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AW SHIT, HERE WE GO AGAIN; ‎‎‎‎‎‎ㅤㅤㅤsim jaeyun

IN WHICH jake keeps telling himself he’s fine with whatever this thing between you is, so he decides that a friends with benefits situation with his best friend's girlfriend's best friend, who also happens to be his other best friend's older sister, is a completely reasonable idea. until he wakes up alone for the nth time and realizes that this friends with benefits situation is not benefiting him at all.

⤷ pairing: jake × fem!reader | ⤷ genre: friends with benefits; college au; romcom; slow burn; situationship dynamics; mutual pining; smut (mdni) | ⤷ playlist: sally, when the wine runs out - role model | casual - chappell roan | calling after me - wallows | whistle for the choir - the fratellis | ⤷ word count: 32k

!! smut warnings: power play / switching; sub jake, switch jake, brat taming, fingering, oral (m receiving), handjob, creampie, cum eating, anal play, spanking, spit kink, praise kink

⤷ ronnie's notes: this fic was originally a birthday gift i wrote for my girl addie @jakesimfromstatefarm <3 even tho her birthday was over a month ago already but a few things happened in between that kept me from finishing it earlier aka i deactivated this blog and also managed to break my thumb lolll but now it’s finally done and i’m posting it here. i know i deactivated my blog and i’m not really active here anymore and this doesn’t mean i’m coming back or anything, i just really wanted to post this as a little love letter to one of my best friends ever !!! addie i love you so much pls come back already, i miss u like crazy and i really hope you like your present 🫶

YOU ALWAYS THINK YOU'RE SMARTER THAN YOU REALLY ARE AT 21, AND THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT JAKE SIM THOUGHT HE WAS. Jake was the kind of guy who had everything figured out before anyone else even realized there was something to figure out. And honestly, for the most part, he was right, even though that was annoying, because Jake had this easy kind of confidence, which made it infinitely worse for everyone around him, because you can't even be mad at someone who's not even aware of how charming they are. Or maybe he was aware and just pretended not to be. Either way, same result.

Jake was doing well, Jake was having fun. He was, by every reasonable metric, absolutely fine. I mean, he was fine – until he decided to be on this friends-with-benefits situationship with you.

Here's the thing about friends with benefits, and you know how this goes, don't you? You've been there, or you know someone who has, or you've watched enough movies to understand the basic architecture of the disaster. It feels logical at the beginning, it feels like two adults making a mature, reasonable decision with full awareness of the consequences, which is almost always a sign that neither person has the faintest idea what they're actually getting into. You tell yourself you can keep things clean, you tell yourself you're not the kind of person who catches feelings over something casual. You tell yourself a lot of things at 21, and most of them are bullshit, but the thing is: you can see all of that coming, you can name every single red flag while it's happening in real time, and you still can't keep it in your pants. That's just the human condition, babe. And obviously, Jake Sim was not immune.

You were a year ahead of him, which at 21 felt like a significant and meaningful gap in the same way that six dollars feels like a lot of money when you're eight years old and then completely irrelevant the moment you grow up. But at the time it meant something, or at least, Jake told himself it did, because he needed a reason to keep things simple, and "she's older and she's got her life more together than I do" was a convenient enough excuse to file away in the back of his head and never really look at again. That should've been his first warning sign. Jake ignored it, because he was 21 and smart, remember?

He knew, on some level, that this was not going to be uncomplicated. And maybe that was the most honest thing about Jake – he didn't pretend he didn't know. He just decided he didn't care. Which, to be fair, is a very 21 year old thing to do, and also, if we're being honest, a very Jake thing to do.

But Jake is not 21 anymore. He is 24 now, which sounds like it's not that different, and in the grand scheme of things, it really isn't – three years is nothing. But the frat parties had lost their charm somewhere around year three of college, when he realized he'd been to enough of them to recognize the exact same playlist and the exact same drama playing out with slightly different people every single time. His liver had filed a formal complaint sometime in junior year and he'd actually listened to it, which was personal growth, honestly. He cared less about being in every room, cared less about showing up to every event, and less about performing the version of himself that he thought a 21 year old was supposed to be. He is a little bit more settled. Jake is still charming (still annoyingly so) but in a way that felt more like his actual personality and less like a habit.

The only thing that hadn't changed – and this is the part where Jake would probably prefer we didn't talk about, but we're going to anyway – was you. Specifically, this weird, comfortable, elastic thing that existed between the two of you that neither of you had ever sat down and properly defined, because defining it would require a conversation, and having that conversation would require one of you to be brave enough to go first, and neither of you had managed that yet. The dynamic was still the same: friends, technically, with all the benefits and none of the labels, which worked great on paper and was actively insane in practice.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's go back to the beginning.

Because the beginning is important and also kind of embarrassing, and Jake would tell you himself if he wasn't so committed to maintaining a certain image. The beginning starts when he was nineteen, maybe twenty, fresh enough into college that everything still felt enormous and consequential in a way that it really, objectively, wasn't. You ran in the same friend group, which sounds like it should make things easier except it didn't, because you had this presence about you that was not intimidating exactly, but more like the kind of person that everyone in the room was a little bit aware of without quite being able to explain why. Jake would later come to understand that this was just because you were genuinely funny and kind and the sort of person who remembered small details about people and asked about them later, honestly you just had a good personality, but when you're nineteen everything gets mystified beyond reason.

But, there was also the small, significant detail: you had a boyfriend.

His name was Yoongi, and he was older – a senior, maybe already graduated, the timeline was fuzzy – and at the time Jake had constructed an entire mythology around this guy based on approximately four interactions and one very intimidating eye contact across a crowded hallway. In reality, Yoongi was probably fine. In Jake's 19 year old brain, Yoongi was the final boss of a video game. You know how it is when you're that age, everything is heightened, everyone seems more powerful and more permanent than they actually are, and a slightly older guy dating the girl you've been trying not to stare at in group hangs becomes this enormous, immovable fact of the universe. Jake was not going to be weird about it. Jake was totally normal about it, actually.

The first time you two actually talked was at a party, of course. A proper college party, and Yoongi was there doing his whole thing (being mysteriously cool or whatever) and somehow he had ended up near Jake with a shot glass in hand and the very specific energy of someone who finds it entertaining to watch freshmen suffer. It was a hazing thing, one of those dumb tradition adjacent rituals that everyone knows is stupid and participates in anyway because the social pressure of a crowded room is genuinely one of the most powerful forces known to man. Yoongi handed Jake the shot with this completely unreadable expression, and Jake, because he was an idiot and also because you were somewhere nearby and nineteen-year-old boys will do genuinely unhinged things when they're trying to seem cool, took it without even asking what was in it.

Big mistake. Historic mistake. The kind of mistake that becomes a bit in the retelling. Because whatever was in that glass was absolutely not meant for human consumption at that volume, and Jake knew it approximately four seconds after swallowing, when the room did a thing rooms aren't supposed to do. He found a wall. He became one with the wall. And then suddenly there was a hand on his arm and a cup of water appearing in front of his face and a voice saying, "you need to drink this right now and also sit down, oh my god, are you okay?"

It was you. You stayed with him for a while, you got him water, you made him eat something, you were practical and a little exasperated in a way that felt weirdly maternal except not weird at all, and Jake sat there feeling like absolute garbage physically while also, somehow, feeling like the luckiest idiot at the party. You left when he was clearly going to survive the night and you gave him this look on the way out, the kind of look that says I saw this coming and I will not be elaborating further – and that was it. That was the whole interaction.

And Jake, because he was a disaster wrapped in a very appealing exterior, developed a crush immediately. Which, great, great news! Really excellent timing, since you were dating someone and that someone had just handed Jake the drink that nearly killed him, so the whole situation was already a little Shakespearean without adding unrequited feelings into the mix.

Having a crush on someone who's taken is its own specific kind of hell. You see them in group settings and you have to be normal about it. You hear their name and your brain does this annoying little thing. You watch them laugh at someone else's joke and you think, I could've said something funnier, which is insane and also definitely not the point. It's not heartbreak, it's more like a splinter small enough to ignore most of the time, present enough to be really fucking annoying. So Jake ignored it, mostly. He was good at that for a while, at least.

And when I say you think you're smarter than you really are at 21, I mean it in the most specific way possible, because Jake genuinely believed he was smart enough to just decide not to have a crush on you anymore. Like it was a setting he could toggle off or like feelings operated on some kind of rational opt-in system where you could just look at the situation, assess that it was inconvenient and counterproductive, and choose to feel something else instead. He told himself he'd gotten it out of his system, he told himself it was just a moment, just the water and the kindness and the fact that you'd looked at him like he was simultaneously the most pitiful and most entertaining thing you'd seen all week, and that was just a normal human response to someone being nice to you when you felt like death. Totally understandable and completely manageable.

Jake thought he was over it. Well, no, Jake was not over it. But he was, to his credit, respectful about it, which deserves acknowledgment, because being respectful about a crush you're pretending not to have while the person is in a relationship is genuinely harder than it sounds.

He didn't do anything weird or didn't hover. He was just Jake, friendly and easy and exactly the right amount of present, and the friendship between you two grew slowly and naturally in the way that friendships do when you share enough people and enough spaces that proximity eventually just becomes familiarity. Part of it was architecture, honestly – you were Jay's older sister, and Jay was close with Heeseung, and Heeseung was one of Jake's closest friends and his roommate and was also dating one of your closest friends, which is the kind of social tangle that somehow becomes the entire foundation of your social life for three years because that's just how friend groups work when you're in college and everyone is always in the same five locations.

So, yeah, Jake saw you around a lot. He got to know you better, the actual you, not the mythologized untouchable version he'd invented in his head in freshman year. And Jake liked you, genuinely, actually liked you, which was its own separate problem from the crush because it made the crush worse in a way that simple attraction never would have. He also, occasionally, saw you with Yoongi, which, well, he didn't love that. He wasn't going to make it a whole thing, but he didn't love it. Yoongi was fine, probably, Jake just thought he was deeply, profoundly wrong for you in ways he couldn't fully articulate and definitely wasn't going to examine too closely.

But Jake didn't spend those two years pining into the void. He had a life. He went out, he met people, he kissed girls at parties and went on dates that were sometimes good and sometimes awkward and sometimes both in quick succession. He even dated someone for four months and she was lovely, and it ended badly in the way that things end badly when two people are both doing their best but ultimately want completely different things and wait too long to admit it. He learned some things about himself and moved on with his life, which is what you're supposed to do, and he did it. He was genuinely actually doing it.

And then, on a completely unremarkable thursday afternoon when Jake was sitting on his couch doing nothing, something miraculous happened. You posted a photo. It was, and he means this with full awareness of how he sounds, a thirst trap of the highest order.

Jake saw it, sat with it for approximately three seconds, and then his brain did the thing brains do when they've been quietly keeping a file on something for two years – it connected the dots immediately and instinctively. Because you and Yoongi had been very much a unit for a long time, and this photo had a very specific energy that did not read as "person in a happy relationship," and Jake noticed, because he was paying attention in the way that people pay attention when they've been pretending not to pay attention for so long that the pretending has become its own full time job.

He went to your profile just to check out of curiosity. Because he was a normal person doing a normal thing. And every single photo with Yoongi was completely gone, which meant it wasn't an accident and it wasn't recent, it was deliberate. Jake put his phone down. He picked it up again. He put it down. He texted Heeseung.

The conversation that followed was, in Jake's own words, purely informational. He was just asking questions because he was curious, in a totally casual way. Heeseung, who had been friends with Jake long enough to see directly through every single layer of that framing, answered anyway, because he was a good friend and also because watching Jake try to be chill about something he was extremely not chill about was genuinely one of his favorite pastimes. Yes, you and Yoongi had broken up. No, Heeseung didn't know all the details. It had happened a few weeks ago, apparently. It was a quiet breakup, you know when long relationships sometimes end, in a mutual understanding that it had run its course, and then one day it's just over and you're taking photos off your instagram and posting thirst traps? Yeah, in that way.

Jake absorbed this information calmly and maturely. But then he also texted Jay, which was insane because Jay was your brother and therefore the least neutral possible source, but Jake had entered a particular mode of information gathering that had suspended his better judgement. Jay's response was approximately four words long and communicated very clearly that this was not a conversation he was interested in having with Jake specifically, which honestly is fair enough. Sunghoon was more helpful, he gave Jake exactly the information he asked for: yeah, you broke up because Yoongi was being a dick. And then Sunghoon looked at Jake for a long moment and said, "so what are you going to do about it," and Jake said, "nothing, I'm just asking," and Sunghoon made a face that communicated profound disbelief without saying another word.

But then, Jake realized something terrible but also incredibly awesome happened: You were single now. And you know what happens when a pretty girl is single, right? The radius expands overnight. Guys who had been perfectly respectful and well behaved for two years suddenly remembered that they had personalities and things to say, and they started saying them, loudly, in your direction, with this very specific energy of people who had been waiting for their window and were not going to waste it now that it had opened.

And you – and this is the part that was making Jake's life genuinely difficult – you were nice about it. You were nice about everything, that was the problem, you had this way of making people feel like they had a shot without ever actually saying anything that confirmed they had a shot, which is both an art form and a form of psychological warfare and you deployed it completely unconsciously, which somehow made it worse.

The conclusion Jake was slowly, painfully arriving at was that everyone had suddenly decided you were interesting, and he had been here, he had been here respectfully for two years, watching from a completely appropriate distance, and now all of a sudden it was fashionable. It felt deeply unfair in a way he couldn't logically justify and felt anyway. He'd been paying attention since before it was the thing to do, and now half the people he knew were acting like they'd just discovered something he'd been sitting with for ages, and it made him irrationally, disproportionately annoyed in a way that he expressed by being slightly quieter than usual and, also, going to the gym more.

So he watched, from his very appropriate and not-at-all-pathetic distance, as you went about your newly single life with the energy of someone who was doing genuinely great and wanted everyone to know it. And he didn't do anything about it, because what was he going to do? Walk up to you and say hey, so I've had a crush on you since you gave me water at a party two years ago while I was actively dying, want to grab coffee? No, obviously not. Jake Sim had many qualities and complete emotional recklessness was not traditionally one of them. So he did nothing, he just observed and he did nothing, and he told himself this was wisdom and not cowardice, and maybe it was a little of both.

He even ran into Yoongi once in the corridor, and the guy looked – well, not bad exactly, but he had that specific kind of distracted, slightly hollow look that people get when something ended and they haven't fully metabolized it yet. Jake recognized it because he'd had it himself after that one girl, and he felt a brief, involuntary flash of something that might have been sympathy before his brain reminded him of the context and he moved on. He did think, privately, that if he had somehow managed to have you and then let that go, he would probably also look like that in a university corridor on a wednesday. Honestly, Jake'd look worse, so he understood completely, he wasn't even mad at the guy. Well, actually, no – he was a little mad at the guy.

And then there was a party because of course there was a party, there's always a party. Nobody ever makes a monumentally stupid life decision at the campus library or over a quiet coffee place, because if they did this would be a romantic kind of story. And this story is about a lot of things but it is not a romance, and the fact that it consistently takes place in environments with bad lighting and worse decisions and 2000s pop hits should tell you everything you need to know about the choices being made here.

Jake was fine at this party. He was having a good time, talking to people, being his usual self, doing great. And then he saw you across the room talking to Sangwon, and something in his chest did something extremely inconvenient.

Sangwon was – okay, look, Jake could be objective about this. Sangwon was objectively attractive in this very specific way that Jake personally found annoying: the delicate, effortlessly pretty kind of attractive that read as completely unthreatening and therefore somehow more threatening than anything else. Tall-ish, soft looking, the kind of guy who probably had nice handwriting and remembered to water his plants. Girls today would call it twink energy – Jake wasn't entirely sure he was using that word right but he was about sixty percent confident it applied here, and the point was that Sangwon had it, and you were currently laughing at something Sangwon had said, and Jake was standing across a party watching this happen and feeling something he was not proud of feeling.

Jealousy is such a stupid emotion. It doesn't feel like the movies make it look! It's not this hot, dramatic surge of passion, it's more like a deeply irritating pressure behind your ribs that you can't breathe out properly. It makes you look across a room too many times and then feel embarrassed about looking and then look again anyway. It is, in summary, the worst, and Jake was full of it, and he was twenty-one years old and smart, so he made the extremely smart decision to do something about it.

He found the tequila.

If you have ever done tequila at a college party, you already know how this goes, I don't need to tell you. Tequila has this specific evil quality where it gives you confidence that feels completely real and is entirely fabricated, and the worst part is it feels indistinguishable from actual confidence until you're already three shots in and saying things out loud that were supposed to stay in your head. It's warm and it's fast and it makes you feel like the version of yourself that has everything figured out, which is exactly what Jake wanted to feel, and it worked, in the sense that he stopped feeling the jealousy quite so sharply and started feeling like a person with a plan. (Jake did not have a plan. Jake had tequila. These are not the same thing.)

