The second you reached home you rushed to your room and shut the door, letting out a quiet, choked sob. You allotted twenty minutes for being miserable away from prying eyes, sitting on the floor with your back to the door and your head in your hands.
You’d read a Richard Siken quote a while back about sliding down a wall crying but only being able to focus on the wall in front of you and how you didn’t paint it all that well. That was you now, as you stared and stared and realised one of your power outlets was crooked. There was something so pathetically sad about hiding your tears when there was no one around to see you cry.
The next day, you told your friends you and Kai broke up. You didn’t give them any more details than that, lest your two stories contradicted each other again.
Aeri and Yizhuo tried their best to comfort you (and you appreciated it) but they couldn’t, not really. Not unless they knew the real reason you were upset. Kai hadn’t “broken your heart”; you’d gotten invested in something knowing it was fake. You were drowning in quicksand you’d willingly jumped into, and you had no one to blame but yourself.
Over the next week you and Kai stayed out of each other’s way. His friends gave you such pity-filled glances whenever you crossed paths that you felt compelled to tell them you were fine each time. Obviously, that was a big fat lie.
Daeseong and Daehyun asked about Kai only once, because the second they mentioned his name you’d burst into tears. They both got so scared they started crying too. You had never cried in front of them in your life.
“I’m cancelling my party next week,” Aeri told you after class. “Yizhuo and I’ll come over and we can hang out.”
“You don’t have to do that,” you shook your head. “Have the party. I know you’ve been excited about it for ages.” She’d recently gotten a pool table and wanted to show it off. You weren’t going to deny her that chance, especially not to just make her join your daily moping sessions.
“Fine, but you don’t have to come,” she acquiesced. She knew you well enough to know you hated pity, and that when you said things you meant them.
“No, I’ll go. It’ll help me take my mind off things,” you said, smiling and poking her cheek. “Anyway, I need to be there to keep you and Yizhuo in check.”
——————————
——————————
Empty bleachers haunted Kai at every practice, but he still looked forward to training. It helped to keep his mind off of you. For a while at least.
After he ended his fake relationship with you, there had been no teasing, ribbing, or I told you so remarks from any of his friends. Not even Beomgyu. How visibly torn up must Kai have been to elicit such unbridled sympathy? He hated thinking about it, the fact that other people knew the strength of his emotions.
Practice ended, and once again a dull ache crept its way back into his heart and settled in, making itself at home as it had for the last week.
Soobin cleared his throat and pointed over Kai’s shoulder. “Someone’s here for you,” he said.
His heart started racing. It was you. You were here to give him another chance to apologise. But then he turned around and saw your friend Yizhuo, standing at the bottom of the bleachers with her arms crossed, staring daggers right at him. He excused himself from the group and made his way over to her.
“Hi, Yi-”
She held up a hand, not in the mood for pleasantries. “I’m not here to be a messenger between you and Y/N. I’m also not here to beg you to take them back,” she started, narrowing her eyes. “They didn’t send me here, but you probably already knew that.”
He did; you weren’t the sort of person to pull such stunts. That’s what really hurt, that you didn’t want to talk to him at all.
“I don’t know what happened between you two, and frankly I don’t care. But I do know that you left them with the impression you don’t care about them,” she continued. You thought he didn’t care about you?
“Whether you guys get back together is none of my business. I just hope you’ll show them they mattered to you and give them closure instead of running away,” she said, before pivoting on her heel and leaving.
Kai sat at his desk that night, unmoving, as if the right path of action would come to him if he stared at his wall collage for long enough. Even Yizhuo knew he was a child, incapable of having important conversations, incapable of real relationships.
He pulled the polaroid of you and him after his championship game off the wall — the one you’d asked for but he refused to give up. He could still remember the feeling of your hands on his face when you kissed him, your palms cool in comparison to his skin flushed from the exertion of the game.
His friends teased him relentlessly over this photo and the way he stared at you in it, saying he was happier at the kiss than their championship win.
He set the picture down on his desk and reached for his phone. He had something he needed to say.
——————————
Did you regret attending Aeri’s party? Maybe. But you couldn’t back out now, and you didn’t want her to worry about you.
While Aeri shepherded the earliest guests down to the basement to see her new pool table and Yizhuo greeted people at the door, you were in the kitchen making a gigantic bowl of your signature sparkling strawberry vodka punch.
It gave you something to do, at least, that didn’t necessitate being out in the living room where the rest of the party was. Talking to one or two people when they popped into the kitchen for a drink was a hell of a lot easier than doing that.
There was no way Kai would turn up, you kept telling yourself, trying to be normal.
You repeated that again when you finally left the kitchen and saw Yeonjun and Soobin walk through the front door.
And again when you were talking to Jongseong in the backyard and spotted Beomgyu and Taehyun walking up the driveway.
Jongseong was trying to assess you — to figure out if he could flirt with you or if you were still upset about Kai — and in the back of your mind you knew that. You answered that question for him when you locked eyes with Kai through the open back patio door. He looked away, a see-through cup of your punch in his hand.
Jongseong turned around as your mask of friendly bubbliness slipped off in an instant and shattered all over the grass beneath your feet.
“Yeah, I figured you’d still be hung up on him,” Jongseong said, sounding mildly disappointed. How long had Kai been watching you? When did he even get here?
“Mm, I guess so,” you shrugged, pushing your entertainer smile back onto your face. But you weren’t fooling anyone, not anymore.
“It’s fine, Y/N. I get it,” Jongseong chuckled, taking a step back to indicate he wasn’t going to pursue you further. “Now’s a bad time. I hope things work out, whether you guys get back together or not.”
You relaxed considerably, scrambling for the shards of your mask as you tried to smile back. “Thanks, Jongseong. I’ll be in the house if you need me,” you said, excusing yourself.
When you returned to the living room Kai was nowhere to be found. You headed straight for the stairs and up to the guest room, leaving the door unlocked behind you as you entered.
If there was anything you were jealous of in Aeri and Yizhuo’s houses, it was the balconies. What you would give to have one of your own. From up here, the sounds of the party seemed so far away. The night Kai had asked you to fake date him on this very balcony, exactly one hundred days ago, seemed equally distant.
It was a cold night, but not unbearably so as long as the air was still. The sky was clear but too polluted for visible stars. You propped your feet up against the edge of the balcony and leaned over the railing, looking up at the deep indigo anyway.
“Don’t do that. It’s dangerous,” came a familiar voice. You stepped back down and turned around, watching Kai shut the door behind him.
You closed your eyes tightly and turned away, back to the view from the balcony, and held your breath.
“You left the door unlocked for me, right? You were hoping I’d follow you, right?” he asked, sounding almost desperate for his assumptions to be true.
And they were. You told him as much when you sighed softly and once again turned around to face him.
He was wearing his student athlete jacket that you loved, a black and gold varsity-style jacket with ‘Kai’ embroidered in small gold letters on the front. You borrowed it sometimes, because it was soft, warm, and smelt like him. Selfishly, you wondered if he wore it hoping to run into you.
“Kai-”
“I’m sorry. Please, hear me out.”
It was too cold to be out on the balcony. You walked back inside, closed the sliding door behind you, and sat down on the end of the neatly made bed. He sat down beside you, hands fidgeting nervously in his lap.
If someone had asked you what you were anticipating from this conversation, you wouldn’t have been able to give them an answer to save your life. No, your head was filled only with him — how sad his eyes looked and how much you wanted to hug him. There was no room in your mind for speculation.
“The other day when I told you I wanted to end things, I was lying,” Kai began, pausing after every other word, choosing them carefully. He wasn’t looking at you while he spoke, his eyes locked low on the wall in front of him. On a power outlet.
“I actually wrote a whole thing out on my phone — that’s what I was looking at — but I didn’t read it out because I was being a coward,” he continued. “Can I read it to you now?”
There was a block in your vocal cords preventing you from speaking. All you could do was nod and watch him pull out his phone. He turned to face you, and each time he glanced up from his phone at you while he read, his eyes seemed to get shinier.
“You were right, it was real. All of it. I avoided thinking about us until you brought it up because I’m immature, I’m childish, and I don’t like thinking about the serious stuff. What people say about me is true, and I was terrified by how much I like you. I chose to act as if everything was fine, and that wasn’t fair to you.
“I’m sorry I hurt you, and that I made you feel like you didn’t matter to me. That was the last thing I wanted to do, because you’re my favourite person. I like everything about you. You just get me, and I never have to pretend around you. I want to be your boyfriend, your actual boyfriend, and I promise I’ll grow up for you. If you’d have me.”
He cleared his throat awkwardly and pocketed his phone, fidgeting with his hair like he always did when he was nervous. You watched him, biting the inside of your cheek, the ambient noise of the party downstairs crackling in the background.
“I- I meant to say all that a long time ago,” he said, trying to hold eye contact with you but breaking it constantly. His hands rested uncomfortably on his knees, like he didn’t know what to do with them.
“Do you still mean it?” you asked. “All of it?”
“Yeah, I do,” he nodded, before sighing and pushing his hands through his hair again. “I just- you know me. I can’t commit to people. I’m the last of my friends to grow up.”
Huening Kai: the master of puppy love and nothing more. Or so people used to say. But there were other types of love aside from romance, and you’d always known he was capable of those. The guest bedroom was painfully quiet, enough so that you could hear him breathing.
“You keep saying that, but I don’t think it’s true,” you said.
“You’re right: it’s Beomgyu,” he agreed, giggling nervously. It had been too long since you last heard him laugh. You smiled at his cautious joke, which appeared to reassure him slightly.
“I’m sorry too. I shouldn’t have let it get this far. I should’ve talked to you earlier,” you mumbled. Your initial outburst must have come out of nowhere for him. The embarrassment of your past actions hit you, delayed, but you pushed it aside and soldiered on. “Can- can we try this again? I don’t want to live with regrets.”
You had barely finished getting out your last word when Kai leaned forward and kissed your cheek, urgent yet hesitant, eager yet tentative. He was beaming as he reached for your hands and held them in his.
“Me neither.” There were sparkles in his eyes.
He kissed you again, pecking you on the mouth this time, and you leaned against him with a content sigh. You could stay like this forever, wrapped in his arms with a soft warmth in your chest you’d never felt before. You played with the gold ring on his pinky finger.
“Kai?” you whispered, closing your eyes.
“Yeah?”
Your voice was soft and hopeful. “This is real, right?”
He moved his free hand to the nape of your neck, gently turning it to tilt your head towards him so he could press his lips to your temple.
“It’s real. I’m all yours,” he promised, “for as long as you’re willing to put up with me.”
You buried your face into his jacket and laughed, breathing him in. His cologne was woody and faintly sweet. “Stop saying things like that,” you mumbled. “This week without you was the longest week of my life.”
He froze, but after a second he relaxed and pulled you closer.
“I told my friends the truth, by the way. They were the ones who knocked some sense into me,” he said. “Speaking of which, we should probably go downstairs.”
Shit. You needed to tell Aeri and Yizhuo.
“They probably all think I’m an idiot now,” you groaned.
He sat up and grinned cheekily. “Is what other people think important to you?”
You rolled your eyes and nudged him, but you didn’t let go of his hand even as you stood up and led him to the door. “Hah, very funny.”
“Hey, you’ve asked me so many difficult questions. I should get to ask you some, too,” he complained, shrugging off his jacket and draping it over your shoulders.
That indescribable soft warmth grew stronger. It reminded you of how your skin felt when you stepped out of a cold room and into the sunlight. You’d missed the feeling of having Kai’s hand in yours so much that it was almost overwhelming, delivering a rush to your head that made you dizzy.
