before the summer ends (n.jm)
𝐖𝐎𝐑𝐃 𝐂𝐎𝐔𝐍𝐓 — 30k words
𝐏𝐀𝐈𝐑𝐈𝐍𝐆 — brothers best friend! jaemin x reader
𝐆𝐄𝐍𝐑𝐄: smut, fluff, angst, secret relationship, brothers best friend, college au, fwb vibes,
𝐒𝐘𝐍𝐎𝐏𝐒𝐈𝐒 — jaemin was supposed to stay a ghost of that summer, your brother’s best friend, the boy you swore you’d never fall for again. but the moment his hands are on you again, it’s hunger all over, heat that won’t let go, secrets pressed into skin. every fuck feels like ruin, every kiss like a dare. the deeper you sink into him, the more you know it can’t last because before the summer ends, everything will burn.
𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐖𝐀𝐑𝐍𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐒 / 𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐒 — explicit language, explicit sexual content, explicit themes (obsession, secrecy, betrayal), retro early 2000s aesthetics such as flip phones, polaroids, vhs, diners, bonfires, small town claustrophobia + pipeline leaving rituals, themes of secrecy, obsession, small-town suffocation, ritual, and inevitable leaving. nostalgia sharpened into danger, rough/dirty sex, bdsm elements, choking/breath play, degradation, impact play (spanking), oral sex (including rimming), cum play (including facial and oral ingestion), forced-feeling scenes (consensual but rough), voyeurism, voyeurism revealed, alcohol use, strong language, emotional manipulation, obsessive/possessive themes, hair pulling, hard thrusting, slaps, gripping, forceful positioning, explicit oral descriptions, face-sitting and eating-out scenes, aggressive handling during consensual sex, cum play, deep-throating, gagging, throat-fucking, softer but still explicit: giggly kissing, vanilla intimacy mixed with raw sex, intimate cock bouncing, intimacy that blurs innocence and hunger, lil hints of a toxic love, obsession, secrecy, voyeurism, betrayal, sibling proximity, possessiveness, y/n is your girl next door,’ timid, observant, always orbiting but never center. carries innocence like a disguise, but underneath is hungry, desperate, reckless once touched, jaemin is mysterious, magnetic, toxic in the way he knows you’ll never stop coming back. possessive, obsessive, mouth full of hunger, hands always where they shouldn’t be. everyone sees him as jeno’s charming best friend, but his real story is written in stairwells and rooftops with you, y/n has established and close relationships with her older brother (jeno), her best friend (saerin, oc), and jaemin (the toxic, summer fling), other nct members in this, other kpop ‘00 liners making appearances, y/n and jaemin fall back into each other quickly, with a seriousness that might feel too fast but trust it’s deliberate, every acceleration is for a reason
listen to 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐏𝐋𝐀𝐘𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓 whilst reading <3
It starts with a box, not just any box, but the orphaned kind that migrates across childhoods, its flaps tattooed in pen-scribbled hearts and the half-moons of nervous teeth. It’s warped at the edges, patched with strips of masking tape the color of old yolk and dust, and if you press your cheek to the lid, it still remembers the soft hush of your mother’s hands, folding secrets inside. Every surface hums with forgotten summers: the ghost of spilled Fanta, the waxy bite of cherry balm, the faint musk of sweat and chlorine and the wild green promise of June.
You kneel amid chaos, clothes flung like confessions, stray bobby pins and crumpled concert wristbands nesting in the carpet, the quilt beneath you faded to some in-between hue that isn’t quite blue anymore, but something closer to longing. Sunlight slips through your open window in buttery, reckless stripes, pooling in gold puddles over the floorboards, painting your bare legs in bruised yellow. Outside, the air vibrates with honeysuckle, thick and sweet enough to swallow, bees heady on sugar and something that feels exactly like possibility. The whole room is teetering at the edge of goodbye and never, and every breeze that ruffles the curtains feels like someone—him—has just left or is just about to come back. The box waits, breathing with you, poised on the cusp of past and next, ready to give up everything you’ve hidden from the world and yourself.
Saerin is already sprawled at your feet, dark hair loose, legs scissoring idly as she rifles through your old things with greedy, almost childlike delight. Her nails are chipped mint, her phone lies face-down and buzzing with group chat notifications neither of you bother to check. “We have to make a pile for what you’re leaving behind,” she declares, tossing a tangle of friendship bracelets into the corner. “A pile for what’s coming with you, and a pile for things that should’ve burned in 2017.”
“Like your middle part?” you tease, nudging her ankle with your socked toe. She snorts, rolling onto her back, stretching in the thick gold light like a cat that’s never been hurt.
The box between you is a time capsule: faded polaroids rubber-banded together, movie ticket stubs, sun-warped pool passes, a stack of CDs so scratched you wonder if they’ll ever play again. Saerin finds the first picture, you and her, beaming with sunburnt cheeks and blue raspberry tongues, limbs draped over each other at the edge of the town’s cracked public pool. “We were so ugly,” she says, but her voice is sticky with affection.
More polaroids tumble out, bright and sticky as spilled candy, their colors running in the late August light. You sort through each photo, pausing at one where the girls are tangled together in laughter on the cracked vinyl of Heejin’s backseat. Seoyeon and Chaeyoung are at the center, hair glittering, chipped nail polish flashing as they link pinkies and press their foreheads together, both shining in mismatched swimsuits. In another, Chaeyoung squints into the camera with a daisy stem caught between her teeth, while Seoyeon attempts a cartwheel in the background beneath a sky divided neatly into blue and gold. There’s a whole strip from that wild field party: everyone is blurred by half-light and sugar, bodies thrown across the grass, cheeks flushed. One photo catches you in a sundress on Eric’s lap, his hand curled in your hair for the camera. In another, Sunwoo leans close, mouth at your ear, grinning so wide the edges of his smile blur. In every shot you’re laughing, showing too many teeth, your eyes a little too bright. You flip those photos over, telling yourself it’s just for fun, just harmless summer.
The photos you hesitate over feel heavier than the rest. They’re shadowy, unposed flashes from nights when the streetlamps barely reached you, faces smeared by passing headlights or the blue glow of a phone screen. One frame shows only sneakers dangling over a rooftop’s edge; another captures a pair of fingers bunched in the hem of your sweatshirt while the rest of the moment slides out of view. Mixed into the stack are the rare pictures of your brother, Lee Jeno, and they pin everything in place. In each shot he stands back-lit in his crimson jersey, grin as wide as an August moon, football tucked under one arm and the other flung across your shoulders. All sun-burnt limbs and fearless swagger, sweat shining along his hairline, he’s never without a half-circle of friends orbiting close. Everyone in town chased that grin, and when it landed on them your name echoed through hallways and house parties, sometimes in praise, sometimes with an edge. Jeno is restless and loud, always in motion, yet the palm he settles at the small of your back in every photograph is rock-steady: part warning, part promise.
Some of the polaroids are so worn they look older than you are, corners bent, borders scribbled over in neon pens, the ink bleeding from sweat and soda. In every one Jeno steals the frame. Backlit in his jersey, mouth split into that sun-shot grin, a football tucked against his ribs or a Red Solo cup in his hand, his arm thrown around whoever is nearest. Girls leaned toward him like sunflowers, all shimmer and gloss, their wrists piled with bangles, their mascara blinking slowly. Boys slapped his back, shoved him into the center of the circle, chanted his name until it felt like the whole town was a stadium and he was the only one lit by floodlights. And then there was you, captured only because you happened to be standing close. Half-cropped, braid messy, lips sticky with cherry ICEE, still tugging a hoodie down over damp shoulders. Younger in every flash, younger in every laugh, younger because that’s how they chose to see you. His little sister. The innocent one. The tagalong. The one with bare legs dangling from a cooler, with a wrist still inked from arcade tickets, with eyes that gave too much away. They smiled at you because he was there, not because you mattered, not because they knew.
But the photos never caught the truth. They didn’t catch the nights when the noise of Jeno’s name shook the walls and you slipped into the dark, where another set of eyes pinned you harder than any spotlight. The cameras missed the slide of his hand against your hip in the shadows, the brush of knuckles under your skirt when no one was watching, the way your back arched against the hood of a car as smoke and laughter swallowed the night whole. Every snapshot is loud with Jeno’s grin, his orbit, his glow but in the margins, blurred and grainy, something else lives. A profile turned just enough to disappear. The faint lean of a body pressed too close behind you. The glint of teeth catching your lower lip. A secret mapped across your skin, hidden in the folds of sweat-soaked cotton and the hush of midnight. The polaroids shouted his story, but in their silences they betrayed yours, the summer of mouths pressed where they shouldn’t be, of moans stifled into his shoulder while the world kept cheering for someone else. What they leave unsaid, what only you can see in the grain, is the fever of a love that was never meant to survive the light. What lingers in the blur, visible only to you, is the wildfire stitched beneath the surface, a season of heat and hunger no one else will ever know you survived
The next stack of polaroids are the group shots, always crooked, always loud. Donghyuck is frozen mid-cannonball in lime-green trunks, a blur of limbs and spray behind him. Renjun balances a plate of watermelon on his head like a crown, expression flat despite the laughter rippling around him. Mark Lee, ever the showman, wears double denim and a grin, caught mid-dance, one eyebrow cocked at the universe like he’s in on a joke no one else will hear. Chenle throws up a peace sign that nearly disappears under a smudged thumbprint. In one, your own eyes glow red from the flash, your smile too wide from laughing too long.
These shots are your favorites. They’re Jeno’s friends, the boys everyone wanted to sit with, wanted to be seen with and somehow, in these fleeting slivers of film, they let you belong. They still saw you as the baby, the innocent little sister who didn’t know half of what was being said, and maybe they liked keeping you that way. They teased you, ruffled your hair, tucked you under their arms like a mascot they had to protect. And you loved it, loved orbiting their noise, their jokes, the way the world seemed to swell and loosen when you were around them. Jeno hated it, hated when you and Saerin tagged along to the lake or slipped into the back booth at the diner. He’d snap, herd you away, insist you didn’t need to see how they really were. But there were days he softened, days he gave in, and those were the ones you folded away like pressed flowers. Nights where the music blurred, where the boys’ laughter cracked open the dark, where you felt older just by being there, breathing their air. The camera caught those moments in fragments, sand stuck to the lens, watermarks across the frame, but to you they were whole. Bittersweet, golden, untouchable, proof that for a while, you lived inside their circle instead of on its edge.
But the ones your fingers keep circling back to are different. They are the ones you’d never lay flat on the kitchen table, never let your mother tuck into an album, never breathe into the light where they might catch Jeno’s eye. They’re private even from yourself, the kind you flip fast but never forget. The polaroids were taken by strangers with sticky fingers at the gas station, by Jeno’s friends passing the camera across chipped diner tables, even by you and Saerin when you wanted to catch the air before it slipped through your hands. Most of them are harmless, stacked like receipts of an ordinary youth, bare feet on the hood of a car parked too close to the ocean, wind pulling hair across someone’s face, soda rings staining the corners of a print. They look like nothing more than the last weeks of a summer, softened at the edges, taken by people who would never suspect what else the film was holding. They thought they were only freezing bonfires that burned low, bridges climbed at midnight, the blur of headlights across wet asphalt. Each frame hums like a worn-out VHS left too long in the player, colors bleeding into one another, the picture shaking as if even then the world knew the reel was almost finished.
But the other kind, the ones where Jaemin’s mouth is on your throat, his hands already tugging fabric higher, your body arched in the blur of a flash, those were never accidents. They’re the reel of that summer, a summer made of sex and wanting, of glances held too long across crowded rooms, of tension snapping in the dark when no one was watching. Some frames are messy with skin and sweat, others hazy with the soft curve of his back caught in lamplight, the trace of his grin when you pulled him down again. Even Saerin ended up behind the lens more than once, her laugh swallowed by the moment as she caught what you couldn’t, Jaemin’s eyes on you like a secret he’d kill to keep, the way you came apart in his hands under a night that smelled like salt and smoke. She’s the only one you ever trusted, the only loved friend who knows the difference between the stacks: the innocent summer everyone else remembers, and the forbidden one you lived, insatiable and hidden, an ache burned into film that will never fade.
The deeper your hand slips into the stack, the more the air shifts, as though the cardboard itself remembers what it’s hiding. The harmless ones fall through your fingers in quick succession, sunburnt cheeks, crooked smiles, Saerin’s limbs mid-splash but then the prints change, heavier, curling at the edges as though they’ve absorbed the heat of what they’ve seen. The stairwell shot stops you cold, the narrow climb to your room stamped in wallpaper flowers that have long since dulled under sun. The flash burns the pattern white, but the truth sits in the shadows: your braid knotted in Jaemin’s fist, your spine bent to plaster, his mouth dragged close enough to taste the salt on your skin. What the photo doesn’t show is how far it went, how the stairwell became an altar to hunger, knees pressed into carpet, your throat aching as you bent down for him, his grip in your braids a tether that made you shiver and obey. He was merciless, feral with it, hissing ‘good girl’ through clenched teeth as you gasped around him, your body folding tighter into the dark while the house roared with life below. Jeno’s laughter rattled up from the living room, his friends shouting over a game, the scrape of glasses, a storm of noise that should’ve kept you safe but only made your pulse hammer harder. Every creak of wood felt like exposure, every moan smothered into his palm a gamble, and still you let him have you, trembling against walls that had heard your childhood cries now bearing witness to something far more dangerous. The picture blurs your expression into something unreadable, but you remember it clearly, not laughter, not begging, but the wild, breaking sound of wanting too much in the one place you couldn’t risk being caught.
The rooftop lives on in a handful of frames, shingles blistered dark with tar and the sky paling into that washed-out silver that always looked more like VHS static than dawn. The camera catches you sprawled across the slope, tank top twisted off your shoulder, hair knotted against your collarbone, and Jaemin lying half-naked beside you, his chest shining faintly in the thin light. To anyone else it looks like two kids waiting for morning, their bodies slouched in easy silence. What the photo can’t hold is the sharpness of your breath when his hand slid from your ribs to your stomach, then lower still, slipping beneath the hem of your shorts. The cicadas rose in their chorus at the same instant his fingers pressed into you, the sound so loud it seemed to sanctify what you both knew was sin. The film shows only a palm laid flat, but you remember the way your thighs opened, the heat of him knelt close, whispering filth against your ear as his knuckles dragged slick and slow inside you. The shingle grit pressed into your back, the dawn broke open overhead, and you came gasping into his hand with the whole town still asleep below, the frame shaking like even the person behind the camera understood it was too much to hold.
The backseat is captured in a single trembling flash, a box of heat and breath pressed tight beneath fogged windows. Condensation drips in crooked trails down the glass, the air so wet it feels alive, and the burst of light ricochets back to paint your skin molten, blurred into something almost feral. Your thigh is slung high over the locked seatbelt, the edge of your shorts bunched around your hip, calf arched in silhouette against the dark interior. Jaemin’s body folds over yours in the photograph, shoulders taut with the strain of holding you down, jaw buried in the slope of your throat as though he could drink you whole. His hair sticks damp against his forehead, sweat and lake water both, his spine bent like a bow strung too tight. Your nails are carved deep into his back, half-moons shining red even through the blur, a vow etched into skin that no one else was ever meant to read.
In the corner of the print, barely visible through the steam, the lake gleams black and endless, still as if holding its breath. It is the only witness to how frenzied you became, the slap of skin against vinyl, the creak of suspension rocking to the rhythm of hunger, the muffled gasp you bit into his shoulder when his thrusts turned sharper, faster, desperate. Outside, cicadas screamed their metallic hymn, headlights traced across the water, but nothing broke the sealed world of that car. It was a chapel of fog and sweat, your body spread across the backseat like an offering, his voice rasping curses into your ear, promising you more even as you clung to him like it might be the last time. The photograph remembers none of the sound, none of the scent, but you do, the thick taste of heat, the slick slide of his skin, the sharp ache of being wanted too much, all of it locked behind glass that steamed as furiously as your lungs.
Further down, the red vinyl of the diner booth bleeds across the print, the surface glossy under fluorescent hum. The diner lives in red vinyl and buzzing light, the kind that makes everything look softer than it really is. Grease-stained menus, half-melted milkshakes, a jukebox blinking tired neon in the corner, the camera catches you smiling, lips glossed and innocent, your chin tilted toward the lens like a girl with nothing to hide. To anyone else it’s sweet, careless, another late-night stop with friends before the town folded in on itself. What Donghyuck didn’t see, even as he held the camera steady and shouted for you to “say cheese,” was the way Jaemin’s hand slid beneath the table, knuckles pale as he pressed his fingers deeper into you under denim.
The flash freezes your gaze, wide and bright, but the truth lives in the tension of your body. Your thighs are clamped hard against the vinyl, trembling just enough to blur the edge of the frame. Jaemin sits beside you, posture lazy, his grin tilted easy toward the lens, but his shoulder hides the ferocity in his hand, the curl of his fingers working inside you like he owned the rhythm of your breath. To Donghyuck, it was nothing, a keepsake of sugar and laughter, a photo destined for the fridge door or a shoebox of harmless memories. To you, it’s the moment you nearly spilled over in public, biting down on your straw as his teeth grazed your ear, the taste of strawberry syrup turning sour on your tongue. The booth hums in the background, jukebox static and cicadas shrieking through the cracked-open door, but all you remember is the way he whispered low enough that only you could hear: good girl, don’t spill it now. The photo pretends innocence, friends sharing fries, a grin captured mid-laugh, yet every time you hold it, your pulse remembers the truth: that beneath the table, in the half-inch of space the flash could never catch, Jaemin had already claimed you.
Buried deepest, curled so far it threatens to tear, is the one you should’ve destroyed. Your bedroom window gapes half-open, moonlight breaking across the wallpaper in stripes. You’re frozen mid-gesture, shirt rucked to your ribs, Jaemin crouched in front of you, his hair spilling forward as his mouth presses against skin just below the frame. His hands are bracketed tight at your hips, a possession too raw to disguise, and the photo trembles with the weight of it, blurred like even the camera was ashamed to record what it saw. To anyone else, it could pass as shadows on a wall, a trick of light. To you, it is the most dangerous proof, the night the floorboards creaked, the night you thought the door might open, the night you risked losing everything and still pulled him closer.
Every print with Jaemin in it seems to carry something extra, a weight that no one else would notice until it pressed into their chest. The shadow lives in the grain itself, in the way light bends around him, in the way the corners of the film curl as though the heat of his body never left. Even in shots where his hands aren’t visible, the air thickens, swollen with the memory of touch, his palm dragging you into stairwell corners, his mouth brushing so close to your pulse it made the walls throb with the sound. You look at them now and can still taste how the house smelled of detergent and summer fruit, can still feel the wallpaper scrape your shoulders when he whispered promises you knew would dissolve the second the season ended.
Saerin has seen every one of these polaroids, her finger tracing the edges with a quiet reverence you never asked for but always needed. She’s the only person you trusted with both stacks, the harmless reel of afternoons in sun-faded swimsuits and the darker reel, stitched from sweat and salt and the kind of hunger that never photographs clean. Her silence is part of the secret, binding it as surely as the masking tape holding the box together. She never flinched when she developed the ones with your braids in his fists, never questioned when your body blurred into his, never asked why the frames always seemed to shake harder when you were caught in them. You gave her your proof, and she kept it, her loyalty pressed flat into every glossy square.
To everyone else, that summer will always be harmless: a chorus of laughter blown thin across wind, car windows rolled down on roads that melted into dusk, sunsets bleeding out into colors too big for film to catch. Those are the memories they’ll hold, the sips of soda gone warm, the taste of burnt marshmallows on someone’s fingers, the sound of music spilling from half-broken speakers. But for you, and for Saerin who bore witness to the evidence, the story is something else entirely. It’s a reel spliced from sex and longing, from glances that lasted too long and touches stolen at the edges of rooms full of people. It is a collection of nights where secrecy was the only oxygen you breathed, where hunger sharpened into something ferocious and love warped into a shape too forbidden to survive daylight. Each polaroid hums when you hold it, as though the box itself still trembles with everything you cannot say aloud, a summer burned into plastic and gloss, preserved in fragments, dangerous enough to ruin you again just by looking.
Growing up is learning that even sunlight bruises if you stay in it too long. The summer you thought eternal was already collapsing into shadows, each moment gilded because it was dying as you lived it. The photographs prove it: light trapped and fading, memories already yellowing at the edges. You clutch them anyway, reminders that life, like summer, is most brilliant at the moment it begins to end. Maybe life is just a reel unraveling faster than you can catch it. Summer was the part you wanted to pause, but the tape kept spooling, bleeding into static. The photos hum like broken film, each one a reminder that you can’t rewind what was lived. You can only press your face to the blur and ache for the moment the world was still in color.
The photographs hum, but they hum with lies. They catch the rush, the hunger, the sweetness of skin in the dark, your braid in his fist, your body bent over the slope of the roof, his mouth against your thigh while laughter rattled the walls below. They trap the thrill of being wanted, the blur of sex stolen in shadows, the kind of joy that could make you believe summer might never break. But what the polaroids never show is the silence that followed, the hollow weight of mornings when he was already gone. There’s no frame that holds the way the house felt after the garage door closed, no image that captures the echo of his voice saying he couldn’t stay. The film bleeds with light but refuses to touch the darkness, leaving you clutching proof of everything that felt alive while erasing the part that nearly killed you, the leaving, the ache, the way a whole season ended in a single night.
You can still feel the silence that followed him, the way it crawled through the house like smoke after fire. One moment the garage was thick with heat and the smell of motor oil, his voice low and sharp in your ear, and the next it was only the grind of tires rolling over gravel, the taillights of Jeno’s car bleeding red into the night. He never looked back, not once, not even when you pressed yourself to the window, bare feet stinging against cold tile, watching the shadow of him vanish into headlights. It should have ended there, clean as a cut, but instead it carved itself into you, the taste of sweat and salt, the press of his hand at your back, the way he kissed you like he already belonged to another life.
You try to tell yourself it wasn’t his fault, that boys like him were always meant to leave, that a town this small could never hold someone who burned so bright. But the polaroids betray you, humming with every touch you swore to forget. His laugh folded into stairwells, the grit of rooftop shingles against your shoulder blades, the humidity fogging glass in the backseat, all of it rising sharp as tidewater, flooding you before you can brace yourself. The ache isn’t gentle. It’s feral, raw, endless, a bruise that refuses to fade. And maybe that’s the truest thing about summer: it rots the moment it ripens, it slips away before you can catch it, leaving only what you stole in secret, photographs blurred at the edges, shadows where his hands used to be, proof of a love that was never allowed to survive the light.
Saerin is sprawled across your quilt like she owns it, one leg cocked, denim shorts hacked so high the threads dangle down her thigh. Her toenails are painted glossy cherry, chipped at the edges, and each drag of her cigarette leaves another stain of ash in the hollow of an empty soda can. A silk ribbon ties her hair up messily, strands slipping loose to stick to her glossed mouth, and her belly ring flashes whenever she stretches too far. There’s a vape balanced carelessly on the sill beside her lighter, the smoke curling into the slow heat of your room, tangling with the scent of sun-warmed cotton. She looks like every rumor you’ve ever heard about girls who burn too fast and every secret you’ve ever needed to survive.
Her eyes flick down to the stack in your lap, your thumb lingering too long on one of the curled photographs. She smirks, soft at first, then sharp. “You’re not slick, you know. I can read your face like subtitles. You go all glassy when it’s him. Like you’re back on that roof, cicadas screaming, hoping nobody notices why you can’t breathe right.” She taps ash into the can and leans her chin into her hand, studying you with that lazy precision that always makes you nervous. “You’ve got everyone else fooled. Not me.”
You huff, tugging the photo back toward your chest. “It wasn’t like that.” The protest sounds weak even to your own ears, your cheeks already heating. “You make it sound like some epic love story. It was just—” You swallow, caught on the word. “It was just summer.”
Saerin laughs, smoke catching in her throat, bracelets clinking down her arm as she reaches to pluck the photo clean from your hands. Her nails skim your skin, teasing, and she smirks down at the blurred image before looking back up at you. “Summer, huh? Call it whatever helps you sleep at night. But I saw it, babe. I saw the way he looked at you, and the way you looked at him. Don’t try to package that as casual. That wasn’t just sex. That was a wildfire, and you’re still covered in ash.”
She flips the polaroid over in her palm, lips glossed and curling. “You’ve had a crush on him since you were what, six? Don’t give me that face. Everybody knew. You used to sit on the porch steps waiting for him to show up with Jeno, hair in crooked braids, pretending you weren’t waiting for Jaemin to come back. And then that summer?” She shakes her head, exhaling slowly, smoke curling between you. “You two disappeared every chance you got. Stairwells, cars, rooftops, even the pool house. It was constant. Three times a day, sometimes more, like you were scared if you stopped touching him he’d vanish. Tell me again how that’s just a summer fling.”
“That’s not fair,” you mutter, finally snatching the photo back. “You make it sound… bigger than it was. We were so young, Sae. Stupid kids.” Your cheeks burn, but she doesn’t let up.
She’s relentless in that way only Saerin can be, cruel and tender in the same breath. “Kids don’t fuck like that, sweetheart. You acted like you were together. Don’t argue. I watched it with my very own eyes. Kids don’t burn holes through stairwells, rooftops and bedsheets like they’re trying to brand themselves into each other. I’ve seen boyfriends treat their girlfriends with less intensity than he treated you. And don’t give me that line about ‘just summer.’ You both acted like you were together. Boyfriend, girlfriend, minus the label. He carried your drinks, you wore his hoodies, he sat pressed up against you like there wasn’t a whole world watching. That’s why it broke you when he left, isn’t it? Not because he fucked you. Because he made you feel like you belonged to him.” She smirks wider, flicking her ash into the can again, eyes locked on yours like she’s daring you to deny it. “So keep calling it ‘summer,’ babe. Keep pretending it was just the heat. But you and I both know the truth: you’ve been his since before you even knew what wanting felt like.”
You throw a cushion at her, half-laughing, half-defensive. “You’re so dramatic.”
“Maybe. But I’m also right.” She flicks her lighter, flame flaring and dying between her fingers. Her voice lowers, eyes catching yours. “I know you haven’t seen him since that summer. I know you’ve been avoiding the places he might be, ducking when his name comes up. But you and I both know it’s inevitable. You don’t just burn like that and never cross paths again. One day, somewhere, you’ll look up and he’ll be there. And the real question is: are you ready for what that’s gonna do to you?”
She only watches you, smoke curling slowly, until the words slip out quieter than you mean them to. “I don’t think I’d be able to survive him twice.” Silence swells, thick and sticky with August heat. You want to argue, but the words lodge in your throat. Finally, you whisper, “You don’t get it. He left without even looking back.”
“I do get it.” She tucks her legs beneath her, smoke curling from her fingers. “I get it more than you think. And that’s why I’m warning you. He’s not gone-gone. His name still runs through group chats. Girls whisper about him, about the grin, the shoulders, the way he fills a room. I’ve heard stories about him at parties, late-night games, rooftops, girls saying he made them forget their own names. He’s not invisible, not untouchable. He’s here, and one day—” she exhales, smoke drifting slowly — “one day you’ll see him again. That’s inevitable. And you can’t keep pretending you’re ready for that when you’re not.”
She sighs then, dragging the filter hard before stubbing it into the can. Her voice drops, more honest, less sharp. “Honestly? He did leave you. And it sucks. But you also knew he’d be leaving with the rest of them. With Jeno, with all the boys. At the end of that summer, that was always their plan, even if you didn’t want to say it out loud. You felt it in your gut every time you kissed him, that ticking clock. I know it doesn’t make it easier and it doesn’t make the way he left feel any better, either. But inevitability doesn’t care about your heart. He was always going, babe. You just didn’t want to believe it.”
You pick at a loose thread on your quilt, tugging it until it curls like a question you don’t want to answer. The room is heavy with August heat, the smoke still hanging between you like an accusation. “Feels like they all got out just in time,” you murmur, trying to make it sound like a joke, though your voice wavers. “Now they’re the ones in jerseys and headlines and group chats I can’t escape. And we’re still here, stuck in the reel, paused in the middle while the film keeps running without us.” Your voice catches but you keep going, picking at the frayed hem of your shorts. “Sometimes it feels like they got to press fast-forward while we’re stuck on pause.”
Saerin smirks, but it’s softer this time, her bracelets sliding down her wrist as she shifts closer, shoulder pressing against yours. “Pause isn’t the same as being stuck.” She tilts her head toward you, eyes narrowed in that way that makes you feel like she can see past your skin. “They were always gonna leave first. They’re older than us, it was their time. They had scholarships, teams, and bigger cities waiting for them. They’ve been groomed for that shit since middle school.” She takes another drag, then smirks, lips curling as the smoke curls with them. “I know it feels like we can’t escape this town but our time will come. That’s how it always goes. Every year there’s a batch that leaves first. Then the next. Then the next. Ours will come too, just like theirs, just like the ones before them, and the ones who’ll come after. It’s the way this town breathes, babe, it exhales people out, one wave at a time.”
You shrug, eyes darting to the scattered photos between you, the way Jaemin’s grin hides in the blur, sharp but untouchable, as if even film couldn’t catch him whole. His face is always half-shadowed, half-masked, the kind of boy who only ever showed you what he wanted you to see, and yet your body still remembers the parts the camera never could, his breath hot against your throat in stairwell corners, the slip of his hand under denim when the house was full, the way he could make you tremble with nothing more than his mouth at your ear. Every frame pretends he’s just another boy in Jeno’s circle, another blur in the summer reel, but you know better. You know the grin that never reached daylight, the one meant for you alone, the one that burned like a secret against your skin. “It doesn’t make it easier. Watching them turn into heartthrobs on somebody else’s campus while we’re still orbiting this town like we don’t know the way out.”
She studies you for a long beat, the way she always does before she decides whether to cut deep or let you off easy. “You know what it is?” she finally says, voice lower, honest in a way that almost startles you. “We’re still in the pipeline. Building up. Pressure, water, all of it waiting. When it bursts, it’ll be ours.” She taps ash into the can, bracelets sliding down her arm with a soft clink. “For now, yeah, it feels like we’re stuck. But we’re not. We’re just loading.”
You huff, staring at your knees drawn up under the quilt. “Loading sounds like an excuse.”
“Loading sounds like patience.” She leans back on one palm, looking at you through the haze. “Look, babe, you’re not ready to leave him behind, not yet. That’s fine. But don’t act like this town has the power to trap you forever. When it’s our time, it’ll crack wide open, and we’ll be the ones they’re whispering about.”
The cicadas grind on, loud enough you can almost feel their wings against your skin, and somewhere on the far side of town a bonfire cracks like fireworks, sending an orange pulse across the undersides of low clouds. Smoke drifts through the window in lazy ribbons; it smells of pine and cheap lighter fluid, the exact recipe of every August you’ve survived. Saerin shifts beside you, hooking one bare heel over the other, anklet glinting in the lamp-glow. She studies the way your thumb coasts the glossy edge of Jaemin’s half-blurred grin and snorts, soft and conspiratorial.
“Face it, babe,” she murmurs, knocking her knee against yours, “you still orbit that boy like he invented gravity. Always have. You’d sprint through a burning cornfield if he crooked a finger.” Her mouth curves, half wicked, half fond. “And yet, I guarantee the minute you breathe the same air again you’ll turn into a statue. You won’t even look at him. That’s your brand of devotion: worship from a distance, panic up close.”
She isn’t wrong, and the thought burns. You’ve always been timid, the kind of girl who ducks her head in crowds, who keeps her secrets stitched tight in notebooks instead of spilling them at parties. You wish you had Saerin’s easy bravado, the way she smirks at the world like it’s already hers. That’s why Jaemin knocked the breath out of you, because of who he is, and who you aren’t. Jeno’s best friend, the boy everyone wanted and no one fully held, all easy grins and restless hands, and you, the quiet one, a virgin who thought she’d stay invisible. Somehow it bloomed anyway, natural as heat rising off asphalt, reckless as sparks catching dry grass. Sinful in its secrecy, masked in stolen corners, dangerous in how fast it consumed you. No one expected it least of all you, and yet here you are, still singed by the fire.
