𝐒𝐘𝐍𝐎𝐏𝐒𝐈𝐒 ─── you and your friends spend all your money on the new greengreen albums and photocards so you guys do what everyone does! get a job!! but who knew getting a job together would bring absolute chaos and yourself a free ticket to meet cortis at your own CAFE??
𝜗ৎ pairing. reader x kim juhoon
status ── ongoing
˖᯽ ݁˖ 𝐀𝐔𝐓𝐇𝐎𝐑’𝐒 𝐍𝐎𝐓𝐄 coco speaking here! GREENGREEN ALBUMS ARE OUT!! but sadly me and my friends are lowkey broke now so i just thought of this silly smau idea that will potentially make our money worth…
𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐑𝐈𝐄𝐒
✶ UNEMPLOYED EMPLOYMENT? | CORTIS
comment to be added in the series taglist or perm taglist here
SYNOPSIS. a series of text threads between you and martin as you navigate a new and hidden relationship under the guise of enemies.
pairing. parallel lines ! martin / f ! actress reader
warnings + info. smau, established relationship, pure crack, fluff, will not be guaranteed chronological order, mentions of kissing, photos used are not representative of reader but for concept purposes
IMPORTANT. takes place post PART 3 events... highly recommended to read parallel lines in order to understand
PARALLEL LINES MASTERLIST
maddy's note. this is a test run— if you guys like this i will turn it into EST TO KST level series :) ik this is the fluff u guys needed after my hiatus LOL
have fun! this starts with them after the first meeting bc why not ahahahah..... next one will be longer if i do
pairing. hockey player ! james / f ! figure skater reader
info. strangers to situationship, morally grey characters on all sides, jealousy, emotional unavailability (both directions), soul tied bc of intimacy type thing, awful communication, fluff and angst
warnings. lowk recommend to be 16+ or so if u can't digest deeper themes, very suggestive themes (nothing explicit ofc), profanity, toxicity, possessiveness, kissing, arguing/banter, implied sneaky link intimacy
POWER PLAY M. LIST
SYNOPSIS. you are on the perfect track to success and competing at the highest level of figure skating. james is seemingly on a similarly perfect track to playing in the NHL. there’s no reason to risk either of those things, so what’s the harm of a small fling? a small fling… that occurs almost every other night and includes a sprinkle bit too much of emotion that probably shouldn’t be there. you were both too committed, too closed off, too sharp at the edges for anything real to catch. four months in and you're still telling yourself that. you're both very good liars.
wc. 21.0k
taglist. permanent taglist here
please specify which TL if u want to only be in fic!
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▸ feedback & reblogs are highly appreciated
LISTEN TO... care by sonder ... stateside by zara larsson and pinkpantheress ... glorybox by portishead ... pushing it down and praying and ...what are we? by lizzy mcalpine ... wicked games by the weeknd ... devotion by dijon and justin bieber ... champagne coast by blood orange... illicit affairs and cowboy like me by taylor swift ... back to friends and undressed by sombr ... bags by clairo ... purple rain by prince ... no. 1 party anthem by arctic monkeys ... robbers by the 1975
maddy's note. i'm sure no one actually cares but i GENUINELY went to hell and back to write this the past 2 months... god james you absolute complex enigma of a human i love you and i def didn't do u justice but oh well #situationshipjames4eva
The last thing you heard before the music swelled was the crowd going quiet.
It was not silence—never silent at nationals. Could never be with the arena packed to the upper sections and the overhead lights running so hot you could feel them on the back of your neck and cameras mounted at every angle like the whole world was watching through a lens. But there was a specific quality of quiet that happened right before a skater's final element. This collective inhale. Seventeen hundred people deciding, in the same half-second, that breathing could wait.
You'd been chasing that sound your whole life.
The Rachmaninoff built toward its peak and you felt it in your sternum before you heard it—that specific swell that had been the architecture of your free skate for eleven months, so embedded in your body now that you could reconstruct it from memory at 3 AM in a pitch-dark room. Your left foot hit the ice on the exact beat. Your body pulled into the combination spin before your brain consciously told it to.
Three rotations and then four. Your arms drew in tighter, speed climbing, and for a fraction of a second the rink and the crowd and the weight of what this score meant dissolved completely. There was just the ice and your body and the music and the precise geometric certainty of the one thing you'd been doing since you were four years old.
You came out clean. And the crowd broke open.
You moved into your final pose—arms extended, chin lifted, one leg drawn out behind you in the line your coach had spent three weeks perfecting—and held it through the last note. Held it until the music died. Held it until your own heartbeat was the loudest thing in the arena.
Then you let yourself breathe.
The sound hit you a half-second later, the way it always did after a program. Like your brain delayed the input until it knew you were done. Applause rolling through the venue in waves, people on their feet in the lower bowl, your name somewhere in there if you listened hard enough past the roar.
You lowered your arms. You smiled. Genuinely and not for the cameras, this smile that only showed up when you'd done exactly what you came to do. You pressed a hand to your chest, bowed once to the judges' panel, once to the far end, once toward the section where you knew your coach was standing even though you couldn't find her through the glare.
And then, because you couldn't help it—your eyes swept the upper sections.
You told yourself it was habit every time. You know, just the automatic scan you did after every program, grounding yourself in space before the adrenaline crashed. Normal. Completely normal. It had nothing to do with anything.
Your eyes found him before you were consciously looking.
Section C, four rows from the back, left side. He was standing against the railing with his arms crossed over his chest and his hood pulled up despite the heat of the arena. A little too tall to miss. Too still in a crowd of moving people, like he'd decided that the noise around him simply didn't affect him.
James. Zhao Yufan. Newly number four on the New Jersey Devils hockey program.
He was not cheering nor clapping. He was just watching you with that particular quality of attention he had. The one that evoked this feeling that felt like being studied, like you were a problem he was turning over slowly in his hands. His expression was unreadable from this distance. It always was, and you'd stopped pretending that didn't drive you insane.
You held eye contact for exactly one second. Maybe a few more milliseconds.
Then you looked away and skated toward the boards where your coach was already waiting, arms open, and you let the noise of the arena swallow the fact that your chest was doing something complicated that had absolutely nothing to do with the program you'd just landed.
He came.
You hadn't told him you wanted him to. You hadn't asked, wouldn't have asked—that wasn't what you and James were. You were absolutely not the kind of attachment where you asked for things and expected them to materialize.
You'd established that early. You'd both been very clear about it, or at least you'd both said the words that were supposed to make it clear, and then proceeded to behave in ways that made a complete mess of everything you'd said.
But he came anyway.
He was there with your coach's arms around your shoulders and the crowd still roaring and your score about to flash on the board, you found yourself thinking about the four months that had led to this exact moment.
About Mattamy at 11 PM and the vending machine on the B-level and an argument about ice time that was never really about ice time. About all the ways two people could sink so deep into something they couldn't name that they lost track of when they started sinking.
You thought about James Zhao, who'd come to your nationals and stood in section C and watched you like he had every right to be there.
And you thought about how badly you wished that didn't mean as much as it did.
𝑰𝑰. four months ago
— first blood
The thing about Mattamy Athletic Centre was that it never really closed. Almost like the city that never slept, if you wanted to compare it to something.
This was what they told you when your federation arranged the Toronto residency—that the rink ran on staggered schedules, that programs overlapped, that at any hour between 5 AM and midnight there was someone on that ice doing something. Figure skaters claimed the early mornings when the surface was fresh and the light through the upper windows was still gray and thin. Development programs ran afternoons. The later slots, the ones that bled past 9 PM and into hours that felt less like training and more like a personal problem, those belonged to whoever wanted them badly enough to show up.
You'd been showing up for three months before the hockey boys arrived.
The news filtered through the rink the way all rink news did—through the manager's assistant, who told the Zamboni operator, who told two of the junior skaters, who told Lia, who appeared in the doorway of the locker room one morning in October with her skate bag over one shoulder and her eyes lit up like she'd just heard something excellent.
"Five players," she announced, dropping onto the bench beside you. "Hockey. They're doing a joint training residency, something about the developmental league deferring for the season. Here through spring. All drafted, apparently. One of them top five picks in the last two years."
You looked up from retaping your blade. "What team?"
"That's the thing—they're not really a team. More like a training collective. All from different programs, all doing the same deferral for different reasons. They specifically requested a rink with high-level multi-sport programming because their coach thinks cross-training with elite athletes from other disciplines is good for them." She raised an eyebrow. "So... us."
"Great," you said, and went back to watching the tape.
Lia watched you for a second. "You're not even a little curious?"
"About hockey players?"
"About five elite athletes who are apparently very—"
"Lia."
"I'm just saying."
"I know what you're saying," you told her. "And I'm saying I have a short program that's thirty-seven points off where it needs to be before December and I don't have bandwidth for whatever you're implying."
She pressed her lips together in a way that wasn't quite a smile. "Okay. Sure."
You met these boys four days later, and not under circumstances that left any room for the kind of first impression you might have wanted.
It was 10:40 PM. You had the ice until 11 and you were using every minute of it—running your step sequence over and over, the section that kept falling apart in the back half, the transition your coach had flagged three sessions in a row. The rink was empty except for you and the overhead lights humming and the music playing through your earbuds, cut off from everything else.
You didn't hear them come in.
What you heard was the door to the ice slamming open instead of the soft hydraulic close it was supposed to make. It was a full crash, the sound of something hitting the boards on the far end. You pulled an earbud out. Voices... laughter? The distinctive sound of skate blades on rubber matting.
Five of them, spilling through the far entrance in various states of gear. One of them said something in another language, Korean maybe, that made two others lose it completely. Another one—tall, quiet, already scanning the rink with a calm, assessing look—noticed you almost immediately and nudged the one next to him.
You skated to center ice and waited.
The one who'd been laughing hardest stopped first when he saw you. Broad-shouldered with an easy smile. This boy had the kind of face that probably made things go smoothly for him in most situations. "Oh—hey. Sorry, we didn't realize—"
"You're not on until eleven," you said.
"Yeah, we know, we just—"
"It's ten forty-two."
A moment of silence. The easy smile flickered but it held. "We figured we'd come early and—"
"The ice schedule exists for a reason." You kept your voice flat, not hostile, just factual. "If everyone showed up whenever they felt like it, the surface would be garbage by the time the later sessions started. So the schedule exists. You're on at eleven."
From somewhere in the group, a voice cut through. "We'll wait."
You looked over.
He was standing slightly apart from the others, stick resting against his shoulder, helmet in his hand. He was not as immediately readable as the one with the easy smile—where that one had warmth built into his whole demeanor, this one had something more contained. He watched the exchange with dark eyes that gave away very little. He looked like someone who'd been running calculations since the moment he walked in.
"Okay," you hummed, though you wanted to say more.
"Okay," he echoed, and something in his tone made it very clear he wasn't agreeing with you so much as acknowledging that the conversation was over.
You put your earbud back in and returned to your step sequence.
For the next eighteen minutes you were aware of them the way you were aware of weather. Like something happening at the edges of your attention that you'd decided not to engage with directly. They settled in the first row of the lower bowl, some of them leaning over the boards to watch, some on their phones, one of them already half-asleep against the shoulder of the one next to him.
The one who'd said we'll wait with that gruffy yet smooth voice didn't sit down. He stood at the boards and watched you skate.
You knew because you could feel it. It was that particular weight of someone's attention when they were actually paying attention. It wasn't just the casual glancing of someone killing time but focused and specific. You'd performed under enough high-stakes scrutiny to know the difference.
At 11:01, you stepped off the ice without looking at any of them.
"Good session," the easy-smile one offered as you passed.
"Thanks," you said, not breaking your stride.
You heard the ice door open behind you as they filed out, the sound of blades, someone doing a warm-up lap with long, aggressive strokes that vibrated through the boards. And then, just before you pushed through to the corridor, that same quiet voice from earlier.
"You're dropping your left shoulder on the back end of the sequence."
You stopped and turned around slowly. Seriously?
He was already on the ice, ten feet from the boards, like he'd said it in passing and had no particular investment in whether you heard it. Was not at all looking at you now. Running a slow circle with his stick trailing behind him.
Every instinct told you to let it go.
"You skate hockey," you scoffed.
"Yeah."
"What would you know about my shoulder?"
He stopped the circle. He stared at you across the ice with an expression that was frustratingly calm. "I know that you ran that sequence nine times and it fell apart in the same place every time, and right before it fell apart your left shoulder dropped about two inches. Might be nothing. Might be why you keep losing the flow at the back end." A pause where those shoulders of his shrugged. "Like I said. Might be nothing."
You stared at him for a long moment. He held your gaze without any apparent discomfort, which annoyed you more than it should have.
"Thanks for the input," you said, and walked out.
In the locker room alone, you pulled up the video your coach had sent from that afternoon's session. Scrolled to the step sequence. You watched the back end three times.
Your left shoulder dropped two inches right before the transition fell apart. Fuck. You put your phone face-down on the bench and sat there for a minute.
Then you picked it up and added a note to your session log: left shoulder—check before back-end transition. You did not think about the hockey player who'd told you.
You were very deliberate about that.
𝑰𝑰𝑰.
You learned their names by accident, the way you learned most things at the rink—through Lia, who had apparently absorbed every available fact about all five of them within the first week and distributed this information whether you asked for it or not.
Keonho was the easy smile, the one who'd spoken to you first—loud by default, the kind of person who treated every corridor like a stage and every interaction like a bit he was already in the middle of. Seonghyeon was the one beside him, who had this way of smiling at you that was slightly delayed, like he'd processed whatever you said, found it good, and only then let his face catch up. A little awkward in the specific way of someone who genuinely meant everything and occasionally didn't know what to do with that. Juhoon was the one who'd been quiet since the beginning—not cold, just watchful. You got the sense he filed everything and said very little of what he actually thought, which made the things he occasionally said feel worth paying attention to. Martin had strong opinions about almost everything and delivered them all with the same measured certainty regardless of whether the topic warranted it, which was either a gift or a liability depending on the day.
And James—
James was the one who'd told you about your shoulder.
Zhao Yufan, Lia told you, like you'd asked. Top-five pick, NJ Devils, deferred entry for the development year. Originally from Hong Kong, grew up in Taiwan. Spoke four languages, according to his player profile, which Lia had clearly read in its entirety. She delivered all of this with the specific tone she used when she wanted to communicate that something was interesting without admitting she found it interesting.
"You looked him up," you said.
"I looked all of them up."
"Right."
"He's good," she added. "Like, really good. I watched some of his development league footage and the way he reads the ice is—"
"Lia."
"What?"
"I don't care."
She gave you a look across the stretch mat that said she didn't entirely believe you. You ignored it and went back to your hip flexor stretch, and you were very careful over the next two weeks to maintain exactly the level of professional indifference you'd established at the beginning.
It worked, mostly. You had different ice times. Your paths crossed in the corridors occasionally—a nod, a passing acknowledgment, nothing that required you to think about afterward. The rink was big enough that you could exist in it without orbiting each other.
And then the scheduling conflict happened.
It was a Tuesday in late October. Your regular 8 PM slot had been bumped by a junior invitational that ran long, which pushed you to the auxiliary rink on the B-level—smaller, older ice, the kind of surface that felt slightly different under the blade. Coaches called it character building. Skaters called it a pain in the ass. You'd been told you had it from 9 to 11.
What you hadn't been told was that James had been given the same slot.
You found out when you stepped onto the ice at 9:03 and he was already there.
He saw you at the same moment you saw him. A beat of mutual stillness.
"They gave you this slot?" you asked.
"Nine to eleven," he confirmed.
"They gave me nine to eleven."
He looked at you and you looked at him. Neither of you looked particularly thrilled.
"I'll call the rink manager," you said, reaching for your phone.
"I tried. She's not picking up."
You stared at your phone. Then at the ice. Then at him. "There's enough room to run separate sessions."
"Barely."
"Can you stay in the far end?"
Something shifted in his expression—not quite offense, but adjacent to it. "Can you?"
"I was here first."
"By three minutes."
"Three minutes is three minutes."
He was quiet for a moment, that contained quality from the boards working itself through the calculation. Then: "We split it. You take the near end for the first forty minutes, I take the far end. We switch at ten."
It wasn't a question. A proposed solution delivered in the tone of someone who'd already run the numbers and decided this was the most efficient answer.
You thought about arguing. You genuinely considered it, because something about the way he operated—like every situation had a logical answer and he'd already found it before you'd finished forming an objection—made you want to disagree on principle.
"Fine," you said instead, because you had a program to run and no time to waste on principle.
For forty minutes you ran your short program on the near end and he ran drills on the far end and you were professionally, deliberately indifferent to each other. The auxiliary rink was smaller than the main surface, the ceiling lower, the acoustics different—sounds carried in a way they didn't in the main arena. You could hear his blades. The sharp stops, the acceleration on straightaways, the way the sound changed when he was running something technical versus something full-speed. You didn't listen. You were very focused on not listening.
At 9:44 he called a water break and you both ended up at the boards at the same time. You grabbed your bottle. He grabbed his. You both stared at the far wall.
"Your short program," he said after a moment.
You glanced at him.
"The entry on the flip. You're telegraphing it." He took a drink. "Your free leg swings out about half a second early. Judges at this level are going to clock it."
Your jaw tightened. "Do you make a habit of this?"
"Of what?"
"Analyzing skaters."
He looked at you then, something unreadable in his expression. "I watch how people move on ice. I've been doing it since I was twelve. It's not a habit, it's—" He paused. "I notice things."
"I have a coach."
"I know."
"She's the one who gives me notes."
"I know that too."
"Then why—"
"Because you've run that entry six times and it's been the same every time," he said evenly. "You can tell me to mind my business. That's fair. But it's there."
You stared at him. Your first instinct was to do exactly that—tell him to mind his business, put your earbud back in, go back to the far end when the clock hit ten. You were very good at shutting things down when they started to feel like more than you'd signed up for.
But the shoulder note was still in your session log. And your coach had said the same thing about the flip entry last Thursday without you managing to fix it.
"Where exactly," you said slowly, "is my free leg."
He set down his water bottle and turned to face the ice. "I'll show you the timing."
"You're a hockey player."
"I know what telegraphing looks like regardless of the sport." He stepped back onto the ice, skated a slow half-circle without the stick, and then approximated the approach—not the jump itself, obviously, but the body position in the three seconds before. He paused at the moment. "Here. Your free leg wants to go here."
He was right. You could see it even in the approximation, the way the hip opened too early and gave the whole thing away.
You hated that he was right.
"Half a second earlier than it should be," you said.
"Yeah."
You stepped back onto the ice and ran the entry twice. On the second attempt you felt the difference—the discipline of keeping the free leg contained until the last possible moment, the way it changed the energy of the approach entirely.
"Better," he said, from somewhere behind you.
You turned around.
He was leaning against the boards with his arms crossed, watching with that same quality of attention you'd felt from the stands during your first session. Up close it was worse. More specific. Like being under a microscope held by someone who'd decided you were the most interesting thing in the room without making it feel like a compliment.
"Why do you do that," you said.
"Do what."
"Watch people like that. Like you're filing it."
Something moved across his face. Not quite discomfort, but a shift—like you'd pushed on something that had more give than he'd expected. He looked back at the ice. "When I was coming up I was always the outsider. New team, new country, new language half the time. Watching people was how I figured out where I fit."
You didn't say anything.
"It's not—" He stopped. "I'm not trying to be weird about it."
"I didn't say you were being weird."
"You looked like you were thinking it."
"I was thinking you're observant."
"That's diplomatic."
"I'm very diplomatic," you told him, and something in your tone made the corner of his mouth move—barely enough to count as a reaction, but enough that you clocked it.
At 10:01 you switched ends. At 11:00 the ice time ended and you both stepped off at the same time and walked toward the B-level corridor in silence that was different from the silence at the beginning of the night. Smaller, somehow.
At the fork where the corridor split toward the separate locker rooms, you stopped.
"Thanks," you said. "For the flip thing."
He looked at you. "You would've figured it out."
"Probably," you agreed. "But faster this way."
He nodded once. You turned toward your corridor.
"Same time Thursday?" he asked.
You looked back. "We have the same conflict Thursday?"
"Scheduling's backed up all week apparently."
You considered this. Thought about the ways it could complicate things, the ways it was already complicated, the fact that you'd been running a two-week policy of professional indifference that had just developed a significant crack.
"Same time Thursday," you said.
You walked to your locker room and told yourself it was just ice time. A practical solution to a scheduling problem. Nothing that needed to be thought about any further.
You thought about it for the entire drive back to your apartment.
𝑰𝑽. the vending machine
The B-level vending machine was a relic. An old unit shoved into a utility alcove across from the auxiliary rink entrance, stocked irregularly and with no apparent logic—sometimes it had three flavors of sports drink, sometimes just two, sometimes the left column sat completely empty for days. The light inside flickered when the compressor kicked on, casting everything in a color that was technically white but felt more like 11 PM on a Tuesday specifically.
You discovered it the second week of the scheduling conflict, when you'd finished a session, were too wired to go home, and needed something that wasn't water. What you wanted were the chips in slot B6—honey butter, the kind Lia kept in her skate bag and that you'd been eating off her since October. You put your money in. You pressed B6.
The machine made a sound like it was considering it.
Nothing came out.
You pressed B6 again. The spiral turned a quarter rotation and stopped. The bag was right there—sitting on the edge of the coil, tipped forward, not dropping. You could see it. You pressed B6 a third time with significantly more force than the situation technically warranted, which accomplished nothing except making the machine rattle once and go quiet.
"B7," said a voice behind you.
You turned around.
James was standing at the entrance to the alcove with his bag over one shoulder, jacket half-unzipped, hair still slightly damp from the shower in the way that meant he'd stayed late too. He was looking at the machine with the same analytical quality he applied to everything—like it was a problem that had already been solved and he was simply reporting the solution.
"What?" you said.
"Press B7." He nodded toward the panel. "Then B6. The mechanism resets. It'll drop both."
You looked at him. Then at the machine. Then back at him with the specific expression you reserved for people who felt the need to explain things to you unprompted. "Do you always feel the need to troubleshoot things you weren't asked about?"
"When I know the answer," he said, without particular defensiveness.
You turned back to the machine. You considered, for a moment, the principle of the thing. Then you pressed B7. The spiral turned, dispensed a bag of plain chips you didn't want. You pressed B6. The honey butter dropped into the tray along with it.
You reached in and retrieved both.
When you stood back up, James had moved into the alcove and was reading the options with the unhurried focus of someone who made decisions the same way in every context—deliberately, and without apparent self-consciousness about the time it took. You used these seconds to do what you'd been doing since the auxiliary rink without really admitting it: you watched him.
He was taller than your brain kept accounting for. Something about the way he moved in smaller spaces—the hallway outside Mira's office, the boards during water breaks, here—made the scale land differently than it did on the ice, where everyone just looked like their sport. He had the build of someone who'd been athletic so long it had simply become how he was shaped: the set of his shoulders, the way he stood with most of his weight on his back foot without seeming to think about it, the particular stillness of his hands while the rest of him evaluated something.
His jaw had a very slight tension in it when he was concentrating. You'd noticed that in the rink too. It wasn't the tension of stress—more like the specific engagement of someone filtering a lot of information at once and choosing which pieces mattered. Right now he was choosing between a protein bar and a sports drink with that same quality of attention, which was objectively not a decision that required it, and somehow you found that more interesting than it had any right to be.
He pressed a button. Retrieved a water. Turned around and found you looking directly at him with a bag of plain chips in each hand.
Neither of you said anything for a moment.
"You have two bags," he observed.
"I'm aware."
"You wanted the honey butter."
"And now I also have these." You held up the plain ones. "Consider it a bonus."
The corner of his mouth moved—that almost-thing, the one you'd started to suspect was the closest he got to openly finding something funny. He leaned against the wall beside the machine, unscrewed the cap on his water, and drank without breaking eye contact, which should not have been as unsettling as it was.
You leaned against the opposite wall. The alcove was narrow enough that you were maybe four feet apart. The compressor kicked on and the light did its flicker thing and in the brief weird quality of it you could see him clearly—the line of his throat when he swallowed, the way his lashes were longer than you'd clocked from any distance, the particular expression he had when he was looking at you and not bothering to perform anything about it.
"How's the flip entry?" he asked.
"Better."
"Your coach notice?"
You pulled open the honey butter bag. "She asked what I changed."
"What'd you tell her?"
"That I figured it out."
A pause—long enough that you knew he'd caught exactly what you hadn't said. He took another drink of water. Put the cap back on.
"The Devils' season opener is in three weeks," you said, not entirely sure why you said it. It had been sitting somewhere in the back of your mind since Lia mentioned it—the awareness that there was a clock on this, on all of it. The residency had an end date. This whole arrangement had an expiration built in from the beginning.
"Yeah," he responded.
"Is that weird? Watching it from here?"
He was quiet for a moment. His eyes dropped to the water bottle in his hands, turned it once, set it against his thigh. "When the footage is good it's harder." He looked back up. "But I wanted the year. I made the decision and I wanted it."
"For what specifically?"
He glanced at you, that considering quality again—deciding how much of the sentence to give you. His thumb was tracing the edge of the bottle cap without him seeming to notice. You noticed.
"To be ready in the ways that actually matter," he said. "When it stops being development and starts being permanent."
You understood that with more precision than you intended to show. The specific gap between being good at something and being prepared for what being good at it actually cost—the pressure that arrived when the stakes went from significant to real, the way it changed the inside of a program or a game entirely.
"How much longer?" you asked.
"Seven months."
Seven. And then the residency ended and he went to New Jersey and whatever this corridor-and-alcove-and-auxiliary-rink arrangement was, it ended with it. That was known information. You'd known it from the first week.
Knowing it in the abstract and standing in a utility alcove at 11:30 PM with the flickering light and the honey butter chips and James Zhao four feet away looking at you like you were something worth looking at—those were different things, it turned out.
"I should go," you said.
"Yeah."
Neither of you moved.
You watched him watching you. You were aware, in a way you'd been trying not to be for two weeks, of the specific quality of his attention—that thing he'd told you at the boards, I notice things, and the way it felt to be one of the things he noticed. It wasn't comfortable. It also wasn't uncomfortable. It was something for which you did not currently have the correct word and that was, in itself, a problem.
You pushed off the wall. Picked up your bag. He didn't move, just watched you collect yourself with that same unhurried patience.
"Thanks," you said, at the door of the alcove. "For the B7 thing."
"You would've figured it out."
"Probably," you agreed. "But faster this way."
He tilted his head slightly at that—something shifting in his expression that you couldn't quite categorize before it settled back into neutral. "Same time Thursday?"
"We have the conflict Thursday too?"
"We have it all week."
You stood in the doorway and thought about the ways this was already more complicated than you'd intended. About the shoulder note in your session log and the flip entry and the way he'd stood at the boards and watched you for eighteen minutes the first night without once making it feel like anything other than simple attention.
"Same time Thursday," you said.
You walked to the stairwell and took the stairs slowly and told yourself, with complete conviction, that this was still nothing. Two athletes at the same rink. Overlapping schedules. A vending machine that required a workaround.
Completely containable. You were in control of this.
You thought about the way his thumb had moved on the bottle cap all the way home.
𝑽. november
The thing was—and you would spend a significant amount of time later being annoyed at yourself for not catching it sooner—it happened gradually and then all at once in the specific way that only happened when you weren't paying attention.
November arrived and the scheduling conflict resolved itself. The junior invitational series ended, the regular schedule was restored, and there was no practical reason for you and James to keep occupying the same ice at 9 PM on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
You did it anyway.
Neither of you discussed this. One Tuesday it just happened—you showed up to the auxiliary rink and he was there and the rink manager, who had figured out months earlier that monitoring B-level after 9 PM was above her pay grade, said nothing. It became a thing the way things became things when two people with no business establishing a routine went ahead and established one—through accumulated small decisions that were each individually defensible and collectively impossible to defend.
What it looked like from the outside, if anyone was paying attention to B-level at 9 PM on Tuesdays and Thursdays: a figure skater running programs and a hockey player running drills on opposite ends of a rink, occasionally stopping to rehydrate, occasionally ending up in the alcove afterward with the flickering vending machine light doing them no favors.
What it was: harder to categorize.
You talked. That was the part that surprised you most, looking back—not that it happened, but how easily. James wasn't a talker in any conventional sense. He wasn't Keonho, who you'd had enough corridor encounters with to understand that his default mode was volume and enthusiasm. James was economical with words in a way that could read as cold until you'd been around him long enough to understand that it wasn't coldness, it was selectivity. He said things he meant. He didn't say things he didn't mean. It made the things he actually said land differently—heavier, like they'd been considered before they arrived.
He talked about hockey the way you talked about skating: not as a job, but as the primary language his body thought in. He talked about reading ice in a game context, how the geometry of a play developed three seconds before it materialized, how the best players weren't the fastest but the ones who understood space. He talked about his development coach, a retired NHLer who communicated exclusively through corrections and had never in four years told James he'd done something well, and the way he said it made clear he respected this rather than resented it.
He asked about your programs the way someone asked about something they were genuinely curious about. Not the performed interest of someone being polite—actual questions, specific ones, the kind that required you to think before you answered. What a GOE deduction felt like from the inside. How you decided which music to skate to. Whether there was a difference between performing when you wanted to win and performing when you needed to.
That last one you sat with for a long time before you answered.
"When you want to win," you told him, one night in the alcove with your back against the wall and the vending machine humming beside you, "you're in it. You're present. Everything is information. When you need to win—" You stopped. "It gets smaller. Everything contracts. You stop skating the whole program and you start skating each element separately, trying not to make a mistake, which is the worst way to skate a program."
He was quiet for a moment. "That's what I do in games. When the need takes over from the want."
"What does it feel like?"
"Like the ice gets smaller." He looked down at the water bottle in his hands. "Like I can feel everyone else's expectations as a physical weight."
You understood that with a clarity that sat somewhere south of your sternum—so specifically that for a moment you didn't say anything, because it felt too close to something you usually didn't let people near.
"What does your team think about the deferral?" you asked instead.
Something changed in his expression. Not quite closed, but carefully rearranged. "They're supportive."
The way he said it made obvious that wasn't the whole answer.
"James."
"It's complicated," he said.
"I didn't ask if it was simple."
He looked at you. Then back at the floor. "My last team wasn't—the dynamics were bad. Two years ago, development league. I made some decisions that weren't popular and the fallout changed some things." He was choosing words with even more deliberation than usual, which for James was saying something. "About how I approach people. About how much I let in."
You didn't ask him to elaborate. You just sat with it.
"Is that why you watched people instead of—" You paused, finding the right word. "Instead of being with them."
He was quiet for a long time. "Probably."
You didn't say anything else. Neither did he. The vending machine hummed. Somewhere above you, the main rink was still running, the sound of blades carrying faintly through the ceiling.
"I don't really do this," you said eventually.
"Do what."
"Talk. Like this. To people I'm not—" You stopped. "I'm not good at it."
"You're doing fine."
"I'm being very honest and I don't usually do that either."
He turned his head to look at you and you were suddenly aware of how small the alcove was, how close you were sitting, how the light made everything softer and more incriminating than it had any right to be.
"Why are you telling me?" he asked. Not challenging—genuine.
"Because you're leaving in seven months," you said. "So it feels lower stakes."
He held your gaze for a moment. Something moved in his expression that you couldn't fully read.
"Yeah," he said slowly. "Sure."
The way he said it made you think he didn't entirely believe you. The worst part was that you didn't entirely believe yourself.
𝑽𝑰. the first time
It started with a fight.
