en-ternity

𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐛𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐳𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐨𝐨𝐧

[en-ternity]

hello & welcome to en-ternity. i am YUMI! your local jayke’s girl. twenty-something. she/her. literature major. cat’s mother. and this is the safe space where i archive my delulu stories with ENHYPEN’s hyung line!

feel free to contact me through the ask any time ♡

LIBRARY

ONGOING SERIES: MEET ME AT OUR SPOT

[en-ternity]

my loves, i have a question! ♡ i have this established relationship au series planned, where each part is just a small slice-of-life scene (some are nsfw, but most are sfw). i was going to do it with a member, but while i was editing the second part, i noticed it could fit another member, so i am leaving it for you to decide

which member is most likely to have your birthmarks memorized and always trace it?

to go to your place in the middle of the night and under the rain just because you said you had a bad day?

to appear at your door drunk because he suddenly missed you but keep saying it is just because his house is too far away and he is too tired?

tell me ♡

Jay

Jake

Hoon

Remaining time: 9 hours 25 minutes

[en-ternity]

Just finished reading and glad to inform you that I did NOT cringe at all! Literally fighting the urge to reread it, it’s so so good , if my friend spoke English I would force them to read it as well and honestly it’s worth it to learn English. Imma read all your works now you’re my favourite author and I’m not trying to flatter, you are that good!

Also I’m really sorry that you had a bad day, hope you’re doing well now, remember after hardship comes ease💞

learning english for fanfics is definitely the most valid reason, careers, and whatever people tell us to learn english to can wait lmao 🤧 but seriously, the fact that you’d want to recommend it to your friend if it wasn’t for the language barrier and that i am your favorite author now is such a honor 🤲🏻 i will do my best to bring more enjoyable stories! ♥️ also, i am so glad you didn’t cringe, i got scared for a moment cause i know the reader overreacted on a few scenes in the second part lmao but it all end well, i see ✨ thank you so much once again for reading and loving tpsateotw!

(also thank you so much for your soothing words! after hardship comes ease is such a comforting reminder, and i really needed that ☹️)

[en-ternity]

I LOVE YOUR FICS, YOU DA REAL GOAT

blushing and kicking my feet! 🙈 i am so glad to know you enjoyed my stories that much! ♥️ thank you for reading and even taking some time to send me an ask. it meant a lot!

[en-ternity]

I’m back cause I forget to mention how perfect the dialogues are there ( I’m saying “perfect” to much but trust me there’s no other words!) usually it’s dialogues that authors have poorly written but you have it all well done😭

thank you so much, anonie 🥹 i am so sorry for not being able to find the right words to thank you, but i swear, your asks made my day 🤲🏻 (and i hope you didn’t cringe on the second part lmao)

[en-ternity]

You’re an author of the century! Haven’t finished reading part 2 of TPSATEOTW yet but had to stop cause of the urge to tell how much I love this story, it’s so so perfect , got me all giggling and kicking my feet! Everything about this fic is perfect , I swear there was no part or even one single word that made me cringe or stuff like that. It deserves to be published I’m pretty sure it would be a bestseller, and then we need a life action of it. Not enough words to express how much I loved it 😭 best literary piece ever! and Jake’s character is so so good , you raised my standards, how am I gonna live without a man like this in my life 🫠

Thank you so much for this masterpiece, it is truly a masterpiece. Pls never stop writing you so freaking talented🩷

OH MY GOD, AUTHOR OF THE CENTURY?! PLEASE, ANONIE! my ego might not recover after this one 🤧 lmao but jokes aside, you have no idea how much your ask meant to me 🥹 i had such a hard day today, and to come here and read this genuinely made everything so much better, so first of all, thank you so so so much for sending me this 🤲🏻 tpsateotw was written from a bunch of personal experience, and it took me so long to put everything on paper, so to see it being so loved always mean so much to me ♥️ i am glad to know you liked it and didn’t cringe or anything hehehe i tried my best, although i feel like you will cringe a bit on a few scenes on the second part 🙈 please, tell me later how it went! hahaha

thank you for reading, loving it and taking some time to write this message 🥹

[en-ternity]

also, for the anonies who asked about it, the second part of the pottery shop at the edge of the world is finally edited and available to read again! ♡ sorry for taking so long :(

[en-ternity]

At the luxurious resort of Marriotte, the staff lived by a single unofficial rule: don’t get involved with the guests. Not the gilded men, not the wives, and certainly not the daughters. One slip meant losing everything. But then you stepped too close, and Sunghoon couldn’t bring himself to care (not anymore)

a summer romance divided into two parts

PAIRING: lifeguard!Sunghoon x fem!reader

WARNINGS (for this part): poor!boy x rich!girl tropé, kinda forbidden love, Sunghoon is rude to you at the beginning, but we love a man who comes back and yearns, right? right?! slow-burnish, mentions of cuts and blood, alcohol consumption, cigarettes usage, reader almost drowns once, and Sunghoon has to save her

PART ONE｜21.6K｜STORY MASTERLIST

Park Sunghoon wouldn’t really describe himself as a waiter.

After all, when he had been hired at the luxurious resort of Marriotte, he had been hired as a lifeguard.

Mr. Hwang — or Mr. Grumpy, as Sunghoon came to know the staff members not so affectionately called their head manager — had been clear about Sunghoon’s part at the resort: for forty hours a week, he had to monitor the pool area, enforce rules, and respond to emergencies, ensuring the guests’ safety as if their lives were made of spun gold.

“Because they are,” Mr. Hwang said, his tone coming with a certainty so untroubled that Sunghoon had to clench his jaw to prevent the honest reply from rolling out of his mouth.

In another universe, he would’ve rolled his eyes and declined. In another universe, he wouldn’t have been born to a poor family on a small island in Jeju, and a job at eighteen wouldn’t have felt like a life raft you grabbed with both hands or drowned.

But this was not another universe.

In this one, he saw the contract with ten thousand won per hour in bold letters, and signed it as he had learned to sign his father’s hospital forms — fast, and without questions for which he couldn’t afford.

But not once — not even once — Mr. Hwang had mentioned that Sunghoon had to learn about French champagne and fill in for waiters, turning fragile crystal into another kind of hazard.

Yet — here he was.

Tray in hand, and wearing a shirt he had borrowed so many times that Jongseong had already stopped accepting it back.

In the few hours he had been given off his lifeguard duty, the deck had been completely altered. The beach chairs that usually angled toward the water were gone, replaced by long tables laid out with linen so white and crisp, they looked ironed — probably Mrs. Kye being ordered to do them along with the suite’s linens — only for the children to ruin everything, clutching it on their chubby hands as they kept on what Sunghoon suspected to be a game of tag.

On any other night, he would’ve told them not to run — not so close to the pool — but luxury was nimble and so was everything in Marriotte, and the pool was just another part of the grand decoration, and such warning was unnecessary. So Sunghoon walked past them instead, weaving between guests, and letting fragments of conversation brush against him like perfume: mergers, villa renovations, summers that lasted forever because this was what Marriotte guests sounded like — people perched so high on the social ladder they spoke as if they could negotiate with the sun.

Somewhere in there, a woman gestured for him to trade her empty glass for another one, her eyes never moving toward him — not even when she groaned a finally at him, and Sunghoon mumbled an excuse as if he had in fact been late for an appointment with her.

He moved away with his pulse tight, catching a blur of bare legs and pastel silk weaving between the chairs’ backs, but as he tried to move out of the way, another child darted through the narrow gap between two tables and bumped right into his thigh.

There was a gasp. A tiny oh no and Sunghoon was falling sideways, bringing the tray with him.

Crystal flutes exploded against the porcelain floor, and shards and golden champagne burst out, soaking through his clothes in a cold rush, instantly sour-sweet and expensive in a way his tongue didn’t understand. And for one terrible and infinite moment, everything seemed to halt.

The string quartet faltered, and conversations dissipated in the middle of a sentence — all the furor of the party suddenly replaced by a silence so complete that Sunghoon could hear his own ragged breathing and the tinkling sound of the crystal still settling against the floor.

He felt the weight of eyes on him, dozens of them, and his face burned with a shame so intense that he felt it like a physical force.

But worse than that was the immediate calculation.

How many glasses had he been carrying? Twelve? No. It surely was more than that, and the last time a staff member broke this amount of flutes, he had not only lost all his monthly salary, but owed the resort the subsequent one. And it wasn’t even filled with Krug Clos d’Ambonnay or any French shit that had been demanding that the staff members handle it with white gloves in the kitchen throughout the whole night.

Sunghoon would be lucky if he was going to manage to buy an ice pop by the end of the summer.

“Oh, my God!” He heard your voice cutting through the panic already spiraling in his mind, and it was enough to make Sunghoon gather himself, pushing up on his elbows. Crystal crunched beneath him with a sound that made him wince before he found himself staring up at you.

“I am so sorry, my cousin—” you began, but Sunghoon wasn’t really listening.

You were beautiful, and he hated that it was his first thought — he hated the way his breath caught despite the fury flooding through his veins like acid. Your hair was swept up in a twist that had probably required an hour and a professional to bring on the exact tendrils that now framed your face in that kind of perfection. Diamond earrings dangled from your ears, each one probably worth more than the whole set of flutes your cousin had just cost him, and catching all the fairy lights overhead, sending sparkles across your exposed collarbones as you knelt by his side. The skirts of your dress sank into the champagne, darkening at where it touched the floor, but you did not even look at it. Your face stayed on him — as if you couldn’t come to care about anything but him at this exact moment.

But Sunghoon wasn’t naive — not anymore — after years of serving people like you, he knew exactly how this would go.

People like you didn’t have to hold onto anything for long. Not objects. Not consequences. Not people.

The moment he left your sight, he would vanish from your life.

“Are you hurt?” you asked. “Oh no, you are.”

Sunghoon glanced down at his left hand, catching a glimpse of where a slice had opened across his palm, and allowed blood to gather too quickly, bright and shocking against his champagne-soaked sleeve.

Out of the corner of his eyes, he saw you reaching out to him.

“Don’t!” He snapped, the word cutting through the air louder than he expected

He pushed air into his lungs and did the only thing he could think to do: assess, contain, fix.

Perhaps if he moved fast enough, the damage would look smaller — it would cost less.

“I only meant to—”

“I’m fine,” he bit out, the words nipping as badly as where the shard had bitten him as he pressed it against the floor to push himself up. “Completely fine.”

“I—” you began again, but Sunghoon had already stood up, bowing at you in something between an acknowledgement and a dismissal.

“I’ll get it cleaned,” he said, turning and walking away.

You didn’t say anything this time, but merely stood still.

As Sunghoon walked toward the main building entrance, he caught sight of a waiter approaching you. She said something about getting you dry, and getting you up from the floor, which was a terrible floor, by the way, very slippery, she hushed as an apology, although everything Sunghoon saw was some type of premium porcelain and couldn’t remember it being truly slippery until now.

What a disaster, he thought. What an absolute disaster.

⋆˚꩜｡

By the time Sunghoon walked back onto the pool deck, the party had already resumed its glittering momentum.

The string quartet played on, and guests chatted in that same wash of careless sound as they did previously, moving through their conversation, their glasses of champagne — their effortlessly perfect lives — and leaving Sunghoon to kneel beside the shattered glass alone, cleaning up a mess that would cost him more than he could afford.

He worked methodically, sweeping and mopping until the deck shone again, and the cut on his palm burned hotter than his own shame.

He would need a cigarette tonight.

When he was walking back to the main building, a staff member intercepted him, her expression pinched with barely concealed irritation.

“Mr. Hwang wants to see you,” she said. “Now.”

Something cracked deeper in Sunghoon’s chest, something that felt dangerously close to breaking completely.

This was it, then. The scorn — if not the possible firing — he had been expecting.

He followed the woman through the last steps into the lobby, and behind the desk to the administrative area, each step heavier than the last, as if gravity itself were conspiring to make this walk as painful as possible.

Mr. Hwang’s office door was open.

The older man already sat behind his striking table, but he didn’t look up as Sunghoon entered. He just continued to review something on his computer screen with the kind of deliberate patience that was clearly meant to make Sunghoon suffer.

And it worked. Something within his stomach tightened as he stood there.

“Sit,” Mr. Hwang said, still not looking at him.

Sunghoon did as he said, and Mr. Hwang finally turned away from his screen, leaning back in his chair as he wove his fingers on the table in front of him.

“That was quite a performance tonight, don’t you agree?” Mr. Hwang asked. “Entertaining our guests by shattering a few million won’s worth of crystal.”

Sunghoon’s jaw clenched. “It was an accident. A child—”

“I’m aware of what happened,” Mr. Hwang cut in. “The young lady came to see me personally. Paid for every single glass, and insisted — no, begged — for nothing happen to you. That you were just doing your job and she was at fault for being negligent with her cousin—”

Mr. Hwang kept talking, but Sunghoon had already stopped listening after the word beg. Something had twisted in his chest then — a complicated knot of emotions he couldn’t quite begin to untangle.

If you paid, it meant that he wouldn’t lose his salary. He wouldn’t go back to his parents’ house empty-handed and be unable to help.

He wouldn’t drown — not this month, at least.

But then the moment soured, suddenly and irreversibly, because the rope had been thrown by you.

Sunghoon’s mind moved back to the pool deck before he could even stop himself, retracing the way you had dropped to your knees, champagne darkening the skirts of your dress like it didn’t matter — as if he mattered more.

He had thought it was pity — perhaps a performance — a rich girl’s impulse to feel good about being kind.

But begging wasn’t performative. Not when you could have just walked away, gone to your glimmering suite, and left him to deal with all the mess.

“She—” Sunghoon started, more in surprise than defense — the idea of you sitting in that exact same chair changed the shape of you in his head, and it startled him, the thought that he might actually like you — but Mr. Hwang had interpreted his intervention wrongly, holding up a hand.

“I don’t want to hear your excuses,” he said. “I should fire you for your attitude tonight. You seem to have forgotten something fundamental about this job. Those guests down there?” He turned, vaguely gesturing toward the window and the party still sparkling under them. “They pay more in a stay than you and I will earn in our entire lives combined.”

“This resort, your salary, my salary,” he continued. “It all exists because of them. So when they ask you to jump, you don’t question it — you surely don’t get angry at it — you ask how high and you smile while doing so. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Sunghoon said, the word coming before he could catch himself weighing them — before his pride could ride up and demand something impossible like fairness — because yes meant he would still be here in the morning, allowed to exist in this building that smelled like money, lemon, and polish.

The same citrus scent of this exact office, but as Sunghoon inhaled he could swear he caught champagne instead and — coconuts?

“Good,” Mr. Hwang said. “You’re not fired. But you’re being punished. Tomorrow you’re on yacht duty.”

Sunghoon halted. “I’m scheduled poolside, Jaeyun and I—”

“You’re scheduled wherever I tell you — and I am telling you that you’re on yacht duty tomorrow,” Mr. Hwang said, the corner of his lips moving upwards as if he was suddenly bemused. “The overnight charter with the corporate group. Departure at nine. Back at sunrise. I know how much you all love that.”

Actually, everyone knew.

Yacht duty was punishment dressed as scheduling.

It ran late into the night until dawn, the guests getting drunker and more difficult as the hours wore on. It was exhausting, demeaning, and occasionally dangerous — especially for lifeguards — and that was why Jaeyun and he always threw a coin for it, the loser getting the duty with a lot of complaints.

“Consider it a learning experience,” Mr. Hwang said, his voice suddenly dripping with a false benevolence. “A reminder of what happens when you forget your place. Now get out of my office. And Sunghoon?” He paused, allowing Sunghoon to take his moment to look back at him. “If I hear about another attitude problem from you — I don’t care which guest provoked it. You’re gone. Are we clear?”

“Yes,” he said, forcing himself to add, “Sir.”

⋆˚꩜｡

Sunghoon hadn’t realized how haggard his breath felt until the elevator doors opened at the staff floor and he inhaled for what felt like the first time in ages. His lungs filled with the scent of bleach and damp walls in a way that only happened in this particular poorly ventilated hallway.

While the rest of the resort glimmered in gold and navy carpets that smelled like lemon and polish, here — so under the ground — everything was slightly shoddy, and messy.

And perhaps that was why his brain tried to refuse the fact that you were here — here — just a few steps down the hallway, hair undone and in a dress simpler than the one he had seen you earlier on, but surely still, not fit to be under these humming fluorescent tubes, and surrounded by stacked boxes and off-white walls that had been scuffed by decades of carts, shoulders and hurried bodies.

The elevator dinged behind him as someone else called for it, and Sunghoon’s first instinct was to turn back at it, check if he had been the one to step into the wrong floor, but not only the peeling paint gave way that he didn’t, but the small sign with STAFF ONLY in bold letters.

“Excuse me,” you tried.

Sunghoon spun back at you, trying his best to don a neutral aspect, but as you walked in his direction he felt as if he was losing control of his own body. He suddenly didn’t know how to stand — he had done it his whole life but suddenly he didn’t know how to be on his own feet.

The harsh fluorescent lights should have been unflattering, but they only made the small details about you impossible to ignore. A few strands of hair clung at the skin of your neck, taken by a thin thread of sweat in that way that Jeju summers always managed in their early days, and the edge of your lipstick was smudged at one corner, as though you had been biting on it and couldn’t come to find the time to check it on a mirror, and he felt delirious, his heart thudding harder the longer he looked — not because you were still beautiful despite it all, but because it were evidences that you had lived through the last hours too.

All together with him.

“I brought this,” you said out of silence, extending your hand to him, and only then did he notice you had been holding something: a simple and stupid roll of gauze in a plastic wrapping with the resort’s logo. “I asked at the front desk for a first aid kit, but they said they could not give it to me — if I had some type of injury they could contact a doctor — I tried explaining it was not for me, bu—”

You paused, taking in a breath as though you had rehearsed this whole speech before coming, curating every word carefully through your way down here but something had escaped you and now you didn’t know how to restart without losing the thin thread of courage you used to start.

“You shouldn’t be here.” He heard himself saying.

Your fingers tightened around the gauze, your neat, pale, and perfect nails crinkling the plastic and making it seem even smaller compared to the world you came from.

“Well, I know — I had to bribe a bellhop—”

The elevator dinged again, this time announcing someone’s arrival and Sunghoon’s composure snapped in half. He couldn’t take another scene — not tonight — not when Mr. Hwang had been clear that he was on his last chance.

His body acted before his mind could, reaching out for your free hand. His fingers closed around yours as he pulled you through the cluttered hallway, catching and opening the first knob he had found before he pushed you both inside — he first, and then you — pressing your body against his as he closed the door and engulfed you both in the darkness.

It wasn’t a real room, he realized, but the makeshift cabinet the room attendants used to stock supplies. The space so cluttered and small that when you gasped he felt it against his neck, warm and sweet smelling, coconuts, and the scent of the champagne still stuck on your skin as if you had changed, but didn’t wash yourself in the hurry of coming after him.

Outside, a cart squeaked as someone wheeled it out of the elevator, and he prayed it was one of the room attendant just ending their shift early and not coming for a supply.

“What—” you began, but Sunghoon raised a finger to his lips, earning himself a wince as he did so. He had forgotten about the cut in his palm, and he suddenly wished he could forget again. But as his finger hovered by his lips for another moment, the throbbing only increased as if the cut itself had remembered its existence and couldn’t cease now.

“Your hand,” you whispered.

Sunghoon shook his head at your worry, but you were already reaching out for him, the tip of your fingers brushing against his fevered pulse.

Someone laughed outside — the sound being so close — it felt dangerous, and if anyone opened this door and found you here it would be the end for him.

It wouldn’t matter what you had to say to Mr. Hwang this time. You wouldn’t be able to save him.

Not that he wanted to be saved by you. One time had been more than he could owe you.

Your fingertips moved through him, finding the cut.

“Don’t—” he hissed, his voice coming louder than the cabinet could hold and it didn’t just land on you — but in the air within — breaking something he didn’t realize that even existed until now.

Your hand dropped back to your own chest as your eyes flickered to his name tag and then, around, your breathing shallower as though you were suddenly trying to become smaller. And in the silence that followed, Sunghoon felt the moment when you came to realize something too.

“I am sorry. I did not realize it could get you in trouble,” you said, and the softness of it made him sick with himself. “I—”

But whatever the rest of your phrase was supposed to be, Sunghoon would never know because you were shaking your head then, reaching for the knob behind you.

The door opened with the smallest complaint of its hinges, and the fluorescent hallway light cut across your shoulder, the pale line of your collarbone, the gleam of your diamond earring.

And then you were gone, taking your warmth back with you.

⋆˚꩜｡

Sunghoon wasn’t sure how long he stayed in that small cabinet, but by the time he stepped out of it, he had grown so accustomed to the darkness that the humming fluorescent tubes had acquired a brightness so intense that his eyes hurt the whole way to the locker room.

As he walked to his locker, he felt as if he wasn’t fully inside of his own skin — as if his mind was somewhere else apart from his whole body — hovering on every single second of this unending night, replaying them as if repetition could change the way he made you leave.

He took off the borrowed shirt and shoved it into his bag in an attempt to let go of everything, but the champagne scent rose anyway, sweet, sharp, and expensive in a way that made his stomach turn. And he was suddenly back at the pool deck, your dress soaking on that same disgusting thing — he was back at that small cabinet you both so close up together, he felt all of your reactions.

Sunghoon pressed the heels of his hands against his forehead and stood like that for a second — breathing and telling himself that if he just stayed still long enough his body would remember how to be normal again — one breath, then another, counting them the way he was used to count drags as he was trying not to think, the way smoke used to give his hands something to do other than shake, and for one humiliating moment, he wished he had a cigarette more than he wished he had a clean shirt.

Somewhere behind him, a locker door clanged.

“You look like you fought a chandelier.” Sunghoon heard, and he didn’t need to turn around to know who it was.

Jaeyun had been raised in Australia, which gave him a peculiar accent that most girls called cute, but it only made Sunghoon certain that he could pick his best friend’s voice out from the whole island — perhaps the world.

“Wrong,” Sunghoon replied, finally looking at him. “The chandelier fought me.”

“Are you alright?”

“I have been worse.”

Jaeyun leaned against his open locker, his hair damp, and a towel curled around his neck as though he had just come in from a late dip — which he probably had. As Sunghoon had been unfortunate enough to be scheduled for the unusable pool tonight, Jaeyun had taken the small portion of the beach the resort claimed as theirs, and annually opened a debate online about whether they could.

“I’m fine,” Sunghoon confirmed.

“What happened?” Jaeyun asked, but Sunghoon only shrugged at the question.

“Champagne.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I have,” Sunghoon replied, reaching out for his clean t-shirt, tugging it over his head. He winced as he did so, the cut reopening for the second time of the night as the fabric caught.

“Hoon—”

“I’m fine.”

“You said that already,” Jaeyun shot back. “And it was a lie.”

“A child ran into me,” Sunghoon said then. “Crystal flutes went everywhere, and then—”

“And then?” Jaeyun pressed.

And then there was you — you asking if he was hurt. You at Mr. Hwang’s office begging for nothing to happen to him. You down here with gauze in your hands, and lipstick smudged and all he did was shove you in a cabinet and be rude again.

Where had you even left the gauze? Sunghoon wondered. Had you dropped it in the cabinet? Somewhere in the hallways as he pushed you through?

He suddenly felt like checking.

Inside the locker room, Jaeyun exhaled at Sunghoon’s sayings, reaching out for his own first aid kit and extending it to Sunghoon, but when Sunghoon didn’t reach back to it, Jaeyun recoiled and opened it himself.

Sunghoon watched as his friend walked toward him, taking his hand, and cleaning the cut with the kind of methodical calm that only made him feel worse at everything.

“You panicked because you’re scared.”

“What?”

Jaeyun tilted his head, but he didn’t look up. He continued with his doings — now, pressing in a gauze against it. “You shoved a rich guest into a closet because someone might see you standing close to them. That’s fear, Sunghoon.”

“Congratulations. You just discovered that I’m employed.” Sunghoon let out a humorless laugh. “It’s not fear, Jae — it’s common sense—”

“Alright, let’s say it’s both then,” Jaeyun said. “Common sense because Mr. Grumpy’s an asshole and those policies are bullshit, and fear because you keep thinking if you breathe wrong, your whole life is going to collapse above you.”

The world seemed to halt then and there, the air suddenly too still and allowing Sunghoon to notice how he ached at these words, a sharp twinge that started at his chest and spread to his throat, tightening there and making him breathless because Jaeyun had said it too cleanly — too accurately — and naming it made it now undeniable.

“Find her,” Jaeyun said. “Talk to her.”

“No”

“Why?”

“Because if Mr. Hwang finds out, he’ll fire me,” Sunghoon said, his voice harsher than he intended. “Because if the other staff see me talking to her, they’ll talk. Because if people start talking, it will become a rumor, and rumors become problems.” He swallowed. “And I can’t afford problems.”

“I expected more from you, Sunghoon,” Jaeyun said, but Sunghoon could tell that his heart wasn’t in it — not really.

“No doubt that was your first mistake.”

“So can you afford being the kind of person who makes someone feel like they’re hated merely for trying to help?” Jaeyun asked, and it felt like a slap.

Sunghoon couldn’t, and that was what had been eating him since you left.

They finished changing in silence, Sunghoon shoving his things into his bag with more force than necessary while Jaeyun remained calm on the other side, closing his locker so carefully, Sunghoon hadn’t realized he did, until he was standing by his side, completely changed and his bag hanging on one of his shoulders.

“Motorcycle still broken?” Jaeyun asked.

“Yeah.”

Jaeyun’s expression softened, his lips curling into the type of smile that only appeared when Sunghoon made it sound like he didn’t care.

“So you are still stuck with me.”

⋆˚꩜｡

The service exit opened onto the staff lot, and immediately, Jeju’s night shrouded him. The humming fluorescent tubes of the interior were taken by the dimmer yellowish lights of the parking lot, and the smell of bleach was replaced by the sea wind cutting through the heat, carrying salt, tangerine, and earthy cedar forest.

Somewhere above, the party was still going on — laughter and music carried faintly across the breeze — but here it was all Jeju, rough and wild.

The parking lot was mostly empty, only a few staff cars lined up, including Jaeyun’s old Jeep at the far end, its paint sun-faded and stubbornly alive.

Sunghoon stopped for a second — just before they reached it.

“Do you mind if I have a smoke?”

“Of course, I do,” Jaeyun snapped. “This thing will kill you.”

Sunghoon pulled the pack of cigarettes out of his bag anyway, selecting a single one out and lighting it up.

The first drag hit him all at once. The ember brightened in the dark as he inhaled, a small orange circle reflecting faintly on his knuckles, and the taste of cheap tobacco bloomed bitter on his tongue before settling in his lungs.

He exhaled, watching the stream unravel and vanish into Jeju’s air, and for a moment he let himself believe that if he kept drawing in smoke and letting it go, he could empty his chest out of this night too.

Out of you.

“You lost the coin toss,” Jaeyun said then.

“What?”

“The yacht duty.” Jaeyun slid to him. “You didn’t mention it. Which means you’re trying to pretend it isn’t happening.”

Sunghoon dropped his hand out of his mouth, his fingers tightening. He wasn’t sure if he was intentionally pretending, but he surely didn’t want to bring this up.

“It’s happening.”

“Mr. Hwang is such a—” Jaeyun began, but he cut himself off, sighing deeply and dramatically as he pushed his hair out of his forehead. For a moment, Sunghoon was confused about whether Jaeyun understood that he was the one not going to the yacht tomorrow night. But he quickly realized that Jaeyun did understand — it was just that he felt everything too deeply, and he cared for Sunghoon too much to allow such an unfairness to go on as nothing. “Okay. You’ll survive — I’ll bring you food. I’ll bring you even this stupid pack of cigarettes if necessary. And I’ll come rescue you if some executive tries to throw you into the sea.”

The scenario made Sunghoon want to laugh and what a strange feeling it was because it had been months since Sunghoon wanted to laugh — perhaps years.

“See?” Jaeyun asked, his lips curling into a smile once again. “Park Sunghoon is still a human.”

Sunghoon rolled his eyes and dragged in again.

“So what are you going to do about it?” Jaeyun asked.

“About the yacht?”

“About her, Sunghoon.”

“What can I do? I don’t even know her name — and I’ll probably never see her again.”

“You work at a luxury resort where she’s not only staying, but attending events,” Jaeyun said. “I’m guessing if you actually tried to find her, you could,”

His voice dropped.

“Jongseong is only leaving for Seoul at the end of summer, he could—” Jaeyun raised his hand, typing on an invisible keyboard. “The question is whether you want to try.”

Did he? Sunghoon wasn’t sure. The thought of facing you again made him want to sink to the ground. But the idea of never seeing you again also sits as an open wound in his chest.

“Find her,” Jaeyun said out of silence. “Your angel in the form of a heiress.”

Sunghoon wanted to see you again. Thank you, at least, and say sorry for the closet situation. And Jaeyun grinned as though he had read it through Sunghoon’s mind.

“Come on,” Jaeyun said, unlocking the car with a single jingle of keys. “Let’s get out of here before Mr. Grumpy finds something else to punish you for — like breathing too loudly or existing in his general vicinity.”

Sunghoon pulled the passenger door open and climbed in, sinking into the familiar worn seat. The car smelled like salt water, suncream, and the cheap air freshener Jaeyun had hung on the front mirror which was supposed to smell like fresh pine, but mostly just smelled like chemicals.