You start to protest, but she waves the cigarette like a wand, scattering sparks that fade before they hit the floorboards. “Save it. The tide’s already moving. You can’t see it yet, but it’s there, pulling us out of this postcard town whether we’re ready or not.” The window rattles in its frame as the wind shifts, carrying with it the taste of lake water, the slap of waves against dock boards you haven’t walked since the boys left. Saerin watches you watch the dark, her grin catching in the low light. “One morning you’ll wake up and everything’ll be different. New skyline, new mess, same ghosts waiting to trip you up. And don’t act like you’re not terrified. You’ll step off that bus all shy and quiet, pretending you’re fine, but the second he’s there…” She leans in, voice dropping, smoke curling from her lips. “The second Jaemin looks at you again, you’ll come apart. Same as before.”
Your mouth opens, ready with some quick denial, but the words catch, too soft to shape into anything solid. You stare down at your thighs instead, bare in the glow of the lamp, your nail polish chipped from peeling it at the diner register. “I hate that you’re right,” you admit finally, voice low, the kind that feels like confession. “I spent whole summers wishing he’d notice me, and then when he did—” You swallow, heat pricking your cheeks. “It was constant. He touched me everywhere. Stairwells, the dock, even this room. He wanted me all the time and I let him, and I thought that made me braver. But I was just… timid, stupid, hoping he’d keep choosing me. He built me, Sae. Every first thing I ever knew, it was him.” Your fingers worry the edge of a polaroid, knuckles white. “So yeah. If he looked at me now, I’d fall apart again. It doesn't matter how much I tell myself I’ve changed. He made me into something I didn’t even know I could be, and that’s not the kind of thing you just shake off.”
Saerin tilts her head, smoke sliding slowly from her mouth as though she’s savoring it. The smirk comes easy, but it’s gentler than before, softened at the edges. “God, listen to you,” she murmurs, bracelets clinking as she reaches over to flick the polaroid in your hand. “You talk about him like he carved his name into your skin and you’re still tracing the scar.” Her eyes linger on you, searching, and then the grin sharpens again, wicked and fond all at once. “I mean, I get it. He was older, hotter, untouchable. And you—” she nudges your knee with hers, teasing—“you were this shy little virgin hiding behind your brother’s shadow. Him pulling you into his world? Of course it felt like gravity.” She shakes her head, half laughing, half sighing. “But you hear yourself, right? Every first thing you gave to him, every corner of this town you let him take. You still talk like he owns you. That’s dangerous, babe. Because the second he’s back in the same room, he won’t even have to touch you. He’ll just look at you the way he used to, and you’ll hand it all over again.” Her smirk lingers, but the truth in her tone cuts through the haze of smoke and August heat. “That’s the power you keep forgetting, he doesn’t even need to ask.”
The room settles into a twilight hush. You tip the polaroid so the lamplight skims across its surface; in the blur Jaemin is laughing at something you can no longer name. Outside, the bonfire pops again, bright, brief, inevitable and the sound echoes down your spine like a warning you’re only just beginning to hear. The air is thick with endings, but somewhere beneath it a shift hums, quiet and certain, like the roll of tide long before it breaks on shore. You don’t know it yet, but soon the map will tilt, the town will spit you out, and every road you thought was still will lead you straight back into his orbit. New dorms, new skylines, new nights you can’t yet imagine, change waiting closer than you’re ready for. The flame outside flares once more, showering sparks into the dark, and you can’t shake the feeling that one of them has already landed on you, smoldering, waiting to catch.
ten months later
The diner exhales in pink and green, neon bleeding through the glass like a wound that never quite heals. The sign outside has been dying for months, buzzing through its own short circuit, stuttering on every third flicker as moths batter themselves against it. Out on the highway the headlights smear past like VHS static, but inside, the air is thick with grease that no mop can erase and sugar that’s gone tacky on every chrome edge. The jukebox hasn’t learned a new song since the summer the boys left. It coughs through its catalogue, skipping whole verses, dragging needles back to beginnings as if the record itself is tired of moving forward. Receipts have fossilized to the register, pressed down with gum so old it’s turned the color of teeth. Grease hangs in the air like perfume turned sour, clinging to uniforms that never quite wash clean, while sugar crusts into the counter seams, glittering under the buzzing neon. The booths shine with a tack worn in by years of thighs and elbows, vinyl lacquered with soda syrup and sweat, and the fryer never stops, spitting out fries that taste faintly of onion rings and funnel cakes. Milkshakes bleed cherry syrup down their glasses, burgers slump under molten orange cheese, and the jukebox skips through half-songs, drowning the place in pink and green until the whole diner feels less like a stop on the highway than a fever dream, sticky and alive long past midnight. Everything hums like a time capsule left too long in the sun: flickering neon, stale syrup, the same songs looping until the year itself feels stuck on repeat.
Saerin owns the place like it was built to orbit her, apron knotted loose at the waist, cherry-red skirt rolled an inch too high, stockings laddered in zigzags she never bothers to hide. Her bracelets slide down her arm as she leans over the pass window, straw swinging between glossed lips, eyes sharp enough to slice through the hum. Every time she shifts her weight, older men leave heavier tips, folding bills under coffee cups like bribes. Boys with no cash at all take up space in booths, grinning too wide, watching too long. She smirks, eats it up, then pockets sugar packets like trophies. You and Saerin drift through the place like a matched set, conspirators in neon, but when she disappears into the kitchen it’s you the diner holds onto. The counter knows the shape of your elbows, the straw between your teeth clicks against glass as you lean in too far, and the camisole strap slips to bare the soft slope of your shoulder. Frayed denim clings high on your thighs, threads brushing skin every time you shift, and the jukebox glow paints your knees in pink and green like stained glass. There’s something almost careless in the way you sit, bare legs swinging, lip caught between your teeth, a laugh too bright for the hour but the air catches on you anyway, thickening, turning your sweetness into something sharper. You look like every boy’s first crush, glossy and sugar-stained, but linger long enough and you’re something else entirely: temptation humming low, innocence dressed in heat.
The whole diner hums like it knows the end is close, as if the neon has been waiting for this night to burn itself out. You and Saerin move through it together, partners in crime until the very last shift, hips bumping behind the counter, fingers brushing when you trade receipts, laughter curling into the glow until even the jukebox sounds like it’s grinning. Every ritual is suddenly sacred: the last graveyard soda fizzing dark in a chipped glass you share between sips, the last jukebox quarter sliding in with a clatter that makes your chest ache, the last sugar packet pocketed like contraband. The brass time clock waits by the door, still and patient, but you feel it watching, knowing when it clunks you’ll belong to somewhere else.
Eric and Sunwoo sprawl in the corner booth, arms stretched wide over vinyl that sticks to their skin, pretending they’re not waiting to be dragged into whatever mischief you two dream up. Sunwoo whistles when you lean across the counter, your cutoffs riding high, and Saerin snaps her gum at him, tossing a balled napkin that misses by an inch. Eric grins, lazy and dangerous, and dares you to join them. You do, sliding across the booth so your bare thigh presses into his jeans, Saerin tucking herself against Sunwoo like she’s been there forever. The four of you fold into one another, laughter spilling into the syrup-sweet air until it feels like the diner itself is holding its breath.
Eric and Sunwoo have been in your orbit forever, the same cul-de-sacs, the same cracked sidewalks, the same summers of stolen bikes and half-burnt sparklers but this is the first year you’ve been close. Close enough that they linger even when the others don’t, close enough that the four of you move as one through the slow, syrupy nights.
“Oh my god,” Sunwoo barks, choking on his soda, “you’ve barely sat down and this guy’s ready to propose. Someone get him a ring pop before he embarrasses himself.”
Eric tilts his head, grinning slow and dangerous, but his voice cracks just enough when he says, “Don’t act like you wouldn’t fold if she climbed on you. You’d be crying in five seconds flat.”
Saerin snaps her gum and smirks, legs crossed over Sunwoo’s lap like she’s claiming territory. “Please. Both of you are pathetic. At least try to last longer than a jukebox skip before you start moaning.”
The table erupts, Sunwoo laughing so hard he slaps the Formica, Eric muttering curses under his breath even as his thumbs stroke lazy circles into your hips, and you, biting down a smile as you shift just enough to make him twitch again. The diner hums around you, pink neon flickering against the chrome, every second sticky with sugar and laughter and the kind of heat that tastes like goodbye.
The boys are laughing, and you’re laughing harder, breathless against Eric’s shoulder like the booth itself has turned into a secret the four of you swore to keep. Every touch lingers longer than it should, Saerin’s knee wedged bold between Sunwoo’s legs, his grin daring her to press harder; Eric’s thumb skating higher up your thigh with every laugh, smug when your breath catches but you don’t move away. The jukebox stutters on another verse, the fryer screeches in the back, but none of it matters, the air is syrup-thick with heat, neon bleeding across your skin, the kind of closeness that feels half like goodbye and half like temptation you’ll never escape.
The diner has been your purgatory, your pipeline, the place you lived while the rest of the world rushed ahead. Tonight you let it devour you whole: fingers sticky and tangled across the table, whispers caught in the shine of the vinyl, Eric’s laugh curling against your neck, Sunwoo egging him on with every crude joke. Saerin steals fries with her free hand, daring Sunwoo to stop her, bracelets clinking as her smirk tilts sharper in the glow. She tips her head back, eyes hooded as she watches the pink sign buzz outside. “Last night,” she says, voice soft but charged. “After this, nothing stays the same.” Eric’s hand flexes on your thigh, warm and certain, his grin cocky but a little too raw at the edges. Sunwoo sets another straw alight just to watch it curl and collapse, smoke curling in the neon haze. And you, caught between them all, laughter still wet in your mouth, skin humming under every touch, can’t help but believe her.
It’s more than talk tonight; something has to be claimed. Eric fishes a marker from his pocket, dares you to leave your names carved into the diner before you go. Saerin grabs your wrist and scrawls a heart into your palm, ink bleeding into your skin. Sunwoo leans over the table, tilting his lighter beneath the rim of a plastic straw until it curls into a warped spiral, dropping it into the graveyard soda like a ritual offering. The boys laugh, you laugh harder, and suddenly the booth feels like church, the neon flicker above you a benediction.
Every touch lingers a little longer than it should, Saerin’s knee pressed between Sunwoo’s legs, Eric’s thumb stroking circles into the bare inside of your thigh and even through the noise of jukebox skips and kitchen clatter you feel the weight of goodbye thick in the air. This place has been your purgatory, your pipeline, the stop before the rest of the world begins. Tonight you let it swallow you whole: sticky fingers laced across the table, breath warm against your cheek, secrets scribbled into the gloss of the booth that no one else will ever read. When the clock finally clunks, metallic and final, Saerin kisses her finger and taps it against the machine. You copy her without thinking, and Eric does too, Sunwoo laughing but following suit. Four prints, pressed into brass, sealing the night. The diner exhales around you, pink and green light flickering, syrup and grease and laughter caught forever in its walls, and you know you’ll never walk through its door the same again.
The diner hums louder than it ever has, like it knows this is the last night it will hold you. Neon spills through the plate-glass windows in jagged strokes of pink and green, bleeding across chrome edges until even the napkin dispensers shimmer like candy. The sign outside sputters, buzzing so hard it shakes the glass, while inside everything is syrup-thick and close: booths glazed with years of grease, counters sugared at the seams, the jukebox stuck in its own loop, skipping verses as if afraid of endings. The glow washes over every face, turning skin into a patchwork of cotton-candy light, receipts curl on the register held down with chewed gum, and bathroom mirrors are smudged with fingerprints and half-lit by girls posing with flip phones, digital cameras flashing like secrets no one will ever print. For months this has been the orbit you and Saerin live in, claustrophobic but alive, a world held in neon and grease, the pipeline stops before life exhales you out into whatever comes next.
Saerin blows a pink bubble with her gum, popping it loud enough to draw stares from guys who are two booths down. “Group chat’s on fire tonight,” she says, tapping her nail against her phone screen like a drummer tapping out a beat. “You won’t believe the shit I’ve seen. Jeno in some shiny jersey, looks like he finally figured out what shoulder pads are for. And Jaemin—” she pauses just long enough to see your lips tighten—“well. Let’s just say rooftop parties look good on him.”
You roll your eyes like the name barely registers, lips closing around the straw with a force that makes it buckle in the glass. The bend squeals faint against your teeth, sugared bubbles stinging your tongue, and you keep sipping long past the point of comfort as if drowning the sound of him in syrup. The cherry syrup leaves a stain on your mouth, gloss sticking, and you set the glass down too carefully, fingers still curled tight around it. “Don’t start, Sae,” you say finally, voice stretched thin but even, the words sliding out like you’ve rehearsed them. “I don’t care.”
“Mm.” She hums, fake-innocent. “Sure. You don’t care. That why you double-tap every blurry photo with his elbow in the corner?”
“Shut up.” You laugh too loudly, lean into Eric’s shoulder as if the sound came from somewhere natural. His hand slides up your thigh under the table, thumb dragging slow, deliberate circles against the soft inside where your skirt has ridden high. Each stroke edges closer, teasing heat into you, daring you to shift or stay still. You let him, tilting your chin toward Saerin in a smirk that says see? I can. She only arches a brow, smirk curling sharper, as if to say you’re trying too hard.
The mounted TV above the counter fuzzes into static before catching, picture cutting to the sports highlights and the campus’ news reel, the kind broadcast from shaky student studios with cardboard backdrops and mics that buzz like cicadas. The camera pans across the field under floodlights, the announcer’s voice too bright, trying too hard to sound professional. Behind him, the stadium looks less like a battleground and more like a carnival, band kids puffing their cheeks raw, banners stitched with glitter and glue, cheerleaders flashing signs that still drip paint. It doesn’t look real, not compared to your town. It looks staged, like someone cracked open a dream and left the edges bleeding into the night.
The names ripple across the screen, familiar but distant. Jeno—your brother—caught in the frame with his helmet dangling loose, sweat slicking his hairline, grin wild like he’s already half in trouble. You remember him barefoot on the cul-de-sac asphalt, cracking water balloons against his own chest just to make you laugh, hollering like he’d won the world. Donghyuck flashes by next, no helmet, just his voice caught on a sideline mic, taunting the camera with that sly half-smile. He’s still the boy who once rigged fireworks in a mailbox just to see if they’d all go off at once, laughing so hard he fell into the ditch when they did. Then Mark Lee, denim vest over his jersey, guitar slung careless across his chest during halftime. He looks every inch the showman, and you see him instead as he was in your garage at sixteen, rigging Christmas lights into a strobe while he wailed on chords until the neighbors called in noise complaints. Renjun gets his split-second too, pressed into the corner of the shot, sketchbook balanced on his knees as though he’s above it all. You remember his rooftop doodles with penlight outlines, stars mapped into constellations only he could explain.
And then—last, like the reel knew to make you wait—Jaemin. He doesn’t even look at the camera, just leans against the bleachers in the shadow of floodlight haze, sweat dripping down his temple, hair matted and grin crooked like he already owns the night. He’s not playing; he never needed to. He’s lounging in the blur, water bottle in hand, shoulder nudging Jeno’s like a secret passed between them. You can almost see him as you last knew him: sprawled across the hood of Jeno’s car with smoke curling from his lips, eyes catching yours in the mirror of some summer night when everything felt louder.
The reel glitches again, static stuttering, and the announcer pushes on with breathless excitement about the “golden generation,” the scholarship kids, the ones destined to break out of small-town gravity. But it looks less like destiny than ritual, the way their names keep getting called in places you don’t belong yet. It’s a myth staged under too-bright lights, each grin rehearsed, each cheer too loud, and yet you can’t shake the whisper that soon, somehow, you’ll be dragged into the next act.
The sound cuts to static for a beat before the screen blinks to a clip of a carnival on campus: booths lit by string bulbs, cheap stuffed animals hanging limp in cages, someone shouting about prizes over a megaphone. It bleeds into the diner like a memory, like the town reminding you of every fair you spent leaning over counters sticky with spilled soda, watching boys pretend they were strong enough to knock a bottle pyramid down for you.
Eric catches it too, his grin tugging crooked as he leans closer, breath warm on your cheek. “Want me to win you a prize?” he asks, low enough that it brushes your ear, like you’re still kids sneaking quarters into claw machines at the bowling alley. His thumb presses firmer against your thigh, playful, daring, like he already knows your answer.
“Already got one,” you shoot back, popping the cherry stem between your teeth. The words feel slick, confident, and for a second you believe them. You smile wide enough that your gloss sticks to your straw when you take another sip.
The table erupts in laughter, Saerin kicking his shin under the booth, Sunwoo howling loud enough to draw a glare from the cook behind the counter. The moment stretches sticky, thick with neon and sugar. Every brush of Eric’s hand is a challenge you pretend to meet, every grin from Saerin a reminder she sees straight through you. You lean closer to Eric, your laughter pitched higher, your lip gloss reapplied twice as shiny in the reflection of the napkin holder. You’re fine, you tell yourself with every sip, every nudge of his knee against yours. You’re better than fine, you’re untouchable, desirable, already halfway out of this town.
Saerin is draped across Sunwoo’s lap like she was born there, his arm lazy around her waist, her thigh angled just so across his jeans. She’s scrolling with one hand, the other idly tugging at the loose thread of his sleeve, her bracelets chiming every time she flicks her wrist. The neon glow paints her mouth cherry-slick, and the curl of her laugh spills louder than the jukebox. Her phone lights up again, the screen buzzing hot against her palm, and your stomach clenches before she even says a word. You know that light. You know what it means. The group chat, muted on your phone for months, the one stitched together by girls and gays who orbit the boys like satellites. Heejin with her too-long stories, Ning teasing mercilessly, Winter always perched at the top of the food chain, her texts dripping with smugness. The chat is a carnival of gossip: who was seen sneaking out of whose dorm, whose jersey smelled like perfume, whose grin got caught on someone’s disposable camera at three a.m. You stay in it because you can’t leave, because leaving would be louder than staying silent but you’ve trained yourself not to look, not to bite. Until now.
Saerin exhales slow smoke toward the ceiling, her head tipping back against Sunwoo’s shoulder as the glow of her phone lights her face. “Oh my god,” she laughs, bracelets jangling as she waves the screen. “Your man’s at it again. They're all at the water tower, the one we always see in the campus posts. His shirt is wide open, cigarette hanging out of his mouth, acting like it’s a fucking photoshoot. Winter’s the one who sent it, of course.” She smirks, shaking her head. “She captioned it ‘missed this,’ like we don’t all know she used to let him fuck her on the back stairs after class.”
Her mouth curves, softer this time as her eyes flick to you. “He looks good, babe. Too good. I’m not even gonna lie.”
You squeeze your eyes shut, lashes pressing hard. You don’t need to look at the screen; every nerve in your body already recognizes him, the pull of memory rushing in like heat.
Sunwoo leans back, straw dangling from his mouth, grin curling slowly. “Let me guess, Jaemin’s out there having fun again?” He drags the word fun like it means everything but, eyes cutting over to you just long enough to watch your jaw tighten.
“Bingo,” Saerin says, dragging it out like a game show host, pressing her tongue between her teeth as she flicks back to the chat. “And it’s not just a photo this time. Winter sent a video. Can you believe that? Of course she did. Always the first one to stake her claim.”
Your hand clenches around your straw until it bends, plastic squealing. Eric notices but doesn’t say a word. His hand on your thigh tightens, slow, his thumb circling higher, as if daring you to look at him instead of whatever’s lighting up Saerin’s screen.
“She’s obsessed with him,” Saerin goes on, smirking as she scrolls. “Like, terminal. I swear, she thinks she’s the only one who’s ever had him. Which is hilarious, because—” She breaks off with a laugh sharp enough to slice. “Never mind.” Saerin laughs too quickly, the sound snapping sharp before she swallows it down, like she’s just realized she’s walked too close to the edge of saying what only the two of you know. Her eyes flick across the table to Eric and Sunwoo and for a beat her mouth trembles with words she won’t risk in front of them. The grin she puts back on is practiced, casual, but you can see the truth tugging at the corners.
You drop your gaze to the neon reflection in your glass, pretending to care about the fizzing bubbles. They don’t know. No one does. Not how far it went, not how reckless and consuming that summer really was. To everyone else, you and Jaemin were a rumor, a ‘maybe,’ something half-buried in whispers. Only you and Saerin know the full reel, the stairwells where his hand clamped over your mouth as you slid down the wall around him, the rooftops where dawn broke while his fingers worked you open under the pale sky, the booths in greasy diners where he pushed you down on his cock while everyone else laughed over milkshakes a few feet away. Bathrooms with the lock barely catching, your dress bunched in his fist, his breath hot against your neck as the sink rattled. Jeno’s car, the vinyl backseat groaning while headlights swept past, your brother’s hoodie still slung over the passenger chair. Even Jeno’s room once, his bed smelling of sweat and detergent, the risk so sharp it tasted like blood in your mouth. Every place that should’ve been safe became a site of hunger, every corner of your small town haunted by the memory of his cock buried deep inside you, your body trembling as you begged him not to stop. And only Saerin knows how far it really went, how every reckless fuck was its own dare, how every gasp was a gamble you should’ve lost. Everyone else thinks it was just summer, a fling blurred in polaroids, but you and Saerin carry the truth: that you fucked him everywhere you weren’t supposed to, and that’s exactly why you’ll never forget.
Eric doesn’t press, just shifts in the booth, his palm heavy on your thigh as though he’s staking his quiet claim. Sunwoo, on the other hand, quirks a brow, grin tugging wide like he knows he’s missing the punchline but enjoys the joke anyway. The hum of the jukebox swallows the moment, and you pray it ends there but it doesn’t.
Winter was always where the chaos was. Winter, with her sharp tongue and sharper eyeliner, the kind of girl who never looked at you without a smirk like she already knew where you ranked. Older, always orbiting closer to Jaemin than anyone else, her presence threaded into every whispered story you hated to hear. She was the one who posted him first, the one who never missed tagging his shoulder in a blurry party shot, the one who looked smug in every bathroom selfie with his chain around her throat. You and Saerin used to mock it in whispers, rolling your eyes at how desperate she looked. But beneath the laughter, something sour always settled in your chest.
Because there was a truth no one else saw, not even Winter: the summer where Jaemin was yours. Where every first kiss, every shuddering touch, every reckless midnight was stolen in corners Winter didn’t own. But Saerin’s words ring truer than you’d like, she wasn’t wrong. Winter and Jaemin had been on-and-off for as long as anyone could remember. She wasn’t just a name in a group chat; she was history, muscle memory, someone he fell back into like a bad habit. And the cruelest part? The only reason you had him at all was because, for a fleeting season, they had burned themselves out and gone “off.”
The thought coils tight in your stomach as you imagine it: Winter’s nails dragging down his back, her laughter cut sharp against his mouth, her claiming pieces of him before and after the summer you thought belonged to you. You picture her sending that video now, grainy rooftop lights, his grin wide open, his shirt undone and your throat closes around it. Not because you want to believe he’s hers again, but because the possibility has always been there, waiting. Saerin doesn’t say it outright. She doesn’t have to. The implication sits heavy in the smoke between you: Jaemin isn’t the kind of boy who belongs to anyone, not fully, not forever. Not even to Winter. But she has a claim you can’t deny, a thread tied long before your braid was ever wrapped in his fist. You hate it. You hate how it makes the summer you fell for him feel fragile, like a secret spliced between their on-and-off rhythm. Even as you keep your head down, stirring the melting ice in your glass, the truth burns in your skin: Winter may have been before, and she may be after, but only you know what happened when the whole world was asleep and he chose you.
Saerin notices before you even realize it yourself. The way your straw has gone still between your fingers, the way your laugh faded a beat too soon, the way your shoulders sag under the neon glow. She doesn’t say anything, doesn’t call you out the way she could, just slides across the vinyl until her thigh presses into yours. Her perfume is sugar-sweet, clinging faintly to the syrup in her apron, her bracelets tinkling as her hand settles on your wrist, cool and steady. She smells faintly of smoke and strawberry gloss, a contradiction you’ve grown up against, one that’s always been your anchor. Her thumb strokes slow across the ridge of your pulse, and it feels like language, her way of saying she’s here, she sees you, she won’t let you drown in whatever you’re not saying.
“You’re thinking too loud,” she murmurs, soft enough that Eric and Sunwoo can’t hear. “You always do that when you’re hurting.” You open your mouth to deny it, but she squeezes your wrist before you can speak, shaking her head with that small, conspiratorial smile. “Don’t bother. I know you.”
The diner clock rattles as it flips to 2:00 A.M., the sound tinny, metallic, like an old film reel stuttering forward. You catch her glance at it, then feel her fingers slip down to lace with yours. Saerin rises first, tugging you with her, and it’s so natural, like the two of you have been rehearsing this moment for years without knowing. Eric shifts in the booth, thigh stretching against denim in a way that tells you he’s still hard, but you don’t give him the satisfaction of a second look. Instead, you and Saerin exchange a conspiratorial smirk, one that blooms into giggles before either of you can stop it, your joined hands swinging as you dart past him. The boys fade into the background, their laughter a blur, as the two of you run like girls escaping into your own private film.
“Slow down,” you whisper through your laughter, but Saerin only pulls you faster, her bracelets jangling like bells. “What if we fall?”
“Then we fall together,” she throws back, hair spilling loose from her ribbon, grin bright as the neon you’re running toward.
The time clock looms by the kitchen door, brass face dulled by grease and years of fingerprints, a relic no one’s replaced because it feels too permanent to change. You’ve both watched older girls kiss their fingers and tap it on their last night, leaving the town like they were touching scripture, a farewell pressed into metal. Now it’s your turn. Saerin presses her cheek to your shoulder as you fumble the card into the slot, both of you laughing too breathlessly, too softly, like the moment is holy and dangerous all at once. The lever slams down with a clunk that reverberates through the diner, louder than it should be, echoing across every syrup-sticky table and neon-lit corner you’ve known.
“God, did you hear that?” you giggle, pressing your free hand to your chest. “It’s like the whole diner knows.”
“Good,” Saerin says, eyes wide and playful. “Let it know. We’re done here. This place doesn’t own us anymore.”
It doesn’t feel like just a punch-out. It feels like ritual, like the town itself has stamped you finished, ready, no longer children. Saerin giggles, whispering something girlish and small against your ear, then kisses her finger and presses it to the clock’s brass face, leaving an invisible seal only you can see. You follow her lead, hand trembling a little as you do the same, and when your fingertip meets the cool metal it’s like you’ve signed a contract you didn’t even know existed. The tradition is older than you, passed down through girls who left in short skirts and glossy lips, who never came back except for Christmases. You’ve seen the photos taped up on the back wall of the kitchen, girls with teased hair in the 80s, scrunchies in the 90s, lip gloss in the early 00s, each of them smiling in the exact same pink glow, on the exact same last night.
Now it’s you and Saerin. Two girls standing too close, holding hands like the whole town might try to tear you apart if you let go. Your laughter softens into something quieter, something fragile, as you look at each other in the jukebox light. There’s no need to say anything. The town has kept you, the diner has caged you, and now you’ve slipped the lock together. This is the moment you’ll remember when you’re gone, not Eric’s grin, not Sunwoo’s teasing, not even the ache that lives in your chest when you think of Jaemin. Just you and Saerin, two girls pressing fingerprints into brass at 2:00 A.M., marking yourselves in a tradition older than both of you, ready for whatever comes next.
“Ready?” she whispers, voice soft enough to fold into the hum of the jukebox.
You nod, squeezing her hand tighter. “As long as you’re with me.”
The hum of the neon follows you out, buzzing against your skin, carrying you into the dark like a secret promise. You know the town will never look the same in daylight again. This was your last shift, your last hour inside its syrup-and-grease heartbeat. What waits is unknown, but inevitable, new walls, new faces, and his shadow already waiting somewhere in the crowd.
The field hums like it’s been waiting for you. Headlights line the grass in crooked arcs, radios bleeding static from truck beds, smoke from the fire painting the sky the same orange-pink as the neon you just left behind. The blaze is enormous, taller than last year, flames snapping like they want to swallow the season whole. You’ve stood at this edge a hundred times before, but tonight it presses different—closer, heavier, like it knows your names. This year isn’t about watching from the edges, clapping for someone else’s send-off. It’s your turn to stand inside the circle, to let the fire mark you. Every summer before, you and Saerin were only spectators, the younger ones, safe in the shadows, whispering promises into each other’s hair that someday you’d be the ones stepping forward. Now the air carries your weight. The blaze doesn’t just belong to them, it belongs to you, too. It feels like the whole field is holding its breath, waiting for you to feed it something you can’t get back, proof that this time you’re part of the leaving, not the ones left behind.
You and Saerin arrive hand in hand, the smell of grease and syrup still clinging to your hair, the laughter of the diner trailing behind like perfume. She’s in denim cutoffs and a halter, silver belly ring catching firelight every time she moves; you’re softer, cotton dress slipping at the straps, ribbon loose at your wrist where she tied it earlier. She smokes like she’s been waiting all day for this, exhaling in slow curls that mingle with the bonfire smoke until you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
Eric and Sunwoo are already sprawled in their usual corner of the chaos, as if the spot belongs to them. Eric leans against the hood of his car, one leg kicked forward, eyes tracking you with a grin that never quite tips into words. Sunwoo’s crouched by the fire, poking at the edges with a stick too small to matter, letting the sparks jump up his arms like it’s a game. When you and Saerin fold into their space, no one blinks. The four of you always find each other, no matter where the circle starts.
“Took you long enough to get ready,” Sunwoo drawls, straightening just enough to toss the stick into the blaze. It pops, sparks catching on the wind. “Thought you’d ditch us for the jukebox.”
“As if we’d ever leave you,” Saerin teases, pressing herself against his side, cigarette dangling loose between two fingers. “Who else would light the fire wrong?”
You laugh, too loudly maybe, but the sound feels good. Eric hears it, tilts his head, and without asking he reaches for your wrist, pulling you down onto the hood beside him. Your thigh presses into his jeans, heat sinking into skin. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t have to. His thumb finds your knuckle, drumming lazily, and the contact says more than words would.
The fire snarls and spits, swallowing everything the kids feed it, shredded jerseys, scrawled notebook pages, beer cartons ripped to ribbons. The heat licks at your skin as each offering disappears, sparks clawing upward like they want to carry the memory higher before it burns away. This is the tradition, older than you, older than most of the kids crowding the field: every summer, those about to leave have to surrender something to the blaze. A piece of who they were, proof of what they lived, sacrificed so they can step into whoever they’re about to become. You’ve sat at the edge of this circle a dozen times, whispering commentary in diner booths, watching smoke curl into constellations that didn’t belong to you. But tonight the ritual is yours, the fire demanding a piece of you, daring you to give up something you’re not sure you’re ready to let go.
Saerin goes first. She flicks her cigarette out into the dirt, digs into her bag, and pulls out her apron, still stained with grease and stiff with sugar. “Guess this is me quitting,” she says, laughing sharply, but her hands tremble when she balls it tight. She throws it hard into the blaze, and it catches instantly, fire chewing through the fabric like it’s been hungry for it all along. She exhales, long and shaky, then folds herself back against Sunwoo’s chest like she can’t stand without him.
You watch with your whole body tensed, chest aching as if the fire itself has wrapped its hands around your ribs. The ribbon Saerin tied at your wrist digs into your skin, frayed from nights of being tugged and twisted, from the one memory you can’t shake, his teeth catching it when the house downstairs was too loud, when your lungs felt strangled by the weight of voices, and he made silence with his mouth instead. Your fingers work the knot loose slowly, trembling, reluctant. The polaroids stay buried in their box, too dangerous to give up. You can’t throw him, can’t burn a person out of yourself. But you can give this.
The ribbon slides free, soft and sweat-damp from your skin, and for a moment you clutch it tight, as though maybe holding it long enough could make it turn back into what it once was. The world blurs at the edges, smoke in your lashes, the heat of the blaze pushing sweat down your spine. You draw in a breath so sharp it scrapes your throat raw, then with a motion quicker than you feel, you let it go. It flutters upward like it’s fighting to stay, twisting in the night air, catching the glow of headlights and the neon-pink spill of fire. For a second it hovers, almost tender, as if it wants to be spared. Then the heat takes it. The fabric blackens, curls on itself, and vanishes into sparks. The fire groans and roars higher, swallowing the offering whole, and you swear it sounds like recognition, like it knows what you just surrendered, like it’s marking you for the next life you’re about to step into.