In retrospect, this was fitting—the two of you had an argument before you had anything else, and whatever came after was partly built on the fact that you'd learned something about each other in the middle of it that you couldn't unlearn.
It was a Thursday in late November, 9:20 PM. The auxiliary rink light had been flickering for two weeks and your third maintenance request had gone unanswered, and James had looked at the ceiling during warmup with the particular expression he had when he'd already decided something and was only waiting for the right moment to act on it.
"I'm going to find the rink manager's office," he said.
"I've emailed her twice."
"In person is different."
You looked at him. He looked at you. You could tell by the set of his jaw that the decision had already been made and this was the courtesy notification—which was exactly the thing you'd called out two weeks ago and which he'd acknowledged and which he was now doing again with the minor adjustment of telling you first.
"Fine," you said. "I'm coming."
He looked mildly surprised by that. Good.
The rink manager's office was somewhere on the administrative level—you'd been told this during orientation and had never needed to know it specifically until now. There was a directory near the main lobby that neither of you had ever looked at. You found it, read it, took the elevator to the third floor, and walked down a hallway that felt immediately wrong. This hallway was too quiet. Too dark at the far end, the overhead fluorescents switching to motion-sensor mode and clicking on in sections ahead of you as you moved.
"This is the wrong floor," you said.
"The directory said three."
"The directory said the admin office is on three. That doesn't mean the rink manager's office is the admin office."
James stopped walking. He’d consulted the photo he'd taken of the directory with the expression of someone reconciling conflicting data. "The admin suite is at the end."
"Those are supply closets, James."
He looked at the doors. Of course, they were—unmistakably—supply closets.
You turned around. He fell into step beside you and you were suddenly, unavoidably aware of how much space he took up in a narrow hallway—the width of his shoulders, the particular way he moved, elegant even when he was wrong, which was its own specific category of aggravating.
"We can find her tomorrow," you said.
"The light has been broken for two weeks."
"I'm aware. I've been the one submitting the requests."
"Right, and submitting requests hasn't—"
"Don't." You stopped walking and turned to face him. The motion sensor clicked on overhead, flooding the section of hallway between you in flat white light. "Do not finish that sentence."
He stopped. You were three feet apart, the hallway narrow enough that three feet felt like considerably less. He was looking at you with that contained expression—the one that gave nothing away on the surface—but you'd been watching his face for two months now and you could see what sat underneath it. The slight tension working through his jaw. The quality of his attention sharpening around the edges and that squint in his eyes.
"What's that going to accomplish that I didn't already accomplish," you seethed.
"Sometimes things get done faster when—"
"When what?" You crossed your arms. "When a man asks?"
He paused. To his credit, he didn't immediately backtrack—he seemed to actually consider whether that was what he'd been about to say. "When someone follows up," he amended with a little head tilt. "The maintenance request was two weeks ago."
"I know how long ago it was. I submitted it."
"Then I'll follow up on it."
"I'm capable of following up on my own maintenance request."
"I know you are," he said, and somehow that landed more aggravating than if he'd disagreed—because it made clear he wasn't questioning your capability, he was just planning to do the thing anyway, which was worse.
"You know what your problem is," you huffed and crossed your arms.
He looked at you with an expression containing raised eyebrows and said he suspected he was about to find out.
"You decide the most efficient solution to a problem and then you implement it without checking whether the other person wanted you to implement anything." The words had more heat than you'd planned for, bouncing off the low ceiling of the hallway and sitting there between you. "You observe, you calculate, you intervene. And it doesn't occur to you that the other person might not want to be intervened on."
"The shoulder note bothered you," he said.
"No—"
"And the flip entry."
"I'm talking about a pattern—"
"You're talking about the shoulder note."
"I'm talking about the fact that you make decisions about what I need without asking me what I need."
Silence.
Somewhere at the far end of the corridor a door seal was bad and cold air was getting in—you could feel it at your ankles, this thin current of November working its way through the building. The light above you hummed. James was very still in the way he went still when he was processing something he hadn't anticipated, and you'd said too much or exactly enough, you couldn't tell which.
Then something rearranged itself in his expression. The contained quality was still there but underneath it something had shifted—like you'd pushed against a door he'd thought was locked and found it had more give than either of you expected.
"You're… right," he said eventually. Surprisingly.
That was not what you were expecting.
"I do that," he continued, more slowly, like he was being careful with the words. "It's not—I'm not trying to undermine you. It's a reflex. When I see a problem I want to fix it and I don't always stop to check if the fixing is wanted." He held your gaze steadily. "That's fair to call out."
You opened your mouth and closed it. The argument had built enough momentum that you'd expected to still be in it, and finding the ground suddenly absent under you was disorienting in a way you hadn't prepared for. You were good at arguments. You were significantly less good at people who met them cleanly and said you're right without making it feel like a concession.
"Okay," you conceded finally.
"Okay," he repeated and kept staring at you.
The tension didn't dissolve—it changed composition. It transformed into cooler and more specific replacing the heat of the previous two minutes, and you were aware, in a way that was getting harder to be casually aware of, of the precise distance between you. The hallway was narrow. The light was doing you no favors. And James Zhao was standing three feet away looking at you like he was filing something important away.
"The shoulder note," you said, not entirely sure why. "The first night. Why did you actually say it? You didn’t even know me."
He looked at you and squinted. Again, with his tongue poking his inner cheek, like he was struggling to think of a response to you.
"The real reason," you said. "Not because you notice things."
A pause. He pulled one hand out of his hoodie pocket—the tell, the one you'd catalogued six weeks ago, this thing he did right before he said something he hadn't planned to say. He rubbed the back of his neck once.
"Because you were running the same sequence over and over," he said, "and every time it fell apart in the same place and you skated back to the start without stopping to figure out why. Just—kept going. Like if you ran it enough times it would fix itself." He looked at the floor for a half-second, then back up at you. "I do that. In games. Like, i keep running the same play, same approach, except nothing changes because the problem isn't in the execution." A pause that had weight to it. "I said it because I recognized it."
The hallway was very quiet.
You looked at him—at the flat light catching the angle of his jaw, the particular stillness of his hands when he'd said everything he was going to say and was waiting to see what you did with it. Two months of Tuesday and Thursday nights. Notes in your session log. The alcove at 11:30 PM. All the things that had accumulated in the sealed compartment you'd been so deliberate about maintaining, pressing against the walls of it now.
"Okay," you breathed.
"Okay," he said.
Neither of you moved save for your eyes. Two pairs drinking each other in like you couldn’t tell whether you would strangle or jump each other’s bones.
Then you did—closed the distance in two steps without making a decision about it, and he met you halfway. That was the thing you'd argue about later, with the stubborn insistence on accuracy that defined most of your interactions: that neither of you could honestly claim to have stood still while the other moved. There was no clean answer. It was simultaneous. Both of you arriving at the same point at the same time, the way you'd been arriving at the same points all along without either of you naming it.
His hand came to your jaw first. Not grabbing but framing, his thumb settling at the hinge of it with a deliberateness that was entirely him, tilting your face up slightly. Like he'd considered the exact angle. Like even now he was being precise about it. You got one second of looking at him up close—the unhurried quality of his attention with nowhere left to redirect it, what you'd been on the receiving end of for two months finally with nowhere to hide behind—and then his mouth found yours and the argument and the wrong corridor and the flickering light dissolved completely.
It was not smooth. You'd known somehow that it wouldn't be—there was too much pressure behind it for smooth, two months of managed distance arriving all at once in a motion-sensor hallway in the wrong part of the building.
He kissed you the way he did everything: with complete intention. No hesitation, no tentativeness, nothing that suggested he hadn't already decided exactly what he was doing. His other hand found the back of your neck, fingers pressing into your hair, and you got a fistful of his hoodie and pulled without thinking about it.
He made a low sound against your mouth that did something significant to your ability to think at all.
You kissed him back with the specific accumulated weight of every session note and every vending machine night and every almost-said thing you'd managed not to say. The contained quality he carried everywhere— fuck, that particular reserve, the way he watched from a distance until he was sure—you could feel it come apart degree by degree. Not gone, never entirely gone, but loosening. It felt like watching ice at the edges in early spring: the structure still there but the rigidity leaving it. His thumb traced the line of your jaw and you felt it with a precision that was almost embarrassing, the specific warmth of it, the way his hand held you like he'd made a decision and intended to follow through on it completely.
You pressed closer. He shifted his weight, walking you one step back until your shoulders found the wall—it was deliberate with the same quality he brought to everything—and the wall was cold through your practice jacket and he was not and you catalogued that contrast with the part of your brain that was apparently still running observations even now.
When you finally pulled back you were both breathing unevenly. His forehead dropped to yours. His hand stayed curved at the back of your neck, your fist still loose in the front of his hoodie, neither of you moving away. Up close like this, eyes closed for one unguarded second, he looked different. Endlessly less contained. Like something had been set down that he'd been carrying for a long time without realizing how heavy it was.
He opened his eyes and you looked at each other.
"This is a bad idea," you said, which was true and came out significantly less convincing than intended given that you hadn't let go of his hoodie.
"I know," he said.
"I mean it."
"So do I." His thumb moved once more along your jaw—absent, almost, like he wasn't fully tracking it. You were tracking it precisely. "We're not pretending it didn't happen."
"I wasn't going to."
"Good. Because I don't do that."
"Neither do I."
He exhaled slowly through his nose. His hand dropped from your hair but he didn't step back—stayed close enough that you could still feel the warmth of him, the cold from the door seal at your ankles making the contrast sharper than it needed to be.
You released his hoodie and smoothed the fabric flat with your palm once, deliberately, a gesture you didn't look at too closely while you were doing it.
He watched your hand. The tension returned to his jaw. It was different from before, quieter.
"The rink manager is probably on two," you said.
His face flickered. Not a grin, but he wasn’t frowning anymore. "Probably."
"We should go back down."
"Yeah."
Neither of you moved. He licked his lips and stuck his hands in his jean pockets.
"James."
"Giving it a second," he said, mild as anything.
You looked at him. He looked back with that patience of his—the same patience that had let him stand at the boards for eighteen minutes on the first night without once making it feel like pressure, like he could wait as long as the situation required and had no particular feelings about how long that was.
"Same time Thursday," you said finally.
He exhaled. "Yeah."
You turned toward the elevator. He fell into step beside you. The motion sensor lights clicked off behind you in sections as you moved, the hallway going dark again in your wake, and you walked back toward the elevator in a silence that was built differently from the one you'd arrived in. It was smaller, and more loaded, and something you were going to have to figure out what to do with.
At the elevator, you both looked at the panel.
"Two," you said.
"Two," he agreed.
You pressed the button. The doors opened. You stepped in together and stood on opposite sides of the elevator with the distance between you that was the arrangement, and you watched the numbers change and said nothing.
You were in control of this.
You kept saying it. You were going to keep saying it for a while yet. Though you were less and less sure it was true.
𝑽𝑰𝑰. four months in
Here was what you and James were.
You were ice time on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the auxiliary rink, the arrangement that had technically resolved itself months ago but that you'd both continued anyway. You were the B-level vending machine at 11:30 PM—the bad sports drink and the water, sitting in the alcove with your backs to the wall while the light flickered. You were text messages sent after midnight about session notes and program adjustments and links to footage that were ostensibly about skating and hockey and were also, on some level, not about that at all.
You were: his jacket left in your car after he'd asked for a ride back when the van was unavailable and which was still there three weeks later, which you had not mentioned and he had not asked about. You were the one time you'd run your short program three times back to back and he'd stood at the boards without saying anything until you'd finally stopped and he'd simply said that was the one about the third attempt, and the feeling that produced in your chest that you were still working through weeks later.
You were also: the fight about the Zamboni schedule in mid-November, three days of clipped texts and loaded silences in the corridor, resolved eventually not through discussion but through both of you showing up to the auxiliary rink on a Thursday like nothing had happened and the tension dissolving somewhere over the first hour. You were the fight about the overhead lights which had started everything else. You were the ongoing argument about whose session notes were more useful—yours, which were technical and precise, or his, which were brief and oddly accurate in ways that annoyed you more than they should.
You were: driving each other home. This had started practically—the team van had a recurring availability problem and you lived close enough to the rink that you'd offered once without thinking too hard about it, and once became a pattern the way everything between you became a pattern.
Tuesdays were usually him dropping you, pulling up outside your building with the heat on low and the city quiet at that hour. Thursdays were usually you—parking outside his building on a street that went calm after midnight, and sitting there in the specific silence of two people who'd just spent four hours in each other's orbit and weren't quite ready to stop.
Sometimes that silence lasted ten minutes. Once it lasted forty-five, the two of you parked and talking about nothing in particular until you'd both noticed the time and laughed at the same moment. The kind of laugh that happened when something was absurd and also undeniable.
You were: the cold of his car in December, the heat clicking on slowly, the city moving past the windows. The way he drove—one hand on the wheel, that same unhurried patience he carried everywhere. The specific thing it did to you, being in a small space with him when neither of you had anywhere to be.
You were not: a relationship. This was established. You'd both said the words—I'm not looking for anything serious, I don't have the bandwidth, this is the year I have and I need to focus on the work. You'd said yours first. He'd nodded like he'd expected it. Then he'd said his version, and you'd nodded. It was very mature. Very straightforward. You were both adults who understood exactly what this was.
And it was the most complicated simple thing you'd ever been involved in.
Because here was the part that didn't fit cleanly into the arrangement you'd agreed on. The part you kept running up against and then backing away from, because examining it directly felt like standing too close to something hot.
James didn't let people in. You knew this now—not from what he'd told you, which had been economical, but from what you'd observed across four months of closer proximity than either of you had planned. He was warm with the other four in the specific way of people who'd built something real together and weathered some things and come out the other side. With people outside that circle he was polite and contained and gave very little away. You'd watched him navigate hundreds of small interactions with coaches, staff, journalists who occasionally showed up to document the residency—consistently cordial, consistently unreachable.
With you, he was different. You couldn't fully articulate how, because it wasn't obvious at all. He wasn't suddenly open, wasn't a different person. But there was an access to him that you understood, by observation, wasn't available to most people. The way he'd told you about the development team and what that year had changed in him. The way he sometimes looked at you in the alcove when he thought you were looking at something else—this brief unguarded thing that disappeared the moment you moved.
The physical familiarity had arrived gradually and then all at once, the way most things between you arrived.
It started small. The way you'd learned the particular tension that lived in his left shoulder when he'd been drilling for too long—a tightness that changed the line of his neck slightly, visible from across the ice if you knew what you were looking at. The way he'd learned that when your landings started going heavy on the back edge it meant your hip flexor was complaining, not your technique. You'd both absorbed these things without discussing it, and then they started showing up in how you moved around each other.
There was the Tuesday in late November when he'd come off the ice after a particularly brutal session and you'd been at the boards stretching, and he'd stopped beside you and without either of you saying anything you'd pressed your thumb into the muscle above his shoulder blade, the specific spot, and he'd gone still under your hand and let out a slow breath. Like he'd been waiting for it. Like his body had already learned what yours knew to do.
He'd looked at you afterward, and you'd looked at him, and neither of you said anything about it.
There was the Thursday two weeks later when you'd been running the step sequence and something had caught wrong in your hip—not painful, just a tightness, the specific kind that presaged a bad session if you didn't address it. You'd paused on the ice, barely, a half-second break in your rhythm. Across the rink, James had stopped what he was doing and looked over. Not asking, just: present, watching to see if you needed something. You'd shaken your head once, so small a movement it barely registered. He'd gone back to his drills.
The knowing without asking. That was the part that had snuck up on you.
There was the night you'd come in from the cold with your hands white at the knuckles and he'd been in the corridor outside the auxiliary rink and he'd just taken your hands without preamble, both of them, and wrapped them inside his for thirty seconds while you both stared at the middle distance like this was a completely normal thing to do in a hallway. Then he'd let go and you'd both walked into the rink and said nothing about it.
And none of these things were supposed to count. That was the arrangement. But they had accumulated anyway, all of these moments of being known by someone in ways that didn't fit inside the box you'd drawn, and the box had been getting less useful by the week.
You weren't supposed to notice these things. You were also completely incapable of not noticing them, because whatever else you were, you were observant, and four months of Tuesday and Thursday nights had made you fluent in the specific language of James Zhao in ways you hadn't entirely consented to.
The not-touching-in-public rule had emerged naturally rather than explicitly. The rink was a small world. People talked. You both had profiles to maintain—you as a nationally competitive skater, him as a high-profile prospect with a team watching his every move. Whatever was happening between you on B-level was genuinely separate from everything else, a sealed compartment, and you'd both agreed to keep it that way without ever having the conversation about it.
For instance: the Friday afternoon three weeks ago when Lia had come out of the auxiliary rink at the same time as you and James, all three of you carrying bags, the situation unmistakably legible. The expression on her face had been a very specific kind of carefully neutral that you recognized as her processing something she'd suspected and just had confirmed.
She hadn't said anything in the moment. But she'd said plenty later.
"So," she'd opened, in the locker room, with the tone of someone who had been waiting to have this conversation and was determined to have it calmly.
"Don't," you'd said.
"I'm just—"
"I said don't."
She'd looked at you for a moment. Then: "Does he know about our sessions together?"
She meant the Tuesday mornings. The early ice, when Lia trained alongside you sometimes, when you ran programs and she ran her own and you occasionally exchanged notes. The sessions that had been happening since August, three months before any of the hockey boys arrived. The sessions that meant Lia had a closer view of your life at this rink than almost anyone.
"No," you'd said.
"Is that intentional?"
You'd thought about it. "Probably."
Lia had been quiet, turning this over.
"He's leaving in seven months," you'd said, not because she'd asked but because it still felt necessary to say aloud regularly. "It's contained. I'm not—it's not what you're thinking."
"What am I thinking?"
"That it's more than it is."
She'd looked at you for a long moment with the expression she had when she was deciding how honest to be.
"Okay," she'd said finally. "If you say so."
The conversation had ended there. You'd pushed it to the back of your mind and gone back to the short program.
The short program was, objectively, going very well.
𝑽𝑰𝑰𝑰.
The Thursday nights had their own gravity separate from everything else. After the rink, after the alcove, after the drive—sometimes you went up. This was how you thought about it, in the specific language of understatement you'd both adopted for anything that didn't need to be named directly. Sometimes you went up. He had an apartment two floors above a dry cleaner on a quiet street, tidy in the way of someone who'd moved often and learned not to accumulate—minimal, functional, everything where it belonged—except for the shelf.
The shelf ran floor to ceiling on the wall beside his desk, and it was entirely Lego.
Not the starter sets. The architectural series, the complex builds, the kind that came with three-digit piece counts and required several evenings and a specific category of patience. The Eiffel Tower, completed. The Colosseum, completed. A Formula 1 car mid-build that had been sitting half-finished on the second shelf since before you'd started coming over, which you'd watched in various states of progress every Thursday since.
"You don't finish them," you'd observed once, trailing your finger along the edge of the car.
"I finish them eventually."
"That one's been half-done for six weeks."
"It's not going anywhere." He'd said it from the kitchen, not looking at you, doing something with the coffee maker that required both hands. Mild. Certain. The tone he had for things he'd already thought about.
You'd looked at the half-built car on its shelf. Then at him across the apartment.
You'd thought: that's the same thing you'd say about everything.
You hadn't said it out loud.
The Lego was the official reason, when a reason was needed. You were looking at the new set. He was walking you through the build sequence. This was a normal thing, looking at someone's things, it meant nothing specific. You'd repeated this to yourself enough times that you'd mostly stopped needing to.
What it actually was: the only space where the sealed compartment existed outside the rink as a container. His coffee, his lamp on the desk casting the room gold at midnight, the window that looked out over a street that had gone quiet, and the particular quality of a Thursday that had run long and was still running. The rest of the city somewhere else entirely.
It meant more than you were calling it. You both knew that. That was still the arrangement—to know it and not say it and keep showing up on Thursdays anyway.
It was the second Thursday of December, past midnight, and the lamp on his desk was the only light left in the apartment.
You were tucked against his side with your cheek pressed to his chest, his arm around you, the room quiet in the specific way of somewhere that had been loud recently and had settled. His heartbeat was steady under your ear. Slower than it had been. You'd been listening to it long enough that you'd stopped consciously tracking it and it had just become the sound of the room. It felt like the radiator in the corner, like the city outside the window, like something your body had decided to organize itself around without asking you first.
His hand was resting at your waist. Still, not absent—the particular quality of his stillness that you'd learned meant he was awake and thinking rather than drifting. You knew the difference now. Four months of proximity had made you fluent in things you hadn't signed up to be fluent in, and the specific weight of his hand when his mind was somewhere versus when it wasn't was one of them.
The ceiling had a hairline crack running from the light fixture to the wall. You'd memorized that too.
Neither of you had spoken in a while. That silence was its own kind of information. It was different from every other silence between you, less constructed, like whatever version of yourselves you maintained for the rest of the world had been set down somewhere and neither of you had bothered to pick it back up yet. You were aware of how much skin was touching skin. Of how naturally you'd ended up here, which was the part that should've unsettled you more than it did.
"Okay," you said eventually, to nothing in particular. Just: the sound of being awake at midnight in someone's room and not wanting to be anywhere else, which was its own problem you were choosing not to examine tonight.
James's chest moved under your cheek—it wasn't quite a laugh but more the physical equivalent of acknowledging that okay covered a lot of ground right now.
"Yeah," he sniffed.
His heartbeat kept its pace under your ear. Steady, like him. You closed your eyes for a moment and let it just be what it was—the lamp, the radiator, the city, his hand at your waist—without running the calculation on what it meant or how to file it or what happened in six months when the clock ran out.
Just this. Just for a minute.
Then he spoke. "The qualifier," and the minute ended, and you were back.
"Four weeks," you hummed and traced the pattern of his grey comforter.
"How's the free skate?"
You thought about it honestly. "The second half is where I want it. The first half has one element that keeps—" You moved your hand in the air above you, a gesture for something not quite landing. "It's close."
"The lutz."
You looked at him sidelong. "How do you know it's the lutz?"
"Because it's always the lutz. You give it a half-second more setup time than everything else. Barely. But it's there."
You went back to looking at the ceiling. The radiator kicked on in the corner of the room, the sound it made, this a low metallic settling. It wa sfamiliar enough now that you didn't register it as noise anymore, just as the room shifting into a warmer register.
"My old coach used to say the jumps you're most confident in are the ones that take the most out of you," you explained to him. "Because you stop thinking about them and start assuming them."
"That's true for shots too." A pause. "The ones I've been making since I was fourteen are the ones that go wide when the game matters."
"Because your body thinks it already knows."
"Yeah."
Silence. It was comfortable in the way that still occasionally surprised you—the fact that you'd arrived here, at a version of this where the quiet between you wasn't loaded with things unsaid but just quiet. Mostly. There were still things unsaid. You were both very practiced at leaving them there.
You turned your head up to look at him. He was still looking at the ceiling, the lamp throwing soft light across the angle of his jaw, the line of his throat. You'd spent four months cataloguing his face in motion—on the ice, in the alcove, in the narrow corridor where it had finally happened—and it was different in stillness. The deliberateness still there but the surface of it gone, like whatever he showed the rest of the world had been set down somewhere near the door and melted away when you kissed him.
You looked back at the ceiling before he caught you.
"Can I ask you something?" you said.
He chuckled and turned into your hair. "You're going to regardless."
"The development team." You felt rather than saw him go slightly more still. "You said the dynamics were bad. You don't have to—I'm not asking you to tell me the whole thing. I just wonder sometimes if—" You stopped and reorganized your thoughts. "Whether it changed how you skate. Or play. Whether it's still in there."
A long pause. The radiator settled again.
"It changed how I enter a room," he said finally. "I walk in expecting to have to prove something. I don't always know I'm doing it until someone points it out." He was quiet for a moment. "Martin pointed it out. In the first week here. He said I looked like I was waiting for something to go wrong."
"Were you?"
"Yeah." Simply, without self-pity. "I'm better at it now. But it doesn't go away completely. The calibration just—shifts." He turned his head toward you, and you were looking at each other now, the lamp between you and the low ceiling and his knee still pressed against yours. "I think that's why the year away mattered. Being somewhere where the room didn't already have a version of me in it."
You looked at him. At the specific quality of his expression in the dark—open in the way he only got when it was late and the rink was behind you and there was no particular reason to maintain the distance.
"I do that too," you said and then clarified. "Enter rooms ready to prove something."
"I know."
"I'm not—I don't know if it's the same reason."
"It doesn't have to be the same reason to be the same thing." His eyes stayed on yours. "You walk into a rink like you already know everyone's doubting you and you've decided it's fine. Like you did the math on being underestimated and found it workable."
Your chest did something complicated. "That's very specific."
"I told you. I notice things."
"You do notice things," you echoed, and your voice came out soft. You watched him hear it—the slight shift in his expression, the thing that moved across his face when you accidentally showed him something you hadn't planned to.
The room was warm now. It meant the radiator had done its job.
You looked away first, which was unusual—normally he was the one who redirected, who filed the moment and moved past it with his characteristic efficiency. But tonight the ceiling felt safer, and you took it.
Your eyes landed on his bedside table. The half-finished Lego car in its place on the shelf. And beside it, sitting on the corner of the desk itself, a pair of headphones.
They weren’t the cheap ones. They were the kind that came in a specific case, the newer Apple ones, the over-ear model that had been everywhere lately. You'd seen them on the subway, in cafés, on athletes at the rink who had sponsorships to maintain or just enough disposable income to justify it.
You reached over without thinking about it, the way you'd gotten comfortable reaching for things in his space over the past few weeks. Your hands picked them up and turned them over in your hands.
"Are these the new ones?" you asked. "The over-ear ones. I keep seeing them everywhere—I've been thinking about getting something for the gym, my old ones finally died."
He looked over at what you were holding and his face morphed into…well, not alarm, just a specific attention. He reached out and took them back from you, not roughly, just took them. Set them back on the desk with a deliberateness that was characteristic of him with things he cared about.
"Don't touch those," he scolded like you were some child and not the girl he’s been secretly fooling around with for a comical amount of time. The audacity.
You raised an eyebrow.
"I don't let anyone use them." This was said the way he said things he'd already decided—not a rule he was making up on the spot, a position he'd had for a while. "They're calibrated to how I listen. Someone else uses them and it changes the ear cushions, the settings. It throws everything off."
"Calibrated to how you listen," you repeated, almost ready to giggle.
"The EQ. The fit." He glanced at them on the desk, then back at you. "Music is specific. I don't share it."
You looked at the headphones on the desk. Then at him. "That might be the most James thing you've ever said."
The corner of his mouth moved—the almost-smile, more genuine than the full version ever looked on other people. "I'll take that."
"Are they good?"
"Yeah." He settled back onto the pillow and motioned for you to pull back into him. "They're good. Get your own."
You lay back down beside him, and the conversation moved on, and you filed the headphones away in the catalogue of things you knew about James Zhao: the way he drove, the shelf of unfinished builds, the shoulder tension, the development team, the patience that looked like coldness until you'd been on the inside of it long enough to know the difference.
The lamp stayed on for another hour.
When you finally left—clothes on, keys found, the familiar ritual of the end of a Thursday—he walked you to the door the way he always did, leaning in the frame while you did up your coat in the corridor. Not saying much. Just: present, the way he was present, with that quality of attention that had nowhere else to be.
"Thursday," you hummed, at the elevator.
"Thursday," he confirmed.
You rode down alone and stepped out into the cold December street and told yourself, as you had been telling yourself for four months, that this was contained. That you had it. That the box was still intact.
The box had long since become theoretical.
You were starting to think you'd known that for a while.
The other four—you'd learned them too, by proximity and by simple accumulation of time.
Juhoon had been the first to actually talk to you properly, in a way that established something beyond nodding in corridors. It had happened in the main rink lobby one morning when you'd both arrived early and the building wasn't open yet, the two of you on the sidewalk in the pre-dawn cold, and he'd offered you half his convenience store purchase—a triangle kimbap he'd clearly been eating on the walk over—with an easy familiarity that assumed you were already friends. You'd taken it. That decision had somehow settled your status with the group in a way you hadn't been planning on.
After that you were simply someone they knew. Not faking warmth in their direction, not hockey fame-adjacent in the way most people at the rink seemed to want to be—just present, occasionally, in the ways that happened naturally when five people and one other person occupied the same building at the same hours over several months. Keonho included you in conversations as if you'd been part of them from the beginning, which was either a genuine personality trait or a very refined social skill and you'd stopped trying to determine which.
Seonghyeon had once spent twenty minutes asking you specific questions about competition prep and the mental side of high-stakes performance, with the seriousness of someone doing genuine research. Martin had strong opinions about almost everything and deployed them at regular intervals, and occasionally your opinions were the opposite of his, and you argued about it, which he seemed to regard as a perfectly reasonable way to spend a Tuesday afternoon.
None of them, as far as you could tell, had any particular knowledge of what was happening between you and James on B-level. This was partly your compartmentalization working correctly and partly—you suspected—because James was very good at keeping things in sealed units, and whatever you were to him fit in a unit he kept separate from everything else.
You tried not to think too hard about what exactly that unit was labeled.
What you noticed, because you couldn't stop noticing: the way James was with them was different from how he was with anyone else. He wasn’t open in the way you'd come to understand as specific to the alcove and the late nights—but there was an ease to it, something built over a long time and weathered and come out the other side.
When Keonho said something catastrophically stupid, which happened on a regular schedule, James's expression shifted in a way that was almost imperceptible but clearly fond. When Seonghyeon got into his head during training, James had a specific approach—it wasn’t fixing it directly, not saying much, just positioning himself where he'd be visible, being a steady presence until whatever was happening internally resolved.
The development team, two years ago. The difficult environment. The decisions that weren't popular.
You thought about it sometimes. About what had happened that had turned him into someone who watched from a distance for a year at a new rink before deciding it was safe. Who built walls with such structural integrity that most people probably didn't even realize the walls were there.
You thought about it and then thought about the alcove, and the fact that he'd told you about the development team at all, and you very carefully did not draw any conclusions from that.
𝑰𝑿. december
—macklin
He arrived on a Thursday, mid-December, which you knew because Lia texted you before you'd gotten to the rink.
lia bear !!
[7:20 PM]
macklin celebrini is doing supplemental training here for two weeks. post-olympics decompression thing. just fyi since you're there tonight.
You read it, put your phone in your pocket, and didn't think much about it. Post-Olympics training guests weren't unusual at high-profile facilities. You had a qualifier in four weeks and the mental bandwidth for exactly one thing.
You ran into him at the main rink during your afternoon session—or more accurately, he nearly knocked over your water bottle coming off the ice, caught it with the reflexes of someone whose entire career was built on being faster than the situation required, and handed it back with an apology that was genuinely sheepish. Like, actually embarrassed, which was not what you'd expected from someone who'd just come off an Olympic podium.
"Sorry—I'm still—" He laughed slightly, a laugh that was directed at himself. "The orientation period after the Olympics is real. My spatial awareness is completely off."
You took the bottle back. "How long were you in the village?"
"Three weeks. Plus two weeks of comp." He ran a hand through his hair, still damp from the session. Up close he looked younger than the broadcast footage suggested—not young, exactly, but unguarded in the specific way of someone who'd just been through something enormous and hadn't yet reassembled all the usual armor. "You lose all track of everything. It's a very specific kind of disorientation."
"I'd imagine."
He stuck out his hand. "Uh, I’m Macklin."
