pairing ⋆₊˚⊹⋆˙⟡ sim jaeyun x f!reader ── .✦ angst, exes with benefits, exes to friends to ???, smut (none in this preview!) , ft. friend group!enha, jake has one sided beef w jungwon wc ꩜⊹✎ᝰ.ᐟ 3k (preview wc!)
synopsis ₊˚⊹⋆˙⟡ sim jaeyun broke up with the love of his life eight months ago. sim jaeyun is doing just fine. or at least, he's gotten very good at saying he is. unfortunately, the truth is a little more complicated when the person you're trying to get over still exists in your everyday life, still shares the same friends, still shows up to game night, still laughs at your jokes, and somehow still feels like your best friend. so when one reckless night becomes another, then another, then another, jake finds himself caught between the future he thought he wanted and the person he can't seem to stop choosing. because some people don't just leave your life. some become the place you're always trying to get back to.
₊˚⊹⋆˙⟡ hiii everybody ok,,,posting this preview so i can force myself to finish this soon & post it officially hehe but literally last week i was at 3k words and rn it's sitting at 25k and counting...so she's gonna be a hefty one but i'm also really excited for this one and also just kinda love jake in this ugh,,,been in my emotions lately for no reason whatsoever im just a #girl so this one is gonna be for my angst lovers & guys & gals with attachment issues bc me too. anyways! im in ireland rn and still whipping her up so she should be done soon lemme know if u wanna be tagged when she's out...mwah <3
the party is loud in the way parties stop being fun after twenty two and start being endurance tests—bass vibrating too hard through the floorboards, red cups everywhere, that specific smell of cheap vodka and someone's cologne that was trying too hard. jake doesn't even fully remember how you all ended up here, it was something along the lines of all five of you lazily sprawled across jay's living room with a movie no one was watching playing in the background until jay mentioned something about knowing a guy who knows a guy who was throwing a house warming party even though he moved in over six months ago and now here we are.
jake had been doing alright the first hour, he'd taken two shots with sunghoon and heeseung just to feel something, let jay rope him into some dumb drinking game that mostly involved shouting and losing, and nodded easily when you told the group you were going to go say hi to some people you recognized. he didn't think about it too much, which was a good habit he found himself trying to get better at more recently—not overthinking every little thing you did, not letting his eyes follow you across rooms like they still had the right to.
but then everything and anything he learned about good habits was thrown right out the window the second he looks over and searches for you, solely only because he's being a good friend, he tells himself. just making sure you were okay, just checking, nothing more. the lie sits easy on his tongue even as his eyes scan across the crowded room, past the clusters of people and the haze of spilled drinks and cigarette smoke drifting in from the balcony. he finds you near the kitchen island, leaning against the counter in that comfortable, familiar way, talking to yang jungwon.
now, yang jungwon was the kind of guy who just kind of existed to jake, a friend, but the kind that never really orbited in his life. he was younger, a little removed from the group, the kind of person whose life didn't collide with jake's enough for a solid, everyday friendship to form. to jake, he was always kind of like background noise, someone he used to nod at across campus, someone he sees at parties and gives a quick 'hey' to before moving on and that's it. never someone significant enough to warrant a second thought in jake's head.
until jake looks over and finds you looking at jungwon. and then what occurs in jake's head isn't only a second thought, but a third, a fourth and maybe the beginning of a fifth. all of which are circling the same stupid, irrational thing: jake hates yang jungwon.
because now here he is, watching the way jungwon leans in a little closer when he speaks, the way your hand brushes against his arm when you make a point. the way you look relaxed in a way jake hasn't seen in a while, shoulders soft, smile easy, the kind of open that used to be reserved for early nights and late mornings when it was just the two of you and the rest of the world felt far away.
and the worst part is that jake couldn't even be mad at jungwon. jungwon, who was all bright smiles and sweet and a little shy and looked at you like he was trying not to look too hard. jungwon, the kind of person who probably remembered birthdays without being reminded and asked follow up questions about people's days. jungwon, the kind of person who probably returned rogue shopping carts in the grocery store's parking lot. jungwon, who didn't know that the last time you laughed like that was because jake said something stupid on purpose just to watch your eyes crinkle at the corners in that way that always made his chest feel too full.
that's the funny thing about perspective. because here's the thing. jake had been looking at the breakup entirely from one side of it, his side. the side where he lost you. which, objectively speaking, was terrible enough on its own. but still, loss is a strangely selfish thing. because when someone loses something, they almost center themselves around the surrounding artifacts of what is no longer theirs. for jake, it was the calls he didn't get anymore, or the newly cold and empty space beside him in bed. or like how he still pauses in grocery aisles in front of snacks he didn't even like because buying them for you became so automatic that not buying them felt stranger. he spent so long mourning the absence of you that he never really stopped to consider what came after.
because yes, you're now his ex-girlfriend. yes, the relationship was over. yes, he had been the one to end it. all of those were true. but there was another truth too, the one that he unfortunately believes in more than the former—that the two of you had loved each other for three and a half years. and that doesn't just disappear. there were entire pieces of one another that would always belong to that relationship, memories nobody else would understand, inside jokes nobody else would find funny. versions of yourselves that only existed because the other person had been there to witness them. it was something sacred, in a way. sacred and special and it belonged to you and him and him and you and some small, selfish part of jake maybe took comfort in that. because even after everything, it still felt like yours and his. like nobody else could ever touch it, understand it, or even come near to it.
but then jake looks across the room and sees you laughing and suddenly, a realization hits him hard enough to make his stomach drop. that you weren't just something he lost. you were someone who would keep going, someone who would keep living. someone who would keep collecting new memories and new experiences and new people. and someone who would eventually fall in love again and be loved. because, of course. why wouldn't you be? you were beautifully soft, kind, impossibly easy to love.
the thought sat heavy in his chest like a bruise that he couldn't stop pressing. jake was all at once suddenly and painfully aware that not only did he take you out of his future, but he had given you back to the rest of the world. that the version of you he still carried in his head wouldn't just be his anymore. that one day it would belong to someone else. someone who would look at you for five minutes and immediately understand why jake had loved you for three and a half years. someone like jungwon, who was sweet and safe and looking at you like he already knew exactly how lucky that would make him.
jake's fingers tightened around his cup until the plastic creaked. and jake usually believes in being the bigger person, he genuinely does. to be mature, to stay put right where he is and let the group have a normal night, to let you have a normal night without making it about the fact that he still notices every little thing about you.
jake takes a long sip from his drink. then another. then another. as if enough of whatever concoction this is in his cup might somehow make him stop thinking. and obviously, because we all know how this goes, it doesn't. if anything, it makes the spiral worse, because now he's really watching. and once jake starts watching you, he's kind of screwed.
he watches the way you're smiling, real and unguarded, the way you lightly shove jungwon's shoulder after something he says, the way he grins, the way you grin back. and suddenly jake is very aware that he hates this. which is ridiculous because, really, nothing is happening. because jungwon is jungwon. because you're allowed to talk to whoever you want. because jake is twenty-three years old, not twelve. because he broke up with you. because he broke up with you. because he—
the thought doesn't get to finish itself. jake is already moving. already halfway across the room before his brain catches up. because apparently all that maturity he spent the last eight months building could be taken out behind a shed and shot the second he saw you smiling at somebody else.
and before he knows it, before he could let himself think about what he's doing for even a second, he's right there against you, his arm sliding around your waist before either of you could react, fingers spreading possessive and familiar over the curve of your hip like they had every right to be there. the warmth of your body against his side hits him like a memory he didn't realize he wasn't ready for. and for the first time in eight months, for one stupid, selfish second, jake felt like he was home again.
"there you are," he says, low enough that only you could hear the small crack in his voice. he then presses a quick, deliberate kiss to your temple, the kind of small, possessive thing that used to make you roll your eyes and smile at the same time. the kind of thing that he's done a thousand times before that used to mean absolutely nothing but now means entirely too much.
everything in your body immediately goes still and jake feels it. he feels the way you freeze beneath his arm, the sharp inhale you try to hide. he feels jungwon's eyes snap to him. then yours. but jake's committed now. or perhaps more accurately, he's already ruined his own life.
"been looking everywhere for you."
there's a horrifying two seconds of silence where nobody says anything.
jungwon then blinks, his eyes flicking between the two of you with that polite confusion that says he's realizing in real time that he's stepping into something he didn't really have the full context for.
"oh—shit, sorry, i didn't know you guys got back—"
"yeah, yeah we did," jake cut in smoothly, smiling like he had everything totally under control and didn't just lie right through his teeth with ease. your head whips towards him. jake pointedly does not look at you. instead, his thumb strokes once, slow and instinctive against your hip under the hem of your top before he could stop it. "right, baby?"
you don't answer right away. the music pulses around you, the lights catch your eyes, and for a second jake recognizes that look and that's when he realizes he's absolutely done for, that he pretty much dug his own grave and is actively getting in it.
jungwon then backs up slightly, mumbling something polite about catching up later before he finally turns and disappears into the crowd. the second he's out of sight, you spin in jake's hold, shoving his chest with both hands, and the look on your face is the one he had been waiting for and dreading in equal measure.
"what the fuck, jake?"
jake blinks at you slowly, like his brain was still catching up to what his body had done. like he's only just realizing that he crossed an invisible line that he laid down himself and then proceeded to sprint fifty feet past it.
"i thought we were good," you say, your voice tight as you look up at him, eyes wide and filled with the familiar mix of frustration and hurt that he knows all too well.
jake's jaw flexes, like he was trying hard to hold back every single, selfish, ugly emotion he'd been suffering with ever since you walked out of those apartment doors eight months ago and took half of him with you.
"we are good." the words come out too fast, too defensive. he heard it and hated it.
you let out a short, disbelieving laugh, "right. yeah. because that was totally normal."
he hesitates for a moment, the small distance forcing his eyes to flick down to your mouth for half a second before he forced them back up.
"c'mon, i mean…you—" the words stopped. for a second he just stands there, just looking at you, accepting that this is the closest he's been to you ever since eight months ago and this could very well be the last time he ever will be. just looking at you and the way your lips press together like you were holding back something much bigger than anger. and then at the very, very obvious fact that even now, even when upset at him, you still haven't stepped back. neither of you have. eight months of carefully curated distance and here you were again, letting him hold you like this in the middle of a crowded room.
"jungwon," he says finally, quieter. "really?"
you quirk a brow, and jake can't tell if it was pure annoyance or that infuriating mix of annoyance and amusement you always got when he was being ridiculous. your hands still stay fisted in the front of his shirt, not pushing anymore but definitely not letting go either. at this point the space was pretty much near nonexistent, his arm still curved around your waist, your knees almost brushing, the heat of him bleeding onto you like it used to when you'd stand in his kitchen at two in the morning.
"and what's wrong with jungwon," you ask, voice deceptively calm. and this is when jake realizes right then and there that eight months must've meant absolutely nothing because just the way your voice sounds, just the way you're looking at him, is already unraveling him in ways in ways he tried really hard to unlearn.
his thumb moves without permission, a quick stroke against your hip, restless and desperate. "he's a kid."
"he's like a year younger than me," you shot back, tilting your head, the movement bringing your faces a fraction even closer.
jake's jaw tightens. "he's still in school."
you stare at him for a long second, something dangerous and challenging sparkling behind your eyes. then the corner of your mouth twitches, not quite a smile, but close enough to make his stomach flip.
"i'm gonna pretend you didn't just say that," you say, voice laced with that teasing edge that always used to get under his skin in the best way. "since when did you become such a possessive old man, jaeyun?"
jake closes his eyes at the sound of his name rolling off your tongue, trying his hardest to pretend it didn't hit him the way it always did whenever you called him that. he sighs, the sound quiet and exhausted, in that defeated kind of way that tells you this isn't coming from completely out of no where.
"c'mon, y/n," his voice is softer now, almost pleading. "i know you."
"right," you scoff, but your stance falters slightly. "so you know what's best for me, right? for the both of us?"
and that lands somewhere. somewhere deep and hard and admittedly more vulnerably raw than he wishes it had. his fingers tighten slightly around you, his breath hitching for a moment before he catches himself.
"c'mon..don't be like that," he murmurs, eyes searching yours like he was looking for an exit he already knew didn't exist. his hand slides a little higher against you, his palm now flat against the warm skin of your lower back. "you know i'm not trying to—"
"i'm not being anything," you cut in, voice quieter now but still edged with that defensive frustration, "you're the one who decided to make it weird. you're the one who came over here and—" your voice breaks off with a shaky laugh that sounded dangerously close to a sob. you shake your head then, eyes now shining. "you know what, this is stupid. whatever."
a beat of silence stretches again between you, jake still unmoving, holding you right there against him. your bodies were nearly flush now in the cramped room, your knee slotted between his thighs, every point of contact painfully impossible to ignore.
then, soft and almost reluctant, you whisper, "let go of me, yun."
he swallows hard, voice low and defeated when he finally answers, the words slipping out before he could stop them.
"i kinda really don't want to."
the confession hangs there in the small space between your bodies, the truth heavy and honest in a way that solved absolutely nothing and somehow made everything worse. you let out another small scoff, but despite yourself you still don't pull away. you don't push him. you just stay right there, letting him hold you, neither of you making any real effort to create distance.
then, your eyes meet his in the dim party light, dark and shining and full of the same messy, desperate thing he was feeling. you break the silence first.
"how drunk are you?" you ask, voice barely above a whisper.
"not at all."
you pause, studying him. your gaze traces his face like you were memorizing it, like you were actively aware you were making a mistake but couldn't bring yourself to stop. then, slowly, hesitantly, one of your hands slid up from his shirt, fingers trailing along his collarbone before curving around the back of his neck, finding the ends of his hair automatically, mindlessly playing with the strands in that familiar way that always used to make his breath catch.
your eyes then meet his again and something flashed between you, something tired and hurt and full of everything you weren't supposed to feel anymore.
"sober enough to drive me home?" you ask after a moment.
"yes ma'am."
and for another agonizingly long second you just watch him again, eyes searching like you were waiting for one of you to be smart enough to stop this. to choose self-preservation over whatever this still was between you.
"liar."
jake's breath hitches. a small, low chuckle escapes him.
"would i lie to you?"
and when jake and you leave the party and end up at his car parked a few blocks away, what happens next is, what jake would later say, probably not his brightest idea.
pairing ⋆₊˚⊹⋆˙⟡ sim jaeyun x f!reader ── .✦ angst, exes with benefits, exes to friends to ???, smut (none in this preview!) , ft. friend group!enha, jake has one sided beef w jungwon wc ꩜⊹✎ᝰ.ᐟ 3k (preview wc!)
synopsis ₊˚⊹⋆˙⟡ sim jaeyun broke up with the love of his life eight months ago. sim jaeyun is doing just fine. or at least, he's gotten very good at saying he is. unfortunately, the truth is a little more complicated when the person you're trying to get over still exists in your everyday life, still shares the same friends, still shows up to game night, still laughs at your jokes, and somehow still feels like your best friend. so when one reckless night becomes another, then another, then another, jake finds himself caught between the future he thought he wanted and the person he can't seem to stop choosing. because some people don't just leave your life. some become the place you're always trying to get back to.
₊˚⊹⋆˙⟡ hiii everybody ok,,,posting this preview so i can force myself to finish this soon & post it officially hehe but literally last week i was at 3k words and rn it's sitting at 25k and counting...so she's gonna be a hefty one but i'm also really excited for this one and also just kinda love jake in this ugh,,,been in my emotions lately for no reason whatsoever im just a #girl so this one is gonna be for my angst lovers & guys & gals with attachment issues bc me too. anyways! im in ireland rn and still whipping her up so she should be done soon lemme know if u wanna be tagged when she's out...mwah <3
the party is loud in the way parties stop being fun after twenty two and start being endurance tests—bass vibrating too hard through the floorboards, red cups everywhere, that specific smell of cheap vodka and someone's cologne that was trying too hard. jake doesn't even fully remember how you all ended up here, it was something along the lines of all five of you lazily sprawled across jay's living room with a movie no one was watching playing in the background until jay mentioned something about knowing a guy who knows a guy who was throwing a house warming party even though he moved in over six months ago and now here we are.
jake had been doing alright the first hour, he'd taken two shots with sunghoon and heeseung just to feel something, let jay rope him into some dumb drinking game that mostly involved shouting and losing, and nodded easily when you told the group you were going to go say hi to some people you recognized. he didn't think about it too much, which was a good habit he found himself trying to get better at more recently—not overthinking every little thing you did, not letting his eyes follow you across rooms like they still had the right to.
but then everything and anything he learned about good habits was thrown right out the window the second he looks over and searches for you, solely only because he's being a good friend, he tells himself. just making sure you were okay, just checking, nothing more. the lie sits easy on his tongue even as his eyes scan across the crowded room, past the clusters of people and the haze of spilled drinks and cigarette smoke drifting in from the balcony. he finds you near the kitchen island, leaning against the counter in that comfortable, familiar way, talking to yang jungwon.
now, yang jungwon was the kind of guy who just kind of existed to jake, a friend, but the kind that never really orbited in his life. he was younger, a little removed from the group, the kind of person whose life didn't collide with jake's enough for a solid, everyday friendship to form. to jake, he was always kind of like background noise, someone he used to nod at across campus, someone he sees at parties and gives a quick 'hey' to before moving on and that's it. never someone significant enough to warrant a second thought in jake's head.
until jake looks over and finds you looking at jungwon. and then what occurs in jake's head isn't only a second thought, but a third, a fourth and maybe the beginning of a fifth. all of which are circling the same stupid, irrational thing: jake hates yang jungwon.
because now here he is, watching the way jungwon leans in a little closer when he speaks, the way your hand brushes against his arm when you make a point. the way you look relaxed in a way jake hasn't seen in a while, shoulders soft, smile easy, the kind of open that used to be reserved for early nights and late mornings when it was just the two of you and the rest of the world felt far away.
and the worst part is that jake couldn't even be mad at jungwon. jungwon, who was all bright smiles and sweet and a little shy and looked at you like he was trying not to look too hard. jungwon, the kind of person who probably remembered birthdays without being reminded and asked follow up questions about people's days. jungwon, the kind of person who probably returned rogue shopping carts in the grocery store's parking lot. jungwon, who didn't know that the last time you laughed like that was because jake said something stupid on purpose just to watch your eyes crinkle at the corners in that way that always made his chest feel too full.
that's the funny thing about perspective. because here's the thing. jake had been looking at the breakup entirely from one side of it, his side. the side where he lost you. which, objectively speaking, was terrible enough on its own. but still, loss is a strangely selfish thing. because when someone loses something, they almost center themselves around the surrounding artifacts of what is no longer theirs. for jake, it was the calls he didn't get anymore, or the newly cold and empty space beside him in bed. or like how he still pauses in grocery aisles in front of snacks he didn't even like because buying them for you became so automatic that not buying them felt stranger. he spent so long mourning the absence of you that he never really stopped to consider what came after.
because yes, you're now his ex-girlfriend. yes, the relationship was over. yes, he had been the one to end it. all of those were true. but there was another truth too, the one that he unfortunately believes in more than the former—that the two of you had loved each other for three and a half years. and that doesn't just disappear. there were entire pieces of one another that would always belong to that relationship, memories nobody else would understand, inside jokes nobody else would find funny. versions of yourselves that only existed because the other person had been there to witness them. it was something sacred, in a way. sacred and special and it belonged to you and him and him and you and some small, selfish part of jake maybe took comfort in that. because even after everything, it still felt like yours and his. like nobody else could ever touch it, understand it, or even come near to it.
but then jake looks across the room and sees you laughing and suddenly, a realization hits him hard enough to make his stomach drop. that you weren't just something he lost. you were someone who would keep going, someone who would keep living. someone who would keep collecting new memories and new experiences and new people. and someone who would eventually fall in love again and be loved. because, of course. why wouldn't you be? you were beautifully soft, kind, impossibly easy to love.
the thought sat heavy in his chest like a bruise that he couldn't stop pressing. jake was all at once suddenly and painfully aware that not only did he take you out of his future, but he had given you back to the rest of the world. that the version of you he still carried in his head wouldn't just be his anymore. that one day it would belong to someone else. someone who would look at you for five minutes and immediately understand why jake had loved you for three and a half years. someone like jungwon, who was sweet and safe and looking at you like he already knew exactly how lucky that would make him.
jake's fingers tightened around his cup until the plastic creaked. and jake usually believes in being the bigger person, he genuinely does. to be mature, to stay put right where he is and let the group have a normal night, to let you have a normal night without making it about the fact that he still notices every little thing about you.
jake takes a long sip from his drink. then another. then another. as if enough of whatever concoction this is in his cup might somehow make him stop thinking. and obviously, because we all know how this goes, it doesn't. if anything, it makes the spiral worse, because now he's really watching. and once jake starts watching you, he's kind of screwed.
he watches the way you're smiling, real and unguarded, the way you lightly shove jungwon's shoulder after something he says, the way he grins, the way you grin back. and suddenly jake is very aware that he hates this. which is ridiculous because, really, nothing is happening. because jungwon is jungwon. because you're allowed to talk to whoever you want. because jake is twenty-three years old, not twelve. because he broke up with you. because he broke up with you. because he—
the thought doesn't get to finish itself. jake is already moving. already halfway across the room before his brain catches up. because apparently all that maturity he spent the last eight months building could be taken out behind a shed and shot the second he saw you smiling at somebody else.
and before he knows it, before he could let himself think about what he's doing for even a second, he's right there against you, his arm sliding around your waist before either of you could react, fingers spreading possessive and familiar over the curve of your hip like they had every right to be there. the warmth of your body against his side hits him like a memory he didn't realize he wasn't ready for. and for the first time in eight months, for one stupid, selfish second, jake felt like he was home again.