Saerin notices first, because of course she does. Her eyes flick to your wrist, bare now, skin still marked faintly red where the ribbon dug in. She doesn’t make a scene; she just exhales, long and soft, then curls her arm through yours like she’s steadying you both. “Good girl,” she murmurs, almost too low to catch, her tone not teasing this time but reverent, as though you’ve just done something sacred. Her bracelets jangle when she lifts another offering, a diner name tag, bent from being pinned and unpinned too many times and tosses it into the blaze without hesitation. It catches fast, blue plastic bubbling into nothing, and she grins like it’s freedom.
Eric’s slower. He sits crouched in the grass a moment, shoulders hunched, fumbling with his lighter as if trying to buy time. Then he peels a strip of receipt paper from his pocket, scrawled over with doodles and half-written lyrics, the kind of scraps he always left crumpled in diner booths. He doesn’t say what it means, but you know, it’s his way of giving up the safety net of the old routines, the endless waiting around. He flicks it into the fire and leans back with a smirk, like it costs him nothing, but his jaw clenches as the flame devours it. Sunwoo’s turn comes last, and he makes a show of it, of course he does, lifting his flask like a toast before pouring the last of it straight into the flames. They leap up with a hiss, licking higher, sparks bursting in the air. He laughs, loud and careless, but when he settles back beside Saerin, his hand brushes her thigh and lingers, quieting him more than he’d ever admit.
The four of you stand there, shoulders almost touching, the heat kissing your faces, the smell of smoke thick in your hair. You feel raw, bare, like the fire has stripped away something you weren’t sure you’d ever give up. The tradition is supposed to be simple, burn the past, step into the next thing but it doesn’t feel simple. It feels like a tether snapping. Like the field, the diner, even the polaroids tucked away are all humming with the same message: you’re leaving. Ready or not, the next part is already here.
Saerin catches your hand, squeezes until your bones press, and leans close enough for only you to hear. “We did it,” she whispers, soft and girlish. “We’re really leaving.”
Sunwoo breaks the hush, voice loose, teasing. “Look at you two. All sentimental. Don’t cry too much, the town’ll flood.”
Saerin flips him off without looking up, still holding your hand.
You manage a laugh, shaky but real. “Don’t worry. I’ll save the tears for the bus.”
The fire keeps eating, kids keep shouting, beer cans keep cracking open, but in the middle of it, the four of you press closer, shoulders brushing, heat sinking into skin. It feels like being stitched together by the blaze itself. You know, standing there, that nothing will be the same after tonight. This was your purgatory, your holding place, the neon-drenched pause before life moves. Now the tape is spooling forward, faster than you’re ready for. And though you don’t say it out loud, though no one else needs to hear, you feel it thrumming in your bones: this town isn’t yours anymore. Tomorrow, you belong to the next chapter.
You don’t remember how you got from the gravel crunch of the parking lot to the dim quiet of your bedroom, only that Eric followed, that Saerin mouthed be careful behind you with a half-smile and a raised brow, and that the house felt different when you unlocked the door, hollow, waiting. Your suitcase sits slouched against the wall, zipper teeth gaping, a mess of clothes spilling like a secret you haven’t decided to tell yet. Tomorrow it will be real: new dorms, new skyline, the campus where all of them already are. Tonight, though, Eric is here, warm and solid, and you let him in.
He drops his sneakers by the door, shrugs off his hoodie like he belongs, and when you straddle him on your bed, it feels less like choice and more like momentum. His hands grip your hips, guiding you down onto him, and your body obeys, slick and clumsy with a need that isn’t really his. You ride him harder than you mean to, chasing something he can’t give, the mattress squeaking, your breath spilling fast. He groans, head tipping back, calling your name like he’s surprised by how much you take, how quick you move. His praise is easy, soft, but every thrust makes your mind flicker elsewhere.
Because it’s not his voice you hear when your nails bite into his shoulders. It’s the one that rasped filth into your ear under the hiss of cicadas. It’s not his hands you feel dragging you down, it’s the bruising grip that once held you still in stairwells, the palm that smudged sweat against your mouth in the backseat while the world shouted outside. Eric groans again, louder, and you press your lips to his throat to muffle your own sound, but the name trembling at the edge of it isn’t his. It never was.
Eric isn’t shy about wanting you, he never has been, not when he’d linger too long at the counter, not when his eyes followed your legs in those diner cutoffs, not when he’d offer to walk you home even though it was out of his way. Now, with you straddling him in the dim hush of your room, he finally lets it spill. His hands frame your hips, sliding up under your shirt, palms wide and warm against your waist as you grind down onto him. He groans like he’s been waiting his whole life for this. “God, you don’t even know,” he pants, forehead pressed to your shoulder as he thrusts up into you, steady and reverent. “I’ve wanted you forever. All those nights at the diner, thought I was losing my mind watching you laugh at him, thinking you’d never even look at me.” He laughs, low and breathless, nipping your collarbone as though he can bite the words into you. “Never thought you’d want me like this. Always figured you were too wrapped up in Jaemin to even notice I was there.”
His words should land heavier, should make you feel chosen, claimed. Instead they echo, bouncing around the hollow he doesn’t know you carry. You move on instinct, riding him faster, your nails dragging along his chest, pretending his touch fills you. He groans, eyes squeezed shut, calling you beautiful, perfect, swearing you feel better than anything he’s ever dreamed. He cups your jaw, thumb stroking your cheek like he wants to memorize the shape of you. But inside, every nerve betrays you. The pace is wrong, too careful where you crave ferocity, too measured where you crave recklessness. His hands are steady, sure, but they don’t make you shake. When he whispers, “You’re all I ever wanted,” your body arches, but not for him. You grind harder, chasing release, but it’s not his name that flares in your throat. You bite it back, lips parted, praying the sound stays trapped in your lungs.
Eric notices your silence, mistakes it for intensity. “Fuck, you’re so quiet—so fucking hot like this.” He kisses your mouth, tongue sliding against yours, soft, earnest, almost tender. He tastes like soda syrup and boyhood, familiar in a way that makes your chest ache. He wants you to want him back, wants this to be real. You let him believe it, let his words soak the air, let his body move in you until the friction tips you into something sharp and quick. Your climax crashes through, messy, desperate, a tremor that makes you cling to him like you mean it. When it’s over, when his chest is slick under your palms and his laugh is still warm in your ear, all you feel is the absence of someone else. The sheets cling damp to your back, the suitcase gapes open at the wall, and Eric whispers how he can’t believe you’re his. You smile faintly, stroke his hair like you care, and wonder how he doesn’t notice that every time your eyes flutter closed, it’s another face, another voice, another night you’re reliving.
The room tilts in neon afterimage, as if the diner followed you here, and when you finally collapse forward, skin damp, Eric strokes your back like he’s proud, like he’s claimed something. You bury your face in the pillow so he won’t see your eyes glassed over with someone else’s ghost. He drifts off after, easy as sleep always comes to boys who’ve never been left waiting. You lie awake, staring at the slumped suitcase, at the ribbon of dawn already fraying at the blinds. Tomorrow you leave. Tomorrow you step into the place where his name is carved into every wall, every rumor, every breath. You aren’t ready, not even close, but ready or not, it’s coming. The night is over. The fire has gone cold. And all you can think about is the shadow you’ll never outrun.
The morning comes too fast, soft light leaking pale across the town like someone pulled the color out of the sky. The air smells faintly of dew and asphalt warming, a kind of freshness that feels borrowed, like the day knows it isn’t really yours to keep. The sidewalks hum with motion, neighbors wheeling suitcases over cracked pavement, mothers fussing with collars, fathers loading trunks with boxes too heavy for one trip. The whole town gathers in slow procession at the community square, the way it does every August when another group gets pulled out of orbit. It’s tradition, but this year it presses closer, heavier, because now it’s your name on the list.
Saerin walks beside you, her hand brushing yours, her own suitcase rolling unevenly behind her, the little bow she tied on its handle dragging against the street. Her hair’s tied high in a silk ribbon that slips loose in the wind, gloss catching the pale sun. She smokes one last cigarette before she goes, the last she’ll light in this town, flicking ash into the gutter like a blessing. You both try to laugh about how surreal it feels, how you’ve spent years watching other kids leave, the air thick with goodbyes and promises, and now it’s you. Your shoes scuff the same sidewalks you’ve always walked, but today every crack looks like it’s leading out.
The square is loud in its own way, church bells straining, old men leaning out of the barbershop to wave, toddlers climbing onto car hoods as their older siblings say their goodbyes. Suitcases stack in uneven pyramids on the grass, some dented and plastered with stickers, others new and shining, bought just for this moment. A folding table is set up at the edge, volunteers passing out paper cups of lemonade and burnt coffee, the same way they always do when a group leaves. The high school band even shows up, horns squealing through half-remembered songs, the notes floating crooked into the air. It’s sweet, clumsy, deeply small-town.
Your mother cries quietly, trying to hide it in the collar of her blouse, hugging you so tight you can feel her heart pounding against your cheek. She keeps smoothing your hair back, like if she fixes it enough times you’ll stay. Your father pulls you into a rough embrace, less words, more grip, the kind of hold that says more than anything he’d manage out loud. Saerin’s family is loud in comparison. her mother fussing over her makeup smearing, her little brother begging her not to leave, her aunt already making jokes about who she’ll date in the city. You stand side by side through it all, letting the ache press into your ribs but refusing to bend under it.
Your mother holds you like she’s trying to memorize your bones, cheek pressed into your hair, breath shaky as it settles into the curve of your neck. Her hands won’t stop smoothing down your back, fussing with the strap of your camisole, tugging the ribbon at your wrist as though it might come loose if she lets go. Finally she pulls back just enough to look at you, eyes shining damp in the pale morning. “At least you’ll have Jeno,” she whispers, like she’s comforting herself as much as you. “He’ll look out for you. Always has.” You nod, even though the thought twists sharp in your chest, because that’s what she needs to hear. That her son will guard his little sister. That nothing dangerous could happen when he’s near. You don’t tell her that the most dangerous thing in your life has always been closest to him.
Because she isn’t wrong. Jeno has always been the one standing between you and the world, the one who waited at the end of driveways with his hands shoved in his pockets, who walked you home from school even when it cost him an hour with his friends, who made sure no boy got too close at house parties without earning his stare first. He’s reckless in most things, but not with you. His hand at the small of your back in every photograph wasn’t just for show, it was steady, protective, a silent warning to anyone who thought you were unguarded. And yet, that same hand, that same circle of friends he folded you into, was where everything dangerous began.
You love him. You always have. The kind of love that comes with growing up in the same house, splitting bowls of ramen in the middle of the night, sharing secrets over headlights in the driveway. Seeing him again is a kind of anchor, and a part of you is almost giddy for it, the way he’ll ruffle your hair like nothing’s changed, the way his laugh will shake the room like home. But underneath the excitement runs the guilt, sharp and constant. Because Jeno doesn’t know everything. He can’t. He doesn’t know that every summer night he swore he was keeping you safe, you were slipping into the shadows with the one person he trusted most. That Jaemin’s name, Jaemin’s grin, Jaemin’s hands, everything you’ve hidden, lives like a second pulse under your skin. Being close with Jeno has always meant carrying that secret too, and the thought of stepping back into his orbit with it still lodged in your chest makes your stomach twist.
Eric’s laugh lingers low in your ear, but it doesn’t stick. By the time you pull back, the square is already buzzing, families weaving together, Sharpies being passed hand to hand. The whole town seems to tilt toward the mural wall like it does every August, kids with packed suitcases waiting for their names to join the layers. It pulls you with it, like a tide too practiced to resist. The town has a ritual for this moment, everyone gathers at the mural wall by the square, the one painted decades ago and retouched every few years. Each kid leaving that year signs their name in marker, some scrawled huge and messy, others small and careful. Saerin writes hers in glitter pen, adding a heart that smudges before it dries. You hesitate, marker hovering, then sign yours smaller, tucked in beside hers, like it’s safer that way. The names pile on top of one another, years of kids who thought they’d never get out until they did.
When you step back, cap clicking closed on the marker, your eyes skim the wall without meaning to. Names stacked over names, years of kids pressed into one another until they blur. Then you see it, sharp, slanted, carved deeper into the paint than anyone else’s. Jaemin. His name sits a little higher than yours, but the black ink drips faint where the paint absorbs it, bleeding down until it brushes yours. It looks like an accident, like chance placement, but your chest seizes with the memory of every place you bled into each other where you shouldn’t have. The way his name hangs above yours is almost obscene, unmistakably tethered, as if the wall itself remembers. All you can see is his body over yours in stairwell shadows, the sound of your knees hitting carpet, his hand fisted in your braid, his voice cutting low and certain, good girl, stay quiet. The ink drips now the same way sweat once slid down your throat when you arched for him. Your name shouldn’t be next to his, but it is, and it always has been, stitched in ways you never meant for anyone to see. You press your thumb against the wall like you could smudge it away, but it stays, bold and damning, the secret no one else here knows curling hot under your skin.
Sunwoo makes a joke about how the mural is basically a graveyard for small-town kids, “names painted over like we’re just ghosts they replace every August.” Eric laughs, flicks his lighter, but his eyes keep drifting back to you. The four of you end up pressed close, the same way you were last night, except this time it’s daylight and families are watching. Saerin makes a face, then links arms with you, tugging you toward the bus like she’s afraid if you hesitate too long, you’ll stay behind. The bus itself waits at the curb, an old yellow thing borrowed from the high school, its paint chipped and seats patched with duct tape. It shouldn’t feel like escape, but it does. People crowd the doors, hugging last hugs, passing bags hand to hand, the air alive with the crackle of nerves.
You and Saerin climb aboard together, sliding into a seat near the middle. Through the window, the town looks smaller already, like it’s folding in on itself the farther you go. The diner’s neon sign is just a faint flicker now, pink light drowned by daylight, but you can still picture it buzzing over sticky booths and jukebox skips. The football field drags past next, bleached pale by morning, empty bleachers yawning like they’re waiting for a season that already left. And then the mural wall, glowing faint in the distance, layered with names that shimmer like they’ve been painted into your ribs. For a second you swear you can still smell the sharp bite of marker, still feel the heat of the brick under your palm, your name bleeding too close to his. The whole town blurs into a reel of everything you can’t carry with you, shrinking behind glass until it looks like nothing at all, except you know it’s everything.
The anticipation swells heavy in your chest. This is what you wanted, what you’ve been waiting for, but your fingers still curl tight in your lap. The suitcase at your feet looks too clean, too final, stuffed with the pieces of a life you’re pretending are enough to build another. Saerin notices, presses her knee into yours, whispers, “We’re really doing this.” She says it softly, almost like it’s a secret, and you nod, your throat too tight to answer.
As the bus hisses to life, you catch one last glimpse through the window. They don’t wave, they’re too proud for that but Eric leans his shoulder against the glass behind you and Sunwoo sprawls lazy in the seat, grinning like the whole thing’s a joke. Their eyes are on you even as the town blurs, and it feels like another kind of promise, one that’s messier, more physical, lingering in the touch of Eric’s hand still resting on your knee, in the memory of Sunwoo’s laugh breaking loudly under neon the night before. The town falls away as the bus pulls forward, past the square, past the diner, past the streets you’ve memorized so well you could walk them blind. Neon ghosts flicker against your eyelids, the taste of cherry coke still thick on your tongue.
Behind you, Eric shifts closer, his breath brushing your hair, while Sunwoo kicks your seat once, playful, as if to remind you he’s watching too. The air shifts, heavy with nerves, sweet with possibility, thick with the kind of intimacy you’ve never been able to name out loud. You don’t know what waits on the other side, the dorms, the games, the shadows of boys who once belonged to you but you can feel it pressing already, closer than you’re ready for. And in that moment, pressed between the weight of their gazes and the ghosts of what you left behind, you realize the leaving isn’t clean. It never was.
The coach sighs as it pulls into town, brakes groaning like they’ve carried a generation too many. Out the window, the morning light is already brutal, bleaching the edges of everything until rooftops look brittle and streets feel smaller than you remember. The square slides into view like a scratched-up postcard, red bricks buckling in the heat, the grout the color of sun-bleached cassette tape. The mural wall blazes under noon light, a living palimpsest of escape routes. Names climb it in thick Sharpie layers, bleeding the way mixtape ink used to smear on sweaty palms; some sprawl in shouty bubble letters, others hide in mouse-sized cursive between the cracks. Fading Lisa-Frank-pink glitter pens still throw flecks of rainbow when the wind nudges them, hearts half-rubbed away by July storms but too stubborn to disappear. Underneath, you can still read ghost slogans from early-’00s seniors, “class of Y2K rulez,” “destiny’s kids,” faint as a forgotten ringtone beneath fresher boasts and inside jokes. Every August, the ritual reloads: kids step up with trembling hands, tag their proof of departure, then back away like they’ve just detonated something sacred. From behind the bus window, the wall feels less like a landmark and more like a mirror ball, catching sun and flashing it straight at you, impatient for your name, your ink, your turn in the reel.
The diner rises sudden at the corner like it’s been waiting, neon cursive blinking against siding the color of old bone. In daylight it looks out of place, too pink, too alive, buzzing so loud it feels like it’s shaking the sky loose. The sign flickers every third beat, stubborn as a pulse, bleeding faint color across the windshields lined crooked in the lot. You’ve never stepped inside, not yet, but it already carries the weight of something you should have known forever—chrome edges catching sun like jewelry, blinds tilted just enough to flash the smear of red booths, the curve of a jukebox haloed in glow. It feels like a photograph you’ve seen a hundred times without remembering when, the kind that presses a place into you before you’ve earned it. Standing there, you feel it tug at your edges, the quiet promise that this will be yours soon, that before long the air will smell like sugar and grease in your hair, that your name will hum against the neon just as stubbornly as the sign refusing to burn out.
The football field unrolls like a film reel caught between frames, grass shaved too close in patches, wild in others, chalk lines bleeding pale against the green. Bleachers sit scorched silver under the sun, metal warped with heat, already waiting for bodies to slam rhythm into them come night. You can almost hear it if you let your eyes blur, helmets colliding like cymbals, sneakers clawing dirt, the breath of boys sharp and hot under floodlights. You picture Jeno in his jersey, chest rising like a drumbeat, and then, inevitably, Jaemin at his shoulder. The way he’d stretch before the snap, spine long and loose, shirt clinging damp across him until it was less fabric than suggestion. His mouth parted, grin crooked, the kind that dared you to keep looking. Everything about him moved in rhythm: the shake of his hair against his forehead, the roll of his shoulders as though even running was a kind of dance. From this distance you can already feel how the air must thicken under those lights, sweat sharp in the back of your throat, every heartbeat syncing to the pace of boys who don’t just play the game but turn it into spectacle. It’s obscene, almost—how much hunger a patch of grass can hold, how the field itself hums like it remembers every body that’s pressed into it, every secret you’ll never say aloud.
Above the treeline, the water tower rises like a relic from some half-forgotten reel, its paint scabbed into rust streaks that glint red when the sun hits. The legs are thick with carvings, layers of names gouged in pocketknife script, each one stacked higher as if bravery could be measured in inches. It looks abandoned from the road, all hollow steel and bird nests, but everyone knows better. It’s lived-in, cigarette butts stamped into the dirt at its base, crushed cans still glittering in the weeds, the faint ghost of spray paint slogans that once felt like prophecy. The climb is always harder than it looks, rungs slick with summer sweat, palms blackened by rust.
At the top, the view spreads out like a postcard gone soft at the edges: headlights streaking highways into crooked constellations, the lake stretched so dark it swallows the horizon, and below, the bunk houses strung together like Monopoly pieces, their roofs patched with tin, their porches sagging with old lawn chairs and Christmas lights that never come down. Someone always swears they’ve seen a coyote slink past those porches, or heard raccoons fighting under the eaves, or watched owls wheel above the tower like guardians. The air up there is sharp, metallic, every inhale threaded with the taste of iron and adrenaline.
Touches on the tower always feel different, riskier, heavier, as if the height itself turned every hand against skin into a dare. It isn’t just a landmark; it’s a measuring stick of the town’s kids. The mural wall records who’s leaving, but the water tower decides who was ever brave enough to climb, who pressed their name high into its frame and kissed with the whole county watching from below. Once someone strung a broken boombox from one of its beams, and if you stood quiet you could still hear the faint rattle of cassette tape caught in the wind, reminding you that every generation leaves a piece of itself hanging there, rusting, daring the next to take it further.
The coach rattles past the corner where the arts house perches, hunched but unashamed, like a relic no one bothered to bury. Once it might have been a mansion, arched windows, brickwork too ornate for student hands but now its bones are patched in flyers that curl at the corners, ink bleeding from rain. Layers of paper turn the walls into a kind of skin, mixtape covers stapled over graffiti, band names scrawled until they blur together. A couch sags across the porch, upholstery torn open in pale seams, cigarette burns stitched into the fabric like constellations only the house knows how to read.
Even in the heat of afternoon, you can feel the sound leaking out of it—bass thudding from a basement speaker, a voice laughing too loudly, a chord hit wrong on a guitar then left to fade. Windows are half-open, curtains knotted up with extension cords, and the breeze carries the tang of smoke, cheap perfume, and something sharper, like printer ink. You can picture the inside already: floors sticky with beer, polaroids strung on twine until they replace wallpaper, disposable cameras left out on counters like candy. It doesn’t belong to the players with scholarships or the golden boys with crowds at their heels. This house is for the restless, the ones who refuse to stand still, the ones who stay awake even when the town is asleep. The bus tilts forward, but your eyes stay on the porch, where a shoe print marks the railing, where someone’s jacket hangs like a flag. You don’t know yet whose laughter you’ll follow into those rooms, or what secrets the walls will absorb from you. But you can already feel the pull, a hum under your skin as certain as gravity. One night, maybe soon, the floorboards will take your weight, and you’ll add yourself to the house’s memory whether you want to or not.
The stadium breaks out of the flat like it was always waiting for you, bleachers glinting silver in the sun, stacked too high to be a small town’s. The field is impossibly green, lines cut so sharp they look painted in steel, and the goalposts reach up like bones, bare against the washed-out sky. Even with the place empty, you swear you can feel the echo of nights it’s seen—drums rattling air, voices rising, lights so bright they bleach out the stars. In your head, you can already see Jeno’s grin hardening under the helmet, Jaemin’s shoulders rolling like he owns the rhythm, Mark tossing his head back as if he’s playing to an invisible crowd. The scoreboard ticks even when nothing’s happening, numbers blinking like it can’t stand silence. From the bus window it looks mythic, too big for the town it belongs to, like the kind of stage that doesn’t let you leave the same.
The dorms run long and low, brick softened with ivy that crawls right into the cracks. Windows hang crooked with box fans and propped-open textbooks, laundry strung between balconies like mismatched flags, sheets, bras, jerseys flapping in the same breeze. A vending machine hums broken in one corner, its plexiglass sprayed over with initials layered thick, some crossed out, others traced over until the letters don’t make sense anymore. Students are everywhere: slouched on stoops, skateboards across their knees, radios spitting static-laced pop that drifts down the row. It feels less like school and more like a holding pen, a summer camp where the walls will be too thin to keep anything private. You can already picture it—footsteps creaking down halls, whispers carried through plaster, the sound of doors closing too fast.
Past the edge of campus, the bar squats like it doesn’t care who notices. Its windows are painted black, beer signs glow faint in daylight, and the door is scarred with so many initials it looks more carved than wood. Motorcycles line the curb like armor, chrome burning in the heat, and someone has wheeled a jukebox onto the porch, its speakers hissing out a half-dead country song. The smell rolls even to the bus. sour beer soaked into wood, fryer grease clinging to air too thick to breathe. You don’t need anyone to explain. This is where nights will crack open, where fights will start and kisses will end against back walls, where secrets will cost less to make and more to keep.
Down by the strip, the laundromat still waits, its windows smeared with detergent handprints, its fluorescent buzz loud enough to set your teeth on edge. The air smells of softener and damp concrete, and the washers slam like heartbeat drums. Quarters clink into slots like tiny prayers, dryers hum until you think they might combust. Plastic chairs sag against the wall, graffitied with names and confessions no one admits out loud. It’s an ugly, ordinary place, but that’s what makes it holy. Everyone ends up here eventually, eyes on the spinning drum, waiting for something bigger to change.
Next door, the video rental shop clings stubbornly to life, its neon sign half-dead, posters sun-bleached and curling until only ghosts of color remain. The carpet inside is thin, the kind that whispers static against sneakers, and the smell is a mix of sugar powder and mildew that never leaves your clothes. VHS shells crackle when you pull them from the shelf, trailers loop endlessly on the fuzzy counter TV, and the aisles are narrow enough that shoulders touch whether they mean to or not. Every visit feels like rehearsal for something you can’t name—pretending to browse, sneaking candy in your pockets, brushing close to someone you shouldn’t. You can already see yourself walking back in years from now, the air thick with dust, the nostalgia heavier than the smell.
Further out, the lake waits like a secret no one keeps well enough. In daylight it flashes silver, dock boards warped and creaking, nails jutting like teeth. By night it swallows whole. Headlights rake across the surface in trembling arcs, cicadas scream until your pulse drowns in them, and the dark thickens with a hunger that feels alive. The planks sag under bodies they weren’t built to hold, skin slick with heat and fear, mouths frantic as if silence itself could catch them. The water remembers what it doesn’t show, bare feet cut on stone, bottles emptied and flung into its throat, whispers pressed against collarbones. It’s a place where risk sharpens touch, where you learn that night always knows more than daylight admits.
The road bends further and the drive-in blinks awake, screen tall and sun-stained, its metal skeleton bent but not broken. Rusted speakers dangle from poles like relics, some still working, most just decoration now. Cars will line here again, trucks with tailgates down, hoods dented from years of leaning, blankets spilling over benches. It will smell of butter and cheap beer, radios crackling the soundtrack when the old speakers give up. Couples will fog windshields, kids will sneak in through the trees, and the whole field will glow with headlights flashing too bright when someone leaves before the credits. It isn’t just a theater; it’s confession. Every kiss, every fight, every secret traded under the screen will stay burned into the dirt long after the reels stop turning.
The whole town hums like it’s caught in amber, each place frozen but breathing. Flip phones flash in bathroom mirrors, disposable cameras click with static patience, mixtapes slide hand-to-hand like secrets, and already everything feels like it belongs to memory more than to now. Through the bus window, nothing looks accidental. Each landmark tilts toward you like a prophecy: the laundromat drums waiting to measure your silences, the rental shop aisles daring you closer, the lake holding its shadows ready, the drive-in aching for its next confession. They aren’t scenery. they’re traps and thresholds both, waiting to swallow you, to give you back ghosts you thought you’d burned. The glass between you and the world doesn’t make it smaller. It makes it sharper, like film unspooling faster than you can catch it.
The bus groans as it pulls into the lot, brakes screeching in protest before the whole frame exhales a hiss of steam. For a moment no one moves, the aisle clogged with duffels and bodies, kids craning to catch their first glimpse of campus through the smeared windows. The air outside looks sharp, sunlight bouncing hard off brick and chrome until it makes your eyes ache. When the doors fold open, the sound of it swallows you whole, voices layered over voices, horns blaring from cars unloading, shouts from upperclassmen calling to each other across the stretch of asphalt. You step down with Saerin at your side, the heat hitting you immediately, the smell of gasoline and grass, the sting of nerves crowding under your skin. Behind you, Eric hefts his bag with a practiced swing, Sunwoo trailing with the kind of swagger that suggests he’d rather be anywhere else, his smirk already slipping into place like armor. It feels like you’ve stepped out of one reel and directly into another, the colors too bright, the noise too sharp, like everything has been waiting for you to arrive.
And then you see him. Jeno stands a little off from the thickest crowd, but not far enough to look separate. He never needs to push to the center, people naturally bend toward him, his gravity doing the work. He’s in a plain white tee, nothing remarkable, but the way it sticks at the spine with sweat and outlines the cut of his shoulders makes him impossible to blur into the rest. His laugh carries over the din, that sharp crack you’ve known your whole life, though now it’s mingled with the voices of teammates, the kind of boys who slap his back like they’ve been doing it for years. Girls hover nearby, two leaning against the hood of a car as though they’ve been stationed there just to watch him. They laugh too loudly, toss their hair too hard, but it doesn’t matter. His focus doesn’t linger on them. It lands on you.
The look changes him, and you feel the weight of it in your stomach before your mind can catch up. His grin pulls sideways, small, not meant for the group still orbiting him. His chin tips up like he’s been waiting for this, like you arriving is the part that makes the whole scene click into place. He doesn’t wave, doesn’t shout your name, just pushes off from where he’s standing and cuts across the lot like the crowd owes him space. They part without question, kids juggling boxes, parents fussing with clipboards, all stepping aside without realizing why. You don’t realize you’ve frozen until Saerin nudges your arm with her elbow, smirking like she’s caught you naked. Your feet move before your brain decides to, drawn toward him like the weeks apart hadn’t stretched at all.
“Finally,” he says when he reaches you, the word dropped low, almost a secret. He doesn’t ask how you are or what the trip was like. He just takes the suitcase from your hand, knuckles brushing yours in the process, grip strong and unchallenged as if it had always been his job. You want to protest, but you don’t. His palm rests firm on the handle, his other hand drifting briefly against the small of your back, steering you out of the bus’s shadow into the sharp light. He doesn’t glance at Eric or Sunwoo even though you can feel them behind you; they don’t matter yet, not in this first moment. He doesn’t even clock Saerin until she barrels into him, shrieking with sunglasses pushed into her hair, hugging him like he’s hers too. He takes it, spins her once, sets her down laughing, then flicks her ponytail with the exact ease of a brother. She beams. His eyes cut back to you instantly, and there’s a softness there the others don’t get.
His arms open before you even move, and when you step into them it feels less like a choice and more like a gravity you’ve been circling back toward for months. He smells faintly of laundry powder and the synthetic bite of turf, the kind of scent that clings to him no matter how far he goes. His chest is solid against your cheek, heartbeat steady, his chin brushing the crown of your head for a second longer than necessary. You breathe in and it’s home, different skyline, different street, same anchor.
“Missed you,” he murmurs into your hair, quiet enough that it could pass for nothing, but his hand at the back of your neck makes sure you hear it. His thumb rubs once, a ghost of reassurance, before he lets you go. Not completely, never completely but enough to see your face again, enough to catch the way your eyes flicker too fast, already glancing at the ground. His grin curves slow, softer than the wide flash he saves for everyone else, and he nudges his forehead gently against yours like you’re still kids in the driveway.
“You’re here now,” he says, steadier this time, like it’s both a fact and a promise. “That’s all that matters.”
You laugh softly, a breath that comes out half-choked, because you feel it too. “I missed you more,” you whisper back, pressing your forehead into his for a beat longer before pulling back just enough to meet his eyes. “I hated every day without you. It didn’t feel right.” The words tumble out before you can catch them, and his grin falters into something heavier, something you recognize from the nights he’d knock on your door just to make sure you were breathing steady in your sleep.
He squeezes your elbow, thumb dragging warm against your skin. “You don’t have to hate anything now. We’re back in the same place. You and me.”
Your throat tightens, but you smile anyway, because it’s true because whatever shadows sit between you, whatever you haven’t told him, none of it outweighs this moment. You tilt your head against his shoulder, letting yourself stay there just a little longer than you should, your voice quiet but sure. “You always make it better. Always.” Behind you, Eric shifts his weight, and Sunwoo clears his throat loud enough to be noticed. But Jeno doesn’t look past you yet. He keeps you in his orbit, gaze warm, palm brushing your elbow as though to remind you: he’s the one who gets to hold this first moment, and you let him, because part of you has always belonged exactly here.
It’s only when Eric steps closer, dropping his duffel with a heavy thud, that Jeno shifts his gaze. The two share a handshake, one of those firm, practiced grips that rides the edge of challenge and respect. “Good to see you made it out here,” Jeno says lightly, but the way his eyes hold Eric’s a half second longer makes the words feel less casual. Eric grins, too wide, the corner of his mouth twitching like he knows better than to push it. He doesn’t step close enough to brush against you even though last night he’d been tangled inside you. You told him not to, told him Jeno couldn’t know, not ever. Protective older brother is one thing; Jeno with proof would be something else entirely. Eric keeps his hands shoved into his pockets now, only letting his eyes flicker your way when Jeno’s focus slips elsewhere. Sunwoo is smoother about it, already leaning against the side of the bus with arms crossed, smirk carved deep, watching like he’s in on a joke no one else has heard.
