ꔛ SYN :: your summer job consisted of working boring hours at a dead convenience store in the middle of your tiny home town when soon you found yourself waiting patiently for a regular customer who you weren’t even sure noticed your presence in the first place . . . ◂𝘣𝘰𝘰𝘬𝘴𝘩𝘦𝘭𝘧 ◂𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘰 𝘮𝘦!
𓏵 CW :: ─── yearning, strangers to ??, swearing, fluff
아기 마틴 ✶ martin x you WC: ²²¹¹ 🍙🛒
Everyday was the same except now schools over, it’s 100 degrees outside and your ass of a boss decided it’d be funny to schedule you a closing shift everyday for the next two weeks.
That meant no parties, no sleepovers, no hangouts… no hangovers. Just like long sweaty days and bitchy customers…
“That’ll be $8.88...” You mumbled as a tiny box fan blew at your right shoulder—it doing no justice against the broiling June heat. You scoffed quietly when the customer threw a dirty ten dollar bill down and left without another word.
You sat back down on the stool behind the countertop with a dramatic plop and rested your head on your palm watching the tv replay the same 5 minutes of the same news channel.
That was the 2nd customer in an hour and you couldn’t be on your phone or your boss who sat in the office behind you would throw a hissy fit. You sighed.
5:55… 6 hours until you could go home and bedrot, you smirked recalling a funny tiktok you saw earlier that day, laughing to yourself out loud like a lunatic when a customer stepped quietly up to the register which quickly pulled you out of your daydream.
“You laughing at me?” The tall boy smiled down at you his head tilted slightly, his shaggy hair resting flawlessly atop his broad shoulders.
You looked up in annoyance anticipating another creepy old man but it was surprisingly quite the opposite? The boy looked about your age, his voice oddly familiar—oddly warm, from only a few feet away you could smell a sweet cashmere musk radiating off of his neck which was stacked with silver necklaces, just by the way he dressed you could tell he liked fashion or at least cared about what he looked like but most striking of all his smile was just so bright…
“Uhm.. Hello?” He said waving his hand in front of your frozen gaze, followed by a short concerned chuckle.
“No! Sorry- sorry!” You replied frantically ringing his items up quickly which looked like two redbulls, a nasal spray, and a bag of chips.
“You good? I thought I lost ya there?” He asked shoving his hands in his pockets leaning back and forth on his heels, his brows slightly raised in suspicion.
“Yes.. yeah sorry, that’ll be $19.96.” You said avoiding his eyes out of blatant embarrassment.
He nodded curtly, flipping through his wallet for a 20 dollar bill before sliding it across the counter and grabbing the bag of his items.
“Here you go, thank you.” You said hastily handing him his receipt.
“Thank you…,” his eyes scanned your name tag, “thank you y/n.” He smiled before turning to exit the building causing your heart to unexpectedly skip a beat.
Your eyes followed his large frame to the door and all the way outside… you had to admit he was cute. It had been so long since you encountered a cute boy while at work since half the store’s customers were crabby retirees or groups of annoying children… you quickly brushed it off, you’d probably never even see him again anyways.
It wasn’t long before quickly got sucked back into another daydream.
☀️
The next day was the same loop as the last. 2 or 3 customers in a single hour, your stingy boss giving you a death glare every time you reached for your phone, the scorching evening heat dampening your underarms.
You sipped at a juice box you stole from the back of the store, your eyes scanning the shelves for something you could eat later for “dinner” which normally looked like a cup ramen or soggy sandwich from the barely working freezer section.
After a moment you lazily looked up at the clock on the wall, it reading 5:50. Ugh.
You flinched slightly when the bell on the door sounded it interrupting the acquainted silence of the desolate store.
Upon noticing the familiarly tall frame that rounded the corner your cheeks became weirdly hot and tingly. It was the same boy from the previous day just his hair just slicked back out of his face now from what you could see above the short aisles.
You subconsciously tucked a piece of damp hair that stuck to your forehead behind your ear and fixed the collar of your uniform.
You threw on a polite smile as he approached the counter today he wore a snug wifebeater, one that hugged every curve and contour of his toned chest. You gulped down the heat rising in your face and hoped he had forgotten about the awkward first encounter you had yesterday.
“Just this?” You asked looking up at him.
“Yeah,” He said with a nod as you began scanning his items “how’s your day been?” He asked looking down at you, his tone polite, patient.
“Pretty slow.” You sighed genuinely.
“That’s good, I guess… right?” He stated followed by a hasty shrug and a stifled smile.
“Depends on who you ask,” You said giving him a weary grimace “that’ll be $4.34.” You said watching him flip through his wallet with a subtly acquired smirk.
“Not staring holes into random customers today, thats a win?” The boy stated with squinted eyes and a teasing grin causing your jaw to clench.
“Mhm… big big win.” You replied sarcastically, shaking your head handing him his change. Your subconscious cringing quietly.
He held out his sizable hand underneath yours in order to catch his change before flashing you that same blinding smile and turning his heel towards the door.
Your heartbeat began to slow back down once the bell on the door chimed as he exited. The tingly feeling in your cheeks gradually draining away once his scent was whisked away with the wind of the door closing.
You found it odd he took the time to ask you how your day was and even mentioning the events of yesterday.. then again those were the bare minimum workings of a basic human interaction.
Holy shit this job isn’t paying you enough if this the biggest thing you’re fixated on.
🌤️
Today’s shift was gonna be a good one. Today was Wednesday that meant your boss was off. And what that meant was that you could have your phone. Which made these excruciatingly boring shifts a bit more manageable… except for the single wooden stool you had to sit on behind the counter. Safe to say your lower back was on fire by the time 10:30 rolled around.
Wednesdays also meant you had to run the whole store by yourself, emptying the trash cans, cleaning up at the end of the night, stocking the shelves. More boring shit.
You hadn’t noticed how late it got since your time was being consumed by actually having to do some work for once.
While stocking the freezers in the back of the store the door chime sounded. You rolled your eyes and waited for the customer to ring the bell on the front counter signaling for you to go and check them out.
“Do you ever leave here?” A recognizable voice from behind you spoke causing you to tense. It was the tall boy from yesterday, here again for the 3rd day in a row?
You quickly stood up from your crouched position and moved from in front of the freezer, his towering frame stepping to grab his usual drink.
Upon gathering your composure you spoke, “Do you ever buy anything else?” You retorted with a twinge of sass.
“What do you mean?” The boy asked stepping slightly closer, his head tilting to the left a tad, his lips bordering a smile.
“You always get the same drink.” You stated crossing your arms, looking up at him.
“So what?” He replied crossing his arms back at you.
“Nothing.” You shrugged going back to stocking the shelves. “Just seems like a big commitment...” You mumbled.
“I know what I like.” The boy avowed while carefully watching you arrange the cans, his gaze feeling like daggers.
“Fair enough I guess.” You shrugged attempting to hide your apparent fluster.
“Do you judge all your customers like this?” he asked causing you to let out a short laugh.
“Only the ones who buy the same thing every day.” You said in a matter-of-fact like tone.
“You’ve been keeping track?” He countered with pursed lips, not sure if he should be touched or creeped out.
The second the words left his mouth, you regretted saying it. “I work here,” you replied quickly. “I notice things.”
“Mhm, right.” He didn’t sound convinced.
“Besides that flavor is disgusting anyway.” You turned back to face him with a sour expression.
“It’s the original?!” He snapped back expressively, inclining you to giggle.
“I’d genuinely rather have any other flavor.” You said in a strict tone making your very strong opinion on redbull known.
“Nah this one’s the best end of story.” He shook his head following you back over to the register like a puppy.
“Whatever helps you sleep at night.” You rolled your eyes as a smirk settled on your face.
“Good to know you're thinking about my sleep schedule now~” the boy said half sarcastically.
“$2.95” you replied in a fed up tone while picking at your thumbs underneath the counter.
He held out a crumpled 2 dollars backed up with a shitty grin that shown all 32 teeth of his, clearly amused by your new tone. You could help but let out a stifled giggle at his expression while loading the money into the register.
“Just get out already.” You said rubbing your temples with one hand, the other holding out his receipt.
“Alright I’m goingggg~” He drew out as he held his hands up in protest.
Was he seriously flirting with you???
⛅️
Thursday afternoon, an hour before work.
You stood in front of the mirror and thought—maybe you should actually put some effort into yourself today? Since usually you rolled out of bed, threw your uniform on and didn’t give your physical appearance another glance. Usually letting your hair rest at your shoulders, not bothering to put any extra effort into doing any makeup, just giving your face a quick wash and a simple chapstick application.
You attempted to slick back your hair into a ponytail, curl your lashes with your mom’s eyelash curler, and throw on some light lipgloss. To you.. you looked the exact same.
You didn’t know what force was compelling you to put this much effort into your looks today but it was strong. Choosing not to admit the truth you tucked your uniform shirt into your pants and left the house.
Upon greeting your coworker when passing him in the break room his stare lingered a bit longer than usual… maybe what you were trying is working?
Your eyes lingered on the clock from 5:15 to, 5:25 to, 5:38 to, 5:49 and finally 5:53.
Your back straightened in the stool you sat on, your neck extended slightly in order to show a more poised posture.
The door chime rang at exactly 5:55, in came the male you were waiting for—his stride slightly quicker today as he made it to the back of the store, his head tilted down to one side as he spoke into the phone on his shoulder frantically.
Usually he’d glance up, nod, at least acknowledge your presence but today he didn’t.
"Yeah, yeah, I know," he said into the phone "I'm on my way." he snapped back.
You waited patiently, studying his every move and mannerism. The way the graphic tee he wore clung to his shoulders, the sound his keys that were attached to his belt loop jingled, the way you could see the slightest bit of his waistline underneath the hem of his shirt. Your jaw clenched tightly, shaking off the thought as he approached the desk still talking into the phone.
“No, just give me ten minutes." He said pulling out his wallet while listening intently to the person on the other line, the silence between you both physically paining you.
“$3.25” you said looking up at him reluctantly.
He just nodded distractedly and handed over the money while listening to whoever was still on the other end of the call.
"Yeah, hold on." He said digging for some change in his wallet, momentarily setting his phone down. The contact at the top of the screen reading ‘manager-nim’
The register beeped. You handed him his change.
"Thanks." He said giving you a quick half-smile, it feeling oddly automatic. Barely directed at you.
Then he picked up his drink and headed for the door. The bell chimed. And just like that, he was gone.
You stared at the register for a second. Swallowing a lump of dullness that accumulated in your chest after the valueless interaction.
To put it into simple terms you felt like a complete idiot, all this pointless effort and useless worrying.
You don’t even know his name.
And.. he wasn't obligated to notice anything of course. He probably hadn't even looked at you long enough to tell if anything was different nonetheless.
Still, you found herself subconsciously annoyed while restocking shelves as it got later. Attempting to try and forget about the painfully charming boy. This was around the time customers stopped coming in anyways so you didn’t need to be up front.
While lost in thought you caught a shadow walk past the aisle you were working in, it stopping then trailing back quickly.
As you tilted your head up you found the male from earlier pretending to be distracted by the shelf he was standing in front of, his hand positioned comically in on his chin, his eyebrows furrowed in query, deep in though at the display in front of him upon being caught trying to speak up on you. Clearly he didn’t think this through all the way.
You shook your head in disbelief, “can I help you?”
“What?” He said a little too quickly.
“…You’re back?” You asked still putting cans on the shelf slowly.
“Yup forgot somethin.” He said confidently, grabbing the nearest item in his reach as a cover up. A single can of soup.
“You forgot soup?” You questioned.
He scoffed, “yes obviously.”
Neither of you believed that statement.
You raised an eyebrow. He looked away first. Finally, he sighed.
"Okay, maybe I didn't forget anything." He expressed putting the soup can back on the shelf, rubbing the back of his neck in pity.
"I figured." You standing up finally, placing your hands on your hips expectantly.
"I was on the phone earlier." He said looking down at his feet.
"Really?" you said dryly, your tone almost motherly.
He laughed, "Okay, that sounded kinda stupid." His eyes trailing up to meet yours.
"A little." You said shrugging.
"I didn't really get to say hi… earlier.”
You stared at him for a second. Then smiled sarcastically, "Hi?"
For the first time since walking back into the store, he smiled sweetly back. "Hi."
At the same time as this your attention was drawn to the front of the store where a group of teenagers entered and began making a commotion, them quickly making their way back to the aisle you both were standing.
A gasp, “Bro! Martin!!” A shorter male exclaimed.
Martin.
The shorter male ran up to tackle Martin from behind as 4 more individuals watched from the rear giggling to themselves. Which looked like 3 more males and a 1 girl who all you recognized from school.
You stood awkwardly, your expression bordering annoyance while watching Martin and you’s sweet interaction get flushed down the toilet.
You huffed a bit too loud which caused them all to turn to you. The girl now at Martin’s side giving you a sour sideways glare whispered at one of the males next to her, they both snickered at you mockingly. While Martin’s expression only faltered slightly.
You turned away moving back up to the front of the store, you were seething.
Soon enough the noisy group trailed up to the register wanting to buy a million things. Martin loomed at the back of the group his demeanor almost guilty because who knows what they said behind your back.
“$36.02” you said blankly as one of the males handed you their card. The girl who made small talk with Martin catching your attention while she batted her stupid eyelashes up at him. Your fists balled under the desk.
The group left after getting rung up, Martins gaze lingering on your slumped shoulders and stoic expression before he was pulled out the door by the group.
You sighed staring off into the night sky. His name is Martin…
🌥️
Friday. The day where most teens stayed out late with their friends or went out to parties but not you.
Another day another 8 hour shift.. luckily tomorrow you were off.
You couldn’t lie about the fact that you were still annoyed about the previous day but after some careful thinking you brushed it off. You didn’t even know the man you had no right to be territorial over him.
As the door chime rang stopping you from biting your nails you looked up your back straightening immediately when you saw Martin entering and heading straight back for the freezers.
It’s only 4:15? Why was he here so early? You cleared your throat as he stepped up to the counter setting one measly drink down, not his usual.
You reached for the bottle and scanned it slowly, “So you didn’t come back to buy more soup?”
“Not this time..” he said exhibiting a small hasty smile looking down at the floor while you tapped away at the registers screen.
"Actually, I wanted to apologize." He lingered on the last syllable.
That catches you off guard, "For what?"
He hesitates, "yesterday."
You immediately knew what he's talking about. Yesterday had been different.. you'd actually been having a decent conversation and for once it felt like neither of you were rushing or blathering through it.
Then his friends barged in and ruined it. Especially when that girl walked straight up to him. You tried to ignore it but unfortunately you noticed every aspect of it. The way she tugged at the sleeve of his shirt, the way she stood close to him, the way she laughed at literally everything he said.
You shrugged, “what about yesterday?”
“I kind of disappeared..” he said chewing the skin on his lip.
“You left with your friends?” You replied back.
“Yeah.” he nodded looking down again.
"So…?" You gestured for him to keep going.
"So..." he scratched the back of his neck, "It felt rude...like disrespectful.."
You paused. Because that wasn’t the answer you expected.
"It wasn't a big deal." You said in a mumble.
He placed his palms on the counter, "it kinda was,” he exhaled "my friends showed up and I got distracted so I just wanted to say I’m so-,”
“You don’t need to apologize Martin.” You announced cutting him off abruptly.
His gaze fixing on yours immediately once you said his name.
“Seriously it’s alright. I’m fine... it’s fine.” You explained despite your expression telling the opposite truth.
“$2.95.” You told him in a mutter, to which he held the money out, his undeniably hard grip on the dollar catching your attention causing you to look up at him.
“I’m sorry, okay?” He stated firmly before letting go of the dollar at last, it being rare you saw this side of him, he was serious?
You only nodded and handed him his change before he was gone.
☁️
Two days off were just what you needed to take your mind off of this confusing week. A weekend of rest and relaxation was all it took for you to convince yourself that the couple minuscule interactions you had with this Martin kid didn’t mean that he had any interest in you whatsoever. Just small talk and normal human behavior. You were just a convenience store cashier and was just the convenience store boy end of story.
A lot has changed since last Monday, the scorching heat started to die down finally, your manager was supposed to be on vacation this week, and you were supposed be training a new hire starting today.
The afternoon started off unusually busy. Which was good so the new hire could get some experience.
You stood behind the counter showing him how the register worked. He was around your age, maybe a year older. Quiet, a little awkward, still fumbling with buttons on the screen.
"No, not that one," you explained for the fourth time, reaching over and tapping the right key. "That one voids the whole thing."
“Oh.” He said softly.
The bell above the door chimed, you looked up automatically.
It was him again.
For a second, Martins expression looked normal. Then his eyes moved from you... to the guy standing beside you. Then back to you. Martin nodded once before he headed back to the coolers, one emotionless nod.
A minute later he came back holding his usual drink. The new hire glanced at you before speaking, "I got this one."
"You sure?" You asked politely.
"Yeah." He nodded stepping up to the register while you moved beside him.
Martin set down his drink his eyes scanning the new hire’s name tag that read “Jun”. He rolled his eyes.
Jun peered down at the screen. Pressed something… then pressed something else, nothing happened, "...Hold on." He mumbled.
You leaned over slightly your arm grazing his, "no, you have to scan it first."
"Oh. Right." He admitted in embarrassment before preforming the action.
Martin watched quietly, too quietly. His glare at the boy not going unnoticed, “so. you new here?” Martin questioned authoritatively.
Jun looked up, "Uh... yeah." He replied shyly, to which Martin only nodded robotically.
"Try it now." You gestured as the register beeped. Success.
“Oh, thanks y/n.” Jun smiled as the total loaded on the screen.
Martin crossed his arms, "Looks like you're getting along." He muttered just loud enough for you to hear. You were about to retort before you were cut off.
“Y/n can I get your help with something over there actually??” Martin asked pointing vaguely at a far away aisle.
“…sure?” You replied slowly. “I’ll be right back.” You told Jun.
Once Martin led you a ways away from the front of the store he spoke, “Does this mean you’ll be working less?” He asked, his expression genuinely disappointed.
You glared up at him, “that’s what you brought me all the way over here to ask? Seriously?”
He frowned slightly, “…well?”
“I have no clue Martin.” You said sassily.
"It doesn’t even look like he knows what he's doing." Martin mumbled in a sulky tone.
You almost laughed, "It's his first day give him a break."
"He almost exploded the register for Christ sake!" He exclaimed.
You shook your head when you heard the door chime ring from up front. You started back up to the front to help Jun, “when you know what it’s like working here you can critique other people’s learning speed.” You said projecting your voice in his direction behind you.
A/n's note: I wanted to experiment again so this fic might be a hit or a miss. Its inspired from weak hero class so for those who haven't seen it, beware of whc spoilers! Part 1(?)
Synopsis: there had been rumours going around about you. Some half true but mostly false. He should've stayed away from you but he was stubborn
Content: non-idol! juhoon x fem!reader, angst & fluff
Cw/Tw: bullying, physical violence, knife injury, forced alcohol consumption, underage drinking, mentions of death mild injury & lots of swearing
~4.5k words | part 2 | | cortis masterlist |
You’d heard the whispers ever since you transferred.
“Stay away from her.”
“She’s associated with the Yeongdeungpo Union.”
“I heard she killed her friend at her last school.”
“No way. A girl like her?”
“Isn’t she gonna drop out soon?”
You let the rumors roll off. What was the point of correcting them? People would believe what they wanted anyway. The truth was messy enough.
You had moved here after the incident at your previous school. Your friend had ended up in the hospital, in a coma. You had tried to save him but it still wasn’t enough. Every single day since then had felt heavy, like you were walking underwater. You didn’t think you’d ever feel comfortable with anyone. That is until you met him.
Kim Juhoon.
He was in the same year but in the advanced class. Handsome, ridiculously smart and always at the top of the rankings. The kind of student teachers loved and girls admired from a distance.Your first meeting with him was.... something.
~~
You’d barely stepped into the empty hallway when Hyoman and his pack cornered you like wolves who’d finally caught their prey.
“Did you really kill your friend?” Hyoman asked, voice low and mocking as he slammed a hand against the locker beside your head, trapping you. His eyes glittered with curiosity. “That’s what everyone’s saying”
Your jaw tightened. The rumor never got old, and neither did the anger it dragged up.
“Yeah?” You lifted your chin, staring straight into his face. “You wanna be next?”
A nasty smirk curled on Hyoman’s lips. One of his friends stepped forward, slowly dragging his gaze up and down your body in a way that made your skin crawl.
“Getting brave now, are we?” he drawled, voice thick with something worse than anger. “Cute. But that mouth of yours is gonna get you in trouble, sweetheart.”
You balled your fists so tight your nails dug into your palms. Every instinct screamed at you to swing, to make them regret poking you. But the promise you made echoed in your head: No more fights
You swallowed hard and scanned the room desperately. The window at the end of the corridor was cracked open just enough so you bolted.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?!” one of them snapped, lunging after you.
His fingers clamped around your arm, yanking you back. Hyoman was right behind him, reaching to grab your other wrist. You twisted sharply and drove your knee hard between Hyoman's legs. He crumpled with a strangled grunt.
You broke free and sprinted, heart racing with adrenaline. Another guy cut you off, slamming into you and wrapping an arm around your waist.
“You’re gonna regret this, darling” he hissed into your ear. A small knife glinted in his other hand. “We’re not done playing with you yet.”
“Fuck off!” you snarled, thrashing wildly. You managed to wrench yourself free, but not without cost—the blade sliced a clean, stinging line just beneath your eye. Pain flared across your face. Warm blood trickled down your cheek.
“Oh shit,” the guy laughed, eyes widening with fake pity. “Did I ruin that pretty little face? What a shame. Guess I’ll have to mark up the rest of you to match—”
You didn’t wait to hear the rest. You spun and sprinted for the window. Hyoman’s footsteps echoed right behind you.
“Come back here, you little bitch!”
You flipped him off without looking back. “asshole!”
You jumped through the open window just as his fingers brushed the back of your shirt. The drop wasn’t as bad as you feared—you hit the grass below with a hard roll, the impact jarring your bones but not breaking anything. Pain bloomed in your ankle, but you forced yourself up and ran. Shouts and pounding footsteps followed. They were still coming.
Your eyes darted across the school grounds. The art room. It was always open this late for the painting club. If you could just make it there somehow. You pushed, lungs burning, blood still dripping from your cheek onto your collar. Every step sent a fresh spike of pain through your face, but you didn’t stop.
The art room door was thankfully unlocked. You slipped inside, and carefully shut it behind you. The smell of turpentine and oil paint hit you instantly. You pressed your back against the wall, breathing hard, and slid down until you were sitting on the cool floor.
For a moment, there was only silence except for the frantic beating of your own heart and the distant sound of your pursuers still searching outside. You touched the cut under your eye and winced. It was shallow, but it stung like hell.
Then you heard a soft creak of a chair from the back of the room.
Shit.
Your head snapped toward the back of the art room. There, half-hidden behind a tall easel draped with a half-finished canvas, sat a boy you recognized immediately.
Juhoon.
He was slouched in the corner, one leg lazily crossed over the other, a thick book resting in his lap and earphones hung from his ears.. He looked completely at peace until his gaze lifted and met yours. For a split second, the world narrowed to just the two of you.
His eyes widened slightly, surprise flickering across his usually unreadable face. You froze, mouth slightly open, blood still slowly trickling down your cheek from the cut. You had no idea what to say.
Before you could form a single word, Hyoman’s voice sliced through the quiet from just outside the door.
“She went this way! Check the art block!”
Your stomach dropped. Pure panic flooded your veins. You shot a desperate look at Juhoon. He still looked lost, like his brain was struggling to process why a bloodied, frantic girl had just burst into his place. His lips parted as if he wanted to say something, but no words came out.
There was no time.
Your eyes darted around the room and locked onto the large supply cupboard in the far corner. Without thinking, you gave Juhoon one last pleading look. He didn’t nod or speak. But something shifted in his expression. You didn’t wait for more. You bolted across the room, yanked open the cupboard door, and slipped inside just as the main door to the art room slammed open.
The space was cramped and smelled strongly of paint and old wood.You pulled the door almost fully shut, leaving only a thin sliver to peer through.
“Check everywhere,” Hyoman growled. “That bitch couldn’t have gone far.”
You saw three pairs of shoes through the gap. One of them walked dangerously close to the cupboard. You held your breath, pressing a hand over your mouth to muffle any sound. The cut under your eye burned like fire, but you didn’t dare move.
From your hiding spot, you could just see Juhoon. He had pulled one earphone out and was now calmly looking down at his book again, as if nothing unusual was happening. Only the slight tension in his shoulders gave him away.
Hyoman stopped right in front of him.
“You. Seen a girl run through here?”
Juhoon slowly lifted his gaze, his voice low and unbothered.
“…No.”
“You sure?” Hyoman asked, narrowing his eyes.
Juhoon didn’t even flinch. He leaned back in his chair, pulling the other earphone out slowly, and answered in that same flat, unbothered tone.
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
One of the guys, the broad one who had cut your face snorted. “What if he’s lying? She could be hiding somewhere in here.”
Juhoon’s gaze remained steady, almost bored. “There’s no reason for me to lie. I don’t even know who you’re talking about.”
The air grew thick with suspicion. Hyoman stared at Juhoon for a long second, clearly trying to read him. For a moment, it looked like they might actually leave… until the guy with the knife started walking straight toward the cupboard.
Your stomach twisted. Shit—
Juhoon noticed at the same time. He let out a quiet sigh and finally spoke again, voice calm but firm.
“I was trying to watch something. Can you guys leave?”
There was a beat of silence.
Then Hyoman burst out laughing, the sound loud and ugly in the quiet art room. The others joined in, exchanging mocking glances.
“You?” Hyoman grinned, raising an eyebrow. “The nerd is watching something? Damn… it’s always the quiet ones, huh?”
Juhoon just stared back at them, expression blank. He simply waited.
Hyoman waved a hand dismissively. “Whatever. Go back to your weird shit, freak.” He jerked his head toward the door. “She’s not here. Let’s go.”
Their footsteps echoed across the wooden floor as they finally left, still laughing and throwing crude jokes behind them. The door slammed shut. Silence swallowed the room once more.
You stayed frozen inside the cupboard, knees tucked to your chest, barely daring to breathe. Then the cupboard door creaked open. You flinched hard, heart leaping into your throat but it was only Juhoon.
He crouched slightly so he could see you better. His eyes scanned your face, lingering on the fresh cut beneath your eye and the drying blood on your cheek. For a moment, something unreadable flickered across his features—concern, maybe or just mild surprise.
“They’re gone,” he said quietly. His voice was softer now, without the cold tone he’d used with Hyoman. He paused, then added, “You’re bleeding.”
“Yeah, no shit, Sherlock,” you muttered, voice sharper than you intended.
You pushed yourself out of the cramped cupboard, wincing as your stiff muscles protested. Juhoon blinked, clearly stunned by your tone for a second. He stood there awkwardly, one hand still holding the cupboard door, watching as you brushed dust and paint flakes off your clothes.
An uncomfortable silence stretched between you. You finally looked up at him and let out a heavy sigh.
“I’m sorry,” you said softly. “And… thank you”
Juhoon studied you for a moment, his eyes unreadable. Then he turned and walked over to his bag without a word. He rummaged inside it before tossing a small bottle of water your way. You caught it with both hands.
“Thanks…” you started, but the words barely left your mouth before the art room door burst open with a loud bang.
“HEY JUHOON! I’ve been searching everywhere for—”
Martin froze mid-step, eyes widening as they darted from you to Juhoon, then back to your bloodied face and messy appearance. The playful grin on his face vanished instantly.
“Anyone care to explain what the hell is going on here?”
Juhoon didn’t miss a beat. He quickly gathered his books and earphones, slinging his bag over one shoulder as he walked toward Martin.
“It’s nothing,” he said calmly. “Let’s go.”
Martin’s eyes narrowed. He tried to lower his voice, but the art room was too quiet for you to miss a single word.
“Why the hell were you with her?” he hissed. “Didn’t you hear the rumours?”
Juhoon grabbed his arm, trying to steer him toward the door, but Martin kept going.
“She killed her friend, man. You know that, right? So stay away from her”
The words hit like a slap. Your chest tightened painfully, the sting reaching deeper than the cut on your face. You looked away, jaw clenched, refusing to let them see how much it hurt.
Juhoon shot Martin a sharp look and yanked him outside. “Shut up and move.”
The door clicked shut behind them, leaving you completely alone in the dimly lit art room. You stood there for a long moment, fingers gripping the water bottle so tightly it creaked. The silence felt suffocating now. The cut under your eye burned, but the ache in your chest was worse.
~~
*A few days later*
The neon sign above the karaoke bar pulsed pink and electric blue, casting shifting colors across the wet pavement. Music thumped through the walls, muffled laughter and off-key singing spilling out every time the door opened. You hadn’t wanted to come, but when a classmate texted saying it was just “a small get-together to chill,” you’d convinced yourself it might be harmless. However you were so wrong.
The moment you stepped inside, the smell of cheap alcohol, cigarette smoke, and sweet perfume hit you. The private room your classmate had reserved was already packed. Your eyes scanned the crowd and your stomach dropped.
Several seniors from your old school were there, loud and drunk. Worse, three guys from Hyoman’s crew lounged on the couches, bottles in hand, their eyes lighting up with recognition the second they saw you.
You turned on your heel immediately.
“I think I should just go—” you started, voice tight.
A girl from your class, soojin grabbed your wrist with surprising strength and pulled you deeper into the room, smiling like everything was fine.
“Come on, stay for a bit! Don’t be such a buzz skill. Just relax, yeah?”
Before you could pull away, one of Hyoman’s friends stood up and shoved a glass filled with amber liquid into your hand. His smirk was ugly, eyes gleaming with cruel amusement.
“Why don’t you have a few shots until this bottle’s finished?” he said, nodding toward a half-empty soju bottle on the table. His voice carried over the pulsing music, loud enough for everyone nearby to hear. The challenge hung thick in the air like smoke. “Then maybe we’ll let you leave.”
Your fingers tightened around the glass. “Why the hell should I?”
The room seemed to quiet just a fraction. A couple of people chuckled nervously. The guy leaned in closer, breath reeking of alcohol.
“Isn’t your friend still in the hospital?” he asked slowly, voice dropping into something almost sweet. “It would be a real shame if something… happened to make his condition worse, don’t you think?”
A cold chill raced down your spine.The music continued to blast around you—someone was butchering a pop song on the mic—but all you could hear was the pounding of your own heart and the threat echoing in your mind.
You stared at the glass in your hand, the liquid catching the flashing lights. The others watched you, waiting. Soojin’s grip on your arm loosened, her smile now uneasy. The guy raised an eyebrow, clearly enjoying himself.
“Well? Bottoms up.”
You stared at the glass for a second longer, then tilted your head back and started drinking.
One shot. Two. Three. The cheap soju burned like fire down your throat, spreading heat through your chest and into your stomach. The room’s neon lights blurred at the edges with every swallow. Laughter and terrible karaoke singing faded into a distant, throbbing hum.
By the sixth shot, your vision started swaying. Nausea rolled violently in your gut, threatening to send everything back up. Your legs felt unsteady beneath you, but you kept your face blank.
The guys from Hyoman’s group watched with sick amusement, grinning like predators enjoying the show. You took the final shot. The empty glass clinked loudly as you slammed it down on the table. For a moment, the room spun hard. You swallowed the bile rising in your throat and forced a smirk onto your lips.
“Here,” you said, shoving the glass back into the broad guy’s hand. Your voice came out rougher than you wanted, but steady enough. “Happy now?”
He raised an eyebrow, clearly surprised you’d actually finished it. A couple of his friends laughed and clapped mockingly.
“Damn, she actually did it,” one of them chuckled.
The guy who’d threatened you earlier smirked back, leaning in close enough that you could smell the alcohol on his breath. “Not bad. You’ve got more balls than I thought.” He waved a lazy hand toward the door. “Alright, get the fuck out of here. We’re bored of you now.”
Relief crashed over you, but it was quickly drowned by the spinning dizziness. You didn’t wait for them to change their minds. You turned and pushed your way through the crowded room, shoulder bumping into strangers as the flashing lights made everything worse.
The cool night air hit you like a slap the second you stumbled out of the bar. The door swung shut behind you, cutting off the music and laughter. You took a few shaky steps down the sidewalk before the world tilted violently.
“Fuck…” you whispered, pressing a hand against the cold brick wall for support. Your stomach churned. The ground felt like it was moving under your feet. You only made it about thirty meters down the dimly lit street before the world spun too violently to fight anymore.
Your knees buckled. The sidewalk rushed up to meet you as you collapsed hard onto the cold concrete. A sharp sting shot through your palms where you tried to break the fall.
If only suho was here.… you thought hazily. I just want to disappear. You thought you were alone. The street was quiet except for the distant hum of traffic and the muffled bass still leaking from the karaoke bar behind you.
Then you heard footsteps approaching you.
A familiar voice cut through the fog in your head.
“What the hell happened to you?”
You recognized it instantly. Juhoon.
He crouched down beside you without hesitation. His dark eyes widened slightly as they took in your disheveled state and his usual calm mask cracked with visible concern.
He reached out, hesitating for a second before gently gripping your shoulder to steady you.
“Hey… can you hear me?” His voice was low. “Did you drink?”
The smell of his faint cologne mixed with the cold night air. You tried to push yourself up, but your arms trembled and gave out again. Humiliation burned in your chest alongside the nausea. Of all people… why did it have to be him who found you like this?
You groaned, the world still spinning even on the ground. When Juhoon reached for you again, you swatted his hand away sharply.
“Fuck. Leave me alone.”
“Hey—” Juhoon started, voice firm. He didn’t pull back. Instead, he stayed crouched beside you, stubborn as hell, refusing to leave you crumpled on the dirty sidewalk.
“Juhoon, just leave,” you snapped, harsher this time. You forced yourself up, ignoring the way your legs felt like jelly. The second you were halfway standing, the ground tilted violently. You stumbled forward and crashed straight into his chest.