"there you are," he says, low enough that only you could hear the small crack in his voice. he then presses a quick, deliberate kiss to your temple, the kind of small, possessive thing that used to make you roll your eyes and smile at the same time. the kind of thing that he's done a thousand times before that used to mean absolutely nothing but now means entirely too much.
everything in your body immediately goes still and jake feels it. he feels the way you freeze beneath his arm, the sharp inhale you try to hide. he feels jungwon's eyes snap to him. then yours. but jake's committed now. or perhaps more accurately, he's already ruined his own life.
"been looking everywhere for you."
there's a horrifying two seconds of silence where nobody says anything.
jungwon then blinks, his eyes flicking between the two of you with that polite confusion that says he's realizing in real time that he's stepping into something he didn't really have the full context for.
"oh—shit, sorry, i didn't know you guys got back—"
"yeah, yeah we did," jake cut in smoothly, smiling like he had everything totally under control and didn't just lie right through his teeth with ease. your head whips towards him. jake pointedly does not look at you. instead, his thumb strokes once, slow and instinctive against your hip under the hem of your top before he could stop it. "right, baby?"
you don't answer right away. the music pulses around you, the lights catch your eyes, and for a second jake recognizes that look and that's when he realizes he's absolutely done for, that he pretty much dug his own grave and is actively getting in it.
jungwon then backs up slightly, mumbling something polite about catching up later before he finally turns and disappears into the crowd. the second he's out of sight, you spin in jake's hold, shoving his chest with both hands, and the look on your face is the one he had been waiting for and dreading in equal measure.
"what the fuck, jake?"
jake blinks at you slowly, like his brain was still catching up to what his body had done. like he's only just realizing that he crossed an invisible line that he laid down himself and then proceeded to sprint fifty feet past it.
"i thought we were good," you say, your voice tight as you look up at him, eyes wide and filled with the familiar mix of frustration and hurt that he knows all too well.
jake's jaw flexes, like he was trying hard to hold back every single, selfish, ugly emotion he'd been suffering with ever since you walked out of those apartment doors eight months ago and took half of him with you.
"we are good." the words come out too fast, too defensive. he heard it and hated it.
you let out a short, disbelieving laugh, "right. yeah. because that was totally normal."
he hesitates for a moment, the small distance forcing his eyes to flick down to your mouth for half a second before he forced them back up.
"c'mon, i mean…you—" the words stopped. for a second he just stands there, just looking at you, accepting that this is the closest he's been to you ever since eight months ago and this could very well be the last time he ever will be. just looking at you and the way your lips press together like you were holding back something much bigger than anger. and then at the very, very obvious fact that even now, even when upset at him, you still haven't stepped back. neither of you have. eight months of carefully curated distance and here you were again, letting him hold you like this in the middle of a crowded room.
"jungwon," he says finally, quieter. "really?"
you quirk a brow, and jake can't tell if it was pure annoyance or that infuriating mix of annoyance and amusement you always got when he was being ridiculous. your hands still stay fisted in the front of his shirt, not pushing anymore but definitely not letting go either. at this point the space was pretty much near nonexistent, his arm still curved around your waist, your knees almost brushing, the heat of him bleeding onto you like it used to when you'd stand in his kitchen at two in the morning.
"and what's wrong with jungwon," you ask, voice deceptively calm. and this is when jake realizes right then and there that eight months must've meant absolutely nothing because just the way your voice sounds, just the way you're looking at him, is already unraveling him in ways in ways he tried really hard to unlearn.
his thumb moves without permission, a quick stroke against your hip, restless and desperate. "he's a kid."
"he's like a year younger than me," you shot back, tilting your head, the movement bringing your faces a fraction even closer.
jake's jaw tightens. "he's still in school."
you stare at him for a long second, something dangerous and challenging sparkling behind your eyes. then the corner of your mouth twitches, not quite a smile, but close enough to make his stomach flip.
"i'm gonna pretend you didn't just say that," you say, voice laced with that teasing edge that always used to get under his skin in the best way. "since when did you become such a possessive old man, jaeyun?"
jake closes his eyes at the sound of his name rolling off your tongue, trying his hardest to pretend it didn't hit him the way it always did whenever you called him that. he sighs, the sound quiet and exhausted, in that defeated kind of way that tells you this isn't coming from completely out of no where.
"c'mon, y/n," his voice is softer now, almost pleading. "i know you."
"right," you scoff, but your stance falters slightly. "so you know what's best for me, right? for the both of us?"
and that lands somewhere. somewhere deep and hard and admittedly more vulnerably raw than he wishes it had. his fingers tighten slightly around you, his breath hitching for a moment before he catches himself.
"c'mon..don't be like that," he murmurs, eyes searching yours like he was looking for an exit he already knew didn't exist. his hand slides a little higher against you, his palm now flat against the warm skin of your lower back. "you know i'm not trying to—"
"i'm not being anything," you cut in, voice quieter now but still edged with that defensive frustration, "you're the one who decided to make it weird. you're the one who came over here and—" your voice breaks off with a shaky laugh that sounded dangerously close to a sob. you shake your head then, eyes now shining. "you know what, this is stupid. whatever."
a beat of silence stretches again between you, jake still unmoving, holding you right there against him. your bodies were nearly flush now in the cramped room, your knee slotted between his thighs, every point of contact painfully impossible to ignore.
then, soft and almost reluctant, you whisper, "let go of me, yun."
he swallows hard, voice low and defeated when he finally answers, the words slipping out before he could stop them.
"i kinda really don't want to."
the confession hangs there in the small space between your bodies, the truth heavy and honest in a way that solved absolutely nothing and somehow made everything worse. you let out another small scoff, but despite yourself you still don't pull away. you don't push him. you just stay right there, letting him hold you, neither of you making any real effort to create distance.
then, your eyes meet his in the dim party light, dark and shining and full of the same messy, desperate thing he was feeling. you break the silence first.
"how drunk are you?" you ask, voice barely above a whisper.
"not at all."
you pause, studying him. your gaze traces his face like you were memorizing it, like you were actively aware you were making a mistake but couldn't bring yourself to stop. then, slowly, hesitantly, one of your hands slid up from his shirt, fingers trailing along his collarbone before curving around the back of his neck, finding the ends of his hair automatically, mindlessly playing with the strands in that familiar way that always used to make his breath catch.
your eyes then meet his again and something flashed between you, something tired and hurt and full of everything you weren't supposed to feel anymore.
"sober enough to drive me home?" you ask after a moment.
"yes ma'am."
and for another agonizingly long second you just watch him again, eyes searching like you were waiting for one of you to be smart enough to stop this. to choose self-preservation over whatever this still was between you.
"liar."
jake's breath hitches. a small, low chuckle escapes him.
"would i lie to you?"
and when jake and you leave the party and end up at his car parked a few blocks away, what happens next is, what jake would later say, probably not his brightest idea.
heeseung x fem! reader ⊹ ࣪ ˖⠀⠀⠀you met heeseung when you were just a kid. somehow, he was always there, until he wasn't. years later, you reunite. what starts as a long distance thing turns into and a relationship neither of you ever stopped trying to make work. the whole time, even in the good years, there's this quiet awareness underneath everything: that the distance was always there, that it never really went away, and that loving each other meant carrying that the entire time, right up until it was the thing that ended it.
→ genre: heeseung as your ex, slice of life, angst, childhood friends to lovers, long distance relationship, non-linear | → playlist: coming up roses - harry styles | wish you were here - pink floyd | less - olivia rodrigo | purple rain - prince | who knows - daniel caesar | i know the end - phoebe bridgers | pluto projector - rex orange county | → word count: 16k | !! warnings: smut scene, grief, heartbreak, oral sex (m and f receiving), protected sex, mutual breakup, bittersweet ending
HEESEUNG SPENT WAY TOO MUCH TIME THINKING ABOUT HOW LONG YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO GET OVER A BREAKUP. All of his friends had a different answer — Jay, for example, said it takes exactly half of the amount of time you spent with that person. Jungwon claimed it took one hundred beers, no matter how long that takes. Sunoo insisted you're cured the moment you survive a date without crying after. Meanwhile, Jake's method was to hit the party as soon as possible and lock eyes with whoever doesn't look away first. And well, Heeseung didn't do any of those things. He just kept wondering if grief had an expiration date or if he'd just have to distract himself from how he felt about you for the rest of his life.
Pablo Neruda once wrote: I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees. He doesn't explain what spring does exactly, he assumes you already know. Everyone has felt that combination of arrival and disruption and beauty once. Spring doesn't ease you into anything, it just shows up one day and suddenly everything that was dormant is out in the open, exposed and vivid, and you start wondering how you went from bare branches to this, without noticing the exact moment it changed.
What people miss about that line is that spring always leaves, and that's not a tragedy in the poem and Neruda doesn't treat it like one. Spring was never going to stay, that's not what spring is for. The cherry trees don't mourn the end of spring, they just stand there changed in whatever season comes next, carrying the proof of what happened to them in the way they've grown. The poem is not about the love that lasts, but about the love that makes you into something you couldn't have become alone.
You thought about that poem more than you should have. You used to turn this over in your head on the bad nights, on the nights when you'd done the math too many times and kept arriving at the exact same answer — that you'd been right about each other and wrong about the circumstances, and that maybe that was its own kind of love story, just not the kind that gets a second act. It helped, sometimes. Other times it felt like something you were saying to yourself in place of something you didn't have the words for yet. But you kept trying to believe that what you two had was complete even if it wasn't permanent, that it counted, that it had changed you in ways you were still discovering. That's what you told yourself when you thought too much about the end.
While you thought too much about the end, Heeseung thought too much about the beginning. You were eleven and he was twelve, his family used to visit the city sometimes, cousins on his mom's side who lived three streets from your childhood home, and one summer he showed up at the end of your block and didn't know the rules of the game everyone was playing and argued about it for twenty minutes. You remember thinking he was annoying. He remembers thinking you were the kind of kid who knew everyone's name already and made him feel like he'd arrived late to something.
You played outside until it got dark, something kids don't do anymore and you both did back then without thinking about it, just stayed out because no one had called you in yet and there was no reason to leave. What he remembers is that at some point, you ended up sitting on the curb away from the others, and he was probably talking about some stupid boyish thing, and you had this way of listening even then, chin in your hand, actually paying attention, like what he was saying mattered. Heeseung wasn't used to that, even though Heeseung was only twelve.
His family came back the next three summers. You'd spot him from your window sometimes before he spotted you, this familiar-unfamiliar face showing up at the end of your street, and you'd go downstairs like you just happened to be going outside. You'd pick up wherever you'd left off, easy in the way things are easy when you're young and don't know yet to be guarded. He brought a portable speaker one summer and you'd sit on the building steps and argue about music, mostly you telling him his taste was bad and him defending himself without much conviction.
Heeseung eventually stopped coming. His family just stopped making the trip, and you'd notice his absence the first summer and then less the second and then it was just how things were. You'd see his name on your phone sometimes, a like here, a story view there. Once, when you were sixteen, he'd commented a single emoji on a photo you posted. By the time you were almost adults you were basically strangers who knew each other's faces.
But then, one day, you were running late when you ran into him. You'd taken the wrong exit and had to double back and you were annoyed and distracted and got on the train and almost didn't look up from your phone at all. He was standing by the opposite doors with his hands in his jacket pockets and you almost didn't place him and then you did, all at once. He looked up at the same moment and that felt like something, even then.
You both figured out within about a minute into the conversation that you were going to the same concert. He showed you his ticket on his phone like proof and you laughed and said that's insane and he said I know and you looked at each other in that way you look at someone when coincidence feels a little too neat to be only coincidence. The Strokes played Someday third song in. You grabbed his arm without thinking about it and you let go of his arm and you both faced the stage and you could feel him smiling even without looking at him.
The show ended at eleven. He said so and you said so and then you both laughed because that was all there was to say. You ended up at a place nearby that was still open and you stayed there until they started stacking chairs around you and the guy behind the counter looked at you twice before you got the hint. You talked the way you talk to someone you don't really know but somehow aren't nervous around. He told you about his hometown and you told him about the last five years and it was easy in a way you couldn't fully explain, the way it sometimes is with people you knew before you knew anything, before you'd decided who you were going to be. At some point you were talking about something completely unrelated and he laughed at something you said and you thought, this is a memory I would like to keep.
Heeseung texted you when he got back to where he was staying that night. That was really fun, he wrote. You read it in bed with your phone on your chest after and thought yeah, it really was.
The next day you walked around for a long time without going anywhere specific. You showed him the street where you grew up and you stood outside your old childhood home for a minute, and Sunday came too fast. You drove him to the airport because you offered and he said yes maybe a little too quickly. The drive took almost fifty minutes and you talked the whole way, then you were there and you weren't talking anymore and you pulled up to departures, and Heeseung looked at you and you looked back, and there was something there that you didn't have a name for yet, something that felt old and new at the same time. He picked up his bag and said he'd text when he landed. You watched him walk through the sliding doors and then you sat there for a moment longer than you needed to before pulling away.
He texted when he landed. You were still awake, not because you'd been waiting, except you had been. landed safe, he sent. Then a minute later: hey. for what it's worth, running into you was the best thing that happened to me this year.
After that, talking to Heeseung just became part of your day. He'd send you something he saw on the way to work, you'd reply hours later with something completely unrelated, and somehow that would turn into an hour of back and forth that neither of you had scheduled. You'd fall asleep mid conversation and wake up to three messages he'd sent after, the last one always something like okay you're asleep. talk tomorrow. You always talked tomorrow.
He called one night because he said he was too tired to type and you ended up on the phone for two and a half hours, both of you lying in your respective beds in your respective cities, talking about nothing that mattered and somehow not running out of things to say. When you finally hung up it was past two in the morning and you had work the next day and you lay there in the dark staring at the ceiling feeling something you didn't want to look at too directly yet.
He made you a playlist once and the title was just a date — the date of the concert, the day you ran into each other on the train. You listened to it on your commute and texted him you put Someday first and he said obviously and you smiled at your phone like an idiot on a crowded bus. So you made him one back and you spent longer on it than you'd admit. You watched movies together sometimes, texting reactions in real time because neither of you could figure out the sync on any of the watch together apps and at some point it stopped mattering.
Nobody called it anything and you didn't talk about what it was. There was no conversation where you defined it, no moment where either of you said so what is this. It just kept being what it was, consistent and entirely without a label, and most of the time that felt okay.
Then he texted you a screenshot of a festival lineup with no caption. You looked at it for three seconds and then called him. "When is it," you said instead of hello.
"June," he said. "Are you seeing what I'm seeing?" You were seeing what he was seeing. Heeseung bought his ticket that night and you already had yours by the time he texted to ask if you were going to get one.
You were at the arrivals gate twenty minutes early. You watched the doors and then he was coming through them with his backpack on one shoulder, looking slightly jet lagged and exactly like himself, and he saw you and his whole face changed in this quiet way, not a big reaction, just relief, maybe. You hugged and he lifted you off the ground, picked you up like it was nothing, and you laughed into his shoulder and he held on for a second longer than necessary and when he put you down you thought, very clearly, this is not how you hug a friend. You picked up his bag and said you look terrible and he said I was on a plane for several hours and and you both laughed and he followed you to the car.
You were at every show together, front to back, and Heeseung had this thing where he'd lean down to say something in your ear when it was loud, not always anything important, sometimes just this part right before a song got good, like he wanted to make sure you were paying attention to the same thing he was. You always were.
Heeseung always had a hand on your back when you were moving through a crowd, his chin on top of your head when you were both standing still watching something, finding your hand in the dark without looking. One night you were waiting for a set to start and he was standing behind you and he said something in your ear and you turned around to respond and your faces were closer than you'd calculated for and neither of you moved back. You said whatever you were going to say. He listened. You turned back to face the stage and your heart was doing something unreasonable and the music started and you let it.
On the last night you sat on the grass after the final set, not ready to leave yet. The field was emptying out around you and you were both just sitting there, not saying much, and he was pulling at the grass next to him, and you looked at him and thought you were going to miss him when he leaves. And then, underneath that, you thought that you were already missing him even though he was right there.
You sat on the curb outside your building for a long time after the festival ended. At some point Heeseung started humming something and you recognized it before he got to the words. "Wish You Were Here? Pink Floyd," you said.
"Yeah."
"I love this song." You were quiet for a second. Then you said, "do you know what it's actually about?"
He looked at you. "Tell me."
You told him about Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd’s founding member. Barrett suffered a mental breakdown and was ousted from the band in 1968, so you told him about how Roger Waters wrote it for someone who was physically there but already gone in every way that mattered. How the band would play it for him sometimes and he'd show up to the studio unrecognizable and they wouldn't even know it was him at first. How it's a song about watching someone disappear while standing right next to them. Heeseung listened with forearms on his knees, looking at the street.
"There's another interpretation though," you said. "About becoming so successful and so numb that you stop being present in your own life. Like, don't get so lost that you forget to actually be there."
"So it's about two different kinds of absence," he said.
"Yeah," you said. "Exactly."
He nodded slowly and didn't say anything for a moment. A car passed. Somewhere above you a window was open and you could hear the low sound of someone's television. "I think regardless of all that," he said, and his voice was quieter now, "every time I hear that song from now on I'm going to think about you."
You didn't see it coming. You don't know why — you should have, probably, but you didn't, and it landed somewhere unguarded, and before you could do anything about it your eyes filled up and you looked away.
"Hey," he said immediately. "Hey, c'mere." Heeseung put his arm around you and pulled you in and you let him, your face against his shoulder, and he just held you there on the curb outside your building at whatever time it was, not saying anything else, just his hand on the back of your head, careful.
When you pulled back you looked at him and he was already looking at you, close, and you thought about how easy it would be and how hard it would be and how those were the same thing right now. "I really want to kiss you," you said. "And I think that's going to make tomorrow really hard."
He looked at you for a moment. "I know," he said. And then, softer: "I know."
He kissed you anyway, or maybe you kissed him, you can't tell afterward who moved first. It was gentle and it lasted and when it ended you stayed close, foreheads touching, neither of you saying anything. It was the best moment of your life and one of the saddest and you understood, right then, that those two things were going to live together for a long time. Heeseung loved to remember that one specific moment.
Heeseung, unfortunately, also remembered the last night he spent with you with an unfairly amount of clarity, because it was so ordinary in every way it shouldn't have been. You were sitting on your couch with your legs across his lap, both of you watching something neither of you cared about. The apartment was too quiet and he'd thought he wanted to remember this moment, which probably meant he already knew you weren't going to cross his path again. The conversation, when it finally came, wasn't a fight; it was two people being honest with each other at the exact wrong time, or maybe the exactly right time, which sometimes does look the same. The most painful thing about loving someone the way you'd loved him was learning to recognize his truth, even when it costs you something. Even when it costed you him.
But what really stayed with Heeseung wasn't exactly the ending, but everything before it. You had given him something he didn't have a word for yet, like the version of himself he'd been while loving you, that was less guarded and more willing. He didn't know what to do with that now that you were gone, it felt like inheriting something beautiful with no place to put it. Some nights he'd catch himself thinking, at least it happened. Other nights that thought felt like the cruelest one of all.
Meanwhile, you made a list of all the things that were supposed to help, assembled from every friend who meant well and every corner of the internet that promised a way through. You tried most of them, trying to act organized about your grief, which felt inappropriate somehow given how disorganized the grief itself was.
You rearranged your bedroom, moved the bed to the other wall, switched which side the lamp was on and bought new pillowcases in a different color. It worked for exactly one night, the unfamiliarity of it, waking up disoriented and not immediately knowing where you were. By the third morning your body had already memorized the new geometry and you were back to reaching for your phone before you were even fully awake, which is how you'd been starting every day since, looking for something you couldn't name and definitely weren't going to find on TikTok.
Then there was the phase you got very into routines. You read somewhere that structure was healing, that the body finds comfort in repetition, so you set alarms and kept them and made yourself eat breakfast at the same time every day and immediately going to the gym next. It helped, keeping yourself busy always helps, which is to say it helped until it didn't, until a random morning the coffee finished brewing and your apartment was very quiet and you stood at the counter of your kitchen and felt it anyway — the whole weight of it, right on schedule, completely unbothered by your new routine.
The crying wasn't even the hardest part, because crying at least felt like something. The hard part was the in between, the perfectly normal moments that somehow hurt even more. You'd be on your way to work, reading, entirely unbothered, and then you'd remember something he said once, something small and stupid and specific to him, and your chest would forget how to work for a second. You'd watch a funny reel and immediately think of his reaction and then remember you wouldn’t know his reaction. You wondered if that was pathetic, then you wondered why you were so concerned with whether your grief was pathetic, and who you were performing sanity for, and why. Then you'd turn the page. Someone across the aisle would shift in their seat. Life would keep moving, as advertised.