As Jaeyun tried the engine — letting it catch and taking on three times before it finally started — Sunghoon found himself staring at his reflection in the side mirror. He was exhausted, in need of a shower and long hours of sleep, but surely, he was not drowning in debt and not fired.

All because of you.

“By the way,” Jaeyun said, glancing at him across the gearstick. “Your motorcycle is dead-dead, or is it just being dramatic?”

“Dramatic, I hope,” Sunghoon said. “Jihoon’s brother is still checking on it.”

Jaeyun hummed, his right hand reaching for the gearstick and putting it in the fourth, racing the car just enough to allow the breeze to brush in — the perfect blend of salty sea air, tangerine, and earthy cedar forest taking over the small vehicle — it was undeniable Jeju’s summer.

And for some reason, it made Sunghoon’s skin creep a little.

The summer of his twenty-two years had begun, although Sunghoon didn’t know what it truly meant.

Yet.

The next night came with the scent of sea air, salt, and teak wood floors.

The yacht sailed from the resort’s private dock at the sunset as Mr. Hwang had promised, its hull gleaming under the floodlights, and turning the water below into a black sheet of polished glass as the deck swarmed with men in tailored suits and women with hair pinned into effortless perfection, as if the wind itself had been instructed not to touch them too harshly — bribed, perhaps — something Sunghoon thought that rich people only did in movies, but then you came over and—

God.

He couldn’t stop thinking about you.

Sunghoon stood at the lifeguard’s designated spot, his eyes scanning the crowd for what felt like the millionth time.

He told himself he wasn’t looking for you — that it was only instinct — he was taking stock of guests, counting faces and risks as his job demanded, but his eyes kept hovering on silhouettes. On bare shoulders, and flash of jewelry. On the slope of necks, and twist of hairs that could have been yours until he stared for a moment too long and noticed that it wasn’t.

Perhaps you hadn’t come, he thought. Perhaps—

But then, he saw you.

Not full at first, but in pieces — as if his mind had somehow learned that he needed to recognize you in fragments because the whole was too much for him to handle at once — he saw the glint of an earring. The curve of your wrist as you lifted your hand to brush a stray strand of hair to the back of your ears.

Your dress was different tonight — simpler than the pool party’s silk, but cut in a way that felt almost deliberate. The thin fabric caught the yacht’s lights, and gave them back like it had been made for this exact setting, and your hair — God, your hair was down, spreading over the expanse of your shoulders, and moving only when the wind found it.

Sunghoon watched you for a second too long, hating himself for doing so because it gave you enough time to catch him on it.

Your gazes locked over, and for a brief moment — a moment so brief, he thought he had imagined it — you softened at him. Not a smile, but something in your eyes that recognized him, and remembered. Your hand rose halfway, fingers hovering in a hesitant greeting that seemed to have decided itself before you came to your senses and faltered, glancing down and lowering your hand to your side, folding into the fabric of your dress.

Sunghoon’s heart did something stupid and painful within his chest and he stood up without meaning to, giving a step toward you and then another, and another.

But before he could reach you, someone stepped into the space within.

A man around your age, tall in that clean and polished way that suggested that not only had he never been poor, but his father hadn’t, nor his grandfather, nor his grandfather’s father. His dyed hair was styled, but not stiff, his suit in perfect shape despite the hours within the yacht and he moved to your side as if he belonged there — as if your proximity was something granted to him by default.

And perhaps it had.

Perhaps the world was more unfair than Sunghoon had ever realized because as he felt unsure about stepping close to you, the man leaned in without a second thought, saying something into your ear, and earning a turn of your head toward him, altogether with a small smile appearing at the corner of your lips and causing something to flare in Sunghoon — hot, immediate, and humiliating.

It was ridiculous and Sunghoon knew that. He didn’t know your name. He had snapped at you twice and had shoved you into a closet like contraband when you were just trying to help. He had no right to want anything from you — not even your attention — yet his stomach tightened anyway, just as it had when Mr. Hwang said that you had begged for him to be spared because honestly, some part of him had decided that you were a story he knew he could not afford but he could not stop reading.

The man said something more, and you let out a breath that could have been a laugh if you allowed it to be. Your hand rose to brush his arm in a gesture so casual — it could have been even dismissal — but Sunghoon’s fingers closed on themselves until the cut from the night previous ached and he had to force his face into neutrality.

He was still trying to decide whether to approach you when the furor began.

It was not one single thing, but a chain of small ones that snapped too fast to catch: someone shouted near the bar, a glass tipped and bled its champagne in a thin gold spill across the teak, a laugh turned too sharp within the night air, and the music stuttered as if something had snagged the performers mid-song before he remembered they were being paid and forced the melody back into place.

Sunghoon’s head turned on instinct toward the commotion, his lifeguard training overriding and making his body already catalog risks, exits, water, the ways panic liked to masquerade as entertainment until it wasn’t.

In his periphery, Sunghoon caught you drifting closer to the railing, stepping away from a man drunkenly stumbling backwards, but it had been in vain. The man’s shoulder bumped into yours anyway and it was enough for your balance to break — enough for you to take one instinctive step to correct it, heel sliding back, searching for the deck to hold you the way it always had, but the teak beneath your heels betrayed you with a slickness you couldn’t have seen under the lights, and your foot slipped.

It wasn’t dramatic, but small, and almost quiet — the kind of slip that people recovered from all the time. You reached for the railing on reflex, fingers stretching out, a flash of jewelry, skin meeting metal. But your hand didn’t close right, didn’t clamp with the sure grip it needed; it caught and slid instead, palm skimming along polished steel like it had been oiled, and suddenly the correction became the fall, your weight tipping past the point where muscle could argue with gravity.

There was a pause that felt like the whole deck had held its breath before someone screamed what could have been your name and bodies surged toward the rail, leaning over as they peered down into the dark water that moved as if nothing had happened at all — as if it hadn’t just taken you — and Sunghoon ran, pushing through the guests with his shoulders, ignoring the outrage, the startled curses, the hands that grabbed at him as if he were the problem, until the railing came up in front of him, and the sea was just below, black and moving.

Sunghoon could not see you — not at first — the yacht’s lights did nothing to brighten up beyond its surface, and it was as dark as it was above, but then he did. A pale flickering shape, and he didn’t allow himself to consider anything before he vaulted the railing, diving into the water with a splash he didn’t hear.

It was late, and the night sea did not feel like summer, but winter — cold and heavy — dragging at Sunghoon’s uniform and pulling at him like it wanted to keep him for itself, too. Salt surged into his mouth as he broke the surface, and for a second his lungs stuttered, confused by the air that wasn’t clean.

Sunghoon had rescued drowning guests before. Of course, he had — Marriotte had a way of grinding the same disasters into repetition until one’s body learned them the way it learned to shape their names — but it always had been at the pool with its two meters of depth or the obedient edge of the resort’s stolen coast. But the sea was neither of them — it didn’t stay still — no matter how desperate someone was.

He heard shouting above, the deck erupting into chaos, but it faded fast, blurred by the rush of his own blood and the slap of waves against his face, and Sunghoon didn’t allow himself to think.

The water went colder as he went under, the world shrinking into nothing but darkness, pressure, and the frantic sweep of his hands through nothing again and again and again, until the tip of his fingers finally hit some fabric.

He grabbed hard, his fists tangling in what he hoped to be your dress, and yanked at it. You came to him limp and heavy, your hair floating around your face. And for one horrible second he couldn’t tell if you were conscious at all — if you were here with him — and he felt his heart weighing at the thought. It didn’t matter if you were one of those stupid rich guests. It didn’t matter if what you had been pulling at him was all an act — to lose you here felt like something he couldn’t handle.

Many hours later, Jaeyun was going to ask Sunghoon how it happened but he — under the aftermath of his panic — wouldn’t know how to.

He remembered how he hooked an arm under your shoulders and kicked upward, breaking the surface with a gasp for which you didn’t replicate, and how it broke the last threat of self-control on him.

He remembered keeping one arm around you and swimming with the other, fighting against the weight of your body, the drag of your dress, and the way the waves kept trying to pry you from him like greedy hands. He remembered how the yacht loomed above like a wall, all made of light, varnished wood, and people leaning over the edge with a mix of expressions. He remembered how his limbs were shaking by the time he reached the ladder and how he almost missed the first rung, having to force himself to jam his foot onto it, lifting you as best he could, bracing you against his chest. He remembered hauling, rung by rung, and getting you to the deck with the help of strangers’ hands, and then the world narrowed again into only you.

Only you and the way you lie on the wooden floor and soaked through. Your skin on a tone that seemed all wrong under the harsh yacht lights. But what horrified him the most was that your chest did not rise.

Someone shouted to call a doctor. Someone shouted to turn the yacht back — to do something — but no one seemed to be doing anything fast enough.

Sunghoon didn’t remember dropping himself onto his knees, but he remembered how his hands shook so badly he almost couldn’t place them. And once again, he had to force himself to take control — to press the heel of his palm to your sternum as the way he had been trained, and start the compressions, counting out loud because counting meant he would not fall apart.

“Come on,” he heard himself whispering between one compression and another. “Come on.”

The yacht rocked gently and the breeze brushed as if nothing was wrong, as if the night wasn’t holding a catastrophe on its teeth.

His hands began to hurt at some point and his arms burned. But he forced himself to keep the rhythm, to keep pressing. He forced himself to keep you here.

Sunghoon tilted your head back and pinched your nose, hesitating — just a fraction of a second — because you were you. And he didn’t know what it meant yet, only that it felt enormous within his chest already.

He bent close, mouth on yours, salt and fear thick in his throat, and strawberries on his lips.

“Breathe for me,” he whispered, the words spilling out like prayer, like command, like begging for which he didn’t have the right to, but did anyway. “Please, Angel. Please — breathe for me.”

You coughed.

Small at first. A weak shudder that made his heart lurch so hard it hurt. Water spilled from your mouth before you turned your head, choking, and dragging in air like it was something new you had to learn.

You were trembling and drenched, just as much as Sunghoon, but he couldn’t come to care about himself.

“It’s okay,” he said. “You’re alright.”

Your chin lifted at it, your gazes locking. It was only seconds that you studied each other, but it seemed a whole eternity to Sunghoon. His heart whipped against his ribs, and although he tried to, he couldn’t collect his thoughts. His lips parted as if he meant to tell you something, but he stopped, and by the time he tried again, the man from earlier was kneeling by your side.

He moved fast, shrugging off his suit with a practiced urgency. He didn’t look at Sunghoon — not really — not at all. His focus was on you, his hands already wrapping the piece around your shoulders, around your wet hair, and the parts of you exposed to the night wind before his hands molded against your arms with a steadiness that Sunghoon couldn’t feign even if he tried to.

“It is fine,” the man said to you. “It is fine. I have got you.”

I have got you.

The words rolled like theft in the air.

Sunghoon had hauled you out of the sea, he had breathed life into you, and still his mind went petty and sharp at a sentence that sounded like possession because the ocean had just tried to possess you first and Sunghoon was still in that wild part of himself that thought: mine to save, mine to keep safe, mine-

He swallowed.

You looked at the other man, dazed and lips parted as one of his arms slipped under your knees and the other rounded over your shoulders, bringing you into his arms before lifting you up.

“Give her some space,” he snapped at the people around and they did — tumbling into their own feet as they stepped back and opened space — because he sounded like someone who should be listened to.

Sunghoon rose as if to follow — as if his mind had once again forgotten that his role was done already — but a hand caught his elbow — someone steadying him, or stopping him. He wasn’t sure, and it didn’t matter.

The night was all shapes and noise.

Your head turned slightly as you were taken away, hair dripping onto the other’s sleeve. And for a heartbeat — a small, burning heartbeat — your eyes found Sunghoon’s. They were unfocused, but they found him anyway, and something in them softened — recognition again, the same thin thread from earlier on. And Sunghoon’s throat tightened with the raw realization that he didn’t want to let you go again.

But then you were gone anyway, taken into the yacht’s interior, and swallowed by light and warmth that wasn’t his, and his eyes merely remained at the place you disappeared in, hardly feeling part of his own body.

His hands were red and raw from compressions, the cut from the night previous all open and bleeding into his bandage. His chest heaved too fast and sea tasted permanent in his throat as if it had moved in and decided to live there.

Around him, the guests’ fear had already begun to convert into a story that sounded pretty — something they could repeat later with dramatic pauses and glittering eyes — using it to make their own hearts feel brave. But Sunghoon didn’t hear any of it.

He only heard your first cough.

He only felt the moment your lungs had chosen to come back.

“Young man,” someone called.

Sunghoon didn’t turn at first — he couldn’t — he couldn’t come to gather himself enough to face another person because although he wasn’t in the water anymore, there was something inside of him fighting still.

Perhaps there would always be a part of him fighting from now on.

“Young man,” the person repeated, stepping closer and the scent of expensive cologne cut through the salt, awakening Sunghoon before the touch at his shoulders did and he forced himself to turn. “What is your name?”

“Sunghoon,” he heard himself saying. “Park Sunghoon.”

The man nodded as he echoed it, his face drawn tight in that kind of controlled expression that suggested he had learned too early how to control his emotions from showing in public.

And Sunghoon caught himself opening his mouth, ready to apologize before he even knew what for — an old instinct, perhaps, sharpened by employment and hierarchy and the knowledge that rich people’s anger was its own kind of weather. But the man’s voice came out rough.

“Thank you,” he said, and for a brief moment Sunghoon felt confused, but the man continued, “my daughter,” and the two words changed the air. The whole deck seemed to tilt into a new shape. “You—”

His voice broke just slightly before he paused, tightening his jaw as he forced it back into place.

“You brought her back.” Sunghoon’s lungs seized again, but this time it wasn’t from the cold. It was from the sudden, horrible clarity that you weren’t a guest or a body or a problem.

You were someone’s daughter.

Someone’s world.

Sunghoon only nodded, because words felt too small then. Because if he spoke, his voice might crack open and reveal how close he had been to losing control.

Your father looked at him for another long second — memorizing his face, perhaps, or the uniform, or the fact that Sunghoon still looked like someone half-made out of seawater and shock.

“Thank you,” your father said again, quieter, as if the first time had been for pride and the second was for truth. “I will not forget it.”

Your father handed Sunghoon a business card and tapped his shoulder once — just once — a brief, human contact that felt almost unreal.

Sunghoon was shivering so violently that the bare push made him nearly drop the piece of paper on the yacht’s floor, but he forced himself to hold, his fingers closing so strongly that the cut from the night previous throbbed as a crease formed in the paper.

He didn’t think the card would come in use, yet — it felt soothing — because names were the first thing one reached for when they were trying to keep someone from vanishing, and he had your last name.

Sunghoon had your last name.

Sleep came so unwillingly to Sunghoon that it refused to last long.

Throughout the past three summers since he had been hired, he had been the one to get the yacht duty — not very lucky, yes — but it always gave him the best sleep of his life.

Sunghoon wasn’t an early bird. He didn’t request to be smoothed and tucked in bed at ten like Jaeyun, but he liked to sleep his nights away, so to be deprived of it always took something from him, but not today.

Sunghoon woke not even a full hour after he had laid himself on the bed, the shafts of light slipping through his curtainless windows and streaming over the place just as it had — yet, he couldn’t stay still anymore.

His body felt like it had been wound too tightly. His arms ached from the compressions. His throat tasted like the sea. And when he blinked, the deck lights flared behind his eyelids.

He swung his legs off the bed.

The small room was warm already, Jeju’s summer pressing through the thin walls with such insistence that the air clung on and the fan in the corner stuttered in vain. Somewhere outside, scooters whined down the road, and a bird shrieked the way birds did here — loud, territorial, unashamed.

Sunghoon washed his face with water that barely came cold, dragged a comb through his hair with more violence than care, and changed into the cleanest shirt he had, though clean didn’t mean much when his skin still remembered salt.

He looked at his hand. The cut had reopened under the bandage, a thin line of blood shimmering like a warning, but he only wrapped it again and left before his mind could catch up and tell him to be smart.

Because if Sunghoon paused long enough to think, he wouldn’t move at all.

⋆˚꩜｡

The resort sat above the road like it always did.

Marriotte didn’t belong to Jeju, but it pretended to, dressing itself in stone and dark wood and tasteful greenery, but it was too polished to be Jeju’s, and quiet in a way that didn’t come from the peace of the island, but from money making sure no one got loud unless paid to.

Sunghoon walked up the steps in the heat and felt the instant change the moment he crossed the threshold. Outside, it was Jeju’s summer, but inside it was Marriotte’s type of summer.

The lobby was not only large. It was layered.

It didn’t open itself like a normal room. It unfolded.

Walkways split from walkways. Corridors slipped away behind screens of dark wood and potted plants that looked so perfect it once led Jaeyun and Jongseong to bet if they were real. Stairs didn’t just lead upward — they led sideways, down, somewhere, dipping like secrets. Hallways branched from hallways, and then branched again, like the building had been designed by someone who enjoyed watching people get lost and pretend they weren’t.

There were walls of glass that gave the illusion of openness, but even those felt controlled because beyond them, the garden glimmered wet and green, water beading on leaves not only holding Jeju’s true nature, but turning it into decoration.

It was early, but the staff already moved through like ghosts in pressed uniforms and present only when summoned as the guests existed in the opposite. Guests floated as they made their check-ins, taking space without apologizing for it in the way only rich people could.

Sunghoon hated that he was here on his day off.

Sunghoon hated that he was here at all.

He walked past the concierge desk and felt eyes flick in his direction in recognition. Not only because they knew him, but because he looked like a staff. He moved like a staff. He carried himself like someone who had learned to keep his shoulders tight so the world couldn’t slip knives between his ribs.

He turned toward the reception.

Jongseong stood behind the desk, immaculate until he saw Sunghoon and something in his face cracked.

“What are you doing here?” Jongseong hissed through a smile that wasn’t meant for his friend, but the couple checking in beside him. His eyes didn’t leave Sunghoon’s face even as his hands moved through the motions of hospitality, tapping at the keyboard, sliding keycards over with practiced grace. “It’s your day off.”

The couple left, and before Jongseong could call the next guest to come, Sunghoon stepped in.

“I know — I need something.”

“No.”

Sunghoon blinked. “I didn’t even ask yet.”

“You don’t have to,” Jongseong murmured, his eyes flicking to the security camera in the corner, before it found Sunghoon again. “Whatever it is, the answer is no. Go home.”

Sunghoon’s throat tightened as he reached into the pocket of jeans, pulling out your father’s business card. The edges were damp-soft from having been clenched too long. He didn’t hand it over, not fully — he only let Jongseong read the last name.

And for a moment, Sunghoon saw it — the shift, the understanding snapping into place like a lock turning once Jongseong made sense of the letters.

Jongseong’s mouth parted, then closed. And when their eyes met again, He stared at Sunghoon as if he had just said he wanted to walk into fire because he missed the warmth.

“You can’t just—” Jongseong began, then stopped himself as guests walked by, their laughter trailing behind them like perfume. He lowered his voice further. “You can’t just ask for a suite. That’s not a thing.”

“I’m not asking you to tell her family’s suite,” Sunghoon lied.

He didn’t know what he was asking for.

“I’ll lose my job — we will lose our jobs,” Jongseong said, but despite the harshness with which his words came out, his expression didn’t match it for long.

“Are you okay?” Jongseong asked, but Sunghoon couldn’t come to answer.

Okay was a word for people who knew what they were, and he didn’t, or at least, he didn’t know anymore. Sunghoon had once believed that he had built himself into something durable and steady, yet you had come, and now, there was something different inside of him, something raw and unpracticed, and if he admitted it — even if just once — it would become real. Not an impulse. Not a passing stupidity. But something he was afraid that wouldn’t fit back inside his chest.

Jongseong exhaled slowly, looking down at his screen.

For one long second, Sunghoon thought he had silently been told to leave. But then, Jongseong’s shoulders sank — just slightly.

“Fine,” he breathed. “Fine, but if you ruin my life, I swear I’ll kill you myself.”

Sunghoon’s pulse jumped — not at the threat. He knew Jongseong would never — but at the view of his friend tapping at the keyboard, and then, tapping some more before he leaned forward, his voice turned into a whisper that scraped against the polished air.

“1512. Rooftop,” Jongseong said. “Go fast and I swear—”

“I know,” Sunghoon replied, already turning away.

He didn’t let himself thank him. He didn’t let himself hesitate. Gratitude was slow, and Sunghoon was running out of control.

His heart raced as he moved through the corridor, taking the elevator just as it was closing with an old couple that paid him no mind, and pressed the elevator’s buttons to the rooftop — rooftop, he had worked for years here and never once had he stepped there, and for a second he wondered if he truly could, if the elevator wouldn’t strangely stop operating and preventing him, but the doors slid shut, and the elevator began to rise. And with every floor it passed, Sunghoon felt like he was doing something he couldn’t undo. Like he was climbing toward a line he couldn’t uncross.

But still — he couldn’t stop.

⋆˚꩜｡

When the doors slid open for one last time, Sunghoon was surprised.

The rooftop had never been a place for the staff, but a rumor. A word whispered in the laundry room when the machines were loud enough to swallow the envy in their words. A direction pointed with a chin when a celebrity checked in and someone wanted to pretend they hadn’t looked because on the surface, they didn’t care. A level the elevator did not even list on the ordinary panel — but kept on a clean, discreet button because those who could afford the rooftop’s suites had lives that didn’t include asking.

Yet — it was exactly like the corridors below. 

The same thick carpets and light colored walls.

In every few steps, there were doors and he found himself staring at the details because the more familiar it seemed, the less anxious he felt. The brushed gold trim on the wall. The line of orchids arranged in vases that had to be replaced every morning. 

But then — absurdly — there was a vending machine.

It stood near the corner where the corridor split, sleek and silver, its glass front filled with neat rows of bottled water, imported teas, protein bars in minimalist packaging, tiny tins of nuts that probably cost more than the whole staff cafeteria’s lunch. But it was a vending machine — a vending machine up here.

Sunghoon slowed without meaning to stare at it.

He had grown up with vending machines that swallowed coins and didn’t always give anything back. Machines that smelled like dust and heat, that dispensed cheap coffee in paper cups, that sat near bus stops where men smoked and teenagers laughed too loudly because they had nothing else to do, but this one looked clean enough to eat off.

He imagined you for a moment — you, with your diamond earrings, your silk dresses and your life that seemed to exist beyond consequences — standing here, under that artificial light and pressing buttons for a bottle of water.

It didn’t fit.

He couldn’t imagine rich people needing something quick. And yet the machine existed, which meant someone up here had once been thirsty enough not to call room service.

The thought made him feel strangely dizzy, as if the world had tilted and revealed a seam that shouldn’t even exist. 

He forced himself to move.

His bandaged hand throbbed with each swing of his arm.

When Sunghoon stood in front of your family’s suite door, he hesitated, feeling a disconcerting flutter in his chest with the realization that he had no idea what he was doing.

He brushed a hand over his face, the bandage pulling at his skin, but before he could do anything else, the door opened, the morning’s sunlight racing out and making him blink a few times before he got used to it.

But it wasn’t you at the door, nor your father, nor anyone related to you — it was Mrs. Kye, the old maid that Jaeyun once joked had perhaps been there since the foundation of the hotel, but Sunghoon never laughed about it. Mrs. Kye was one of the nicest staff members.

“Sunghoon?” she called. “What are you doing here?”

“I—” he began, not sure how he was supposed to explain everything. His throat felt too tight for words that weren’t rehearsed. “I was looking for someone. She is a guest, her family is staying in this suite—”

“Sunghoon,” Mrs. Kye cut in, and there it was — the edge of the rules in her tone, the weight of them. “You know the rules.”

He swallowed.

“She almost drowned yesterday,” he said. “I just — I just want to check if she is alright. In the hurry, I couldn’t tell her what symptoms she should watch out for.”

The lie came so easily it almost felt true. But Sunghoon knew Mrs. Kye wasn’t buying it by the way she sighed, shaking her head, and for a moment he thought it was over — that she would close the door and he would need to go back down the elevator and pretend this impulse had never happened. But Mrs. Kye’s eyes lingered on him for a moment too long, traveling through the worn bandage, the frayed edge of his shirt and his washed jeans. She took the way he stood like someone trying to take up less space than he was allowed, and he knew without knowing it hurt her. She had seen boys like him come through this resort every summer; she had seen which ones laughed, and which ones counted. And Sunghoon had always been the kind who counted and she knew.

“Playground,” she said then, her voice coming so low that Sunghoon took a while to notice she had really spoken. “She was with her cousin,” Mrs. Kye continued, glancing over her shoulder into the suite as if making sure no one was listening too closely. “Asked if there was anything like that in the hotel.”

His breath caught.

“Go.”

Sunghoon didn’t trust himself to answer and so, he only bowed, quick and deep, and before his gratitude could trip him into being seen.

⋆˚꩜｡

The playground was not really a playground.

It was a corner of the resort’s garden that had been dressed up for children the way Marriotte dressed up everything: carefully, expensively, and with the kind of effort that pretended to be effortless. The ground was padded with soft, springy flooring that looked like it had never met a scraped knee. A small slide curved like a ribbon beside a miniature climbing frame made of polished wood, the grain of it so perfect it felt staged — as if the trees had been grown for the singular purpose of becoming décor. Even the air smelled curated: sunscreen and cut grass, the resort’s citrus polish ghosting over it all, as though even childhood had to be sanitized before it could be permitted to exist.

Sunghoon approached slowly. And at first, he didn’t see you, but the children.

They sat cross-legged in a loose semicircle on the padded ground, faces tilted upward, eyes wide with the bright, unfiltered devotion that only children could offer. Sunghoon was used to it; spring was a great time for Jeju, but not for Marriotte, and he had taught swimming lessons at public pools when Marriotte’s rooms weren’t so full and the pool not so required that he needed to complete full hours. He knew the way children trusted without thinking, how they listened with their whole bodies, how easily they could be soothed by a voice that sounded sure.

What unsettled him was who they were listening to.

Sunghoon recognized your voice with a physical certainty, as though his body had memorized it before his mind could refuse, but how could he not? He had replayed the night of the pool party like a punishment: your gasp, your apologies. He had heard you in the staff elevator, in the locker room, in the thin, cruel moment before sleep took him and the crueler one after it abandoned him.

You had been a ghost to him through the past days, but now it was real — sat on the edge of a bench that looked too clean to have ever hosted a tired body — your hair looser than it had been on the yacht, darker at the ends as if you had showered and simply didn’t care about drying it. And a book rested open in your hands, spine broken in the middle the way books only were when someone actually read them. 

Your cousin sat by your side, one fist balled in the fabric of your dress as though you were the only solid thing in the world, a plush toy trapped under her arm.

Sunghoon opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out, and for a heartbeat, he simply stood there, watching you. 

A child noticed him first — then another — heads turning in a soft disturbance that spread through the group until their attention broke from you and stumbled toward him.

And you noticed him too.

It was barely anything — just your chin lifting, a slow blink like you didn’t trust your eyes — but still, it hit him anyway, sharp as a hook under the ribs and Sunghoon’s body reacted before his brain could file it away as harmless. His shoulders tightened, and his breath caught, every instinct screaming be still, be professional, don’t be seen wanting. But the garden was shifting out of place anyway, as if the world had tilted and decided you were the only thing worth keeping upright because God — you were. 

You watched him for a moment — perhaps two — before you turned to the children, slipping a bookmark between the pages and excusing yourself with the seriousness of someone stepping out of a meeting — and stood up.

Your cousin clung harder for a second, startled by the motion, and you reached for her without even seeming to consider — one arm scooping her up against your side and letting her settle against you, cheek pressed to your shoulders, and fingers now locked in your hair — before you stepped forward, crossing the place toward him. 

And for the second time he caught himself trying his best to don a neutral aspect, but as you walked in his direction he felt as if he was losing control of his own body. Sunghoon didn’t know what to do with his hands. He let them hang uselessly at his sides, then shoved them into his pockets, then pulled them out again because it looked rude, because it looked like he was nervous, because it looked like he was waiting for you.

Which he was.

But the truth didn’t seem that easy to admit.

“Hi,” you said, your voice coming breathless in a way that didn’t match the short distance you had walked, and Sunghoon’s mind snagged on the inconsistency like it was a safety hazard because well, it made no sense — but then it did – and that small understanding warmed him in a way he didn’t want to allow. His fingers flexed at his side, bandage tugging, and grounding him back into his body before he made himself remember how to speak.

“Hi,” Sunghoon echoed.

Your cousin shifted at the sound of him, her arms tightening around your shoulders as she hid herself into the crook of your neck. You murmured something in her ear, softly, and too low for Sunghoon to make sense of what it had been, but whatever it was, it got her lifting her head and looking at Sunghoon again, round-eyed and shiny with embarrassment. 

“Sorry,” your cousin whispered. It had been so quiet that Sunghoon almost thought he had imagined it — but then, her lips continued shaped into the word, and his breath caught in surprise. 

Sunghoon bent down a little, lowering himself to your cousin’s eye level in the way he did with the children at the public pool, his instincts taking over where his pride usually lived whenever he breathed Marriotte’s air.

“It’s okay,” he said, hesitating for a moment before he lifted his bandaged hand and gave her a small thumbs up, the gesture making the healing skin pinch, but he didn’t allow it to show. “I will survive.”

Your cousin blinked at him before she tried to hide again, her fingers twisting on the locks of your hair in a manner that should have been painful. But if anything, you gently patted her back. 