"I know who you are." You shook it. "I'm—"
"I know who you are too," he said, and smiled—and that was the thing about Macklin Celebrini that you discovered immediately and filed under dangerous, the smile. It was not a performance of warmth but the actual feeling, this one that arrived in his eyes first and his mouth second, the kind that made you feel like you'd said something worth smiling at even when you'd said almost nothing. "Nationals qualifier. Your short program score from the regional was—"
"Don't quote my scores at me."
He laughed again, fuller this time. "Fair. Sorry."
He picked up his bag from the boards, relaxed and with the ease of someone who'd been navigating high-performance environments since he was sixteen and had long ago made peace with being watched in them. "I looked up the skaters training here before I arrived. Research habit. I like knowing who's in the building."
"Why?"
He considered the question like it was worth considering. "Because the best athletes in any sport are doing something I can learn from. Doesn't matter the discipline." He glanced at the ice, then back at you. "The way figure skaters approach edge work is something hockey players should study more than they do. The precision of it." A pause. "The way you were running that step sequence earlier—the back half especially—there's a flow management thing happening that I've been trying to figure out how to apply to—" He stopped himself and smiled. It was slightly rueful. "Sorry. I do that. Go too far into it."
You looked at him. You'd had exactly this experience before—someone watching you on the ice and seeing something specific in it, something technical, something that meant they'd actually been paying attention rather than just observing. It had happened before from exactly one other person in this building and you were careful not to follow that thought any further.
"The back half is a work in progress," you chuckled and cracked your neck.
"It didn't look like it."
"It always looks better than it is from the outside."
He tilted his head slightly, studying you with an open curiosity that didn't have any performance in it. "Is that specific to skating or a general philosophy."
The question caught you off guard in a way you didn't particularly like—not because it was intrusive but because it was accurate. It was a question that got underneath something without trying to. You felt the corner of your mouth move before you could decide whether to let it.
"Probably both," you said.
He grinned. "Yeah. Same."
You picked up your water bottle. The session was supposed to resume in four minutes and you had a step sequence to fix and no good reason to still be standing at the boards talking to someone you'd met six minutes ago.
"Are you in the evening sessions?" he asked. "I've got the eight o'clock."
"Nine."
"Maybe I'll see you around."
He said it the way people said things they meant without needing to make a production of it—easy and direct with no particular agenda in it—and moved toward the exit with that relaxed confidence of his, the specific gait of someone who'd spent their whole life being the best person in most rooms and had somehow not let it make them smaller.
You watched him go for exactly one second longer than necessary.
Then you stepped back onto the ice and went back to the step sequence and told yourself it was nothing. New person in the building. Polite exchange and completely unremarkable.
You thought about the question—is that specific to skating or a general philosophy—for the rest of the session without meaning to. The way it had landed. The way you'd answered honestly without deciding to.
He'd gotten through, was the thing. Barely, and you'd realized it the moment it happened, but he had. And you were practiced enough at maintaining distance that the fact of it registered like a small alarm—not loud nor urgent, just… noted. Filed. Something to be aware of.
You finished the session and went to find the vending machine and didn't mention it to James that night in the alcove.
That felt like its own kind of information.
𝑿. the vending machine
—december
It was 11:45 PM, two days after Macklin had arrived, when you found out that James had registered his presence in a way that went beyond neutral.
You were already in the alcove when you heard his footsteps coming down the B-level corridor. You knew his walk by now—the particular rhythm of it, the sound of someone who moved through spaces like he'd freaking owned them. You'd been in this building long enough to identify half the staff by footfall alone. That you could pick his out from the stairwell was a fact you kept in the same drawer as several other facts you'd stopped examining directly.
You didn't turn around until he was there.
He came into the alcove and looked at the machine the way he always did—reading it first, like it might have changed since last time, like the options were worth reassessing. Got his water. Cracked the cap. Drank half of it standing up, his back half-turned to you, and you watched the line of his throat when he swallowed and looked away before he turned around.
"Macklin Celebrini," he acknowledged.
It wasn’t loud. It was almost offhand, the name dropped into the quiet of the alcove like he was reading it off a list. You looked at him. He was looking at the machine, not at you, his expression doing that thing where it gave nothing away on the surface and you'd long since learned to read what was underneath.
"What about him?" you asked, though you wanted to laugh at the outwardness of it.
"He talked to you after the afternoon session."
It wasn't a question. James had a way of presenting verified information in the shape of a question—stating the thing he already knew as though he was asking about it, which was a quality you'd identified early and never stopped finding aggravating, partly because it was so effective.
"He nearly knocked over my water bottle and apologized," you said. "That's a conversation in the loosest possible definition."
"He's here for two weeks."
"I'm aware. So are you basically."
James looked at the wall across from the machine. The compressor kicked on and the light did its flicker and in the brief shift of it you could see his jaw clearly—the tension that lived there when he was working through something he didn't particularly want to be working through. Almost invisible if you didn't know what you were looking at.
You knew what you were looking at.
You leaned your shoulder against the wall and watched him. This was something you'd gotten less careful about over the past month—the watching. Early on you'd been deliberate about redirecting it, making sure your attention had somewhere else to be when he was close, a mechanism to try and act like you didn’t care as much as you did, surely. Somewhere around week six you'd stopped bothering, and he'd never said anything about it, which meant either he hadn't noticed or he had and had filed it the same way you'd both been filing everything else.
"Okay," you said slowly. "What is actually happening right now?"
"Nothing."
"James."
He looked at you then. Full on, which he didn't always do when the conversation was about something he was managing—usually he looked adjacent to you, at the machine or the wall or the middle distance, and let you infer. When he looked at you directly it meant he'd decided to be in it rather than around it, which was either a good sign or a warning depending on the night.
"You’re doing the thing," you told him with a wave of your hand.
"What thing?"
"The thing where you have a feeling, you know you're having a feeling, you've decided it's inconvenient, and you're attempting to compress it into a shape where it doesn't take up any space, and meanwhile it is taking up a tremendous amount of space, especially around me."
The alcove was quiet.
"I don't have a thing about Macklin Celebrini," he said finally.
"Then why did you open this conversation with his full name? No how was your session? No did you take my advice this time?"
He didn't answer that. James looked back at the wall. His thumb was moving on the water bottle cap—that tell, the one you'd first catalogued in the alcove two months ago, this habit that occurred when he was processing something he hadn't decided what to do with yet. You watched it without pointing it out.
"I'm just noting," he scoffed, "that he's personable. And that you responded to him."
You stared at him. "I received an apology for an almost-spilled water bottle. That's not a response, that's basic social functioning."
"You were friendly."
"I'm friendly sometimes. To some people."
He looked at you with an expression that communicated, without a single word, that he had four months of data on your baseline demeanor and had formed opinions about the word friendly in that sentence. You were forced, in the privacy of your own head, to concede the point.
"Okay," you huffed. "I was—whatever. Normally human."
"Right."
"Which is not a crime."
"I didn't say it was."
"But you're standing here… bringing it up."
He was quiet. His gaze was at the wall again, jaw tight, water bottle in his hands. You pushed off the wall and moved to stand beside him—not in front of him, beside, close enough that your arm almost touched his, looking at the same wall he was looking at. You felt him register the proximity without moving. That was its own thing, the way his stillness changed quality when you were close to him. Like the air pressure shifted slightly.
"James," you approached, more carefully. "You don't get to do that."
He turned his head toward you. And that gaze of his immediately dropped to your lips.
"You don't get to be weird about someone being normally nice to me." You kept your voice even, not unkind. "We said what this was. And I meant it and so did you, and it works because we both meant it. But this—" You didn't gesture this time, just let the word sit between you, let the alcove and the proximity and the 11:45 PM do the work of defining what this referred to. "This doesn't fit inside what we said."
"I know," he grumbled.
You looked up at him. He was close enough that you could see the tension working through his jaw, the slight furrow between his brows that meant he was being honest with himself about something he'd rather not be honest about. His eyes were on yours and not moving away, which was the thing about James when he was actually in a conversation rather than managing one—he didn't look away. He held it. Almost like looking away would be a concession he wasn't willing to make.
"So…" you plagued.
"I know," he hushed again. Quieter.
"Do you?"
He exhaled. A long, controlled breath that he'd clearly been holding for longer than this conversation. He looked at the ceiling for a moment—the tell that meant he was doing the calculation, running the numbers on how much to give you—and then back down.
"Yeah," he digressed. "I know. I'm not making it your problem. I just—" He stopped. His thumb stilled on the bottle cap. "I noticed it. That's all."
You held his gaze for a moment. You were very aware of how small the alcove was. Of the fact that you'd moved to stand beside him and hadn't moved back. Of the specific quality of his attention right now, which was the unguarded version, the one that showed up when it was late and he'd run out of energy to keep it managed.
"Okay," you said finally.
"Okay," he conceded.
Neither of you moved for a moment. The light flickered once—the compressor cycling—and in the half-second of it his face was closer and more visible than the steady light made it, and you looked at him the way you looked at him when you were pretty sure he wasn't tracking it, and then the light steadied and you both looked back at the wall.
You finished your chips. He finished his water. You left the alcove two minutes later without touching, which was the arrangement, which had never felt more like a technicality than it did tonight.
On the drive home, you thought about the noticing. Not about the possessiveness—you had every intention of not encouraging that, of not letting it mean what it wanted to mean. But the specific feeling underneath it. The way something caught in your chest when the world reminded you that this arrangement was, by design, limited. That there was a clock you'd both agreed to and that agreeing to it hadn't made it feel any smaller.
You thought about Macklin's question—is that specific to skating or a general philosophy—and the fact that you'd answered honestly, and the fact that you hadn't told James about it.
And you thought about James saying I noticed it. That's all, with his thumb still on the bottle cap and his eyes on yours, and the specific feeling that had produced somewhere behind your sternum that you were very deliberately not giving a name.
You were fine about it. You were almost certain you were fine about it.
The almost was doing a lot of work.
𝑿𝑰. lia
Who was Lia?
Aside from being someone your current fling was beginning to warm up to—which was a sentence you were not examining—Lia… was one of the most technically precise skaters you'd ever shared ice with and also had the social awareness of someone who should have gone into a different profession entirely. She noticed things the way you noticed things, which was part of why you'd gotten along from the beginning and also occasionally made her exhausting to be around.
It was a Sunday morning in mid-December. You were both doing off-ice conditioning in the training room, a practice you'd started together in September when you'd both realized your respective coaches had identical opinions about cross-training. The room was mostly empty at this hour—one of the junior skaters doing resistance work in the corner, the assistant coach for the development program passing through with a coffee—and you'd claimed the cable machines along the far wall the way you always did, by arriving first and saying nothing about it.
"You know I actually know about Tuesday and Thursday nights," Lia said.
You kept your eyes on the cable machine. "Lia."
"I'm not about to give you a speech." She moved to the mat beside you and started on her stretches with the methodical focus she applied to everything—deliberate, thorough, like she'd decided at some point that half-measures were a waste of time and had never revisited the position. "I just think you should know that I know, and that it's obvious, and that some of the other people in this building have eyes."
"Noted."
You reset the weight and pulled. The cable machine offered its familiar resistance and you focused on the mechanics of it—the specific engagement of the muscle, the controlled return—because focusing on the mechanics of something was a technique you'd been using your whole life to not focus on other things.
"Also," she said, in the lighter tone that meant she was changing direction, "I've been spending time with him. With James. Since a couple weeks ago." A pause in her stretching, brief, like she was choosing the next part. "He helped me with some edge work, we ended up talking after, it's been—" Another pause. "It's been nice. He's thoughtful. Different from what I expected."
You kept your face completely neutral.
This took more effort than it should have. The thing that moved through you in the half-second after she said it was fast and specific and not something you had a clean name for—not quite jealousy, because you had no right to jealousy and you knew it, but something adjacent, something that lived in the same neighborhood. The specific sensation of hearing someone describe access to a person you'd assumed was yours to have access to, in a tone that suggested it had been going on for a couple weeks, which meant it had been going on while you'd been in his apartment on Thursday nights and his arm had been around you and you'd been listening to his heartbeat.
You pulled the cable. Released. Kept your eyes forward.
"That's good," you said.
Lia looked at you for a moment—you could feel it without turning your head, that particular quality of her attention when she was deciding how much she believed you.
"He talks about you sometimes," she added. "Not a lot. Just in passing. Your programs come up."
You didn't say anything.
"I thought you should know that too," she said quietly. "Since you both seem committed to maintaining the fiction that this is casual."
You finished your set. Reset the weight. Took a breath that you made sure was the same as every other breath.
"What makes you think it's fiction?" you said.
"The fact that he showed up to watch morning practice last week—the session you don't know about because you were in off-ice training." She glanced at you, not unkindly. "The fact that the rink manager told me someone requested the auxiliary rink lighting be fixed as a priority maintenance item and gave the requester's name as James Zhao." A moment. "Casual people don't do that."
You stared at the cable machine for a moment.
The lighting request. You'd known about it—he'd told you he was going to follow up, had told you in the specific way he'd arrived at after the argument, informing rather than asking, and you'd said fine, thank you, and that had been the end of it. You hadn't thought about what it looked like from the outside. You hadn't thought about the fact that his name was attached to it in a building full of people who paid attention to exactly this kind of thing.
"It has an expiration date," you shrugged and stretched your back.
"Most things do," Lia replied, with the serenity of someone who'd made peace with impermanence in a way you hadn't. "That doesn't mean they don't mean anything while they're happening."
You wanted to argue with her. You had a whole architecture of reasons why what she was describing was fine and contained and manageable—why the expiration date was a feature rather than a flaw, why the not-naming-it was protection rather than avoidance, why two people could be this far inside each other's lives and still keep it from being the thing it was starting to look like from the outside.
You were getting less convinced by your own architecture by the day.
"You like him," she commented. It wasn't a question. She said it the way she said things she'd already verified. It was gently, without pressure and just putting the fact in the room.
"I have a nationals qualifier in four weeks."
"Sure."
"And a program that's still thirty points short of where I need it."
"Absolutely."
"I don't have space for—"
"You don't have to convince me," she said mildly. "I didn't ask."
You looked at her. She was doing hip stretches with the serene expression of someone who'd said exactly what she intended to say and was now completely at peace with the outcome, which was one of the most aggravating qualities a person could have and also, you were aware, something you'd thought about James in roughly the same terms approximately forty times.
You went back to the cable machine.
You did not think about James Zhao requesting the auxiliary rink lighting as a priority maintenance item. You were very disciplined about that.
You were also, without meaning to, thinking about the way Lia had said it's been nice. He's thoughtful. The specific warmth in her voice, which was Lia's default register, which you'd never had cause to find threatening before.
You thought about the Thursday nights. The shelf. His hand at your waist in the dark. The heartbeat.
You thought about the fact that he'd been talking to Lia about your programs.
It took approximately four minutes for the discipline to fail. Then you reset the weight again, pulled harder than necessary, and spent the remainder of the session being extremely focused on your form.
𝑿𝑰𝑰.
You were aware, in the abstract, that James had been spending time with Lia.
You'd registered it without making it mean anything—Lia was easy to spend time with, shared the early morning schedule, was approachable in all the ways you tended not to be, and she was a good enough skater to offer the kind of cross-discipline perspective he'd found useful from you in the beginning. It was practical. It made sense.
Then you came down to B-level at 11 PM on a Tuesday and found the auxiliary rink dark and empty, and followed the sound of voices to the corridor, and found James and Lia at the vending machine.
Not the alcove—just in the corridor in front of the machine, Lia holding a sports drink and James holding his water. The two of them were mid-conversation, the easy rhythm of something that had been going on for a while. Lia was laughing at something. James's expression had that fractional softness it got when he was comfortable—the thing you'd catalogued over four months, the thing you'd only ever seen directed at the four boys and at you.
You stopped at the end of the corridor.
Neither of them had seen you.
The feeling that moved through you in that moment was something you recognized immediately and didn't like recognizing at all. It was precise and uncomfortable and it had no business being there given the architecture you'd constructed. You'd specifically built the architecture to prevent this. You'd said the words, you'd meant the words.
You turned around and took the stairwell up to the main level and told yourself you were fine.
You texted James at 11:45 PM: not coming tonight. program stuff.
He responded in eleven minutes.
james yufine
[11:55 PM]
okay
One word. The kind of response that could mean anything or nothing or everything depending on what he'd been doing when he received it and what his face had done when he read it, none of which you would ever know.
You put your phone face-down on your kitchen counter and went back to your program notes and did not think about the specific way Lia had been laughing. You did not think about the fact that she was warm in all the ways you struggled to be, approachable in all the ways you deliberately weren't. You did not think about the fact that James had spent years getting burned by people he'd let in and had spent four months slowly, carefully letting you in anyway, and that some part of you had started to rely on the symmetry of that—two people with the same damage, the same sealed-compartment approach, the same stubborn insistence on containment.
You were in control of this.
You kept saying it. You kept saying it.
𝑿𝑰𝑰𝑰. nationals
The night before nationals you didn't sleep.
This wasn't unusual. You rarely slept before competitions, your body running on that specific anxious current that came from months of work arriving at its singular moment. You'd made peace with it years ago—with the lying awake and running the program in your head in the dark, every element in sequence, every transition, every place something could go wrong and the correction you'd execute if it did.
What was unusual was that somewhere in the dark at 2 AM, your phone lit up.
james
[2:04 AM]
good luck tomorrow
ur ready
James. No preamble, no context, just that.
You stared at it for a long time.
Then: how do u know
His response came three minutes later.
james yufine
[2:08 AM]
cuz ive watched u run that program like 80 times and the last 10 were perfect
not to glaze or anything
and ur the kinda person who forces herself to be ready
deadass it's not luck it's basically architecture atp
You read it twice.
Then: architecture?? wtf is that supposed to mean
james yufine
[2:08 AM]
the way u build things
always with this like structure already in place before anyone can see it idrk how to explain
You put the phone down and stared at the ceiling. The program ran through your head—every element, every transition, the Rachmaninoff building to that final spin. Eighty times. He'd been counting.
You picked the phone back up.
are you going to be there, you typed. Deleted it. Typed it again. Stared at it.
Sent it.
The response came in two minutes:
james yufine
[2:14 AM]
maybe
One word. The architecture of something you still didn't have a name for.
You put the phone on the nightstand and lay in the dark and thought about the alcove and the vending machine and the argument that started everything and the seven months you'd been so careful about, all the ways you'd kept this contained and controlled and still somehow ended up here—lying awake the night before nationals because a hockey player had texted you you're ready and it had landed somewhere much deeper than it had any right to reach.
You thought about Lia laughing in the corridor. About the look on his face in the alcove when he'd brought up Macklin, that jaw-tension, the carefully compressed feeling. About four months of Tuesday and Thursday nights and I'll follow up on it and that was the one.
About section C, four rows from the back, left side.
You didn't sleep until past 3AM. When you finally did, the last thing in your head was the specific quality of his attention from across a crowded arena. He was not cheering but just watching, like he'd needed to see it for himself.
In the morning, you went out and skated the best program of your life.
𝑿𝑰𝑽. gold,
reprise
Your score flashed on the board and the arena broke open and your coach was saying something in your ear that you couldn't fully process because your brain was still catching up to the fact that the number was real.
First place. Nationals. The goal you'd been building toward for eleven months.
You pressed your hand to your chest. You let yourself feel it—just for a second, before the obligations started.
The kiss-and-cry. The interview. The photograph with the medal heavy around your neck, the weight of it more literal than you'd expected, like the thing you'd been chasing had actual mass. Your coach squeezing your shoulder and saying something about the second half that you'd replay later when your nervous system had returned to a normal register. The federation rep with the itinerary for the evening, the group dinner, the schedule for tomorrow's remaining events.
You moved through all of it on the specific adrenaline plateau that followed a clean program—not high exactly, more like everything had sharpened, every detail more present than usual. The lights in the corridor outside the kiss-and-cry were very bright. The carpet was very red. Someone handed you water and you drank it without tasting it.
It wasn't until you were back in the changing area, the noise of the arena muffled through two sets of doors, that you let yourself stop moving for a moment.
You sat on the bench with your skates still on and your hands in your lap and breathed.
The door opened.
You looked up.
James filled the doorway the way he filled most spaces—like he'd calculated exactly how much room he needed and taken precisely that. He was in a dark hoodie, hood up, hands in the front pockets. He looked at you across the changing area with that particular quality of attention, the one you'd been on the receiving end of for four months, and for once you didn't try to catalogue it or file it or look away before he caught you looking back.
"You're not supposed to be back here," you warned though it had zero bite to it. In fact, your tone sounded inviting if anything.
"I know." He came in anyway. Let the door close behind him.
You looked at each other.
"Section C," you said.
"Row four from the back."
"You could've sat closer."
"I know where I can see clearly." He crossed the room and stopped in front of you, close enough that you had to tilt your head back slightly to look at him, which you did. "Row four from the back works."
You held his gaze. The changing area was very quiet—the noise of the competition a distant thing, someone else's moment now. Just the two of you and the overhead light and the medal still around your neck.
He reached out and picked it up with two fingers, turning it once, the metal catching the light. He didn't say anything. Just looked at it for a moment, then let it rest back against your chest, his fingers brushing your collarbone on the way back.
The touch was light yet tt landed like something much heavier.
"I want to say something," he said.
"Okay."
He was quiet for a moment, choosing words with that precision of his, the deliberateness that meant whatever came next had been considered from multiple angles. "I've been careful. With people. For a long time." His eyes stayed on yours. "And I know you've noticed that, because you notice everything, which is—" The corner of his mouth moved. "That's a problem for me, that you see that clearly."
You didn't say anything.
"I just want you to know," he said, "that careful stopped applying. Somewhere. I don't know when exactly. But it did."
The corridor outside was quiet. Somewhere further in the building a skater was finishing a program—you could hear the muffled swell of the crowd through the walls, the particular rise of it that meant something had gone well.
"That's not low stakes," you said.
"No," he agreed. "It's not."
"I don't know what to do with that."
"Neither do I." He held your gaze. "I'm not asking you to do anything with it. I just—you deserved to know."
You looked at him for a long moment. At the face that had been the most consistently unreadable thing in your immediate world for four months and was right now, in this particular moment, not unreadable at all. Showing you something it kept for very few people, maybe no people, maybe just you.
"I noticed the thing about Lia," you said quietly.
He went very still.
"The vending machine. A couple weeks ago." You held his gaze. "I saw the two of you and I had a feeling about it that I have no right to have given what we said, and I've been managing it."
A silence. Then, "It's not—Lia and I are—"
"I know," you shook your head. And you did know, or you were choosing to know, which sometimes amounted to the same thing. "But I'm telling you because you were honest and I'm trying to be honest back, and I don't—" You stopped and started again. "I'm very bad at this part."
"I know," he smiled but it wasn’t mockingly. And then quieter: "You're doing fine."
The echo of it—early November, the alcove, you would've figured it out—landed somewhere below your sternum and stayed there.
He reached up and tucked a loose piece of hair back from your face. Slowly, like he had all the time in the world, like the competition wasn't still running somewhere above you. His hand stayed at your jaw after, the way it had in the corridor on the wrong floor, that same deliberate framing. His thumb moved once.
"The seven months," you blurted, sounding like a squeaky little teenager. You hated it.
"What about them?"
"I don't know what happens at the end of them."
"Neither do I."
"That should probably bother me more than it does."
"Yeah," he agreed softly. "Me too."
You looked at each other for one more second.
Then you reached up and closed your hand around his wrist—not pulling and not pushing away, just holding. And he looked down at your hand on his wrist and something moved across his face that you felt in your chest like a key turning.
"The hotel's ten minutes from here," you notified him.
He met your eyes.
"I know," he hummed.
𝑿𝑽. after
The hotel room had that specific quality of somewhere temporary—neutral walls, blackout curtains, the silence of a building full of people who'd arrived from somewhere else and would leave again. You'd stayed in enough of them that they'd stopped feeling strange.
This one felt different. That wasn't about the room.
The lamp on the nightstand was the only light. You'd set the medal down somewhere without looking at where. Your competition jacket was on the floor and you weren't thinking about it.
James was standing by the window with his back half-turned, looking out at the city through the gap in the curtains. He did this sometimes—went quiet in a way that wasn't absence, just processing, turning something over. You'd learned not to fill it. You sat on the edge of the bed and watched him and said nothing and the room held both of you without requiring anything yet.
He wore this vintage hoodie and sweats. One day, you peeked into his closet and saw his his regular clothes which you rarely saw, obviously being that he was in athleticwear at the building at all times. He owned a lot of henleys
"You were different today," he said. Still looking out the window. "On the ice."
"Good different or bad different."
"Just different." A pause. "Like you had a different kind of purpose in winning."
You didn't answer that. You weren't sure you could without saying something you'd have to stand behind.
He turned around. Looked at you across the room with that expression you still didn't have a clean name for after four months—not warm exactly, not cold, something that lived in the space between wanting and not letting himself want. You recognized it because you'd been making the same face at him since October without realizing it.
He crossed the room and stopped in front of you. Close. You looked up at him and he looked down at you and neither of you said anything and the not-saying was its own conversation by now, the one you were both fluent in whether you'd agreed to be or not.
His hand came up to your face. It was slower than usual. His thumb moved along your jaw—the same path it always took, like it had learned the route—and you felt your eyes close for half a second before you caught yourself.
"James," you said.
"Mm."
"What are you doing."
He was quiet for a moment. His thumb traced the same path again, unhurried, not going anywhere.
"I don't know," he said, and kissed you.
It was different from the corridor, different from the Thursday nights. Those had urgency underneath them—the pressure of things unsaid finding a physical exit. This was quieter and slower. His hand still at your jaw, the other finding your waist, and you felt in the way he touched you what he wasn't saying, which was the problem, which had always been the problem. You could read it too clearly. The wanting underneath the control, the way his hands told the truth his mouth didn't.
You pulled back and looked at him. He looked back at you.
There were things that could have been said. Neither of you said them.
He let you look. That was the thing—he let you, which was not nothing, from someone who spent most of his life being very deliberate about what he showed people.
He reached over slowly and found your hand where it rested on the bed between you. He turned it over. Ran his thumb across your palm once, studying it like it was interesting. Then he leaned in and kissed the corner of your jaw, your cheek, the side of your neck, with that same elegant quality—methodical, thorough, like he had a specific idea of what he wanted and intended to get there without being rushed about it.
His hand slid from your waist to your knee. It stayed there. His thumb moved in a slow arc and you were very aware of the weight of it, the deliberateness, the fact that he was watching your face while he did it.
"We're supposed to go watch the other programs," you protested with a hint of a smile while weakly pushing him away.
"Right," he said into your neck, which meant nothing and everything.
His hand moved a fraction further and stopped. You could feel him almost smiling against your skin. "We have time."
"James—"
"We have time," he said again, quieter, and you stopped arguing about it.
His hand moved, tracing slowly up the inside of your thigh, and stopped. It was waiting. His eyes on yours the whole time, not asking out loud, letting the question exist in the air between you.
You should have said something. Something honest—about the 2 AM texts and the eighty times and careful stopped applying and all the weight that had been accumulating in the sealed compartment for months. Something that acknowledged what tonight was, what this room was.
But you'd just won nationals and his thumb was on your jaw and you didn't want to come down from something that felt this good with a conversation that had no clean ending.
You pulled him back down instead.
Some things could wait.
𝑿𝑽𝑰.
An hour later you came down in the elevator side by side, not touching, which was still the arrangement, though it felt even more like a technicality than usual tonight.
The hotel lobby was bright after the dim of upstairs—all that neutral lighting doing its best to approximate cheerful, the low hum of a building in the middle of a competition weekend, skaters and coaches and federation people moving through in various states of post-event wind-down. You'd been to enough of these that you knew the rhythms of it: the ones still in competition gear heading to late sessions, the ones already changed heading to the group dinner, the ones in the corners on their phones getting scores from other venues.
James had his hands in his hoodie pocket. You had yours crossed over your chest. You were navigating toward the corridor that led to the main event venue, where the ice dance pairs were midway through their program, because that was the plan and you were both people who kept plans.
You were also, underneath the plan, in a version of the past hour that hadn't quite settled yet. The lamp. His hand. The way he'd kissed the corner of your jaw like he had a specific idea and no intention of being rushed about it. All of it sitting in your chest alongside the medal and the score and the text at 2AM, adding up to something you still didn't have a clean name for but that was getting harder to keep unnamed.
You were thinking about telling him something. You'd been composing it in the elevator, the shape of it—not a declaration, nothing that blew up the architecture of what you'd agreed on, just: an honest thing. The depth of honesty you'd been managing not to say for four months and that felt, tonight of all nights, like it might actually be sayable.
You opened your mouth.
"Hey—"
"Oh my god, you were incredible today."
You turned.
Lia was crossing the lobby toward you, already mid-sentence, bright-eyed in the way of someone who'd watched a good competition and hadn't come down from it yet. She was in street clothes, hair down, moving with the easy warmth that was just how she existed in the world. She came straight to you and hugged you, and you let her, and over her shoulder you could see the lobby going about its business.
"That second half," she said, pulling back to look at you with genuine delight. "The spin at the end—I was losing my mind, I was sitting next to two of the junior coaches and I think I grabbed one of their arms—"
You laughed, and it was real, because it was Lia and she meant it. "Thank you. It finally came together."
"It didn't just come together, you built it—" She stopped. Her head looked past you to James, and her face shifted into something warm and uncomplicated, the smile she had for people she genuinely liked. "Hey."
"Hey," James greeted with a wave of his hand.
"I didn't know you were coming." She said it easily, not an accusation, just a fact she was noting. Then she reached into the bag on her shoulder. "Actually—I was going to text you about these. I've been meaning to give them back since Tuesday." She produced the headphones—his headphones, the ones from the corner of his desk, the case he'd taken back from your hands and set down with that deliberateness, the ones he didn't let anyone use—and held them out to him. "Thank you for letting me try them, by the way. You were right about the volume thing, I actually noticed the difference—"
"No problem," James said, and took them. Tuesday.
The exchange was just like that. Natural. The same hands that had been in your hair an hour ago taking the headphones back from Lia like it was nothing, like the case didn't represent the exact thing he'd said to you: I don't let anyone use them. Music is specific. I don't share it.
You kept your face very still.
You were good at keeping your face still. You'd been doing it your whole career—the landing face, the performance face, the face you showed the judges that had nothing to do with what was happening in your body. You used it now, in a hotel lobby in the middle of a competition weekend, while Lia said something else you didn't fully process and James responded and the two of them had a thirty-second exchange that was perfectly normal and completely unremarkable to everyone in the lobby except you.
The honest thing you'd been composing in the elevator was gone.
You smiled at something Lia said. You weren't sure what.
James glanced at you once. It was a brief thing, a look that on another night you'd have catalogued and analyzed and filed. Tonight you didn't hold it. You looked back at Lia and said something about the ice dance pairs starting soon and it came out normal, fine, like a person who was fine.
"I'll walk over with you," Lia said and fell into step with you.
The three of you crossed the lobby together and you kept your eyes forward and your face arranged into something easy and you told yourself what you always told yourself.
You were in control of this.
The difference was that tonight, for the first time, you didn't even almost believe it.
warnings + info. bridgerton au, enemies to lovers, best friend's brother, forbidden love, situationship (as much as it could be in the 1800s), kissing, reader is an edwards, morally grey characters, bordering emotional infidelity, lowk toxic mindsets, love triangle w keonho kinda…
TAoR— TABLE OF CONTENTS...!
synopsis. the edwards family and the eom family have always moved in the same circle. you and seonghyeon have spent years perfecting the art of avoidance after... well. after his father's funeral when you both said things you couldn't take back. but the ton is small, his sister is your best friend, and eventually you run out of excuses and arguments. especially when he's looking at you like that across the ballroom. the only thing is… you’re soon to be engaged. will he get to your hand before a ring does?