Jeno doesn’t pause long enough for the tension to settle. He jerks his chin toward the dorm buildings, already tugging your suitcase behind him. “Come on,” he says, not waiting for a reply. He moves fast enough that you’re forced to keep pace, his palm finding the curve of your back again whenever the crowd thickens. He doesn’t push people, doesn’t need to. They just notice him, step aside, clap his shoulder, call his name, and keep moving, leaving a trail of recognition in his wake. Girls brush too close with smiles sharp enough to slice, boys greet him like a captain returning to his team, and yet he doesn’t break stride, doesn’t look at them longer than it takes to nod. His attention threads back to you, to the weight of the bag he’s carrying, to the path he’s carving so you don’t have to.
The campus unfurls around you in pieces, flyers taped crooked to lampposts, laundry lines strung between balconies with sheets flapping pale against the sky, the smell of cut grass mixing with the faint reek of sweat and asphalt. Somewhere a speaker blasts distorted pop music, half swallowed by shouts and laughter. You pass clusters of kids sprawled on the lawn, hair glinting under the sun, polaroid cameras snapping so often it sounds like cicadas. Jeno doesn’t break stride, the tilt of his shoulders making it look like he owns the place already, like it was built for him. He holds the door open at the dorm, his grin cutting sharp, daring you to admit you need him.
And you do, even if you’ll never say it out loud.
The reunion doesn’t end at the curb. Jeno doesn’t let it. The moment he’s pulled back from your hug, he hooks his fingers around the handle of your heaviest suitcase before you can even reach for it again, then another, then the box stacked with books Saerin had sworn was “light.” He shoulders it all like it weighs nothing, like carrying your world has always been his job. The sun is mean overhead, baking the blacktop, but Jeno barely blinks, the veins in his forearms stark as he adjusts his grip. Saerin teases him about showing off, but he only smirks, the corner of his mouth twitching the way it always does when he knows he’s being watched. Still, his eyes keep flicking back to you, checking, guarding, like he’s making sure no one else lays a hand on you or your things.
The building that will be yours isn’t like the glossy halls you’ve glimpsed in sports reels or brochures. It sits on the far edge of town, where the main road thins into cracked sidewalks and the oaks lean so low their branches scrape the siding. Once a boarding house, long before it was bought up and rebranded for this summer bridge program, it still looks half-haunted, half-sacred. Its bones are old, brick faded to the color of rust, ivy crawling high, windows painted shut in places. The porch sags under the weight of too many shoes already kicked aside, sneakers piled with glitter flip-flops, skateboards stacked against the railing. A corkboard nailed to the entry door is drowning in flyers: zine launches, thrift swaps, Polaroid collages, hand-drawn arrows pointing toward someone’s room for “midnight mixtape parties.” Someone has scribbled over the official welcome sign in sharpie: arts house or die.
Inside, the air hits like camp, paint peeling in long curls, fans clattering overhead, everything smelling faintly of pizza boxes and permanent markers. Bulletin boards line the walls, pinned with notes and doodles that already make it feel alive: phone numbers written in glitter pen, disposable camera shots of faces you don’t know yet, song lyrics scrawled in thick ink. The staircase curves narrow, carved deep with initials, and the banister is polished not from care but from years of hands sliding across it on their way up to something forbidden. You and Saerin share a look at the bottom step, that flicker of disbelief that this is actually yours, that you finally get to climb.
Your room sits under the sloped roof at the very top, the kind where the ceiling dips so low on one side you’ll both bump your heads until you learn its angles. The window is small but cut wide enough to frame the water tower in the distance, streaked in rust and names, watching you even here. The glass warps the view, so the world outside looks softer, blurred at the edges like film left too long in sunlight. The radiator under the sill rattles when you brush past, and someone has scrawled a phone number across it in a pink gel pen. The walls are bare now, but you can already see how they’ll change, Saerin’s glitter flyers, your Polaroid strips, strings of fairy lights that buzz faintly when plugged into outlets too old for this century.
Jeno sets your bags down one by one, straightening as he looks around, brow pulling tight. “This is it?” His tone isn’t cruel, but protective, as if the slanted ceiling and scuffed floorboards aren’t good enough for you. His hand finds the doorframe, gripping it like he could test its strength, and for a moment he looks like he’s about to suggest you come stay with him instead. Then his eyes fall back to you, softening just enough that you can breathe again.
Saerin is already sprawled across one of the twin beds, her bracelets jingling as she kicks her legs up, grinning at you with a mix of disbelief and joy. “We actually made it,” she whispers, not for him but for you, the words trembling just enough to make your chest ache. She pats the mattress beside her, and when you sit, your hands tangle automatically, the two of you pressing together like you always have at the start of something too big to name.
From the doorway, Jeno watches. He doesn’t say anything at first, just folds his arms across his chest, eyes narrowing slightly as if committing every detail of this room to memory. Then he steps forward, brushing a strand of hair from your cheek in a gesture too casual to call out, his voice low but steady. “You call me if anything’s wrong. Doesn’t matter how small. If anyone gives you shit, you tell me. Got it?”
You nod, throat tight, because there’s no other answer to give. Saerin squeezes your fingers under the quilt, her grin wicked and proud. “Relax, Lee. We’ll survive. Probably.” She winks at you, and you laugh, but it’s Jeno’s gaze you feel most, heavier than the old roof pressing down, a silent promise that wherever you’ve landed, he’ll be orbiting close.
Jeno stays, rolling his sleeves higher, steadying the wobbly leg of your desk with one hand while hauling boxes with the other. The afternoon turns into a montage of small moments stitched together, the kind you’ll replay later: his shoulders bent under the weight of your trunk, the sound of tape tearing as he folds flattened cardboard, his voice low and steady when he reads the instructions for the lamp you bought at a thrift shop back home. He puts it together without complaint, tools spread out on your bedspread, the tiny screws lined neatly on the edge of a postcard. When you thank him, he only shrugs, like there’s never been another option but to take care of you. It’s a softness he wears without even knowing, the kind that makes everything else around him feel steadier, safer. Even when the heat of the room grows unbearable, sweat prickling the back of his neck, he only laughs when Saerin teases him about being the “mule,” carrying your whole life on his back. He grins, wipes his forehead with his sleeve, and keeps working as though the role was always his.
The room takes shape slowly, blooming into something more than four walls. Saerin tapes up magazine cutouts with glitter pens marking the corners, her bracelets clattering as she climbs onto the bed frame to tack fairy lights overhead, humming tunelessly between mouthfuls of gum. You unpack the box marked fragile, filled with spools of tape, battered film cameras, and a small cassette deck that still smells faintly of smoke. Jeno crouches down beside you when you hesitate, his hand brushing yours as he takes the recorder, studies it with the curiosity of someone who knows machines inside out. “Needs rewiring,” he mutters, almost to himself, already reaching into his bag for a small screwdriver like he couldn’t help preparing for this.
Within minutes he’s got it open, wires spread like veins across his palm, explaining the fix in words you don’t really follow but love listening to anyway. The sharp smell of metal and dust fills the air as he works, his brow furrowed, his lips pressed thin in concentration. He’s an engineering major, and it shows in the way his hands move, precise, practiced, like he was always meant to take things apart just to make them better. He tilts the recorder toward the light, brows knitting as he tests each connection with the patience of someone who can already see the fix in his head. When the tape finally whirs smooth, his eyes brighten in quiet triumph, the kind of satisfaction that only comes from making a machine breathe again. When he sets it gently into your hands, grinning with quiet pride, the moment is intimate enough to make you hold your breath, like he just returned a piece of you that might’ve stayed broken without him.
It’s intimate in other ways too, the kind you don’t point out because naming them might break the spell. Jeno sets up your desk lamp so it casts the perfect glow across your notebooks, angling it twice until you nod approval. He fiddles with the shelf until it’s sturdy enough to hold your stack of Polaroid albums, muttering under his breath about poor design while you smile at the sound of his voice. He plugs in the fairy lights himself, testing each bulb, grinning when the strand flickers alive in pink and gold. The glow pools warm across your mattress, catching in the gloss of Saerin’s lip balm as she throws herself onto your mattress with a groan of satisfaction, declaring the place officially home. You feel it too, not just a room, but the start of something. Outside, the late light sharpens against the windows, buses still hissing in the distance, and yet in here, for a moment, it feels like the world has slowed just for you, like the three of you have carved out a pocket of time that belongs only to now.
It’s Saerin, of course, who breaks the spell. She stretches long across the bed, smirk curling as she props herself up on one elbow, the fairy lights flickering behind her like a halo that only makes her look more mischievous. “So,” she drawls, lazy and sing-song, “where are all your boys, Jeno? Thought this place couldn’t breathe without your crew clogging the halls.” Her bracelets clink down her wrist as she stretches, the teasing sharp but softened by the grin tugging at her mouth.
You snap your eyes wide at her, shaking your head sharp, lips forming don’t. It’s a warning she ignores easily, biting her lip as though daring you to stop her. She’s always had a talent for prying at the edges of secrets, pressing where it hurts just enough to make you feel alive.
Jeno barely notices your panic, leaning back against the desk he just built, arms folding across his chest. His shoulders fill the space, posture loose but his voice steady. “Spread out,” he says easily, like he’s reciting from memory. “Mark’s in the music program, living basically in the basement studios. Renjun too, he’s always holed up painting or something, barely leaves unless you drag him. Hyuck’s with the theater crowd, god knows what hours he keeps. And Jaem…” His voice softens just slightly as he shifts, “…Jaem’s on the sports side with me. Training, conditioning, all that. We’ve been at it since summer.” His mouth tugs faintly, something between pride and fatigue, but you don’t let yourself linger on it too long.
The name lands heavy in your chest. You keep your head bowed, fingers tangling too tight in the ribbon tied at your wrist, your thighs pressed close together as if holding yourself still could disguise the rush that spreads hot and fast under your skin. The memory of stairwells and rooftops flickers sharp in your body, so vivid you almost smell the heat of asphalt, feel the scrape of shingles under your shoulder blades. You force your mouth into something that looks like a smile, murmur something noncommittal, but your breath catches halfway through, snagging sharp in your throat. Saerin clocks it instantly. Her smirk dips into something softer as she rolls onto her back, humming like she’s satisfied with her little victory, eyes darting to you with something more like concern than triumph. Jeno glances at you once, frowning faintly, his eyes scanning your face like he’s trying to read something he can’t quite catch. You duck your head further, pretend to fuss with the cassettes in your lap, the edges of the cases biting into your palms as heat crawls up your neck.
He shakes it off, choosing not to press, but you know he saw more than you wanted him to. You’re terrible at hiding, and it sits between the three of you unspoken, humming like static in the walls. Jeno slides the box of tangled cables onto your desk, knuckles brushing against a stack of your notebooks, and clears his throat like he’s trying to shake loose the weight of the silence. “You’ll want to keep this corner clear,” he says, voice even, steady. “Heat from the outlet’ll fry your tapes if you pile too much on top.” Practical, protective, always. He points at the recorder he just coaxed back to life, the reels spinning smooth. “That’ll give you trouble again if you don’t keep an eye on it. These old things need attention.”
Jeno props open the window with the heel of his palm, letting the heat bleed out of the small room. “You’ll get used to it,” he says, leaning against the frame like he’s lived here forever. “This building runs hot. Last year Jaemin practically slept on top of the fan all summer, swore it was the only thing keeping him alive.” He chuckles, shaking his head, the memory easy on his tongue, no suspicion in it at all. Just your brother, talking about his best friend.
Your grip tightens on the edge of the desk before you can stop it, the image flashing too vividly, Jaemin sprawled out, sweat-soaked, grinning through the heat. You look down quickly, hair falling forward, hoping it masks the sharp pull low in your stomach. Saerin catches it instantly, because she always does. She tips her head, lashes low, voice sweet but edged as she lets the words slip. “Bet the fan wasn’t the only thing keeping him entertained.”
Jeno doesn’t catch the undertone, he’s already shifting another box, muttering about where your books should go. But Saerin’s smirk widens, bracelets clinking as she rolls onto her back like a cat stretching in the sun. “Interesting,” she drawls, watching the color rise in your cheeks. “Guess this year’s going to be more fun than I thought.” You shove at her ankle, trying for playfulness, trying for normal, but your pulse gives you away. The truth hums in your veins, electric and undeniable: you’re here, breathing the same air, standing in the same set of walls as Jaemin for the first time in years. And no matter how much you try to play it off, your body already knows before your heart admits it.
The room doesn’t look like much yet, just four walls that smell faintly of plaster and paint, but Saerin drops her bag like she’s staking a claim and sprawls across the mattress nearest the window. “All ours,” she declares, bracelets jangling against the frame. You laugh, small and sharp, but something inside you gives, like maybe this really is happening, maybe this town is about to become yours too.
Jeno lingers at the doorway, practical as ever, grabbing the heaviest box and hauling it across the floor without asking. “Come on,” he says eventually, brushing dust from his palms. “You can’t spend your first night here hiding. I’ll show you around before it gets loud.”
The air outside is cooler, sharp with wet leaves and gasoline, but the streets glow with that strange hush of a town about to wake. Orange lamps hum overhead, buzzing flies caught in glass. Saerin loops her arm through yours and tugs you toward the corner store, where a battered photobooth slumps against the wall like it’s been waiting for you. The booth smells of dust and gum wrappers, the curtain stiff, the coin slot jammed until Jeno shakes it with his palm. “Still works,” he mutters, voice low but satisfied. You squeeze in tight, three across. The first flash goes off before you’re ready, catching you mid-blink, Saerin with her tongue out, Jeno smirking. The white smear across the frame makes your chest tighten. For a second it looks like Jaemin’s shoulder at the edge of the picture, blurred and half-there, the way he always was in the background of photos that summer. You blink hard, but the strip spits out proof anyway: he isn’t here, and still he is.
The walk keeps going. Past the bar with a jukebox that eats quarters, past the laundromat whose dryers slam like heartbeat drums, past the VHS rental where movie posters peel in the window. Jeno keeps pointing things out with that steady calm of his, the way he’s always mapped the world for you. “This place is decent,” he says at the laundromat, tapping the frame of a machine. “Doesn’t look it, but it’s solid.” He doesn’t see the graffiti scrawled low on the plastic chairs, names you almost recognize. One of them is his. Another looks like Jaemin’s, sharp and slanted, carved into vinyl from a night you weren’t supposed to be there. You look away before your throat can betray you.
Saerin is less subtle. She presses her face to the VHS rental window, gasping at the shelves lined in cracked plastic shells. “God, it smells exactly like him,” she teases, glancing sideways at you. You don’t bite, but she grins anyway, knowing she’s right. The store reeks of mildew and candy powder, the same scent that clung to Jaemin’s hoodie the night he walked you home and kissed you against the alley wall, soda fizz still burning your throat. You chew your lip, force your eyes down. Jeno pushes open the door with a shrug, oblivious.
The square is quiet at night, but the mural wall glows faintly under the lamps, names stacked thick in Sharpie. Jeno rests his hand on your shoulder, guiding you past it, but your gaze catches anyway. Someone’s left a heart scrawled sloppy above last year’s mess, initials bleeding dark. J + W. You don’t have to think hard to know who it is. The sound of Saerin’s bracelets cuts sharp at your side, pulling you away before you linger too long. “Later,” she says softly, as if she knows exactly what you saw.
By the time you loop back, the air feels heavier, every landmark carrying a piece of him. Back in your building, Saerin collapses on the bare floor, sorting through the polaroids she shoved in her bag, while Jeno fiddles with the busted lamp until it flickers steady. “See?” he says, grinning when the light holds. You murmur thanks, tuck the photostrip under your pillow. Jeno’s presence is a balm, solid and grounding, but when Saerin sprawls against the wall, humming along to the jukebox song still looping in her head, she shoots you a look that says she knows. You’re not hiding it as well as you think.
Later, when Jeno leaves with a warning to lock the door and Saerin is half-dozing, you stay awake. The silence feels crowded. The polaroid strip glows under lamplight, the blur at the edge of the first frame still tricking your eyes into seeing him. The air smells faintly of gasoline and rain, the same mix that clung to him on the nights he’d sneak through your window. You press your face to the pillow, breath catching. You haven’t let yourself feel it fully, but your body already knows: you are here, and so is he.
The next morning cracks open slowly, sunlight watery and pale across the new window, the air still heavy with plaster dust and the faint sweet of Saerin’s perfume from last night. She’s the first to stir, hair knotted from sleep, voice muffled against the pillow when she mumbles, “Let’s get brunch.” It isn’t a suggestion, it never is with her, and you’re already tugging denim up your legs before the word fully lands. She wriggles into her low-rise pair, tugging the waistband sharp across her hips, a rhinestoned belt dangling loose for no reason but the shine. You pull on flares that still smell faintly of the thrift shop, the hem frayed where they drag, and lace up sneakers with blue Sharpie doodled across the rubber. Neither of you bother with real makeup, just a swipe of gloss, Saerin digging her nails into a pot of sticky glitter she smears across your collarbone like war paint. By the time you drag combs through your hair, it still smells faintly of last night’s heat, too tangled to tame, so you let it sit messy. You look like you belong, but more like kids playing dress-up in someone else’s city.
Outside, the streets are quieter than you’d pictured, as though the town is holding its breath. Storefronts tilt open slowly, blinds half-drawn, neon signs still buzzing weak in daylight, each letter humming like it’s waiting to warm up. A 99¢ store window flashes with plastic flip-flops stacked in piles, a rack of sunglasses spinning lazy in the morning air. Flyers flap on the light poles: band auditions scrawled in gel pen, a yard sale advertised in bubble letters, a missing cat notice with a Polaroid stapled crooked. Saerin catches her reflection in one of the windows, sunglasses shoved into her hair like a crown and grins wide enough to catch you too. This is your parade, the walk down streets that already feel like they’ve been waiting for you to step into them.
The quiet isn’t silence. Radios hum from open windows above the shops, static-fuzzy with late 90s ballads, the kind of songs everyone pretends not to know but still hums under their breath. The air smells like bagels baking in the café you haven’t reached yet, sharp coffee layered over it, butter catching in the corners. Someone’s skateboard clicks against pavement, a truck engine coughs to life down the strip, and every sound feels amplified, as though the town itself is leaning forward to listen. Saerin links her arm through yours, bracelets cold against your skin, and the two of you laugh at nothing as you step off the curb, sneakers hitting asphalt sticky with last night’s spilled beer.
The place Saerin drags you to is only three blocks from the bridge housing, a squat corner café with striped awnings that used to be green but now fade closer to lime. A neon “OPEN” flickers weakly in the daylight, buzzing over a door patched with stickers from bands that broke up years ago. Inside, the air is thick with butter and hot sugar, the kind of smell that clings to your hair for hours. Booths sag at the seams, vinyl split where countless thighs have pressed too long against the heat. Each table is armed with laminated menus curled at the edges, ink faded to a ghost of its original color: stacks, scrambles, waffles, milkshakes in silver cups. The kind of food that feels impossible anywhere but here, bottomless, messy, loud.
Saerin slides into a booth like she owns it, bracelets clattering against the Formica as she snatches two straws from the dispenser, blowing the wrapper from one straight across the aisle. You’re still half tangled in your jacket when a waitress with teased hair and frosted tips slaps down two waters, a pad tucked under her arm like she’s been working this same shift since 1997. You don’t even need the menu to know what you want, your body answers before your eyes do. The smell alone makes you ache for it: pancakes stacked tall enough to lean, glossed with syrup that sticks to the plate in amber pools, bacon curling at the edges and slick with maple, hash browns fried until they shatter under a fork. Still, your finger drifts down the faded fonts like the words themselves are a spell, like tracing them might make the plates appear faster. It’s less about choosing than about surrendering, about feeding the craving that’s been gnawing since you stepped off the bus. Saerin watches, lips quirking up as she sips from her water, like she knows you’re already halfway drunk on the idea of breakfast for lunch, sugar for survival. The pages smell faintly of grease and cleaner, edges curled from years of hands, and when you finally drop the menu flat it feels like more than ordering, it feels like letting yourself in, claiming your first taste of this place.
The café hums with a blur: flip phones snapping mirror selfies in the bathroom, a disposable camera flashing from the corner where a trio of freshmen crams together for a photo, old arcade machines wheezing in the back. You can hear the click of nails on plastic straws, the hiss of a milk steamer that never quite gets loud enough to drown out the laughter. Saerin leans across the table, snatching your menu just to twirl it between her fingers, glitter on her collarbone catching the light like she dressed for something bigger than eggs and toast. When the plates arrive they nearly bury the table, pancakes dripping strawberries down the side, eggs scattered across greasy china, whipped cream collapsing under the heat. Saerin digs in with the hunger of someone who hasn’t eaten in days, moaning loud enough to make the boys at the counter glance over. She grins through a mouthful of waffle, eyes gleaming, and pushes the plate toward you. You spear a piece just to shut her up, syrup bleeding down your knuckles. It feels less like eating, more like claiming space. Like saying: this is ours now.
Syrup slicks your fork, tugging slow between your teeth as you lean your cheek into your palm, gaze wandering past Saerin’s chatter. The room sharpens around every bite, details etching themselves in because you’re still new here, the bulletin board sagging with guitar-lesson flyers printed in ink that’s already bleeding, a payphone nailed crooked to the wall with a sticker that dares call collect, Polaroids curling above the register where kids grin too wide with sugar-stained mouths and marker still on their fingers. It feels less like brunch in a café than flipping through someone else’s scrapbook mid-page. Saerin licks powdered sugar off her thumb, humming at you to try the hash browns, grease crackling against your tongue when you do. Behind the counter, a girl chews gum loud enough to punctuate the air, newspapers stacked at her elbow, headlines unfinished. You picture yourself there in a week, pressing type with fingers still sticky from syrup, slipping words into pages that strangers will read over their coffee and never know came from you.
That’s why you’re here. The “summer bridge program,” as they called it back home, but what it really means is this: a chance to slip into a world you weren’t ready for yet, not by their rules. It’s one year, a trial, a feeder into something bigger. You and Saerin weren’t scouted like the boys were, you didn’t have scholarships or recruiters waiting at your door but you had grades, essays, drive. They called it an exchange, framed it like charity almost: you get to study here, take prep classes, live on campus in a smaller program, tight-knit, like camp with textbooks. You know the truth though, it’s the town’s way of keeping you tethered, close enough to still be theirs, but just far enough to taste the air the boys left for. Saerin says it’s fate, that the universe just refused to let you sit out another year. Now she’s stirring syrup into her coffee with a butter knife, rolling her eyes at the idea of waiting one more summer while the boys got to play royalty. “We’re in,” she grins, clinking her mug against yours across the sticky table. “Finally.” Her bracelets catch the light again, flashing like little promises.
You swirl the foam into your coffee, watching it dissolve as if it already knows, soon you’ll be doing the same, slipping quietly into your new role, recording lives that don’t even see you there. They’ll tuck you behind the byline, ‘anonymous contributor’ stamped in cheap ink, because the program isn’t meant to make you visible, it’s meant to test if you can survive here quietly, without taking space from the ones already crowned. You’ll be carrying a camcorder heavy on your shoulder, a dictaphone rattling in your bag, film canisters clinking like loose change. Your work will be capturing life in fragments, student games, rituals in classrooms, the hum of nights under stadium lights and feeding them into the paper without your name attached. It’s supposed to be impartial, but it won’t be; every angle you frame, every shot you linger on, will be yours. That’s the reason they picked you, the reason you’re here: because you already know how to tell stories without giving yourself away. You’ve been practicing for years in diner booths, in Polaroids tucked under mattresses, in whispered confessions no one else ever got to hear.
Saerin’s role will look brighter, at least on paper. She’ll be folded into the arts house collective, tasked with running the events board, posters plastered on walls, string lights hung for basement shows, flyers pressed into palms in the quad. It will suit her: she’s the one who always knows who’s sleeping with who, which band is breaking up, which girl just dyed her hair in the bathroom sink. She’ll thrive on being the pulse, the gossip, the one who decides what posters stay up and which mysteriously vanish overnight. It’ll be the same instinct that made her the queen of your group chat back home, except here it will have weight, printed in ink and stapled to bulletin boards. Her work will bleed into yours, you’ll cover, she’ll advertise, she’ll stir the waters you’ll end up recording.
The walk back from brunch feels slower, heavier, both of you stuffed and laughing at nothing, shoulders brushing as the roads stretch wide and eerily empty. You duck into the corner store with the cracked bell on the door, and the shelves glow with things that feel like they belong to another decade: glass bottles of Yoo-hoo sweating in the cooler, grape Fanta in cans printed too bright, packets of Pop Rocks stacked by the register daring you to buy them. Saerin grabs a six-pack of SunnyD like it’s contraband, and you add a sleeve of strawberry Pixy Stix just because the sugar dust feels like a dare. The cashier barely looks up from his tabloid, mutters the total, and you’re back on the street with plastic bags digging into your wrists, laughing when one nearly splits open. By the time you reach your building, the sun is tilting toward late afternoon, shadows long across the pavement. You kick the door shut behind you, bags dropped in a heap, and both of you collapse onto your unmade beds, wrappers already crinkling under your arms, stomachs too full, limbs sprawled like you never plan on moving again.
The room grows quieter with the afternoon, the kind of quiet that makes every sound sharper. The click of a nail polish cap twisting open, the faint hiss of Saerin’s glitter hairspray still hanging in the air. You both sink into it like it's a ritual. Her knees knock against yours as she paints your nails in uneven strokes, pink bubbling at the edges of your cuticles, while you twist her hair into braids so loose they’ll slip free before night. Clothes spill from your open suitcases, sheets hang half-tucked, posters curl at the corners where you tried taping them to paint that still smells raw. The space doesn’t look lived in yet, but the two of you make it feel that way: laughter muffled into pillows, half-finished sodas sweating onto the nightstand, polaroids already tacked above her bed in messy constellations. It feels like a secret camp, like summer stretched longer just for you.
The outside world keeps tugging. your phone stays silent on the desk, no word from Jeno, no knock from Eric or Sunwoo. You picture Jeno caught somewhere between drills and chalkboard talks, shoulders already hunched under the weight of being who he is here. You don’t need to text to know it. Eric and Sunwoo, quieter still, maybe hiding out, maybe drifting into their own corners of this new place. You don’t ask. You let the quiet claim you and Saerin instead, your little world carved into these four walls, bare feet kicking against the wall as if you’ll leave scuff marks to prove you were here.
When the sun drops, everything tips forward. The air turns honey-gold through your window, the hum of cicadas swelling louder, and Saerin starts rifling through your clothes like it’s her job. Denim, silk, lace, nothing survives her judgment until she tosses a top across your bed, rhinestones catching what little light is left. “This one,” she declares, like it’s non-negotiable. You slip it on, fabric brushing bare skin, and she grins, tugging at the hem until it rests shorter than you’d ever wear back home. She’s already pulled on her own cut-offs, rhinestone halter glittering, eyeliner sharp as a dare. The two of you end up side by side in the mirror, shoulders bare, thighs glowing in the last of the sun, the air heavy with cheap body spray and perfume that smells like fruit and smoke. You don’t look like girls who just got here. You look like you’ve been waiting for this night forever.
They call it the Lantern Walk, though no one can say who named it. Out past the fields, the path bends toward the woods where strings of paper lanterns swing low, each one glowing soft orange and pink, like fireflies tethered to wires. The ground is littered with cups and cigarette butts already, the air humming with static and speakers too old to carry bass without rattling. Older students lean against the tree line with beers slick in their hands, watching, waiting, while the new arrivals drift forward under the glow, eyes wide, skin catching every flicker of light. It feels staged and feral at once, half bonfire, half pilgrimage. Every step pulls you deeper until the night presses close, until the lanterns blur into stars overhead, until the whole thing feels less like a party and more like a dare: welcome to this place, prove you belong.
The field opens like a stage when you step off the gravel, and for a moment you have to remind yourself to breathe. Smoke hangs thick, rolling out from the bonfire at the center, a blaze so tall it paints every face in orange and gold. Radios crackle from the open beds of trucks, all different stations bleeding together, pop, rock, something with too much bass, and it feels like the air itself is humming. The grass is already trampled flat from bodies moving through it, cups crunching underfoot, glow sticks snapping green and blue and tossed into the night like fireflies.
It smells like everything at once: gasoline from the parked trucks, cheap perfume, the sour bite of beer spilled into the dirt, charred wood rising from the fire in waves. Every flicker of flame cuts shadows sharp against the faces around you, and there are so many, new kids, older kids, the ones who left before you, the ones who are legends already. Saerin walks a half-step ahead, sunglasses perched on her head though the sky’s already gone dark, hips swaying like she owns the ground. She doesn’t hesitate, never does. You feel the opposite, every step slow, shoulders tucked, your eyes catching flashes of faces too bright, too immediate, like Polaroids snapping one after the other.
You catch yourself twisting your cup between your fingers, trying to act smaller, quieter, while Saerin tips her head back and laughs at something a boy you don’t know says. The difference between you is a pulse. She belongs, already, and you’re trying to learn how to. You barely notice the way the crowd shifts until Eric is there, sliding into your space like he never left. His grin is sharp, lazy, like the night itself, and before you can even decide if you’ll smile back, his hand is on you, fingers hooking into the back pocket of your cutoffs, palm warm against your ass like it’s already his.
“Miss me?” he says, too close to your ear, his breath cut with the taste of beer. It makes you stumble, heat flooding through your skin even as you try to swat him off, but he only laughs.
Behind him, Sunwoo whistles, stretched out in a lawn chair like he’s watching a show. “She did,” he calls, voice rolling lazy. “Look at her. She’s blushing all over.” Eric squeezes once, deliberately, before he finally lets go, grin widening as though your fluster is the whole point. The fire roars louder, cups clatter, someone screams in delight at the far edge of the field, and the night swallows you whole.
The crowd bends almost imperceptibly, laughter thinning and talk pausing just long enough for you to notice the shift in air before you see Jeno. He doesn’t force his way through, doesn’t need to; bodies simply move aside, creating space as though his presence demands it without asking. Firelight sketches the edge of his jaw, catching in the short strands of his hair, the smoke that drifts in curls behind him rising like it has chosen to follow. His shirt is dark, fitted at the shoulders, the kind of casual that looks deliberate, and a thin chain glints each time the flames throw light in his direction. He doesn’t search, not really. His gaze lands on you instantly, certain, like he already knew where to find you in the blur of faces and the noise of the night.
When his arm settles across your shoulders the sound of the gathering thins even further, fading to a dull wash against the closeness of him. The weight is steady, not heavy, and it folds you into his side with a confidence that doesn’t need to be announced. He’s warm against you, heat sinking through the strap of your top, the scent of smoke and the faint clean edge of his cologne pushing into your lungs until your body leans without thought. The crowd’s energy still swirls around you. the press of shoulders, the scrape of bottles, the muffled bass from a stereo hidden in someone’s truck but in the middle of it you feel cocooned in his steadiness. There’s no question in the gesture, no hesitation; it’s an unspoken claim that you are his to guard, and the ease of it steals your breath before you even realise you’ve moved closer, cheek brushing the fabric stretched across his chest.
Jeno dips his head, the corner of his mouth tugging up as his brow lifts in quiet amusement. “So,” he says, voice steady but laced with that soft tease he always saves for you, “you holding up okay? The place hasn’t scared you off yet?”
Your laugh is small, almost tucked into your chest, but it slips free as you glance up at him. His hand stays warm at your shoulder, grounding, like he’s not in a rush to let go. “Trying,” you admit, voice quieter than you mean it to be. “It’s a lot, big, different. I don’t know if it’s settled in yet.”
He hums, a low sound that feels more like a reassurance than a reply, his thumb brushing once against your arm as though he’s smoothing the nerves straight out of you. When his arm settles across your shoulders the sound of the gathering thins even further, fading to a dull wash against the closeness of him. The weight is steady, not heavy, and it folds you into his side with a confidence that doesn’t need to be announced. He’s warm against you, heat sinking through the strap of your top, the scent of smoke and the faint clean edge of his cologne pushing into your lungs until your body leans without thought. The crowd’s energy still swirls around you, the press of shoulders, the scrape of bottles, the muffled bass from a stereo hidden in someone’s truck but in the middle of it you feel cocooned in his steadiness. There’s no falter in the way his arm settles, no second-guessing; it’s instinct, the kind of steady shield only an older brother can give. It pulls you into him without demand, the quiet safety of his side wrapping around you before you even think to resist. The fabric of his shirt is cool against your cheek, familiar in a way that makes the noise of the crowd fall back, and for a moment it feels like you’ve carried this closeness with you all along, waiting to fall into it again.