And when Sunghoon straightened himself, he caught you smiling.

Not in that one polite and restrained way he had seen you wear the previous night, but something small and helpless at the edges, as if it had happened to you without your consent — as if your body had decided that because he had offered something of himself, you had to give something back.

And the fairness of it felt strange in his chest. Heat climbed up the back of his neck and into his ears. Sunghoon didn’t know what to do with the fact that you were looking at him like that, so he blinked, and glanced away, setting his mouth back into place as if it had betrayed him.

“Do you want to go back to the other children?” you asked your cousin, receiving a nod almost immediately. 

The moment her feet touched the padded ground, she retreated — not far, not truly — choosing the safety of the other children in a blunt instinct Sunghoon understood too well.

And with her gone, there was nothing left to hone the moment into harmlessness — no child, no movement, no noise to hide behind — just you and him, with the air between you tightening into something quiet and dangerous despite the bright morning.

Sunghoon should have stepped back — he knew — but his feet didn’t listen. Something in him held, stubbornly, as if staying was a risk he recognized but chose anyway.

“I—” you began, at the same time as him.

“You first.”

“I had asked for you,” you said quietly. “At the reception, however, they said it was your day off.”

“It is,” he heard himself answering, but when he didn’t put in any further information, you continued:

“I wanted to thank you — for saving me last night.”

“It’s my job.”

“I know.”

“Then don’t—” His throat scraped. “Don’t thank me.”

You halted, surprised by his words. And for a moment Sunghoon was afraid he had been once again too rude without thinking, but then, a shadow of humor softened your mouth subtly, almost careful. Not a smile, exactly. But something that said you weren’t afraid to meet him where he stood — not anymore.

“Alright,” you said. “I take my formal thanks back. Yet still — I am grateful.”

Sunghoon swallowed. The morning was too bright for how fragile he suddenly felt, the air too clean for the way his chest still tasted like fear. And his hands-bandaged too roughly for what he wanted.

“Your turn,” you remembered.

“I’m grateful too,” he admitted. “For what you did the other night. It saved my month.”

“It just didn’t feel right,” you replied, your brows drawing together — that small divot returning like an old habit, and Sunghoon couldn’t help but feel that familiar heat rising anyway, quick and instinctive. Of course it didn’t. Things never did, and somehow the rich always had a way of smoothing the edges down — paying until the world agreed to look away.

The thought sharpened on his tongue, ready to become something ugly.

But then, he caught himself, almost startled by his own reflex because you were standing right in front of him, smaller in the sunlight than you had been under the pool lights and yacht’s dazzle, and looking at him like you meant it.

Sunghoon swallowed, letting the anger fold back into his chest where it belonged.

“How are you feeling?” he asked. “After — all of it.”

“My throat hurts a bit,” you said. “And I am smelling water.”

“Smelling water?”

“Not like a wet breeze,” you clarified, almost apologetic for the strangeness of it. “Actual water. Like I am breathing it.”

“It’s normal,” he said. “But you should rest today. Be attentive. If you get a fever, if breathing gets worse, if you feel tired in a way that doesn’t make sense—”

“I know.”

Sunghoon halted then. Of course you did. Someone had already told you — a doctor, perhaps a private one, someone whose name you didn’t have to wait for. The thought put a sour edge on Sunghoon’s tongue, and he hated himself for it.

His gaze dropped instead to the book in your hands. 

“You shouldn’t be reading out loud,” he said before he could stop himself. “Not if your throat hurts.”

Your gaze dropped to the book as well, only for a fraction of a second before your gaze encountered him again, and when you did, you smiled. 

“Finish it for me, then.”

“What?”

“You said I shouldn’t be reading,” you countered, and he could hear the amusement threading your voice. “But the children will be disappointed if they don’t hear the end.”

You tilted the book toward him. “Finish it for me.”

Sunghoon glanced past you, catching the children still turned toward you both, eyes bright and hungry for gossip.

It was a trap, he knew it, perhaps your whole existence was a trap to him.

He had not come here to perform. He had not come here to sit in a garden playground and read to rich children while his heart tried to hammer itself out of his ribs. And yet — you looked at him as if you were trusting him with something small.

As if you weren’t afraid he would drop it.

He reached out. The bandage on his hand made the motion clumsy, and for the briefest second his fingers brushed against yours as he took the book — the touch more a delirium than a real thing — but it made his whole body go rigid for a moment too long before he walked to the children, sitting where you once did and cleared his throat.

The children stared.

You sat back, allowing your cousin to tumble into you once again, and watching him with the kind of patience that made him feel exposed.

Sunghoon began.

His voice came out awkward at first — too careful, too flat — and he hated the sound of himself in this setting. But soon he caught himself changing voices for the characters, letting a higher pitch slip for one, a rougher edge for another. A child giggled. Then another, a small sequence until your laugh broke through and something warm rose in Sunghoon’s chest, and it took him a long time to notice that it was pride — a foolish pride for making you laugh. 

When he finished the book, the children groaned in protest, and he handed it back to you as if it might burn him.

“Thank you,” you said again. And time he didn’t tell you not to, but just nodded, because some refusals felt pointless against you.

Somewhere behind you, a nanny called, and the children broke apart the way children always did — all devotion, and then none at all — feet pattering off across the soft flooring, laughter dissolving into the garden as if it had never been held.

But you stayed — still as a held breath, hands quiet at your sides, your gaze fixed on him like you were waiting for something he hadn’t learned how to give and Sunghoon didn’t know what to do with that.

“I should go,” he said, pushing himself to his feet. His fingers found his jeans on instinct, smoothing at a crease that wasn’t there because perhaps — perhaps he could press order back into his body if he tried hard enough.

You nodded at his saying but as he turned away, you called out his name and he stopped.

He didn’t mean to but his feet simply listened.

It was the first time you had ever said his name, and it landed wrong in the best way, catching him under the ribs. Not only because of your accent, all made in the knottiness of Seoul, but because coming from your mouth it sounded softened and slower, drawn out as if you had stolen it and made it all yours.

“Wait,” you said.

And he did.

“My father,” you continued. “He is in hope that you are going to call — he wanted to thank you properly. And—” You hesitated, the same kind of hesitation you had in the staff hallway: bravery gathering itself again. “He wanted to make sure you are taken care of.”

Sunghoon’s throat tightened at your words. He didn’t want to be taken care of. Not by you. Not by anyone who could turn care into debt.

“I’m fine,” he said automatically, and you looked at him like you already knew it was a lie.

“Dinner,” you said.

Sunghoon blinked. “What?”

“You should come to have dinner,” you repeated. “With us.”

With us.

You didn’t say it, but the meaning was explicit: you were inviting him to have dinner with your family — your family who occupied one of the suites on the rooftop corridor with its vending machine, and it made his reality tilt.

The whole world you belonged to was being offered to him, yet he knew — it was a treasure that was never meant to be touched by him.

“I—” Sunghoon started. “I’m not sure if I can — there’s a policy.”

You nodded at him, and it should’ve been the end of it. But instead, you stepped in — careful as if you knew exactly where too close began and chose to stop just short of it. And the air between you tightened, charged in that quiet way Sunghoon hated because it made him aware of everything at once: your breath, the warmth of skin, the soft, loose strand of hair the breeze had freed.

His hand almost moved on instinct — one simple lift of fingers as if to tuck it back where it belonged but he caught himself and you did it yourself.

“Can I see your phone?” you asked.

“My phone?” he echoed, but his hands were already reaching, unlocking it, placing it in yours like surrender.

He watched you type quickly. He watched the ease of your fingers, the certainty of you — or at least, the way you fake it, because your hands held it too tightly and you were biting at the corner of your lip, smudging on your lipstick and leaving it on the way you had on the night of your first encounter.

“We always have dinner at the resort’s restaurant, I will send you the time,” you said, giving him the phone back. “If you feel like — just come. My father will be more than happy to do something about the policy.”

He stared down at his phone, finding the message you sent to yourself and your name, sitting there as if it belonged.

He looked up, but you were already moving away, as if you knew the moment was too dangerous to linger in. 

“Goodbye,” you said, almost under your breath, and Sunghoon’s chest tightened at the sound. 

“Bye,” he managed.

You held his gaze for a heartbeat too long, almost as if you were trying to memorize him in daylight, storing the version of him that existed under the sun instead of under dim lights and bad decisions before you finally turned and walked back to where your cousin sat, giving him just a single glance back as if you wanted to check whether he was still there.

Sunghoon found it adorable in a way that terrified him.

It made him want to follow you back — tug at the thin thread you had left behind and see if it would truly hold.

But instead, he ran. Sunghoon found the staff access and took the stairs — two at a time — fleeing so quickly that the encounter began to feel weightless behind him, unreal in that particular way of dreams: gone the moment you wake, but still warm in your skin.

⋆˚꩜｡

Jaeyun had barely arrived for his shift when Sunghoon found him. The air smelled like salt and sunscreen and the faint metallic tang of old engineers.

“I talked to her,” Sunghoon said before even greeting, and the urgency in his tone startled even himself.

“Who?” Jaeyun asked — more reflex than curiosity — because the moment his gaze landed on Sunghoon, the question dissolved on its own, understanding settling without needing an explanation. “Angel.”

Sunghoon corrected him by saying your name before he could even feel self-conscious about the syllables because if he thought about it, he would notice how they were intimate — as if saying them out loud was an admission. It was ridiculous, but it was also true: it felt like the moment he spoke your name, the thread between your lives tightened.

“You lost me,” Jaeyun said. “How did we go from not even knowing her name to you being invited to have dinner with her and her parents tonight?”

Sunghoon explained — or at least, tried to explain — about the yacht, the rescue, the strange gravity of you, the way his body seemed to move toward you before his mind could decide. And although Jaeyun listened with the amusement of someone watching a friend walk willingly into danger everything he said was:

“What are you wearing?” 

Sunghoon looked down at himself.

“No,” Jaeyun cut him off immediately. “Tonight. What are you wearing to dinner?”

“I don’t even know if I should—” Sunghoon said. 

“You can’t be fucking serious, Park Sunghoon,” Jaeyun cut. “You’re going.”

⋆˚꩜｡

It was around three in the afternoon when Sunghoon received Mr. Hwang’s message approving his dinner with your family, a brief and cold string of words that didn’t even try to hide the warning: this wasn’t a permission, but a leash — Mr. Hwang knew where Sunghoon was — and if he slipped, even if barely, it would not be an accident anymore. It would be a choice. Sunghoon knew the rules — God, he knew it so damn well that even with the approval all written on his phone screen, he felt unsure about it, but then he received your message with a tiny please at the end, and he couldn’t come to care about being smart.

By evening, Sunghoon was freshly showered, hair damp at the nape of his neck, and Jongseong’s suit pressed and scented with Mrs. Kye’s laundry soap like a borrowed dignity.

The host didn’t know him, but a few waiters did, and as he stepped inside, he felt their glances like something material at the back of his neck.

He wasn’t a staff at the moment, nor a guest, and it somehow felt more troublesome than being either.

But then, he saw you — and you saw him too, your lips parting in that one smile you had given him at the playground, and something within him misfired.

The windows were thrown open at your back and the last gold of the day cut through the room, catching on crystal glasses and expensive cutlery until everything glittered underneath it. And you — you looked like you belonged there. Not because of the dress, the jewelry, or the easy curve of your mouth, but because the light itself knew your worth and reached for you as much.

Sunghoon took one steadying breath — yet lost it the moment you stood up, saying something to your parents before you walked toward him, and he had the strange, irrational thought that for as long as he lived, he would know the scent of you and the sound of you approaching him.

“You came,” you whispered, and Sunghoon felt his breath hitching once again. His fingers flexed once at his sides, grounding him back into his body, but he couldn’t find a sentence that didn’t give too much away, so he didn’t give you any.

You didn’t seem to mind it as you led him to your family’s table and introduced him, your finger steady on the cover of his suit.

Your mother was the first to move. Not a polite nod from her chair, nor a measured smile meant for strangers and for which Sunghoon had been prepared — but a real reaction — immediate and strangely human. She stood from where she was, reaching for his hands before Sunghoon could decide what to do with his own, holding him so warmly yet carefully that it surprised him.

“Sunghoon,” your mother called. “I do not feel like I can thank you enough.”

“It was — it was my job, ma’am.”

“No,” she said, and for a moment her warmth sharpened into something almost fierce. “It was more than that to me.”

The words came out darker than she seemed to intend — too honest for a table set in crystal and gold — and she seemed to realize it the moment they landed because her expression shifted then. Embarrassment, perhaps, for letting too much truth rise to the surface in front of people who measured vulnerability like weakness.

“And please,” she added, voice gentler again, “no ma’am.”

She glanced toward your father then. “We are family friends after all.”

“She is right,” your father agreed. He seemed to want to say more, but before he could do so, his phone chimed.

“Byeongseok,” he said, stepping away with a brief excuse and a plea for them to sit before him, and for one moment, Sunghoon could swear he felt you stiffening by his side, your shoulders drawing inward as your hands closed too tightly on the arms of your chair as you sat down, but he couldn’t come to ask the reason behind it.

Not even when your father hung up and the person he supposed to be Byeongseok appeared and greeted your parents like old acquaintances.

Not even when your mother smiled at him with clear familiarity or your father clapped a hand against the younger man’s shoulder with the ease of habit.

Sunghoon didn’t dare to ask — not even when Byeongseok turned to you with a fond smile and bright eyes — simply unable to hide the irrational happiness of seeing you.

You stood up again, allowing Byeongseok to hug you, and when his arms wrapped around your waist, it happened with the ease of someone who had never had to wonder if he was allowed to touch the world like this — like proximity was a language he had been fluent in ever since his childhood. Byeongseok pulled you in without any further question, the fabric of your dress creasing under his grip and his cologne turning into a private air between you, and when his lips chased your temple, something settled inside of Sunghoon. Not a thought, exactly, but not a feeling he could name in a way that could make sense. 

There was a sudden flare under his ribs, a reflex like pulling a hand away from the fire, except that there was nowhere to put it — nowhere to hide — and so, he only watched, understanding with a clarity so clean, it made him dizzy. It was what belonging looked like: not asked for, not earned, just assumed.

Byeongseok not only had the type of face women in this island would make lines for, but he knew how to wear his money well — Jongseong’s suit was great, honestly, the best people could find at Jeju’s malls, but anyone who said no one could tell the difference between a suit from the mall and a suit made by a clever designer had never seen the latter and Sunghoon was seeing one — not to mention that Byeongseok made a strange image near you, almost too fitting. Almost too perfect.

And Sunghoon hated the way that thought honed something in him.

The craving hit him suddenly then — sharp and familiar. Smoke at the back of his throat, something bitter enough to burn this feeling out before it rooted itself deeper. His fingers moved through his lips before he could even think about it, placing a cigarette that wasn’t even there.

“Byeongseok,” you said, drawing yourself back. “This is Sunghoon. You might remember him from last night — he was the one who saved me.”

Byeongseok frowned as his gaze fell on Sunghoon, confusion settling heavily over his features because he didn’t recall. But Sunghoon couldn’t blame him. He couldn’t have told this was the man who took you away until you mentioned it.

“Sunghoon — this is Byeongseok, son of my father’s business partner, and my classmate at the university. He was there last night as well.”

“Sunghoon has joined us per her request,” your father explained, nodding briefly toward you.

“Great,” Byeongseok replied immediately, but something about the brightness of his voice felt just half a beat too late, too polished to be entirely sincere.

Byeongseok sat down by your side, and soon enough, his parents arrived, quietly changing the shape of the evening.

Smiles settled into place as though rehearsed beforehand. Greetings were exchanged with the precise familiarity of people who had known each other long enough to stop performing enthusiasm and start performing balance instead. 

Byeongseok’s mother smiled often, but Sunghoon quickly realized it was the kind of warmth that could never truly reach the room. And his father looked at the table the way businessmen looked at properties — assessing, categorizing, deciding what belonged naturally and what had merely been allowed inside.

Still, the beginning remained civil.

Byeongseok’s mother asked about Sunghoon’s life in Jeju, and he answered the way he had been trained to answer guests: politely, briefly, and with nothing that couldn’t be more than entertaining — even when she pressed again, head tilted as if she were fishing for a story he could be made into, Sunghoon didn’t give her one. He kept his smile soft and his words cleaner, guiding the conversation along familiar paths without offering anything that could be held too tightly.

But then, the menus arrived.

“Always so many good options,” Byeongseok’s father commented lightly, leaning back in his chair. “What would you recommend, Sunghoon? If staff were allowed to eat those, of course.”

Heat crawled through Sunghoon’s neck before he could even stop it and he had to force his face to keep still. No flinch, no tell, no satisfaction given.

He understood the tactic: Say it smiling, say it soft, and if Sunghoon reacted, Sunghoon would be the problem. Not the man who had said it. That was how this worked.

Sunghoon’s jaw tightened with the unfairness, and the urge to answer with something that would cut back grew bigger — but then, you spoke.

“Sunghoon is here as our guest,” you said, your eyes never even leaving the menu. “Perhaps it would be better to ask the chef.”

The words were light enough that someone outside the table may not even notice them, but Sunghoon did.

Your parents did.

As well as Byeongseok’s. 

Byeongseok’s father gave a short laugh then, lifting his hands slightly in surrender.

“I was joking.”

“We know, however, my daughter is right,” your father cut. “Perhaps we should call the chef if we want recommendations — although Jeonbok is calling me tonight.”

He looked up through his menu to your mother.

“What do you think?”

Your mother hummed in agreement, visibly grateful for the shift.

“Would wine match?” she asked.

Sunghoon expected you to smile then, to claim victory, and let your eyes meet him with that one spark you had worn on the playground. Yet it never came. If anything, you turned even more still than before, shoulders drawn in as you had at the beginning of everything, and he understood then, that you were different near these people — quieter — if not non-existent. As if showing too much of yourself was something that could be used against you later, in a quieter room, with words that only sounded nice at the surface but sliced you open if listened to it more carefully.

And the realization settled in his chest like heat.

Protective wasn’t a word he had ever used for feelings. It sounded like something out of a movie, a pretty story for which he couldn’t afford. But whatever this was, it was real.

His knee bumped into yours, perhaps accidentally, or perhaps it was his body leading him to what he should do, but it caught your attention, and you looked at him.

It’s okay, he meant and you bumped him back as though you had understood.

⋆˚꩜｡

Nothing truly happened between the main course and dessert — or at least — nothing that Sunghoon could point to directly.

Every new plate earned a sound from Byeongseok’s mother — too loud for the room and too practiced to be true — but her husband hummed in agreement anyway, and by the time the dessert was served, the table’s volume had swelled because Byeongseok’s family didn’t just fill the room, but took it apart and rebuilt it around themselves, as if the air belonged to them by default.

Sunghoon kept his posture straight. His borrowed suit sat stiff across his shoulders, and his bandaged hand rested in his lap, where no one would ask questions. He nodded when addressed, and answered when appropriate, smiling cleanly and briefly — nothing that could be used later as proof that he had forgotten his place — but the exhaustion crept in anyway. 

Not the kind that came from a late shift, but the kind that came from holding yourself still while other people moved freely.

By his side, you had gone even quieter than before, your eyes trained on your plate as if digging at your chocolate sphere required your full concentration. 

Sunghoon watched you for a moment too long, his knee still angled toward yours under the table, close enough that he could feel the faintest shift when you moved. 

“You are supposed to break it,” Sunghoon said, quiet enough that it couldn’t interfere with the conversation going around the table, but direct enough that it couldn’t be mistaken for nothing. “Not dig.”  

“I beg your pardon?”  

“You break the layer above, not—” he paused, leaning in as if the rest of the table might steal the sentence.  

You leaned forward too, almost instinctively — meeting him in the small space he had made until your shoulders nearly brushed and the world narrowed to the dessert between you. 

Sunghoon reached out for you, his knuckles brushing yours as he took the spoon from your hand, and the contact short-circuited his brain for a fraction of a second because you were warm, soft, and close enough that he could catch your scent under the restaurant’s citrus polish and your mother’s selected wine — coconut and strawberries, just like the night you met.

His breath caught.  

He brought the spoon down and cracked the chocolate shell with one clean press — the surface split neatly, revealing the cake beneath, darker and softer, steam barely rising.

“I knew,” you whispered.  

Sunghoon halted then.

Of course you knew. Fancy desserts weren’t a novelty to you — you had probably broken a hundred chocolate shells in your life without thinking twice. You were digging not by ignorance, but because you were buying seconds — letting the chocolate shell and the soft cake beneath it become cover. Something small to hold onto, something to keep your hands moving so you didn’t have to lift your eyes to the furor of the table.

The realization made something in his chest hurt, sudden and sharp, like he had swallowed the wrong thing and it lodged in his throat.

His gaze flicked up to your face before he could stop himself.

You weren’t looking at the dessert anymore — not really — you were looking at him, eyes softened in a way that made the noise around the table feel suddenly far away. And Sunghoon knew he should lean back — put distance where it belonged, fold himself into his place again before anyone could notice.

But you were too close still and he didn’t want to be the one to let go.

He stayed as if staying could be harmless, as if the room couldn’t take this small thing and make it cost — even when your fingers brushed his again, taking in the spoon.

“Thank you regardless,” you said. “And I’m sorry.”  

I’m — not I am — and he caught the slip just as you did, your voice already smoothing itself back into I am, back into etiquette, but it was already too late.

Byeongseok’s mother waved her spoon again, mid-story. “And then I told her, I said, ‘You cannot possibly wear that to the chairman’s event.’ Can you imagine? The girl looked like she had been dressed by a toddler—”

The rest of the table chuckled, but not you.

“It’s loud,” he said, and you huffed at him.  

“Yes,” you agreed. “It is loud.”

The corner of Sunghoon’s mouth twitched in what could turn into a smile, but it was quickly taken by the way you went quiet again, folding inward until you were nothing but manners and stillness beside all that noise. 

He could pretend he didn’t see it — he could — but he didn’t.

Sunghoon let his knee stay angled toward yours under the table, a small act of defiance no one could call out, and felt the decision settle in him with a steadiness that scared him.

“Do you want to leave?” he asked. Your eyebrows furrowed at his sudden question, your surprise flickering across your features, and Sunghoon rushed on before he could talk himself out of it. “Not now, but after — after the dinner is finished — if you want to, we can go somewhere else.”

Your chin dipped once, so small it could have been nothing, yet, it wasn’t. 

His voice lowered. 

“If you leave by the resort’s main entrance and turn right, you’ll see a park full of red flowers and a black bench — I’ll be there waiting for you.” 

⋆˚꩜｡

The bench was colder than July should allow.

It sat at the edge of the small park like a leftover thought — the black paint worn thin by the number of sunsets. And above it, the red flowers flared under the streetlights, clustered and moving only when the wind picked up — Jeju’s sea air slipping in from somewhere beyond the resort’s polished boundaries and carrying salt, damp soil, and the faint sweetness of crushed petals.

Sunghoon sat with his hands clasped together so tight his knuckles ached with the pressure, and his cut pinched underneath the bandage, but even with such discomfort, he couldn’t come to release. 

Perhaps because the night air kept biting at his skin, and his body was struggling to keep heat in. Or maybe it was dinner and the way the restaurant’s light had made everything sparkle — it was normal to feel wound too tightly after standing inside wealth for too long, after all — money was a room with no windows, and it made the lungs forget how to expand. 

But his gaze kept flicking to the same stretch of road.

The resort’s main entrance was somewhere behind him, out of sight but too close still — and that was the problem. Every second that passed stretched longer, the way time did whenever someone stared at it too directly. And the idea of you not coming settled like a weight under his ribs, heavy enough to make his posture go stiller. 

He had spoken too boldly — too recklessly — he had asked a question for which he had no right to ask, offered a door he didn’t even know if you could open. But now that the words were out in the air, he couldn’t pull them back. 

Sunghoon couldn’t pretend they hadn’t existed. 

He glanced down at his suit — Jongseong’s suit, actually — although it was supposed to have become his the moment he had put it on, but the fabric sat wrong across his shoulders, sleeves a centimeter too small because Jongseong had always been shorter, and it was clear now that he looked like someone he wasn’t — like someone who could sit at your father’s table without feeling the world shift under him. 

The thought made his stomach twist. 

He dragged in a breath, tasting the air — flowers, damp earth, and the distant trace of cigarette smoke from somewhere down the road and he wondered if he should smoke, but his pack was still in the locker room, safely hidden with his clothes. 

And not to mention that he didn’t even know if you mind cigarettes. Perhaps you despite the smell of it as much as Jaeyun, and if you ever came—

God

Sunghoon leaned in, forehead resting against his clasped hands. 

But then, he saw a movement in his periphery. 

At first it was only a shape separating itself from the dark — a silhouette against the faint spill of light from the resort’s property, slow and hesitant as if the body itself wasn’t sure it was allowed to keep walking. And Sunghoon’s spine straightened before he could stop it, the motion too sudden for him to even have time to consider preventing it.

His heart didn’t leap, exactly — but shifted, like something inside him had been forgotten and finally remembered its existence.

Sunghoon rose. He didn’t mean to do it so quickly, but the bench seemed to push him up anyway, and by the time you reached the edge of the park, he was already standing there, hands useless at his sides, and the night suddenly too loud in his ears. 

For a second you only looked at him, chest rising and falling just a bit faster than it should have from such a short walk, and your eyes bright in a way that didn’t match the dim light. As if you had been running internally even when your feet hadn’t.

“I thought you wouldn’t come,” Sunghoon heard himself say, and hated the way the honesty slipped out before he could catch it.

“I almost didn’t,” you admitted. “My parents were taking forever to go to their room. My mother kept asking if I was tired. If I wanted tea. If I wanted to sleep early.”

“And?”

“And I said yes,” you said, and something small changed in your expression, a flicker of the mischievous he had seen at the playground. “To all of it.”

Sunghoon nodded at you, only once — only because he understood and he didn’t want you to explain further. Explanations could turn into an apology, and he didn’t want your apology — not tonight, not anymore — not when the corners of your lips were already curling into a smile. 

You glanced at the bench, and then, at him. “Is this—” you paused. “Is this where you always wait?”

“No,” he said. “Only tonight.”

The words sat between you — true enough to make the space feel thinner, but if anything, you stepped even closer — the red flowers behind you making your skin look warmer than it probably was. 

Sunghoon’s hand lifted without his permission — not to touch you, not really, just hovering near your elbow like a reflex, like his body decided to lead you away from danger before his mind had agreed it was allowed. But he caught himself at the last second and dropped it back.

“We should go,” he said then. “Before someone sees.”

“Where?”

“Where do you want to go?” 

You glanced toward the road first, watching the faint spill of the resort light that didn’t quite reach the park before you looked back — looked at him, the wind picking and shifting a strand of your hair across your cheek in the process, and he was thankful that you reached for it fastly, tucking it behind your own ear before his hand could mischief again.

“Somewhere,” you said. “Anywhere.”

⋆˚꩜｡

The resort disappeared behind you in trimmed hedges, stone paths, and the last spill of gold light thinning between the trees until it couldn’t reach. Even the air changed. Less citrus polish and more Jeju: salt threaded through the dark laced with tangerine, damp earth, cedar, and something sharp-green from the moss that climbed the trunks like it owned them. Even the sounds shifted as you kept walking, string music and fountain hush traded for insects, a burst of laughter somewhere down the road — the messy life of the island bleeding back in.

Sunghoon led you along a path that dipped and narrowed, the trees thinning until the sky opened. And then the beach was simply there — no staging, no chairs and parasols with Marriotte’s logo, but just the sea moving in slow, endless pulls toward the pale sand.

He stepped down first, shoes sinking just slightly, and you followed — until you didn’t.

You stopped at the line where pavement ended and sand began, staring at the sea for a quiet moment before your gaze dropped to your feet, to the heels that suddenly looked ridiculous here.

“I—” you started, already crouching to slip one off, but the sand shifted under you, breaking your balance.

It had been nothing more than a small slip, your ankle rolling in a way that could have passed unnoticed — but Sunghoon was watching, and before you could pretend it hadn’t happened, his hand had already closed around your forearm, firm and quick, saving you from a fall that would never really come.

Your skin was warm under his grip, summer still caught in you somewhere, and suddenly, you were so close and the night so still. All he could feel was the breeze on his cheeks, your breath feathering against his skin, and the sea hissing at the shore.

“Careful,” he whispered.

You steadied yourself, letting out a breath that sounded almost like a laugh — embarrassed and relieved all at once — before you slipped the heel off properly this time, then the other, holding them by the straps as you finally stepped further.

“Is this one of those beaches where you’re not allowed to go in the water at certain times?”

“Allowed,” he echoed. The word sounded strangely cute coming from you, but it was all wrong out here, too Marriotte, and he hated what that place had taught you to carry.

He bent down and unlaced his shoes, slipping them off before he stepped further, finding where the sea had already touched the sand and left it wet, but he stopped there then, looking over his shoulder at you, as if offering the path with his body.

“Come on,” he said. “This isn’t Marriotte. We can do what we like for a little while.”

You hesitated for a moment, lips parting as though you meant to say something else — but whatever it was, you let it go with a small shake of your head and followed.

Sunghoon kept his pace slower than normal, not looking back fully — just enough to confirm you were still there, a step behind him, heels hooked securely over your fingers — and matching your pace when it slowed, pretending he wasn’t listening to every change in your breathing like it could mean something.