Heeseung went home after you broke up. Jay picked him up from the airport and looked at him before saying anything, exactly like people do when they already know but are giving you the chance to bring it up first. By dinner that night somehow everyone already knew, someone just said so, you good? and Heeseung said yeah in a tone that meant the opposite.
Jungwon tried to get him to do the hundred beers thing, obviously. Heeseung made it through maybe four before he just stopped and nobody pushed it, which he was grateful for. Jake and Riki dragged him out one night to a bar and Heeseung stood there holding a drink he wasn't really drinking, and at some point Jake just put a hand on his shoulder and said we don't have to stay and they left twenty minutes later and got Taco Bell instead, and that ended up being the better night by a lot.
What actually helped — if anything did — wasn't any of the specific things but just being around people who'd known him before, who could sit with him in a room without needing him to be okay. Sunghoon made fun of him for something stupid he did in middle school and Heeseung laughed for real for the first time in weeks, and it wasn't because the joke fixed anything. It just reminded him that he existed outside of heartbreak, that there was a version of him that had nothing to do with you, that had been around a long time before you and apparently was still in there somewhere.
Still, he kept catching himself doing the thing where a place would remind him of something and he'd just stand there for a second, recalculating.
His cousin's wedding was the first thing you two ever went to together as an actual couple; the first time either of you had to explain to other people what you were to each other, something neither of you had really practiced. His aunt asked, very directly, in front of everyone, and who is this? and Heeseung had said this is— and then paused for just slightly too long, and you'd jumped in and said your name and then, after a beat, his girlfriend, like you were trying it out loud for the first time too. His aunt had said oh, finally, like this had been a long time coming, making you laugh, and Heeseung remembered standing there thinking that you'd just said it so easily, and that had made it feel like a bigger deal.
The trip to the mountains was the first real trip you went on together, just the two of you for a few days on a cabin he'd found. It was, by any measure, romantic. The cabin had a fireplace that he spent way too long trying to figure out and a window that looked out at actual mountains and you'd cooked together in a kitchen too small for two people, bumping into each other constantly, and at night you'd sat wrapped in the same blanket watching something on his laptop because the cabin didn't have a TV.
But what he actually thought about, more often than the fireplace or the view, was the heater breaking on the second night and the two of you lying there in every layer of clothing you'd packed, laughing about it instead of being annoyed. He thought about the hike that was supposed to take two hours and took four because you'd insisted on a "shortcut" you found on your phone that turned out to not exist, and you'd both ended up arguing about whose idea it was while also laughing too hard to actually be mad, and by the time you got back it was dark and you were both starving and the only thing open was a gas station and you'd eaten gas station food like it was the best meal of your life because you were so hungry, sitting on the hood of the rental car in the cold.
Those were the things he remembered, the parts that would only ever mean anything to the two of you, the kind of thing you'd bring up years later and both immediately start laughing.
The first time you flew out to see him after you'd both quietly decided this was a thing now, without either of you using the word relationship out loud yet — he remembered standing at arrivals and seeing you before you saw him, and you looked pale, lightly green. You hadn't told him until after that you hated flying and that you hadn't been on a plane in years, that you'd spent the whole flight gripping the armrest and doing breathing exercises and that you'd nearly cried during turbulence. You told him all of this like it wasn't a big deal, like you hadn't just done something that scared you specifically so you could stand in this airport.
Heeseung hadn't known what to say to that, then. He still didn't, fully, even now. He just remembered taking your bag and putting his hand on your back and you leaning into him slightly, still a little unsteady, and him thinking — not in those words but the feeling of it — you did something hard to get here. He hadn't asked you to, you'd just done it.
After that it was the normal stuff. Time zones you both did math around. Flights that got more frequent and then somehow never frequent enough. His friends started including you in plans before you'd even arrived — is she coming this time? — and your friends started doing the same with him, asking about him like he was just part of the group now, which he was. You'd shown up to enough things that people stopped explaining who you were to each other. You were just Heeseung and you, one unit. So that's why it hurt even more when his heart broke.
Heeseung never actually had his heart broken before. He'd had things end before but nothing serious, nothing that lasted more than a month. He'd never had a person and never built a life around someone and then had to figure out what to do with the life once the person was gone.
So when it actually happened, he didn't recognize it. He thought he just had a cold. That's not a joke, for the first few days he genuinely thought something was physically wrong with him, because nothing had ever made his body feel like that before. His chest hurt not metaphorically, he felt like there was something tight wrapped around his ribs that didn't loosen no matter how he sat or stood or breathed. He didn't know that heartbreak was a physical thing. He'd heard people say things like my chest hurts about breakups his whole life and always thought it was just an expression. He found out that it was true the hard way, lying awake with an actual, physical, located ache in his chest.
He wasn't hungry, which had literally never happened to him in his life because Heeseung was always hungry, and then when he did eat, food tasted like nothing, like he was chewing for the sake of chewing. He'd lie down to sleep and his brain would just start running through everything on a loop he couldn't turn off, and he'd look at the clock and it would be 4 a.m. and he'd have work in four hours.
He kept reaching for his phone to tell you things, like send you a video, a thought, this happened today, you'd find this funny. His thumb would be most of the way to your contact before his brain caught up and he'd just sit there holding his phone feeling like an idiot. It happened more times than he wanted to admit but it still happened, actually, even weeks later like some reflex in him that kept assuming you were still the person he told things to.
And there were the plans and that was maybe the worst part. A trip you'd been saying you wanted to take, an apartment thing, eventually, someday, a conversation you have when you're imagining a future together without officially deciding you're imagining a future together. None of it had been a promise exactly, but it had been real in the sense that he'd started picturing it, started letting himself assume it.
And now all of that was just sitting there unused. He didn't know what to do with a future he'd been picturing that didn't exist anymore. It wasn't like returning something you bought, where there's a process, a receipt or somewhere to send it back. It was more like the plans were still technically his, still in his head, except they didn't connect to anything real anymore, and he didn't know if he was supposed to throw them away or just let them sit there until they stopped meaning anything on their own. Neither option felt possible. He just had this whole imagined life with no home for it.
And you'd been through heartbreak before, or you'd thought you had. You'd had a breakup at seventeen that wrecked you for months, your friends had to physically remove you from your room sometimes, and you'd thought, at the time, that this was what heartbreak was. And you'd survived it, you'd come out the other side eventually, and some part of you had filed that experience away as the worst it gets, a kind of benchmark — you'd been through the worst, so whatever came after, you'd know how to handle it.
You did not know how to handle it.
It wasn't that this hurt the same and you were just better at managing it now. It was that this hurt more, because by every external measure the relationship at seventeen had been messier and more obviously bad for you. This one hadn't been bad and that was the whole problem. There was no version of this where you got to be angry at Heeseung, no version where you could point to something and say that's why it ended, that's the villain of the story, and that was so much harder to carry than betrayal had ever been.
You thought, I already did this. I already know what this feels like. And then you'd be hit by something like a song or a memory, and you'd realize you didn't know what this felt like at all. This heartbreak was something else entirely when the first one had been just bad, because you'd never actually lost something you thought might have lasted. At seventeen, some part of you had always known it wasn't going to work out. This time you hadn't known that, this time you'd been wrong about that, and being wrong about that was its own kind of grief, separate from the grief of losing him.
But there were moments that felt like progress. You went to the movies by yourself one day because you had nothing else to do and the alternative was sitting in your apartment alone again. You bought a ticket for a movie nobody else wanted to see, got popcorn, sat in the middle of an almost empty theater and watched the whole thing. Walking out afterward, you felt — and you remember being almost embarrassed by how big this felt for something so small — capable. Like you'd done something that proved you could still be a person who did things alone. It was such a small thing but it felt enormous.
You went out with your friends one night and a guy at the bar started talking to you, and you flirted back, leaned into it a little, enjoyed it even. He was funny and he asked for your number near the end of the night and you almost gave it to him, you really almost did, and then you didn't, and you told your friends in the bathroom I don't think I'm ready, I think I just wanted to know I still could, and you went home that night feeling fine about it.
You downloaded one of the dating apps eventually, because everyone kept telling you it would help, and you matched with someone within the first day, and you looked at the match notification for a long time and then deleted the app. You just didn't feel like doing it and you'd promised yourself a while ago that you weren't going to do things anymore just because you were supposed to.
And yes, you bleached your hair. At home, by yourself, with a box kit and gloves, because you'd decided that going into your late twenties, it made sense to have pink ends again, something you hadn't done since you were a teenager. It took three tries to get the bleach even and you fried your hair more than the box promised you would, and it looked a little uneven for the first week, but you loved it anyway.
For a while you thought all of this was the healing, and it was, partly. But at some point you noticed that you were doing all of it a little too quickly, a little too eagerly, like you were decorating around a hole instead of dealing with the hole. You were busy, and you were fine, and underneath both of those things was everything you hadn't actually let yourself feel yet.
So one night you decided, very deliberately, that you were going to feel it and not avoid it, just feel it, all the way for the first time since it happened. You got in the shower and you sat down on the floor of it, water running over you, and you just let it happen. And it wasn't pretty crying, it was loud and ugly and it didn't stop when you wanted it to. You'd always called it emotional constipation, where you go too long without crying and it all just sits there waiting, and when it finally comes out it comes out all at once, everything you'd been holding for weeks, and you have no control over how long it takes or even what it looks like.
You don't know how long you sat there but probably for long enough that your legs went a little numb from the position. And while you cried you let yourself go back through it on purpose this time. You let yourself have all of it again, fully, one more time, specifically so you could put it down. You thought about the way Heeseung used to talk about love, back when none of this had happened yet, back when love was still a theory to him and not something that had already happened to him and broken his heart.
He'd never been in love before you. He told you that early on like a disclaimer, like he wanted you to know what you were getting into, that he was the kind of person who needed things to make sense. He'd grown up obsessed with space, he had learned that the universe is infinite and if everything he'd ever do or feel amounted to a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the universe's lifetime, then none of it had to be a big deal. Nothing was permanent because nothing was supposed to be permanent.
He told you all of this the night he told you he loved you, which you found out later was not a coincidence because he'd been rehearsing it in his head for weeks. You were in his backyard and it was getting cold and neither of you had bothered to go inside, and you'd asked him half jokingly, if he still thought love was just chemistry, like dopamine, oxytocin, all the stuff he used to bring up whenever the topic came up. He thought about it for a while, and then he said, "I think about the math."
"What do you mean by math?" you asked.
"You know. The odds of us both existing right now, at the same time, on the same planet." You didn't say anything, just waited, because you could tell he was going somewhere with it. "Okay, so — the universe is 13.8 billion years old, right," he said, looking up at the sky. "Earth is about 4.5 billion. Life on this planet has been around for something like 3.7 billion years. And humans have only existed for about 300,000 years." He paused. "If you do the math on that, all of human history put together like every war or civilization — comes out to something like 0.000002% of the universe's lifetime. It's basically nothing, a rounding error, actually."
"That's scary," you said, but you were smiling, because you could tell it wasn't where he was going.
"It's not, though," he said. "That's the thing. I used to find that comforting. Like, if everything I am and everything I do amounts to almost nothing on that scale, then none of it has to be a big deal." He shrugged. "I liked that."
"What changed then?"
"You." He said, like it was the simplest thing in the world. "And for someone who's spent his whole life thinking everything has an answer, there are questions I have about you that I can't solve. Like, I know how stars form and I know how galaxies move, and I still don't know how, or when, or why I fell for you."
You felt something in your chest shift, your eyes wet, but you didn't say anything yet because you wanted him to keep going, and he did. "And I get it," he continued, and you could tell his heart was going faster now, that this part was harder. "I get being scared. I'm terrified most of the time — of saying the wrong thing, of not knowing how to do this—" he gestured between the two of you, "—but I'd rather be terrified and honest than safe and nowhere."
You stared at him, while a stubborn tear ran down your cheek, "And I'm — god, I'm jealous of you," he said, the words coming faster now. "Of the way you feel things so easily. The way you just let yourself experience stuff without trying to explain it first. I've spent my whole life trying to make everything make sense, and you don't do that, you just — exist in it. And it's beautiful. You're beautiful." he stopped, flustered, started again.
"So when you ask if I still think it's just chemistry," he said, quieter now, "I think about the probability of us both existing right now, in this exact moment. Humans have been around for 300,000 years and you and I get maybe eighty years each, if we're lucky. Do the math on that and it comes out to something like 0.00000058% of the universe's entire lifetime. And somehow, in that fraction of a fraction, we're both here on the same planet at the exact same time."
His voice cracked, just slightly, on the last part.
"And when I think about that — about how unlikely it is that I get to exist on Earth at the same time as you. And I'm scared of it, because if the universe only gave us this much time, then you deserve to spend it happy. And I want to make you happy."
The tears that had been building finally spilled over, and you didn't wipe them away. "No one's ever said anything like that to me before," you whispered.
"It's just math," Heeseung said, almost apologetic, like he was embarrassed by how much of himself he'd just handed over.
"No," you said, laughing through the tears. "You make it sound beautiful."
He looked at you for a second, like he was deciding whether to say the next thing. Then he said it anyway. "You make everything beautiful."
Sometimes he'd imagine a future and it felt precarious and unstable. Would you be there with him? Would you want to be? But who was he to say? He wasn't a computer. He couldn't run the simulation a thousand times and find the outcome with the highest probability of success. Was it a crime to not have the answers? In physics, uncertainty was a principle, but in life, people seemed to expect certainty and confidence. And Heeseung had neither.
Maybe one day things would make sense. Maybe he'd understand what you saw in him, if you saw anything at all. Maybe you'd get married, build a life, exist in the same space for longer than this brief cosmic moment. He'd probably take these thoughts to the grave, but somewhere, in the parts of himself he didn't like to examine, he knew something else too: he'd love you always. Or at least, he thought he would.
So when you'd said it back, that you loved him too, that you wanted this, whatever this was going to turn out to be, distance and uncertainty and all of it — Heeseung didn't think he'd ever been that happy in his life. He just remembers standing there in the cold with you and feeling like something had clicked into place.
Neither of you had any idea what you were actually signing up for. You said it like it was simple and it felt simple that night, because you were both standing in the same place and the distance was just an idea. You didn't know yet what it would feel like to want to tell someone something at eleven at night and have to wait until morning because of the time difference. You didn't know what it would feel like to watch someone's flight status app for two hours because their plane was delayed and you couldn't do anything about it from where you were. You didn't know that missing someone could become a baseline, something you got used to without it ever actually going away.
But you made it work, in an unglamorous way that long distance actually works. You learned each other's schedules down to the hour like when he was done with practice, when you were free for lunch, the three hour window every day where your awake times actually overlapped and you protected that window like it was sacred. He'd call you on his walk home so the time wasn't wasted on nothing. You'd eat dinner with your laptop propped up so he could "be there," even though being there meant a slightly pixelated version of him eating ramyeon at his kitchen counter while you ate whatever you'd thrown together, and somehow that still counted as a date, and somehow it actually felt like one.
Heeseung got good at little things. He'd send you a photo of the sky at golden hour with no caption because he knew you'd be waking up to it, he was handing you the start of your day before he went to sleep. He'd leave voice messages instead of texts, just rambling about his day, and you'd listen to them on your commute and it would feel like he was right there talking to you, which he kind of was, just delayed.
He said things to you over those months that he never thought he'd say to anyone. He told you once, half asleep on a call at like 2 a.m. his time, "I like falling asleep on the phone with you more than I like falling asleep in silence, and that used to be my favorite part of the day." You'd laughed and told him that was the saddest compliment you'd ever gotten and he'd said, "no, I mean it, I used to look forward to the quiet. Now I look forward to you."
He told you, after a video call where you'd been having a bad day and cried a little and he couldn't do anything except be on the other side of a screen, "I hate that I can't just be there. But I'm glad you let me see it anyway. I don't want the version of you that's only okay."
He'd say things like "I keep thinking about what you'd think of this" about completely mundane stuff like a building, a song, a weird thing someone said on the subway, and you started doing the same thing, narrating your day to him in your head even when he wasn't there, because somewhere along the way he'd become the person you processed your life through, even from across miles and miles away.
Funny enough, Heeseung felt exactly like that now too. He'd be walking somewhere and see something like a dog wearing a stupid little jacket, a sign with a typo, some guy arguing with a vending machine and the first thought was, automatic, before he could stop it, she'd think this was so funny. And then there'd be that second where he remembered he had nowhere to send it.
He wondered, sometimes, if he'd ever feel that again. He didn't know if that was a one time thing or if it could just happen again with someone else, eventually. He hoped it could, but he also kind of hoped it couldn't, which he knew didn't make sense.
And then he'd spiral a little, sometimes late at night — was any of it even worth it? But not in a bitter way. He didn't regret it, not even on the worst nights. But he'd lie there doing the math again, except this time the math wasn't comforting. He'd think about all those years and all that effort and flights and time zones, and where it had landed him: here, alone, missing someone he used to talk to every single day, and he'd think, what was the point of all of it, if this is where it ends up?
The distance had always hurt, that part wasn't new. But the distance used to have an end date like in two weekends or three weeks, whatever it was, there was always a number attached to it like a flight already booked and something to count down to. But this was different, this distance wasn't going to end in a reunion. It was just going to be the new permanent shape of things, and that took some getting used to, the idea that the ache wasn't temporary anymore, it was just what this was now.
For a long time, he'd actually felt kind of arrogant about it, looking back. He'd believed, fully, that the two of you could outlast the distance, like that it was a problem like any other problem, something you could just be diligent enough about and eventually it would stop being a problem at all. He used to think love was the kind of thing that just automatically solved logistics. And for years, it kind of had. You'd both shown up for it, over and over, and then, after everything, after years of doing exactly that, the distance won anyway.
The visits had been getting less frequent for a while, it was just life. He'd gotten busier with work, you'd gotten busier with yours. Your friend group needed you for things. His family needed him for things. The visits that used to happen every month started happening every couple months, and then less than that, and you both kept saying next time will be easier without either of you really believing it.
Then the first real conversation happened, you were on a call and you'd made some offhand comment like I miss when we used to see each other more, and he'd said, yeah, me too, and then there was a pause that went on a beat too long. "So what do we actually do about that," you said, eventually, but you weren't accusatory, you were just tired.
And neither of you had an answer, that was the thing. You both had real lives and not placeholder ones you were waiting to leave behind. He had his job, his friends, his family, a whole structure he'd built around himself in his city and you had the same, in yours. Moving wasn't simple for either of you and you both knew it, and neither of you wanted to be the one to ask the other to give theirs up because you both knew what that would actually cost, and you loved each other too much to want the other person to pay it.
People don't really talk about how love doesn't always mean being willing to give up everything for someone. Sometimes the healthiest version of loving someone is not doing that, even if it would feel more romantic in the moment. You'd both built lives that mattered, separately, before you'd built something together, and asking either of you to dismantle one for the other wasn't love.
After that, it wasn't one conversation, but it was a lot of small ones, spread out over months. There was a stupid fight about a missed call that wasn't really about the missed call. There was a conversation where you asked, carefully, if he'd ever consider relocating eventually, and he said maybe, someday, and you both heard how far away someday sounded. There was a night where he asked you the same question, in reverse, and got the same kind of answer.
You both just kept circling it, and there'd be a good week, where it felt normal again, where you'd talk like always and it would feel like maybe you'd just been in a rough patch. And then there'd be another conversation that didn't go anywhere, another what are we going to do that ended in the exact same place.
He took a few weeks off work over the holidays to visit you, since your birthday was a week before Christmas, and he'd booked the trip around it months in advance so he could be there for it and for Christmas with your family and ring in the new year together too. You both just kind of needed it, even if you both already knew, somewhere underneath, that it might not turn out the way either of you had pictured when he'd booked the flight.
It started fine, better than fine, actually, for the first couple of days. You picked him up from the airport like you always did, and he hugged you the way he always did, and for a few hours it felt like nothing had changed and nothing would change. Your birthday came first, and he'd remembered everything, and for that whole day it really did feel like nothing was wrong. Then there was Christmas, and you took him to see your family, and your mom made too much food like she always did, and your dad asked him about work and Heeseung answered like he always did. Your nephew still asked him to play video games and he still let him win even though you both knew he wasn't actually trying, like he always did.
You did all the things you always did. The same coffee place. The same walk along the river you always ended up on. You went to the bookstore he liked, the one with the cat that ignored everyone but him, and he bought a book he probably wouldn't read and you both knew that too.
But underneath the whole week, there was something different, nothing either of you could point to. Just a silence that hadn't used to be there in between the normal stuff. A few times you caught him looking at you in a way that felt like he was trying to memorize something. A few times you did the same thing.
New Year's came and went quietly as you watched the countdown from your living room, and he kissed you at midnight the way he always did, and neither of you said anything about how it felt different this time, like you were both carrying something into the new year that you hadn't carried into the last one. The second night of the new year — his last night before he flew back — you were on the couch at your place, some movie on that neither of you had picked for any real reason, just something to have on, and neither of you was watching it. You were sitting close, his arm around you, and at some point you just started crying quietly. You didn't make any noise about it, didn't want to, but he noticed it the way you do when you know someone's body that well.