He found you on the balcony, you were alone, leaning on the railing with your drink, looking out at nothing in particular. Jake walked over and stood next to you, and you glanced at him, and he opened his mouth and said:

"Do you think I'm a twink?"

You turned to look at him fully, almost choked on your drink. "I'm sorry," you said, "what?"

"A twink," he repeated, with the confidence of someone who had rehearsed this in his head and it had gone differently. "Do you think I am one."

"I heard you the first time, I just –" you stared at him for a second. "Where did that come from?"

"I'm just asking," he said. "I feel like it's a thing right now. Like girls are really into it."

You looked at him for a long moment with an expression that was doing several things at once. "Some girls," you said carefully, "are into that, yes."

"Are you?"

You tilted your head. "Why does that matter to you?"

"It doesn't," he said, very quickly, which was a terrible answer. "I'm just curious. About the demographic. Generally."

"About the demographic," you repeated.

"Yeah."

"Jake," you said, slowly, like you were choosing each word with intention, "you are the least twink person I have ever seen in my life."

"Okay but is that a bad thing."

"I didn't say it was a bad thing."

"You didn't say it was a good thing either."

You made a face that was fighting very hard not to become a smile. "What is happening right now? How much have you had to drink?"

"A normal amount," he said, which was a lie and you both knew it. "I'm just making conversation."

"You opened the conversation by asking me if you were a twink."

"It's a valid question."

"It's genuinely not," you said, and lost the fight with a smile, and there it was, that thing you did where your whole face shifted and Jake's brain momentarily stopped doing its job. You shook your head. "What are you actually trying to ask me, Jake?"

"I'm asking what you're into," he said, and it came out more direct than he intended, tequila smoothing over the part of his brain that normally installed a filter between what he thought and what he said. "Like. In general. What your type is."

You looked at him over the rim of your cup. There was something in your expression now that was different from the amusement, like more measured and more deliberate, like you were deciding something. "You're asking about my type," you said.

"Yeah."

"At a party."

"Yeah, we're at a party."

"After asking if you were a twink."

"I'm trying to get context," he said, with great dignity.

You laughed then, and looked away from him out in the dark, and Jake stood there next to you feeling like an idiot and also like things were going slightly better than he deserved given the circumstances. You were quiet for a second and then you said, without looking at him, "I don't really have a type."

"Come on, everyone has a type."

"Then maybe mine is just –" you paused, and glanced at him sideways, "– interesting."

Jake's brain was working on a response but the tequila had reorganized his priorities and for a second he just stood there looking at you looking at the city and thought, with extraordinary clarity: I am going to make so many bad decisions. "It's just," he started, and then stopped, and decided to just say it, because the tequila had apparently also reorganized his sense of self preservation. "You were talking to Sangwon in there and I kind of assumed you were into him. Like, into the whole twink thing he has going on."

You stared at him for a second then you laughed, and you tried to cover with your hand when it surprised you. "Jake," you said, "Sangwon is not only a twink. Sangwon is actually gay."

"Right," he said immediately. "Yeah. Obviously."

"Did you think he was hitting on me?!"

"I mean." He shifted his weight. "There's been a lot of that going around lately. It's not an insane assumption."

You turned toward him a little more, and there was something in your expression that was enjoying this more than was necessary. "You've been paying attention to who talks to me at parties?"

"No," he said, and then, because the tequila had completely destroyed his ability to maintain a coherent lie, "I mean. It's hard not to. You know, pay attention to you. Generally. That's – that's all I'm saying."

You were quiet for a second, looking at him with this expression he couldn't fully decode, and he became acutely aware that he had just said that out loud to your actual face with his actual mouth and there was no taking it back now. "Are you hitting on me?" you asked, and your voice was genuinely curious, not teasing, just asking.

"I think I might be," he said, "but I should be transparent that my execution is suffering because I've had a lot of tequila and I feel like I could've come at this with a much better angle sober."

You bit your lip and chuckled, and Jake watched you do it, and his brain said several things in quick succession that he chose not to act on. "You're cute, Jake," you said, and your voice had shifted into something more deliberate. "You're really cute."

And here's the thing – Jake had been called cute before. He had been called significantly more than cute before, by people who meant it and he had received it normally, like a human being. But something about you saying it, on this specific balcony, after this specific conversation, with that specific tone, completely short circuited whatever normal wiring he had for receiving compliments and he just stopped. Jake just stood there and just looked at you. His brain presented him with approximately three possible responses and then quietly took all of them off the table and left him with nothing, just this blank, slightly overwhelmed stillness, because he couldn't tell if you meant it or if this was just the thing you did, this friendly, warm, effortlessly charming thing that made everyone in your orbit feel special without any of them actually being special, and the possibility that he was just another guy on the list of guys you'd smiled at this month was enough to freeze every single instinct he had.

You watched him not respond for what was probably five seconds and felt like significantly longer. And then you laughed again and looked at him. "Okay," you said. "But you're clearly very drunk, so I genuinely can't tell if you're actually hitting on me or if this is just tequila being tequila."

"I'm trying to hit on you," he said, with more clarity than he'd managed in the last five minutes, because that part at least he was sure of. "I've been trying to for – that's a separate conversation. But I'm hitting on you. I'm just not being very good at it right now."

"No," you agreed pleasantly, "you're really not."

"Yeah I know."

You smiled at him, and then you looked down at your drink for a second, and when you looked back up there was something more open in your expression, like you'd made a small decision. "I've been posting on instagram for like three weeks," you said, very casually, "and I was kind of hoping you'd say something. Or do something. Or literally anything." You paused. "You never did."

Jake's brain processed this sentence. Then it processed it again. Then it took it apart and looked at each individual word to make sure he was understanding correctly. "Those photos were –"

"I mean, they were for me too," you said fairly. "But also a little bit for you to notice."

"I noticed," he said, immediately and with feeling.

"Well, I could see when you watched my stories." You said it without any particular accusation, just stating a fact, and Jake made a mental note to turn off his read receipts on instagram stories 30 seconds after they were posted. "I just thought you weren't interested. I figured you'd seen them and moved on."

There were so many things Jake could say to that, starting with the fact that he had absolutely not moved on, had not been moving on, had been doing the opposite of moving on for a frankly embarrassing amount of time, and also that he had literally asked Heeseung and Jay and Sunghoon for information about you like some kind of deranged private investigator, and none of that was going to come out of his mouth right now in a way that sounded good.

"Next time," you said, picking up your drink and pushing off the railing, "maybe drink a little less first and we can figure this out in a way that's slightly more coherent, yeah?"

You said it like it was simple, like it was already decided. Like the next time was a given, a scheduled thing, something that existed in the future that you were both just waiting to arrive at, and then you gave him one last look, the one he was starting to understand was specifically designed to make him lose his train of thought – and went back inside.

Jake stood on the balcony alone. He stood there for a while, by the way. She was posting for me, he thought, with the slow, dawning comprehension of someone receiving information his body couldn't immediately process. She was posting for me and I watched every single story and did absolutely nothing and she thought I wasn't interested. The tequila, which had felt like such a good idea two hours ago, was now sitting in his stomach like a personal insult. There had been a very clear, very explicit open door just now and he had stood in front of it and stared at it like an idiot while you held it open and eventually you'd gotten tired of waiting and closed it and gone back inside, and he had done nothing, nothing, chickened out completely, frozen up like someone had unplugged him.

The next morning, Jake was sitting on his kitchen floor with his back against the cabinet and a glass of water he'd been working on for forty minutes, trying to convince his body that survival was worth pursuing, when he told Heeseung and Sunghoon what happened. They laughed, hard.

"Wait, wait, wait," Heeseung said, holding up a hand, because he needed a second to process. "You opened with – you asked her if you were a twink."

"I was establishing context, dude," Jake said.

"What context? What context requires you to ask a girl if you're a twink?"

"I thought she was into Sangwon–"

"Bro, Sangwon is gay!"

"I know that now!"

Sunghoon had been quietly losing it since the twink part and had not fully recovered. He was sitting against the opposite cabinet with his legs stretched out, shaking his head slowly like a man confronting something he hadn't expected to encounter on a Saturday morning. "So you saw her talking to Sangwon," he said, walking through it, "got jealous, did tequila shots about it, went out to the balcony, and the first thing you said to her was do you think I'm a twink."

"When you say it like that–"

"How else is there to say it?"

"I was building up to something."

"To what? What was the twink question building up to?"

Jake drank his water and said nothing, which was answer enough. "And then," Heeseung continued, because apparently they weren't done, "she told you – she literally told you, with her mouth, using words – that she'd been posting on instagram for three weeks to get your attention. And you stood there."

"I was processing."

"Jake, what the hell is wrong with you, she handed you everything, she did everything except write it on a sign," Heeseung said.

"I panicked, dude, okay?" Jake said, with the quiet dignity of a man who had accepted his losses. "I didn't know if she meant it or if she was just being like that."

"Being like what?"

"You know how she is. She's like that with everyone. She makes everyone feel like–"

"She told you she was posting for you," Sunghoon said flatly. "That's not her being like that with everyone. That's her telling you specifically a thing about you specifically."

"I know."

Heeseung had migrated to the kitchen counter at some point and was sitting on it eating Jake's cereal, which he'd helped himself to without asking, which was normal, which was just what Heeseung did. He pointed the spoon at Jake. "Okay but what are you gonna do now."

"I don't know," Jake said. "Die, maybe."

"Tempting, but no," Sunghoon said. "You should text her."

"And say what?"

"Literally anything. Hey, sorry I malfunctioned, I like you, let's try this again."

"I can't say that."

"Why not?"

"Because it's–" Jake gestured vaguely at the air. "It's embarrassing."

"More embarrassing than asking a girl if you're a twink at a party?" Heeseung asked, genuinely curious.

Jake had no answer for that. Sunghoon stretched his arms above his head and said, in the tone of someone remembering something important, "also, unrelated, but I really hope she doesn't tell Jay about the twink thing. Or any of it, honestly. I don't know what he'd do with that information."

Oh, right. Yeah. That was also another thing entirely: your brother.

Look, Jay was one of Jake's closest friends. They had the kind of friendship that runs on shared history and the specific comfort of knowing someone well enough that you don't have to explain your references, and that is genuinely one of the most valuable things a person can have. Jake loved Jay. Jay was great. Jay was also, when it came to you, a little bit insane.

Jay wasn't the kind of brother who made issued warnings or anything that overt – he was too self aware for that, and also you were older than him, which he was fully cognizant of, and bringing up the age thing would've gotten him absolutely demolished and he knew it. But there was this thing Jay did, this very specific thing, where if someone made a comment about you – like if someone in the group said something offhand, like oh your sister's pretty funny or hey your sister was at that thing last night – Jay's face would do this extremely subtle shift, this microscopic recalibration, like running a quick background check on the speaker's intentions before deciding how to respond. He never said anything directly. He didn't have to, because the shift was enough.

Jake had witnessed this shift several times over the years and had been extremely careful to never be the cause of it, which meant he had spent a non-trivial amount of energy making sure that nothing he said about you, ever, in Jay's presence, could be interpreted as anything other than completely neutral. He had not said you were funny in a way that implied anything. He had not said your name with any particular emphasis. He had been, in this specific arena, disciplined in a way Jake was almost never disciplined about anything else.

The fact that he had been nursing a crush on you for two years was information that Jay did not have and that Jake had every intention of keeping that way, because the version of that conversation he played out in his head never ended in a way he liked. Jay wasn't irrational about it – he knew you were a grown woman who could do whatever you wanted – but there was a difference between knowing that intellectually and finding out that your close friend had been quietly down bad for your older sister since freshman year and had just drunkenly asked her if she found twinks attractive at a party. That was a specific combination of information that Jake did not feel ready to present to Jay at this time.

So when Jake saw Jay again later that evening, he was operating on two simultaneous hangovers: the physical one, which was tequila doing what it was supposed to, and the moral one, which was the specific psychic weight of having had an entire moment handed to him on a silver platter and having dropped the platter, the moment, and his dignity all at once.

The reason he had to look Jay in the face that evening was because Heeseung – his best friend, his roommate, the person who knew everything and had spent the morning laughing at him – had invited everyone over to play NBA 2K, because Heeseung had the emotional intelligence to understand that the best thing for Jake right now was probably to be around people and not sitting alone in his room refreshing your instagram profile, and also because Heeseung just genuinely wanted to play NBA 2K and this was a convenient excuse. Both things were true. That was Heeseung.

Jay showed up at seven with beer and absolutely zero indication on his face that he knew anything about twinks or balconies or his sister telling Jake she'd been posting for him for three weeks. They played for a while and talked shit, the party came up because parties always come up the day after, there's always a debrief, always someone who saw something or heard something or made a decision that needs to be collectively processed.

"Honestly solid party," Sunghoon said, not looking up from his controller. "Better than the last one."

"The last one was terrible," Jay agreed. "Fucking Beomgyu didn't even mind opening the window before making his apartment feel like a hot sauna after smoking 3 tons of weed."

"There was a balcony at least," Heeseung said. "Too much tequila, but a balcony."

Jake said nothing. Sunghoon did not look at him. Heeseung did not look at him. They were both being very normal about this. "Oh, Jay, by the way," Heeseung said, with the casual tone of someone who had absolutely planned this segue, "my girlfriend told me your sister was excited to go, said she seemed like she was having a good time."

Jay made a sound that was half acknowledgment, half something more affectionate that he would've denied if you'd pointed it out. "Yeah, she needed it, honestly. She's been kind of in her own head since the Yoongi thing, I think it was good for her to just go out and not think about it."

"How's she doing with all that?" Heeseung asked, with the perfectly calibrated innocence of a man doing Jake an enormous favor and knowing it.

Jake kept his eyes on the screen. Jay shrugged, the loose kind of shrug that means I've thought about this enough to have an answer ready. "She's good, actually. Better than I expected," he paused. "As far as I know she hasn't hooked up with anyone or whatever, she told me she didn't want anything serious for a while and honestly, I'd be the same way."

"Totally makes sense," Heeseung said, nodding like this was a general philosophical point and not targeted intelligence.

"Mm," Jake said, contributing nothing, which was the correct amount. Sunghoon glanced at him for exactly half a second and then back at the screen. Jake felt it anyway.

Jake lay on his bed that night staring at the ceiling with the specific stillness of someone whose brain is moving very fast. Okay, you didn't want anything serious. And well, you'd said it yourself, to your own brother, which meant you meant it, as an actual position you'd taken on your own life after thinking it through. That's okay, that's valid, honestly. But you had also told him, on a balcony, twelve hours ago, that you'd been posting on instagram for three weeks hoping he'd notice. Which meant you'd noticed him, at some point, enough to want him to notice back, which meant something. He wasn't sure exactly what shape that something was, but it existed, it had been confirmed by your own mouth, and it sat alongside the other thing (the not wanting anything serious thing) in a way that felt less like a contradiction and more like information. Like two coordinates that, taken together, pointed somewhere specific.

Jake'd spent the whole weekend in this horrible intermediate state of wanting to text you and talking himself out of it on a loop, going back and forth, and eventually he'd landed on not texting you, which was a decision he'd made approximately eleven times and kept having to remake every hour or so. He would text you eventually but that was a problem for future Jake. Future Jake would handle it. He had no idea when future Jake was showing up exactly, but present Jake was not equipped and needed more time and also more water.

Future Jake, he thought, was going to have to get his shit together pretty soon. And future Jake saw you on Wednesday, which he had not planned and was not ready for in any capacity. He'd just come out of basketball practice, which, okay, look, Jake played recreationally with a group of guys and it was one of his favorite parts of the week, except for right now, because right now he was standing in the corridor outside the gym in a sweaty tank top with his hair doing something he couldn't see but could feel, smelling like a person who had just done significant physical activity in an enclosed space. He was, by every possible measure, not looking like someone who was prepared to have a conversation with a girl he'd almost-but-not-quite made a move on four days ago while drunk on tequila at a party.

You were coming from the other direction, you saw him before he had any real chance to do anything about how he looked, which was fine, it was totally fine, it was just – he would've liked a second, that's all. "Hey, Jake," you said like nothing was weird, like you were just two people who ran into each other in a corridor, which technically you were but also, come on.

"Hey," he said, and shifted the strap of his bag on his shoulder, which did nothing for the overall situation but gave his hands something to do.

You slowed down without fully stopping and your eyes did this thing where they went from his face down to – look, he was wearing a tank top, that's just context, that's just what he was wearing, but the way you looked at him was not nothing, and he clocked it immediately, and then he clocked that he'd clocked it, and he had to work very hard to keep his face doing something normal. "Basketball?" you asked.

"Yeah. Just finished."

"I can tell," you said, pleasantly.

"Is that a nice way of saying I smell."

"I didn't say that." You were smiling, just a little. "You look good though."