“Well, then, to answer your question: no, it’s not,” you smiled, opening the door.
The party was still thumping along downstairs; with all the chaos going on you could hardly blame anyone for missing your absence. But the second you and Kai reached the halfway point of the staircase, Taehyun spotted you from the backyard through the kitchen door like some kind of superspy, breaking into a knowing smile immediately.
“What’s that like? Must be nice,” Kai joked, although the underlying element of truth was clear in the look in his eyes as he waved to Taehyun. You squeezed his hand and smiled, trying to be comforting, not knowing if you were doing a good job or not. He led you towards the front door, clearly wanting to leave.
“Are you okay?” you asked, feeling the tension in his forearm as you held onto him so you wouldn’t get separated by the crowd. The chaotic chatter of the partygoers around you concealed your words and afforded you both a paradoxical privacy.
“Yeah. You’re here,” he replied, turning around and flashing you a sweet smile — the kind he reserved only for you. The sincerity of it knocked the air from your lungs temporarily.
Once you’d made it out of the packed house, you swiftly found Aeri to let her know you were leaving.
“Hi, uh-” Aeri started, staring at Kai’s name embroidered on the jacket around your shoulders. Her pupils were dilated from the alcohol. “What?”
“I’ll explain tomorrow, I promise,” you said, holding up your pinky finger.
She locked her own around yours with a dramatic eye roll. “God, I can’t wait to hear whatever this story is,” she ribbed, clearly joking, because she gave you a tight hug and told you to get home safe.
——————————
While you were talking to Aeri earlier, Kai had run around to the backyard to tell his own friends he was leaving to take you home. None of them had seemed even remotely surprised at this news. They saved all their questions for the group chat, not that he’d bothered to check his texts since. He’d reply to them later.
He tiptoed into your living room after you and took off his shoes, trying not to disturb your brothers.
“What are you smiling at?” Kai asked, watching you curiously as he locked the front door behind him and turned on the lights.
“Just making sure Daeseong and Daehyun did their chores,” you replied, looking around the room, clearly pleased that they had. The plates were washed, the floor was cleaned, and the curtains were drawn. As far as he could tell, the only thing left for you to do was iron.
Your wood floors were cold under his feet, even through his socks. He stood with his hands in his back pockets and waited for you to speak, but all you did was glance at the ironing and then back at him apologetically.
“I’ll help you,” he offered, never mind that ironing wasn’t exactly a two-person operation. He knew you’d forgiven him, that you were ‘back together’, but he remained on edge. You did too. Standing right beside you as you ironed and he folded clothes, he could almost taste the nervous energy radiating off of you. You two still needed to talk.
“Do you want to spend the night?” you asked. You had never invited him to stay over before.
Inquisitive, he studied your features. “Do you want me to spend the night?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, I will.”
You fell silent. He continued folding, biting his tongue.
“I feel like I should say something, but I don’t know what to say,” you admitted, with your trademark straightforward bend, your eyes locked on Daehyun’s school uniform shirt you were pressing.
“Why did you take me back?” he blurted out, surprised by his own forwardness. He hadn’t quite realised how close to the surface in his mind that question had been bubbling for the last hour until now.
The laundry pile had depleted much faster than he expected it to (you were clearly a better ironer than he was), reduced to just two of your own school uniform shirts. You switched off the iron and set it aside, reaching for his hand. He gave it to you.
“I really like you, Kai,” you began, and as if you could sense his apprehension you immediately added, “the real you, not the one everyone else sees that you keep calling immature or cowardly or whatever you said earlier.”
Yeonjun had mentioned something ages ago: he said he spoke to you after school once and asked you what you liked about Kai. You answered, “everything.” At the time Kai figured you just didn’t know how to respond (because what kind of question was that, right?), which was what he told Yeonjun.
“No, man,” Yeonjun insisted. “I was joking around with them like, ‘Are we talking about the same person?’ And they shrugged and said, ‘He makes it easy.’ They had the corniest, dopiest smile on their face. It was revolting.”
Yeonjun was still reeling from his breakup at the time, clearly.
The way Kai felt now was exactly how he felt back then. It must’ve been more than two months ago. A flippant memory for Yeonjun, perhaps, and you probably didn’t even know Kai knew of the conversation, but Kai never stopped thinking about it.
“You’re kind, you’re caring, you’re selfless. You notice things that no one else does, and you’re always there to make sure I’m okay without ever taking credit. I wish you wouldn’t be so hard on yourself, because you’re my favourite person too,” you continued.
He shook his head, fighting off a smile, holding your hands in his. “I don’t- that’s not true.”
At that, you frowned. “But you are. And you’re wonderful.”
Your eyes were soft but insistent, pulling him in and not letting him look away. He wasn’t used to such frank words. He was used to superlatives and grand titles: the best-looking boy in school, the MVP of the soccer team, one-fifth of the fifteen day kings.
But to be called wonderful was something else. It made him giddy.
“You didn’t tell me about Stackies,” you reminded him. “Most people would have. And you didn’t tell me about Hangil.”
Kai blinked. “How do you know about that?”
“His friends were bitching about it to Aeri,” you answered. “Wasn’t it because of us?”
“Not us, you. He was being inappropriate,” Kai replied, scowling now as he remembered the encounter. “But I didn’t keep it a secret out of some noble selflessness, I just didn’t want you to find out I punched someone.”
It took you all of two seconds to see through his obvious self-deprecating lies. You didn’t dwell on it though, merely letting go of his hand and reaching for the iron to turn it back on. He could almost see you thinking, trying to figure out how best to respond without scaring him off.
Neither one of you spoke while you pressed your last two shirts and he put them neatly on hangers, or while you left to put away the laundry and he helpfully kept the iron and ironing board.
He felt exposed, mortifyingly so. Your words were too kind, the type to make him want to run away. It wasn’t like he hated attention, far from it, but it was just different when it was your attention for some reason.
But when you returned from your room empty-handed and ready to talk, he stayed and listened.
“That’s not why. You know I wouldn’t have been upset by that,” you observed with a playful smile. You never complained about people like Hangil being knocked down a few pegs.
Kai shrugged. “Well, you shouldn’t have to hear stuff like that,” he said simply. You walked right up to him and took his hand again, and it felt like his heart was going to burst. “I know you don’t need me to protect you or anything, but-”
He was almost relieved when you leant forward and kissed him to shut him up, because it was apparent he was incapable of doing so himself. You tasted like your favourite raspberry chapstick, oh so sweet and intoxicating.
“See?” you whispered when you pulled back. “You are selfless.”
——————————
After Kai stubbed his toe on the corner of your kitchen counter and only barely stopped himself from shouting in pain, you decided it’d be better to head up to the roof to talk. If either of your brothers woke up now they’d never go back to bed.
You both put on your jackets and he dragged a blanket up the stairs behind him, ready to brave the night chill until you were tired enough to sleep. Leaning back against the tall parapet, legs tangled together as you sat side-by-side on the floor, Kai rested his head on top of yours with a happy sigh.
“You knew I liked you, right?” you asked, sitting obediently still while he wrapped both of you up in the blanket and tucked you in.
“I think so. I couldn’t understand why, though,” he said, only half-joking.
“What does that mean?” you mumbled, mindlessly opening the suspiciously-old pack of gummy bears Kai had fished out of his jacket pocket earlier. He told you not to eat them, but you didn’t listen. When you offered him one, he refused.
“I remember when you first started waking up earlier to prepare your brothers’ dinner before school so you could stick around until my soccer training ended,” he started, grabbing the pack from your hands to check if the gummy bears were still edible before reluctantly returning it. You sat up, ready to dispute that, but he stopped you.
“Don’t deny it! I could tell because you started answering my messages at six in the morning instead of six-thirty,” he said, grinning smugly when you closed your mouth and relented, lying back down. “And you always brought me snacks after my practice. I knew then, I’m pretty sure, but I didn’t feel like I deserved it.”
The rooftop was small, the view was unimpressive, and the night air was cold and dry, but none of that really mattered to him. What mattered was you, your hand in his, and your head on his shoulder.
“I cannot comprehend why you think you’re so unlovable,” you mused. Your tone was light, but he could tell you were upset from the way your voice pitched up ever so slightly as it always did when you got emotional.
He watched you eat the gummy bears with a lingering mild concern, turning your words over and over in his head.
“I don’t think that exactly,” he answered after a long pause. “I just don’t really know who I am yet.”
The implied ‘how can I think I deserve love if I don’t even know myself?’ went unsaid, hanging in the air between you two like a stubborn fog unwilling to clear. Sometimes it really did feel like everyone else around him was racing ahead in front of him, leaving him in the dust, aimless and confused.
“I don’t know who I am either. Most people don’t, even if they act like they do,” you pointed out sagely. “We don’t need to have everything figured out.”
He smiled and adjusted the collar of your jacket to better shield you from the wind. “How did you get so wise?” he teased, playfully messing up your hair with his free hand. You automatically leaned into his touch when he did, like you’d never fought at all.
“If only my report cards agreed with you,” you laughed, suppressing a yawn and checking your watch. “It’s past midnight. We should go to bed,” you said quietly.
The loss of your warmth as you stood up and walked over to the rooftop door almost made him whine. He dragged himself to his feet, more tired than he would’ve liked to admit, until a realisation hit him.
“Wait,” he called, chasing after you. You turned around, looking so cute in your massive teddy jacket.
“What-”
Kai put one hand on your waist and the other on your jaw, tilting your head up so he could kiss you. He felt no surprise, no hesitation, no tension in your body as he did, even though he’d caught you off guard. Your lips were tinged with the artificial sweetness of the probably-expired gummy bears you’d been eating, soft and plush as they moved against his.
He had been craving this for so long — to feel your waist in his hands and your fingers in his hair, to be as physically close to you as the laws of nature would allow. A real, proper kiss, one where everything else in the world fell away and he could think of nothing but you.
He was forced to pull away by his pesky need for oxygen, feeling the urge to kiss you again the second he did. You looked up at him, slightly confused but mostly blissful, the sort of dazed contentment one felt after waking up and realising a loved one had covered them with a blanket while they were sleeping.
“What was that for?” you whispered, your cold fingers wrapping naturally around his forearms to hold him closer. Like it was magnetic, both of you were drawn to each other.
He beamed, pointed to your watch, and kissed your forehead one last time. “Happy 100 day anniversary.”
You and Kai still hadn’t kissed since Yeonjun’s party months ago, when you were two weeks into your fake relationship.
That thought crossed your mind from time to time, and it crossed your mind again while you sat in the bleachers with Aeri and Yizhuo, watching your school’s soccer team go up against their rivals from AG High. It was the final match of the season, AG were the defending champions, and you were losing.
Until Kai scored a goal, putting both teams neck-in-neck. Even amidst the chaos of all his teammates huddling around him, cheering, and ruffling up his hair, his eyes found yours instantly. You beamed.
Throughout the game he’d missed every goal he attempted, and you could tell he was getting frustrated. His brows were low and his jaw was clenched, and he barely glanced in your direction. Now, he was glowing so bright you’d think they’d already won the championship.
“Did you see how Kai looked straight at you?” Aeri whispered to you, a wicked grin on her face.
“Shut up,” you whispered back.
They did win the championship, and Kai scored the winning goal.
All around you, the students in the bleachers erupted into cheers. Kai’s captain tackled him to the ground and his teammates piled on top of him, yelling and laughing. You let them celebrate on their own for a while, but when the other players’ friends and partners started making their way down to the field, you had to follow them.
