulling you into a drunken false sense of security. “I think you’d be perfect. She’s just getting into reading.”

“I-I’ll keep that in mind. Thank you.”

He gave you a smirk of knowledge and left. Shit. Why did you have to be so indiscreet? You quickly collected yourself and returned to your book. You had to forget about it.

The characters in your book fought against dragons and fell in love and fell apart and passed on. Chapters became nothing like the minutes. There were rare moments when you had to look up and assist someone, but aside from that, the day was relatively uneventful. 

Night arrived, slowly like it always did. You were a dedicated reader, but the story was uninteresting compared to the pretty girl lounging across you. She was the only one there now. 

Before you could return your eyes to the book and stop watching at how she flicked her hair back and checked her phone, she caught you. Her attractive smile was full of awareness of your plight. You quickly looked down at the pages. It was too late.

School shoes tapped a rhythm on the floor as she approached you. She leaned down on your desk. You tried to ignore her and pretend she wasn’t there. But Olivia had a face people would never forget. She was most likely someone’s first love, who, even when along came a girl who filled their life, was not erased from memory. No, she was too precious to let go.

“You know,” stated Olivia, her tongue curved upwards at the side of her lips, “you could just talk to me. I’m not scary, am I?”

You lowered the story. She was so good to look at. Her hair was tossed over the side and she wore a carefree smile that invited you to close the book.

Was she scary? Yeah - her exclusiveness, tight-knit friendships and beautiful wit - you’d call that scary. 

But the fear always turned into a yearning - please notice me when I walk past; please say my name again; please ruin me- let me ruin you-

“Sure.” You gave in. “What do you wanna talk about?”

She thought for a while. “Anything that’ll make us friends. I like you. It’s gonna be easy.”

Being friends didn’t sound dangerous. What could happen? It’s not as if the moment you bonded you would suddenly grab the small of her back and let your lips meet.

“Wanna get out of here?’’ She framed her cheek with her fingers. “I’ll put on a jacket. Nobody will know.”

You’d love nothing more. But was it alright? There were lines being crossed here: the relationship between a student and a mentor; the rules; the propriety.

She looked you up and down, taking note of everything, then cocked an eyebrow. Oh, it was a challenge. Would you give in?

You found yourself buttoning your coat and walking out with her. The library had to close early. She grinned and looped an arm through yours. You made an excuse that your sudden freezing up was due to the night air.

Well, it was chilly. The breeze puffed Olivia’s hair into the night. She always made herself look like a femme fatale from a fan favorite watch - red lips; smoky eyes; and a tendency to make anyone want her. Ah, not a tendency - she was a natural heartstealer. She broke it even if you weren’t a thing when you saw her with boys, with girls, with anyone looking to tear her uniform down in pieces when you felt the exact same thing.

The school looked more serene in the darkness. It was so grand but looked just like home. Old bricks built themselves up into pillars that resembled castles. Dim light illuminated from dorm windows. 

“It’s nice to get out of that place for once,” Olivia said. She tilted her head to the school and sighed humorously. But the smoke of air that left her mouth shook a little too. “It’s kind of suffocating in there, honestly.”

The branches reached for her hair. Your shoes were torn by growing roots. But through everything, you kept walking. You wanted to know: what was more to this forest? What was more to her?

“Let me guess,” you said. “It’s the popularity contests? Friends? Math?”

She rolled her eyes, a confirmation. “Ugh, math.” 

“You’ll get through it,” you assured her. It was cliché to say, but everything would eventually come to pass. You were on a planet in a galaxy in a galaxy in a galaxy, or whatever. It didn’t matter. “I mean, I did. If anyone could do it, it’s you.”

“I was gonna say you did excellent getting through it, but I don’t know you that well.”

“So get to know me.”

You talked, and Olivia was surprisingly easy to connect with. She listened with attentively creased brows and an occasional laugh. You narrated the basics: “read” was your first word. You did your classmates’ homework in exchange for candies. Reading was your foundation. If you had to go without it, you died.  

You thought that she would make a joke about the cheesiness, or worse, laugh at you. But she didn’t. She kept listening. She sometimes threw you a few interesting questions that kept the drain of conversation going. The thoughtful, caring energy in her face was solid and you felt undeserving to bask in it.

“What I like to say is I’m a reader before a woman,” you told her anyway. The depths of the forest came up and for some reason you weren’t scared. It was the rumor mill for ghosts and hookups, but you were with Olivia. Why would you be scared? “That’s how I wound up here in a uni, letting them read what I have.”

Olivia nodded, hands on opposite elbows. The trees towered over you and made horrific shadows on the dust. Fear didn’t get to you. “Do they pay you well?”

“They do.”

“Must be fun.” She bit on the inside of her cheek, making the soft skin hollow. “Doing something you love.”

There was a wistfulness in her voice. Her expression was dreamy as she thoughtfully stepped over the roots and twigs. 

“Well,” you began, carefully, “what do you love?”

Olivia smiled self-assuredly. “Me.”

She told her story. She was born rich, lived rich, and would die rich. Her mother was an heiress whose love was a businessman, and the wealth would go on for the next ten or more generations. She wanted to be an active and proper student, behaving well enough so as not to take advantage of her father buying her out of any situation. She participated in many clubs and, according to this year’s paper, was the school’s Actress of The Year.

You didn’t think you had too much coffee today but you thought that it wasn’t illusion she had inched closer. Olivia’s knee was beside yours, and she was speaking and chuckling like you weren’t close to being insane about how smooth her skin felt. 

Was this the “bitch” who supposedly broke hearts and ruined lives? She flipped her hair and giggled like she had all the time in the world. She didn’t seem so terrifying.

“I try not to be so stuck up. I want people to leave me alone, but only when I need them to.”

You shrugged. “That explains why . . . ”

“Yeah?” She was not going to let that obvious halt pass.

You blinked. “Oh, I didn’t mean-” 

“It’s fine,” she dismissed, continuing the path down the forest. Olivia studied her fingernails. “It’s not like I don’t know people think I’m a bitch.”

So she knew. She had that admirable composure steadying her, but how did she deal with the falsehood? There was everything to cope with - the pressure of her parents; school; and friends who expected a lot from her. What was her method?

“For the record, I don’t think you’re a . . . ”

“Say it.” Olivia’s eyes flicked up from her nails and shot you with a cheekiness that made you feel lightheaded. “Call me a bitch.”

She slipped her hand in yours. The textures of your skin were vastly different. Hers was as soft as a baby’s cheek. Smooth and blemishless too. 

“Actually,” she added coyly, “call me whatever you want . . . Ma’am.”

You stared back at her. What did you just start? She winked at you then continued talking like she didn’t almost cause a heart attack.

The moon was stark and sent bursts of wind whipping you around. Sometimes you felt her grip tighten around the slots of your fingers to keep her balance. You hoped your palm wasn’t sweaty.

“They’re right though.” She giggled, fixing the blazer of her uniform. “I need a little redefining. So I’m doing some self-improvement, working on my habit of rolling my eyes.” 

“You’re a perfect student,” you joked, but you meant it. Every word was genuine. “You’re intelligent, pretty, studious, and committed. Who do I have to fight to be you?”

As expected, she rolled her eyes with a stifled simper. You both burst out laughing and for a few seconds it was all you knew. The lines of her smile, the shrink of her eyes as she chuckled - it was all so beautiful. 

“Seriously! You’re a beautiful girl. And that hair is lethally gorgeous.”

“Thank you. It’s smooth too. I guess combing like ninety times a day helps.” She scooted closer, as if close weren’t close enough, and turned her head. Golden-brown locks showed themselves to you. “See for yourself.”

Was she bold or just friendly? You gingerly ran your fingers through them. No knots blocked your way. Each thread was silky and clean. This was the kind of soft you’d feel on pillows in hotels you couldn’t afford. You were pretty sure she had well-paid, adoring women who attended to her for this.

It felt intimate. Too intimate. There was hesitance as she observed you, like she wanted to do something but had to think twice. You were getting so comfortable in the familiarity of her features that you had to remember she was a student and you were . . . you. This was like busting yourself out of the closet and getting yourself a case of being improper with a student, although she wasn’t a child by any means.

You put your hand back down. “What color is it?” you asked.

“I dunno.” She shrugged. “Brown? Blonde? Somewhere in between?”

Whatever it was, it looked good on her. Everything looked good on her. She was the only student you saw who never looked stuffy in the hot uniform. The British air was hot in the morning but not one drop of sweat stuck to her skin. Her mane of somewhere-in-between was articulately brushed and straightened.

Footprints of athletes still were visible on the ground. You stamped your foot over a mark of a rubber one. She followed suit. With that, you left a sign you were here. It might be the only sign that you ever lived. 

Books and shelves faded over time, but the earth would always remember your mark. It was sort of sentimental. This would be the first and only time you live, and you were glad to spend it enjoying a night with a girl you liked and getting to know quickly. Maybe you knew her all along. 

“If you really think I’m all that,” Olivia said, toying with the zipper of her jacket, “you should come to the play. I’ll prove my worth. It’s next week.” 

“I’ll be there,” you instantly replied.

You’d love to see her act again. Plays weren’t your thing but it would be good to see Olivia onstage, reciting her lines with deep emotion and twirling from prop to prop. You knew she wouldn’t disappoint. 

Her eyes lit up, and that response told you, without overassumption, of a mother who was too busy to come to her activities, of a father who wasn’t there. Never was. “You promise?” 