The shoreline pulled in and out, foam thinning and retreating, leaving the sand dark and shining under the moonlight. A small wave slid up in a cold sheet and flattened at Sunghoon’s feet, soaking the hem of his trousers. 

“I am sorry,” you said. “I had no idea that my father had invited Byeongseok and his parents. If I had, I would have told you to come some other time. I know they are—” but you never finished. There wasn’t anything you could say that they hadn’t already proven to be, and so, you merely shook your head, your gaze dropping back at your feet. “I am genuinely sorry.”

Sunghoon halted then, not realizing he had done it until you halted too, turning to find him a step behind. He never thought he had any problem with speaking and talking, but now he realized that perhaps whenever he had something serious to say, he needed to go still first. 

“Byeongseok,” he began.

“What about him?”

“Are you both a — thing?” 

“What?” you laughed, less because you were amused than because you knew you were supposed to be. “He is a friend — kind of, I don’t know.”

You shuddered.

“Our parents have known each other since university and co-founded their first company together,” you explained. “When our mothers got pregnant around the same time, it was already decided that Byeongseok and I should be friends too — actually, when they figured out our genders, even — even marriage was in the talks.”

The world didn’t stop then. The wind kept blowing, tucking loose strands of your hair and sending them through the night in thin ribbons of moonlight. The sea kept hissing at the shore in its slow, indifferent rhythm, as if it had never learned the meaning of names. But Sunghoon went painfully still.

It shouldn’t have made him feel anything — this truth of yours — but it did, because it carried the sharpest fact with it: you could slip away without anyone even touching you. You could turn back toward Marriotte’s gold light and be absorbed by it like you’d never stood here at all. Like this beach was only a pause between rules. Like the night had borrowed you and would have to give you back.

And the thought spiked so suddenly that it made him angry.

Sunghoon worked his jaw once and swallowed hard, as if he could force the feeling down to wherever he kept everything else. But it didn’t go. It stayed lodged in his throat, cold, heavy, and growing harder with every second he didn’t say it out loud: don’t go.

And in the hush of the moment, you continued, your voice slipping into the space before his could, soft and quick, like you were trying to save you both from something.

“It is not so terrible,” you told him, and for a moment he couldn’t tell what you were referring to. “I mean, I am not the type of person who did much — ever since childhood — as you can notice. I did not have much experience with anything. I do not know how to swim, and I only know how to ride a bike because one of my babysitters thought it was absurd that I did not know how at the age of twelve.”

“Twelve?” Sunghoon echoed, his voice softer than he expected. He tried to picture a twelve-year-old you and someone finally deciding you should know how to balance yourself on two wheels. “What else have you never tried?” 

“Carnivals, arcades, street food,” you said, and it hurt Sunghoon to notice how you didn’t even seem to go very far into your mind before coming up with those, as if you had already listed all the things life had kept from you, holding it on a secret corner. “I’ve also never played in the rain.”

You didn’t look at him when you said it. You looked at the water instead, and the words hung there a moment — small and wrong against the sea.

“What else do children do?” you asked quietly.

“In Jeju?” Sunghoon echoed, and you shuddered a little because the problem wasn’t Jeju at all, but that you didn’t know what children did anywhere.

His gaze slid past you, down the shoreline, and toward where the harbor lights would be if you followed the coast far enough.

“Fishing boats,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

He glanced back at you. “Have you ever been on one?”

“No,” you laughed, and it sounded like surprise more than amusement. “Not even close.”

Sunghoon didn’t think. He just decided.

“Come.”

“Now?”

He nodded, already moving — already turning it into something inevitable before he could talk himself out of it. Sunghoon stepped into your space, reaching for you. His fingers closing around your wrist, as though he was afraid you’d vanish if he didn’t anchor you to the moment.

He didn’t look back as he led you along the shoreline. He only tightened his grip once — pulling you farther down the beach with the sound of the sea and his heart pounding against his ears. 

⋆˚꩜｡

Sunghoon didn’t stop walking until the sand gave way to wood and damp rope, until the harbor opened up in front of you and it was too late to turn back.

Boats rested low in the water, tied close to the dock as their hulls knocked softly in the tide’s slow pull. The air here was thick with things the resort would’ve scrubbed away: seaweed gone sweet at the rocks, gasoline that never fully left the planks, fish in a way that didn’t come plated, and rope that held the day’s work in its fibers.

He stepped onto the dock and led you between the boats without slowing until he found one smaller than the rest — paint chipped, name faded to something half-forgotten, but still rocking with a stubborn kind of life.

“Is it yours?” you asked.

Sunghoon shook his head, letting go of your hand only so he could climb down first, one hand on the rail, knees bending on instinct as the boat dipped beneath his weight and steadied again. 

“It was — is my father’s, but he doesn’t use it anymore,” Sunghoon answered, looking back up at you from the deck. 

“It moves,” he warned. “Just — just step where I tell you.”

“You know,” you whispered. “The last time I was on something like this, I slipped and caused chaos — what if I slip again?”

“I’ll jump after you again,” he replied, taking a moment too long to notice how silly he had sounded, but you laughed then — real, and soft — cheeks growing a shade darker beneath the lights, and Sunghoon decided that he didn’t care. He could be as silly as he needed to be to see you like this. 

“I am trusting you on this,” you said. 

Sunghoon reached up toward you, not offering his hand like something romantic, but lifting his arms like he was preparing to catch you before you could fall.

“Come,” he said, and when you stepped closer, he didn’t give either of you time to second-guess it. His hands found your waist, fingers curling and holding onto as he lifted you.

The boat shifted under him as he brought you down, the deck dipping at the exact wrong moment, and making Sunghoon’s balance break — just a fraction — but he stumbled anyway, the two of you jolting together.

Your lips parted on a gasp, and you were suddenly too close again. The air between you thinned enough that Sunghoon could not only hear but feel it against his mouth, sweet with the strawberry cocktail you had been nursing at dinner and chocolate from the dessert he almost stole from you.

He wasn’t sure what had come to your mind, but your gaze dropped to his lips, and for one stupid second, he thought the deck had tilted again, some tide moving the boat beneath your feet, because he caught himself moving toward you — toward whatever it was.

It was absurd, honestly, how quickly his body betrayed him. How instinct moved first: the pull forward, the half-formed reach, the mind going blank in the same way it did right before a dive.

But then, his mind snapped back in with the same brutal timing it always had, and Sunghoon halted.

He forced his hands to stay where they were. Forced his feet to hold, and his gaze to move up and off your mouth — off the sweet stain of chocolate and strawberries on the air — because if he kept looking, he didn’t trust himself not to finish what his body had started.

For a moment, neither of you moved. The only still point in the middle of a harbor that continued to creak as it always had: water brushing softly against wood, rope shifting overhead, and the hull answering the tide with a slow, patient pull for which Sunghoon couldn’t bring himself to match. But then, you stepped aside, your gaze already skittering away, and searching for anything to hold onto that wasn’t this.

“It is a nice boat,” you said. “Why does your father not use it anymore?” 

His fingers flexed once at his sides — a newfound habit to ground him back into his body — as he breathed in.

“He had a stroke a few years ago,” he said, and it came out with the same level of emotion the doctors had said back then, like a fact because well, it was what it was. “It interrupted the blood flow to his spinal cord for long enough — long enough for his legs to stop working.”

It made you turn back at him, your gaze settling on him with a softness Sunghoon didn’t know what to do with because it didn’t feel like pity, not really. It felt like you were staying. As if you’d reached for the ugly truth and, instead of handing it back to him, you were holding one corner of it with your bare hands, because you didn’t want to give it back to him, not when it weighed so much, and it made his breath catch.

He looked away on instinct, jaw tightening as if he could lock the reaction behind his teeth, but his throat still burned anyway, sudden and sharp. The harbor lights blurred for a second on the water’s surface, trembling lines turning softer as he blinked and forced his eyes to behave.

“I am so sorry, Sunghoon,” you said, quietly. “I cannot imagine how hard it must have been for you.”

Something in his chest shifted at the way you said it — for him, not just his father — and it left him unsteady in a way the boat never could. He pressed his tongue to the back of his teeth, swallowing once, and then again, as if he could force the feeling down into a place it wouldn’t show.

But he couldn’t — he never could, not with you.

“Yeah,” Sunghoon managed, rough around the edges. Then, after a beat, like the words had to be pried loose: “It was—”

“It was my last year in high school and suddenly I was having to get part-time jobs to help with the bills. University exams and everything that came with it became just a reality that couldn’t be mine,” he said, the words coming out in a rush, like now that he had started, he couldn’t stop. “I graduated by a miracle, I would say — and then I got the job at Marriotte, and it’s not like we are rich, but it gave us some breathing room. They pay well — I mean, not enough to cover a dozen of crystal glasses with one of the most expensive champagnes comfortably—”

“That is why you reacted that way,” you said.

“Desperate?” 

“I wasn’t going to use this word.”

Sunghoon’s lips twitched.

“You can be harsh with me, Angel,” he said, and regretted the nickname the second it left his mouth. It sounded too familiar — too owned — but if anything, you smiled at him, ending the distance you had previously created and reaching for him, your thumb brushing the space between his brows.

“You are frowning,” you whispered.

Sunghoon hadn’t noticed it — he couldn’t come to care, actually — all he could think about was the warmth of your thumb, the faint smell of coconuts at your skin, and the sudden, odd urgency in him to keep you there and not let you slip away again.

“Do you want me to take her out a bit?” he asked, his voice lower than he intended. “It’s better once the lights are behind us.”

“The boat?” you asked, and he was surprised by how excited you sounded. “Can you?”

He moved before he could overthink it, reaching past you to the console by the cabin, fingers finding switches and knobs with the muscle memory of a childhood he didn’t talk about much. 

The cabin itself crouched in the middle of the boat — small windows clouded with salt, paint chipped, a cheap string of bulbs hanging along a metal frame overhead from one decision he was too young to remember. Warm light spilled onto coiled rope and a cooler shoved against the cabin wall, onto a bucket with a cracked handle and nets bunched like shed skins.

The boat rocked in small answers as he worked, impatient, like it wanted to be out in the water too.

You stepped into the cabin’s shadow, close enough to watch without getting in the way. 

The engine coughed when he turned it over, and Sunghoon coaxed it gently — hand steady, voice low under his breath as if the boat could hear him. It sputtered again, then finally caught, a rough vibration running through the deck and up his legs, swallowing the harbor’s quieter noises.

Sunghoon guided the boat out, slow at first, easing past the tighter line of docked vessels. The harbor lights stayed bright behind you for a moment — gold smearing across the water — before they began to thin.

And then, gradually, the world changed. The air opened. The smell of gasoline softened into salt and night. The noises of the docks dissolved into nothing but the sea’s quiet insistence and the boat’s engine thudding like a heartbeat.

You leaned a little, peering past the cabin.

“It is — dark,” you said.

“You aren’t supposed to be looking down.”

“I—”

Sunghoon killed the engine, and the sudden silence landed heavy and solemn, although the boat continued to drift, tide and current doing what they always did, and the hull continued to knock against the water.

“Come,” he said.

Sunghoon stepped out and moved toward the side passage between the cabin and the rail. It was narrow — barely enough for one person to pass without turning sideways, and you seemed to notice it right away.

“Is it — safe?” you asked, and Sunghoon snorted at it.

“Define safe,” he said, because it wasn’t, but there was no other way, and so, he merely turned sideways, giving in a few steps into the narrow patch before he glanced back at you.

“Like this,” he instructed. “Sideways — you can use the cabin for support.”

You did as he said, following him into the gap.

The cabin wall pressed close as you both moved, and only when you reached the bow, the space widened by a few inches — not much, but enough to feel like freedom. The cabin lights were dimmer here, allowing the sky to be everything.

Sunghoon looked at you for a second, taking in the way you stared upward, your lips parting in a gasp you didn’t quite release.

Sunghoon didn’t wait for you to decide. He lowered himself first, back meeting the wood, one arm tucked under his head like he belonged to the boat in a way he didn’t belong anywhere else. 

You watched him as if you weren’t sure you were allowed to follow, but then you did anyway, lying down beside him.

Above, the stars were so bright they looked spilled — silver and white against a dark so deep, it swallowed the last memory of the harbor.

And it was so nice to just lie there with you — backs resting against the deck as you watched the stars — as if you both had shared something and were no longer alone with yourselves and your little secrets, because well, you had.

“You know,” you began. “You made me do two things I have never done in the span of a single hour — be in a fishing boat and watch the stars.”

“Have you never watched the stars?” he asked.

“Not really,” you said. “There are too many lights in Seoul, it’s almost impossible to see the stars.”

“That’s a waste.”

You laughed at that — so small and soft — as if the night had pulled it out of you without asking and Sunghoon’s mouth twitched at the sound. He kept his eyes on the sky, knowing it was safer than looking at you, but your laughter stayed in his chest anyway, warm, stubborn, and making something within him shift.

“We could do more,” he said, the words escaping before he could prevent them. “Not tonight, but while you are in Jeju — I could teach you how to swim — there is a public pool nearby, we could go there after my working hours at the resort.”

He was rambling at this point, trying to turn the thing he had just offered into something practical — something that could be scheduled and explained and, if necessary, defended. As if putting it into logistics could make it safer.

“I mean—”

“I would love to,” you cut in. “I genuinely would love to.”

“Tomorrow, if you can,” he said. “Let’s meet on the bench.”

“Tomorrow,” you said. “At our spot.”

“Our spot,” he heard himself agreeing. 

Sunghoon couldn’t tell how long you stayed there, the boat drifting and rocking beneath your backs, but it was enough for the air to shift, the night cooling as if the morning had already started to gather itself somewhere out of his sight. And Sunghoon understood, with a clarity that made something within his chest tighten, that soon the world would wake up, and he would have to take you back. Tomorrow was going to come no matter what, and yet still — he wanted it to. 

If it were to be with you, he wanted it to.

PART TWO｜STORY MASTERLIST

[en-ternity]

Oh I just read your reply with explanation to another anon’s question about pottery shop part two, sorry I panicked too fast when the link didn’t opened (who can blame me the story is a masterpiece 🫠)

that’s ok! that was cute lmao ♥️ i will try to edit it faster so you all can read it! (also blushing and kicking my feet because you called it a masterpiece 🥹)

[en-ternity]

Hi, I love your pottery shop fic but when I click on the second part it says “no post found” please help I’m about to cry rn 😭 I really really hope you didn’t actually delete it i was so exited to read it

hello, anonie! thank you so much for reading tpsateotw! i am genuinely so happy to know you liked it that much ♥️ and i am so sorry for almost making you cry! but don’t worry! i haven’t deleted the second part. a few weeks ago i wasn’t on good terms with my writing and being here in general, so i put this story on private and closed my account for a few. but it’s still here, i am just making some edits as i caught a few typos and grammatical mistakes while re-reading 🥲

soon enough i will make it public again and tell you all! 🤲🏻 thank you so much for your support once again

[en-ternity]

At the luxurious resort of Marriotte, the staff lived by a single unofficial rule: don’t get involved with the guests. Not the gilded men, not the wives, and certainly not the daughters. One slip meant losing everything. But then you stepped too close, and Sunghoon couldn’t bring himself to care (not anymore)

a summer romance divided into two parts｜40K+

PAIRING: lifeguard!Sunghoon x fem!reader

TAGLIST IS OPEN! if you would like to be tagged, feel free to send me an ask, or simply leave a comment down below! ♡ and for those who have asked me on the previous masterlist, don’t worry! your url is still on my notes :)

PINTEREST MOODBOARD

PART ONE｜21.6K｜WARNINGS (for this part): poor!boy x rich!girl tropé, kinda forbidden love, Sunghoon is rude to you at the beginning, but we love a man who comes back and yearns, right? right?! slow-burnish, mentions of cuts and blood, alcohol consumption, cigarettes usage, reader almost drowns once, and Sunghoon has to save her

PART TWO｜coming soon｜WARNINGS (for this part): still slow-burnish, but we are finally getting the lovers part, swimming lessons written by a person who doesn’t know how to swim at all (me), skinny dipping, smut, unprotected sex, nipple play, fingering and oral (f. receiving), handjob (m. receiving), shower and semi-public sex (they do it on a boat?!)

[en-ternity]

yumi, good thing i was following you or else i wouldn't have known about your jake fic! please add more tags on your works for visibility, limit's up to 30 now!

ANONIE, IT WAS SO SWEET OF YOU, I SWEAR! 🥹 thank you so much for reaching out to help me with the tags, you’re genuinely so cute ♥️

i have to admit that i leave it with just a few tags on purpose 🙈 i post the stories with a bunch of tags, but since i’m not the type of author to go to the popular part of it, my stories get lost 🤧 so as soon as the interactions start to die, i remove them and leave only the necessary ones for people to navigate on my profile (aka member name and the abbreviation of the series name if it’s part of a series)

but seriously, thank you so much 🥹 it was so sweet of you! ♥️

[en-ternity]

hello! first of all i love!!! ur two jake fics 🥹 literal butterflies in my stomach <33 was just wondering if you will open part two of TPSATEOTW, i was so invested and now my imagination's been running wild imaging what could've been 😭

hello, love! i’m genuinely so happy to know you liked both of my jake stories and literally got butterflies in your stomach ☹️ thank you so much for reading and even taking some time to send me an ask, it means a lot! ♥️

and oh god! i was supposed to have already changed the post back to public, but irl came in (aka enhypen’s concert in my hometown, my friends coming here) and i didn’t! 😵‍💫 while i was writing sim jaeyun’s guide, i re-read tpsateotw and noticed some typos, plus some (abominable) grammatical incoherences, so i took the opportunity that i had already made it private as i was going to close my account and decided to edit it carefully 😅 i haven’t finished editing the second part yet, but i will do it as soon as possible and make a post to let you guys know!

[en-ternity]

When a friendship comes with too much history, rules become necessary. It’s easier to stay safe when you can name the lines you refuse to cross. That’s why Jaeyun has always been so strict about his secret little guide, or at least, he was, until the moment you asked him to sleep with you, and everything started to shatter in his hands like it was never real at all.

a childhood friends to lovers oneshot｜27.9K

PAIRING: Jaeyun x fem!reader

WARNINGS: university au, Jaeyun is an electronic engineer student, kinda nerdy, and too down bad for the reader even though she is a bit of a brat, i am not sure if there’s a major plot, smut, nipple play, fingering and oral (f. receiving), handjob, virginity loss, protected and unprotected sex, there’s a fwb situation within, one fight between Jaeyun and reader’s ex, and jaykehoon being the most chaotic roommates ever

PINTEREST MOODBOARD

RULE ZERO: DO NOT RUIN THE FRIENDSHIP

When you were twelve, Jaeyun got you both grounded.

He had the brilliant idea of bringing a bottle of whiskey home — something one of his soccer teammates had stolen from his father’s cabinet and hadn’t known how to get away with now that it had been opened and already had a swig taken from it.

Jaeyun didn’t know why he decided to take charge of it, much less bring it home — he could have just let his teammate deal with it alone, for God’s sake. But perhaps because he liked the thrill of secretly carrying it and the astonishment in your eyes when he took it out of his backpack, he did bring it home. 

But the fact was — neither of you drank any of it, yet his brother — the Mr. Perfect, as you used to whisper in each other’s ears — had caught you with your hands on it, and in the end it didn’t matter.

You were grounded for four weeks. No phones, video games, or allowances. You were only allowed to go to school and straight back to your homes — Jaeyun having only the small detour of dropping you off before going to his. 

It made you miss the Seoul Annual International Book Fair. A major literary gathering with author events, book markets, and cultural programs that you had been looking forward to. 

Nerdy, he had told you, which only made your tears flow even harder, and he felt so bad about it that he gave you a voucher the next morning, a handmade thing that got you laughing when he handed it to you.

Jaeyun had never been much of an artsy type. The voucher was irregular, and his handwriting was so bad you could barely decipher the words free wish — but perhaps because it was his way of trying, you took it, promising you would use it well.

That was probably when it started: the first page of a guide he would never mean to write, on how not to ruin a friendship that felt bigger than him because as he watched you folding the paper and tucking it into the front pocket of your sweater like a keepsake, he had a sudden clarity that he would do anything not to lose you.

You never really used the voucher.

Eleven years into your friendship, you never once brought it up. 

Perhaps because Jaeyun always did everything for you, the voucher seemed useless. 

When you got asked for a date for the first time in your life, Jaeyun agreed to go shopping with you — even though he despised every second of it — and when you called him afterwards, telling him to come over so you could rant about it, he once again was there without the voucher having even passed through your minds. He simply came and stayed there, listening to you, your backs side to side on the hardwood floor of your bedroom until the walls had turned orange and pink with the sunrise.

When you crashed your father’s car and called him crying, he asked where it had happened with his jacket already on and searching for his keys.

And when you moved out of the university dorms somewhere around your second semester, Jaeyun was carrying your boxes and luggage without you even glancing at his side. 

So it felt a bit weird now, seeing you pushing the little thing through the counter — its edges turned so yellow with the advance of the years that he could see it even in the bar’s reddish light — and especially with the words that followed: 

“Sleep with me,” you said. 

RULE #1: DO NOT ACCEPT RECKLESS REQUESTS

Don’t answer requests she makes when she’s drunk, mad, or sad — that’s when she turns reckless. I’m supposed to get her home, get her water, and let time take the sharp edges off whatever she thought she wanted. If I do my job right, she’ll wake up with a headache — maybe puffy eyes — but no regrets. At least not the kind that have my name on them.

Arcano wasn’t as fierce as the name made it seem.

If Jaeyun were being honest, it was, in fact, a terrible bar. Awful, actually.

The seats were constantly sticky, and the tables were permanently stained with something spilled too long ago. The restrooms always smelled like weed and sex, and there was writing on the walls telling you who to call for a good time — but, awful as it was, it was the only bar on the outskirts of the university, and the drinks were cheap, which made it a reasonable choice for anyone who wanted to get drunk in the middle of a weekday. 

Which, apparently, was what you were doing. 

You had called him, your voice softened and a little slurred at the edges, even as you tried to keep it brief — trusting him to hear the truth between your words, as he always did — and making his body go tight, that low instinct already moving beneath his skin with the need to make it better.

Jaeyun came in without question, his eyes scanning through the dim room. Tables first, booths next, then the bar counter, because putting things in order always helped him keep control — but then he saw you, and his heart hitched hard enough to make his hands unreliable.

Arcano was nearly dark, red bulbs offering more irritation than light, and yet whatever sheen clung to its corners now seemed to gather around you; the glint of bottles, the thin neon humming above the bar. Even the noise shifted, bending your way subtly, as if the room itself couldn’t help but want to be near you. 

Or perhaps it was only him — caught on you like gravity, a quiet flaw built into his body that only ever showed itself in your presence.

Across the bar, the music shifted, and someone laughed too loudly as a glass hit the counter with a wet little sound, but none of it reached him the right way, not while you were there, bent toward the counter with your hair falling forward and your shoulders loose with drink and something sharper underneath it.

Jaeyun swallowed and pushed his hair back off his forehead — the gesture automatic in the way habits were — as he closed the last steps in.

You shifted on your stool as he stopped behind you, small and unthinking, leaning back into him as if it was the most natural thing in the world to put your weight onto his chest merely because you trusted him to catch it without ever asking. And he did, his body reacting before his mind did, his arms raising and settling just enough to keep you upright.

He didn’t understand how you did it — how you could recognize him without looking. If your bones had memorized the shape of him and refused to forget even here, in a terrible bar, with alcohol in the air and the whole world pretending not to watch, or if you merely felt the same gravity as him, because you, too, had been built with some quiet flaw that only ever showed itself in his presence.

“Hello,” you said, tipping your head back to look at him.

“Hello, Princess,” he said, leaning in just to drop a kiss on your forehead. But you smelled like vanilla and white flowers — the kind of soft sweetness you always insisted on having threaded through every perfume you owned — and he allowed himself to breathe you for a second more before he let go, sliding onto the stool beside you. 

His jeans brushed your bare thigh, and when you turned toward him, he had no other option than to spread his legs further apart, opening space so your knees fit between his; and for a second, Jaeyun’s brain focused on the image, slowly and cruelly, taking the stark line of your skin against denim, the heat of you seeping through a fabric barrier that suddenly felt too thin to be decent. Your knees fit perfectly between his, and the placement was so intimate it might’ve been accidental if he hadn’t felt how quickly his body registered it as right.

He went still.

Not because he didn’t want more contact, but because he did. Because he wanted it in a way that made him feel juvenile, and his restraint could turn into nothing but a costume you’d just tugged at the seam.

So he forced himself to look up, his gaze finding your face like it was the only safe thing left, but it only turned to be worse. 

You were flushed from the alcohol and the heat, color blooming across your cheeks and the bridge of your nose as if you’d been kissed too many times already. And your eyes were bright in that unfocused way that made his whole body ache with protectiveness and something he refused to name. 

Jaeyun swallowed, dropping his gaze before he could stop it — and that was when he saw the dress. 

Low-cut, and reckless in the quietest way, exposing your skin in a soft curve that made his throat tighten, not because it wasn’t vulgar or blaring, but merely because it was you — warm, real, and too close. 

And resting there, right in the center of it all, was the necklace he’d given you on your fifteenth birthday, the thin chain catching what little light Arcano offered and holding it like a secret. Jaeyun felt something in his chest twist — sharp and familiar. A gift, a promise, a piece of him you’d kept on your skin for years without making a thing of it.

He blinked, dragging his eyes back up, back to your face, as though that could undo what he’d seen. As though looking anywhere else could turn his thoughts into something normal again, but it didn’t.

“You called me,” he said in the end, voice light on purpose, aiming his gaze at the safe edge of your hairline instead of your eyes. 

“Is there a question in this statement?” you asked, your head tipping to the side the way it always did when you were teasing him, letting a strand of hair slip loose and rest against your cheek.

Jaeyun huffed a quiet breath through his nose, something that almost counted as a laugh if anyone else had been listening. The bar noise swelled and dipped around you — ice clinking in glasses, a burst of laughter from a booth, the bass thudding like a distant heartbeat — and for a second it made the moment feel ordinary. Like this was just the two of you, playing the same game you’d played a hundred times.

“I don’t know,” he said. “You’re the linguistics genius among us.”

His hand lifted without thinking and brushed the strand away — quick, familiar, and thoughtless — the kind of gesture that belonged to years of friendship. He didn’t linger. He didn’t let it become a thing. He just tucked it back like he’d done it before and would do it again. Still, you felt the contact anyway, blinking at him, and it took you a moment to speak again.

“I think there was,” you said, your voice more serious than he expected. “I need to ask you something.”

“Okay.”

You turned halfway on your stool to reach into your purse, and Jaeyun took the moment to breathe — really breathe, looking across the room as his hands found and pushed at his hair, steadying himself. 

Overhead, a red bulb faltered, and the neon hissed in — thin, stubborn light clinging on.

“Yun,” you called.

He turned to you again, catching as you slipped the voucher toward him, the piece yellowed into something that didn’t belong to the present. His own handwriting stared up at him, crooked and absurd in the way only a teenage promise could be.

Jaeyun’s lips parted around a question, but the words slipped before they could reach his mouth.

“I’m using it,” you announced, slurring a little — but not enough to take the weight of the words that followed:

“Sleep with me.”

Jaeyun inhaled too fast and choked on the air, like the sentence had gone straight for his throat and his body refused to swallow it. He coughed once, twice, eyes watering, and hated himself for how obvious it was.

“Drink,” you said, lifting your glass toward him — offering it with the careless kindness of someone who had no understanding of the damage they were capable of causing.

Jaeyun pictured you rummaging through your drawers for the voucher, trying to guess when the decision had formed. Whether it had been planned. Whether it had been impulsive. Whether the dress had been chosen with him in mind—

He didn’t get to finish the thought.

He took the glass too fast, his thumb grazing your knuckle — more an echo of a touch than a touch itself — but his whole body registered it like a confession. And he forced himself to bring it to his mouth and swallow it. The liquor burned his throat, cheap and harsh and useless, and then — for one horrifying second — he tasted you there, sweet and faint beneath the sting.

He set it down.

“What—” he tried, but his voice came out wrong, and he forced himself to clear his throat. “Where’s Baekhyeon?”

Because it felt reasonable to ask where your boyfriend was when you were asking him to sleep with you.

Your eyes gleamed at the name and then cleared just as quickly. Whatever that feeling was, it was banished with a blink before you reached for your glass again, considering the few drops he’d left.

“We broke up,” you said.

“When?”

“Today — or yesterday.” Your brow creased. “I’m not sure. What time is it?”

“But why?”

You shuddered, already turning toward the bartender for another drink, but Jaeyun reached for your wrist and drew you back in. His hands were cold against your warm skin, and a shiver danced across you, strong enough to make your shoulders tremble.

He let go.

“Princess, talk to me,” he said. “What happened?”

And so you told him, your words coming rushed and messed up, one long stream being pulled out of you because now that you’d started, you couldn’t afford to stop. You told him how Baekhyeon had gotten quieter for some time now — absent — balancing himself on that thin space where he could keep you without having to show up. And whenever you asked what was wrong, he kept saying he’d been thinking, whatever that meant, as if the word could stretch indefinitely and still count as effort — like you were supposed to wait politely while he decided if you were worth choosing because he wasn’t sure anymore, but still expected you to stay soft about it: keep answering, keep waiting, keep existing in the exact place where he could reach for you whenever he felt like it. And when you finally said it out loud, he told you you were overreacting — like wanting clarity was something you needed to unlearn.