The second he saw you he pushed past his teammates and wrapped his arms around you, hugging you tightly. He was sweaty and out of breath, but you didn’t care.
“The MVP of the championship finals doesn’t even get a kiss?” Yizhuo teased.
Pointedly, you cupped Kai’s face in your hands and gave him a peck on the lips.
“Well, hello there,” he grinned, kissing the tip of your nose. His eyes shone with pride, and he couldn’t stop smiling as he basked in the glory of their win.
“That’s it?” Aeri baited, egging you on with a mischievous smirk.
“Damn. I remember when you couldn’t walk down a school corridor without finding Kai making out with someone inside an empty classroom,” Yeonjun joked.
You tensed up, praying Kai hadn’t noticed. You didn’t know if your heart could handle having to kiss him again properly. It took you two full weeks to get over the first one.
“Y/N’s different,” Kai said calmly, his hands still on your waist, speaking to the group but looking only at you.
The justification you’d both been giving all this time for the lack of PDA in your relationship, as opposed to all his previous flings, was that you were shy. And it was true. Sure, you flirted with people a lot, but you weren’t ever one to kiss and tell, and people knew that.
He had felt you tense up after all. You could tell from his eyes, sweet and worried and reassuring. Maybe it would’ve been less painful to just kiss him instead of having to listen to him call you different while he looked at you like that, knowing it was a lie.
——————————
You kissed (for real) the very next week.
For the first time that weekend, you were going to spend the afternoon at Kai’s house instead of him coming over to yours. You vaguely remembered visiting his house before, most likely for a party a couple of years back, but it didn’t look all that familiar to you when you arrived.
His parents were out of town, and you had expected him to seize the opportunity to throw a wild party because of it. But all he wanted to do was order fast food and have you over for a movie night, and you weren’t complaining. He had promised you that movie projector system in his basement all those months ago, right?
“Welcome to my humble abode,” Kai said, opening the front door and inviting you in. He realised the insensitivity of his words the second he said them, wincing slightly and giving you an apologetic look. You shrugged it off.
There was nothing humble about his abode. You were fairly sure his foyer alone, large and cavernous and grand, dwarfed your entire house. The long driveway bracketed by gorgeous flowered hedges and the front garden complete with a koi pond and waterfall feature had already rendered you speechless long before you stepped over the threshold.
You found such ostentatious displays of wealth gaudy as all hell, and you felt the same way about Azeri and Yizhuo’s houses. It was a wonder any of them, let alone all three of them, could turn out as normal as they did.
“Do you want a house tour, or-” he trailed off, rubbing the back of his neck, clearly uncomfortable. He’d shrunken into himself, eyes glued to the floor and his broad shoulders rolled inwards, somehow appearing small despite his height and impressive stature. Awkwardness was a new look on him, at least as far as you knew.
“That’s alright,” you said. You actually did want a house tour (and to see his infamous basement, complete with movie projector system, retro arcade games, and mini bowling lane) but that seemed like the last thing he wanted to do. “Let’s just go to your room.”
So he led you up a coiling marble staircase with dark wood handrails, sturdy and polished, down a long corridor with more rooms than you could count. More rooms than were in your entire block of flats, it appeared. He looked embarrassed, almost ashamed, as you arrived at his bedroom.
When he finally pushed open the door and let you in, he couldn’t stop watching your expression. You knew this because you could feel his piercing gaze as you glanced around his room.
It was massive, more than thrice the size of yours, with an attached en-suite bathroom, walk-in wardrobe, and private balcony. He had a king-sized bed, a small sofa by the wide windows, and a large desk complete with a full gaming PC setup. Half of his bed was covered in stuffed animals.
“I like your plushies,” you said, before you noticed the wall above his desk.
Like he’d mentioned to you all those months ago, he had put up a collage of pictures of him and his friends, notes, letters, and the like. But there were pieces of memorabilia that were very familiar to you.
The first one to catch your eye was the photo you took of him at the botanical gardens, the one with the red leaf over his face as he stared mysteriously at the camera from behind it.
The second one was of you, also from the botanical gardens, except you weren’t aware it existed. You were facing away from the camera, a broad smile just barely visible in your side profile, your eyes wide while you admired the autumn leaves. When had he taken that?
You looked closer.
The receipt from Stackies, where he had paid for you and refused to let you pay him back. A recipe for crepes you’d scrawled on the back of a napkin for him one night while you cooked together for your little brothers. A polaroid of you and him taken on the field after his championship game, with your hands cupping his face and his hands on your waist. You were both looking at each other, paying no mind to the camera.
When he said you were different.
“This is a cute picture,” you complimented casually, trying to sound like your heart wasn’t aching. “Can I have it?”
“No! That’s my copy,” he refused. Ah, the perils of non-digital photography. He reached over your shoulder and pulled a different polaroid off of his wall, handing it to you. “Here, you can have this one.”
The polaroid was from Yizhuo’s party a while back, after most of the guests had gone home and you were helping with the clean-up. Kai was preoccupied with gathering used cups into a bin bag and you were trying to get his attention. You had on Kai’s student athlete jacket and were tugging on his sleeve.
It took a while, but you eventually remembered why: you had found an unbelievably embarrassing love note in one of the cups, perhaps written as a drunken confession. The folded piece of paper, a torn receipt stained with whatever had previously occupied the cup, was pinned between your fingers.
The photo captured the exact moment he turned around to look at you, his eyes falling to the sight of his jacket on your shoulders. The smile on his face was soft while yours was excited, wanting so urgently to make him laugh. Was that really how you looked at each other?
“Thank you,” you said, still studying the picture, running your thumb over its glossy surface. Finally, you turned back to Kai, who now seemed even more embarrassed than he was earlier.
“Yeah, don’t mention it. What do you want for dinner?”
——————————
You were drowning. In a mountain of stuffed animals.
“Can we move some of these to the floor?” you asked, moving a blue shark plush aside so you could lean back against the pillow behind you.
“No, they’re my children,” Kai said. “Why are we watching Ratatouille, again?”
“It’s a good film,” you answered, hugging one of his many teddy bears to your chest.
He laughed. “Okay, I guess I just thought we’d watch something more ro- conventional.”
You expected to be nervous, but you weren’t. It felt surprisingly familiar, lying on Kai’s bed with him as rain battered his closed windows. When he first hit play on his laptop, you two were barely touching. By the time the film ended, his arm was around your shoulder and your head was on his chest.
“That was a good film,” he admitted, somewhat begrudgingly.
“See? I told you.”
He was about to respond when a loud crack of thunder ripped through the room, scaring you half to death. You jolted at the noise. Somehow, neither of you noticed just how much heavier the rain had gotten. It was storming now, with howling winds and lightning repeatedly flashing across the dark sky, even though it was still early in the evening.
How were you going to get home now?
You pulled yourself out of the bed — which was difficult to do given the rocky terrain of stuffed animals on which you struggled to find purchase — and over to the window. Kai was right behind you, drawing his heavy cream curtains back with the push of a button. Automated curtains, you mused. Both interesting and wholly unnecessary.
“Maybe you should spend the night here,” he suggested, frowning at the way the rain fell in thick heavy sheets and the way the wind whipped so ferociously that even the biggest trees wobbled.
“I can’t leave my brothers by themselves,” you said, shaking your head, your fingers curled tightly around his windowsill. “The power in our building always goes out during storms and they get scared.”
Kai paused to think. “It’s still early,” he began calmly, trying to soothe you. “Let’s wait and see if the storm lightens up.”
He tried to distract you for the next hour, even offering you the house tour he so desperately wanted to avoid giving earlier in a bid to take your mind off the storm, but nothing worked. You weren’t really listening to him the entire time, constantly fidgeting with your phone and glancing out the window.
“It’s calmer now,” you mumbled to him, biting your nails. That was a bad habit from your childhood you’d mostly gotten over. Mostly.
The winds were nowhere near as ferocious as before, and the lightning and thunder had stopped. The rain was still heavy, however, and the storm was only going to worsen later that evening according to the forecasts.
“How are your brothers?” Kai asked quietly, wrapping his arm around your waist and pulling you into his side to comfort you.
“Scared. The power’s coming and going,” you replied, your phone pressed to your ear. If you weren’t so anxious, his gesture would’ve given you butterflies.
“I’ll send for a car while the road conditions are good,” he offered, half looking at you and half watching the rain outside. “They can spend the night here.”
You chewed on your bottom lip. Daeseong, the elder of the two, was only seven. “They’re kids. They’ve never taken a taxi without me before.”
“Not a taxi. I’ll call my driver,” he answered immediately, without a hint of hesitation.
You were speechless as he took out his own phone and began tapping away at it, only snapping back into action a full ten seconds later to call your brothers again.
Too anxious to talk, you passed the time helping Kai work on his current Lego project while he sang excerpts of songs you both liked to keep your mind off of the storm. As much as he could, anyway. He could see it in your eyes even when you tried to hide it from him.
Your brothers both arrived in one piece just as the storm began to pick up again. You fed them the leftover pizza for dinner while Kai set up the guest room, even changing the bedsheets for them.
He returned from upstairs once he was done and you were just finished with the dishes. “We can put them to bed now,” he said.
We? We? WE?
You ushered the two boys upstairs, with Kai staying silent as they squealed at the size of the house and how fancy all the furniture was. He watched on with amusement as you ordered them into the bathroom to change into their pyjamas and wrangled them into bed.
“This bed is softer than mine at home,” Daehyun whined. “I want this one.”
You shoved one of Kai’s stuffed animals into his arms so you wouldn’t have to explain the economics of quality mattresses to a four-year-old. He’d been complaining incessantly earlier about how much bigger Kai’s kitchen was compared to your own.
“I packed Daehyun’s bag for him. He’s too young to do it himself,” Daeseong told Kai proudly, eager to be complimented. You stifled a laugh, watching them from afar.
“You did? Good job, little man,” Kai praised, ruffling the boy’s hair. He was always so sweet with them.
The second your brothers were asleep and you were back in Kai’s room, you threw yourself at him with enough force that he stumbled back momentarily.
“Woah. Everything okay?” he asked with a light laugh, hugging you back.
“Yeah. Thank you,” you mumbled into the front of his hoodie before letting him go. Looking up at him, too exhausted to feel embarrassed, your gaze shifted down to his lips. “I want to kiss you, Kai.”
Again, just like at Yeonjun’s party nearly three months ago, he didn’t bat an eyelid. He placed a hand on your lower back and pulled you towards him. “Me too.”
You kissed him gently, tangling your fingers in his hoodie strings just to give your hands something to do. You remembered why you needed two weeks to get over the last kiss now; he was addictive, everything about him.
It was a bad idea to kiss him for any reason other than to add credibility to your fake relationship in front of witnesses — you knew that logically. That’s why you’d refused him the very first day he’d come over to your house. Then again, if logic was your strong suit you wouldn’t have been in a fake relationship with him to begin with.
When he pulled you back in for another, you didn’t stop him. His lips were so soft, his hands were so warm, and his cologne was just strong enough to be pleasant without being overpowering.
Like before, the way he kissed was slow and patient, not a shred of urgency detectable in his motions. He tilted your head back to deepen the kiss with a low hum, reaching under the hem of your jumper.
Not for the first time, you clammed up, splaying your fingers across his chest and pushing him away.
“Sorry,” he whispered.