She was holding you to it, you could tell. It was a promise you were willing to keep. You’d never break it if the circumstances tested you.

“If that’s where you want me to be.”

“That’s my line,” she objected. She pulled the end of her skirt down to her knees. The waistband sank and unveiled modest skin. It was so devoid of ill intention that it was just right to make you feel guilty for looking. “If you use it, you need to have a nickname for me too.”

She turned to you. The crescent moon refracted in her pupils. Olivia was dead serious. You stopped in your tracks and tried to think. But she was there - so gorgeous, so put together and so lovely - that it made your thoughts go static.

Right from the start, you yearned. You thought it began when she visited your library for the first time. But now you thought that it dated back to watching her act, watching her and her group of friends, watching her be herself in a midst of elites. You wanted her since the moment she stepped in the university and it was difficult to deal with.

Why? Because you wanted to call her a lot of things. Each would be sweet or sour, whichever she chose, as she sank between your legs and/or sat in your lap and/or just kept being the tantalizingly beautiful thing she was.

“What’s something people call you?” you offered weakly. 

“Uh. Ollie and um, Hayes-Are-For-Horses” - you laughed and she had to explain it was back in primary, when she used to be bullied by the people who desired her now - “Liv, Livvie, Livia, Princess-”

“Princess?”

She looked down, a little embarrassed. “My friends call me that. It’s my code name.”

She was a princess, truly. Olivia was everything a princess should be. That’s why her peers loved her. That’s why her peers hated her. She was royalty, and people didn’t know if they wanted to lust for her or reject her just to say they had the opportunity to.

You nodded approvingly. “Very fitting.”

“That’s it then,” she said, satisfied. “You’re Ma’am, and I’m Princess.”

Saying the name felt like sinning - you realized this when you thought it over. But she was smiling again, so of course you’d do it without penance.

The play was beautiful. The props were crafted diligently and all actors quoted with diction and importance. You sat at the front as staff should and kept searching for your favorite student. She came in a white dress and hair styled in endless curls, and delivered a performance deserving of whatever Oscar there was for college plays. She was an excellent actress. All bias melted when you believed she was the best out of the whole drama club. Even her fellow actors said so.

While Olivia performed her nuances, she looked at the crowd, as if willing them to come onstage and save her. The fourth wall was broken through. You were too. She saw you at the front, went out of character with a smile, and got away with it. Her slip-up was so unnoticeable that at the end of the play, you thought you would have signed up for drama club if you were a student. She made it all look so easy. 

“You came!” she said, bouncing off the stage stairs and wrapping you in an unexpected hug. 

You fought back your giddiness. She was just being friendly. You returned the embrace like a good friend should. “Of course.”

The purple dress swayed around her like water, the little details and seams the seashells that fit the siren that she was, born from foam. You saw it hug her waist and flow around her legs and - despite everything: your promises to remain professional, a good senior, a good friend - you couldn’t deny she looked insanely good.

She ushered you backstage as the curtains closed. The cheers erupted for her, and you could picture her making it really big out there. She was gorgeous, talented, and excessively charming - a director would ditch screenplays to cast her. The coach was sure to die if they watched her rehearse. And anyone’s going to fall in love with her, really.

“Beautiful,” you remarked, and it could mean either way: the performance or the pretty little thing in front of you.

“You liked the yelp I did when Paris dragged me?” asked Olivia. Her eyes contained all the stars in the galaxy. She made a wish to each of them, asking for an eager attendee to her play. “I strained my voice, but I did good, right?”

Never did you ask about the black wig, or the smoky makeup, or the way she was almost in tears - almost like she never expected you to come. Or anyone for that matter. 

All you said, squeezing her forearm where you could feel the beat of her excitement, was: “The Princess was more than great.”

She never got that library card. Olivia chose to stay in your library for hours at a time rather than take them back to her dorm. The play was done but she began reading for fun instead of necessity. You recommended her thrillers and romance. Your heart grew bigger. She was actually very easy to be fond of. 

Now she took a seat near your desk where she occasionally asked questions - what does this word mean? what language is this? have you read this? - and left you biscuits in your lunch break. You enjoyed her company. You were insecure about a lot of things but one: she did back.

“Coffee.” Olivia brought a cup of steam to your desk. She pulled a chair to your desk and sat on it, crossing her legs. “Nobody’s here. The rules don’t exist.”

Your heart did a little offbeat thump. She was a generous girl. You forgot to thank her upon seeing that her strawberry blonde hair was tucked into a bun on her head. The strong curve of her jaw and her swan’s neck were just out there.

Olivia’s full lips closed on the straw of her iced coffee. You couldn’t stop watching her. You could help her out with her lessons - there’s her opened textbook, her reviewers - but you had eyes only for her. What a cliché. But you’re a reader. You liked your fair share of clichés. You could give this one a pass.

“Thanks Princess,” you said. You took the coffee and blew its smoke out. “You’re really kind.”

She was the kindest girl you ever met. These past few months, she did nothing but keep you company and spoil you. Olivia was a generous princess - she stepped out to meet the populace, give them food worthy of a royal, and kept them company. That was why you liked her. 

You stopped there. You didn’t want things to go too far. Not yet. These feelings you had for Olivia were inappropriate and deserved hindering. But she was just so beautiful and lovable that blocking the thoughts from your head felt like torture.

“It’s no problem.” 

She was smiling again. You really wondered how her peers carved her out to be an alleged pain. She was so thoughtful that you were beginning to think if anyone had chosen to befriend you this way. Were you even deserving?

“What are you studying?” you asked her. You had to make conversation before you slipped up again.

Olivia’s simper melted. “Math.”

You looked over at the formulas, fractions and calculations. It already made your head hurt. “Can’t help you with that,” you said regretfully. “It’s either I don’t know it or I forgot that thing a long time ago.”

“Can you help me with something else?”

After you nodded, she began to speak. Well, tried to. She trailed off, looking blankly at her textbook. Her face wore a blue little look that was a break of character from the serious one she always had. Olivia Hayes, as far as you knew, was not once lonesome.

“It’s been . . . really hard these days. I’m sorry, I know it’s completely out of topic but-”

“You can tell me anything.”

Hope crossed her features. She didn’t really have anyone to trust with her feelings. Her mother was too busy. Her friends would use them against her. The guidance counselor would just tell her to pray. Would you listen to her without bias?

“I don’t know if I’m hanging with the right people. I don’t know if I’m even that good. I don’t know if I-” Olivia stopped and made complicated gestures with her hands. A defeated sigh sounded from her slim throat. “-am.”

Self-doubt. It was your accurate diagnosis. You were surprised that a girl like her would experience it, but even the most confident people went through that. It would be easy to assume from the way she walked, talked, and acted that she had all the assurance for herself.

Olivia sighed at her textbook and shut it. Her shoulders were trembling. Was she sulking? Nearly crying? You couldn’t bear to see it. 

“I don’t think I know myself at all.” She swallowed, then without looking at you, asked, “Do you ever feel that way Ma’am?”

She was too young and too pretty to be going through this dilemma. You couldn’t say you didn’t go through the exact same thing yourself in the younger years of your life. But seeing the look of pride and strength disappear from her face was a death to your own self-pity. 

You looked at your hand close to her. The pins you gifted for her bag. The jacket you let her borrow after she lost it. Foolish to think, but maybe you finally found someone you could care about more than you did yourself.

“Every day of my life,” you said quietly.

“Oh,” she whispered, nodding. She said nothing more. Olivia’s view was focused on the cover of her textbook, which boasted happy students reading from it. It wasn’t the case for her. Revising this subject, being in this school? It didn’t make her happy.

Well, one thing did.

It hurt to see her like this. Had anyone ever considered what she felt? Or did she put up a front, being pretty and kind? 

“I just feel like I’m wasting borrowed time,” Olivia muttered. Each fragment of her broken sentences grew heavier.  “I want- I need-”

Before she could burst into tears, you tilted her face up. The water in her eyes remained there. What held them back besides your gentle hand was the tight frown of her lips. She was trying very, very hard not to break down.

“Hey. Chin up Princess,” you told her. You offered her an encouraging smile. “I know you. You’re a strong girl, aren’t you?”

Her eyelids were still puffy in their fight to keep her tears back. She didn’t quite believe that. But you would make her.

“Look at you. You’re smart, studious and sensitive. Nothing would make me think otherwise.”

Her gaze lingered on you, thoughtful. Did you really think that? Were you this sweet to anyone else? She chuckled and looked down shyly. “Alliteration.”

Smart girl. “That’s right,” you said. “I’m rubbing off on you.” 

“I guess that makes me okay.”

“You’re doing great. I promise.”

Light coffee stained the end of her mouth. You wiped it away with your thumb. A bit of her lipstick smudged your skin. An indirect kiss? 

When you retracted your touch, you thought the coffee was doing something to your head again. You could have sworn that Olivia leaned in.

And just when you thought lines couldn’t be crossed further:

People like to believe in things that they can see. Why trust in ideas that aren’t visible to the naked eye - it’s a lie for sure, right? Thus, the concept of atheism. Thus, the need for eye witnesses in court, primary sources, the like. Thus, the school not believing that the odor of cigarettes from behind the library could possibly be from you.

Well, they’d be damned.

Gray floated from your mouth like a lost dream. Vices aged along with your soul. See, you weren’t a bad kid. You stayed in school, did your homework, only tried a few prohibitions. But the smoking stuck to you - it reminded you of a more youthful time. It also made you feel a little light on your feet.