The thing about you was that you said things like that completely straight, not like a joke and not like a big deal, just as a casual, factual observation, and that was so much more effective than if you'd made it into a thing, and you probably knew that, and that was genuinely evil of you. Jake decided the only reasonable response was to match your energy and not make it weird. "I feel disgusting," he said.

"That's fine. You don't look like it."

"You're being very nice to me considering the last time we talked I asked you about twinks."

You laughed at that, a quick one, and stopped walking properly, which meant this was now a real conversation and not a corridor pass-by, and some part of Jake's brain quietly celebrated while the rest of him stayed focused on being a normal human person. "I've been thinking about that," you said, "and I've decided it's one of the best things anyone's ever opened with."

"That's a low bar."

"It really is," you agreed. "But you cleared it." He laughed despite himself, because that was the thing about talking to you – it was just easy, even when it shouldn't have been, even when there was all this other stuff underneath it. "So," you said, head tilting slightly, "you never texted me."

"Should I have texted you?"

"Well, I thought you were going to."

"I'm a thorough person. I was figuring some stuff out."

You looked at him for a second with that expression that meant you were deciding how far to push it, and then you said, "and did you figure it out?"

"Getting there," he said, which was true in the sense that he was standing here having this conversation instead of watching your stories from a safe distance, which was progress, technically. And look, Jake was not exactly proud of what he said next. I mean, he was proud of it, very much so, he just couldn't believe he actually had said it without thinking about it first, but he said it anyway: "Are you free tonight?"

You blinked at him in the way of someone who had been expecting the conversation to go one direction and watched it go another, and were recalibrating in real time. There was a second, just a beat, where you looked at him and then something in your face settled and you said, "yeah, I am."

"Okay, cool," he said, with a confidence he was mostly performing. "Give me like twenty minutes to shower and we can do something, if that's fine."

"Sure," you said, and the corner of your mouth did the thing. "I'll wait."

So you waited outside while Jake went back into the locker room, and yeah I know, the locker room situation was not ideal, because it was still mostly full of guys from his session who were in various stages of packing up and being loud about it, and Jake had to navigate all of that while also internally processing the fact that you were standing outside waiting for him, which was a sentence he hadn't expected to be true today when he woke up this morning. He found a free shower, turned it on, and stood under it trying to organize his thoughts into something resembling a plan.

Jake had no plan. He had asked you if you were free tonight with the energy of someone who had a plan and he absolutely did not. He didn't know where you were going, didn't know what doing something meant in this specific context, didn't know if this was a hang or a date or something in between that didn't have a clean name yet. He was showering at a speed that was not fully compatible with actually getting clean and he was also having what could generously be described as a mild internal crisis, which was a lot to do simultaneously.

He was out in eleven minutes, and that was a personal record and also probably not great for his hair but there was nothing to be done about that now. You were where he'd left you, on your phone leaning against the wall, and you looked up when he came out and you looked at him for just a second before saying anything. "There's a bar near the east exit," he said, because he'd spent eleven minutes in the shower and that was the one concrete thought he'd produced. "They have good beer and it's not too loud."

"Yeah, I know that place," you said, pushing off the wall. "Let's go."

That was the whole planning process, Jake had produced one idea and you'd accepted it and now you were walking side by side toward a bar on a wednesday evening and he still had no idea what this was.

Here's the thing about a first whatever-this-was with someone you've been down bad for – you spend the whole time doing two things at once, which is actually being there and having a good time, and also running this constant background process trying to figure out what category the evening falls into. Like, is this a date? It felt like a date in the sense that you were there and he wanted to be there and there was a thing between you that both of you were aware of. But it also felt like two people getting a beer after running into each other, which is just a normal human activity with no inherent romantic weight. The not knowing is its own specific kind of torture because you can't calibrate how to act. If it's a date you can be a certain way. If it's not a date you have to be a different way. If it's somewhere in between you just have to pick one and hope. Jake picked somewhere in between and hoped.

You talked, and it was good, it was easy in the way that talking to you was always easy even when it was also making him insane. You talked about the semester, about a class you were taking that you hated but couldn't drop for scheduling reasons, about something stupid that had happened in your friend group that week that he'd heard a partial version of from Heeseung and now got the full story on. He told you about basketball, about a guy on his team who took recreational sports way too personally and made everyone's day slightly worse for it. You laughed at that and added something from your own experience and the conversation just kept going the way good conversations do where you don't feel the time passing until you look up and realize it has.

The whole time, his brain was doing the background thing. Because on one hand you were sitting across from him at a bar table being funny and warm and looking like that, and on the other hand Jay had said clearly that you didn't want anything serious, and you'd said it yourself apparently, to your own brother, which was not a thing you say casually. And this was a beer on a Wednesday. Was a beer on a Wednesday serious? By most definitions, no. But you'd also posted thirst traps for him on instagram and told him about it to his face, which was not something you did with someone you thought of as just a friend getting a beer on a wednesday. So what was it then? What was the correct interpretation of all available data? Jake ran the numbers and kept getting different answers and at some point gave up and just looked at you instead, which was the better use of his time anyway.

You were on your second beer when you nudged his foot under the table with yours, just lightly, and said, "you know, you really did just completely ignore every single photo I posted."

"I was being respectful."

You looked at him with an expression that was somewhere between amused and genuinely baffled. "Respectful," you repeated.

"Yeah, you know, I didn't want to just slide into your stories two weeks after you broke up with someone, that feels weird, that's a weird thing to do."

"Okay but who told you I wanted respectful?"

Jake opened his mouth and then closed it because that was a very good question and he didn't have a great answer to it. You were looking at him with this expression that was patient in the way that people are patient when they've already made a decision and are just waiting for the other person to catch up to it, and Jake sat there for a second genuinely recalibrating, because there was a version of you he'd built in his head over two years and it was accurate in a lot of ways but apparently had been missing some information. Specifically this information. The who told you I wanted respectful information.

"I was trying to read the situation," he said finally.

"And what did the situation tell you?"

"That you'd just gotten out of something long and probably needed time."

"I'd had plenty of time," you said, easy as anything, taking a sip of your beer. "The last few months of that relationship were not exactly great, Jake, I wasn't as blindsided as everyone assumed."

Jake was doing a full system reboot. Because there was the version of this he'd been preparing for, and that involved being careful and measured and not pushing too fast because you'd just ended something serious and probably needed space, and then there was the version that was apparently actually happening, which was you sitting across from him telling him that you'd had plenty of time and nobody had asked him to be respectful about it. And those were two very different versions with very different implications and Jake was standing at the crossroads between them trying to figure out which road he was actually on.

What he landed on, quietly, in the back of his head, was that he'd maybe underestimated you a little. He'd been so busy being careful around the idea of you that he hadn't fully accounted for the actual you, who was sitting here being pretty straightforward about what she wanted and had been this whole time, and he'd been the one making it complicated. Which was funny, sort of. Kind of embarrassing, sort of. Did it make things better or worse, knowing that? He genuinely didn't know. Better, probably, in the sense that it clarified things. Worse, possibly, in the sense that he now had significantly less reason to stall and significantly more reason to do something about this, which meant the next move was on him and he was going to have to actually make it.

He looked at you across the table. You looked back at him, completely unbothered, like you had nowhere else to be and no particular investment in how long this took. And then Jake did something he genuinely hadn't planned, which was becoming a theme with you. He looked at the space next to you on the booth seat, looked at you, and said "can I sit there?" with the energy of someone who had made a decision approximately one second before the words came out.

You looked at the space, looked at him, and said "yeah, sure" like it was a stupid question.

So he sat down next to you, close enough that your arms were touching, and he put his arm along the back of the booth behind your shoulders in the way that is technically not putting your arm around someone but is absolutely putting your arm around someone, and you let him, and you turned your head to look at him with this expression that was patient and a little amused and something else underneath that that Jake was trying very hard not to read too much into. He looked at you for a second. Then he said, "what do you want, Y/N?"

You raised an eyebrow. "I thought I'd made that pretty clear."

"You have," he said. "I just want to hear it."

"Seriously?"

"Yes, please."

You looked at him for a moment with the expression of someone deciding whether to find this charming or annoying, and Jake held the eye contact and did the thing – he knew he was doing it, he was fully aware, this was a conscious deployment – where he looked at you like that, a little helpless, a little earnest, the face that had gotten him further in life than he was entirely proud of but that worked, consistently, empirically, and he was not above using it right now.

You saw it, and he could tell you saw it because something in your expression shifted. "Well," you said, and your voice had dropped just enough that he felt it, "I want you."

Jake's brain received that sentence and did several things with it at once, the main one being a kind of full-body recalibration that he had to keep off his face, and then it handed him back one clear thought which was: okay, do something, do it now, you have been waiting two years for a version of this moment and she just handed it to you on a plate so for the love of god do not stand there like an idiot again.

He didn't. Jake closed the distance and kissed you, and Jake had kissed people before, he had a functional amount of experience, this was not new territory, but the first second of kissing you was still enough to make his brain go briefly offline in a way that was embarrassing and also completely out of his control. And then your hand came up and grabbed the front of his shirt, pulling slightly, like you knew exactly what you were doing and were in no particular hurry about it, and that was – yeah, okay, that was new information, that was the kind of thing that reorganized a person's entire understanding of a situation. You kissed him back like you'd thought about it, which apparently you had, which was a concept Jake was going to need some time to fully process.

Your lips parted against his and Jake felt the soft slide of your tongue just barely teasing the seam of his mouth. He made a low, helpless sound he didn't even mean to make and opened for you, and the second he did you took it, kissing him deeper, hotter, like you'd been waiting two years too and you were done being patient. The booth was small and the angle was awkward and none of it mattered because you were kissing him hard, harder than Jake thought you would. Jake's hand found your waist, sliding under the hem of your top without thinking, and you made this little approving hum against his mouth that short-circuited half his brain.

You smiled into the kiss, clearly pleased with yourself, and then one of your hands left his shirt and slid up the side of his neck with your fingers threading into the hair at the back of his head, nails scraping lightly. The shiver that ran through him was so obvious there was no hiding it. Jake pulled back after a moment, not far, just enough to look at you, because he'd waited long enough that he felt like he'd earned the right to look at you for a second. "Fuck," he said. "Okay."

You pulled back just enough to look at him. "What?"

"I wasn't expecting this today," he said.

You looked at him for a second with that expression that was doing several things at once and then you said, "well, it's still better than the time you asked me if I thought you were a twink."

Jake laughed, and so did you, and then somehow you were kissing again and the twink conversation was the last thing either of you were thinking about.

You kissed a lot that night. And then, because apparently one night was just the beginning of a much longer pattern neither of you officially agreed to, you kissed a lot over the next three years. That's not a metaphor for anything, that's just literally what happened: you and Jake kissed in a lot of places over a lot of time and it never quite resolved into something clean and it never quite went away either, and that combination of things is basically the entire story, condensed.

But let me give you the highlights, because the highlights are worth it.

There was the time in the library, second floor, which should've been a terrible idea and was, but the terribleness of it didn't occur to either of you until after, which is usually how it goes. There was a rooftop at a party and it felt significant enough that Jake remembered what clothes you were wearing, there was also a cab home from somewhere, and you'd fallen asleep on his shoulder and he'd stayed completely still the entire time like an idiot so he wouldn't wake you up. There was his kitchen at seven in the morning, you in his hoodie, him making coffee badly, and the specific kind of easy that existed between you two in the mornings that he tried very hard not to think too much about because thinking about it led places he wasn't sure he was allowed to go.

And it wasn't just kissing, to be clear. This is a story about friends with benefits and we're all adults here, so, yeah. It was more than that, it was a lot more than that, and it was good, consistently, annoyingly good, the kind of good that makes it harder to keep things in the category you've agreed to keep them in. Jake was aware of this problem. He noted it. He filed it away and took it out occasionally and looked at it and put it back, because what else was he going to do with it?

Because here's where it got complicated, or more complicated, or a different flavor of complicated than it had already been: every time things got a little more real, a little more weight to them, a little more like something that had a name and a shape and a future – you disappeared. One day the texts would slow down, or you'd be busy, or you'd show up to the same group hang and be perfectly warm and perfectly normal and perfectly distant in a way that only he could tell was distance because he knew the other version of you, the close one, and the difference was noticeable if you were paying attention and he was always paying attention.

And every single time, without fail, Jake would feel it coming the way you feel a change in pressure before it rains, and he'd think, with the tired resignation of someone who has been through this enough times to recognize the opening notes: aw shit, here we go again.

Jake could not do this, and he knew it, but he did it anyway. There were moments where he'd lie there and wonder how long a person could exist in something undefined before it started to cost too much. He never landed on an answer. He'd fall asleep and wake up and you'd text him something funny and the question would go back in the drawer where it lived.

But that's all later. That's the three years of it, the accumulated weight of a thing that was never fully named and therefore never fully dealt with. That's twenty-four year old Jake's problem, and we'll get there.

Right now, tonight, it's still that bar, and you've just kissed him for the first time and none of the rest of it has happened yet. And he's not thinking about patterns yet, he just knows that you're here and he finally did something about it and your lip gloss is slightly smudged and you're pretending not to notice and honestly, for right now, that's good enough. It was good enough for a while, actually.

But you know what was really good? What happened between you two later that night.

After the bar closed out and the tab was paid and you were both a little buzzed and grinning like idiots, Jake finally got his shit together enough to say it out loud. He was like, "hey, Heeseung's not home tonight… you wanna come over?" and he said it so casual but his ears went bright red, which was hilarious because you could tell he'd been thinking about it the whole walk to the car. You just raised an eyebrow at him and said "yeah, obviously" and that was it. Heeseung could not find out, like, ever, so the empty apartment was basically a gift from the universe as far as Jake was concerned.

The second the door shut behind you guys he was already kissing you again, hands a little shaky on your waist, but you took over pretty quick. You pushed him back toward his room without even asking which one was his, and the whole time he was muttering stuff like "fuck, this feels good" under his breath. You laughed at him, soft and mean in the best way, and once you got him on the bed you climbed right on top and started peeling his shirt off.

And here's the part that still cracks Jake up when he thinks about it: Jake had always figured he was pretty normal in bed, you know? Take charge, make the girl feel good, the usual. But the second you pinned his wrists down and told him "don't move" he just… folded. Like instantly, eyes wide, breathing all shaky, looking up at you like you'd hung the moon and also maybe ruined him forever. He didn't even realize it was happening until you were grinding down on him slow and he let out this pathetic little whimper and you smiled like you'd won the lottery.

You kept teasing him, hands everywhere but never quite where he wanted, and every time he tried to touch you you'd just push his arms back down and go "uh-uh, ask nicely." He actually whined, and when you finally let him speak he was all cracked voice going "please… fuck, please touch me" and you made him say it again, louder, like he was begging for it. He did. He did it twice. Looked so embarrassed and so turned on at the same time it was actually kind of beautiful. You kept calling him good boy in that low voice and every time you did his brain just shorted out more. He was legit acting like a puppy, pressing up into your hand, following every little movement you made with his hips, mumbling "please, please, I'll be good" while you rode him slow enough to make him lose his mind.

When you finally let him come he buried his face in your neck and shook the whole time, arms wrapped around you so tight like he was scared you'd disappear if he let go. Afterward you just lay there on his chest, both of you sweaty and laughing a little because yeah, neither of you expected it to go down quite like that. Jake kept saying "fuck, that felt so fucking good–" and you'd just kiss him and tell him to shut up and enjoy it.

So the morning after, Jake woke up and reached over without thinking about it, the way you do when you fell asleep next to someone and your body just assumes they're still there, and they weren't. You were gone. The bed was cold on your side, which meant you hadn't just gotten up, you'd been gone for a while, and Jake lay there for a second staring at where you were supposed to be processing that information with the dawning comprehension of someone whose brain hadn't fully booted yet.

He looked for a note. There was no note. He checked his phone, there was no text. He got up and did a lap of the apartment like you might've just migrated to the living room, which you hadn't, and then he ended up in the kitchen where the only evidence that you'd ever been there at all was a glass in the drying rack next to the sink washed. You'd gotten up, gotten dressed, had a glass of water, washed the glass, and left, and Jake stood there in his kitchen at eight in the morning naked looking at a clean glass like it had personally wronged him.

He was, to be direct about it, a little pathetic that week. Not in a way that anyone else would've necessarily noticed, he kept it mostly internal, but he was going over the previous night on a loop with the specific energy of someone trying to figure out if they'd misread something, except he didn't think he'd misread it, he was pretty sure he hadn't misread it, but then why was there a clean glass in the drying rack and no text and no note and nothing. He waited two days, which felt like a reasonable amount of time to not seem insane, and then texted you: hey. had a really good time the other night.

You responded six hours and forty two minutes later. He was not counting, he just happened to notice. You said: me too, sorry been swamped with coursework this week, how are you?