When his gaze dips, the smallest lift of his brow tells you more than any words could. It catches on the strap sliding down your shoulder, the hem that’s crept too high, and you know the verdict before he even moves. His arm slips away only to return with the weight of his jacket, settling it firmly around you. It’s warm, carrying his cologne and the smoke clinging from the fire outside, the lining brushing your bare skin as though to remind you who put it there. His jaw sets as he adjusts the collar higher, fingers precise, protective in a way that feels older-brother certain. You tip your eyes up at him, exasperated, rolling them just enough to make your point, but you don’t take it off. You let it stay, heat pooling where his presence lingers.
“You really came here dressed to stress me out, huh?” His tone is teasing, low and warm, as if he’s more amused than scolding.
You roll your eyes, shoving lightly at his chest. “It’s called fashion, Jeno. You wouldn’t get it.”
He chuckles under his breath, but his hand lingers at your shoulder, adjusting the collar of his jacket until it sits neatly. The playfulness drains into something steadier, his gaze holding yours longer than you expect. “Still,” he says softly, almost like it surprises him to admit it, “you look beautiful. So grown up.”
The words knot in your chest. You jab him again to keep the mood light, muttering, “Don’t get sentimental on me,” but your cheeks burn and you have to glance away. His pride is obvious, too heavy and too gentle to ignore, and even when you try to hide behind the roll of your eyes, you can feel his hand tighten briefly at your shoulder like he can’t believe you’re really here.
The attention this draws is instant. Eyes catch on you, some wide, some narrowed, every glance marking the novelty of your presence and the weight of your surname. Whispers scatter like sparks thrown from the fire: new girl, Jeno’s younger sister, I wonder how long she’ll last. The sound bites at the edges of your awareness, but it doesn’t quite touch you, not with his hand resting where it does, thumb shifting in the smallest motion over your shoulder, both reassurance and warning at once. Across from you Eric’s grin falters, the bravado slipping as though tugged from his face. He laughs too thin to convince anyone. Jeno says nothing, the look he holds on Eric is enough, a stare that doesn’t blink, doesn’t rush, just waits until the other boy drops his eyes. The authority in it makes the silence louder, and you feel the heat rise in your throat at the thought that he saw more than you wanted him to.
Jeno’s arm stays snug across your shoulders as the crowd thickens, guiding you with a pressure so steady you can almost forget how loud it is. His hand nudges at the edge of Saerin’s elbow too, tucking her into the circle of his reach as if he’s pulling both of you through the noise together. You catch the way a couple of guys glance too long at your legs as you pass, and before you even think to shift uncomfortably Jeno’s fingers tighten briefly on your shoulder, a silent correction, steering you closer into his side. Saerin notices too, rolling her eyes with a grin, whispering something like “already scary big brother mode” into your ear that makes you smother a laugh, your cheek brushing against the fabric stretched across his chest. It’s protective, yes, but familiar in the way it always has been, like he’s moving you through the world the only way he knows how.
The bonfire blazes higher up ahead, shadows flickering over faces you half-recognize and voices tumbling together, the smell of charred wood sinking into your skin. You’re still adjusting when Jeno steers you into the circle where the rest of his friends are gathered, and suddenly you’re small again, all wide eyes and nerves as laughter spills over you like heat. For a moment the firelight bends the years, and you see yourself at eight years old with crooked pigtails, tugging at Jeno’s sleeve while his friends towered overhead, lanky limbs and too-loud voices making you feel like you’d stumbled into a world meant for bigger kids. Back then they’d ruffle your hair, call you mascot, tease you for hanging on Jeno’s arm. Now the circle closes around you the same way, their shadows taller, their smiles wider, but the awe is different, sharper, older, tinged with something you can’t name. The little girl with scraped knees has been folded into the firelight, and for the first time you’re not just Jeno’s baby sister trailing behind, you’re standing shoulder to shoulder with them, even as your pulse races like you still don’t belong.
For a heartbeat, the noise dips like someone’s turned the volume down. The music from the truck stereo still hums low, the fire still cracks and spits but you feel it in the way their eyes widen, quick gasps tucked into their throats before they’re smothered by grins. Chenle recovers first, smirk tugging as he tips his cup like he’s toasting you, but his gaze lingers longer than it should. Mark shifts, shoulders straightening, the usual warmth in his smile sharper now, as if he’s checking you over before he lets it soften again. Donghyuck whistles low under his breath, playing it off like a joke, though the edge in his grin makes your skin buzz. Even Renjun’s quiet, careful eyes drag over you once, sharp enough that it feels like he’s cataloguing every change before looking away. Jisung’s the only one who doesn’t mask it, his jaw drops, his gaze unguarded, and Hyuck nudges him hard enough to snap him back. It’s subtle, hidden beneath the easy teasing of a reunion, but you feel it: the shift, the weight, the way the firelight seems to cast you in sharper relief than you’ve ever stood in before.
Mark’s laugh comes easy, rolling out like he’s been saving it for this exact moment. When he lets you go, he doesn’t step far, still hovering close like he’s making sure you’re real. His eyes are softer than his grin, a steadiness there that always made him the most approachable of Jeno’s friends, the one who tuned his guitar on porches and let you strum clumsy chords with bubblegum-sticky fingers while the others were too busy daring each other into chaos. That same guitar is slung over his back now, strap frayed and patched, its body nicked from too many nights like this. He catches you glancing at it and shrugs with a sheepish little tilt of his head. “Still dragging it everywhere,” he admits, voice pitched low, more for you than anyone else. For a second, it’s grounding, the fire popping behind him, the chatter rising again, and Mark grinning down at you with that mix of dorky charm and something older, something solid. It feels like a tether, and you lean into it without even meaning to.
The laughter from Mark’s hug is still fading when another voice breaks through, brighter, sharper, impossible to ignore. Chenle’s turn comes naturally, like he’s been holding it in just long enough to make it dramatic. He claps his hands once, the sound cutting across the circle, and announces with full theatrics, “She’s here, she’s here!” The firelight throws his grin wide, eyes sparkling as he barrels forward to pull you into a hug that spins you so fast Saerin stumbles into your side. She squeals, laughing, shoving at his shoulder until he lets you go, still smirking like he won something. “Dangerous pair, the two of you,” he teases, flicking his glance between you and Saerin. She only blows him a kiss, looping her arm tighter through yours as if to prove him right. Chenle rocks back on his heels, soaking in his own performance, and even the older boys shake their heads, grinning at how predictable he is, loud, reckless, but always the spark in the room.
Donghyuck leans back in his chair, smirking over the lip of his cup as though he’s been waiting for this exact moment. “Well, well. Jeno’s little sister finally out in the wild.” His words drip mischief but his eyes soften when they meet yours, and when he pushes himself up to hug you it’s warm, familiar, his chin pressing into your temple. “We were starting to think you’d never show,” he murmurs low enough that only you hear it.
Saerin pretends to gag, stage-whispering, “He’s always been this dramatic,” which makes him flip her off over your shoulder before pulling back with a grin.
Renjun waits his turn like always, steady in the middle of the noise. He doesn’t lunge forward or raise his voice, just stands there with that even stare that makes you feel like you’re being measured and reassured all at once. When you’re close enough, he offers his hand, firm and deliberate, like this is some business deal instead of a reunion at a bonfire. You take it, his grip solid, and he tips his head with the faintest curve of a smile. “Took you long enough to get here,” he says, tone dry enough to make Saerin snort, though the warmth in his eyes betrays him. His hand lingers a beat longer before he lets go, and the simple steadiness of it calms you more than any of the rowdy greetings before.
Jisung lingers at the edge, half-hidden in the shadows until Saerin nudges him forward with her hip, bracelets jingling as she teases, “Go on, she doesn’t bite.” His ears flush red, the color stark even against the bonfire’s glow, and he stumbles into a hug that’s more an awkward bump of shoulders than anything else. His laugh comes out nervous, cracked at the edges, but it’s soft enough to make you smile.
“Welcome,” he blurts, pulling back too quickly, like he’s afraid of holding on longer than he should.
Saerin squeezes your hand tight, her grin wicked as she leans into stage-whisper, “He’s cuter than I remember,” earning an immediate scandalized glare from Jisung that only deepens the pink climbing his neck. The sound of her laughter rings bright in the firelit air, and even he can’t help the reluctant smile tugging at his mouth.
Jeno’s arm stays locked across your shoulders even as the circle thickens, the fire throwing shadows sharp enough to make every grin look like it belongs to someone older, someone with secrets. The air smells of char and sweet beer spilled into grass, and voices overlap until you can barely tell who’s saying what. Through it all, his weight doesn’t budge, steadying you like he’s filtering every sound and every gaze through himself first. The heat presses in from all sides, laughter rings too loud, and yet all you can feel is the pull of him, the solidness against your side, the faint rasp of his sleeve brushing your arm whenever you move.
Saerin leans in close enough that her perfume cuts through the smoke, bracelets chiming as she presses her hip against yours, smirk already curling like she’s been waiting all night for this. Her eyes flick lazily over the boys, over you, then linger on the fire as if she’s talking to no one in particular. “So,” she hums, lilting it like a nursery rhyme, “where’s Jaemin hiding, hm?” The name lands heavy, but she’s grinning too wide, shoulders shaking with her own delight as if she’s just lobbed the best firecracker into the circle. A laugh bubbles out of her, high and bright, and she tips her head back in mock exasperation, exposing the long line of her neck to the firelight. For a second the glow gilds her features, catches in the gloss on her mouth, the shimmer dusting her collarbone. Jeno’s gaze snags on her without meaning to, just a flicker, just a beat too long before he pulls it back to the flames, jaw tight. No one notices but her.
She clocks it instantly, lashes lowering, smile sharpening with a secret kind of mischief. She doesn’t press, doesn’t let it linger, just leans back into you with a giggle so girlish it borders on cruel. “What, no one’s gonna say it? He’s always just there, even though he’s really quiet, you feel him. The whole place shifts when he walks in, and now?” She flicks her wrist, bracelets clinking like punctuation, eyes glinting as they cut from you to Jeno. “Nothing. Empty. Weird, right?” Her tone stays featherlight, sing-song almost, but the words carry weight. They sketch Jaemin without naming it: the way he’s never been background, the way even silence from him still fills a room. The implication hangs between firecracks and laughter, sly and deliberate, her grin widening as though she can already feel the ripple it sends through you.
Your stomach knots tight, the fire popping at the same moment like it’s in on her joke. Jeno exhales through his nose, a low sound almost lost under the chatter around you, and his arm tightens against your shoulders in a move so instinctive it borders on a warning. Saerin just beams, the smirk back on her lips, her gaze lingering knowingly at the way your body betrays you, the way your fingers dig into the hem of your cup as if it might steady you.
He turns his head just enough to catch her, the edge of the fire painting his profile sharper, eyes narrowing in a way that feels more instinct than choice. The flicker climbs his jaw, tightens it, and when he speaks the word comes out low, almost flat, but carrying weight. “Why are you asking about Jaemin?” It isn’t loud, it isn’t dramatic, but it lands heavy enough that Saerin’s smirk falters for a heartbeat before curling sharper, like she’s pleased she got under his skin. The air between them shifts, subtle but tense, your pulse catching against the warmth of his arm still draped steady over your shoulders.
Saerin shrugs like it costs her nothing, tilting her cup just enough for the ice to clink against the rim, her bracelets chiming in time. “Because he’s not here,” she says, tone light, almost careless. “And that’s so unlike him.” The words slip out with that teasing lilt she wears so well, but when her eyes flick sideways toward you, there’s a softness there that undercuts the mockery, like she’s checking the ground before you step on it.
Jeno exhales, the sound rough at the back of his throat, eyes cutting toward the shadows that rim the fire’s glow. He doesn’t lower his voice, doesn’t bother to dress it up, just lets it fall blunt and certain. “He’s probably with Winter. Backseat, her sheets, take your pick, it’s nothing new.” The line drops like gravel, casual on his tongue but jagged in your chest, leaving no room to imagine otherwise. The fire snaps, sparks breaking like nerves across your skin, and you stare into it until the blaze smears into nothing but heat and color. Your thighs cinch tight under the blanket, muscles betraying you, and the cup in your hand quivers just enough for soda to kiss the rim. Every breath tastes scorched, every sound muffled, and still you don’t dare look up—because the weight of his name paired with hers feels like being caught mid-heartbeat, split open in front of them all.
Saerin lets out a laugh that’s too sweet to be genuine, her eyes flicking across the firelight to where Winter’s voice is carrying somewhere in the crowd. “Please. Winter couldn’t keep him busy if she tried,” she says, syrupy and sly, sipping from her cup like it’s wine and not soda laced with someone’s vodka. Her bracelets clink as she shrugs, feigning innocence. “She’s all noise, no encore.” Jeno doesn’t rise to it. His hand just firms at your shoulder, steering you subtly closer, the curve of his jaw carved harder in the glow. He leaves the air thick with silence, but that silence feels heavier than words, coiling around the three of you.
It’s Mark who breaks it. He coughs once, deliberately, and when you glance his way, his eyes catch yours with that infuriatingly gentle knowing, like he’s clocked the crack in your mask, like he knows more than he’s letting on. He doesn’t linger, doesn’t expose you. Instead, he tilts his face back toward the fire, speaking almost to the night itself. “He’s not with Winter.” The words are easy, casual, like small talk. Then, after a beat, his mouth quirks. “Hasn’t been for weeks. Last I heard, he’s been holed up at the VHS store, running the late shifts, developing film in the back, messing with those old Super 8 reels like he’s married to them.” The fire hisses, a can somewhere in the circle cracks open, but your chest knots tighter, breath catching where you don’t want it to. You keep your gaze fixed forward, but Mark’s words slip under your skin anyway, stitching images you can’t unsee: Jaemin bent over a spooling machine, neon from the shop’s window bleeding against his jaw, fingers stained faintly with ink and dust, eyes trained on something only he knows how to bring back to life.
Saerin doesn’t let the silence linger. Her hand snakes around your wrist, bracelets clinking, tugging you up with a grin too bright to refuse. “Come on,” she chirps, already pulling you through the crush of legs and smoke, her hips swaying exaggeratedly like she knows exactly who’s watching. You stumble after her, laughing as she drags you across the firelit grass, the hem of your skirt catching against your thighs, sparks popping above the logs like the world’s egging you on. She doesn’t stop until you’re at the edge of the circle where Eric and Sunwoo are posted up like kings without a throne, cups loose in their hands, pretending they aren’t waiting to be entertained. Saerin collapses into the space between them, draping her arm over Sunwoo’s shoulder like it’s hers to claim, head tipping back with a giggle that makes him raise a brow. You fall into Eric, landing against his side harder than you meant to, his hand immediately finding the curve of your waist to steady you, maybe too easily, maybe like he’d been hoping for it.
The four of you knot together fast, like the fire’s heat has pulled you into the same gravity. Eric’s thumb traces absent circles at your side as he murmurs something low, and you smirk back, hair spilling forward as you lean in closer than necessary. Across from you, Saerin tips her cup into Sunwoo’s, challenging him to chug with a wicked smile, bracelets jangling as he groans but goes for it anyway. The boys aren’t subtle; their eyes drag over bare knees, the straps slipping down your shoulders, the way you and Saerin sparkle in the firelight like you’ve made it a performance. You can feel it in the air: the teasing, the heat, the way their laughter tangles with yours until it’s impossible to tell who’s pulling who closer. Saerin shoots you a wink over the rim of her cup, like she’s daring you to play along, and you do, brushing your fingers over Eric’s knee as you laugh at nothing, letting the touch linger until his grin sharpens.
Donghyuck takes the crate of beers Renjun just dropped, climbs onto the back of a pickup, and whistles sharp enough to turn the crowd toward him. He’s got that grin, sly, lopsided, already knowing he has everyone’s attention. The fire spits behind him, throwing his shadow long, and he tips his chin like he’s about to deliver a sermon. “Alright, listen up. For the new faces, welcome. For the old ones, you know the drill. Tonight isn’t just about standing around a fire drinking warm beer. This night’s older than any of us. It’s the one night the town lets us burn our ghosts, laugh too loud, and maybe regret it tomorrow. Consider it a baptism… or a trap. Your choice.” His laugh carries, low and mocking, but not unkind.
He paces along the tailgate, eyes flicking over the circle until they land on you and Saerin, holding just a beat too long before moving on. “First, the ritual burn. Don’t think you’re just tossing scraps. It's a blood sport. You give the fire something real. Band tees, mixtapes, notes you swore you’d never show, sneakers you ran in until they died. If you throw in trash, the flames spit it back at you. You’ll see. You kids burned shit back home, didn’t you?” His grin stretches, slow and knowing. “Same thing here. Doesn’t matter if it’s notes, ribbons, whatever, you feed the fire or it eats you instead. That’s the rule. Always has been. It’s not just burning junk. It proves you’re serious. That you’re ready for the new start. You toss something in, it ends the story back home and this, right here, becomes the first page of whatever’s next.”
His grin sharpens, teeth flashing. “Last year, someone torched a whole stack of love letters. Half the crowd cried, the other half cheered. That’s the kind of energy I want.” The group jeers, someone shoving Chenle as he whoops. Donghyuck lets it ride, then lifts his cup like a conductor. “Second, the glowstick game. You crack it, toss it into the dark, and pray you’re faster than the person chasing you. Don’t come back empty-handed or we’ll know exactly how weak you are. And if you bump into someone in the dark…” His smirk curls meaner. “Well, whatever happens stays in the dark.” A ripple of laughter cuts the air. He rolls his shoulders, letting the pause stretch. “Then comes the don’t-spill initiation. Red solo cups, filled to the brim. If you’re fresh meat, you carry one. If you spill, we chant your name until you chug. Simple. Fun. Public humiliation never killed anyone.” His eyes gleam. “Though it’s close.” He hops down, sneakers hitting the dirt, smirk unbroken. “So drink up. Burn something worth remembering. Run fast. Don’t spill. And don’t think you’re leaving untouched. This night never lets anyone leave clean.”
The fire is swollen now, flames stacked on flames until the heat licks your skin like breath. One by one, the circle feeds it. Shirts turned to smoke, shoes curling black, ink bleeding from paper into ash. The crack of Renjun’s busted camcorder as it snaps open in the blaze draws hollers; Jeno’s jersey disappears quieter, swallowed whole without fuss. Saerin takes her time, spinning her diner name tag once on its chain before letting it go. She makes a show of it, of course she does, the plastic catching blue before it warps. The fire roars louder with every offering, as if it knows the weight of what it’s being given, proof, sacrifice, a cut between what was and what might be.
The fire answers each sacrifice with a new surge, sparks lifting into the night like they’ve been waiting years for this release. The circle buzzes, laughter and jeers pitched over the roar. Someone yells for Chenle to throw in his sneakers, and he waves them over his head like a trophy before lobbing one in. “Bro, that thing could walk itself,” Sunwoo heckles, nose wrinkled. “It’s not a burn ritual, it’s pest control.”
The group breaks into howls, Chenle bowing like he’s onstage before hurling the second shoe after the first. Mark digs through his pockets, muttering, “Didn’t bring anything good.” He holds up a guitar pick finally, chewed at the edge, flipping it between his fingers before tossing it in. “Guess I’ll miss that one,” he sighs, grinning when Jisung groans, “You literally have hundreds.”
Saerin smirks, cupping her hands around her mouth to shout across the circle, “Renjun, admit it, you were just waiting for an excuse to destroy that camcorder. You’ve been torturing us with your shaky-ass movies for years.”
Renjun shoots her a look over the fire, deadpan. “You’ll regret that when I win my first Oscar.”
“More like Razzie,” Donghyuck cuts in, his grin wicked, already leaning into the role of ringleader. He flicks his bottle cap into the flames like punctuation. “Best performance by a guy who accidentally films his own feet.” The laughter spills easy, warm and loud, covering the crackle of firewood. But beneath it, you still feel the smoke curl low in your chest, because not every offering burns as light as a shoe or a pick. Some things linger. Some things sting.
You feel her before you see her, the hush that comes when the weather turns, and then there she is, walking into the circle like she’s always owned the sky. She arrives the way a storm does, not sudden, not loud, but in the shift of air pressure, the way the night seems to lean, the flames bending as though they’ve already made room for her. Winter doesn’t announce herself. One moment the circle hums with noise, and the next it thins, bent around her without needing to be told. You don’t see her until she’s already moving, slipping through the crowd with that unhurried grace that’s always been hers, like she knows every set of eyes will fall anyway. The fire takes her in as if it was waiting, catching in her hair until it burns too bright to stare at, making her glossed mouth gleam like lacquered fruit. She stands there and the murmurs bend toward her. She commands without asking. She always has.
It’s the kind of beauty that isn’t fair, the kind that makes a room tilt whether she wants it to or not. Boys track her automatically, shoulders angling, mouths going dry; they always have, from locker rooms to parking lots to this circle now. You catch Jisung nudging Chenle, Eric’s smirk tipping wider, even Sunwoo faltering mid-joke. They all watch. Except Jeno, who doesn’t look, his hand heavy at your shoulder, thumb steady against your collarbone, and Mark, who keeps his chin dipped toward the guitar pick already gone to ash. Their refusal to look is its own kind of loyalty, and you love them for it, even as your skin prickles with the weight of everyone else’s attention.
Her eyes land on you finally, and you remember why you hate them. Not because they’re cruel, though they can be but because they’re endless, dark pools that never give back what they take. It’s a stare that makes you thirteen again, tongue-tied and shrinking, while she and her friends lean back like queens on their cafeteria throne, smiling with their teeth, making you feel small without ever raising their voices. That’s what she does: she reduces, pares you down, reminds you of where you started. And standing here, shoulder to shoulder with her in the same firelight, you feel it all over again.
Winter’s lips curve, the kind of smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. “Didn’t think I’d see you here,” she says lightly, though the words carry teeth. Her gaze flicks over your top, your shoes, lingering like she’s taking inventory, and then she hums, amused. “Guess they really are letting anyone in this year.”
Your silence hangs heavy, the fire spitting like it wants to fill it for you. Winter’s eyes don’t move, steady and bottomless, and you feel that old squeeze in your chest, the one that makes you smaller before you even notice. Saerin, though, doesn’t give her the satisfaction. She leans forward, bracelets sliding down her wrist with a soft metallic scrape, her mouth tilting into a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. “God, Winter,” she says, tone dripping with amusement, “you walk in here like the main event, but you’ve been doing the same performance for years. Aren’t you bored yet?”
Winter doesn’t flinch. She only leans closer, voice dropping to silk-edged venom. “Careful, sweetheart. This place has a way of swallowing girls like you whole.” Her stare lands back on you, pointed, heavy, like she’s daring you to prove her wrong.
Eric sidles up behind you like he’s always belonged there, heat and mischief arriving before his voice. His arm drapes over your shoulder, hand skimming low with no shame, and he bends close enough that his breath tickles your ear. “She spends all night practicing that entrance,” he mutters, a grin pressed sharp into your hair. “The only thing tighter than her smile is her grip on old gossip.” His palm dips lower, casual as if he owns the right, squeezing a handful of you in a way that makes your body jolt, face flushing hot under the weight of too many eyes and too much firelight.
The circle shifts, someone calling for the next sacrifice, and suddenly all the faces tilt toward you. Your heart lurches, your fingers moving before your head catches up, digging into your pocket for anything. What surfaces isn’t planned, a frayed ribbon, the one knotted months ago around the handle of your old backpack, worn soft from too many mornings waiting in the hidden alleyway, waiting for Jaemin to pick you up. It unravels from your grip like it’s been waiting, and before you can think, you hurl it forward.
The flames catch it instantly, curling blue at the edges before swallowing it whole. It’s small, nothing compared to jerseys or cameras, but the way it blackens feels heavier, like you’ve let go of something you weren’t ready to name. Saerin squeezes your hand tight, anchoring you, but the knot in your chest only coils tighter. Even with Eric pressed warm behind you and the fire eating your past, something thrums across the clearing, an unseen current snapping the hairs on your arms upright, as if a hidden planet has swung into orbit and yanked the gravity sideways. You don’t see him, not yet, but the air tilts the way metal leans toward a magnet, heat concentrating on the back of your neck until the bonfire’s glow feels secondary. It isn’t the crowd, and it isn’t Winter; it’s a singular pull lodged just beyond the reach of flame, unmistakable in its private constellations. Somewhere out in that hush, Jaemin is looking, and the space between you vibrates like a tuning fork just struck.
Smoke heaves off the bonfire in slow, rolling ribbons, diffusing the world into moving watercolor, orange, ember-red, river-black. Eric’s palm slides lower, crowding beneath the hem of your skirt with practiced ownership, his breath a slick curl against your ear. He mutters something half-filthy, half-joking. words sticky as soda syrup. while his thumb coaxes bruising circles into the muscle of your thigh. Laughter and whoops rise around you, but they land distant, muffled, as though someone has wrapped the night in cotton. Because the second you lift your gaze past the heat shimmer, Jaemin materializes through the haze like a star stepping out of deep space. He’s propped against the tailgate of some beat-up truck, arms folded, cigarette ember burning a slow heartbeat between his fingers. Flamelight flickers across the sharp plane of his cheek, the cut of his collarbone, the open line of buttons that reveal a pale triangle of chest. His eyes, dark, half-hooded, cosmic, fix on the place where Eric’s hand owns you, and the contact detonates into significance: your pulse skitters, your breath stutters, every nerve recalcibrating to the singular frequency of him.
It’s instantaneous, volcanic, a supernova flash in the wide mouth of the field. Nothing moves except the smoke and your chest, but it feels like the entire bonfire slants toward the gravity between you. Eric laughs again, oblivious, squeezing a little harder. Jaemin’s gaze flicks up, meets yours, holds. Time dilates. You can hear the tick of wood splitting in the flames, the fizz of cheap beer foaming in red cups, the tiny mechanical click of the disposable camera Saerin winds somewhere behind you, but all of it is subtext beneath the roaring hush that fills your skull. He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t need to. The corner of his mouth tilts a millimeter, enough to taste like a challenge. Smoke currents halo his hair, ember sparks catching on the strands so he looks backlit, dangerous, unbothered. Under the truck’s dome light, metal grommets on his belt glint like stray constellations; the chain of a lighter dangles at his hip, swaying to some secret rhythm. Boys loiter near him, girls laugh too loudly at something he’s already stopped saying, but his attention remains nailed to you, unzipping your composure cell by cell.
Eric shifts, lips skating across the shell of your ear. “Wanna find somewhere darker?” he murmurs, voice toasted with liquor. The words brush hot over your skin, but they dissolve before they settle; Jaemin’s stare is an eclipse swallowing every alternative light source. Your thighs tighten reflexively; you’re suddenly, painfully aware of every place Eric is touching that Jaemin once mapped first.
In your fist sits the object you didn’t realise you had been holding deeply in your pocket until now, a square of glossy photo paper, edges frayed, image so faded it’s almost ghost-white. One of last summer’s Polaroids, an accidental double exposure of Jaemin’s grin blurring into the twilight sky. You didn’t mean to bring it. Instinct shoved it into your pocket when you fled the room earlier. Now it feels radioactive in your palm, humming in time with the frantic beat under your ribs. Saerin’s voice breezes behind you, “it’s your turn again, babe!”—and the group whoops encouragement, waiting to see what you’ll sacrifice.
Jaemin straightens, cigarette slipping from his lips, gaze sharpening into something that could scorch paper all by itself. The air between you vibrates like the charged space beneath a storm cloud; one spark and the entire night will detonate. You step forward, Eric’s hand sliding from your waist in surprise, and the heat of Jaemin’s eyes trails every inch of skin exposed by your too-short hem, the jacket Jeno draped now hanging open like an invitation. The Polaroid flutters once between your fingers, one pale supernova crossing another before you let it fall into the blaze. For a breath the film hovers, edges curling, colors flaring back to sudden life: his grin catches electric blue, twilight floods violet, and then the fire devours them, turning memory into gold sparks that spiral up, up, gone. Across the flames Jaemin exhales smoke like a silent verdict, eyes molten with something unreadable, something that feels like ownership reclaimed. Your knees go weak; Eric’s palm finds your lower back again, steadying you, but the touch lands diluted, a faraway echo compared to the cosmic pull singing under your skin. The bonfire snaps, sparks leap like shooting stars, and the night swells around the gravity of a single, unanswered question burning in Jaemin’s eyes: now what?
Donghyuck’s voice slices through the haze, sharp and amused, announcing the next tradition like he’s the ringmaster of some half-feral circus. Glowsticks crack open, neon spilling between hands before they’re hurled into the dark field, the dare simple: grab one and make it back without being caught. Laughter rises, bodies already surging toward the grass, but you barely hear it; Jaemin hasn’t looked away once. His stare pins you, steady and merciless, like he’s stripping you down layer by layer without moving a muscle. Even as Donghyuck hypes the rules, even as the circle shifts and scatters, it feels obscene, like Jaemin’s already in the dark with you, hunting, long before the game begins.
The field feels narrower once the Polaroid is gone, as if that single square of film had been anchoring oxygen for half the crowd. You step back into the dark fringe where the bonfire’s light breaks apart, embers popping like distant camera flashes, smoke spiraling thick enough to taste. Somewhere behind you Saerin is howling at Chenle’s glow-stick crown; Eric is laughing too loudly, fingers still orbiting the small of your back; Winter’s posse has regrouped, their high-pitched gossip snapping like gum. But all of that blurs to background grain, because Jaemin is moving.
He doesn’t cut through people so much as glide around their blind spots, body a slow-rolling storm front, black button-down hanging loose to mid-thigh, sleeves shoved to the elbow, a thin silver chain tracking the dip of his collarbone before disappearing beneath fabric. Every few steps the fire hits the metal and throws a star-flare across his throat, making the smoke swirl in eddies behind him like dark water parting for a hull. You watch the incremental tilt of his shoulders, the relaxed curl of his knuckles against his thigh, the way his tongue catches on the inside of his cheek when his gaze drops to the length of your bare legs and drags back up. It’s obscene how nothing in his face softens, only that half-smirk, as if the last three years have been one long inhale he’s ready to exhale all over you. His hair’s longer now, pushed back but falling loose at the edges, shadows curling under his jaw where it’s sharper than before. Same mouth, same grin coiled just shy of showing, but it carries weight now, like he knows what it does, what it undoes. He’s a star that burned out and came back harder, hungrier, brighter, and you can’t stop watching.
He watches every time Eric’s hand skims your hip, every time Saerin leans in laughing, every time you shift in the firelight, Jaemin’s gaze holds. slow and heavy, dragging down your legs, up the line of your chest, back to your mouth until you forget what air is. It’s obscene in its steadiness, how he doesn’t look away even when the crowd presses around him, girls brushing his arms, voices tugging at his ears. The rest of them blur, their chatter muffled like static, and in that haze it feels like you’re both sealed in glass, two magnets pushing closer across a room no one else exists in. Jaemin carved from stillness, so precise it makes the chaos around him look cheap. Everyone else is moving, laughing, lunging for glowsticks, but he holds himself like stone, anger distilled into silence. It’s the kind of disapproval that chills the air between you, a steady, cold weight that makes Eric’s touch feel suddenly flimsy, juvenile. His indifference reads sharper than any outburst could, he doesn’t need to fight for space, doesn’t need to announce his claim. He just is, and in that unmoving quiet, you feel your breath stumble, like you’ve already been caught.
No one calls it out, not outright. But you catch Chenle’s smirk cutting quickly across the fire, Renjun’s side-eye sharp as flint, even Winter narrowing her gaze like she can smell it, this charge tunneling between you. Still, nobody speaks, because the silence between you and Jaemin hums louder than their laughter. It’s the kind of silence that thickens, that dares you both to move first, and your body reacts before your head does: thighs tight, heart hammering, pulse in your throat. His mouth twitches like he knows.
A lone whistle cuts through the hush, then a familiar bark of laughter. Jeno slides in from your blind side, draping an easy arm across Jaemin’s shoulder, bro-hug grip, a short shake. “Thought you were gonna ghost the freshman bash, man,” he ribs, but his grin tilts your way. “Look who finally made it out of the store.” He knocks your chin with two knuckles, affectionate, then flicks a glance down your borrowed jacket like he’s making sure it still covers what he meant it to. “You okay, little sis?”