Juhoon’s arms wrapped around you instinctively — one hand firm on your waist, the other bracing your shoulder — pulling you flush against him to keep you from falling again. For a minute, everything stopped. Your cheek was pressed against his shoulder, and you could feel the steady beating of his heart beneath his hoodie. Your own heart raced wildly, a mix of alcohol, and adrenaline.
You glanced up at his face. His eyes were wide, lips slightly parted. A faint flush crept up his neck and across his cheeks. He cleared his throat, clearly trying to play it cool.
“…okay?” he asked, voice a little rougher than before
He carefully loosened his hold, giving you space, but kept one hand lightly on your arm just in case. You stepped back and pushed him away, gentler this time.
“I’m fine,” you muttered.
“You don’t look fine,” he said quietly, scanning the cut under your eye and your unsteady posture.
You tried to laugh it off, but it came out weak. “I’m fine. Just drank a little.”
“A little?” Juhoon echoed, one eyebrow raised in disbelief.
The irritation and shame boiled over. You turned away from him, fists clenched at your sides.
“Why are you even here talking to me?” you huffed, voice cracking slightly. “You shouldn’t get involved with me. I killed my friend, right? That’s what everyone says. So just… go. Save yourself the trouble and stay away”
You started walking away... or at least tried to. Your steps were shaky, but you forced yourself forward.
“I don’t believe them.”
His words stopped you cold. You froze mid-step, then slowly turned around. Juhoon was still standing there under the streetlight, hands in his pockets, watching you with that calm, steady gaze. He didn’t look like he was joking.
“You wouldn’t hurt anyone,” he added, softer this time.
You searched his face, heart twisting painfully in your chest. The sincerity in his eyes made something inside you crack. For the first time in weeks, someone was looking at you like you weren’t a killer.
“How do you know that?” you slurred, your voice thick and unsteady. The alcohol made your tongue feel heavy, and the words came out softer than you wanted. You swayed on your feet, squinting at him under the hazy streetlight.
Juhoon stepped closer. “I just do.” His tone left no room for argument. He glanced down the empty street, then back at you. “Now let me drop you off. You’re not walking home like this.”
“I don’t need—”
Before you could finish the sentence, the world tilted again. Your knees buckled. Juhoon moved fast, catching you as you stumbled. This time he didn’t just steady you. In one smooth motion, he scooped you up — one arm under your knees, the other supporting your back — lifting you bridal-style against his chest like you weighed nothing.
“Hey—! Put me down!” you protested, voice cracking with embarrassment. You pushed weakly against his shoulder, face burning. “Juhoon, I’m serious! Let go!”
“Stop squirming,” he muttered, adjusting his grip so you wouldn’t slip. His voice was calm, but you caught the slight strain and the way his ears had turned red. “You can barely stand. Just… let me do this.”
You kept struggling half-heartedly, kicking your legs a little even though it made the dizziness worse. “This is humiliating— people are gonna see…”
“There’s no one around,” he replied simply, already walking down the quiet street. His steps were steady despite carrying you. You could feel the warmth of his body through his hoodie, the subtle rise and fall of his chest, and the faint scent of his perfume mixed with fresh night air.
You huffed, eventually giving up the fight as exhaustion crashed over you. Your head lolled against his shoulder.
“…Why are you doing this?” you mumbled against his collar, eyes half-closed. “Everyone else thinks I’m a killer. You should too.”
Juhoon slowed his steps for a second, adjusting you more comfortably in his arms.
“Because I’ve seen enough to know the rumors are bullshit,” he said eventually, voice low. “And I’m not leaving you out here alone. All drunk”
“So caring, I see…” you mumbled sleepily against his shoulder, the words slurring together. “Whoever dates you is gonna be the luckiest girl alive.”
Juhoon let out a low, surprised chuckle. The sound vibrated warmly through his chest, and you felt it more than you heard it.
“You probably have girls lining up to date you, right?” you continued, the alcohol completely loosening your tongue. You tilted your head back slightly to look at his face, your cheek brushing his jaw. “Tall, smart, handsome… bet they’re obsessed.”
Juhoon sighed, shaking his head as he kept walking. A small, reluctant smile tugged at the corner of his lips.
“Not really like that,” he said quietly.
You blinked slowly, genuinely puzzled. “Huhhh!? Not even one?”
He glanced down at you, amused by your exaggerated reaction. “There are a few… but it’s not as much as you think. I’m barely noticeable most days.”
“Oh really?” you teased, poking his chest with a clumsy finger. “Then let me ask you something important, Mr. Invisible. How many chocolate packs did you get for Valentine’s Day?”
Juhoon hesitated for a second, then answered almost sheepishly, “Mhm… thirty.”
There was a beat of silence.
“Oh—” He realized how it sounded right after he said it and faltered, his ears turning visibly red under the passing streetlights.
You burst into soft, tipsy laughter, your body shaking lightly in his arms. The movement made him tighten his grip on your waist to keep you steady.
“Maybe this is why you don’t have a girlfriend,” you giggled. “You get thirty packs of chocolate and still act like you’re invisible. So unfair…”
Juhoon rolled his eyes, but the small smile on his face lingered. “You’re not allowed to bully me while I’m literally carrying you home”
“Thirty though…” you repeated, still giggling. “That’s a whole army of admirers. Do they write love letters too? Draw little hearts on the boxes?”
“You’re enjoying this way too much,” he muttered, but there was no real bite in his voice. He shifted you slightly in his arms, pulling you a little closer as the night breeze picked up. “And what about you?” Juhoon asked after a moment, his voice low. “You probably have people who admire you too.”
You scoffed, the sound sharp and bitter even through the slur in your words. “That’s gotta be a joke… You really think I have people secretly admiring me from afar? After everything?”
Juhoon paused mid-step. His arms tightened slightly around you as he continued walking, slower this time.
“I do,” he said softly.
You let out a tired, frustrated breath and shook your head against his shoulder. “You’re just being kind right now. I know you don’t mean that. You don’t have to act so good, Juhoon. I know you’re just being sweet so I don’t feel like complete shit.…”
Juhoon stopped walking completely.
For a few seconds, the only sounds were distant traffic and your own uneven breathing. He shifted you in his arms so he could look at you properly. His eyes scanned your face— lingering on the healing cut beneath your eye, then drifting to your tired ones. A faint heat crept up his neck again, but he didn’t look away.
“I do admire you,” he said, voice quiet but steady. “You’re strong. Even when people treat you like garbage, you still stand up for yourself. And you stand up for people who aren’t as strong as you… even if they don’t deserve it. You’re blunt as hell, and yeah...I like that about you.”
“You’re not just saying that?” you whispered.
“I’m not the type to say things I don’t mean,” he replied simply.
You swallowed hard, suddenly hyper-aware of everything — how close he was holding you, the warmth of his chest, the way you felt strangely safe for the first time in weeks. Your house appeared at the corner of the street, the familiar gate coming into view under the soft glow of the streetlamp. You stayed quiet, letting the moment linger a little longer.
But then your mind drifted back to what happened with Suho. You couldn’t let Juhoon end up the same way. This time you wouldn't be able to forgive yourself if something happens to another person. When Juhoon gently set you down in front of your gate, your legs wobbled but held. Before he could say anything, you forced the words out, voice cold and slurred.
“Stay away from me. I mean it.” You took a shaky step back. “I don’t want us to interact at school… or anywhere else.”
Juhoon looked visibly taken aback, his dark eyes widening. “Why?”
He stepped closer, searching your face for an answer. You pushed at his chest, harder than you intended.
“In grateful for you helping me today … and that day in the art room,” you continued, voice rising unsteadily, “but just stay the hell away from me, okay?”
Juhoon didn’t move. He stood there under the dim light, staring at you with that stubborn expression.
Martin has been (choosingly!!) single his whole life and is fully convinced that he doesn't need a girl (or so he thought). Enter Seonghyeon's sister, who just finished studying from abroad, is freshly broken up, and wants nothing to do with men for the rest of her life. A girl that's hot, lowkey a bitch, and doesn't want him at all? Fuck, that's just his type.
MARTIN x F!RDR ━━ band au , best friend's sister trope , profanities , martin is down bad , ftr carmen & yuha h2h , stella h2h as yn's fc
-> if you are seeing a reblog, be sure to check the original post for the realtime update
NOTE ' how's the smau progressing so far??? do u guys fw these long chaps?? u guys like maryn dynamic rn?? also que yn being sappy at the end for like a split sec loll more seongyn dynamic in further chaps!! they the best siblings frrr (even tho their ego is so big lol) js going w the flow for this smau. lemme know how u think it's going!! love you smm
SYPNOSIS : in which…the guys thought it would be funny to play a little prank on you, not knowing you hadn’t completely healed from the way they used to treat you before debuting.
CORTIS 6TH MEMBER AU
a/n: two updates in one day omg…ALSO I LOVE THIS CHAPTER SO MUCH AIAOSOSO I HOPE YOU GUYS LIKE IT AS MUCH AS ME…
01 | 02
series mlist
the past few days had been hell for everyone. avoiding the others wasn’t exactly difficult since you were barely home anymore. whenever practice ended, you usually disappeared with allday project and stayed out until ridiculous hours of the night. if you did return to the dorm, it was usually long after everyone had gone to sleep. you would quietly let yourself in, grab a blanket from the couch, and sleep there until morning before leaving again. the guys had tried everything to catch you long enough for a conversation, but every attempt somehow failed.
even during practice there wasn’t an opportunity. lately, you had been training like your life depended on it. the second practice started, you completely locked in. every break was spent stretching, rehearsing, or running through choreography again. if anyone tried approaching you, you always found an excuse to leave. after a few days, everyone finally realized you weren’t just busy. you were avoiding them.
nobody was taking it well. keonho had probably sent enough texts to fill an entire novel by now, and martin had already tried cornering you twice after practice. even seonghyeon had sent an apology message, which shocked everyone considering he hated talking about his feelings. none of it worked. every time you thought about that stupid prank, your stomach twisted all over again. what hurt wasn’t even the prank itself. it was the fact that they all knew exactly why it affected you so badly.
especially james.
out of everyone, james was the one you couldn’t stop thinking about.
that was how you ended up sitting on the beach late one night. the ocean stretched endlessly in front of you while the moon reflected across the water in a long silver line. the waves rolled onto the shore in a steady rhythm, and for once your thoughts felt a little quieter. you had been sitting there for nearly half an hour when you heard footsteps approaching from behind.
normally, you would’ve ignored it, but something about the pace felt familiar. a second later, someone lowered themselves into the sand beside you. you didn’t even bother looking. you already knew who it was.
james.
for several minutes, neither of you said anything. he sat beside you with his hands resting on his knees while staring out at the water. surprisingly, the silence wasn’t awkward. it never really had been between the two of you. eventually, you let out a slow breath and broke it yourself.
“out of all people, i thought you’d be the last one to do something like that.”
beside you, james lowered his gaze and nodded once. he didn’t interrupt, didn’t defend himself, and didn’t try making excuses. he simply waited. he knew you weren’t finished.
you laughed quietly to yourself, not because anything was funny, but because you genuinely didn’t know what else to do. “i mean, seriously. i understand keonho or sean. they’re idiots. i love them, but they’re idiots. half the time they don’t even realize they’re doing too much until somebody yells at them.”
that earned the smallest smile from james before it disappeared again.
“but you?” you finally turned your head toward him. “you’re supposed to be my older brother.”
james visibly winced.
“you were the first person in this group who actually saw me as me. before everyone got close to me. before all of that. it was you.” your eyes drifted back toward the ocean. “you saw how badly all that trainee stuff affected me. you saw everything.”
the words came easier now that you had started.
“that’s why i thought you’d stop them. or at least tell them it wasn’t going to be funny. you were there when i cried about that stuff. you were there when i thought nobody wanted me around. you were there when i felt like i didn’t belong here.” you swallowed hard. “so when all of that happened again, even for one day, i honestly felt like we were right back at the beginning.”
for a moment, neither of you spoke. the only sound was the ocean.
when james finally spoke, his voice was quieter than usual.
“i know.”
you didn’t say anything.
james dragged a hand through his hair and sighed. “and honestly, that’s exactly why i’ve felt like shit this entire week.” he stared down at the sand while speaking. “i’m not gonna sit here and make excuses because there really aren’t any. we thought it’d be a stupid prank. that’s the truth. we thought you’d get annoyed, we’d tell you it was a joke, everybody would laugh, and we’d move on.”
he shook his head.
“but we didn’t stop to think about what it’d actually feel like for you. especially me.”
you glanced over at him.
“i should’ve known better than anyone,” he continued. “i remember those trainee days. i remember finding you crying after practice. i remember how long it took before you finally got comfortable around everyone. the second you came home excited about seeing allday project, i already knew this was probably a bad idea. i should’ve stopped it right there.”
the guilt on his face was obvious.
“and i’m sorry.”
the apology sat between you for a few moments. you didn’t know what to say to it. part of you was still angry. part of you was still hurt. but another part of you could tell he genuinely meant every word.
james looked back out at the water and laughed quietly to himself. “also, whether you like it or not, you’re basically our little sister.”
you immediately rolled your eyes.
“there it is.”
“what?”
“the sibling speech.”
james grinned.
“it’s an important speech.”
“it’s a terrible speech.”
“still important.”
despite yourself, the corner of your mouth twitched slightly.
james immediately pointed at you.
“that was almost a smile.”
“shut up.”
“it was.”
“james.”
“i saw it.”
you groaned and buried your face in your hands while he laughed quietly beside you. for the first time all week, the tension between you didn’t feel quite as suffocating.
after that, neither of you said much. surprisingly, it wasn’t awkward. if anything, it reminded you of your predebut days. back when you and james weren’t particularly close yet, but somehow always ended up sitting together after practice. neither of you had known how to start conversations properly back then, so you mostly sat in comfortable silence until somebody finally thought of something worth saying.
eventually, james pushed himself to his feet and brushed the sand off his clothes. then he held out a hand toward you.
you stared at it for a second.
then sighed dramatically.
“you’re annoying.”
“coming from you, that’s basically a compliment.”
rolling your eyes, you grabbed his hand and let him pull you up.
the walk back to the dorm was almost completely silent. strangely enough, it felt familiar. not because everything was fixed, because it definitely wasn’t. there were still conversations waiting for you back at the dorm and apologies you hadn’t heard yet. but for the first time in days, the distance between you and james didn’t feel quite so impossible anymore.
and for now, that was enough.
the next morning, you woke up before everyone else like you had been doing for the past week. for a moment, you simply stared at the ceiling. your usual routine would be to quietly leave before anybody woke up, spend the entire day avoiding the dorm, and come back sometime after midnight. honestly, you were already halfway through convincing yourself to do exactly that.
instead, you sat up with a sigh and climbed out of bed.
the apartment was completely silent as you made your way into the living room. pale morning sunlight was peeking through the gaps in the curtains. after a moment of hesitation, you walked over and opened the blinds. sunlight immediately flooded the room, making you squint.
you stood there awkwardly for a second, then shook your head. if you were already here, you might as well do something useful.
the kitchen was exactly as disastrous as you expected. judging by the state of a frying pan sitting in the sink, somebody had attempted cooking recently and failed miserably. you didn’t even want to know who.
with a sigh, you rolled up your sleeves and got started.
despite everything that had happened, you still knew exactly how everyone liked their breakfast. james liked his eggs plain. martin liked extra cheese. juhoon hated having too much pepper. keonho somehow managed to complain about every breakfast food imaginable except bacon. seonghyeon preferred his eggs cooked longer than everyone else.
it was annoyingly easy to remember.
by the time you were done, six different plates sat neatly on the countertop. beside them were six different drinks. water for james. orange juice for martin. cherry juice for juhoon. cold milk for keonho. warm milk for seonghyeon.
you had no idea why you remembered all of that.
afterward, you grabbed your own bowl of cereal and sat at the table. you had never liked eggs much anyway. the apartment remained quiet for a while before you finally heard movement coming from one of the bedrooms.
a few seconds later, james shuffled into the living room.
his hair was sticking up in every direction imaginable and his face was still puffy from sleep. he looked half conscious at best. the moment his eyes landed on you, though, you watched something visibly relax in his expression.
like a weight had been lifted off his shoulders.
james simply grabbed his plate and drink before sitting down beside you. the two of you ate quietly. it wasn’t awkward. if anything, it felt surprisingly normal.
that peace lasted all of five minutes.
the next person to wake up was juhoon. he walked into the living room while rubbing his eyes, clearly still half asleep, when he noticed you sitting there.
he froze.
without saying a single word, he turned around and walked straight back to the bedroom.
“…okay.” you frowned.
james immediately started laughing into his water.
a minute later, juhoon returned, this time holding a folded piece of paper. he walked directly over to you and awkwardly shoved it into your hands before taking several steps backward.
you stared at him. slowly, you started unfolding the paper.
“no, wait.”
you paused.
juhoon looked like he wanted the floor to swallow him whole. “don’t read it now.”
you looked up. “why?”
“because it’s embarrassing.”
you immediately became interested. “how embarrassing?”
“very.”
“juhoon.”
“please.”
you grinned. “if this is too corny, i’m literally never letting you live it down.”
juhoon closed his eyes and sighed like a man accepting his fate. without another word, he grabbed his breakfast and sat down as far away from you as physically possible.
you laughed quietly and slipped the paper into your pocket. whatever was written on it could wait until practice.
a few minutes later, the peaceful atmosphere was shattered by yelling.
“i’m telling you that’s not how microwaves work.”
“then explain why it started smoking.”
“because you’re stupid.”
“that’s not an explanation.”
the remaining three idiots.
their argument continued all the way down the hallway before they entered the kitchen together. the second they walked in, however, all three of them froze.
their eyes landed on you.
the silence lasted approximately two seconds.
“oh thank god.”
before you could react, keonho launched himself across the room.
you had literally just taken a bite of cereal when he wrapped his arms around you. the sudden impact made you immediately choke.
“i’m sorry y/n, i love you, you’re my baby sister, please forgive me, i’ll never do that again, i’m horrible, i’m a terrible person, you’re just a little kid—”
you awkwardly patted his back while coughing. “get him away from me.”
james took another bite of breakfast. “nah.”
eventually, martin grabbed keonho by the hoodie and physically dragged him away. keonho hit the floor dramatically and kept whining.
your relief lasted about three seconds, because then you noticed martin opening his arms. “no.”
martin ignored you. the next thing you knew, he had somehow folded himself into your lap despite being significantly larger than you.
“we don’t deserve you,” he cried dramatically. “if it wasn’t for you, we’d be dead. we’d be starving. we’d be eating drywall.”
“martin, you’re crushing me.” you coughed while trying to shove him away.
eventually, after several seconds of struggling, you managed to push him off. martin immediately collapsed onto the floor beside keonho.
both of them remained there.
your attention drifted toward seonghyeon. unlike the others, he hadn’t said much. he was already sitting at the table with his breakfast in front of him. when your eyes met, he immediately froze.
for a second, neither of you looked away. then seonghyeon lowered his gaze.
you frowned slightly. the tension was definitely still there, which was strange.
you had already forgiven keonho. honestly, the second he threw himself at you and nearly caused your death by cereal, most of your anger disappeared. martin was martin. juhoon had apparently written you some sort of emotional apology letter. james had already talked things out with you last night.
but seonghyeon felt different. he didn’t feel angry, defensive or anything like that.
he just looked nervous as hell. almost like he’d been rehearsing something in his head for days and still hadn’t figured out how to say it.
and judging by the way he kept staring down at his breakfast instead of eating it, you had a feeling that conversation was coming sooner rather than later.
practice had gone surprisingly well.
the atmosphere was completely different from how it had been a week ago. everyone was joking around again, teasing each other whenever someone messed up choreography, and arguing over things that didn’t matter. for the first time in days, things felt normal.
during break, you slipped away to the balcony with a can of cola.
the sun was beginning to set, painting the sky orange and pink as a cool breeze drifted through the air. after making sure nobody was following you, you finally pulled the folded letter out of your pocket.
juhoon’s handwriting was terrible.
you immediately smiled.
dear y/n.
first of all, before you start making fun of my handwriting, shut up.
i know you’re already laughing.
anyway.
i’m not really good at saying stuff like this out loud, so i’m writing it instead. james told me that’s a coward move, but i’m choosing to ignore him because he’s old.
i wanted to say i’m sorry.
not just for the prank. i’m sorry for every time i’ve made you feel like you weren’t important to us. because you are.
i don’t think i tell you that enough.
actually, i don’t think i tell you that at all.
you do so many things for us that none of us even think about until they’re suddenly gone. you remember everyone’s schedules. you remind us to eat. you know exactly how everybody likes their food. you somehow always know when one of us is having a bad day before we even say anything.
and the thing is, you act like nobody notices.
but i do.
i notice how every night before bed, you stand on the balcony for a few minutes and stare outside before going to sleep.
i notice how you always leave the last piece of food for somebody else even when you’re still hungry.
i notice how you pretend you’re not tired because you don’t want anybody worrying about you.
i notice how you always check if everyone’s home before you go to bed.
i notice how every time one of us gets sick, you somehow become the most annoying person alive because you’re constantly checking on us.
i notice how you’re always the first person to congratulate us when something goes right and the first person to comfort us when something goes wrong.
you think nobody notices those things.
but i do. and i know the others do too.
i think sometimes you forget how much you’ve become part of our lives.
if i’m being honest, i can’t really remember what the dorm was like before you moved in, which is probably a problem because it definitely existed before then.
but you get what i mean.
you’re family.
you annoy me constantly. you steal my hoodies, and i steal your stupid skinny jeans. you threaten violence every other day. you insult me at least seventeen times daily.
but you’re still family. and i love you.
even if saying that makes me want to launch myself into traffic.
i’m really sorry, y/n and i hope someday you’ll forgive me completely.
please burn this letter after reading it. seriously. i’m begging.
love, juhoon.
p.s. if you show this to anyone i’ll tell everybody about that embarrassing thing you did in 2024.
p.p.s. you know exactly which thing i’m talking about.
you finished reading and immediately started laughing through the tears in your eyes. by the end of the letter, your vision had become blurry. stupid idiot.
a small smile remained on your face as you carefully folded the paper and slipped it back into your pocket.
that’s when the balcony door opened.
you looked up at seonghyeon who stood there. the second your eyes met, he looked like he wanted to run away. instead, he awkwardly walked over and sat in the chair opposite yours.
for a moment, neither of you spoke. then you sighed. “i know there’s stuff you wanna get off your chest, so just say it. you know i’ll never judge.”
seonghyeon immediately looked down. his fingers twisted together in his lap. he chewed anxiously at the inside of his cheek while trying to find the words.
you waited.
eventually, he looked up. the second he did, a tear slipped down his face.
your heart immediately dropped. “seonghyeon—”
“i was jealous.”
you froze as he laughed shakily and wiped at his eyes. “that’s it. that’s the reason.” more tears followed.
“every time you talked about allday project, you’d look so happy.” his voice cracked slightly. “like… really happy.”
you stared at him quietly.
“and i started thinking maybe that was because they were your first choice.” another tear slid down his cheek.
“and maybe we weren’t.”
your stomach twisted.
seonghyeon looked away. “i know it sounds stupid.”
“it doesn’t.”
“it does.” he laughed bitterly. “because instead of talking to you like a normal person, i got jealous.” his shoulders shook.
“i kept thinking maybe you still liked them more than us. maybe you were only here because you had to be. maybe if you could choose, you’d pick them every time.”
you felt your chest tighten. “seonghyeon…”
“and then i started thinking about how i’m probably the member you’re least close to.” his voice had gotten so quiet you could barely hear him.
“i mean… can you blame me?” he wiped at his eyes again. “i treated you like absolute shit before debut.” the bluntness of it made you flinch.
“and i know we moved past it. i know you’ve forgiven me.” he shook his head. “but part of me always thought maybe you didn’t forgive me completely.” the words seemed to physically hurt him.
“so when everyone started talking about pranks, i suggested ignoring you.” he laughed bitterly. “because i was jealous.”
another tear rolled down his face. “and because i’m an idiot.”
by now, tears were running down your own face too.
“i’m so sorry, y/n.” the guilt in his voice was unbearable. “i’m sorry for the prank. i’m sorry for being jealous. i’m sorry for everything before debut. i’m just… i’m sorry.”
for a few seconds, neither of you moved. then you grabbed your chair and dragged it closer. before seonghyeon could react, you wrapped your arms around him.
immediately, he broke. his face buried itself in your shoulder as sobs shook his entire body.
you held him tighter and before you knew it, you were crying too. “you’re so stupid,” you mumbled through your tears.
he nodded immediately. “i know.”
“you’re actually so stupid.” another nod.
“i know.”
you laughed weakly, then hugged him tighter. “i love you all equally, seonghyeon.”
his shoulders froze while you pulled back just enough to look at him. “you guys are not my last choice.”
more tears spilled down his face.
“not even close.”
he immediately buried his face back into your shoulder.
“please don’t ever think that again.”
seonghyeon nodded so fast it was almost painful. for the first time in days, you felt some of the tension finally disappear.
inside the practice room, meanwhile, absolute chaos was unfolding.
martin was standing by the door with his phone out.
“clip that, clip that!” keonho giggled from beside him
“i am clipping it.” martin whisper yelled at keonho
james looked exhausted. “guys, she literally just forgave us. let’s not make her angry again.”
neither of them listened.
juhoon, meanwhile, looked like he was experiencing genuine psychological distress.
“i need that letter back.”
nobody answered him.
“i’m serious.”
still nothing.
“i need to burn it.”
keonho immediately looked over. “was it that bad?”
mysterious stranger in my phone -how to pull an idol (a series)
idol!martin x reader
⋆ ִֶָ˖·˳˖When you let a random stranger rant for a whole ten minutes, you not only gain a new favorite band but also a devestating crush. ݁‧₊˚⋆ִֶָ
previous warnings: cussing
just got home from a party, so obviously the first thing i do at 3am is post the next part
脷 .ᐟ TONGUE. 2 in which, your ‘relationship’ with James couldn’t be messier, a situationship based on fights and low-key hookups, tearing at each other like it’s second nature—all sharp words, dirty looks, and the kind of tension that never really goes away. because the thing about james? he knows exactly how to hurt you—and you hurt him right back…
❛ 赵雨凡 𝑥 idol!reader ❜ 𓈒𓈒 based on my baby @tinygladiatorworm ‘s request 𖤼
⚠︎ MDNI ! smut, a LOT of angst~, multiple sexual scenes, denial, toxic dynamics, ghosting, avoidant behavior (?) situationship, idol hiatus, health problems, ethel cain mention, ( that’s a whole trigger warning ) social media posts,yearning nsfw : unprotected sex, missionary, multiple positions, crying during sex (angsty sex ) spooning sex, oral (fem receiving) body worshipping, semi-public foreplay, dry humping, shower sex, oral fixation, multiple orgasms.
𓏸 19k ╱ 𝓶. list. ♪♫ 𝑝laylist
TONGUE ࿇ part 1. part 2.
It was Mina who finally said the thing.
Of course it was Mina -she had the patience to wait until the moment was right and the precision to choose her words without excess, which meant that when she spoke it had the particular weight of something that had been considered thoroughly before being released.
It was a Sunday. Rare day off, or close to one- no company schedule, just a morning of your own before the final week of pre-release preparation began.
“It was the right thing,” you told her when she asked about the whole situation, less like a position being defended and more like something being confirmed to yourself. “I don’t regret it.”
“My body just-” you stopped. Started again. “I’ve been feeling off. You know that. And the doctor said the bloodwork is clean, so it’s just-” you shook your head. “Stress. The comeback. The schedule.”
Mina looked at you across the table, her coffee cup held in both hands in the unconscious mirror of yours, and her expression was so specifically careful- so precisely calibrated to the exact amount of honesty you could currently tolerate - that you understood she’d decided what she was about to say some time ago and had simply been waiting for the right Sunday morning.
“Your body,” she said, gently, “has been trying to tell you something for six weeks.”
“Mina.”
“I’m not saying it to make you feel bad,” she said. “I’m saying it because you’re the most self-aware person I know in every direction except this one. You analyze everything. You see everything. And this-” she held your gaze, “-you’re looking directly at it and calling it stress.”
“It is stress.”
“Yes,” she said. “It is. And what’s causing the stress?”
The silence that followed had a specific texture -not the comfortable silence of the canteen Tuesday, not the charged silence of a hallway moment. The kind that existed when the answer was present and both people knew it and one of them wasn’t ready to say it out loud yet.
“The comeback,” you said.
Mina’s expression didn’t change. She didn’t push. She simply held the quiet with you, patient and immovable, and let the silence do what silences do when they’re given enough room -expand, and fill, and eventually reveal the shape of what was living in them.
The bathroom door opened. Hye-ri emerged in a cloud of steam and sheet mask, took one look at the kitchen table, and reversed direction with the swift social intelligence of someone who understood immediately that she had walked into a conversation that was not finished.
“I was never here,” she said, disappearing back down the hallway. “But I love you guys ! Fighting !”
The Sunday light moved across the table as you sketched out a small laugh. Your coffee was getting cold.
“I miss him,” you said. Very quietly. To your coffee cup, more than to Mina. The first time the words had existed outside your own head, and they sounded, out in the air, smaller than you’d expected and larger than you could manage simultaneously. “Which is stupid. I made the right call and I know I made the right call and I still-”
“It’s not stupid,” Mina said.
“It’s so counterproductive.”
“Those aren’t the same thing.”
“I don’t wanna miss him,” you said, and heard the specific texture of your own voice saying it -the distinction that mattered, the difference between what was true and what you wanted to be true, the gap between them that you’d been living in for six weeks and calling by other names. “I want to be fine. I am fine. In every way that counts I made the right-”
“You can make the right decision,” Mina said softly, “and still grieve it.”
You performed the showcase the way you performed everything -completely and precisely.
The formation issues were resolved. The bridge transition was clean. Your body knew the choreography the way it knew breathing, and so it did what it did, and the lights were bright and the crowd was loud and for the duration of the set you were exactly and only what you were on stage -present, professional, the dance machine, all of it.
Afterward, in the wings, you bent forward with your hands on your knees and breathed.
Hye-ri appeared beside you, still coming off stage herself, and put a hand briefly on your back. Said nothing. You straightened after a moment and smiled and it was real, because the performance high was real, because whatever else was happening in the background of your body -the stage still gave you the thing it had always given you -that clean, temporary, complete aliveness that nothing else quite replicated.
One more week, you told yourself. Get through the release week. Then you can be a person again.
You’d negotiated.
Release week was seven days -press appearances, music show performances, fan engagements, content shoots. Seven days of concentrated, high-visibility, high-demand activity that you had obligations to your members and your company and three years of work to see through.
Seven days.
You could manage seven days.
Your body, which had been listening to these negotiations with the patient skepticism of an entity that had been ignored for six weeks and was running low on goodwill, received this latest proposal in silence.
Release week arrived with the particular atmospheric pressure of something that had been building for months.
Monday was three back-to-back press interviews, a photo shoot for a digital magazine spread, and an evening fan live that ran an hour over schedule because the fans were in the specific mood of people who had been waiting for new music and were vibrating with it their energy coming through the screen with a warmth that you found genuinely moving even through the low-grade nausea that had showed up mid-afternoon.
You ate small amounts between schedules, drank water constantly, kept the antinausea prescription in your bag and used it twice on Monday and told no one.
Tuesday was the first music show performance.
You were in hair and makeup at five-thirty am, which meant your alarm had gone off at four forty-five, which meant you had woken at three am and not gone back to sleep, which was becoming its own subsidiary pattern that you were also not examining.
Ji-eun worked in focused silence, reading your tiredness in the particular way she had, and when she got to the outer corner of your right eye she paused for a fraction of a second.
“The lash is gonna be a pain,” she said.
“When has it ever not been,” you deadpanned.
She worked around it carefully, the way she always did, and the lash did what it always did- curled upward like a small rebellion, refusing to be corrected, the single detail that never quite cooperated regardless of technique or product or effort.
You looked at it in the mirror.
Did not think about the person who would have noticed it from forty feet away and said nothing and noticed it anyway.
Did not think about that. Definitely not.
“You look beautiful,” Ji-eun said, setting down her brush with the quiet satisfaction.
You looked at yourself in the mirror. The full construction of you -flawless and deliberate, the armor fully assembled, every surface of the public self precisely rendered. You looked exactly like what you were supposed to look like.
You looked, from the outside, completely fine.
“Thanks,” you said with a genuine smile, grateful in a way.
The performance on Tuesday was good.
Wednesday’s was better.
Thursday’s -the third music show, the one with the largest live audience component, the one that mattered most in terms of chart impact-Thursday’s was when it happened.
It happened the way most real things happened -inconveniently, incompletely, without regard for timing or audience or the seven cameras currently pointed at the stage.
You were in the second verse when you became aware of your body in a way that was distinct from the usual performance awareness -not the productive, kinetic consciousness of a dancer in the middle of choreography, but something else. Something underneath.
A quality of physical information arriving from a direction you’d been ignoring for weeks, insistent and escalating, like a notification you’d been swiping away finally demanding to be read.
You kept dancing.
You kept dancing because that was what you did, that was the thing you’d built your entire professional identity around -the capacity to keep going, to absorb and continue, to be present in your body as an instrument of the music regardless of what your body was privately communicating.
You made it to the end of the second chorus.
In the formation change before the bridge - James crossed your mind- or rather his eyes.
Your vision went briefly strange. Not dark exactly. More like the quality of the light changed, the stage brightness doing something it shouldn’t, the edges of your visual field making a decision you hadn’t authorized.
You corrected. Automatically, physically, the muscle memory doing its job while the rest of you registered what was happening with a calm that was less composure and more dissociation.
Hye-ri was two counts to your left. She caught the correction -you knew she did because you knew her, knew the micro-adjustment in her peripheral focus that meant she’d seen something. She held her formation. Kept going. Trusting you.
You got through the bridge.
And got through the final chorus.
You were in the last eight counts -the outro formation, stationary, the lights shifting to the end configuration- when your body made its final and non-negotiable statement on the subject of six weeks of negotiation.
You folded.