“I- I haven’t-” you were too nervous to finish your sentence, settling for gesturing vaguely to his bed instead despite knowing he was the last person who would make fun of you over something so trivial.
“That’s okay. We don’t have to,” he said. His ears were red.
By the time both of you wound down, the storm had eased up considerably. The drumming of the rain was still heavy enough to be audible through his closed windows and heavy button-operated curtains, but in the absence of vicious thunder or wind it was more soothing than frightening.
With Kai next you, though, you didn’t think you would be scared even if those were present. He had offered to sleep downstairs in the living room like the gracious host he was, but you’d wrapped your fingers around his wrist and asked him to stay.
And he did, turning off the lights and joining you under his duvet.
“Thanks for letting us stay over,” you whispered for the fourth or fifth time that night, resting your head on his chest. You could hear his heartbeat, slow and steady against your ear, above the backdrop of the rhythmic rainfall.
He kissed the crown of your head. “Of course.”
——————————
Kai didn’t understand how he went two and a half months without kissing you, because now that he had (and not for show this time) it was all he wanted to do. Every time he met you at your front door so you could walk to school together he was filled with an overwhelming urge to feel your lips against his.
“Daeseong and Daehyun love the plushies,” you told him on Monday morning. He’d let both of them pick their favourites from his collection and take them home the night of the storm. As you were showing him pictures of your brothers with their new toys, he caught a glimpse of the polaroid he gave you in your phone case.
His friends had asked him more than once why he never invited you over before then, or why the two of you were so much less physical than he normally was with other people. He usually just brushed it off with a comment about commute times or your shyness and left it at that, as unbothered and nonchalant as ever.
But when another soccer player in the year above him asked him if you were as good in bed as you were at flirting, Kai punched him in the face and got sent home early. No one ever mentioned the subject again.
“What’s with 53? Why does he keep glaring at me?” you asked Taehyun one day when he came to the bleachers for a water break.
Taehyun turned around. “Who, Hangil? Kai almost broke his nose. Didn’t he tell you?”
“What? No. Why?” you asked. Kai didn’t have a violent bone in his body; he hardly ever raised his voice, let alone a hand. Taehyun just grinned cryptically and returned to the field.
For the last two weeks, Kai hadn’t been able to get that night out of his head. The way you’d rushed to hug him after your brothers fell asleep, the sleepiness in your voice when you declared you wanted to kiss him, how naturally you nestled into his side as you slept.
If someone had told him a year ago that he’d be perfectly happy to go three months without getting laid just because of a fake relationship with someone he barely knew, he would never have believed them.
You continued coming to his soccer practices when you could, spending your afternoons doing homework by the field until you absolutely had to leave, and he continued coming over to your house for dinner to hang out with you and your brothers.
But something had changed, and you were acting differently.
He realised that when he kissed you in the bleachers after his practice on Friday. You were kissing him back, your hands in his hair like you didn’t mind his after-practice grossness (you never did), but he could tell you were distracted.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, pulling away and reaching for your hands.
“You need to stop kissing me like that, Kai,” you sighed, staring down at your intertwined hands, at his thumb running soothingly over your knuckles. “I can’t- I can’t keep doing this.”
His heart sank. He stayed silent, not knowing what to say.
“I can’t tell what’s real and what’s not anymore. You say this is just for your friends, but you put my brothers to bed and have photos of us up on your bedroom wall,” you mumbled, your voice so soft he could barely hear you. “I know I shouldn’t have kissed you that night, but at least at the start I could tell when you were pretending. I can’t anymore, and if we keep going like this I’ll break my own heart.”
His thumb stopped. “I- I like spending time with you,” he said hesitantly, his heart pounding in his chest.
That was the understatement of the century and he fucking knew it, but he couldn’t bring himself to say what he refused to admit was true.
“That’s not an answer, Kai. Either we date for real or we break it off. I won’t be mad no matter what you choose,” you promised, shaking your head and pulling your hands out of his grasp. Your fingers were trembling. “But not knowing hurts too much. I’m sorry.”
The thought of you hurting, hurting because of him, sent a stab of pain through his heart. He didn’t know either. He didn’t even know what you were apologising for.
“Can we at least get to our 100 day anniversary?” he asked, his face twisting at his own demand before he’d finished his sentence like he was already aware he was being selfish. You stayed silent and reached for your bag.
His friends were right; he was immature. He wasn’t ready for this. He wanted nothing more than to grab you, hug you, and tell you he loved you. But he couldn’t.
What he ended up saying was, “Can I walk you home, please?”
An agonising few seconds passed of you looking at him without saying a word. He couldn’t read your expression, but it was the same one you’d had on at his championship game when he chose not to kiss you.
Finally, you spoke. “Yeah. Let’s go.”
He walked you home in silence. Your hands kept brushing accidentally as you walked side-by-side on the narrow pavement, neither of you daring to hold the other’s. Normally when you reached your house he’d give you a kiss goodbye. This time, you headed inside without even so much as a glance in his direction.
——————————
That was just about the last conversation Kai wanted to have with his friends before he talked to you.
After your fight (it felt wrong to call it a fight when neither of you had even raised your voices, but he didn’t know how else to describe it) on Friday, he hadn’t spoken to you at all over the weekend.
But he still picked you up from your front door on Monday and you both showed up at school together as if nothing had happened. In front of your friends he still wrapped his arm around your waist, and you still laughed at all of his jokes.
He pulled you aside at the earliest possible opportunity.
“Can we talk? Please?” he asked in a whisper, half-expecting you to just walk away.
You didn’t. “When?”
“After my practice today.”
Although you agreed then, you didn’t show up after school. He kept glancing over at the bleachers searching for you, trying to spot your trademark Rick Astley QR code laptop sticker throughout his practice. Unsurprisingly, he wasn’t playing very well.
“Kai! Get your act together or get off the field!” his captain shouted the second their third practice game ended as everyone else scattered for a quick break.
Kai gritted his teeth, squeezing his eyes shut to keep his sweat from dripping into them, and bowed in apology before scurrying away.
“Why are you so out of it today?” Taehyun asked, frowning as he handed Kai his water bottle.
“I have a stitch,” Kai lied, pretending to double over in pain.
His captain’s call-out worked. Once he was convinced you weren’t going to come, he stayed focused enough on the game to not be singled out again. He wasn’t looking over at the bleachers at all, fighting every urge in his being not to think about you.
So he didn’t notice you when you turned up right when his practice ended until Beomgyu pointed you out.
“Where’s your stuff?” Kai asked as he jogged over to you. Really? That was the riveting question he was opening with?
“I went home first to get dinner ready,” you replied, explaining your lack of school bag and binder.
You had left and come all the way back to school just for him. For some reason, that made him feel worse. He sat down beside you, dabbing at the sweat on his forehead, still breathing heavily from practice. He couldn’t tell if you were angry or not.
“Uh- wait.”
He fumbled for his phone and opened his Notes app, looking for the two paragraph-long sappy idiotic stream of consciousness he’d written the previous night. His eyes glossed over it, and he understood then why his teachers were always yelling at him for not proofreading his essays.
“Kai,” you called, watching him stare at his phone screen. “I thought you wanted to talk.”
“Fuck. Yeah. I-” he looked at your face, then back at his phone. You didn’t seem angry or nervous or upset, just calm. Your hands were folded patiently in your lap, not fidgeting at all. He wanted to hold them.
I feel the same way. Why was that so hard for him to spit out?
“You’re right,” he forced out instead through gritted teeth. “Let’s break things off.”
You closed your eyes and turned away. I take it back, he screamed at you in his head.
“Why were you so nice to me?” you asked after a few seconds of silence, your voice starting to shake. “You did things you didn’t have to, things no one else was privy to. What was the point of all of that?”
Down on the field, his teammates were all packing up their things and getting ready to head home. Beomgyu stood around watching you and Kai talk, but Taehyun eventually managed to drag him away.
He glanced back down at your hands, now curled into loose fists in your lap, so he wouldn’t have to look at your expression.
“I’m really sorry, Y/N, but I’m not sure what else you expected out of this,” he said, his heart beating so fast he felt physically ill. “I hope we can still be friends.”
All he could think about was the pancake doodles on your calendar. When you took that photo of him at the botanical gardens. How you hummed quietly under your breath as you washed dishes together. Like you’d said, things no one else was privy to. The moments belonged only to you and him.
“I really liked you, you know,” you mumbled, picking at your nails and trying not to cry. “Before all of this started.”
It hit him like a freight train. You liked him? More worryingly, did he on some level know that in his subconscious? Had that been the reason he’d chosen to ask you, of all people, to pretend to date him? Had he used you?
“What-”
“I spent the last three months trying to figure out if you felt the same,” you told him, turning your phone over in your hand and unintentionally flashing him the polaroid in your phone case. He made the mistake of glancing down at it, at the smile on your face immortalised in the flimsy frame. How you looked at him with stars in your eyes.
“I guess I don’t have to wonder anymore,” you muttered.
It wasn’t like him to be speechless, but for all the words he was screaming at you in his head, he couldn’t get his vocal cords to cooperate.
He watched in silence as you strode across the field, taking long, brisk steps like you couldn’t get away from him fast enough. It was a cold night and you were just in your school uniform, and he wanted nothing more than to give you his jacket.
You had granted him a second chance and he tore it apart right in front of you. Why? All because he was too afraid to admit he liked you back?
──── യ ⋆ synopsis :: y/n l/n sets her pfp as a cute boy without much thought, turns out the rando she found on pinterest was the campus crush, choi yeonjun. dating rumors spread rapidly throughout the school, and yeonjun now has an interest in the girl who’s ‘in love’ with him.
That’s how Kai always greeted you now, regardless of what you were wearing — even if you were just in your school uniform. He was already by the entrance of your apartment block waiting for you, despite you being five minutes early.
Yeonjun was hosting a party that night to celebrate his one-month breakup anniversary (weird), and it was coincidentally also the fifteenth day since Kai had first posted you on his Instagram. He said the party would be the perfect opportunity to step it up a notch.
You’d been sticking to the plan you drew up when he came over to your house two weeks ago. You ate lunch together now; sometimes you joined him and his friends, sometimes he joined you and your friends. But sometimes you and Kai would go off to the running tracks by yourselves to talk.
There, you’d work through the questions most real partners would know the answers to — your favourite music, which shows you watched, what your parents did. You had expected your conversations to be mechanical, rigidly going through the motions, but he was surprisingly easy to talk to. And despite all his flirting, he did actually pay attention to you.
“I can meet you at the train station, you know,” you said. “You don’t have to walk all the way into my street just to pick me up.”
He took your hand and laced his fingers with yours. “But I want to.”
It was things like that which were going to be your downfall. You’d only just crossed the two-week mark of your fake relationship and you already knew it. Yizhuo was right: your crush on him had never fully faded.
When he held your hand or wrapped an arm around your waist or gave you his jacket in public, you didn’t really feel anything. You knew he was performing for your friends or his, the showmanship of his craft clear in his rehearsed smirks and clichéd, sugary words.
But when you were alone, as you were now, you couldn’t tell if he was acting. Your racing heartbeat was, however, unfakeable. Regret seeped into every pore of your skin each time he smiled genuinely or offered to carry your bag or walked you home when there was no one around to witness it.
So, here you were: Kai had picked you up from your house and you went to Yeonjun’s breakup party (still weird) together, your fingers intertwined the entire journey there. You hadn’t arrived particularly late, but Yeonjun was already wasted by the time you turned up.
“He’ll be fine,” Kai reassured you, placing a hand in between your shoulder blades to direct you towards the living room. You kept glancing back at the older boy.