TAoR PLAYLIST
LISTEN TO… enchanted, guilty as sin? all too well: ten minute version and illicit affairs by taylor swift ... fallen star by the nbhd ... self control by frank ocean ... almost is never enough by ariana grande ... iloveitiloveitiloveit by bella kay ... close to you by gracie abrams ... we'll never have sex by leith ross ... i couldn't be more in love by the 1975 ... 18 by one direction ... memories by conan gray
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wc. 12.4k
▸ feedback & reblogs are highly appreciated
maddy's note. EVERYONE SAY HAPPY LATE BDAY TO ELLIE MY ANGEL BABY @snowselle 🍾🍾🥂 i'm a little late bc i didn't finish dis in time but my girl is LEGAL!!!
#big18 🔞🔞🔞 this yearning is for u bbg i luh u 💞💞
anyway last one for a while aha mwah mwah mwah
A month passed the way months did when you were trying very hard not to think about someone.
Slowly and agonizingly. Truly in excruciating detail.
Ahn Keonho called on you twice a week with the regularity of a man who meant what he said about patience. He brought flowers the first time—pink roses that your mother pressed her hand to her heart over—and books the second, because you had mentioned offhandedly during their walk in the garden that you had been meaning to read something new, and he had apparently filed that information away and acted on it, which was the sort of thing that should have made your chest warm and instead made you feel... inexplicably, wretchedly guilty.
He was trying. He was genuinely, earnestly trying, and you were sitting across from him in your family's drawing room producing the appropriate responses while some distant part of you catalogued everything that was wrong with the situation.
His laugh was pleasant. It rose and fell in the right places. It simply did not make the back of your neck prickle with awareness the way—
You did not finish that thought. You had gotten rather good at not finishing those thoughts.
"Your sister was telling me about the charity project," Keonho said one afternoon, setting down his teacup with the easy comfort of someone who had become entirely at home in your family's parlor, which he had done with an alarming speed that your mother celebrated.
You observed with a complicated feeling you could not quite name.
"The one Lady Edwards has been organizing. It sounds like a remarkable undertaking."
"Wonhee has been devoted to it," you agreed, which was true and also safe and required absolutely no emotional investment whatsoever to say. "She has rather a talent for rallying people to a cause."
"She rallied me," Keonho said, smiling. "I have already promised a donation."
"She will be delighted to hear it."
Keonho was looking at you. You could feel it. That warm, patient attention he directed at you that you had come to recognize over the past weeks as simply the way he looked at you. It was without calculation. Without agenda. As if you were someone worth looking at for no other reason than that he wanted to.
It made you feel like the worst kind of person.
"You are thinking about something else," he observed, and his voice was gentle. Not accusatory. Simply stating a fact.
"I apologize," you said immediately. "I am—"
"You do not need to apologize." He set down his cup. "I told you. No expectations."
"I know." You looked at your hands in your lap, then back up at him. "I am trying, Keonho. I want you to know that. I am genuinely trying."
"I know you are," he hummed simply. "And I am not asking you to try harder. I am simply asking you to be honest with me when you are somewhere else in your head."
It was such a reasonable thing to say. Such an impossibly kind, reasonable thing. And you hated yourself a little for how wrong it still felt, how his reasonableness only made the ache more pronounced because the person you kept thinking about was anything but reasonable, anything but kind, anything but patient—
You forced a smile. Keonho returned it, and you both picked up your teacups and pretended the silence between you was comfortable.
You were getting rather good at pretending.
You had only been to a cafe a handful of times in your lifetime. This time, it was by the grace of Keonho.
"I know we have been confined to drawing rooms and garden walks," he had said during his previous call, with that particular self-deprecating smile he deployed when he was about to suggest something he suspected you might refuse. "But I thought perhaps—if you were amenable—we might venture into town. There is a place near Piccadilly that serves remarkable tea. Very respectable. Your maid could accompany us, of course."
You had agreed before you could examine why you were agreeing, and now here you were, seated across from him in a small cafe with large windows that let in the afternoon light, watching him laugh at something the proprietor had said about the weather.
He was handsome when he laughed. You had noticed this before, but in the particular quality of the cafe's light—golden and warm and somehow kinder than the usual London gray—it struck you with renewed force. His entire face transformed when he was genuinely amused. The careful politeness he wore in drawing rooms fell away and something younger emerged, something unguarded that made him look like someone you might have known in a different life. Someone uncomplicated.
Someone who was not Eom Seonghyeon.
The thought arrived incredibly uninvited and you pushed it away immediately.
"You are staring," Keonho observed, and there was warmth in his voice rather than accusation.
"I was simply thinking you look different here," you said, which was true and also safe.
"Different how?"
"Less like you are… networking," you admitted. "More like yourself."
"Ah." He set down his teacup with that easy grace he seemed to possess innately. "I confess drawing rooms make me rather anxious. All those eyes. All that assessment. Here—" He gestured around the cafe, which was occupied by perhaps six other patrons, none of whom were paying you the slightest attention. "Here I can simply be."
"Simply be," you repeated, testing the phrase.
"Yes. No pretense. No strategy." He tilted his head. "Is that terribly naive?"
"No," you said, and meant it. "I think it sounds rather lovely, actually."
He smiled at that—though not the practiced social smile but something genuine that reached his eyes and made small lines appear at the corners. You found yourself smiling back involuntarily, and the ease of it surprised you. When was the last time smiling had felt this uncomplicated?
The tea arrived. Keonho had been correct—it was remarkable, some blend you did not recognize that tasted faintly of bergamot and something else you could not name. You said as much, and he looked pleased in a way that was entirely disproportionate to the compliment.
"I am glad you like it," he grinned. "I have been coming here since I arrived in London. It reminds me of—well. Of somewhere quieter."
"Derbyshire?"
"Yes." His expression turned thoughtful. "There is a shop near my family's estate that makes tea like this. The owner is a woman who studied in China for several years and came back with rather revolutionary ideas about brewing temperatures." He paused. "I am sorry. I am likely boring you with—"
"You are not boring me," you interrupted, and realized with some surprise that you meant it. "Tell me about Derbyshire. What is it like?"
So he did.
He told you about the hills that rolled like waves in a frozen ocean, about morning fog that clung to the valleys and made the whole world look like something from a painting. About the people who had known his family for generations and treated him with a familiarity that was both comforting and occasionally suffocating. About the horses he kept and the books he collected and the garden his mother had planted before she died that he had been trying to maintain with varying degrees of success.
He talked and you listened, and somewhere in the middle of it you realized you were leaning forward. That you had set down your teacup and forgotten about it entirely. That the light was hitting his face in a way that made his eyes look very dark and very warm, and he was looking at you with that particular quality of attention that made you feel…
Seen. That was the word. He looked at you like he was actually seeing you, not the performance of you, not the idea of you, but whoever you actually were beneath all the careful construction.
It was terrifying. It was also rather intoxicating.
"I am talking too much," he said suddenly, with a slight laugh that sounded almost embarrassed.
"No," you said. "You are not. I asked."
"You did," he agreed. "But I suspect you were being polite."
"I suspect," you said carefully, "that I was being genuinely curious."
His expression softened. He looked at you for a long moment, and you held his gaze despite the urge to look away, and the silence that fell between you had a quality you could not quite name. Not uncomfortable nor tense. Simply... present. Full of something unspoken.
"I want to find someone I cannot imagine being without," Keonho said quietly, and the shift in his tone made it clear this was no longer about Derbyshire or tea or anything quite so safe. "Not because I need them, precisely. But because the world seems—less interesting without them in it. Less vivid, somehow. Do you know what I mean?"
Your throat had gone tight. "I think so."
"I think you do," he said, and there was something in his voice that made you wonder what exactly he saw when he looked at you. "I think you know exactly what I mean. And I think—" He paused, as if weighing whether to continue. "I think you are carrying something. Some weight you are trying very hard to set down."
The accuracy of it hit you like cold water.
"I am not asking you to set it down on my behalf," he added quickly, perhaps reading something in your expression. "I am simply—acknowledging that I see it. And that I am in no particular hurry."
You stared at him. At this man who had appeared in your life with perfect timing and perfect patience and a smile that made you feel light in a way you had not felt in longer than you cared to admit. This man who was kind and handsome and genuine and absolutely nothing like—
You laughed.
It surprised you as much as it clearly surprised him. It came out sudden and involuntary and entirely outside your control. You pressed your hand to your mouth but it was too late, the laugh had escaped, and with it something that felt dangerously like fondness.
"I am sorry," you managed. "That was—I did not mean to—"
"No, please," Keonho said, and he was smiling now too, that genuine smile that transformed his face. "I would very much like to know what I said that was so amusing."
"It was not amusing," you said. "It was—" You stopped. Searched for the right word. "Kind. It was very kind. And I am not—I am not accustomed to that. Not in this particular context."
His smile softened into something that made your chest ache. "Then perhaps we should work on that," he said gently.
And you found yourself nodding, smiling back at him, liking him despite yourself, despite the weight you were carrying, despite the fact that sitting here in this cafe laughing with Ahn Keonho felt like a betrayal of something you could not name and had no right to anymore.
You hated yourself for it. For the ease of this. For how much lighter you felt when he smiled at you like that.
You hated yourself for liking him.
But you did begin like him. That was the terrible, complicated truth. You liked him and yet it was not enough and that was not his fault at all.
The promenade happened on a Tuesday.
You had not planned to see him. You had become, over the course of the past month, quite skilled at anticipating which social events he was likely to attend and positioning yourself accordingly. Of course, it was not avoidance, precisely—more like strategic awareness. You were simply informed about his movements, in the way that anyone might be informed about the movements of someone they shared a social circle with and had absolutely no particular interest in whatsoever.
Keonho had your arm tucked through his as you walked along the path, your sisters trailing a respectable distance behind with Eunji, who had attached herself to your afternoon outing with the particular enthusiasm of someone who had an ulterior motive and was not being remotely subtle about it.
You had chosen to ignore the ulterior motive. You had become rather good at that too.
"I believe the roses are particularly fine this year," Keonho was saying, gesturing toward the beds that lined the path. "Though I may be biased. Derbyshire has rather spoiled me for gardens."
"I have never been to Derbyshire," you confessed.
"You would like it," he chuckled. "It is... quieter than London. Less performing, somehow. People are simply themselves."
"That sounds rather appealing."
"It is." He glanced at you sideways. "Perhaps someday—"
He did not finish the sentence. You were grateful for it. Someday was a word that carried weight you were not ready to hold.
You were saved from having to respond by the sound of laughter carrying across the gardens from the path that ran parallel to yours, separated by a low hedge and the particular geometry of the promenade's design. You glanced toward it automatically.
And then immediately wished you had not.
Eom Seonghyeon was surrounded by ladies. That was the only way to describe it. There were no fewer than four of them arranged around him like a particularly well-dressed constellation, each one angled toward him with the focused intensity of young women who had read Lady Whistledown's most recent column and decided to act accordingly.
The column. You had read it three days ago over breakfast, and the memory of it still made something unpleasant twist in your chest.
"This Author must observe that Mr. Eom continues to elude even the most determined of this season's eligible young ladies. Handsome, established, and possessed of a charm he deploys with remarkable economy, he remains the great unclaimed prize of the marriage mart. One begins to wonder whether Mr. Eom is simply discriminating, or whether his heart is otherwise engaged—though he shows every indication of being entirely, frustratingly unattached. Mothers, take note. The season is not yet over."
Entirely, frustratingly unattached.
You had read that line four times. You were not proud of it.
Now you watched one of the ladies—Miss Hartwell, you thought, though at this distance it was difficult to be certain—lean toward him to say something, her expression artfully composed into the kind of delighted attention that took considerable practice to achieve. Seonghyeon responded with something that made the group laugh, his mouth curving in that way it did when he was being charming on purpose, when he had decided the situation called for it and deployed it like a tool.
You knew that smile. You knew it was not the real one. You knew that those dimples came out yes, but it did not truly mean he was smiling. You also knew you had absolutely no right to that knowledge anymore, and the fact that you possessed it anyway was its own particular form of torture.
Something bubbled up in you despite yourself. It was a light and involuntary giggle and entirely inappropriate given the circumstances. You pressed your gloved hand to your mouth and turned your face away before it could become visible.
You were not quick enough.
"Was that a laugh?" Keonho asked, and there was warmth in his voice. Genuine delight, even. "I do not believe I have heard you laugh like that before."
"It was nothing," you said, your voice coming out slightly strangled. "I merely—thought of something amusing."
"Clearly." He followed your line of sight briefly before looking back at you, and his expression shifted. Just slightly. Just enough to tell you he was more perceptive than you gave him credit for. "The roses really are exceptional this year," he remarked, after a moment.
The kindness of the redirect made you want to sink directly into the earth.
"They are," you agreed, and let him steer you gently around the next bend in the path, away from the view of the parallel walkway and the man you were absolutely, definitively not thinking about.
Behind you, you heard Eunji's voice, bright and carrying across.
"Oh, brother! I did not realize you were walking this direction—"
You did not turn around.
You walked slightly faster instead, Keonho matching your pace without comment, and you stared very fixedly at the roses and told yourself the warmth in your cheeks was from the afternoon sun.
Your cold arrived four days before the Ashford dinner party, settling into your chest with the determined persistence of something that intended to stay. Your voice went first. It dropped to something lower and rougher than its usual register, threaded through with a hoarseness that your mother clucked over and your brothers found endlessly entertaining.
"You sound like you have been gargling gravel," Martin informed you helpfully at breakfast.
"Thank you, Martin."
"Or perhaps a small, disgruntled toad."
"Martin."
"I am simply making observations—"
"Juhoon," you whined, turning to your quieter brother with the weary authority of someone who had been managing Martin Edwards for their entire life.
Juhoon looked up from his book. "Martin," he said, without inflection.
Martin rolled his eyes and turned away.
You pressed your handkerchief to your mouth and tried not to think about the masquerade. About the red gown that Wonyoung had talked you into on an afternoon that now felt like it belonged to a different version of yourself—the one who had marched into the modiste in a fit of something that was half defiance and half the particular recklessness that came from spending a month trying to feel something you did not feel.
Red, Wonyoung had said, holding the fabric up to your face with the expression of someone who had a plan. You never wear red. That is precisely the point.
You had agreed, at the time, with the vague logic of someone who had stopped trusting their own instincts. Now, with four days left and a voice that sounded like autumn leaves underfoot, you were beginning to wonder what exactly you had been thinking.
The masquerade could wait.
The Ashford dinner party, unfortunately, could not.
𝑰𝑰.
The Ashford dining room seated twenty-four.
You knew this because you had counted. Twice. Once when you arrived and were shown to your place, and once when you realized where Seonghyeon had been seated and needed something to focus on that was not his face.
Which was directly across the table.
Not beside you—mercifully, impossibly not beside you—but directly across, at the precise angle that made it entirely unavoidable to look up from your soup and find him there. Lady Ashford had arranged her dinner party with the cheerful obliviousness of a hostess who genuinely believed she was simply balancing her table, with no awareness whatsoever of the particular cruelty her seating chart had achieved.
Keonho was on your left. Mrs. Eom was three seats down on the right, currently deep in conversation with Lord Ashford about something that had her laughing with her whole face in the way she did when she was genuinely delighted. Eunji was further down still, seated between two young gentlemen who both appeared to be competing for her attention with varying degrees of subtlety.
And Seonghyeon was directly across from you, separated by the width of a dining table, two candelabras, and approximately two years of accumulated damage.
He had not looked at you yet. Or rather... he had not looked at you in a way that acknowledged he was looking at you, which was an entirely different thing and one you had become fluent in reading. You could tell by the particular quality of his attention in your direction. The way he was looking just slightly to the left of where you actually sat. The way his jaw had done that thing when he first saw Keonho pull out your chair.
You had noticed that too. You were noticing everything tonight and hating yourself for it.
"The soup is excellent," Keonho murmured beside you, which was true and entirely irrelevant and also the kindest thing he could have said in that particular moment because it gave you something to respond to.
"Lady Ashford has a remarkable cook," you agreed.
"I believe she poached him from the Pembrokes," said the gentleman on your right—Lord Hartwell, who had apparently decided that this dinner party was an opportunity worth pursuing. "Caused rather a scandal at the time, if I recall."
"Poaching cooks seems a lesser scandal than most," you said.
"Unless you are the Pembrokes," Hartwell said, and laughed at his own observation with more enthusiasm than it warranted.
You smiled politely and looked up.
Seonghyeon was looking directly at you.
Not to the left of you. Not at the candelabra between you. Directly at you, with an expression that was so carefully arranged into neutrality it told you everything about how he actually felt. Your gaze met his across the table and something passed between you—brief and electric and gone in an instant as you both looked away.
Your fingers tightened around your spoon.
"Miss Edwards," he said, and his voice carried the precise distance of the table between you. "I trust you have been well."
It was the kind of thing one said at dinner parties. Perfectly conventional. Perfectly appropriate and said in a tone that was perfectly pleasant and gave away absolutely nothing except to someone who had spent years learning to read the gaps between his words.
"Quite well, thank you," you replied, in a tone that matched his exactly. "And yourself?"
"Very well." A pause, the length of a heartbeat. "The season has been—eventful."
"Hasn't it," you agreed, and looked back down at your soup.
Keonho, beside you, said nothing. But his hand found yours briefly beneath the table—a light, questioning pressure, there and gone—and you understood it for what it was. A check. An offering. You pressed back slightly to indicate you were fine, and felt him relax beside you.
The first course was cleared.
He should not have come.
That was the thought Seonghyeon kept returning to, with the regularity of someone pressing a bruise to confirm it still hurt. He should not have come to the Ashford dinner party. He should have developed a sudden illness, sent his regrets, remained at home where he could not sit across a dining table from you and watch Ahn Keonho exist in your proximity with the easy comfort of a man who had already been given what Seonghyeon had thrown away.
Keonho's hand had been on the back of your chair when you were seated.
A minor thing. A perfectly conventional gesture of courtesy. Seonghyeon had watched it from across the room and felt something white-hot and entirely unreasonable move through him that he had spent the subsequent twenty minutes trying to classify as anything other than what it was.
He had failed at that too. He was failing at rather a lot lately.
"You are very quiet tonight," his mother observed from three seats down, in the particular murmur mothers developed for conversations they did not want the table to hear.
"I am always quiet at dinner parties," he said.
"You are quieter than usual." Her eyes moved briefly, deliberately, across the table. "Is there something troubling you?"
"Nothing whatsoever."
His mother made a sound that was not agreement. He ignored it.
The second course arrived. Seonghyeon applied himself to it with the focused attention of a man who was absolutely not tracking every shift in your expression from across the table. You were speaking to Hartwell now—Lord Hartwell, who had apparently decided that this dinner was an opportunity and was pursuing it with the single-minded enthusiasm of someone who had also read the Whistledown column and drawn conclusions from it.
Seonghyeon's jaw tightened.
You were being polite to Hartwell. Of course, not the warmth you directed at Keonho, which was genuine even if it was tentative, even if Seonghyeon could see you trying in the slight over-carefulness of your responses—but polite and measured. The particular courtesy you deployed when you were managing someone you found tolerable but uninteresting.
He knew that look. He had been on the receiving end of it for two years before you had stopped even bothering with the pretense.
"Mr. Eom," you said, without looking up from your plate.
He realized, belatedly, that the table conversation had shifted. Something about the upcoming season at the opera, and someone had apparently said something that required his input, and he had been so thoroughly occupied with cataloguing your expression that he had missed the entire preamble.
"Forgive me," he said smoothly. "I was distracted. The opera—yes. I believe the season opens next month."
"I was asking whether you intended to attend," you said, and now you did look up, and there was that particular quality in your expression. The one that was perfectly pleasant on the surface and razor-sharp beneath it. "The Ashfords have a box, I understand. I imagine it would be a most... diverting evening."
"I imagine it would," he agreed, holding your gaze. "Will you attend, Miss Edwards?"
"I have not yet decided," you said. "So many engagements this time of year. One must be selective."
"Indeed," he said. "Selective. How very wise."
The word landed between you. You both knew it was not about the opera. The table, mercifully, did not.
Keonho glanced between the two of you with the expression of a man who was too intelligent not to notice the undercurrent of something and too polite to acknowledge it. You looked away from Seonghyeon first, turning back to Keonho with a smile that was a fraction too bright, and Seonghyeon watched you redirect the conversation with the practiced ease of someone who had been navigating social warfare their entire adult life.
He looked down at his plate.
The fish course was removed. The meat arrived. Seonghyeon ate without tasting any of it.
You were laughing at something Keonho had said. And it wasn't the polite laugh, not the performance—but smaller and more genuine that he had not heard directed anywhere near him in months. Keonho was looking at you with that expression he seemed to have developed specifically for you, this warm and focused attention that Seonghyeon recognized with a nauseating clarity as the expression of a man who was falling.
He deserved it. Keonho deserved that laugh. He had done nothing to forfeit it.
Seonghyeon was the one who had forfeited things.
He reached for his wine and found his glass already empty. He did not remember drinking it.
"Miss Edwards," he heard himself say, and was mildly horrified by his own inability to stop, "I believe you mentioned last season that you found the second act of La Traviata rather overlong. Have your opinions on the matter evolved?"
The table went momentarily quiet in the way that happened when someone said something that appeared innocuous but carried a weight the surrounding parties could not quite identify.
You turned to look at him with the particular expression you reserved for moments when he had surprised you and you were deciding how to respond. Your head tilted slightly. The left eyebrow rose a fraction.
"I believe what I said," you replied, with exquisite precision, "was that certain performances would benefit from knowing when they had made their point and choosing to stop. Rather than continuing past the natural conclusion simply because they could."
The candlelight caught in those eyes of yours.
Seonghyeon held your gaze for one moment too long. "A fair critique," he said quietly.
"I thought so," you agreed, and looked away.
Beside you, Keonho picked up his wine glass with the careful neutrality of a man who was absolutely paying attention and had chosen, with considerable grace, to say nothing.
Seonghyeon looked down at his plate. His chest felt cracked open and raw, the way it did in the early mornings when the house was quiet and he could not lie to himself about anything.
You had always been better at this than him. At the pointed observation that was simultaneously about everything and deniable as nothing. He had spent years watching you do it to other people and never imagining you would need to do it to him.
He had never imagined he would deserve it either.
The dinner continued. The courses were cleared and replaced with the mechanical efficiency of excellent service. The conversation shifted and eddied around the table, carrying people in and out of exchanges with the natural momentum of a well-attended dinner party. Seonghyeon said the right things to the right people and smiled at the appropriate moments and did not look at you more than was strictly unavoidable.
He looked at you considerably more than was strictly unavoidable.
At the way your fingers traced the stem of your wine glass when you were thinking. At the particular way you held yourself when you were amused by something but choosing not to show it—the slight softening around your eyes, the barely-there curve of your mouth. At the way you leaned fractionally toward Keonho when he said something that caught your genuine interest, this unconscious movement that meant you were actually listening rather than performing attention.
At the way you did not lean toward him. Not once. Not even when he spoke directly to you, when you responded with perfect courtesy and the precision of a girl who had learned to keep her distance from something she had decided was dangerous.
He had taught you that. He had been so determined to protect you from himself that he had taught you to protect yourself from him instead.
He was not sure he could call that a success.
The dessert course arrived. Seonghyeon looked at it without appetite. Across the table, you were saying something to Keonho that made him laugh, and the sound of it was pleasant and uncomplicated and contained absolutely none of the edges that Seonghyeon had apparently spent years believing were essential to a conversation worth having.
Maybe he had been wrong about that. Maybe he had been wrong about a great many things. He picked up his spoon and ate his dessert and did not allow himself to think about it.
But he thought about it anyway.
𝑰𝑰𝑰.
Your cold had not resolved so much as settled, leaving your voice lower than its usual register and threaded through with a roughness that Wonyoung declared "mysterious and rather perfect, actually," while helping you dress. You were less certain. Your throat felt like the aftermath of an argument and your head had been aching softly since midafternoon, which seemed like an inauspicious beginning to an evening you had already not been looking forward to.
The night of the masquerade arrived with the particular cruelty of occasions one had been dreading.
"You are going," Wonyoung said, in the tone that meant the discussion was closed. She was pinning something at the back of your hair with focused attention, her eyes meeting yours in the mirror with an expression that was sisterly and merciless in equal measure. "You promised."
"I promised before I developed a cold."
"It is a minor cold."
"My voice sounds like—"
"Like someone interesting," Wonyoung interrupted. "Stop complaining and hold still."
The red gown was already on. There was no taking it back now—it had been altered to fit, the modiste had done extraordinary things to the neckline, and your mother had seen you in it and pressed both hands to her cheeks in a way that suggested this was not a dress you could simply return to the wardrobe and forget. The fabric was a deep, rich red, the color of something deliberate. The color of someone who had decided to be someone else for an evening.
Which was, you supposed, rather the point of a masquerade.
The mask was half-face, red to match, adorned with small dark feathers along the edge that cast shadows across your cheekbones in a way that changed the architecture of your face entirely. You stared at your reflection in the glass and barely recognized yourself.
Good, some part of you thought. You wanted to be someone else for the night. Someone without all the qualms you'd planted on yourself.
"You look extraordinary," Wonyoung said, stepping back to assess her work with the critical eye of someone who had opinions about presentation. "No one will know you."
Your stomach turned over.
"That is the idea," you said, and your voice came out rougher than intended—the cold catching at the edges of it, smoothing away its usual register into something lower, something unrecognizable.
Wonyoung smiled. It was slow and knowing, and said nothing.
You pulled on your gloves and thought about all the reasons this was a terrible idea, and attended the masquerade anyway.
Seonghyeon had not intended to attend the masquerade.
He had spent the better part of the week constructing increasingly elaborate excuses—estate business that required his immediate attention, a persistent headache that made social gatherings inadvisable, a sudden and convenient journey to the country that absolutely could not be delayed. His mother had listened to each excuse with the patient expression of someone who knew exactly what he was doing and had decided to allow it anyway.
"You will attend," she had said finally, on the morning of the masquerade, with the particular tone that meant the discussion was closed. "Eunji is excited about it. Your absence would be duly noted, by the Queen no doubt. And you cannot avoid every social gathering for the remainder of the season simply because—"
She had stopped herself. But they both knew what she had been about to say.
Simply because you might have to see her.
So here he was, standing at the edge of the Hartwell ballroom in a mask that concealed the upper half of his face and did absolutely nothing to conceal the fact that he would rather be anywhere else. The room was full of candlelight and strangers, everyone rendered anonymous by silk and feathers and the particular license that anonymity provided. It should have been freeing. It felt like drowning.
He had been scanning the crowd without admitting to himself what—or rather, who—he was looking for when he saw her.
Or rather, when he saw someone who might have been her. But it could not possibly be her. Was absolutely, impossibly her despite the fact that nothing about her appearance suggested it should be.
She stood near the far side of the ballroom, alone for the moment, holding a glass of champagne she did not appear to be drinking. The gown was red—a deep, rich red that caught the candlelight and made her look like something deliberate, something chosen. He had never seen you in red. You favored blues and pale pinks and soft greens, colors that made you look like spring personified.
This was not spring. This was something else entirely.
The mask covered the upper half of her face, red to match the gown, adorned with dark feathers that cast small shadows across her cheekbones. From this distance he could not make out the details of her features, could not see enough to confirm or deny the thing his chest was trying very hard to tell him.
But the way she held herself. The particular angle of her spine. The set of her shoulders that was both composed and faintly combative, as if she was always prepared for an argument—
His throat had gone dry.
It could not be you. You would not wear red. You would not come to a masquerade alone, without your family clustered protectively around you the way they always were. You would not stand like that, with that particular quality of deliberate isolation, as if you had chosen to be separate from the crowd rather than simply finding yourself that way.
And yet.
Something in him recognized her anyway. Recognized her with a certainty that bypassed rational thought entirely, that lived somewhere in his chest where logic could not reach it. His blood knew before his mind could catch up.
He was moving before he decided to move. Crossing the ballroom with the single-minded focus of someone who had stopped listening to the part of his brain that said this was a terrible idea, that he should turn around, that nothing good could come from this.
She did not see him approaching. She was looking at something across the room—he followed her line of sight but could not determine what had her attention. Then she turned, and their eyes met across the remaining distance, and he watched her go very still.
For a moment, neither of them moved.
Then he closed the final steps between them and stopped close enough that he had to look down to meet her eyes through her mask, and heard himself say:
"Forgive the presumption, but I believe the next set is beginning. Would you do me the honor?"
The Hartwell ballroom was transformed.
Every candle in the house had been lit—that was the impression, at least, as you stepped through the entrance and into the flood of it. Golden and warm and flickering, it turned everything soft and slightly unreal, like a memory of a room rather than the room itself. The guests moved through it in their masks and finery, their identities submerged beneath silk and feathers and carefully crafted anonymity, and the effect was of something that existed slightly outside ordinary life. Outside the rules that governed it.
You understood, suddenly, why masquerades were considered dangerous.
James had already disappeared into the crowd with your mother, both of them absorbed into the social machinery of the evening within minutes of arriving. Wonhee had found the Ashford twins almost immediately and been absorbed into their orbit. Wonyoung, who had attended on the strict understanding that she was too young to do anything interesting, had immediately located a corner with a good vantage point and the expression of someone intending to observe everything.
You were, for the moment, alone.
It was a strange feeling—pleasant and exposing in equal measure. Without the familiar architecture of your family around you, without your name being attached to your face, you were simply a girl in a red dress at a masquerade. Unknown. Unattached. Free of the weight of being Miss Edwards, eldest daughter, Whistledown's current subject of speculation, Ahn Keonho's uncertain courtship prospect.
Free, too, of being the girl Eom Seonghyeon had twice decided was not worth the risk of his heart.
You took a glass of champagne from a passing footman and let yourself exist in the crowd for a moment. Just exist... without performance or strategy or the constant low-level management of your own expression.
It was rather lovely.
You were contemplating the dance floor—the next set was beginning, the musicians lifting their bows—when you felt it. That particular quality of attention. The sensation of being watched that you had developed an involuntary sensitivity to over the course of what felt like your entire adult life, though it had sharpened considerably in the past several months.
You turned. And your heart stopped.
He was standing perhaps fifteen feet away, on the opposite side of the floor, and he was looking at you.
Though not with recognition. That was the thing that landed first, that hit you somewhere in the sternum and knocked the air from your lungs. He was looking at you with the expression of a man who had noticed something—or other, someone—and had not yet decided what to do about it. The mask he wore was dark and simple, covering the upper half of his face, but you would have known him in a room of a thousand people. You would have known the particular set of his shoulders, the exact quality of his stillness, the way he held himself when something had caught his attention and he was deciding how to proceed.
You would have known him anywhere. You had always known him anywhere.
Apparently, he did not know you at all.
The realization moved through you like cold water. It was shocking, then clarifying, then something else. Something more complicated. You watched him tilt his head fractionally, the particular gesture he made when he was considering something, and beneath his mask his mouth was doing the thing it did when—
He took a step toward you. Then another.
Your grip tightened on your champagne glass. Every rational instinct you possessed was screaming at you to turn away. To move into the crowd. To find your sisters or your mother or literally any other person and put as much distance as possible between yourself and what was clearly about to happen.
You stood very still and did not move at all.
He crossed the distance between you with the unhurried confidence of a man who had decided, and stopped close enough that you had to look up to meet the eyes behind his mask. Dark and focused and entirely, devastatingly unaware of who they were looking at.