Not collapsed -not the dramatic buckle that the cameras would have made something of. A fold. A sitting down, essentially, your knees making contact with the stage floor in the last two counts of the song, graceful enough in the moment that two seconds passed before anyone in the audience understood it wasn’t choreography.
Hye-ri was beside you before the music stopped.
The next few hours had the quality of something experienced through broken glass.
The backstage area. The company doctor who had been on site for the broadcast. The cold pack at the back of your neck. Soeun’s face, the sleepiness entirely absent, replaced by something wide-eyed and young that you registered and felt guilty about in the dim practical way of someone running low on processing capacity.
Mina’s voice on the phone somewhere nearby, calm and authoritative, the big-sister register fully activated. Your manager’s face doing the thing it did when it was holding several difficult things simultaneously and not allowing any of them to surface.
“I’m fine,” you said, twice. Then stopped saying it, because even by your standards the evidence against it was fairly compelling at this point.
Dr. Yeon arrived. She’d been called while you were still on stage, apparently -someone had made that call in real time, which meant someone had been watching closely enough to see it coming.
She didn’t say I told you so, because she was a professional and a decent person. But she looked at you with the expression of someone who had said the relevant things two weeks ago and was now simply proceeding with the next appropriate steps.
“Hospital,” she said. Not a question.
“The schedule-” you started.
“Hospital,” she repeated, firmly
You looked at Mina.
Her eyes were very steady and very bright and she was holding herself with controlled stillness.
“Okay,” you said.
Mina took your hand and you let her.
ᴺᴼᵂ ᴾᴸᴬᵞᴵᴺᴳ 눈,코,입(Eyes, Nose, Lips) - Taeyang ♫♬♪
The hospital room was quiet -a manufactured quiet, the absence of noise rather than the presence of peace, the hum of equipment filling the silence where silence would otherwise have lived.
The lighting was the kind that made everyone look like they needed to be in a hospital, which you supposed was appropriate given that you were, in fact, in a hospital, a fact that still carried a faint quality of unreality even as you lay in the bed with the IV line in your arm and the monitors doing their steady work.
Dehydration, primarily. That was the immediate clinical language for it.
Significant enough to require intravenous correction, combined with the weight loss and the disrupted sleep and the sustained nausea, presenting as a body that had been running on insufficient resources for an extended period and had reached the end of its reserves.
Not dangerous in the acute, alarming sense.
But real nonetheless, th kind of real that required a building and a bed and a machine tracking your fluid intake.
Your members were in the waiting area. Your manager was on the phone. The company’s PR team was, presumably, having a series of conversations that you’d deal with later, when you were in a position to deal with anything that wasn’t the IV line and the quiet room and the odd lightness of finally having been stopped.
You stared at the ceiling.
It was smooth. No cracks. No interesting imperfections. Nothing to read.
You thought: this is what I did.
Not accusatory. Not self-punishing. Just factual, in the way that things became when you ran out of energy to frame them otherwise.
This was what six weeks of not reading the thing had looked like, accumulated. This was the story your body had been writing while you called it stress and schedule and bibimbap and mild iron deficiency and all the other names that were true in the peripheral way and false in the central one.
The central one sat in the quiet hospital room with you.
You’d been grieving. You’d been missing an essential piece of you, while rehearsing and performing and doing press interviews.
Here you were.
Thinking that 3 years were easy to forget just like that.
And somewhere in the building with the practice rooms and the corner canteen table and the tape on the booking boards that no longer had your initials on it -James was, presumably, living his life. Existing in the spaces you’d removed yourself from.
You wondered if he’d already found someone else with wild lashes to point out. Wondered if he was noticing someone else’s weird traits-
The thought arrived without armor, which was the hospital room’s contribution in your defense.
You missed him.
Not the fights, exactly. Not the pattern, which had been the right thing to end and remained the right thing to have ended.
The specific him. The particular person underneath all of it.
The one who had said it’s not nothing in the dark with the armor completely down, then had made sure you know it had been, indeed, nothing.
James found out the way he found out most things he wasn’t supposed to know yet -too early, too suddenly, with no adequate preparation and no one to blame for the lack of it.
It was Keonho’s phone. They were in the dorm living room, the five of them -James on the floor with his back against the couch, Keonho on the couch itself, Martin in the kitchen doing something that involved more cabinet opening than was strictly necessary for whatever he claimed to be making.
A mug cake of some sort.
Keonho’s phone lit up. Then lit up again. Then produced the specific rapid-fire notification pattern of something spreading quickly.
“What,” Keonho said. Not a question -the flat observational what of someone reading something that was outpacing their ability to process it.
James didn’t look up from his own phone. “What.”
“There’s a- hang on.” his voice had shifted into the careful register of someone managing, which was the register that made James look up.
Keonho was watching something. His face had done the thing faces did when they received weird news.
“Keonho dude,” James said.
Keonho turned his phone around.
The video was forty-three seconds long.
It had been filmed from the audience -mid -distance, slightly angled, the kind of footage that existed in the age of everyone having a camera in their pocket and no one quite being able to stop themselves from pointing it at things.
The quality was decent.
Clear enough to see the full choreography of the outro formation. Clear enough to see the lights shifting to their end configuration. Clear enough to see, in the last two counts of the song, the moment your knees made contact with the stage floor.
James watched it once.
Then he took the phone from Keonho’s hand and watched it again, and the second time he watched it with focused attention of someone who knew the person on the screen in a way that the forty thousand people in that venue did not.
He handed the phone back without speaking.
Martin had appeared in the kitchen doorway at some point during the second viewing. The cabinet sounds had stopped. The three of them sat in the living room with the television still running its indifferent programming and the notification sounds still coming from Keonho’s phone, muffled now against the cushion where he’d placed it face-down.
“She okay?” Martin asked.
James said nothing.
He was looking at his own phone. His contacts. The entry that was no longer there -removed not by him but by the one-sided erasure that he’d understood immediately.
No error message, no bounce-back. Just the specific quality of a door that had been locked from the inside.
He’d counted the days. Not deliberately.
Twenty-three days since the last time your name had been accessible in his phone. Since the last time he could have said something if he’d had something adequate to say, which he hadn’t, which was its own separate problem.
“James,” Keonho said. Quiet. Not pushing.
“I saw it,” James said.
“Dude... How you feeling ?”
“I’m fine, why wouldn’t i be?”
Neither Keonho nor Martin said anything to that, which was the correct response.
He stood up. “I’m going to the studio.”
“It’s eleven bro,” Martin said.
“I know what time it is.”
He got his jacket from his room, his headphones, the specific small kit of things he brought when he went to the studio late -which was not infrequently.
It had become somewhat more frequent in the last months, which he was also not examining.
He passed back through the living room. His members were both looking at him with wide eyes.
At the door he stopped, and didn’t turn around.
“She’ll be fine,” he said. To the door, more than to them. “It’s not that bad.”
The walk was cold. October doing its thing, the air sharp the city running its quieter late-night version of itself. He walked with his headphones around his neck instead of on, which he didn’t notice until he was already at the building entrance.
He took the elevator to four, sat down at the board in the smaller suite, and opened a blank session.
For a few minutes he just sat there.
He was thinking about a morning six months ago, You’d been in his bed, after what he categorized as the best sex of his life.
It had started lazy and deep. You’d straddled him without a word, knees bracketing his hips, sinking down onto him inch by inch until he was buried completely inside you. No rush. Just that tight, wet heat gripping him as you rolled your hips in long, luxurious strokes. Your palms pressed flat against his chest, thumbs brushing over his nipples while you watched his face like you were studying every flicker of pleasure.
He remembered the way your breath hitched when he sat up to meet you, wrapping one arm around your back and pulling you closer so your breasts pressed against him. Skin on skin. Sweat already starting to slick between you. He’d taken one of your nipples into his mouth, sucking gently, then harder when you moaned and clenched around his cock. Your fingers threaded into his hair, tugging just hard enough to make his scalp sting in the best way.
At some point the pace changed. He flipped you onto your back, spreading your legs wide and driving into you deeper, slower, grinding against your clit with every thrust. You were so wet it was obscene -the sound of it filled the room every time he sank back in. Your hands roamed everywhere: down his back, nails digging into his ass to pull him harder into you, then up to cup his face so you could look him in the eyes while he fucked you.
That’d been the part that almost broke him.
The eye contact. The way you whispered his name like a secret, your thumb brushing his lower lip. He’d felt exposed, raw, like you were seeing straight through every wall he’d built. His thrusts grew rougher, more desperate, chasing that feeling of being completely known. You came first -back arching, thighs shaking around him, pussy pulsing so tightly he had to bury his face in your neck to keep from losing it right then.
He followed seconds later, groaning against your skin as he spilled deep inside you, hips stuttering, every muscle locked tight. You held him through it, stroking his back in those long, meaningful caresses that felt less like afterglow and more like absolution.
For a long time afterward you stayed connected, his cock softening inside you while your fingers traced patterns along his spine.
He’d almost cried then -something thick and unfamiliar rising in his throat -because no one had ever touched him like they actually wanted to keep him.
The statement dropped at nine the next morning.
He read it in the kitchen, standing, having not slept. The coffee was in his hand but he’d stopped drinking it without noticing.
He read through the official language to what it actually said. Indefinite hiatus. Immediate effect. Stable condition. He knew the translation of these words in context, had been in this industry long enough to understand what the gap between official statements and actual situations generally contained.
Then he got to your message. The part at the end, the one that was clearly yours and not a PR team’s -the rhythm of it, the specific direction of it, turning outward the way you always did.
Spend it on something that gives it back to you.
He read it several times.
Juhoon came in while James was still standing at the counter with the statement on his phone and the coffee going cold beside him.
He poured himself a cup, leaned back against the opposite counter, and looked at James the way he sometimes did -not pushing, just present, running his own quiet assessment.
“You saw it,” Juhoon said.
“Yeah.”
A pause. Juhoon drank his coffee.
“She okay?”
“Stable. That’s what it says. I don’t fucking know.”
Juhoon nodded slowly. Another pause, longer this time, the comfortable kind between two people who didn’t need to fill space. Then, in the register of someone who had decided to just say the thing: “Bro, you’ve been going to the studio until three in the morning since she blocked you. I’m not blind.”
James said nothing.
“Like I’m not trying to get in your business,” Juhoon continued, “but it’s been almost a month of you walking around like that. I think even the cleaning staff noticed.”
“I’m fine.”
That was a big fat lie wrapped with no caution tape.
“You said that yesterday. And the day before.” Juhoon set his cup down. “When’s the last time you actually ate a full meal that wasn’t vending machine stuff?”
James didn’t answer, which was its own answer.
Juhoon exhaled through his nose -not quite a laugh, not quite exasperation, somewhere between the two. “I knew it. I literally knew it.” He looked at James with the specific expression of a friend who had been watching something develop for a long time and had opinions about it that he’d been sitting on. “Can I ask you something honestly?”
“You’re going to anyway. Suit yourself.”
“Did you ever just -tell her? Like actually tell her, not the James version of telling her where you say half the thing and let her figure out the rest.”
James looked at the counter.
“That’s a no,” Juhoon said.
“It’s complicated.”
“It’s always complicated with you two, that’s like -that’s the whole thing. That’s been the whole thing for three years.” Juhoon picked his cup back up, shook his head slightly. “She’s not a mind reader, man. Like she’s smart, but there’s a difference between her noticing things and you actually saying them out loud.”
“I said things.”
“She blocked you.” Juhoon looked at him evenly. “I’m not trying to be harsh. I’m just - well dude she blocked you.”
James was quiet for a moment. “I know.”
“So.”
“So I know,” James said. “I know that. I’ve been aware of that.” He looked at the statement on his phone, still open, your line still sitting there. Spend it on something that gives it back to you. “I just didn’t think it was going to -I thought there was more time.”
Juhoon was quiet for a beat. Then, more gently: “Is she -do you actually…” he paused, choosing words with slightly more care than usual. “Like is this just the situation being unresolved or is it actually serious for you.”
James didn’t answer immediately, which was, for him, the most unambiguous answer available.
Juhoon absorbed this with a small nod, the kind that meant he’d suspected as much and was filing the confirmation away without making a production of it. “Okay,” he said simply.
“She’s in a hospital,” James said. “And I can’t reach her. And the last thing I said to her was-” he stopped.
“There’s nothing I can do right now.”
“No,” Juhoon said. “There really isn’t. Right now.” He let the right now sit there, intentional and specific. Then: “Go make something. You always think better when you’re making something. Go do that.”
James picked up his coffee. Drank it. Put the cup in the sink.
“And eat something,” Juhoon said, to his back. “Real food. Not the vending machine thing.”
James got his jacket.
“I mean it about the food,” Juhoon called from the kitchen.
The front door closed.
Juhoon stood alone in the kitchen for a moment, looking at the space where James had been standing, and then looked down at his own coffee and said quietly, to no one: “Three years, man, fucking insane.”
You’d spent the first month at your parents’ house, which had been Mina’s quiet suggestion and your manager’s logistical arrangement and your own eventual agreement, and which had turned out to be the right thing in the way that right things sometimes weren’t obvious until you were already inside them.
Your childhood bedroom with its slightly outdated posters and the window that overlooked the neighbor’s persimmon tree had been the right amount of small, the right amount of removed from everything.
Your mother had cooked things you hadn’t eaten since you were fifteen. Your father had asked very few questions and watched television with you in the evenings in the comfortable silence of a man who understood that presence was sometimes the whole offering.
You’d seen a therapist. Twice a week, then once, then when you needed it -Dr. Lim, who was in her fifties and had a direct manner that you’d initially found confrontational and had come to deeply appreciate. Who didn’t let you manage your way through sessions the way you’d managed your way through everything else, who had a particular talent for waiting until you ran out of other explanations before the real one surfaced.
You’d talked about the industry. About the particular machinery of it, the relentless forward momentum, the way it consumed the private self in increments small enough to miss until there wasn’t much of it left.
You’d talked about the members. About Mina’s Sunday morning kitchen and Hye-ri’s bathroom floor vigil and Soeun’s rice balls delivered with the matter-of-fact love of someone who didn’t know how to perform care and therefore simply performed it.
You’d talked about painful stuff.
About what it meant to make the right decision and still have it cost something real.
About the difference between ending something and being done with it, which were not - Dr. Lim had pointed out with characteristic directness-the same thing at all.
You’d talked about James approximately three times before you stopped needing to talk about him as a category and started being able to talk about him as a person -specific and complicated and genuinely, permanently significant in the architecture of who you were, which didn’t require resolution to be true.
You’d find out that talking about James was like talking about yourself, in the way that everything he’d done - or everything you’d let him do- reflected on who you were as a person.
You hadn’t contacted him.
He hadn’t contacted you -couldn’t, technically, the block still in place on your end for the better part of the year.
You’d thought about lifting it, in the way you thought about things you weren’t ready to do yet, turning the idea over occasionally to check its weight. It was lighter than it had been. Not weightless. Just lighter.
By month four you were dancing again, in the small studio your parents’ neighborhood had, a local place that smelled of old mirrors and someone’s forgotten lunch and that contained exactly zero professional-grade anything.
You’d gone in off-hours, alone, and run through things you already knew -old choreography, the muscle memory of three years intact and waiting patiently under the surface of everything that had happened.
The first time you’d danced through an entire piece without stopping to negotiate with your body about whether it was going to cooperate, you’d stood in the middle of the studio floor afterward and felt something so uncomplicated it had taken you a moment to identify it.
Relief. Just relief, plain and complete.
By month seven you were having conversations with your company about returning, careful ones, the kind that involved Dr. Lim and your physician and your manager and a degree of deliberateness that the old version of you would have found excessive and that the current version understood as simply necessary.
The company had been, to their considerable credit, patient in a way you hadn’t entirely expected. The hiatus had cost them something too, and they hadn’t weaponized it, which told you things about the relationship you filed away with appropriate gratitude.
R3SET would have a comeback in the spring. You’d be on it. That was the plan, still in its early stages, but real -the kind of real that existed on paper and in calendars and in the careful, forward-facing energy of people who had decided on a direction and were beginning to move in it.
The MC offer had come through a separate channel, a variety production company rather than HYBE, which was part of why it had landed differently -it wasn’t the return of the idol, the big-stage comeback announcement, the thing that required a full machine mobilization. It was smaller than that.
A weekly music show, live broadcast, the kind of hosting gig that required presence and personality and genuine knowledge of the industry rather than a specific performance mode.
Two co-hosts. Gyuvin, who you’d met twice at industry events and who had the particular gift of making any room feel like it had been waiting for him to arrive, and Dohoon, who was newer, quieter, with the specific attentiveness of someone still learning how everything worked and paying very close attention in the meantime.
Your manager had sent the offer on a Tuesday, which felt appropriate, and you’d read it twice and then gone for a walk and come back and said yes.
Not because it was safe -it wasn’t, exactly. Live television had its own demands, its own relationship with the unpredictable. But it was yours in a way that felt important. Something chosen, something that fit the shape of who you were returning as rather than who you’d been before, which was not the same person, which was fine, which was the point.
The announcement went out on a Thursday.
By Friday morning your name was trending again, for the first time in a year, and this time the feeling that came with it was different -not the hollow unreality of the hospital morning, not the dissociation of watching your own crisis unfold on someone else’s phone screen.
Just the particular warmth of people being glad to see you, which the industry could make you forget was real until it reminded you.
‘she’s back’ was everywhere. Fan edits assembled from old footage. The comments section of your old posts reactivating.
Hye-ri sent approximately forty messages in the group chat in the space of ten minutes, an escalating series that began with a string of capital letters and ended with a voice note that was mostly just screaming with some words in it.
Soeun sent a single photo: a rice ball, from a convenience store, with a small drawn heart on the wrapper in pen.
Mina sent nothing for two hours and then called, and when you picked up she said your name once in the way she sometimes said it -the full weight of years of knowing you in a single word -and then said “I’m so glad” and that was the whole call, thirty seconds, and it was exactly right.
You sat in your childhood bedroom with your phone warm in your hand and the persimmon tree doing its October thing outside the window and felt, with a completeness that had taken a year to arrive at: ready.
Not the performed version. Not the managed version assembled for public consumption. The actual thing -the quiet, solid, unglamorous readiness of the someone who had rested and repaired and done the work and was now genuinely, simply prepared to return.
You looked at your reflection in the old mirror on your bedroom wall. The slightly different person looking back -same face, same rebellious lash at the outer corner of the right eye doing its usual thing, same specific person. But the way you were sitting in yourself was different. Less braced. Less prepared for impact.
The lash curled upward in the mirror, faithful and unreformed.
You looked at it for a moment.
Let yourself think of him, briefly, with the lightness that a year of actual processing produced -not the sharp guilty thing, not the defended thing, not the named grief of the hospital ceiling.
Then you put your phone in your pocket and went downstairs, where your mother was cooking something that smelled like your childhood, and you sat at the kitchen table and let it be a good evening.
The first day of filming was a Tuesday in November.
The studio was a different building -not HYBE, a broadcast facility across the city, which had its own geography and its own particular smell of stage equipment and coffee from the production staff’s perpetual supply. You arrived with your manager and your stylist, the professional bubble reassembling itself around you with the practiced ease of a machine that had been waiting rather than dismantling.
Ji-eun was there. She looked at you when you sat down in the makeup chair -a full, genuine look, the kind between two people who had history -and then smiled and picked up her brush.
“You look good,” she said. And then, more quietly: “You look like yourself.”
“Getting there,” you said.
She worked in the comfortable silence you’d always had, and when she got to the outer corner of your right eye she paused for the traditional fraction of a second, and you both said nothing, and she worked around it the way she always had, and the lash did its thing, and you looked at yourself in the mirror when she was done and decided you were ready for whatever the day was.
Gyuvin found you at the craft table between the makeup suite and the studio floor, loading a cup with coffee at a speed that suggested he’d been awake since five and was not complaining about it.
“Okay so first of all,” he said, without preamble, turning around and seeing you and immediately operating at full social capacity, “I’m a huge R3SET fan and I’ve been trying to figure out how to say that without it being weird for approximately two weeks.”
You looked at him with an amused smile. “That was pretty weird.”
“Yeah, I know. But now it’s done and we can just be normal.” He extended a hand with the easy confidence of someone who’d decided how this interaction was going to go and was correct about it. “Gyuvin. I’m really glad you’re doing this.”
“I know who you are,” you said, shaking his hand. “I watched your show from the hospital. It was good.”
Something shifted briefly in his expression -not pity, just recognition, the acknowledgment of a real thing being mentioned without drama. “Thank you,” he said simply.
Then, pivoting with the smooth gear-change of someone who understood when to move forward: “Dohoon’s already on the floor running lines with the floor director. He gets nervous before live things, it’s actually very endearing, don’t tell him I said that.”
“I already heard that,” Dohoon said, appearing from around the craft table corner with the specific dignity of someone who had definitely heard it and was choosing grace.
He was younger than you’d expected in person - not young, just carrying the particular quality of someone still assembling their public self, not entirely sure yet how much space they were allowed to take up.
He bowed politely, straightforward and genuine.
“I watched your performances a lot,” he said. “When I was a trainee. The footwork in the second comeback stage-” he stopped himself, seemingly deciding this was too much. “Sorry. I just wanted to say I’m glad you’re back.”
You looked at him, at the earnest specific quality of it, and felt something warm and uncomplicated.
“Thank you,” you said. “Really.”
The floor director appeared and swept all three of you toward the studio, Gyuvin already talking at a pace that suggested the live broadcast format had found its correct person, Dohoon falling into step with the quiet attentiveness you’d already identified as characteristic.
You walked onto the studio floor under the lights -different lights, different stage, different version of the machine -and stood at the hosting position in front of the cameras and felt the room settle into its pre-broadcast hum around you.
The lights were warm. The floor was solid. The cameras were ready.
You were ready.
The floor director counted down.
Gyuvin straightened beside you, Dohoon on your other side, both of them finding their positions, and you found yours -natural, easy, inhabited rather than performed.
Five. Four. Three. Two.
You smiled. The real one, the one that lived in the corners of your eyes.
One.
The year had a shape to it, from James’s side.
Not a clean one.
Just the irregular, unglamorous shape of someone learning to carry an absence without drawing attention to the carrying.
He was good at it, technically. He’d had practice -not with this specifically, but with the general discipline of keeping interior things interior.
It was the skill he’d developed youngest and refined longest, and it served him here the way it always had, with the small additional cost that this time the underneath was doing considerably more than usual.
Nobody said anything directly. This was a Cortis characteristic -they had an unspoken agreement about the limits of intrusion, a collectively maintained understanding that presence was available without being forced.
Juhoon occasionally appeared with food or a suggestion to leave the studio at a reasonable hour.
Seonghyeon, who had the particular quality of someone who processed things by being physical, started dragging James to the gym in the early mornings, never explaining why, which meant they both knew why.
Martin sent memes at random hours, which was his version of checking in.
Keonho cooked elaborate meals approximately once a week and made enough for everyone without comment.
Nobody asked directly.
James was aware of this and grateful for it in the specific way he was grateful for things - privately, thoroughly, without saying so.
The song sat in a session file on his laptop.
He didn’t listen to it often. Once a week, maybe, in the first few months -not obsessively, not with the quality of picking a wound, but with the particular need to check that the thing existed somewhere outside of himself. That it was real, that the four studio nights had produced something actual rather than just the sensation of having produced something.
It existed. That was enough.
He didn’t release it. Didn’t show it to his label, didn’t bring it to any of the collaborative sessions that his schedule produced. It wasn’t for that.
It was for you to still have somewhere to live in him. It was entirely yours.
The fans noticed things anyway, during their performances. Or thought they did -the internet had a talent for reading things into performances that may or may not have been there, and he’d learned not to engage with the discourse.
He’d meant all of the words he’s sung. He always meant all of it. That was the thing about performing something you couldn’t say -the stage absorbed it, held it, gave it somewhere to go that the interior couldn’t contain indefinitely.
The second song on the Cortis comeback was not about you, technically. The lyrics were someone else’s, the concept was the team’s, the choreography was collaborative.
But something in the space between the notes had been filled with something that was his alone, and Juhoon had apparently felt the difference.
“Don’t say anything,” James had said, eventually.
“I wasn’t going to, motherfucker,” Juhoon said.
The R3SET comeback announcement came six weeks later.
James found out on the same day as everyone else, which was how these things worked when you had no particular access to someone’s professional calendar anymore.
The concept photos dropped at midnight -the industry’s preferred timing for maximum impact- and by seven in the morning the internet had done what it did.
He didn’t see the photos immediately. He was in early practice, which he’d been doing more of since the year had given him the particular gift of understanding what mattered and what was noise, and his phone was in his bag.
Seonghyeon saw them first.
He appeared in the practice room doorway between run-throughs with his phone extended. “R3SET dropped their comeback concept photos,” he said. “Midnight release.”
James looked at the phone.
He processed them with the industry-reading part of his brain first. Clean aesthetic. Strong concept. Good styling choices. Blah blah blah.
That took approximately three seconds.
Then the other part engaged and the professional reflex became entirely irrelevant.
You were in the center frame of the main concept photo, which was where you belonged and always had, and you looked -
He stood there with Seonghyeon’s phone in his hand and took in the photograph and didn’t immediately have a word for it, which was unusual for him.
He was generally a person who had words for things. Precise ones, specific ones, the right ones rather than the approximate ones.
This required a moment.
You looked like yourself. That was the first thing, and it was not a small thing -a year ago, in the last months before everything, there had been something in the way you were presenting yourself publicly that he’d noticed and not been able to name, a quality of effort in the surface that suggested you were working harder than you should have needed to.
He’d noticed it and said nothing, which was its own entry in the running catalogue of things he’d noticed and said nothing about.
That quality was gone.
You looked settled inside yourself in a way that a year of actual repair produced and nothing else did. Not relaxed, not softened -you were still precisely, recognizably you, the same specific presence that had been stopping him mid-thought for years. But inhabited differently.
And within that -within the settled, familiar, three-years-known specificity of you- something that hit him in the chest with the particular force of things that had been managed at a distance for a year and were suddenly no longer distant.
You were devastating.
Not in the industry sense, not the calculated aesthetic impact of a well-executed concept photo, though it was that too.
Not in the safe, catalogued way beautiful women usually were- where you could admire the symmetry, the lighting, the careful construction of a concept shoot and then file it away under art or aspiration.
No. This was the other kind. The kind that reached into his chest, wrapped around his lungs, and squeezed hard.
His thumb hovered over the screen, trembling slightly.
Jesus Christ.
He felt it in his body before his mind could catch up: the sudden, stupid stillness in his chest. Lungs suspended mid-breath.
It was -in the specific and undefended privacy of the three seconds before he handed the phone back- a lot.
He handed the phone back.
“Good concept,” he said.
His voice came out normal. This was the skill, the one he’d been practicing the longest, and it served him.
“Yeah,” Seonghyeon said. “It is.”
They went back to practice.
The variety show offer arrived three weeks later.
His manager brought it to him in the standard way -scheduled meeting, proposal documents, the professional framing of something being pitched for consideration.
A cross-group variety program. Six episodes, a production company with a good track record, the kind of format that leaned into genuine chemistry rather than manufactured conflict.
“The full lineup,” his manager said, sliding the document across.
He read your name on the document with full composure.
“The production company reached out to both labels simultaneously,” his manager continued, professionally unaware of or professionally choosing not to read the room. “They’re pitching it as a legacy act collaboration -both groups debuted around the same period, different concepts but complementary. They think the chemistry is there.”
Chemistry, James thought. That was one word for it.
“The format?” he said.
“Episodic. Each episode has a different challenge structure -travel, cooking, outdoor activities. Very unscripted. They want the real dynamic.”
The real dynamic. Funny.
He looked at the document again. At the lineup. At your name next to his in the clean administrative language of a production proposal, as if the history contained in those two entries was simply information, simply text, simply names on a page.
“I need a few days,” he said. He didn’t.
“Of course,” his manager said.
He took the document home. Sat with it on the kitchen counter for an evening while the dorm did its weeknight business around him. Juhoon passed through once, saw the document, looked at James, and made the diplomatic decision to refill his water and leave without comment.
An hour later Juhoon appeared again. Leaned in the doorway.
“Is it the R3SET thing?” he said.
James looked up.
“Seonghyeon’s manager mentioned it,” Juhoon said. “The variety show.”
“Yeah.”
“And?”
James looked at the document. At the lineup. At the specific administrative reality of six episodes, unscripted, real dynamic.
“I don’t know yet,” he said.
Juhoon nodded. Didn’t push. Stayed
“She’s doing well,” Juhoon said, eventually. “From everything I’ve heard. She’s back, she’s good. She sounds like herself again.”
James said nothing.
“That’s all I’m going to say,” Juhoon said. And left.
James sat with the document for another hour. He pulled the document toward him Read it again from the beginning. Six episodes. Unscripted. Real dynamic. He picked up his phone. Texted his manager two words.
I’m in.
Closed the document.
Went to bed.
Simple as that.
The variety show production schedule arrived on a Monday.
First meeting -all cast, production team, initial briefing on format and episode structure - Thursday, eleven am, the broadcast facility across the city. Standard pre-production stuff, the kind of meeting that existed to let everyone shake hands and establish a baseline before cameras were involved. His manager had forwarded the details with the administrative neutrality of someone who had learned not to editorialize.
James had read it. Put his phone down. Picked it up and read it again, which was becoming a recurring motif in his life whenever your name was involved in anything.
Thursday. Four days.
He slept adequately.
He was fine. just fine.
Thursday morning he woke up fine.
Got dressed fine -the particular care he took without appearing to take care, the version of himself he put together when something mattered without announcing that it mattered.
Dark jacket, clean lines, the kind of thing that required no comment. He’d stood in front of the mirror for approximately forty-five seconds longer than usual and then left the room before it became something.
Juhoon was in the kitchen. He looked at James in the way he sometimes looked at him.
“Eat something, hyung,” Juhoon said.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Eat something anyway or you’re gonna bitch about how you’re hungry.”
James stood at the counter and ate half a piece of toast, which was apparently what fine looked like on Thursday morning.
The five of them took the van together -James, Juhoon, Seonghyeon, Martin, Keonho -which meant forty minutes of the particular Cortis energy, Martin talking at a pace that suggested he’d had too much coffee too early, Keonho asleep against the window with the enviable ease of someone whose nervous system had not received the Thursday morning memo.
Seonghyeon was on his phone. Juhoon sat beside James and said nothing, which was the most useful thing available.
ᴺᴼᵂ ᴾᴸᴬᵞᴵᴺᴳ Strangers - Ethel Cain ♫♬♪
James looked out the window.
The city was doing its November thing -grey and particular, the trees stripped to their architecture, the light the flat specific quality of a season that had committed to itself. He watched it pass and thought about nothing deliberately and thought about everything anyway, which was how it worked when the thinking was below the level of decision.
He was fine.
He was going to walk into a room and you were going to be in it and he was going to be fine, because a year had passed and he had built something solid and equilibrium meant equilibrium, it meant the thing held under new conditions, it meant-
“We’re here,” Martin announced.
The broadcast facility had a different geography than HYBE -different smells, different light quality, different ambient sounds. James had been here before for other projects, knew the layout well enough to navigate without thinking.
The production team’s assistant met them in the lobby and took them up to the third floor meeting room, talking about the schedule in the bright, efficient way of production assistants everywhere.
The meeting room had a long table. Several production staff already seated. Coffee and water at intervals. A small catering spread that nobody was eating yet.
No R3SET.
James sat down -second from the end, which was where he sat in rooms like this, the position that gave him the widest sightline without being visibly strategic about it. Juhoon sat beside him. Martin immediately reached for the catering spread. Keonho poured water. Seonghyeon was already in conversation with someone from the production team about the episode structure.
Normal. All of it normal. The ordinary machinery of a pre-production meeting assembling itself around him.
He poured coffee. Drank it.
The door opened.
He heard you before he processed that it was you -a voice in the corridor, saying something to someone outside the room, the particular cadence of it landing somewhere in his chest before his brain had completed the identification.
Then you walked in.
And everything-
Everything single thing that James had spent a year building -the equilibrium, the organized weight, the solid carefully-constructed fine collapsed.
It proved insufficient. In the space between the door opening and you stepping through it.
The year was on you in the best way, in the way he’d seen in the photograph but hadn’t fully understood until now, until the actual specific physical reality of you was in the same room.
Your face, your sweet sweet face, your long hair draped over your chest, all of it significantly more than he had been prepared for despite believing he was prepared.
You were talking to Mina beside you, something low and quick, and you hadn’t seen him yet, and he had approximately three seconds of that -of watching you exist in a room without you knowing you were being watched.
And then something happened in his body that he hadn’t expected and didn’t have immediate language for.
It started in his chest. Not the metaphorical chest, not the poetic shorthand for emotional experience -the actual physical chest, a sensation that spread outward from somewhere behind his sternum with the slow insistent quality of something that had been waiting for the right conditions to make itself known. Down into his stomach, which turned over once, deliberately, like a held breath released in the wrong direction.
He set his coffee cup down. Carefully. Because his hands needed to do something specific and he needed to do it carefully.
This was not what equilibrium was supposed to feel like.
You crossed the room with Mina, talking to the production team lead who had come forward to greet you, and your eyes moved across the table in the natural survey of someone entering a room and orienting themselves.
They found him.
One second.
Something moved across your expression -too fast and too layered to read in full, a whole vocabulary of a year passing through your face.
You looked away first, or he looked away first, or it was simultaneous -he couldn’t reconstruct it afterward with any accuracy.
He looked at the table.
His hands were still.
His stomach was not.
Am I making you feel sick -the line arrived from somewhere, something he’d been listening to in the studio months ago, late and alone the way he did his best listening, Ethel Cain’s voice asking it with the specific quality of a question that already knew its own answer.
He was, in fact, feeling sick.
He hadn’t thought about the line in months. It arrived now with the precision of something that had been filed and was now being retrieved because the conditions finally matched.
He felt so sick indeed, that his stomach seemed to want to crawl out of its shell, and the space where you lived, in his ribcage stored there for comfort, was burning like thousands of fires.
It started without announcement.