How are you? Okay, normal, friendly, completely unreadable. He stared at that text for an embarrassing amount of time trying to extract information from it that probably wasn't there. You texted back and forth for a bit after that and it was fine, it was good actually, you were funny and easy to talk to like always, but it had this quality of a conversation between two friends catching up, and Jake kept waiting for some acknowledgment of the thing that had happened (you literally had called him a good boy and he came and he couldn't stop thinking about it) so he expected at least some small signal, but it never came. You were warm but you were also just normal, and Jake couldn't tell if that was you being cool about it or you genuinely treating it as a casual thing that didn't require any particular follow up, and not knowing which one it was made him feel insane.

He took a step back after that, more like a self preservation instinct kicking in before he did something embarrassing like double text you about your feelings. He told himself it was fine, casual was fine, he could do casual. He was a 21 year old guy, casual was supposed to be his native language. He was completely miserable about it, but quietly, which he felt was at least dignified.

Heeseung noticed, but Jake had made a decision to keep this one close to his chest for a while, at least until he understood what it was, so every time Heeseung gave him that look Jake just said he was tired or stressed about school and Heeseung let it go with the patience of someone who knew he'd find out eventually and was willing to wait.

Heeseung found out on tuesday. Jake was on the couch doing something on his laptop when he heard the front door open harder than necessary and Heeseung came in with the specific energy of someone who had just received information and had walked home with it at an elevated pace. He looked at Jake. Jake looked at him. "You absolute dick," Heeseung said. "Why didn't you tell me you hooked up with Y/N?"

Jake didn't know how Heeseung got that information. Jake was shocked. Jake closed his laptop. "How did you– I– I didn't know if I was supposed to."

"What does that even mean?!"

"It means I didn't know what it was yet and I didn't want to make it into a thing by telling people."

"I'm not people, I'm me," Heeseung said, dropping his bag on the floor with the energy of a man deeply personally offended. "Also you forgot that she's one of my girlfriend's best friends, so I was going to find out regardless, and instead I had to find out from her like an idiot keeping secrets."

"I wasn't keeping secrets, I was just–"

"You told me about the twink thing in real time," Heeseung said, pointing at him, "like I got a full play by play of the twink conversation the morning after, but then something actually happens and you go completely silent?"

Jake opened his mouth and then closed it because that was a fair point. "I didn't know what she wanted," he said, which was the honest answer. "She left in the morning without saying anything and then texted me like everything was normal and I couldn't figure out if it meant something or nothing and I didn't want to tell you and then have it be nothing."

Heeseung looked at him for a long moment and then came and sat down on the other end of the couch with slightly less aggression than he'd entered with. "Okay," he said. "That's actually a real reason."

"Thank you."

"Still should've told me."

"Yeah, okay, sorry."

Heeseung picked up Jake's abandoned throw pillow and held it for a second and then threw it at him anyway, not hard, more ceremonial. Jake caught it. They sat there for a second in the way that they did when a conversation had finished being an argument and was transitioning into something more useful. "For what it's worth," Heeseung said, in the tone he used when he was relaying information he'd been given permission to relay, "from what my girlfriend said, it sounds like she had a good time."

Jake looked at him. "What?"

"That's what I'm told."

"Did she say anything else?"

"I'm not a messenger service dude," Heeseung said, but he was almost smiling, which meant there probably was more and he was choosing not to give it up yet, which was an absolutely classic Heeseung move. Jake threw the pillow back at him.

"You're useless," Jake said.

"I'm extremely useful actually," Heeseung said. "You're just impatient."

Which was true. Jake was very impatient, and also still confused, and also still thinking about you calling him a good boy, and also apparently you'd had a good time, which meant something, even if he wasn't sure yet what it meant or where it went from here. It was a start, Jake figured. A weird, inconclusive, slightly maddening start, but still.

The first time Jake saw you after that night was at Jay's place, which was, in terms of ideal settings for navigating whatever the hell was happening between you two, pretty much dead last on the list.

He'd gone over with Sunghoon and Heeseung on the weekend and Jake had shown up expecting a normal saturday, maybe some games, maybe they'd order food later, nothing that required him to be mentally prepared for anything. And then Jay opened the door and Jake walked in and saw you sitting on the couch next to Sunoo, and you were wearing this little top that kept riding up just a little every time you moved and those jeans that sat low on your hips and hugged your ass in a way that made his brain immediately supply very unhelpful memories and very difficult to immediately look somewhere else, which he did, eventually, after approximately two seconds too long.

You looked up at the same time he looked away, which meant you definitely caught him, which meant you knew exactly what those two seconds were, and you just smiled and looked back at whatever you and Sunoo were talking about like absolutely nothing had happened.

The thing was, you were subtle about it in a way that was actually not subtle at all, it was just subtle enough that no one else was catching it. You weren't doing anything obvious, you'd say something to the group and let your eyes land on him a beat longer than necessary. Or you'd laugh at something and angle yourself slightly in his direction. Or you'd reach across the coffee table for something so your top pulled tight across your chest, or cross your legs in a way that made the seam of those jeans shift against your thighs. Every little movement felt deliberate, like you were putting on a private show just for him in a room full of people who had no idea. He'd catch the movement in his peripheral vision and have to actively redirect his attention back to whatever conversation he was supposed to be in. It was a very specific, very targeted kind of casual, and Jake was losing his mind about it while maintaining a completely normal facial expression, which was one of the more athletically demanding things he'd done recently.

At one point Jay said something to him directly and Jake had to ask him to repeat it because he'd been looking at the TV but actually thinking about absolutely nothing related to the TV, and Jay gave him a mildly suspicious look and said "are you good?" and Jake said "yeah, sorry, tired" which was the same excuse he'd been using for weeks and was starting to wear thin. Sunghoon, from his spot on the floor, did not look at Jake. He was very pointedly not looking at Jake in the specific way that meant he was fully aware of everything that was happening and had chosen to be Switzerland about it, which Jake both appreciated and found slightly irritating.

Heeseung was on the other couch next to his girlfriend, who was next to you, and at one point his girlfriend said something to you quietly and you laughed and glanced over at Jake for just a second and he caught it and then had to pretend he hadn't caught it, and he looked at Heeseung with an expression that said please help me and Heeseung looked back with an expression that said you're on your own, buddy.

Eventually you got up to go to the kitchen and on your way back you stopped right next to his armchair, leaned down slowly to grab your phone from the side table, and your body was suddenly so close he could smell your perfume. You looked right at him for a second, lips curved like you were enjoying this way too much, and asked the room in the most innocent voice, "Has anyone decided what we're doing for food?" and Jake stared straight ahead at the TV like a man who had seen god and was not ready to discuss it.

"Pizza?" Sunoo offered.

"Pizza it is. Okay, I'm ordering right now. I'll go down and grab it when it gets here," you said, straightening up. "Jake, you can come with me so I'm not carrying it alone."

It was said so casually. Just a totally normal thing to say. Nobody in the room looked up. Jake said "yeah, sure" in a voice that was completely regular and betrayed nothing and then went back to looking at the TV.

The elevator ride down was eleven floors. Jake stood on one side and you stood on the other and it was fine for approximately four seconds and then you looked at him and smiled, not the group hang smile, the other one, the one that meant something specific, and he looked back at you and thought about the clean glass in the drying rack and the six hour forty two minute text response and how you'd spent the entire afternoon driving him insane in a room full of his friends and your brother.

The doors opened at the lobby and you both went and got the pizza and on the way back to the elevator you were walking close enough that your arms kept almost touching, and he held the elevator door open for you and you walked in and he let the doors close and before the elevator had even started moving he said, "what the hell are you doing?"

You turned to look at him with an expression of absolute, practiced innocence. "What?"

"You know what."

"I really don't," you said, which was a complete lie delivered with complete confidence, and you said sweetly, stepping a little closer even though there was plenty of space. Your eyes dropped to his mouth for a second, then back up and somehow you were still managing to seem like the most irritating and attractive person he'd ever encountered in his life. "I just asked you to help me carry pizza, Jake."

"That's not –" he stopped and looked at you. You looked back at him, waiting. "You've been doing that thing all afternoon."

"What thing?"

The elevator was moving, seven floors to go. "You know what thing."

"I genuinely don't know what you're talking about," you said.

Jake looked at the elevator doors then back at you. "You're going to get me killed by your brother," he said.

"Jay's not going to do anything to you."

"You don't know that."

"I know Jay," you said. "He'll be annoying about it for like two weeks and then he'll get over it."

Jake stared at you. "That implies there's something for him to get annoyed about."

"Isn't there?" you said, and the elevator doors opened on Jay's floor, and you walked out with the pizza like that sentence hadn't just happened, and Jake stood there for a second before the doors started to close and he had to stick his arm out to stop them.

And what happened between you two that night was, in Jake's words, the best sex he'd ever had.

After everyone said their goodbyes at Jay's and the group started splitting up, you turned to him with the sweetest, most innocent little smile and asked, "Jake, can you give me a ride home? I don't feel like taking an Uber this late." He just nodded, trying to look normal, and said "yeah, sure" while Sunghoon and Heeseung gave him one last knowing side eye. The car ride was quiet at first, but the second you two pulled up in front of your building you looked over at him and said, "Come up for a bit?"

Jake didn't even pretend to hesitate. Your apartment was cute as hell, by the way. Soft lighting, a big comfortable looking puff in the corner that screamed "perfect for sitting and getting straddled," and a whole shelf full of those little Hirono figures lined up like a tiny army watching everything. He was still busy scanning the place, smiling at how it was so you, when you decided you'd waited long enough. The second the door clicked shut you were on him.

You grabbed the front of his shirt with both hands and pulled him into a kiss that was anything but innocent, even a little bit desperate, tongue immediately sliding against his. Jake made a surprised sound into your mouth but kissed you back just as hard, hands finding your waist. "I couldn't stop thinking about you since last time," you breathed against his lips, biting his bottom one right after. "Kept remembering how pretty you sounded begging." Jake let out a low chuckle, the smugness creeping in now that he wasn't trapped in an elevator with you. He walked you backwards until your back hit the wall, pressing his body against yours.

"Oh really?" he murmured, voice dropping. His hand slid down to grip your ass, squeezing hard. "You spent all afternoon teasing the shit out of me in front of your brother and now you're admitting you were horny the whole time?"

You grinned, and rolled your hips against him. "Maybe. What are you gonna do about it?"

He kissed you again, slower this time but filthier, tongue licking into your mouth while he pinned you harder against the wall. When he pulled back just enough to speak, his lips brushed yours. "I think I'm gonna make you beg this time," he said. "Since you had so much fun with me the other night."

You laughed softly but there was a challenge in it. "Good luck with that, Jakey."

"Yeah?" He slipped his thigh between your legs, pressing up just right, and you couldn't stop the little gasp that escaped. "You've been acting like such a fucking brat all day. You wanted me worked up, didn't you?"

You rolled your hips against his thigh again and looked him straight in the eyes. "Yeah, I did," you said, voice already a little unsteady. "I kept thinking about how you'd look trying to hide it in front of everyone. It was hot."

Jake's expression shifted, something hungrier crossing his face and he didn't answer with words. Instead he grabbed your waist, turned you and pushed you back onto the bed in one quick motion. You landed on the mattress with a soft bounce, and before you could push yourself up he was already over you, knees bracketing your hips, one hand catching both your wrists and pinning them above your head against the pillow. He leaned down close, mouth right next to your ear, voice low. "You really like pushing me, yeah?" His free hand pushed your top up slowly, fingers dragging over your skin.

You tugged at your wrists just to test him, but he held them firm. A shiver ran through you when he kissed down the side of your neck, open mouthed and wet, then sucked lightly under your jaw. "Jake…" you started, but he cut you off by pressing his thigh between your legs again, this time with more pressure.

"Tell me what you were thinking about," he murmured against your collarbone. "When you were teasing me in front of your brother. Be honest."

You bit your lip, trying to keep some control, but your breathing was already getting faster. "I was thinking about how you sounded last time…"

He let out a quiet laugh, almost surprised, and pulled your top the rest of the way off. His eyes moved over you for a second before he lowered his head and kissed between your breasts, then lower, across your stomach. He took his time undoing your jeans, sliding them down your legs along with your panties, leaving you completely bare under him. When he settled between your thighs he pushed them wider apart with his hands, thumbs stroking the sensitive skin there. He looked up at you, hair falling into his eyes, and there was that smug little edge in his expression again. "You're already this wet," he said, running one finger slowly up your pussy and spreading the slickness. "Just from teasing me all night?"

You opened your mouth to answer but he leaned in and licked a long, slow stripe from your entrance up to your clit. Your hips jerked and a moan slipped out before you could stop it. Jake hummed against you, the vibration making your thighs tense. "Fuck… Jake–" He did it again but slower, tasting you properly, then closed his lips around your clit and sucked gently. Your back arched off the bed and you pulled hard at the hand still pinning your wrists, but he didn't let go.

He pulled back just enough to speak, lips shiny. "You taste so fucking good." Then he went back in, licking and sucking with more focus, and every time you tried to roll your hips up to get more he'd press you back down with the hand on your stomach, keeping you right where he wanted. You were breathing hard, little sounds escaping despite yourself.

"Shit– Jake, please…" you gasped.

He lifted his head with his lips wet, eyes dark as he looked up at you. "Please what?" His voice was low, almost sweet. "You gotta tell me, baby. I wanna hear it."

You glared at him even as your cheeks burned, still trying to hold onto that bratty attitude. "Don't stop… keep going."

Jake smiled, slow and knowing. "That's not very specific." He pressed a soft, teasing kiss right above your clit. "You made me beg last time, remember? Fair's fair."

He licked you again, deliberately slow, dragging the flat of his tongue over your clit before pulling away completely. You let out a frustrated sound and tried to move your hips toward his mouth, but he held you still. "Jake, come on–"

"Use your words like a big girl," he said, pressing another kiss to your inner thigh, then biting lightly. "Tell me exactly what you want me to do to you."

"I wanna cum," you whispered. "Please, Jake… make me cum." The smug little smile he gave you was almost unbearable, but then he dipped his head again and there was no more teasing. He licked you like he was starving for it with hungry strokes of his tongue, then focusing on your clit with steady pressure, sucking gently and then harder when your moans got louder. He kept your wrists pinned with one hand and used the other to hold your hip down so you couldn't squirm away from the intensity. "Fuck– right there–" you gasped, head tipping back against the pillow.

The pressure built fast and sharp, and when it finally broke you came hard, thighs clamping around his head, a broken moan spilling out of you as your whole body tensed and then melted. Jake didn't stop right away, he kept licking you through it, slower and softer, until you were twitching and pushing at his shoulder. Only then did he kiss his way back up your body with open mouthed kisses along your stomach, between your breasts, up your neck, until he reached your mouth. He kissed you deep and you could feel how hard he was against your thigh.

"You sounded so fucking pretty," he murmured against your lips. "Love when you beg like that."

You let him enjoy his victory for about ten seconds. Then you smiled, sweet and dangerous, and in one quick move you pushed his shoulder and rolled, flipping him onto his back so you were straddling his hips. Jake's eyes widened in surprise, a startled laugh escaping him. You settled on top of him, your hands sliding up his chest, he was still fully dressed from the waist down and you could feel how hard he was under you. You rolled your hips slowly, grinding against his bulge, and watched his breath catch. "Think you can just get away with it?" you asked, leaning down to kiss along his jawline. You sucked lightly on the spot right under his ear, the one you already knew made him weak, and smiled when his hands gripped your thighs tighter.

"Baby–" he started, but you cut him off by palming him through his jeans, squeezing just enough to make his hips jerk up.

You kissed down his neck, biting softly, then whispered right against his skin, "You looked so good between my legs… but I like you like this too."

Jake let out a shaky breath, head tilting back against the pillow as you kept kissing and biting along his jaw and throat. His hands slid up your sides but didn't try to take over, he was letting you have this, and the way his breathing kept stuttering told you he was enjoying it more than he wanted to admit. You popped the button on his jeans and slid your hand inside, wrapping your fingers around him. He was hot and heavy in your palm, already leaking, and you stroked him slowly, thumb brushing over the head. "Fuck…" he groaned, eyes fluttering shut. His hips twitched up into your hand, chasing the touch.

You kept kissing his jaw, his neck, the corner of his mouth, while you worked him with your hand with slow, tight strokes that had him breathing through his mouth. "Look at you," you murmured, voice low and teasing. "You like it when I take over, don't you?"

Jake swallowed hard, cheeks flushed. He opened his eyes and looked up at you, that mix of smug and submissive that made your stomach flip. "Yeah… shit, I do," he admitted, his hands squeezed your thighs like he needed something to hold onto. "Keep going… please."

You smiled against his neck and stroked him a little faster, twisting your wrist just how you knew he liked from last time. He let out a broken sound that went straight between your legs. "Yeah," you whispered, nipping at his earlobe. "Be good for me again, Jakey."