"Forgive the presumption," he said, and his voice was exactly as you remembered it and you hated yourself profoundly for how much that affected you, "but I believe the next set is beginning. Would you do me the honor?"
It was so perfectly, absurdly him. No preamble. No excessive flattery. Simply a direct request offered with the confidence of someone who was accustomed to knowing what he wanted.
You opened your mouth to refuse. The word was right there, fully formed, entirely ready to be deployed. Part of you screamed to use it. This was dangerous. This was reckless. This was the kind of thing you did not recover from.
The other part—the part that had spent a month watching him from across promenades and dinner tables and every social event the season offered, the part that had memorized the quality of his stillness when he was trying not to look at you—that part had other ideas entirely.
He does not know it is you.
The thought arrived quietly, and with it something shifted. Some door opening in the part of you that had been bricked shut since the drawing room. Since it was a mistake. Since you had told yourself you were done.
He does not know. And for one evening—just one—neither of you has to be who you are to each other. Neither of you has to carry the weight of it.
The conflict moved through you in the space of a breath.
"I would be delighted," you heard yourself say instead.
And the voice that came out was not quite your voice—lower than usual, roughed by the cold into something unfamiliar, something that could belong to anyone—and you watched something flicker behind his mask as he processed it. A small hesitation. Something that might have been a caught breath.
Then he offered his hand, and you took it, and he led you onto the floor.
𝑰𝑽.
She moved like someone he knew.
That was the thought that arrived first, uninvited and persistent, as he settled his hand at her waist and felt her settle into the position of the waltz. Something in the back of his mind registered it and held it up for inspection like a thing that warranted examination. She was the right height—though that meant nothing, many women were this height. She tilted her head in a way that felt... familiar, somehow, though familiarity was a trick the mind played in candlelight and anonymity.
Familiar. That was the word his mind supplied, and he pushed it away immediately because it was absurd. He did not know this woman. Had never met her before tonight. And yet something in his chest insisted otherwise, insisted with a certainty that made his throat tight and his mouth impossibly dry.
He swallowed and tried to focus on the steps, on the music, on anything other than the way his hand fit against her waist as if it had been designed for exactly this purpose.
Her voice had been low when she spoke. It was different and intriguing.
He looked at her through his mask and found her looking back at him through hers, red feathers casting small shadows across cheekbones he could not quite make out in the shifting light, and felt the peculiar disorientation of looking at someone you could not fully see. The red of her gown caught the candlelight in a way that made her look like something deliberate. Something chosen. He could not have said what drew him across the room to her—only that something had, with a certainty that bypassed deliberation entirely.
She reminded him of someone.
He had been trying not to examine that thought too closely since it arrived.
You had forgotten how tall he was.
That was the thought that arrived as you placed your hand on his shoulder and felt the solid warmth of him beneath expensive fabric. You had danced with him before—of course you had, dozens of times over the years, every ball and gathering where your families inevitably ended up partnered—but somehow the fact of his height had become theoretical in the month since you had been this close to him.
It was not theoretical now. It was immediate and undeniable, and you had to tilt your head back to meet his eyes through his mask, and the familiar angle of it made something in your chest crack dangerously.
He did not know you. The thought should have been liberating. Instead it felt like loss.
"You dance quite well," he offered, because it was true and because the silence had taken on a quality that required addressing.
"You sound surprised," she said, and her voice was that low, roughened tone again, and something moved in his chest at the sound of it that he could not account for.
"Not surprised," he said. "Merely—noting it."
"How very generous of you."
The particular arch quality of her voice. The way she delivered the words with that slight edge that was not quite mockery and not quite genuine offense. He felt the corner of his mouth move despite himself.
This is wrong, his mind supplied clearly. You should not be here. You should be finding her, you should be—
But his hand at her waist said that this was right. It said familiar in a language that had nothing to do with conscious thought and everything to do with the fact that his body had apparently been keeping records his mind had refused to acknowledge.
"I am told I am terrible at compliments," he said, and his throat was still impossibly dry. He ran his tongue across his lower lip.
"Are you?" She tilted her head, and the movement was so achingly familiar that something caught in his chest. "Who told you that?"
"Someone who knew me rather well," he said, and the admission surprised him. "Someone I—"
He stopped himself. But the pause had already told her everything.
"Someone who knew me rather well," he said, and something shifted in his chest as he said it. Something that pressed against an old bruise.
She was quiet for a moment. They moved through the steps together, and he was aware—distantly, with the part of his brain that was apparently still functioning—that she danced with a particular quality of attention. Not effortless exactly, but natural. As if she had done this many times and had opinions about it.
She tried to lead on the turn. His heart stuttered in his chest.
This was wrong, his mind said, louder now. This is wrong. She should be here instead of this stranger. You should be dancing with her, you should be fixing what you broke, you should not be here with someone else feeling things you have no right to feel—
But something deeper than thought said familiar. It said I know this. It knew the exact pressure required to correct her without making it seem like a correction, I know the way she holds herself when she is pretending to yield, I know the particular quality of her resistance—
"You were trying to lead," he said, and his voice came out strained.
"I was not," she said immediately, with a conviction that would have been more persuasive if she had not very clearly been trying to lead.
"You were."
"I was simply... anticipating."
The phrasing. The particular way she deployed language as both defense and weapon. His fingers flexed against her waist involuntarily.
"You were leading," he said, and something was happening in his chest that he could not name. "Most people follow."
"Most people," she hummed, "are not particularly interesting."
He looked at her. Truly looked at her, as much as masks and candlelight permitted—at the line of her jaw, the set of her shoulders, the way she held herself with a particular quality that was both composed and faintly combative, as if she was always prepared for an argument and considered this a reasonable way to move through the world.
The back of his neck prickled.
"You argue," he observed.
"I have opinions," she corrected. "There is a difference."
"Is there?"
"A significant one. Arguing implies conflict for its own sake. Having opinions implies—" she tilted her head again, and the candlelight caught the edge of her mask "—simply being correct."
It surprised him—the genuine quality of it, the way it came out before he could decide whether to allow it. He could not remember the last time a stranger had made him laugh like that, without calculation or performance. Could not remember the last time anyone had made him laugh like that except—
Except her. Except you, in a garden or a ballroom or across a dinner table, saying something cutting and clever that made him forget every reason he had for maintaining distance.
His hand tightened fractionally at her waist.
This felt right... his blood said, and it was loud now. This feeling was written into him at a cellular level, encoded in his bones, living in the particular way his body had spent years memorizing someone without his permission. This is right. This is familiar. This is—
"Have we met before?" The question emerged before he could stop it. "You are rather..."
"Rather what?"
"Familiar," he said.
He watched her go very still.
He did not mean it as a compliment or an accusation but simply as the truth of what he was experiencing, this strange persistent sense of recognition that had been present since she turned to look at him across the ballroom and he had thought—
He had thought: that almost looks like her.
He pushed the thought away. The candlelight was playing tricks. Anonymity made the mind reach for what it wanted. He was simply susceptible, tonight. Tired from a month of careful performance and the sustained effort of watching you with Keonho at every social engagement and telling himself it was fine, it was good, it was right.
"Familiar," she repeated, and her voice had gone carefully neutral in a way that was itself familiar, in a way that made the prickling at the back of his neck intensify.
"I apologize," he said. "I did not mean—"
"No," she interrupted. "Tell me what you meant."
He considered her through his mask. The music carried them through the next phrase of the waltz—a turn, another, the slight shift of her hand in his as they moved.
"You remind me of someone," he admitted finally, and even as he said it he knew it was inadequate. Insufficient to describe what was happening in his chest, the way his entire body seemed to be insisting on something his mind could not yet name.
His throat was dry again. He had forgotten to breathe properly. His hand at her waist felt like the only thing anchoring him to the ground.
Beneath her mask, something moved. He could not see enough of her face to name it. "Someone you know well?"
"Someone I—" He paused. "Someone I have known for a long time. And perhaps not well enough. Despite the years."
The admission surprised him. He did not, as a rule, say things like that to strangers. But the anonymity of the evening had loosened something in him—the masks, the candlelight, the particular unreality of dancing with a woman he did not know in a room full of people who did not know him either. It felt, strangely, like permission.
"That seems—" She was quiet for a moment, and he watched the line of her throat move as she swallowed. "That seems like a painful thing to carry."
"Yes," he said. "It is."
The music was winding toward its conclusion. He did not want it to end.
"Would you—" He hesitated, which was unusual for him. He did not typically hesitate. But everything about this evening felt unusual, felt like it existed slightly outside the normal rules. "The terrace. Would you take some air with me?"
She was still for a moment. Some emotion passed through her expression. He caught the edge of it, whatever it was, before it was smoothed away into composure.
"Yes," she conceded, and her voice was very quiet. "I think I would."
𝑽.
The terrace was cooler than the ballroom, the night air a relief after the press of bodies and candlelight. You stood at the balustrade and looked out at the dark garden below and tried to remember how to breathe like a person who was not falling apart.
You couldn't help but think... was this a common occurrence with him? Taking ladies to terraces under the premise of fresh air?
Behind you, you heard him close the terrace doors. The music became muted. The world contracted to just this—the two of you and the night and the terrible, wonderful choice you had made to follow him out here.
This was a mistake. You had known it was a mistake when you said yes to the dance. Had known it again, more clearly, when you felt the familiar press of his hand at your waist and had to remind yourself to breathe normally. You had known it a third time when you tried to lead on the turn from pure habit—twelve years of practice refusing to be overridden by good sense—and he corrected you and said you were leading in a voice that made your throat go tight.
He had not said your name. He did not know your name. Not tonight.
That was the thing you kept returning to. The fact that he did not know.
The fact that every careful thing he had said on that dance floor, every fractional lowering of his guard, every word that had the quality of truth rather than performance—he had said all of it to a stranger. Not to you. To whoever this woman in the red dress was, this anonymous person who had no history with him, no two years of accumulated hurt, no argument in your drawing room that you could still hear in specific, devastating detail when you let yourself.
He had been kind and easy. The version of himself you had glimpsed in small moments over the years and spent considerably too much time thinking about.
That was the part that cut deepest.
"You are quiet," he said, coming to stand beside you at the balustrade. Not close enough to be improper. Close enough that you could feel the warmth of him in the cool air.
"I was thinking," you said. Your voice came out rougher than usual and you felt him register it—the faint pause, the slight turn of his head.
"About what?"
"About masks," you settled on finally. "What it means to wear one."
He was quiet for a moment. Below the terrace, the garden was dark and still. "I have been wearing one for a long time," he said, and his voice had dropped to something that was not quite performance. "It becomes—habitual. After a while you stop noticing the weight of it."
"Until something makes you notice," you said, without meaning to.
"Until something makes you notice," he agreed.
You turned to look at him. The mask obscured the upper half of his face, but you knew the lower half by heart—the line of his jaw, the particular set of his mouth when he was being careful, the slight furrow that appeared between his brows when something was troubling him and he was trying to decide whether to allow it.
"Are you troubled?" you asked.
"I have been thinking about someone," he said. His hands gripped the balustrade, knuckles pale even in the moonlight. "For longer than is wise. For—" He stopped. "For longer than I have admitted to myself, even."
Your heart was beating so hard it hurt.
"And?" you prompted, barely audible.
"And watching them try to be happy with someone else is rather more difficult than I had anticipated," he said. His jaw clenched. "Than I had any right to anticipate, given that I was the one who—"
He stopped himself. But you understood what he was not saying. You had always understood what he was not saying.
"Did you expect it to be easy?" you asked.
"I expected to feel certain I had made the right choice," he said. A laugh that was not quite a laugh. "I have not felt certain once."
The admission hit you somewhere vital. You had spent weeks telling yourself he was certain, that his choice had been deliberate and clean and he had not looked back even once. The thought that he had been carrying this too—
"Why did you make it then?" The question came out rougher than you intended. "If you were not certain."
"Because I was afraid," he said simply, and the plain honesty of it made your throat close.
"Of what?"
He turned to look at you properly. Even through the mask you could see the particular quality of his gaze—searching, vulnerable in a way he never allowed himself to be in daylight. In the moonlight his eyes were very dark and very focused, and you felt seen in a way that was both terrifying and necessary.
"My father planted roses in our garden the year I was born," he said quietly. "My mother told me he chose them because they came back every year regardless of how harsh the winter was. Regardless of what they weathered. Persistent and stubborn and refusing to give up."
You had gone very still. You knew this story. You had been there when his father told it, standing in the Eom gardens on a summer afternoon when you were twelve and everything was simple.
"I spent a great deal of time after he died thinking that love was the opposite of that," Seonghyeon continued. "That it was fragile. That it did not survive what roses survived. That choosing to love someone was choosing to lose them eventually, and the loss would be—" His voice caught. "Unbearable. I watched my mother grieve and I thought: I cannot do that. I cannot become that vulnerable. I cannot hand someone that much power over whether I survive."
"And now?" you whispered.
"Now I think I was wrong." He ran a hand through his hair—the familiar gesture, the one he made when he was agitated or uncertain or trying to solve something he could not solve. "Now I think I was simply afraid, and I dressed it up as wisdom to make it bearable. I looked at what I wanted most and convinced myself that the wanting was the danger."
The garden was very quiet.
"Roses are stubborn things," you whispered before you could catch yourself.
His expression changed. Immediately, visibly. His eyes sharpened—a rapid, alert attention that moved across your face with a quality that was no longer simply listening. No longer simply a man speaking to a stranger in the dark.
"Yes," he said slowly, and something in his voice had shifted into a register you recognized. Careful and precise. "They are. My father used to say that."
You had said it without thinking. You had said it because you had heard it years ago, in the Eom garden on a summer afternoon when his father had been teaching you the names of the roses and you had complained that the thorns were inconvenient, and he had laughed and said...
You had said it because it lived in your memory in a place the mask apparently did not cover.
Your heart was beating very loudly.
"I should—" You started to step back. "I should go back inside—"
"How do you know that?" His voice was quiet and careful in the way he was careful when deliberating something.
"I simply—" You turned away, toward the balustrade, toward the dark garden. "I must have heard it somewhere, or—"
"No one says it quite like that," he said, and he was closer now, you could feel the changed proximity without looking. "The particular—" A pause that had a quality of something assembling itself. "No one says it quite like that."
You said nothing. Your hands were flat against the cold stone and you were looking at the garden and trying to remember how to breathe normally and failing.
"You are not going to tell me," he observed. It was not a question.
"There is nothing to tell," you said, and even to your own ears your voice had gone strange. Careful.
He was silent. Then... "I do not know your name."
"No," you agreed. "You do not."
Seonghyeon tilted his head and took a step toward you.
"I have felt—" He paused, as if weighing his next words very carefully. "Since the moment I saw you across that ballroom tonight, I have felt like something in me already knew. Like it was written into me somewhere I cannot read. Something in my blood that recognized you before my mind could catch up."
Your breath stopped entirely.
He took a step closer. Close enough now that you could see the rapid pulse at his throat, the slight tremor in his hands that he was trying to control, the particular quality of barely restrained something that lived in the set of his shoulders.
"I know that makes no sense," he said. "You are a stranger. I do not know your name. But I feel—" Another pause, this one longer. "I feel as though I have been looking for you my entire life. And now that I have found you I do not know how to let you walk back into that ballroom and disappear."
You could not speak. You could not breathe. Could only stand there and feel your entire carefully constructed world rearrange itself around this moment, this admission, this boy who did not know he was saying all of this to you—
"You could distract me," he said, and his voice had gone very low. Very rough. "From everything I have been carrying. From all of it. You—whoever you are—you already have."
The words you had said. The invitation. The thing you had offered because you could not help yourself, because being this close to him and hearing him be honest was more than you could bear without touching him somehow.
"Maybe I could," you heard yourself say. "Distract you. For a moment."
He made a sound that was not quite words. Then his hand was reaching for your wrist—the right one, where your glove ended.
"May I—" His voice was rougher now and slightly unsteady in a way you almost never heard from him. "Your glove."
Your breath caught.
His fingers found the edge of your glove—the right one, at the wrist—and he drew it back with extraordinary care, as if he were unwrapping something fragile. The night air met your skin. You felt every small movement of it, every degree of the cool, and then his hand was there.
He turned your wrist over gently. His thumb traced the inside of it once—a single, deliberate line from the base of your palm to the pulse point—and you felt your own heartbeat against it, rapid and entirely visible.
He pressed his lips there.
It was not a brush. Not a courtesy. A real, deliberate kiss, his mouth warm against the thin skin of your wrist, and it lasted long enough to be a choice. Long enough that the world contracted to that single point of contact and everything else—the masquerade, the music inside, the month of careful distance and Keonho's patience and all the things you had told yourself—receded to something distant and irrelevant.
When he lifted his head, you were both very still.
"You enchant me," he said, barely audible. "Whoever you are."
And then he was kissing you, and you were kissing him back, and the ground tilted beneath you in a way that felt like falling and flying and coming home all at once.
𝑽𝑰.
She kissed him back immediately.
That was the thought that arrived, briefly and incoherently, in the first moment of it—she kissed him back, she turned into him, her hand came up to his chest with a sureness that did not feel like a stranger's. He kissed her and felt the ground shift slightly beneath him, the solid certainty of an evening spent in careful anonymity tilting into something that felt dangerously, impossibly, specifically like—
He pulled back just enough to breathe.
Her mouth. He had been looking at her mouth all evening without letting himself acknowledge it, and now he had kissed it, and it was—wrong was not the right word. It was not wrong. It was exactly right, which was itself a problem, because the rightness of it had a specific quality. A particular texture of familiar, the way familiar was distinct from merely pleasant.
He kissed her again, because he could not help it, because the month of pretending had left him so depleted of whatever reserve allowed him to be sensible, and she made a sound against his mouth that—
He went very still. He knew that sound.
Well, not consciously. Not in any way he could have named or defended or explained to anyone who asked. But somewhere beneath thought, beneath deliberate memory, in whatever part of him had spent years cataloguing the specific details of one particular person—the way she laughed, the way she moved, the quality of her attention when she was genuinely listening, the exact shade of expression when she was being cutting versus when she was actually hurt—somewhere in that exhaustive involuntary archive, something recognized it.
He pulled back.
She was watching him through her mask, her breath coming slightly faster than before, her hand still against his chest. The feathers at the edge of her mask cast shadows across her cheekbones in the flickering light from the ballroom windows, and he looked at her—really looked, the way he had been half-looking all evening and half-refusing to—
She tried to lead. On every turn. Every single time, she tried to lead. She favored her right side on turns and... she had to tilt her head back to even make eye contact in her dancing slippers.
She said roses are stubborn things and it had sounded like a memory spoken aloud. She argued the way... she had opinions the way... she tilted her head in that specific angle when she was listening—
His hands were not entirely steady.
"I should—" Her voice came out rough and lower than before, and something lurched in his chest at the sound of it. At the familiarity he had been cataloguing all evening and refusing to look at directly. "I should go back inside."
"Wait—" he started.
But she was already stepping back. Her hand dropped from his chest. She turned toward the ballroom doors, and through the glass the light caught something—the movement of a familiar figure crossing the room beyond. Dark hair and disgustingly good posture. The distinctive bearing of a man she had been spending considerable time with over the past several weeks.
Keonho.
He watched her see it. He watched the small, involuntary stillness move through her—just a fraction of a second, barely perceptible, but he was watching her very carefully now. The almost imperceptible way her breath changed.
Then she was moving again, quickly, her free hand coming up to check that her mask was still in place.
"Please," he said, and his voice came out strange. Raw in a way he had not intended. "Your name. Just—tell me your name."
She stopped with her hand on the door.
In the shifting candlelight from within he caught—just for a moment, just a fraction of a second—the line of her jaw where the mask ended. The particular curve of it. The way she held her chin at an angle that was not performed but simply how she moved through the world.
He had spent years watching that angle. He had spent years pretending he had not.
She did not turn around.
"Goodnight," she bid, barely audible, rough with the cold or with something else entirely.
And then the door opened, and she stepped back into the light and the music and the crowd, and she was gone.
Seonghyeon stood on the terrace.
The night pressed around him. Below, the garden was still. Inside, the music continued. The masquerade went on without him, entirely unconcerned with the fact that something had just happened that he did not yet have words for.
He stood very still and let the recognition assemble itself.
She tried to lead. Everyone who had ever danced with her knew she tried to lead—had been noting it since she was twelve years old and her governess had despaired of it and she herself had maintained, with absolute conviction, that the problem was the convention rather than herself.
She said roses are stubborn things the way someone said a thing they had heard once and kept. The specific phrasing of it. The weight it carried. He knew the exact afternoon it had been said. He had been standing three feet away.
Her voice. The quality of her voice, roughened into something lower than usual—but underneath it, the cadence. The particular rhythm of the way she formed sentences, the specific music of it that he had been hearing his entire life and apparently could identify even stripped of everything recognizable about it.
Her hand against his chest. The sound she had made. The way she had kissed him back with that particular sureness, that complete absence of the tentativeness a stranger might have—
His chest was very tight. He looked down at his hand.
Somewhere in the sequence of events on this terrace, he had kept her glove. He had not meant to. Had not noticed. And yet here it was—white and small and entirely real, sitting in his palm with the matter-of-fact quality of an object that had simply decided to stay.
He stared at it for a long moment. Then he looked back up at the ballroom doors.
He knew exactly who she was.
He had known her all his life. He had known her across dinner tables and promenades and two years of careful, constructed distance. He had known her in blue silk and moonlight and the particular way she argued about things that mattered to her. He had known her since he was old enough to understand what knowing someone meant, and he had spent the better part of two years pretending otherwise with a conviction that had apparently fooled everyone except the part of him that recognized her voice in a crowd and her touch in the dark and the specific quality of her silence when she was deciding whether to be honest.
She had come to this masquerade in a red dress and a half-face mask and a voice roughened by a cold he was not aware of because he didn not have the right to, and she had stood on a terrace and let him say things he had not been able to say to her face, and then she had run.
The glove was still in his hand.
He thought about what that meant. About the choice it had required—to stand there and let him speak, to say the things she had said in return, to let it go as far as it had. She had known, the entire time. She had known and she had chosen and then she had run, which meant—
Which meant she was afraid too. He closed his fingers around the glove. He was going to need to think very carefully about what came next.
He was, he suspected, not going to be capable of thinking about anything else at all.
where martin ends up sliding up on one of ur stories and try’s to shoot his shot 😂✌️
MARTIN X FEM!READER
ft.SEONGHYEON (crack,fluff,and humor!! use of profanity, kys jokes, texting and driving.)
hi i’m back frr, i lowk wrote this at 2am on a school night also this was lowk inspired by a dm i got lolz (ss at the end) I WAS SHOVELING AND MY BACK HURT SMM. anyways this lowk boring asf but just a lil smth lmk if u want part 2 on some cool shyt 😂😂
𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐁𝐄𝐀𝐂𝐇 ─── you visit the beach every week to watch the sunset because of your first love
★ bf ! keonho × fem!reader
word count ── 5.9k
˖᯽ ݁˖ 𝐀𝐔𝐓𝐇𝐎𝐑’𝐒 𝐍𝐎𝐓𝐄 coco speaking here! I'M STARTING TO LOCK IN WITH LONGER FICS! but warning uhm this is angst but obviously i don't do sad ending so… oh and make sure to listen to the beach by the neighbourhood 🥰 𖧧 𝐌𝐀𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓
The first time you realized you were still in love with him, it wasn’t because you saw his face or heard his name.
It was because your chest ached at the sound of waves.
The ocean folded into itself again and again, white foam dissolving into darkening water, and something inside you folded with it, quiet, involuntary, bruised. The sound was the same as it had always been.
Unlike him.
You came to the beach every week.
You told yourself it was for the sunset. For the quiet. For the way the horizon swallowed the sun whole and bled color across the sky, bruised violets melting into molten gold, streaks of rose unraveling like torn silk. You told yourself it was therapeutic. That watching something end so beautifully made endings easier to accept.
That was a lie.
You came because this was the last place you had felt whole.
The wind brushed against your skin, cool and salted, tangling your hair and kissing your cheeks with a softness that felt almost intimate. The air smelled like brine and damp sand and fading warmth. The tide rolled in and out with a rhythm that felt almost cruel, consistent, dependable, never faltering.
Unlike everything else in your life.
You sat in the same spot you always did, as if the sand remembered the shape of you. Your toes buried themselves beneath the surface, grains slipping between them, cool at first and then gradually warming. You hugged your knees to your chest, arms wrapped tight as though you were trying to keep your own pieces from falling apart.
The sky was streaked with pink and orange, the sun hovering low like it was reluctant to leave.
It was beautiful.
It hurt.
Your throat tightened before you even realized why. The pain was subtle at first, a dull pressure beneath your ribs. Then it deepened, spreading like ink in water.
You didn’t notice you were crying at first.
You rarely did anymore.
The tears didn’t come in dramatic sobs. They slipped out silently, hot against your wind-chilled skin. One traced the curve of your cheek, then another. You blinked slowly, confused by the blur, until you tasted salt that wasn’t from the ocean.
It always started the same way.
A fragment of memory.
A laugh that wasn’t there.
The phantom feeling of arms wrapping around your waist from behind, warm, secure, familiar. The imagined brush of lips against your temple. A voice, low and teasing, calling you baby like it was the most natural word in the world.
And suddenly your vision would cloud.
Your breath would hitch.
Your fingers would curl desperately into the sand, nails digging in as if you could anchor yourself to something solid. As if you could grab onto the past and drag it back with you.
But the sand always slipped through.
Just like he did.
Because he wasn’t there.
There was no warmth pressed against your back. No steady heartbeat beneath your ear. No hand reaching to tuck your hair behind your ear when the wind got too bold.
Keonho wasn’t there.
And yet somehow, impossibly, he was everywhere.
In the way the water shimmered under the fading light, because you remembered how he used to grin at you with that same glow in his eyes.
In the way the wind wrapped around you, because it almost felt like his arms.
In the shared silence of the sunset, because this was where he once kissed you slow and sweet, like time was something the two of you owned.
The beach had moved on. The tide had moved on. The sky had moved on.
But you hadn’t.
You were still sitting in the ghost of his embrace, watching the sun sink below the horizon, waiting for something that had already left.
And every week, when the last sliver of light disappeared and the sky turned dark, it felt like losing him all over again.
You remembered the way he used to drag you into the ocean like it was his favorite game, like your protests were just part of the routine he adored.
“Come on, baby,” he would laugh, his fingers wrapping firmly around your wrist, warm and insistent as he tugged you toward the shoreline. His grip wasn’t rough, but it was impossible to escape, not that you really wanted to.
“Don’t be scared.”
“I’m not scared!” you would argue immediately, even as your steps slowed, even as your toes curled at the edge where the water lapped at the sand.
The first wave would rush forward, cold and sudden, splashing over your feet and ankles, and you’d gasp despite yourself.
He’d noticed.
And then he’d grin, that knowing, teasing grin, like he had every single one of your reactions memorized. Like he could read you better than you could read yourself.
“Not scared, huh?” he’d tease, raising a brow.
You’d glare at him, but there’d already be a smile tugging at your lips. “Shut up.”
Another wave would come, stronger this time, climbing higher, up your calves, your knees, soaking the hem of your clothes. You’d squeal, trying to pull back, but he’d only tighten his hold, laughing as he dragged you deeper with him.
The ocean would surge around you, rising to your thighs, your waist, your ribs, cold enough to steal your breath, but somehow never unbearable.
Not when he was there.
Not when his laughter filled the air, bright and unrestrained, blending with the crash of the waves.
Eventually, you’d stop resisting and give in
And then you’d both just be there, standing in the water, completely drenched, hair sticking to your cheeks and neck, clothes heavy and clinging, laughing like there was nothing else in the world that mattered.
You remembered how it felt.
Weightless, easy, alive.
He loved sneaking up behind you.
Even when you were expecting it, he’d still manage to catch you off guard.
You’d be distracted, watching the way the sunlight danced on the surface of the water, or trying to smooth your soaked hair back, when suddenly—
His arms would wrap around your waist from behind, strong and secure, lifting you just enough for your feet to leave the ground.
You’d shriek, the sound breaking into laughter almost instantly.
“Keonho!”
He’d laugh against your shoulder, the vibration of it sending warmth straight through you despite the cold water.
“Got you,” he’d say, like it was some kind of victory.
He’d spin you once, just once, before letting you drop back down, the water splashing up around you both.
“I’m gonna kill you!” you’d gasp, breathless, turning to shove at his chest.
He’d barely budge. Instead, he’d lean in, pressing a wet, lingering kiss to your cheek, warm despite everything, lips soft against your skin.
“But you love me,” he’d murmur, like it was the simplest truth in the world.
And you did.
God, you did.
It was in the way your heart would stutter when he looked at you like that.
In the way your hands would instinctively reach for him, gripping onto his shirt, his arms, anything, just to stay close.
It was in the quiet moments too.
The softer ones.
After the laughter faded and your energy dipped, when the sun began to lower and paint everything in gold, you’d both make your way back to shore.
You’d collapse onto the sand, exhausted, limbs heavy, breaths still uneven. The cool air would hit your damp skin, sending a shiver through you.
“Cold?” he’d ask softly, already reaching for the towel.
There was always only one.
There didn’t need to be more.
He’d drape it around both of you, tugging you closer until your sides pressed together, your thighs touching, your shoulders brushing.
His arm would slip around you naturally, like it belonged there, pulling you into his chest.
And you’d go without hesitation.
Your head resting against him, cheek pressed to the warmth of his skin, listening to the steady rhythm of his heartbeat.
It was strong.
Grounding.
Real.
You used to think that sound would follow you forever.
His fingers would move gently, carefully, brushing your hair away from your face, untangling strands with a patience that made your chest ache even then.
His touch would soften after the chaos of the ocean, thumb tracing slow, absentminded patterns along your cheekbone, your temple, like he was memorizing every detail.
Like he didn’t trust the world to remember you properly, so he had to do it himself.
“Stay still,” he’d murmur quietly when you shifted.
“I am still,” you’d mumble back, eyes half-lidded.
“Mm,” he’d hum, unconvinced, but there’d be a smile in his voice.
The sky would deepen around you, gold slipping into orange, orange melting into pink, pink dissolving into something darker, richer.
And then, he’d tilt your chin up.
Always gently. Always with two fingers beneath your jaw, careful and deliberate, like even the slightest pressure might hurt you. Like you were something fragile in his hands, something rare he didn’t quite trust himself to hold, but couldn’t bear to let go of. His touch would be warm despite the ocean air, grounding in a way that made your breath hitch before you even realized why.
Your eyes would meet his.
And everything would slow.
Not just metaphorically, it truly felt like the world softened around you. The crashing waves dulled into a distant hush. The wind that had been tugging at your hair moments ago seemed to pause, like it didn’t want to interrupt. Even the fading light of the sun, slipping lower and lower behind the horizon, stretched itself thin, lingering just a little longer.
Like the universe was giving him time.
Giving you time.
It all blurred into the background.
Because in that moment, the only thing that existed was him.
The way his gaze softened when it landed on you, like you were something he could never quite believe was real. The way his thumb would brush lightly along your cheek, slow and absentminded, as if memorizing the exact shape of your face. As if committing you to memory without even realizing he was doing it.
His lips would find yours.
There was never any rush in the way he kissed you. Never any urgency to take more than what you were already giving. It wasn’t desperate. It wasn’t demanding.
It was certain.
Certain in a way that made your chest ache even then, though you didn’t understand why at the time. Like he knew you weren’t going anywhere. Like he believed, wholeheartedly, that this, you, him, the ocean, the sunsets, would always be there waiting.