The thing was: the school couldn’t know. So you sank into the wall of the back of your library, fingers twined between a cigarette. You may not know yourself but you weren’t depressed or anything - it’s just a thing you do, like drinking coffee in the morning and writing. People often got that wrong.

The forest was just close by. Naturally you mistook the crunches of leaves for the usual PE class. Then they grew louder, and when you turned your head, there was-

“Ma’am? Oh!” Olivia stopped in her tracks and gasped sharply. It was a sound only an actress could make - sweet, tiny. “I’m sorry, am I-”

You waved your wrist. “Not at all,” you said. If there was anyone in the school you trusted with this secret, it was her. “It’s just smoking. I’m not committing a felony.”

She nodded. Her eyes remained doe-wide. 

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it time for your classes?” you asked.

It was the middle of the afternoon. She should be having English at this hour. Would they be surprised to find out that the top student was absent? The reason being . . . you?

Olivia swept her hair back. Time slowed down and made permanent the flight of her mane and the pride that stayed. “I’m cutting. I know, I’m a very bad girl.”

She was skipping classes for you. You didn’t want to assume, but was your friendship really that strong? It felt like you knew everything about her. She knew you too, like a book. She read you from cover to cover and annotated your pages. Olivia was a significant part of your life now.

“Oh, what have I done to you.” You played into it as if you were an actress as good as her. What she didn’t know was that you were enjoying it. 

Her nose wrinkled at the smell of your cigar. Still, she stepped closer, albeit cautiously. “Can I-”

“Leave?” You nodded. “Sure. Secondhand smoke’s cancerous.”

Yet if there’s anything you would hate, it would be for her to go.

Olivia shook her head. “I-I’d like to try, Ma’am.”

Your brows were furrowed. You took one look at your cigar then at the student. She was looking down shyly, her side fringes hanging from her face. It was obvious she was trying to prove something. But what else did she have to make worthy to you?

“I don’t think that would be appropriate.” 

“Please?” she said, a pout stretching on her pretty mouth.

“Princess.”

Your sharp tone didn’t hold her back. It seemed to drill her on. Olivia slipped beside you with a look in her eyes that you didn’t know if you liked. Her lashes sat low and her smile - god help me. Like that wasn’t enough, she wore a low ponytail with a few specks of hair left untied. She was too beautiful, and you weren’t strong enough to handle it.

She let a finger twist through the smoke. “It’s just smoking,” Olivia echoed. “I’m not committing a felony.”

Her character was hard to read sometimes. She could be sweet and innocent to you then switch to being a coy serpent that told you to do all the wrong things. Her breath next to your ear didn’t help your hypocritical case. The fight in you yelled to be the bigger person, to tell her it wasn’t right. It was anything but easy when she had a face that you’d die to hold.

“I don’t have more on me,” you excused. It was the truth - your pockets were empty, this was the only one you got.

“Wouldn’t mind using yours.” Olivia was almost whining at this point. The desperate look on her face was one you chased after, and you wanted to make her beg more. She sounded pretty that way. “I’m not a child, am I?”

She had a point. It wasn’t like you were giving away and teaching vices to an impressionable little girl. It didn’t feel right.

“Please, Ma’am?” 

You found yourself giving it to her - not only this, but your everything. Your future, your job, your morals.

Your main takeaway from that moment wasn’t to never do that again, or remind yourself that you could easily say no to a pretty girl (you couldn’t.) It was this: 

Olivia Hayes’s lips looked gorgeous wrapped around a cigarette.

She was made for the part. Her mouth fluttered around it while her stare was distant, piecing something together. She lowered it down and blew a ring of smoke in the air, just like in the movies. Olivia was an old Hollywood actress - a blonde bombshell; the main lead.

“It feels . . . ” She struggled for a word. “Good.”

You took the cigar away from her. “Don’t get attached,” you said. It was genuine advice. “We all know how that ends.”

She was smiling. You were too. 

She rested her head on the brick wall, facing you. Not quite - her gaze was fixated on your lips. “You look beautiful today Ma’am.”

You leaned forward. It was a dare for her to be audacious enough to prove it right. “Really now?”

The bump of her neck bobbed. You realized that your faces were too close to each other. Her lips were so full that it would take a small stumble to accidentally kiss her, to accidentally pin her to the rusty wall of this building. Those wide, princess eyes stared back at you in fear.

It was your signal to back up. This wasn’t right. No matter how beautiful she was or how close you were, flirting with a girl years younger than you wasn’t right.

Even in the silence that carried guilt, the universe didn’t take kindly to your offense. It brought about a punishment you would remember: the snap of a camera flash. 

You jolted. Who was that? 

Privy to your conversation, there was the man who asked for a library card. He was smirking. You knew and tried to avoid him because it was an open secret: he was bad news. He blackmailed, lied, used-

Ronny Kent was his name, and he was not a good person. 

There was Mika, whose reputation was solidly ruined after he leaked a picture of her. The rumors were too loud to keep secret. Then the janitor who only wanted a private moment with his partner. Ronny turned everyone inside out and it wasn’t pretty.

“Chainsmoker and a slut,” he said to Olivia, lowering the camera. “You play every game, even your friends. Gotta respect you for it.”

“Shut up,” said Olivia. Her jaw was tight. She spoke very softly that the insult bore no real bullet. “Please.”

But she meant this one. You hadn’t seen her this uncomfortable. There was real fire in her eyes but a downness in them too. This was not the first time Ronny had seized her dignity and smashed it beneath his feet. You could tell from the sudden rigidness of her body, the loss of her stability.

You couldn’t speak. He was so close to her, and you were afraid you would shove him if he came closer. Maybe you should.

“I don’t think so.” Ronny’s mouth sat next to Olivia’s ear. She cringed in spite of trying to remain nonchalant. Hot odored breath huffed on her face. “Get out of my way.” 

Olivia stared down at her socks. Nothing else existed to her. She felt cornered, afraid and humiliated. 

“Mr. Kent.” Your authoritative voice was no match to a teenage rebel. You glared at him and crossed your arms, but he took none of the signs. “It’s not your place. I’ll kindly ask-”

“When I told you to be her friend,” he said, completely ignoring you as he stroked the camera lens, “I didn’t mean to try hooking up with her. What would her boyfriend think?”

Boyfriend?

Olivia lifted her head with a short-lived defiance. “He broke up with me, Ronny.”

“Of course, because he found out she kissed me.” He was proud of it too. “She took me on a date. Ice cream and coffee.”

Olivia had just cut things loose with Donté. She never told you why. But this couldn’t be true. That wasn’t the girl you held close to your heart. Anger was clear in her face but she didn’t move. She took each word to heart as tears welled up. 

You had never seen Olivia Hayes cry before. This might be the first time.

“Everyone knows what you did to Mika,” she said, slowly and sourly. The end of her sleeve brushed at her eyelid. “You can’t hurt people anymore.”

“Oh, you don’t know that, Princess.” Ronny squeezed her shoulder. Each move he made stenched of bad luck. “I guess you’ll have to wait and see.”

Olivia was trembling so bad you had to step forward to hold her. You had to defend her and set a boundary with Ronny, who had crossed anything you could have made. To your shock, she left before you could speak up. Her shoes clicked angrily to her exit. 

And there was Ronny’s cruel smile that told you nothing good was going to come out of this.

And there was her somewhere-in-between hair: soaring in the wind, like a closing curtain.

You finished several good reads and Olivia was still not visiting you. She hadn’t been for the past three days. It was beginning to concern you. 

You watched the campus from outside of your library. It was full of rushing, bustling students, but you couldn’t spot Olivia. Your heart ached. She was a face you could spot in a crowd miles away but she wasn’t showing up in one or alone.

Was that her friend? A pretty girl with hooded eyes and an atmosphere around her that reminded you of Olivia. “Excuse me?” you asked. “Amber, right?”

She looked almost irritated to entertain you. She always wore that bored expression anyway. “Yes?”

“Have you seen Olivia? Olivia Hayes?”

“She’s probably here. Or there.” Amber lifted her shoulders. “I don’t know.”

“Well, if you see her, please tell-”

“I don’t want you looking for her,” interrupted Amber seriously. The little once-over she did told you that she knew something, and everyone did too. She wasn’t afraid to be upfront about it. “If what they say about you is true, you shouldn’t be allowed near her.”

She left without another word. That was the end of it. 

Now you knew why less and less pupils logged in. Ronny had done the job: spread the rumor, took the reins, rendered you completely of your power. 

It was your fault. If he had crossed a line, you crossed thousands with Olivia. From your thoughts to your gestures to the bond you had - none of it was supposed to happen. None of it.

You brought this upon yourself.

You didn’t want to seem suspicious by asking around. Anyone who visited your library knew you and Olivia were close. You didn’t want to ruin the girl’s reputation.

Maybe someone already did.

The days felt empty without her. No biscuits, no fun conversations, no Olivia. You missed her coquettish laugh and lean posture and thoughtful little gestures. The desk across yours was devoid of a girl who became important to you. Everytime someone entered, you hoped it was her tall and pretty self coming to check in on you. Much to your dismay, faceless pupils were the only people logging in. 

It hurt. You didn’t want to make this about you. But it hurt. 

You had to quit being selfish. She probably needed space. Space? She wasn’t your girlfriend. She couldn’t be. 