And oh boy, he was good. Jake's head tipped back against the pillow, eyes half closed and his mouth open as every slow twist of your wrist pulled another broken little sound out of him raw and helpless. His hips kept twitching up into your fist, chasing the tight heat of your hand, and you could feel him throbbing, getting impossibly harder, the head of his cock slick and leaking over your fingers. "Fuck– baby, slow down," he gasped, but his body was saying the exact opposite, pushing up harder like he couldn't stop himself. You didn't slow down, you stroked him faster and watched his abs tense, his thighs shaking under you.

You leaned down, lips brushing his ear again. "You close already, Jakey? Gonna cum all over my hand like a good boy?"

He made a strangled noise, hips stuttering. "Shit yeah, I'm– fuck, I'm really close–"

You slowed your hand at the last second, squeezing the base just enough to edge him right there on the brink. Jake's eyes flew open, desperate and glassy. "Tell me," you whispered, still stroking him slowly and torturously. "You wanna cum like this or do you wanna cum inside me?"

"Inside you– fuck, please, inside you, I need it so bad," and it came out so fast and desperate it was almost funny. You laughed softly and kissed him once, quick and dirty, before you sat up and shoved his jeans the rest of the way down his thighs.

You didn't even bother taking them all the way off. You just swung your leg over him, lined him up, and sank down in one smooth motion. The stretch was perfect, it was thick and hot and so deep you both groaned at the same time. Jake's hands flew to your hips, fingers digging in hard as you bottomed out, your ass flush against his thighs. "Oh fuck, yes," he breathed, voice hoarse. "You feel so fucking good baby–"

You didn't give him time to adjust. You started moving right away, rolling your hips in slow, filthy circles at first, then lifting up and dropping back down harder, finding a rhythm that made the headboard knock softly against the wall. Every time you sank down he hit that spot inside you that made sparks shoot up your spine, and you let yourself moan loud and shameless, not caring who heard.

Jake looked wrecked underneath you with flushed cheeks, messy hair, lips parted, eyes locked on the way your tits bounced every time you rode him. But he wasn't completely gone, his hand cracked against your ass with a sharp smack, the sting blooming hot and perfect. "Fuck– yeah, just like that," he groaned, voice breaking. He slapped your ass again, harder this time, and you clenched around him so tight he cursed.

You leaned forward, hands braced on his chest, and started bouncing faster, thighs burning in the best way. "You like it when I ride you like this?" you panted, grinding down deep on every thrust. "Like being good to me?"

Jake whimpered and nodded frantically, hips snapping up to meet you. "Yes shit, yes, use me, I don't care– fuck–"

The switch was so easy between you two now, flipping back and forth without thinking. One second he was slapping your ass and thrusting up like he was trying to ruin you, the next he was looking up at you with those big, needy eyes, letting you pin him down and take whatever you wanted. You rode him harder, grinding your clit against him on every downstroke, the wet sound of skin on skin filling the room. Jake's hands were everywhere – squeezing your ass, sliding up to pinch your nipples, then back down to slap you again when you started slowing down just to tease him.

You felt another orgasm building fast and you didn't fight it. You leaned down close and grabbed his jaw with one hand, forcing him to look at you. "Open your mouth," you ordered, voice rough.

Jake's eyes widened but he obeyed instantly, lips parting, tongue just barely showing. You didn't even slow your hips, you just kept riding him deep and steady while you leaned in and spit right onto his tongue. He moaned like it was the hottest thing that had ever happened to him, eyes fluttering shut as he swallowed without being told. His hips jerked up hard, slamming into you, and the slap of skin got louder, messier. "Fuck, that's so hot," he gasped, voice completely shot.

You kept riding him like that for a few more seconds, hips grinding down deep while he swallowed and looked up at you like he was completely gone. But Jake had clearly reached his limit. "Enough," he said, voice low and rough. He grabbed your hips hard and flipped you over in one fast move, putting you on your stomach. "On your knees, baby. Ass up."

You didn't even think about arguing. You pushed yourself up, arching your back the way he wanted, and felt the mattress dip as he knelt behind you. His hands spread your cheeks almost immediately, thumbs digging into the soft flesh. "Fuck, look at you," he muttered. "All wet and messy from riding me. Such a good girl."

He rubbed the head of his cock up and down your pussy a couple times, teasing your entrance, then pushed in deep in one smooth thrust. You moaned loud into the pillow, fingers gripping the sheets. He felt even bigger from this angle, stretching you open perfectly. Jake gripped your hips and fucked you hard with deep strokes that made your whole body rock forward.

"That's it," he growled, one hand sliding up your back to press between your shoulder blades, keeping your chest down. "Take it just like that. Fuck, your pussy is squeezing me so tight." You were slipping fast into that softer, needier headspace, moaning every time he bottomed out. He leaned over you, chest against your back, and spoke right next to your ear. "You like it e when I fuck you from behind, don't you?" He gave you a particularly hard thrust that made you whimper.

His hand moved down, and you felt his thumb circle your asshole, pressing lightly. You tensed for a second, then moaned louder when he pushed the tip of his thumb inside, just a little, while still fucking you deep. "Yeah? You like that?" he asked, as he worked his thumb in and out slowly, matching the rhythm of his cock. "Want me playing with your tight little ass while I fuck this pussy?"

You nodded frantically against the pillow, pushing back against him. "Yes– fuck, Jake–"

He groaned and gave you more, sliding his thumb deeper while he kept pounding into you. The double sensation was overwhelming, making your legs shake. Every thrust pushed you closer, and Jake could feel it. "You gonna cum again?" he asked, breathing hard, still fucking you deep.

"Yeah," you moaned into the pillow. "I'm so close, Jake. Don't stop– please don't stop."

He groaned at how desperate you sounded and picked up the pace, slamming into you harder. The wet slap of his hips against your ass mixed with the filthy sound of his cock sliding in and out of your soaked pussy. His thumb pushed a little deeper, stretching you just right, and the overwhelming fullness made your eyes roll back. "Fuck, you're gripping me so tight," he growled. "This pussy is gonna make me cum if you keep squeezing like that."

You were right on the edge, every hard thrust pushed you closer until you couldn't hold it anymore. "Jake– I'm gonna cum," you gasped, voice breaking. "Please cum inside me. I want it. Fill me up please, please cum in me."

The words barely left your mouth before your orgasm hit you like a wave. You cried out, clenching hard around his cock and his thumb, whole body shaking as pleasure crashed through you. Jake cursed loudly, hips stuttering. "Shit– yeah, take it," he groaned, burying himself as deep as he could. "Gonna fill this pretty pussy up."

He came hard right after you, thick and hot, pulsing deep inside while he kept fucking you through both your orgasms. You could feel every twitch of his cock until you were dripping and messy between your thighs. For a moment the only sounds were both of you trying to catch your breath. Then Jake slowly pulled out, his cum already starting to leak from you. He grabbed your hips keeping your ass up and leaned down. "Stay just like that," he murmured.

He spread your cheeks with both hands and dragged his tongue all the way from your swollen clit up to both of your holes, licking up his own cum in one long stripe. You whimpered at how sensitive you were, but he didn't stop. "Fuck, Jake…" you moaned weakly, twitching every time his tongue passed over your clit.

He hummed against you, clearly enjoying himself way too much. "Taste so fucking good together, can't waste any of it."

He kept licking you lazily from behind until you were trembling and oversensitive, then finally kissed the curve of your ass and collapsed next to you, pulling you into his chest.

And remember when Jake said that was the best sex he'd ever had? Well, he lied. I mean, he didn't, but the thing is he had the best sex of his life with you multiple times after that, so that meant the bar kept moving, which meant he kept revising the statement, which meant at some point the statement stopped being a useful metric for anything and he just had to accept that you had broken something in his brain that was not going back to its original position.

What that night did, more than anything else, was open a door. And once a door like that is open you don't really close it again, you just kind of agree to keep walking through it whenever it makes sense, and then it starts making sense more and more often, and before you know it you've been doing this for five months and nobody has said a single word about what it is. That's not a criticism, that's just what happens when two people are having a genuinely good time and neither of them wants to be the one to introduce paperwork into the situation.

The thing about having that kind of arrangement with someone in your twenties is that it's good in a way that's hard to explain to someone who hasn't been in it. It's casual in the best sense of the word, there's no pressure, no performance, no having to show up as anything other than exactly who you are on any given day. Jake could text you at eleven on a tuesday and you'd say come over or you wouldn't and either way it was fine, nobody's feelings got managed, nobody had to have a conversation about expectations. You'd show up, it would be great, one of you would leave, and then a few days later it would happen again. Transactional sounds like a bad word but it wasn't, it was clean and easy and it worked.

Except for the parts where it didn't.

Jake kept bumping what was the waking up alone situation, and that never fully stopped being a thing. He'd gotten better at it, in the sense that he'd stopped expecting otherwise, but there's a difference between not expecting something and being fine with it, and Jake was operating solidly in the first category while telling himself it was the second. Because, well, you always left. Sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes early morning, once while he was still technically in the shower, which he found out when he came back to an empty room and a text that said had fun, talk later with a little waving hand emoji that he chose not to analyze too deeply.

There were good stretches and weird stretches and stretches where you'd disappear for a couple weeks and he'd go about his life and not text you first because he'd learned by then that pushing got him nothing, and then you'd come back and it would be like the reset button had been pressed and everything was fine again. He'd had enough of those cycles by month three to recognize them as a pattern. Recognizing a pattern and doing something about it are different skills and Jake had only fully developed one of them.

The moments that got him, specifically, were the ones that didn't fit neatly into the casual box. Like that day you showed up at his and Heeseung's place with no particular agenda and that had never happened before, you'd always had a reason, a direction, somewhere to be after. But that day you just came over and sat on his couch and said put something on, and Jake put something on and you watched a movie and somewhere in the middle of it you ended up sideways with your legs over his and his arm around you and you fell asleep for twenty minutes on his shoulder, and he sat there not moving and watching the rest of the movie and thinking, okay, this is a different thing, this is a new category.

He made dinner after, just pasta because it was what he had and neither of you had eaten, and you sat at his kitchen counter and stole pieces of bread while he cooked and complained about your thesis advisor and he gave you genuinely useless advice that you told him was genuinely useless and you both laughed about it, and it was domestic in a way that nothing between you two had been before. It was easy in a different way than the other easy.

You two did have crazy monkey sex afterwards, obviously, a cozy evening apparently had a very natural endpoint when it was you two involved, but the point is the cozy evening happened first, and Jake went to sleep that night thinking maybe this was shifting into something with more weight to it. Jake woke up alone, of course.

By month six Heeseung had watched enough of this play out from a front row seat to have developed opinions about it, which was inevitable, and those opinions had been accumulating for long enough that they required a formal airing. "We need to talk about the Y/N thing," Heeseung said.

"There's no thing. It's casual." Jake said.

"It has been months of casual dude," Heeseung replied. "You haven't hooked up with anyone else in five months. You cancelled on that girl Jungwon introduced you to because you were, and I'm quoting you directly here, not really feeling it right now. You got quiet at that party two weeks ago when she was talking to that guy."

Jake put his hands down. "I wasn't —"

"You were," Heeseung interrupted, not unkindly. "I'm not saying this to give you a hard time, I'm saying it because you're my friend and I've watched you go through this loop enough times and you've gone there anyway and you need to either say something about it or accept that you're going to keep waking up alone and feeling like shit about it."

Jake looked at the table. Then at his cereal. Then at Heeseung, who was looking at him with the patient, slightly tired expression of someone who had been waiting for this conversation for a while and was just glad it was finally happening. "She doesn't want anything serious," Jake said, which was the thing he always came back to.

"Did she tell you that? Directly? To your face?"

"No but Jay said –"

"Jay said that months ago man," Heeseung said. "That's not the same as her telling you now, those are two different infos and you're using the old one because it's easier than asking about the current one."

Jake had nothing to say to that because it was correct and he knew it was correct and knowing something is correct and being ready to act on it are still two different things. So Jake did what he did best, which was absolutely nothing. He filed the whole thing under "will deal with later" and went about his life with the practiced ease of someone who had been avoiding his own feelings since approximately age nineteen and had gotten very good at it. The situation was what it was and he was an adult and adults could handle ambiguous situationships without imploding, that was just a thing adults did, he was doing it, everything was under control. He managed this for about three more weeks.

Then he saw you with Soobin. Now look, Soobin was – okay, there's no way to say this without it sounding insane but Soobin was objectively one of the most disarmingly attractive people Jake had ever met in his life, and he meant that in the most objective, non threatened way possible. Soobin had this face that looked like someone had put in a very specific request with the universe like big eyes, the guy was massive, tall as hell, and still he had this soft energy that made everyone around him feel immediately comfortable and also vaguely like they wanted to protect him, which was funny because Soobin was not a person who needed protecting, he was just built in a way that made people feel that instinct.

And there you were standing way too close to each other and you were laughing at something he'd said with your hand on his arm and Soobin was smiling at you like you were the funniest person he'd encountered all semester. It was objectively innocent and it was probably completely innocent. Jake watched it from across the courtyard for about fifteen seconds and felt his entire chest do something unpleasant.

Jake at twenty two was marginally more self aware than he'd been at twenty one, and that meant he knew that what he was feeling was jealousy and that jealousy was his problem to manage and not a logical basis for any decisions. He knew this. He sat with this knowledge for approximately four days and then went and texted Minjeong, which was either proof that self awareness and self control are completely separate skills or just proof that knowing better and doing better have never been the same thing and probably never will be.

Jake dated Minjeong for a few weeks before, not actually dated but more like the kind of thing that had been easy and low stakes and had faded out naturally because neither of them had been particularly invested, which in retrospect made her a terrible choice for what Jake was trying to do, because Minjeong was smart and she knew him well enough to immediately clock that something was off. She responded to his first text warmly enough but when he tried to suggest hanging out she said, with the directness of someone who had no interest in being a supporting character in someone else's drama, "are you doing okay? you seem weird." He said he was fine. She said okay but you seem like you're in your head about something. He said he wasn't. She said she believed him and also that she was busy this week, and that was pretty much that.

Minjeong was not going to be a pawn in whatever this was and honestly, fair enough. Jake deleted the thread and lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about how even his attempt to be stupid about this had failed, which was a new low.

He'd been doing this for about two weeks, going back and forth and getting nowhere, and then, when he was heading to his car after his last class that week, thinking about nothing except that he hadn't eaten since noon and needed to fix that, he heard his name from behind him and turned around and it was you, slightly out of breath like you'd jogged a little to catch up.

"Hey," you said, falling into step next to him. "You walking to the lot?"

"Yeah," he said. "You need a ride?"

"No I'm good, I'm meeting someone." You paused. "I just wanted to ask you something."

"Okay."

You were quiet for a second in the way that meant you were deciding how to phrase something. "Are you seeing Minjeong again?" you asked, and your voice was totally casual, just a question, except it was not just a question and you both knew it.

Jake stopped walking. You stopped next to him. He looked at you. "Where did you hear that?"

"Around," you said, which was not an answer.

"Around meaning who."

"Does it matter?"

"Kind of, yeah."

You looked at him with this expression that was doing a lot of things at once. "So are you?" you asked again.

Jake looked at you for a second and then almost laughed, not because it was funny exactly but because of the specific absurdity of the situation, of you standing here asking him about Minjeong with that look on your face, after weeks of him watching you with Soobin and saying nothing about it, after months of him waking up alone and saying nothing about that either. "No," he said. "I'm not seeing Minjeong."

"Okay," you said.

"I texted her like twice and she was busy," he said, and he wasn't sure why he was giving you that level of detail except that something about your expression made him want to be honest about it. "It wasn't anything."

You nodded slowly. "How come you texted her then?"

"I don't know," he said, which was a lie, and by the way you looked at him he could tell you knew it was a lie, but you didn't push it, you just stood there with your arms crossed and your head tilted slightly like you were waiting to see if he'd say the rest of it on his own. He didn't, Jake e was not ready for the rest of it on his own.

"Okay," you said again, and there was something in your voice that sounded like it wanted to be more than okay but had decided against it, so Jake filed away to think about later when he was alone and could turn it over properly. You uncrossed your arms. "I'll see you around, Jake."

"Yeah," he said.

You walked off in the direction you'd come from and Jake stood next to his car with his keys in his hand watching you go and thinking, she asked. She came over here specifically to ask me about Minjeong, which means she noticed, which means she was paying attention, which means there is something here that is not nothing and we are both standing right next to it and pretending we can't see it.

Jake got in the car, drove home, and spent the entire ride being quietly, unreasonably annoyed at everything. Not at you specifically, or at least that's what he was telling himself, more at the general situation, at the specific cruelty of the universe for engineering something that felt this close to something real and then consistently making it impossible to get there. He was annoyed at Minjeong for being perceptive, at Soobin for existing and being objectively very pretty, at himself for texting Minjeong in the first place, which he knew was stupid while he was doing it and had done anyway because apparently knowing something is stupid is not sufficient protection against doing it. Twenty two years old. So much growth.