He was looking at his folder -had looked away when you’d found him across the table, one second of eye contact and then back to his own folder, the professional management reflex executing itself automatically -and the production team lead was talking, and the room was doing its meeting thing, and James was sitting in his chair with his hands flat on the table on either side of the open folder.
And then his eyes were wet.
Not -it wasn’t a gradual thing. It wasn’t the dignified film version of emotion, the single meaningful tear navigating a composed face.
His eyes were wet and his throat had done something that he couldn’t reverse and his stomach had turned over with a violence that was nothing like the manageable discomfort of the morning.
This was different.
This was -he didn’t have a word for it and his mind was not currently in a condition to locate one, because his mind was busy with the overriding physical fact of his eyes being wet in a meeting room with eight other people in it and the production team lead still talking and Juhoon two feet to his left.
He pressed his thumb into the table edge.
Breathed.
The wetness didn’t stop.
Because you lived inside of his ribs, like a sickness.
He moved. He stood up, which required his body to cooperate and his body did cooperate, performing the physical action without the usual sense of decision preceding it.
He kept his head down -not dramatically, “Sorry,” he said. To the room, not to anyone specifically. His voice came out level. “One minute.”
He walked to the door and left.
He made it to the men’s bathroom twenty feet down the hall and through the door and to the sink and stood there with both hands braced on the porcelain and looked at himself in the mirror.
His eyes were wet and his face was doing something he didn’t have experience managing because he didn’t have experience with this, with the specific thing that was happening, which was apparently: crying.
Get a fucking grip, he thought.
His eyes stayed wet.
He turned the cold tap higher and pressed his hands against his face and stood there in the particular specific silence of a broadcast facility bathroom while somewhere down the hall a production team was running a meeting he had walked out of, and somewhere in that meeting room you were sitting at a table for the first time in a year, and his body had apparently decided that the year of careful construction was no longer relevant information.
One year. Twelve months, a couple hundred days, and it had taken approximately four seconds for you to fuck it up all over again.
It had just been you walking into a room, talking to Mina, your voice reaching him before he’d processed that it was you, landing somewhere in his chest with the accuracy of something that had always known where to go.
He pressed his thumb into the edge of the sink. The physical pressure of it grounding him in the present tense.
ᴺᴼᵂ ᴾᴸᴬᵞᴵᴺᴳ Sparks - Coldplay ♫♬♪
A soft knock sounded on the door.
“James?” Your voice. “The staff… they need everyone back for the briefing. They sent me to-”
The door opened and you stepped inside.
And the second your eyes met his in the mirror, everything shattered all over again.
Your warm eyes met his, like you’d already known what position he occupied in the room without seeing him - the same navigational certainty that had always existed between you, the compass needle finding north before the map was even consulted.
For a moment neither of you moved. The tap running. The mirror holding you both.
Your lips started quivering first.
He watched it happen. Watched you try to stop it -the small visible effort of someone attempting to tuck something away for a more convenient moment, your jaw tightening, your teeth catching your lower lip.
The mental slap he could practically see you administering to yourself, the furious internal instruction to hold it together, to not be -this.
Not here. Not in front of him.
It made no sound. That was the thing that undid him entirely. No sound -just your tears spilling out of your eyes like fountains, you biting your lip so hard it hurt, just because you couldn't cry.
Because you'd spent months rebuilding yourself to be stronger, less naive.
It was a huge let down and betrayal to see that your body still recognized his to this level.
That it always would.
James turned around from the mirror.
His breath hitched violently. The sound of it involuntary, wrenched out of him by the sight of you standing at the door of a broadcast facility bathroom crying silently with your teeth in your lip -a sight that hit him somewhere below the level of thought, somewhere that didn’t have the option of management.
“Don’t-” he tried.
Too late.
His own tears spilled over. Hot and humiliating, sliding down his cheeks. He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth, the gesture instinctive and entirely useless, trying to hold in something that had already left the building.
Pride had lost.
It had never stood a chance. Not in this room. Not with you standing at the door looking like the last year had happened to you the same way it had happened to him -not cleanly, not neatly, and absolutely not with the resolved quality of someone who had made a right decision and been at peace with it.
You crossed the room.
Not all the way. You stopped a foot away from him and leaned against the wall beside the sink, close enough that the space between you was a chosen distance rather than an accidental one.
You pressed the back of your wrist to your own mouth in the same gesture he’d just used -both of you apparently sharing the same futile reflex- and looked at the ceiling in the way you did when you were deciding something about gravity.
You stared at the ceiling. He stared at the sink. The tap ran between you, filling the silence with something neutral and constant, and the year sat in the room between you like a third party that hadn’t been invited and wasn’t leaving.
Thirty seconds passed.
Maybe more.
“I’m not-” you started.
You stopped.
Pressed your wrist harder against your mouth and tried again. “I’m not going to be able to have a conversation right now,” you said. Your voice was wrecked at the edges, thin, the managed version completely gone. “is that okay?”
“Okay,” he said.
Another silence.
He reached over and turned the tap off and the quiet that followed was immediate and different -denser, the absence of the running water making everything else louder..
“I didn’t think it would-” you started again.
And he waited when you interrupted yourself.
“I told myself I was prepared,” you continued. To the ceiling. “I knew you were going to be here. I’ve known for weeks. I thought I’d-” a breath that was not quite steady, “- i don’t know why this is happening.”
He said nothing. What could he possibly say without crying like a goddamn pussy?
You lowered your gaze from the ceiling. Looked at the wall in front of you instead -the neutral middle ground of a tiled surface that required nothing from either of you.
“I’ve been fine,” you said. “This year. I want to say that clearly -I’ve been actually fine. And i hope you have been too.”
“I know,” he said, although it hurt him.
“So I don’t know why I’m-” you gestured vaguely at your own face, at the evidence currently decorating it, the gesture frustrated and slightly helpless. “I don’t know why my body is doing this.”
He looked at you sideways. “Yeah you do,” he said.
You pressed your lips together. “Don’t,” you said.
“Okay,” he concluded. “The hosting thing suits you,I’ve seen some of the-” he stopped himself. Recalibrated. “You seem good on it. Natural.”
“James,” you said, your bottom lip trembling.
“Yeah?” his voice trembled.
“Stop.”
He did.
The silence that followed was the longest one yet -not the comfortable silence you both already knew.
This was the silence of two avoidants standing a foot apart in a broadcast facility bathroom, both crying, both fully aware of approximately ten thousand things that needed to be said, and neither of them capable of saying any of them.
Your breathing had steadied slightly. His had too.
“I should go back,” you said. Not moving.
“Yeah,” he said, not moving either.
“The director’s going to send someone else,” you said.
“Probably Martin,” he said.
“Martin would make it worse,” you said.
“Definitely,” he agreed.
A silence. And then -almost against your will, by the sound of it -a small exhale that was almost, not quite, the ghost of a smile.
He felt it in his chest like a struck match.
“Okay,” you said, pushing off the wall. “Okay.”
You crossed to the sink. Ran cold water. Pressed it to your eyes with efficient composure, by necessity, because the day continued outside this room regardless of what had happened inside it.
Your reflection appeared in the mirror. You looked at it with the neutral assessment of a technician checking equipment. He stood behind you, a foot of space. The mirror showing you both.
You looked at your own face for a moment.
Then your eyes moved in the mirror -not to his face, not all the way there, but somewhere in the direction of his reflection. The almost-look. The periphery.
“You have-” you started. Gestured vaguely at your own eye. “Your-“
“I know,” he said.
He reached up and pressed the back of his fingers to his own cheekbone, clearing the evidence. The gesture rough and unsentimental.
“Okay,” you said again. The forward-motion word. You straightened your jacket, the small act of reassembly, the putting-back-on of the surface that the bathroom had temporarily removed.
You didn’t look at him when you walked to the door, hand on the handle, then you opened the door.
And in the space of the opening -in the moment between the door still closed and the door open enough for the corridor to enter the room -you said, to the handle, to the gap, to the space between staying and going:
“I don’t know what to do with you.”
You didn’t tell him that you didn’t know what to do without him. Because that was admitting a bunch of things you’d buried.
He didn’t answer so you walked out, not expecting more of him than what he’d always shown.
The remaining filming days were unbearable.
Charged, the way air was charged before weather, the way a room felt different when something had happened in it that hadn’t been resolved.
The production team was pleased. The director kept using words like authentic and natural chemistry in the debrief notes that circulated between episodes.
James read those words in a group message and looked at his phone for a long moment and put it face down on his desk.
Natural chemistry.
That’s one way to put it.
Episode four was a travel segment -a day trip to a coastal town two hours from the city, two vans, the cast split across them, and a loose itinerary that the production team described as go wherever feels right but had in fact been extensively scouted and mapped in advance.
You were in the first van.
He knew this before the vans departed, had registered the configuration with the awareness he’d developed over four filming days of knowing exactly where you were in any given space without appearing to track it.
The production team released them in loose pairs and small groups with cameras following at a distance, the unscripted format doing its job of making everything look accidental.
James walked with Juhoon along the harbor front for forty minutes. They talked about things that had nothing to do with anything -Juhoon had been reading something, had opinions about it, James listened and offered his own and the conversation moved forward with an easy momentum.
He was fine.
The show aired three weeks later.
Thursday night, eight episodes, released weekly -the standard format, the production company’s familiar rollout.
James watched the first episode alone in his studio on his laptop.
It was good television. He could see that clearly, the way it was easier to see things from the outside -the dynamic was compelling, the mixed-group chemistry genuinely worked.
Martin and Keonho’s energy balanced against the quieter members in a way that created natural contrast. Mina and Soeun had good interactions with Juhoon and Seonghyeon. Nothing that crossed any invisible lines.
He watched the table scene from episode one, the first interaction he had with you after the bathroom moment.
Forty seconds, forty seconds too much, so he closed the laptop.
By episode three the fan forums had developed a vocabulary.
It started, as these things started, with a clip - a background interaction that neither of you knew was being filmed, thirty seconds of the two of lof you sitting down at the set.
The comments assembled their case with the industry of people who had been watching both groups for years and now had, for the first time, sustained footage of them in the same frame.
The forums had moved past speculation into something more like excavation, going back through years of archived footage and industry events with the specific energy of people who had been handed a key and were now locating the lock.
Stage crossings at award shows. A single frame from a year-old behind-the-scenes video in which James was visible in the background of a shot that was ostensibly about someone else.
And in that background, barely in frame, he was looking in a direction that corresponded to where you had been standing. Something purely coincidental.
A fan-taken photograph from an industry dinner -both groups present, separate tables -in which you were mid-laugh and he was beside you, not looking at the camera, looking at you with an expression that the fan who’d taken the photo had captioned at the time : cute group moment - and that was now being screenshotted and analyzed with forensic intensity.
one commenter said : that’s not a ‘cute group moment’ expression. that is something else entirely.
I found the original post. this photo is from two years ago. TWO YEARS.
okay so this has been going on for at least two years possibly longer and they’ve both been just. existing in the same building. I need to sit down
The digging produced timelines. Cross-referenced schedules, corroborating fan accounts, a general industry consensus assembled from fragments -the kind of picture that was never complete but that was complete enough.
Nothing explicit, nothing confirmable, just the aggregate weight of years of small things that meant more in retrospect than they had in the moment.
Your name and his, trending adjacently for the first time, the fan shorthand assembling itself with the creative efficiency of a community that had been waiting no - dying- for a subject.
Then the end of the show aired.
The final episode -with a studio segment, a paired game, the forty seconds clip in the previously released episode that had already done its damage -generated the kind of response that production teams privately hoped.
The clips moved through the usual channels. The fan analysis assembled and reassembled itself with new material. The forty-seven thousand posts became a different, larger number.
And the specific four seconds from episode six- a paired game, a moment where the challenge had required James to catch something you’d thrown and he’d caught it without looking because apparently his hands had simply known where to be -became the new center of gravity.
he caught it without looking. without LOOKING. he didn’t even glance. his hands just knew. I’m sick.
I need everyone to understand what it means that his hands just knew.
three years. they’ve been in the same building for three years. I’m not okay.
someone who knows things please tell me there’s something there because I have invested emotionally and I need to know it’s real.
Your name and his, in that order or the reverse, everywhere.
“Unnie,”
Hye-ri put her phone down on the dorm kitchen table and looked at you across it with the expression of someone who had reached the end of something.
“I know what you’re gonna say,” you chuckled humorlessly. “This is getting weird. They need to stop over analyzing things. There’s nothing to analyze.”
“Have you really seen all of it?” she raised an eyebrow.
“I’ve seen enough”
“And? Thoughts? Prayers?”
You wrapped both hands around your mug. “And nothing,” you said. “There’s nothing to say. Though i’m really praying they drop this before i go crazy and start filing lawsuits”
“Unnie,” Hye-ri breathed. “I love you. You know I love you. But oh my god, you are so fucking stupid.”
Your eyes widened, surprised. “Huh?”
“I’ve been watching this for three years and then watching you be hospitalized and then watching you rebuild… and I have said almost nothing because it wasn’t my place and you weren’t ready.” She paused. “Are you ready yet? Because I’m watching thousands of people on the internet understand your life better than you’re allowing yourself to and it’s becoming genuinely freaking difficult to watch.”
You said nothing, still busy being shocked.
“Soeun has opinions,” Hye-ri said. “Soeun, who falls asleep mid-sentence, has opinions about this situation and has had to be physically restrained from expressing them.”
“Hye-ri-”
“What are you going to do,” Hye-ri asked quietly.
You looked at your mug. “I don’t know, i don’t even know what i’m feeling. I just don’t wanna be bothered with that. I just wanna do my job, and not be confronted with this all the time” you said. “because i don’t know if i have enough self control anymore.”
“I know it’s not an answer,” you continued. “I know.”
Hye-ri looked at you for a long moment. Then she picked up her phone, put it back in her pocket and reached across the table to cover your hand with her red-nailed one and said nothing.
The wrap event was at a venue the production company used regularly -a private room above a restaurant in the city, warm and low-lit, the kind of space that encouraged the end-of-project loosening that these events were designed to produce. The full cast, most of the production team, the ambient atmosphere of something finished and celebrated.
James arrived with Juhoon and Keonho, found the bar, acquired a drink, and began the social navigation of the room.
You were already there.
You were across the room with Hye-ri and the producer, saying something that made the producer laugh. Your hair was down, which was unusual enough that he noted it, and you were wearing something he hadn’t seen before, a black prada dress.
You looked so devastatingly beautiful that he had to look somewhere else.
The evening moved forward with its own momentum. Drinks, conversation, the genuine warmth of a cast that had spent weeks together and had produced something they were collectively proud of.
Martin gave an impromptu toast that was both entirely sincere and completely absurd, talking about how much fun he’d had, and about the cookies the staff gave away on set.
Soeun fell briefly asleep against Hye-ri’s shoulder - surprising- and was nudged back awake with fond efficiency.
James talked to the director for twenty minutes about the editing process, to Keonho about something unrelated to any of it, to a production assistant about the schedule for the release rollout. He was present and functional and socially competent and fine.
He was aware of where you were in the room the entire time.
An hour in, the room had loosened into its later-evening configuration -smaller clusters, people drifting, the formal structure dissolved.
James had found his way to the room’s edge, not antisocially but in the way he sometimes needed to at these events, a few feet of breathing room.
You appeared beside him.
Not like you’d sought him out - but like you’d been heading for the same breathing room and had arrived at the same edge by the same instinct.
The room moved and talked around you. Someone’s laugh carried from across it. The warm low light did its work but you were close enough that he was aware of the specific warmth of being in proximity to you, which was a thing his body had catalogued years ago and had not, apparently, stopped cataloguing.
He couldn’t, the weight of it pressing right between his heart and lungs like a hot stone.
There was no part of him that could stand with you, next to you and not feel like the whole world was shaking at his feet.
So James did what James did best. He grabbed his glass, aimed for the closest exit and started walking.
Because being the asshole in the story was easier than being the man who loved. Who yearned.
This had been something he’d come to terms with -although his brain and his heart were two completely opposite organs that didn’t seem to want to collaborate- somewhere in him, he knew that what he felt for you wasn’t pointless arousal, anger or attraction.
Surely he did feel all those things all at once, but a whole year of thinking had brought out a simple explanation out of him. James didn’t know how spell the word ‘love’, didn’t know what it was, what he knew though, was that he’d put everything on the line just to feel your wrath.
Whether you were angry, sad, disappointed or disgusted at him, it was you that he held on to.
That thought had taken a whole year to form, and he still didn’t know what to do with it.
He was only grateful he got to see you, to live in your small world.
So when you followed him into his own small world - when the door to the hallway he’d escaped to opened and you were standing in the frame of it, the warm light of the party behind you and the cooler light of the corridor finding your face, his breath caught in his throat.
The door fell shut behind you.
You looked at him across the corridor.
“Do I bother you that much?” you said. Your throat bobbed.
He wanted to tell you that you didn’t. In fact, he wanted to tell you so many things but he didn’t want it to feel like he’d started thinking them just because you had left.
Like absence had manufactured something that wasn’t already there.
“I think,” he said, and his voice came out wrong, too low and too careful, “I think you should go back.”
“Do I bother you that much?” you repeated, harder this time, like you wanted it to cut.
No. The answer was no, had always been no, the word bother doing almost none of the work required to describe what you did to him.
“Yes,” he said.
You stood your ground, because you knew James, and you knew that when his voice cracked like that, he was most likely lying.
“I don’t understand you. We were good-“ you looked down at your shoes, “we were back to normal just a day ago.”
“No we weren’t. We never were.” James spoke, voice constricted. “We were working.”
You looked up at him, taking a faithful step toward him. “You’re really gonna act this way? Even after everything? After a whole year?”
He looked at you.
You were closer now -the corridor was narrow, the private venue’s hallway not designed for that kind of distance,
ᴺᴼᵂ ᴾᴸᴬᵞᴵᴺᴳ PURPLE RAIN - PRINCE ♫♬♪
“You don’t know what acting this way means,” he said. Quiet. The heat not in his voice yet, just the control that preceded it.
“I know exactly what it means,” you said. “It means you walked away. Again. Because something got too close and you needed the exit.” You looked at him with the directness that you got when you’d decided to stop managing the look. “I’ve been watching you find exits for so long James. I know the walk.”
“You also know how to leave,” he retaliated.
“Don’t do that,”
“You blocked me,” he said. “On everything. You were in a hospital and you had me blocked.”
“I was in a hospital because-” you stopped yourself again, the sentence running somewhere that cost too much, “-that’s not-” you shook your head. “I’m not doing this. I’m not standing in a hallway at a wrap party telling you about that-“
“You followed me in here,” he cut you.
“Because you walked away,” you said. “Again. You were standing next to me and you just-“
“I wasn’t walking away from you,” he denied.
“Then what were you doing.”
He said nothing.
“James.” Your voice lower now, the anger finding its quieter register, which was more dangerous than the louder one. “What were you doing.”
“I was-” he stopped. “I couldn’t stand next to you and-“ he stopped again. Started differently, because the first direction was the edge of the thing and he was so tired of the edge. “I couldn’t stand next to you and act like the last year didn’t happen and the three years before it didn’t happen and we’re just -two people at a party being normal about it.”
“Nobody asked you to be normal about it,” you retorted.
“Nobody had to ask,” he said. “The room is full of people. The cameras have been full of people for weeks. Everything is-” he exhaled, “-everything is happening in front of an audience and I don’t know how to-” he stopped.
“You don’t know how to what,” you said, bitterly.
The corridor was very quiet. The party sounds from behind the closed door -muffled, belonging to a different world.
Just the two of you, the amber light and the question.
“I don’t know how to be in the same space as you,” he said, “and not feel it.”
The sentence arrived quietly, like he just couldn’t hold it back.
“Feel what,” you said. The question not aggressive. Genuinely asking, the way you asked things when you needed to hear the actual word rather than the approximate one.
He held your gaze.
“All of it,” he said. “Everything. Take your pick.”
You were quiet for a moment. “That’s still evasive,” you said softly.
“I know,” he said. “I’m still learning.”
“James,” you said.
“I’m not-” you stopped. Started differently. “I’m not angry at you for walking away just now. I know why you did it. I know the walk because I have the same walk. I’ve been using mine for years, so it wouldn’t be fair to blame you.”
He looked at you.
“I’m angry at the amount of times,” you continued. “That’s what I’m angry at. Not you specifically. Just -the amount of times we did that.”
“Yeah,” he admitted. Low. “Me too.”
The corridor did what corridors did in these conversations -provide a container just barely large enough for the thing trying to exist inside it.
“The filming’s done,” you said.
“Yeah,” he said.
“So there’s no more-” you gestured vaguely at the concept of structured filming days and production schedules and the machine that had been providing the structure, “no more excuses for us to be in the same rooms. For now.”
“No,” he said.
“Which means- i’d like to end things maturely. I’d like you to know things i haven’t told you. So we can- so I can finally move on.”
It tasted cruel coming out of your mouth and he felt every bit of it.
End things? Why the fuck did this hurt so much when things were already over?
“I missed you.” you started, eyes already filling way too fast. “I missed being known. You knew things about me that i never told you. And nobody else has known me the way you did, cause no one was paying that kind of attention.” your voice went thin at the edges. “And then you weren’t here and I had to figure out how to- how to be, all over again.”
James’ jaw hung open just the tiniest bit, like he had never prepared himself to hear that today.
“God, i don’t want to be corny… i just want you to put it in your stupid head- i want you to know, cause i can’t keep this to myself James. I’m so tired and i don’t want to do this anymore.”
The water in your eyes started overflowing, tears falling down your cheeks with absolutely no consent. “And i know what you’re gonna say, that’s what everyone says. That i knew this wasn’t a relationship, that i knew we weren’t serious. But how can you expect me to not feel like this, when- when i spent 3 years of my life growing beside you, seeing you, knowing you. How can anyone fucking expect me to be chill about this?? Please tell me.”
“Because you cracked me open and you read me like a fucking book. And i- I could never be simple when it comes to this.”
His eyes started welling up uncontrollably, like they had the other day, insanely fast, cruel and mean.
“Y/n” his voice cracked.
“No- no, let me finish” you wiped your eyes almost aggressively, “You can’t tell me to shut up anymore. I’m done being a little immature bitch-im done looking for fights- just because fighting was the only way i knew how to get close to you without admitting I wanted to be close to you.
“I just wanna be the bigger person, i want you to know that even if we weren’t good for each other- i had never felt something so real and so fucking brutal.” your voice shook under the force of your tears, “And sometimes- god im so fucking stupid- sometimes i just feel like i don’t wanna be anywhere except with you.”
James couldn’t say anything, his voice was stuck in the depth of his throat- or down to his chest- he didn’t know, all he knew was that he wanted the tears to stop.
“y/n - please.” he looked at the ceiling, bottom lip quivering with restraint.
“What? Does it hurt? Does it hurt you knowing that i felt all of this ?” you got closer, invading the space he’d carefully guarded. “That you could never feel the same things for me? That you fucked me like you loved me for 3 fucking years even though you knew you couldn’t feel those things?”
James’ mouth opened, like he just couldn’t believe what you were saying. Like he wanted to scoop you up and put you in his head so you could feel -for one second- the way you undid him.
“What the- what the fuck are you even saying?” his voice trembled, eyes pouring, “you always think you know what’s going on in my head. Fuck. Y/n you don’t know shit.”
“Because you don’t let me, just for once, tell me. Tell me.” you got closer, chin tipping up to look at him.
James’ composure faltered, he erased the last of the space between you both and cupped your chin -grabbed it between his fingers with equally devotion and anger.
“You-” he swallowed his tears, “you know it. You know me, y/n. Do you want me to get down on my knees and tell you what i feel?”
Seeing him so close was like going back home, you thought. You couldn’t breathe anymore, something cruel squeezing your lungs.
“You’ve played the same games I played, so don’t act like you were a saint. We both fucked around, but this?” he pointed between the both of you. “It’s never been nothing.”
Your eyes were wide, shining with fresh tears. The black Prada dress suddenly felt too thin, the air between you charged like the seconds before lightning. He could smell your perfume, the faint salt of your tears, the warmth of your skin that had haunted his dreams for a year.
“We’ve never been ‘nothing’ y/n. You know it. You know there wasn’t a moment where i didn’t need you.”
James sounded like a totally different person, like the year had matured him maybe a tiny bit.
“So please love me again,” he continued, the words spilling out like they’d been waiting behind every exit he’d ever taken. His thumb brushed your lower lip, shaking. “Don’t leave me. Love me again and -and if you never did, you can start now.”
The confession hung there, raw and bleeding. His eyes were wet, spilling over without permission, tracking down his cheeks.
You made a small, broken sound and surged forward like you needed it in order to breathe.
He met you halfway.
The kiss was devastating. A year of absence crashed into the moment your mouths met -desperate, open, messy. His lips were urgent against yours, tasting salt from both your tears.
You gasped into him and he swallowed it, tongue sliding against yours like he was trying to memorize every texture again.
Your hands fisted in his shirt; his cupped your face, thumbs wiping at your tears even as more fell. You were both crying through it, foreheads pressed together between kisses, breaths hitching, noses bumping, teeth grazing in the need to get closer.
“I missed you,” he mumbled against your mouth, voice cracking. “Fuck, I missed you so much it felt like dying.”
You answered by kissing him harder, tongues tangling, bodies pressing flush. His hands roamed -down your sides, gripping your waist, pulling you against him so he could feel the heat of you through the thin fabric. You arched into him, and the groan he let out was pure yearning.
A broken sob escaped you and he swallowed it greedily, tilting his head to kiss you harder, deeper, like he could crawl inside you and never leave.
In the narrow hallway, your back met the wall with a soft thud and his mouth moved to your jaw, your neck, sucking lightly, then harder, like he needed to leave proof that this was real.
One of his thighs pushed between yours, pressing up against the heat between your legs, and you gasped into his mouth, grinding down instinctively. Your fingers pushed into his hair, tugging, and he shuddered, hands sliding under the hem of your dress, palms greedy on your thighs. His hands roamed lower, sliding down the curve of your ass, squeezing hard through the thin Prada fabric before hiking your dress up your thighs. Cool air hit your skin as his palms found bare flesh, groping, kneading, pulling you tighter against the hard line of his cock straining in his pants.
You moaned into the kiss, one leg hooking around his hip, opening yourself to the pressure. His hips rolled forward, grinding his erection against your core in slow, filthy drags that made you both shudder. The friction was electric, too much and not enough. Your fingers pushed into his hair, tugging sharply, and he growled, biting your lower lip before soothing it with his tongue.
“I missed this,” you whispered brokenly between kisses, tears slipping into your mouth. “Missed you -your hands, your mouth-”
He answered by shoving your dress higher, one hand slipping between your bodies to cup you over your panties. His fingers pressed firm circles against your clit through the damp fabric, and your head fell back against the wall with a whimper. He chased the movement, mouth latching onto your throat, sucking a mark just below your jaw while his fingers worked you relentlessly.
“James- we can’t- not here..”
“I don’t care,” he growled against your throat. “I need you. Now. Always.” And that was enough.
You touched him everywhere you could reach -chest, shoulders, the line of his jaw, the hard press of his cock already straining against his pants.
“Wet already,” he breathed against your skin, voice cracking with emotion and lust. “Always so fucking wet for me. Even after everything.”
You reached down, palming his cock through his pants, stroking the thick length with desperate need and he bucked into your hand with a choked groan, forehead pressed to yours, eyes locked even as tears blurred them.
The hallway was silent except for your ragged breaths, the wet sounds of kissing, the rustle of fabric.
His free hand shoved the neckline of your dress down, exposing one breast. He palmed it roughly, thumb flicking over your nipple, then bent to take it into his mouth -sucking, licking, teeth grazing while his fingers kept rubbing your clit faster.
You were panting, grinding shamelessly against his hand, so close already. “James -here -please-”
He switched to your other breast, sucking harder, hips thrusting against your thigh in time with his fingers. The tension coiled tighter, the risk of someone opening the door only heightening everything.
His cock throbbed under your palm; you squeezed him through the fabric and he moaned around your nipple, the vibration shooting straight to your core.
James straightened suddenly, crashing his mouth back to yours in a filthy, tongue-heavy kiss. Two of his fingers pushed your panties aside and slid into you without warning, your slickness making it so easy -deep, curling, stroking that spot that made your knees buckle.
You cried out into his mouth, clenching around him, tears pouring faster as the pleasure mixed with the overwhelming ache in your chest.
“I love you,” he gasped against your lips, fingers pumping steadily, thumb circling your clit. “I fucking love you-don’t leave me, please don’t-”
That was his leap of faith. He’d never said things so straightforwardly before and here he was, telling you just how much he adored you.
You were right there, teetering on the edge, when distant laughter from the party filtered through the door, shattering the moment just enough.
James pulled his hand back with a pained sound, but he didn’t let you go. He rested his forehead against yours, both of you breathing hard, bodies trembling, faces streaked with tears and flushed with need.
Your hand was still on his cock; his fingers were still glistening with you.
“We can’t -not here,” he rasped, but his hips twitched forward anyway, seeking more contact.
You nodded shakily, but kissed him once more- slow, deep, lingering. “Take me home.”
He didn’t need to be told twice. He fixed your dress with shaking hands, you straightened his shirt, and then he grabbed your hand, lacing your fingers tightly like he was afraid you’d vanish.
You slipped out the side exit without a word to anyone, like you’d done so many times before.
Only this time you knew something different.
In the cab, you couldn’t keep your hands off each other.
The back seat was dark, the driver politely ignoring the heavy breathing and closing the backseat-front seat window.
James pulled you half into his lap, kissing you slow and deep, one hand under your dress stroking the slick mess between your thighs, the other tangled in your hair. You ground against him, whimpering, tears still slipping down your cheeks.
He kissed them away, murmuring, “I’ve got you. I’m here. I’m not leaving.”
By the time you reached your dorm, you were both trembling with need.
The door to your dorm barely clicked shut behind you before James had you lifted in his arms, your legs wrapping instinctively around his waist.
The short cab ride had done nothing to cool the fire between you -only stoked it.
His mouth was on yours again, hungry and uncoordinated, as he carried you the few steps to the bed and laid you down like you might break.
Clothes came off in a desperate haze. He peeled the black dress from your body with shaking hands, kissing every inch of skin he revealed. Your bra and panties followed, then his shirt, pants, and boxers -until there was nothing between you but a year of aching absence.
He hovered over you for a moment, eyes drinking you in, tears still glistening on his lashes.
“God, you’re beautiful,” he whispered, voice thick with emotion. “I thought I remembered… but this-”
He leaned down, pressing open-mouthed kisses along your collarbones, the valley between your breasts, the soft plane of your stomach.
His hands mapped you reverently -cupping your breasts, thumbs brushing nipples until they tightened, sliding down your sides to grip your hips.
He sucked marks into the sensitive skin just above your hipbones, like he needed to claim you all over again.
When he finally settled between your thighs, spreading them wide with gentle but insistent hands, you were already dripping. He groaned at the sight, a low, wrecked sound that vibrated through you.
He started slow, almost worshipful -pressing soft, lingering kisses to the inside of your thighs, then higher. The first broad swipe of his tongue through your folds drew a broken sob from deep in your chest.
He licked you like a man starved, savoring every drop. His tongue was warm and velvet-soft, flattening to drag from your entrance up to your clit in long, deliberate strokes, then circling the swollen bud with precise, teasing flicks. He hummed against you, the vibration making your hips jerk.
“James-” Your fingers threaded into his hair, tugging as fresh tears slipped down your temples.
He didn’t answer with words.
Instead, he sealed his mouth around your clit and sucked gently, tongue fluttering rapidly against the underside while two thick fingers slid into you, curling upward to stroke that perfect spot inside. The wet, obscene sounds of his mouth filled the room- slick, hungry lapping mixed with his low, appreciative groans.
He was completely pussy-drunk, lost in the taste of you, the way your walls fluttered around his fingers, the way your thighs trembled against his ears.
You came the first time with a sharp cry, back arching off the bed, thighs clamping around his head.
He kept going -didn’t even slow- licking you through every pulse and aftershock, fingers pumping steadily. Tears streamed down your face from the intensity, mixing with the sweat on your skin.
He pulled back only long enough to look up at you, lips shiny and chin wet, eyes dark and glassy with tears of his own. “One more,” he rasped. “I need to taste you again. Please.” Then he dove back in, even more fervent.
This time he fucked you with his tongue- pushing it inside as deep as it would go, curling and thrusting while his nose rubbed against your clit.
His fingers replaced his tongue on your clit, rubbing tight, fast circles, the overstimulation had you whimpering, hips grinding against his face, but he held you down with one strong arm across your stomach, devouring you like he’d never get enough.
You came harder the second time, a full-body shudder that left you sobbing his name, gushing against his tongue as he drank every bit of it.
Only then did he crawl up your body, kissing a wet trail up your stomach, between your breasts, until his mouth found yours.
You tasted yourself on his tongue as he kissed you deeply, sharing the evidence of your pleasure.
You reached between you, wrapping your hand around his cock -thick, heavy, burning hot and leaking steadily at the tip. He groaned into your mouth, hips twitching, but when you tried to shift downward, he caught your wrist gently.
“No,” he whispered, eyes wet and earnest, voice cracking. “Not tonight- fuck -I need to be close to you. Inside you. Please, baby. Let me feel you.”
He settled between your legs, bracing on his forearms so he could watch your face.
The blunt head of his cock nudged at your entrance, slick and ready before he pushed in slowly -inch by inch- stretching you open with that perfect, burning fullness you’d missed for a year.
The sensation was overwhelming: the way your walls yielded and clenched around every ridge and vein, the heavy heat of him filling you completely until his hips pressed flush to yours.
You both gasped, foreheads touching, tears falling freely again.
“Fuck… you’re so tight,” he breathed, voice trembling. “So warm and wet and- fuck, I love you. I love you so much.”
He stayed buried deep for a long moment, just feeling you pulse around him, savoring the squeeze.
Then he began to move -slow, deep rolls of his hips that dragged his cock along every sensitive inch inside you. Each thrust was deliberate, pulling almost all the way out before sliding back in to the hilt, grinding against your clit on every downstroke.
The wet, rhythmic slap of skin filled the room, mingled with your shared sobs and gasps.