He sat up a little straighter and turned toward you, careful, and put his hand on the side of your face, his thumb just resting there. "Hey," he said, quiet. "Hey. What's wrong?"
You looked at him and you didn't say anything for a moment. Then you said, "I don't know if this is going to be the last time we do this."
He didn't say anything right away. He let out a long breath like he was trying to hold something back, and he couldn't, his eyes filled up too and he didn't wipe them. "I don't know either," he said. "And that scares me."
You looked at him. "I know I've asked this so many times already," you said, "but what do we do?"
"I don't know," he said. "I don't know what to do."
"I don't either," you said.
And that was the thing that broke it open. You both just started crying properly, and you didn't care about being quiet anymore, and he pulled you in and held onto you like he was trying to keep something from slipping through his hands. "I love you so much," he said into your hair, his voice not really working right. "I don't want to let you go."
You pulled back enough to look at him, and you reached up and wiped the tears off his face with your thumb. "You need to love me less now, baby," you said.
"I don't think I can," he said.
"But you have to," you said. And you weren't saying it to hurt him, you said it like it was the only kind thing left to say.
It went quiet for a while after that. Just the movie still playing, both of you sitting there with your faces wet and your hands still holding onto each other. "Is there a way we can make this work?" he asked eventually. Not like he believed there was an answer, just like he had to ask it one more time, for both of you.
"We already did," you said. "We made it work. For years, we made it work." You looked at him. "And I don't want to be here to see when it stops working."
He closed his eyes. He leaned his head down onto your shoulder, his whole body curving toward you, and he said, barely above a whisper, "I've never felt this much pain before."
You rested your head against the top of his, and you said, "Me neither."
And you both just sat there like that, holding on, for a long time, not because either of you thought it would change anything. Just because you both needed a little more time before it stopped being something you got to do.
Growing up, you thought grief was a word that belonged to death. That's how it was always used in books and movies, at least. You'd see characters in black and slow piano music, someone staring out a window, and you understood that this was what grief looked like and that it only happened when someone died. You later found out that grief is actually just the word for what happens when you lose something that mattered to you. You can grieve a person who's still alive, still texting other people, still posting pictures, still existing in the world, but just not in your world anymore. You can grieve a version of your life that didn't happen. You can even grieve a job you lost. You can grieve a future you'd already started building in your head, and none of that requires a death. It just requires losing something.
Movies get some of it right. You personally enjoyed Past Lives because gets a lot of it right, actually, like that scene at the end, when the two of them are standing on the curb waiting for the car. Nora says something about how if she'd stayed, if things had gone differently, she wonders who she would have been, and that line stuck with you because it's not really about him. It's about grieving a version of yourself that only existed in a timeline that didn't happen. The you that would've existed if things had gone differently. You'll never meet her.
But movies also get a lot of it wrong, or at least incomplete as if they compress it. Grief in a movie happens in maybe a montage with sad song and rain, a few weeks pass in a cut, just like that one Bella scene in her bedroom in New Moon. Real grief doesn't have edits, though. It just keeps going in real time and there's no soundtrack.
Joan Didion wrote about grief after her husband died, about how she kept his shoes because some part of her brain hadn't accepted that he wasn't going to need them again. She talks about how grief isn't a thing you process and finish, it's a thing that ambushes you, again and again. You read that book a long time ago and thought it was about death specifically, but you understand it differently now, especially the ambush part. It doesn't ask permission, it just arrives, when you're listening to a song, or an specific smell, and you're back at the beginning again.
You grieved all of your firsts. The first kiss on the curb outside your building after the festival, you crying before it even happened because some part of you already knew how hard it would be to let him go the next morning, but you'd jumped in anyway. You remembered thinking, right before, this is going to complicate everything but I'm doing it anyway, because by that point not doing it felt like the bigger risk. The first time he said he loved you at his backyard and the conversation after, the one where you both actually decided that this was going to be a real thing now. You remembered how light you'd felt afterward, like something had been settled.
You remember the first proper date, where he'd called ahead of a visit and said, let me take you out on a date, like he wanted to do it right. You went to a café in the afternoon, then a movie — Joker, which he'd picked, and which you ended up loving way more than you expected. "You're being weirdly into this," he said. "This is giving me incel girlfriend energy." You'd hit his arm and said "shut up, it was good," and he just kept laughing the whole walk out of the theater, occasionally muttering "Arthur Fleck did nothing wrong" under his breath in a voice clearly imitating you, even though you'd said no such thing.
Then you ended up at a bar afterward, way later than either of you meant to, drinking beer and laughing about nothing, and at some point it turned into one of those nights where you just kept going back and forth, building on each other's jokes the way you always did. "Honestly," he said, leaning back, "now that you're my incel girlfriend, I gotta be careful. Don't want to accidentally get red pilled by association."
"You're the red pilled one, Heeseung, what the hell are you on," you said, laughing. "You like Neon Genesis Evangelion. That's literally the most incel anime ever."
"That's a masterpiece of animation and you know it."
"That's what they all say." He waved the waiter down and asked, completely seriously, if he could borrow a pen. You raised an eyebrow at him. "What are you doing?"
"We need to write all of this down," he said, already scribbling on a napkin. "Every inside joke we have. We're gonna lose track otherwise."
So you did, you spent probably an hour just going back through everything, all the bits you'd built up, laughing harder at some of them out loud than you had the first time, because hearing them said back to you made them funnier somehow. The incel girlfriend thing. The thing about his cousin's wedding band. A whole bit about a typo he'd made once that had become a permanent part of your vocabulary. By the end the napkin was full on both sides and completely illegible, and neither of you could read half of what he'd written, which somehow made it even funnier.
For your one year anniversary, you actually made a real little book with every inside joke you could remember, written out properly with little doodles next to some of them. You gave it to him and he read through the whole thing slowly, laughing at some pages, going quiet at others, and at the end he just looked at you for a second like he didn't totally know what to say, and then said, "this is the best thing anyone's ever given me," and he wasn't joking.
There was a version of this where you tried to explain it to people and it never quite landed right, because what you had with him didn't fit the categories people usually used. Boyfriend was true, technically, but it always felt like it was missing something. The truer thing you'd have said if you weren't worried about how it sounded, was that he was your best friend. The person you'd call first, the person whose opinion you actually wanted before you made a decision, the person you trusted completely with everything, including the parts of yourself you usually kept tucked away.
People talk about friendships turning into relationships like it's this dramatic slow burn shift, some kind of line you cross, but it never felt like that with you two. It felt more like nothing changed and everything changed at the same time. You still talked the same way, you still made fun of each other the same way, you still told each other things you wouldn't tell anyone else, except now you also got to kiss him, which honestly felt like a bonus.
That's why it was so light. Not in the sense of unimportant but in the sense of having no extra weight on it and no performance or anxiety about whether you were doing it right. A lot of relationships you'd seen, and even some you'd been in, had this undercurrent of tension running through them but you never had that with Heeseung. Even with the distance, you almost never felt jealous and neither did he, and it wasn't because either of you was trying hard not to be, it just genuinely didn't come up. You trusted him completely in this almost boring way, and he trusted you the same way. There was nothing to manage, because there was nothing either of you was worried about. The only thing that was ever actually hard was the physical distance itself but never the relationship.
You used to think that was rare, even back then, even before you had any sense of how it would end. You'd hear friends talk about their relationships with all the games, and you'd feel almost guilty that you didn't have any of that to contribute. What you had instead was just ease — he was your best friend who you also happened to be in love with, and being in love with your best friend turned out to be the most uncomplicated thing in the world, right up until it wasn't anymore. Except even then, even at the very end, that part of it never broke because you never stopped being each other's best friend. That might have been the hardest part of all of it, actually. You didn't just lose a boyfriend. You lost your best friend too, and there was no version of moving on that got you that part back.
Even though every time you told him he was your best friend, he'd fire back, completely straight faced but jokingly, "no, Jake's my best friend. Know your place," and you'd laugh every single time, no matter how many times he'd done the bit — and you grieved that too, the fact that you'd never hear it again in that specific voice over that specific dumb thing.
And then, you also grieved the moment you were intimate for the first time.
It was on the weekend when he first came to visit because of that festival. One of those afternoons you'd taken an everything shower, scrub, shave, lotion, the nice perfume you almost never wore and you felt ridiculous doing it. He was your best friend. You'd talked everyday, shared everything, there was no reason to be nervous around him. But the old stuff was still there, the quiet insecurities left over from people who hadn't been careful with you like he was. Your hands shook a little when you dried your hair. You told yourself it was stupid but it didn't stop the feeling.
That night, after you cried on the curb outside your building before he even kissed you, you went upstairs with him. The second the apartment door closed, the air changed. He looked at you like he already knew the next visit was months away. You barely made it to the couch. He kissed you carefully at first, almost reverent, his hands cupping your face, then the kisses grew deeper and slower, like he couldn’t help himself. He leaned over you and you softened under him, and it felt different from anything you'd known. This wasn't just want, it was like every cell in you pulled toward him. He hadn't said the words out loud yet, but you could feel it in the way he touched you. He already loved you. You already loved him.
You let out a small sound against his mouth, almost a whimper. He pulled back just enough to breathe, forehead against yours, and you felt him hard then, pressing against your thigh through his jeans, embarrassingly obvious. The realization made heat rush through you and another soft moan slipped out before you could stop it. He exhaled sharply. "Don't do that," he murmured, voice rough, "or I'm not gonna be able to control myself."
You looked up at him, heart hammering, and said the only thing that felt true. "Please don't control yourself."
He kissed you again harder, then stood and lifted you, and your legs wrapped around him. He carried you to your bed and laid you down carefully,and he sat on the edge of the bed for a second, just looking at you. His eyes moved over your face, your neck, the rise of your chest under your shirt. "You're so fucking beautiful," he said quietly, almost to himself. Then he leaned down and kissed you again, slow and deep, before his hands found the hem of your blouse. He pulled it up gently, pausing when he reached your ribs so you could lift your arms. The fabric slipped over your head and he dropped it somewhere on the floor.
His gaze stayed on you, just taking you in. "God," he breathed, fingers tracing the line of your collarbone. "I've thought about this so many times. You have no idea." He said it like a confession, like he still couldn't quite believe he was allowed to touch you.
He kissed your neck, open mouthed, and you felt yourself arch while he moved lower, his lips brushing over the tops of your breasts, and your fingers threading through his hair. He unhooked your bra with both hands, sliding the straps down your shoulders, and the cool air hit your skin and then his mouth was there, soft and warm. He kissed one breast, then the other, like he had all the time in the world even though you both knew he didn't.
He kept going lower, lips brushing over your ribs, then your stomach and he stayed there for a moment, forehead resting just below your belly button, breathing you in. "Can I take these off?" he asked, fingers already at the waistband of your pants. His voice was low, but you could see the nerves in the way his hands trembled just slightly. He was being more direct than you'd imagined he would be, saying exactly what he wanted, and it made something hot twist low in your belly.
"Yeah," you whispered.
He pulled your pants down your legs carefully, eyes following the movement. Once they were off, he sat back for a second and tugged his own shirt over his head. The sight of his bare chest, the way his skin looked made your mouth go dry. He leaned down again, pressing his whole upper body against yours, skin on skin, and the warmth of him was overwhelming. He kissed you deep and you felt like you could drown in it.
Then he moved lower again, kissing the inside of one thigh, then the other, slowly. When he reached the center, he pressed a kiss right over your panties. He inhaled, slow and deep, and let out a quiet sound that made your cheeks burn. "You okay?" he asked, looking up at you. His eyes were dark, but the concern was still there reassuring.
You nodded quickly, hips shifting toward him without meaning to. "Yeah. Please."
He hooked a finger under the edge of your panties and pulled them to the side. "Fuck… you're so wet," he murmured, almost reverent. "Is this all for me?"
You let out a shaky smirk, trying to keep some control. "Obviously."
"Yeah?" His voice dropped even lower, then his mouth was on you. The first slow lick pulled a broken sound from your throat. He took his time at first, learning you, but the more you reacted, the more sure he got. He licked and sucked with a focused hunger that made your head spin. Your hands fisted the sheets and his hair, trying to stay grounded.
"Heeseung… oh my god," you moaned. He groaned against you, the vibration shooting straight through your body. One of his hands moved down to palm himself through his jeans, like tasting you was driving him crazy too.
You tried to hold back, but it was impossible. The tension built fast and sharp. He felt the way your thighs started to shake around his head, and he went faster and more insistent, mouth working you like he needed you to come for him. When it hit, it crashed over you hard. Your back arched, a loud moan tearing from your chest as you came, pulsing against his tongue. He kept going through it gentler now until you were panting and trembling.
He kissed his way back up your body, kissing your stomach, ribs, the valley between your breasts until he reached your mouth. His lips were slick, and the taste of yourself on him made your head spin. "Are you okay, baby?" he asked while brushing hair out of your face.
"More than okay," you breathed. You pulled him down into another kiss, deep and messy, while your hand slid down between you to palm him through his pants. He was rock hard, straining against the fabric. The groan he let out against your mouth went straight to your core.
"We don't have to keep going if you don't want to," he said, voice strained, "or if you're tired."
You smirked, suddenly feeling bolder, dirtier. "I would never be tired. I want you, Hee."
You pushed at his shoulders gently and he let you flip him onto his back. You straddled him, and started kissing down his chest, his stomach, taking your time the same way he had. But you let a hungrier side of yourself show, the one that felt safe enough with him to be a little shameless. You mouthed at him through his pants, looked up at him while you did it and watched his eyes flutter. He looked wrecked already, breathing hard, one hand reaching down to touch your hair like he couldn't believe this was real.
You kept teasing him like that, pressing open mouthed kisses along the hard line of him, breathing warm against the fabric until his hips twitched up toward your mouth. His hand tightened in your hair, and you finally hooked your fingers into his waistband and looked up at him. He lifted his hips to help you drag his pants and underwear down together. When he sprang free, you took a second just to look at him hard and flushed, leaking a little at the tip. The sight made your mouth water.
He let out a low chuckle, half breathless. "Holy shit… you're actually a little dangerous, aren't you?"
You smirked up at him. "You'll see."
You leaned down and took him into your mouth slowly, tasting him and learning the weight of him on your tongue. He groaned deep in his chest, the sound raw while his hand stayed in your hair. "Yes… right there," he breathed, voice wrecked. "Fuck, you're doing such a good job. Just like that."
You took him deeper, hollowing your cheeks, and he cursed under his breath, hips jerking a little before he caught himself. He looked completely lost with his eyes half closed and his lips parted, chest rising fast. Before long his grip tightened and he gently tugged you back by the hair. "Wait," he panted, "I don't wanna bust too soon."
You laughed softly and kissed the inside of his thigh. "I don't mind. I want to make you feel good."
He pulled you up and kissed you hard, hands sliding down your back like he needed to hold all of you at once. While you sat on the edge of the bed catching your breath, he reached for his jeans on the floor, dug through the pocket for his wallet, and found the condom. You watched him the whole time, the ordinary little movements somehow making everything feel even more real. He came back to you and rolled it on quickly, then looked at you with something almost reverent in his eyes. "You're so, so perfect," he said quietly, and kissed you again.
You guided him to sit up against the headboard and straddled him again. While he finished with the condom, you reached down and slipped your panties all the way off, tossing them aside. His hands moved over you immediately cupping your breasts and then sliding down your waist, gripping your hips. "Look at you," he murmured. "So fucking beautiful. I can't believe you're mine right now."
You braced your hands on his shoulders and slowly sank down onto him. The stretch was intense, perfect. Both of you gasped at the same time. When he bottomed out you stayed there for a second with your foreheads pressed together. You started moving, rolling your hips, and he met every movement with small thrusts up into you. The sounds in the room were just skin, breath, and moans. "Fuck, that's it," he whispered, one hand on your hip guiding you, the other tangled in your hair. "Ride me just like that. You're so wet… shit."
You picked up the pace as you were rolling faster and taking him deeper each time. You leaned closer, lips brushing his ear. "You feel so good inside of me," you breathed, the words slipping out raw. "So fucking good, Heeseung."
He groaned and his hands slid down to grip your ass, squeezing hard. He bit his lip, eyes screwed shut for a second. "Fuck… I don't think I'm gonna last," he managed to say.
You could feel him trying to hold back, his thrusts getting a little more careful. You kissed along his jawline softly and then murmured against his skin, "It's okay, Hee. You can cum for me."
That was all it took. He let out a low groan that turned into a moan of your name as he came hard inside you. His hips stuttered up into yours and his arms wrapped tight around your waist, holding you down against him while he rode it out. For a moment everything was just his shaky breath and the way his body trembled under yours.
He stayed like that for a few seconds, panting against your neck, then pulled you into a full hug, bare chest to bare chest. He kissed your forehead, then your temple. "I'm so sorry, baby," he whispered, sounding genuinely embarrassed. "I couldn't hold it. Just… give me a minute to recover and we can keep going. I promise."
You let out a soft laugh and pulled back just enough to look at him. His face was flushed and his hair was messy, his eyes still a little dazed. You brushed a strand away from his forehead. "It's okay," you said gently. "We have all the time in the world."
The words made something shift in his expression. His heart squeezed tight because he knew it wasn’t really true since he was leaving the next morning. But he didn’t say any of that, instead, he kissed you again. When you pulled back, you stayed there straddling him, just looking at him. Your hands rested on his chest, feeling his heartbeat slowly settle. He looked up at you with an open expression he only ever had with you, thumb gently stroking your lower back.
"God, I love the way you look at me," he said quietly, almost like he was talking to himself. He reached up and cupped your face with both hands, pulling you down for another kiss but this one was sweeter. When he broke it, he kept his forehead against yours.
You woke up early the morning after, both of you, neither of you having really slept much. Heeseung had a flight to catch back to his actual life that existed outside of this weekend, and you got up and got dressed and drove him to the airport in a comfortable kind of quiet, the radio on low, his hand resting on your knee the whole way. At the airport you stayed with him through check in, standing next to him at the counter, double checking if he had his passport, making sure his bag wasn't over the weight limit. He kept looking over at you while he did it, like he was checking you were still there.
You had time before his gate, so you got ice cream from one of the little kiosks. You ordered something and ate maybe a third of it because you weren't really hungry. He noticed and didn't say anything about it, just finished his own and then quietly ate some of yours too. You sat near his gate for a while. He had your hand the whole time. When his boarding group got called, he stood up and you stood up with him, and he looked at you for a second before either of you said anything.
"Hey," he said. "You know you're not getting rid of me that easily, right?"
You laughed a little wet, wiping under your eyes. "I know."
"I mean it," he said.
"I know, Heeseung," you said. "It just sucks saying bye to you anyway."
"Yeah, it does," he said, and pulled you into a hug, his arms wrapping all the way around you, and you put your head against his chest and he ran his hand over your hair, and pressed a kiss to the top of your head. Then he pulled back just enough to make you look up at him. "I'll be back," he said. "And we'll figure it out, okay?" You nodded. "Smile for me. I don't want to see you sad before I go."
You smiled, even though your eyes were still full, and he smiled back like that was exactly what he needed. He kissed you once more, and then picked up his bag and walked toward the gate. He looked back once right before he went through, and you saw the way his jaw tightened, the way he was clearly holding something back too. For one second he looked like he was actually considering turning around and walking back, leaving the flight behind entirely. Then he gave you a small wave, and went through.
That day had been bittersweet, the kind of sad that still had something good to look forward to. You drove home that day still feeling sad but lighter than you'd expected, because there was a next time attached to it. There always had been, every time, for years.
The last time was different.
The drive to the airport was the same as it always was with you behind the wheel and him in the passenger seat, the same roads you'd driven a dozen times. The airport was busy since it was the first week of January, and you walked with him to check in like you always did, stood next to him while he handled his bag like you always did, made sure everything was in order, the same as every other time, like you always did. Except this was the last time you'd ever do this.
Your face was swollen from crying the night before, you both were actually, neither of you had slept and neither of you had bothered trying to hide it from each other that morning. But he still held your hand the whole walk to security, the same way he always did like nothing had changed, even though everything had.
You got close to the gate and neither of you said much. There wasn't really anything left to say that hadn't already been said the night before. You just stood there, and at some point he pulled you in, and you both just held onto each other and cried properly for a long time, not caring who saw.
"I'm always going to love you," he said into your hair, his voice breaking on it.
"I'm always going to love you too," you said.
He held onto you a little longer after that like he was trying to make it last, and then he pulled back and wiped his face, and you wiped yours, and there wasn't anything left to do except let him go through the gate.
For him, walking through that door was the worst pain he'd ever felt, worse than anything, worse than he'd known a person could feel, walking away from someone while every part of him wanted to turn around and not get on the plane at all, and knowing he was going to do it anyway because there wasn't another option left. For you, watching him walk through it was the worst pain you'd ever felt — watching his back disappear, knowing this was the last time, with no next time attached to it, nothing waiting on the other side of this except the rest of your life without him in it.
You both stood on opposite sides of that door for a moment, in the worst pain of your lives, at exactly the same time, in exactly the same place, the way you'd always somehow ended up.