Like he had all the time in the world to love you.
And you could feel it in every second of it.
In the way his lips pressed against yours, slow, lingering, just a fraction longer than necessary. Your fingers would curl into his shirt without thinking, holding onto him instinctively, like your body already understood something your mind didn’t, that this was something worth keeping.
That this was something that mattered.
“Pretty,” he’d murmur against your mouth, his voice low and warm, breath fanning softly across your lips.
The word would melt into you, quiet and sincere.
You’d roll your eyes like it didn’t affect you. “You say that every time,” you’d mumble, your voice softer than you intended, your forehead brushing against his.
“Because it’s true every time,” he’d reply, without hesitation.
And then he’d kiss you again, but softer this time that felt slower, and deeper.
His hand would slide to the back of your neck, holding you there gently, his thumb tracing slow circles just beneath your ear.
You’d lean into him without thinking because being close to him felt natural
You thought those moments were endless.
You thought there would always be another sunset. Another laugh. Another kiss waiting just around the corner. You thought time was something generous, something that would stretch for you because you wanted it to.
You thought the sunsets would keep coming, one after another, with him sitting beside you every single time. That no matter how many days passed, he’d always be there when the sky turned gold.
You thought the warmth of his arms would always find you. That his laughter would always fill the spaces between your thoughts. That his lips would always meet yours like it was the most natural thing in the world.
You thought all of it was permanent.
You didn’t realize you were memorizing it.
The exact weight of his hand against your cheek. The way his voice softened when he called you pretty. The rhythm of his breathing when you rested against him. The way the world felt quieter, kinder, when he was close.
You didn’t realize your heart was holding onto every detail because somewhere deep down, it knew.
It knew this wasn’t forever.
And by the time you understood that—
it was already gone.
That was the cruelest part, not the leaving, not the silence, not even the empty space he carved into your life.
It was the innocence of that morning. The way it felt ordinary. The way the sunlight filtered through your curtains like it always did, soft and golden, brushing across his face as he stood by your door with nervous excitement in his eyes.
There were no warning signs. No dramatic music swelling in the background. Just him, your boyfriend, adjusting the strap of his bag and smiling at you like he’d be back in a few hours.
He told you he had an audition.
He said it casually at first, like it was something small. Like it didn’t carry the weight of a future behind it. He had always loved music. Always hummed under his breath, tapped rhythms on your thigh absentmindedly, sang into the ocean wind like it was his personal stage. But he said this was just a chance. Just a “what if.” Just a dream he wanted to test the waters with.
“I don’t even know if anything will happen,” he had shrugged, almost shy.
You believed him.
You wanted to believe him.
You supported him. Of course you did. You stood in front of him that morning and held his face in your hands, your palms warm against his cheeks, your thumbs brushing softly under his eyes like you were steadying him. You told him he was talented. That he was special. That they’d be stupid not to see it. You smiled so brightly he didn’t see the flicker of fear behind it.
You kissed him before he left.
You stood on your toes and pressed your lips to his. The kind of kiss you’d shared a hundred times before. No desperation. No finality. Just routine affection. He smiled against your mouth, hands resting comfortably at your waist.
“Bring me back a star,” you teased, grinning up at him.
His eyes crinkled in that way you loved, the way that made you feel like the only person in the world.
“I’ll bring you the whole sky.”
You laughed.
You thought he’d be back for dinner.
You even planned what you were going to say when he walked in, some dramatic gasp, maybe a playful bow if he failed. You pictured him shrugging it off, collapsing onto your couch, pulling you into his lap while complaining about nerves.
Instead, he came back with trembling hands and shining eyes.
You knew before he spoke.
There was something different in his posture. Something electric in the way he stepped inside. His breath was uneven, not from running, but from adrenaline. His fingers twitched like he didn’t know where to put them.
“I passed,” he said, voice barely above a whisper, like saying it too loudly might make it disappear.
Your heart stopped.
He was going to debut.
You remembered how your smile froze for half a second too long before stretching wider. You threw your arms around him immediately, because that’s what you were supposed to do. You hugged him tight, telling him you were proud. That you knew it. That you always knew.
And you meant it.
You were proud.
But beneath the pride, something else bloomed — something heavy and sinking and inevitable.
Because you knew.
You knew what that meant.
Training schedules that stretched past midnight. Dorm rooms filled with strangers. Managers. Cameras. Fans. Interviews. A life that demanded perfection and privacy and sacrifice.
A world that didn’t have space for you.
He held you that night on the beach.
The same beach.
The sand felt colder under you. The wind sharper. The sky burned in shades of red, not soft rose or gentle coral, but deep, violent crimson, like the horizon itself was splitting open. It felt like a warning. Like an omen neither of you wanted to acknowledge.
“I don’t want to lose you,” he whispered into your hair, his voice trembling in a way you had never heard before.
You wrapped your arms tighter around him immediately, fingers clutching the fabric of his shirt like you could keep him anchored by force alone.
“Then don’t,” you said, the words breaking on the way out.
He didn’t answer right away.
And his silence was louder than any confession.
It stretched between you, heavy and suffocating. You could feel the truth in it. The understanding that some dreams demand everything. That sometimes love is not enough to compete with destiny.
He kissed you like he was memorizing you.
His hands cupped your face, thumbs brushing away tears you hadn’t realized were falling. His lips moved against yours with a kind of aching tenderness that made your knees weak. Not rushed. Not careless. Every second deliberate. Every touch lingering.
Like he was trying to store the feeling, because he knew he’d need it later.
“You’re my home,” he murmured against your mouth, forehead pressed to yours, breath uneven.
And you believed him.
You believed that home was permanent. That it couldn’t be taken away. That if two people loved each other enough, the world would bend around them.
But homes can burn down.
And sometimes, people choose their dreams over the ones who love them, not because they love you less, but because they love the dream differently.
He left two weeks later.
There wasn’t a dramatic fight. No screaming. No shattered glass or slammed doors. No betrayal you could point at and blame.
Just distance.
It started small.
Texts that came a little later than usual. Replies that felt shorter. Phone calls cut off because he had practice. Because he was tired. Because he had schedules.
You told yourself it was temporary.
Late replies turned into missed calls. Missed calls turned into apologies. Apologies turned into exhaustion in his voice. And then, slowly, heartbreakingly, they turned into silence.
The last thing he sent you was a picture of a sunset.
A city skyline you didn’t recognize stretched across the bottom of the frame. The sky was fading into orange and gray behind tall buildings. It was beautiful, in a distant, unfamiliar way.
It wasn’t as pretty as yours.
It wasn’t as warm.
It didn’t have sand between your toes or his arm around your shoulders.
There was no caption.
No “I miss you.”
No “I love you.”
Just the image.
You stared at it for a long time.
Your fingers hovered over the screen, ready to type something, anything, to bridge the growing gap.
But what could you say?
That you felt him slipping away?
That every sunset without him felt like losing him again?
That you were scared he was already gone?
You didn’t answer. You didn’t need to. The silence said everything.
And somewhere between the waves and the skyline, between the dream and the girl who loved him, he let go first.
You told everyone you were fine.
You perfected the smile. The casual shrug. The “we just grew apart” explanation delivered with a softness that made it sound mutual. You laughed at the right moments. You nodded when people said, “You’ll find someone better.” You pretended the ache in your chest was just nostalgia, harmless, distant, manageable.
At night, when your room was quiet and your phone screen stopped lighting up with distractions, you would lie on your back and stare at the ceiling, whispering to yourself that you were okay. That you were stronger than this. That love wasn’t supposed to feel like an amputation.
You told yourself you had moved on.
You repeated it so often it almost felt true. You deleted old photos, or at least moved them into a hidden folder you never stopped reopening. You stopped checking his name online. You forced yourself not to search for interviews, not to look for glimpses of him in crowds. You built a routine without him. You learned how to exist in the empty space he left behind.
You dated once.
He was kind, patient, and chill.
You tried. You really did.
You let him take you to dinner. You let him hold your hand. You let him kiss you goodnight outside your door.
But when his lips touched yours, there was no earthquake. No familiar warmth that unraveled your spine. It was pleasant. Polite.
It wasn’t him.
He didn’t pull you into his chest like you were something he needed to protect. He didn’t whisper pet names like they were sacred secrets meant only for you. He didn’t look at you like you were the only thing anchoring him to earth.
No one wrapped a towel around you the same way. No one kissed you like you were something holy.
So you kept coming back here.
Every week.
Rain or shine. Cold or warm. You would sit in the same stretch of sand as if it were reserved for you, as if the beach itself recognized your grief and made room for it. You told yourself it was habit. Muscle memory. That your body just didn’t know where else to go when the sky started bleeding into evening.
But the truth was uglier.
You were waiting.
You told yourself you weren’t. You rolled your eyes at your own foolishness. “He’s not coming back,” you would whisper as the tide rolled in. “You’re being ridiculous.”
And yet.
Every time a silhouette appeared in the distance, your heart would jump violently in your chest before logic crushed it back down.
Every time you heard laughter behind you, you’d stiffen.
Every time the wind brushed against your neck just right, you’d swear it felt like him.
The sky was turning lavender now, soft purples blending into deepening blues. The sun dipped lower, painting the water in molten gold that shimmered and fractured across the waves. It was breathtaking.
It was unbearable.
Your chest tightened again, a slow, squeezing pressure that made it hard to breathe. You wiped your cheeks impatiently with the heel of your palm.
“Get over it,” you muttered to yourself, voice cracking. “It’s been years.”
Years.
He was probably famous now. Probably standing under blinding stage lights while thousands of people screamed his name. Probably smiling for cameras, signing albums, waving from airport gates.
Probably calling someone else baby.
The thought made your stomach twist so violently you had to press a hand against it.
“Stop,” you whispered. “Stop thinking like that.”
You hugged yourself tighter, arms wrapped around your own torso like you could hold your broken pieces together. The wind picked up suddenly, sharp and cool, carrying the scent of salt and something achingly familiar.
Your breath hitched.
You closed your eyes.
And for one fragile second, you let yourself pretend.
You could almost feel it, strong arms sliding around your waist from behind, pulling you into a familiar chest. You could almost feel the warmth of him at your back, the steady rise and fall of his breathing against your shoulder.
You could almost hear it, that low, quiet laugh he used to let out when you got dramatic. The one that vibrated softly against your ear.
Your throat tightened painfully.
“Stop,” you whispered to yourself again, shaking your head. “Stop pretending he’s here.”
“Y/N.”
Your heart stopped.
The sound didn’t feel imagined. It cut through the wind too clearly. Too solid.
You froze.
You had imagined it before. The voice. The footsteps. The presence behind you. Grief was cruel like that, it replayed memories so vividly they felt alive.
Sometimes you imagined him walking out of the ocean like some kind of miracle.
Sometimes you imagined him standing behind you, hesitant, unsure.
You didn’t turn around.
You were afraid that if you did, and no one was there, something inside you would finally snap for good.
“Y/N.”
Your breath caught so sharply it felt like something inside your chest tore.
For a second, you didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. Didn’t even blink.
Because if you turned around, if you looked, and he wasn’t there… you didn’t think you could survive that kind of disappointment again.
Slowly, painfully slowly, you turned your head.
And there he was.
Keonho.
Not softened by time. Not blurred by memory. Not a cruel trick your mind was playing on you.
Him.
He’s real.
Standing a few feet away like he had just stepped out of every memory you’d been trying to bury.
His hair was darker now, shorter, styled but messy from the wind. His shoulders broader, posture straighter, like the world had shaped him into someone stronger, someone more put together.
But his eyes—
His eyes hadn’t changed at all.
Still soft and warm. Still looking at you like you were something he could lose again.
You stared at him like he might disappear if you blinked.
“You’re…” Your voice broke completely. Your throat tightened so painfully you couldn’t even finish the sentence.
He took a step closer. Like you were something fragile he didn’t have the right to touch anymore.
“I came back,” he said quietly.
And something inside you snapped.
“Why?” The word tore out of you, sharp and shaking. “Why now?” Your voice cracked, rising without your permission. “Why would you come back now, Keonho?”
He flinched. His hands trembled at his sides as he swallowed hard, eyes glossy.
“Because I kept looking at sunsets in other countries,” he said, voice uneven, breaking between words, “and they never looked right.”
A broken laugh ripped out of you.
“That’s not fair,” you said, shaking your head, tears spilling faster now. “You don’t get to say that. You don’t get to come back and say things like that like it fixes anything.”
“I know,” he whispered. “I know I don’t.”
There were only a few steps between you. But it felt like years stretched across the sand.
“I thought leaving was the right thing,” he continued, voice cracking. “I thought if I made it… if I became someone… I could come back and deserve you.”
Something in your chest twisted violently.
“Deserve me?” you repeated, your voice rising again. “You think that’s what I needed?”
Your tears were falling uncontrollably now.
“You already did,” you choked out, your voice breaking apart. “You were already enough. You were everything.”
His face crumpled.
“I wasn’t,” he said, barely holding himself together. “I was scared. I thought I’d hold you back. I thought you deserved someone better—”
“I didn’t want better!” you cried, your voice echoing across the empty beach. “I didn’t want bigger, or stronger, or famous— I wanted you!”
The words ripped out of you like they’d been trapped for years.
“I waited for you,” you continued, sobbing now, your chest heaving. “Do you know how long I waited? Do you know how many nights I stared at my phone hoping you’d call me?”
He shook his head slightly, tears spilling down his own face now.
“I dated someone,” you said, your voice trembling harder. “I tried to move on. I really did. He was nice. He was everything a person is supposed to want—”
Your voice broke completely.
“But every time he touched me, it wasn’t you,” you whispered, shaking your head violently. “Every time he kissed me, I kept thinking about you. I kept wishing it was you.”
Keonho’s breathing hitched, his shoulders shaking.
“I couldn’t love him,” you sobbed. “Because I never stopped loving you.”
Silence shattered around you, filled only with your broken breathing and the sound of waves crashing too loudly against the shore.
“You left me,” you whispered, your voice smaller now but somehow more painful. “You left me here… and I didn’t know how to stop loving you.”
Tears streamed down his face freely now.
“I know,” he said, voice cracking completely. “I know, and I hate myself for it. I hate that I did that to you. I thought I was doing the right thing, but I was just—” his voice broke, “—I was just a coward.”
“You were,” you said, not even hesitating.
He nodded.
“I was,” he agreed, his voice shaking. “I was a coward who walked away from the only person who ever felt like home.”
Your chest tightened painfully at that.
“I never stopped loving you,” he said again, stepping closer despite the tears blurring his vision. “Not once. Not when I was on stage. Not when people screamed my name. Not when I was surrounded by everyone else.”
His voice dropped into something quieter. More fragile.
“I’d go back to empty rooms and wish you were there. I’d look at sunsets and think about you sitting here alone and it killed me.”
“You should’ve come back sooner,” you whispered.
“I know,” he said immediately, his voice breaking. “I should’ve.”
There was barely any space between you now.
“Can I…” His voice trembled. “Can I hold you? Please. Just—just once.”
You should’ve said no.
You should’ve turned away.
Instead, you broke.
You stepped forward and collided into him, your hands gripping his shirt as a sob tore out of your chest.
And the moment his arms wrapped around you—
everything shattered.
He held you like he was terrified you’d disappear, his grip tight, desperate, his face buried into your hair as his shoulders shook.
“I’m so sorry,” he kept whispering, over and over, his voice breaking each time. “I’m so sorry, baby, I’m so sorry.”
You clung to him just as tightly, your fingers digging into his back as you cried into his chest.
“You hurt me,” you sobbed. “You hurt me so bad.”
“I know,” he cried. “I know, I know—I’m sorry—”
“I couldn’t breathe without you,” you choked out. “Everything reminded me of you. The beach, the sunsets, everything—”
“I know,” he repeated helplessly, his voice wrecked.
You pulled back just enough to look at him.
His face was soaked with tears.
So was yours.
He reached up instinctively, wiping your cheeks with trembling hands, just like he used to.
“Still crying at sunsets?” he tried, but his voice completely broke halfway through.
You let out a shattered laugh.
“Every week,” you whispered.
That destroyed him.
“God,” he sobbed softly, pressing his forehead against yours. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know it was this bad.”
“You didn’t ask,” you whispered again.
“I know,” he said, closing his eyes tightly. “I know.”
He leaned down slowly, so slowly it almost hurt to watch, his movements hesitant, restrained, like every instinct in him was telling him to close the distance but fear was still holding him back by the collar.
His eyes flickered between yours, searching, asking, begging without words. Giving you an out. Giving you time to step back, to turn away, to protect yourself from him all over again.
You didn’t.
You couldn’t.
Not when he was right there. Not when he was real.
The second his lips touched yours, it shattered any illusion of control either of you had left.
It hit you like a wave breaking too hard against the shore, sudden, overwhelming, impossible to brace for. Years of suppressed longing unraveled in an instant, every unsent text, every sleepless night, every quiet “I miss you” whispered into empty space pouring into that single point of contact.
His mouth moved against yours like he was starving, like he’d been deprived of this for far too long and didn’t know how to take it slowly anymore.
His hand came up to cradle the back of your head, fingers threading tightly into your hair, not rough, but firm, anchoring, like he needed to keep you there, needed to make sure you wouldn’t slip through his hands again.
Your hands grabbed onto his shirt almost painfully, fists bunching the fabric, pulling him closer until there was no space left between your bodies, like you were trying to erase the years that had existed without him.
The kiss turned messy almost immediately.
Your breaths collided, uneven and desperate, breaking apart only for a second before crashing back together again. Your lips missed, found each other again, clung, over and over, like neither of you could get enough, like every second apart, even for air, felt wrong.
You could taste everything.
Salt from your tears.
Salt from his.
The faint, familiar warmth of him that hadn’t changed, even after all this time.
A broken sound escaped you, half sob, half gasp, and he swallowed it, kissing you deeper, more urgently, like he didn’t want to hear your pain, like he wanted to replace it with something else. His thumb pressed against your jaw, trembling slightly, and you realized—
He was shaking.
His lips faltered for just a second, not pulling away, just… weakening, like the weight of everything between you was catching up to him too. A quiet, wrecked sound left him against your mouth, something fragile and human that you’d never heard from him before.
“I—” he tried, but the word dissolved the second it left him, replaced by another kiss, deeper this time, more emotional than anything else, less about urgency, more about need. About holding on.
Your grip tightened instinctively, like your body was afraid he’d disappear mid-kiss, like this was all some cruel, fleeting moment you’d wake up from.
He kissed you like he couldn’t breathe without you.
Like he hadn’t been breathing without you.
Like every day he spent away had been something he survived, not lived.
And it poured out of him in the way his lips lingered too long, in the way he kept coming back even when he pulled away for air, in the way his forehead pressed briefly against yours before he dove back in again, unable to stop, unwilling to.
When he finally pulled back, it wasn’t because he wanted to.
It was because he had to.
Both of you were trembling, your bodies still pressed together, your foreheads resting against each other like that small point of contact was the only thing keeping you grounded. Your breaths came out uneven, mingling in the space between you, warm and shaky and completely out of sync.
His eyes didn’t open right away. When they did, they were glassy and overwhelmed. His nose brushed lightly against yours as he exhaled, a broken, unsteady breath leaving him like he’d been holding it in for years.
“Baby,” he whispered, voice trembling, completely wrecked. “I’m so sorry.”
You closed your eyes, tears slipping down again.
“I never stopped loving you,” he said, barely audible. “Not once. Not ever.”
Your chest heaved.
“You broke me,” you whispered.
“I know,” he cried softly. “And I’ve been broken without you too.”
The last bit of sunlight disappeared completely, leaving only twilight wrapped around both of you.
You didn’t know what tomorrow would look like. You didn’t know if he would stay. You didn’t know if your heart could survive this again.
But as he slipped his jacket over your shoulders and pulled you back into his arms, holding you like he never wanted to let go—
warnings + info. bridgerton au, enemies to lovers, best friend's brother, forbidden love, situationship (as much as it could be in the 1800s), kissing, reader is an edwards, morally grey characters, bordering emotional infidelity, lowk toxic mindsets, love triangle w keonho kinda… LOL chill ik i packed this one HEAVILY
TAoR— TABLE OF CONTENTS...!
synopsis. the edwards family and the eom family have always moved in the same circle. you and seonghyeon have spent years perfecting the art of avoidance after... well. after his father's funeral when you both said things you couldn't take back. but the ton is small, his sister is your best friend, and eventually you run out of excuses and arguments. especially when he's looking at you like that across the ballroom. the only thing is… you’re soon to be engaged. will he get to your hand before a ring does?
TAoR PLAYLIST
LISTEN TO… enchanted, guilty as sin? all too well: ten minute version and illicit affairs by taylor swift ... fallen star by the nbhd ... self control by frank ocean ... almost is never enough by ariana grande ... iloveitiloveitiloveit by bella kay ... close to you by gracie abrams ... we'll never have sex by leith ross ... i couldn't be more in love by the 1975 ... 18 by one direction ... memories by conan gray
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wc. 16.2k
▸ feedback & reblogs are highly appreciated
maddy's note. long time coming LOL justice for both hyeon and yn............. song easter eggs btw lmk if u find heh i also added a bunch more bc ugh so many songs fits them
also this ones for my baby claire i Heart u
It had been two days since the ball, and Seonghyeon had not slept properly once.
Two days.
Every time he closed his eyes, he saw you. Blue silk and moonlight and that expression on your face when he had cupped your jaw, when his thumb had traced your cheekbone, when you had whispered his name like a prayer.
Seonghyeon. Akin to a damned siren in his ear.
He ran a hand through his hair—for perhaps the hundredth time that morning—and tried to focus on what his mother was saying. Something about returning a book to Lady Edwards and Eunji wanting to see you. Something that had resulted in him standing in the entrance hall of Edwards Hall, his cravat feeling too tight and his mouth impossibly dry.
"The ladies are in the drawing room," the butler intoned, and Seonghyeon felt his pulse kick up.
You would be there—of course you would be there. It was your home.
He had not prepared himself to see you again so soon. Had not prepared himself at all, if he were being honest.
His mother swept ahead, Eunji at her side, and Seonghyeon followed with the reluctance of a man walking to his own execution. Through the familiar corridors of Edwards Hall—corridors he had run through as a boy, chasing you and your brothers, back when everything was simple and uncomplicated and he did not lie awake at night thinking about the curve of your mouth.
The drawing room doors opened, and there you were.
You stood near the window, backlit by the afternoon sun, and for one terrible moment Seonghyeon forgot how to breathe. You were dressed in a day gown of pale green muslin, your hair arranged simply, and you looked...
You looked exactly like someone he should not want as desperately as he did.
Your eyes met his across the room, and he watched your expression shift. Surprise, then something that might have been hope, then shuttering into careful neutrality. It had been like this since the ball. Since he had nearly kissed you on that terrace. Since he had come so dangerously close to forgetting every rule he had ever set for himself.
"Mrs. Eom, Eunji!" Your mother rose, all warmth and welcome. "What a lovely surprise. And Seonghyeon, how good to see you."
Seonghyeon bowed, murmured the appropriate pleasantries, and tried very hard not to stare at you.
He failed. He felt like a moth to a flame.
You were looking at him too. He could feel it. He could feel the weight of your gaze like a physical touch, and his fingers twitched at his sides with the urge to—
No. He would not think about touching you. Would not think about how your skin had felt beneath his palm, how you had leaned into his touch, how close he had come to—
"I brought your book back," Eunji was saying to you, smiling brightly. Far too brightly for an innocent visit. His sister knew exactly what she was doing. "The one you lent me last month? I finally finished it."
"Oh!" You seemed to shake yourself, tearing your gaze from Seonghyeon's. "Yes, of course. It is in my room. Perhaps you could help me fetch it?"
"Perhaps your sisters could help," Eunji said sweetly. "I wanted to ask your mother about the charity event next month."
Seonghyeon watched you blink. Observed the realization cross your face that his sister was meddling. That she was trying to orchestrate time alone between the two of you.
Unchaperoned. Yet again.
"I shall help," Wonhee volunteered, rising with perhaps too much enthusiasm. "Come, Wonyoung. Eunji. Mama can spare you for a moment, can she not?"
And suddenly, somehow, the drawing room was emptying. Your mother and his being led away by Eunji with promises of discussing charitable endeavors. Your sisters disappearing under the pretense of helping find this mysterious book. Your brothers nowhere to be seen—likely in the study or out riding.
Leaving you and Seonghyeon alone. The silence that fell was deafening.
You stood by the window still, beautiful and looking at him with an expression he could not quite read. He stood near the door, every muscle in his body taut, hands clenched at his sides to keep from reaching for you.
"Well," you said finally, your voice carefully neutral. "This is not awkward at all."
Despite everything, he felt his lips twitch. Almost a smile. Almost.
"Eunji has never been subtle."
"Neither has Wonhee, apparently." You paused, worrying your lower lip between your teeth, and Seonghyeon made himself look away before he did something foolish. "We should—we need to talk about what happened. At the ball."
His throat tightened. "There is nothing to discuss."
"Nothing to—" You laughed and your eyes flashed in disbelief, but there was no humor in it. "Seonghyeon, you nearly kissed me."
Hearing you say it aloud—be it in a hushed whisper—made something crack in his chest. He had been trying very hard not to think about it in those exact terms. Not to remember how close he had been. How desperately he had wanted to close that final breath of distance until that scoundrel of a Lord Pemberton interrupted.
"I am aware of what nearly happened," he croaked, his voice coming out rougher than intended.
"Then how can you say there is nothing to discuss?"
He made himself meet your eyes. He forced himself ignore the way his pulse was racing, the way his mouth had gone dry, the way every instinct he possessed was screaming at him to cross the room and finish what ungodly thing he had started on that terrace.
"Because it was a mistake." The words tasted like ash on his tongue. "We were caught up in the moment. The moonlight, the ball—it was all very romantic, I am sure. But it cannot happen again."
He watched you flinch. The way your hand came up to rest against your collarbone—that gesture, the one you made when something hurt you deeply.
God, he was doing this all wrong.
"A mistake," you repeated slowly. Your voice had gone very quiet and very careful.
"Yes."
"And the moment?" You took a step toward him, and he felt his breath catch. "Was that a mistake as well? When you touched my face? When you called me by my given name? When you looked at me like—"
"Yes." He cut you off before you could finish. Before you could put into words what he had been trying very hard not to acknowledge. "All of it. A mistake. A lapse in judgement."
It was not. None of it had been a mistake. It had been the most honest thing he had done in two years, and now he was standing here lying about it because he was terrified. Terrified of wanting you, terrified of losing you. Terrified of becoming the kind of man who put his own desires above his responsibilities.
You were quiet for a long moment, studying him with those too-clever eyes, and Seonghyeon wondered what you saw. Could you see the way his hands were shaking? The way his throat kept working as he swallowed? The way he was fighting every instinct he possessed not to cross the room and take back every word?
"You are lying," your ever-so-sharp cleverness concluded finally.
His jaw clenched. "I am not—"
"You are." You took another step closer, and he found he could not move. He could not step back even though every rational part of his brain was screaming at him to maintain distance. "You are lying to me, and you are lying to yourself."
He scoffed and avoided your eye contact, "This is not productive—"
"What are you so afraid of?" Your voice rose slightly, frustration bleeding through. "That you might actually feel something? That you might actually want something for yourself instead of martyring yourself on the altar of duty and responsibility?"
The words hit like physical blows to his resolve. He ran a hand through his hair again, fingers catching in the strands, pulling slightly. The pain helped him focus on your voice in the way that mattered. That was allowed.
"You do not understand."
"Then explain it to me!" You were directly in front of him now. You were close enough that he could smell rosewater. Close enough that he had to clench his fists to keep from touching you. "Explain why you looked at me like that on the terrace. Why you touched me like—like I was something precious. And then why you are standing here now telling me it meant nothing."
His gaze dropped to your mouth. He could not help it. Could not stop himself from remembering how close he had been to tasting it, how your lips had parted in invitation, how desperately he had wanted—
He dragged his eyes back up to yours, and something must have shown on his face because your expression shifted. Softened. As if you
"Seonghyeon," you pleaded quietly, and the sound of his name on your lips did devastating things to his composure. "Just tell me the truth. Please."
The truth.
The truth was that he had been half in love with you since he was fourteen years old. The truth was that pushing you away after his father's funeral had been the hardest thing he had ever done. The truth was that seeing you in blue silk had undone two years of careful distance in a single moment. The truth was that he wanted you so desperately it terrified him.
But he could not say any of that.
"The truth," he heard himself say, his voice hoarse, "is that this—whatever this is—cannot happen. I have responsibilities. Obligations. I cannot afford to—"
"To what?" Your eyes were bright now. Suspiciously bright. Were those tears? God, if you cried he did not know what he would do. "To be happy? To want something? To let yourself feel?"
"To be reckless!" The words burst out of him, louder than intended. "To put my own desires above what is right—above what is safe."
"Safe," you repeated, and there was something almost broken in your voice. "You want to be safe."
"I want—" His throat was so tight he could barely speak. His hands flexed at his sides. His entire body was taut with the effort of standing here, having this conversation, not crossing the final foot of distance between you. "I want to protect you."
"From what?"
"From me!" He ran both hands through his hair now, destroying whatever careful arrangement his valet had achieved that morning. "From the inevitability of loss. From the pain that comes with caring too much. I watched my mother nearly break when my father died. I will not—I cannot—"
"Cannot what?" Your voice was barely above a whisper now.
"I cannot be the one who breaks you." The admission tore out of him. "I cannot let you care for me that deeply when I know what it costs. When I know that one day I would leave you to grieve just as my father left my mother."
For a moment, you just stared at him. And then, with the voice of an angel, you whispered an incredibly raw truth that seemed to rub salt into his deepest wound: "That is the most cowardly thing I have ever heard."
He flinched as though you had struck him.
"Seonghyeon, you are simply being cruel in the name of being honest," you sniffed as you blinked profusely, taking a few more steps toward him.
"You are so afraid of loss that you refuse to live," you continued, and there was anger in your voice now. Real anger. "You hide behind duty and responsibility, but really you are just terrified. Of feeling. Of wanting. Of admitting that you care about my wellbeing."
"I do not—"
"Do not dare." You stepped even closer, and he could see the way your chest was rising and falling rapidly. Could see the flush on your cheeks. Could see everything he was trying so hard to deny. "Do not dare stand there and tell me you do not care when I can see it written all over your face."
He was staring at your mouth again. Seonghyeon could not seem to help himself. His gaze kept dropping to it, lingering, remembering how close he had been. How it had felt to hold your face in his palm. How you had whispered his name, not his family's.
His throat clicked as he swallowed hard.
"What do you want from me?" The question came out almost desperate.
"The truth!" Your hands came up, and for a moment he thought you might touch him. His entire body tensed in anticipation. But you stopped just short, your fingers hovering between you. "I want you to stop lying. To stop pretending. I want you to admit that the terrace meant something, Seonghyeon. That I mean something. That you feel this too."
He did. Curse it, he did. Every atom of his being was screaming it. The way his heart was racing. The way his hands trembled. The way he was leaning toward you even as he tried to maintain distance. The way his eyes kept dropping to your lips. The way breathing felt difficult when you were this close. But admitting it would change everything. Would mean acknowledging that he wanted something he could not have. That he had fallen for the one person he had spent two years trying to avoid.
"I—" His voice cracked. He swallowed again and licked his lips. "I cannot give you what you want."
Your features crumpled, and it was like a knife to his chest.
"Cannot?" you asked quietly. "Or will not?"
"Does it matter?"