You wrapped your legs around his waist, heels digging into his back, pulling him deeper. “Harder, James -please-”
He gave it to you, thrusts growing firmer, faster, but still so full of emotion.
His cock felt impossibly thick inside you, stretching you perfectly with every plunge, the head nudging against that spot that made sparks explode behind your eyes. When you clenched around him particularly hard, he moaned loudly, a raw, broken sound that vibrated through his chest.
“Yes- fuck, just like that. You feel so good, so so good baby.”
You switched positions naturally, rolling so he was spooned behind you, chest pressed tight to your back.
One of his arms banded around you, hand cupping and kneading your breast, the other sliding down to rub firm circles on your clit. He thrust up into you from behind -deep, grinding strokes that kept him buried as much as possible.
His mouth was at your neck, kissing, sucking, murmuring against your skin: “I missed this. Missed feeling you around me. Never letting you go again.”
Tears soaked the pillow beneath your cheek; his fell onto your shoulder. The emotion was devastating -relief, love, grief, desperation- all of it pouring out with every thrust.
You came first again, walls clamping down hard around his cock, pulsing and fluttering as pleasure tore through you with a shattered moan.
The sensation broke him. James groaned deep in his chest, hips stuttering as his orgasm hit. His cock throbbed violently inside you, swelling even thicker as he came hard -thick, hot ropes of cum flooding your walls in powerful pulses.
“Y/N -fuckfuckfuckfuck” He kept thrusting through it, shallow and desperate, drawing out every wave as your pussy milked him dry.
But even after he spilled everything, he didn’t stop. He stayed rock-hard, the overstimulation making him shake and whimper, but the feeling was too good.
“Don’t stop,” he begged hoarsely, still crying, voice wrecked. “Please, don’t let me pull out. It’s too much- too good. I can’t-”
You pushed back against him, meeting every thrust, and he kept moving -kept cumming in smaller, intense waves that made his whole body jerk. His cock pulsed again and again inside you, more cum leaking out with every thrust, making everything slicker, messier.
He buried his face in your neck, sobbing against your skin as another orgasm ripped progressively through him, hips grinding deep.
You turned your head for a messy, tear-soaked kiss, tongues sliding lazily as he kept fucking you slow and loving and frantic all at once.
The year apart dissolved completely in the heat, the tears, and the devastating certainty that this had never been nothing.
It had always been everything. Filled every single corner of every single room you’d been in.
And neither of you left.
The room was quiet except for the slowing rhythm of your breathing and the occasional sniffle as tears finally began to ease.
James stayed buried deep inside you from behind, his arm wrapped tightly around your waist, chest pressed flush to your back. His cock still twitched with aftershocks, warm and full inside your slick, cum-filled heat. Neither of you moved to separate.
You couldn’t. Not yet.
He pressed soft, lingering kisses to the nape of your neck, his breath shaky. “I’m not leaving,” he whispered, voice hoarse and raw. “Not tonight. Not ever again if you’ll have me.”
You turned your head just enough to meet his eyes over your shoulder. Fresh tears welled up. “I thought we were done. I really believed it this time.”
“I know.” His hand slid up to cup your cheek, thumb brushing away the wetness. “I was so fucking scared you’d never see me again.”
You squeezed around him instinctively, and he groaned softly, hips giving one lazy thrust before stilling again. “I was cruel too,” you admitted, voice small. “Blocking you. Pushing you away when I needed you most. I was hurting and I wanted you to hurt with me. But God, James… I never stopped loving you. Even when I hated you.”
His eyes shut tight, another tear slipping free. “I love you. I’m shit at saying it, shit at showing it the right way, but I do. So much it terrifies me. You’re the only person who’s ever seen all the ugly parts and still made me feel like I’m worth something.”
ᴺᴼᵂ ᴾᴸᴬᵞᴵᴺᴳ Jealou$y - The Nbhd ♫♬♪
You stayed like that for a long while- tangled, joined, whispering truths you’d both buried for years. Soft confessions. Apologies. Promises. The kind of vulnerable honesty that only came after devastating sex and shared tears.
His hand stroked your stomach, your breasts, anywhere he could reach, grounding himself in your warmth.
Eventually the tenderness shifted. His cock, still half-hard inside you, began to thicken again. You felt it -slow, deliberate swelling that made you gasp. James kissed your shoulder, then your neck, teeth grazing.
“Again?” you whispered, a small, breathless laugh breaking through.
“I can’t help it,” he murmured, rolling his hips slowly, stirring the mess of cum and your arousal. “You feel too good. Being inside you again it’s fucking addictive.”
The heat built quickly. You pushed back against him, and he groaned, pulling out just long enough to turn you onto your back so he could kiss you properly -deep, slow, emotional. Then he was lifting you, carrying you toward the small en-suite bathroom on unsteady legs.
The shower was tiny, barely enough room for both of you, but that only made it better. He turned the water on hot, steam filling the space as you stepped in together. Water cascaded over your bodies, washing away sweat and tears but not the need.
James pressed you against the cool tiles, mouth devouring yours while his hands roamed -slick with water, sliding over your breasts, pinching nipples until you moaned into him.
You wrapped your arms around his neck, one leg hooking over his hip. His cock, fully hard again and flushed dark, slid against your stomach.
He lifted you effortlessly, pinning you to the wall. “Wrap your legs around me, yeah?”
You did, and he guided himself back inside you in one smooth, deep thrust. The stretch was even more intense after everything -your walls sensitive and swollen, still slick with his earlier release.
He groaned loudly, forehead pressed to yours as water poured over your joined bodies.
“Fuck, Y/N… so warm. So fucking tight even after I filled you up.” He started moving -deep, rolling thrusts that ground his pelvis against your clit with every stroke.
The wet slap of skin mixed with the sound of running water. His cock dragged along every ridge inside you, thick and veined, hitting that perfect spot over and over.
You cried out, nails digging into his shoulders. Tears mixed with shower water on your cheeks. “James -harder. I need you.”
He gave it to you. Thrusts turned punishing but loving -powerful snaps of his hips that lifted you higher against the tiles. One hand held your ass, the other braced beside your head. His mouth moved to your neck, sucking marks, then to your breasts, licking water from your nipples before biting gently.
You clenched around him deliberately and he moaned, deep and broken. “Yes -squeeze me just like that. Fuck… I feel everything. You’re gonna make me cum again too soon my pretty girl.”
The angle, the heat, the steam, the overwhelming emotion -it all built fast. You came first, walls pulsing hard around his cock, sobbing his name as pleasure crashed through you.
James followed right after, burying himself to the hilt with a guttural groan. His cock throbbed violently, pumping more thick ropes of cum deep inside you. He kept thrusting through it, shallow and desperate, whimpering against your neck as overstimulation made him shake.
But he didn’t pull out. Instead, he lowered you slightly, still buried deep, and reached between you to rub your clit with slick fingers while grinding slowly.
“One more,” he begged, greedy. “Please, baby. I need to feel you cum around me again.”
You were oversensitive, trembling, but the way he looked at you -eyes wet, desperate, full of love- made you nod. He fucked you through it, slower now but no less intense, water streaming between your bodies, until you shattered again with a broken cry.
Only then did he ease out, both of you boneless and clinging. He held you under the spray, kissing you softly as the water began to cool.
Voices suddenly filtered in from the main dorm area -your members returning home, laughing and calling your name.
James froze, then smiled against your lips, a little dazed and wicked. “Guess we made it just in time.”
You laughed breathlessly, pressing one last kiss to his mouth. “Stay the night anyway. We’ll figure it out.”
He nodded, eyes soft. “I’m not going anywhere.”
So he didn’t go anywhere.
He stayed.
Became the better man he always told himself he’d be once he found the courage.
The morning after the wrap party, you woke tangled in his arms, his face buried against your neck, breathing steady and warm. Neither of you spoke much at first. Just quiet touches, soft kisses, and the shared understanding that everything had shifted.
Your members teased you mercilessly when they saw him sneaking out later that day, but the smiles on their faces said they’d known this was coming.
A few days later, he showed up at your dorm with a ridiculously corny bouquet of red roses and a handwritten letter -actual pen and paper and no chat gpt involved, slightly crumpled from how many times he’d rewritten it.
The letter was long, rambling, equal parts apology and love confession, ending with: “Will you let me take you on a real date?”
You said yes, he kissed you right there in the doorway, slow and reverent, like he still couldn’t believe he was allowed.
Your first official date was simple but perfect: a late-night drive to a quiet beach outside the city, where no one would find you and snap photos, blankets in the trunk, cheap convenience store snacks, and hours of talking under the stars. He held your hand the entire way home.
That night, back at your place, the sex was different -less desperate hunger, more deep, aching worship. He laid you out on his bed and took his time again, licking and sucking between your thighs until you came twice on his tongue, then fucked you slow, eyes locked, whispering “I love you” with every thrust.
Over the next weeks, you rebuilt in quiet, beautiful ways. Brunch dates ( in your bedroom unfortunately - there was only so much fame allowed) where he stole bites from your plate. Late studio nights where he brought you coffee and rubbed your shoulders. Public outings were careful at first -disguises, quiet corners- but the the thrill of risking to be seen together, even subtly, felt like freedom.
As your career with R3SET soared -comeback stages under blinding lights, sold-out tours that took you across continents, and the quiet pride of watching your members shine beside you -he was there. Cheering the loudest from the wings, waiting with warm arms and quiet understanding after exhausting schedules.
“You’re always the best thing in any room you’re performing in,” he’d said one time, towel drying your sweat after a long show in Seoul.
One month in, he took you to a private listening of Cortis’ finished project. Sitting in the dark, his hand on your thigh, fingers tracing lazy circles, you listened to the song. He’d included his song in the album, the one he’d written about you.
And now you were certain, that by being honest, you’d gotten everything you wanted.
In the car afterward, you couldn’t wait -you rode him in the backseat, windows fogged, your dress hiked up, his hands gripping your ass as you bounced on his cock. He came so hard he saw stars, burying his face between your breasts and murmuring how perfect you felt squeezing him.
Two months later, he talked to the girls properly -nervous, respectful, and endearingly awkward. They approved. Not that you would’ve left him anyway.
That same night, back at your dorm while the others were out, he fucked you against the kitchen counter, then bent you over the couch, pounding deep from behind until you were sobbing his name. He loved pulling your hair just enough to tilt your head back for messy kisses, loved the way your pussy fluttered and milked him when you came.
Three months in, during a quiet weekend getaway to a cabin in the mountains, he told you he was in therapy -working on the exits, the fear and the walls. You cried in his arms, proud but also insanely full. Like you suddenly realized how fulfilled you were been at such a young age.
Six months later, you both got a secondary apartment to share. It was private but yours- filled with your combined chaos and growing collection of memories and polaroids.
The sex only got better with time: lazy morning blowjobs where he’d eventually pull you up and fuck you slow and deep; shower quickies that turned into long, steamy sessions against the tiles; nights where he’d edge you for an hour with his mouth and fingers before finally giving you his cock, making you cum so many times you lost count.
You read in his arms, learned more about yourself than you’d ever did anywhere else, learned how to love him correctly, appropriately, learned how to not be so addicted to the chaos.
Your story had never been nothing. It had always been tongue-tied and beautifully, spoken aloud.
In the end, it was always his tongue that undid you both. Not just the wicked, reverent way it worshipped between your thighs.
But the way it finally learned to speak the truth.
oh my shit fuck. I actually am so grateful for this request cause i fucking loved writing this. Idc if it’s ass and if some don’t like it. I loved it. 🤤 loved writing it.
SUMMARY a feminist podcast roasts a boyband live on air, and Keonho makes the mistake of getting intrigued by the one girl who refuses to be impressed.
PAIRING idol Keonho x podcaster Yn / female reader
FEATURING CORTIS, ILLIT Wonhee, NewJeans Hyein, H2H Ian, mentions of other idols
GENRE social media au with written parts, romance, crack, fluff (tba)
WARNINGS wony fc!! umm lots of jokes? swearing, complete roasting of the male kind (= hopecore), kys/kym, underage drinking, tba
mysterious stranger in my phone -how to pull an idol (a series)
idol!martin x reader
⋆ ִֶָ˖·˳˖When you let a random stranger rant for a whole ten minutes, you not only gain a new favorite band but also a devestating crush. ݁‧₊˚⋆ִֶָ
previous warnings: cussing
bros so down bad he crashes out even though he already knows what she looks like god damn
݁꒰ᐢ. .ᐢ꒱₊˚⊹ 요약 - when you are chosen to be the female lead in the ‘blue lips’ mv, martin seonghyeon keonho and juhoon can’t help but tease james for his long time crush on you…
warnings .ᐟ fluff, alcohol consumption, smoking, smut ( mdni ), unprotected sex ( do not do that ) fingering, oral, praising, soft dom james, reader finds out she likes the whole submissive ordeal, drunk sex kinda, very very light choking ( just hand around the neck atp) a looooot of praising like a crazy amount.
at twenty-two years old, your name carried the kind of weight most actors spent decades chasing.
not because you were loud or chased headlines, but because every role you touched became unforgettable. you were the actress critics called “emotionally dangerous” because people never watched your dramas casually, they felt them. deeply and pathetically at that. the kind of performances that left people staring at ceilings at 3 a.m. wondering why fictional heartbreak suddenly felt personal.
your rise happened obscenely fast.
at seventeen, you played the younger version of the female lead in a historical drama and completely overshadowed actresses twice your age with barely fifteen minutes of screentime. one crying scene alone went viral across korean platforms overnight, and directors began requesting you specifically after that.
at nineteen, you starred in your first lead role in the netflix drama ‘winter static’, a romance about two strangers communicating through old cassette tapes left inside a train station locker.
the drama exploded internationally, and tiktok edits of your scenes reached millions overnight. people quoted your monologues religiously, which was kind of stupid for you since they were just words stuck in your brain at this point.
your face appeared on billboards from seoul to tokyo to paris.
then came ‘velvet hour’ and ‘salt to the sea’, then the thriller ‘silhouette hearts’ that earned you your first baeksang arts award for best actress at the age of twenty-one. youngest actress in the category to win in over a decade.
after that, everything changed.
luxury brands fought over you. you became the global ambassador for miu miu and later the face of dior beauty in asia. campaign photos of you covered entire department stores. airport pictures became articles within minutes. fashiom editors loved your “old cinema” aura, soft eyes, elegant posture, expressions that looked heartbreakingly human even in still photographs.
and despite your fame, people adored you for smaller reasons too, your quirks became internet lore at some point. you were kind of awkward with the camera but in an endearing way, you didn’t know how to behave at award shows and came across as a socially akward person.
it wa also maybe the way you always carried disposable cameras instead of using your phone, and how you wrote handwritten letters to the staff after filming ended. how you fell asleep absolutely anywhere, chairs, makeup rooms, car rides shorter than ten minutes. fans also noticed you had a tendency to mirror people unconsciously. if someone leaned closer while talking, you did too. if someone laughed quietly, your voice softened automatically. interviewers said conversations with you felt strangely intimate because you listened with your entire attention and never felt unapproachable. there were compilation videos online titled:
“y/n being accidentally affectionate for 8 minutes straight.”
your management hated those videos. but the internet ate them up.
you also had one particular reputation in the entertainment industry: mv queen.
not because you appeared in many or anything, because every mv you touched became viral.
at eighteen, you starred in txt’s emotionally devastating “ghosting” inspired visual film project, playing a girl remembered through fragments an old footage. the chemistry between you and the members had fans posting edits of tiny interactions for months.
a year later, enhypen chose you for a vampire-themed comeback trailer where you portrayed a girl that anchored them to the mortal world. your final scene, holding member jake’s inanimate body in the sea, became one of the most replayed teaser moments of the year. you had a gift for making music videos feel cinematic instead of performative.
you understood silence, micro expressions, longing.
which was exactly why the cortis creative team wanted you.
specifically you.
mainly because of you name and the reputation you carried but also because “blue lips” wasn’t supposed to feel like a regular idol music video. it was supposed to feel like a lost teenager being put in an adult world after spending years as a trainee, caught on camera.
and your role inside it was very important. you would play the embodiment of what martin talked about in the song. the metaphor of swimming in a pool for a long period of time, referring probably to his trainee days.
you weren’t a girlfriend, not a muse either, something slightly in between.
the director had apparently rejected over thirty actresses before seeing one clip of you from ‘velvet hour’. a scene where your character silently cried while pretending to smile during dinner.
that was it.
the director reportedly paused the screen and said: “that’s her.”
⋆˙⟡. ⋆˙⟡
so two weeks later, you found yourself seated inside a glass walled meeting room at the company building of one of the biggest rising fifth-generation groups in korea.
rain tapped softly against the windows outside while managers discussed paperwork around you, the conference table covered in contracts, visual references, concept photos drowned in blue tones.
You sat calmly in an oversized cream sweater, lazily spinning an expensive fountain pen between your fingers while your manager reviewed the conditions carefully.
“the filming schedule overlaps slightly with the milan campaign,” your manager noted, he was an overly serious guy with coffee problems.
one of cortis’ executives nodded immediately. “we’re prepared to accommodate her availability entirely.”
another added quickly: “the director is willing to reorganize scenes around her schedule if necessary.”
you tried not to smile, because it always felt surreal when entire productions adjusted themselves around you now. like you were more essential than you imagined.
at twenty-two, that level of influence still startled you sometimes. things came easy for you but that came with a price to pay.
the creative director slid a storyboard toward you, inside were rough sketches of scenes:
a flooded apartment, blue lipstick stains on skin, hands trembling beneath neon lights, a drowning scene, but everything weirdly coincided with the whole cortis aesthetic.
you skimmed through quietly. “it’s emotionally heavy,” you murmured.
“that’s why we wanted you,” the director admitted honestly.
he looked almost nervous speaking to you. you’d noticed that recently. older directors tended to treat you less like a rookie actress and more like someone they genuinely wanted approval from.
“the members were personally involved in choosing the female lead,” another staff member added.
“oh?” you glanced up with mild curiosity.
the director smiled faintly. “there was unanimous agreement.”
you tilted your head slightly. “that’s flattering.”
your manager laughed softly. “you say that like it isn’t obvious.”
you ignored him, not in a rude way but just because sometimes he made you look like a stuck up celebrity without meaning to.
the meeting continued for another hour, image rights, overseas distribution, teaser appearances, confidentiality agreements.
standard things. pleasantries if you will.
but eventually the conversation shifted toward the actual emotional dynamic of the music video.
the director leaned forward slightly, a head full of ideas, “the role requires natural chemistry with the members,” he explained. “especially james.”
your eyes flickered briefly toward the storyboard page featuring him.
you had had time to check who all the members were beforehand, not because you didn’t know them but because you simply never had a free moment to really give it a try.
cortis were monsters internationally right now, but james stood out even among them to you, he was extremely unfiltered, goofy even, alternating between insane visuals and unhinged moments. you heard he also had a reputation for being painfully outgoing offstage.
you had watched interviews while preparing for the meeting, he always spoke out and gave his opinion, always made funny faces and enjoyed things way too much.
the director continued speaking. “the emotional core of the mv revolves around your connection with him specifically, it’ll be grief and pain.”
your manager nodded. “understood.”
then the director smiled suddenly like he just remembered something,
“the members actually wanted to meet her personally tonight if she’s comfortable.”
you blinked. “tonight?”
“there’s a team dinner.”
your manager looked at you questioningly. you considered it for a moment before shrugging lightly.
“sure, i can make that work.”
⋆˙⟡. ⋆˙⟡
and that was how, three hours later, you ended up entering a private hot pot restaurant room alongside two managers while five of the most talked-about idols in korea immediately stood up to greet you.
the room smelled warmly of broth and spice and low golden lighting reflected against polished wooden walls while steam curled softly from the simmering pots placed at the center of the table, the restaurant itself was cozy, sat tucked away in a quieter street of Seoul, the kind of place celebrities favored because paparazzi rarely bothered searching for it.
your manager walked slightly ahead of you as an employee guided both of you toward the reserved room.
“you’ve worked too much this week,” your manager muttered quietly while checking his phone. “try to eat properly tonight.”
“i always eat properly.”
“you had strawberries and iced coffee for dinner yesterday.”
“oh yeah… forgot about that.”
he sighed deeply. “one day I’m going to retire because of you.”
you smiled innocently just as the sliding wooden door opened.
inside, the members of cortis stood almost immediately. they bowed politely, intimidated not so much, but just cordial and respectful.
“thank you for coming,” one of the managers said warmly.
“thank you for inviting me,” you replied.
you greeted the members one by one.
martin was immediately charismatic, respectful but outwardly comfortable as if he treated this more like a job interview or a way to get more experience.
keonho shook your hand while joking that the pressure surrounding this music video already felt “oscar-level.”, he seemed the most introverted, nervous almost.
juhoon greeted you politely before admitting his sister would probably disown him if he didn’t get a selfie with you eventually, he seemed chill and easy to be around.
seonghyeon seemed calm and observant, speaking gently, a little nervous but growing confidence over the course of dinner.
and then there was james.
quiet.
polite.
a little reserved.
not at all what you’d expected, you were almost waiting to see him unhinged as he was on cortis’ reels, joking around, but he was way calmer, after all it wasn’t unknown that idol put on a bit of a show on-camera when asked.
he bowed respectfully, offering a soft greeting before pulling your chair out slightly without making a big deal out of it.
the dinner started slowly, mostly conversations between management teams about, and promotional timing. they talked about their new album, about how ‘blue lips’ would be totally different from other mvs and much more vulnerable.
this felt entirely different from your usual work settings, even though you weren’t immensely older than them, it still felt like grabbing lunch with high school friends, in a good way. you liked people who joked easily.
when it came to talking about the music video, you asked questions about the symbolism behind the flooded apartment set.
martin became overly passionate explaining how one choreography sequence represented emotional dependency.
he scratched the back of his neck with a small laugh at some point.
“it’s kinda embarrassing when people explain it seriously.”
“you wrote it,” juhoon replied. “you explain it.”
martin groaned dramatically while everyone else laughed softly.
the director slid one of the concept pages toward you. unlike the earlier boards filled with blue neon lights and cinematic references, this one was simpler.
a swimming pool with dark water and rippled reflections.
a figure submerged too long beneath the surface.
you looked up curiously.
martin rested his elbows against the table before speaking quieter this time.
“the song’s about being a trainee.”
you recalled seeing somwhere that he had spent 6 years as a trainee.
“i trained for years before debut,” he continued. “and eventually it starts feeling like you’re swimming without knowing where the edge of the pool is anymore. or at least that’s how i’d like to put it you know?”
“you’re exhausted all the time,” he continued with a small shrug. “but everybody around you is exhausted too, so you convince yourself it’s normal.”
your eyes drifted back toward the image of the water. cold enough to turn lips blue.
“the pool represents training?” you asked softly.
martin nodded. “the longer you stay in cold water, the harder it becomes to feel anything properly. but you still stay inside because leaving feels worse.”
for a moment, nobody joked, certainly not you, you hadn’t experience being a trainee, but you connected easily with words and experiences, so much that his words resonated with you in a silly way, really. You didn’t usually expect tha level of emotional intelligence coming from a person around your age.
then seonghyeon spoke gently.
“the song isn’t really about giving up though.”
martin nodded again.
“yeah.” his expression softened slightly.
“it’s more like… asking the people beside you if they’ll keep swimming too.”
that sentence stayed with you.
maybe because you understood it immediately.
not as an idol or anything. but as someone who entered the entertainment industry young enough to mistake exhaustion for ambition.
“that’s why the music video can’t feel overly glamorous,” the director explained carefully. “we want emotional intimacy more than perfection.”
suddenly all the visual references clicked together inside your head.
“you know what’s ironic?” martin said suddenly, picking his chopsticks back up. “the company hated the original demo.”
everyone burst out laughing.
“no seriously,” keonho added. “they said it was too depressing.”
the mood lightened again after that, but the conversation stayed centered around the song’s meaning now.
the members began sharing small pieces of their trainee experiences naturally.
long practice nights and monthly evaluations, the weird emotional numbness that came from repeating the same routines endlessly.
at one point, seonghyeon admitted quietly:
“you stop noticing how tired you are after a while.”
your expression softened instinctively. that sentence felt familiar too.
actors weren’t trained the same way idols were, but exhaustion translated across industries frighteningly well, especially when being underage in such a cruel industry.
“you just adapt to it,” you agreed.
several eyes turned toward you.
you laughed faintly. “filming is similar sometimes.”
“how long was your longest shoot?” keonho asked.
“twenty-one hours.”
the members stared at you in horror.
“damn that’s illegal.”
“it probably was.” you shrugged like it was no bigdeal
“what drama was that?”
“salt to the sea.”
martin physically pointed accusingly. “that drama emotionally destroyed my mother.”
“i’m getting blamed for a lot tonight… i mean not that i don’t usually get accused of sending people into meltdowns…” you cringed.
“you should. that shit was brutal.”
the table laughed again.
but then James spoke quietly from beside seonghyeon.
“i watched the behind-the-scenes documentary for that.”
your gaze flickered toward him.
he continued calmly, almost thoughtful.
“you kept filming even after collapsing during the staircase scene.”
you blinked once in surprise, very few people remembered that, probably you and your manager… that was about it.
the documentary itself had only shown brief footage before the production team cut the cameras.
your manager immediately sighed beside you.
“she scared everyone that day.”
“i was fine.”
“you passed out, y/n.”
“temporarily. see i came back.”
martin looked genuinely alarmed now. “why do actors live like nineteenth-century poets?”
“occupational hazards i guesss”
james smiled faintly into his drink at that.
“he watched all your dramas actually, big fan,” juhoon added helpfully, almost matter of factly.
keonho leaned dramatically across the table, chopsticks projecting sauce across the surface.
“he also defended your ending in velvet hour for two hours. which is weird since you killed someone and all.”
“because people misunderstood the symbolism—” james started.
“he took notes...”
you let out a soft laughter before even thinking. real laughter, the kind that makes your shoulders shake slightly.
at some point the staff began discussing practical filming concerns.
rain machines, and underwater camera rigs. cold temperature precautions and all the other overly serious things.
your manager immediately interrupted:
“she’s sensitive to cold filming environments.”
you groaned softly. “ah you say that like i’m an elderly victorian child.”
“you get sick every winter.”
“that’s just my immune system, i should be okay.”
the members laughed, then unexpectedly, james spoke up quietly toward the production staff.
“the water temperature should stay monitored anyway. hypothermia risks increase during long shoots.”
you glanced toward him. you didn’t take him as a serious and practical person at all before this.
the production manager nodded quickly. “of course.”
martin talked constantly, sometimes started rapping parts of his sentences like it was normal,
keonho teased everyone equally, even you, he was still 17 and had the energy of a high schooler. it felt refreshing to hang out with people around your age rather than 40 year olds.
juhoon had dangerously quick humor, pretty nonchalant guy overall, with a resting model face that made it hard to take him seriously.
and james… james observed today, he smiled from time to time but he put his bubbly personality aside for the night.
that was the first thing you noticed. he was not himself, or maybe he was just like that all the time and you were biased by youtube videos.
at one point you mentioned casually: “i haven’t slept properly in weeks because of filming, it’s been tough.”
twenty minutes later, without saying anything, james quietly slid the least caffeinated drink on the table toward you instead of soju after noticing what others were pouring.
cute, you thought.
⋆˙⟡. ⋆˙⟡
the first day of filming began at 4:12 a.m.
you knew because you checked the time through half-open eyes while your alarm aggressively blared in your ears.
‘your driver is downstairs.’ your manager texted.
a muffled groan escaped you from beneath layers of blankets. you dragged yourself out of bed dramatically, hair messy, oversized sleep shirt hanging off one shoulder while your cat blinked judgmentally from the corner of the room.
early filming days always felt surreal, no matter how famous you became and no matter how many awards sat in your apartment collecting dust.
at four in the morning, every actor looked equally miserable.
your routine before shoots had become almost ritualistic over the years.
warm water first, never coffee immediately, your body reacted badly on an empty stomach.
skincare while still half-asleep.
voice warmups your acting coach forced into your life at nineteen.
then wardrobe references, probably the most annoying part.
your stylist had already sent final fitting photos the night before, so you scrolled through them while eating strawberries over the kitchen counter.
the styling for “blue lips” was intentionally understated compared to your previous projects. you usually ended up in chanel and dior but this time around it was way simpler. you liked that.
soft fabrics and muted colors, smudged makeup and natural hair.
nothing glamorous.
your manager arrived while you were still trying to force yourself awake properly.
“you slept three hours.” he checked the sleep schedule you had hung on the fridge.
“had to rehearse my lines for ‘if wishes could kill’”
another drama you were shooting.
he handed you iced coffee anyway, because despite his complaints, he enabled you constantly. he had worked with multiple celebrities but you were by far the most humble and hardworking one.
the drive toward the filming location stayed quiet.
seoul still looked asleep beneath pale blue dawn light while your phone buzzed endlessly with schedule notifications.
over the past few weeks, your life had become filled almost entirely with “blue lips.”
creative meetings, camera tests, wardrobe fittings, chemistry readings, storyboard revisions.
you’d met with the cinematographer twice alone just to discuss facial framing during emotional close-up shots.
rhe director was obsessive in the best possible way.
every visual detail mattered.
you also had several rehearsals with the members before filming officially began, not full acting rehearsals, but movement coordination, emotional pacing discussions, and camera positioning workshops.
those meetings unexpectedly became some of your favorite parts of preparation.
the members were involved in everything, fun to be around, and easygoing.
the filming location for day one was an abandoned motel complex outside seoul, transformed entirely by the production team overnight.
the moment your van pulled into the parking area, you could already see massive lighting rigs glowing through the early morning fog. staff members rushed everywhere carrying cables, garment bags, equipment cases.
the assistant director greeted you immediately.
“good morning y/n!”
“good morning,” you answered with a sleepy smile.
“you’re our first cast member here.”
“that’s concerning.”
he laughed. “the members finished rehearsal extra late last night, so they’re probably on their way.”
the makeup trailer smelled faintly like hairspray and coffee when you climbed inside, and for the next hour, your face slowly transformed into the exhausted melancholy the character required.
light concealer, smudged eyeliner, pale lips and a subtle shadows beneath your eyes.
the stylist adjusted your navy dress while reviewing continuity photos carefully.
“you look too healthy,” she complained.
“thank you?”
“no, for the scene.” she laughed.
she proceeded to make you look emotionally devastated again, because apparently it was a thing.
by the time you stepped back outside, the set had fully awakened, and unfortunately for your nervous system, so had cortis.
“you survived,” martin announced dramatically the moment he spotted you.
“barely.”
“you look sad already,” keonho noted approvingly.
“the makeup team worked very hard for this depression.”
juhoon immediately pointed toward your sweater, the oversized one you had put over the dress for temperature purposes. “damn youre even dressed like a cortis member now.”
you laughed softly while greeting everyone properly. the atmosphere felt noticeably easier compared to the dinner weeks ago.
familiar now, not totally strangers anymore.
even the staff interactions had relaxed over time.
then you spotted james standing near the monitor screens speaking quietly with the cinematographer.
black hoodie and messy dark hair, sleepy eyes.
he looked up when you approached.
“morning,” he greeted quietly.
“you look awake.”
a small laugh escaped him. “got some redbull, want one?”
“im good thanks, they make my heart go crazy.”
“…fair point.”
the first scene filmed that day took place inside one of the motel rooms.
the set design was extremely cortis-coded, sand in lieu of the floor, and dozens of misplaced items such as buoys and rubber ducks. dim blue lighting flooded cracked walls while rain projections moved softly across thin curtains. old cassette tapes littered the floor beside overflowing ashtrays and unfinished cups of coffee.
the room looked like something out of an abstract painting,
you sat cross-legged on the motel bed while martin paced near the window during his verse,
your role wasn’t to comfort him directly but rather just to exist beside him.
the director explained carefully before filming:
“you represent the reason he keeps enduring everything. not because you save him, but because loneliness feels lighter beside you.”
martin nodded thoughtfully, he hadn’t wanted to make this into a romantic music video but here you didn’t portray a lover but rather an emotion?
you understood immediately.
“action.” the room fell silent.
music echoed softly through hidden speakers while martin moved through the scene naturally, frustration building beneath restrained expressions. he was truly at ease with the cameras, the level of empathy needed to be an actor was really highlighted, so much so that you already begun imagining different career paths for him.
you watched him from the bed quietly, not smiling just observing while the camera cut through the room. the windows were open letting the curtains flow around martin’s figure.
the director loved it instantly.
“perfect,” he muttered behind the monitors. “don’t overact. keep it restrained.”
the next several hours blurred together in typical filming chaos. different angles, different lighting setups, endless camera adjustments.
one sequence involved all the members sitting together inside the motel’s dim laundromat at while water overflowed from broken machines slowly across the floor. another one showed you walking through narrow motel hallways illuminated entirely by flickering vending machine lights while james followed several steps behind, never quite reaching you.
the symbolism stayed subtle but emotionally heavy, it was truly nice seeing how invested they were in the artistic process.
at one point during setup delays, juhoon challenged everyone to balance grapes on their noses, it seemed like a common occurrence really, like it happened everyday.
seonghyeon succeeded immediately somehow.
martin cheated shamelessly, and you nearly choked when keonho dropped his directly into hot coffee.
meanwhile james sat across from you quietly watching them fool around.
“i really thought you’d be crazier,” you told him.
“i’m just too tired for that, i feel like u go through a threshold when you turn 20 and then you don’t have energy anymore,” he answered.
“hah, skill issues”
james smiled, his teeth peeking out as he wrapped his fluffy blanket around his shoulders.
the first real scene between you and him happened around noon. the setup was intimate visually but emotionally restrained.
a narrow hallway and a green screen for special effects purposes, you’d heard they wanted to add some kind of animal, again very cortis-coded.
your character sat against the wall while james stood nearby after an implied argument no audience would fully see.
no dialogue, just acted out emotional aftermath.
the director approached both of you before filming.
“don’t play romance,” he smiled “i know you’re used to it for the dramas etc and you’re obviously amazing at it, but right now it’s more….” he instructed carefully. “… familiarity.”
you nodded. and james beside you nodded too.