You'd think, looking back, that the day at the airport was the worst of it, but the actual worst day was the one after. You'd told yourself you could do this on your own because you were an adult. You had your own apartment and your own life and your own ways of dealing with things, except none of that turned out to be true, not that day. What you actually did was drive to your parents' house and you walked in and your mom took one look at you and didn't even ask, just opened her arms, and you fell into them and cried in a way you hadn't cried since you were small.
Your mom held you and kept saying "okay, okay, it's okay," but you could tell she was a little alarmed by how much was coming out of you, like she hadn't known a person could cry that much for that long and that loudly. You weren't embarrassed, though. You'd spent your whole adult life being a little embarrassed by big emotions in front of people, even your mom, but that day you just let it all out, the way a kid does with no filter, just pure unfiltered grief taking up all the space.
At some point, you became aware of where you were. This was the house you grew up in. The same house on the same street, where you'd met Heeseung for the first time, more than a decade ago now. You tried not to think about it, you really did but it came anyway.
You were eleven and you'd been playing some version of hide and seek with the other kids on the street, and Beomgyu, one of the neighborhood kids, showed up with this kid you'd never seen before and introduced him as his cousin. You were wearing an Eevee shirt and you remember that specifically, because the first thing Heeseung said to you after Beomgyu introduced him, was, "do you like Pokémon?"
"Yeah," you'd said.
"Every girl likes Eevee," he said, like it was just a fact.
You remember being instantly annoyed. "Yeah, I love Eevee. You have a problem with that?" you'd said, hands on your hips, eleven years old and ready to fight about it.
"No, no," he said quickly, holding his hands up. "I'm just saying." And even then, even as a dumb kid who'd clearly just said something dumb, there was this flicker of him being careful like he didn't want you to take it the wrong way.
He told you his favorite was Gengar. You shot back, "every boy likes Gengar," and that felt like a very satisfying thing to say.
"My friends mostly like Charizard," he said.
"Everyone likes Charizard," you said.
"I pulled a shiny Charizard once," he said, like that changed everything.
"No you didn't," you said.
"Yes I did."
"Then where is it?"
"It's at my house."
"Let's go get it then."
"I don't — I don't live here," he said. "I'm just visiting. Beomgyu's mom is my mom's cousin."
"Oh," you'd said. And even then something in you had felt a kind of disappointment, this quiet little fact landing somewhere: he's not going to be here whenever I want him to be. You didn't know what to do with that feeling, so you didn't do anything with it, you just kept playing.
You remembered that feeling now, lying there on your mom's couch, feeling like that same eleven-year-old, except this time you knew exactly what it meant. Heeseung wasn't going to be here whenever you wanted him to be. Not this summer. Not any summer. Not ever again.
And even though, in those first weeks, you'd been completely sure you'd never get past it and that this pain was just going to be the new permanent shape of your life — one day, months later, you woke up and didn't think about Heeseung first thing.
You were running late for work, actually, which was probably part of it because there wasn't time to lie in bed and feel anything before you had to move. You got dressed fast, caught the train, put your headphones in, read a few pages of your book. Work was normal, you laughed at something a coworker said. You went to lunch with one of your friends from the office and had something genuinely good. You went home, watched an episode of the show you were into at the time, had a glass of wine, and went to bed. And that whole day, for the first time, you hadn't thought about Heeseung not even once. And the strange part was that you hadn't noticed not noticing.
The next day went the same way mostly, until someone at work mentioned they'd seen Joker 2, the one with Lady Gaga, and that it had been terrible. And just like that, you thought of him. And it hurt the way it had hurt the day it happened, like no time had passed at all.
You sat there for a second, kind of stunned by it, and then you realized something else: it had been a while since you'd felt that specific ache of missing him. You'd gone — what, a day? Two days? — without it, and you hadn't even clocked it as an absence until it came back. The thing that struck you was that some part of you had actually missed it. Not only him, but you'd missed the missing. You'd gotten so used to carrying that weight that his absence had felt like its own kind of absence, and its return felt almost like coming home to something, even though it hurt.
C.S. Lewis wrote about grief in A Grief Observed, something about how sorrow turns out not to be a state but a process but more like a long valley with bends in it, and every time you turn a corner you think the road has changed completely, but then you look back and realize the shape of the landscape is still the same, you've just gotten used to walking through it. That felt true now in a way it hadn't before because the pain hadn't gone anywhere. You'd just stopped noticing it was there, and then, when it changes, even for a second, you remember — oh, yeah. That happened.
You weren't sure if that meant you were healing or if it just meant you'd made peace with the ache itself, or maybe learned how to live alongside it instead of waiting for it to leave. Maybe those weren't the same thing, you didn't know yet. But you sat there with your coffee going cold, missing him in that old familiar way.
Heeseung had never had to move on from anything before. So every piece of advice he got, every thing his friends said, all of it assumed he knew the shape of this, that he just needed reminders of a process he'd been through before and would get through it again. But he hadn't, he had no reference point. He was just kind of stumbling through it and figuring out the rules as he went, the way you do anything you're experiencing for the first time as an adult.
For a long time every day felt like the same day but just repeated. Bad but in slightly different ways, but always bad and always present the second he woke up. And then, one day, it just wasn't. He didn't notice it happening, just like you. He woke up and went for a run, because Sunghoon convinced him running was supposed to help with everything, and he actually felt good after, and not "fine, considering," just normal good. He showered and made breakfast, had a video call with Jay about something stupid and they ended up talking for an hour about nothing important and Heeseung laughed. He worked, went out with Jake and Sunoo that night and had a genuinely good time with no asterisk on it.
He went to bed that night and felt good. It felt weird feeling good. Then he realized that he hadn't thought about you all day, not once. He lay there almost waiting for that to upset him, like maybe realizing it would bring it all back, but it didn't, really. He just felt this strange quiet thing on his chest, it wasn't happiness, definitely wasn't happiness, but something close to relief.
The next few days were okay too. Not perfect but the baseline had shifted somehow. He started to think, cautiously, that maybe this was it. Maybe this was what people meant on what moving on feels like. Maybe he was actually getting somewhere. And then there'd be a bad day again out of nowhere, just a monday that felt exactly like the worst weeks all over again, like none of the good days had happened at all. He'd lie there wondering if he'd imagined the progress, if it had been a fluke, if he was back at square one.
He'd pictured it, before, as a kind of slope. Bad, then less bad, then less bad than that, steadily, like a graph trending in one direction. That's not what it was, it was more like weather. Good days and bad days just like rainy days and sunny days, no pattern and no schedule, and the good days didn't cancel out the bad ones and the bad ones didn't erase the good ones either. They just both existed taking turns.
Heeseung found that he could hold both at the same time, eventually — that he could think about you, about the years and the calls and the airport goodbyes and feel something warm about it and something sad about it in the exact same thought. He wasn't sure if that was what moving on actually meant. Maybe moving on wasn't about the bad days disappearing. Maybe it was just about being able to hold the good and the bad without it knocking him over anymore. He didn't know if he was there yet. But some days, increasingly, he thought he might be getting close.
Years went by, the way years do. You still followed each other on social media, but muted. Neither of you unfollowed each other but neither of you really engaged either, beyond the one thing neither of you ever stopped doing: a birthday message. You knew that for the rest of your life, probably, on October 15th, some part of your brain would just know — it's Heeseung's birthday — whether you wanted it to or not. You weren't sure if he'd remember yours the same way since yours was buried in the Christmas week, easy to lose in everything else going on, and you figured if anyone had a reason to forget, it'd be understandable. But Heeseung never forgot. Every year, a message would show up, sometimes with something small attached, maybe a joke or a reference only the two of you would get. You always answered. He always did too, on his.
He changed jobs. His brother had a kid. You moved apartments. You changed your car. You broke your thumb and it hurt like hell. You changed your hair more than once — the pink eventually grew out, and then came back, and then grew out again. You went to Paris for a week with friends and posted way too many photos of the Eiffel Tower. He went to China for something work related and you saw, through someone, that he'd looked happy in the pictures.
You dated someone eventually, a couple of years in. It ended badly actually, messier than you'd have liked, an ending with real anger and real hurt feelings on both sides. But it didn't break you the way you might have once expected something like that to. It hurt, and then it stopped hurting on a fairly normal timeline, and somewhere in the middle of it you realized something almost funny: this wasn't the worst thing that had ever happened to you, not even close. You'd already had the worst thing. You'd survived the worst thing. Whatever this was, you already knew you could get through it, because you'd gotten through something so much bigger already. Heeseung had been the big one. Everything after that, you could handle.
He found someone too, eventually. You've heard he's still with her, years later, and that they seem happy. You didn't feel anything bad about that. You'd thought, at some point, that you might — that hearing it would hurt, but it didn't. If anything, it felt right. That was what he deserved. You meant that, plainly.
Then one day, there was an announcement that Oasis, the band you'd been sure would never get back together, somehow getting back together. You got tickets and you went with a friend, a friend you'd gotten closer to over the past year, someone you still weren't entirely sure how to define, if you were being honest with yourself. You weren't sure what this thing between you two was yet, but you were still figuring it out.
At the show, you stood next to her, and at some point during one of the songs, she reached over and took your hand and you let her, and you stood there like that for the rest of the set. And you felt something settle, this unexpected relief. The thought arrived almost gently: maybe I can do this again. Maybe you weren't someone who'd only get to feel this once. There had been a long stretch where you'd genuinely wondered if you'd ever feel love again — not necessarily romantic, but that unguarded affection — and standing there, holding someone's hand listening to a song you'd loved, not even sure yet what it meant, you realized you were feeling it. Whatever this was, it was real and it was love in some form, and you loved her, regardless of what it eventually turned into. And it reminded you, distantly, of him.
And in the middle of that thought, you looked over. And there he was. A few rows over, watching the show, singing along with his arm around someone, her head resting against his shoulder, both of them completely in it, completely happy.
He'd found it too. He'd let himself love again. And it didn't hurt seeing him love someone else.
Heeseung had spent way too much time, once, thinking about how long it's supposed to take to get over a breakup. To get over you. He'd never gotten a real answer, maybe that was because it was the wrong question all along. Some loves aren't ones you get over. They're ones you get through, and what's left, on the other side, is not an absence — it's room. Room to love again, because you finally know you can.
ronnie notes ⊹ ࣪ ˖⠀⠀hi everyone!! i’ve actually been writing this one over the past three months and it’s not as long as the stories i usually post but it means a lot to me. i’m pretty sure some of you are going to yell at me after reading it because well !! it’s sad very sad..... this story is also a lot more personal than most things i’ve written before. there are a lot of emotions and experiences in here that came from things i was dealing with in real life. i started writing it during a period where i felt like i needed somewhere to put all of those feelings, so every time i was sad, overwhelmed, confused, or just trying to make sense of something, i ended up pouring a little bit of it into this fic. in a weird way, writing it helped me get through a lot of the things that were happening while i was away. so i hope you enjoy it.!! and as always, feedback is more than welcome. thank you for reading and for sticking around ♡
RONNIE MY LOVE MY WIFE i forgot to repost this when i read it and u alrdy know my thoughts bc i texted u my reaction in live time and uk how many screenshots i have in my camera roll of parts that stuck by me,,,,,,,which was pretty much all 16k of this piece of art……anyways. needless to say. you continue to be my icon my inspiration my person that i will forever be in awe with because the way you process and execute your emotions in such a beautiful way is something that needs to be studied and praised. this is so much more than just a fanfiction but a testimony to the human experience and the reality of love and the experience of falling into it and falling out of it and how we should be grateful we get the 0.00000058% chance to go through such things 💔💔💔💔 and i think just knowing so much abt who you are at the core and what makes you you made reading this an experience im so thankful i get to have bc i have u as my friend😭anyways everyone pls read this absolutely amazing piece, miss veronica really did bare her absolute soul into this and i know how much she really put into it behind the scenes and i will forever admire and respect your vulnerability and skill and talent and emotional intelligence to do so🥹🥹🥹
HIIII I saw in your recent spidey jake post you said you're writing two fics right now...can I ask what they are🥺🥺🥺or even previews???? EITHER WAY I'm excited for another one of your fics I've been missing them 💔💔💔
HIIII ANONNIE YES YES of course i will spill hehe here are the previews i have rn (might tweak them in the final ver…)
i honestly started writing adore u sooooo long ago after watching the movie ‘materialists’ and got heavy inspo by it,,,altho it’s only loosely based and the plot is nothing like the movie LOL the only similarities really is that yn is a matchmaker and heeseung is rich and wants her bad LMAO but yeaaaa that one is at 10k words rn but i lowkey am taking a break bc i recently started writing ex!jake …. anddddd i think im way too invested to stop now so i think that’ll be the first one i post :3 i’m kinda taking my time with these because i’m trying to work on my writing and trying to be a little more vulnerable and raw so it’s been a process for sure but stay tuned <3333 and im so sorry it’s been literally FOREVER since my last full fic </3 i know i kinda disappeared for a moment there but i never stopped writing the entire time just kinda taking a breakkk but hopefully i’ll post these soon :’))))) ty for being so patient
so back2u is now at 22k and i'm not even close to done and i really didn't think it would take this long SO NOW IM ANXIOUSSSS i hope u guys are okay with a longer fic >:((((
The reveal was just so 🤌🤌🥹 good! (Andrew was my fav spidey😭)
Idk i dont even have a word to describe it. I was wondering. I've not seen anyone write this scene as an au in particular and was wondering if you would want to cause unfortunately even if i do hv ideas i was NAWT gifted in the writing dept. Like ur supercalifragilisticexpialidocious gorjus brain🥹 I love ur works 💗💗💗 you're amazing! Dont forget that!
Have a nice day/night! 💗
[Damn I yapped like crazy💀]
[Hope i made sense tho cause English is NOT my first lang]
YAYYYYY IM GLAD U LIKEDDD ITTTTT and omigosh yes that reveal was probably the best spidey reveal is the entire history of spidey reveals,,,like it literally gave kid me butterflies when i watched it and little did i know many years down the road i'd be writing it for jake HAHHAHA maddie knew who she was at a very young age or however the quote goes LMAO ugh i love peter parker in general he's just so dorky and that scene is like so dorky hot and so by my logic, perfect for jakey hehe <3 THANK YOUUUUUU FOR UR KIND COMMENTS IM SO GLAD U LIKED IT MWAH
HIIII I saw in your recent spidey jake post you said you're writing two fics right now...can I ask what they are🥺🥺🥺or even previews???? EITHER WAY I'm excited for another one of your fics I've been missing them 💔💔💔
HIIII ANONNIE YES YES of course i will spill hehe here are the previews i have rn (might tweak them in the final ver…)
i honestly started writing adore u sooooo long ago after watching the movie ‘materialists’ and got heavy inspo by it,,,altho it’s only loosely based and the plot is nothing like the movie LOL the only similarities really is that yn is a matchmaker and heeseung is rich and wants her bad LMAO but yeaaaa that one is at 10k words rn but i lowkey am taking a break bc i recently started writing ex!jake …. anddddd i think im way too invested to stop now so i think that’ll be the first one i post :3 i’m kinda taking my time with these because i’m trying to work on my writing and trying to be a little more vulnerable and raw so it’s been a process for sure but stay tuned <3333 and im so sorry it’s been literally FOREVER since my last full fic </3 i know i kinda disappeared for a moment there but i never stopped writing the entire time just kinda taking a breakkk but hopefully i’ll post these soon :’))))) ty for being so patient
𖢥 ────── spiderman!jake texts .✦ ˎˊ˗ fluff, crack, ft. sunghoon aka guy in the chair hehe, jake is extremely down bad, based off of tangled up with you!jakeyn
°˖➴ .ᐟ ── a little something as an apology for being absent on here :') reread some of tangled up with you recently and started missing spidey jakey hehe so here's this! i promise i'll start being more active soon,,,i'm currently in the midst of writing two fics ;) anyways enjoy & take care <333
────── idk how smau writers do it this took me forever, i have mad respect for yall LMAO :')
𖢥 ────── spiderman!jake texts .✦ ˎˊ˗ fluff, crack, ft. sunghoon aka guy in the chair hehe, jake is extremely down bad, based off of tangled up with you!jakeyn
°˖➴ .ᐟ ── a little something as an apology for being absent on here :') reread some of tangled up with you recently and started missing spidey jakey hehe so here's this! i promise i'll start being more active soon,,,i'm currently in the midst of writing two fics ;) anyways enjoy & take care <333
────── idk how smau writers do it this took me forever, i have mad respect for yall LMAO :')
ADDIE HIIIII how are you!! missed u sm it's been a good while since i sent a message <33 ive been hella busy with exams omg i feel like they're never gonna end because one ends and then they start all over again
ALSO to the anon who was wondering if you could adjust the html for coloured/gradient font on mobile (idk who you are so i'm sending it thru addie's inbox, but if you want more help, feel free to reach out to me!) you actually can, using the web version of tumblr on the browser you have on your phone,,, although ngl, it's much more annoying to do on phone than it is to do on a laptop or tab 😐
id recommend using a laptop, but if push comes to shove & u have no other option, then mobile web is an okay-ish option to do ur formatting, although u will have to scroll for a helluva long time to find what line of ur code u want to edit if u don't like the formatting.... but i hope this helps!! 🫶🏼🫶🏼
HIIIII omg sorry this is so late!!! ive been ok!!! definitely been mia on here but life is busy :') ahhhh good luck with exams luv, i hope they went well and that you're resting now!!! and TYYYYY for ur help hopefully this anon sees <3
pairing 𖢥 ₊°˖ spiderman!jake x f!reader ── .✦ fluff, rom-com, angst, slowburn, miscommunication!trope, classmates to lovers ft. guy-in-the-chair!sunghoon
wc 𖢥⊹✎ᝰ.ᐟ 25.4k ( ˶o˶˶o˶)
synopsis 𖢥 ⁺₊✧ keeping his secret identity...a secret? easy work. hiding his raging, massive, all-consuming crush on you? not so much. sim jaeyun has a lot on his plate: high school, late-night crime-fighting, a history final next week, and a painfully massive crush on his chemistry lab partner—you. and things are finally starting to look up—during the day, jake bonds with you over caffeine-fueled study sessions and at night, spider-man walks you home. but then you drop a bomb: you've got feelings for someone else. and that someone is...spider-man. and now, somehow, someway, jake is in a love triangle. with himself. turns out—falling for your lab partner and your friendly neighborhood hero? easy work. realizing they're the same guy? not so much.
warnings 𖢥⊹ ࣪ ˖ mentions of violence, blood, wounds // mild cursing // multiple kiss scenes bc jake is just so kissable whoops // slowslowburn // jakehoon bromance keeps me alive // jake pines & yearns & longs & yearns.. // concept of 'casual' dating // superhero & mcu elements & easter eggs :3 // jake is a loser but spider-man is a smooth-talker heh
°˖➴ .ᐟ 𖢥 addie ── FINALLY !!! i have finally, finally finished a full fic for the first time in literal forever and i'm actually so excited for this one bc i freaking love mcu & spiderman & jake so freaking much you guys dont understand...spidey was my first ever childhood crush i think i literally made a post abt it somewhere here on my blog ages ago...so my reaction when i got this anon request for this fic?? i cheered. ꉂ(˵˃ ᗜ ˂˵) ty for being patient with me and for all the words of support & encouragement & love throughout the process <333 if you've been here some time and read my other works you know i literally get myself way too indulged into the whole process,,,but i really did have so much freaking fun writing this so i really hope you guys like all 25k words of spidey!jake :3
sim jaeyun has a lot of secrets.
like the fact that he’s secretly (but not so secretly) a giant nerd and, frankly, a genius with the probable IQ of someone who can calculate pi to the 500th decimal in his head just for fun. or maybe the fact that he’s definitely smart enough to hack into the school’s database and find copies of the finals’ answer keys under ten minutes flat.
but he doesn’t. because again. sim jaeyun is a genius (and because he’s scared of getting caught. but mostly the genius thing).
sim jaeyun pours his milk before cereal. he sleeps on his stomach. he doesn’t separate his white socks from his colored ones. he’s terrified of cats. he loves rom-coms. he’s spider-man. he can’t fall asleep without his favorite build-a-bear. and he doesn’t know how to ride a bike.
but his most important secret?
he has the biggest crush on you.
so big that he’d say it’s more top-secret than the fact that he uses 5-in-1 men’s soap and being the city’s web-slinging, crime-fighting, red-and-blue spandex-wearing superhero.
and in all honestly—
it’s not like the latter is even that secret anymore.
because another thing about jake?
he sucks at keeping secrets.
he figured this out about two weeks into accepting his new life post-radioactive-spider-bite—right around the same time he decided yeah, sure, i can totally handle having powers and a double life. and not freaking out every time he accidentally shot a web out in his sleep.
he figured this out when park sunghoon, his longtime best friend, accidentally found jake’s suit in his room. and by accidentally, we mean jake just…left it lying out. on his bed. in plain sight. because he forgot to put it away the day sunghoon came over to share his history notes.
that was the day sunghoon declared himself jake’s “guy in the chair.”
so yeah.
jake sucks at keeping his spidey secret…a secret.
but his crush on you?
oh yeah.
that one’s highly classified (except from sunghoon. because again—guy in the chair).
“you should probably stop staring before it gets creepy.”
jake blinks.
he stops staring at you—across the cafeteria, laughing with your friends, completely unaware of how he’s most definitely about five seconds away from writing your name in bubble letters with a pink glitter pen on his notebook cover.
he turns his head toward the voice.
sunghoon, of course.