And it wasn’t just that. He got calm in that way people do when they’re trying to sound reasonable, like if he kept his voice soft enough then you would start doubting your own memory. He said that you were making it bigger than it was — and then he asked you why you were trying to start a fight. And when you didn’t back down, he laughed a little — not kind — and told you were being dramatic. So you left.

“But it’s so humiliating, Yun,” you said, your hands dragging down your face, hiding it as you folded forward and rested on him again — forehead against his shoulder, your whole body fitting into the space between his thighs like it had always known where to go.

Jaeyun reached out without thinking, one hand settling at the small of your back as the other slid into your hair, fingers tangling gently there — holding you together in the only way he knew how.

“It’s not like I thought he was going to be my forever one. I never even considered it, but I thought — God.” You let out a laugh that didn’t even try to sound like humor. “I’m a virgin in university, Jaeyun. After having a boyfriend. Do you know how stupid that feels? I kept waiting for something to feel right, and now it just feels like everyone else has learned how to do this — how to be with someone, how to start, how to stop — and I am still a little girl who doesn’t know where to put her hands.”

The whole sentence hit and sank in with a dull ache, shifting a fault line in him so sharply his whole body twitched. His fingers flexed against you, tightening at your back before he could stop himself, because this was simply his first instinct: pull you in, hold you tighter, so perhaps he could keep you from breaking by sheer force of his will.

But then he hated himself for it — for the greedy relief that came with the feeling of you against him, for the way wanting and protecting acquired the same face in his body — and he loosened his grip immediately, forcing his touch back into something safer, something that could still pass as friendship.

“Hey,” he said. “Don’t talk about yourself like that.”

“I’m feeling terrible,” you muttered. “Like I might have done something wrong in my life.”

“Princess,” he said again, the nickname rolling softly through the air, and for a moment, it didn’t feel like a joke at all. “Look at me.”

You shook your head, stubborn even like this, forehead still pressed where you’d chosen to hide. And Jaeyun exhaled through his nose, trying to sand the edge off himself before it could cut you.

“You’re drunk,” he told you. “And you’re not thinking straight.”

You didn’t react this time — which somehow made it worse.

“Come on,” he said, his hands slipping away only so they could find you again, but this time, somewhere safer. His palms spread on the bare skin of your arms to guide you up. “I’m taking you home.”

“But—” you began, your gaze sliding to the voucher.

Jaeyun reached for it and tucked it into the back pocket of his jeans, taking it out of your sight like he could make the exchange never happen — like merely hiding it could erase the fact that something had moved inside his chest with your ask, and now refused to calm down.

“I’ll keep it safe,” he said, and the promise tasted older than tonight.

He helped you off the stool with one hand at your waist as the other caught your purse, looping it around his wrist before he returned it to your elbow — steadying and guiding, making sure your feet landed where they were supposed to.

You swayed into him, coming so close that when you spoke, he not only heard you, but felt it through his skin.

“You always do.”

Jaeyun’s fingers flexed once again at your side.

“Yeah,” he said, looking ahead as he led you through the mess of bodies and sticky tables. “I know.” 

˖ ⟡  ݁˖

Outside, it was already spring in theory, but in practice, Arcano’s door swung shut behind you, and the night folded over — winter still pressing into April nights, and making it chilly.

The sidewalk out in front was uneven in that neglected-university-outskirts way, broken slabs and hairline cracks waiting for someone careless, and tonight, that someone was you. 

Jaeyun watched as you made it three steps before you stumbled. It had been nothing significant, just your ankle rolling in a way that could have passed unnoticed — but he was watching, and before you could pretend that it hadn’t happened, his hand had already closed around your forearm, firm and quickly, holding you.

He brought you closer to him on instinct, the lines of your bodies collapsing and melting under the same yellow wash of streetlight, and when you looked up at him, it gathered in your eyes in tiny gold flashes, softening you at the edges, and making you look heartbreakingly close; the tiny gasp you released warming his mouth.

“Easy,” he muttered. 

“I am being easy,” you argued, but you made no effort to disengage yourself from him, and so, neither did he — letting you both stay in the dim hush of the night for a moment more before he finally eased back, shrugging out of his jacket and easing you into it, one sleeve first and then the other. 

Jaeyun gave your purse back, and only when your fingers closed around it did he turn and drop into a crouch in front of you — shoulders broad and steady on purpose.

“What are you doing?” you asked.

“Taking you home,” he replied. “Get on.”

“I can walk.”

“You can barely negotiate a curb,” he argued. “Get on.”

Jaeyun waited then, bracing himself for another surge of protest, but instead, you leaned forward, your arms sliding around his shoulders, automatic, and with the kind of trust that never failed to set a quiet ache behind his ribs.

But if anything, he hooked his hands under your thighs and stood, letting your weight settle against him and your cheek to press into the side of his neck, warm and familiar.

“This is a bit embarrassing.”

“This is practical,” Jaeyun said. “Better than having to take you to the hospital over an ankle you refuse to admit you could break.”

You hummed, and he huffed a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh, tightening his hold as if you could slip out of his hands.

As if he would let you.

“Princess,” he muttered, more to himself than to you, “you’re going to be the death of me someday.”

You didn’t react this time — either because you didn’t hear it, or because your hazy mind had already filed it somewhere dangerous for tomorrow — but in any case, Jaeyun kept walking.

˖ ⟡  ݁˖

Jaeyun’s apartment building greeted you in the same failing way it always did. The hallway light flickered with stubborn inconsistency, always seeming one second away from burning out, and the front door still refused to open unless someone met it with a shoulder and a certain amount of conviction.  

He did it one-handed, you still on his back and refusing to let go even when he had to fumble for the key, his free hand going to his pockets once, twice, while the other kept you anchored against him, steadying you with the same absent care, as though you were simply part of the equation.  

Inside, the living room looked exactly the way it always did — dim, cramped, familiar in the ugly way cheap rent always was. Sneakers lay abandoned near the entrance like they’d given up halfway through the day. A laundry basket sat in the corner with the quiet menace of something that had been ignored too long.

And a few steps in, Sunghoon was there — barefoot, hair damp, skin still carrying that clean, just-showered warmth, as if he’d stepped out of steam and decided the world could handle itself for a while.  

His gaze flicked to you, draped over Jaeyun, then back to him, and his mouth twitched like he was trying not to smile.

“She really can do whatever she wants to you,” he said, flat as anything.

At the sound of his roommate’s voice, Jaeyun felt you shift against him, lifting your head just enough for the night’s air to slip into the space you’d made.

“Hello, Hoon,” you said.

“Hello, Princess.”

The hallway light blinked out, wiping your shadows clean for a quiet beat before Sunghoon shifted, and the sensor caught it, coaxing the bulb back to life. Jaeyun adjusted his grip like it meant nothing, like you weren’t warm against him in all the places he worked hardest not to think about. You shifted at his back once more, settling and slipping, and his shoulders tightened on reflex — prepared to steady you, prepared for anything — except your next words.

“If Yun doesn’t, would you do it with me, Hoon?”

“Do wh—”

“Nothing,” Jaeyun snapped. “She’s drunk, and I’m taking her to my room.”

Sunghoon’s brows rose at his roommate’s urgency, his mouth twitching deeper, but he didn’t push. If anything, he stepped back, clearing the way like Jaeyun needed permission at all.

“Tell me tomorrow, Princess,” Sunghoon called after you, loud enough to be heard down the hall. “Though I’m pretty sure Jaeyun will do it for you.”

Jaeyun didn’t give you the chance to answer.

He was already moving, turning down the hall. And when he reached his room, he shifted your weight higher with a small, efficient jerk of his arms, then shoved the door open with his shoulder.

The motion-sensor light in the hallway faltered again behind you, a brief blink of dark, and then the room swallowed you whole — quieter, warmer, smelling faintly of detergent, old cologne and whatever Jaeyun used to pretend he didn’t care about.

He stepped into his room and kicked the door shut with his heel, shutting the rest of the apartment out — Sunghoon’s smugness, the hallway’s flicker, all of it cut off as if it had never happened.

Yet still, he didn’t set you down. Jaeyun carried you the last few steps to his bed, and when he finally tried to set you down, you clung tighter — arms locking around his shoulders as your thighs pressed against his sides. 

“No,” you said, and there was no explanation required. It didn’t matter that it had been six months since you last shared a bed. He knew your rules just as much as he knew his: you didn’t do beds before a shower — much less in outside clothes. You didn’t even sit on them in anything that had been out in public.

“Princess,” he sighed. “It’s my bed. I don’t have that rule.”

“Your bed is contaminated,” you decided.

Jaeyun went still for a second, like sheer willpower might make you reasonable. But it didn’t. You stayed latched onto him, stubborn as a vow, and he realized — again — how useless he’d always been at saying no to you.

He sighed again.

“Fine,” he said. “Fine — let’s take a shower first.”

He tried to lower you, shifting his hands to set you down properly, but the moment your heels brushed the floor, you stiffened in protest, clinging harder.

“No shoes inside,” you reminded him, as if he were the one being difficult.

Jaeyun’s eyes shut for a brief beat — his surrender arriving the way it always did with you, tender and doomed.

“Yeah,” he muttered. “I know.”

He crouched carefully, still keeping one arm hooked around your legs so you wouldn’t tip, and reached for the thin strap of your heel. His fingers worked quickly and practiced, undoing what he could without looking like he was paying attention. 

Only when both heels had slipped free did he straighten again — and only then did you finally loosen, sliding down from his back. Jaeyun kept his hands on you the whole time, steadying you through the transfer, guiding you down until your bare feet found the floor without a stumble.

“There,” he said. “Now cooperate.”

Jaeyun went to his drawer and pulled out a t-shirt so old it had softened past saving, turned into the kind of thing that should’ve been discarded a long time ago. But it was the one you always chose when you slept over, and so it stayed — stupidly and hopefully, waiting for you.  

He pushed his hair back off his forehead, his hand lingering there for a beat before he reached for a towel and stood up.  

“Come,” he said then, placing his hand behind his back to encourage you to catch up and grab it.

You held hands across the apartment and into the bathroom, letting go only when Jaeyun reached for the switch and snapped the light on — white and harsh in a way that suddenly made the night tangible.  

“The lock is broken,” Jaeyun said.  

“Wasn’t Jongseong going to fix it months ago?” you asked.  

Jongseong had, but it broke again and again, and by the fourth time, the three of them had decided it was what it was and left it to its habits.

“I’ll wait outside,” he said. “Can you handle yourself?”

You leaned against the sink, head tipping to the side. Your necklace sparkled with the movement, catching the bathroom light in thin, bright flickers, and all at once, he regretted asking.  

It all felt too real, too reckless. What if you asked him to stay and help you, as it had happened a dozen times before Baekhyeon?

He couldn’t trust himself to make good decisions — couldn’t trust himself to help you out of your dress without looking. Not with the voucher still in the pocket of his jeans and your words coiling through his mind, slowly displacing all his other thoughts.

He was suddenly wild under the fluorescent lights of the bathroom.

“I’ll be right outside,” he said, reaching past you to set the towel on the counter, then the shirt beside it — lining them up like order could keep the night under control. “Take your time.”  

“Okay.”  

Jaeyun didn’t say anything as he stepped out. He merely pulled the door shut and folded himself down in front of it — knees up, forearms crossed above them, and his fingers tightening against the sides of his jeans for a quiet moment before he let go. 

From inside the bathroom came the soft shift of fabric. Then the small, telltale clink of something against porcelain — your necklace, surely your necklace — before the water finally started to run. And Jaeyun let out a slow breath he couldn’t quite believe in.

It wasn’t the first time he’d guarded a door for you, and he should’ve known how to breathe through it by now.

But tonight had reached in and rearranged all the defenses he’d built, and now he was back at the beginning with nothing solid to brace against. His fingers flexed once again, anchoring himself to the pressure and the bone, and making him almost miss the complaint of a floorboard down the hall.

“What the hell are you doing?” Jongseong’s voice carried from the hallway. “Why are you sitting on the floor?”

“The lock doesn’t work,” Jaeyun said.

“It never worked.”

“She’s inside.”

“Who?” Jongseong asked — more reflex than curiosity — because the moment his gaze landed on Jaeyun, the question dissolved on its own, understanding settling without needing a name.

“Oh, it’s been a while,” he said, and Jaeyun’s mouth tightened, the words pressing an old bruise.

It had been six months since you last slept here, to be exact — the same amount of time you’d been with Baekhyeon, and the same amount of time Jaeyun had been pretending the distance was natural. Reasonable. Maybe even healthy.

It wasn’t as if Baekhyeon had forbidden your friendship with him, or your sleepovers at this apartment. Baekhyeon was—

Jaeyun’s mind halted.

For a second, he tried to call him nice, the word rising up like it wanted to be fair — but he recoiled from the generosity of it, because your confession at Arcano was still echoing in his body.

The fact that Baekhyeon never forbade your friendship didn’t change what it meant to hear you say you’d been made to feel humiliating for wanting clarity — for wanting to be chosen like it wasn’t the bare minimum. Nice didn’t undo the image of you folding in on yourself as you said it, like you’d already started taking the blame out of habit.

So Jaeyun said nothing. He only breathed out, real slow, between barely parted lips, and let the silence carry what his mouth couldn’t afford.

Jongseong leaned back against the opposite wall and crossed his arms, staking out the space without saying a word because that was how he always did. He didn’t press — never that. Jongseong just stayed, letting the world breathe between them until it started to feel like an invitation people never knew how to refuse.

Jaeyun looked away.

“She called,” he said. “She was at Arcano. Drunk — not falling-over drunk — but enough.”

“Baekhyeon?” Jongseong asked, not because he was looking for gossip, but because it was logistics. It was the obvious missing piece.

“They broke up — he broke up with her,” he said. “Something about not being sure anymore.”

“Damn.”

Jaeyun hummed in agreement, and because he didn’t know how to bring up the topic, he merely said: “She asked me to sleep with her.”

Jongseong blinked — actually blinked, his whole body failing with the sudden information.

“She asked you,” he repeated.

Jaeyun’s jaw flexed. “Yeah.”

“To sleep with her.”

The words hung there between them, obscene in how plainly they fit the shape of the night. Jaeyun breathed out slowly through his nose; the air itself didn’t want to make room for them.

“And you said?” Jongseong asked, though his tone already suggested he knew the answer. Everyone knew Jaeyun’s reputation. Everyone knew he didn’t say no to much — especially not to you.

“I said no,” Jaeyun replied. 

Jongseong stared at him, then let out a low whistle, indecisive whether to be impressed or concerned.

“Don’t make it weird,” Jaeyun muttered.

“I’m not making it weird,” Jongseong said. “I’m just—” He paused, pondering what his next words should be. “You’re kind of famous for not being the guy who says no. Not to her.”

Jaeyun’s lips parted, his tongue already rolling in to say something, but the words stuttered and stammered, refusing to leave immediately, and Jongseong shifted his weight, glancing down the hallway once as if checking whether Sunghoon would appear and make this worse. But when he didn’t, he looked back at Jaeyun and waited again.

Of course he did.

Behind the door, the shower shifted pitch — water on tile instead of skin, the soft scrape of movement as you’d turned under the stream — and Jaeyun’s shoulders tightened at the sound, reflexive and stupid, like his body wanted to go in there and steady you with his hands.

He forced himself to stay where he was.

“You know what the problem is?” Jaeyun asked.

“Tell me.”

“I know her,” he said, and he hated himself for how quickly it came out, like a confession that had been waiting all night. “I know she meant it.”

Jongseong’s expression softened, but he didn’t interrupt.

“But what if it changes something?” he asked. “I could say yes, and for one night I’d get—”

He cut himself off, shoving his hair back as if he could physically push the thought out of his head.

“Fuck — I’d get something I’ve wanted for a long time.”

“And then?”

“And then she’d wake up, and something could flick.” Jaeyun said. “Like she’d look at me and realize she made a mistake. Like she’d hate me for letting her.” His grip tightened once, then loosened. “Like I’d lose the only part of her I’m allowed to have.”

The hallway seemed to draw in around him, the air thickening as if it could listen. And Jaeyun lowered his voice in response.

“I’d rather have just a part of her forever than have her entirely for a night and lose her in the morning.”

“That’s — that’s more honest than I expected.”

Jaeyun let out a humorless breath. “Thank you.”

“I’m not done,” Jongseong said, because of course he wasn’t. “You’re treating having her like it’s one thing.”

Jaeyun frowned, irritation returning on instinct because it was safer than admitting Jongseong was right. 

“It’s either you stay in the safe version of your friendship forever — half-measures, unsaid things — or you sleep with her and blow it up.”

“But it could happen.”

“But it also couldn’t — not if you do it in the right way.”

“In the right way,” Jaeyun scoffed. “That clears everything up.”

“When she’s sober,” Jongseong continued, ignoring the sarcasm like it was a symptom. “You tell her the truth she can use.”

“Like what?”

“You tell her you said no because she was drunk.”

“Obviously.”

“And you tell her you care about her too much to risk the friendship over a night.”

Jaeyun’s stomach tightened. The sentence was too clean — neat edges, no mess, nothing anyone could accuse him of — and it sounded like something he was allowed to say. But it wasn’t the real reason, though. The real reason lived lower in him, hot and humiliating because of the selfishness of it. 

Jaeyun cared too much to let you choose him with alcohol blurring the corners, too much to wake up and find your eyes clear and horrified — he cared too much to have his name become the sharpest part of your regret.

He didn’t want a night he’d have to defend. He wanted a tomorrow that didn’t require forgiveness.

He couldn’t lose you.

“And if she guarantees nothing will change?” he asked, and his voice sounded small there, drowned out by the fantasy of it.

“You decide,” Jongseong said. “You do it, or you don’t. But don’t lie to yourself that you can keep something by freezing it.”

“I can keep it by not touching it.”

“And you can lose it that way too,” Jongseong said, immediately and all at once making Jaeyun halt. “You’re already changing. She’s already changing. Baekhyeon happened. Tonight happened.” 

“So what?” Jaeyun asked. “You think I should accept?”

“I think you should accept the conversation,” Jongseong corrected. “Not the drunk proposal. Not the chaos. Not the one-night disaster you’re picturing.”

He paused, just long enough for Jaeyun to swallow.

“It’s the best way,” Jongseong added. “Because it’s the only way she gets to choose you with a clear head — and you get to be chosen without feeling like you stole it.”

“Fine,” he said. “I will talk to her tomorrow — when she’s sober.”

“Good.”

For a moment, neither of them spoke, but then Jongseong nodded toward the bathroom door with a faint grimace that tried to pass for humor. “Rap on my door when she’s done, yeah? I need to use the bathroom, and I don’t feel like getting murdered for walking in on — whatever this is.”

Jaeyun shot him a look, he wasn’t going to, and Jongseong knew it but if anything, his mouth quirked, teasing and mean, as he turned and started back toward his room, leaving Jaeyun alone with the thin shaft of light coming from under the door, the broken lock, and the sound of you moving on the other side — alive, breathing, and close enough to ruin him if he let himself reach.

˖ ⟡  ݁˖

The bathroom door opened with a tiny complaint from its hinges. Your figure momentarily silhouetted against the spill of light before he blinked and put you into focus, barefoot, hair slicked back and tucked behind your ears, cheeks still flushed from the shower, alcohol, and something that didn’t belong to soap or steam. His old shirt hung off you all wrong and yet perfectly: too big in the shoulders, too long in the hem, but familiar in a way that made Jaeyun’s chest tighten.

Perhaps he was dreaming this night.

“I thought I heard someone,” you whispered.

“It was Jongseong,” he replied, smoothing his tone into something casual, in the hope that you wouldn’t notice the way Jongseong’s appearance now sat warm and heavy beneath his ribs, pulsing each time he breathed, threatening to spill.

“Did we wake him up?”

Jaeyun shook his head and pushed himself up, his joints protesting with stiffness from the position and from the sheer act of not moving every time his instincts had told him to go in and make sure you were okay. “No. He just needed the bathroom.”

You nodded at him, and Jaeyun reached his hand to you, the gesture so unconscious, he didn’t notice he had done it until you reached back to him, fingers finding the slots between his, and intertwining your hands.

“Let’s go,” he murmured, already turning and guiding you down the short stretch of hall.

He wasn’t sure what time it was, but when he opened the door to his room, the world outside seemed vivid in comparison, a mist of light blue and purple coming through his open window, and spilling across the rumpled sheets and the scatter of things that made the space undeniably his: a jacket draped over the chair like it had been forgotten mid-thought, a half-open book, and a glass of water caught a thin slice of shine. The air was warmer in here, carrying the faint, familiar mix of laundry soap and skin and something clean underneath everything that had happened.

“Lie down,” Jaeyun said, swinging your interlaced hands toward the bed even though he expected you to refuse, saying something about contamination or demanding clean sheets, and forcing him into the familiar rhythm of your rules because that was how it always went — he was already halfway bracing for it, already planning how to humor you through it without letting his hands linger where they shouldn’t — but you moved then, slipping from his touch and laying on the mattress without protest. And it was somehow worse than anything.

“Princess,” he called, not really sure what the rest of the phrase was supposed to be, and the nickname hung in the air longer than it was necessary.

“Aren’t you coming?” you asked, and he was caught by the simplicity of it.

“Close your eyes,” Jaeyun said. “I’m going to get changed first.”

You made a small sound that almost counted as a snort, like the idea of him needing you not to look was ridiculous. But you did it anyway — eyes shut, face turned into his pillow, going still with the kind of obedience you only ever gave him when you didn’t want to argue.

Jaeyun changed quickly, like speed could make him safer. Jeans off. Sweatpants on. Shirt pulled over his head and tossed it somewhere he refused to look at. He kept his movements efficient, controlled — all about angles and purpose — because he couldn’t afford softness. Couldn’t afford the way tenderness turned reckless when it had nowhere to go.

By the time he finished, you hadn’t moved, and for a moment, he thought you’d fallen asleep, your body finally ceasing. But when he stepped closer, you opened your eyes, the dim light catching in them like a held secret, glazing along your lashes, turning your gaze into something soft and deep, as if whatever remained of the light had found a way to live inside you.

And Jaeyun hovered at the edge, forgetting for a beat how to be anything but pulled in.

He sat on the bed, and you shifted closer, cheek pressing deeper into his pillow like it belonged there — like you belonged there.

And the fact that you were smelling like him didn’t help. His shampoo was tangled in your damp hair. His soap clinging to your skin. The boring smell of him with something sweet underneath — vanilla and white flowers — threaded through it all. Like the night had taken the parts of him that were supposed to be private and braided them through you.

He wouldn’t sleep tonight.

“Yun,” you called. “About what I said—”

“Just sleep,” he cut in. “We can talk tomorrow.”

Your mouth parted as if you wanted to argue on principle. But your body betrayed you in the softest way: your breathing deepened, your fingers loosened on the sheet, your forehead sank into his pillow as if it was the only safe thing left in the world.

Jaeyun lay down beside you before he could think too hard about it, keeping the space between your bodies like a rule — a boundary he could hold — but you drifted closer inch by inch, pulled by some instinct that had never learned to be afraid of him. Your knee brushed his leg. Your hand settled near his, warm and lax, fingers curved like they might reach if you dreamed the right dream.

Jaeyun didn’t move. He only stared at the ceiling and listened to you breathe — slow and even — trying not to count it.

Tomorrow, he told himself.

Tomorrow, he would be brave. Tomorrow he would say the right things — the usable truth, as Jongseong had called — the truth you could hold without cutting yourself on it. 

Tomorrow, he would not ruin you, or the fragile shape of a friendship he’d carried for years like a glass of water.

But tonight—

He turned his head just enough to look at you, and stayed awake anyway — guarding the morning like it was the most dangerous thing he’d ever faced.

˖ ⟡  ݁˖

Jaeyun woke up to the morning sunlight filtering through the still-open window of his bedroom, and you curled into him, cheek on his shoulder, as your hand rested on his chest.

He didn’t move — he couldn’t bring himself to move — he didn’t even let his breath deepen because his first thought was the same one it had always been, old as instinct and just as merciless: don’t wake you. Don’t jolt you out of whatever gentle, thoughtless trust had guided you here in the dark and kept you here in the light. He merely stared at your hand on his chest.

Your fingers were loose, resting over his heartbeat like they’d found it by memory. Like your body had reached for the most familiar thing in the room and settled before your mind could intervene.

He swallowed.

The sunlight was falling in slow stripes across the sheets and across the line of your shoulder beneath his shirt, turning the old cotton into something almost translucent, and catching on your necklace. Dust drifted through the brightness like the morning was innocent — like the world hadn’t heard what you’d asked for last night, hadn’t seen the way his restraint had shaken under the skin.

He’d stayed the whole night trying to remain as far as he could tell. And still, here you were — curled into him like this was allowed. Like this was fine. Like you belonged in the hollow of his shoulder with your palm over his heart, claiming the one part of him he’d never learned how to hide.

You made a small sound in your throat, barely more than a breath, and nudged closer, your knee tucking nearer, your fingers flexing once against his shirt, and the heat of you spread through him like something inevitable.

His gaze drifted to your face.

Sleep had unmade you cruel in its sweetness; your lashes cast a faint shadow under your eyes; your mouth was parted just slightly, softened by the quiet. There was no teasing there, no armor, no bright deflection — only you, unguarded, and breathing against his shoulder like you trusted him to hold.

Because he would — he always would.

Jaeyun swallowed and very carefully — so carefully it bordered on absurd — slid his arm out from beneath your head, immediately receiving a small sound of protest from you, brows drawing together, and for one panicked second, he thought you’d wake.

But if anything, you only turned your face further into his pillow, drifting your hand from his chest to the sheet between you.

Jaeyun sat up slowly, pushing his hair back off his forehead as if he could physically push the feeling out, and looked at you once more.

Then he reached for the blanket and pulled it higher, covering you with a tenderness that felt dangerously close to a confession — tucking the edge beneath your arm, smoothing it down over your ribs, restoring order because order was the only thing that kept him from doing something reckless — before he stood up, crossing the room barefoot.

Jaeyun left the room, pulling the door nearly shut behind him, careful not to let the latch click.

˖ ⟡  ݁˖

The kitchen met him as it always did on weekdays.

The sink was crowded with his roommate’s morning small evasions — a cup abandoned to the drying rack, a plate left half-rinsed as if someone had set it down and decided they couldn’t be bothered to finish. Old coffee grounds sat in the filter, gone cold and sour, and the air held that faint, stubborn bitterness like it had seeped into the walls.

Jaeyun stood in the middle of it all for a moment, then two — trying to make his brain behave.

Tomorrow, he had said, and it was tomorrow.

He exhaled through his nose and opened the fridge, scanning the shelves as if the answer to what to do with his hands might be hiding behind the milk, but not even this they had. There were eggs, half a loaf of bread, butter, something green that had once been vegetables in a kinder timeline, and the strawberries he bought weekly and kept in the back, pretending it wasn’t for you.

He closed the door on impulse, pushing his hair back off his forehead before he reopened it and grabbed the eggs.

Jaeyun had never been a breakfast person, but he needed something to do with his hands that morning, and so, he warmed the pan, melting the butter as he had seen you do a dozen times. 

He cracked the first egg too hard, and a piece of shell fell in, forcing him to fish it out with the edge of a fork with a curse under his breath. The second one cracked clean. And he caught himself staring at it for a second, mildly offended by success.

He scrambled the eggs the way he tuned a circuit on the bench — low heat, constant motion, watching for the first hint of runaway before it could burn. The toast popped up asymmetrically overdone, one side dark enough to count as a failed test, and he scraped it back with a knife like he could calibrate it into passing.

He got strawberries in the back of the fridge, rinsed them, and set them on a plate.

And by the time it started to look like something someone might eat, he heard you, softly coming down the hall and making the air shift, the apartment itself holding its breath.

Jaeyun turned, and there you were in the doorway — his shirt hanging off you, hair a mess, eyes brighter than they had any right to be.

Your gaze landed on the plates — on the counter, catching the eggshells still on it, the crumbs of his burned toast, and the strawberry tops before it moved to him.

“You made breakfast,” you said, the corner of your lips shifting into a smile.

“I’m aware.”

You padded toward him, bare feet on the kitchen tile, and suddenly you were so close, he could smell you, his soap still clinging to your skin. Your eyes were puffy, your cheeks still a little flushed, but the embarrassment had already arrived; Jaeyun could see it in the way you held your shoulders, in the way your gaze didn’t stay on his for too long.

“I’m sorry,” you said suddenly.

Jaeyun leaned his hip against the counter, arms crossing because if he didn’t put his body in order, his face might betray him. “You were drunk. You called me. I picked you up. That’s not like it never happened.”

“I remember what I said.”

Jaeyun went still.

“I’m not going to pretend I don’t,” you said. “Or that I said it only because I was drunk — I mean, I was drunk.” 

You paused, heat creeping up to your cheeks and making it a tone warmer.

“Jaeyun, I’m—” You pressed your palm to your forehead briefly, as if you could push the shame back inside. “I’m in university. I’m still a virgin. And it’s not even because I’m some — saint. It’s because I kept waiting for the right moment.”

Your voice dropped. “But now it just feels like I’ve been standing still while everyone else moved.”

Something moved in Jaeyun’s chest then — sharp, protective, and making him push himself off the counter before he meant to, closing the space between you in a step he didn’t ask permission for.

“Princess,” he called, his voice as soft as the way his arms eased apart, but he didn’t touch you. Didn’t put his hands on your shoulders or tuck your hair back or do any of the things his body begged him to do on autopilot — because this was morning, and you were sober, and this mattered.