“action.”
the silence between you inside the scene felt strangely real almost immediately.
you stood while james leaned against the opposite wall, enunciating his verse while looking at you.
then slowly, without speaking, he slid a cup of vending machine coffee across the floor toward you.
that was it.
that was the scene.
the director looked content watching playback.
“…yeah,” he murmured softly. “that’s the feeling.”
⋆˙⟡. ⋆˙⟡
by lunchtime, everyone looked genuinely exhausted already.
the production team moved outside near equipment trucks while staff distributed boxed meals and drinks. without cameras rolling constantly, the atmosphere shifted completely.
less professional.
you ended up seated in a circle of foldable camping chairs beside the members near the edge of the parking lot. large plaid blankets covered everyone because the wind had turned freezing unexpectedly.
martin looked half-dead beneath his blanket cocoon.
“i can’t feel my fingers anymore.”
“that’s because you keep standing in the rain you dick face,” seonghyeon replied calmly.
“the pics go hard though,”
“you’re gonna get hypothermia, that’s gonna hit harder.” a staff member said while walking past with cardboard boxes.
seonghyeon pointed at him like saying ‘see?’
you sat between juhoon and james while balancing hot soup carefully in your hands. for the first time all day, there were no managers nearby. no stylists fixing clothes, and no directors discussing angles.
just all of you resting together.
the conversation drifted naturally between random topics.
keonho confessed he once cried over fried chicken during debut preparations.
“that’s deeply moving,” you told him, ironically.
“it was a spiritual experience, shoulda been there.”
juhoon pointed at james suddenly like a kid remembering something, “he once got emotional over taiwanese food.”
james looked confused immediately,
“that happened once and stop oversharing dude.”
“three times.” juhoon raised a finger matter-of-factly.
you smiled quietly into your drink.
the members clearly adored embarrassing each other.
eventually martin stretched dramatically in his chair.
bside you, james sat slightly hunched in his chair scrolling through his phone silently, dark hair messy from filming. the sunlight caught faintly against the silver rings on his fingers.
and unfortunately for him, martin suddenly looked down at his screen with the exact expression of someone about to ruin another person’s life for entertainment.
“oh my god.”
james immediately narrowed his eyes.
Keonho physically turned away coughing dramatically into his fist.
“you know what’s weird?”
“what?” you asked.
“i feel like we haven’t addressed the rhino in the room.”
“elephant dude…” juhoon corrected.
“no this one’s way bigger and has big ahh horns and shit.”
you sat back, digging into your lunch, as everyone shot him a confused look.
“go straight to the point.”
“bro james, show y/n your saved folder on tiktok.”
james didn’t even look up from his phone when he said it, but the immediate redness creeping across his ears betrayed him instantly. he dropped his phone backwards on his lap.
“dawg shutup.” he gave you an awkward smile, “don’t mind him.”
“what’s in the folder ?” you asked, chewing on your food like you really had no clue wtf they were talking about.
“fangirling material” keonho coughed, looking around like ‘who said dat’.
“yeah my dude right here has thousands of edits of you saved.” martin chuckled, pushing his sunglasses on his nose like they would hide his amusement.
“why you out him like that?” you smiled, glancing at james.
the latter had one of his eyebrows raised, frozen and staring straight ahead.
“it’s nothing weird or creepy, he just always talks about how you’re the best actress korea has ever known.” seonghyeon comes to the rescue.
“well that’s sweet, can i see?” you turn directly to james now, trying to get him to look up at you.
the entire circle exploded immediately.
“OH MAH GOD.”
“BROTHER STAND UP.”
james looked ready to walk directly into traffic.
“it’s literally nothing,” he muttered.
“oh its absolutely somthing,” juhoon corrected.
you laughed quietly while trying to catch james’ gaze again.
“now i’m curious.”
for a second, he just stared at you, trying to determine whether you were joking maybe. but your expression stayed open and amused rather than mocking.
eventually he sighed softly through his nose.
“you guys are evil.”
martin looked proud. “look who decided to man up.”
james unlocked his phone slowly, still visibly embarrassed, before turning the screen slightly toward you.
and immediately your eyes widened. “dang.”
not because it was creepy or anything, it was just… extensive, there was a lot, you could probably scroll down a few times and still not come to the end of it.
edits from your dramas, interview clips, award show moments, cinematic compilations with dramatic music. one fan edit from winter static with over four million likes. you stared at the screen in disbelief while james, him, visibly contemplated death beside you.
“wait,” you laughed softly, “this edit has better color grading than my actual drama.”
james rubbed tiredly at his forehead.
“i told you it wasn’t weird.” martin mouthed.
“it’s adorable,” keonho corrected immediately. “he’s like a little fan boy.”
“it’s cinema appreciation,” martin added dramatically.
you kept scrolling slowly through the folder, some videos were emotional scene compilations while others focused on your interviews or behind-the-scenes moments.
then you paused at one specific edit. it was from salt to the sea. a scene where your character silently broke down at a bus stop in the rain while pretending to smile.
you remembered filming that scene vividly, it had taken hours because emotions were raw and because portraying mental decay and insanity was harsh on you.
“you saved this one?” you asked softly.
james nodded once. “it’s my favorite scene.”
something in his voice changed slightly when he said it. you’d knew then that this wasn’t a stupid crush or anything like that, it was just someone truly appreciating someone’s art.
you looked at him curiously. “why?”
for a moment, he seemed surprised by the question itself but then he answered honestly.
“because it didn’t feel acted.”
the others had quieted now too, because james rarely spoke this openly. he kept his eyes on the phone screen instead of directly on you.
“a lot of emotional scenes feel polished i think,” he continued carefully. “but that one just felt… human. and you transmit emotions in a way ive never seen before.”
your chest tightened unexpectedly, actors spent years hoping audiences would notice performances beyond aesthetics, not beauty or popularity, and in that moment you felt seen.
and somehow james articulated exactly what you’d wanted people to get from that scene years ago. you smiled softly without realizing it.
“thank you.” he finally looked up then.
and the expression on his face almost made your stomach flip unexpectedly, because he looked relieved, like he’d worried you might misunderstand him completely.
martin abruptly pointed between both of you.
“see this is why they have chemistry.”
“i been saying.” keonho added.
“oh my god,” james groaned, rolling his eyes.
“you literally analyze her scenes like a film professor,” juhoon added. “no really y/n we have to put up with his shit all the time.”
“meanwhile I just cry and move on,” keonho admitted.
“that’s cause you lack emotional depth,” martin informed him.
“you cried during toy story 3 my dude, fuck you mean emotional depth.”
“that movie is devastating.”
you laughed again, warmth settling naturally into your chest now. and honestly? there was something strangely touching about discovering that james admired your work so genuinely before ever meeting you. not in the shallow celebrity-crush way people often assumed.
he paid attention, and it explained a lot actually. from the thoughtful comments during rehearsals to the way he approached scenes carefully.
entually you handed his phone back gently.
“well,” you announced lightly, “i’m honored to apparently live inside your tiktok algorithm.”
james looked like he wanted the earth to swallow him whole, but beneath the embarrassment, there was the faintest smile tugging at the corner of his mouth now too.
thankfully martin immediately ruined the moment.
“wow,” he sighed dramatically. “cinema soulmates.”
⋆˙⟡. ⋆˙⟡
the second half of filming resumed around three in the afternoon. and somehow became even more chaotic. the official tiktok team arrived, which instantly destroyed any remaining dignity on set.
“oh no,” you muttered the moment you saw phones appearing.
“oh yes,” juhoon corrected.
you really weren’t into the whole tiktok filming thing, you’d given it a try but you looked akward more than anything.
thas how between filming emotional scenes, the members suddenly transformed into content demons. incorporating dance challenges to ‘blue lips’ choreographies that mind you, didn’t have anything to do with the vibes.
at one pointartin forced everyone into a trending transition video while staff members tried not to laugh watching from behind cameras. your manager had said something about requiring a few content for social media.
“you have experience with idol tiktoks already,” keonho accused while reviewing footage.
the social media manager immediately brightened.
“can we film one with only james and y/n too?”
james looked genuinely alarmed.
“why me?”
“fans will love it.”
unfortunately he was right.
the video itself was simple, just a slow cinematic trend using audio from “blue lips.” the concept involved james walking past the camera before the transition revealed you standing in the same hallway afterward, doing a silly tiktok dance.
easy in theory. except james became awkward anytime the camera focused too directly on him outside official filming.
“you’re overthinking it,” you told him while the staff reset lighting.
“i know.”
“pretend it’s an actual scene.”
“that’s worse.”
you laughed softly. and weirdly enough, that finally relaxed him.
the final take turned out perfect. the social media staff looked thrilled immediately.
“oh this shit is DEFINITELY going viral.” martin smiled at the screen. “‘s like two fandoms crossing.”
james looked exhausted already. “you people terrify me.”
“you chose fame my guy” martin reminded him.
“i was young and vulnerable.”
the sun had already started setting by the time day one finally wrapped.
everyone looked tired, cold and emotionally drained, but satisfied.
as staff members slowly began dismantling equipment around the motel set, you stood near the monitors reviewing final shots with the director. and honestly? the footage looked beautiful. exactly what the song deserved.
⋆˙⟡. ⋆˙⟡
you said your goodbyes to the staff slowly before heading toward your van. as you climbed inside, your phone buzzed immediately.
lee minjae: u alive?
you snorted softly. you and minjae existed in that messy category of relationship nobody defined properly. friends sometimes, colleagues, occasional hookups other times. mostly convenience mixed with familiarity.
there had never really been emotions involved, which was probably why it worked.
he wasn’t deep, he was a stable constant, always there but not too much.
you: barely
minjae: come over after shoot?
you stared at the message for a second. normally maybe you would’ve considered it. a few hours together. satisfying sex, temporary distraction from exhausting schedules.
but tonight your entire body ached, and honestly?you just wanted silence.
you: too tired tonight sorry
three dots appeared immediately.
minjae: damn they got u working like a victorian child again
you smiled faintly.
you: exactly
by the time you arrived home, it was nearly midnight. your apartment felt blissfully quiet after the nonstop noise of filming equipment and staff chatter all day.
the first thing you did was shower. a long scrumptious hot shower. enough to thaw the cold still trapped inside your muscles from the rain scenes.
then came your actual night routine, an oversized hoodie, hair clipped loosely away from your face and your skincare lined neatly across the bathroom counter.
you moved through the routine automatically by now. cleanser, moisturizer, lip mask. finally you applied a cooling sheet face mask while walking barefoot into the kitchen for tea.
you were trying to be aesthetic but that failed instantly because the taste was awful. you hated tea. your apartment lights stayed dim while city noise hummed faintly outside enormous windows.
you should’ve slept immediately, but instead, you curled up on the couch with another script resting across your lap.
your next drama project. a psychological thriller filming later that year. something about wishes and an app. the character notes were covered in your messy handwriting already, underlined motivations, emotional beats, scene interpretations. you read through several pages while absentmindedly sipping tea, still half-lost in the atmosphere of “blue lips.”
then, annoyingly your thoughts drifted toward james again. specifically the way he observed scenes afterward instead of rushing away between takes. the way he listened carefully during emotional discussions.
the saved tiktok folder probably.
you smiled quietly to yourself before tossing the script aside.
“absolutely not,” you muttered aloud.
your brain needed sleep.
you eventually fell asleep sideways on the couch beneath a blanket, script pages still scattered nearby.
⋆˙⟡. ⋆˙⟡
the next morning arrived cruelly fast. your alarm went off at 4:30 a.m.
you genuinely considered quitting the entertainment industry for a corporate job. for three full seconds before dragging yourself awake. today was the swimming pool shoot.
which meant one thing: cold.
the production studio sat inside an enormous indoor filming complex on the outskirts of seoul. when your van pulled inside, you immediately spotted massive water tanks, underwater camera rigs, lighting cranes suspended from ceilings, and crew members in waterproof gear rushing around the space.
the swimming pool itself looked unreal, huge and deep blue. artificial fog drifting softly above the surface beneath enormous studio lights.
underwater speakers played instrumental versions of “blue lips,” the haunting melody echoing strangely through the massive room.
the atmosphere felt dreamlike already. you stepped toward makeup still half-awake while staring around the set.
“this is insane,” you murmured.
one of the stylists laughed. “wait until you’re underwater for four hours.”
“don’t say things like that.” you chuckled, mentally preparing for the cold.
the styling process took almost two hours, you had to have the perfect amount of color corrector to look a certain way under the blue lights, but the makeup itself focused heavily on softness.
wet skin and smudged lashes with the signature pale lips, like someone submerged too long.
then came wardrobe, the dress waiting for you hung beside the styling rack beneath protective plastic. it was white and long, thin enough to become almost translucent underwater.
beautiful in a ghost way,
“its gonna weigh like twenty pounds once soaked,” the stylist warned while helping adjust the fabric.
“great. good news” you chuckled with her, sipping on your iced coffee.
“you’ll look amazing suffering though.”
when you finally stepped onto set fully dressed, several crew members visibly paused for a second. the dress flowed around you softly beneath the blue studio lights, already giving you an almost ghostlike appearance against the dark water.
and unfortunately, you also immediately spotted james already inside the pool.
your breath caught slightly, without you wanting, he gave you a small smile and went back to focusing.
his dark hair was completely soaked, floating against his forehead while stylists adjusted the drenched white button-up clinging to his frame underwater.
the first underwater sequence involved you diving into the pool after spotting james floating motionless beneath the surface. the symbolism represented trying to save someone emotionally drowning alongside you, from you’d been told.
the stunt coordinator explained everything carefully beforehand,
“you dive here,” he instructed, pointing toward a marked edge of the pool. “swim toward james, grab his wrist first, then pull upward.”
you nodded while adjusting your breathing, underwater filming always exhausted actors faster than people realized because everything became heavier and slower, each movement required extra strength.
after a few minutes of touch ups and the crew getting ready, you heard the director behind you.
“ready?”
you inhaled deeply. “yep, we can go ahead, i’m ready.”
the music started playing and like a choreography, you looked at the pool, seeing him in the water, the camera angled towards you as you walked, then dove.
cold swallowed you instantly, the white dress blooming around your body beneath the water while muted instrumentals echoed through the pool speakers.
across from you, james floated eerily still beneath blue lighting, eyes closed and body suspended weightlessly. you swam toward him quickly, fingers catching around his wrist before trying to pull him upward.
but the soaked fabric tangled instantly around your legs.
you both resurfaced coughing.
“cut!” everyone burst into laughter immediately.
“the dress is trying to murder me, i’m sorry, could we get it shortened maybe?” you gasped.
james pushed wet hair back from his forehead, laughing quietly too.
take two went smoother.
this time you reached him properly underwater, grabbing his arm while his eyes slowly opened beneath the surface.
the moment felt strangely intimate underwater, just eye contact and drifting fabric surrounded by blue light. you understood in that moment how one could think actors fell in love on set. this is probably how those stories started.
you pulled him upward carefully while cameras followed beside you.
“cut— beautiful!” several staff members clapped softly.
the cinematographer looked thrilled reviewing the monitor playback.
“again,” the director called. “one more for safety.”
several more takes followed afterward, some focused entirely on your expression underwater and others captured james reaching toward you weakly beneath the surface before sinking again.
by the fourth take, both of you were visibly freezing. your teeth chattered violently between resets while staff wrapped heated robes around your shoulders immediately after each cut
james looked equally exhausted.
“you okay?” you asked quietly while makeup artists fixed wet hair from his face.
he nodded once. “you?”
“yeah i’m good, cold though.”
martin suggested later, a brilliant idea really, that you guys filmed a tiktok with the sound ‘swim’ by bts, which you agreed to unwillingly.
the next sequence paired you with juhoon underwater instead. the concept was more abstract emotionally.
no rescue, no struggle, just two people drifting around each other in slow movements beneath dark blue lighting while the instrumental played overhead.
the underwater choreographer demonstrated soft turning motions and hand placements before filming began.
and once submerged, everything became eerily beautiful. your dress floated weightlessly around you while juhoon reached toward your hand underwater, both of you spinning slowly beneath the lights like fading memories. hair drifting, and fabric swirling.
at one point the director asked both of you to simply float motionless beside one another underwater while staring upward toward the surface.
the result looked haunting on playback and by the time the morning shoot finally paused, your entire body felt frozen.
staff immediately wrapped a heated blanket around your shoulders while you sat shivering near portable heaters.
wet hair clung to your neck while makeup artists tried repairing smudged eyeliner.
and then,
“rough?”
you looked up.
james stood nearby still damp from filming, oversized gray hoodie thrown over soaked clothes. you smiled tiredly.
“i can’t feel my limbs anymore.”
“good sign.”
“for hypothermia maybe.”
he laughed quietly before sitting beside you on one of the equipment cases, he reached on the small table behind him and handed you a warm drink of something.
“there you go, so you don’t get hypothermia.”
you smiled some more, fingers wrapping against the hot cup to get warm. “thanks, i owe you one.”
for a moment neither of you spoke, the massive studio echoed softly around you, crew members moving lights, water rippling gently behind cameras, distant instrumentals still playing faintly underwater.
then James glanced toward the pool.
“the underwater shots looked insane.”
“you saw playback?”
he nodded. “the scene where you grabbed my arm looked…” he paused slightly, “pretty real.”
you looked at him curiously beneath the blanket wrapped around you.
“well you were very convincing as a drowning man.”
“years of experience.”
you laughed softly.
and weirdly enough, sitting there dripping wet beside him beneath freezing studio lights felt strangely peaceful.
eventually lunch break arrived annd somehow the atmosphere felt even friendlier today than yesterday. everyone sat together around folding tables in oversized hoodies and blankets while inhaling hot food like survival depended on it.
martin looked emotionally broken already.“underwater filming was invented by sadists dude, fuck my life.”
“you swallowed half the pool, i’m dead.” keonho reminded him, cracking up.
“and lemme tell you something, that water tasted expensive. i kid you not i bet they fill it with fiji water.”
at some point seonghyeon asked about your upcoming project and everyone listened genuinely while you explained the thriller script you’d been preparing for.
“it’s like a cursed app thingy, shamanism and stuff.”
“shit that’s so cool, i wish i was an actor.” juhoon looked down.
“bro wants to be everything. model, idol, police man, dude pick a fight.” keonho turned to him.
“no but lowkey, acting is so cool, sounds exhausting though.”
“she works too much,” james said suddenly like he’d been thinking about it.
you blinked. “so do you.”
“yeah,” he admitted quietly. “but still.”
by early afternoon, your filming schedule wrapped for the day while the members prepared for additional solo scenes that didn’t involve you.
you said goodbye gradually while staff removed underwater equipment behind everyone.
“survive your scenes,” you told them while gathering your bag.
“no promises,” martin sighed dramatically.
juhoon saluted weakly from beneath three blankets.
and james looked up from his chair near the monitors.
“get home safe,” he said softly.
you smiled automatically, you did a lot of that these days.
“you too.”
then you climbed back into your van still smelling faintly like chlorine and studio fog, completely exhausted while Seoul blurred softly outside the windows on the drive home.
⋆˙⟡. ⋆˙⟡
the studio doors slid shut behind your van and for about three full seconds, silence settled across the set.
then martin slowly turned toward james with the most insufferable grin imaginable.
“so.” he wiggled an eyebrow “how’s the crush going?”
james didn’t even look up from the towel draped over his head. “i’m going to drown you in that pool i swear to god.”
keonho gasped dramatically from nearby “you’re getting violent towards your homeboy, all this…. just for a woman. what happened to bros before hoes.”
“shut yo ass up keonho” james retorted.
“that sounded defensive,” juhoon pointed out immediately.
the members were still scattered around the massive pool set wrapped in blankets while staff members reset lighting for the next scenes. Wet clothes hung over equipment racks nearby, and the dress you had been wearing was there too.
james sat near one of the portable heaters trying to thaw himself back to life. unfortunately his members refused to let him exist peacefully.
martin dragged a chair directly beside him.
“no because lowkenuinely,” he continued, “you’re down catastrophic dude, talm about some artistic respect, man fuhhhh that”
james sighed deeply. “you guys say this every day.”
“because every day you prove us right,” seonghyeon replied calmly while sipping hot coffee.
james looked betrayed. “you too dude? no support whatsoever.”
“i support realism, fuck you mean.”
juhoon pointed dramatically across the empty set where you had been standing earlier beneath your heating blanket.
“bro looked at her like she personally invented cinema. she must be one of the lumiere brothers the way he bowed down to her.”
“ah shutup man, you don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
martin physically mimicked james’ expression from earlier, staring into the distance with exaggerated emo sadness.
“‘the underwater shots looked insane dude.’”
keonho clutched his chest dramatically. “the yearning…”
james shoved martin weakly with one hand.
“you’re all actually unbearable you bunch of virgins.”
“i might be a virgin looser,” martin replied smugly, “but i’m not incorrect.”
james groaned and leaned further back in his chair, towel still hanging over damp hair.
honestly? he knew they weren’t entirely wrong. that was the problem.
at first, before filming started, the crush had felt manageable, he just thought you happened to be the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, but overall just a celebrity crush. just someone he admired for their moving work. normal. but now?
after working a couple weeks with you in meetings, small artistic gatherings and whatnot, now that you sat beside him during breaks laughing quietly into your coffee. now he knew the exact expression you made before cameras rolled.
it was becoming a bad thing. what had started as a harmless crush, tripled in size by the hours. and apparently it was painfully obvious.
martin watched him silently for a second before speaking again, this time less teasing and more curious.
“you actually like her, huh?”
james stayed quiet, which unfortunately answered the question immediately.
keonho slowly sighed, “oh he’s cooked.”
“deeply cooked,” juhoon agreed.
james rubbed at his face tiredly. “i just think she’s…” he paused.
the members looked at him expectantly.
“really easy to be around. but i don’t thinks it’s a crush, it’s just admiration.”
that softened the teasing slightly, because they understood exactly what he meant cause you never acted superior despite your fame. never made filming awkward, never demanded attention. you listened carefully during conversations. thanked every staff member individually. stayed professional while still feeling warm somehow.
even martin had admitted privately that working with you felt comfortable.
still—
that didn’t justify why james felt this way,
martin leaned forward again. “she looks like she likes you too though.”
james immediately looked up. “… huh.”
“oh my god,” keonho groaned. “there he goes.”
“I’m serious,” martin insisted. “you think she smiles at all of us like that?”
“yes?” james replied cautiously.
the entire group stared at him. seonghyeon looked almost offended.
“she definitely doesn’t. she’s under that zhao yufine shit charm.”
juhoon nodded aggressively. “she laughs at your jokes specifically. That’s important.”
“that means nothing.”
“it means everything.” they continue feeding into his delusion.
james rolled his eyes but his ears had already started turning pink again. martin looked delighted noticing it.
“and the way she looked at you during lunch?”
“please stop talking.”
“nah cause see i’m analyzing.”
“nobody asked you to.”
martin ignored him completely.
“there’s tension.”
“there’s literally not.” james rolled his eyes.
“brother she asked to see your saved edits folder voluntarily.”
keonho pointed upward like that proved divine intervention existed. “that’s basically marriage.”
james nearly choked on his drink. “yall need serious help.”
juhoon shrugged. “we’re not the one staring at an actress like she’s gta 6 with a 50% discount.”
silence, then seonghyeon added calmly:
“don’t listen to him, that shot did look kinda insane though.”
unfortunately that was true. even the staff had noticed the chemistry during playback earlier.
martin suddenly leaned back in his chair dramatically.
“damn.”
“what now.”
“now that i think about it you’re living every man’s dream.”
james narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “what that mean?”
“you have a mutual slowburn with the nation’s most beautiful actress while filming a devastating music video. shit you might be blessed.”
“you need to touch grass.”
⋆˙⟡. ⋆˙⟡
the final day of filming arrived wrapped in rain.
real rain this time, not artificial studio water or carefully controlled downpours created by production crews. actual gray skies stretched over the city from early morning onward, leaving streets slick and reflective beneath traffic lights.
your manager glanced out the van window while driving toward set.
“kind of fitting. did you grab an umbrella?”
you hummed softly in response, half-awake beneath your hoodie. last night you’d slept a little late, crawling under work. you were also preparing to be the mc of a variety show in a few months, everything was kinda crazy.
the atmosphere already felt different before you even arrived, final filming days always carried a strange emotional weight to them, even though this one wasn’t a big one, it still felt too good to end. you’d truly loved the project and the aesthetics, but especially working with the whole cortis crew. you saw shoots as a little world that people packed up once it was over.
you arrived at the set around six in the morning, as today was a shorter day, more centered around correcting any possible mistakes and issues.
today’s location was an abandoned indoor train station with graffitis on the wall. the signature blue fluorescent lights reflected against wet concrete floors while massive industrial fans pushed cold air through the enormous space probably to add visual effects onth hair. fake rainwater dripped steadily from ceiling pipes into shallow puddles arranged carefully for reflections.
The final scenes today would focus heavily on group shots, lypsincing with no excessive action.
you stepped into the makeup room while staff buzzed around quietly preparing for the day and even the stylists had stopped pretending they enjoyed early call times.
today’s makeup stayed minimal again, pale skinn, tired eyes and slight redness beneath the lashes. your stylist pinned sections of damp hair away from your face while studying continuity photos carefully.
“does this bother you? the piece of hair in your face.”
“yeah, if you could possibly pin it, please.”
“sure, should i add some more product or does that feel like too much on your head right now?”
“do whatever you think looks best, you’re the professional, either way you do amazing work.”
“you’re annoyingly kind, what are we gonna do once you’re gone.”
you laughed softly. “might need to start working on my sets.”
outside the trailer, you could already hear the members somewhere nearby arguing loudly over coffee. by the time you stepped onto set fully dressed, filming had already started on martin’s opening shots.
you paused automatically near the monitor screens. the scene looked pretty sick, martin stood alone beneath flickering station lights while rainwater dripped from dark hair onto his face, he was wearing baggy jeans as always.
you watched quietly beside the director until someone approached from your left.
“morning.”
james.
you looked up. his dark jacket hung loosely over layered black clothing while damp hair fell messily across his forehead. He looked tired too.
“morning,” you replied. “you look freezing.”
“i am freezing.”
you dug inside your pockets, “well i have these pocket warmer thingys, if you’d like one.”
he blinked once, then nodded as you handed them over, “warm, thank you”
you noticed immediately that talking to him no longer felt careful because atthe beginning of filming, every interaction carried awareness beneath it. professional politeness and measured conversation.
now things slipped naturally, like two good friends working together.
the assistant director eventually called you both toward the first setup together.
today’s scene involved you and james sitting inside the abandoned train car while rain hammered softly against the windows outside. you were supposed to be just sitting there, special effects added later to make it look like the train was moving, and to stare at the camera while james lip synced.
the director explained quietly before filming:
“remember, you’ve both stayed in the water too long by this point emotionally.”
you nodded.
“no dramatic sadness,” he continued. “you’re past that stage now. just tired.”
james glanced toward you briefly after that, and an eye contact that lingered half a second too long ended in a small smile.
“action.”
your character stared absently out the rain-covered window. and james watched you, lip syncing the word as if he were actually talking to you.
my blue lips ( we’ve been in here way too long) i’ve been feeling way too cold.
then slowly, your eyes met his, nothing dramatic. no touching. no speaking. but something unspoken passed between both characters anyway. recognition maybe. the understanding that neither of you knew how to leave the pool anymore.
“cut.”
nobody spoke immediately. the director stared at the playback monitor for several seconds before exhaling softly.
“…yeah.”
several staff members exchanged glances quietly behind cameras.
“let’s do a couple more just to be sure, but i’ve never gone through a scene this quickly, you guys are truly phenomenal.”
⋆˙⟡. ⋆˙⟡
the next few hours passed through constant filming setups around the station. one sequence involved all the members standing motionless on separate train platforms while water slowly flooded the tracks below them.
another showed you wandering through empty hallways while distorted station announcements echoed overhead. everything felt dreamlike. the emotional tone of the project had settled fully into everyone now.
between takes, the members still joked around constantly, but softer today, like everyone subconsciously knew this temporary atmosphere was ending soon.
at one point keonho started aggressively singing ‘blue lips’ while staff reset lighting equipment.
martin threw a plastic spoon at him. “shut the fuck up bro.”
“yeah dude i’m tired of the song already. i’ve been hearing it too much.” juhoon expressed.
“fair.”
you smiled quietly from your seat beside a portable heater, you had your phone in hand, you and a friend texting back and forth about an upcoming event.
james sat nearby scrolling through monitor playback again.
you nudged his shoe lightly with yours. “you re gonna watch every take?”
he glanced up. “most.”
“why?”
he considered the question briefly. “i don’t know we all look pretty fly in them, it doesn’t feel like reality.”
you smiled faintly. “so i’m not fly off screen? that what you’re saying?”:
a small silence settled before he quietly corrected himself, “no, you look pretty fly all the time i’d say, i was mostly talking about me and the guys.”
before you could respond, martin suddenly appeared between both of you holding coffee cups.
“wow.” he said, dreamy.
james closed his eyes immediately, smiling amused. “please fuck off before i loose it.”
“am i interrupting cinema?”
“yes,” both of you answered at the exact same time.
james and you were growing friendlier, talking more, like it came easy. nothing had happened technically.
but something was definitely happening.
the afternoon scenes focused heavily on physical closeness.
one setup involved james resting his forehead briefly against yours while both characters sat on the flooding train tracks, completely exhausted. this was specially intricate, because it couldn’t cross an invisible line at the risk of upsetting fans.
the director explained carefully beforehand:
“you’re comforting each other without actually fixing anything.”
the scene sounded simple, but it absolutely was not. how could you communicate a feeling that wasn’t love, but still looked like it.
the station lights dimmed low around you while cameras moved closer slowly.
“action.”
you sat facing one another in silence. water started flowing the tracks, but none of you paid attention..
then slowly, james leaned forward, his forehead touching yours lightly. warm despite the cold set.
the proximity felt startling suddenly because you could hear his breathing, feel it on your mouth. feel water dripping from his hair against your skin.
things like these happened more than you’d like to think, physical touch scenes were always complicated to film because of the body’s natural reactions to being close to someone, it wasn’t necessarily that much of a challenge with james because you didn’t mind his closeness.
and worse, neither of you pulled away immediately after the director called cut.
just half a second too long, like you’d enjoyed it.
“that’s wrap!”
the entire station exploded instantly. staff members cheering. applause echoing everywhere.
you blinked slowly beneath dripping hair while reality returned all at once.
james looked at you quietly and for one strange suspended second, neither of you joined the celebration immediately, just stood there beneath the rain staring at each other like maybe something unfinished still lingered.
then martin screamed somewhere nearby:
“YES MY CHICKENS, THATS A WRAAAAAP.”
and you couldn’t help but burst into laughter.
⋆˙⟡. ⋆˙⟡
james stood quieter near the monitor station speaking softly with the director while absentmindedly pushing soaked hair away from his face.
your eyes drifted toward him automatically.
dangerous habit.
he looked handsome like that, with a bandaid on his left cheek from a careless scratch.
the director eventually gathered everyone together beneath the rooftop overhang for final thank-yous.
“i mean this genuinely,” he said while looking between you and the members, “this project only worked because everybody trusted each other emotionally.”
the atmosphere softened instantly.
the cinematographer nodded toward you specifically.
“we had to chance to work with the amazing y/l/n y/n, you brought exactly the realism we needed.”
you bowed your head slightly.
“thank you for trusting me with it.”
“and thank you,” the director added while turning toward the members, “for being vulnerable enough to tell this story honestly.”
“oh no,” Keonho sighed dramatically. “that’s so artistic i might cry.”
eventually people started separating naturally, staff packing up, managers discussing post-prod, stylists collecting clothing pieces from dressing rooms downstairs.
you had just started walking toward the elevators when martin suddenly clapped loudly behind you.
“food.”
juhoon looked up instantly from inside his fuzzy blanket.
“yes.”
“i’m serious,” martin continued. “we survived hypothermia together. we deserve meat.”
“real,” juhoon agreed.
“there’s a barbecue place nearby,” seonghyeon offered.
everyone looked interested instantly. then martin turned toward you.
“you’re coming.”
you blinked. “ was that a question or do i not have a choice ?”
“you don’t.”
twenty minutes later, the six of you were crammed into a private room inside a small korean barbecue restaurant tucked into a quieter seoul side street.
the moment you stepped inside, heat hit your freezing skin instantly. actual heaven.
everyone collapsed around the low table dramatically while staff brought endless plates of meat and side dishes.
shoes were kicked off beneath seats and heoodies tossed carelessly aside. exhaustion settling comfortably over everyone.
martin immediately raised his water glass.
“to good meat”
“cheers.”
“to chlorine poisoning,” juhoon added, coughing.
you laughed softly while clinking glasses with everyone. you and james were the only ones drinking alcohol as you were the only people of age, you had picked a japanese beer while he went with strawberry soju.
the atmosphere loosened almost instantly afterward, alcohol seeped in your veins, making you instantly more comfortable. conversations overlapped naturally while grills crackled loudly in the center of the table.
martin aggressively cooked meat while pretending he was a professional chef while keonho criticized him nonstop. juhoon kept stealing pieces directly off the grill before they finished cooking.
“you people are animals,” seonghyeon muttered calmly. “someone’s gonna get food poisoning if you don’t wait for the meat to cook.”
“erm hello? i’m martin edwards park i don’t get food poisoning. the only i poison is dat beeeeaaaat.” he said the last part loudly.
“unfortunately.”
you sat beside james almost accidentally after everyone settled into seats. not that anyone failed to notice.
the conversations drifted between memories of the tiktoks you hadmade, keonho’s hand showing the videos over the table, best places to eat in the city and other non importants.
at one point juhoon asked: “what was everyone’s hardest scene?”
“the underwater one,” keonho answered immediately. “saw my ancestors man.”
“you barely submerged.”
“dude i can’t hold my breath fr long.” he rolled his eyes.
martin pointed dramatically toward you.
“hers with James on the rooftop though?”
james closed his eyes immediately like he already knew where this was heading.
“here we go,” he muttered.