“actually, too late. it’s creepy,” sunghoon adds before casually chewing on the cafeteria pizza that’s always a little too suspiciously rubbery but no one ever questions it for their own sake.
jake sighs, his eyes going back to your figure across the busy room. “you think she’ll talk to me in chemistry today?”
sunghoon doesn’t even blink.
“she has to talk to you. you guys are literally lab partners.”
“that’s different,” jake mutters, chin in his hand, eyes never leaving you once. “i mean, i could ask what her favorite color is or something…”
sunghoon stares. jaw slack. full deadpan.
“that’s a joke, right? please tell me that’s a joke. because i don’t know what funnier—the fact that you have the pick up lines of a first grader, or the fact that even i know that you know you don’t have the guts to say anything to her that’s not directly related to ionic bonding.”
jake whips his head to his best friend, the look in his eyes being nothing less than betrayed, “i so totally can!”
“jake,” sunghoon says slowly, voice lowering, “you broke the test tube in your hand last week when she asked what your weekend plans were.”
a pause.
“then you ran out of the room. without saying anything.”
jake groans. drops his head into his arms on the table. “okay, i specifically remember saying we would never bring that up ever again.”
sunghoon chuckles, hands raised, “just saying.”
a brief silence falls over the table as jake lifts his head up in despair. he goes back to probably-definitely-not-so-subtly watching you from across the cafeteria.
“you should just…y’know—” sunghoon nudges jake’s side. “—get your lil buddy to help you out.”
jake freezes.
turns to his best friend in horror, “my…lil what now?”
sunghoon’s palm smacks the side of jake’s head before his voice drops to a whisper, “your alter ego, idiot.”
jake rubs the side of his head, staring at the way sunghoon is casually sitting there like this is a perfectly reasonable suggestion.
“you heard me,” sunghoon continues when jake makes no sign of responding, the look on his face enough to tell sunghoon he thinks he’s probably borderline psychotic. “go up to her as spider-man. be mysterious. say something cool. i bet she’ll be super impressed and instantly fall in love with you.”
“that is literally the worst idea you probably could’ve ever thought of.”
“is it?” sunghoon shrugs, smug as he leans back in his chair. “because seeing as your track record so far is either a) breaking glass around her, or b)…actually, no. yeah, that’s it. that’s all i got. your track record sucks, bro.”
jake groans for the nth time and lets his head thunk onto the table this time with a soft clunk. “i hate it here.”
“you’re not even going to consider it?”
jake lifts his head just enough to glare his eyes at sunghoon, “do you hear yourself? you want me to flirt with her…while wearing spandex. in full mask. while i talk like this—” his voice drops to the deeper, definitely-not-as-disguising-as-he-thinks-it-is tone he uses while saving the city at night. “‘hey. i know i’m wanted by, like, a hundred bad people out there, but also, what’s your favorite color?’”
sunghoon grins. “add a little web trick and shoulder touch and boom—she’s yours.”
jake deadpans at him, his voice returning to normal, “do you even like me? are we even friends?”
sunghoon shrugs. pops a fry in his mouth. thinks for a second. “you’re entertaining.”
jake groans again. slumps dramatically into his seat, staring at the too-bright fluorescent lights in the ceiling above him. “i can’t flirt as spider-man me,” he mutters. “that sounds like a nightmare. i can’t even talk to her as me me.”
“duh. that’s kinda the entire point.”
“and then what, huh?” jake dramatically throws his hands up. “i take her on a date while web-swinging through the city? and if i drop her?”
“i dunno,” sunghoon takes another unbothered bite of his rubber pizza. “use two webs? you’re the one with the sticky powers, i don’t know it works!”
jake lets out an exasperated sound.
sunghoon pats his back, attempting to be the supportive friend he is. “face it. it’s the only way she’s ever gonna know you’re slightly even remotely cool and do anything more than read books on like…i don’t know—how physics makes the earth spin or something.”
jake pouts. “i am cool!”
“you own a build-a-bear named woofy.”
“he’s a comfort object!”
“exactly. that’s why spider-man has to take the wheel from now on.”
jake stares at sunghoon, shakes his head, and starts packing up his completely untouched lunch.
“whatever. i’m going to chemistry,” he mutters, swinging his backpack around his shoulder with a huff, despite the fact that class doesn’t start for another twenty minutes.
and it’s not like he needs to get to class early to ask the teacher questions or get extra help on the homework or anything normal and productive like that—don’t be ridiculous.
because here’s the thing. jake getting to class early means one very important thing: he gets to his seat—the one next to yours—before you do.
which means you have to acknowledge him first. which is crucial.
because if the roles were reversed—jake does not trust himself to be able to acknowledge you first and say hi without choking on his own air or probably knocking over a glass beaker that wasn’t there before but would somehow magically appear because that’s just jake’s luck in the process.
regardless, it works. the system works. he’s perfected it by now. because it’s about half way through the school year and without fail, every time you walk into class and jake’s already sitting there—busy pretending like he’s reading some article on his laptop when in reality his senses are going haywire over being overwhelmed by your entire presence that he already felt from down the hallway—you always greet him first with the same airy, cheery tone in your voice, bright smile, hair flowing, perfume floating in the air—
"hi jake!"
jake's soul ascends.
he looks up (too fast), catches himself (too obvious), and tries to play it cool with a little nod and smile that definitely looks a little more like a grimace (too tragic).
"hey." nailed it.
you smile casually as you plop your backpack down on the lab table you share with him and start pulling out your notebooks for the day. and jake just stares ahead like a soldier at war. his hands are sweating. his feet are bouncing. his entire nervous system is screaming at him to say something, anything.
and as if the universe decided to play a casually cruel trick on him—
"...so what's your favorite color?"
"so, any fun weekend plans?"
both your voices overlap.
you both freeze.
turn to each other at the same time.
blink.
"oh—"
"—sorry, you go—"
"no, you first—"
"okay—wait—i, i forgot—"
silence.
you hold back a smile.
jake wishes to melt into the earth and hopes he never reincarnates.
"i was just gonna ask," you say, a small smile still playing on your lips that it makes jake's brain actively start doing 360s, "if you're doing anything this weekend."
jake short-circuits.
say something. be mysterious. be cool. be normal. channel spider-man. but maybe...not spider-man when you talk to him. spider-man when he talks to everyone else. "i'm...uh." he clears his throat. tries again. "probably just, y'know. working."
you tilt your head, eyes sparkling with curiosity, "working?"
"yeah," jake nods, too quickly for his own liking, then stops himself. "like—side gig."
if a side gig came with at least two new bruised ribs some nights and meant saving a city from criminals, but yeah, okay. sure. side gig.
your brows raise. "that's cool! what do you do?"
jake freezes.
panics.
what does he do.
he can't say spider-man.
he also can't say he has the molecular build of an eight-limbed arthropod and can stick onto walls with only his bare fingers.
and he definitely can't say i spend 70% of my free time thinking about you and the other 30% swinging off buildings.
"...delivery." he says it like he's mysterious. cool. totally normal.
you blink. as if waiting, as if expecting him to elaborate.
he blinks back at you.
"delivering...what?"
"...pizza."
(and he did once deliver a stolen pizza order back to its rightful owner after webbing the thief to a lamppost. that totally counts.)
"oh," you nod slowly, giving him a genuine smile. "that sounds fun!"
jake gives a thumbs up.
mentally smacks himself in the face repeatedly.
but then, his brain suddenly catches up to the situation at hand and before he can stop himself, he blurts—
"wait—uh, why do you ask?"
and then you break eye contact, glancing down at your notebook, and jake pretends not to notice your fingers suddenly fidgeting with one of your many too-colorful pens.
"well," you start, and jake is trying his very, very best to ignore the fact that his senses can pick up on your heart beat. "we've got the final coming up next week, and i don't know—you always seem like you know what you're doing in class, so—"
she thinks im smart? oh my god. she notices me? even when i’m not breaking glass? oh my god oh my god oh my—
"—i was hoping maybe we could study together?" you look up at him again, your eyes wide. "or go over the study guide one last time or something. but it's totally fine if you're busy working! and that makes sense, you probably don't even need to study, you're, like, uber smart and stuff, so—"
"no."
your words come to a halt and your mouth is left slack.
jake smacks himself. mentally. again.
and again.
"...oh, um—"
jake coughs suddenly, a little too loud, a little too forced. "sorry! i mean—no...no, i'm not busy. yes, i'm down. down. to study. together. yeah."
he takes note in the way your shoulders slightly relax and the way you release a breath of what sounds like relief and amusement at the same time.
then, a soft smile makes its way to your face again, "okay! okay, cool!"
jake doesn't know if he should scream, sob, or launch himself into the sun.
he smiles back. "cool."
there's a pause.
"wait—but what about work?" your head tilts slightly, a soft crease forming between your brows.
shit.
"oh. right," jake mutters, clearing his throat as his hand casually brushes through his hair as if he thought this one through (he, in fact, did not).
quick, lie—wait, no. casual lie. lying is not cool. don't lie to the girl you like. you're simply protecting her. be mysterious. be cool. be normal.
"i'm...sure the pizzas will be okay for a night! yeah. they have flexibility. my job, i mean. not the pizzas. my manager's chill."
your smile brightens at his answer and jake decides launching himself into the sun is dramatic. in fact, he thinks the sun came out today just for him.
"okay, yay!" you're beaming. "sounds like a plan."
jake also thinks his heart just tripped over itself.
"here, let me—" you rip off a corner of your notebook and start scribbling something down with one of your pens before sliding the slip of paper over to his side of the table, "—give you my number and you let me know when and where works best, yeah?"
and jake is simply a guy.
a guy entirely entranced.
it's the way you lean a little closer to the desk, tongue peeking out at the corner of your mouth in concentration. the way your hair shifts when you tilt your head, the gentle swish of it brushing over your shoulder. the way your bracelets softly clink together when your hands move. the way you smoothly push the small slip of paper with your number and name signed with a small smiley face towards him like it's no big deal.
jake stares at the paper like all those nights of manifesting finally paid off and this small slip of notebook paper is first proof that a manifestation journal really does work.
your name. your number. a tiny smile doodled next to it.
it's the cutest thing he's ever seen.
he looks at the note. then at you. then back at the note.
how did this happen. what did he say? was it the pizza lie? no, it couldn't have been the pizza lie.
"cool," jake eventually says, but he realizes he's said cool one too many times and it comes out so high-pitched, he's genuinely unsure if he said it out loud or just squeaked like a mouse.
and you just simply smile back at him, soft and sweet and light, and jake decides to revisit the potential idea of self launching into orbit.
and when the teacher enters the classroom, immediately starting the lecture, jake turns back to the front of the class, trying his very best to focus—
"pink."
it comes out as a low and soft whisper. jake's head jerks slightly towards you, and you're leaning in, just slightly enough for your shoulder to brush against his.
"...i—what?"
you smile, your eyes crinkled at their corners as you look at him, "my favorite color. it's pink."
then, you turn back to the whiteboard, already scribbling down your notes like you didn't just change the entire trajectory of jake's future.
jake doesn't move.
jake, in fact, doesn't hear a single word of whatever the teacher is saying about the synthesis and characterization of something-something-carbene-molecular-something.
all he knows is:
he's seeing you this weekend.
your favorite color is pink.
and tucked into the back of his phone is now a piece of corner notebook paper with your number on it.
and, of course, it's written in pink.
jake doesn’t know what he’s going to tell sunghoon about first—the fact that the favorite color pick-up line potentially worked, or that he has an actual study date with y–
wait.
“do you think it’s a study date?” jake’s voice is muffled by a peanut butter protein bar, his legs dangling off the edge of some random apartment building he deemed clean from bird poop to sit on.
there’s a long beat of silence from the other end of his phone that’s perched beside him on speaker, before sunghoon finally answers.
“i think it’s your chemistry lab partner…who needs to study for an exam…with her super genius bench partner,” sunghoon pauses. “but yeah. it’s definitely also a study date.
jake fist-pumps the air. “right?! that’s what i’m saying!” he leans back on one of his palms, staring down at the blur of streetlights and car headlights below, watching the tiny dots of normal people go about their normal people lives after their normal people days.
“god, i’m gonna say something dumb. i always say something dumb. i’m gonna probably tell her my favorite element is, like, carbon, or something. that’s not even a fun one,” jake sighs as he watches the sun slowly set along the skyline in front of him.
there’s a long, suffering sigh from the phone. “please, for the love of God and everything He created, do not tell her what your favorite element is.”
jake frowns, even though he knows sunghoon can’t see it. “you don’t think it’s charming?”
“remember what happened in the sixth grade when that girl asked for a pencil and you gave her an entire lecture on valence electrons and then she never spoke to you ever again?”
jake makes a face. “okay, but she didn’t specify what kind of lead she needed—”
“just…be normal,” sunghoon cuts in. “be jake.”
jake goes quiet.
because that’s just the problem, isn’t it?
because jake isn’t normal.
“normal” and “jake” haven’t belonged in the same sentence since he woke up one random morning with super strength, freakish reflexes, and abs (not that he’s complaining about the abs. but still. he knows his two-day-a-week gym habit and occasional protein bar didn’t cause them).
normal isn’t waking up in the middle of the night because your fingers literally fused to your bed frame. normal isn’t learning how to navigate puberty while also learning how different wrist angles shoot out different types of webs. normal isn’t lying to your mom about why your laundry always smells like burnt rubber and concrete dust and weirdly enough, hot dogs.
and normal definitely isn’t sitting a hundred feet above the city at 10PM on a friday night with your best friend on speaker and your spandex suit hidden under a hoodie, trying to decide if your biggest life crisis is:
a — the rise of petty city crime
or
b — the way your ridiculously pretty chemistry partner smiled at you and made you question your entire being in 0.2 seconds
but when he thinks about you?
when jake’s with you—he’s just jake. no suit, no webs, no…fear of potential death.
he feels like a regular teenage boy. the kind who worries about history finals and likes stupid memes and builds lego sets with his best friend on saturdays and has a crush on the cute girl in his chemistry class.
with you, he doesn’t feel like a science experiment. or a secret. or an accident waiting to happen.
he just feels like…jake.
“i just—dude. i didn’t even have to pull the spider-man card!” jake sits up a little, legs now swinging. “like. at all. she said i was smart! jake-smart. i didn’t need to save a cat or catch a bus or—”
“—instead,” sunghoon’s monotone voice cuts in, “you told her you deliver pizzas for fun and somehow it worked.”
“you’re the worst guy in the chair.”
“and yet, here we are. you’re still call—”
“wait” jake freezes. sits upright. his head tilts slightly. “hold on.”
something in the air hits him.
his senses prick. muscles tense. tingling. sounds slow, scents sharpen. the world zooms in all at once.
“i gotta go,” jake stands up, his voice muffled by shoving the rest of his protein bar into his mouth, already slipping his mask over his head.
“duty calls,” sunghoon replies casually, like this is the third time this week (it is). “be safe!”
“love you, bye!” jake says before the hanging up and shoving his phone into his backpack and thwipping it to the rooftop wall in one motion. it’ll probably still be there later. hopefully.
on most nights, it is still right where he left it, waiting patiently after the hours of his city-saving. but right now, jake couldn’t care any less about his belongings. he’s already airborne, swinging building to building with smooth, practiced ease. he follows the tug in his chest, the sense of something being slightly off. a scuffle. somewhere just a block or two away.
and on most nights, you’re careful. you’re observant, aware. you know how to check left, right, then left again before crossing the street. you stick to the well-lit sidewalks, don’t take shortcuts, avoid the sketchy alleyways your parents used to warn you about growing up.
and you also know, deep down, that you probably shouldn’t have stayed at this library this late. but here we are.
you’re barely a block from the bus stop you just got off at when it happens. a shadow moves—quick, low, but intentional. he’s stumbling. smirking. slurring.
your stomach drops immediately.
“hey, pretty thing,” he calls out, “where you off to this late?”
“not interested,” you mumble, clutching your bag closer to your body, steps picking up faster.
“oh, come onnn,” he draws. you hear his footsteps behind you. too close now. “just a little chat—”
you turn over your shoulder just in time to see his hand land slightly on your shoulder, just where your bag strap sits.
but before you can even react—
THWIP.
it happens before you can even blink.
the guy disappears. yanked off his feet. with a yelp, he’s slammed against the nearest parked car on the street with a heavy thud, followed by a line of white, sticky substance trapping his sides.
and suddenly, another one hits his hands.
then his ankles.
then his chest.
until it’s all around him and he’s stuck to the car like a decal himself.
you freeze, not knowing what just happened or what the hell you’re supposed to do now. your heart is racing, your brain playing catch-up, your breathing paused.
and as you’re staring at the man-shaped cocoon, wondering if this is what finally wills you into full-blown psychosis—
a figure drops from above. with absolutely zero subtlety. and lands directly in between you and said webbed-up guy in a crouch.
dressed in red and blue. head to toe. and so much spandex.
spider-man.
“wow,” he says deadpan, turning to point at the man-turned-car-decal. “okay. that was, like, a solid ten out of ten on the creep scale. would’ve been a nine, but then you touched her. so. automatic point deduction.”
the guy groans beneath the webbing. “what the—who the hell are you?”
spider-man throws his arms up in exasperation, gesturing to himself like it’s obvious.
“spider-man, dude. the webs? the spider logo on my chest? keep up.”
he then turns to you, brushing off the imaginary dust from his hands. “you know, if i had a nickel for every time some scuffy guy tried the whole grabby in an alley thing this week, i’d have like…four nickels.”
a beat.
you’re still frozen. eyes wide. jaw slack.
“which isn’t a lot. but it’s weird that it happened that many times. should probably do something about that. or i guess that’s my job.”
the man groans from behind him, squirming, “get this shit off me man—”
“shhh,” spider-man shushes him, raising a hand. “don’t speak. we’re in a delicate moment of justice here.”
then, he turns back to you, head tilting. the eyes of his mask dilate as they squint at you.
his voice softens. “hey. everything okay?”
and you’re still frozen.
because there are many things you don’t believe in. you don’t believe in narwhals. you don’t believe that tarot cards can predict your love life. you don’t believe in flushing ice down the toilet to make it snow the next day, and you probably, maybe, sometimes don’t believe in birds being government spies.
but spider-man? you didn’t know if you believed in him or not. sure, you’ve seen the headlines. heard the rumors, watched the blurry phone footage. but never with your own eyes. until now.
“uh…” you nod quickly, eyes still wide, mouth still slightly ajar. “i...yeah. thank you. for that.”
and jake tries his best to keep his cool. exhales behind the mask, trying to not completely lose it.
to not completely combust when the literal crush of his life is standing in front of him, somehow glowing even under a dim, flickering street light. to not think about the very real fact that he just saved you from whatever-he-refuses-to-think-about that he just saved you from.
so he gives a casual shrug.
“that’s what they pay me for.”
you blink. “you get paid?”
jake stills. “uh, well. no. not technically. emotionally, yes. and sometimes sweet old ladies buy me churros.”
you blink again, but this time, your lips twitch slightly. “…okay. right.”
jake clears his throat, straightening up, placing his hands on his hips all awkward again and then putting them down when he realizes he probably looks like a cheap superhero mascot like that.
this part—this part—he’s usually good at. web the creep. leave a note for the cops. call them in. that’s how it usually goes.
what doesn’t usually happen is…this.
saving the girl he likes. the girl who doesn’t know she’s the girl he likes. the girl who definitely doesn’t know he sits next to her in chemistry and pretends to read when she walks in.
the creep behind him groans again. jake spins around on his heels and double thwips a neat string of webs over the guy’s mouth.
“aaaaand silence,” jake mutters, nodding to himself. “look at that. instant peace. should’ve probably done that twenty seconds ago.”
he turns back around. and you’re smiling now. it’s small and slightly shaky, but it’s there. jake notices. of course jake notices.
“are you sure you’re okay?” his voice dips again, gentler now.
you nod. “yeah, i think so. seriously…thank you so much.”
and jake hesitates—heart thumping, nerves sweating, because you are literally standing in front of him and he has the mask of spider-man on right now but the confidence of jake from chemistry. but still, he manages, "get home safe, yeah? you shouldn’t be walking alone this late. city’s full of creeps and…men in spandex.”
you let out a quiet laugh. “noted.”
“cool,” jake lets out, throwing up an awkward thumbs up and he makes a mental note to stop using the word ‘cool’ and to stop using thumbs ups as a defense mechanism.
he clears his throat and takes a casual step back as you watch him, still unmoving, as if you’re still trying to convince yourself he’s real.
“alright,” jake says, pointing his hand up to the building behind you before saluting you goodbye with the other. “spider-man…away?”
he fires. latches perfectly. but the fact that he actually, out-loud, said ‘spider-man away’ gets to his head and so he doesn’t time the swing quite right and his foot hits the top of a recycling bin on the way up. and he really hopes you didn’t see it happen (you did).
he lands on the rooftop above you, immediately crouching down out of view, chest heaving as his brain catches up to his body, still processing what just happened. heart still hammering, fingers still tingling.
then, after waiting a few seconds, he peers his head carefully over the line of buildings down the street and watches your figure walk away. head down, bag hugged close, pace quicker now.
and of course, because he’s jake—and spider-man (but mostly because he’s jake)—he follows you from above. quiet, careful, out of sight. just to make sure you make it back okay.
and when you finally reach your apartment building and unlock the front door, he still waits.
waits until he sees a light flicker on in your bedroom window.
waits until he sees your figure draw your curtains closed.
waits until he knows you’re safe.
only then does he finally exhale.
he drops onto the roof of a nearby pizza place—the one that claims they sell dollar pizza but it’s really $1.49—pulls off his mask with one hand and runs the other through his completely wrecked hair.