“Are you sure?” you asked, still worried. His hand was warm against your skin as he traced circles lightly on your upper back.
“Soobin will keep an eye on him. He usually does,” he said. The music was too loud for you to hear each other normally, so Kai’s solution was to whisper directly into your ear, his lips brushing over the shell of your ear as he spoke. It gave you goosebumps.
He told you to sit down on the sofa and dipped into the kitchen to get you both drinks. While you waited, his good friend Beomgyu joined you.
“Hey, Y/N,” he said loudly, holding up his drink, already tipsy. “Congrats on making it this far! I didn’t think you guys would be able to do it.”
People had been saying that to you the entire day. You laughed politely. “Thank you! I’m hoping this won’t be our last milestone together, though.”
Before he could respond, Kai returned and pushed his shoulder.
“What are you doing sitting so close to Y/N?” Kai chided, annoyed. Well, he was pretending to be annoyed. It didn’t bother you, or so you kept telling yourself.
“Sorry, man,” Beomgyu said, standing up and holding his hands up in retreat. “I didn’t take you for the possessive type.”
Kai took his seat and handed you a drink, wrapping his arm around your waist and pulling you into his side so you were half-leaning on his chest. He looked at you and winked. “I am now. Just for them.”
He would be the death of you someday.
You weren’t even paying attention while Beomgyu teased Kai back and walked over to the dance floor to join the rest of his friends, giggling drunkenly to himself the whole time.
“What is this?” you asked, peering into your cup of mystery liquid and trying to ignore the feeling of his leg fully pressed against your own. He had a metal chain attached to his black jeans.
“I don’t know. The label was in German,” he said with a shrug, before tapping the rim of his cup to yours. “Cheers.”
You furrowed your brow in scepticism but took a sip anyway. It was sweet, not too strong, and surprisingly smooth on your tongue.
“Good, right?” he asked proudly, tucking his head down to look at you. You nodded in concession, leaning against him even more. You had an audience, after all: both of your friends were watching you from across the living room. Aeri caught your eye and mouthed ‘fifteen days!’ to you.
Yeonjun’s sofa was lumpy and mildly sticky and not the most pleasant thing you’d sat on. It was hot, even with the air conditioning on full blast, an inevitable side effect of the sheer number of people packed into his house.
Your discomfort barely registered in your head, though. All you could focus on was that you were leaning on Kai’s chest, broad and firm against your back. His arm was around your shoulder, and his chin was resting on the top of your head.
“Let’s go out for lunch tomorrow,” Kai suggested, “it’ll be my treat.”
“Why?” you mumbled, tired. Lying on him was making you sleepy; he was just so warm and comfortable.
He laughed quietly. “Because I want to take you out?”
You could already feel your heart starting to race at his words and hoped he wouldn’t notice. “Said the hitman,” you joked.
“You’re such a tease,” he whispered, nuzzling his face into your neck. You shuddered at the sensation, at his messy hair pushing up against your skin, at his lips brushing your collarbones. You could feel him smirking, satisfied by your reaction. He always was, so smug and cool and confident.
“And you’re lucky I laugh when I’m nervous, so to our friends I just look like some smitten giggling fool instead of a sim dying of embarrassment,” you replied.
He pulled away, and you almost deflated at the loss of contact. “Why are you nervous?” he asked, confused.
Oh. Whoops.
“Y/N, what’s wrong?” he pressed, sounding somewhat concerned, his grip on your shoulder tightening ever-so-slightly.
See, these were the things that made you think this was all a huge mistake. Because when he looked at you like that — like how he did on the balcony at Aeri’s party or in your room when you were talking about your brothers — his eyes were just soft enough and his voice was just quiet enough that you could trick yourself into thinking he was being genuine.
“Don’t look so serious,” you changed the subject, nodding towards where your friends were. Some of them were still (still!) watching you, as if they were waiting for you to break up right then and there in front of everyone. Fifteen days. “We aren’t being believable at all.”
He looked over, thought for a bit, and then slid his hands under your knees, lifting up your legs and putting them across his. You let out a small squeak of surprise at the sudden motion and held onto his shoulders. He smirked when you came face-to-face with him.
“Is that better?” he murmured, the tip of his nose just millimetres from yours.
“I can’t tell, honestly,” you answered, feeling like you probably looked exceptionally posed and rehearsed in the position you were in. It was likely evident to everyone that neither of you were used to being in each other’s space like this.
“I think you’re right. Taehyun does not look convinced,” he reported to you, looking over your shoulder. “Well, I don’t know what else to do.”
You knew what the issue was: Kai was big into public displays of affection, and he hadn’t kissed you yet. He was constantly making out with whichever new person he was ‘dating’ in the school halls, empty classrooms, or at parties. In comparison, he had been as chaste as a nun with you.
“Fine. Kiss me, then,” you said, biting your tongue so hard you wouldn’t be surprised if it just fell off.
He didn’t even flinch at your directness; in fact, he seemed to enjoy it. He tilted your chin up gently with two fingers and leaned in. “I’d thought you’d never ask.”
What did that mean?
You didn’t even have time to address the fluttering in your heart at his words before his mouth was on yours. He still had one hand on your knee, holding you in place. You were in his lap, with your arms wrapped around his neck so you wouldn’t fall off the sofa.
He kissed so lazily, slow and languid, like he had all the time in the world. Like you weren’t in the middle of a circus-level house party and surrounded by countless loud drunk peers. He tasted like the mystery German alcohol you’d both been sipping, his mouth hot against yours.
You were getting dizzy, high on him, temporarily forgetting where you were too.
When he ran his tongue over your bottom lip, though, you jolted back to the present and broke the kiss.
“Sorry,” he mumbled, looking slightly dazed himself. His lips were red and wet, and you wondered if he could feel just how hard your heart was hammering against your ribcage as you leaned on him. “Got carried away.”
What? Did? That? Mean?
“See? I told you we had to make out in front of them,” he joked, clearly less affected by the kiss than you were. You turned around to glance at your friends and found that most of them had finally stopped watching you.
Kai kept his hand on your chin. If he had noticed your silence he didn’t make any indication of it, although Aeri was still squinting at you suspiciously. He pressed a quick kiss to your cheek, unflappable as ever.
——————————
——————————
Kai was on top of the world: he’d broken the fifteen-day curse. Of course, his sense of achievement would have been even greater if it was real, but his friends were convinced and that was all he cared about.
Everyone had thought he was going to dump you on Friday at Yeonjun’s party, the fifteenth day. But he hadn’t, and on Tuesday you came to visit him during his soccer practice.
It was common for whoever he was with at the time to do that, although you hadn’t yet. He supposed you had no reason to since you weren’t actually interested in him, but you and him had agreed on it the night before. Of all the people he’d invited to watch him practise, you were the only one who had stuck around beyond day fifteen. And his friends obviously had a lot to say about that.
“So you two are, like, really a thing,” Soobin marvelled, checking his watch for the date. He waved to you where you were sitting in the bleachers. You waved back.
“Didn’t you see him tonguing them on Yeonjun’s sofa on Friday?” Taehyun said.
“What? You sinned on my sofa?” Yeonjun asked, clearly having been too drunk to remember anything from that night.
Kai pushed Taehyun and put his water bottle away. Their break was over, he decided. “I was not tonguing them. Jesus,” he cursed, running back out onto the field and blowing you a kiss as he did so.
Yeonjun rolled his eyes. “Sickening.”
“You’re just bitter you got dumped,” Beomgyu shouted, running away before he’d even finished talking, anticipating to be smacked.
Unfortunately for Yeonjun, you continued coming to their soccer practices, and Kai continued blowing kisses at you whenever he got the chance.
By the one month mark, Kai was spending just as much time with you as he was with his friends, much of that alone when you didn’t have to pretend.
It was funny how he could so easily flirt with you in the past, before you’d started this whole thing, and now that you were ‘dating’ he felt weirdly embarrassed whenever he did so. He was fine in public, perfectly able to act in front of others, but the second you two were in private he turned into an altar boy, apparently.
Especially when he was in your room like he was now, after school one afternoon, sitting cross-legged on your bed next to you.
“Are you free Saturday morning?” you asked, staring at your calendar. “We could hang out for a bit and then head over there together,” you suggested. If he didn’t know any better he might have thought he heard nervousness in your voice, like you were hoping he’d say yes and scared he’d say no.
All of your friends were meeting up for lunch that day at a newly launched pancake restaurant called Stackies you’d been telling him about for ages. Kai was actually the one to suggest it to the group because he knew how badly you wanted to try it — but you weren’t aware of that.
He smiled to himself when he saw the square inch of space that made up Saturday’s box adorned with a halo of exclamation marks and messy pancake doodles, fairly sure you were the only person under the age of forty who still used a physical calendar.
“Yeah, I’m free. What do you want to do?” he asked, knowing subconsciously in the back of his mind that he would have agreed to anything you requested.
Your eyes lit up. “Can we go to the botanical gardens? I heard the leaves are starting to turn.”
You both used to refer to your outings as “hanging out”, sessions for you to get to know each other and get your stories straight, couching the intimacy of it all in deliberate language like a shield. Against what, he wasn’t sure. But somewhere along the line, and he wasn’t quite sure when, interrogative questions gave way to long conversations about music and TV shows and your friends.
Dates. You were going on dates.
Something pulled at his heart when he saw your expression, your eyes shining with excitement, your pen clipped behind your ear. He never knew that was a thing people did in real life, sticking writing implements behind their ears. He’d always thought only cartoon characters did that.
“Really? Let’s go, then. I want to see them too,” he smiled.
You hadn’t kissed since Yeonjun’s party more than a month ago. Well, not properly, anyway. He kissed you on the forehead a lot in front of others, and you kissed him on the cheek from time to time, but those didn’t count. Not to him.
He wanted to kiss you whenever you two were alone, an impulse which always set alarm bells ringing in his head that maybe he should pull the brakes on this whole thing.
It was foreign to him, all of it — recommending pancake restaurants and going on trips to the botanical gardens. Two-week flings driven by physical attraction and teenage infatuation, ending either in the mutual understanding that it hadn’t been serious or a broken heart for the other party, were more his speed.
This was not that, he realised, whatever it was. He reached that conclusion after your trip to the gardens, when you both arrived at Stackies. You took his hand and smiled at him as you walked through the door to the table where your friends were waiting for you, although it was your performing smile. He used to think it was pretty (he still did), but now whenever he saw it he yearned for your real one.
The one you’d given him one fateful Wednesday, the day he came over to your house so you could study each other’s favourite foods, hobbies, and usual hangout spots. When it was time for him to leave, he had asked on a whim if he could stay and help you with dinner. You’d beamed when he did, and he still found himself picturing it from time to time.
“I’m happy you chose this place,” you told Soobin, who was sitting on your other side, while the waiter was taking Aeri’s order. “I’ve actually always wanted to come here.”
Soobin looked at you, confused. “Yeah, that’s why I picked it. Kai asked me to.”
Kai placed his hand on your knee, a message. “Right, that’s what I meant,” you backtracked smoothly. The second everyone was distracted by the waiter turning on the table’s hotplate, you leaned over to him and whispered a soft ‘thank you’ into his ear. You gave him another one of your smiles, a real one, and he found himself unable to focus on anything else for the rest of the lunch.
A few days later, you were sitting in the bleachers together after his soccer practice. His teammates had all gone home, leaving you two alone on the field. This wasn’t something you normally did; you usually had to leave an hour before his practice ended to get home in time to do your chores.