“You don’t owe anyone a timeline,” he said. “And you don’t have to make it some performance to prove something.”

“I know, Yun, it’s just that—” Your mouth tightened, lips pressing as you searched for the shape of the truth. “When I think about it, I keep coming to the conclusion that it would be safe if it were with you.”

“Do you remember that party at Seoyeon’s where they did that stupid bottle game, and we both had our first kisses in her parents’ closet?” you asked. Jaeyun blinked at the sudden turn of topic, but nodded anyway. “It was awful and so awkward. The guy made it so awkward. And the whole time I remember — the whole time I remember wishing it had been you on the other side of the bottle, because it would’ve been easier if it were you.” You swallowed. “If it were you, I’d be safe — and it’s still true, I know it would be okay with you,”

“You’re the person I trust the most in this world.”

The whole sentence went straight through his ribs and sank there, spreading through the parts of Jaeyun that had learned to stay careful until his restraint loosened another notch, and his chest went tender with it, so sudden it almost hurt.

In his mind, he was back at Seoyeon’s party, you laughing and brushing the situation off in front of him, cheeks flushed even in the low light with what he thought was shyness. And perhaps it had been. Perhaps he hadn’t been completely wrong: you’d been shy there, but not because you’d just had your first kiss, but because you’d wished he was the one there. He, your best friend — and the thought came so suddenly he couldn’t prevent it — he wanted it to be him, too. He wanted to be your first in every way that counted.

And that was exactly what you were offering to him.

Jaeyun swallowed, his fingers flexing on the counter.

“Do you truly want it?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“But nothing can change between us,” Jaeyun said. “We start as best friends. And even if this — if this thing doesn’t work and we turn out to be awkward, we end as that. Best friends. No matter what.”

You held his gaze, and for a moment, he was afraid that you’d heard what he hadn’t meant to say: the way he’d started listing boundaries like constraints in a design brief, as if naming the limits out loud could keep the system stable, keep you from failing him. But you only tilted your head, a small smile gathering at your mouth, warm and unalarmed.

“Are you afraid of losing me?” you asked, teasing with an offer to laugh — to dissolve the moment back into something safe. But when he looked at you, his eyes were solemn. So solemn that whatever retort you’d been about to throw at him got stuck somewhere between your lips and your courage.

“Yes,” Jaeyun said, and the teasing fell away.

Your breath caught for a moment before you exhaled, your face softening into something older than jokes.

“Okay,” you whispered.

“Okay,” he echoed.

Your gaze flicked to the counter again, to the two plates resting there, and suddenly the objects felt too ordinary, too real.

“So,” you said, voice a little too bright, “we’re doing this?”

Jaeyun’s mouth twitched. “Eat.”

“That was not an answer.”

He reached past you, grabbing a fork, and placing it in your hand with exaggerated seriousness.

“Eat,” he repeated. “Then we talk.”

“Jaeyun.”

He held your gaze, and the air between you tightened with something that had nothing to do with breakfast.

“Yes,” he said, his voice coming out rougher than he wanted it to. “We’re doing it.”

“Good,” you said, and then, because you were you, because you couldn’t help yourself: “When are we doing it?”

Jaeyun stared at you.

“Are you—” he began. “Are you trying to schedule sex?”

“Seems reasonable.” You shuddered. “Or do you want us to do it now—”

“No,” he cut in, eyes narrowing, but the fondness in it betrayed him. “Tonight.”

“Don’t you have classes?”

“Are you having second thoughts?” he countered.

“Tonight,” you agreed. “My place?”

“That makes more sense,” he said, not only because he didn’t want his roommates hovering around, but because if he kept you here, if he kept you in his bed again, he didn’t trust the part of him that wanted to pretend you didn’t already belong.

“Okay,” you said.

“Okay,” he echoed.

Jaeyun straightened, grabbed his own plate, and turned away from the counter as if he hadn’t just scheduled the end of the life he’d been carefully maintaining like a lie. As if he’d invited you to the movies instead of into the most dangerous part of him.

“Eat,” he said again, voice rough. “Before I change my mind.”

You took a bite of eggs, crunching your nose. “These are terrible.”

“They’re edible,” he argued.

You smiled around your bite, and in the brilliance of it, Jaeyun noticed with sudden clarity that you might not be drunk, you might not be mad, but it had been a reckless request.

And he had just said yes.

He should’ve panicked.

He should’ve backed out and clung to his rules until they cut him open.

But he only watched you — standing in his kitchen with his shirt draped around you, alive and real and trusting him with clear eyes, and he couldn’t make himself care about the danger.

RULE #2: DO NOT TOUCH HER IMPROPERLY  

Some touches are allowed because they keep her safe — elbow, shoulder, wrist, maybe her waist; small steadying things I can explain without it sounding like a lie. Improper is anything I do for myself. Improper is touching her like I’m owed something just because I’ve been here a long time.

Jaeyun liked electrical engineering — he really liked it — perhaps more than he’d ever admitted out loud.

There was something about how he could take a mess of a problem — wires crossing like arguments, values that looked meaningless until he stopped panicking and actually looked — and reduce it to rules that held. KCL. KVL. The calm mathematics of not lying to himself. Find the reference. Label the nodes. Define the direction. Solve.

If he couldn’t control other things — timing, people’s feelings, the way you could laugh like nothing was wrong while something in him quietly broke — then at least he could control this.

At least here, the world had edges. Here, the answer existed, and he found some calmness in it.

But not tonight.

Jaeyun sat in the last row with his book open and his pen in hand, trying to make his body obey.

But the professor’s voice moved through the room, muffled by the low hum of the projector and the whisper of AC that never quite cooled the lecture hall. Something about the transient response. Something about step inputs and settling time. Jaeyun stared at the diagram on the slide until it started to blur, because all he could see was you in his kitchen, barefoot on his tile. His shirt on your body. Your mouth around the word tonight like it was a dare and a promise and a joke all at once.

He wrote a line of notes, realizing a moment too late that it didn’t make sense; it was just a string of symbols that meant nothing. His jaw tightened. He scratched it out so hard the paper tore, then froze, breathing through his nose like he could sand himself back into something normal.

He tried to listen again, forcing his gaze to the board, and his brain into the shape of equations.

But the truth was: he wasn’t there anymore.

He was already walking to your studio apartment. He was already at your door, pressing the code of your keypad as he had done a thousand times. 

He was already hearing your voice say his name the way you always did when you wanted something — and he hated that the wanting in him answered like a trained dog.

His leg bounced under the desk as his eyes moved to the clock.

The second hand dragged itself forward like it was doing it on purpose, like time had decided to become cruel just to prove it could. Jaeyun forced himself to look back down at the board. Forced his jaw to unclench. Forced his foot to stop bouncing.

It didn’t work.

He dragged a hand through his hair, knuckles scraping his scalp, and stared at the open page like he could threaten it into giving him peace.

Step response.

Damping ratio.

Overshoot — his chest felt like overshoot.

Jaeyun exhaled slowly, then made a decision, closing his book with a sound sharper than it should’ve been in the lecture hall, a final clap that made the person in front of him glance back, but Jaeyun didn’t care. If anything, he slid the book into his bag, capped his pen, and stood.

Outside, the late afternoon air hit him with a faint bite — winter pretending it hadn’t left yet. And the campus was loud in the way it always got near the end of the day: students spilling out of buildings, scooters whining by, laughter too bright, life too easy.

Jaeyun walked straight through it, taking the quickest route off campus, cutting between two buildings, and down the narrow street that always smelled like fried food and stale cigarette smoke.

He didn’t stop to think — didn’t even breathe; he only followed the line to your apartment complex, pushing the door open and taking the stairs, two at a time.

At your door, the keypad was there, small and impersonal, a little square of plastic and numbers that shouldn’t mean anything. But Jaeyun had always been stupidly good at remembering what mattered, and your passcode was one of those things he picked up without asking, without naming it as intimacy — the way he learned strawberry was your favorite fruit when you were both twelve, the way he memorized the sound of your laugh before he realized he was paying attention. Four digits. He knew it — he had used it a dozen times, but as his finger found the first digit, he froze because him knowing it all too well, suddenly felt like trespassing.

Jaeyun stared at the numbers. His hand still in the air, suspended, and ridiculously caught between two versions of himself. The one that had always been allowed inside your life, the one that had walked into your space carrying groceries and textbooks and your bad moods like they were part of his schedule, and the one standing here now, with the taste of tonight still sharp in his mouth, and the knowledge that tonight is not errands or emergencies.

He exhaled, slowly, trying to make his body act normal — trying to make his hand stop trembling with the sheer idiocy of wanting.

But couldn’t, and when he raised his hand again, he only knocked at the door and waited, hearing his own pulse in his ears, a stupid, loyal metronome that refused to slow down. 

And then — movement.

The smallest sound from inside. Footsteps. A shift of air through the crack of the frame, like your apartment exhaled before the door even opened.

Jaeyun straightened without meaning to, shoulders going back like he’s bracing for impact. His hand dropped to his sides, finding his pockets because he refused to be caught halfway through panic.

Warm light spilled through the gap, and the scent of your place followed it — something clean and faintly floral, the trace of whatever you always used that made you smell like comfort when you hugged him goodbye. And there you were, framed in the doorway as if you’d been waiting in the exact spot where he would have to see you all at once.

For half a second, Jaeyun couldn’t breathe, his lungs catching, devastated by you.

“Hi,” you said. It was the same word you’d always used, yet it didn’t sound the same. “Did you forget the code?” 

Jaeyun swallowed, forcing his face into something neutral.

“No,” he managed, his voice coming out rougher than he wanted it to. But if anything, you hummed at him, requiring no further explanation, as you opened the door a little wider so he could come in.

Jaeyun had molded the moment when he would step into your place in his mind enough times to believe he would be prepared when it finally came into reality. 

Yet it didn’t.

He tried to don a neutral aspect, tried to speak — make some joke — but the words stayed in, hooked into years, and yanked, allowing nothing but air to pass through his lips.

Your apartment was small in the way studios always were — everything close enough to touch from the same spot, everything bearing the faint imprint of your routines. A blanket was folded too neatly on the end of the bed. A mug sat on the counter that looked like it had been rinsed and set down without being fully put away. A stack of books with their spines cracked in the middle like they’d been loved, not displayed.

And there was you — too close, too real.

You hadn’t really changed since he had seen you early on; you were the same girl he had known his whole life, and yet, there was something different about you tonight, and it made something in him tighten until it felt sharp.

Jaeyun shut the door behind him with his foot, careful not to let it slam, yet the click of the latch sounded louder than it should’ve, and he stood there for a beat too long, backpack strap still across his shoulder, hands in his pockets.

“Shoes,” you remembered, because you couldn’t help yourself, and a laugh escaped through him, familiar enough to settle him.

Jaeyun bent, unlaced his sneakers, slipped them off with quick, efficient motions before he lined them near the door and dropped his backpack.

When he straightened, you were still watching him, draped in a dress that didn’t try to be subtle.

It hugged you way too prettily, clinging to your waist and hips like it had been made with the sole purpose of making him forget he’d ever learned how to breathe. The neckline dipped just enough to show skin, and right there — resting against it like a quiet, years-old claim — was the necklace he’d given you. 

“Jaeyun,” you called. And he knew this tone — he knew it so damn well. It was your do something. 

And so he did, striding in your direction, his hands already reaching for your face, cradling it on his palms before he looked down at you with a small question that he couldn’t come to pronounce because you were already replying by closing your eyes, tipping your head up so he didn’t need to do much to catch your top lip within his.

It was your first kiss. Jaeyun had known you for his whole life, but it was the first time he had come to know your mouth, and it felt almost like a travesty of the universe.

You tasted like strawberries, sugar, and something so familiar that his chest ached, threatening to break open and groan escaped him when you parted your lips, allowing him to dip his tongue inside, pressing against yours until he couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t you.

You and the way your hands found the front of his t-shirt and curled on it.

You and the way you pulled him along with you as you stepped back — and back, until the back of your knees had hit the mattress, and you had no other option but to fall on it, his hands bracing around your face, one knee bent and pressed where the skirts of your dress had pooled in too high.

You didn’t say anything as you reached for him, rushing your hands beneath the blue shirt and pushing it over his shoulders.

“Wait, Princess, wait,” he asked. “Slow down.” 

“Is this how you always do it?”

And he could have lied, could have merely said yes, that was how he took all the other girls, but he didn’t.

“No,” he said. “It’s because it’s you and me.”

You stared at him, and suddenly the room felt too small for your heartbeats, too quiet for how loud everything inside of him turned.

But then, you leaned in and kissed him again — slower this time — giving him space to meet you properly. 

His hand slid from your jaw to the side of your neck, his thumb pressing and feeling your pulse through the tip of it as his other hand followed the line of your shoulders, moving further and further until his palm had found your waist, his fingers spreading on you the way he always did to anchor you — except that now it was less anchoring than keeping you.

You shifted beneath him, your leg sliding close enough to brush the inside of his thigh, and Jaeyun felt it like a jolt — small, accidental, and devastating — traveling straight through his length, and making his breath catch.

He forced himself to hinder — force himself to keep his head clear. But his body was already answering you, heat gathering with every centimeter of contact, the novelty of it turning molten and bright in his blood — wanting to move, to press in, to take what you were offering without thinking. 

“Tell me if—” he started, then stopped, trying to rearrange his thoughts. 

“If what?”

“If you want me to stop,” he managed. “Say it if you—”

“I won’t,” you said, and the certainty in it hit him like a punch.

Jaeyun exhaled, pressing his forehead to yours — not kissing, not moving — just breathing the sweet scent of you, vanilla and white flowers, the same he always had as he counted the seconds like he could make them behave through the sheer force of his want.

“You’re sure?” he asked — because he had to — because he knew that this was the line where everything became real, and everything before this was going to feel small in comparison.

“Yes, Sim Jaeyun,” you whispered. “I’m sure.”

“Okay,” he murmured, more to himself than you. “Okay.”

Jaeyun’s fingers found the strap of your dress, sliding it with a gentleness that didn’t match the way his pulse was climbing, easing it down through your shoulder slow enough that it felt like a question you could stop without words — yet you didn’t — and the dress shifted with a soft whisper through your body. 

He leaned in and pressed his mouth to the skin he’s uncovered — one brief kiss, then another — until the dress loosened and pooled lower, until he could guide it away and reveal your lingerie set, pinkish in a way that only made your skin warmer under the lights of your apartment. 

His breath hitched.  

You were beautiful in a way he’d always known, but also in a way he’d never allowed himself to study — never this close, never with permission. Never with the soft spill of your skin under his hands, much less with the heat of you turning every familiar detail into something obscene and new. 

His hand splayed over your belly, the tips of his fingers skimming the lower edge of your bra before he slid down, finding the band of your panties and hooking it lightly.

“You’re—” he began.

“Don’t get too full of yourself, Jaeyun,” you murmured. “I dress like this because I just happen to have no bad sets.”

The laugh that left him was helpless, more air than sound, relief threading through it because you were still you, even here, even now, just in your lingerie set and with skin turning reddish because of his kisses, and it truly didn’t matter that you interpreted him wrongly this time. 

“Right,” he managed. He couldn’t argue with anything you said — not right now — not never. “Of course.”

Your fingers curled in his shirt, pulling him closer — not frantic, not desperate — just needy, and Jaeyun went still for one beat to let himself feel it: the pull, the permission, the way your hands on him turned his years of restraint into something soft and breakable.

“Of course,” he whispered again, bending down and kissing you, your temples first, and then your cheeks — his lips pestering over your face with soft pecks before he moved lower, discovering that one sensitive spot underneath your jaw, and when you gasped, he took it as an incentive to move to the column of your neck, his mouth parting as his tongue slipped out in a tiny tease that got you gasping softly — almost silently, hands closing at the shoulders of his shirt as if you couldn’t help yourself.

“You’re sensitive,” he murmured, tucking his discovery carefully alongside all the other details he’d collected about you over the years.

You called for him, but if it had been a warning or a submission, you lost interest in the rest of your thought as he kissed you again, open mouth and tongue rolling against your skin, surely leaving a mark, and making a moan to rumble through your lips instead. 

Jaeyun’s eyes flicked up to your face, and he didn’t let go — not even when his hands slipped to your back, the tips of his fingers finding and curling on the clasps of your bra. Not even as he opened it and slid further into you, kissing the tip of your breast and sending goosebumps through your skin. 

He never let go.

And when his lips parted, tipping his tongue out, and making your hands move to the back of his head, fisting at his hair almost bitterly, he only smiled against you, the movement adding another coating to the sensation and making your arch against him.

He licked you softly, licked you hard, covered the areola with his lips and pulled the tip into his mouth, pulled more and harder, until your back arched even more and created a gap between the mattress that his hands took no time to fill, his fingers spraying through your skin and holding you still as his mouth moved, leaving your nipple just to create a path through your body, trailing down to your sternum, your stomach — taking in every piece of your skin in between his lips.

Jaeyun lifted his head then, just enough to look at your face properly, catching the flush on your cheeks, the way your lips had parted because your breath had turned pant, your chest moving too fast and allowing your necklace to sparkle.

The room was suddenly too small for how loud his blood had gotten. 

For a moment, he didn’t kiss, didn’t lick, didn’t give either of you the mercy of motion; he only held still and watched, like he needed to see what he was doing to you before he let himself do more.

“Princess,” he breathed, the word slipping out before he could decide on anything else. 

You looked at him, and your gazes locked as they had done a dozen times across the existence of you, yet the moment acquired that dream quality because you were here, bare in a way he’d only imagined in the abstract — late at night, in the quietness of his room, in the version of his imagination he kept locked away like contraband — and the distance between wanting and having had narrowed to a single breath.

Jaeyun swallowed, trying to steady himself, before let the moment break by degrees — his palm slid down the slope of your stomach, slow enough to feel like asking, fingertips grazing your skin as if he were relearning it; as if touching you like this rewired something in him that had always been too careful until his fingers finally found the band and paused there, hooked lightly under the elastic.

He looked back up at you then, thumb stroking once along your hip as his other hand held you steady at the small of your back, refusing to let you drift away from him — from this.

“You okay?” he murmured, and it sounded like he meant all of it.

You nodded at him, and he moved — quietly relentless — his knuckles brushed your thighs on the way, accidental touches that weren’t accidental at all, and the sound you made hit him physically. 

He had never been so hard in his whole life.

He guided the panties lower, and lower, until they slipped free; and for a beat, he just held them, as though the simplest thing in his hand had become proof that the night had finally crossed into real.

Then he set them aside without looking, his attention snapping back to you immediately — hand returning to your inner thigh with a firmer hold than before. 

“If I do anything you don’t like — you tell me, okay? We have to communicate.”

“Okay.”

“Okay,” he echoed. 

His thumb drew one more slow line along your inner thigh, watching the way you answered it before he allowed himself to lower his head again, kissing the inside of your knee this time — soft — almost innocent, if the moment hadn’t been burning at the edges. Then another kiss, slower, lingering, his mouth warming you as his hands guided you open with a care that felt reverent. 

“You are just — beautiful,” he heard himself say.

You let out a small sound that wasn’t quite a breath and wasn’t quite a laugh, startled by how earnest he was being. Your cheeks warmed, and you turned your face just slightly, like you could hide behind the angle.

“You’re ridiculous,” you murmured, aiming for teasing, but it came out too soft for anything but shyness.

And Jaeyun’s mouth twitched, a helpless curve that didn’t reach humor so much as relief. And his hand tightened once at your thigh, then gentled, thumb stroking a quiet line as if to soothe the flush he’d put in you.

“Yeah?” he said. “But is it okay?”

“Yeah,” you said, the word threaded through the quiet laugh that escaped you. You didn’t dress it up, didn’t offer an explanation, didn’t hand him the because — you just let the answer be simple. But it wasn’t simple at all, not to him because he heard the rest in the way your gaze found his and held: yeah, you said, because it’s you.

The first touch of his mouth against your folds was light enough that he didn’t even taste you, but your body still reacted: a sharp inhale, a pull through your spine, the instinctive arch that made his own breath break low in his throat.

And when you tipped your hips to him, he mouthed you again, his hands sliding further into you, thumbs finding the tender flesh of your hood and lifting it — leaving your clit in full exposure for him to lean in, the tip of his tongue kneading the sensitive flesh around, slightly rubbing before he pressed it, unable to prevent the sound that escaped his throat then — something between reverence and desperation. 

It took your smile away — your lips parting in a gasp as your fingers met and wove through his hair, pulling him in a demand that he had no second thoughts before obeying, giving you another lick — a harder one.

His tongue twirled all around the edge, then he pressed a kiss over it — a long, tender wet kiss before he lowered his head and licked at the entrance of your body because you were clenching around nothing, and it suddenly felt too evil, and Jaeyun would never be evil to you.

He pushed his tongue against your hole, and then, he pushed again until his tip went inside it, and he had to control his will to roll his eyes back.

Even his boldest fantasy hadn’t come close to how sweet you actually were. And the thought landed too tender to survive, cracking him open into something darker because being careful had started to feel like another kind of denial, and he couldn’t come to continue to restrain himself when you had given him all the permission. Jaeyun lifted his head just long enough to look at you, eyes blown wide and honest, as if he was giving you one last chance to pull him back. To tell him to stop. To make him good again.

Yet you didn’t. And something within him shifted. His hands held you firmer, spreading you open as he went back to you no longer soft-edged, and decided to stop hovering at the threshold, giving you what you were asking for.

Jaeyun’s grip tightened as he worked on you, alternating between broad strokes and precise licks on that one spot that never failed to make you cry out his name.  

“That’s it,” he whispered. “Let me hear you.”

Your response came almost immediately — a broken moan that seemed to come from somewhere so deeply inside of you, Jaeyun felt your own desperation reverberating through his entire body.

You were getting closer, he could tell by the way your thighs kept quivering under his hands, your breathing becoming more and more ragged with each pass of his tongue, but it wasn’t enough — he needed to see it: the moment pleasure turned undeniable, the moment he could stop wondering if he was reading you wrong.

Jaeyun retreated with a torturous care, pressing a final kiss to your folds as he pushed himself back onto his knees and earned a protest from you.

“Yun—”

“Not yet,” he said. “For now, I need you to hold yourself open for me. Can you do that, Princess?”

You nodded despite yourself, spreading your legs further apart — pushing the soles of your feet against your sheets for some leverage and fuck.

The sight of you like this — glistening with your fluids and remnants of his saliva — the sight of you so ready for him.

He could hardly breathe.

He brought one hand down through your thigh, his thumb resuming the circular motions on your clit while his other hand moved to your seam, teasingly brushing the tips of his fingers through before he slid a single one inside.

You were so wet already, he slipped with no resistance, and it was so dizzying — everything about it was so dizzying — he hardly heard you panting as he began to move his finger in and out, your stomach tightening and giving a small convulsion, but you kept your legs apart as he had asked you to.

It was a false deed, honestly — as if Jaeyun could command anything when both of you knew — he was the one to always follow. 

But he really didn’t care.

When Jaeyun felt you opening up to him, he added a second finger in, curling them slightly to discover that one spot that soon enough got you into a mess — squeezing him with your release as your hands grabbed at your sheets. Your lips parted around his name, and your hair turned wilder as your head pushed against your pillows, arching your back in that one beautiful bow before you melted again.

“Princess,” he called, and you clenched at the endearing name, a velvet heat that he felt in his very soul.

You hadn’t done anything to him, but Jaeyun felt utterly undone by you. His breath was coming in short, ragged gasps just by watching you.

God — he could come just by watching you.

You were so wet. His hand was coated with you, white slick dribble coming out of your cunt, making each of his moves obscenely loud in the quiet night, yet — all he could think was how stunning you were like this, so lovely and so his.

He wanted to keep looking — to hold the moment still, to learn it by heart, and make it something real enough to survive the morning. But he wanted to look away, too, all at once — startled by the sheer size of his wanting.

You had so much power over him, it was terrifying even to examine the way you owned his soul. When your gazes caught, his heart seemed to burst in his chest.

Was he doing it for you, or doing it for him? He couldn’t tell anymore.

He curled his fingers deeper inside of you, making you mumble something unintelligible, a sob ripping through your chest and already threatening to turn into a release. Jaeyun couldn’t help but grin at the sound, reveling in the way your body trembled and arched underneath his touch.

You thrashed and thrashed as he still tended you the way you needed, stroking the spots inside that made you shudder and rubbing at your clit until he heard you panting, his own name falling from your lips in a breathless moan before it turned into whimpers, and when you came around him, he leaned in to kiss you.

Jaeyun stayed close through the last shiver, like he didn’t trust the world not to startle you out of it. He kissed you again — slower now, softer — catching your mouth as your breathing stuttered, and pretending that he could take the edge off the intensity just by holding you there. His hand eased from its grip into a gentler touch, smoothing along your thigh.

“Hey,” he murmured. “I’ve got you.”

His forehead brushed against yours as his hands smoothed over your body, taking you through until he could cup your face, and his thumb could reach for the corner of your mouth, wiping away the evidence of his kiss with a tenderness that didn’t match how wrecked he looked. He swallowed, chest rising and falling too fast, and forced himself to slow his breathing until yours started to follow.

“Still okay?” he asked again, softer, as if the question mattered more now than it had before.

You nodded at him, managing a flimsy sound that might’ve been yes, and Jaeyun pressed another kiss to your temple, then your cheek, unhurried, almost devotional, as if he needed to apologize for his own intensity.

“You did so well,” he whispered. “Tell me what you need. Water? A minute? Do you want me to hold you, or—?”

“Jaeyun,” you cut.

“Yes, Princess?”

Your hands slid to the back of his neck, fingers curling and weaving through his hair, holding him still.

“I need you.”

It might have been the words, the small plea that took Jaeyun anew because he would never refuse anything you asked him, or perhaps it was the way you said them, a bit flimsy because you couldn’t control it still, but either way, he gave in, slipping from your hold only so he could take his t-shirt off. 

He almost choked when you stood with him, your hands reaching for his lower abdomen, nails scraping his skin slightly before you took his belt and unbuckled it. 

“Princess,” he called, the questions already on his tongue, shaped by habit, and the need to do this right.

But you didn’t give him time.

Your hands moved for his jeans, unzipping them as if you’d decided you were done waiting, easing them down in one smooth, impatient motion. The room seemed to go hushed around the sound of it — denim shifting, breath catching — until the only thing left was the sudden, helpless awareness of his length slapping against his abdomen.

Your hand found him, fingers curling around him almost beautifully, closing and molding with a care that didn’t match, and making his whole body go taut, breath pulling tight in his chest like it had nowhere to go. Not because he didn’t want it — God, he wanted it — but because he did, too much, too fast, the kind of wanting that threatened to ruin the rest of the night by sheer impatience.

He caught your wrist gently, holding you as his forehead dipped toward yours again, his eyes shutting.

“If you do that,” he began. “I’m not going to last.”

The honesty of it landed between you, sharp with embarrassment. And when he opened his eyes again, there was something almost pleading in the way he looked at you — like he was asking you not to laugh, not to make him feel small for how quickly you could undo him.

“Another time,” he promised, realizing the implications of his words a fraction too late. Not just later tonight. Not just when you feel like it. But again. As if he’d already decided that there was going to be a future where he got to learn you — and be learned — without rushing.

But you didn’t tease him. When you looked at him, your gaze holding his until the heat in his face had nowhere to hide, you merely nodded.

“Okay,” you said.

You were no warmer than Jaeyun was, but when he touched your waist, your skin shivered, a fine tremor running under his fingertips.

“Okay,” he echoed.

You let him ease you down onto the sheets, smoothing you into place as he followed you down, bracing himself over you without crushing you, and kissed you — slow, mouth soft, reverent in a way that made the moment feel almost holy.

“Tell me if anything hurts,” he whispered. “Tell me if—”

“I know,” you breathed, and the words sounded so much like trust — Jaeyun’s throat worked, and he kissed you again and again and again, only letting go to reach down beside the bed for his jeans, fingers finding the pocket by feel — clumsy in a way he never remembered being. His breath caught when you made the smallest sound behind him, and he hurried to get his wallet free, forcing it out with a practical shuffle before the faint and quick tear of foil came in the hush.

He slid it on with shaky hands that he hoped you wouldn’t notice.

But you did — of course you did. 

When he climbed back over you, you reached for his arms, your fingers brushing down until you found his hands.

“You’re shaking,” you whispered, your brows knitted, and searching his face like you were afraid you’d pushed him somewhere he didn’t want to go.

Jaeyun went still.

“Because it’s you,” he replied, not giving himself time to consider how much he had exposed with this mere phrase. 

Of course he was shaking. He’d wanted you for so long it had grown into something foundational, something he’d learned to live around and never touch. And now you were here beneath him, looking at him like he was allowed — like he was chosen — and his wanting hadn’t been foolish after all.

His throat worked. He tightened his fingers around yours, trying to make the shaking stop by force.

“If I mess this up, you won’t ever let me hear the end of this,” he smoothed.

You laughed at him — familiar in a way that loosened something in his chest, easing everything inside him as if the sound of you had always known where to press to make him breathe again.

“Don’t worry,” you said. “I’ll keep it all as another of our secrets.” 

“What other secrets do we have?”

“What you had under your bed when we were teenagers,” you began. “That you couldn’t sleep without a lampshade until you were twelve. Where we were on your eighteenth birthday. That you cried watching The Notebook—”

“Everyone cried watching The Notebook at least once.”