“jesus christ, jake,” he mutters to himself, a hand dragging down his face. “spider-man away? really?”
he shakes his head at himself, partly in shame, partly in disbelief, but mostly in shame, then stretches out his legs, groans at the ache in his biceps, and swings back towards the first rooftop where he left his backpack.
and thank god it’s still there. because once he unwebs his bag and fishes through his textbooks, unknown food wrappers, and decathlon club fliers to take out his phone with just merely 12% battery left, he clicks on your contact. stares at the blank message field. then he types.
JAKE (10:42PM) :
hey! it’s jake (from chem lol)
hope your night’s going okay :)
also
still good to meet at the cafe near school tomorrow? maybe around noon?
he stares at it. rereads it six times.
changes lol to haha.
then back to lol.
deletes the smiley face.
then the whole message.
then retypes it word for word.
eventually, he hits send.
and jake, bless his heart, keeps staring at the screen. forgets it’s nearly 11PM. forgets that his mom, who thinks he’s in bed, is probably gonna check in on him any second now (and yes, jake is nearly a legal adult. but he also grew up with chronic nightmares, so. check ins are necessary at times).
but then his screen lights up.
your name. a single message.
Y/N (10:43PM) :
yes :)
he feels his entire body exhale.
or light up on fire. he’s not sure of the difference, honestly.
and jake’s also not sure how long he sits there smiling at his phone like an idiot.
he doesn’t remember swinging back home. he doesn’t remember sneaking back into his room through his fire escape. he doesn’t even remember showering and wincing at the sting of soap against his fresh cuts and scratches.
because all he’s thinking about is your text.
which is probably why he also forgets to set an alarm.
so when he wakes up the next day at 11:45AM, twenty minutes away from the café he promised to meet you at in fifteen minutes, and absolutely zero minutes ready to leave his place—he’s in full blown panic.
“oh crap, crap—ow, damn it—crap,” he’s mutters, runs into a chair, accidentally smears toothpaste on his hoodie sleeve, and grabs the first protein bar he sees—cookies & creme this time—before sprinting out the door. but not before kissing his mom on the cheek goodbye.
his hair is still damp. his backpack is half-zipped. he’s 85% sure he applied deodorant twice and toothpaste once. or maybe the other way around.
and by the time he barges into the corner café that sells overpriced matcha lattes with the grainy oat milk but has good lighting and free wifi and outlets to use so it’s deemed a good study spot anyways, he immediately zeroes in on you at the small corner table—pen in hand, sipping from a cup casually and not at all aware that your mere existence and the way the little beam of sunlight shining through the café windows reflecting on you is already sending his sleep deprived state into overdrive.
he makes—or more like stumbles—his way over, just in time for you to glance up and catch his eye.
“hey!” you smile, so warm and relaxed that it almost makes jake forget he sprinted over in mismatched socks. “you made it.”
“yeah—sorry,” jake exhales, pulling out the seat across from you and placing his stuff down. “i stayed up late, forgot to set an alarm, then couldn’t find matching socks, i had this blue one on and then a red—“
jake stops himself. looks at you. gives you a sheepish smile. “sorry. you don’t need to hear about the whole sock saga.”
you giggle as you look up at him, “what a shame, i was kinda invested to see where that was going.”
jake tries not to float.
“and it’s fine, jake. really. if it makes you feel any better, you’re only like twelve minutes late.”
jake lets out a nervous chuckle as he slides into the seat across from you, “thanks. i’m usually only, like, ten minutes late, so this is all new to me. including the study date part.”
jake freezes.
your eyebrow quirks.
why did he say that.
why. did. he. say. that.
a small smile tugs at your lips, “study date?”
jake’s eyes are frozen and blown wide as he stares at you in horror from across the table, stumbling over his own words, “i mean. i—no, not a date! unless…unless you wanted it to be a date, which is fine! not just fine! i mean, it’s fine if you wanted—i just assumed that—well sorry, i shouldn’t have assumed—that would be non-consensual and i’m really big on, like, mutual respect and consent and—”
he stops.
jake needs to stop. he should stop talking about consent before he even got to ask you how your morning’s been like a regular human being does.
your stare lingers for a beat longer before you break into laughter, hand flying to your mouth, the other holding onto the table in front of you to support yourself as you snort. “jake.”
jake sinks slightly in his seat. wishes he was sinking into the earth. “yeah?”
your laughter softens into something gentler, and you look up at him, sure and simple and steady. “it’s okay. let’s call it that. a study date.”
you know how your laptop sometimes freezes because it’s firing a million tasks at once and then the fan starts whirring violently before the entire thing decides to just shut off and it has to take a few minutes to recover before rebooting itself back up to be able to fully function again?
yeah. that’s what’s happening to jake. right now.
“oh. okay. cool. cool, cool, cool,” he tugs at the collar of his hoodie. stop it with the cool, jake, we talked about this. and whatever you do, do not throw up a—
he throws a thumbs up at you. puts it away. tries to recover. “i’m very…pro…studying.”
you grin at him. “clearly.”
the dating part? not so much.
and after that, thing settles. in that warm, weirdly comforting way things do when you’ve either known someone your entire life or just long enough to know you want to.
textbooks open, laptops propped, flashcards highlighted, questions exchanged, your iced matcha is slowly disappearing while jake’s iced americano just sits there untouched—slowly watering down because jake forgets coffee makes him jittery but he was in a state of panic when he got to the counter so…here we are.
“wait, can i ask you something kinda random?"
you glance up from your notes, giving jake a small nod. “yeah?”
jake’s eyes land on the back of your laptop and he gestures vaguely to it. “why is your laptop covered in like…fourteen different beluga stickers?”
your head tilts as you follow his gaze and—yup. it’s true. it’s covered with not only fourteen little cartoon belugas, but also otters, starfish, and a little whale in the corner that isn’t so little and cost you a whole whopping five dollars at the book fair.
you blink at it. “oh, right.” a small smile then tugs at your lips. “i’m kinda obsessed with ocean life. it’s, like…one of my things.”
and jake is silent. not because he’s judging. no, he recites the periodic table in alphabetical order to help him fall asleep at night, so he can’t judge. but because—god. you say that like it’s the most casual thing in the world and not the most adorable sentence he’s ever heard.
“like, belugas are my favorite sea animals,” you continue, your own voice picking up from your own excitement now. “they’re just so cute and squishy looking. and they always look like they’re smiling? and granted i’ve never met one, but if i did meet one, i just know it’d be kind.”
jake is still not saying anything.
he’s watching the way your hands move animatedly, the way your eyes light up, the way your voice lifts when you say the words “if i did meet one” like it’s the most natural thing in the world to meet a literal beluga.
“they do look pretty nice,” jake adds eventually, absolutely trying his best to fight the grin off his face. “for a whale, i mean.”
your eyes widen as you suddenly gasp and lean in over the table towards jake, catching him off guard. “okay, i’m gonna pretend you didn’t just say that.”
jake freezes. and he doesn’t know how and he doesn’t know when, but he’s pretty sure he messed up somehow just by trying to impress his crush by complimenting a beluga.
“belugas aren’t whales,” you say, matter of fact, “they’re actually a type of dolphin, despite the name. common mistake.”
“oh,” jake just blinks and nods like this is a totally normal conversation. like he isn’t currently being lectured by the cute girl from his chemistry class about beluga whales. beluga…dolphins? not whales.
his eyes flick briefly to your hands, still hovering mid-air, animated from your explanation. then to your face, your eyes sparkling just a little bit too much for him to blame it on the café lighting. and everything—every little detail jake seems to notice and learn about you—makes jake feel like his heart is about to beat out of his chest.
“sorry,” you pause, noticing his stare. “i just…i really love this kind of stuff. it’s all just so fascinating to me. it’s kinda like whenever you start freaking out over, i don’t know…cis-trans isomerism in alkenes?”
jake chokes on his spit. smooth.
“wait,” he’s coughing, sitting up straighter, “how do you know that i—wait, how do you even know about cis-trans isomerism?”
“what can i say? i’m observant,” you look at him over the rim of your cup as you take a sip, casually shrugging, a small smirk on your lips.
and jake just casually tries not to freak out.
because, sure, jake has had his fair share of realizations through out his lifetime. like the day he woke up and found out he could suddenly stop a bus with his bare hands. or the time he discovered he’s mildly allergic to cauliflower. but this? this might top the list.
because you notice things. about him. him. and it short-circuits his brain. just a little. maybe a lot.
jake tries not to smile too hard. tries not to read too much into it. tries not to wonder if you notice the way he leans closer during chemistry labs or the way his voice raises half a pitch when you talk to him or the way he purposely gets to class early just so he could talk to you before.
they’re the kind of thoughts that keep him up that night. the kind that plague his entire mind until the only thing he’s thinking about when he falls asleep that night and the only thing he’s thinking about when he wakes up the next morning is…you.
and for the next few days, that’s just about the most exciting thing that happens to jake. the next few days for him go pretty normal.
and by normal, jake means boring. and by boring, i mean on monday, spider-man stops a bodega robbery and gets a pat on the back from the police officer and a sprained ankle. on tuesday, he wakes up late and almost misses his history final (which honestly would’ve been preferable). and on wednesday, you text jake for help on a chemistry review question. which is actually very exciting and not at all boring nor normal, despite how hard jake tries his best to act normal.
on thursday, however, jake stays late in the school computer lab to tinker with his web shooter tech. and that’s when sunghoon pulls up in front of him, dropping two small pieces of paper on jake’s mess of wires and tools and notebook doodles.
“bada-bing, bada-boom,” sunghoon announces as he plops into the chair next to jake.
jake looks up. sunghoon’s spinning awkwardly slowly in the swivel chair, arms out like a king clearly waiting for applause.
jake squints at the slips of paper. then back up.
“sunghoon.”
“yes?”
“why are we binging and booming and why are there clown fish on my web shooters?”
sunghoon beams. the kind of beam that makes jake’s spider tingle feel immediately and instinctively nervous.
"because, my friend,” he begins proudly, “i am your guy-in-the-chair and thanks to me, you are now officially going on an aquarium date this weekend.”
jake blinks down at the two tickets. then looks up at sunghoon. blinks again. “wait. i’m going on a what with who now?”
sunghoon’s face falls flat. “with y/n, you idiot. who else would i be sending you to the aquarium with? me?”
jake’s jaw slackens. eyes widen. heartbeat pounding, “what—why, why, why, would you do that?”
sunghoon’s brows furrow as if the answer is the most obvious one in the world (and it is), “because you like her? and now you can take her to see those things she has fourteen of on her laptop that she likes so much. beluga whales or whatever they were.”
jake opens his mouth to argue—then shuts it. looks at sunghoon very, very, seriously. “beluga dolphins. they’re beluga dolphins. common mistake.”
and sunghoon could give two flying farts about beluga whales versus beluga dolphins versus beluga birds for all he knows, but because jake’s his best friend, he tries not to judge.
“…okayyyy, beluga dolphins.” he claps jake on the back and jake flinches. “anyways! you. y/n. aquarium date. this weekend. bada-bing. bada-boom.”
friday is the most un-normal and the most un-boring day of them all.
because on friday, right when jake slams his locker shut at the end of the day—ready to go home and debating if he should build his brand new imperial star destroyer lego set or practice different swinging techniques off the library roof—
“JAKE!”
and jake’s spidey sense could not have predicted what happens next. because before he can even register his own name, jake’s slammed into. stumbling. arms flailing. back hitting the lockers behind him.
and it’s you.
you, clinging to him in a hug. smiling. glowing.
and jake is dying. screaming. ascending.
“I GOT A 99,” you smile as you look up at him, eyes sparkling and wide.
jake swallows hard. his hards are still awkwardly hanging at his side, unsure whether to hug you back or just spontaneously combust into dust right then and there.
“wait. the chemistry exam?” he manages, voice higher than usual.
you nod so fast it’s a blur. “yes!—i think it’s a little stupid she docked me a single point just because i rounded wrong on that molarity question—which, yeah, i know you warned me about. but it’s fine. i’m literally a chemistry genius.”
jake lets out a breathy laugh, looking down at you—still warm, still wrapped around him, still lighting up like the literal sun in the middle of the school’s halls.
“you are,” he says, and it comes out softer than he expected.
and then you’re looking up at him again—close, glowing, happy—and jake swears the whole world pauses. like the only thing that has ever mattered to him is this exact moment. like someone hit pause on everything except you. the shouts, the lockers slamming, the overhead announcements—he doesn’t hear any of it.
all he knows is you. the way your smile curves just slightly more on one side. the scent of your shampoo. the feel of your arms around him and the way his pulse has never been louder in his entire life.
jake doesn’t think he’s ever felt this way about someone before.
and like you suddenly realize how long you’ve been holding onto him, or maybe just how close the two of you are—you slowly pull back. not all the way, just a half-step, your arms slipping from around his middle. you clear your throat, eyes flickering to a locker, then to a ceiling.
“um—thanks to you, though. seriously,” you say, voice softer now, “for all your help. and studying with me.”
and jake is still staring. still dazed. “oh! no, yeah. yeah yeah. totally. i had fun. it was fun.” he swallows again. please stop saying fun. “so fun.” yeah. he’s absolutely a lost cause.
but you laugh. and god, jake loves your laugh. he wants to bottle it up, carry it around in his pocket, and use it like a power-up when he’s out fighting criminals at night.
and it’s in that moment, somewhere between your grin and the sound of your giggle still ringing in his ears, that it hits him.
this is it.
this is the moment.
jake clears his throat. wipes his palms on the sides of his jeans like it’ll help. glances off to the side before looking back at you.
“listen, so um—” he’s already fumbling. “i was wondering—like if you’re free this weekend, and only if you really, really want to, seriously no pressure at all because i know you’re probably busy, but—”
he pauses. breathes. tries again. “—but if you’d be down, i, uh—i have two tickets to the aquarium. and since you’re really into the ocean and stuff i thought—”
“oh my god,” you interrupt, eyes lit up. “you got tickets to the aquarium?”
jake nods so fast he swears he looks like a bobblehead.
“yeah! well—no. technically sunghoon got the tickets but—”
“ohhh, like you and sunghoon were going to go together?” you tease, grinning now. “that actually sounds kind of fun—”
“wait. wait—no.” and jake nearly panics, his hands waving. “no, no, no, i mean—i’m trying to—”
jake inhales sharply. gets a grip. “do you want to go with me? this weekend? to the aquarium?”
“oh!” you blink up at him, clearly surprised—but not in a bad way. your voice goes a little softer. “like…just us?”
“yeah,” jake nods, trying to sound chill and not at all like he’s internally combusting. which is definitely, 100%, happening right now. “i mean—if you want. if you don’t, it’s totally cool. i’ll just…give the ticket to my mom or something. she likes fish. i think. probably. i’ve never actually asked—”
“jake.”
jake stops. looks at you again. “yeah?”
you smile. all fond and amused and sweet. “i’d love to go to the aquarium with you.”
and jake completely loses the grip he thought he had a strong hold of.
“wait, really?”
“really.”
“oh,” jake breathes. “cool. cool, cool, cool.”
you tilt your head, “you’re doing the repeating thing again.”
“i know,” jake groans, dragging a hand down his face. “i literally had a whole mental intervention about this, it’s not working—
you laugh. again. and jake ascends. again.
“okay,” you say, stepping back just enough. “aquarium this weekend. it’s a date.”
jake ascends a third time.
“right,” he says, barely recovering. “totally. i’ll—uh, i’ll text you the details?”
you nod, already backing away towards the main doors, “can’t wait!”
and forget the imperial star destroyer set or brand new swinging techniques. jake 100% knows what he’s doing tonight—and it’s sounding a lot like googling beluga dolphin facts.
later that night, jake’s perched on the edge of a random rooftop—one leg dangling off the ledge, a protein bar in one hand, his phone in the other, glowing with an article titled: top twelve facts about belugas that will shock you.
but then—his spidey senses prick.
because at exactly 10:32PM, like clockwork, your usual bus pulls up to the stop below the building he’s seated at.
okay. so maybe it’s not exactly a coincidence he’s here. and maybe this roof isn’t that random after all.
and maybe, just maybe, he’s made it a habit to make sure you get home safe every night. it started with just one night—making sure you got home safe after last week’s incident. then it turned into two. then three. then…every night. at exactly 10:32PM. now it’s a full-blown instinct he hasn’t admitted to anyone (especially not sunghoon) because, well…he likes making sure you get home safe. sue him.
when he sees your figure step off the bus, jake immediately straightens. the hairs on his arms prick up. his pulse quickens. his palm slightly sticks against the protein bar wrapper. and this is just a regular friday.
except—it really isn’t. because today, you—you, the very smart and very funny and very pretty ocean-loving girl who sits next to him in chemistry—hugged him today and agreed to go on a date with him and oh god.
so actually, nothing about today was regular. not even close. and nothing about what jake is about to do is regular.
instead of just watching from above like he has the past week…
he swings.
with a few quick, practiced motions, he webs himself building to building, bouncing off a wall to land neatly right in front of you on the sidewalk.
and you scream. “what the—oh my god—” you jolt back mid-step, instinctively clutching your bag closer to you.
“ah—sorry! sorry!” jake holds his hands up, immediately regretting his dramatic entrance. he straightens up from his crouch, brushing dust off his suit. “that probably looked a lot cooler in my head.”
you narrow your eyes, still trying to catch your breath, looking not totally convinced, “right.”
jake rubs the back of his neck awkwardly.
then, like it’s the most normal thing in the world to be nearly ambushed by a red-and-blue-suited vigilante, you simply adjust the bag on your shoulder, sidestep him, and continue walking down the sidewalk.
jake blinks behind the mask, stunned for a second, before quickly scrambling to catch up.
“you know,” he says, effortlessly falling into step beside you, “if i didn’t know any better, i thought we agreed you wouldn’t be walking home alone this late.”
you glance over, the corners of your mouth slightly tugging upwards, “and if i didn’t know any better, i’d say you’re starting to follow me, spidey.”
“woah,” jake fake-gasps. fake-clutches his chest as if offended. “spidey? oh wow. we’re already on nickname basis and i don’t even know yours.”
you snort. “y/n,” you say, finally looking at him fully. “it’s y/n.”
jake’s heart does a triple flip. he thinks he’s heard your name a thousand times already—slipped through conversations with sunghoon, when your teacher calls out your name during attendance, in his dreams—but somehow, this feels new.
he flashes a smile you can’t see behind his mask, “y/n.” he repeats it like it’s the most important thing he’s ever learned. he then points to himself. “spidey.”
you laugh again, this time loud and real and soft and sweet. and suddenly, jake’s night feels warmer.
“yeah, i got that,” you say, shaking your head. “thanks for the clarification, spidey.”
there’s a short silence after that—comfortably quiet, but not empty. both your footsteps crunch against a thin blanket of scattered leaves, the echoes of your steps bouncing off the dimly lit sidewalk. somewhere in the distance a dog barks faintly. a bus drives by.
“shouldn’t you be out—” you finally speak again, glancing up at him, “—stopping carjackings or getting churros from old ladies?”
jake hums, the sound low in his throat. be mysterious. be cool. be normal. "well yes,” he clears his throat and adjusts his web shooter just to do something with his hands, “but it’s also part of my duty as your friendly neighborhood spider-man to make sure the citizens of this city get home safe.”
you raise a brow, smirking, “is it also part of your duty to walk every single citizen home after saving them?”
“…well. not exactly,” he tries not to sound nervous. tries. “just the ones i think are…pretty.”
you freeze mid-step. your breath catches, feet stopping entirely.
jake does the same. his heart might actually fall out of his chest. “that’s—” he coughs, scratching the back of his neck. “that’s just you, by the way. if that wasn’t…super clear.”
your mouth parts. but no words come out. only your eyes react—wide, soft, blinking.
“oh—" you eventually say, softly and unsure, as if you’re trying to figure out if the literal spider-man is trying to flirt with you. “thanks? i think.”
and jake is 98% pretty sure he’s redder than his own suit right now. “yeah, yup. of course,” he says, voice cracking ever so slightly as his mind searches for anything, something else to talk about. “uh…so any fun plans this weekend?”
smooth. so smooth.
you blink, still looking at him a little weird, but your smile comes back almost instantly as you two start walking again, “actually yeah! i’m going to the aquarium tomorrow.”
jake’s heart does another little flip. yes. yes, yes. she still wants to go. she’s still going with me—
“with this guy,” you add casually, kicking a pebble in your way.
jake feels his heart do a little pause. “a guy?” he says, wincing when it comes out just a little too quickly, a little too high-pitched. “oh. a guy guy. wow. a guy.”
you nod along, completely oblivious, mind clearly elsewhere, “yeah, he’s pretty great. got us the tickets and everything.”
jake nods stiffly, staring straight ahead like the lamp post across the street is the most fascinating thing he’s ever seen in his entire life, “nice. that’s…really nice. sounds like a pretty solid dude.”