You were finishing up for the night. The screen of your computer was bright. It reflected in your tired eyes an Excel sheet. It was a record of late fees and damage compensation. Someone had missed their return date and as much as you didn’t want to charge anything, you had to. Generosity wasn’t a skill they hired you for.

Calculus. It was exam season; you expected that.

What you didn't expect was the loud banging on your door. 

“Jesus-” You flung out of your seat, clutching your chest. The clock said it was past 7 PM. Didn’t they have a watch? Elite heirs usually had watches whose prices skyrocketed past your salary. So who was it?

You ignored it, sitting back down. It wasn’t your fault they couldn’t read the rules.

The rummage of the knocks grew louder than the typing sounds. Along with the darkness and otherwise complete silence, it was beginning to terrify you. Words didn’t make sense for the first time ever. You had to tell them to cut it out.

You stood, paced to the entrance and opened the door. 

“Ma’am?”

It was Olivia. 

She was crying.

Tears streaked her face. Sniffling, she threw her arms around you. Her back rose and rested to the tempo of her sobs, an unwelcome rhythm. The redness in her eyes and the desperation in them - full of need to be comforted, to be held - you ached seeing it.

Something was wrong. You closed the door and hugged her. She was shaking like she had escaped a rainstorm. The only rainstorm here was the flood of sobs that stained her cheeks. Now they spotted your collar.

“Ma’am,” she murmured. Her lips were on your neck, vibrating her cries into your skin. Oh, if you could, you’d take that with her pain. “I thought I lost you. Ma’am-”

Olivia’s voice was broken. She said your nickname not only to call you, but almost like a reminder that you were here. She had nobody else. 

You held her tight and let her cry it out. It was alright, you told her. You were here. Your hours were done but you had and would add more if it was for her.

“I’m here. Hi Princess.”

Your Princess.

Olivia didn’t let go. She was suffocating you with her arms knotted behind you, and a mouth that muffled her pain into your shirt. The pain that bubbled in her chest killed you. but you’d die a thousand times if it were for her. 

Olivia shivered when you let go. You led her behind your desk, her safe place. She leaned against it and tried to control the tears dropping from her red eyes. But the rainstorm was inevitable. The whole day poured down on her ruthlessly.

The familiarity of everything seemed to calm her down a bit. Hands on her hips, you gently pushed her down her usual box. She didn’t sit alone. You were there for her this time.

“Hey,” you repeated. 

You wanted to call her your girl, your baby, your Princess - anything that would comfort her. You wanted to take care of her. You’d wrap a blanket around her and take her out to eat. You’d kiss her and tell her you were here. You’d say: hey little dove, you don’t have to soar all the time. You could just sit here with me.

All you could do was hold her waist and try to control the shudders. “What’s wrong?”

She whined and placed her face into her hands. “I’m sorry.”

What was she apologizing for? She did nothing wrong. She couldn’t do anything wrong. She was so frail and weak as she supported herself at the end of your table that you wrapped her in an embrace again. You knew she needed it.

“Sorry for what?” 

Her words trembled, regretful too. “He . . . he leaked the photos . . . ” Olivia stammered.

Your heart dropped. You didn’t need to ask to know what photos or who did it. Ronny’s visit was a revelation of the end. “Oh baby-”

It was one of a girl’s worst nightmares. There came a deceptive boy whose threats held bite to them, who deceived and lied and manipulated. Nothing could ever be given to them without the fear of the tables turning. 

That was why you couldn’t find her like you always did. That was why she didn’t visit. The world was against her, and she couldn’t keep her resilience anymore.

Her breaths kept tying around her neck and choking her. You kept a hand on her back so she could at least catch them. Her shaking was knives to your chest.

“I was looking for you. I thought they . . . they took you away.” The thought got to her and she looked at you with begging written all over her face. Her frowned lips uttered the words you didn’t think would hurt you this way: “Ma’am, please don’t go away, please don’t go away-”

You pulled her close. Her hair stuck to her cheek, glued with teardrops. 

“I’m not going anywhere Princess,” you told her. 

She didn’t quite believe that. Sniffling, she pushed you off.

“I lied to you Ma’am,” she laughed sourly. Her thumb soothed a teardrop at the end of her mouth as she stood up. “All this time. Did you know that?”

What was she talking about? Was Ronny right? You denied it with all your heart.

Olivia looked villainous. The rage was new. She’d contained it all these years, keeping it together, keeping pretty. But this was the end of it. 

“He’s spreading it around too so I think you know already. I’m not an heiress. Fuck, I’m not even rich. My dad’s been gone for years. My mom would rather die than go to my shit. But I thought that everyone would love me if I was just like them.”

“Olivia-”

“I’m sorry for lying to you!” She broke down again. She was the victim and the villain - crying, laughing; hurting, hitting. She was hysterical, hands together as she pleaded for your forgiveness. “You like me so much and I like you so much but you won’t trust me ever again. So I’m sorry-”

“Olivia.”

She beat her wrist on the counter in frustration. “What?” 

Her scream deafened you. The feedback ringing was so high yet it didn’t cut out her frantic crying. It couldn’t save you from the pain of hearing her tear herself down.

You took the red trunk of her wrist and held it close. She wasn’t going to hurt herself. Not when you were around. “Olivia,” you repeated, “I don’t care if you’re rich or not. I want you anyway.”

She tossed her head back, trying to keep the water in her eyes. It pooled and overflowed. Olivia couldn’t hide anything anymore.

You squeezed her forearm. “I still wait for your gifts.”

She glanced down at your touch enveloping her. Slowly, there was a realization that sank into her. 

She swallowed. “I still look if they have your favorite on the menu,” Olivia said softly.

“I still read the notes you leave.”

“I still want you to call me Princess to get through the day.”

You pulled her in. It was an unconscious decision but you didn’t regret it. Her skirt swished against your legs. You were chest to chest and stomach to stomach. No boundaries. Just her skin against your skin. Her eyes connecting with yours. 

“I still pray you never get a library card,” you confessed softly, “so you can read with me everyday.”

Olivia was silent. Her glimmering eyes pierced through your soul and saw what you didn’t need to say. Actually, she would have said something herself, had she not chosen to kiss you.

She was whimpering as she devoured your lips. She held your cheek and let the passion infect you too. It was like in these little kisses, these little touches, she found a promise that it would all be okay. 

(It would be - in all due time.)

You closed your eyes. Shock melted into passion, passion melted into the need to carry her to the edge of your table. Everything about her was perfect. You believed that until now.

It never stopped. Your fingers laced into her golden brown hair to lead her face closer. You would burn if she left you. Your mouth trailed hotly down her neck anyway. Even here, in the little space where her skin flexed and sweat, she was delicious.

You noticed her ragged breathing and stopped. Was it alright if you tore away the line that put you apart? 

You couldn’t say anything. Were you really doing this? To a student? To a girl that you adored?

Olivia’s legs were spread open. Her chin below yours, she blinked up at you. “Ma’am?”

Your thighs squirmed together. The word eternally had this meaning, this double-edged sword that killed you. “Yes?” you asked.

“Wh-What do you think of me?” Olivia asked weakly. The vulnerability in her question was painfully sweet.

You kissed down her chest and opened her blouse. Little gasps coming from her pulsing throat sounded like heaven. Her pretty bra cupped her breasts and she was just singing these tiny moans - begging you to take it off, begging you get your hand all up under her skirt; make the lines of her mouth twist with shock and pleasure; change the color of her face to red. Oh, she needed you to do a lot of things to her - you knew you wanted to do each one of those when you saw her walk in through that door.

Your tongue played with her stiff nipple. She began to move around, afraid to moan yet afraid to leave you hanging. 

“I think,” you said, before giving a final peck to the sensitive chest that came up to your mouth, “you’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”

Pretty face, pretty soul. Eyes as big as the heart everyone thought was ice cold. Lashes as long as her patience, her understanding. The beat of her heart matching the loudness of her need to feel good, just for one night.

“Oh.” She sighed. A familiar pink settled over her cheeks. “I really like hearing that from you.”

“Want me to keep talking to you?” It was impossible how every scape of her flesh was appetizing. You licked behind her ear, where she could hear every word. “Want me to tell you how pretty my Princess is, what a good girl she is for me?”

Her thighs clamping around you was enough answer. She was nodding and nodding, the desperate little thing. She was just coming undone. The student, who was so confident and collected, sat on your desk with her uniform tor and lips swollen from kissing.

Her lips. 

You pressed a kiss to your fingertips before tracing them to her mouth. Olivia’s lips were cushiony soft. When you slipped your digits past them, she rolled her eyes back.

Your fingers were the source where she drank and drank. Small moans fought their way out of her. She was enjoying this too much. The angry heat left in her body changed to one she enjoyed. This one made her feel giddy, made the little hairs on her skin rise. And Olivia had to voice it out in tiny sighs which provoked something in you. 

It wasn’t right, but weren’t you entitled to a little sin?

You freed her mouth and instead imprisoned her chin with your hand, letting them float around her face. “You know where these are going Princess?” 

Olivia shook her head. Behind that innocent look, you had a feeling she knew. 

A path forged down to her skirt. It was unfair that the uniform fit her so perfectly. Under the blazer, the blouse, the curve of her body slanted beneath your touch. There came the hourglass line of her waist then the flare of her hips, full around your palms.

Olivia was getting an idea now. No sound needed to leave her mouth when it could all be read from her face. The puppy dog eyes, the quiver of her lips, the red of her cheeks.