"Yes." Your voice was fierce now despite the fire dwindling in and out within your eyes. "Yes, Seonghyeon, it matters very much. Because if you cannot, then there truly is no hope. But if you will not—if you are simply too afraid to try—then you are exactly the coward I accused you of being."
The words should have made him angry. They should have made him defensive. Instead, they just made him feel hollowed out and empty. You were right. He knew you were right. But knowing it and being able to do anything about it were two different things entirely.
"Perhaps I am," he admitted quietly. "Perhaps I am a coward. But at least that way, no one gets hurt."
"You are already hurting me!" The tears were visible now, though you were fighting them valiantly. "You hurt me when you pushed me away after your father's funeral. You hurt me when you spent two years avoiding me. You hurt me on that terrace when you gave me hope—" Your voice broke. "And you are hurting me now by standing there and telling me it meant nothing when we both know that is a lie."
His hands were shaking. His throat was tight. Every part of him wanted to reach for you, to pull you close, to kiss away those tears and tell you everything you wanted to hear.
Instead, he took a step back. He watched you register the movement. Watched the realization flood your face. Closely observed something that might have been hope flicker and die in your eyes.
"So that is it, then," you said flatly. "You are simply going to walk away."
"It is for the best—"
"Do not." Your voice was cold now and you took a step back that felt an awful like a landmine exploding in his world. "Do not tell me what is for the best. Not when you are making this decision entirely out of fear."
"I am trying to protect you—"
"I do not want your protection!" You were almost shouting now. "I want your honesty. I want you to stop hiding behind this—this facade of noble self-sacrifice when really you are just too afraid to admit what you feel."
He opened his mouth and shut it. he simply had no idea what to say. Because you were right... about all of it.
The silence stretched between you and it was incredibly heavy with everything unsaid. He could hear his own heartbeat in his ears. He could hear the way your breathing had gone unsteady. Could feel the weight of this moment—this choice—pressing down on him.
"Say something," you whispered finally. "Please. Say anything."
He looked at you. Really looked at you. At the tears on your cheeks that you were trying so hard to hide. At the way your hands were trembling. At the devastation in your eyes that he had put there.
And he made a choice.
The wrong choice but the safe choice. The coward's choice, you would likely say.
"I am sorry," he said quietly. "But this—we—it cannot work. It is better if we simply—"
"Stop." You held up a hand, and he fell silent immediately. "Just stop. I understand perfectly."
"I do not think you do—"
"Oh, I do." Your voice had gone very calm. Very controlled. The tears were still there, but your expression had shuttered completely. "You have made yourself abundantly clear. You do not want this. You do not want me. Fine."
"That is not what I said—"
"It is exactly what you said." You stepped back now, putting distance between you, and he felt the loss of it like a physical ache. "You said it was a mistake. That it cannot happen again. That it is better this way. I heard you perfectly."
His chest felt tight. His throat burned. "I am trying to do what is right—"
"No." You cut him off with a sharp shake of your head. "You are trying to do what is safe. There is a difference."
He watched you draw yourself up. Watched you wipe at your cheeks with quick, angry movements. Watched you transform before his eyes into something cold and distant and nothing like the woman who had smiled at him in the moonlight two nights ago.
"You want to pretend it meant nothing?" Your voice was like steel now. "Fine. We can pretend. We can go back to being perfectly civil strangers who happen to share a social circle."
"That is not—"
"No more dances," you continued, speaking over him. "No more private conversations. No more—" Your voice caught slightly, but you pushed through. "No more anything. We will be polite when forced into proximity by our families' friendship. But that is all."
"You are being—"
"What?" Your eyes flashed. "Reasonable? Practical? I learned from the best, after all."
The barb landed precisely where you had intended it. He flinched.
"I am merely trying to—"
"I do not care what you are trying to do," you said flatly. "I do not care about your noble intentions or your self-sacrificing reasoning. You have made your position clear. So allow me to make mine equally clear: we are done."
The words hit him like a physical blow. Done. As if there had been something to be done with. As if you were ending something that had barely begun.
"If that is what you wish," he heard himself say, even though every part of him was screaming to take it back. To tell you the truth. To be honest for once in his gods-damned life.
"It is." Your chin lifted in that way it did when you were hurt but determined not to show it. "Believe me, Mr. Eom, it is absolutely what I wish."
Mr. Eom. Not Seonghyeon. The formality of it was like a door slamming shut. He should have felt relieved. This was what he wanted, was it not? Distance which translated to safety. No risk of loss because there was nothing to lose.
Instead, he felt like he was being hollowed out from the inside.
"Very well," he managed. His voice sounded strange to his own ears. Distant. "I apologize for—for any misunderstanding. It will not happen again."
"No," you agreed quietly. "It will not."
You both stood there for a moment longer. Him lingering near the door, you by the window. A room between you that might as well have been an ocean.
He wanted to cross it. He wanted to close the distance and take back every word. He yearned to pull you close and tell you that you were right, he was a coward! He was terrified, yes, but he wanted you anyway.
Instead, he bowed—stiffly. So disgustingly formally.
"I should—the others will be returning soon. I should go."
"Yes," you said, turning to face the window. Away from him. "You should."
He made it to the door before the words burst out of him, unbidden and entirely without permission from his rational mind. He dared and turned to face you again.
"For what it is worth—"
"Do not." You did not turn around. He stared at the beautiful frame of your back that he had learned to memorize over the past few years of you having it towards him. "Please. Just go."
So he did.
He walked out of the drawing room on legs that felt unsteady. Down the corridor. Past the entrance hall where voices echoed—his mother, your mother, Eunji, your sisters, all still occupied with whatever pretense they had manufactured.
Seonghyeon walked out of Edwards Hall and into the afternoon sun, and with every step, he told himself he had done the right thing.
The safe thing... the thing that would protect you both from inevitable pain.
He told himself this all the way home. He told himself through dinner, through the evening, through another sleepless night where all he could see was the devastation on your face.
He told himself he had made the right choice. He told himself it would get easier. He told himself a lot of things.
None of which were true.
𝑰𝑰.
You cried.
You hated yourself for it, but you cried anyway. Great heaving sobs that you muffled into your pillow so no one would hear. So no one would know that Eom Seonghyeon had broken your heart twice now, and you had been foolish enough to let him.
"It was a mistake."
"It cannot happen again."
"We are done."
The words played on repeat in your mind, each iteration cutting deeper than the last.
A soft knock at your door. Then Wonyoung's voice: "Can I come in?"
You did not answer, but she came in anyway. Your youngest sister had always been too perceptive for her own good. She took one look at you—at your tear-stained cheeks, at the way you had curled yourself small against your headboard—and said nothing at first. Simply crossed the room and climbed onto the bed beside you, tucking herself against your side the way she used to when she was very small and frightened of thunderstorms.
You let her. You were too tired to pretend.
"He is an idiot," she said finally, into the quiet.
Despite everything, you almost laughed. "You do not even know what happened."
"I know you went into the drawing room fine and came out looking like your world had ended." Wonyoung pulled her knees to her chest, her expression far too wise for sixteen. "And I know Seonghyeon Eom left looking like he wanted to throw himself into the Thames. So unless I am very much mistaken, he said something monumentally stupid."
"He said several monumentally stupid things," you admitted, your voice hoarse. "In a row. With great conviction."
Wonyoung made a sound of deep disapproval. "Typical."
"It is not—" You stopped. Swallowed. "It is not entirely his fault. He is frightened. I understand that. I simply—" Your throat tightened. "I am so tired of understanding it. Of making excuses for him. Of waiting."
Your sister was quiet for a moment, studying you with those dark, careful eyes that had always seen more than anyone gave her credit for. She had always been like that. Even as a child, Wonyoung had possessed an uncanny ability to read the room, to feel the currents beneath the surface of things. It had made her seem younger than she was, somehow, that quietness. People often mistook stillness for ignorance.
"Do you love him?" she asked.
The question hung in the air between you. Plain and incredibly devastating. You had never said it aloud. You had barely admitted it to yourself in the dark hours when sleep would not come and your mind circled back to him like water finding its inevitable course.
"It does not matter," you concluded finally.
"That is not what I asked."
You closed your eyes. Behind them, you saw the terrace. The moonlight hitting the sharpness of his features. His hand cradling your jaw with a tenderness that had undone two years of careful distance in a single moment. The way he had looked at you—like you were something precious. Like you were something he was terrified of wanting.
"Yes," you whispered. "God help me, yes. I love him. And he—" Your voice broke cleanly. "He does not want me."
"I do not believe that for a single second."
"You did not see his face, Wonyoung. You did not hear him." You opened your eyes, and the ceiling swam slightly. "He pushed me away. Again. And I—" You pressed the back of your hand to your mouth for a moment, steadying yourself. "I cannot keep doing this. I cannot keep putting myself in front of someone who only knows how to walk away."
Wonyoung reached over and took your hand in both of hers. Her grip was firm and warm and achingly familiar. "Then we shall find you someone who stays."
You wanted to argue. You wanted to say that you did not want someone who stayed in theory, that you wanted him specifically, that your heart was not the kind of thing that could be redirected like water in a channel. That loving Eom Seonghyeon had not been a choice so much as a slow, inevitable accumulation of years and moments and the particular way he looked at you when he thought you were not watching.
But you were tired. So very tired.
"Yes," you heard yourself say instead, squeezing her hand back. "We shall."
Wonyoung rested her head on your shoulder, and you both sat like that in the dimming afternoon light. Neither of you spoke for a long while. Outside, you could hear the distant sounds of the house settling into evening—your brothers' voices somewhere below, the clatter of the kitchen, the world continuing on with perfect indifference to the fact that your heart had been broken rather thoroughly this afternoon.
"For what it is worth," Wonyoung said eventually, very quietly, "I think he loves you too. I think he is simply the worst kind of fool about it."
You did not respond to that, you could not afford to.
But you thought about it long after your sister had gone, long after the candles had burned low and the house had fallen silent. You thought about it, and you hated yourself a little for the way it made your chest ache with this familiar feeling that had been clinging to you since you started whatever this was with the fresh Lord of Eom house that felt dangerously like hope.
You could not afford hope either.
Not anymore.
𝑰𝑰𝑰.
Three days later, disaster struck in the form of Lady Whistledown's Society Papers.
You were at breakfast—your second cup of tea going cold beside you, staring at nothing in particular—when Wonhee swept in with the energy of someone who had slept perfectly and found the morning entirely delightful. She dropped into the chair beside you, reached across to steal a piece of your toast without asking, and unfolded the scandal sheet with the reverence of someone opening scripture.
"Do not," you said flatly.
"I have not done anything yet."
"You have that look."
Wonhee ignored you entirely. Across the table, Martin wandered in looking half-asleep, hair still a bit disheveled, followed by Juhoon who was already dressed and composed in the way that perpetually made the rest of you feel vaguely inadequate. James arrived last, poured his coffee in silence, and settled at the head of the table with the bearing of a man who had also not slept particularly well.
Nobody commented on it. The Edwards family had learned, over many years of living in close proximity, when to push and when to simply pour more tea.
"Oh," Wonhee exclaimed in her seat.
Something in her voice made you look up.
"What?" Martin reached across to steal a corner of Juhoon's toast without looking. Juhoon moved it precisely two inches to the left without acknowledging him.
"Whistledown." Wonhee's eyes cut to you briefly, and then she straightened in her chair. "She has written about our family."
The table went very still.
"Read it," James beckoned, his voice even as he continued to slice on his plate.
Wonhee cleared her throat.
"Dearest Gentle Reader,
This Author has observed a great many things in her considerable tenure documenting the social machinations of London's finest families, but she confesses a particular delight in identifying those rare individuals who manage to captivate the ton without appearing to try. Such a creature has emerged this season in the form of the eldest Miss Edwards.
The daughter of the late Viscount Edwards—a gentleman whose absence is still felt most keenly in certain circles—Miss Edwards possesses what this Author can only describe as an unfair combination of attributes. Wit sharp enough to draw blood, beauty that requires no artifice to recommend it, and a dowry substantial enough to make even the most discerning fortune hunter weep with longing.
Though she entered society two years prior, it seems the gentlemen of the ton have only just taken notice of her particular charms—and taken notice they most certainly have. Several gentlemen of considerable standing have expressed interest, though this Author understands that no formal courtship has yet been established. One wonders if the eldest Miss Edwards is simply unbothered, or if she is waiting for something—or someone—rather more specific.
Either way, this Author suspects the coming weeks will prove most illuminating. Place your bets, dear Reader. This Author certainly has.
Yours in devoted observation, Lady Whistledown."
Silence from your family.
Then Martin said, with great feeling: "She called your dowry substantial."
"Thank you, Martin," you said. "That is precisely what I took from it as well."
"I think it is rather flattering," Wonhee offered, watching your face carefully. "She called you captivating."
"She implied I am waiting for someone specific," you corrected flatly. "In print. For all of London to read."
"Are you not?" Juhoon asked, very quietly, without looking up from his plate.
You had nothing to say to that. Thankfully, you did not have to say anything, because your mother chose that moment to arrive at the table with the bright, purposeful energy of a woman who had already read the column and formed several opinions about it.
"Well!" She settled into her chair and looked at you with an expression of supreme satisfaction. "It seems Lady Whistledown has done us rather a favor."
"Has she," you said.
"She has brought you to the ton's attention in the most favorable terms possible. Now we must be strategic." She reached for her teacup, her eyes already distant with scheming. "James, we must think carefully about the coming weeks. There will be more callers now, I expect. We should be selective."
"I am always selective," James said mildly.
"You have been passive," your mother corrected, with the gentle precision of a woman who loved her son and would not flatter him unnecessarily. "There is a difference. You have not turned anyone away, but you have not encouraged anyone either. That was perhaps reasonable when there was no urgency—but Whistledown has rather changed the landscape."
James looked at you over the rim of his coffee cup. Something unspoken passed between you.
"I am aware," he said finally.
"Several gentlemen showed interest at the Eom ball," Martin offered helpfully. He was grinning in a way that suggested he was enjoying this more than was strictly brotherly. "Hartwell. Beaumont. That fellow from Derbyshire whose name I cannot remember."
"Pemberton's nephew," Juhoon supplied.
"Not Pemberton's nephew," you and James said simultaneously.
Martin raised his hands in surrender.
"The point," your mother continued serenely, "is that we should be thoughtful. We want someone worthy. Someone established. Someone who will—" She paused, a new thought clearly occurring to her, and turned with bright eyes toward Wonhee. "Oh, Wonhee darling, won't you ask dear Eunji if her brother has any prospect ideas for your eldest sister? He must know several eligible gentlemen, and we do so value the Eom family's judgment."
You choked on your tea.
Actually choked. Coughed and sputtered with considerable violence, felt your eyes water, pressed the back of your hand to your mouth while the table erupted into varying degrees of concern and poorly concealed amusement.
"Are you quite alright?" James half-rose from his seat.
"Fine," you managed, voice entirely destroyed. "Just—went down wrong."
"Clearly," Martin said, and had the audacity to look amused.
Wonyoung, from across the table, was watching you with entirely too much understanding in her expression. When you met her eyes, you saw it there plainly—the knowledge, the sympathy, and beneath it, the very faintest flicker of mischief.
"What a lovely idea," she said sweetly, her voice perfectly innocent. "I am certain Mr. Eom would have excellent suggestions. He is so very—" a delicate pause that only you would understand the weight of— "discerning."
You were going to have words with your youngest sister. At length.
"Yes, quite," your mother agreed, entirely oblivious to the undercurrents running beneath her breakfast table. "The Eom family has such good sense. And Eunji is your dearest friend—surely she would want to help see you well-matched."
The irony of it was genuinely staggering.
Eunji. Your best friend. Whose brother you were hopelessly, devastatingly in love with. Whose brother had broken your heart not three days ago in your own drawing room. Whose brother was now being cheerfully volunteered by your mother to assist in finding you a husband.
As though Eom Seonghyeon's opinion on the matter of your romantic future was something you could survive hearing.
"I am certain Eunji will have many suggestions," you said, weakly, reaching for your tea again with a hand you hoped no one was watching too closely.
"Settled then!" Your mother beamed. "Wonhee, you must—"
"Actually." You interrupted perhaps slightly too quickly, and every head at the table turned toward you. You collected yourself. "I believe Eunji mentioned she intended to call today. Something about returning a book I lent her. I can ask her myself."
A lie. A complete and total fabrication. But you could not—would not—sit by while Wonhee innocently asked Seonghyeon Eom for husband recommendations on your behalf. The mortification of it would be genuinely fatal.
"How convenient," your mother said, pleased. "Yes, do ask her, darling."
You nodded and took a careful, measured sip of tea, and prayed with considerable feeling for the conversation to move elsewhere.
It did not.
"Lord Hartwell seemed promising," Martin offered, apparently committed to this particular form of torture.
"Too eager," James said.
"Eager is not necessarily—"
"He asked me twice if you had expressed any preference regarding the country versus the city for a primary residence." James's tone was dry as dust. "Before he had been introduced to you."
"That is—" you started.
"Alarming," Juhoon finished quietly.
"Borderline alarming," James agreed.
Martin subsided. Juhoon returned to his breakfast. Your mother began a detailed analysis of the eligible gentlemen currently in London that you absorbed approximately none of, because you were sitting very still and thinking about the fact that three days ago you had told Eom Seonghyeon you were done, and meant it, and were now being served your future husband for consideration over toast and cold tea.
This was fine. This was entirely fine.
"You do not have to pretend," Wonyoung said, very quietly, under the cover of Martin and James resuming their debate about Lord Hartwell's various merits and deficiencies.
"I am not pretending anything."
"You have been staring at the same spot on the tablecloth for four minutes."
You looked up and met her eyes. She looked back at you with that expression she had worn last night too. It was this one that was somehow both sixteen and a thousand years old.
"I am fine," you told her.
"You are not," she scolded simply. "But you will be." A pause. "We will make sure of it."
You said nothing. You could not trust your voice with anything more than the silence you offered her, which she accepted without pressing further.
Across the table, James caught your eye over the rim of his coffee cup. He did not say anything either. His narrow eyes simply looked at you for a long moment—and in it you recognized something that might have been an apology, or a question, or simply the particular brand of helpless concern that older siblings carried for each other in quiet moments.
You gave him the smallest nod. I am alright.
He nodded back. If you say so.
Outside, London was waking up. Somewhere across the city, Lady Whistledown's column was being read at a hundred breakfast tables, and the ton was forming opinions about the eldest Miss Edwards and her matrimonial prospects and what fortunate soul might succeed where others had not yet tried.
You wondered, briefly, whether Seonghyeon was reading it. You wondered what his face looked like when he did.
Then you picked up your cup, drank your cold tea, and resolved very firmly to stop wondering about Eom Seonghyeon's face entirely. You resolved this with great conviction.
It lasted approximately four minutes.
𝑰𝑽.
Seonghyeon was going to murder his sister.
Not literally, of course. He was not that far gone. But the thought had crossed his mind approximately seventeen times in the past hour alone, which seemed like a reasonable enough foundation for at least considering justifiable homicide.
"—and I do think the embroidery on the sleeve is what truly elevates the design, do not you agree, Mr. Eom?"
He blinked and refocused on Miss Hartwell, who was looking at him with an expression of patient expectation. She had been talking for—he checked the position of the sun against the oak trees—approximately fifteen minutes about needlework. Or possibly fashion. The two topics had blurred together somewhere around the ten-minute mark, at which point Seonghyeon had made the executive decision to simply nod at appropriate intervals while his attention remained fixed on far more pressing matters.
Matters which were currently standing near the refreshment table in a gown of pale yellow muslin that made you look like concentrated sunlight.
"Indeed," he said to Miss Hartwell, because it seemed safe.
"I am so pleased you think so!" Miss Hartwell brightened considerably. "I was telling Mama just yesterday that—"
Seonghyeon made what he hoped was an encouraging sound and let his gaze drift back across the Ashford gardens.
It was a perfect afternoon for a garden party, objectively speaking. The May sun was warm but not oppressive, filtered through the new leaves of the old oaks that lined the sweeping lawn. The Ashfords had gone to considerable effort—tables laden with refreshments, musicians tucked beneath a canvas pavilion playing something light and inoffensive, enough seating scattered throughout the grounds that the guests could cluster in whatever groupings best suited their social machinations.
Under normal circumstances, Seonghyeon might have even enjoyed it. The Ashfords were pleasant enough hosts, their gardens were genuinely lovely, and the weather was cooperating with unusual grace.
But these were not normal circumstances.
These were circumstances in which he had spent the past week attempting and failing spectacularly to stop thinking about you. Circumstances in which he had not slept properly in eight days. Circumstances in which his sister had ambushed him at breakfast this morning with information so mortifying he had genuinely considered fleeing to the country and never returning.
"I had the most interesting conversation with Wonhee Edwards yesterday," Eunji had hummed, setting down her chocolate with the careful precision of someone delivering a killing blow.
Seonghyeon had not looked up from his coffee. "How delightful for you."
"She asked if I might inquire whether you had any prospect suggestions for her eldest sister."
His hand had frozen halfway to his mouth. Coffee had sloshed over the rim of his cup. He had stared at his sister with what he could only imagine was an expression of complete and utter horror.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Prospect suggestions," Eunji had repeated, her eyes gleaming with something that looked suspiciously like vindictive satisfaction. "For matrimonial purposes. Apparently Lady Whistledown's column has generated quite a bit of interest in her, and the family is being strategic about potential matches."
Seonghyeon had set down his cup before he dropped it. "And they asked you to—"
"Ask you, yes. For your opinion on eligible gentlemen who might be suitable for your—" a delicate pause "—dearest sister's dearest friend."
The irony of it had been genuinely staggering.
You. The girl he had pushed away one week ago in your own drawing room. The girl whose face he saw every time he closed his eyes. The girl he was desperately, devastatingly in love with and too much of a coward to do anything about it.
And now your family wanted his recommendations for your future husband.
"What did you tell them?" he had managed.
"That I would ask you, of course." Eunji had smiled sweetly. "What else would I say?"
"You could have said no."
"I could have," she had agreed. "But where would be the fun in that?"
He had seriously considered disowning her on the spot.
Now, standing in the Ashford gardens with Miss Hartwell chattering beside him about sleeve embroidery or whatever it was, Seonghyeon found himself replaying that conversation with increasing levels of mortification. Your family wanted him to help find you a husband. As if he were some neutral third party with no personal investment in the matter. As if he had not nearly kissed you on a moonlit terrace. As if he had not cupped your face in his palm and felt the exact moment you had stopped breathing.
As if he were not currently tracking your every movement across a garden party while pretending to care about needlework.
You were still by the refreshment table, he noted. Still in that yellow gown that he absolutely was not thinking about. Still surrounded by—he counted quickly—three gentlemen now, down from four. Lord Rathord had apparently given up and wandered off, which showed some measure of good sense.
The remaining three were less wise. Or perhaps more persistent. Seonghyeon watched Lord Beaumont say something that made you smile politely, the same smile you gave everyone, the one that did not reach your eyes.
His throat felt tight. He swallowed and refocused on Miss Hartwell, who had apparently moved on from embroidery to—gardens? Yes, gardens. She was gesturing enthusiastically toward a rose bush.
"—and the Ashfords really have done wonders with the landscaping this year, have they not?"
"Quite," Seonghyeon agreed. He had absolutely no idea what the Ashford gardens had looked like last year. He had not attended their garden party last year.
He had been in mourning. Everything had been different last year.
His gaze drifted back to you automatically, pulled by some gravitational force he had long since stopped trying to resist. You had moved slightly, he noted. Closer to the table. Lord Beaumont was still talking. You were nodding, but your attention had drifted toward—
Seonghyeon's eyes narrowed. What were you looking at?
He followed your line of sight and felt something uncomfortable twist in his chest. You were watching the musicians. Or rather, you were watching the space beyond the musicians, where the lawn sloped down toward the pond and the willow trees created these pockets of shade that looked like they had been designed specifically for private conversations.
Were you thinking about leaving? About escaping?
He would not blame you. The circling gentlemen were relentless, and you looked... tired, he realized. There was something in the set of your shoulders, the careful neutrality of your expression, that spoke of someone who had been performing for too long.
He knew that feeling intimately.
"Mr. Eom?" Miss Hartwell's voice pulled him back. "Are you quite alright? You seem distracted."
"Forgive me," he apologized immediately, forcing his attention back to her. "I am afraid I have rather a headache coming on."
It was not entirely a lie. His head did ache, though he suspected it had less to do with the sun and more to do with the fact that he had not slept in over a week.
"Oh, how dreadful!" Miss Hartwell's expression transformed into something like genuine concern. "Perhaps you should sit down? There is a lovely bench just over—"
"I am fine, I assure you," Seonghyeon interrupted, perhaps too quickly. "Merely need a moment. Would you excuse me?"
He did not wait for her response. Simply bowed, murmured something about fetching refreshment, and extracted himself from the conversation with the practiced efficiency of someone who had spent years navigating social obligations he would rather avoid.
Free of Miss Hartwell, he moved toward the refreshment table with the vague pretense of actually getting something to drink. In reality, he was simply recalibrating. Finding you in the crowd again. Making sure you were—
You were gone.
Seonghyeon stopped mid-stride, his chest tightening with a feeling akin to one that felt uncomfortably like panic. The spot where you had been standing was now occupied by Lady Pemberton and her niece, both of whom were examining the lemonade with far more attention than it warranted. The three gentlemen who had been circling you had dispersed—Lord Beaumont was now talking to the Brook sisters, the others had vanished entirely.
But you. You were nowhere.
His gaze swept the garden with increasing urgency. Past the musicians, past the refreshment tables, past the clusters of guests arranged in careful social groupings across the lawn. He cataloged faces with the efficiency of someone who had been doing this all afternoon—Miss Ashford, Lord Hartwell, the Beaumont family, half a dozen others whose names he could not immediately recall—
There. The Edwards family.
He spotted Martin first, because Martin Edwards was difficult to miss, what with his striking blonde hair and height for days. Seonghyeon often found himself wishing the boy would spare some inches to him. He was standing near the rose arbor with—Seonghyeon squinted slightly—the Ashford twins, apparently. And he was gesturing with the kind of wild enthusiasm that suggested he was telling a story that probably should not be told in polite company. The twins were laughing, and one of them had her hand pressed to her mouth as if trying to contain herself.
Beside Martin, Juhoon stood with his characteristic quiet composure, hands clasped behind his back, contributing the occasional word but mostly just watching his brother with an expression that managed to convey both affection and mild exasperation. The twins seemed utterly charmed by both of them, which was—well. Typical. The Edwards brothers had always possessed this effortless charisma that Seonghyeon had never quite understood how to replicate.
He scanned the rest of the garden. Wonhee was near the musicians with Eunji, both of them bent over what looked like a program, probably discussing whatever piece the ensemble planned to play next. Wonyoung was—he searched for a moment—there, sitting on a bench beneath one of the oaks with a book open in her lap, apparently having decided that social interaction was optional.
Everyone accounted for except...
His heart stopped. There you were.
Near the far edge of the lawn, where the gardens opened up toward the walking paths that wound through the more wooded sections of the Ashford estate. The afternoon light filtered through the oak leaves in a way that turned everything golden and soft, like the world had been dipped in honey.
And somehow, impossibly, you managed to look like you belonged to that light. Like you had been created specifically for this exact moment in this exact garden with the sun catching in your hair and turning it to silk.
James Edwards stood perhaps three feet to your right, the very picture of a responsible older brother fulfilling his chaperoning duties. His posture was relaxed but attentive. His attention was split between you and the broader garden, clearly keeping watch in that way protective siblings did at social gatherings.
But James was not the problem.
The problem was the boy standing directly in front of you.
Seonghyeon's breath caught—properly caught, the way it did when you took a blow to the chest and your lungs forgot momentarily how to function. Because you were not wearing yellow. How had he thought you were wearing yellow? The gown was pink. Pale pink, the exact shade of the wild roses that climbed the garden walls behind you, the ones that had just begun to bloom in these past weeks of unseasonably warm weather. The same roses his father had planted when Seonghyeon was a boy, the ones that came back every spring without fail, persistent and lovely and entirely unbothered by the passage of time.
The same roses you used to tuck behind your ear when you were twelve and thought no one was watching.
The fabric moved when you did. It was some whisper-light muslin that caught the breeze and made you look almost ethereal, like if he blinked you might disappear entirely. Like you were something he had conjured from want and memory and two years of desperate denial finally taking physical form to torment him.
The sun loved you. That was the only way to describe it. It found every angle of your face, traced the line of your jaw, caught in the few strands of dark hair that had escaped their pins to curl against your temple. You were backlit in gold, completely haloed in it, and the pink of your gown made your skin look luminous—like porcelain, like something precious and breakable that should be kept behind glass where careless hands could not reach it.
But someone was reaching.
The boy standing in front of you was tall—nearly Seonghyeon's height, maybe taller unfortunately, which meant you had to tilt your head back slightly to meet his eyes. Well-dressed in a way that suggested money but not ostentation, all clean lines and understated elegance. Dark hair, good posture, and a face that Seonghyeon could not quite make out from this distance but suspected—knew—was probably handsome.
Of course it was handsome. Of course you were standing in a garden surrounded by roses that matched your dress, bathed in golden light like some sort of painting, talking to a man who looked like he had stepped out of a fairy story specifically designed to torture Seonghyeon.
And you were smiling at him.
It was completely not the polite, distant smile you had perfected over two years of navigating the marriage mart. Not the one you gave Lord Beaumont and Lord Rathord and every other gentleman who circled you at social gatherings with varying degrees of transparent interest. Not the carefully practiced expression you wore like armor when you were performing the role of the eligible Miss Edwards for an audience that would judge you for any crack in the facade.
No. This was different.
This smile was small. Reserved, even. Your guard was not entirely down—Seonghyeon could see it in the set of your shoulders, the way you held yourself with that particular careful grace that meant you were being cautious. But there was something genuine in the curve of your mouth. A soft emotion in your expression that he had not seen directed at anyone in...
How long?
Weeks? Months?
Not since before his father's funeral, certainly. Not since the last time you had looked at him like he was someone worth smiling for instead of someone to be tolerated for the sake of your friendship with his sister. Not since he had pushed you away and spent two years pretending he did not notice every single time you entered a room, stupidly cataloging the exact shade of whatever you were wearing, the particular way you moved, the sound of your voice even when you were not speaking to him.
Not since he had ruined everything by choosing fear over honesty.
The roses behind you swayed slightly in the breeze. The petals were the exact color of your dress, and Seonghyeon thought about how his father used to say that roses were stubborn things. That they came back every year no matter how harsh the winter, no matter how badly they were pruned, no matter what. They simply refused to give up.
You had been like that once, he thought. Persistent. Refusing to let him retreat entirely even when he built walls. Coming back season after season, year after year, still trying.
Until you stopped. Of course, until he had pushed too hard and you had finally, mercifully, decided you were done with his stubbornness.
His hands flexed at his sides. His throat had gone completely dry despite the lemonade he was still holding in one white-knuckled grip. He ran his tongue across his lower lip and tasted copper—he had been biting the inside of his cheek without realizing it, hard enough to draw blood.
Who was that?
The boy said something. Seonghyeon could not hear it from this distance, could not make out the words, but he watched your reaction with the attention of someone reading text in a language they desperately needed to understand. Your eyes widened slightly. Your lips parted. And then you laughed.
The sound carried across the garden even at this distance, bright and clear as bells, and it hit Seonghyeon like a physical blow. Like someone had reached into his chest and squeezed. He had not heard you laugh like that in so long he had almost convinced himself he had imagined how it sounded. He had almost convinced himself that memory had sweetened it, made it better than reality could possibly sustain. He almost forgot.