Before you can answer, Jeno jerks a thumb toward Jaemin, his grin breaking wide as he leans into the tease. “Crazy, right? You used to call her our mascot, little thing trailing after us with pigtails and juice boxes. Hard to picture that now, huh?” The laughter in his voice rings easy, but underneath it hums a sharper current, a brother’s warning dressed up as a joke, daring anyone in earshot, especially Jaemin, to forget how small you once were.
As Jeno says it—hard to picture that now, huh?—the actual picture Jaemin is building in his head is obscene enough to make your pulse stumble. He doesn’t see pigtails or juice boxes. He sees your ass bouncing wild on his cock, every slap of skin sharp and wet, your voice gone wrecked as you sobbed his name into the dark. He sees the way your tits spilled free, bouncing with every thrust, the way your nails carved down his chest before you bent forward to lick the sweat off his abs, grinding harder, cumming all over him until his stomach gleamed with you. He sees your knees bruised on the stairwell carpet, spit and drool dripping from your chin as he fucked your throat raw, his grip brutal in your hair, while Jeno sat only a few doors down, clueless to the filth his best friend was feeding his younger sister.
It unravels in him like hunger sharpened to a blade, feral, unrestrained, the memory of you never soft but always messy, always loud, always begging until you were gagging, crying or clawing at his shoulders. The thought alone makes his cock ache, makes the firelight stretch strange across his vision until it’s all you, spread out, dripping, desperate. He doesn’t move, doesn’t let on, but the reel in his head is filthy and endless, every frame a reminder of how you gave yourself to him like you couldn’t help it, how he ruined you and still, even now, wants to ruin you worse.
Jaemin’s gaze slides from you to Jeno and back, expression smoothing into something nearly polite. “Yeah,” he says, almost too soft for the fire crackle, the syllable dragging like velvet across gravel. “She grew up.” His eyes meet yours again, linger. “Looks good on her.” The corner of his mouth tugging into the faintest smirk, low enough that it could be read as nothing at all. “Guess the mascot outgrew the jersey,” he says, voice pitched casual, but the weight of it coils deeper, meant only for you. His eyes hold yours for a beat too long, daring you to catch the undercurrent.
You tip your head, let a smile ghost your lips, light enough to pass as banter. “Guess some people forget jerseys weren’t the only thing that fit,” you answer, airy, careful, but your pulse spikes when his gaze sharpens.
Jeno’s laugh cuts through the noise of the fire, warm and careless, the kind that still has the power to make you feel small beside him no matter how much time has passed. His hand drops heavy to your head, fingers dragging through your hair like he’s reminding everyone around the circle that you’re his to claim, his little sister, no matter how much you’ve grown. “Still my kid sister,” he says with a grin that finds Jaemin, a grin that carries pride and challenge in the same breath, like he’s daring him to disagree. “And still making those dumb jokes no one else gets. Nothing’s changed.” His arm tugs you closer against his side, the fire’s heat and the weight of him blurring together until you can hardly tell which one is searing your skin.
Jaemin doesn’t flinch under Jeno’s grin, doesn’t rise to the bait the way some of the others might. He only shifts his weight, a faint lean against the glow of the fire, his profile softened by smoke and shadow. His gaze drifts lazily back to you, not sharp enough to draw attention, but held long enough to make your chest tighten. His voice lands low, almost careless, like he’s filling silence rather than feeding it. His eyes lock on yours and it’s the opposite of careless. They’re warm brown at first glance, the kind of brown that holds a thousand shades if you look long enough: the burn of coffee left too long on a hot plate, the glossy shell of chestnuts, the varnish on a guitar neck after years of playing. There’s softness in them, yes, but also something that cuts, something that pins. He looks like he could strip you down without a word, like he’s waiting for you to blink first.
They’re layered, restless things, brown shot through with honey where the firelight hits, darker near the edges where it swallows you whole. They remind you of varnished wood that still smells of smoke, of the sheen left on skin after sweat, of the depth you once drowned in when he pressed his forehead to yours in stairwells that felt too small to hold you both. There’s no mercy in them, no retreat. They're velvet and iron at once, soft enough to seduce, sharp enough to cut. He lets you look, lets you know, and then tips his head slightly, a gesture so small no one else would register it, but you do. It’s the same gesture he used to give you when the code was set, when the night was promised. And then, in that same voice he uses when he’s teasing Jisung or brushing off Renjun’s comments, he slips it in. “Strange how quiet it is tonight,” he says, almost casual, almost to the fire. His tone isn’t sharp, not even pointed, just a little musing observation tossed into the heat.
But the words slam into you, because you know them. That was always the phrase, one of many phrases and shared secret code words sacred between you both. ‘Quiet tonight’ means meet me, slip out when no one’s watching, and find me in the dark. It was your language once, the rope you pulled between you, the code only your bodies answered to. No one else could hear it, not really. To Jeno, to anyone else, it’s nothing more than filler talk, something to cut through the silence. But to you it’s a touch at the base of your spine, a reminder of every night you followed him out of rooms like this one. Back then, when it was only the two of you moving in the shadows, you and Jaemin had built a language no one else could hear. A handful of words, small phrases, gestures too ordinary to raise suspicion, but weighted enough to carry entire nights inside them. They were signals, coded invitations to slip out from under Jeno’s, or anyone else’s, watch, to vanish before anyone noticed, to meet in stairwells, rooftops, empty rooms where the world narrowed to breath and skin. It had been your secret, spoken so lightly it passed as nothing, and yet here, by the fire, Jaemin is using it again. The cadence, the phrasing, the subtle tilt of his head, so exact it steals your air. No one else notices, but to you it’s deafening, as if he’s already marked the place you’ll meet, already calling you back into that private ruin you thought you’d buried.
It’s infuriating, the way he can still undo you with nothing more than a look, as if years haven’t passed, as if the wreckage he left behind hasn’t settled into your bones. One glance and your pulse is already betraying you, heat pooling low, your body answering him before your mind can protest. It shouldn’t be possible after the way things ended, after the endless reminders he pressed into your skin even in those nights together: this isn’t forever, don’t mistake this for love, I’ll be gone before you can hold me. He warned you every time, made it clear with his words even as his body contradicted them, even as he touched you like you were his. You knew he would leave, he never let you believe otherwise, but knowing didn’t save you. You still fell, quietly, desperately, against all reason, until you were his in ways you couldn’t admit out loud. And now, here he is again, hardly doing anything at all, not even speaking, just meeting your eyes across the fire and making you feel called, summoned, dragged back into that secret ruin you swore you’d never step into again. It’s maddening, humiliating, how he can still command your heart and your body so completely, when all you want is to hate him enough to look away. The fire cracks, laughter jolts around the circle, but it all blurs at the edges. You can feel the words he didn’t say vibrating in your pulse, the private script etched back into your skin. To everyone else he’s quiet, half-distracted, but to you he’s a blade held steady at your throat, daring you to remember.
Jeno’s warmth slips from your side before you can catch it. Someone calls his name across the circle, something about beer running low, and his hand squeezes your shoulder once before peeling away. His laugh trails after him as he disappears into the hum of bodies, and just like that the buffer is gone, the shield that had been keeping the air around you from collapsing in. The moment he steps away you feel it. A shift. A tug. Jaemin doesn’t move with urgency, doesn’t announce himself with sound or gesture. He only drifts back into the shadows at the far edge of the firelight, posture loose, mouth unreadable, like he isn’t doing anything at all. But you see the precision in it, the way his presence folds the dark around him. He doesn’t look at you, not directly, but every breath in his stillness says he knows your eyes are already tethered. He wants them there. He wants you to follow, and worse, he knows you will. He anchors you without lifting a finger, holds you in place with nothing but the weight of his silence. Every inch of him is an unspoken command, and the cruelest part is the certainty threaded through it, he doesn’t just hope you’ll follow, he knows. It’s already written in the heat sliding under your skin, in the pulse low in your body that betrays you. He wants your eyes fixed on him, wants your steps to bend toward his shadow, and the most unbearable truth is how easily you surrender to it.
It feels like treason to admit it even in the safety of your own body, but the truth sears through anyway. Every part of you that remembers the wreckage screams to stay planted, to hold still, to prove you aren’t still his. You tell yourself to turn toward the fire, toward the laughter, towards Eric, towards distractions you know won’t work, toward anything that isn’t him. And yet your legs feel hollow, your chest too light, your thighs trembling with a hunger you hate. He doesn’t need to coax or call because the want is already in you, soft as breath and sharp as a blade. Desire has always been the weakest part of you, the soft underbelly he branded once and never gave back. The thought of walking toward him feels like surrender, but staying still feels worse. He’s still inside you, even now, threaded through your body like a fever that never broke. Every look drags you back to the press of his mouth, the taste of his kiss that always lingered too long, the stretch of him filling you until you thought you’d split, until you were certain he must have loved you to fuck you like that, to hold you like that. His cock branded you with every thrust, carved hunger into your spine, left your heart and your pussy aching in the same breath, and the worst part is how memory alone still makes your body tremble, begging for him as though he never left.
You find Saerin, breath brushing her ear so no one else can hear. “I’m going with Jaemin,” you whisper, the words tasting bitter and sweet all at once.
Her head snaps to you, eyes widening, pupils catching the firelight as she searches your face. “What? Are you sure that’s the right idea?” she murmurs, voice low and quick.
You shake your head, lips pressing into the edge of her hair. “No.” The word lands soft, a confession more than an answer. Her sigh spills heavy against your cheek before she tips her head, resigned and fond in the same stroke.
“You should just go, what’s the worst that can happen? I’ll cover you. Don’t look back.” She presses her forehead briefly to yours like she’s sealing it, then straightens, bracelets sliding down her wrist as her palm snaps against your ass in a playful slap. “Make it worth sneaking off for, let him remind you why his cock ruined you for anyone else,” she teases, grin tilted, drunk and dazzling. You swat her hand away with a tut, cheeks burning, but the words stick as she adds, quieter now, “He isn’t a bad guy. He’s just… yours. Go.”
The fire roars behind you, voices lift into laughter, but you slip away through the margins where shadows stretch long. The path curves uneven beneath your shoes, grass slick with dew, the night pressing cooler against your bare skin. The glow from the fire shrinks behind you, replaced by the hum of insects, the flicker of neon spilling faint from a distant vending machine. The world feels thinner here, stripped of noise, as if you’ve stepped off film and into its grainy negative. Every step is a secret, every crunch of gravel a confession. The retro hum of the machines, the faint sputter of a broken bulb overhead, the sharp sweetness of cherry soda left open on the ground, it all folds into a haze that feels designed for two. You don’t have to see him to know where he waits. It’s the pull of gravity, the certainty of orbit. Every breath you take moves you closer, softer, deeper into his dark.
The dock bends beneath your step, wood swollen with years of rain and sun, each board creaking like it carries memory. The lake spreads endless in front of you, black and slick, catching only fragments of the bonfire’s glow. Smoke drifts low from behind, mingling with the damp air until the whole night tastes of ash and water. He’s there, exactly where you somehow knew he would be, leaning against the railing as though the structure itself had been designed for his frame. Shoulders squared, chin tilted, his posture holds something casual yet deliberate, like he’s waiting without ever admitting it. The fire casts him in bronze, a living statue half-carved by shadow, half-lit by molten gold. It drips down the sharp plane of his jaw, gathers at the cut of his mouth, glows faintly against the hollow of his throat where the collar of his shirt gapes open. He doesn’t look at you so much as seize you with his gaze, a pull that works under your skin like current, dragging you forward before you even think to resist.
His eyes don’t hurry, but they don’t hide either. They move slowly and deliberately, cataloguing you as if the years between you never existed, his stare unapologetically fixed on the slip of your strap, the soft hollow above your chest, the skin revealed at the hem of your skirt. The air feels thick with it, each pass of his gaze a hand, each pause a memory dragging itself across your body. His lip catches briefly between his teeth, the barest bite, and when he releases it, the wet shine makes his half-smile tilt hungrier, sharper, too intimate for the space you stand in. You know that look. You know what he’s saying without words. You spent a whole summer learning the language of it, the way silence could mean “follow me,” the way a single glance could strip you open. The way silence used to sit between you was never empty. With him, it carried command, thick as smoke, heavier than words. Silence meant doors closing and backs hitting walls, meant your body bending to his before you’d even realized you’d moved, it lived in your bloodstream long after, the kind your pulse still answers to now.
It pins you now, raw and undeniable, and you hear yourself stumble into deflection, voice low and uneven. “I can’t be here long. Jeno’s gonna wonder where I am.” The words fall thin, excuses more than warning, but they’re all you can manage under the weight of his stare.
His response is almost cruel in how calm it is. His gaze only deepens, dark and fixed, a slow, heated sweep back to your eyes like he’s already touching you. The corner of his mouth lifts, barely, the faintest curve that makes your chest clench, and when he speaks, it comes rougher than you expect, quiet enough to feel meant only for you. “Then don’t waste what you do have.”
You huff a laugh, sharp and shaky, tilting your chin like you’re the one in control. “Careful, you make it sound like you’ve been waiting for me.” The words slip out lighter than you feel them, a shield dressed up as a joke, but your body betrays you, thighs pressing, fingers tugging at the hem of your top as if to ground yourself. You glance away for a beat, toward the glow bleeding off the water, before daring to look back at him. “I really can’t stay out here long, Jeno’s gonna come looking. What are you gonna do if he sees us together?” It’s flimsy, transparent, but you toss it between you anyway, as if distraction could soften the way his eyes are already stripping you bare.
His mouth curves slow, deliberate, eyes never leaving yours as his tongue flicks briefly across his bottom lip like he’s tasting the thought. “Together?” he repeats, voice low, threaded with heat. He leans in just enough that the boards creak beneath your heels, his breath ghosting the shell of your ear. “We’re just standing here. Talking. Looking.” The pause is heavy, pointed, his gaze dragging over you again with no pretense. “Unless you want him to think it’s more than that.”
You swallow hard, but you force the corner of your mouth up, trying to match the calm he wears like armor. “Talking? Looking? That’s your story?” you murmur, letting it slip out airy, teasing, your gaze dipping once over his mouth before you catch yourself. “Funny, feels a lot more dangerous than that.” Your voice tilts lighter, almost mocking, but your thighs brush together, a tiny shift you can’t disguise. You tilt your head, feigning bravado, words sharp as you bite down on the urge to lean closer. “Guess it depends who’s doing the looking.”
You shift, slow enough to pretend it’s casual, closing the space between you by a fraction that feels louder than any word. The boards creak under your weight, the night air catching on your bare skin, and you lift your chin just enough to force yourself into his line of sight. “See?” you whisper, feigning ease even as your pulse stumbles, “nothing to hide.”
His breath leaves him sharp, like you’ve pulled it straight from his chest, and the sound alone makes your stomach tighten. His eyes rake over you in one long drag, darker now, glazed with a hunger you know too well, pupils blown, lashes trembling with the weight of holding back. The faintest groan slips from him, too low for anyone but you, and the corner of his mouth twitches like he wants to smirk but can’t quite manage it, not with the way his gaze sticks on you, hungry and unmasked. The silence between you stretches, thick as the smoke curling off the fire, but neither of you moves to fill it. His gaze holds you still, unflinching, your breath tightening under the weight of it. The hunger in his eyes remains, sharp and molten, yet there is something else threaded through now, an unguarded softness, raw and bare, the side of him you always craved and never quite touched. It’s the look you chased in every kiss that summer, the ghost you dreamed of when his hands pressed you into the shadows, the part of him you thought he’d buried when he walked away. It makes the night bend, makes the dock creak louder under your shoes, and suddenly you’re back in those fevered hours, your skin lit with his breath, his mouth tasting of smoke and want, his body pinning yours like he couldn’t stand the space between you.
His chest rises, slow, deliberate, as if even breathing is something he has to hold steady for your sake. Then his mouth parts, and the words come rougher than you expect, too plain to be rehearsed. “It’s really good to see you. I missed you more than I should have.” The cadence is measured, but the truth inside it spills uncontained, sinking into you like a brand. For a heartbeat you think you misheard, that the smoke has played some trick, but his eyes lock harder into yours, soft and searing at once, leaving you stripped under their weight. It cuts deeper than any touch he could give, more dangerous than his hands on your skin, because honesty is the one thing you never prepared for from him, and it steals the breath from your lungs before you can answer.
Your throat tightens before you can steady it, the words clawing their way out ragged, thinner than you meant them to be. “I missed you too.” It lands like a confession, hushed and dangerous, before you can take it back. Heat rushes up your neck, your lips pressing shut quick as if that could erase it. You shift a step backward, heel knocking the dock rail, hands tugging the hem of your skirt down, like maybe fabric can guard you better than distance. You want to smother the softness, to layer it with sarcasm, with some careless quip that proves he doesn’t still own this part of you. But your chest betrays you, rising fast, pulse drumming so loud it feels like it fills the air between you. You won’t meet his eyes, can’t, because you know the second you do he’ll see the truth you’re still trying to smother, that he never left you, not really, and that one glance has undone all the walls you built in his absence.
You barely make it a single step before his eyes pin you in place. He doesn’t move, doesn’t reach, doesn’t need to. The air between you thickens, heavy with a pull older than the flames licking the horizon, and it drags at your body with the same inevitability as gravity. His gaze sharpens, dark and unblinking, a quiet command threaded into every second he refuses to look away. It presses harder than hands ever could, rooting you to the boards, holding you there with nothing but the weight of him seeing you. Your chest stills, your throat locks, and every nerve beneath your skin sparks like it remembers exactly what it means to obey him.
His voice follows, low and rough at the edges, more breath than sound, the kind of timbre that winds straight into your pulse. “Come here.” Just two words, but they unravel something inside you, untying every flimsy knot you thought would hold. You know it’s reckless, you know it’s ruin, but the heat in his eyes makes it thrilling in a way you can’t fight, like your body already belongs to the order, like you’ve been waiting to hear it again all along.
You move before you even realise you have, the creak of the boards betraying your steps as though the dock itself wants to announce your surrender. He stays still, waiting, a silhouette carved against the fire’s reflection in the water, and then when you’re close enough, his arms fold around you with a certainty that feels both familiar and new. His hands find your waist first, rough warmth searing through the fabric, then lower, thumbs grazing the top of your hips, palms pressing in just enough to remind you where you bend, where you yield. The hold is too tight for casual, too long for polite; it is a claim dressed up as reunion.
Your face fits against the hollow of his collarbone, breath brushing his skin, and for a moment it feels like falling back into a season you swore you buried. His chest is broader than you remember, the steady rise and fall against you slower, heavier, as though he’s in no rush to let go. His breath ghosts your temple, and you can feel the faint drag of his mouth close, close enough that every nerve in you expects a kiss, though it never lands. The restraint only sharpens the ache, makes the air between you electric with all the things he doesn’t do.
Your own hands betray you, fingers curling into the fabric at his back like they were never meant to hover at his sides. They slide lower, instinctive, brushing the dip above his belt before you force them back, pretending it was nothing. But the damage is done: the memory of his skin beneath your nails floods you, unspooling heat that sits low in your belly. When he finally shifts, it isn’t to release you. It’s to press you closer, his palms firm at the small of your back now, pushing you against the length of him. The dock tilts, the water laps darkly beneath, but all you feel is the weight of his body pressed into yours, the promise of what his hands are already saying without words. It’s supposed to be a hug but it’s anything but.
Your fingers slip along his arms before you can stop yourself, tracing the hard line of his bicep through cotton stretched too thin. The muscle flexes under your touch, alive, warm, like a living memory coming back to life. Your nails skim higher, over the slope of his shoulder, down the cut of his back, greedy for confirmation that he feels just as solid as you remember. The sound that claws out of you when your palm presses harder is small, muffled into his chest, but it betrays everything. His response is instant, like your moan lit a fuse he’d been hiding, his hands slip beneath the hem of your shirt, rough palms spreading wide across your waist, dragging up, mapping your ribs as if relearning you. His thumbs brush under the soft curve of your breasts before sliding lower again, possessive, deliberate, until one hand closes firm around your ass, pulling you tighter into him.
You can feel the shift in him when he realises you’re trembling, his mouth hovering just above your hair, his breath stuttering as if he’s the one on the verge of losing control. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t have to; his hands are already saying it all, kneading into the backs of your thighs, slipping higher until fabric gives way to skin, coaxing your body to remember. Heat pools sharp between your legs, every nerve strung tight with the way he holds you, with the way he moves like he’s starving for something only you can give. When you finally lean back, the world tilts with you, the dock groaning underfoot, the fire’s reflection catching in the black water. His eyes are waiting, brown so dark they swallow the light, yet edged with gold where the flames reach them. They rake over you shamelessly, lingering on the dip of your neckline, the line of your waist, the hem of your skirt riding higher with every tug of his hand. His tongue drags slow across his bottom lip, catching in the corner, and he doesn’t bother to disguise it; he looks at you like a man undressing, consuming, unashamed of how blatant his hunger is.
The air between you feels drenched, heavy, thick with the weight of his stare. He doesn’t blink when your gaze drops to his mouth, doesn’t hide when his eyes drag down the length of you again, slower this time, settling where his hand already grips you hard. You feel seen in a way that leaves your pulse tripping, every inch of your body called forward, called older, called his. The clothes you chose, bare shoulders, hem a little too short, neckline looser than you planned, suddenly feel like proof of how much you’ve changed, how much you’ve grown, how much you’ve stepped into the kind of body and heat that has his jaw tightening, his breath catching, his stare refusing to release you.
The air tastes damp and smoky, heavy with the fire’s reflection bleeding across the lake, but here with him, it feels clearer, sharper, like oxygen you’ve been starving for. His voice comes low, softer than you remember, his words carrying that effortless sarcasm he wears like a second skin. “So, you’ve survived the night so far,” he murmurs, head tilting, gaze tracing your face in a way that feels more like mapping than looking. “Crowds, fire, Eric’s hands everywhere. Impressive.” There’s humor in it, faint, almost careless, but you can hear the undercurrent beneath it, he’s been watching. He always watches.
You try to laugh it off, but it comes thinner than you mean it to, your pulse stammering under his stare. When you answer, it’s shaky sarcasm, “Yeah, thriving. Totally loving being the bonfire entertainment.” He huffs a laugh through his nose, the kind that barely stirs his mouth but shifts his whole face, and in that small moment, that flicker of warmth, you remember too clearly why you ever fell: because he could make the world lighter without even trying, because one tilt of his grin could undo every guard you thought you built.
You tell yourself you won’t, you shouldn’t, but the pull is merciless. Your body leans before your mind can stop it, closing the scant space, lips brushing his with the barest ghost of a kiss. It’s instinct, it’s hunger, it’s your undoing in one motion. But then his head tilts back, just slightly, denial disguised as ease, and you freeze. The shock catches in your throat, a silent gulp that burns worse than the smoke, humiliation and yearning tangling sharp in your chest. Then he leans down, almost too close, but it isn’t your mouth he claims, it’s your forehead, a press that lingers, steady and deliberate, warm enough to rattle you from the inside out. His breath drags quiet when he pulls back, and the words he leaves behind are lower still, almost reverent. “You’ve always felt like home.”
And yet he didn’t kiss you, not where you wanted, not where your pulse begged him to. He holds back because kissing you would mean crossing a line he isn’t ready to blur again, not here, not now, not with the bonfire a breath away and the ghosts of your brother’s voice still echoing in the air. The restraint is its own weapon, cruel and careful: he knows what his lips on your forehead will do, how it’ll collapse you softer than a mouth pressed hungry to yours. He pulls away because he wants you unravelled, not claimed, because waiting, denying, stretching the ache until you’re starving for it, has always been the way he keeps his power, the way he makes sure you never forget that he moves the tide of your body with nothing more than patience.
The boards groan under your weight as you shift back, pulling air into your lungs like it might clear the fog he draped around you. For a second, you believe you can walk away, that if you just put one foot behind the other, you’ll be free of him, of this heat pressing into your chest. But before you can slip past, his body tilts into your path, quiet as shadow, his voice even quieter. “Don’t go running from me.” The words don’t lash, they land soft, steady, the way a hand might settle over your wrist to remind you of its hold.
You bite back, softer than you mean to, your voice a crack trying to mask itself as strength. “Shouldn’t you be with Winter?” The name tastes bitter on your tongue, and you throw it like a stone even if it trembles midair.
His answer comes without hesitation, low and steady as the lake beneath you. “Haven’t touched her since Jeno told me you were coming back. She was never what I wanted, I’m not interested in her.” His breath drags close, warm against the shell of your ear, and when he speaks the words sink deeper than the fire ever could. “You talk about Winter like she’s the problem, when I haven’t looked at her once tonight, haven’t spoken a word in her direction. And yet I watched Eric put his hands all over you all night long, I watched you stand there and let him.” His tone isn’t raised, but it cuts sharper for how quiet it lands, a jealous edge folded into the softness, like he’s admitting more than he intends. His eyes sweep you slowly, hungry, as though replaying the image, punishing himself with it even while he punishes you. “You’re a grown woman and you can do what you want, you can be with whoever you want and I know we’re not together but don’t stand here pretending you don’t know what you’re doing to me.”
You try to turn the tide, words spilling in a whisper sharp with hurt. “You weren’t supposed to matter anymore. I planned to ignore you, to let this night pass without you touching me again.”
Jaemin exhales slowly, the curve of his mouth catching in a smirk that pretends at ease but sharpens underneath, like glass hidden in velvet. “Ignore me tonight if you want,” he murmurs, his tone deceptively casual, though every word lands with intent, “but what’s your plan tomorrow? Or next week? We’re here now, in the same town, the same streets, the same nights, the same places to end up.” His gaze does not waver, brown eyes deep and unblinking, and it feels like he’s stitching you into place with nothing but his stare. He tips his head slightly, his voice softer but no less cutting, gaze sliding slowly over the length of you as though reminding you of every inch he once claimed. “You know how this goes, Y/N. We don’t get to escape each other.”
Your chest knows the truth before your mind can argue, because that summer was proof of what proximity did to you both. It was never careful, never planned, only the inevitability of breathing the same air and burning under the same heat until there was no room left to pretend. You walked the same roads, leaned against the same walls, lingered in the same shadows, and every time the space between you shrank, the hunger demanded somewhere to go. You fucked because there was nowhere else to put it, you fell because he was everywhere you turned, and by the time you realised, it was already too late.
The ache spikes through your ribs as you finally let the words spill, the ones that have sat like rust in your chest since the night he walked away. “You made it clear that you didn’t want me, that I was temporary,” you say, the admission thin, your voice frayed even as you try to lace it with steel. “You told me what we had wasn’t built to last, and then you proved it when you left.” The sentence burns as it leaves you, heavier than you imagined, a truth flung like a weapon you are too tired to sharpen.
His answer comes without hesitation, the edges rough but steady, his tone slipping lower, so quiet it feels like he is speaking only to your pulse. “I told you it wouldn’t be forever, you knew I had to leave,” he says, each word measured, heavier for how unguarded they sound. His gaze hooks into you, unrelenting. “But don’t twist it, wanting you never ended. You think that died because I walked away?” His breath hitches once, caught in the silence. “I’ve wanted you every damn day since.”
The words pin you before he ever touches you, heat crawling under your skin in a way you want to deny, but your body betrays you. Your grip on the night air falters, chest pulling shallow breaths as if that alone might steady you, as if you can resist the pull of him by holding yourself upright. You try to step back, to claim the distance your mind tells you is the only safe ground, but he reads it before you even shift. His hand finds your waist with an authority that is both remembered and newly sharpened, and the next moment your back meets the railing of the dock. The metal is cold, unforgiving, pressing through your shirt until it bites into your spine, and the shock of it only sharpens the heat pouring through you. The lake laps against the posts beneath, dark water catching fragments of firelight, but the air you breathe is all him.
His chest presses into yours, the solid weight of him undoing your resolve. The warmth of his palm slides beneath the hem of your shirt, rough from calluses, fingertips dragging up the slope of your waist until they graze the underside of your breast. The sound that slips from you isn’t a word but a broken gasp, too close to a moan, and you hate yourself for the way it spills so easily. His eyes blaze darker at the sound, lips parting, a sharp exhale brushing your cheek as though your weakness fuels him. You find yourself touching back before thought can intervene. Your hands slide over the hard lines of his arms, muscles straining under your grip, biceps flexing as he cages you tighter against the railing. Your palms climb higher, curling over the breadth of his shoulders, fingers digging in like you could anchor yourself in him instead of fighting the pull. A stifled whimper claws its way out when you trail down again, over the thickness of his chest, lower still until your nails catch lightly at his ribs. He groans, low and guttural, the sound rolling out of him as if you’ve struck a nerve he’s been waiting for you to hit.
The rail shudders faintly against your back when he shifts, thigh sliding firm between yours until it presses with purpose, nudging you open before you can think to resist. He fits there deliberately, every inch of him reminding you of the memory your body never forgot. His hand grips your ass, firm enough to make your pulse lurch, holding you in place as though the dock itself might collapse without him anchoring you. His head dips, lips skimming the line of your jaw, stopping just shy of your mouth, his breath fanning across your lips like the promise of something you can no longer deny you want.
“Tell me you don’t feel it,” he murmurs, the words catching low, gravelled with hunger, his thumb pressing harder into your hip. His gaze drops briefly to your mouth, then lifts again, eyes molten and unashamed. “Tell me to stop, and I’ll stop.” But your body answers before your lips can. Your hands clutch at him, pulling him closer still, nails scraping against his back through the thin fabric, your thighs tightening around his. Your head tips back, throat bared, a soft, betraying moan breaking the last of your restraint. His response is immediate, a sharp groan against your skin as his lips drag over your cheek, your temple, the shell of your ear. His teeth catch your earlobe lightly, just enough to make your knees give again, and his voice drops into the space between your racing breaths. “That’s what I thought.”
The boards seem to bend beneath you, the night dipping heavier, tighter, as his words settle into your skin like heat that cannot be shaken off. The fire behind you throws his profile into fragments, half gold, half shadow and in that flicker he looks like the boy who used to pull you into corners of the summer you thought would never end, and the man who left you gutted by his absence. His voice still lingers, low and grainy, but the weight of it grows louder in the silence he leaves behind. You feel every syllable like a pulse beating under your ribs, a reminder that distance did nothing, time did nothing, because the hunger never dissolved, it only lay waiting for this exact collision.
You should speak, should cut it down before it climbs any higher, but the air between you clings too heavy, your throat too dry to manage anything sharp. Your body betrays you first, your hand curling tighter on the railing behind you as though you need something solid to counter the way your knees slacken at the look in his eyes. They hold steady, brown but glinting darker where the firelight fails, layered with something rawer than you’ve seen in years. There’s no mask there, no smirk to soften it, only the unguarded ache of a man saying what he swore he’d never admit.
“Jaem…” His name slips, thinner than you mean it, your voice stripped down to its core. It’s half plea, half warning, but he takes it like a key handed back to him. His chest rises with it, slow, sharp, as if saying his name is proof he’s pulled you into the same current again.
He tips his head down closer, voice brushing the edge of your ear. “Say you didn’t miss me. Look me in the eyes and say it.” His breath ghosts warm against your skin, and the challenge in it makes your stomach coil. You want to lie, to protect yourself, but the truth is already unraveling you.
Your lips part, falter, before you whisper the only words you can manage. “I did. I missed you.”
His eyes close for the briefest second, lashes dragging slow against his cheeks, as if the admission carves into him as much as it frees him. When they open again, the softness is gone, replaced by a sharper gleam that rakes down your body without pause. His gaze drags over the neckline of your top, the bare strip of your thigh revealed in the flicker of the fire, and when his lip catches between his teeth, you feel it in your pulse, fast and frantic. His head dips closer, nose brushing the line of your temple, and his voice comes low, wrecked with hunger and something softer laced beneath. “I missed you too,” he breathes, the confession blurring into a groan as his hips roll slowly against yours, cock grinding deeper into the heat between your legs. “Missed your body, your sounds, the way you take me like you were made for it.” His mouth hovers at your ear, teeth grazing the shell before his whisper deepens, weighted and filthy. “I missed being buried in you, fucking you until you cried for me. God, I missed all of you.” The words cling to your skin like smoke, equal parts tender and depraved, and your breath catches hard, a stifled whimper rising that betrays exactly how much you’ve ached for the same.