The Soobin thing, to be clear, had no evidence behind it. Jake knew this but he had convictions, not proof, which is the worst possible combination because convictions without proof live entirely in your head and your head is not an objective narrator. He'd seen you together twice and you were touchy with people you liked, that was just how you were, he knew that, he'd watched you do it with your friends a hundred times. The hand on the arm meant nothing, probably. The laughing meant nothing, probably. Soobin was in your friend group adjacent circle and it made complete sense that you'd have a normal friendship with him that involved proximity and laughter and absolutely nothing else and Jake had zero basis for any of the conclusions he'd been drawing for two weeks.

But he wasn't going to say any of that to you. He wasn't going to say anything to you because saying anything to you meant talking about why he'd texted Minjeong which meant talking about seeing you with Soobin which meant explaining why seeing you with Soobin had bothered him which meant having the exact conversation Heeseung had told him to have weeks ago, and Jake was not ready, had not been ready, kept moving the goalposts on when he would be ready, and in the meantime was going to deal with this the way he dealt with everything which was poorly and quietly.

So you two didn't talk, at all. You didn't fight or anything, just because neither of you reached out and the silence settled in the way silence does when two people are both waiting for the other one to go first. It was one of the worst months Jake had had in a while, which embarrassed him slightly to admit because (objectively) nothing had happened. Nothing had been lost that he'd technically had to begin with. You weren't his girlfriend, you didn't owe him texts, the silence was not a punishment and he had no logical claim to feel as bad as he felt about it. But feelings are not interested in your logical framework, they just do what they do, and what Jake's were doing was making him terrible company for approximately five consecutive weeks.

Week one he was mostly just annoyed and told himself he'd feel better eventually. Week two he did not feel better. Week three Sunghoon asked him at lunch why he looked like that and Jake said nothing's wrong I'm just tired, and Sunghoon nodded in the way that meant he did not believe a single word of that but had chosen to let it go.

Week four was genuinely bad. He saw you across the courtyard with a matcha latte and your headphones on, clearly going somewhere, clearly fine, and he had to make a very deliberate choice to keep walking in the other direction and then felt sorry for himself about it for the rest of the afternoon, which was pathetic and he knew it was pathetic and could not stop. He typed a text to you three times and deleted it three times and then put his phone face down on the table and watched TV for two hours without taking in a single thing that happened on screen.

Week five he was sitting in his morning class not paying attention to anything when his phone buzzed with a text from you that just said hey, you good? and Jake stared at it for long enough that the professor made a comment about phones and he had to put it away, and he spent the remaining forty minutes of class with the focus of someone who had something much more important to attend to the second he got out.

He texted back the second he was out the door. Yeah, I'm good. You? and what followed was the most aggressively normal conversation two people have ever had, you talked about nothing for about twenty minutes – something about a class, you mentioned a show you'd started watching and he said he'd heard of it, and that was genuinely it, that was the whole exchange.

The thing was Jake knew what the problem was. He wasn't confused about the problem. The problem was that every time he was actually talking to you his brain split into two tracks – the one that was present in the conversation and the one running in the background doing risk assessment, calculating how much of what he actually wanted to say was safe to say, how much would land okay and how much would make things weird, and by the time the background track finished its calculations the conversation had moved on and the moment was gone. He'd been doing it for years, it was not a new problem. He just couldn't figure out how to turn the background track off.

Jake looked at his phone then. He typed a few things and deleted them, which was a habit he'd developed since you two started hanging out. He typed I miss you mostly just to see how it looked, fully intending to delete it like everything else, and then sat there looking at it for a second too long, and then sent it before the part of his brain that managed his decisions could intervene. He put his phone face down on the cushion immediately after, like creating physical distance from it would somehow change what had just happened.

You'd seen it – no response. So he put it face down again.

The thing about sending a text and watching it get read and then getting nothing back is that it's one of those experiences that is objectively minor and feels catastrophic for reasons that are hard to explain to anyone who didn't live it. The message just sits there read out in the open. And your brain, which is not your friend in these moments, starts generating explanations for the silence at a pace that is not useful and cannot be stopped. She's busy. She's thinking about what to say. She's showing it to someone. She's not going to respond. She thinks it's weird. She's fine with it. She hates it. She hates me. She saw it and put her phone down to do something else and forgot and she'll respond later. She's not going to respond. She wants me dead. I should never have asked her if she thinks I'm a twink.

Jake went to bed without a response and woke up the next day to nothing (he checked before he was fully awake) so that added its own specific layer of bad to the morning. And somewhere around mid afternoon, having run out of productive options, he made the executive decision to smoke a completely unreasonable amount of weed and play video games for the rest of the day, which was not a solution to anything but was at least a suspension of the problem, and that was good enough for right now. He was deep into it, and when his brain finally quieted, the doorbell rang. He paused the game and sat there for a second like maybe if he waited long enough it would sort itself out, and then it rang again and he got up, slow, and opened the door.

You were standing in the hallway with your bag on one shoulder and this expression on your face that he couldn't immediately read, and you looked at him and then did a quick scan of the general situation – the slightly glazed eyes, the very specific energy of someone who had been horizontal for hours – and said: "are you high?"

"A little bit," he said, which was generous. "What are you doing here?"

"You said you missed me," you said, just like that, straightforward, and Jake stood in the doorway and looked at you and felt his brain (which was not operating at full capacity) attempt to catch up to what was happening.

"I did," he said.

"I didn't know what to text back so I just didn't, and then I felt bad about not texting back, so." You gestured vaguely at the hallway, at yourself, at the general situation.

Jake looked at you standing at his door at four in the afternoon because he'd said three words and you hadn't known what to say and had shown up instead, and he thought, not for the first time and probably not for the last, that you were the most confusing person he had ever met in his life and he was absolutely crazy about you and those two things were going to be true simultaneously for the foreseeable future. "Okay," he said, and stepped back to let you in.

You dropped your bag by the door and went and sat on the couch like you'd been there a hundred times, which you had, and Jake went to the kitchen and got two glasses of water on autopilot because he needed something to do with his hands and also because he was dehydrated and still a little high and the combination was making him feel like he was watching the situation from slightly outside himself.

He came back and handed you one and sat down on the other end of the couch, not too close, and for a second neither of you said anything. You were looking at your water glass. He was looking at the middle distance. Very cinematic, very unnecessary. "So," you said.

"So," he said.

You smiled a little at that, and then it faded and you went back to looking at the glass. "I've been kind of weird lately," you said. "I know that."

"It's fine," he said, automatic, and then caught himself. "I mean, it's not, like – I noticed. That's all."

You nodded slowly. "The Minjeong thing threw me off."

"There was no Minjeong thing."

"I know that now." You paused. "I didn't know it then. And I didn't really have a right to care about it either way, made it more annoying to care about it."

That was more than you usually gave him, more direct than you tended to be about anything that touched on the actual situation between you two, and he wasn't sure if it was an invitation to say more or just a thing you were putting down and moving past. He decided to treat it like an invitation. "Why didn't you have a right to care," he asked, and it came out more careful than accusatory.

You looked at him for a second. "Because we're not — this isn't a thing where I get to have opinions about who you talk to."

"I have opinions about who you talk to," he said.

You were quiet, receiving information and sitting with it instead of deflecting immediately, which for you was actually something. "Soobin is one of my best friends, you know, since like sophomore year of high school."

"I didn't know that."

"Well, you didn't ask."

He picked up his water glass and put it down again without drinking from it. "I'm not – I'm not trying to make this into a fight. I just think we've been doing this thing where we're both aware something is going on and neither of us is saying it and I'm kind of tired of it."

You looked at your hands. "Yeah."

"So I'm saying it," he said. "I like you. I've liked you for a long time, like a stupid long time, and I know that's not what we agreed to and I'm not trying to pressure you into anything, I just, I think you should know, because I'm done pretending it's purely casual on my end because it's not, and hasn't been for a while."

The room was quiet. You weren't looking at him and he was looking at you and the weed had not prepared him for this level of conversation but here you were, doing it anyway. You took a breath. "I like you too," you said it plainly. "That's not – that's not the issue for me."

"Okay," he said carefully. "So what is it?"

You were quiet for long enough that he thought you might not answer, and then you said, "I don't know how to do it. Like, how to date someone, not anymore... I think." You said it to the middle distance, not to him, which he'd learned meant you were being more honest than comfortable. "I was in a relationship for a long time and it was fine for most of it and then it wasn't and when it ended I realized I'd spent like two years just, like, going along with something because it was already in motion and I didn't know how to stop it. And I don't want to do that again. And you're –" you paused. "You're someone I actually like being around. Like, outside of everything else. And I don't want to do the thing where we try to make it into something and it goes wrong and then that's gone."

"So it's easier to keep it as nothing."

"It's not nothing, Jake," you said, with a bit more edge, and looked at him properly for the first time since you'd sat down. "It's never been nothing, that's the whole problem."

Jake looked back at you and felt the specific exhaustion of two people who are on the same page about all the wrong things. You liked him and he liked you, but you were both scared of different versions of the same outcome and the overlap between those fears was exactly the space where nothing could grow. He understood it and he hated that he understood it. "So what do we do," he said.

You looked at him for a long moment and he could see you working through it. "I think maybe we should just be friends," you said. "I think we skipped a lot of steps and now everything is – tangled, and I don't know how to... untangle it."

It landed the way he'd expected it to land and it was not great, but not as bad as it could have been either. It wasn't a no, exactly. It was more like a not like this and not right now, so his brain tried to file as encouraging and his chest filed as disappointing regardless. "Okay," he said.

"Okay?"

"I mean, no, not okay, it kind of sucks," he said, and you laughed a little at that, surprised, and he felt the tension in the room drop half a degree. "But I get it. I don't love it but I get it."

So that being said, the whole just friends thing lasted for three days.

In retrospect, it was optimistic of both of you. The conversation had been mature and the intentions had been real and Jake had genuinely gone to bed that night thinking okay, this is the reset, this is the thing that changes the dynamic, we talked about it like adults and now it's going to be different. And then three days later there was a thing at Heeseung's girlfriend's place, just a small group and a few drinks, nothing that should've led anywhere, except you were there and Jake was there and at some point the evening got late enough and the drinks got sufficient enough that the careful distance you'd both agreed to maintain started feeling a little abstract and unnecessary, and then you were in the kitchen alone for five minutes while everyone else was in the living room and that was that.

The night ended the way it usually ended. His place, late, Jake came when you called him a good boy, you two had crazy monkey sex, Jake fell asleep next to you and woke up reaching for something that wasn't there anymore. The bed was cold, the glass in the drying rack was clean. Aw shit, he thought, here we go again.

The difference this time, the thing that made this loop slightly different from the one before, was that Jake had promised himself he wasn't going to pretend. He'd done enough pretending, enough filing things away and leaving them for future Jake and treating honesty like it was optional. So when you texted him two days later like nothing had happened he didn't just go along with it, he said can we talk and you said yeah and you did, and it was fine, it was actually fine, you were both adults about it and nobody cried or slammed doors or said anything they couldn't come back from.

You agreed, again, to be just friends, and that lasted about a week. And then it happened again, and you agreed again, and it lasted less time than that, and somewhere around the fourth or fifth cycle Jake stopped counting because the counting wasn't useful and the cycle was the cycle regardless of how many times it had completed. This was just the shape of the thing. You two were apparently constitutionally incapable of maintaining the resolution long enough for it to stick, which would've been funny if it weren't also slowly making him insane.

The loop went like this, roughly: something would happen, one of you would pull back, there'd be a stretch of weird distance, then a conversation, then just friends, then three to ten days of actually being just friends which was fine except for the part where it wasn't, and then something would shift (you were both horny and crazy for each other) and the whole thing would reset. Sometimes you'd disappear after. Sometimes he would, genuinely, just to see if it felt different from the receiving end, which it didn't, it just felt like he was being petty (he was). Occasionally one of you would get weird about something the other one had done and it would surface in a conversation that started about something else entirely.

Like the time Jake saw a guy dropping you off outside your building and spent two days being normal about it until you came over and he was so aggressively, transparently normal about it that you noticed immediately. "What's wrong with you," you said, not even five minutes in.

"Nothing," he said.

"It's clearly something, I know you."

He looked at you. "Who dropped you off on thursday?"

You blinked. "Yeonjun. He's in my thesis group." You looked at him for a second. "You saw that?"

"I was walking back from the gym."

"And you've been weird about it for two days."

"I haven't been weird?"

"Yes, you have?"

He stopped. "Yeah, okay, I've been a little weird about it."

You sat back and looked at him with an expression that was more tired than annoyed. "You can't do that," you said. "You can't be weird about that if this isn't a thing. That's not fair."

"I'm not saying it's fair. I'm saying it happened."

"So what do you want me to do with that?"

"Nothing," he said. "I'm not asking you to do anything with it. I'm just being honest about it because you asked."

Or the time you showed up at his place at eleven on a week day and you'd clearly had a bad day and you didn't really want to talk about it, you just wanted to exist somewhere that wasn't your apartment, and Jake let you in and didn't ask questions and you watched something on TV for two hours and it was easy and comfortable and at some point you fell asleep on the couch and he put a blanket over you and went to bed, and in the morning you made coffee and you both sat in the kitchen and it felt so much like something.

Or the time it turned into an actual argument. You'd gone quiet for two weeks after a particularly good night together that had felt like more than its usual self, and Jake had waited and waited and finally said something about it and it turned into the kind of conversation that starts about one thing and ends up being about everything underneath it. "You always do this," he said, and he hadn't meant it to come out with that much edge but it did. "You disappear every time it gets close to something real so you just check out. And then you come back and it's fine and we don't talk about it and then it happens again."

"I'm here right now," you said.

"You're here now because enough time passed that it felt okay to come back. That's not the same thing."

You looked at him and he could see the thing that happened when you felt cornered, this slight closing off, and he knew pressing wasn't going to get him anywhere but he was tired, genuinely tired in a way that had been building for months. "I told you from the beginning I wasn't good at this," you said.

"You told me you didn't want anyone to get hurt. Those aren't the same thing."

You were quiet for a long time, long enough that he thought the conversation might just end there unresolved like everything else. And then you said, "I don't know how to change it," and your voice was honest and Jake looked at you and felt the specific ache of two people who want the same thing and keep arriving at it from incompatible directions.

"Okay," he said, softer.

"I'm sorry," you said.

"Stop apologizing."

"I don't know what else to do."

"I know," he said. "Me neither."

You stayed that night. In the morning you were still there when he woke up, which was unusual enough that he lay still for a second just registering it, and when you woke up you didn't immediately reach for your phone or your bag, you just looked at him in the grey morning light and said "hi" and he said "hi" back.

And, well, that kept going for two years.

Two years is a long time when you're in your twenties. It doesn't sound like a long time but when you're twenty two and then you're twenty four it's actually enormous, it's the difference between who you were and who you're becoming, and you can feel it in the way you carry yourself, in the things that stop being funny and the things that start being, in the specific peace that comes from knowing yourself well enough to stop pretending you don't. Jake was not the same person he'd been at twenty one, or twenty two, or even twenty three. It wasn't a sad thing, it was just a true thing.

He didn't go to every party anymore, he'd gotten selective about where he put his energy, which is something nobody tells you happens in your twenties but it does. Jake was, by most measures, doing well. He had good friends (Heeseung), a job he didn't hate (Heeseung helped him get it), an apartment he and his roommate (also Heeseung) had quietly made into somewhere worth coming home to. The bones of a life, assembled slowly and without much ceremony, the way actual lives get built as opposed to the way you imagine they will be when you're nineteen and everything feels enormous and provisional.

The only thing that remained exactly as chaotic as it had always been, the one constant in three years of otherwise gradual maturation, was you. At some point over two years of this loop the loop started to look less like a loop and more like a life, and you both settled into it the way you settle into anything that's been around long enough. So you basically started acting like a couple.

He knew how you liked your matcha latte, you kept a charger at his place, and then a hoodie, and then a toothbrush. When something good happened, he texted you before he texted anyone else, even before Heeseung. You showed up to things together and left together and the space between you in a room had narrowed to something that everyone around you could read even when you were across from each other and not touching.

The arguments had quieted down too, which was maybe the most telling thing. Not because nothing was unresolved (plenty was still unresolved) but because the situation itself had worn down through sheer frequency of contact. Jake knew when you needed space before you asked for it. You knew when he was in his head about something before he said anything. That kind of knowledge doesn't come from a label, it comes from time, and you two had put in the time whether you'd meant to or not.

All of your friends knew, they'd known for a while, they'd probably known longer than Jake had known himself. Heeseung had stopped asking about it, which meant he'd accepted it as a permanent condition of Jake's life and had filed it accordingly. Sunghoon made exactly one comment once, which was just "you know this is kind of obvious, right," and Jake had said "thanks, Sunghoon" in a tone that closed the subject, and Sunghoon had let it stay closed but the look on his face had communicated volumes. Even Jay, who had made his peace with the situation through a combination of being a reasonable person and genuinely not wanting to know the details, had stopped doing the subtle check in thing he used to do, had stopped reading the room when Jake and his sister were in it together, because the room was always the same and he'd adjusted.