“Should I make a one month anniversary post on Instagram?” he asked, snacking on the cookies you had bought for him as he flicked through the photos you’d taken together at the botanical gardens on his phone.
“I don’t think so. I feel like it’s more believable if we keep it low-key,” you said, leaning over his shoulder to look at the photos. “I like that one,” you commented, stopping him when he landed one you took of him. He was staring straight into the camera and holding a red leaf in front of his face, covering his left eye.
You were wearing his sports jacket, the one only student athletes were allowed to wear. It was black with gold trim, read ‘athlete’ on the back in big bold letters, and had his name embroidered on the front.
That was one of the first things he learnt about you, that you had always wanted to be a student athlete but lost the chance to after you broke your knee eight years ago and it never fully recovered. He’d always wondered why someone as popular and seemingly active as you wasn’t on a sports team. But now he let you wear his jacket whenever you wanted, which seemed to make you happy.
“Can I ask you something?” you said after a short silence, playing with the hem of his jacket. He nodded, prompting you to continue. “Why do you care if you’re the last of your friends to be in a relationship?”
Yeah. Why did he care?
This was far from the first time you had asked him that question, but he was always unable to give you a straight answer. He knew it bothered him, but he couldn’t fully articulate why. And not for a lack of trying, either. His explanation was constantly changing.
“It’s not really about the relationship,” was what Kai settled on this time around. “It’s just a sense of being left behind while everyone else around me is growing up and moving on.”
The autumn wind howled. “I get it,” you nodded. This had been the first question you asked him all those weeks back on Aeri’s balcony, and you’d never once pointed out the number of times his answer to that question changed.
“Why do you keep asking me that?” he said with a small smile, a question of his own, standing up and offering you his hand. The lights had switched themselves off. It was probably time to head home. You accepted, and he pulled you to your feet with ease.
“I don’t know. I thought if I asked enough times, eventually you’d figure out your answer,” you replied, stumbling slightly when he pulled you a little too hard. He laughed, not being able to tell if you were serious. You smiled. “Have you?”
He hadn’t, but he was starting to wonder if he was looking right at it.
——————————
——————————
“What do you plan on doing after we graduate?” Kai asked you once when you were walking home from school together. “Taehyun asked me that just now, and I realised I didn’t know.”
That was how a lot of your conversations with Kai went. It was hard to figure out what normal people talked to their significant others about.
“I don’t want to think about that now,” you laughed. Kai wasn’t the only one who hated the thought of growing up. “I’ll probably go into data analytics or something.”
It’d been two months since you started ‘dating’, and there were still occasional gaps in your knowledge that hadn’t yet been plugged. The other day, Aeri asked you what Kai’s parents did and you had just barely managed to avoid a catastrophe.
You didn’t really know what the goal was anymore, if you were being honest. From time to time you felt the urge to ask him when this whole thing would end, but you always found yourself unable to go through with it. You didn’t want it to end, that much had become clear. You were living a lie you so desperately wanted to believe in.
He walked you home after school on the days he didn’t have soccer practice, sometimes staying over for dinner. You’d go to the shops together to buy ingredients before your brothers came home, and he’d help you cook.
He didn’t need to, there was no one around to witness it, but he did. Your kitchen was far too small for two people to be crammed in there at the same time, but somehow, neither of you had been injured yet. He never complained about how cramped your house was or how loud and boisterous your brothers were.
When he could tell you needed a break from them, though, he would suggest taking your dinner up to the rooftop of your building and leaving them to their adventures. The two of you sat on the rooftop, eating dinner and talking until nine or ten at night.
It was why you’d had a crush on him in the first place (yes, you were finally admitting you had a crush on him). He was a flirt, that much was true, but no one could ever accuse him of being unkind. He didn’t go around breaking hearts on purpose, which you couldn’t really say for some of the other popular boys.
At one of Yizhuo’s parties, you were all sitting in her backyard on the grass, even though it was way too cold to be outdoors. As always, Kai gave you his jacket without you needing to ask. It wasn’t his student athlete one this time, but a light denim jacket that was more fashionable than functional.
“You guys are so cute!” Yizhuo squealed, when Kai reached for your hands and clasped them in between his larger ones to warm them up. He leant forward and pressed a quick kiss to your temple with a pleased smile.
“Isn’t today your two month anniversary? Congratulations,” Aeri said.
“Uh-”
“No, it’s not. That was two weeks ago,” Soobin cut you off, confused.
You turned to Kai. You had sixty whole days to iron out your origin story and you still hadn’t. In retrospect, that was a pretty glaring oversight.
“It’s a long story, actually,” Kai laughed, thinking on his feet. He was so good at that, always calm and collected whenever things like this happened. You, however, panicked like a spooked young fawn at the slightest hint of your scheme being exposed.
“Oh, is it?” Taehyun said, squinting at you with inquisitive eyes, trying to decipher your facial expression. “I love long stories.”
You squeezed Kai’s hand. Please help. Taehyun was too observant for his own good.
“Sorry. I’m sworn to secrecy,” Kai lied smoothly, poking your cheek with his index finger and a playful smile. “This one says it’s embarrassing, so I can’t tell you.”
Grateful for the out he’d provided you, you went along with it, swatting his finger away with a giggle and pretending to hide your face in his sweater at his teasing. Your friends rolled their eyes at your sickening sweetness.
It seemed to work, at least for now. But the second it was no longer overtly suspicious to do so, you two escaped back into Yizhuo’s house, scouring the place for a quiet space where you could talk. You settled on the area in the back near the rear staircase — yes, her house was that big that it had two staircases.
“What did you tell your friends?” Kai asked, evidently on edge. He was trying to hide it and doing a pretty good job, but you’d also gotten much better at reading him now.
“I said we got together at Aeri’s party! Isn’t that what you said?” you replied, not ever thinking this would need to be clarified. That story made the most sense, didn’t it?
“I said we got together two weeks before,” he groaned, pushing his hands through his hair.
You sputtered. “Why on earth would you do that?”
“I wanted to make the relationship longer so I could beat Beomgyu.”
Really? Really? And he didn’t think to explain this to you in advance? You took a deep breath to compose yourself.
“Okay, okay, it’s fine. We can do damage control,” you said, trying to talk yourself out of the panic you were inching closer and closer towards.
“Except that all our friends are now out there without us and they’re definitely discussing what just happened,” Kai pointed out casually.
This fact dawned on you both at the exact same time.
“Shit.”
“Shit.”
“Shit!”
You turned to look at the source of the third voice. It was Sunghoon, visibly drunk with a table tennis paddle in his hand for some reason.
“Sorry, just wanted to feel like I was a part of something,” he giggled, waving the paddle nonchalantly as he walked past you. It was a nice break of bewilderment from your stress, which returned almost as soon as the other boy was gone.
You didn’t have any time to react, though, because here was Yizhuo coming to look for you, calling out your names. Before you could even process what was happening, Kai grabbed you by the wrist and yanked you into the empty closet under the staircase to hide.
The closet was tiny, just barely large enough for two people. You were pressed almost fully against him with no room to move away, face-to-face, your hands flat against his chest and his braced against the door behind you.
Now you were stuck there. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Getting your Goddamn Stories Straight. You could hear his rapid breathing and your blood pumping in your ears.
“Nice weather we’re having,” he joked, looking down at you.
His pupils were blown in the darkness, and you were sure yours were too as they struggled to adjust to the lack of light. You could just barely make out his facial features, even though he was so close to you his hair was brushing your cheek.
You laughed nervously. “Maybe we can tell them we made it official at Aeri’s party but first started talking two weeks before,” you suggested, looking anywhere but at him. You were fairly sure you wouldn’t be able to speak if you looked into his eyes or at his lips or at his arms on either side of you. Yizhuo was still outside, asking an unknown person if they’d seen you or Kai.
“Mm, that works,” Kai agreed, his breath warm on your face as he giggled quietly. “I can hear your heartbeat.”
He was so mind-numbingly oblivious to the fact that your heart was beating that fast for him, and not for the fear of getting caught by your friends.
“Can you really?” you whispered. Yizhuo walked away; you knew it was her by the sound of her footsteps.
Kai reached for the doorknob behind you. “I can. It’s loud,” he teased, before opening the door.
The space was so tight that you nearly tumbled out as soon as he did, but he caught you easily by the waist to prop you back up onto your feet. Your mind was still scrambled from the memory of his eyes being so close to you that you could count his eyelashes. What had you gotten yourself into?
Kai sat at the cafeteria table with his head in his hands, sulking.
“Now you’re the only one out of the five of us who’s never been in a relationship,” Taehyun noted, pointing out the obvious. Beomgyu grinned, proudly showing off his new lockscreen.
“Yeonjun’s single, too,” Kai protested.
“But he just got dumped, and it was serious. He really loved her,” Soobin said.
Yeonjun smiled with gritted teeth. “Thanks, Soobin. I definitely needed to be reminded of that.”
“It’s kind of nice having a real connection with someone instead of hopping from fling to fling,” Beomgyu said wistfully.
“Are you kidding me right now?” Kai said, monotone.
“Yeah, Kai could never do that,” Yeonjun joked. “He’s the original fifteen-day king. He can’t settle down.”
Kai pursed his lips. Maybe it was time for him to grow up.
——————————
He would never admit it, but his friends all being taken (or recently un-taken) affected Kai much more than he thought it would. He had never expected the day to come, not least of all this soon.
Gone was the era of the fifteen-day kings, the group of boys who could walk into a party and each get any person they wanted. No, now Soobin, Beomgyu, and Taehyun were boringly tied down to their partners, and Yeonjun was too mopey to join Kai on his flirting escapades.
In his mind he told himself he was young and just wanted to have fun, and that was easy to do when basically anyone would jump at the chance to be with him, even if only for fifteen days. But as the months went by, a larger and larger part of him feared that he was just using ‘free-spiritedness’ as an excuse for cowardice and emotional immaturity.
Did he fool around because he was popular and liked the excitement? Or because he was scared of responsibility and getting close to anyone?
That rumination turned itself over and over in his head when he saw you standing at your locker after school one day, fighting for your life to try and get it open. Although you ran in the same circles, he didn’t know you too well. He thought you were hot and flirted with you on occasion, but that was it.
“Need some help?”
You smiled when you saw him. “Yes, please.”
Kai liked that you didn’t get all shy and flustered when he talked to you the way some of the other students did. Why would you? You were just as attractive and popular as he was.
He saw you at parties pretty frequently and you were friends with many of the same people, but within your network you were one of the less prominent ones. Not because you were less well liked or less good-looking, but because you were tamer, more sensible, and more grounded. Kind of like him, he supposed.
He placed a hand on the small of your back and moved you aside with a cocky smirk. Grabbing your locker door, he braced against it with his shoulder and yanked it open on the first try.
“Thank you, Kai,” you smiled, checking the rust on the hinges of your locker door.
He winked. “Anything for you, Y/N.”
“Will you be at Aeri’s party on Friday?” you asked, leaning back against the closed locker next to yours and looking up at him, waiting.
Kai quickly got the hint and rested one hand on the locker right by your head, caging you in on your left. You always responded so well to his joking advances, which was something else he liked about you. You didn’t take anything he did too seriously, knowing he did everything in good fun.
“I will,” he confirmed, pausing only for a couple of seconds before adding, “I’ll be looking for you. I want to ask you for a favour.”