His hand finds your waist, thumb pressing slow circles into the fabric until it dips dangerously close to skin. “You don’t know how many nights I wanted this,” he murmurs, voice rougher, heavier. “How many nights I thought about your skin, your mouth, the way you used to sound when you were begging for me.” The memory sears hot, unbidden, the summer nights pressed against cool walls, his hand over your mouth, his body grinding into you with desperate rhythm while your pulse screamed that you’d never get enough. It was hunger then, insatiable, and now it presses back into your chest, heavier because you know exactly how it felt, exactly what it did to you, and how powerless you are to stop it from happening again.
You force yourself to breathe, chest rising sharp against his, and the words come out shakier than you want. “Things have changed since you left, Jaemin. I’m not some little naive girl anymore, I—”
His breath hitches, and then he’s closer, lips brushing the edge of your jaw without touching, his voice breaking low, rough enough to scrape. “I know,” he cuts in, steady but hoarse. “I can see it. You’ve grown into every curve, every edge. You’re stronger, sharper, harder to touch. But don’t think for a second it makes me want you any less.” His mouth tilts nearer, heat spilling against your ear. “If anything, it makes me want you more. Tell me you regret us, you regret running into me tonight. Tell me you don’t want me now.”
Your chest heaves, the protest on your tongue dissolving into something rawer, hungrier, impossible to cage. “I want you, Jaem,” you whisper, voice trembling but thick with heat, each syllable catching in your throat like it’s been waiting years to escape. Your fingers curl tighter at his arms, nails dragging over muscle like you need the proof of him solid under your hands. “I’ve wanted you every night since. Every time I touched myself, every time I couldn’t sleep—always you.” The words pull a sound from you closer to a moan than speech, your lips barely parting against the corner of his mouth as you confess. “I want your hands on me. I want your cock. I want you to ruin me again like you used to.” Your thighs shift, pressing together, the friction sharp, helpless. “You think I can breathe when you look at me like that? You think I can even think when you’re this close?”
His laugh is low and ragged, a scrape of sound that feels more like a growl dragged through his teeth. His lips skim the edge of your jaw, not quite kissing, just letting his breath sear a path down your skin. “You think I don’t know?” he murmurs, voice tight, dripping filth even as it simmers in restraint. “I know when you touch yourself, baby. I know you still fuck yourself open thinking about me, about how deep I used to get, about how no one else ever stretched you right.” His hips shift, slow but deliberate, his cock grinding firm against the heat between your thighs until the railing shudders under the pressure. He lingers there, savoring the sound of your sharp breath, his hand dragging higher along your waist until his thumb teases the underside of your breast, pausing only to let the tension coil tighter. “Say it,” he whispers, eyes pinning yours, pupils blown wide, a storm of need barely leashed. “Say you’re still mine to ruin. Say you want me to bend you over this railing right now and remind you how you used to cry for it.” His words are coarse, but the steadiness in his delivery is crueler still, a tease sharpened into a promise.
Your knees weaken further when his forehead lingers against yours, the air between you molten, every breath you take drawn from his lungs as though he’s feeding you life. Your grip tightens at his arm, feeling the swell of muscle shift under your palm, and the strength in him only makes your body tremble harder. His scent clings, smoke, pine, the faint salt of his skin and the thought that you’ll never shake it again makes your stomach clench. His lips hover, teasing, brushing without sealing, each pass sparking through you like static in a storm. You tip your chin, unable to keep from chasing more, but he stays maddeningly still, his restraint its own form of dominance. “Why now?” you whisper, your voice a scrape, trembling with a need you can’t mask. The question hangs heavy, a plea, a challenge, a wound reopened in his hands.
His answer comes raw, his eyes locked into yours, steady even as his breath stutters. “Because all I want is you. Because watching you with Eric tonight fucked me up. Every day without you was another cut I carried quietly, and I can’t sit through another night pretending you aren’t mine.” His mouth hovers near your jaw, voice slipping into a rasp so intimate it thrums low in your spine. “I’m sorry I left, but I’ll make it right. Tell me how, and I’ll do it.”
Your fingers curl deeper into his sleeve, the tremor in your body betraying you as your chest tips into his, searching for anchor. “I don’t know,” you breathe, broken and thin, like confession and surrender in one. “I just know I hated missing you.”
The corner of his mouth curves, tender and sharp all at once, his eyes dark and lit from within as though your words crack him open. His forehead presses to yours again, the brush of his lips softer this time, aching, reverent. “Then let me make sure you never have to miss me again.” The dock groans beneath you both, wood bending like it feels the weight you’re carrying, the fire’s roar dulled to a faraway hum. His hands anchor you, his chest burns against yours, and every part of you remembers at once, the hunger, the danger, the inevitability. Nothing has shifted. Nothing has dulled. The current is the same as it was that summer: wild, obsessive, pulling you under before you can think to fight it.
It begins in the silence between breaths, the kind that thickens until it feels heavier than the night air itself. His eyes lock to yours, unwavering, a molten brown that drags over you like touch, leaving your skin tight with heat. You know that look, you’ve drowned in it before, the way it strips you bare without a word, the way it says come closer without sound. Your body betrays you first, leaning in, lips parting as though already tasting the memory of him. His hand flexes at your waist, a silent claim, and then he moves, swift, desperate, collision rather than approach. Mouth to mouth, teeth clashing, the kiss lands like a crash after the storm built too long, raw and hungry, as though waiting even a second more would have been impossible.
The railing bites cold into your spine as he cages you there, his breath ghosting your neck before his mouth finds yours with a force that steals whatever protest you thought you had left. It isn’t gentle, it isn’t patient, his lips crash into yours like a match struck against stone, all fire and hunger, teeth grazing, tongues tangling until you’re gasping into the wet heat of him. His thigh wedges between yours, bracing you where the dock gaps beneath your feet, the pressure grinding up into your core until your legs tremble. Every sound you make, every broken moan, gets swallowed straight into his mouth, his grip tightening low at your waist like he’s holding you upright only to devour you harder.
The water below laps at the wood, a rhythmic applause to the way his tongue strokes deep, claiming, demanding, tasting you like he’s carving your mouth into memory. His lips are rough, swollen against yours, dragging down to bite at your bottom lip before sucking it back into the heat of him. Your moan spills louder this time, guttural, and he groans into it, the sound reverberating straight into your chest. His hand slides higher beneath your shirt, the brush of his knuckles setting every nerve alight, but he doesn’t slow his mouth; if anything, he kisses you harder, wider, as if your lips are the only thing tethering him to earth.
You claw at his shoulders, nails raking through fabric, tugging him closer until your chest is crushed to his. The dock creaks beneath your weight, but neither of you hear it, not with the wet heat of his mouth sealing yours, his tongue plunging deeper, twisting with yours in a rhythm filthy and reckless. He groans when you bite him back, sharp at his lip, his hips driving forward until the hard line of his cock grinds into you through denim. The kiss turns into a battlefield, your mouth devouring him as much as his claims yours, spit slicking your chins, teeth clashing, the kind of messy, desperate hunger that only builds the longer you give in.
Your moans spill raw into him, each one matched with his groan, low and rough, vibrating against your tongue. The world shrinks to the wet, obscene sounds of kissing, the slide of his lips, the fever of his breath, the way his hands grip tighter each time you whimper. It’s more than kissing, it’s collision, it’s collision dressed as reunion, obsession re-lit in the dark, each pass of his tongue a promise, each bruising press of his mouth a punishment for every second you spent apart. The night folds tighter around you, smoke, fire, and the lapping water all blurring into one roar, but the only thing you feel is him, every breath, every bite, every desperate, consuming kiss.
His mouth slams back to yours before you can even catch your breath, lips bruising, tongues colliding, messy and wet, a kiss that isn’t a kiss so much as it is an act of devouring. You moan straight into his mouth, your fists clawing at his shirt, dragging it up until your nails scrape bare skin, and he groans into you, grinding his cock so hard against your cunt that your back arches, pinned helplessly against the railing. The cold bite of the metal sears through your spine, but his heat swallows it whole, drowning every nerve in a fever you can’t shake. Your jacket falls, useless, and he yanks it off the rest of the way, tossing it aside with a growl, his hands cupping your ass, squeezing hard, dragging you against him until your skirt hikes high enough that the thin cotton of your panties is the only barrier left.
He mutters against your lips, the words jagged with restraint and lust, every syllable a groan pressed into your skin. “Fuck, I want you right here—” his hips thrust again, his cock grinding so thick and heavy through denim that it makes you cry out, “—want to bend you over this rail, fuck you until you can’t breathe.” His teeth scrape your throat as he sucks a bruise deep into your neck, and the sound that rips from your mouth is high, sharp, needy. His tongue drags hot over the mark before he whispers darker, filthier, “But I’m not letting anyone else see your pussy spread open for me. You’re mine. Only mine. All mine”
Your thighs clamp around his waist as he lifts you like you weigh nothing, carrying you in frantic steps, his mouth never leaving yours. His tongue fucks into you with the same rhythm his hips grind between your legs, each thrust a filthy promise of what’s coming. You moan into his mouth, panting, hands shoving his shirt higher until you can claw at the muscle underneath, tracing the ridges of his abs with your nails, drinking down the guttural moan that spills from him when you pinch his skin. He slams you against the wall before the door, kissing you harder, wetter, until spit drips down your chin and his lips smear your lip gloss away.
The jangle of keys sounds like thunder between you, his hands shaking as he fumbles with the lock, but he doesn’t stop kissing you, doesn’t stop rutting you against his cock like he can’t survive a second without friction. “Can’t wait to get you inside, fuck, I’ll ruin you on the counter, against the shelves, anywhere.” His voice breaks into a groan when your hips buck back against him, grinding yourself raw against his length. “Shit—just like that. You’re fucking soaking. You want it that bad, baby? Can’t even wait?”
The lock finally gives, the door creaks open, and he doesn’t step, he kicks, barging through with you still wrapped around him, lips fused, moans swallowed. Inside smells like dust and old plastic, the faint buzz of a neon sign the only light, casting you both in a dirty red glow. He doesn’t pause, doesn’t breathe, just slams the door shut with his boot, pressing you against it, grinding his cock harder, whispering against your lips like it’s a confession: “I missed this pussy every fucking day. Missed ruining you.”
The neon sign outside bleeds through the front window in a dirty red glow, casting the whole store in the kind of light that makes everything look illicit, forbidden. Shelves of tapes tower around you like dark sentinels, rows of glossy plastic spines and faded covers half-forgotten, the air thick with dust and the faint musk of old cardboard. He doesn’t give you a second to look. His mouth crashes back to yours as he hauls you straight to the counter, the edge digging into your thighs as he sets you down with a thud, his hips still grinding forward like he can’t detach from you, not for air, not for anything.
Your legs cinch tighter around his waist, locking him in place. His lips are hot, swollen from the assault of your kisses, and he drags them down your jaw, to your throat, sucking and biting until you’re panting, head tipped back, fingers clawing into the hard planes of his shoulders. His breath is ragged, all groans and curses muffled against your skin, each word shaking with a hunger driving him. “Fuck, you taste the same. Still sweet, still mine.” His teeth catch at your collarbone, and you moan so loud it echoes in the empty store, bouncing off glass and plastic.
You gasp out half a laugh, dizzy with the press of his mouth, your fingers fisting into his hair to pull him back up. “Where, where even are we?” The words stumble out broken, cut short by another moan when his hand squeezes your thigh, rough and claiming.
His lips ghost over yours again, smile sharp, breath hot. “The town’s VHS store.” His voice is a growl, smug and low, the words rasping right into your mouth. “I work here.” Then he drags your lower lip between his teeth, tugging until you whimper, until your hips buck up against the hard line of his cock. “Tonight it’s all ours.”
Your hands fist tighter in his shirt, shoving it up to bare the ridges of his abs, nails scratching down until he grunts into your neck, his hips snapping forward like he’s fucking the sound out of himself. You kiss him again, filthy and open-mouthed, tongues clashing, spit smeared across both your chins. His hand snakes under your skirt, dragging up your thigh, thumb brushing the edge of your panties before he palms your cunt through the thin fabric, grinding in circles until your legs spasm around him. You moan right into his mouth, pulling his face higher, kissing him harder like you’re trying to breathe him in, your thighs trembling against his hips. His hands slip everywhere, up your ribs under your top, cupping your breast, pinching your nipple until you whimper against his lips, then back down to your ass, yanking you against him. He kisses you like a man possessed, like he’s been starving for this, groaning when your tongue curls into his, when you tug his lip between your teeth.
The counter rattles beneath you as his mouth devours yours, open, messy, teeth clashing, tongues sliding with the wet smack of hunger you’ve both held back for too long. His hands don’t know where to settle, they grip your ass, squeeze your tits, yank your shirt up so high that your bra nearly snaps with the strain. You drag your nails down his arms, leaving faint red lines that make him hiss through his teeth, cock grinding up against your cunt so hard you can feel the outline pulsing through his jeans. When he drags your panties aside and thrusts two fingers into you without warning, you gasp loud, a sound so filthy it echoes off the shelves of VHS tapes like a confession. His other hand fists in your hair, pulling your head back so his mouth can suck deep bruises down your throat, marking you like you belong to him.
His mouth claims yours like it’s the first and last chance he’ll ever get, lips crashing, teeth grazing, tongue pushing past yours until the kiss is less kiss and more devouring. You can taste your own slick on him, the salt and fire of it smeared between both of your mouths as he groans deep into you, dragging you closer until there’s no air left to steal. His hand fists in your hair, yanking your head back only to dive in again, biting at your lower lip until it swells, sucking it back into his mouth like he’s starving. You claw at his shoulders, nails digging through fabric, tugging his shirt up only to shove your tongue deeper when he growls into the wet heat of your mouth. Every sound is raw, uncontrolled, your moans, his grunts, the obscene wet noise of your mouths colliding again and again like you’re trying to consume each other whole.
The counter rattles beneath you, VHS tapes sliding from their stacks, cases clattering to the linoleum floor in a rain of plastic and glossy covers. The hard spine of the display presses at your back, sharp enough that you cry out, but his palm catches the back of your head instantly, pressing there, holding you steady so you don’t bruise. The tenderness is gone as quick as it came, replaced by another feral kiss that grinds your teeth together until you’re gasping, trembling, trying to keep up with the frantic pace. His free hand grips under your thigh, squeezing bruises into the soft flesh as he forces you tighter around him, his body pinning you down completely. Your mouths slip, saliva smearing your chins, but neither of you stop, both of you chasing more, always more, as though the only way to survive is to take and take until there’s nothing left.
You moan into his mouth when he kisses you again, filthy and wet, his tongue fucking yours as his fingers fuck your cunt. He groans when you bite down on his lip, and in the next breath, he’s spitting into your mouth, hot and obscene, and you swallow it down like it’s holy. Your moan rips straight into his chest, and he answers with a low growl, fingers curling harder inside you until your thighs quake. You choke around the pleasure and his palm is suddenly at your throat, not tight enough to scare but just enough to remind you how much control he holds. “You’re mine here, mine everywhere,” he rasps, his lips slick as he licks the corner of your mouth before biting your jaw. “I love this pussy, let me feel all of you.”
Your legs lock tighter around his waist, dragging him closer until the blunt length of his cock grinds directly against your soaked folds through the last barrier of fabric. You whimper, loud and broken, as he shifts to line himself up, his chest pressed to yours, sweat already damp on his skin. You shove his shirt up, desperate to touch the hard cut of his abs, his pecs, the heat of him. Your fingers pinch his nipples hard and he moans raw into your mouth, cock twitching as he curses against your lips. You giggle through your moan, the sound strangled when he thrusts again and again, grinding his cock against your clit while his fingers keep curling inside you, hitting that spot that makes you cry.
He pulls back just enough to look at you, eyes blown wide and black with hunger, his lips glistening from spit and your kisses. He spits in your mouth again, slower this time, his thumb pushing your chin down until you swallow every drop. His groan when you do is guttural, like he’s losing control, and he presses his forehead to yours, panting hot. “That’s it. Take it all. Fucking made for me.” His hand drops from your throat to yank your bra down, his mouth closing around your nipple, sucking hard, biting until you shriek his name. He doesn’t stop, just groans against your skin, “God, I missed these tits. Missed this body. Grew up so perfect for me to ruin again.”
Your whole body is arching into him, into every touch, every filthy word. The counter is slick beneath your thighs, your skirt bunched up around your waist as his cock ruts against your cunt, desperate and unrelenting. You claw at his shoulders, his back, moaning into his mouth as your tongues tangle again, the taste of spit and heat thick between you. When he pushes deeper, the head of his cock straining against your entrance through the thin cotton, you sob his name into his mouth, a broken chant, while he growls low, “That’s it, baby. Moan for me. Moan until everyone outside knows whose pussy this is.”
The second your back hits the counter, he drags you forward by the thighs until your ass hangs right off the edge, the cold glass of the display case biting your skin before his shoulders wedge between your legs. Your knees lock tight around his head like you’ve done this a thousand times, his hair caught between your fingers before his mouth even reaches you. When it does, there’s no hesitation, no easing in. his tongue parts you and pushes deep, wet and sloppy, his lips sealing against your pussy with a hunger that makes your whole body seize. You jerk forward, hand flying to fist in his hair, tugging him closer, grinding up into his face like you’re feeding him something he’s been starved of.
The sound is filthy, slick and unashamed, spit dripping down his chin as he groans into you, sucking hard at your clit until your thighs tremble. You hear yourself babbling through the haze, voice gone wrecked before you can catch it. “That’s it, fuck, Jaem, eat me, fuck, I know you missed this, missed me, I know you fucking missed this pussy.” He moans into you like you’re right, like the words alone make his cock twitch in his jeans, and he answers the only way he can, tongue lashing harder, sharper, until you’re squirming against the counter, breath breaking into high little cries.
His hands grip under your thighs, fingers digging into the crease just below your ass, spreading you wide for him. He drags his mouth lower, slurping messily over your entrance before flattening his tongue and licking one long, slow stripe all the way to the swell of your ass. You choke on a moan when he spits, hot and wet, then seals his mouth over your rim, sucking and pushing his tongue inside until your vision goes white. Your nails dig into his scalp, sharp enough to make him jolt, and your hips rut down against his face like you’re trying to bury yourself in him, grinding, needy, unashamed. The moan that rips out of you isn’t human, cracked and raw, echoing off the counter and into the aisles like a confession you can’t take back. Your words spill messy, slurred through the haze: “God, fuck, eat my ass, Jaem, fuck yes—” every syllable a plea dressed as command. His answering groan is low, guttural, carried straight into your skin, and it vibrates through you like a live wire. His tongue slides lower, slick and merciless, and when his teeth graze where you’re most tender, you yank at his hair so hard his neck bends with it, dragging him deeper. He doesn’t fight it. He stays locked there, breath and spit coating you, like his only air is what he steals from your body.
He pulls back only to spit again, thick and obscene, rubbing it in with his thumb before pressing his mouth back down, alternating between sucking your ass and your pussy like he’s determined to worship every inch. You can barely breathe, your head tipping back, hair falling wild as you tug hard at his hair to guide him exactly where you need him. He answers with sharp bites against your pussy, little slaps that sting then soothe when he kisses over the mark, his voice finally rasping through the mess. “This is mine. Always was. No matter who’s touched you, this pussy is mine.” The words are carved, deep and brutal, and they make your walls clench hard enough to soak his tongue.
You grind down harder, riding his face, fucking into his mouth with sloppy abandon while he holds you steady, taking everything you give. Every time you moan his name, he groans back into you, like he wants the sound etched into his tongue. Your thighs quake around his head, locking him in place, and you barely register your own voice spilling filth between gasps. “Yeah, you like it when I use your face, don’t you? When I fuck your mouth like it’s my cock? Gonna cum all over you, make a mess, fuck, Jaem, I’m close.” His answer is another growl into your clit, his tongue thrashing until your back arches off the counter.
By the time the orgasm hits, you’re screaming into the dark, hand yanking his hair like you might pull him apart, your hips jerking helplessly as you gush against his mouth. He doesn’t stop, not for a second, he drinks you down, sucking and spitting and moaning like he could live off the taste. When you finally collapse back against the counter, trembling and soaked, he licks his lips, chin shining with you, and drags the flat of his tongue across your pussy one last time, slow and deliberate, just to watch you shudder. His eyes lift up, dark and wrecked, and he smirks against your skin. “Told you. Mine.”
The counter is cold under your back, the laminate biting through your thin top, but you hardly notice it with the weight of him pressing you down. His mouth crashes into yours, no hesitation, no easing in, just raw hunger. His lips are hot and swollen against yours, dragging and pulling like he means to consume you whole. Your moans tangle together, muffled but loud, wet and messy, teeth scraping, tongues battling for more. His hunger sharpens into something almost feral, and it shifts, no longer only his mouth on yours but his teeth grazing at your bottom lip, catching it and dragging until you gasp. He takes the sound like it’s his to own, swallowing it back down with another bruising kiss, his tongue plunging into your mouth like he’s starved for the taste. When you try to pull back even a breath, he follows, chasing the space you’re trying to steal, hand on your jaw forcing you open wider, forcing you to give him more. It feels less like kissing and more like he’s feeding, desperate and obsessive, like every second he isn’t inside your mouth is wasted. Your thighs cinch tighter around his waist and he growls low against your tongue, the sound vibrating through you, every bit of him demanding you stay still and let him devour.
His hands are everywhere, greedy and unrelenting, tearing the jacket from your shoulders, shoving fabric aside as if your clothes are just obstacles between his mouth and your skin. Buttons snap, seams stretch, the air fills with the sound of tearing threads. Your skirt rides high when his thigh pushes between yours, grinding against you until you gasp into his mouth, thighs clamping tight. He grinds back harder, his cock thick and unyielding beneath his jeans, pressing into your hip as though even denim can’t contain how badly he needs you. His shirt comes off in one rough pull, fabric tangled before it’s flung aside, and the sight steals your breath so completely you forget to hide the gasp that tears out of you. His chest fills your vision, broad and cut, muscle carved in deeper ridges than the boy you remember, every line sharper now, darker, matured into something ruinously male. Back then it was abs you could trace in secret, soft gasps and nervous fingers skimming the hard plane of him when you were still learning how to touch, but this—this is a man’s body, swollen with strength and hunger, heat pouring off him until your skin prickles. The fire’s ghost-light paints him gold, sweat catching at the dip of his sternum, sliding down the ridges of his abdomen like it was made to guide your mouth lower.
A moan breaks in your throat before you can catch it, raw and wanting, and you bite your lip before the words spill but they do anyway, shameless, gasping against the open air between you. “You’re so fucking hot, Jaem… I can’t stand it.” Your voice shakes, more a whimper than speech, dumb with the ache curling through you. You slide down his body, lashes fluttering up to meet his eyes with a flirty, desperate tilt that borders on ruined, the kind of look that begs and taunts in the same breath. Your hands are greedy, splayed over the hard lines of his abdomen, tracing the grooves until your palms flatten against the bulge straining at his jeans. His breath shudders out loud enough to echo, a groan rough and shocked, hips jerking into your hand before he fists it back into control.
Your lips trail up slow, reverent but hungry, kissing the slicked skin of his abs, each press punctuated by your breathless whispers. “Perfect.” A kiss lower, wet against the groove by his hip. “So fucking sexy.” Another kiss higher, dragging your tongue over the ridge of muscle until he moans again, guttural, breaking. “Missed this. Missed you.” By the time you reach his mouth again, his head tips down into you, lips catching yours in a kiss that tastes half like relief, half like shock at how much you’ve changed. Your words puncture the kiss, whispered against his lips between the clash of tongues. “Want you.” A kiss. “Need you.” Another kiss, wetter, deeper. “Always.”
His reaction is instant, visceral, as if your forwardness punches the breath from his chest. The sound he makes is low and guttural, cut from the kind of hunger he’s held back too long, and his cock jerks hard beneath your palm in proof of how undone you’ve made him. His jaw clenches tight, teeth flashing for a second before he exhales sharp through his nose, eyes locking onto yours with a gleam so dark it strips you bare. “Fuck, baby girl, you’re turning me on so much,” he growls, the words half a moan, half a warning, like he can’t believe how brazen and filthy you’ve become in his absence. His hands fly up into your hair, tangling hard, tugging until your mouth is dragged to the column of his throat. “Here,” he commands, rough but trembling at the edges, pressing you into the salt-warm skin of his neck. “Kiss me here. Suck me till I feel it.”
You obey without thought, lips bruising his pulse, tongue tracing the ridge of his tendon as his groans rasp out loud, needy, unashamed. He tilts his head back to give you more, the muscles of his chest flexing against your palms, every line of him hard and hot under your grip. His hand fists tighter in your hair, pulling you down lower, then angling you up to his jaw, his cheekbone, his ear. “Use your tongue, baby. I missed that mouth.” The words are broken by a shudder when you circle his earlobe with your tongue and bite down lightly, his hips bucking into your hand again, cock straining against denim.
When your lips slip back to his throat, he hisses, dragging your head further down to his collarbone, guiding each kiss like he’s painting you into him. Your teeth scrape skin, your tongue leaving wet trails that glisten under the low light, and every time you mark him his moans deepen, thick and feral, so close to breaking that the sound vibrates through your mouth. “God, look at you,” he mutters, breath hot, eyes burning as he watches you work his body. “Hungry little thing. You don’t even know what you’re doing to me.”
He drags your mouth lower, his grip in your hair rough and sure, the pace unrelenting as he pulls you down the cut of his chest. Your lips trail fire over every inch of him, the ridges of his abs twitching under your tongue as you lick the groove down the center, leaving spit shining over skin that’s already hot enough to burn. He groans raggedly, head tipping back, hips jerking forward as though his cock is begging for you before his voice even shapes the words. “Lower,” he growls, panting, dragging you past his navel. “Don’t stop till you’ve got me in your mouth, baby. I’ve thought about this every night.” His cock strains in denim, thick and swollen, and when your mouth presses wet kisses along the line of his waistband, his control snaps. He yanks the button open, pulls down the zipper with one hand, the other fisting in your hair to hold you there.
The sight of him is obscene, his cock heavy, flushed, glistening already at the tip, and the sound you make when you lick it is pure hunger. His hiss rattles low in his throat as your tongue drags along the underside, circling the head, your lips wrapping around it with a messy, eager pull. He moans loud, raw, hips pushing forward until you gag on him, spit bubbling down your chin. “That’s it,” he groans, his voice wrecked, thrusting into your mouth harder, deeper, his hand pressing you down, controlling your pace. “Take it. Take all of me. God, I missed this, missed that filthy little mouth choking on my cock.” You moan around him, hollowing your cheeks, your eyes watering as he fucks into your throat, the sound of slurps and wet gasps filling the air like music. The tapes rattle on their shelves, the whole store trembling like it can’t hold the hunger tearing through you both.
He pulls you off just before he breaks, spit and precum dripping down your chin, his cock twitching as his voice shatters. “Open,” he groans, thumb dragging your bottom lip down, his hand still locked in your hair. The first hot rope of cum paints your tongue, the next streaks down your chin, dripping messily over your skin. He swears viciously, jerking himself through the release as his hips stutter, his groans low and feral. Before it can spill further, he drags his fingers through the mess, smearing it up, forcing it back into your mouth. “Swallow it. All of it. You’re mine.” His voice is thick, possessive, every word dripping with hunger as his thumb presses cum past your lips, his cock still heavy against your cheek. Your throat works obediently around the taste, salty and hot, and when you look up through your lashes, his moan is wrecked, guttural, his hand guiding you back to his lips so he can kiss the taste into you all over again.
His grip on your ass is punishing, palms spread wide as he hoists you up, your back slamming into the counter with a jolt that rattles the tapes beside you. He groans into your mouth at the bounce of your body in his hands, squeezing, kneading, one hand landing sharp against your ass with a slap that makes you gasp. The sting blends with heat, and you grind harder into him, his cock pressing solid through denim against your soaked panties. His mouth crashes back to yours, messy, hot, tasting his own cum as your tongue drags it from his lips, both of you groaning at the filth of it.
He eats at your mouth like he’s starving, pulling your head back by the hair so his tongue can plunge deeper, slick and commanding. Your whimper shatters against him when his fingers dig into the fat of your ass, lifting and adjusting you so the counter edge cuts at your thighs, spreading you wider for him. His thumb circles the welt he left from the slap, rubbing it rough, then striking again, the sound sharp in the still air. You cry into his mouth, nails clawing down his back, and he growls, devouring the sound, grinding his cock harder against your cunt as if to punish you for every second apart.
The shelves around you rattle with every thrust of his weight into you. VHS tapes cascade like dominos, thudding against the counter, falling to the floor in messy stacks. He doesn’t care. You don’t care. The chaos of it only sharpens the frenzy, makes every kiss harder, every bite deeper. He spits into your mouth when you moan too loud, the filthy mess of it spilling over your lip, and you lap it back with a gasp that makes him choke out your name like a curse. His hand grips your throat, thumb pressing into the hollow, pinning you there so he can tongue you open again, obscene and desperate.
Your body arches against him, needing more than his mouth, needing the weight of him inside you. You try to pull your panties down, fumbling, but his hand slaps your thigh hard enough to sting, the sound sharp in the quiet of the store. He doesn’t stop kissing you even then, doesn’t lift his mouth from yours, just growls into it, fingers sliding beneath your skirt to palm your pussy through the soaked fabric. The moan that tears out of you is feral, too loud, and his other hand slams against the counter behind your head as though the noise alone might break him. His teeth sink into your lip, almost too hard, and you taste copper before he sucks it clean, devouring you like your mouth is his lifeline.
You whisper into him, filthy and trembling, words spilling without shame. “Please, Jaem. Need your cock. Need it now.” Your voice is raw, a high-pitched whine that makes his cock throb against your hip.
He growls, deep and hoarse, grinding against you until your back scrapes the counter. “You’ll get it. Every inch of it,” he rasps, spitting the words into your mouth, swallowing your moan down his throat. His hand pushes your underwear aside, two fingers sliding over your wet slit, spreading you until you whimper into him. He hisses at the heat of you, moaning into your mouth like he’s the one undone, and whispers rough against your tongue, “Your pussy’s mine. Always has been. Always will be.”
His fingers slip inside you without warning, two at once, curling sharp until your back bows off the counter, mouth breaking open in a cry that he swallows down with another filthy kiss. His tongue slides rough against yours as his knuckles grind deep, fucking you with the same rhythm his cock will take in seconds. You clutch at his shoulders, nails digging red crescents into his skin, dragging him closer like he isn’t already pressed flush to you. Every thrust of his hand sets the counter shuddering, VHS cases clattering down in waves that crash against the linoleum floor, but neither of you break. His lips stay locked to yours, spit dripping at the corners, obscene and hungry, the sound of it louder than the fire crackling outside. When he pulls his mouth back, only far enough to growl against your cheek, his voice comes ragged, soaked in want. His words slide out low, lips brushing your cheek like every sound belongs pressed against your skin. “Soaked for me already,” he murmurs, almost in wonder, though the heat in his tone makes it more of a groan. His fingers tease through your wetness, slow, deliberate, like he’s savoring proof of how ready you are. His breath drags down your neck, the scrape of his teeth just enough to make your pulse trip, and he whispers rougher, closer, “All that waiting, and you still open for me the second I touch you. Like you’ve been starving for it.” His thumb presses firmer, circling, coaxing another moan from you as he breathes it in like oxygen. “Greedy, baby,” he says softer this time, husked with something possessive, almost reverent.
You gasp, choking on the air that never feels enough, thighs trembling around his waist as you try to push down on his hand harder, chasing the coil tightening deep inside you. “Jaem, please,” you pant, voice shredded, clinging to him like he’s the only surface that will hold you upright. He groans low, the sound torn straight from his chest, and drags his fingers out of you, leaving you clenching around nothing until you whine in protest. His smirk flashes sharp as he pulls your underwear down in one savage tug, the fabric snapping at your knees before he kicks it free. His jeans are undone in seconds, zipper split, the heavy press of his cock slapping against your inner thigh. The heat of him alone makes you dizzy. When he fists himself once, slow, deliberate, you hear the slick sound of pre-cum smeared across his palm, and your pussy clenches in response, desperate to take him in.
The first push is brutal. He slams into you to the hilt, no tease, no warning, just his cock filling you so deep that your scream rips through the store. The counter jolts, tapes raining down in heavy bursts, stacks collapsing like towers, but he doesn’t stop. His hands grip your thighs, spreading them wider until your knees nearly knock into the shelves, his body braced between your legs as he drives into you again and again. You claw at the counter behind you, searching for grip, but all you find is slick cardboard covers and dust, everything sliding out from beneath your fingers as he fucks you harder. His breath is fire against your throat, his teeth scraping along the tendon there before sinking in sharp enough to bruise. Each thrust slams your hips into the counter edge, pain mixing with the obscene pleasure until you’re moaning his name like a prayer.