Everyone had adjusted and everyone could see it. Your friends, his friends, people who barely knew either of you, anyone who'd been in the same space as you two for more than forty minutes. Everyone except, apparently, you and Jake.

You both had an unspoken agreement to keep not naming it that had outlasted all reasonable explanations and was at this point less a decision and more a deeply ingrained habit that neither of you knew how to break without acknowledging that it existed. There's a specific kind of relationship that exists in the space between what it is and what it's called, and it's comfortable there, in that space, in a way that's hard to explain to someone on the outside because from the outside it looks like avoidance, and it is avoidance, but the reason nobody names it isn't always fear of losing it, sometimes it's just that the naming feels like the least important part when the thing itself is already so thoroughly present in your daily life that a word for it seems redundant. Well, that's what you told yourself, at least.

But accommodation isn't the same as acceptance, and acceptance isn't the same as being done with it, and Jake was twenty four now and not the same person he'd been at twenty one, and the things he was willing to keep accommodating indefinitely were getting fewer. He just hadn't done anything about it yet. Which was, if you'd been following along, extremely on brand. Somewhere in those two years a lot of small things accumulated that neither of you addressed directly because addressing them would've required acknowledging what they were, and you two had gotten very practiced at not doing that.

There was the running thing, which started because you had a route along the river near your apartment that you did a few times a week, and Jake had mentioned once that he'd been wanting to run more and you'd said come tomorrow then, casual, and he'd shown up the next morning and then the morning after that and then it just became a thing. He was faster than you over distance and slower than you on hills, and you'd figured out pretty quickly that the route worked better if you didn't try to talk for the first twenty minutes and just ran, and then the last stretch you'd slow down and talk about whatever, and it was one of the most genuinely easy things between you two, which was saying something. He started keeping a spare pair of running shoes at your place but neither of you mentioned it.

Every time he went home to visit his family he came back with food. Dumplings once, vacuum sealed, with a note from his mom that you were pretty sure was in part addressed to you even though Jake claimed it wasn't. He'd hand it over like he hadn't specifically told his mom what you liked, like his mom hadn't specifically made extra of it because her son had mentioned you enough times that she'd started cooking for two. You ate it and didn't say anything about the implications and neither did he.

Jay was around more, which was its own thing. Not because anything had been said between Jake and Jay about the situation – as far as you knew that conversation had never happened – but just because Jake and Jay had gotten closer over those two years in the natural way that happens when someone becomes a consistent presence in your life and you start to actually know them. Heeseung's girlfriend had started referring to the four of you as the four of you, which was something she'd done so naturally and so early that by the time anyone might've pushed back on it the window had passed. Movie nights at the apartment happened at least twice a month, board games that got competitive enough that Heeseung's girlfriend once threw a card across the room, dinner sometimes, the four of you at a table, splitting the bill, walking home in pairs. Heeseung and his girlfriend held hands. Jake and you walked close enough that your arms touched and sometimes his hand would find yours and you'd let it and you'd walk like that for a block before one of you found a reason to need that hand for something else. It was a whole thing, everyone could see it was a whole thing.

You'd started staying over more, and that happened gradually enough that there was no single moment where it became the new normal, it just did. And then you started staying the whole night, not leaving before he woke up, which he noticed the first few times and tried very hard not to make obvious because he didn't want to spook you by making it into something. You'd wake up and he'd be in the kitchen and you'd come out in whatever you'd slept in and he'd hand you coffee already made the way you took it, and it was domestic in a way that should've felt strange given the official status of things and somehow just felt like tuesday. He stayed at yours too, more than before. Your roommate had stopped asking who he was approximately three weeks into this pattern and had started just saying hi Jake when he came in the door and offering him whatever she was eating.

The hand holding happened without ceremony too, his hand would find yours and you'd be holding hands and that would be that. You went to a farmers market once and walked around for an hour and a half and held hands the entire time and talked about produce and absolutely nothing else, and on the way back he'd bought you something you'd looked at twice and you'd told him not to and he'd already paid for it.

You'd gotten into this habit somewhere along the way of always being in the same car. If you were going to the same place, which happened more often than it probably should have given that you weren't technically together, Jake drove or you drove and the other one got in and that was it. It was efficient and practical, he told himself. Good for the environment, even. Spring break came around and it turned out you were both heading back toward the same general direction of the country, your hometown was about forty minutes from his, and the route passed through his anyway, so the road trip thing made sense logistically, he told Heeseung, who did not ask about the logistics and also did not bother hiding his expression. "Have fun," Heeseung said.

You left on a friday morning, your bag in his backseat, matcha latte from the place near your condo because you'd insisted on stopping even though it added twelve minutes and he'd complained about it the entire way there and then drunk half of yours when his ran out somewhere around the first hour. You didn't say anything when he reached over and took it, just handed it to him without looking up from your phone, which was somehow more intimate than most things and he noticed but didn't say anything about it.

The first hour was easy the way things between you two were always easy. You told him about something that had happened with a friend of yours that week, and he asked questions in the right places and you filled in the gaps. Around hour two you'd migrated into the particular road trip intimacy where you'd turned slightly sideways in the passenger seat so you were half facing him. Jake had one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the center console and at some point you put your hand over his, just placed it there, and he turned his hand over so your fingers could settle into his, and you stayed like that for a while without commenting on it.

The playlist cycled through something slow and you sang along under your breath to a part you knew and he watched the road and listened and thought about how this was just a thing that was happening, a normal friday, two people driving to their hometowns for break, nothing remarkable about it, and somehow it was also one of his favorite days in recent memory and he had no idea what to do with that information.

"You missed the turn," you said.

"I didn't miss it, I'm taking the other way."

"The other way adds like twenty minutes."

"Yeah but the other way has Weendy's."

You stared at him. "You're taking a twenty minute detour for Wendy's."

"Wendeez nuts."

"Jake." You tried not to laugh.

"You want some or not, pretty?"

"Deez nuts or Wendy's?” You asked, smirking playfully.

"Wendy's.” Jake answered, laughing. “Unless…”

You laughed out loud, and you did want some. You both got chips and sat on the hood of his car in the rest stop parking lot for twenty minutes eating them and watching other people's road trips pass through, and you stole from his bag even though you had your own, and he let you because he always let you. The last hour he had his hand on your knee for most of it, not consciously, just where it ended up, and you had your head tipped back against the seat looking out the window at the trees and you were quiet in a good way, and he drove and thought about nothing in particular and everything loosely related to it.

He pulled up in front of your house and your bag was already in your lap and the engine was still running and you sat there for a second without moving. "Thanks for the detour," you said.

"Best Wendy's in the state," he said.

You smiled and looked at him and he looked at you and there was a moment, a couple seconds long, where neither of you said anything and the car was quiet and it would've been very easy to just stay there. Then you leaned over and kissed him, soft and unhurried, one hand coming up to his jaw and he kissed you back. You pulled back and he could still feel the warmth of it. "Drive safe," you said. "Text me when you get there, okay?"

"I will," he said. You got out and shut the door and he watched you go up the front path, your bag on your shoulder, and he lowered the window because there was something – he didn't plan it, he didn't think about it, it came out the same way things sometimes come out when you're not monitoring yourself closely enough –

"Love you," he said.

And then he drove away.

He was at the end of the street before his brain fully processed what had just come out of his mouth. He kept driving. He went through a green light. He merged onto the main road. His hands were on the wheel at ten and two like a person who was being very normal about something.

Jake had not waited to see your face. He had not waited for anything, he'd just said it and put the car in drive like he could outrun it if he moved fast enough, which was insane, which was possibly the most insane thing he'd done in three years of consistently insane behavior, and that was a high bar. His phone was in the cupholder but he did not look at it. He drove for twenty minutes before he accepted that he was going to have to look at it eventually and pulled into a gas station and sat in the parking lot and picked it up. No messages, thank God. Thank.. God?

Okay, Jake thought. Okay. That happened. He'd said it and you'd heard it clearly and he'd driven away before you could respond and now he was in a gas station parking lot forty minutes from his hometown and twenty minutes from yours and he had no idea what came next and his heart was doing something loud and inconvenient in his chest. So he called Heeseung. "Hey," Heeseung said, background noise of the TV behind him. "You get there okay?"

"I told her I love her," Jake said.

A pause. "You did what?"

"Yeah and I drove away before she could say anything."

Silence. "What the fuck is wrong with you?" Heeseung said.

"You gotta be more specific," Jake said.

"You said I love you and then you just –"

"I drove away, yes, I'm aware, I was there –"

"Why would you do that, you absolute moron?"

"I don't know, dude!" Jake said, which was true. He genuinely did not know. It had come out and his foot had hit the gas and now here he was in a gas station parking lot having the worst and best moment of the last several years simultaneously. "What do I do now?!"

Heeseung was quiet for a second. "I mean," he said, "you could start by driving back."

Jake did not drive back. He sat in the parking lot for another ten minutes being a coward about it. But eventually he drove the rest of the way to his hometown with the radio on and his phone in the cupholder and the specific stillness of someone who has done something irreversible and is still in the process of understanding what that means. His family's house looked the same as always, his mom had left the porch light on, and he sat in the driveway for a minute before going in, kinda expecting his phone to buzz and it didn't, and he went inside and ate dinner and was normal about it with his family in the way that you're normal about things when you have no other option.

He texted you saying he got home. Delivered. He checked his phone before bed to see if you had texted back, nothing. Woke up the next morning, still nothing. Day two? Yeah, nothing. Aw shit, here we go again.

The thing about being home is that it does something to your memory, it pulls things up from storage without asking permission. Jake lay there on day two and day three with nowhere particular to be and found himself thinking about things he hadn't thought about in years.

He thought about being fifteen and having a crush on a girl in his class who'd looked at him exactly once with any particular intention and he'd spent three months treating that one look like a compass, orienting everything around it, which was a lot of weight for a single look to carry. Nothing came of it but he'd survived. He thought about being seventeen and thinking he understood what it meant to care about someone, the specific confidence of that age where you feel things enormously and interpret that enormity as depth when sometimes it's just volume. He'd been loud about his feelings at seventeen without being particularly honest about them, which is a thing that takes a while to notice about yourself.

He thought about his ex (yeah, sad, I know) who had been genuinely good and genuinely wrong for him in equal measure, and how the ending of that had been the first time he'd understood that caring about someone and being right for someone were separate questions with separate answers. He'd learned something from that. He thought he had, at least. He'd carried it forward, applied it, tried to be more careful about the difference.

And then he thought about you, which was where everything kept ending up regardless of the route it took to get there.

Jake'd spent three years worrying about the shape of what you two were, the category, the label, the question of what to call it and what it meant and whether it was going anywhere and whether anywhere was even a place worth going. He'd had that conversation with himself more times than he could count, lying in various beds in various states of having just woken up alone, and it had never resolved because it was the wrong conversation. He'd been so focused on the uncertainty of the situation that he'd spent three years treating his own feelings like they were also uncertain, like they were part of the question instead of the one thing he'd actually known the answer to for a long time.

He thought about a cup of water at a party when he was nineteen years old and everything felt enormous. He thought about how you'd texted first after five weeks of silence and how that had been enough to make the whole week retroactively survivable. He thought about the way you fell asleep in the passenger seat and trusted him to get you there, the way you said things that were true in voices that were quiet like you were only willing to be honest at low volume. He thought about all the times he'd watched you leave and missed you in the mornings with the tired resignation of someone who'd accepted a situation instead of examining it, and he thought about how for three years he'd framed his own feelings as a problem to manage rather than a fact to just live in, and how exhausting that had been, and how unnecessary.

Jake'd said love you out of a car window and driven away and the world hadn't ended. It was still there, he was still there. You were somewhere not texting him, which was familiar territory and not his favorite place to be, but underneath the silence was still the fact that he'd said it and he'd meant it and meaning it turned out to be the most uncomplicated part of all of this by a significant margin.

Jake loved you. He'd loved you for a long time, longer than he'd let himself call it that, long enough that the feeling had become structural. It wasn't the enormous, operatic thing he'd maybe expected love to feel like when he was seventeen. It was knowing how you liked your matcha latte and your favorite Hirono figures, and the face you made when you were about to say something honest and the specific way, how you played The Sims when you were tired of living life or when you went to the movies by yourself when you felt like it. It was the thing that had made him stay in a loop for three years that any rational person would've exited, because the loop still had you in it and the exit didn't, and that was the math he'd been doing without ever writing it down.

He didn't regret saying it. That was the thing he'd been slowly arriving at across three days and two nights in his childhood bedroom. He'd driven away like a maniac and you'd gone silent and he was lying here in the house he grew up in with no idea what you were thinking and he still, genuinely, did not regret it. Which was new information about himself. He'd expected to feel more like he'd made a mistake and instead he just felt like someone who'd finally said out loud the thing that had been true for a long time.

The silence still sucked, though, that part wasn't better with context. But the thing underneath the silence was solid in a way it hadn't felt before, and he lay there on day three and looked at the ceiling of the room he'd slept in since he was a kid and thought, okay, I love her, that's just a true thing, and whatever she does with it is her thing to do, but I'm done pretending it's a question.

So Jake stopped pretending. And I know this sounds clean and decisive, but it was neither of those things. What it actually looked like was Jake sitting at his childhood desk at eleven at night opening a notes app and typing things I could say to her and then staring at the blank page for twenty minutes before writing one bullet point and deleting it. He tried writing a letter, an actual letter with pen and paper, which lasted about four sentences before he read it back and physically cringed at himself and folded it into eighths and put it in the bottom of his bag where it would never see daylight again. The sentences had been fine, objectively, they just sounded like him trying to sound like someone who wrote letters, which was worse than just sounding like himself.

He watched a movie the next afternoon because he had nothing else to do and his mom had suggested it and it turned out to be a romantic comedy, which under normal circumstances he would've been fine with but in his current state of mind he watched with the attentiveness of someone studying for an exam. It was Crazy, Stupid, Love, and he'd seen it before but not like this, not with this level of critical analysis and thought that it would not work for him because the grand gesture thing required a certain kind of confidence he didn't currently have and also a soundtrack, and real life didn't come with a soundtrack, and without the soundtrack it was just a guy standing somewhere looking hopefully at a girl and that was just a regular tuesday. (But if real life had a soundtrack, he would've picked Mistletoe by Justin Bieber, even though it was spring, and not Christmas).

He watched another one the following day because apparently this was his life now. This one was 10 Things I Hate About You, his sister had put on and he'd stayed for because he had nothing better to do, and there's that part where Heath Ledger sends Julia Stiles a delivery of flowers at school, this whole thing, very public, very committed, with Can't Take My Eyes Off You playing in the background – and he thought about flowers with genuine seriousness before concluding that showing up to your hometown with a bouquet for a girl you'd been sleeping with for three years without ever officially dating was so tonally confused that no flower arrangement could survive it. What did the flowers even say? Hey, I said I love you out a car window and drove away, here are some peonies. No, dude, absolutely not. Also Heath Ledger had also paid a marching band to serenade her on a football field and Jake was not doing that either, he had limits.

He thought about texting, but texting felt small for what this was. He thought about a voice note and then immediately dismissed it because he'd once sent a voice note instead of a text by accident and the experience had been traumatic enough that he'd never fully recovered.

Eventually, Jake picked up his phone and stared at the screen for a solid ten minutes deciding what to do with it. Calling had its own energy he wasn't sure he was ready to sustain, you call someone and they pick up and then you have to have something to say in real time with no editing with no backspace, no fourteen minutes to collect yourself first. Facetime was worse because then you'd see his face, and his face lately had the specific quality of someone who had spent four days watching romantic comedies and writing letters he was never going to send, and he didn't think that communicated the right thing.

He sat there long enough that his screen went dark and he had to unlock it again, which felt like a sign that he needed to just pick something and do it. So he called you because the thinking hadn't produced anything useful in four days. It rang twice and you picked it up. "Hey," you said, normal, like nothing.

"Hey," he said, and settled back against his headboard and felt something in his chest unclench slightly just at the sound of your voice, which was embarrassing and also completely out of his control.

"How's home?" you asked.

"Good," he said. "My mom's been cooking every single meal like I've been away for a year, I've had a full lunch and dinner every day since I got here, I physically cannot say no to her."

"That sounds amazing actually." You said, and Jake could sense you smiling on the other side.

"It is, I'm not complaining, I'm just saying my body is not used to this schedule anymore." He shifted against the headboard. "She made her carrot cake yesterday, with the chocolate frosting."

"Oh my god," you said, more invested. "I love that cake."

"I know, she's making another one before I leave so I can take some back with me."

"Yeah you better," you said. "God, your mom," you said, in the tone of someone genuinely fond of a person. "I love everything she makes."

"I told her that, she said she'd cook for you when you –" he stopped. When you what, Jake. When you come over, which presupposes a version of this situation that hadn't been discussed. He of course corrected smoothly enough. "She said she'd make more of it."