“These are slipping right under this skirt,” you continued. You did as you said. Her slim thigh was held by a long, white stocking. It would stay on. “Right between your legs, through this pretty white underwear. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes. Oh god.” She shut her eyes. “Take it off, take it off-”

Olivia gasped sharply as you touched her. You weren’t in her - not yet. But she was already this sensitive. She squirmed around at how you cupped her core, felt how she was cleanly trimmed through the thin undershorts, how the heat was unbearable. You had to do something about it.

Not yet. You clicked your tongue, continuing to feel her. You would take your sweet time with this princess, make her feel good, make her remember this night. 

“You can’t boss me around, Sweetheart.” Sweet talk never truly left your conversations despite the scolding. Punishing a poor little girl who keened and sighed to your touches was cruel enough. It was like wielding an upside-down cross to an angel. “Play nice. What do you say when you want something?”

Olivia kept shimmying her hips into your palm. Her fingers struggled on the desk to keep her stable, and her mind struggled as well to do the same. 

“P-Please.”

“Yes?”

“Please . . . ” Olivia breathed, “please fuck me, Ma’am.”

Shit.

You wasted no time. She was true to being a princess - her panties were lace, frilled and white, a bow on the top. Perhaps it was simply you admiring Olivia like you always had, but it was making you so pent up: seeing her with her skirt lifted, the front of her blouse unbuttoned, her long legs embroiled in a fight not to close.

Olivia whined in response to your thumb caressing her clit over the fabric. The rhythm had her chest tightening while her breathing abruptly lost itself. She was done with the teasing. 

So were you.

You hooked on the sides of the fabric and gently pulled them down. And God - if her panties were pretty, her pussy was even more so. Her wetness glistened, as if telling you it would look better coating your fingers. Filling your mouth. Sheening your thigh.

You pushed first, not pulled. 

“Oh . . . oh.” Olivia lowered her head with her eyes squeezed shut. She was throbbing like crazy. She lifted her head and you could see the gratification written (no, scrawled) all over her face. “Ma’am, I- oh . . . ”

You let yourself curl inside her for a moment. The texture of her walls slid over your skin and the wetness satiated your thirst. Slowly, she took over you. And it was the same on your end - you slid yourself deeper and felt for her sensitivity. It was everywhere, taking from the whines she let out and the frown on her lips.

“Princess,” you said. ”You are so fucking tight.” 

You couldn’t even start thrusting. What if you hurt her? 

“Just clenching around me, yeah?” You caressed her nub in slow circles. “So damned wet too. Fuck-”

One hand on the small of her back, you buried yourself inside her. Her gasps were shorter and blunter as you fixed yourself inside her. The only thing that made it easier was her wetness, sticking to you and allowing faster movements.

You smoothed her hair as she threw her head back. Her collarbone stood out from beneath the fabric. You pressed your lips there with a nibble gentle enough to increase the sensitivity that set her skin on fire. As her jawline grazed your mouth, you felt her moans vibrate below it. You wondered if she knew how pretty she sounded. 

She lost everything once you sucked on that spot. Olivia sounded prettier.

“Ma’am, Ma’am, please-” Olivia thrashed around as if she were a wild animal. What if she were? And not the royal she made herself out to be? She rode your fingers with a fury that beat the angriest of hearts, but she was whimpering - lips pursed; sweet little sounds barely escaping their soft prison. No, this girl was too angelic, too fragile to be feral - but the ferocity of her hips and the grip she had on your wrist said otherwise.

Maybe it was fate that she took you so well. All the little conversations, all that twisted yearning pinned the thread right to this moment wherein you got lost immediately upon sinking inside her cunt. She was so tight, almost too tight, but her wetness let you finger her without having to be careful. You had a feeling she didn’t want you to be careful at all.

And the thing between you and this pretty girl you had literally wrapped around your fingers? The intuition was always right. 

Yes, she wanted you to nip at her beautiful shoulder so she moaned louder. Yes, she wanted you to keep a hand firm around her ass so she wouldn’t collapse against the wood. Yes, she wanted all of this - and it’s not in you to say no.

Neither was it in Olivia. The pitiable girl was tearful. Turns out it wasn’t the cigarettes that would eat away at her cleverness, the breath leaving her weak lungs - it was the pleasure. “Yes yes, oh my God, I need them, I need it, need you to ruin me-”

Her words were an invitation to add another finger, and perhaps fuck her harder on this desk. No one had to know. Not the school, not the students - it was just you and Olivia, in your own world, kissing and touching.

It was, too, an invitation you accepted.

Her chin tipped back. “M-mmm, oh!” Olivia cried. Those long lashes carried big tears that fell down her cheeks, as if she were a mystical saint, the monarch of monarchs, a girl worth worshiping. Saint Olivia Hayes, martyred by a want that blossomed in her chest for far too long. Drink from the nectar between her legs and she’d grant a miracle as good as an orgasm. “It’s just- it’s- oh-”

You thumbed at her clit fast. It was so easy to get her moaning and whining but you still felt that you had to work hard. You had to make love to her in a way that she’d forget everything. You had to drive yourself in her like you were trying to start the engine of her insanity. Oh, come on - whose approval were you trying to gain? Olivia’s? 

Plausible. Because the ache of your wrist you would trade over and over  for the shiver of her body and those big blue eyes staring at you with this subtext that said if you give it to her harder, she might just be yours. 

“More.” You felt her twitch around you, your fingers wrapped by the heavenly feel of her pussy. “Oh fuck me now, faster. I deserve it, I’ve been so good.”

“Of course you have.” You lifted her face and looked at her with the gaze of a doting teacher, almost making this moment justifiable. You were only taking care of her. This was nothing out of the ordinary, teacher and student. “You deserve everything, Princess. Oh, you don’t even have to ask for anything. I’ll give it all to you, baby, I promise.”

And this was around the time, or perhaps exactly when, Olivia melted. Her cheeks flushed and her pout ran deeper. As queen bee and campus celebrity, she carried herself as if she didn’t need anything, not even a compliment. But the need throbbed and screamed inside her. This was the true Olivia, wanting to be petted and praised and kissed. You were the one to satiate it.

You rubbed the tips of your fingers along her weak spots while thrusting quickly. The marriage of your eyes obligating her to meet them, the curl of your fingers, the thumb at her chin - it was too much. She was pushed to the edge and she could fall at any moment.

“Don’t-” Olivia shook her head. Tears ran freely. She didn’t know what she was feeling anymore. The lust was overwhelming and there were too many things she wanted you to do to her. “Fuck… oh God, please!”

Your thumb worked on her swollen clit; meanwhile, you’d spread her legs and instantly slid your tongue through her slit. It’s fucking crazy - when her flavor pooled in your mouth and you drank her freely, she tasted like a memory. You’re already missing her. She was a habit you wouldn’t think to kill off and she’d grow within you and become part of you.

And you would lose her. Just like that.

But you would never, ever, forget her.

You lapped her up. You savored her because the repercussions would catch up and you had to save every last bit of her until you could. Oh, she was screaming, loud and raw - you heard her despite her soft thighs clamping around your head. You kept them there. You wanted to stay in her forever.

“Too much,” Olivia implored, but not for you to stop. She had a fist around your scalp and another around your heart. “Ma’am please, you’re going too fast!”

This was the first time in her life she liked being overwhelmed. Her novel plot of an expression twisted and turned - (it would end like this: beautifully, yet not the way you wanted.) She pouted, she smiled in spite of, she gaped. She did everything and showed you how good you were being to her. But nothing quite prepared her for the feel of your lips tight around her clit.

Her river flowed and flowed. She arched her back and screamed for what all of it was worth. She fell in love with you and you let her dance on the tip of your tongue. You fell in love with her and she let you quench your thirst with her taste. You - two women, from two different lives - fell in love with each other, and you weren’t quite sure how to end that.

You secured her clit in your mouth and sucked as hard as you can. She burst into tears, trying and crying and swearing that she couldn’t handle more but she’d chew off more than what she can stomach, for when the orgasm bubbled in the pit of her stomach, she knew that it was going to be difficult.

“Ma’am, please, I don’t think I can handle it.” 

You were sure you were going to suffocate. The hold of her thighs around your neck was deadly. 

“No, please make me cum, it’s too much!” She sobbed and rode you harder. “I can’t I can’t I can’t, Ma’am, Mommy-”

And there it ended. With the sudden drumming of your heart you didn’t know how to do it. But it finished itself with your Princess finishing on your face, static shock running through her blood and looking quite lost in her own world. 

It happened. The expectation of it did not make it easier. Ronny’s photos reached the school authorities and the students. Every detail was out there in the spotlight. It included how you met, how you admired her from afar, how you were caught smoking suspiciously alone with her.

You were brought in and quietly dismissed. Nobody wanted attention brought to the school already gained by the murders happening. It was an unsafe place, for both your heart and soul. It was just right to leave.

You didn’t get to have a last conversation with Olivia. Afterwards, she simply sat there on the desk with her eyes closed and exhausted. Her head rested on your heart. You could still feel it now, as you sat at home, looking for another job. There was no use tearing up about it. It was wrong from the start and it was wrong now.

A few tears did end up on the black and white ink of the classifieds.

Not a day went by that you didn’t think of Olivia. How was she doing? Was your Princess coping? To be outed like that to what she saw as her world, to be named a slut and villain by her peers . . . it couldn’t be easy. You wanted to apologize to her in some sort of way. It would be to pay back all the good things she’d done for you. She was a good listener, a good student, a good girl. She deserved to be okay.