He didn’t realise he’d been subconsciously leaning in until his nose bumped up against yours. He was so close to you that he could see the outlines of your irises. There weren’t many people who could be pinned to a locker by him with his face so close to theirs without blushing or squealing, but you were one of the talented few.
“Can't you just ask me now?” you pressed, bristling at his vagueness. Your lips were plump and pink.
“I would, but I think someone’s waiting for you, and they seem a little impatient,” he informed you with an innocent grin, nodding down the corridor.
Standing a couple of metres away was Park Jongseong, another popular kid, watching everything unfold with annoyance written all over his face. According to the school rumour mill, he was your latest romantic link. You’d been seen with each other at his recent house party.
Kai backed away. The slits in the locker door had left parallel indentations on his palm. He traced your jaw with his index finger, preening at how naturally you lifted your head for him as he did.
“I think you may be right,” you sighed.
“Patience, baby,” he teased with a boyish smile. “I’ll catch you on Friday.”
——————————
You surveyed the amount of alcohol Aeri had stockpiled in her kitchen with a disapproving eye. As was tradition, you and your other friend Yizhuo were the first to arrive on Friday to help her set up.
“Don’t you think this is somewhat excessive?” you asked, preaching to a brick wall because Yizhuo was already tipsy, Aeri was careening towards the same destination, and the first guests had only just started to arrive.
While they were distracted, you removed half of the hard liquor and hid it in an empty cabinet. Aeri had hung a small whiteboard on the handle of the kitchen door that read, ‘drink responsibly :)’, like that was going to do anything. You shook your head and put some extra pitchers of water out on the counter.
Once the sun had set, Aeri’s house began to fill up rapidly. She and Yizhuo were sitting on the floor of her living room in a circle with eight other people playing some sort of kissing game. They invited you to join, but you declined. Those types of things had never interested you. Besides, you were waiting for Kai to show up.
You weren’t sure exactly why you kept thinking about him. Fine, you’d had a crush on him two years ago, but you had crushes on people all the time and you’d long since moved on from him. In the circles you moved in it wasn’t even puppy love; it was cycles of infatuation. Everyone was constantly flirting and hooking up with one another; it was hard not to get caught up in it every now and then.
But there you were, refusing advance after advance from your countless suitors, faithfully waiting for Kai. Eventually your head started to hurt from the pounding bass of Aeri’s expensive surround-sound system and you retreated upstairs.
The doors on the second floor were all locked with fancy electronic locks, but you had the password to the guest room. You keyed it in, slipped inside, and escaped to the balcony.
Normally you’d be downstairs joining in the fun (and more likely than not making sure people were drinking responsibly) but you had to admit that the peace and quiet was equally enjoyable in a different way.
An hour passed before you heard a familiar voice behind you.
“I was looking everywhere for you.”
It was Kai. You had accidentally left the door unlocked.
“What are you doing out here?” He closed the door behind him and joined you on the balcony, leaning against the railing like you were doing. He was wearing a black button up over a white t-shirt and black jeans, as effortlessly good-looking as he always was. His black hair, no longer styled neatly for school, was messy and tousled in the best way.
“I have a headache,” you told him, which had been true an hour ago, but you were fine now. “What about you? Why aren’t you downstairs?” you asked. You still had no urge to return to your friends even though they were blowing up your phone.
He shrugged. “Not in the mood to drink tonight.”
Your friends sometimes called Kai his friend group’s version of you — less wild, more sensible, more innocent, albeit more childishly chaotic at times. He kept them in check, or tried to, because they didn’t listen to him much.
“It’s nice to get you alone for once. It doesn’t happen very often.”
“I could say the same for you,” you replied, casually picking a piece of lint off of his collar. “Where were we on Tuesday?”
He smirked with a cool confidence that would probably have come off as sleazy if he wasn’t so charming, turning around to face you. He rested both of his hands on the railing on either side of you, again caging you in, bringing his face close to yours.
“I believe we were here,” he whispered, “and I was about to ask you something.”
Strangely, your heart jumped. You weren’t the type of person to get nervous at such gestures; in fact, you were known for being unflappable in situations like this. He didn’t give you any time to think too hard about the uneasiness in your chest, though, because the next thing out of his mouth wiped your mind completely clean.
“Can we pretend to date?”
“What?”
His phone went off but he ignored it, laughing at the ridiculousness of a scenario of his own creation. His smile when he wasn’t trying to be flirtatious or seductive was sweet and pure. You wished he smiled like that more, because he looked cute when he did.
“Okay, hear me out,” he began, already giggling before he’d even said anything. “Beomgyu just got into a relationship, and I’m the only person in our group who hasn’t been in one yet.”
“Are they giving you shit for it?” you asked, confused, because his friends didn’t seem like the sort of people to do that. Sure, they were massive flirts, but they were also nice people. You’d never heard anyone say anything that negative about them, including Kai.
Especially Kai. He was the least playboy-ish of them all, not so much a chronic heartbreaker as he was just a good-looking guy who liked the attention but could never get past the initial stages of infatuation.
Not that you spent a lot of time thinking about him or anything.
He sighed. “Not exactly, but according to them I’m too much of a flirt to settle down.”
Your lips quirked up into a smile. “Are you?”
That mustn’t have been what he was expecting to hear, because his eyebrows flicked upwards in surprise. “I- I feel like they see me as immature. They think I’m- I don’t know- scared of commitment or something,” he answered, hesitant.
Just like you weren’t normally the type to get nervous, Kai wasn’t normally the type to hesitate. But here he was, unsure, for once not entirely confident in what he was saying.
“Is what other people think important to you?” you continued, looking up at him.
He smiled again, one of his rare real ones. “Why do you ask such hard questions?”
You laughed. “I’m just trying to understand your motivations, as one is apt to do when an acquaintance of theirs asks them to pretend to date them,” you teased.
“Acquaintances? I thought we were friends,” he pouted in mock-hurt, leaning in and glancing down at your lips. “Although I guess not many people would see this as purely friendly,” he added, lowering his voice and gesturing to the small space between you.
You ignored the slight spark of excitement in your heart when he said that, holding up two fingers. “I have two more questions. They’re easier, I promise,” you said. “First, what’s in it for me?”
He touched your jaw lightly. He seemed to like doing that. “You get to be with the best-looking guy in school. I’ll take you on fake dates anywhere you want. And I have a movie projector system in my basement.”
That last point made you laugh again. “I have to admit, those are enticing perks,” you said, playing along. “Second, why did you ask me?”
“I like you,” he answered simply. You shook your head and turned away, because you knew he didn’t mean it. “So, what do you think? Can I be your fake boyfriend?”
Against your best judgement, you nodded.
“I promise I’ll make it worth your while,” he said, his voice low.
You poked his chest playfully. “I’ll hold you to that, fifteen day king.”
More than an hour and a half had passed by the time you returned to the party, but your friends were still playing that stupid kissing game. Yizhuo was the first to see you and Kai walking down the stairs together, wiggling her eyebrows suggestively at you. You hurriedly ushered him towards the kitchen, hoping to disappear before anyone else noticed, but Aeri spotted you.
“Y/N!” she screamed, piercingly loud and very drunk. She was lucky it was her house. “Where were you? We were waiting,” she whined, dragging out the word ‘waiting’.
“Especially this guy,” Yizhuo shouted, equally as loud and drunk, gesturing to Jongseong sitting beside her. “He kept asking us where you went. He wants to make out with you.”
You stifled a laugh at her obliviousness to the boy’s embarrassment — he was beet red and avoiding your gaze like looking at you would turn him to stone.
“I’ll join you in a bit!” you called out across the living room, noncommittal, barely audible over the blaring music.
Jongseong started to stand up like he wanted to follow you to the kitchen, but he quickly backtracked when Kai slipped an arm around your waist and pulled you into his side. You turned to him in surprise.
Kai tapped his fingers on your hip and smirked. “Shall we start?”
——————————
After school the next Monday, the same day Kai surprise-debuted your relationship on his Instagram, you were standing at Yizhuo’s locker with her and Aeri. While you waited for her to find her phone charger, someone grabbed you by the waist from behind and rested their head on your shoulder.
“Hello,” Kai said against the shell of your ear. “I missed you.”
You despised the way your heart raced at that — you knew it wasn’t real — but you swore it was solely because he was so good-looking and nothing else. Yes, you would feel that way if any other good-looking person touched you like that and said those words against the shell of your ear.
You turned your head to kiss his cheek. “Hi.”
“Sorry to steal your lovely friend away from you,” he said to Aeri and Yizhuo, releasing your waist from his grasp and taking your hand instead. “But we’re walking home together today.”
“We are?” you asked. Kai rather conspicuously kicked in the back of your knee, like kids do to trip each other over. You issued a hasty correction, “Oh, yeah, we are.”
As soon as you were out of earshot, he let go of your hand and burst into laughter, throwing his head back. It was yet another glimpse of his true self, without rehearsed displays of confidence or calculated movements crafted specifically to entice.
“You know, I thought I was going to be the unconvincing one, but you might be worse than me,” he said in between giggles. “Have your friends been won over?”
Your hand felt empty, but you ignored it. “Apparently the Instagram post was enough for them,” you answered, waiting for a beat before adding, “it would’ve been nice to have a heads up, though.”
He tapped his temple with a knowing grin. “No paper trail. Speaking of which, can I come over?”
Your grip on your school file tightened. “For what?”
“Well, we should probably get to know each other if we’re going to pull this off,” he said, and he had a point. Honestly, neither of you had really thought through your plan (or lack thereof) since Friday.
You’d reached the school gates. “Right.”
“Do you not want me to come over?” he frowned, given pause by your unenthused response. The only people you’d ever invited to your house were Aeri and Yizhuo, and even then, you’d only done so after knowing them for four whole years. “Actually, now that I think about it, you’ve never held a party at your place.”
Most of the kids you were friends with lived on the north side of the city in the spacious suburbs — home to brand new mansions with surround sound systems, electronic door locks, and perfectly manicured backyards.
In fact, of all of the ‘popular’ students, you were the only one who didn’t. You lived in the west where all the old apartments were, and your two best friends were the only ones who knew that. As Kai astutely observed, you were always at other people’s houses for parties, but you were never the host of your own.
He was already walking north towards the train station. See, everyone always assumed you lived in the suburbs too. You grabbed the sleeve of his school blazer, pulled him towards the intersection, and pushed the traffic light button in answer.
“Where are we going?” he asked, confused. You weren’t sure exactly why you were willing to show him where you lived without first befriending him and making him wait for four years. On some intrinsic level, not having realised it yet, you must’ve trusted him.
You put your hands in your pockets and took a deep breath. “To my house.”
——————————
Kai was largely silent as he followed you, too busy taking in the sights of the unfamiliar streets and buildings to talk. Funnily, although he’d grown up in this city and lived a mere twenty minutes away, he’d never once walked through this area. He liked it.
“I’m jealous. You get to walk to school,” he said, looking around. You didn’t respond. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” Your voice was flat, quiet, and so unlike your usually chipper self. You stopped walking so suddenly that he bumped into you on the narrow pavement, and gestured to the short three-storey building in front of you. “Here we are.”
It was old and run-down, with overgrown green vines invading its facade and a massive padlock on the damaged front door holding it shut.
“I like it,” he declared, smiling at the small yellow flowers sprouting from the ancient vines sprawled across the grey cement walls. You pretended to be preoccupied with fishing your keys out of your bag.
He wasn’t really the sort of person to keep speaking just because the other party refused to, but now he had the urge to fill the silence. Maybe it was down to him being unaccustomed to seeing you without a smile on your face for so long.