You either didn't notice or chose not to notice, and either way you let it go, and he appreciated it. You told him about your days, and your days sounded genuinely good – Jay had arrived the day before and you'd watched movies until two in the morning, which he absolutely tracked as a Jay thing, and you'd taken the family dog out twice a day and apparently the dog had gotten dramatically more chaotic since you'd been at school, and that took up a full three minutes of conversation. You'd gone to the Target near your house because your mom needed things and you'd ended up wandering for forty minutes buying nothing, which was the Target experience. You'd seen two friends from high school, one of whom had a baby now and that fact had done something strange to your concept of time, and one of whom was exactly the same as at seventeen and that had done a different strange thing to your concept of time.

He told you about his days, and that was a creative exercise because his days had consisted almost entirely of overthinking and romantic comedies, so he gave you the surface version like helping his dad with some stuff around the house, going for a run, and seeing an old friend from school for an hour. All technically true. Jake did not mention the letter. Jake would never mention the letter.

And then there was a pause and Jake looked at the ceiling and thought, okay, just say the thing, you've been doing nothing but thinking for days and the thinking hasn't helped, just say the thing. "Hey," he said. "I miss you."

He heard you go slightly quiet. "I miss you too, Jake," you said, and your voice was soft and straightforward about it.

"Can I come through on the way back? I can like, stop and get you and we drive back together." He said it casually because that was the only register he had left, the planned approach having long since been abandoned. "If that's okay."

"Yeah," you said. "That's okay."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." And there was something in your voice that he couldn't fully name over the phone but that sounded like it had been waiting, like you'd been in your hometown watching movies with your brother and walking a chaotic dog and going to Target and carrying something around the whole time, the same way he'd been carrying it. He didn't know that for sure, but it sounded like that. "And then we can go to the best Wendy's in the state again," you said.

So on Saturday morning, Jake woke up earlier than he needed to, and that was not a thing he did voluntarily under normal circumstances but he was already awake at seven thirty staring at the ceiling and there was no going back to sleep after that so he just got up. He showered, packed his bag, ate the breakfast his mom had made before he could say he wasn't hungry, accepted the tupperware of carrot cake she handed him at the door and got in the car.

The drive to your hometown was about forty minutes and he spent most of it thinking about what he was going to say, which was a thing he'd been doing for a week and which had not produced results yet but his brain was apparently committed to trying one more time. He ran through versions of it like the direct version, where he just said look, I meant what I said, here's what I want, what do you want. The casual version, where he eased into it through normal conversation and let it arrive naturally. The version where he just said nothing and let the drive do whatever it was going to do and trusted that you'd both know what needed to happen.

Jake didn't love any of them, but he was twenty minutes away and the options weren't improving so he was going to have to pick one and commit. He pulled onto your street and saw your house and his brain (that had been running scenarios for forty minutes) went quiet like it just stopped producing options and left him with whatever was actually there.

You were outside already, sitting on the front steps with your bag next to you, and you looked up when his car pulled up and stood and got inside to grab something, and then he saw Jay come out the front door behind you, jacket on, hands in his pockets, and Jake thought, ah. Of course. Obviously.

He got out of the car. "Hey man," he said to Jay.

"Hey," Jay said, and he was doing a thing with his face that was neutral enough to be readable only if you knew him, which Jake did.

"You need a ride back?" Jake asked, because it was the polite thing to ask and also because he genuinely had no idea what else to open with.

"Nah, I got my car," Jay said. "I'm leaving later anyway." He picked up your bag and put it in Jake's trunk. Jake and Jay were standing in the driveway and Jake became very aware of the fact that this was a thing that was happening. Jay looked at him. "She really likes you, you know," Jay said.

Jake felt something land in his chest. "I really like her too," he said.

"Yeah, I know," Jay said, like it was obvious, like it had been obvious for a long time and he was just stating it for the record. "How long has this been going on? Like two, three years?"

"Yeah," Jake said. "Something like that."

Jay nodded slowly. Then he said, "you could've just told me, bro. I'm not an idiot."

"I know you're not."

"You've been acting like I wasn't gonna notice my sister basically living in your place."

"She doesn't live in my –"

"She has a charger and a toothbrush there, Jake."

"That's not –" Jake stopped. "Okay."

Jay looked at him for a second and then did something that was almost a smile. "I'm not gonna do a whole thing about it," he said. "She's older than me, she can do whatever she wants, I'm just saying. Next time skip the three years of sneaking around and just talk to me like a normal human being."

"Yeah," Jake said. "That's fair."

"It's very fair," Jay said. "I had to find out from Heeseung's girlfriend, not ideal, you know."

"I know, I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry, just –" Jay gestured vaguely at the situation, at the car, at all of it. "Figure it out alright? Like actually figuring it out."

"Yeah, that's the plan," Jake said.

"Good," Jay said, and that was apparently the whole thing, because he picked up his coffee from the porch railing and looked at his phone and the conversation was over in the way that conversations with Jay ended when he'd said what he meant and didn't need to keep going. Jake stood there and thought, that was the most reasonable that interaction could have possibly gone, and also, I probably should have just talked to him like two years ago.

The front door opened and you came back out with your charger in hand slightly out of breath, looking between the two of them with the expression of someone calculating how much had been said in the last two minutes. "What," you said.

"Nothing," both of them said, at the same time, which was not suspicious at all.

You looked at Jake. He looked at you. "Huh, okay," you said slowly, and went around to the passenger side. Jay caught Jake's eye over the roof of the car before he got in, and did the thing with his face that said I mean it, figure it out, and Jake nodded once, and that was that.

He pulled out of your street and you were putting your seatbelt on and pairing your phone to his car's bluetooth with the familiarity of someone who had been a passenger in this car enough times to have opinions about the music, and Jake drove and watched the road and thought about what Jay had said, she really likes you, said like it was a fact he'd been sitting on for a while and had finally decided to put down somewhere.

And then you turned to say something to him and he looked at you for a second before looking back at the road, and he understood, in that moment, with the tupperware of carrot cake in the backseat and Jay's voice still in his head and hours of highway ahead of him, exactly why he'd said it out the car window without thinking. It wasn't a slip, it wasn't the kind of thing that comes out wrong; it had come out exactly right, in exactly the right direction, because it was just true. Jake loved you and every time he saw you it was there, this simple, inconvenient, load bearing fact, and last week it had just gotten out before he could catch it, which was maybe the most honest thing he'd done in three years.

"What did Jay say to you," you said, narrowing your eyes at him.

"Nothing," he said.

"Come on, I know he said something."

"He just said to drive safe."

"He absolutely did not say that."

"He said that… and other things."

You looked at him for a long moment. He kept his eyes on the road and tried to look like a person who was not thinking about being in love with you, which was a thing he'd been attempting with mixed results for approximately three years and was not about to crack the code on now. "Other things like what?" you asked.

"I'll tell you at Wendy's," he said.

You made a face. "But that's so far away."

"Twenty minutes."

"Jake."

"Twenty minutes, baby," he said, and turned up the music, and you huffed and looked out the window and he drove and thought, okay, twenty minutes, and then the Wendy's, and then whatever comes after that. He could do twenty minutes.

Jake pulled in and you both ordered at the drive through and he parked facing the road and you ate in the car the way you always ate in the car, just the two of you and the food and the radio on low. You stole his fries before you'd finished your own. You were working through your burger when something dripped and he reached over without thinking and wiped your chin with his thumb, and you went slightly still for a second and he didn't move his hand away immediately, just let it stay there against your jaw for a second, and you looked at him with your burger still in your hands and he leaned over and kissed you, soft and easy, and you kissed him back and you tasted like french fries and he didn't care at all.

He pulled back just enough to look at you. You had that expression that you got sometimes, the open one, the one that didn't have the usual layer of deflection over it, and he thought about how much he liked that face specifically, and then thought about how he had approximately a hundred thoughts like that a day and had been filing them away for years. "Okay," you said, settling back in your seat. "Are you going to tell me what you and my brother talked about?"

"He said he already knew," Jake said after a second. "About us. He just wanted me to know that he knew."

You made the face that meant you were not surprised. "Of course he knew."

"He said he had to find out from Heeseung's girlfriend."

"Oh god," you said.

"Yeah." He smiled and reached over and stole one of your fries, you watched him do it with an expression of betrayal that was entirely performed. "He also said something else," Jake said.

"What?"

He leaned back in his seat, looking at you, and let himself be a little smug about it because he'd earned it. "He said you really like me."

You opened your mouth and closed it. "He did not say that."

"He did."

"No, he did not."

"He really did," Jake said, enjoying this more than was strictly necessary. "Very straightforward about it. Just, she really likes you, you know." Jake mimicked Jay's voice.

"Oh my god," you said, turning to look out the windshield, and your ears had gone slightly pink which he was also filing away. "I cannot believe him. Or you."

"What? I thought it was helpful information," Jake said while he grabbed your hand.

"I'm sure you did," you said flatly.

"Very useful," he said. "Really rounded out my morning."

"Jake, I swear to god –"

He laughed and reached over and tucked a piece of hair behind your ear and you stopped mid sentence and looked at him, still flustered in the way you rarely let yourself be, and he kept his hand there against the side of your face and felt the conversation shift into something quieter. "But I told him something too," he said. "That was also true."

Your expression changed, just slightly. "What?"

"That I really like you too," he said. "Which you know. But I wanted it on record with your brother, so."

"Jake…" you said, soft, a little warning in it, the way you said his name when you were about to close off, when you felt something getting close and your instinct was to redirect it.

"Let me say something," Jake said, and his voice was easy but he meant it, and you heard that he meant it because you went quiet and looked at him and didn't redirect, so he took a breath. "I've been trying to figure out for a week how to say this the right way," he said. "I wrote an actual letter and it was bad, like it sucked. I watched like three romantic comedies looking for ideas and none of them were applicable, and oh my God, I even thought about flowers –"

You blinked. "Flowers?!"

"I decided against it."

"Oh."

"The point is," he said, "I've been making this complicated for days and it's actually not that complicated. I said what I said last week because I meant it and I've meant it for a long time and I'm done pretending I don't." He looked at you, at your face in the afternoon light, at the open expression you were still wearing despite your best efforts. "I love you. That's it. That's the whole thing. I'm not asking you to say it back right now, I'm not trying to make you feel like you have to do anything with it, I just – I'm done not saying it. It's been true for long enough that it feels stupid to keep it in my head."

The car was very quiet. Outside, a truck passed on the highway. The radio was playing something neither of you was listening to. You were looking at him with an expression he hadn't seen on your face before, or maybe he had but not this clearly, not without the usual layer of armor over it. Your eyes were a little bright and you blinked once and looked down at your lap and then back up at him, and he waited.

"I hate that you said it and drove away," you said finally, and your voice was a little unsteady.

"I know, I'm sorry," he said. "In my defense, it came out before I decided to say it."

"That's not a defense."

"I know," he said, softer. "I know it's not." He reached over and took your hand where it was sitting in your lap and held it, and you let him, and your fingers curled into his. "I'm saying it now though. Properly. To your face." Jake smiled when you looked up at him. "I love you."

You were still a little bright eyed and you said, quiet and plain, "I love you too, Jake."

He heard it and his brain did something that wasn't quite a thought, more like a full system restart, just a second of complete blank before everything came back online at once. You'd said it back, plainly, to his face, in a Wendy's parking lot on a saturday, and he sat there for approximately three seconds just holding that fact in both hands like he was making sure it was real.

And then he kissed you. Not on the mouth first, he kissed your cheek, and then your other cheek, and then your forehead, and then the side of your face, just going at it, and you started giggling, trying to lean back and not quite managing it because he followed you. "Jake –" you said, still laughing. He kissed your cheek again. "What is happening –"

"Nothing," he said, into your cheek.

"You're insane," you said, but you were giggling now, the kind that you couldn't control, and your hand had come up and was sort of half heartedly pushing at his shoulder while the other one was holding onto his jacket, which was contradictory and he appreciated it.

He pulled back enough to look at you, your face all open and laughing, and he felt so straightforwardly happy about it that he couldn't do anything except be honest. "What? I'm in love, bro, damn." he said.

You stared at him. "So I'm your bro now."

"No," he said, "you're my girl, and I'm pampering my girl with little kisses, those are different things."

"Pampering your girl?" you repeated.

"Yes," he said, and kissed your nose, and you scrunched it and laughed again. "You deserve little kisses. I have three years of little kisses to make up for and I'm very behind," he said, very seriously. "I have a deficit."

"You are so –" you started, and then stopped, and were looking at him with that smile that was softer and he looked back at you and felt the thing in his chest. "Say that again," you said.

"What, that I have a deficit –"

"No," you said. "The other thing."

"That you're my girl?"

"Yeah," you said, quiet.

"You're my girl," he said. "If you want to be." You laughed a little and looked down, and he watched you sit with it for a second, this thing that had been true for so long that naming it should've felt redundant and somehow still felt enormous, and then he said, "Come on, baby, we gotta communicate," because you'd gone quiet and quiet with you could mean anything and he needed to know which kind of quiet this was.

You looked up at him and smiled, and it was the unguarded one. "Yes," you said. "I want to be your girl."

He felt it all the way through. "Yeah?"

"Yes, Jake," you said. "I'm tired of pretending I'm not ready for it. I want you."

He stared at you. "For real? You wanna be my girlfriend?"

"I want to be your girlfriend," you said, a little laugh in it, like you were trying the words on and finding they fit. "I've wanted to be your girlfriend for a really long time and I've been really stupid about it."

"We've both been really stupid about it," he said.

"Yeah but I was stupider."

"I asked you if you liked twinks because I was jealous of Sangwon," he said.

You pointed at him. "Okay, it was even."

Jake laughed and kissed you again, properly this time, and you kissed him back with your hand in his jacket and you were kissing at a Wendy's parking lot, and he couldn't have cared less because you were his girlfriend now and that was the only relevant information. He pulled back and looked at you and you were smiling into the kiss the way people smile when they're too happy to keep a straight face, and he thought, I have been in love with you since I was nineteen years old and you gave me water at a party and I've been an absolute idiot about it ever since and somehow we still ended up here, and somehow here was exactly right.

"Hi," that's all Jake managed to say.

"Hi," you said back.

"Hi, girlfriend."

You covered your face with your hand. "Oh my god."

"Hi, my girlfriend, my baby, my precious," he said again, delighted with himself.

"You're the worst," you said, into your hand.

"You literally just agreed to date me," he said. "You did that. You made this choice."

You looked at him through your fingers, laughing, and said "I know" in the tone of someone who had absolutely no regrets, and Jake thought, aw shit here we go again, but this time he meant it like a beginning.

You always think you're smarter than you really are at 21, and that's exactly what Jake Sim thought he was. And look, he wasn't wrong, not entirely. He was smart enough to know what he was getting into, smart enough to see it coming, the problem was that being smart about something and doing the right thing about it are two completely different skills, and Jake had only developed one of them at 21, and it wasn't the second one.

He's 24 now. And here's what 24 looks like, for the record: it looks like knowing your limits and mostly respecting them. It looks like going to bed at a reasonable hour without feeling like you're missing something. It looks like three years of the most circular, exhausting, wonderful situationship of his life finally becoming something with a name, which happened in a Wendy's parking lot on a Saturday afternoon, which is not how Jake would have written it if he'd been given creative control over the situation, but which turned out to be exactly right anyway.

For Jake, being twenty four looks like you. Specifically, you in his passenger seat, which is where you've always been, except now when you steal his fries he calls you his girlfriend and you tell him to shut up and he does it again. It looks like your charger in his car and your hoodie on his couch and the specific way you say his name when you're trying not to laugh at something he said, which is a sound he's been collecting since he was nineteen years old at a party with a cup of water and an audience of exactly one. It looks like waking up and you're still there, which still gets him every time, which he suspects will keep getting him for a long time, and which he has decided to just let get him instead of filing it away somewhere.

The thing about being 24 and not 21 is that you stop pretending the things that matter don't matter. You stop performing indifference about the stuff you're actually not indifferent about. You get tired of the gap between what's true and what you're saying, and at some point the gap gets small enough that closing it feels less like bravery and more like just, finally, telling the truth. Jake told the truth out a car window and drove away and it was embarrassing and it was worth it and he'd do it again.

He knew, on some level, that this was always where it was going. Not the Wendy's specifically, but the version where you're his and he's yours and the loop finally closes into something that isn't a loop anymore. He'd known it since he was 21 and smart and absolutely full of shit about what he was and wasn't capable of feeling. He'd just taken the scenic route to get here, which, given that the scenic route included three years of you, he couldn't bring himself to regret.

So yeah, Jake Sim thought he was smarter than he really was at 21. Turns out he wasn't smart enough to avoid falling in love with you, wasn't smart enough to keep it casual, wasn't smart enough to protect himself from any of it. But it was the best thing that ever happened to Jake Sim, honestly.

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