He drags his hand up, fingers catching your jaw and shoving two into your mouth until you choke around them, drool slipping past your lips. “Suck,” he orders, voice rasped, and you obey, sucking so hard your throat hollows, moaning around his knuckles until his eyes roll back. He watches you like he’s in awe, like the sight alone could undo him, then pulls his spit-slick fingers free to slap your pussy, sharp and wet, the sting making you jolt even as your walls clench tighter around him. “You’re mine,” he snarls, fucking into you harder, the sound of skin on skin echoing off the aisles. “This pussy’s mine. This mess you’re making? All mine.” He leans down, his lips devouring yours again, tongue thrusting in time with his cock until you’re choking on both, overwhelmed, feral with need.
Every inch of you feels owned. His mouth finds your nipple, teeth biting, tongue dragging until you arch up and sob his name, tugging his hair to keep him there. His mouth latches harder, tongue circling until your back bows off the counter and your cry cracks in the air, nails dragging down his shoulders as if clawing him deeper inside you. He moans into your skin, wet and feral, biting down until the burn makes you shiver and gush around him. “I missed this body,” he growls, his voice a scrape of hunger as he drags his mouth back up, kissing sloppy, teeth grazing, leaving heat branded across your throat. “Missed the way you take me, the way your pussy strangles me like you’ll die if I pull out. You’re hooked, baby. Obsessed. Just like me.”
Your reply rips free without thought, your voice cracked with sobbing moans as you grind up against him, legs locked like chains around his waist. “Yeah—fuck—yeah, I’m obsessed, baby, I’m your slut. I’d die without your cock, I’d let you keep me dripping and ruined forever, just fuck me, please, I need it, I need you.” Your words are shameless, slurred with cock-drunk desperation, and it makes his thrusts slam rougher, his groans breaking raw against your mouth like he’s unraveling with you.
His forehead drops to yours, sweat slick between you, eyes glazed with something hungrier than lust, something that lives in the marrow. “I dreamed of this,” he gasps, his thrusts pounding in rhythm with his words. “Every fucking night, I dreamed of your face when you cum, of your voice crying my name, of this pussy swallowing me whole. I don’t care how filthy it sounds, you’re mine, you’ve always been mine, and I’ll never stop wanting you.”
His cock fills you with one brutal stroke, splitting you open until the counter shakes under your spine. The stretch is obscene, a sharp ache that melts straight into a flood of heat, and the moan that claws out of your throat sounds nothing human. Your pussy clamps around him like it remembers, like it’s been waiting, trembling walls hugging every inch of his length until you can feel his pulse inside you. He grinds in deep, hips locking flush, the thick head of him pressing right where it hurts sweetest, and you’re already writhing, already sobbing into his ear. Your nails carve down his back, dragging him deeper, and when he pulls out only to slam back harder, the shock of it ricochets through your bones.
Your lips catch on the ragged edge of his jaw as the words slip out, torn between a sob and a moan, your body trembling around the thick drag of him inside you. “God, Jaem—fuck—I missed your cock so bad, I wanna bury myself in it, choke on it till I can’t breathe, let it split me open and keep me there, stuffed full until I’m drooling and begging for more.” You breathe, voice cracked and desperate, every syllable shaking against his skin. Your nails dig into the broad plane of his shoulders like you’re trying to anchor yourself, but it’s useless, every thrust breaking you open deeper, making you whisper filth you never thought you’d give him again. “Fuck—you’re the only thing that makes me feel alive. No one else—nothing else—touches me like this, like you do.”
He groans low, guttural, his forehead pressing to yours, lips brushing your mouth between ragged breaths, every sound he makes sinking into you as if it belongs in your bloodstream. His hips roll forward, slower but meaner, cock dragging through you like he wants to carve himself into the walls of your pussy, and the weight of it makes your eyes blur with tears. His hand slips under your thigh, hauling it higher against his ribs, opening you up until you’re sobbing right into his kiss. He mutters against your lips, voice rough and close, “Say it again, baby. Say how much you missed it. Say you’re all mine.”
Your voice tears out of you shameless, high and raw, as his cock drives you apart, every thrust wringing the truth loose from your chest until you’re screaming it into his mouth. “I missed you, Jaem, I missed this cock, I missed choking on it, riding it till my legs gave out, feeling it ruin me until I couldn’t walk straight. I thought about it every night—fuck—I thought about the way you stretch me, the way you split me, the way you make me drip down your abs.” Your nails claw at his back, your body thrashing greedy beneath his, and the words come out hungrier, filthier, like confession and prayer all at once. “No one else makes me come like this, no one else even comes close, this pussy was starving for you, baby, starving.”
Every thrust is ruin. His pace brutal but precise, cock dragging along every swollen nerve until your eyes roll back and your mouth spills filth you don’t even think to stop. “It’s yours, Jaem, this greedy pussy’s all yours, I’m your whore, no one else fucks me like this, no one else can—fuck—stretch me like you do.” Your voice shatters into sobs, desperate and wet, your thighs quivering as he drives you higher. He groans low into your throat, biting at your jaw while his hips slam you into the counter, each thrust sounding wet, vicious, slick with how much you’ve soaked him. His hand hooks under your knee, yanking it up until your ankle digs into his back, angle opening so he can slam even deeper. The sound you make then is wrecked, guttural, your whole body bowing as your cunt milks him greedily.
He growls through clenched teeth, his breath hot and ragged against your cheek. “Yeah, baby, squeeze it, this pussy knows who owns it. You’ve been aching for me, dripping for me, all those nights pretending you weren’t thinking of my cock splitting you open. Say it.” His words are as hard as his thrusts, tearing the truth out of you with every savage grind of his hips.
You cry into his mouth, shameless and broken, “Yes—fuck, yes—I dreamed of this cock, I touch myself to you every night, Jaem, no one else makes me cum like you, I need you, I need it, I’ll take it all, ruin me with it.”
He snarls, kisses you like punishment, tongues colliding messy and wet as he fucks you harder, deeper, faster, the VHS counter rattling beneath you, tapes tumbling to the floor like applause. His hand slaps your ass, sting and heat making you cry out, and then he grips it, hauling you closer so every brutal thrust drags you up the counter with him. The sound of your pussy sucking him in is obscene, each plunge wetter, filthier, until your body is trembling against his, owned, undone, cock-drunk beyond thought. The counter rocks violently, squealing against the floor, the shelves behind you shaking so hard that VHS cases topple in a constant cascade, spilling over your legs, your arms, raining plastic down like applause. He doesn’t stop. He pins you tighter, one hand wrapping firm around your throat while the other anchors your hip, holding you in place for his cock to slam deeper, harder. You cry out, half-moan, half-sob, legs trembling as you lock them tighter around his waist, dragging him as deep as you can. Your nails rake down his back, leaving hot lines across his skin, and he groans into your mouth, sucking your tongue between his lips like he’s starved for every part of you. When you whisper his name brokenly, the sound of it shattering in your throat, he moans right back, fucking you with abandon, lost in the heat and hunger that has no end.
The glass of the front window fogs with every slam of your back against it, your breath ghosting hot onto the pane as his hips drive into you from behind, merciless and relentless. His hands are everywhere, one tangled in your hair, pulling your head back so your throat arches, the other gripping your ass, spreading you open as his cock pounds deep enough to make the glass rattle in its frame. “Look at you,” he snarls low against your ear, voice frayed with hunger, “pressed up for anyone walking by. My filthy girl, my perfect little whore. This pussy was made for me.” His teeth scrape your earlobe before biting, hard enough to sting, and your cry echoes sharp through the dim aisles. Tapes slide from their racks, falling into messy piles, the sound drowned out by the obscene slap of skin and the guttural moans spilling from both of you.
He shifts you suddenly, dragging you off the window only to slam you onto the counter again, your ass hitting the edge so hard it jars through your spine. His palm cracks against your thigh, then higher against your ass, the sting blooming into heat as he keeps you pinned there, his cock driving up into you so deep you see white behind your eyes. “Say it,” he growls, his hand squeezing your throat just enough to make the air burn when you try to speak. “Say who owns this pussy. Say who you’re dripping for.” His thumb presses into your jaw, tilting your head until you’re forced to meet his eyes, and what you see there steals whatever words you had left—dark, fevered, possessive in a way that makes your clit throb.
You choke on a moan, finally gasping, “You, Jaem—fuck, it’s yours, it’s all yours.” His grin splits sharp as he slaps your pussy once, the sound wet, the pain colliding with pleasure so hard you keen.
The store is a ruin around you, boxes toppled, shelves leaning, the smell of dust mixing with sweat and sex. He drags you across the counter so your legs hang open, knees hooked around his arms as he bends down and spits directly onto your clit, his tongue following immediately to lick it in messy circles that make your hips buck. His groan rumbles into you as he mutters between licks, “Taste how ruined you are, baby. Taste how much you missed me. Can’t believe I ever left this pussy behind.” You grind down, riding his tongue, grinding until your moans turn wild, until he clamps his hands bruising-tight on your thighs to keep you from writhing away. He bites, sucks, spits again, then comes up, face wet, smirking as he smears your slick across your own lips with his thumb before kissing you so hard your teeth clash.
Then he flips you again, bending you over the counter, chest pressed to cool wood, his body caging you in. His cock slams back inside, and the shock makes you scream into your arms, muffled, feral. His hand tangles in your hair, yanking your head back so your cries spill free, echoing through the ruined aisles. “That’s it, scream for me,” he pants, pounding so hard the counter shakes under you. “Been dreaming about this, about bending you right here, fucking you until the whole world hears who you belong to. You think Eric could ever fuck you like this? You think anyone else could own you this deep?” His pace is brutal, hips snapping with a violence that makes the edges of the counter bruise your stomach, but your body only begs for more, every nerve lit with need.
Your body is plastered to the glass, sweat slicking your skin until the reflection blurs and doubles, the fire outside staining your outline in amber. You catch a glimpse of yourself in the pane, mascara smudged, lips swollen, hair sticking damp against your cheek and you moan at the sight of it, fucked-out and beautiful, his greedy little whore made visible for anyone to see. “God, Jaem, look at me,” you sob, voice shattering into the glass, “I look ruined for you.”
His hand fists in your hair, yanking your head to force your eyes open, his breath a low growl in your ear. “That’s right. My ruined girl. My perfect fucking mess.” His hips slam harder, deeper, his cock splitting you open until you squeal into the night, and when the tears spill down your cheeks, he coos, soft and taunting, licking the salt from your skin. “Cry for me, baby, show me how bad you wanted this,” he whispers, his pace turning brutal, “show me you’re mine.” Your reflection trembles, mouth wide open on his name, and you’ve never wanted anything more than to stay caught in this hungry ruin he makes of you.
Every movement now is obsession, possession, hunger sharpened to a blade. His cock slams into you so deep you swear you feel it in your throat, his hand never leaving your neck, guiding your head back so he can groan right into your mouth when he pulls you into another kiss. It’s sloppy, frantic, your tongues colliding, teeth clashing, spit smearing both your faces until you can’t tell where he ends and you begin. His voice breaks through the mess, a growl threaded with awe and filth, “Gonna make you cum all over me, baby. Gonna make a mess of this store with your scream.”
His rhythm changes before you even realize what he is doing, the sharp, punishing thrusts slowing to something crueler, more deliberate, each drag of his cock drawn out until you are shaking around him. His hand clamps firmer at your throat, thumb pressing under your jaw, forcing your head back so you feel the heat of his mouth just brushing your ear. “Don’t you dare,” he murmurs, the words thick with smoke and need. “You don’t cum until I tell you. You want it, don’t you? Beg for it.” His hips snap hard once, the sudden violence of it jolting your body forward against the counter, your palms slipping on the slick wood. You moan so loud it embarrasses you, but he only chuckles darkly, lips dragging along your cheek as he grinds his cock deeper inside, holding there until your walls flutter helplessly.
The counter is unforgiving beneath your stomach, the edge biting into your hips as he spanks you sharp and quick, each slap echoing through the store, each one making your pussy clench tighter. You cry out, thighs trembling, and he growls low, “That’s it. That’s my greedy little slut. So wet for me you can’t think straight.” His fingers slide into your mouth before you can answer, forcing themselves past your lips until you gag slightly, your moans vibrating against them. He watches you choke on them, watches your tears prick, then yanks them free with a filthy smirk, shoving his spit-slick fingers down to rub your clit in circles that make your entire body writhe. But the second your legs twitch toward release, he pulls away, spanking you again, harder this time. “Not yet. You cum when I say.”
He flips you onto your back in one motion, your body colliding with the counter, tapes spilling onto the floor around you. His cock slams back inside before you can even gasp, his chest pinning yours, sweat dripping from his brow onto your skin. His mouth devours yours in another kiss, rough and desperate, his tongue fucking into you as hard as his cock does. He pulls back only to growl against your lips, “Say it. Say you need me to let you cum. Say this pussy belongs to me.” His hand grips your jaw, forcing your face up to his, eyes burning into you, brown so dark they look bottomless.
“Please, Jaem,” you sob, your voice breaking under the strain, your nails digging into his back as your hips roll frantically against him. “Please, I need it, I need you. It’s yours, it’s all yours, just, please let me cum.” Your plea rips out of you raw, half-scream, half-prayer, and he groans so deep you feel it reverberate through his chest, his pace quickening again until the counter rattles violently beneath you. “Good girl,” he grits out, slamming into you harder, faster, the sound of your wetness filling the room. “Good fucking girl, cum for me now. Make a mess of me.” The permission breaks you. Your body arches off the counter, your scream ripping through the air as your orgasm slams into you, violent and unrelenting. Your pussy clenches around his cock like it’s trying to keep him inside forever, your nails clawing red lines down his back as he fucks you through it, each thrust deeper, filthier. “That’s it, baby,” he moans, teeth scraping your neck, “squeeze me just like that. Fuck, I can feel you milking me.”
He doesn’t last much longer, his thrusts turning frantic, his control shattering. His mouth crashes into yours again, sloppy and wet, his moans spilling into you as he rams himself to the hilt, grinding deep as his cock throbs inside you. The moment he breaks, it’s with a ragged growl of your name, his entire body jerking as he comes, filling you so hot it makes you whimper, your pussy still spasming around him. You hold each other through it, sweat and spit and tears smeared between your mouths, the counter groaning beneath you as though it might collapse under the weight of what you’ve just done. When it ebbs, he slumps against you, his forehead pressed to yours, his breath ragged and heavy, chest heaving against your breasts. The store is chaotic, shelves bare, tapes scattered, glass fogged. But his arms are locked around you like iron, as if letting go might mean you vanish again. His voice comes rough, almost broken, lips brushing yours in the aftershock. “Never again. I’ll never fucking leave you again.”
The walls lean in with the weight of history. Old band posters curl at the edges where the tape’s lost its grip, a stack of VHS tapes slouched in the corner like they’re dozing, the lamp on the dresser glowing weak, its shade crooked, casting amber puddles across the room. Your back hit the door before you even realized you’d crossed the threshold, his hands still locked under your thighs, carrying you with the same urgency he kissed you with. The key scraped the lock blind, his mouth never leaving yours, and then the door gave, swinging you into the place that was him in every detail. The air itself carried him, sharp cologne faded into fabric, smoke clinging like memory, something cleaner threaded beneath it all, like detergent that never quite erased the boy underneath.
Your eyes adjusted in fragments, catching glimpses as he pressed you deeper inside. A lamp in the corner tilted on its stand, shade crooked so the glow fell sideways across the floorboards. A stack of VHS tapes leaned against the wall like drunks propped up in an alley, spines cracked, some labeled in his scratchy handwriting. Posters lined the walls, their corners curling where tape had lost its stick, a collage of bands you knew he loved, each one a snapshot of summers past. His sneakers lay kicked off haphazardly at the base of the bed, one half-buried under a hoodie you’d watched him wear a hundred times, sleeves stretched at the wrists. The sheets on his mattress were tangled, lived-in, the kind of mess that said he never expected to bring anyone here but still made it feel like he’d been waiting for you.
It was him everywhere, in every crooked line and careless detail. The dent in the wall by the doorframe where he must have kicked it shut too hard, the Polaroids taped above the desk, edges yellowing, his grin frozen in a dozen different versions of himself. Even the half-empty can of Coke balanced on the windowsill screamed of him, unfinished, stubbornly left where it was set down. You knew him too well to need explanation, every mess was deliberate, every object a piece of him. And pressed into his lap, your thighs braced around his waist, it felt less like entering someone else’s room and more like slipping into a memory you’d been starved of.
The sheets cling to your knees when you shift, worn thin in places from years of turning over the same body, fabric softened by time until it feels like a second skin that belongs to him alone. They smell of him too, salt, heat and something faintly sweet that has lived here longer than you have, ghosting up from cotton as if every night you missed is stitched into the fibers. You breathe it in like it’s oxygen, like without it you might dissolve. His hoodie hangs heavy on your shoulders, the cuffs stretched where his wrists once lived, the fabric swallowing you whole as though he’s wrapped around you twice. And still it isn’t enough. You sit on him, thighs spread wide across his lap, your body claimed in the oldest language it knows, his cock dragging through you in slow, grounding strokes that pin you to the moment, that insist there is nowhere else you could possibly belong. Every push feels like proof, like ownership, like the room itself bows to the sight of you, his sheets beneath you, his clothes on your back, his cock inside you, every inch a claim that no one else could stake.
The room curves around you like it knows its place, every corner bending toward the gravity you make with him. The lamp tilts, throwing amber light across the tangled sheets, the posters lift faintly at the edges as though straining to watch, and even the air itself feels pulled in tight, carrying only the rhythm of your breath and the drag of his cock inside you. His hoodie hangs loose on your shoulders, swallowing you in his scent, cotton damp against your skin with the heat of what you’re doing, and it only makes him harder, rougher, needier. His hands grip your waist through it like it’s an extension of him, hauling you down until your thighs shake and the sound of your pussy swallowing him fills the small room. You roll your hips, slow then sharp, and the stretch makes your lips fall open against his throat. He groans there, voice low, words cracked out between thrusts: “My hoodie, my bed, my cock, you’re mine everywhere, baby. You look so fucking perfect like this.”
Your rhythm builds, bouncing now, the slap of your skin against his thighs obscene in the quiet, your nails digging crescents into his shoulders as if to keep yourself from floating. His gaze drops between you, eyes dark, locked on where you sink over him, where his cock disappears inside you with every roll of your hips. The awe in his face cuts through the hunger, makes your pulse stutter as he whispers, almost reverent, “Look at the way you take me… fuck, you were made for this.” His fingers drag higher under the hoodie, spreading you wide against him, palms hot at your ribs, pushing you down harder as though he can brand the truth into your body with each stroke. And all you can do is moan into his mouth, sloppy and frantic, whispering broken fragments of his name while the room bends tighter still, the whole world reduced to the ache of his cock and the ease of belonging here, on him, in him, of him.
The hoodie slips higher with every bounce, the hem nudging your ribs, and your thighs ache from holding his weight inside you. He kisses you slowly, so slowly it feels like he’s mapping you, tongue teasing your lower lip before slipping in, stealing your laugh when you try to mumble something about the mess in his room. He chuckles into your mouth, the sound warm, amused, before groaning deep when you sink lower, burying him to the hilt. “God, you’re perfect,” he rasps, and his hand slides higher beneath the hoodie, cupping your breast, thumbing your nipple until you arch into his palm with a whimper. You whisper nonsense back at him, something about how his posters are crooked, about how this bed should’ve been yours years ago, about how you can’t believe it’s this hoodie you’re sweating in and he hushes you with another kiss, rougher now, hips lifting under you.
His eyes catch yours and hold, and it is almost cruel how easily everything in you caves to it. That same molten brown, steady and unguarded, pulling you back into a summer you thought you’d buried, only now it’s worse, because the look doesn’t just draw you in, it claims you. Your body remembers that pull before your mind can argue, and every time you bounce on his cock the protest dissolves, breaking into breathless laughter against his lips, into soft moans you can’t disguise. He kisses you like he’s smiling, teeth brushing yours, your giggles swallowed into the heat of his mouth until they turn messy, wet, a different kind of music. The world narrows to the rhythm of you rising and sinking, hips rolling, the soft slap of your skin against his thighs echoing under the lamplight.
When you lean forward, he meets you halfway, lips brushing, eyes locked on yours until you forget how to breathe. The hoodie slips higher with every motion, and his hands slip beneath it, anchoring you there, stroking your back slow as if to soothe while he’s buried so deep inside you it feels obscene. You kiss him again and again, softer, sweeter, until you’re both laughing into each other’s mouths like it isn’t fucked, like it isn’t dangerous, like it isn’t everything you promised yourself you wouldn’t fall back into. His breath hitches when you break just long enough to look at him, cheeks flushed, lips swollen, and he whispers like it’s the most obvious truth in the world, “You’re mine.” And though your nails scratch at his shoulders in some faint echo of resistance, your thighs lock tighter, your moan spills against his smile, and you let yourself drown in it all over again.
“Jaem,” you pant into his skin, teeth grazing his hipbone, “you’re gonna ruin me.”
He tugs your head back up, dragging your mouth to his, kissing you harder, filthier, the hoodie bunched under your arms now. “That’s the point,” he mutters between kisses, each word hot against your lips, “you’re mine to ruin.” His hands splay across your back, pulling you flush to him until there’s no space left, just heat and friction, the sounds of your moans swallowed down his throat. You rock in his lap, the wood creak of the bed loud beneath you, his cock stretching you wide, filling every inch until you can’t remember what breathing felt like before he was inside you.
The truth is, the bed isn’t the first place he’s had you tonight. It started in the hallway of his apartment, your back hitting the peeling paint as his hand clamped over your mouth to keep your moans from spilling down the corridor. The fire escape outside still has the scrape of your knees in its metal grating, the streetlamp above flickering as he fucked you from behind, your breath fogging white against the humid night. His car is still fogged up from the inside, glass slick with the heat of your bodies as you rode him in the backseat, your hands clawing at the leather, his groans muffled into your shoulder as you screamed his name. The VHS shop counter remembers the sound of tapes crashing to the floor, his cock buried so deep in you that you forgot where you were, only that you needed more, needed all of him. Even the park bench by the train tracks still holds the imprint of your body spread open, the electric buzz of the lights overhead catching the shine of your sweat. It was feral, endless, like you were trying to claim every square inch of the town with your moans, with his cock inside you, until nowhere was safe from the memory of what you did together.
What you didn’t know, what never crossed your mind through the hunger, was that eyes lingered at the edges. Watching, waiting, hidden in shadows you thought were empty. You believed you were alone with him, but you weren’t. Winter was the shadow in the flame’s reflection, the frost clinging to the edges of every heat-blurred moment. While your body bent to Jaemin’s, blind to anything but the hunger between you, her gaze was the cold pressed against the glass, patient, unblinking. She was the stillness beneath the noise, the ice threading itself quietly through the fire, watching, waiting, letting the knowledge of what she saw settle sharp and secret in her chest.
Now here, in his room, the pace slows, but the hunger doesn’t. Your thighs tremble as you lift and drop onto him, moans spilling out every time his cock hits that place inside you that makes your vision blur. He kisses your neck, your jaw, then your mouth again, biting at your bottom lip until you cry out and arch closer, grinding yourself down on him. His voice is low, rasping against your skin, half filthy, half reverent. “God, you feel unreal,” he whispers, his thumb brushing over your nipple under the hoodie until it peaks hard against his palm. “Look at you riding me, baby. You’re perfect like this. All mine.” The words make you clench around him, a broken moan escaping before you can hold it back, and his grin sharpens, groaning as he feels the response in your body.
You pull back only long enough to catch his eyes again, and you almost flinch at what you see there. They’re wide, heavy, darker than you remember, pupils blown until they swallow the brown, but softened by something raw, something unguarded. His gaze drags over your face, down your throat, to your body rocking above him, and when he licks his lips slow, it feels like a brand pressed against your skin. “You’ve changed,” he says, voice strained, chest rising harder with every bounce of your hips. “You’re not that girl I left behind. You’re…” His words cut off with a groan as you slam yourself down onto him harder, forcing the air from his lungs.
“Say it,” you whisper, your breath broken, your voice unsteady but sharp with want. Your palms spread flat against his chest, nails dragging over the sweat-slick muscle, and the moan that spills out of you is half from the sight of him and half from the feel. “Say it, Jaem. Tell me how different I am. Tell me how much you want me.”
Your eyes drop to his abs, gleaming with sweat, every line sharper than you remember, and you lean down, pressing open-mouthed kisses over each ridge, licking the salt from his skin, whispering against him like it’s prayer. “You’re so fucking hot. God, I missed this body. I missed you.”
He groans, louder this time, hips jerking up into you until you cry out, your tongue dragging over the lines of his stomach. His hand fists in your hair, yanking you back up to meet his lips in a kiss that swallows both your moans. “You’re gonna kill me,” he growls into your mouth, biting at your lip until it stings. “Look at you, so greedy. My perfect little whore.” His other hand slides lower, gripping your ass tight, spanking it once hard enough to make you yelp, before dragging you down against his cock again. “You missed me, huh? Tell me. Say it.”
Your words tumble out desperate, half sob, half moan, your eyes rolling back as his thrusts turn sharper beneath you. “Yes—fuck—Jaem, I missed you, I missed your cock so bad. I’m obsessed, I can’t stop, I want it all, all of you, every second.” You grind yourself down, gasping into his mouth, tugging at his hair like you can drag more out of him, your voice slurring into a whimper. “I want to fuck you forever. I want to die on your cock. God, I need you.”
His laugh is broken, half-moan, half-growl, the sound of someone drowning in the same need you’re confessing. His eyes lock on yours, glassy and wild, and the words fall from him like they’ve been waiting all night. “You have me,” he whispers, fucking into you harder, his cock hitting deep enough to make your body shake. “Every inch of me. I’ve always been yours.”
The hoodie rides higher as you move, cotton bunching around your ribs until his palms slide under it, warm and steady, kneading your waist like he’s relearning every inch of you. Your lips trail down his throat, lazy kisses that make him groan low in his chest, the sound vibrating against your mouth as you smile against his skin. When you look up again, his eyes are waiting, soft, molten, pulling every nerve in your body taut with recognition. “Feels different,” he breathes, voice catching as you sink down slowly on him, your hips rolling in a rhythm that makes his lashes flutter. “You feel different. Grown.” His hands flex tighter, almost reverent, sliding higher until his thumbs brush the underside of your breasts through the hoodie. “Pussy’s even tighter, hungrier. Like it’s been waiting for me to come back.” The filth in his words is cut through with awe, with something unguarded, and it makes your thighs quake as you kiss him again, swallowing his moan into your mouth.
You whisper back against his lips, teasing, breathless, “I told you I wasn’t the same girl anymore.” Your tongue brushes his, your hands dragging down his chest, tracing every line of muscle until you’re kissing across his collarbone, then lower, lower still, each touch drawing another ragged sound from him. His hips jerk up once, helpless, his cock buried deep enough to make your pulse race in your throat. His head tips back, eyes shutting tight as your lips press over his chest, his abs, your tongue tracing the ridges you remember softer years ago but harder now, sharper, matured with him. “Fuck,” he whispers, voice breaking on the word, his fingers tangling into your hair to guide you, to hold you there as his breathing stutters. “Didn’t know I could miss anything this bad. Didn’t know you could change and still ruin me the same way.”
Your body rides him like it’s second nature now, every drop of your hips slow enough to tease but deep enough to leave him trembling, and it makes his head spin because he remembers how it used to be. He remembers the girl who shook when he touched her, who gasped like every thrust might undo her, who flushed red with inexperience and clutched at him as though she didn’t know what to do with the ache he gave her. That girl is gone. In her place is a woman grinding herself down on him with a confidence that makes his chest tighten, your breasts fuller against the thin cotton of his hoodie, your thighs flexing around his hips as you swallow him whole again and again, your face sharpened into something that tempts and taunts, no trace of timidness left. The air feels charged with it, a storm breaking in the heat between your bodies, his cock buried so deep that every movement makes his vision blur.
Your tongue drags across the slope of his chest, licking up the ridges of his abs, slow and wet, until you reach his collarbone. You bite lightly, kiss harder, your ass grinding down against his hips in a rhythm so dirty it knocks a strangled sound from his throat. He grips you tighter, fingers digging into the meat of your ass, pulling you rougher, greedier, as though he can’t stand the thought of you moving without him forcing it deeper. His body falls heavy into the mattress, muscles tight, breath ragged, eyes fixed on you with that starved, predatory gleam that feels like it could strip you bare without a single touch. A sound rips out of him, low, raw, caught between a growl and a moan, that makes your thighs clench tighter around his hips. His jaw flexes hard, teeth flashing when he groans through them, the sound raw enough to make your skin prickle. One hand grips your ass, palm smacking hard against it before kneading the flesh, dragging you down rougher until he’s buried to the hilt. His stare drags slow over you, from the hoodie bunched high on your ribs to the bounce of your breasts to the slick stretch of your body swallowing him whole, and every flicker of his gaze feels like fire. His words slide out rough, half-broken, carried on his breath as if he can’t hold them back. “God… look at you.” His head tips back, throat taut, moans spilling free, his hand fisting tighter at your waist. “Fucking perfect.”
Every slick slide of your pussy around his cock leaves him shuddering, the wet heat gripping him tighter than his own breath. His eyes drag back to you, molten and wild, watching the way you bounce, the way your mouth opens against his skin, the way your body seems to demand him. His chest heaves as if he can’t keep up, and when you grind down harder, circling his cock with a pace that has your clit dragging right against his pelvis, his growl bursts raw, feral, pulling from somewhere deep. “You’ve wrecked me,” he groans, clutching your hips so hard you know he’ll leave bruises. “You don’t even see what you’ve become, you’re perfect—fuck baby—every second you’re on me, I don’t wanna fucking breathe, just want you to fuck me like this forever.” His lips crash to yours, his tongue rough and frantic, as though kissing you is the only way to survive the pace you’re setting, his groan bleeding into your mouth when you moan back, hot and hungry and unstoppable.
The sweat still clings between you, breaths sticky with heat, but when Jaemin presses his lips to your forehead, it doesn’t feel filthy at all, it feels reverent, boyish awe stitched into something that makes your chest ache. His cock is still heavy inside you, your thighs still trembling where they cage him, but he’s looking up at you like you’ve turned into something he never thought he’d deserve to touch again. He cups your jaw, thumb stroking slowly as he drags you into another kiss, hungry at first, tongues slipping, teeth catching, the kind of kiss that steals air instead of sharing it. Then it softens, dissolves into small pecks, your lips chasing him again and again like you both can’t bear to stop, giggles breaking through when your noses bump, when his groan gets caught in your throat instead of his.
“God, you kill me,” he whispers against your mouth, and you laugh, whispering it back even as your moans hitch with every roll of your hips. His teeth scrape your ear when he leans in closer, murmuring filth softened by the hush of his voice, and it makes your skin prickle hot. You’re gone, fully gone, melted into him in this stolen room, in this stolen night, his hoodie sticking to your back, his hands everywhere. You don’t even care how obvious the sounds spilling out of you both must be.
Then it hits you abruptly, a sound too sharp for this softness, too loud to be anything but a warning. The knock crashes against the door like a gunshot, the vibration rattling through the wood, cutting every moan out of your throat. You jolt hard, heart leaping into your ribs, and Jaemin stills beneath you, his eyes wide, jaw set tight. Another knock follows, heavier, rough enough to shake the hinges. The air drains out of the room, heat curdling into something colder, darker. And then a voice, low and edged with authority that makes your blood freeze. Your brother’s voice. Lee Jeno.
“Open the fucking door.”
authors note — now, if you made it this far, i’d love it if you left me a comment, reblog, or even a like. i read every single one and they mean so much to me—it’s genuinely the best way to let me know what moved you, what you loved, or even what broke your heart. writing is a little lonely sometimes, it always takes me restless nights, and hearing from you makes it all feel worthwhile, like sharing a secret or lighting a candle for these characters. so don’t be shy! every little note is treasured and makes me want to keep going. thank you for reading, and for loving these messy, magical people with me. <3
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