But how?

The answer came to you one day in the form of an email, from an unknown address but a familiar name:

We broke the rules. How about we and some good friends of mine break more to get even?

You in? ;)

Yours, 

Princess

[excalibur-gone-missing]

Paring: wonwoo x fem!reader

Genre: lovers to exes

warning(s): angst

summary: wonwoo realizing that good things dont last unless one takes care of them.

words:750

a/n: I request each and every one of you to comment on this fic don't be a silent reader it helps me as an author to understand my readers and i would love to communicate with all of you. Constructive criticism is always welcomed by me so do talk about this fic or send me an ask.

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Wonwoo had realized you were the love of his life from the prime age of fifteen. You obviously were not aware of this revelation of his, but you did not need to, he was fine with keeping it secret from you till he was comfortable with sharing it.

He had met you when you were six and though a series of unfortunate events, wherein you shoved his face in dog shit and he pushed you into the lake without knowing you could not swim, you both became best of friends, almost inseparable.

The first crack in your ever so strong friendship came with Wonwoo realizing his feelings for you, he stopped talking to you trying his level best to make sure it goes away. It resulted in you breaking into his house to inquire his sudden disappearance from your life and decreasing his life span in the process.

He had his first serious conversation with you about your relationship then. After spending the whole night talking, you both realized you were equally in love with each other and felt the innate teenage need to get into a relationship.

That was the second crack. Now that he thinks back to that day, he realizes the foolhardy risk you both took. It just resulted in a lost friend and a broken relationship.

That was five years ago, both of you were young and dumb, and did not know how to actually work out a relationship. Now at the age of twenty, both still young and dumb, but wiser than your fifteen-year-old selves stand in the living room of his college dorm teary eyed and exhausted from the conversation you just had.

"Maybe it's time we take a break you know experience the world, because I don't really have the energy to do a long distance anymore Wonwoo, not when it's just me putting the effort." You spoke.

That was the topic of the argument, 'his extreme ignorance to your presence', as you had stated, taking utmost care to point out all the time when he went wrong and how you are the only one putting enough effort.

In return he had used up his energy to point out valid reasons as to why he was not able to be available for you in his schedule. His head is throbbing, and he would very much like to have a glass of water but alas the predicament he is in refrains him from doing so.

"let's break up then, what are we waiting for", he says.

All he gets is a scoff from you as a reply. You turn around while running a hand through your hair, you mumble something that sounds similar to 'prick' and walk out of his dorm slamming the door shut.

Maybe if he would have tried to understand where he went wrong instead of making excuses, maybe if you would have tried to understand his predicament or maybe if you both would have sat down for a discussion, you could have salvaged the broken relationship of yours.

But that was not the case here, you both were too deep in your emotions to even try and feel the others, the years in uni had made you both incapable of accepting the changes you both went through. It has made you both hardheaded souls who refused to accept their own shortcomings and blame the world for everything when they could easily fix the problem with accepting their faults instead of defending them.

You were Wonwoo’s first love, and he knows he was yours, but maybe good things do not last long or maybe to make them last one must put in effort, which you both just refused to do. He knows before anything else you both were friends; he does not know if you will be anymore, but he sure does hope that the friendship stays.

Maybe he is a prick he thinks, but you are no less, he knows both of you are equally at fault here, but he will take the easy route this time too, he will blame you because it takes too much courage to blame one’s own self.

He just hopes when the storm dies down you come back to him maybe not as a lover but as a friend because you are too precious for him to lose, and he hopes you think the same as him. Because at the end of the day, you are best of friends.

[youremyheaven]

Do you think it’s possible for a solar man to be loyal? My ex turned boyfriend and I are going long distance and it’s not that I don’t trust him but like…gulp. He’s a Krittika sun and his atmakaraka is in Mrigashira he’s also a revati rising😶. He said he’s committed but we can’t see each other for three years😭 he was a senior when I met him as a freshman(in college) and now I’m entering sophomore year and he’s graduated. Apparently when I graduate, moving in together and marriage is what he wants. I’m just scared tho😞 like he’s super blunt and honest sometimes to a fault so if he did anything he’d tell me?? Idk 😭

i think anybody regardless of their naks can be a good, honourable person who is loyal, faithful etc. what naks show us and what their purpose is, is to reveal the innate tendencies of a person. anybody can attain self-mastery and rise above their nature though. (yk the whole enlightenment business hehe)

that saiiiiidd,

i dont think a combination of krittika + mrigashira + revati sounds like husband material stuff to me. thats my honest opinion.

idk what your placements are and how ya'lls synastry looks like but you clearly already have your doubts, which is why you're telling me about it 👀

this isn't only tied to astrology but as a psychic-intuitive person, im getting bad vibes from this man. 🫢🫢

you can make any decision you'd like to and its up to you. im not trying to fearmonger or falsely accuse a man i dont know of anything.

BUT

as a grown woman, i'll tell you that seniors who hit on freshmen and get into relationships with them are more often than not, predators. he was in that uni for a good 4-5 years and yet he was single in his final year and the only suitable woman was a girl right out of highschool???

if you're in your 20s you would know how hard we find it to connect to someone in their teens. a 21-22yr old is entering the work force/studying further etc and is an actual adult with real responsibilities whose life looks vastly different from an 18yr old fresh out of highschool. this is not a relationship of "equals". there is a power dynamic here (and with that krittika + mrigashira + revati 💀💀💀the power is most definitely in his hands)

i say this as someone who has male friends who have done the same thing and dated freshmen. they've all talked about how "innocent" the girls are and how "naive and cute" they are 🤢🤢🤢🤮 i would never let my daughters around these men. so that should tell you something.

idk how many relationships you've had but trust me, the guy you meet in your first year of university is not The One

another thing that reallyyyy bothers me is how, he expects you to wait for him for 3 years. it SCREAMS revati + krittika/solar influence. he's had a whole college experience and is now graduated and onto other things but he wants you to remain committed to him until you graduate college even though he knows there's no way you can see each other for THREE YEARS???

my june talking stage (Venusian man) was Revati Sun & Venus and him & i used to run in the same circles in school etc and reconnected after nearly a decade. after days of flirting, proposing marriage, him wanting me to have his babies etc he "accidentally" revealed that he's planning on migrating abroad in the next several months 💀💀💀 and i asked him why tf would u then plan ur entire life with me and he said "bc it would be nice to have a plan ready when we meet again in the future" 💀💀💀bro was basically trying to make me hopeful for a life with him, give him my time and energy and stay waiting for the day that may or may not come lmao

its different when a guy who is already your boyfriend promises these things (marriage, moving in etc) but you're 19 baby, you have your whole life ahead of you. do you really believe that this man is the love of your life? do you think you can put up with him every day until the day you die?

at 19, love and romance will feel very do or die and intense af,, you think this is your only shot at true love but that's not true. there is SOOO much wonderful stuff waiting for you in your future and you shouldn't throw it all to the side for a Solar/Martian/Mercurial man 🤢🤢🤢

life changes so dramatically after u graduate college, u have no idea!!! u will become an entirely different human being. you're still a kid right now and you should be focusing on yourself, having fun and doing well in college. men come and go but this degree can change your life!!!

as someone who has been in long distance relationships, lemme tell u that it takes A LOT of time and energy. and at 19, i think that time and energy will be better spent elsewhere. i also generally dont think long distance relationships work except in veryyyy rare cases.

your man loves the idea of you saving yourself for him, waiting for him, needing him, belonging to him. he loves to gives you ideas, fill you up with images of a future together because he relishes having that power over you. this is literally what Solar men are like. sprinkle some Mercurial manipulation on top of it. Martian men can be reallyyy violent and abusive (if imbalanced). he's already harsh with his words as you say, do you really want to stick around and find out what else might happen???

again, not trying to fear monger but i dont get good vibes from this guy

plenty of girls i knew in my first year of college started dating seniors and entered into the most destructive and life changing relationships.

none of them are still together. and this is coming from an indian pov where people still used to date to marry.

all im saying is, this looks bad from many different angles and i dont want you to ruin your college experience caught up with some guy who isn't even there. your friends will be out there making memories of a lifetime, acing their classes and you'll be arguing with him on face time and crying yourself to sleep

ik that sounds dramatic but im trying to be realistic here

cut this man out babe , you can do so much better<3333

[starsh1ne-va1ly]

To Win youre heart (2)

Theme : Akai and Furuya are fighting for youre attantion. What they dont know is that youre already marryed, with Masumi.