“Baekhyeon didn’t—”

“Did you watch it with him?”

“It’s my favorite movie, of course I did,” you said. “But don’t worry, it was just once — it’s funnier with you anyway.”

“Obviously,” he said. “Everything is funnier with me — and we are about to have a lot of fun.”

You laughed again, softer and only because he was allowed to — he kissed you again, his hands smoothing your thighs, your calves, his fingers moving and curling around your ankles and pulling you to him, lifting your legs to his hips.

You stiffened as his tip made contact, your body going taut beneath him and he stopped like he’d been trained for it, like every instinct he had rewired itself around not hurting you. His grip shifted back from your ankles to your thighs — his thumbs stroking small, steady circles as if he could coax your muscles out of panic.

“Princess, look at me,” he murmured. “Do you want me to stop?”

You shook your head, a little bit too frantically as if you were afraid he would really stop it, and Jaeyun exhaled through his nose, a sound that stood somewhere between a laugh and a prayer. He kissed you once, slow and grounding, then another at the corner of your mouth.

“Okay,” he said. “Then we go slow. I’m right here.”

He shifted — barely enough to change the angle, but you seemed to feel it and his thumb reached for you seam, wetting the tip of it with your fluids, and finding your clitoris, rubbing it in slow and deliberate circles that got you closing your eyes, moving your hips, and welcoming whatever he was giving.

Jaeyun made himself still enough to read you, his eyes tracking your face with the kind of focus that might’ve felt clinical, if it hadn’t been so tender. He watched your breathing first, then your mouth, then the tiny shifts in your shoulders before he slowed and it eased again.

He moved in careful increments, pausing whenever your breath changed. Waiting whenever your brows pinched. His hands steadied you — firm at your thighs, gentle at your waist, and holding you through the newness of it.

“Tell me,” he whispered. “Is it okay?”

You nodded and he lowered his forehead toward yours.

It was slow at first, all about him discovering the new shape of you, but soon enough, it was confident and knowing. When he drew back, he knew exactly how to move back in, how to make you tighten around him, and his name to escape from your lips a little bit more frantically as his rhythm increased.

Your fingers spread through the back of his neck, fingers twisting at the hair at his nape and bringing him closer and closer, as if you couldn’t help it. And when your breath turned ragged and your fingers tightened, Jaeyun pressed his mouth to your temple, whispering your name like a promise he could finally keep.

Even if only temporarily.

“Yun, I’m going—”

“It’s okay, Princess,” he said. “I’ve got you.”

And this time he meant it in every way.

“Come for me, babe.”

You twisted under his body, even as he kept you pinned in place with his hands on your hips, squirming and whimpering your way through it, finishing with an almighty shudder as you came a second time, and it was so beautiful, and overwhelming — he tried to stay careful. He tried to keep his breathing even. But you said his name like you needed him, and something in him cracked clean through.

He buried his face against your neck, a shaky sound trapped in his throat. “Princess—”

He didn’t have room for anything except you.

No thought. No control. Just the force of feeling, cresting too high and too fast, until it dragged a groan from him with your name inside it — like that was the only thing he could say when he finally lost himself — and with a final, deep thrust, his body tensed and spilled inside of you — groaning your name. The echo of it carved into your skin as he buried himself, his fingers molding into your skin with an intensity that left behind indentations as the waves of his pleasure washed over.

Jaeyun hadn’t realized how noisy you both had been, but the room felt suddenly too quiet after. 

And for a beat, he only stayed still — his forehead tucked against the curve of your neck, breathing you in like he was trying to memorize the exact shape of the air between you, the feeling of your pulse under his mouth, your fingers still lost in his hair, and your bodies so tangled, he couldn’t quite tell where he ended and you began — his whole soul afraid that the moment would slip away the second he admitted it had happened.

But then, you made a small sound, and it made him force his head up — just enough to look at you.

He brushed his knuckles along your cheek, then paused, thumb hovering at your lips because he didn’t know if he was allowed to touch you like this now that the moment was gone. 

“You okay?” he asked, the question already worn thin by the number of times he had used it through the night, but it felt heavier somehow, meaning more than any of the earlier ones ever had.

But if anything, you only nodded — leaning into his touch as your lashes fluttered shut.

“Just stay,” you whispered.

And so, he stayed — rolling you both through your bed, his back sinking into the mattress as he drew you to his chest, giving you a place to rest as if it was any other night and you were merely best friends falling asleep together. He stayed until your heartbeat evened out against him and the room turned orange and pink with sunrise, dust motes catching in the full light like glittering hush, and the night had inevitably bent itself into morning.

˖ ⟡  ݁˖

Jaeyun lay on your bed, holding a breath in his chest as if it could keep the morning from happening. The sun slipped through your parted curtains and spilled across the room — patient and indisputable — turning everything into proof.  

Your dress was still pooled on the hardwood, your panties right above it, and his jeans were so close it could’ve been one thing. Your bra was still at the edge of the bed, pink, half-tucked into the sheets he couldn’t remember tangling.  

He let the breath go, and the mattress answered, making you stir — just a little — your head rolling off his chest until your chin found him again.  

When your eyes opened, the light caught and held — as if it had nowhere else to be.  

Jaeyun felt the instinct to speak. Something practical. Something safe. Something that could be filed under morning conversation and good friend behavior.  

Are you okay? he thought. Do you need water? 

Do you want me to make breakfast again and pretend I don’t care when you mock me for it?

But you didn’t give him time.  

You lifted your head — sleepy as it was certain — brushing your nose against his before you caught his lower lip between yours and kissed him in a way that made teasing feel like a promise.

Jaeyun went utterly still, his hands hovering, useless with hesitation. He had spent years learning which parts of you he was allowed to hold — elbow, shoulder, wrist; the small, steadying touches that could be explained without telling on himself.  

But this was your room.  

Your bed.  

Your morning.  

And you were kissing him like you’d never once needed an explanation, catching his lower lip — so gentle it hardly counted as a bite — holding it for one heartbeat longer before you let him go and eased back.

Jaeyun blinked, and the muted morning light dazed him — your room pressing in with a kind of hush that made it feel like a dream: sun-warm sheets, the sound of breath, the closeness of you like something he hadn’t earned but had been given anyway. He let it hold him for a suspended moment before he leaned in and kissed you again, this time with more feeling than thought — one hand found your waist, as the other slid behind your neck, tilting you up to him.

Your breath caught at that, and for a moment, Jaeyun feared he had gone too far — too fast. He’d finally slipped enough to not be able to lie and pretend he hadn’t broken his second rule, but then you shifted, sliding a leg over his hips, straddling him like it was the most natural place in the world to be, and something in him went quiet with the rightness of it.

He didn’t move first. He didn’t take. He only held where you’d placed him.

And when you parted — pulling back just enough for you to breathe — it carried the kind of practicality that had always been your shared language. 

“I need a shower,” you said.

For a beat, Jaeyun blinked at you, incapable of understanding the words. But then, his brain latched onto it, and he felt thankful. A shower meant tiles. Water. Soap. Clean lines. A task that could be completed. A thing he could do without interpreting your mouth, your eyes, the way your kiss had said stay.

“Okay,” he heard himself say. “Okay, yeah.”

Jaeyun shifted carefully, guiding you off him with hands that tried to remember what permitted felt like — waist, ribs, shoulder — anywhere that could still pass as gentle logistics instead of want. His gaze skated away from your face on instinct, as if looking at it too directly might pull him back under, and slipped out of the bed.

You followed, swinging your legs over the side of the bed, slightly swaying — more due to sleepiness than weakness, but Jaeyun’s body reacted anyway. He reached for you, his hands steady on your arms.

He helped you up. Guided you through your studio: past the small table with the stack of books, past the mug you never fully put away, and into the narrow bathroom where the tiles were warm and the mirror caught the gold of morning and gave it back to him as evidence.

Your skin carried so many marks from the night before that his breath caught.

He looked away so fast it felt like a flinch.

Jaeyun moved like he was trying to fix the world.

He turned on the light first. Then the fan. Then the tap — hot first, then cold, adjusting in small increments until the water felt right because putting things in order always helped him keep control. 

He watched the water steam faintly as it ran, watched it like it was a system he could calibrate.

He set a towel within your reach. Folded it once, then unfolded it because the fold looked too neat and he didn’t want you to notice how nervous he was. Then he reached for your shampoo and put it back where it already was, because he suddenly ran out of things to do, but his hands still sought for something.

You leaned your hip against the sink and watched him with that quiet softness that made his chest feel too full. The bathroom was suddenly too bright for how careful he was trying to be.

“Yun,” you called, and he turned to you like a man answering a question in class — focused, braced, trying to keep his face neutral.

“Yeah?”

You tilted your head, gaze flicking once before you merely stepped past him, your hands brushing and taking his, pulling him to the shower with you.

The steam gathered immediately, beading on his skin, blurring the sharp edges of the morning until the world became smaller and quieter.

“Sometimes, I can hear you thinking,” you said. “Did you know that?”

“I’m sorry,” he replied.

You laughed at that, but didn’t say anything. You merely turned around, reaching for the shampoo bottle he had previously rummaged and gave it to him. 

“Wash my hair,” you said. 

And so, he did.

Jaeyun took the bottle, pouring shampoo into his palm — more than he needed, because his hands were unsteady — and rubbed it between them until it warmed and foamed. Then his fingers slid into your hair, working the suds in small circles at the crown of your head, careful and thorough, moving outward as the steam gathered and the water ran down your spine. His knuckles grazed your ear once. An accident, maybe. But you let out a sound — more a sigh than anything, and something in Jaeyun tightened anyway, a flare that made his chest feel too warm. His jaw flexed at it, and he forced his hands to stay where they belonged — his attention to stay on the sequence, because sequence meant control: lather, rinse, repeat.

He rinsed you with his palm shielding your forehead, water sluicing through your hair in clear sheets. The gesture was intimate in the most domestic way — protective, and practiced — as if he’d been doing it for years.

And maybe that was why it did him in.

You must have felt the pause in him, the way his body went too still behind you, because when he finally finished, you turned to him, reaching for the bottle, and pouring shampoo into your own palm as you stepped closer — the warm line of you almost meeting the warm line of him, and slid your fingers into his hair.

Jaeyun didn’t know what to do with himself.

He merely bent a little so you could reach, letting your hands take over with a quiet competence that made his throat work. Water ran down his temples, traced the line of his jaw, caught at his lashes. He kept his eyes on the tile like a prayer — like if he looked at you, he’d lose the last clean edge of himself.

You rinsed him, and only when you tapped his hands — did he straighten again.

Then you smoothed soap over his bare skin, starting at his shoulders, your palms unhurried and warm. Down his collarbones. Over his chest.

Jaeyun’s breath broke when you reached his lower abdomen, your fingertips hovering dangerously close to the ache he’d been holding back, and making a sound slip from him — low, involuntary — rushing before he could trap it.

“Princess,” he said, but the word carried no warning at all, and you merely allowed your fingers to rest there, steady as the way your gaze met his.

“You said another time,” you remembered. 

Jaeyun froze.

Not because he didn’t understand. Because he did. Because the memory arrived with humiliating clarity: your hand curled on him in a way that made his honesty slip out raw and breathless last night.

He dragged in a slow breath through his nose. Steam beaded along his lashes; water traced the line of his jaw. He still didn’t look at you — not fully — like eye contact might knock the last brace out from under him while he was still negotiating with himself. Like he was trying to find the border between permitted and improper and realizing you’d moved it with one sentence.

“Are you asking me?” he began. “Or—”

“I’m asking,” you said.

His gaze found yours.

“Okay,” he whispered.

He took your wrist and guided your hand, not down, not yet, but to his jaw, to his throat, to a place he could handle without losing himself.

“Slow,” he said, and you nodded at him, letting your fingers linger.

Your thumb brushed the hinge of his jaw first — testing, almost absent — before your hand slid lower and lower, following the line of his throat, his collar bones. Water ran between your knuckles and his skin, warm and constant, making every touch feel softened at the edges, as if the steam had filed down the danger until it could pass for tenderness, but Jaeyun’s pulse changed immediately, his heart racing as though it too wanted to reach for you through his skin, meeting where your fingers brushed against his chest.

Jaeyun’s lips parted in a soft gasp as you reached for him, tentatively brushing through his extension. Starting from the already flushed tip and moving to the prominent veins all over him and then, all the way back, receiving an almost imperceptible buck of his hips in response.

“Okay?” you asked, and he nodded, but it wasn’t an answer so much as a reflex — his body trying to behave when his mind had gone helpless and searched for something to say — something small enough to fit inside a bathroom, inside steam, inside the ordinary noise of water hitting tile.

But there was no small word that fit because how could he say that anything you did with him would be okay?

How could he say that if you asked for his heart, he would open his ribs for you? If you reached in and took it, he would hold still and even tender you if you faltered.

Jaeyun swallowed, throat tight, breath catching on the way out as he reached for you, his fingers splaying over your cheek as his thumb reached for where a drop had taken place on your skin. 

“I’m okay,”  he said then, the closest answer he could give for what he meant. If you could feel the shape of the unspoken right alongside the spoken, you didn’t show it. 

Your hand merely closed around his length, fingertips tracing the same places his mind had traced a thousand times in private, and every pass of your hand felt like it rewrote him — like your touch didn’t just touch, but claimed a truth he’d been denying for years.

Jaeyun’s breath hitched as you guided him closer, his eyes shutting as his forehead tipped to the curve of your neck.

“Princess,” he whispered, not really sure if he intended to say something, but the sudden call made you pause, your hand motionless enough to make his breath hitch again, his hips bucking and chasing for the friction still. 

“Don’t stop,” he said, and perhaps it had been the words, perhaps it had been the way he said it, more like a plea than a request. But you didn’t — even when his grip tightened on you, his finger shaping bruises on your hips, and his lips parted, leaving a matching one at your neck.

You didn’t stop, even when he came into your hand. You merely gentled him, moving to his stomach, his chest, smoothing him down until his breath wasn’t so ragged and his heart had come into peace beneath your touch.

“Yun,” you called, and he hummed at you, still pressed close, eyes half-lidded, mouth parted like he’d forgotten what to do with the air. Water clung to his lashes. Steam softened the hard lines of him into something boyish, something undone. For once, he wasn’t braced for impact — he was simply there, breathing, and letting you see him, and it was strange how it made your kiss just even better.

How he could simply melt into you.

You smiled at that — small, warm — kissing the corner of his mouth, then his cheek, then a place beneath his jaw that made Jaeyun’s eyes flutter shut, his head tipping just slightly to give you access, like his body wanted to cooperate even when his mind still tried to keep score.

“Princess,” he breathed again, and this time it sounded less like a plea and more like disbelief.

Your hands found him at your hips, guiding it down through your body, the swell of your ass, giving him enough time to grow on it, and take the lead, brushing over warm skin, following curves with a care that made it feel devotional rather than desperate. 

“Okay?” he murmured, because he couldn’t help — he couldn’t ease — not until you had nodded, brushing your noses and making something within settle with the gentleness of it.

Jaeyun exhaled and stepped closer. One hand halted at your waist while the other slid down and around, his fingers tightening briefly against your skin before he shifted, and lifted one of your legs — guiding it up to rest against his hip.

His tip brushed against your seam with the new position, barely anything, but you drew in a breath that didn’t quite make it back out to you, and a faint, trembling noise escaped through your lips instead, and he couldn’t help the soft, almost-gentle smugness that warmed his smile.

He rolled his hips against yours, and your head tipped back, eyes closing and lips still parted on that same faltered breath, allowing sunlight to catch on your skin in the shift, warm and liquid-gold along the lines of you.

“Bed,” you whined, and you didn’t need to tell him twice. 

Jaeyun turned the taps off, not really checking if he had done it properly, before he took you in his arms again, folding your legs around his waist as he walked you back down the short stretch of your place. Water tumbled from you both — tiny drops trembling loose with each step, catching the light before they fell in a thin, gleaming trail on your floorboards.

But you didn’t complain, you didn’t even say anything. When he placed you on the mattress; you merely spread your legs further — wordlessly making room for him like it was the most natural thing in the world.

“Condom,” you reminded him. “Do you have more?”

For a moment, the question didn’t make sense, but then, he nodded at you, slipping from your touch — just enough to reach for the wallet still tossed on your floor.

“How many did you bring?” you asked, and although Jaeyun had listened to it and understood, he didn’t reply, he allowed the question to hang in the air, a flush of warmth spreading up to his cheeks because the memory of him piling it at the chaser before he went to his classes last evening was too fresh still. 

Just enough, he had thought like he wasn’t, in fact, hoping.

Hoping that it wouldn’t be a one-time thing.

Jaeyun’s fingers fumbled once at the wallet before he forced them steady. He didn’t let himself look at you while he did it; if he looked, he’d lose the last clean thread of control he had left, and so, he merely tore the foil, the sound too loud in the quiet room, and the practical motions that followed felt like an anchor — something procedural to keep him from drowning in the fact that you were watching.

He climbed back onto the mattress, moving slowly, knees sinking into the sheets between your thighs. The bed dipped under his weight, and you shifted automatically to make space for him, your body already well known in the shape of him.

Jaeyun paused above you.

Water still clung to your hair, darkening the strands where they stuck to your neck. Your skin gleamed in the soft light — warm, flushed, kissed by steam and morning and the evidence of him. You looked up at him with your mouth slightly parted, breath uneven, eyes steady and it hit him so hard it almost made him gentle to the point of breaking.

“Princess,” he said, but if anything, you reached up, fingers catching at the back of his neck — not pulling him down, only holding him there — close enough to feel your breath on his mouth. Close enough that he couldn’t lie to himself about how much he wanted it.

Jaeyun lowered his forehead to yours and breathed once, then twice, as if he was counting himself into calm.

“Tell me if—” 

“I know,” you cut, and he snorted at that, his hands finding your thighs, and spreading there with care — measuring you, reading you, bracing you the way he always did when something mattered and he couldn’t afford to do it wrong.

He pulled in slowly, pausing each time your breath changed. Waiting when your fingers tightened in his hair. Listening like your body was the only language he trusted.

“Okay?” he murmured against your mouth.

“Okay.”

Jaeyun exhaled, giving himself a moment before he shifted his weight and settled in deeper.

You made a small sound at that, and Jaeyun halted — caught mid-motion as his eyes stayed on your face, searching for the smallest crack of discomfort, for anything he might have missed and could never forgive himself for.

“Talk to me, Princess,” he said. “Is it too much?”

“No,” you whispered. “It’s — good.”

That answer landed somewhere under his ribs and stayed.

Jaeyun’s eyes shut for a beat. And when he opened them again, he looked wrecked in the quietest way.

He kissed you once more, slower, lingering at the corner of your mouth, your cheek, beneath your jaw — mapping comfort into you the way he mapped calm into circuits, the way he tried to fix the world when it was too big.

And then he moved again, careful and deliberate, letting the moment become real one breath at a time.

The sheets gathered under your fingers. The room narrowed to heat and the sound of his name caught in your throat. Jaeyun held you like he could keep you safe simply by refusing to rush, like tenderness was the only rule he needed now.

“Look at me,” he whispered, and you did, blinking under the morning light and making him swallow, his chest swelling then, big enough to break open with love for you. And perhaps, you had felt it too — heard it in his voice, this sickening desperation, because your hands found his face, cupping it with a tenderness that didn’t match the way he was burying deep inside of you, his tip forming an eminence on the lower part of your belly as he worked on you with slow, long thrusts, and making you come in the morning haze.

Jaeyun collapsed beside you, his back sinking into the mattress as you followed rolling so you rested over his chest.

“Always,” you whispered, the word coming so suddenly, Jaeyun blinked down at you, his head rolling so he could search your face, confused if he had asked you something in his own haze. But sunlight picked strands of your hair, reflected through your damp skin. And he couldn’t make sense of anything.

“What?”

“I’m always okay when I’m with you,” you said.

He knew that he shouldn’t — but Jaeyun felt so right about it.

He felt so right when you called him Sunday afternoon, a tiny can you help me with something? rolling from your tongue and making him sprint to your place, being greeted with you already in your lingerie and you didn’t lie — you had no bad sets.

When he brought you down onto the bed, he didn’t even care about taking it out of you; his fingers merely reached in between your thighs, holding the piece as he slid inside of you.

He didn’t know then, if his hands were still doing their job or if they’d defected. If he was still keeping you safe — or if he’d finally started touching you like he’d wanted to for years, and breaking one more rule.

But as he held you, listening to you breathe quickening and setting against the curve of his neck, he couldn’t make himself care.

Again.

RULE #3: DO NOT BE POSSESSIVE  

I’m her best friend. I always have been. That doesn’t give me the right to be possessive. If I can’t be calm about her, I at least have to be kind. If I touch her, it has to feel like a question she can stop — not a claim. And if someday she chooses someone else, I have to accept it. I have to accept it like it won’t split me in half.

Jaeyun woke to movement.  

Not the slow, sleep-warm kind he’d grown used to in the past weeks, but something quicker — restless. Drawers scraped open and knocked shut again in the same nervous motion; fabric whispered against fabric, and hangers clacked as they were shoved aside.

He didn’t open his eyes — not yet. He listened to you instead: your bare feet skimming the floor, the breath you kept trying to hush, the tiny hitch of frustration when something wasn’t unfolding the way you needed it to.  

And that — that was what pulled his eyes open at last. You sounded wound tight with it, and Jaeyun couldn’t stand the idea of you being anything but fine.

You were half-dressed — shorts on, bra, hair still messy in the way only the mornings after managed, the frizz denoting the number of times he had made you come the night before, arching and pushing your head against the sheets — one of his t-shirts clutched in your hands like it belonged to you more than it belonged to him.

“What—”

You looked over your shoulder at him, guilty only for the fraction of a second it took before your face rearranged into something else.

“Sorry,” you whispered. “I’m late.”

Jaeyun pushed himself up on his elbows, the sheets slipping down his waist. He blinked slowly, trying to coax his mind into one piece through the morning haze.  

“Late for what?” he asked — voice rough with sleep and something worse.  

“My exam,” you said, already turning and moving another hanger. This time you pulled a blue plaid shirt free — the kind you’d been loving to borrow and make him come to collect it himself, your scent worked into the fabric like a quiet claim disguised as comfort.  

“You’re stealing that,” he said.  

You didn’t even bother to look guilty. “Borrowing.”  

“My wardrobe is becoming empty.”  

“And yet,” you said, turning to him with that familiar tilt of your mouth, “you really don’t hate it.”

Jaeyun didn’t answer. He merely watched as you stepped in close again, stealing the air from between you, as you pressed a kiss to his mouth — soft, swift, like a blessing you left behind on purpose.

And the second you pulled away, he moved. Jeans in his fists, he dragged them on as he went, stumbling through the doorway — desperate to be the first thing at your heels.

He caught you at the exact moment his roommates did — both of them lingering in the living room, their backpacks slung over one shoulder, caught in their coffee-stained routines — until the second they saw you and stopped like they’d walked into an invisible wall.

Sunghoon’s gaze went straight to the shirt.  

Then to Jaeyun.  

Then back to you, his mouth twitching like he was trying not to smile.

Jongseong’s eyebrows lifted, slow and serene — the kind of calm that only existed because he liked chaos best when it belonged to someone else.

“Morning,” Jongseong said.

“Morning,” you replied — too bright. “I’m late.”

“Exam?” Jongseong offered, easing into conversation the way he always did: polite, steady, giving everyone an out.

Jaeyun cleared his throat. “She’s late.”

“I am late,” you echoed, pointing at him like it was somehow his fault you’d woken up tangled in his sheets instead of your own — in a room with no alarm clock at all, because Jaeyun despised morning obligations. “But yes.”

You crouched by the door, fingers quick on your laces, and slipping your shoes on.

Sunghoon’s eyes tracked you the whole time, amusement sharpening at the edges of his expression as Jongseong, bless him, kept the conversation where it belonged — safe, ordinary. 

“Good luck,” he said.

“Thank you,” you chirped, already halfway upright again. “Do you have exams too?”

“We’re finishing our exams too,” Sunghoon said. “We should go out after. Celebrate.”

Jaeyun’s jaw worked, like he was chewing down whatever sound wanted to come out of him.

“Arcano?” you asked, and Jongseong’s expression tightened into immediate refusal. He despised the bar, convinced it was what got him hospitalized during his first semester. “I know it’s terrible, but Yun has classes until late tonight — it’s the most reasonable for him.”

For a moment, the room went strangely quiet.

Jaeyun’s gaze found yours and held, warmth rising in him — quiet, disarming — and he went still with it, not knowing where to put the feeling. His mouth parted on a reflex, then he swallowed it back.

Jongseong’s eyes flicked to Jaeyun, then back to you.

“Fine,” he said at last. “But if anyone ends up in the ER again, I’m haunting all of you.”

“That’s fair,” Sunghoon said.

“You don’t have to—” Jaeyun began.

“I — we want to,” you cut in, the words coming as gentle as it was final before you stood and took the knob. “Text me the time!”

You slipped out with a bright, hurried smile, the borrowed shirt hanging off you like a secret, and making Jaeyun step forward, holding the door open so he could stand in the doorway, lingering in the shape of you leaving, and the way you’d arranged the world so he could follow.

When Jaeyun finally clicked the door shut, silence filled the hallway for exactly two seconds before Sunghoon whistled. 

“So,” he began, but Jaeyun didn’t look at him; his gaze stayed on the closed door. “Friends-with-benefits?”

Jaeyun’s jaw flexed. “Don’t.”

“Oh, it is that.”

“It’s not—” Jaeyun started, pushing his hair back off his forehead before he turned to his roommates. “I mean, I don’t know! We haven’t talked about it.”

“But you should,” Jongseong said, his voice neutral enough for Jaeyun not to hear the warning it carried until the air in the room shifted.

“Baekhyeon talked to me yesterday,” Sunghoon said.

“What?” Jaeyun asked, more as a reflex than in fact, understanding what it meant. “Why?”

Sunghoon’s gaze flicked to the door before it moved to Jongseong. And Jaeyun didn’t need anyone to spell it out — his roommates had already talked about this when he wasn’t there.

“He wanted to ask about her,” Sunghoon said. “He didn’t come in aggressive — he came in like he was trying to be the reasonable one.”

Jongseong’s mouth flattened. “Careful.”

“I’m not being cruel,” Sunghoon replied. “I’m telling you how it felt — and it felt like he’d rehearsed it.”

“What did he say?” Jaeyun asked, his voice warped to his own ears. “Exactly.”

“That was it,” Sunghoon said. “He just asked if I’d been seeing her around.”

He paused. 

“And if she was with someone else.”

Jongseong’s eyes cut to Jaeyun, concern flashing there before he forced his expression back into stillness.

“And?” Jaeyun asked.

Sunghoon’s mouth twitched. “I’m not stupid, I didn’t say you both have been acting like bunnies over the past few weeks.”

“Do you think she told him something?”

“No,” Sunghoon cut. “That’s the thing — I think he has been trying to contact her, but she has been ignoring him.”

And suddenly, it made sense — all those times he’d watched you skim your phone, thumb hovering over the screen, before you set it aside and you looked back at him, a smile forced into place.

God — he’d been so silly for overlooking it.

“He broke up with her,” Jaeyun said. 

“We are not telling you this to make you stressed,” Jongseong cut in. “We are just telling you so you can decide — this thing of yours is working for now, and I am glad for you — she apparently doesn’t want Baekhyeon back, which is great, but it might be someone else someday, and you will have to decide if you are okay with having only a part of her again.”

The apartment fell silent at this, and only then did Jaeyun notice how fast his heart was beating. It hummed against his ears, so loud he couldn’t even think.

When you were both younger — ten, maybe eleven — you had camped in your parents’ garden, your backs side by side on a too-thin blanket and a tent that never stopped letting the wind in. The world had been so silent, you’d whispered that it felt like there were only the two of you in the world, wouldn’t it be nice? You had asked. Back then, he’d rolled his eyes and said something dumb to make you grin, too young to consider anything.

Now, in his hallway with your perfume still on his skin and your borrowed shirt still bright in his mind, he understood what you’d meant. It would be so nice — so nice — if the world really could narrow down to just the two of you, and choosing you didn’t mean risking everything else. And he didn’t know whether that thought made him in love or made him dangerous.

˖ ⟡  ݁˖

By the time Jaeyun arrived at Arcano, you were already on the dance floor with Jongseong and Sunghoon.

And it was stupid, honestly, how whenever he thought he was getting used to your existence, you managed to surprise him — newly lit, newly impossible — you stood between his roommates, eyes sparkling, arms half around Sunghoon’s shoulders as you both shouted the lyrics of a song that was too loud and too familiar, and Sunghoon was singing like he meant it, even if he was off-key on purpose. Jongseong yelled the chorus at your back, his face turned upwards as if the ceiling had personally offended him.

Arcano was the same as it had always been — red bulbs that made everyone look like a rumor, sticky floors that clung to the soles of your shoes like the place didn’t want anyone leaving sober, and bass so loud it turned thought into vibration. The air smelled like cheap liquor and perfume and sweat and the faint bite of citrus from a just-spilled drink. 

And it’s too much — everything was too much.

But the moment he stepped further, you turned to him — not searching, but sure — as though you knew he was going to be standing there.

Gravity, he thought.