“i’m serious,” martin continued shamelessly. “the tension was insane.”
“there was no tension,” james replied too fast.
you smiled, looking at him while sipping on your second beer, the table went silent briefly.
then juhoon slowly leaned back. “that sounded crazy defensive not gon lie.”
keonho nodded solemnly. “bro folded instantly.”
you hid your smile behind your cup, he was the only one embarrassed cause you genuinely didn’t mind the teasing.
“this group is a nightmare.”
“shutup cause you’d be unemployed without us.” seonghyeon said.
“no the fuck i wouldn’t?” james frowned.
he was objectively hot, now that the alcohol made its appearance in your veins. sharp jawline and all tight muscles. nah you were definitely not going there.
but it didn’t help that at some point while everyone argued about whether mint chocolate was overrated, you reached toward the grill at the exact same moment as james.
your fingers brushed lightly.
both of you paused instinctively. the warmth blooming of the tiny moment suspended strangely long beneath restaurant lighting.
“my bad” he quickly said, leaving you space to grab meat.
who would’ve thought zhao yufan was shy when provoked.
⋆˙⟡. ⋆˙⟡
somewhere between the endless teasing, food, and celebratory drinks, you and james had both crossed into that dangerous almost-drunk state.
you hadn’t controlled the drinks, just kept diving in for some more, it felt natural, like a friend gathering.
you felt warm in the cheeks, you were probably flushed red by now, loose around the edges.
james was becoming less guarded, easier, he laughed louder now, shoulders relaxed while leaning back against the wall beside you.
at one point keonho stared dramatically between both of you across the table.
“oh my god.”
james narrowed his eyes immediately. “what now.”
“you guys are literally glowing.”
you started laughin, not because it was necessarily funny but… yeah you didn’t even know why.
james was also laughing beside you, head dropping slightly while rubbing at his eyes. “you people genuinely need hobbies.”
“we had hobbies,” martin replied. “but now we’re gonna have to take you home.”
you hid your smile behind your drink, feeling way too jolly for your wellbeing.
honestly the alcohol made everything feel softer tonight, you weren’t one to drink usually but this felt right, like finally you claimed back all those teenage years spent working. the only thing that was bad though, was james’ lingering looks and the way they felt nerve-wracking. you’d promised yourself not to be stupid, and here you were.
eventually when the table became empty, everyone slowly started gathering their things. managers had long since gone home, trusting the members enough to survive one celebratory dinner without supervision. outside, the city glittered beneath rain-slick streets and blurred neon reflections like a scene straight out of cyberpunk.
cold air hit your face immediately when you stepped out of the restaurant. “damn,” juhoon muttered. “it’s so cold”
“pissesme off, we had sun last week,” keonho agreed while tightening his jacket.
the group lingered outside for several minutes beneath the restaurant awning while figuring out rides home. juhoon seonghyeon keonho and martin called an uber, while james claimed he would wait to sober up before coming back. you were gonna call a ride back home too.
the 6’3 giant looked between you and james suspiciously one last time before grinning.
“fuck off receding hairline” martin shot back instantly.
“goodnight.” james deadpanned, already turning around.
everyone burst into laughter. then slowly, one by one, the members disappeared into separate cars still yelling dramatic goodbyes through open windows.
until eventually, only you and james remained beneath the glowing restaurant sign. rain had softened into mist now, cool against your cheeks while distant traffic hummed somewhere beyond the narrow streets.
you were painfully aware of how flushed you were and how undone your hair probably was, but decided not to worry, at the end of the day, he had seen you underwater, under the rain, in various weird situations.
then james caught your attention by shoving his hands deeper into his jacket pockets and glancing toward you.
“so…” he started softly. you looked up.
“do you have somewhere to be?”
the question lingered gently between you, he wasn’t pushy nor presumptuous. maybe he meant it in a friendly manner but it came across as hopeful.
you shook your head slightly. “not really.”
something subtle shifted in his expression then, probably relief.
“you wanna hang out a little longer?”
your stomach flipped embarrassingly fast, probably the alcohol.
“yeah,” you answered quietly like it was evident.
james smiled, the bandaid on his cheek crooking.
“cool.”
⋆˙⟡. ⋆˙⟡
twenty minutes later, the two of you stood inside a convenience store near the han river laughing over candy choices like idiots. the alcohol absolutely wasn’t helping.
“that shit’s gross, worst flavor ever. you can’t possibly eat that.” you frowned.
“watch me.”
that made both of you laugh for some reason, carefree, like two morons.
“what flavor do you want?” james chuckled,
“those peach ones, stop with the crap we’re not eating cherry ones.”
he laughed, grabbing the peach bag, almost letting it fall.
the cashier looked mildly amused while ringing everything up, he couldn’t recognize you with your masks. james insisted on paying, struggling to get his card to go through with how much he was swaying.
outside again, cold night air wrapped around both of you while plastic bags swung gently from james’ hands.
the han river stretched dark and glittering beneath city lights ahead, and you eventually settled onto a quiet bench near the water. the city skyline reflected beautifully across the river while distant bikes rolled past occasionally along the paths nearby.
you sat tucked into your coat while james leaned back against the bench beside you sipping canned coffee despite already being energetic enough.
“you know,” you murmured, “this is pretty nice actually. i never thought you and i would be friends.”
he looked toward you, the word friend stabbing through his heart. ouch.
“yeah me neither”
“you’re pretty cool, i like hanging with you.” you said, head dizzy.
you took a sip of water, leaning closer to him for warmth. you gestured vaguely between both of you and the river and the convenience store snacks.
“i don’t even really hang out with people actually. i mean- i have friends but i never have time to hang out. so this is nice. ”
james smiled faintly.
“yeah, i’m glad, you can call me anytime if you wanna hang.”
“i probably will if i have time. schedules are pretty tough these days, i bet you guys have it the same.”
he nodded at that, “yeah we’re preparing for upcoming shows and stuff, it’s hectic. but i’ll make time for you.” you looked down briefly at the snack bag in your lap, trying unsuccessfully to hide your smile.
“that sounds dangerous,” you murmured.
“what does?”
“you saying things like that.”
james laughed quietly under his breath. “sorry.”
“you don’t sound sorry.”
“i’m not.” james leaned back slightly against the bench, shoulder still brushing yours.
then suddenly he squinted toward your phone sticking halfway out of your coat pocket. “…is that an arcane keychain?”
you blinked. “maybe.”
his head turned so fast it almost made you laugh.“no way, you play league?” the genuine disbelief in his voice was somehow offensive.
“yes?” james stared at you for a full second.
“you’re lying.”
“i literally have the keychain.”
“that proves nothing. people fake interests every day.”
“you’re lame”
“i need proof.”
you immediately pulled your phone out. “gatekeeping lol like millions of people don’t already play it.”
james leaned closer automatically to look at the screen and unfortunately your shoulder pressed fully against his now. his eyes widened immediately.
“you actually play.”
“told you.”
“what rank?”
you narrowed your eyes suspiciously. “that’s classified.”
“oh my god you’re bronze.”
“i’m not bronze.”
“so silver.”
“i hate you.”
james looked genuinely delighted now, like a kid. “this changes everything.”
“how?”
“i don’t know yet but it definitely does.”
you laughed softly while shoving his shoulder lightly. “what about you then, idiot?”
he looked annoyingly smug suddenly. “emerald.”
your jaw dropped. “no way.”
“way.”
that’s how you both ended up yapping about league of legends, because it was easier to do that than to pretend like there wasn’t an underlying tension.
“and junglers— oh my god don’t even get me STARTED on junglers.”
“you literally play jungle sometimes.”
“yeah and every lane blames me for EVERYTHING. top dies in a 1v1 thirty seconds in? ‘jg diff.’ bot lane pushes to enemy tower with no wards and gets ganked six times? somehow it’s MY fault. i could physically cure disease and my mid laner would still ping my smite cooldown.”
he then realized he had spoken without stoping for a breath, so he did just that, your shoulder brushed his slightly while reaching into the snack bag.
your eyes were bored on his, slightly drunk but it wasn’t just that. maybe it was the whole league of legends rambling that got you going, who knew you were into geeks. but you suddenly felt way too honest.
“that was the hottest thing i’ve ever heard.” your eyes trailed on his face, your voice carrying the softest drunken slur.
james didn’t expect that, his eyes slightly widened, but his ears went red. “what? you’re serious? i didn’t know that league of legends was hot…”
you didn’t waste a second, alcohol bringing back that bold side of you, “no, you are.”
his eyes went wild, like he couldn’t believe what you had just. said. “huh?” he said dumbfounded.
“just keep on talking.”
james took a shaky breath, hand retreating to his lap, and he looked around trying to distract himself from your gaze, your absolutely breathtaking gaze. you were so much bolder than he ever was, he hid behind jokes but he would’ve never been capable of telling you all the things he wished he were doing to you right now.
your heart stumbled violently against your ribs and the city noise around you suddenly felt very far away. when james’ eyes drifted back to you, they landed on your lips before lifting back to your gaze again.
“you know what the worst part is about all of this?” he murmured, trying to change the subject for his sanity. “i can’t watch your scenes normally anymore.”
your breath caught slightly, not really understanding where this was going. “why?”
a tiny smile pulled faintly at the corner of his mouth.
“because now i know what you sound like laughing between takes.” the whole changing the subject thing wasn’t working. “i know how you feel when you’re close to me and i know what you smell like.”
you stared at him silently. and maybe kissing a friend wasn’t all that bad. not that you had ever been friends truly. friends didn’t want to undress each other. at least that’s what you knew.
the tension stretched tighter but neither of you moved. james swallowed once before speaking again, quieter this time.
“can i?” he asked softly. then even quieter: “please.”
you nodded, you knew what he was asking for. with the way he was looking at your lips, it was painfully evident.
he wasted no time cupping your jaw, knees brushing against candy bars, he kissed you.
slow at first, like he’d imagined this too many times and was terrified of ruining it now that it was real.
his mouth moved carefully against yours, warm and slightly tasting like coffee and sweet alcohol while the city blurred somewhere far beyond the river.
you felt him exhale softly when you kissed him back harder, like tension physically leaving his body.
one of your hands instinctively grabbed the front of his hoodie, pulling him closer without even realizing it.
that made something shift in him immediately, the kiss deepened, like you weren’t outside, like you weren’t two famous celebrities eating each other in public. but that was long forgotten, the alcohol taking away every ounce of responsability.
james’ thumb brushed slowly against your jaw while his forehead nearly bumped yours from how close he’d gotten on the narrow bench.
and god,
he kissed just like he looked at you.
undressing you with attention, reverence and undeniable respect. your heart hammered violently against your ribs when he pulled back barely an inch, just enough for both of you to breathe.
you found yourselves in the same position as in the filming, foreheads pressed together, warm breaths, but this time it was different, because he had just kissed the living hell out of you.
“you have no idea,” he murmured quietly, “how long i’ve wanted to do that.”
the tension somehow got worse after the kiss. because now you knew exactly how he tasted. how he sounded when he lost composure for half a second. how his hand tightened gently against your jaw when you kissed him back.
“you’re staring,” you whispered.
“can you blame me? you’re beautiful.” his nose brushed against yours, mouths opened and chasing each other’s.
your stomach flipped hard but before you could answer, he kissed you again. this time there was nothing hesitant about it. his hand slid from your jaw to the side of your neck gently, thumb brushing beneath your ear while he leaned closer against you on the bench. the kiss deepened almost immediately, not afraid to use tongues, a little messy from laughter and alcohol and too much tension finally snapping loose at once.
you kissed him back harder without thinking and that earned the quietest sound from him,barely there, almost swallowed by the river breeze, but it made your entire chest tighten anyway. james’ other hand settled instinctively against your waist, pulling you closer until your legs brushed fully against his.
the convenience store bag tipped sideways somewhere beside you but neither of you cared. your fingers slid into the front of his hoodie, bunching the fabric of his undershirt slightly while kissing him again and again and again like maybe you were both trying to make up for weeks of holding back.
being kissed by someone who already liked you this much felt unfair. you could feel it in everything. it was so painfully sweet yet so filthy, so him. like the way he gripped your waist, scared to go lower, the way his sloppy kisses sent thrills down your body, the way he kept pausing for half-seconds just to look at you before kissing you again, like you were the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
james tilted his head slightly, kissing you deeper now while his hand ventured underneath your shirt, tentative. he wanted to pull you on his lap right then and there, but that was the alcohol speaking.
“you’re killing me,” he murmured quietly against your mouth.
“you started this.”
“i know.”
then he kissed you again immediately like he physically couldn’t stop himself, his hands brushed against the under sides of your breast through your clothes for a second before he slid them down.
at some point your hand brushed against his lower stomach and james visibly lost composure.
“oh my god,” he muttered softly against your lips.
and then, a bike sped past somewhere nearby. very nearby.
both of you froze instantly. the reality of being outside in public slammed back into place all at once. james pulled back just enough to look around quickly while still keeping one hand at your waist.
you stared at each other for half a second, out of breath, not thinking straight.
“you were one second away from climbing into my lap.” he stated.
“like you would’ve said no.”
“right here yeah, i can control myself, i don’t want anything bad happening to your career.” he said.
you breathed out, taking his hand in yours and playing absentmindedly with his fingers and rings. you didn’t know what to say and everything was a blur.
so, you didn’t know how you ended up in the hallway leading to your apartment, pinned to a wall while james kissed his way to your neck.
it had probably started when you had resolved to innocent conversation but one wrong sentence ended up in another kiss, and another, and another, until you’d been halfway on his lap on the bench, both of your hoods pulled over your heads for a minimal privacy. after that youd stood up, hands unable to leave him, and you’d called over a taxi, putting face masks back on and requested your address. the drive had been intense, you’d wanted to climb on his lap right then and there, just to see how far his kisses would go.
the second you had been out, james had pulled you closer, almost running towards the elevator, and once inside he had pinned you to the wall, making you gasp in the feverish kiss.
and now, you struggled with your key to open the door, while he was behind you, mouth on your neck, your ass pressed right against his hardness. truth is, he didn’t wanna be disrespectful but he had a thing about your ass, had to physically refrain himself for looking at it while you walked past these last few weeks, couldn’t help but imagine how it’d feel against his palms, or if he ever got to slap it while you bounced on-
you let out a moan when he reached for the hem of your hoodie, tugging at it upwards, he managed to take it off as the key finally got in, you forced the door open, and he pushed you inside. it took everything in his power not to take you right there against the door,
"bed," you said with a shaky voice.
"yeah," he nodded, walking backwards, still kissing you while you guided him through the mess of your apartment.
once in your bedroom, he didn’t look around, he was too focused on you, on how perfect you sounded against him, undone, breathy, he sat you on the edge of your bed and his hands slid up your sides under your top,slow and deliberate and stopped at your chest. both of them. full. you inhaled sharply.
"fuck," he breathed, more to himself than you.
his thumbs dragged over your tits, testing, squeezing, like he had been thinking about this in the privacy of his own mind.
"is it wrong that i’ve thought about this?." he whispered against your neck, leaving wet kisses there.
you shook your head immediately, “no… tell me about it, i wanna hear.”
he pulled your top and bra down and his mouth replaced his hands, warm and open, taking your tit into his mouth, tongue circling your nipple before he sucked, harder than you expected. you gasped, back arching off the mattress while his other hand stayed on your other breast, squeezing, rolling your nipple between his fingers, alternating between slow and sharp until you had your hands in his hair and your eyes shut tight, absolutely no remaining composure.
“thought about these so many times, how perfect they looked in that dress, in the swimming pool, you’re fucking perfect y/n, so beautiful, everywhere.”
you moaned at his words, “james”
“i know, i know pretty thing.” he said, not looking up. he dragged his teeth lightly over your nipple as he pulled away, causing you to shiver. then he dropped to his knees.
“you know how many times i had to stop myself from staring at you? cause id feel guilty, always wanted to be so respectful, but i couldn’t stop imagining you…”
he got your jeans off and pulled you to the edge of the mattress; his mouth found your inner thigh, in absolutely no hurry. he mapped out slowly in open-mouthed kisses, the slight scrape of his teeth occasionally, and you propped yourself on your elbows to watch him, his hair tousled, eyes black and wild with arousal. he glanced up, catching you looking and the almost-smile he gave you was genuinely unfair.
when he finally got to your pussy, you shuddered, thighs already trying to close around his head, one hand draped across your face in anticipation. he started with the flat of his tongue, one long stroke, as the breath punched out of you. only then did he settle in. he learned you fast: what made your hips stutter, what made you tug at his hair. his tongue working your clit in slow circles, pulling you taunt like a thread, and when he slid two fingers and curled them just right, the dual pleasure made you go crazy. you thought you’d come with that gesture alone, your chest moving up and down with uncontrolled breaths.
"there," you say. “right there… please…”
he kept the same pace, looking up at you with adoration, learning the faces you made when you were touched right. his mouth then stayed on your clit while his fingers worked that spot relentlessly.
“look at you, so pretty, so fucking pretty.” he praised against the skin of your thigh, hooking your legs over his shoulders.
he was so turned on, his pants tight with the throbbing ache between his legs, he thought he could cum in his pants just by eating you out alone. he’d seen a lot of things in his short life, but nothing compared to this. to seeing you stretched out around his fingers, ever so compliant, beautiful and wrecked.
you moaned as he found the perfect rythm, the perfect coherence of fingers and tongue, your release building in the pit of your stomach, it was usually rare for someone to make you come that fast, but you weren’t at the end of the surprise, because when your hips started grinding down on his tongue, he flipped you around, ass up, arched on the soft sheets.
and god, james thought he knew what living felt like. he thought he was pretty damn accomplished already, a promising idol career, fans, brand deals, but this? james just stared,like this sight of you was a religious experience he wasn’t worthy of.
you whimpered just then, face buried in your pillow, and he looked down, mesmerized, surely the alcohol had worn off, but now it was a different type of drug that possessed him. “so beautiful like this, all for me. what am i gonna do with you…”
your hips moved back, triggered by his words, and your ass pressed right against his pants. james clicked his tongue, the flat of his hand grabbing your ass. “what do you want? huh? tell me what you want and i’ll give it to you.”
you preened, one hand reaching behind you, spreading your ass shamelessly, your pussy glistening with your arousal and his saliva, clenching around nothing like you just couldn’t fathom not feeling him inside of you. you were ready to beg, you weren’t normally into that, but the way he carried yourself so differently from usual, not shy, not afraid of anything, made you want to tell him he could do anything with you.
“fuck… you’re gonna kill me.” james bent down to press a kiss against your spine and you shivered, so empty… and so cold.
“please… please” you crossed one of your boundaries, you had never thought you would ever want to- scratch that- need to beg. but it felt so good, the way his breathing stopped for a second, the way his hips rutted against your bare ass, like it was the best thing he’d ever heard.
“please what, baby?” he sucked a spot on your spine, right where you had a tattoo. “tell me what you need. use your words.”
and fuck, you’d always thought you were kinda dominant… maybe? or vanilla. sex only ever cringed you out when dudes started calling the girl ‘good girl’ and manhandling them. but this? you thought you would die from the tone of his voice, reverant but so fucking firm. it made your insides turn into burning fire, made you rethink your whole view on sex.
“please… i need you to fuck me.” you spoke, like a big girl. you felt james’ tongue drag a path down your spine, until it reached your tailbone.
“that’s it, you’re doing good.” he dropped a kiss there, one of his hands going back to your pussy.
he spread you, still giving unwavering attention to your tailbone while two fingers slipped inside, earning a dragged out moan from you. “so fucking loud… such a good girl.”
who was this? cause this certainly wasn’t the james from set, the james whose ears would turn red everytime you spoke to him for too long, the james who was worried he’d be a pervert if he so much as gazed at your tits. but you had no complaints whatsoever. your soaked thighs were enough evidence. you clenched around his fingers at his words, gripping the bedsheets, and he gave your shoulder a kiss. “is that good pretty thing? you like that?”
you nodded instantly, afraid he’d stop if you didn’t manage an answer, your breathing had long turned franctic, leaving you a mess, but it’s like he knew what he was doing to you, and he wanted more. he knew how surprised you were, god even he was surprised at himself.
“you want more? yeah?” james worked his jeans open, only the zipper, as his other fingers were busy hitting that delicious spot inside of you, the one that made you reconsider pleasure. the angle made it so unbearably good that you couldn’t even manage words out.
“yes … yes fuck yes please… - please.” you babbled, ass pushing against his hand with unabashed need.
“look at you, my pretty girl is so needy.” james pushed his jeans down, along with his boxers, his thick cock resting on your ass now.
you ground your ass against him, the feeling of him so heavy sending jolts right where his fingers where working tirelessly. you were so close, so so close, and he was so good, like he had done this hundreds of times, he touched you exactly where you liked being touched. “please… fuck me.” you begged, wanting to be properly filled.
“you’re being such a good girl for me right now… you think you deserve it?” he mused, tip leaking on your lower back, so much so that at first he thought he’d came.
you nodded aggressively against the pillow, teetering on the edge of release,walls fluttering around his digits. “yes yes - fuck yes- i don’t know… please… please i’ll- i’ll be your good girl, i’ll listen, just please.”
this was new for you, so foreign, but it felt somehow right, like you relished in his praise, his taunting tone. james was all man, and you were already ruined.
“so desperate, my sweet thing…” he sped up his fingers, cock now shamelessly grinding against the skin of your behind. “you’re gonna be a good girl and take what i give you okay?”
you nodded, because his hands were driving you insane, and now he was pinching your nipple, twisting it between his fingertips, and you were a goner.
your orgasm crashed into you like a train, body lapsing into convulsions while you didn’t even try to be keep sane anymore. you moaned over and over not caring about how loud you were, about how vulnerable you were, ass spread for him as he made you cum with only two fingers, and he kept praising you, like you were a precious thing, like he couldn’t believe he was getting to see you like this, he whispered sweet things in your hair, fingers never stopping.
only when he was satisfied with the mess between your legs, he flipped you around, on your back, his mouth immediately latching onto your neck, careful not to leave any marks that could harm your career, he spread your legs, throwing his shirt across the room, and settled between your thighs, cock heavy on your lower stomach. “you did so good… might have to do that again but this time i wanna see your face.” james said agains your jaw, mouth brushing but not quite touching.
your fingers raked through his hair, softly tugging, until he was groaning, cock slipping to where you needed him the most. when you felt his tip nudge your clit, you arched, breasts touching his chest. “so wet, look at you baby…” he kissed your cheek then forehead. “you want me to fuck you, yeah?”
you nodded incapable of forming coherent thoughts, your legs wrapping around his waist, “i’ll fuck you my love, i think you deserve that don’t you? you’ve been so good to me, came on my fingers like a champ…” james kissed your pulse point, cock sliding between your folds.
his forehead pressed against yours, he cursed, guiding the tip at your entrance. “are you sure my pretty girl?” you nodded immediately, hips chasing him. james wrapped his hand around his cock, almost like he had to restrain himself from burying himself inside of you, and he slid the tip inside, cursing. “shit… so wet baby.”
you whimpered, as he took in the sight of your pussy accommodating his length, squeezing on only the tip of him. he slid in ever so slowly, and when he was fully seated inside, he didn’t move. he thought he could cum from just the feeling of you, squeezing him, the tight fit, your moans… he couldn’t take it. “fuck… you’re taking me so well pretty thing…”
he took a second, grounding himself, before finally moving. he slid all the way out before slamming back in, kicking the breath out of your lungs. you moaned, so close to him in all the senses of the word, filled to the brim with only him. your heels dug on his lower back, you felt him so deep that you wanted to honestly cry.
you wrapped weak fingers around his wrist, without thinking it through, and guided his hand on your neck. it wasn’t something you thought you’d ever enjoy, but there you were, his hands so fucking attractive you could only think about them choking you. so he did exactly that, following your movements, he wrapped his fingers around your neck and squeezed, mouth slightly open at the sight of you, you were being so good, so perfect.
“so beautiful with my hand around your neck, you know that right ? you know how fucking pretty you are?” he rasped, eyes wild with want, and devotion. “answer me baby,” his lips trailed down your neck.
you nodded, gasping, but he didn’t seem content with that response, his cock dragging inside of you. “nuh-huh, words baby. i need to make sure my girl is aware- fuck- of how beautiful she is.”
and there he was, calling you his girl, you didn’t mind it one bit, cause somewhere in your head you were already ready to be his. “yes—… i know… fuck i know.”
james pushed impossibly deeper, knocking the sense out of you, “good girl,” and he showed you, just how pretty you were, every drag of his cock sending you closer to a devastating edge.
“mmmh… james” you moaned, the intimacy of the moment overtaking you, “- need more”
“yeah?” he reached for one of your leg, lifting it to rest on his shoulder. “there, better?”
you nodded, the pressure in your lower belly unbearable, the new angle dragging sounds you didn’t even know were yours out of your mouth. he fucked you harder into the mattress, his hands around your neck never too overwhelming, whispering sweet nothings interrupted by curses agains your skin.
“m so- so close…” you said delirious, arms wrapped around him, pulling him impossibly closer.
truth is, you had never felt so good, and that scared you, you were discovering another side of you, another side of him, and it was so dangerously good. you wanted to crawl into his skin, keep him around forever.
“mmhh… so tight, you’re squeezing me so tight sweet girl, are you gonna cum for me?” he pushed in faster and deeper, if that was only possible.
your walls fluttered around him, nails digging on his back, and you felt him twitch inside you, he wanted to tease you, edge you until you couldn’t take it anymore, but he was so close he couldn’t sustain that, he ached for you, wanted to bury himself inside of you and never leave.
“so so so sweet… so good to me, you’re doing so good my princess…” he whispered, feeling you getting closer and closer.
one last push was all it took, your orgasm shook you beyond reason, you trembled against him, moaning his name over and over, you weren’t even sure how long is lasted, james kept dragging out your pleasure, until he was the one violently twitching.
he buried his face in your neck, rutting inside of you, “oh fuck fuck fuck… so fucking… good” his hips snapped fast, “i’m cumming, i’m cumming… shit.” you felt him come inside, thick and warm, filling you up until it dripped between your thighs. james kept panting, pushing it deeper, before he crumbled on top of you, exhausted with the force of his release.
it dawned onto you just then, how fucking gone you were.
⋆˙⟡. ⋆˙⟡
what had undeniably been the best sex of your life ended with you both falling asleep jus like that.
exhausted by the alcohol, the tension, the day of filming, and the world wrecking sex. james didn’t pull out, he tucked you against him, still buried deep inside, and in a beat you were both asleep.
what was, as unspoken as it was, supposed to be a good time, nothing much more, ended up in- well… much more.
you started seeing often. when the screening of the music video came around and you saw the chemistry you had on screen, you remembered glancing at him through your lashes across the room, he’d felt the same things. you snuck out right after, kissing like lovesick teenagers not worried about loosing their jobs. he fucked you in the bathroom, loosing himself in you all over again. it happened a couple of times after, until one day, balls deep inside of you, he asked if you could be his. it was an evidence for you, and you retorted that you were already his.
that was how you ended up falling in love with him, pushing aside every boundaries you once had about dating, you couldn’t care less about anything. he loved you like a sickness, and that was enough to make the risk worth it.
and truthfully ? how lucky was he to have made his all time celebrity crush fall in love with him?
SYNOPSIS like most of the other students in your school, youve taken quite the liking towards the drummer of your school’s band. but unlike everyone else, he surprisingly says yes-to your totally impulse text asking him to date you.
part 1 | part 2 | part 3
💬..sorry guys ive been FUCKIN DEAD but i will be back to posting again😭😭😭i been supa dupa busy cuz i got the job, finished exams, and pulled DOUBLE KEONHO and JJU from my album 😂😂😂✌️✌️✌️my friend pulled seonghyeon man i was like come homeeee bro👀👀👀neways i will HOPE to put the next chapter up tmrw cuz i was genuinely abt to give tf UP on ts ALSO PRETEND JJUS POSTS ARE LIKE A WEEK APART cuz idk how to change the dates😂🤔bro guys jju been looking way too fuckin good lately like that police outfit ? say less bro
SUMMARY a feminist podcast roasts a boyband live on air, and Keonho makes the mistake of getting intrigued by the one girl who refuses to be impressed.
PAIRING idol Keonho x podcaster Yn / female reader
FEATURING CORTIS, ILLIT Wonhee, NewJeans Hyein, H2H Ian, mentions of other idols
GENRE social media au with written parts, romance, crack, fluff (tba)
WARNINGS umm lots of jokes? swearing, complete roasting of the male kind (= hopecore), kys/kym, underage drinking, tba
it's your job to wake up your members early to film a portion of the documentary management is insisting on making. you can't help but let your fear seep in.
i. WHAT YOU WANT VS WHAT WE WANT ( coming soon )
the filming of the documentary and the struggles and pressures throughout it.
A LESSON IN GIRL PROBLEMS
everything seems to be annoying you, including your members. but when they realize what’s going on, they try their best to understand.
LOVE AT SECOND SIGHT
when cortis goes to collab with katseye in LA, yoonchae has the opportunity to see you again.
A CREEP TRIED TO BREAK INTO OUR HOTEL ROOM ( GONE WRONG, 3 AM, MANAGER WAS CALLED )
the documentary shows a lot of things, except an encounter between you, keonho, and a strange man.
IT’S ALL ABOUT YOU GIRL, ON YOUR SPECIAL BIRTHDAY !( coming soon )
what the boys do for your birthday in front of the camera and what they gift you afterwards.
🎨 DYNAMIC DUOZ WITH CORTIS
🐶 HE WHO BECOMES YOUR GUM
you love your personal space, keonho does too ! maybe a little more than you do...
🦅 AND IF THAT MOCKINGBIRD DON’T SING AND THAT RING DON’T SHINE, IMA BREAK THAT BIRDIE’S NECK ( coming soon )
when james realizes how much the hate gets to you at times, he vows to protect you no matter what.
SYNOPSIS. you finally bagged the man of your dreams after all that time spent chasing him. your relationship was fine until it wasn’t. location turned off, texts being left on read, and even cheating rumors. you try to get out of the relationship but you just can’t, and it turns into a messy cycle you keep getting pulled back into. until you meet keonho, fell in love at first sight. that would’ve been perfect except you already have a boyfriend. will you stay with your boyfriend or go through drama just to get with keonho?
keonho x reader. slight woojin x reader, smau, written, crackfic, slow burn, slice of life, attempt at humor, attempt at angst, cursing, infidelity, mentions of underage drinking, partying, drama, miscommunication, toxicity, etc
featuring. kasia ifeye, louis lngshot, ian h2h, all of cortis, and many more!
SYPNOSIS : in which… being a trainee under hybe obviously was not fun. It made your life miserable for a long time. You thought that when the time to debut finally came, things would get better. But when you see who you were to debut with, things get even worse.
CORTIS 6TH MEMBER AU
warnings: things get better before they get WORSE, crying, y/n crashes out really badly in the end and might appear kind of harsh
01 | 02 | 03 | 04(last part coming soon)
cortis had been working nonstop for weeks.
practice after practice, evaluations after evaluations, recordings, dance rehearsals, vocal lessons. everyone looked exhausted lately. even seonghyeon stopped making comments as often because he looked too dead to even bother.
so when the company suddenly announced that friday and the weekend were completely free, the practice room exploded instantly.
tarzzan would’ve probably fit right into this group with how loud everyone got.
keonho literally jumped up yelling while martin almost collapsed dramatically onto the floor from relief. juhoon looked half asleep but still visibly happy, and even james looked surprised for a second before quietly smiling to himself.
you felt happy too, but unlike them, you couldn’t express it openly. you couldn’t scream with them. couldn’t high five them. couldn’t celebrate with them like normal teammates would, because things still weren’t normal between you.
so while everyone else kept loudly talking over each other about what they wanted to do during the break, you quietly grabbed your bag and left the practice room first.
the second you got back to the dorm, you practically threw yourself onto your bed and immediately grabbed your phone.
you: THEY GAVE US THREE DAYS OFF
the groupchat exploded so fast it almost lagged your phone.
annie: OH MY GODDDD
tarzzan: WE GOT THE WHOLE WEEK OFF
bailey: finally
youngseo: wait that means
woochan: you can actually hang out with us
annie: FOR THREE DAYS
your eyes widened immediately. three whole days. three entire days with them.
your chest filled with excitement so quickly that you actually squealed loudly into your pillow, kicking your legs slightly against the mattress with a huge grin spreading across your face.
for the first time in what felt like forever, you genuinely felt happy.
and of course, that was the exact moment james walked into the room.
you froze instantly.
james stopped mid step and visibly did a double take at you. his eyebrows furrowed slightly in confusion while staring at your face.
you kinda understood why. he had literally never seen you smile before. he’d seen annoyed expressions, exhausted expressions, blank expressions, watery eyes, angry stares, but never a real smile showing teeth.
the second you noticed him staring, your expression immediately dropped back into annoyance out of pure instinct.
james looked away awkwardly after a second and quietly placed his phone down on his bed.
the happiness still lingered inside your chest though. you wereso happy that something strange suddenly happened.
you felt hungry for the first time in over a month. your stomach twisted slightly as you suddenly started craving spicy ramen so badly it almost hurt.
without even thinking too hard about it, you got up from the bed and headed toward the kitchen.
the moment you walked in, every conversation stopped immediately, like always.
all four of them sat around the table eating together while talking loudly over one another.
keonho and martin were arguing about some game. juhoon looked seconds away from passing out face first into his food. seonghyeon was laughing at something on his phone.
but the second you entered, silence completely swallowed the room. you ignored it. you were too happy today to care properly.
quietly, you walked toward the cabinet and grabbed one of the spicy ramen cups you bought yourself weeks ago.
honestly, you were surprised nobody ate it already, but then again, maybe they avoided touching your stuff entirely.
the thought annoyed you slightly.
you poured hot water into the cup before placing it into the microwave for seven minutes.
then you leaned back against the counter and scrolled through your phone while waiting.
the silence in the kitchen felt almost aggressive. nobody spoke. nobody laughed anymore. you could physically feel them glancing at you occasionally before quickly looking away again.
you kept pretending not to notice.
a few minutes later, james quietly walked into the kitchen too.
you looked up automatically, while he didn’t even glance at the others. he just started preparing his own food silently beside the counter.
your brows furrowed slightly, because it felt weird. nobody willingly stayed close to you anymore. usually people grabbed what they needed and immediately left, but james stayed there quietly beside you like it was normal.
you glanced at him once, confused and slightly suspicious, but he just kept doing his own thing without looking at you.
eventually, the microwave beeped.
you grabbed your ramen quickly, mixed the seasoning in, then immediately escaped toward the balcony before the awkwardness inside the kitchen swallowed you whole again.
cold air hit your face softly once you stepped outside.
instantly better.
you sat down in your usual chair and started eating while scrolling through the endless reels annie and tarzzan spammed you with.
most of them were stupid.
you were so distracted that the balcony door suddenly sliding open startled you badly.
you looked up immediately.
james walked outside casually holding his own ramen cup. he closed the balcony door with his foot before walking over and sitting in the only other chair across from you like this happened every day.
you paused mid chew. inside the dorm, you could literally see the others staring through the glass with confused expressions.
especially martin.