Request by : @jennieyeager

Paring : (Oneside feelings) Akai x fReader x Furuya// (Romantic) Masumi sera x f!Reader

Warning: Oneside feelings// Grammar mistakes

Note : Oh wow lol. It didnt took me 20 minutes but 2 hours. I deeply apolegise for this ༎ຶ⁠‿⁠༎ຶ My ADHD isnt letting me focus :')

Furuya compliments you whenever he gets the chance, ask you out for a walk or for dinner at a expensive Restaurant. Shuichi offering to drive you to youre Uni/College/ whatever, whenever you want. Ask you to come at his place and makes you try his curry. Flirts to make youre heart flip like he wants to. Just, for some reason, it never makes a diffrents. No matter what they do, or how often they flirt. You dont seem to catch up in their behaivor. Later in the evening you ramble to Masumi, who lays in youre lap with just losely pants and a sportsbra, about the two men who seem like the nicest on the whooole world. Masumi listens to you until she gets someonething you problaby didnt quit catch on yet. Her eyes widen and she now sits upright and turns around to stop youre rambles by putting her hands on youre cheeks. Looking into your eyes with a expression that looks like she was gonna burst out into laugher any second. "Babyyy, theyre only doing this because they want to court you!" And she swings youre face from left to right. Youre eyes widen and youre ready to protest : -Whaaat? Noooo! Their not! Why should they? We're friends, besides, I'm engagend…" You say with a cute pout in youre face, that cant help but make Masumis heart studder. Even tho youre still pouting, refrusing to understand that, the wonderfull friendship you have build was just a lie, she hugges you from behind and lays her chin on youre shoulders. " Babyyy, don't you think it's weird to do all this just for friendship? Overall you met them just a few months ago. Thats clearly flirting, you Dummy!" "….Ehhhh?" -Masumi bursts into laughter when she notices that you finally understand their unusual behavior. - She, who lays now on the floor, made you meet up with them. When they both meet you in the Park, you thanked them and asked to clear Things.They we're shocked when you said that you were'nt aware of their flirting and in addition to that also married. Just a second after they asked who the lucky one is, Masumi shows up and pretends to flirt with you…. Soon she turns around to look at Akai and Furuya who only see what is happening before their eyes. Masumi plays to be surprised and just switches between the astonished faces. Shortly after she acts like she got an Idea letting out an "Oh!". And before Shuichi can even ask her what that's supposed to be, she raises an eyebrow, grins, turns around and starts kissing you. With Akai and Furuyas big eyes and youre now Red face, Masumi lets Go of you and explains the situation. Moving here to study you got an job as a maid in the Hotel Masumi lived in.You have met a lot of times and ended up falling for each other. Masumi is literally bursting with the fact that she was finally better than her big brother. She proudly takes you in her arms and shouts with a huge grin on her face "HA NOW LOOK AT THAT!! THAT MY WOMAN" Akai and Furuya gave up trying to court you and you stayed Friends :D But shes still reading them both, and dramaticly says that her big Bro wanted to steal her precious wife away from her.

This is the work of @lostin7hsky dont steal my work. These character dont belong to me.

[bapouro]

If you have the time and if it’d be fun at all, can you talk about how going to school for art is/was? Like what was bad about it but what did it make you realize about why you create? What was originally incomprehensible that became digestible after being surrounded by it? I’m just curious because I really only got into art after college age.

Hi

ive finally handed in my final project ever last friday and after somewhat recovering i can now answer u. (ill put an aside here that before i started uni, i saw a lot of the online umming and awing about art school and it being a scam etc that made me nervous going into it. i dont really think it has been for me but keep in mind im doing this in the uk. i think if i was in the usa or somewhere where it was that expensive i think youd get just about as many benefits going to somewhere like a community college instead. its worth a bit of money but not a lot of money.)

i realised while turning over your questions in my head last week how much doing my degree (illustration undergrad) during covid lockdown, illustrated (haha) the point art school had for me. and the point being that after trying to stick it out for the first few terms during lockdown, i deferred, i didnt really see the point i had already spent my entire life making art in my bedroom online for free, without somebody telling me what to do. practically what that degree offered me was physical facilities and resources, but really what i wanted it for was that vague miasma of drive and something bigger than myself to physically 'prove' myself to. i was and still am very interested in that gap between the online environment i learnt art within that felt a world away from my 'real life', and coming to meet with that 'real life' was kind of my goal. i needed both to meet on a very basic level for my quality of life. and id say i succeeded. twice now somebody i was originally mutuals with online turned out to be in my class. i live with one of them now. and i feel some pride now looking back on how much i felt like i had to separate my 'school' art and my 'personal' art during secondary school and now theyre practically one and the same. in fact one piece of advice ive kept with me from the uni tutors here is they consistently wish the students wouldnt 'hold back' so much on the kind of work they make: one of my friends, the one i now live with, was doing a tasteful furry pinup statue for a project and one of the tutors essentially asked them why the statue was being so sexually subtle with it, for example.

so what was bad about it! man... thinking about it the same reason i gave for why i came back after lockdown could also point out how flippant the reasoning was. its still a lot of time and effort let alone money to be putting into something that you dont Need an institution for. and art and academia, as much as you might try, arent going to be as neatly married as maybe STEM and academia. not that there isnt a place for it. we need it in there. but basically your work still has to get 'graded' on things so they can prove themselves as an institution so they can still get money to run. i ''apreciated'' the deadline part, for what it was, because i was(/am) a serial put-er off-er and i knew i needed something big to try and train me out of it. but the actual mark scheme and trying to work off of it is never not going to be nebulous. what the hell does it mean to 'demonstrate my awareness of the changing landscape of contemporary illustration' graded between 0 - 100 via a 3d animation. ive done pretty well. sometimes id get top marks. a couple times i wouldnt even pass and id have to do it again. the only pattern i could really see between what got those marks for me and what didnt was effort? so take with that what you will.

yea that being said, what it helped me realise why i create... i am thankful my particular course at my particular uni is so into their experimentation / medium diversity. because it proved to me again that experimenting is something i love to do. i could keep doing it forever maybe. but that also made me realise after trying to do that project after project that its only one part of the enjoyment. i couldnt sink my teeth in as much as i wanted. part of why im glad to leave is im glad to try and focus on just a few things now. take a project at my pace... reeeally get way too into it. hopefully.

what was originally incomprehensible that became digestible after being surrounded by it? mm.. i think getting to see a lot of the behind the scenes and the people actually doing illustration as a job kind of softened my glare on some art styles / ways of working i dislike. not that i Like them now but that kind of flat illustrator thing.. for some people it really is more of a job than anything else. i think thats fine. theres all kinds of other art to enjoy outside of their 9-5. i just hope they like it too. but of course it does set a precedent for what clients expect/what you feel like you should be making..? oh also i did actually end up really enjoying the couple of art essays we needed to write. reading cultural/art/etc pdf essays was something i already liked to do like reading baudrillard and ellen dissanayake and things but it was great to actually get to apply it in writing. and i think it certainly became more digestible to realise that these kinds of writers and this kind of writing wasnt some hard to penerate academia i couldnt be a part of really but turned out to be writing about things that already applied to life, whether i went to uni or not. really the whole experience... for me i felt like it was just something i needed to do. if anything just to get away from my family and make my own life. im glad i did it. but really art is art no matter where you find it. uni gave me a push to go further, i could sit around and say i couldve done it without uni but i think we overestimate ourselves. i think i couldve but i bet it wouldve taken longer and i may have experimented less, challenged myself less. who knows. just dont ever let something like that put you off art, it will always find you again eventually. im glad you got into it too.

[ao3feed-narlie]

i hate you (affectionately)

read it on AO3 at https://ift.tt/fuM7GKx by joelle2038 Nick Nelson: So did Harry actually hurt you? I hope not charlie: no injuries sustained except a broken nose and busted lip! Nick Nelson: Omg wait are you serious???? He broke your nose??? Im so sorry I didn’t step in sooner mate he’s such an arsehole charlie: why are you apologising like you have to protect me or smth i don’t even know you charlie: anyway, i have to continue studying. thanks for the check-in. also no he didn’t actually break my nose i’m just fucking with you xx Nick Nelson: What is your problem???? Seen. -- or, University AU where Nick and Charlie get off on the wrong foot. They fall in love. Words: 3565, Chapters: 1/?, Language: English Fandoms: Heartstopper (TV), Heartstopper (Webcomic) Rating: Mature Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Categories: M/M Characters: Charles "Charlie" Spring (Heartstopper), Nicholas "Nick" Nelson, Tao Xu (Heartstopper), Imogen Heaney, Isaac Henderson (Heartstopper), Elle Argent, Sai Verma, Harry Greene, Christian McBride (Heartstopper), Otis Smith | Omar, Benjamin "Ben" Hope, Other Character Tags to Be Added Relationships: Nicholas "Nick" Nelson/Charles "Charlie" Spring, Elle Argent & Isaac Henderson & Charles "Charlie" Spring & Tao Xu, Charles "Charlie" Spring & Tao Xu (Heartstopper), Imogen Heaney & Nicholas "Nick" Nelson, Harry Greene & Nicholas "Nick" Nelson, Elle Argent & Charles "Charlie" Spring, Elle Argent & Isaac Henderson & Nicholas "Nick" Nelson & Charles "Charlie" Spring & Tao Xu, Other Relationship Tags to Be Added, Benjamin "Ben" Hope/Charles "Charlie" Spring, &lt;-- PAST Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - College/University, Aged-Up Character(s), Enemies to Lovers, First Impressions, not PROPER enemies but lets just say bad first impressions, Charles "Charlie" Spring (Heartstopper)-centric, Nicholas "Nick" Nelson-Centric, Nicholas "Nick" Nelson Loves Charles "Charlie" Spring, Nicholas "Nick" Nelson has Golden Retriever Energy, University Student Nicholas "Nick" Nelson, Bisexual Nicholas "Nick" Nelson, Charles "Charlie" Spring (Heartstopper) has OCD, Charles "Charlie" Spring (Heartstopper) Has a Crush, Nicholas "Nick" Nelson has Strong Rugby Arms, Charles "Charlie" Spring is a Menace (Heartstopper), Drinking, Harry Greene Being an Asshole, Fluff, Fun, My First Work in This Fandom, Falling In Love, Happy Ending, Sexual Tension, Texting, Banter, sarcastic charlie spring, Protective Nicholas "Nick" Nelson, Protective Charles "Charlie" Spring (Heartstopper), Boys In Love, Boys Kissing, charlie tao and isaac share a dorm, nick fell first charlie fell harder, Charles "Charlie" Spring Loves Nicholas "Nick" Nelson, Psychological Trauma, Comfort, Soft Nicholas "Nick" Nelson, homeboy can still throw down tho dont get me wrong, charlie spring has abandonment & attachment issues, Slow Romance, not TOO slow like moderate, Teasing, Past Benjamin "Ben" Hope/Charles "Charlie" Spring, Emotional Baggage, author is arab so the UK uni writing might be off read it on AO3 at https://ift.tt/fuM7GKx

[ya-boi-haru]

Giving some irl advice I wish I was told, cause you never know who needs to hear it.