“I like this whole street,” he continued, feeling strangely compelled to get a response out of you. “It’s got so much more personality than where I live.”
Although it didn’t reach your eyes, you smiled. “That’s nice of you to say,” you said, but he could tell it was insincere.
The way you were glancing around at your surroundings told him you were picturing the northern suburbs where he and all your friends lived — comparing your apartment building to their stand-alone mansions, the weeds colonising your cracked pavements to their pristinely landscaped lawns, and the heavy rusted chains on your neighbours’ doors to their automated alarm systems. Maybe you were even thinking about the movie projector system in his house that he’d promised you. He shut up.
You gingerly eased the main door open — it was nearly falling off of its hinges — and led Kai up the narrow coiled staircase to the second floor, letting him into your apartment. Again, he kept his mouth shut as you brought him into your room.
“Make yourself comfortable. I’ll go get you a drink,” you said, excusing yourself.
He sat down at the foot of your bed (he would’ve sat at your desk, but you didn’t have one) and studied your room. It was small, big enough for your bed, a small dresser, and not much else. Like the rest of your house, it was small and modest, but clean and uncluttered.
In lieu of a headboard, you had pictures of you and your friends taped to the wall above your bed. Most were polaroids complete with Sharpie captions, and others were strips of photos from mall photo booths. Interspersed between them were ticket stubs, receipts, and long handwritten birthday letters from your two best friends.
One photograph in particular caught his eye: it was of all three of you in your room, on the very bed he was sitting on, making a scrapbook together. You had your arms wrapped around Aeri, Yizhuo’s head on your shoulder, and a massive smile on your face.
In it, your hair was unstyled. You were wearing glasses, no jewellery, and a loose grey sweatshirt. It was completely antithetical to how he always saw you in school or at parties — so impeccably put together with contacts in, your hair done to perfection, and carefully chosen accessories to match your well-planned outfits. He liked you better without all that faff, he decided.
You returned with two sodas in your hands and shut the door behind you with your foot.
“This is cute,” he complimented, pointing to your wall collage. “I’ve been meaning to put up something similar in my room for ages.”
Finally, you gave him a genuine smile. “Thanks, Kai.”
It seemed like you were about to join him on your bed, but you changed your mind and sat on the floor instead. “So, the plan,” you started, already back to your old self, “What did your friends say?”
“They’re not buying it,” he complained. “They asked me what I was trying to prove when I posted that picture of you. Beomgyu’s already started his fifteen-day countdown.”
You covered your mouth with your hand and laughed. “To be fair to them, we didn’t interact at all in school today,” you said.
Kai hummed. You were right.
“What should we do, then? We could walk to school together, I guess. I can meet you at the intersection after I get off the train,” he suggested, knowing it was a pathetic excuse for an idea even before he said it. You told him to wait while you got out your notebook and a pen.
If you’d been anyone else, he would’ve taken you by the waist and pulled you onto the bed with him, but for some reason he didn’t feel like flirting with you. Not right then, anyway. His head was curiously still occupied by the thought of you in that picture on the wall behind him.
He wanted to see that side of you, more of it. The side of you who asked him difficult probing questions about his inner psyche. The side of you who let him come over to your house and see your room. The side of you who carefully arranged photos and memorabilia on your wall, away from the chaos of loud parties or your popular friends.
“Kai. Kai!” you called, tapping your pen against his knee, looking up at him questioningly from your spot on the floor. He snapped out of it. “What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing,” he lied, unconvincing. “Sorry, I didn’t hear what you said.”
You clipped the end of your pen between your teeth with a breathy laugh, drawing his attention straight to your lips. This was your public self, complete with an enigmatic gaze and a flirty upward tilt of the corners of your mouth. Perhaps he did want to pull you into his lap.
“I said we should have lunch together, and maybe pretend to hang out after school a couple of days a week,” you repeated.
“Sounds good,” he agreed, but you were still looking at him inquisitively, like you could tell he was off. He patted the spot on your bed next to him like it was his own and said, “Come here.”
Together, sitting side by side on your bed, you worked out your schedules down to the hour, meticulously planning when you would see each other and which friends would be around to witness your interactions.
“What do you think will convince your friends? You know them better,” you asked.
Kai shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. Maybe we need to, like, make out in front of them or something,” he said, only half-joking. He’d never spent this much time in someone else’s room, let alone on someone else’s bed, without touching them even once. He wanted to.
You laughed again. “Yeah, maybe.”
Turning to you, he placed his hand on your knee and leaned in. “Shall we practise?”
He hadn’t expected you to clam up at that, but you did. You were one of the most popular kids in school, constantly connected to one love interest or the other, always seen flirting with and surrounded by others. All the people in your social circle, including him and his friends, got around. Surely, you did too.
“Maybe some other time,” you said casually, putting your own hand over his. But he had noticed, no matter how swiftly you recovered or how much you tried to hide it. “My brothers are coming home soon. I need to get dinner ready for them.”
He didn’t even know you had brothers. He was realising that, despite how talkative and open and outgoing you acted, you rarely shared anything about yourself. In fact, the more time he spent with you, the less he felt like he knew you.
cw - non-idol!au, fluff, friends to lovers, grocery shopping + food talk, jongho + wooyoung + yeosang are flatmates
word count: 1.3k
a/n: i loved writing this sm, if anybody wants a sequel lmk bc i'd love to write one <3
Jongho reckons that sooner or later he'll fall in love with you.
He hasn't known you all that long, and for most of the time he has known you you've been a friend of a friend and nothing more. But when he looks at you now, looking through milk cartons with far more concentration than necessary as you try to identify the exact kind of milk Wooyoung asked you to buy, he thinks that all that time he was just waiting to make his mind up. If you can even make up your mind about something like falling in love.
"It's this one," he interrupts your train of thought, reaching for the pink-tinted carton of strawberry milk that's right in front of you. He watches you go through all of the stages of grief as he places the carton in the shopping basket you're holding. Finally, you turn to look at him and gasp.
"Did you know the whole time and not tell me?" you ask in an accusatory tone. He laughs and shrugs.
"It looked funny when you kept staring at them," he says, patting your shoulder when you roll your eyes, a pout forming on your lips.
"Whatever," you grumble, letting Jongho pick up a carton of regular milk as well before the two of you start walking down the aisle to collect the rest of the items you were sent here for by Jongho's flatmate.
Grocery store lighting isn't flattering, but somehow you make it work. The fluorescent lighting highlights your imperfections (Jongho thinks you should wash your hair tonight and will likely mention it later) but for some reason it doesn't make you look unappealing at all. You make this lighting look even better than that overpriced ring light Wooyoung keeps insisting makes his selfies look better. Jongho stares at you for a little longer and then looks away before you can call him out on it.
"Hey, should we get pizza dough?" you ask, coming to a sudden halt in front of a fridge full of all kinds of ready made dough. There's a happy glint in your eyes when you look at him. If it had been anybody else Jongho would've told them to get a regular frozen pizza, but he knows he won't be able to convince you otherwise now that your mind is set on it. He doesn't know if he likes that you're headstrong yet (he'll figure it out once he's sure he's in love with you) but he indulges the trait and grabs a roll of pizza dough to put in the basket. You grin. "Nice!"
"We need to get cheese now though," he says, looking down the aisle. "Wooyoung didn't give us money for that, right?"
"It's cool, I'll cover it," you say casually. You don't even live in their flat, so grocery expenses shouldn't fall on your shoulders, but you don't seem bothered by it at all. The two of you walk down the aisle and as you grab two bags of pizza cheese (what the fuck is pizza cheese anyway?) Jongho checks the price tag as subtly as he can.
"We'll split it," he says.
"The cheese?" you ask, raising an eyebrow as you stare at him. Jongho's stomach does all kinds of somersaults and flips. His insides could get an Olympic gold medal in gymnastics if they keep this up. "I wasn't planning on just eating it by myself, only Hongjoong does weird shit like that."
"And Yunho," Jongho corrects you with a snort. "No, I mean we can both pay for the cheese."
Your eyes widen and Jongho grins when you give him an embarrassed nod.
"Shit, yeah, right," you mumble, your words running together. Jongho laughs again. You're cute, he thinks. Not that he would ever say that out loud, probably not even after he falls in love with you. "Anyway, Yeosang asked for Monster."
"Gamer girl juice," Jongho mumbles, which makes you let out a loud bark of laughter that sounds far too similar to Wooyoung's laugh for his liking, considering everyone in the aisle has turned to stare at you both. He guesses that whole thing about people being like their five closest friends must be true. "You should pray for his kidneys, he's one of those people who forgets to piss whenever he's playing."
"Isn't caffeine a diuretic as well?" you ask, still stifling a laugh as the two of you come to a stop in front of a refrigerator stocked with brightly coloured energy drinks. Jongho hums as he nods, and watches you pick out a few cans. Bright pink. Teal. Green. Yellow. Purple.
"Wait, what are you picking based on?" Jongho interrupts, staring at the rainbow you've created in the shopping basket.
"Well I know the orginal black ones taste like piss so the colourful ones must be the opposite, right?" you glance at Jongho, looking for confirmation. He just shrugs.
"I don't know, last time I drank Monster was when I turned sixteen," he says. The two of you look between each other and the cans in the basket for a few moments, Jongho's heartbeat picking up it's pace the more you look at him. He swallows his nerves and points at the refrigerator. "Get him one that tastes like piss as well."
You do as he says, grabbing the original can and setting it down in the basket.
"Good call," you say solemnly.
There's nothing else on the list that the two of you need to buy. The shopping carton is now filled with vegetables, a bag of frozen chicken, the two cartons of milk, your pizza supplies, energy drinks, a copious amount of instant ramen and a few apples. A decent-looking basket for three guys in their early twenties (plus the few things that you threw in for the times you eat lunch with them). The two of you keep walking around the store anyway, making fun of brand names and debating over whether you should get crisps as well.
"Wait!" you exclaim suddenly, looking at Jongho as though you've just come up with a way to achieve world peace. Jongho smiles at you as though you have. "Let's get donuts instead."
Okay, so maybe not on the same level as achieving world peace but Jongho keeps smiling anyway.
"Sure," he says, and you grin as the two of you make your way to the bakery section of the store.
The bag of donuts that you place in the basket seems to mark the end of the shopping trip, and the two of you make your way to the till, spending a few minutes calculating how to split the cost of the extra groceries before you actually pay, both of you crossing your fingers that Jongho's bank card doesn't decline (Yeosang managed to input the wrong code for his card twice and Jongho's been living in fear of losing his card ever since).
"Here, let me carry them," Jongho says once the two of you are out of the store, taking the three plastic bags (what can he say, they're easier to reuse than the paper ones) and huffing softly as he arranges them in his grip.
"Thank you strong man," you say, only half-joking.
"You're welcome," Jongho replies politely, only half-serious.
You've walked halfway back to Jongho's apartment when you interrupt the idle chatter the two of you have kept up about wifi costs and whether or not the government cares about the exponential construction of apartments in favour of taking one of the bags from him.
"We should do this more often," you comment. Jongho raises an eyebrow.
"What, go grocery shopping?"
"Yeah," you say with a firm nod. "It was fun."
Well. Jongho can't deny that.
"I'll let you know when I'm on grocery duty again then," he says. He looks over at you and finds you smiling at the dreary view of concrete and traffic around the two of you - not that he could find it dreary when you're there.
In all honesty, Jongho reckons he's going to fall in love with you sooner rather than later.
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