“…why are you here?” you finally asked after a long silence.
james blew on his ramen calmly before answering. “the balcony isn’t just yours.”
you stared at him.
it kinda was.
nobody else really came out here. it became some weird unspoken rule over time that the balcony belonged to you while everyone else occupied the rest of the dorm.
“…okay,” you muttered awkwardly before going back to eating.
silence settled again. but weirdly enough, it wasn’t uncomfortable.
james quietly scrolled through his phone while eating. you did the same.
after a while, james suddenly spoke again without looking up. “i can leave if you want.” your heart immediately dropped.
please don’t.
the thought appeared so suddenly it startled you. you didn’t even fully understand why you didn’t want him to leave.
maybe because eating beside somebody again felt comforting after spending weeks isolated. maybe because for once, someone was willingly sitting beside you without glaring or sighing or acting disgusted. maybe because the silence between you and james felt peaceful instead of cruel.
whatever the reason was, you suddenly realized you really didn’t want to be alone again right now.
but your silence lasted slightly too long and james misunderstood immediately. he nodded faintly to himself before quietly standing up with his ramen cup. “okay.”
panic rushed through you instantly. “please stay.” the words came out quickly.
james paused. he looked down at you, slightly surprised. your expression probably looked pathetic honestly. pleading eyes, tense shoulders, hands gripping your phone tightly.
after a second, he quietly sat back down again causing you immediately relaxed.
neither of you acknowledged it afterward. you just went back to scrolling through your phones quietly while eating together.
once you finished eating, you stood up slowly while holding the empty cup.
your eyes flickered toward james’s ramen, which was empty too. yet he was still sitting there. your brows furrowed slightly.
was he waiting for you to go inside first so you wouldn’t have to stay alone outside?
the realization made something weird twist inside your chest. you quietly stepped back into the dorm. immediately, all the others looked at you, then at james.
their expressions looked completely confused.
you ignored them like always and simply walked toward the trash to throw your ramen cup away.
but for the first time since moving into this dorm, something felt slightly different.
it was one am and you were finally sure that everyone was asleep. you quietly stepped out of your room, carefully pulling the door shut behind you so juhoon wouldn’t wake up. the dorm was dark and silent except for the faint sound of the air conditioner humming somewhere in the background. for a second you thought maybe james had already left like he usually did at night, but the second you turned into the living room you nearly screamed.
james was just standing there in the dark wearing all black like some creep from a horror movie.
“what the hell?!” you whisper yelled, clutching your chest. “i thought you were out.”
he looked just as startled as you did. “no i was uh… y’know…” he mumbled awkwardly, shifting on his feet while avoiding your eyes completely.
“i don’t, actually.” you glared at him before brushing past him towards the front door.
“wait.” his voice came out too fast. “can i maybe come with you?”
you stopped immediately and slowly turned around like you genuinely couldn’t believe what you’d just heard. “no.”
“please. just this once.” he grabbed your wrist before you could open the door, and you immediately looked down at his hand with annoyance.
“i’m not going out alone. i’m meeting people.” you pulled your wrist away.
“i know.” he said quietly. “you’re meeting annie and tarzzan and bailey and youngseo and…”
“okay congratulations?” you cut him off instantly. “you know who i’m meeting with. why would that make me wanna bring you? we’re not friends.”
he looked like he wanted to say something else, but nothing came out. you scoffed softly before opening the door and walking out into the hallway. for a second you almost felt guilty after seeing the look on his face, but the feeling disappeared just as quickly as it came. he had spent weeks making your life harder, staring at you during practice like he had something against you personally, and acting cold every single time you tried to exist near him. if he felt bad now then that was his problem.
you almost reached the elevator before the realization hit you.
you stopped walking and sighed heavily before dragging yourself back toward the dorm.
james was already halfway down the hallway with his hood pulled over his head, shoulders slumped.
“you wanna meet woochan.” you said flatly.
he froze immediately before slowly turning around. “he told you about me?” he asked, and for the first time since you met him he actually sounded hopeful.
“what? no.” you frowned. “when i found out woochan was supposed to debut i searched him up online and trainee a popped up. then when i saw you at the company i thought you looked familiar. it just took me forever to realize why.”
he nodded slowly. “does woochan know we’re supposed to debut together?”
you paused for a second. “probably. but he never brought it up. also he probably hates you. i haven’t exactly said kind words about any of you.”
there was an awkward silence after that before you started walking again. after a few seconds you realized he still wasn’t following you.
you turned around immediately. “can you hurry up? i’m already late.”
the relief on his face was actually embarrassing. he quickly caught up beside you, shoving his hands into his pockets while trying way too hard to act calm.
the streets were quiet while the two of you walked side by side. neither of you spoke much. both your hoods were up and your heads were down whenever people passed by. james kept walking slightly ahead of you the entire time which confused you because you never told him where you were going. somehow he already knew exactly where you were meeting the others.
you kept glancing at him every now and then. the oversized black hoodie, the way he walked with his shoulders slightly hunched forward, the hidden face. he reminded you of someone but you couldn’t tell who, and it annoyed you the more you thought about it.
when you finally got to the park the others were already there waiting near the benches. annie spotted you first and immediately stood up excitedly, but the second everyone noticed the extra person beside you they all went silent.
woochan froze instantly.
you and james both noticed it immediately.
james looked like he was about to pass out. his face had gone completely pale and his hands were shaking so badly it was actually concerning.
“you’re okay.” you quietly told him before walking over toward woochan.
woochan looked like he wanted to kill you already.
“come here for a second.” you said.
he didn’t move.
annie and tarzzan immediately started shoving him forward while laughing at his expression.
woochan finally walked over with tense shoulders and narrowed eyes. “y/n, what the hell.” he muttered through gritted teeth.
you smiled innocently. “just go talk to him. i’m literally fifteen, don’t yell at me.”
he scoffed loudly before looking over at james again. for a second neither of them moved. then woochan slowly walked over and sat beside him on one of the benches.
you immediately got tackled into a hug by annie before bailey and youngseo joined in too.
“you disappeared again!” annie complained while squeezing you.
“because im busy dealing with those immature idiots i’m supposed to debut with.” you groaned dramatically.
tarzzan laughed loudly before throwing an arm around your shoulders. “hybe finally released you from the prison?”
“barely.”
the conversation instantly became loud after that. everyone kept talking over each other at the same time while trying to catch up on everything that had happened recently. annie complained about…everything, bailey talked about a producer that scared her half to death, youngseo kept roasting everybody nonstop, and tarzzan somehow turned every conversation into something stupid within seconds.
for the first time in weeks your chest didn’t feel heavy.
you laughed so hard your stomach started hurting at one point because tarzzan somehow slipped off the bench while trying to imitate one of the trainers.
every now and then you glanced over toward james and woochan.
at first both of them looked painfully awkward sitting there side by side in silence, but eventually they started talking. then talking turned into actual conversation. at some point james even laughed quietly at something woochan said, and the look on woochan’s face softened immediately after hearing it.
hours passed without any of you noticing.
the sky slowly turned lighter above you while the city around the park started waking up. students in uniforms walked past half asleep while people carrying coffees headed to work. meanwhile you were currently dying in tarzzan’s headlock while everyone else laughed at your suffering.
“i actually hate you!” you yelled while trying to pry his arm off your neck.
“you’re weak!” tarzzan shouted back dramatically.
annie was laughing so hard she almost fell off the bench while bailey recorded the whole thing on het phone.
then suddenly tarzzan stopped laughing.
you immediately noticed the way his eyes shifted somewhere behind you before he awkwardly let go of you.
james had shot up from the bench so quickly it startled everyone.
“it’s seven am!” he shouted in panic. “the others are awake and martin keeps calling me!”
your soul genuinely left your body.
you immediately stood up so fast you almost tripped. “we have to go.”
you let out a sigh before looking back at everyone. “bye! i’ll see you whenever!”
you didn’t even wait for responses before taking off running with james right in front of you.
the two of you sprinted through the streets like actual criminals while people stared at you in confusion. students walking to school moved out of your way while you nearly crashed into multiple people trying to cross the street.
“we’re dead.” james gasped between breaths.
“i know.”
“martin called me fourteen times.”
“stop counting!”
you were so exhausted your legs were starting to burn by the time james suddenly stopped running.
you slammed directly into his back with enough force to send both of you falling onto the sidewalk.
“what the hell?!” you groaned while trying to catch your breath.
james stayed hunched over with his head down while his shoulders shook violently.
your eyes widened immediately.
oh no.
you quickly crawled closer to him on the ground, ignoring the confused looks people were giving you. “wait are you crying? don’t cry please. i thought your conversation with woochan went well. you guys literally talked for hours and if he said something bad i’ll actually fight him even though he’s older than me and probably stronger and…but wait why would i fight him for you? youre mean and really—“
you stopped talking the second james looked up.
this idiot was laughing.
actual tears were in his eyes because he was laughing so hard.
you stared at him in disbelief before dropping your head into your hands. “jesus christ.”
a breathy laugh escaped you before you could stop it.
then suddenly both of you were laughing so hard neither of you could breathe properly.
every bit of stress from the past few weeks just disappeared all at once while you sat on the sidewalk at seven in the morning looking absolutely insane.
eventually james stood up first before holding his hand out toward you, still laughing quietly under his breath.
you looked at him for a second before grabbing his hand.
neither of you bothered running again after that.
instead you just walked slowly back toward the dorm together while the city fully woke up around you. the morning air felt cold against your skin and exhaustion was finally starting to hit you properly, but somehow you didn’t really mind it anymore.
for once the silence between you and james didn’t feel uncomfortable.
it actually felt nice.
the second you and james stepped into the dorm, the atmosphere completely changed.
everyone who had been scattered around the living room immediately shot up from their seats the second they saw him. martin practically sprinted across the room first while the others started talking all at once, voices overlapping loudly enough to make your already pounding head hurt even more.
“where the hell were you?!” martin snapped, grabbing james by the shoulders. “your phone was on silent, nobody knew where you went!”
“we thought you got caught outside!” another voice added.
“or kidnapped honestly.”
“hyung, i literally called you like twenty times!”
the chaos exploded around james instantly while he stood there blinking in confusion from the sudden attention. everyone kept crowding around him at once, checking if he was okay, arguing over each other, complaining about how worried they’d been since he disappeared in the middle of the night.
you quietly slipped your shoes off near the entrance without saying anything.
not a single person looked your way.
you preferred it like that.
you were exhausted enough to pass out right there on the floor. your legs still hurt from running halfway across the city, your hoodie smelled like cold morning air, and your brain felt completely numb after staying awake all night.
you were just about to walk away when movement in front of you made you stop.
juhoon was standing there awkwardly a few feet away, hands shoved into the pockets of his sweatpants while the chaos continued loudly behind him.
he looked at you for a second before speaking quietly. “you okay?”
you stared at him in confusion.
“yeah?” you answered slowly, almost sounding suspicious about why he was even asking.
he nodded once. “okay.”
that was it.
then he just walked past you toward the living room again like the interaction never happened in the first place.
you stood there for a second watching him before sighing softly and heading toward your room.
the dorm still felt noisy behind you. you could hear martin scolding james from the hallway while the others kept talking over him nonstop. surprisingly, james actually sounded awake for once while replying instead of mumbling one word answers like usual.
you changed into comfortable clothes as quickly as possible before climbing into bed. the second you got under the covers your body immediately relaxed into the mattress.
you were seconds away from passing out when the bedroom door suddenly opened again.
james walked inside, grabbed fresh clothes, and immediately headed for the bathroom without saying anything.
you barely acknowledged him.
a few minutes later he came back wearing loose sweatpants and a black hoodie, hair still damp from quickly washing his face. meanwhile you were practically unconscious already, eyes half closed while leaning against the headboard.
then james walked over and sat directly on your bed.
you slowly opened one eye.
“what.”
“well obviously i’m gonna tell you what me and woochan talked about.” he said like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “duh.”
you stared at him blankly.
he sat cross legged near your legs, looking weirdly energetic for someone who hadn’t slept at all. meanwhile you felt like your soul was actively leaving your body.
for a few seconds neither of you spoke.
james looked genuinely excited.
you looked sick. not in the good way.
finally you sighed heavily before forcing yourself slightly upright against the headboard. “go on.”
that was apparently all the permission he needed.
the words immediately started pouring out of him so fast you could barely even process them.
“okay so first of all he remembered literally everything. like everything. he remembered the terrible vocal lessons and the monthly tests and even that one time leo almost got us kicked out because he accidentally broke the practice room speaker and then apparently he thought i hated him before because i stopped answering after trainee a ended but i didn’t know what to say because everything got messed up after we all split up and then he told me he saw my name on the lineup list months ago but didn’t know if it was actually me because apparently there are multiple jameses in korea which is stupid because obviously it was me and then…”
you blinked slowly while staring at him. this was the most you had ever heard him speak in one sitting. he barely even talked this much with the others, yet now he was ranting nonstop while sitting on your bed at eight in the morning like he physically could not stop himself.
every now and then he’d pause to laugh quietly at something woochan said earlier before immediately continuing his story again.
you mostly just listened in silence while fighting sleep.
hearing him like this felt weird.
for weeks james had been nothing but tense shoulders, annoyed glances, and awkward silence around everyone in the dorm. sometimes you genuinely forgot he was only a few years older than you because he carried himself so strangely all the time, like he constantly expected something bad to happen.
but right now he looked lighter somehow.
his eyes weren’t dull anymore and he looked happy.
you didn’t even realize you’d started smiling slightly until james suddenly stopped talking mid sentence.
“why are you looking at me like that?” he narrowed his eyes suspiciously.
“like what?”
“like i’m a zoo animal.”
you scoffed tiredly. “because you haven’t stopped talking for twenty minutes. i didn’t even know you could do that.”
he looked offended immediately. “i talk.”
“sure.”
“i do!”
“to who?”
he opened his mouth before immediately closing it again. “okay well…you don’t talk either!” he said, wanting to defend himself.
“can you blame me?” you asked.
after that the room slowly became quieter.
james kept still talking, just slower now. your responses became shorter and shorter while exhaustion finally started winning. at some point he shifted lower on the bed without even realizing it, eventually resting against your legs underneath the thick blankets.
you were too tired to care. normally, you would have kicked him off you.
your head slowly tipped sideways against the wall while james continued mumbling half asleep about woochan and trainee a and old memories that barely even made sense anymore.
eventually his voice faded completely and silence filled the room.
a few hours later, the dorm had somehow become chaotic again.
apparently the others noticed james had disappeared for an unusually long amount of time, which immediately worried everybody considering his habit of randomly leaving at night recently.
outside your bedroom door, multiple voices whispered nervously.
“is he sleeping?”
“did they leave again?”
“why would they leave again? aren’t they tired?”
“shut up.”
finally juhoon slowly opened the door just enough to peek inside.
the second he saw the two of you he visibly relaxed.
you were completely knocked out against the headboard in the world’s most uncomfortable sleeping position while james was asleep sideways across the bed, his head resting against your knees like that was completely normal.
juhoon stared for a second before quietly snorting.
behind him martin immediately pushed forward to look too.
his expression instantly changed into pure confusion. “…what am i looking at.”
seonghyeon appeared behind him next, only to immediately frown at the sight inside the room. keonho looked over his shoulder too before his face twisted into annoyance almost instantly.
“since when are they close?” seonghyeon muttered, sounding weirdly irritated about it.
keonho just rolled his eyes dramatically before grabbing seonghyeon by the sleeve and dragging him away from the door.
“who cares.”
“apparently i do.”
“well stop.”
martin kept staring inside the room with the most confused expression imaginable while juhoon quietly shut the door again before anyone could wake either of you up.
inside the room neither of you moved once.
for the first time since joining the company, both you and james actually looked peaceful.
when you finally woke up, your entire body felt disgusting.
your throat was painfully dry, your hoodie was sticking to your skin from sweat, and your neck hurt horribly from sleeping against the headboard for god knows how many hours. for a second you just sat there blinking slowly at the dark room while trying to figure out what time it was.
then you noticed james wasn’t there.
you frowned slightly before grabbing your phone from beside you. the brightness almost blinded you instantly.
8:43 pm.
you stared at the screen in disbelief.
“what the fuck.”
you had slept the entire day away.
before you could process that properly, loud laughter suddenly echoed through the dorm from the living room. multiple voices talked over each other while some action movie played loudly in the background.
right.
friday movie night.
your stomach growled painfully.
you dragged yourself out of bed and lazily walked toward the kitchen while rubbing your eyes. the dorm lights felt way too bright after sleeping all day. everyone in the living room was too distracted by the movie to notice you walking past, which honestly made things easier.
you opened multiple cabinets searching for something quick to eat before finally finding a half crushed bag of chips shoved in the back of one drawer.
good enough.
you grabbed the bag and yawned loudly while walking behind the couch toward the balcony.
the movie was ridiculously loud. some actor was screaming while explosions played in the background and martin kept reacting dramatically to everything happening onscreen like his life depended on it.
before stepping outside, you heard james quietly ask seonghyeon, “can you grab my charger from my room? i forgot it.”
“lazy.” seonghyeon muttered.
“please.”
you didn’t stick around long enough to hear the response.
the cold night air immediately hit your face the second you stepped onto the balcony, and honestly it felt amazing after waking up sweaty and overheated. you dropped into the chair you always sat in and opened the chips while scrolling aimlessly through your phone.
you wished you had your diary with you.
your fingers twitched slightly at the thought.
writing had become almost automatic at this point. every night after everyone slept, you’d quietly sit there and write down every stupid thought that crossed your mind because it was easier than actually talking to people.
it was embarrassing honestly.
nobody knew how much stuff was in there.
you sighed heavily before standing up from the chair.
might as well grab it.
you quietly walked back inside and toward your room while crunching on chips absentmindedly. the movie was still playing loudly behind you, mixed with random yelling from the others.
once you stepped inside the bedroom, your eyes immediately moved toward the top of your bedside drawer.
you froze, because your diary wasn’t there.
you frowned slightly.
that was weird.
you could’ve sworn you left it there before falling asleep earlier.
you set the chips down before checking properly. maybe it fell behind the drawer or got shoved somewhere under the blanket while you slept.
nothing.
your stomach immediately twisted uncomfortably.
you crouched down and pulled your suitcase out from under the bed, quickly unzipping it. clothes immediately spilled everywhere while you searched through it faster and faster.
nothing.
okay.
okay no.
your breathing started speeding up slightly.
you ripped through the rest of your stuff, throwing hoodies, shirts, notebooks, chargers, literally everything across your side of the room. drawers got opened aggressively. blankets got thrown onto the floor. your entire side of the bedroom looked destroyed within minutes.
the diary was nowhere.
actual panic started settling into your chest now.
because the thing was, you never took that diary outside the dorm.
ever.
which meant it had to be somewhere inside the dorm.
which meant somebody had it.
you immediately rushed back toward the living room.
“james.”
your voice made him look away from the movie instantly.
he hummed quietly. “what?”
you tried your best to sound normal even though your chest was practically caving in. “do you remember that pink notebook you asked me about like a month ago?”
james nodded immediately. “the one where you write lyrics every night?”
right.
that lie.
“yeah.” you forced out. “have you seen it?”
his expression changed slightly at your tone. “wasn’t it on top of your bedside drawer this morning?”
everyone’s attention slowly shifted toward you two now.
“this morning.” you repeated tightly. “now it’s gone. i looked everywhere.”
the movie was basically background noise at this point.
james stared at you for a second before immediately standing up. “i’ll check my side.”
you followed him instantly down the hallway.
the second you were away from the others, james lowered his voice. “you don’t write lyrics in there, do you.”
you looked at him tiredly.
“it’s a diary.” he said quietly, already knowing.
you groaned softly while rubbing your face. “i genuinely don’t know why i keep lying to you anymore. you literally figure everything out.”
“because you’re bad at lying.”
“i’m not, though. you’re just a good observer.”
he ignored that completely and started checking his side of the room carefully while you stood there anxiously pulling at your sleeves.
he searched everywhere.
desk drawers.
under the bed.
closet shelves.
nothing.
then james suddenly opened the bedroom door again. “juhoon.”
a few seconds later juhoon appeared looking mildly annoyed at being dragged away from movie night.
“what.”
james explained quickly. “her notebook’s missing.”
he purposely avoided mentioning it was a diary.
juhoon looked at you for a few seconds silently before speaking.
“that’s a diary, right?”
you blinked at him. “how do you know that?”
he looked completely unimpressed. “i’m a light sleeper. you wake me up half the time when you hide it in your suitcase at night.” he shrugged slightly. “also nobody hides lyric notebooks like government secrets.”
you rolled your eyes aggressively. “okay whatever. can you please just help me find it?”
juhoon sighed before lazily looking around the room. “sure. but if someone stole it, they definitely wouldn’t hide it near my stuff.”
still, the three of you searched again anyway.
every drawer.
every shelf.
under the beds.
inside closets.
inside bags.
nothing.
the room stayed completely silent afterward, because slowly, all three of you seemed to realize the exact same thing at once.
the diary had to still be inside the dorm.
which meant someone from the group had taken it.
your stomach dropped horribly.
james looked tense immediately.
juhoon looked annoyed.
“don’t involve me in whatever mess this turns into.” juhoon muttered while already walking back toward the door. he walked back toward the living room, leaving you and james alone in the destroyed bedroom.
for a few seconds neither of you spoke.
then james quietly said, “whoever has it probably hasn’t read much yet or hasn’t read it at all.”
you looked at him immediately. “how do you know?”
“because if they did, the dorm would already be on fire.”
the next few days felt painfully tense.
even though nobody mentioned the diary out loud anymore, the thought of it never left your mind for even a second. every time you walked into a room and conversation suddenly stopped, your chest tightened. every time seonghyeon glanced at you for too long or keonho whispered something quietly to martin, your stomach twisted horribly.
you started paying attention to everything.
every expression, every weird interaction, every single glance.
martin was the first person you crossed off mentally. you still didn’t particularly like him, and he definitely didn’t like you either, but after watching him for days you realized he just didn’t seem cruel enough to do something like this. annoying? yes. loud? absolutely. but invading somebody’s privacy like that felt too calculated for him.
which left seonghyeon and keonho.
honestly, you leaned more toward seonghyeon. he had this habit of pretending he didn’t care while clearly caring way too much, and the way he kept avoiding eye contact with you lately was starting to look suspicious.
but you couldn’t fully tell.
and not knowing was driving you insane.
somehow, despite everything happening, things between you, james, and juhoon had gotten strangely better.
you still wouldn’t exactly call your friendship with juhoon normal because most of your conversations still sounded like passive aggressive arguments half the time, but there was something weirdly comfortable about him now. maybe it was because he knew more about you than you originally thought. maybe it was because he never treated you delicately after finding out about the diary. he just acted the same as always, and honestly you appreciated that more than expected.
with james though, things had completely changed.
the two of you were together constantly now.
training, convenience store runs, late night talks, random walks around the city whenever the dorm felt suffocating. at some point people just accepted that if one of you was somewhere, the other probably wasn’t far behind.
everyone thought it was weird.
especially considering how much you used to hate each other.
even martin pointed it out once during dinner. Yes, dinner. James wouldn’t let you eat alone anymore. “you two are actually attached at the hip now. it’s creepy.”
“mind your business.” you immediately replied.
“see?” martin pointed between you two dramatically. “that was synchronized.”
james just laughed quietly beside you while eating.
right now, the three of you were walking back from the corner store carrying way too many snacks and random junk food that none of you actually needed. juhoon walked slightly ahead while checking something on his phone, and you and james kept laughing at some stupid story he was telling about woochan accidentally falling asleep during practice years ago.
the second the three of you stepped inside, everything stopped.
your laughter died immediately.
so did james’.
because sitting in the living room were martin, seonghyeon, and keonho and in seonghyeon’s hands was your diary.
for a second you genuinely couldn’t breathe.
they were so focused reading that they didn’t even notice you come in until the plastic bags slipped from your hands and hit the floor loudly.
all three of them looked up instantly.
you moved before even thinking.
you stormed across the room and ripped the diary straight out of seonghyeon’s hands so harshly the pages bent painfully.
“what the fuck is wrong with you?” your voice came out shaky immediately.
nobody answered.
your eyes dropped to the open page and your stomach dropped.
they were reading the worst page.
the page where you finally snapped weeks ago and wrote everything down after crying yourself to sleep. every disgusting thought you’d been forcing down for months was right there in messy handwriting across the pages.
how miserable they made you. how you dreaded coming back to the dorm every night. how exhausting it was constantly feeling unwanted. how you memorized everybody’s schedules just to avoid accidentally making them uncomfortable by existing near them. how badly they destroyed your mental health without even realizing it. how badly you wanted to leave.
something inside you completely broke.
“are you happy now?” your voice cracked instantly. “seriously, are you proud of yourselves?”
the room stayed dead silent. you threw the diary back on to the table, and it landed in front of seonghyeon.
you laughed bitterly while tears started streaming down your face almost immediately. “i never bothered any of you. i never did anything wrong to you people and you still treated me like absolute shit every single day.”
nobody moved.
nobody spoke.
your voice just kept getting louder.
“do you even realize how exhausting you all are to be around? do you realize i had to learn your schedules like some fucking psycho just so i wouldn’t accidentally run into you in this dorm because i knew you’d all look annoyed the second you saw me?”
martin looked horrified. keonho was frozen. seonghyeon looked like he genuinely wanted the floor to swallow him whole.
but you didn’t stop.
“you all made me feel insane for months. every single time i walked into a room you’d go quiet or stare at me like i was ruining your day just by existing there. do you know how humiliating that feels?” your breathing became uneven while tears kept falling faster. “i’m fifteen. i’m literally fifteen years old and i spent months feeling scared to walk around my own dorm because of you people.”
james quietly stepped closer beside you but didn’t interrupt.
your hands were shaking violently now.
“and then instead of acting like normal fucking human beings you steal my diary? my diary? do you know how disgusting that is?” your voice nearly echoed through the dorm at this point. “you invaded the only thing i had that was actually private because apparently making my life miserable during the day wasn’t enough for you people.”
seonghyeon finally opened his mouth quietly. “y/n…”
“fucking don’t.”
the way you snapped it made everyone freeze immediately.
you glared at him so harshly it almost startled yourself.
your hands shook uncontrollably at your side.
you wanted to hit him.
for one horrible second, you genuinely wanted to slap him across the face, and everybody noticed.
martin’s eyes widened instantly, keonho straightened up, and seonghyeon visibly tensed, glancing between your hand and your face with visible worry.
james grabbed your wrist immediately before you could even think further.
“y/n, calm down first.” he said quietly.
you laughed angrily through tears. “i’ve been calm for months.”
james tightened his grip slightly. “please.”
“no.” your voice cracked badly. “i kept my mouth shut this entire time because i thought eventually things would get better and they never did. so what now? they get to act like i’m the problem and i’m just supposed to sit there quietly forever?”
“you’re upset right now.” james tried carefully. “you’re saying things you’ll regret later.”
you turned toward him immediately. “no i’m not.”
the entire room stayed silent.
“i mean every single word i’m saying right now.” your voice shook violently. “and i meant every single thing i wrote in that diary too. none of that was written because i was dramatic or emotional. it was the truth.”
nobody even tried interrupting anymore.
“those pages exist because that’s genuinely how horrible you people made this experience for me.” you looked directly at seonghyeon while speaking now. “you act like disgusting fucking bullies and then stand there shocked when somebody finally says it out loud.”
seonghyeon looked physically sick at this point.
“y/n…” martin finally spoke quietly.
“i said don’t.”
nobody moved.
then james suddenly spoke firmly without taking his eyes off seonghyeon.
“give her the diary. now.”
seonghyeon grabbed it slowly with shaky hands before holding it toward you.
you stared at it for a second.
then immediately shoved it right back against his chest.
“why the fuck would i want it back?” you laughed bitterly. “you already read everything.”
seonghyeon looked devastated hearing that, but you obviously didn’t care. why should you? they never cared when you were on the verge of ending it all.
you turned around immediately before anyone could stop you.
juhoon was still standing near the entrance completely silent, watching everything with an unreadable expression.
for a second your eyes met.
then you walked straight past him, yanked the dorm door open, and slammed it shut hard enough to shake the walls behind you.
TAGLIST CLOSED (if i missed anyone, please tell me! this blew up literally overnight and i made the taglist like two minutes before i had to write my exam so i was kinda stressing)
summary: nursing school debt is not easy to pay off so you choose to indulge in becoming a camgirl bc why not. however, when you start your job as a nurse at the ptmc you decide its time to step back. how will you let your top spender know?
warnings: 18+, camgirl reader, sex work, degradation, fingering, masturbation.
notes: this is quite literally my first time writing anything so pls dont be mean. idk if i’ll do other parts bc my creative juices r lowk shot.
AMOUNT DUE: ……
you never imagined you would see those words, such a large amount of money, and your name, all in the same place. nursing school was everything but easy. juggling 8 hour clinicals, a part time job, assignments, and a side gig was not easy but somehow, you made it. you were lucky enough to secure a job at the ptmc straight out of grad.
“shoot what time is it” you put the letter down and grab your phone and see its 7 pm. you rush into your room and change into whatever lingerie set you pull out of your drawer, dim your lights and quickly set up your tripod and camera. this debt wasn’t going to get paid just working 8 hour shifts at a cafe so you took some friends advice and signed up to become a camgirl. some may say it’s not the most practical way to make money, but it does get you paid well.
cupidangel444 is now live
you turn on the live and see all the viewers stream in. you have the camera tilted to not show your face. no matter how much these men pay you to reveal your true identity, you refuse. “hi everyone! im so so sorry for being a little late tonight” you pout.
cupidangel444numberonefan has tipped $50 “you can make up for it by taking off that skimpy outfit”
“oh my thank you so much for the tip! well i guess we’ll get this started” you slowly slip the straps off your shoulders, teasing the viewers. more and more tips start pouring in. once you’re completely bare you start teasing. “what should we do now guys?” you ask in your sultry voice.
dnswhtcker has tipped $80 “you look so beautiful, can you touch yourself a little?”
you feel yourself getting wetter at his words. you and him have gotten as close as a camgirl can get with her top spender. he once told you on a private call that his name was dennis. at first you weren’t sure if that’s true as you gave him a fake name, never truly trusting anyone on here. however, as time has passed he intrigued you more and more. he slowly starts to gain more and more of your trust. he is always of course nothing but generous with his words and tips. you and him have had plenty of one-on-one calls where he treats you like a princess. offering to pay you extra for these calls but you refuse. simply because he treats you so good.
“of course i can” you slowly start to lower your hand until your reach your nipples. you start to rub over them and pinch them. you let out a little gasp and quickly cover your mouth. you then trail your hand lower and touch your clit. you let out quiet little moans as to not bother your neighbors. you then start to rub your clit and see another tip pop up.
dnswhtcker has tipped $30 “you’re doing so well baby, can you put a finger or two in now?”
you thank him for the tip and oblige. you start thinking back on all those late night private calls you and him would have. calling you late saying hes sorry he had such a long shift. as you’d watch him stroke his thick cock, tip pink and leaking precum. listening to him whimper and moan as he’d get closer and closer.
you closer your eyes as you insert your middle finger and slowly start moving in and out. you curl your fingers until you brush against that special spot that makes you let out a loud moan. “oh yeah, you like how im fucking myself with my fingers. i wish you were doing it instead. fuck.” you speed up and insert another finger. before long your chest starts to heave and your breathing speeds up. “oh—oh my god i’m gonna cum” you’ve never felt an orgaasm so strong before. just thinking about dennis and his cock and how good it would feel to have him beside you makes you tremble as it all hits you at once. before you even realize, you look down and see a puddle forming under you. did you just squirt?
user224267499 tipped $10 “holy shit that’s the first time you’ve ever squirt on live before. filthy little slut be a doll and give us another one”
“i-i’m sorry guys, im uh, gonna have to cut the live short because i start my new job tomorrow. do you guys remember me telling you all?” you see replies saying they don’t care and that all they want is to see you on here, working for them. you then read the one true comment that matters it’s okay beautiful, i’ll see you soon. you smile, and wave at the camera and stop the live.
You have ended the live. Total amount made: $560
you sigh and throw yourself back on your bed. you know you have to take a break from this and focus on your career, but how are you going to tell everyone, especially dennis. you know he’d understand. right? as you realize the mess you’re laying on you get up and start to take the sheets off and throw them in the washing machine. you lay on your couch and turn on your tv, you slowly start to doze off when you’re awoken by a ding.
you look at your phone and realize you got a text from the site you stream on. you’ve only accepted message requests from one person so you know exactly what who it is. as you’re about to respond start to think. will he even miss me when i stop being consistent? does he ever think of me now? what does he think of me? does he think of me as much as i think about him? are we even anything? should i even keep talking to him? am i being dramatic? once you gather yourself you decide to just call it a night and go to bed. you have a big day tomorrow—your first day as a nurse at the PTMC. you think about dennis once more before you slowly drift to sleep.
END CHAPTER 1
note: guys im so nervyyyy this is my first time writing anything!!! hope u guys enjoyed what i could give!