1) If you are in (high)school:

It. Does. Not. Matter!

I remember being told this when I was in school and thinking "Maybe it was easier for you. You don't understand the pressure I'm currently under"

And now I know it truly doesn't matter.

I knew I wasn't going to do well in my HSC (final exams) and yet I was going for an ATAR anyway. I could drop down, out of ATAR maths cause I knew it would fail me more. And low and behold, for the first time in 6 years, I didn't dread going to math class.

I went for my ATAR INCASE I went to Uni (college) it's been 5 years and it's the last thing I want to do. Not that It would have helped, cause it was so low.

My highest test scores (Band 3 & 4) was for the 2 classes I actually cared about, and that's what I was happy with.

Lesson: Dont stress yourself out with highschool, that amount of stress and anxiety wasn't worth it for me.

Also cut off/block all the bitches that you went to school with, they aren't worth your precious time.

2) When going for a job interview:

Ask them why they're hiring.

I've worked at a couple places where I've thought "No wonder they're understaffed"

Ask them why they're looking for people/ what happened to the last lot.

If they say they moved on to other opportunities that may be true but maybe ask if there was anything else, just to safe. If they say that had to be fired ask why so you can learn from mistakes/ know what to expect.

I went to work for a company for 3 months and I've never been fucked around so hard in a job (that's a whole other story for another post) and later I had another women telling me she lasted a week before she quit.

Lesson: know what you're getting into

[sttoru]

so i like i a girl (i think)

well i used to have a big crush on her about a year ago but i think my fear of rejection and commitment is the only thing that’s stopping me from asking her out.

okay so about a year or two ago, i had a big crush on this girl in my college. we have so much in common and we talked all the time. and then during the end of my first year, i asked her out (not like a romantic/date kinda of thing, just as friends going out ykiwm?). so we went to the cinema and then we walked about until we both went our separate ways to go home and then i immediately lost feelings for her. not as in i hated her or anything, i could never she’s always been so sweet to me but i just didn’t feel that romantic interest in her anymore. that’s until i spoke to her recently.

time skip to the present (so two years later from the event above) she’s working full time and i’ve moved to a different college to prep for uni next year. for some reason i had missed her so much and i have no idea why. these feelings came back outta nowhere and then i ended up inviting her to see the fnaf movie with me and omg it was so good to see her again it’s literally been MONTHS since we’ve talked or seen each other face to face. um anyways, i like her again.

btw (if it wasn’t obvious) i haven’t confessed to her at all (bc i’m a coward). i was so close to saying something at the cinema but i didn’t (again, bc i’m a coward). but i feel bad. i feel like i’m leading her on or toying with her feelings. i don’t want to see mom like i’m wasting her time, i just wasn’t ready at first. dgmw i could wait and see what the future holds but i doubt i’m gonna find another person like her. (i’m so sorry this got so long 💀)

tl;dr

i got a big fat crush on this girl and i am fighting back demons to not confess my feelings to her because i lost interest in her a few years ago but those feelings came back recently when i met up with her after so long and i don’t want to seem like a piece of shit

OKKAAAAY THERES A LOT TO UNPACK HERE !!.!:!:8 😦😦

UHM okay first of all EEEEK ik . . . love is hard & (romantic) feelings are hard to fully understand too. it’s much more complicated / complex than ppl think — like it’s described in ur msg to a certain degree. but tbh.,,,

theres this saying that goes ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ which is actually perfect for your situation LOL i think the fact that you have realised your feelings for that girl after you spent a long time apart & met up again, says a lot. u speak very highly about her so there definitely must be some kind of feelings involved too

i would say: take time and figure it out before anything else. keep contact with her if yu can, don’t hint or do anything that you’re unsure of or could possibly lead her on when you aren’t sure about your own feelings abt her yet. bcs what if your feelings go from romantic to platonic again? yk it happens LOL figuring out what you precisely see someone as is stressful but yea it has to be done to prevent unnecessary painful consequences

thoooo if you ARE 100% sureeee of your big crush for her, then i will also advice you to take your time & dont rush into anything. i dont think you’ll lose contact any time soon (since you had a 2 year break before) so dont worry abt that. confess if you feel like the time is right / whenever you feel comfortable doing it — no forcing urself to!!!!!!!

u wont seem like a piece of shit if you figure your own feelings out first . keep it at friends until you do! then its all goooood . GL BBY U CAN DO THIS >_< tis nerve wracking but if u take enough time to reflect, im sure everything will work out smoooothly

[hyunjinspark]

Hii I Hope ur well 💛 questionnn! Only if ur comfortable with answering ofc! so ur involved in art for school I see, and art is a passion of mine I want to pursue. Im seeing a lot of people saying don’t do it regarding work purposes and that colleges and universities for art aren’t worth it, and people can make it without it. Although,, I don’t know people personally who have some relation to art. But being conscious about money just puts me in a dilemma- So I just wanna ask ur thoughts I suppose?

I hope ur week goes well 💛 and I’m excited for you and your opportunity to Paris, it’s very inspiring too

hi ! im more involved in the design part, so that can vary from pure art/illustration if thats what you’re interested in pursuing. personally, for me uni is very worth it since i work on a lot of projects for my portfolio, meet other people in the field, and also have experience building skills! its not the same for everyone, a lot of people may not prefer going to college or uni for it, but i was v interested in getting a masters in that.

i think if you find a good enough uni for it in your county, it can be worth a shot! i love learning and thats why i choose to continue studying, but im sure you can make do without it, depending on the kind of job you’re interested in!

as for the money, its v expensive but i applied for a lot of different scholarships and im working on a campus job as well. college scholarships are super helpful ! so if you have a good portfolio in art, you dont need to worry you can perhaps even get a full ride, or 30/50% of your fee paid off. and you can also apply for state aid/financial aid from other organisations, so if youre really passionate about uni i suggest you look into those options! i hope that was even slightly helpful just my opinion 😭

[daedalusdavinci]

📓

Put “📓” or some other version of a book emoji into my inbox and I’ll explain the plot of a fanfiction that I haven’t written but daydream about.

ive spent a lot of time recently trying to remember the hs fics i always dreamed id write one day, but lost motivation for before i ever could. i feel like i used to have endless inspiration and i guess im hoping reflecting on that will help me reconnect with it now

i think i wanted to write a collegestuck fic, where dave and sollux were roommates and dave had a shitty job at a coffeeshop and that he swore was basically step one to becoming a dj because they had live music sometimes and thats *almost* a club (but he doesnt want to be a dj, bro was a dj, hes studying archaeology and hes never been happier and he spends too many hours bent over textbooks in the library with aradia just because he loves it, its everything he wanted when he was a kid and it feels like freedom in his hands, but jade asks him what he wants to be and he says the sickest dj there is, and college is just to tide him over until then, and john asks him what he wants to be and he says a director, so he can make movies even shittier than johns dumbass favorites, and rose asks him what he wants to be and he says solluxs sugar baby, because if you dont admit you want something its harder for people to take it from you)

i dont know what the ship wouldve been, im sure there were times where i was full on applebee2 to the end and times where it wouldve been dvekat and so on and so forth, but i know that dave moved across several states so he could go to school with his friends and i know that he and sollux were assigned to the same dorm and get along in the way that only two irritating nerdboys confined to one room can (which is to say that theyre besties and also they hate each other), because i feel very passionately about sollux and dave being friends just as much as dave and aradia being friends.

i think it would be funny if eridan was studying abroad and was one of those annoying europeans that cant go ten seconds without shitting on america (why are you here then, karkat asks him every ten seconds) and was generally just. literally so insufferable but also had no real idea what he wanted to do w his life so he was just majoring in business even tho he hated it (he switches to history, eventually, and is much happier for it), and i think he studies at daves coffeeshop and gets the kind of coffee that makes dave think hes a pretentious hipster (he is), only he doesnt actually do a lot of studying at all and spends most of his time checking out dave bc hes stupid, and instead of flirting with him he insults him constantly, bc hes stupid. dave literally hates him.

on the side i think id want to spend some time exploring dave reconnecting with rose as long lost siblings and john and jade navigating that weird space of "okay ive known you online forever but this is what knowing you in real life is like huh". i think id go jadrose for this au and emphasize jade having a very complicated relationship with romance bc who am i if i dont make someone aspec. john burns out bad towards the end of their first year and is in his depression era

but yeah. all that, i guess. i came up w a lot of ideas for college aus when i was finishing up community college bc i was so excited to get out and go to uni and so theres a lot of like, idea scraps floating around and maybe someday id like to do something with that, especially now that ive gone to uni and know what its actually like