No. That was a lie. He had not forgotten. He remembered it with painful clarity. He thought about it late at night when sleep would not come and his mind circled back to you like water finding its inevitable course. He thought about it every time he saw you at social gatherings and you smiled politely and looked through him like he was made of glass.
But no.
It was exactly as he remembered. Low and genuine and entirely too appealing. The kind of laugh that made everyone in its vicinity want to know what had prompted it, want to be the reason for it, want to bottle it up and keep it close.
The kind of laugh he used to pull from you with embarrassing regularity when you were children and everything was simple. When making you laugh was as easy as pulling faces behind your governess's back or deliberately missing your steps during dance practice just to watch you try to correct him while fighting a smile.
When had he stopped trying to make you laugh?
He knew the answer. God, he knew the exact moment. His father's study. Papers he did not understand and responsibilities he was not ready for and you, sitting with him in silence because you somehow knew that words would make it worse. You had not tried to fix it. Had not offered empty platitudes. You had simply been there.
And it had terrified him how much he needed that. How much he needed you.
So he had pushed you away. Built these walls. He retreated behind formality and distance and every defense mechanism he possessed because needing someone that desperately felt like handing them a loaded weapon and hoping they chose not to pull the trigger.
And now you were laughing at something someone else had said, standing in a garden full of roses that matched your dress, and Seonghyeon understood with sudden, devastating clarity that he had handed you that weapon and then walked away before you could decide what to do with it.
He had made the choice for both of you.
And now someone else—someone better, someone braver, someone who apparently knew how to make you laugh without years of shared history to draw from—was standing in the space Seonghyeon had abandoned.
The afternoon light caught in your hair again as you tilted your head, and Seonghyeon watched one of those loose curls brush against your cheek. His fingers twitched with the sense memory of tucking that same curl behind your ear on a moonlit terrace barely two weeks ago. Of feeling your skin warm beneath his palm. That awe of watching your eyes flutter closed for just a moment when he touched you.
Had it only been two weeks?
It felt like a lifetime and yesterday all at once. It felt like something that had happened to someone else entirely because the woman standing in that garden, laughing in pink and gold and rose-petal softness, felt as unreachable as the stars.
And it was his own fault.
Now, he thought about your laugh all the time, and hearing it directed at someone else made him want to do something inadvisable. Like march across the garden and insert himself into whatever conversation you were having. Like demand to know who this man was and what he had said to make you laugh. Like—
"Seonghyeon."
He jumped slightly and turned to find Eunji standing beside him, her expression a careful blend of concern and something that looked suspiciously like I told you so.
"You are staring," she said quietly.
"I am not—"
"You absolutely are. And you look like you are about to do something foolish." She followed his gaze across the lawn, and her expression shifted into something unreadable. "Ah."
"Ah?" Seonghyeon repeated. "What does 'ah' mean?"
"That is Ahn Keonho," Eunji said, and there was something in her voice that made his stomach drop. "He just returned to London. His family estate is in—Derbyshire, I believe? Or perhaps Yorkshire. Somewhere north, at any rate. He has been managing it for his father, but apparently the old man decided it was time for him to rejoin society. Find a wife. That sort of thing."
Seonghyeon's jaw clenched so hard he felt his teeth ache.. "I see."
"He is very nice," Eunji continued, and he could not tell if she was being deliberately cruel or simply stating facts. "Kind. Well-regarded. Reasonably wealthy. Good family. No scandals."
Everything Seonghyeon was not. Everything you deserved.
"How fortunate for him," Seonghyeon managed.
Eunji was quiet for a moment. Then, very softly: "You could simply tell her the truth."
"There is nothing to tell."
"You are such a liar." But her voice was gentle. It was almost pitying, which was somehow worse than if she had been angry. "You love her. Everyone with eyes can see it except apparently you and her."
"It does not matter what I—"
"Of course it matters!" Eunji's voice rose slightly, enough that a few nearby guests glanced over. She lowered it immediately, stepping closer. "It matters more than anything. But you are so determined to martyr yourself on the altar of responsibility and duty that you cannot see what is right in front of you."
"Eunji—"
"She loved you too, you know." Past tense. Loved. As if it were already over. As if he had already lost you though it was merely a few nights ago. "Maybe she still does, I do not know. But you pushed her away, and now she is trying to move on, and you—" She gestured helplessly at him. "You are standing here watching her with another man and doing nothing."
Seonghyeon's throat was so tight he could barely breathe. "What would you have me do?"
"Fight for her!" Eunji's eyes were bright now. Almost angry. "Or let her go. But stop—stop this. Stop hovering. Stop watching her like you are dying while refusing to do anything about it. It is not fair to her, and it is not fair to you."
Before he could respond—before he could even process what she had said—Eunji turned and walked away, leaving him standing there with his heart in his throat and his hands shaking and the sound of your laughter still echoing in his ears.
He looked back across the lawn.
Keonho—because apparently that was his name now, Ahn Keonho, a name Seonghyeon was absolutely going to remember for all the wrong reasons—had said something else. You were smiling again, and James looked pleased in that particular way older brothers did when they approved of someone talking to their sister.
Which meant James approved.
Which meant this was not some casual conversation. This was a courtship beginning. This was you moving on from his foolish tribulations, just as Eunji had said. This was everything Seonghyeon had told himself he wanted when he pushed you away in your drawing room and said it was for the best.
This was what he deserved.
His hands were still shaking. He shoved them into his pockets and made himself turn away. He made himself walk in the opposite direction, toward the refreshment table where he had told Miss Hartwell he was going. He picked up a glass of lemonade he had no intention of drinking.
He forced himself to ignore the way his ears were burning, the way his throat felt like it was closing, the way every part of him was screaming to turn around and cross that lawn and tell Keonho to stay the hell away from you.
But he had no right.
He had given up that right when he chose safety over honesty. When he chose his fear over your heart. When he said it was a mistake and walked away.
He watched Keonho say something that made you tilt your head in that way you did when you were genuinely interested in what someone was saying. He watched James nod approvingly at something—probably whatever perfectly appropriate topic of conversation Keonho had chosen. He watched the afternoon light continue to paint you in gold and rose-petal pink like the universe itself was conspiring to make this moment as devastatingly beautiful as possible.
He stood and watched you be happy.
And the worst part—the absolutely worst part—was that you looked like you were trying. As if you wanted to be interested in whatever Keonho was saying. Like you were actively attempting to move on, to find someone else, to do exactly what Seonghyeon had told you to do when he said it was a mistake and walked away.
This was what he had wanted, was it not?
For you to find someone suitable. Someone kind and stable and brave enough to actually court you properly instead of pushing you away out of fear. Someone who would not break your heart twice in the span of two years. This was exactly what he had told himself he wanted when he chose duty over honesty.
So why did it feel like he was being carved open with a dull blade?
"Mr. Eom?"
He startled badly and turned to find Miss Hartwell had somehow materialized beside him again, her expression one of polite concern.
"Are you quite certain you are well?" she asked. "You have been standing here for some time without moving."
"I am—" His voice came out rough. He cleared his throat. "Yes. Merely lost in thought."
"Perhaps you should sit," she suggested. "The heat can be rather overwhelming."
It was not the heat. But he nodded anyway, let her guide him toward one of the benches beneath the oaks, let her chatter about something he would not remember five minutes from now. But even seated, even with Miss Hartwell providing a wall of sound that required no actual participation from him, Seonghyeon found his gaze drifting back across the garden.
Back to you.
To the roses that matched your dress and the light that loved your face and the man who was making you laugh when Seonghyeon had forgotten how. And he understood, with the kind of clarity that only came from watching something slip through your fingers, that Eunji had been right.
He was losing you.
It wasn't immediate, thank god. But slowly, inevitably, like water finding its course downhill. You were moving on. Building a life that did not include him and his antics. Finding happiness with someone who had not spent two years proving that he was too afraid to choose you.
This was the consequence of cowardice. This was what safety cost.
And Seonghyeon sat there in the dappled shade, surrounded by the sounds of a perfect garden party, and told himself this was fine. So he stood there, lemonade untouched in his hand, and told himself this was fine. This was what he had wanted.
You deserved so much better than what Seonghyeon had given you.
He told himself this with great conviction. He told himself a lot of things to aid in his delusion, to stay sane.
And again and again, he failed to believe himself.
You had not intended to laugh.
Truly, you had not. You had come to the Ashford garden party with every intention of remaining politely pleasant but ultimately distant from any gentleman who approached. You had armed yourself with appropriate responses, perfected your smile, prepared yourself for another afternoon of deflecting interest you had no desire to return.
And then Ahn Keonho had introduced himself, and all your careful preparations had promptly deserted you.
"Miss Edwards," he had greeted, bowing with exactly the right degree of formality. "Forgive the presumption, but I believe we have a mutual acquaintance. Lady Ashford suggested I introduce myself."
You had looked at him properly then. Tall—nearly as tall as—
No. You were not going to think about him. You had promised yourself you were done thinking about Eom Seonghyeon, and you meant it.
Keonho was handsome in an understated way. Dark hair, kind eyes, a smile that seemed genuine rather than calculated. Well-dressed without being ostentatious. The sort of person your mother would call "suitable" and mean it as the highest compliment. You were sure your brother was salivating in his boots next to you at the sight of such a proper gentleman.
"A mutual acquaintance?" you had asked, because it seemed the appropriate response.
"Lord Beaumont's sister," Keonho had said. "We grew up together in Derbyshire. She mentioned you had a rather cutting response to her brother's... persistent attentions at the Eom ball last week."
Despite yourself, you had felt your lips twitch. "Did she."
"She said you told him that if he asked you to dance one more time, you would be forced to develop a sudden and dramatic illness that would require you to spend the remainder of the season in the country."
"I may have said something along those lines," you had admitted.
"I have never heard my friend laugh quite so hard," Keonho had said, and his smile had widened. "Her brother is—well. He means well, but subtlety has never been his strength."
"That is a remarkably diplomatic way of saying he has the self-awareness of a particularly determined terrier."
And that was when you had made the mistake of laughing.
Because it had been... unexpected. Refreshing, even. Most gentlemen who approached you at social gatherings did so with the careful calculation of someone making a business transaction. They asked appropriate questions, made appropriate observations, and maintained an appropriate level of interest that somehow managed to feel both overwhelming and completely impersonal.
Keonho was different.
He was easy to talk to, you discovered. He did not hover. He did not position himself between you and potential escape routes. Did not look at you like you were a prize to be won or a problem to be solved.
He simply—spoke. He asked questions that seemed genuinely interested rather than socially mandated. He listened when you answered. He made observations that were actually clever rather than trying desperately to appear so.
"I understand congratulations are in order," he had said after a few minutes of surprisingly pleasant conversation. "Lady Whistledown's column was quite complimentary."
You had felt heat creep into your cheeks. "Lady Whistledown has a remarkable talent for making observations that are simultaneously flattering and deeply mortifying."
"I cannot imagine being scrutinized by all of London," Keonho had said, and there was sympathy in his voice. "Though if I may—she was not wrong. About... any of it."
It should have felt like flattery. Like every other compliment you had received in the past week from gentlemen who had suddenly noticed you existed. But something about the way he said it—straightforward, matter-of-fact—made it feel less like he was trying to curry favor and more like he was simply stating an observable truth.
"You are very kind," you had said, because it seemed the only appropriate response.
"I am honest," Keonho had corrected gently. "There is a difference."
From the corner of your eye, you had been aware of James positioning himself slightly closer. Not intrusively so, but near enough that any onlooker would understand you were properly chaperoned. Near enough that James could hear every word of the conversation and form his own opinions.
You suspected he was forming favorable ones.
"Have you been in London long, Mr. Ahn?" James had asked, entering the conversation with the practiced ease of someone who took his responsibilities as head of household seriously.
"Only recently returned," Keonho had said, turning to address James directly. "I have been managing my family's estate in Derbyshire for the past several years. My father felt it was time I—" A slight hesitation, a rueful smile. "Rejoin society, as it were."
"Find a wife, you mean," you had said, because apparently you had decided that directness was the approach you would be taking with Ahn Keonho.
He had laughed and it was surprised and genuine. "Yes. That was the implication, though my father was rather more diplomatic in his phrasing."
"And have you?" you had asked. "Found one?"
"I have been in London for all of three days," Keonho had said, eyes bright with amusement. "My father is ambitious, but even he does not expect miracles of that magnitude."
It should not have been charming. Really, it should not have. But somehow—impossibly—you found yourself smiling. Found yourself relaxing in a way you had not at a social gathering in longer than you cared to admit.
You found yourself thinking that perhaps, just perhaps, moving on might not be as impossible as you had feared.
"Miss Edwards," Keonho had said after a few more minutes of conversation that had somehow remained interesting despite covering thoroughly conventional topics. "I wonder if I might—that is, would it be terribly presumptuous to call upon you? At Edwards Hall?"
You had glanced at James, who had given the smallest nod. Permission, or perhaps encouragement.
"I do not think that would be terribly presumptuous at all," you had heard yourself say.
The smile Keonho had given you then had been warm. It was genuinely pleased in a way that suggested he had not been entirely certain of your answer.
"Tomorrow afternoon, perhaps?" he had asked. "If that would be convenient?"
"Tomorrow would be lovely."
And that, apparently, was that.
Ahn Keonho had bowed—to you, to James—and made his excuses with the same easy grace he had demonstrated throughout the entire conversation. You had watched him walk away, had felt something in your chest that might have been hope or might have been relief or might have simply been the absence of the constant ache that had taken up residence there since Seonghyeon had walked out of your drawing room one week ago.
"He seems pleasant," James had observed, in that carefully neutral tone that meant he approved but would not pressure you.
"He does," you agreed, pursing your lips together in a small attempt to fight a smile.
"Shall I expect him tomorrow, then?"
"It would appear so."
James had been quiet for a moment, studying you with that particular expression older brothers developed—this one that saw too much and said too little.
"You do not have to," he had said finally. "If you are not ready—"
"I am ready," you had interrupted, perhaps too quickly. "I am—it is time. To move forward."
James had not argued. He had simply nodded and offered you his arm, and together you had made your way back toward where your siblings were clustered near the musicians. And if you had felt eyes on you from across the garden—if you had been acutely, painfully aware of exactly where Eom Seonghyeon was standing even though you had not looked directly at him once since you arrived—well.
That was something you would simply have to learn to ignore and avoid the urge to further engage. Because that was not welcome anymore.
Just as you would learn to ignore the way your chest had tightened when Keonho smiled at you, because it was not the right smile. Just as you would learn to ignore the way his laugh had sounded pleasant but wrong, because it was not the laugh you had spent two years listening for across crowded ballrooms. Just as you would learn to stop comparing every man you met to someone who had made it abundantly clear he did not want you.
You would learn. You had to.
Because Eom Seonghyeon had made his choice, and now it was time for you to make yours. Even if your choice looked nothing like what you had imagined. Even if it felt like settling for something safe when what you wanted was entirely different. Even if every part of you was screaming that this was wrong, this was not what you wanted, this was not—
You told that part of yourself to be quiet. You told yourself that Keonho was kind and genuine and exactly the sort of person you should want.
You told yourself a lot of things.
And if none of them made the ache in your chest any less pronounced—well.
You would simply have to learn to live with that too.
𝑽𝑰.
Ahn Keonho arrived at Edwards Hall at precisely three o'clock in the afternoon, which was the correct time for a social call. He brought flowers—pale pink roses that matched the gown you had worn yesterday, which to you, suggested either remarkable memory or careful planning. He was dressed impeccably in a dark blue fabric, his manners were flawless, and when your mother invited him to sit in the drawing room, he did so with the exact appropriate degree of comfort that suggested confidence without presumption.
He was, in every measurable way, perfect.
You hated how much that bothered you.
"Mr. Ahn," your mother said warmly, settling into her chair with the air of a woman who had already decided she approved. "How kind of you to call. I understand you have recently returned to London?"
"Yes, my lady," Keonho replied. "I have been managing my family's estate in Derbyshire for the past several years, but my father felt it was time I—" That same slight hesitation you had noticed yesterday, followed by a self-deprecating smile. "Reconnected with society."
"How very sensible," your mother said. "And your family—they are well?"
"Very well, thank you. My father's health has improved considerably since I took over the daily management of the estate, which has allowed him to enjoy his retirement without the burden of constant decision-making."
It was exactly the right answer. Dutiful son, responsible, capable of managing an estate, devoted to family. Your mother was practically glowing.
From his position near the window, James was doing an admirable job of appearing relaxed while clearly cataloging every word Keonho said. Martin had wandered in halfway through the introductions and taken up residence on the settee beside you with the air of someone who had decided this was going to be entertaining. Juhoon had claimed the chair nearest the door, book in hand, ostensibly reading but you knew for a fact he was paying attention to every word.
Your brothers had deployed in formation. This was an assessment.
"And what brings you to London specifically, Mr. Ahn?" James asked, his tone perfectly pleasant and absolutely calculating.
"Several things," Keonho answered easily. "Estate business, primarily. Some investments that required personal attention. And—" He glanced at you briefly, warmth in his expression. "The season, of course. My father was quite insistent that I make an effort to—engage with society."
"Find a wife," Martin supplied helpfully. "You can say it. We are all aware that is what 'engage with society' means for gentlemen of a certain age."
"Martin," you scolded warningly.
"What? I am merely being honest. Mr. Ahn seems like the sort of person who appreciates directness." Martin turned to Keonho with interest. "You do appreciate directness, do you not?"
"I do, actually," Keonho chuckled, and you could hear the smile in his voice. "And yes. My father believes it is time I married. He has been—insistent on the matter."
"How very paternal of him," Martin said. "And have you? Found anyone suitable?"
"I have been in London for four days," Keonho said dryly. "Hardly sufficient time for such an important decision."
"Some people decide rather quickly," Martin said, and you had the distinct impression he was enjoying himself far too much. "Love at first sight and all that."
"Martin," James said, in a tone that suggested their younger brother was dangerously close to being ejected from the drawing room.
But Keonho was laughing. "I confess I have always been somewhat skeptical of that particular concept. Love at first sight seems rather—impractical. How can one know someone well enough to love them based solely on appearance?"
"How indeed," you murmured, and tried to ignore the way something in your chest twisted painfully.
Because that was the sensible answer. The rational answer. Love was not something that happened instantaneously. It was built over time, through shared experience and genuine understanding and all the things that could not possibly exist in a single glance across a ballroom.
Except you had been half in love with Eom Seonghyeon since you were twelve years old, which rather definitively disproved that entire theory.
"Miss Edwards?" Keonho was looking at you with polite inquiry. "Forgive me, I fear I have lost you."
"No, I—" You collected yourself. "I merely agree. Love at first sight seems rather—unlikely."
"Though not impossible?" Keonho asked, and there was something curious in his expression.
"I suppose anything is possible," you said carefully. "But it does seem impractical to base such an important decision on something as ephemeral as initial attraction."
"Precisely," Keonho said, looking pleased. "Marriage is—it should be built on something more substantial. Mutual respect and shared values. Genuine compatibility and whatnot."
Everything he was saying was correct. Reasonable. Exactly what any sensible person would want in a marriage.
So why did it feel like he was describing a business arrangement?
"Do you not believe in love, Mr. Ahn?" Wonyoung asked from the doorway, where she had apparently been eavesdropping for an indeterminate amount of time.
"Wonyoung," your mother said, though without much force. "We did not realize you had joined us."
"I have been here for several minutes," Wonyoung said, moving into the room and settling herself on the arm of Juhoon's chair. "No one was paying attention. Mr. Ahn—you did not answer my question."
Keonho looked slightly taken aback by the directness, but recovered quickly. "I believe in love," he responded carefully. "I simply think it is something that grows over time, rather than something that strikes like lightning."
"How very practical of you," Wonyoung said, and you could not tell if she approved or not.
"Wonyoung," you said, in a tone that suggested she should perhaps demonstrate some restraint.
She ignored you entirely. "And what are you looking for in a wife, Mr. Ahn? If not love at first sight?"
"Wonyoung," James said, more firmly this time.
"It is a reasonable question," Wonyoung protested. "He is calling on our sister. Surely we are entitled to know his intentions."
"You are sixteen," Martin pointed out, though he was not to talk. "You are entitled to sit quietly and perhaps offer our guest some tea."
"I do not see why age should preclude me from—"
"I do not mind the question," Keonho interrupted gently, and something about the way he said it made the room fall quiet. He was looking at Wonyoung with the same patient interest he had directed at everyone else, as if he took her question seriously despite her age. "I suppose I am looking for someone I can talk to. Someone who is honest. Someone who—" He paused, as if considering his words carefully. "Someone who challenges me. Not in an adversarial way, but in the way that makes one want to be better."
It was, objectively, a lovely answer. It was the kind of answer that should have made your heart flutter.
It did not make your heart flutter.
"How very romantic," Wonyoung droned dryly, in a tone that suggested she found it anything but.
"Wonyoung," you, James, and your mother said simultaneously.
She subsided, but not before giving you a look that you absolutely would be discussing later.
"Forgive my sister," you said to Keonho. "She is—"
"Honest," Keonho supplied, smiling. "I appreciate it, actually. Too many people say what they think others want to hear rather than what they actually believe."
"A diplomatic way of saying she can be rather rude," Martin offered.
"I prefer 'refreshingly direct,'" Keonho said.
Despite yourself, you felt your lips twitch. He was charming. Genuinely charming and it was not in the calculated way some gentlemen deployed charm like a weapon, but in an easy, natural way that suggested this was simply who he was.
He was clever. He was kind and funny which was rare. He treated your family with respect, even Wonyoung's borderline inappropriate questions. He looked at you like you were someone he wanted to know better, not a prize to be won or a problem to be solved.
He was everything you should want.
So why did it feel like you were playacting? Going through the motions of something that should feel natural but instead felt like you were reading lines from a script you had not properly memorized?
"Mr. Ahn," your mother said, rising from her chair with the practiced grace of someone who knew exactly when a social call had run its appropriate course. "It has been delightful to meet you. I do hope you will call again."
"I would be honored," Keonho said, standing as well. He turned to you, and there was that warmth again in his expression. "Miss Edwards—might I have the pleasure of your company for a turn about the garden? Briefly, of course. With your mother's permission."
"Of course," your mother said, before you could respond. "James—perhaps you might chaperone?"
"Naturally," James said, in a tone that suggested he had been planning to do exactly that regardless of whether he had been asked.
And so you found yourself walking through the Edwards Hall gardens with Ahn Keonho on one side and your brother trailing at a respectful distance on the other, and trying very hard not to think about how this should feel different than it did.
The garden was lovely at this time of day. The roses your father had planted years ago were beginning to bloom, the same ones that grew at the Ashford estate, the same ones that climbed the walls at Eom House—
You cut that thought off immediately.
"Your family is wonderful," Keonho shared, pulling your attention back to the present. "Very warm. Welcoming."
"They are also very nosy and entirely too invested in my matrimonial prospects," you said before you could stop yourself.
Keonho laughed. "Is that not what families are for?"
"Yours is not, I take it?"
"My father is—persistent in his suggestions. But he tends to express his opinions through strongly worded letters rather than direct interrogation." Keonho's expression turned wry. "Though I suspect if you met him, you would find him and your brother James rather similar in their approach to familial responsibility."
"James takes his role very seriously," you agreed.
"As he should. You are fortunate to have him."
There was something in the way he said it that made you look at him more carefully. "You sound as though you speak from experience."
"I lost my mother when I was young," Keonho said quietly. "And my father—he did his best, but he was not equipped for the day-to-day care of a child. I was largely raised by tutors and governesses. Kind people, certainly, but not—" He paused. "Not family. Not the way yours so clearly cares for one another."
Your chest softened at that. "I am sorry. That must have been difficult."
"It was," he acknowledged. "But it also taught me to value genuine connection when I find it. To not take it for granted."
He was looking at you as he said it, and the implication was clear. He was interested. Genuinely interested, in a way that had nothing to do with your dowry or your family's social standing and everything to do with whatever he had seen in you yesterday and again today.
You should have been flattered. You should have been pleased.
Instead, you felt... guilty.
Because you were standing here with a genuinely kind man who was making a genuine effort, and all you could think about was how wrong it felt. How his voice was pleasant but not the voice you wanted to hear. How his laugh was nice but not the laugh that made your chest ache. How his eyes were warm but not the eyes you saw when you closed yours at night.
How he was absolutely everything you should want, and somehow not what you wanted at all.
"Miss Edwards," Keonho said gently. "May I be honest with you?"
"I thought we had established that you value honesty," you managed.
"I do. And in that spirit—" He paused, as if weighing his words. "I find you remarkably interesting. Yesterday at the garden party, I watched you deflect no fewer than five gentlemen with varying degrees of politeness, and yet you agreed to let me call on you. I am—curious about that."
"Curious?"
"About whether you agreed because you wanted me to call, or because it seemed easier than refusing."
The directness of it caught you off guard. Most gentlemen would have simply assumed your agreement indicated interest. Would not have questioned it.
But Keonho was not most gentlemen, apparently.
"I—" You paused, searching for honesty that would not be cruel. "I am not certain."
"That is fair," Keonho said, and he did not look offended. "May I ask what you are uncertain about?"
"Everything," you admitted. "I am uncertain about everything."
It was too honest and far too revealing for a gentlemen you had just met. But Keonho had asked for honesty, and you found you did not have the energy to lie.
"Then perhaps," Keonho said slowly, "we might simply—spend time together. With no expectations. No pressure. Simply two people getting to know one another. And if, at the end of it, you remain uncertain—" He smiled, and it was gentle. Understanding. "Then we part as friends, and no harm done."
It was a remarkably generous offer. More generous than you deserved, given that you were standing here comparing him to someone else and finding him wanting through absolutely no fault of his own.
"That is—very kind of you," you said.
"It is practical," Keonho corrected. "I have no interest in pursuing someone who does not wish to be pursued. That benefits no one."
"And if I do wish to be pursued? Eventually?"
"Then I will consider myself remarkably fortunate."
You wanted to cry. You desired to bawl your eyes out=, standing there in your family's garden with this perfectly kind man who was offering you exactly what you needed and somehow nothing that you wanted.
"I would like that," you heard yourself say. "Time. To—determine what I want."
"Then time you shall have," Keonho said simply.
The rest of the call passed pleasantly enough. Keonho was easy to talk to, you discovered. He did not fill every silence with unnecessary chatter, did not seem to need constant reassurance that he was being interesting or clever. He simply existed beside you. Comfortably. Without expectation.
It should have been perfect.
When he finally took his leave—with promises to call again, with appropriate farewells to your family, with one more warm smile directed at you that you returned with an effort that hopefully did not show—you found yourself standing in the entrance hall feeling inexplicably exhausted.
"Well," your mother said, appearing beside you with that expression mothers developed when they had Opinions. "He is lovely."
"He is," you agreed.
"And so polite. Did you notice how he engaged with Wonyoung? Even when she was being—"
"Wonyoung," you supplied.
"Precisely. Most gentlemen would have been put off. But he seemed genuinely interested in what she had to say."
"He did."
Your mother studied you for a moment, but she knew you all too well. "But you are not certain about him."
It was not a question.
"I—" You exhaled slowly. "I do not know what I am certain about, Mama."
"That is alright," your mother said gently, reaching out to tuck a strand of hair behind your ear in that way she had been doing since you were small. "You do not have to decide anything today. Or tomorrow. Or even next week. Take your time."
"Lady Whistledown seems to think I should decide quickly," you said, aiming for light and landing somewhere closer to bitter.
"Lady Whistledown," your mother said with feeling, "can mind her own business. You will choose when you are ready. And you will choose wisely. I have every confidence."
You wanted to tell her that you had already chosen. Had chosen years ago, actually. And your choice had pushed you away twice and made it abundantly clear he wanted nothing to do with you.
But you did not say any of that.
"Keonho is kind," you said instead.
"He is."
"And genuine."
"He seems to be."
"And he is offering exactly what I need."
"Is he offering what you want?" your mother asked quietly.
And there it was. The question you had been avoiding since yesterday. Since Keonho had first smiled at you and you had felt absolutely nothing except the absence of something.
"I do not know," you admitted.
"Then find out," your mother said simply. "Spend time with him. Get to know him. See if what you need and what you want might, eventually, become the same thing."
It was sensible advice. Practical and exactly what you should do in such a perfect scenario like this.
So why did it feel like settling? Why did it feel like giving up?
That evening, after dinner, Wonyoung cornered you in your room with the determination of someone who had been waiting all day to have this conversation.
"You do not love him," she blurted without preamble.
You looked up from the book you were not actually reading. "I have known him for two days."
"That is not what I said. I said you do not love him. You do not even particularly like him."
"That is not true. He is very—"
"Nice? Kind? Perfectly suitable?" Wonyoung crossed her arms. "You are describing a pleasant acquaintance, not a potential husband."
"What would you have me do?" The question came out sharper than you intended. "He is offering exactly what I should want. What I need, even. And I am trying—"
"To force yourself to feel something you do not feel," Wonyoung finished. "I know. I watched you today. You smiled at every appropriate moment. You laughed at his jokes. Engaged in perfectly pleasant conversation. And you looked absolutely miserable the entire time."
"I was not—"
"You were. You are." Wonyoung's expression softened. "And I understand why. But pretending to like someone because you think you should is not going to make you happy. And it is not fair to him either."
"He knows," you said quietly. "I told him I was uncertain. He offered to simply—spend time together. With no expectations."
"That was kind of him."
"It was."
"But it does not change the fact that you are comparing him to someone else."
You said nothing. You could not, because she was right and you both knew it.
"He is not Seonghyeon," Wonyoung said gently. "And he will never be Seonghyeon. No one will be. And if you are waiting for Keonho to somehow transform into the man you actually want—"
"I am not waiting for that," you interrupted. "I know he is not—I am not trying to make him into someone else. I am trying to—" You stopped. "I am trying to move on."
"I know," Wonyoung said. "But moving on does not mean forcing yourself to fall for the first kind man who pays you attention. It means giving yourself time to heal. To actually heal, not just pretend you have."
"I do not have time," you croaked, and your voice came out more broken than you intended. "Lady Whistledown has made me the topic of the season. James is being patient but I know he wants to see me settled. Mama is being understanding but I can see the concern in her eyes every time I hesitate about a suitor. And Seonghyeon—" You stopped. "Seonghyeon has made his position clear. So I do not have the luxury of time. I need to move forward."
"Even if moving forward means settling for someone who does not make your heart race?"
"My heart racing is what got me into this mess in the first place," you said bitterly. "Perhaps I should try for something more—stable. Less likely to break me in half."
Wonyoung looked at you for a long moment, something like pity in her expression. Then she crossed the room and pulled you into a hug that you had not realized you desperately needed.
"I care for you," she said into your hair. "And I want you to be happy. Genuinely happy, not just... settled."
"I know," you whispered.
"Promise me you will not marry him unless you are certain," Wonyoung pleaded as if it were her own relationship at sake. "Promise me you will not sacrifice your happiness just because you think it is what you are supposed to do."
"I promise," you said.
You told yourself you meant it. You told yourself you would know when you were certain. You told yourself a lot of things.
And if none of them made the ache in your chest any less pronounced—if Keonho's kindness only made you miss someone else's sharp edges more acutely—if every smile you gave him felt like a betrayal of something you were supposed to be letting go...
Well.
You would simply have to learn to live with that. Just as you would learn to live with the fact that Eom Seonghyeon had chosen his fear over your heart. Just as you would learn to live with a lot of things.
Even if learning to live with them felt remarkably like dying.
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