He moved through the bodies like he’d done it a hundred times — shoulders angled, hands careful, a quiet apology here and there, never shoving, never rushing. The bass beat against his ribs and still he stayed steady, eyes on you the whole time as if the rest of the room was just static.

You didn’t meet him halfway — you never did — you stayed where you were, your body turned subtly toward him, and only when he got close enough, your hand lifted, fingers finding his. And the moment you held him, the noise of Arcano seemed to dull around the edges, like the room had agreed to give you a fraction of quiet.

His hand was cold while yours was warm, and a shiver danced across you, strong enough to make your shoulders tremble.

And God — he wanted to kiss it. 

You had changed since the morning, trading the shorts and t-shirt for a white dress, but his shirt remained, draped around your shoulders, and making his breath catch — he tightened his grip only enough to be sure you felt him back.

“Hi,” you said, loud enough to be heard over the music, but soft in the way you always became with him.

“Hi,” he replied.

“Look who finally decided to show up,” Sunghoon shouted. “We were about to file a missing person report.”

Jaeyun huffed a breath that almost counted as a laugh. He had gone to the apartment after his classes to drop off his backpack, but he didn’t feel like explaining, not when you were squeezing his hand — small, and private.

“Did you eat?” you asked, and Jaeyun felt the absurd tenderness of it. The fact that you could be in a bar, sweating and laughing and alive, and still your first instinct with him was care.

“Yes,” he lied automatically.

Your eyes narrowed. “Yun.”

“I ate.”

“You ate what?” you asked, and Jaeyun opened his mouth, but his words stalled, and so he closed it again.

“He didn’t eat,” Jongseong said.

“He did that thing where he decides worrying is a food group,” Sunghoon agreed.

Jaeyun’s jaw flexed, but his hand stayed linked with yours like the connection mattered more than winning. “I’m fine.”

You didn’t argue, or at least, not right away. You just watched him for a second, your expression shifting into something softer and knowing, like you could see through him even in red light and bass.

“I am getting you something,” you said. “Stay here — don’t wander.”

Sunghoon leaned in. “He literally can’t. He’s on a leash.”

Jongseong barked a laugh. “Be nice.”

Jaeyun opened his mouth to protest, but you were already gone — your smile tossed back at him before you turned toward the bar and leaving him to stand there, eyes following, and tracking the small obstacles: the drunk guy who swayed too wide, the table edge that could catch your hip, the slick patch of floor near the booths. All the little risks the world liked to place in your path, as if daring him not to rush up and fix it before it could hurt you.

You barely had reached the counter when he approached you. 

For a moment, Jaeyun thought it was a guy merely trying his luck with you, but then he shifted, red light catching on his features and Jaeyun recognized him immediately. 

Baekhyeon.

Your body stiffened as he leaned in, his mouth close to your ear for a moment before you shifted sideways, trying to create space. Jaeyun couldn’t hear the words leaving your mouth, but your body was speaking loudly enough: no.

Yet Baekhyeon didn’t step back; when you seemed to be about to leave, he reached out, his hand closing around your wrist, and forcing you to stay.

Jaeyun didn’t even think, Sunghoon shouted something behind him, but he was already moving, shoving through people, and cutting a direct line toward you.

“Just listen — fuck, I’m talking to you.” Jaeyun heard Baekhyeon say, his grip still on you.

“And I said I don’t want to,” you said. “Let go—”

“Let her go.”

Baekhyeon turned at the sound of his voice, eyes unfocused and caught in that ugly space between sober and drunk. For a second he only stared, his brain having to wade through the noise to understand what he was seeing. But then, something in his face tightened, reading the truth between the lines and understanding, all at once, that you weren’t alone here. That you weren’t waiting to be won back. That whatever space he thought he still had in your life had been filled.

Or worse — that it never existed at all.

Jaeyun inhaled, his chest filling with a silly compassion toward Baekhyeon because he, too, wouldn’t know what to do if he ever found himself being dismissed from your life like this, but then Baekhyeon’s hand tightened on your wrist, making your fingers contract in pain, and Jaeyun exhaled, letting it all go. 

He would crawl through hell, cut himself open until his body had become numb to pain, but Jaeyun surely would never hurt you — never.

“Let her go,” Jaeyun repeated.

“Here he is.” Baekhyeon laughed, the sound of it echoing oddly loud in Arcano’s air. “Always on time like a good little lap dog.”

Jaeyun’s jaw flexed once. And Baekhyeon’s smile widened, bright in that unpleasant way that said he’d found the exact spot to press.

“What is it, man?” he went on. “You show up, you play hero, you get to be the good guy. That’s the deal, right?”

His gaze snapped back to you.

“And you,” he said, sweetly, as if he could deny he was being mean underneath. “You always keep him there. On standby. Like an emergency contact you can kiss.”

The air went tight.

“Baekhyeon,” Jaeyun warned, and the other released your wrist, flicking his hand in a dismissive gesture as he looked around the bar.  For a moment, Jaeyun believed Baekhyeon had given up, putting an end to it, but then he turned back at you again, eyes brighter than ever.

“Don’t act like I’m the crazy one,” he said. “I saw it — every time you called her, she softened. Every time you showed up, she lit up. I was never the one — she just let me borrow the role until she was ready to stop playing innocent and let you crash,”

“I just didn’t expect she’d do it this fast — she always played so hard to catch with me—”

Jaeyun didn’t decide to shove him — he didn’t plan it — his body merely moved like it had been waiting for permission from something older than thought.

His hands drove into Baekhyeon’s chest, making him stumble back, hard, and knocking into someone behind him. 

Drink spilled onto the floor, and the scent of it rose almost immediately — sharp citrus and cheap sugar, muddled by the stale sweetness already living in the boards. It cut through the sweat and perfume for half a second, bright as a peel torn open, before the warmth of the room swallowed it again and left only the sour bite of liquor drying in the air.

“What the fuck—?” Baekhyeon barked. 

“Yun,” you called, but it was already too late.

Baekhyeon launched himself at Jaeyun, his knuckles across Jaeyun’s cheekbone with a hot, skidding sting.

For a beat, the impact didn’t hurt the way it should’ve — it was just information — pressure, heat, the metallic taste of adrenaline flooding his mouth.

But then, something in him snapped.

The image of Baekhyeon’s hand around your wrist flashed behind his eyes like a short circuit, and Jaeyun moved before his mind could catch up, his fist driving forward on instinct, a short, brutal arc — no finesse, no warning — just the need to hit back, to end it, to make Baekhyeon understand with his body what his brain refused to learn.

The punch connected.

Jaeyun felt it in his knuckles, in the jolt up his arm, in the startled give of flesh beneath bone — and the sound that left Baekhyeon was small, shocked, as if he hadn’t expected consequences to be real. Jaeyun didn’t wait to see what it did to his face. He only stepped in closer and did it again.

Baekhyeon fell on the dirty floor, Jaeyun above him, fist in the middle of another throw, when someone hooked an arm around Jaeyun’s chest from behind and hauled him up.

“Stop it,” Jongseong snapped. “You’re going to ruin your damn face.”

But Jaeyun barely heard him. He was still leaning forward, still straining toward the floor like if he just landed one more hit, the feeling in his chest would finally loosen, and make sense. 

Jongseong tightened his hold, bracing his weight behind Jaeyun’s back like an anchor.

“Yun,” you called.

Your voice wasn’t loud.

It didn’t need to be.

Jaeyun froze like you’d put a hand straight on his spine. His fist hovered, trembling with leftover momentum, and then you were standing in front of him, your hands on his face — warm palms cupping his jaw, thumbs brushing his cheekbones as if you could physically pull him back into himself.

“Yun,” you said again, closer and eyes searching his. And just like that, the fight drained out of him in a shuddering rush. His shoulders sagged. His breath broke. He let Jongseong hold him up for a second longer than he should’ve needed before he leaned on your touch.

“Princess, I—”

“Come with me,” you said. “Can you?”

For a second, Jaeyun couldn’t find the shape of an answer. Not because he didn’t have one — but because he had too many, a lifetime of yeses he’d never said out loud. His body was still buzzing with violence, his knuckles still singing, but your hands on his face made the world narrow into something he could survive. You were asking like it was a choice, like he was a person with options, when the truth was simpler than that: he had been following you since he was old enough to recognize your voice in a crowd. Since gardens and tents and school hallways. Since the first time you turned and expected him to be there — and he was.

“Yes,” he breathed, and the word came out rough, almost broken with how easy it was. Because you could’ve asked him to walk through fire and he would’ve stepped forward without thinking, just because you were the place his instinct went when the world got sharp. His hand rose, uncertain at first, then settled at your wrist like a question he’d spend his whole life answering the same way. 

Always.

You looked past him to Jongseong and nodded, a quiet reassurance, and Jongseong finally released Jaeyun.

“Come,” you said, your fingers slipping into his.

˖ ⟡  ݁˖

Arcano’s neon shrank behind you with every step, its red glow thinning into something distant and irrelevant, but Jaeyun’s body hadn’t gotten the memo yet. The adrenaline still sat high in his chest, making his breath feel too big for his lungs, his heart beating like it was trying to outrun what had happened. He kept swallowing like he could force it down.

You didn’t talk much at first. You didn’t need to. You just walked — your fingers laced through his.

And every time his grip tightened without meaning to, you squeezed back once, small and reassuring. It’s okay. I’m here. 

The street was cooler than it had any right to be, so closer to the summer, late-night air cutting cleanly through the smell of booze still clinging to him. The city sounded normal — cars passing, a laugh from someone’s balcony, a distant siren that didn’t belong to you. It was strange, how quickly the world returned to ordinary after a fight. As if nothing could be important for more than a few minutes.

Jaeyun glanced at you once, then again.

You looked furious in a contained way, like your anger had somewhere to go now that you’d gotten him out. Your mouth was set, your brow faintly pinched. Your thumb brushed the side of his hand, absent and grounding, like you couldn’t help checking he was still there.

Jaeyun’s chest tightened.

He wanted to say something useful. He wanted to apologize in a way that would actually fix it. But every sentence he tried to build collapsed into the same thing: I saw him touch you and I lost my mind.

Instead, he stayed quiet and let you lead.

You pushed the code into the keypad of your door with muscle memory, the little beep sounding too loud in the stairwell before it buzzed open and revealed your apartment.

Quiet in the specific way your place always was — soft, contained, familiar, smelling like clean laundry, faint florals, the lived-in warmth of your routines. The small lamp near your bed cast a gentle yellow glow that made everything look calmer than it felt. Books stacked neatly where they always were. A mug by the sink. A blanket folded too precisely at the end of the bed like you’d been trying to keep your life in order by force.

“Shoes,” you remembered. “Then sit by the counter.”

Jaeyun did as you said, slipping out of his shoes before he went to your counter and sat down on a chair, his hands on his thighs, and palms down, like he was trying to behave as you rummaged around — drawers, cabinet, a small basket you moved too roughly — the soft clack of objects knocking together filling the silence between you.

“First aid,” you muttered. “I know I have it.”

“Princess,” he said quietly.

“Don’t move.”

“I wasn’t going—” he began, but stopped, suddenly understanding. You weren’t being dramatic, but practical, anchoring the night into tasks: disinfectant, gauze, bandage. The same way he always did when his emotions got too big to hold comfortably.

You found the kit with a little gasp before you crossed back to him and set it on the table with a soft thud, bending slightly so you could see him properly.

“Give me your hand,” you said.

Jaeyun hesitated for a fraction of a second — then extended it.

Your hand closed around his, gently turning it over in the light, and beneath this sudden clarity, you frowned, eyebrows knitted, lips pressing into a thin line. The wounds were worse than it seemed. There was a cut over his fingers, bleeding as a darker bruise spread over. You reached for them, the tips of your fingers wandering through his skin as if you could erase them with your bare touch.

“I’m sorry,” you whispered.

Jaeyun went still, your words reaching past the cuts and hitting something deeper.

“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t say you’re sorry for that.”

“It’s my fault—” you started. 

“No,” Jaeyun cut in. “No. He did that. Not you.”

You turned to the aid kit on the kitchen counter, dropping your gaze like you could hide behind the small, practical motions of it — like if you focused hard enough on gauze and antiseptic, he wouldn’t see the way your eyes had gone wet. But Jaeyun did. He always did, in the quiet, unfair way he noticed everything about you.

“I hate that you got hurt because of me,” you said.

Something in Jaeyun’s chest tightened — sharp and aching. 

He leaned forward in the chair before he fully knew he was doing it, his uninjured hand sliding to your wrist, fingers curling gently around your skin as he pulled you onto his lap.

The motion was clumsy with the chair and the counter and the first aid kit half-open, but the moment you settled, your thighs bracketing his hips, the world narrowed into something that made painful sense.

His hands came up to your face, palms cupping your cheeks as his thumbs brushed along your cheekbones, cleaning your tears like he had done when he got you both grounded at twelve, and like he’d done again years later, on the night you crashed your father’s car — your hands shaking on his wrists, as he told you to breathe.

He made you look at him.  

Your eyes were wet and bright, with tears, the shine gathering at the lower lid until it spilled and traced down your cheek, and his chest ached at that low instinct already moving with the need to make it better.

“Don’t take the blame,” he said. “I can’t stand it when you do that.”

Your breath hitched.

“It wasn’t your fault — he grabbed you and said those things. He—” Jaeyun’s throat worked, and for a second his voice broke. “I heard the way he talked to you, and I didn’t know how to be calm about it. If there’s someone to blame here, it isn’t you. It’s me.”

You stared at him for a second before your hands lifted, your fingers finding and resting at his wrists as they always had.

“Yun,” you whispered.

Jaeyun’s breath shuddered out, and he leaned forward without thinking.

And for the very first time, you met him halfway.

Your kiss was soft at first — careful, but Jaeyun answered too eagerly.

His grip tightened at your cheeks, bringing you closer as if he believed his existence lay in the acknowledgment of you — on how your heartbeats resonated together, how naturally your hands curled around his shoulders, and the sensations your bare fingertips are capable of drawing on his skin.

He kissed you like he was still at Arcano. 

Like he was still shaking.

Like the only way to stop the night from replaying was to overwrite it with you.

His nose pressed hard against your cheek as his tongue licked over your own, slipping past your lips, and tasting that stupid strawberry cocktail you always ordered on your nights out, sweet and a little floral, like summer dissolved and turned on a flavor, and his thumb pushed at the corner of your mouth, asking for more.

He couldn’t come to care that it wasn’t protection anymore, but possession. He just wanted proof that you were still here.

Your hands slid into his t-shirt, fingers curling at the thin material the way they always did when you wanted him close, and it was enough to steal a sound from him — quiet, and yet completely wrecked — his arms slipped, and tightened around your waist, pulling you nearer until there was no space left to misunderstand.

“I’ve been trying to be good. I keep failing when it’s you,” he heard himself say. “I don’t know how to be only your friend anymore.”

There was a lost moment — a second where none of you moved, and Jaeyun thought that he finally did it — he had finally ruined the friendship, but then, you leaned in again, lips on his as your knees tightening around his hips, your weight settling into him like you’d chosen the place on purpose.

And it made him exhale like relief.

His uninjured hand slid along your side, finding you. The curve of your waist. The line of your ribs. The warmth of you under your dress like a living proof he couldn’t talk himself out of. He paused every time your breath changed, as if he was listening for the smallest no, for any flicker of doubt.

But you didn’t give him one. Instead, you tipped your forehead to his, noses brushing, and whispered his name in that soft, wrecked way that always pulled something honest out of him.

“Tell me what you want,” he murmured, the words rough around the edges. “Tell me and I—”

You kissed him before he could finish, fingers threading into his hair, holding him so close, he not only heard the next word, but felt them. “You.”

Jaeyun’s throat worked.

He lifted you — not smoothly, not perfectly, because the chair was in the way and the counter was too close and the first aid kit lay open like a dirty evidence — but he did it anyway, with a gentleness that didn’t match the violence still humming under his skin. He carried you those few steps like it mattered, like the distance between your kitchen and your bed was a threshold he needed to cross carefully.

When he set you down, you caught the back of his t-shirt and pulled him after you.

He braced his weight so he wouldn’t crush you, forearms on either side of your shoulders, head dipping until his mouth found you again, again and again, pressing kisses along your cheek, your throat, the place beneath your ear that always made your breath hitch and he made a question of always finding it. His hand slid down your arm to your fingers, lacing them together above your head for a moment like a question, like an offering, and when you squeezed back, he let himself believe you.

His shirt went first, easing off your shoulders like a last, familiar layer — then your dress, and then your bra, quietly as the breath you released when he leaned in again and kissed the tip of your breasts, one at a time before he moved to your sternum, your stomach — taking in every piece of your skin in between his lips.

When he reached your panties, he didn’t care about taking them off; he merely kissed you over them, the thin lace not doing much to dull the feel of his mouth over your cunt and making you shiver, hands coming to his hair and threading almost bitterly, but if anything, he hummed, giving you another kiss and then, another. Open mouthed and tongue sneaking out every now and then to bump against your covered clit, and making you squirm in his hands, head thrown back, and sliding away a bit.

He pulled you into him, hands grabbing at your thighs so he could push his face back between them, licking a flat, slow stripe over your cunt. The lace did nothing to hold your fluid this time, and he tasted you through, his eyes closing almost instinctively to savor it better. 

“You taste so good,” he couldn’t help but say. “So fucking good.”

A grin broke across your face — bright, and disarming — and Jaeyun forced his arms to push him up, kissing it like he could keep it there, among your already flushed cheeks, and your hair messy against the sheets because God — he was so in love with you.

“Princess,” he called, not really sure if he had something to say. But you hummed at him anyway, hands reaching for the hem of his t-shirt, and slipping your fingers underneath it.

His abdomen tensed and contracted as you wandered through, your trembling fingertips grazing through the lines long memorized, and pushing the piece up and up, until he had no other option but to lift his arms and help you take it off. 

Jaeyun groaned as you moved to his belt, unbuckling it with the same ease you unzipped his jeans.

“Shit,” he murmured. 

“What?”

“Condoms,” he whispered. “I — we used the last one yesterday. I was going to buy after Arcano.”

“That’s okay.”

It was his turn to halt, your words catching somewhere between sound and meaning. “What?”

“That’s okay,” you repeated, and when he didn’t move, you arched up beneath him, lips finding his ear. “I am saying that you can hit it raw, Yun.”

He made a sound — small and involuntary — the kind of honest noise his body made when his mind was still trying to pretend it had control. And you laughed the way you’d always done to turn moments into something survivable.

Jaeyun’s face heated immediately, color climbing up his neck.

“Don’t,” he managed, as if the word could stop you from seeing him like this — undone by you, made soft by a sentence and the brush of your mouth near his ear.

But you only smiled wider, eyes shining with the kind of fondness that hurt.

And Jaeyun — God, Jaeyun — looked at you like he didn’t know what to do with how much he felt. Like love had taken up residence in him years ago and never once paid rent, and now it was everywhere: in his breath, in the way his hand hovered and then settled, careful, as if touching you was a question he wanted to keep asking for the rest of his life.

He exhaled, a little shaky. Then, because he couldn’t help it — because you were laughing and alive beneath him, and he was hopeless — his mouth twitched.

“You’re going to be the death of me, Princess,” he whispered, the words rough with tenderness.

You shook your head, not quite dismissively, but more like you couldn’t believe how silly he was — how silly he was for you. 

Yet he couldn’t bring himself to care.

“Hips up, babe,” he instructed, and you met him there, your body moving on a quiet arch, as you pushed at your feet, and allowed him to curl his fingers at the band of your panties, sliding them away before his hands returned to your inner thigh, your calves, taking over your ankles, and pulling you toward him. 

You shivered as he pushed himself inside of you, your fingers digging into his back as your lips parted on a quiet moan that he made up for you — Jaeyun simply not being able to be quiet at the feeling of you around him with no limitation and groaning loudly.

Jaeyun never thought he would be the type of guy to be emotional over taking a girl without a condom, but it was you with him, and when he started moving again, it was slow and deep, each thrust deliberate as if he wanted to memorize every sound you made, every way your body responded to his. The friction was different, he could feel every ridge, every pulse of you around. And it was almost too much, the intimacy of it making his chest tight with emotion he couldn’t name.

Jaeyun hissed, looking down between your bodies, eyes all warm and glazed as he watched how you fit together for a quiet moment before his forehead dipped and rested against your shoulder, his breathing uneven, as if he was trying to keep the night from turning reckless again.

He was so careful with you it felt like devotion.

But then, you drew him closer — insistent — and he finally let his body answer with the same honesty his voice had tried to avoid. Jaeyun kissed you until you tasted like him. Until your hands clung. Until the space between your bodies stopped feeling like a rule and started feeling like a lie. Each thrust of his hips pronounced with a wet clash, and the sound of your headboard hitting the wall.

And it was too much, honestly — you were too much.

When you came, he followed — quietly, inevitably, his breath breaking as if your body had taken his and led it somewhere he’d never learned to survive. Yet still, he didn’t punish you; he stayed close, slowly towing your climaxes for as long as he could. And when he finally stilled, he pulled back with a tenderness that looked almost like it broke him to let you go.

Jaeyun eased down and let his head rest against your lower stomach, breathing there for a second — then another — almost as if his lungs needed to relearn how to work. Your hand found him, threading into his hair, fingers combing gently until his face softened and his eyes fell shut. And, for the first time all night, his body stopped bracing.

RULE #4: DO NOT LET HER KNOW YOUR TRUE FEELINGS  

If I say it out loud, I make it her problem. I put something heavy in her hands when she never asked to carry me. And I’m afraid — plain and simple — that if she knows, everything changes. And if everything changes, she might step back. She might leave. I can survive wanting her. I can survive swallowing it. I can’t survive losing her. So I’ll keep it useful: jokes, rides home, answers at 2 a.m., the kind of loyalty that looks harmless from the outside. I won’t say I love her. I won’t say I’ve always loved her. I won’t turn our friendship into a question she has to solve.

Jaeyun stayed where he was a little longer than he ought to have, his palms splayed at your sides, lips parted against the skin of your stomach as he pressed a kiss there, and then, at your hips, your thighs, covering all the way to your knees and back up again. 

You shivered as he nipped at the tender skin just inside your hip, your fingers tightening in his hair for a moment before you eased again — slow, and unconsciously, keeping time with your breath.

“Jaeyun,” you whispered, and perhaps it had been the way your breath changed then, caught on something that he couldn’t quite hear, but his heart wavered in his chest.

He knew you enough to know it was the beginning of a confession. He just didn’t know what kind. And that was what scared him: not the truth itself, but the possibility of it. That you might be about to ask for distance. That you might be about to reach for a word that would make him either the safest thing in your life — or the mistake.

“Could you turn the lights off?” you asked. 

It could have sounded silly then. But it was something old between you — something you’d done as kids when you needed to confess something embarrassing, something heavy. As if darkness could make secrets smaller. As if not seeing each other’s faces could make bravery easier.

Jaeyun propped himself up, knees pressed against your mattress as he reached for your lampshade and turned it off.

The room darkened instantly, but not completely — not with your curtains still open and the city’s light streaming in, painting the walls in soft silver and distant neon, scattering stripes on your sheets.

Jaeyun hadn’t noticed how still you both had become until a car passed outside, its tires whispering over the asphalt before it was gone, and the room held onto the quiet that followed, too complete, too attentive.

The sheets rustled softly as Jaeyun lay back down beside you, not touching you — not yet. He just stayed close enough that when you turned to him, he could feel you through the dark, but then you reached for his hand, interlacing your fingers as you had done when you were nine and whispering that you’d heard your parents arguing and didn’t know where to put the feeling, you were thirteen and admitting you were terrified that one day you’d grow up and he wouldn’t be yours to keep.

“Talk to me, Princess,” he whispered.

“Baekhyeon wasn’t wrong,” you said, the words scattering through the space of your bodies so quickly, Jaeyun took a moment to catch it all, and when he did, he went very still, eyes sharpening on your face.

“Not about you,” you added. “But about me — he wasn’t wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you remember my first date?” you asked.

Jaeyun let out a breath that was almost a laugh, except it didn’t contain humor. Of course he remembered. He remembered the outfit. He remembered your perfume. He remembered how a strand of hair didn’t quite stay on your pins and he kept fixing it while you paced through your room. He remembered how his fingers lingered there for one last time before you slipped through the door.

“Yeah,” he said hoarsely. “I remember.”

You stared at your hands for a beat, thumb brushing against his knuckles. 

“I thought you would tell me not to go,” you admitted. “But you didn’t, and so I went, and through the whole day I kept thinking oh, it would have been so much better if Yun was here,”

“The same thing happened with Baekhyeon — I kept wishing you were there with me instead, and I thought it was just because you’re my best friend and everything is funnier when it’s just us. I thought it was just because I feel safer when I’m with you, but—” you paused. “But through these last weeks, I just realized that I truly wished you had asked me to stay,”

“I truly like us.”

Nothing in the room moved, but something in him did, his internal footing slipping, the world turning unstable while his body stayed perfectly still beside you.

Jaeyun’s mouth parted, but his body acted like it was still losing its footing. His breath snagging, throat tightening, the words jamming as if speech required solid ground he no longer had. And in the middle of his silence, you created your own answer.

“Never mind, I just—” you began, slipping from his touch and slipping away, but he caught you then, fingers closing around yours again and keeping you there.

“I’ve wanted to tell you to stay a thousand times.”

Your breath caught at his words, your gaze lifting to his and holding, steady and unblinking, the kind of eye contact that made everything feel suddenly too honest to survive. His grip tightened on your fingers, then gentled again, careful not to turn it into a claim — only a question he was asking with his whole body.

“I wanted to,” he said. “When you had that first date. When you called me after and tried to laugh about it, like it didn’t get under your skin. When you—” His breath caught. “When you started seeing Baekhyeon, when he called when we were together. Every time — every damn time — I wanted to ask you to stay.”

Jaeyun lifted your joined hands to his face, turning them slightly so the backs of your fingers brushed his cheek. 

“But I didn’t,” he whispered. “Because I thought if I told you to stay, that was when I was going to lose you entirely — and you know, Princess, I can handle being your best friend forever. I can handle being the one you call when you’re sad or drunk or mad — even if it’s just for you to leave once the moment passes. I can handle having only parts of you.”

His voice lowered. “But I can’t handle losing you.”

You turned toward him properly then, shifting until your faces were close enough that when you spoke, he didn’t just hear the words that followed, but he felt them.

“I would have stayed,” you said. “Every damn time — I would have stayed.”

Jaeyun made a sound that didn’t belong to him — small and raw — the sentence going straight through his ribs and lodging there.

His grip on your hand tightened — and his forehead dipped toward yours, hovering there as if he didn’t trust the space between you not to change its mind. 

“Stay, Princess,” he asked.

“I’m going nowhere.”

FINAL RULE: NO MORE RULES  

I wrote rules that were supposed to keep me from ruining us. I thought that if I could define every boundary, I could pretend I could control the outcome. Don’t accept reckless requests. Don’t touch her like I’m owed. Don’t be possessive. Don’t say the words that might make her leave.

A small guide for surviving her without losing her.

But I’m not losing her.

She’s here. She’s not a maybe, not a mistake, not something I have to handle with gloves on. She’s with me — clear-eyed, chosen, real. And for the first time, the future doesn’t feel like a threat I need to solve. It feels like something we’re walking into together.

So this is the last rule: no more rules.

Not because I’ve stopped being careful with her — fuck, I’ll always be careful with her. But because I don’t need rules to keep her close when she’s already choosing to stay. Because I don’t have to hide love inside procedure anymore. Because I can finally stop bracing, and start living in the simplest truth I’ve ever had:

It’s us.

[en-ternity]

omg congrats on graduating that’s amazing!!! i’m glad you’re doing well 🫶🏼 are you kidding me tpsateotw is literally one of my favorite fics ever you’re insanely talented so i hope you’ll be comfortable and motivated enough to write again whenever you feel like it 😌 im happy you’ll get to see enha for the first time soon, i also cant wait to see them in europe for their tour

thank you, anonie! for the congratulations and for being so kind about tpsateotw ♥️ this story is seriously my sweet child, i have written a bunch of stories before and after it, but nothing beats this one on my heart, so it’s really nice to know someone else liked it a lot too 🤧

and i hope so too! i honestly love writing and being here, so it’s always a shame when i don’t feel like it 🥹 but be sure that your ask itself already helped me feel a lot better about it, so thank you so much for reaching out 🤲🏻

omfg! i am happy for you too! the european dates are just like next year, right?! you guys are so much stronger than me, i feel like my country’s date is taking too long already, and seriously can’t wait 😵‍💫

[en-ternity]

hii how are uu? i hope youre doing well it’s been a while since ive seen a post from u 🙈 i wanted to read TPSATEOTW again and i couldn’t find it :( do u still write? i really love your work seriously its so good

hello, my dearest anonie ♥️ i am great, honestly! thank you so much for asking 🤧 i have graduated from university this month, and i am 13 days away from seeing enha for the very first time! i am genuinely shaking from excitement 😭 how are you? are you taking care? i hope so!

and what?! i thought tpsateotw was long forgotten by the tumblr nation hahaha it’s really nice to know someone not only remember it but was looking forward to re-read! (since the seasons have officially changed and it’s summer over some parts, i guess it’s completing a whole year since i posted it?) 🥹 but unfortunately, i turned the posts private as i am demotivated about sharing my stories 🥲

but seriously, thank you! ♥️ it’s great to know that you thought it was good 🤲🏻

[enha]

JAKE for ESQUIRE Korea