“totally,” you grin up at him, and it’s the kind of grin that makes jake’s lungs forget why they exist in the first place. the crinkle of your eyes, the curve of your mouth, the gentle ease in your voice—it all hits him at once. the most perfect storm.
“a little awkward,” you continue. “says ‘cool’ way too much. but he’s really sweet. and funny. and a genius.”
and jake combusts on the spot. jake thought he knew what happiness was. he thought getting accepted into the school’s robotics team felt good. he thought shaking hands with the mayor after saving him from a limo crash was peak fulfillment. he even thought finishing the millennium falcon lego set with sunghoon in a single night was the height of his serotonin levels. but this? hearing you talk about him—about jake—with that softness in your voice, that tilt in your smile, that warmth in your eyes?
oh yeah. this is what true happiness is.
and by the time jake returns back to earth, the two of you are approaching your apartment now—he recognizes the street by heart at this point.
you come to a stop in front of your building, turning to face him beneath the glow of the overhead lighting, “thanks for walking me, by the way.”
jake shrugs, hands shoved into the sides of his suit awkwardly, “it’s part of the job description. gotta make sure my favorite citizen gets home safe.”
you give him a look. one of those lingering ones that makes jake wonder. the kind that lasts a beat too long.
“…favorite, huh?” you raise a brow, lips quirking into a soft smile.
jake’s heart stutters. “top three, at least.”
you giggle again, shaking your head slightly, “night, spidey.”
“night, y/n,” he murmurs quietly before you go in, watching as you head inside. the door clicks shut behind you, and jake’s world immediately feels a little dimmer.
jake stands there in the quiet for a second.
and then—
he fist pumps the air in celebration, kicking his leg up like an animated character, “yes, yes, yes!”
with the goofiest grin under his mask, jake flings a web up toward the apartment building across the street and launches himself in one fluid motion. he lands with practiced ease, sitting in his usual spot just as the light flickers on in your bedroom window.
he’s still grinning.
still breathless.
still absolutely unable to believe what just happened.
with a newfound confidence, jake pulls out his phone from one of his suit pockets and unlocks it.
JAKE (10:54PM) :
hey! just wanted to say im excited for tomorrow :) hope you have a good night y/n
he doesn’t hesitate before hitting send this time.
and when he wakes up the next morning, jake is still smiling.
no nightmares. no forgotten alarms. no dreading history finals. just the lingering memory of yesterday—from the hug to the walk last night, from the way you smiled at him to the way you said ‘night, spidey’, from the way he swears your laugh is not permanently stored in his brain’s top five sounds of all time.
now, he’s staring up at the massive curved glass in front of him, a large ‘beluga whales here!’ sign above him. you’re already right up against the glass, peering inside like you’re looking at the most fascinating thing in the world.
and to you—it is.
to jake? his answer would be very different.
his answer would look a lot like you.
because you’re right there, next to him. shoulder brushing him. looking effortlessly beautiful in the soft dim blue light of the tank.
and jake is trying very, very hard to look calm, cool, and collected. despite the fact that he’s sweating through his button-up because he’s nervous, giddy, and definitely sprayed way too much cologne (two spritzes max, sunghoon said. jake did six. he panicked).
but you—you look completely at peace.
you’re smiling, your eyes lighting up with wonder, one palm pressed gently against the glass as you watch one of the belugas swim past.
“they’re literally smiling,” you whisper, completely in awe. “look at them. they’re so pretty.”
jake glances at you. then the belugas. then back at you.
he’s not entirely sure who you’re talking about anymore.
“yeah,” he says, a little breathlessly. “they’re…really pretty.”
at that, you turn to look at him and jake has to force himself to not look away. he smiles at you when your eyes meet his. and your smile is soft. soft and amused. like you knew what he was saying. like you’re choosing not to call him out on it.
“so,” you eventually say, tilting your head to look up at him. “on a scale of one to ten, how ridiculous does this shirt make me look?”
jake glances down at your outfit—you’re wearing an oversized t-shirt now layered over the outfit you picked out for today. it’s bright blue, has a cartoon fish giving a thumbs up, and across the front in bubbly letters sits, ‘fish makes life betta’.
your eyes landed on it the second you two walked past the gift shop. and you had to have it. immediately, of course.
jake had laughed at first when you turned to him, holding up the shirt against you, eyes wide. “should i buy this?” you asked, not a hint of sarcasm in your tone.
and that’s when jake realized, you meant it.
and that was also the exact moment jake realized he’s absolutely, undeniably, hopelessly gone for you.
“negative twelve,” jake says now, very seriously, despite the smirk on his face. “you look unironically very cool.”
you scoff, “you’re such a liar.”
jake shrugs, still grinning. “did that get me a couple more points at least?”
one of your eyebrows quirk, like you’re surprised by the sudden confidence. and honestly? so is jake.
there’s a beat—one of those soft, lingering ones carrying a silence that feels full with something unspoken. the kind that hums quietly below the surface. the kind jake could live inside forever.
then, your lips twitch into a smile. “mmm…maybe half a point. you’re up to, like, an 89.5%.”
jake lets out a soft, breathless laugh, eyes still on you, “i’ll take it. that’s like…a B plus.”
“better than what you got on the history final,” you say, already smirking.
jake’s eyes widen as he gasps, “hey—what!? that was so uncalled for.”
you laugh again, clearly enjoying this. “you got a 73, jake.”
“a 74!” he corrects you, his voice now a pitch higher. “it was curved! and i woke up late! blame it on sleep deprivation.”
“that…still sounds like barely passing to me.”
jake narrows his eyes at you playfully, “okay, you know what? i’m deducting your points for emotional damage. 99.5%.”
you gasp dramatically. “you can’t deduct points!”
“better than what you got on the chemistry final,” jake says, eyebrows quirked, feeling ridiculously proud of himself for that one.
your eyes widen—equal parts shocked and impressed, “touché, jake. touché.”
and jake just grins, heart pounding so fast he swears it’s about to break out of his ribcage and up and run.
your smile lingers for a little longer before you glance away for a moment, returning your gaze back to the tank in front of you, watching as the belugas swim past lazily, weightless and floating like clouds. and you think there’s something oddly calming about them. it makes the whole world slow down.
jake watches you instead.
the lights from the tank dance against your skin, your features glowing blue and soft and perfect. your hands are simply at your side, head tilted slightly as you follow their movements with your wide eyes. you’re not even saying anything—but you don’t need to.
jake swallows hard. takes half a step closer to you.
“hey,” he says quietly.
you look over.
“yeah?”
“i’m really glad you came today.”
your expression shifts—just a little. surprised, maybe. but then, it softens. into something gentle and honest.
“i’m glad you asked,” you say, just as quiet.
and jake is so close. so close, that he can feel the slight brush of your pinky against his own. and suddenly, the air feels heavier. tighter. packed with nerves and possibilities and hope and everything that makes jake’s senses want to scream into a pillow.
and jake, because he’s still jake, blurts out the first thing his brain lands on—
“let’s take a picture with a beluga!”
you blink. but then, your laugh bubbles up again as you nod, stepping close behind him as he’s already fumbling to pull out his phone.
the photo is slightly blurry. your shirt is bright and front and center. jake’s smile is too wide, and yours is somewhere between a laugh and a look—
one that’s angled towards him instead of the camera.
the walk back later that night is quiet. not the awkward quiet. not the quiet filled with weird tension. but soft quiet. warm quiet. the kind of quiet that settles over jake like his favorite blanket—thick and safe and familiar, the kind that jake feels whenever he’s tucked into bed after a night out around the city.
and when you two walk side by side, you’re close enough that jake can feel your sleeve brush against his every few steps.
and the sidewalk is wide. but neither of you move away. not even once.
street lamps shine above you, the city hums quietly around, and jake—who literally has the ability to swing between skyscrapers and soar through the air—feels like he’s floating for the first time in his life.
because he’s definitely not thinking about how he can catch the small traces of your perfume or how your hand keeps brushing his.
and he’s definitely not spiraling over whether or not you’re thinking about how his hands keep brushing yours back.
and right when he’s mentally trying to calculate just how fast his heart is currently beating (and if his calculations were correct, he thinks he’s at 142 beats per minute)—
you stop walking.
jake halts a half step ahead, blinking in surprise as he turns back to face you, “everything okay?”
you bite your bottom lip. squeeze your eyes shut for a second. “yeah. yeah—i just…” a breath. “i have to tell you something.”
and that knocks the air straight out of jake’s lungs.
he steps towards you instinctively, his steps quiet against the pavement until he’s standing right in front of you—frozen under the soft glow of the streetlight overhead.
“okay,” he says, trying to sound normal.
which is hard. because jake is currently experiencing what can only be described as sensory overload.
he tries to not notice the way you’re fiddling with the hem of your incredibly bright blue shirt. or the way you’re blinking too many times. or the way he can literally hear your heartbeat from where he’s standing. and he calculates 143 beats per minute. maybe 144.
“i—um…i actually didn’t really need help with chemistry,” you blurt, eyes still focused somewhere near his shoelaces in front of you. “i know exactly what cis-trans isomerism in alkenes is. not only because i thought it was really cute when you explained it in class that one time, but because i genuinely think it’s super cool so i did my research project on it last—”
you pause. “…which is super irrelevant. oh my god—wait, let me backtrack.”
then your words start tumbling.
“i just—i thought you were really cute. and smart. and witty. and honestly, probably a little awkward too but, like, in a cute way. and i didn’t know how else to talk to you outside of class. i figured you were too busy or not really into random girls asking to hang out. so i panicked. even though i have a 98 in chem right now.”
you stop. take a breath—finally.
jake, however, does not.
jake’s entire being has stopped functioning.
his brain is blank—no thoughts, just the steady, continuous static of oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. every nerve in his body is on high alert. his spidey senses are firing—heart pounding, breath caught, fingertips tingling. it’s like his body’s trying to prepare him for a fight, when really? he’s just trying his hardest not to melt into the ground.
and jake can feel everything. the warmth of the streetlight on his back. the shift in the breeze between you and him. the exact distance between your body and his. it’s all too much and not enough and jake is losing his mind.
and when you notice his frozen stare, you wince—your eyes squeezing shut again as you start mumbling, “oh my god. i’m so sorry. okay, let’s just forget i said—”
and jake, because he’s still jake, doesn’t think.
jake kisses you.
it happens before he can overthink it. which is entirely a lie, because jake always overthinks.
but this time, it happens before he could spiral through every worst case scenario. before he could remind himself of all the ways he could possibly screw this up.
all he knows is that you were standing there—rambling, flushed, perfect—and he just had to.
his hand finds your cheek instinctively, warm and unsure and trembling ever so slightly. and when his lips meet yours—it’s gentle. so gentle, like a question asked without words. like an answer given all at once.
and jake is still spiraling. his senses are everywhere—you smell like faint citrus and something a little like vanilla, your grip on his shirt is tight, and your lips are soft, so soft, moving with his like you two have known this rhythm forever.
everything is heightened for him. blurred and focused at the same time. and the kiss isn’t perfect—his nose bumps yours and you step too close and accidentally hit his shoe—but none of that matters.
because this is real.
because it’s you.
and when jake finally, slowly, pulls back—just barely—both of you are breathless.
both heartbeats loud enough for jake to hear. quite literally.
“you think i’m smart?”
you let out a small scoff as your eyes meet his, his shirt still under your grip, “out of everything that just happened, that’s what you’re focusing on?”
“i mean,” jake shrugs, helplessly smiling, “i’m just making sure i heard that part correctly.”
you laugh louder now—relieved and warm and everything jake wants to hold onto forever.
the rest of the night moves slower for jake. literally slower.
like neither of you want the moment to end—your steps gradually slowing the closer you get to your apartment building. jake keeps his hands in his pockets, fingers still tingling, goosebumps still on his skin. every now and then, he steals a glance your way, just to make sure this is real. that you’re real.
and when you reach the front of your apartment building, jake’s chest tightens the tiniest bit. you stop at the base of the stairs. so does he.
“well,” your voice is quiet as your eyes flick up to his. “i’ll see you at school on monday?”
jake nods, trying to look cool, calm, and collected even though he’s pretty sure he’s still at 142 beats. “yeah. for sure. monday.”
you smile, soft and a little shy. “night, jake.”
“night, y/n,” he echoes, offering a tiny, awkward wave that makes you smile as you slip through the door.
jake lingers for a second longer, watching until the door clicks shut.
then he spins on his heel, a giddy smile on his face, stumbles three steps down the sidewalk and—
“holy shi—” he physically clamps a hand over his mouth to keep himself from screaming.
jake fist-pumps the air. once. twice. spins in a circle. nearly trips and eats it on the curb. but he doesn’t care.
he kissed you.
he kissed you. and you kissed him back.
and jake is back to nearly launching into orbit.
his fingers are still trembling as he pulls his phone out from his pocket, text message already full of typos from typing too fast when the screen lights up—
incoming call : GUY IN CHAIR 🧠
“DUDE,” jake answers instantly, breathless and borderline yelling. “i was just about to text you—I KISSED HER!”
a beat.
“WHAT?!” sunghoon’s voice explodes over the phone. “you KISSED her? you KISSED HER? oh my god.”
jake is pacing now, still walking down the street but barely aware of it. “i know. it just happened. i don’t even know—like, we were walking, then she stopped and told me she didn’t even need chemistry help and that she just needed an excuse to talk to me and i literally blacked out so i don’t remember the rest—”
“oh my god. oh my god.”
“i KNOW.”
“like, wait—you kissed her-kissed her?”
“i KISSED her-kissed her, dude.”
“bro.”
“i know.”
they’re both beaming. celebrating. somewhere above him, a very confused old lady stares at jake from her window as he dances in the middle of the sidewalk like he just won the lottery.
“wait. wait, crap—” sunghoon cuts in, tone suddenly serious. “hang on, i called you for a reason.”
jake freezes mid-spin, “huh?”
“guy in chair duties,” sunghoon’s voice shifts. “there’s a call coming through the police scanner. armed robbery. bank on 23rd and main. it just came in, like, thirty seconds ago.”
jake stops. groans. “you’re kidding me,” he mutters under his breath.
“sorry, man.”
without missing a beat, jake glances around for any people—then ducks into the nearest alleyway.
“can’t a guy catch a break?” he mumbles, already yanking off his button up, his suit already underneath (because—obviously, you can never be too prepared), then bunches up the shirt and webs it to the brick wall in one fluid motion.
sunghoon’s voice buzzes through his phone, “good luck, spidey.”
jake pulls the mask over his face. “i’ll just tell you the rest on monday.”
“copy that.”
“thanks, hoon. spidey’s on it.”
turns out—spidey, in fact, was not on it.
he doesn’t know if he should blame it on the fact that he was mildly (extremely) mentally distracted by the memory of kissing you under the warm streetlight, or the fact that those robbers had insanely good aim, but either way:
jake comes home with a black eye, a rapidly darkening bruise on his cheekbone, a bullet graze burning across his left side, and what he’s 97% sure is a dislocated ankle.
“crap, crap, crap,” he mutters under his breath, wincing as he carefully locks the window behind him. he drops down from the ceiling with a thud, trying not to yelp out in pain when he lands on the ankle that he’s now 99% sure is dislocated. the apartment is quiet. his mom’s probably asleep. hopefully.
jake rips off his mask and immediately grimaces at his reflection in the mirror, “jesus.”
his right eye is already swelling. there’s dried blood going down the side of his face. his suit is slightly torn and singed and still sticky over the wound at his ribs. he presses a palm there, breathing through his teeth.
it’s fine. he’s fine. totally fine.
the shower was probably the most painful part of the night. every drop stings, and there’s something really, really humbling about trying to wash off dirt and dried blood while also replaying the moment you kissed him in perfect clarity over and over again in his head.
and jake’s been at this for a while now. out patrolling, out fighting crime, out throwing dad jokes to creeps at night. but he’s never had a night like this. not with this much chaos, not with this much feeling.
an unexpected bullet. a slam against concrete. some dumb goon with a perfect punch.
but right before it? you. you in an obnoxiously bright blue t-shirt saying ‘fish make life betta’. looking at him like that. kissing him like that.
by the time jake stumbles out of the bathroom, patched up with some teenage mutant ninja turtles bandages and wrapped in an oversized hoodie, he’s exhausted.
every limb aches. every muscle screams. every brain cell thinking of you.
and by the time monday rolls around and he wakes up to his alarm at 6:32AM—because he snoozed it for 32 extra minutes—jake frowns at what he sees.
his black eye looks worse, his face is, at least, five different shades of blue, purple, pink, and his ankle is still swollen. every step sends a jolt of pain up his body that even breathing feels like a core workout.
so jake does what any emotionally and physically fatigued teenage superhero would do.
he fakes food poisoning.
when his mom knocks on his door to get him up for school, jake meekly groans out a quick, “mooom. i’ve been projectile vomiting since, like, 3AM. i think it was the fish tacos.”
jake did not eat fish tacos.
but she buys it anyways, says something about him getting rest, and how she’s going to the store for medicine.
and jake sighs. mentally blesses his mom’s heart. attempts to fist pump weakly. fails. winces in pain. then, he turns his phone completely off, buries himself under his blanket, and with nothing but the hazy image of beluga whales, a reminder that he needs to wash his bloodied suit, and you—jake finally falls asleep.
the next thing jake can comprehend is more than twelve hours later. a lot more than twelve hours later. when he blinks awake—it’s pitch black, his body is still aching, his phone is dead, and—
there’s knocking.
soft, but persistent.
he stumbles out of bed with a groan and a wince, croaking out a low, “coming..” while he limps over with one arm holding his side before he whips his door open and—
it’s you.
jake blinks.
you blink.
your jaw drops.
“y/n,” jake blurts out, eyes wide. he rubs them once. twice. hopes, prays, this is just one of those weird fever dreams that feel way too real that he gets whenever he sleeps for too long.
but then you rush forward, brows furrowed and eyes flicking from his black eye, to the bruise on his cheek, to the way he’s leaning heavily on one leg with the other slightly elevated—
yeah.
this is not a fever dream.
“what are you—what—how—what are you doing here?” jake stammers, instantly turning around, nerves spiking as he quickly scans his room for any incriminating spidey-like props.
suit? mask? web shooters? where did he put that damn mask—
“i texted you, like, fourteen times,” you say following him in, concerned painted all over your face. “you didn’t show up to school. you weren’t answering. i panicked and your mom let me in—jake.”
you stop.
jake stops.
your voice drops.
“what in the world happened to you?”
jake did not plan for this part. well, he didn’t plan for any of this. “i—uh,” he turns to you, eyes wide. “i…fell.”
your eyes flick down to his knuckles—bruised, battered, and definitely the aftermath of punching something hard. you raise a brow.
jake follows your gaze. panics.
“jake—did you…get in a fight?”
“what?!” his voice goes an octave too high. he clears his throat. tries again. “no. no, no. i don’t—fights? me? no. i don’t—i don’t get into fights. that would be very…un-cool.”
you give him a look that says you clearly don’t buy it, but to his relief, you don’t push.
but because jake is still jake, he continues anyways. “i…i was biking—”
jake doesn’t know how to ride a bike.
“—without a helmet. bad idea, don’t do that. and then i hit this…massive pothole. huge. basically fell off and hit the curb and…and yeah.”
you blink at him. and jake’s panicking, so he’s still going.
“—and then a pigeon flew into me…?”
you blink again. “a pigeon.”
jake nods quickly, as if that could convince you anymore (it doesn’t). “a pigeon! you know how they are. dumb pigeons.”
there’s a pause. you stare at him from halfway across the room. jake stands there awkwardly with his hands by his side.
you sigh. cross your arms. “you’re a really bad liar.”
jake looks at the ground. his ears turn red. then he looks back at you with a small, sheepish smile on his face. “yeah,” he admits softly. “kinda am.”
jake moves to sit on the edge of the bed, and you take that as an invitation to sit next to him. there’s a silence between you two again as jake fiddles with the ends of his hoodie, his face warm from either the bruising, the fact that you just called him out, or the fact that somehow, someway, you’re here. in his room. on his bed.
you glance sideways to look at him. then at the floor. then back at him again. you nudge his knee with yours. “…well,” your voice comes out quiet. “are you okay? at least?”
jake looks up. meets your eyes.
and they're wide and worried and so completely focused on him. and for the second time in twenty-four hours, jake thinks his heart might literally give out.
he nods once. swallows. “yeah. yeah, i am. thanks, y/n.”
the moment lingers as the same warm hush settles again between you, like some kind of quiet, mutual agreement—like hey, i’m here, and yeah. i care. and no, i’m not going anywhere. and jake doesn’t know what to spiral about first.
the fact that:
you haven’t left.
you haven’t pried about why he looks like a literal punching bag.
you care.
you shift a little, reaching into the backpack that jake hadn’t even noticed you brought, and pull out a packet of neatly clipped papers.
“i brought the chem notes from today,” you say, holding them out in between you. “there was a pop quiz, and i figured you might want the stuff we reviewed after.”
jake blinks down at the packet, then up at you. then back at the packet. he tries to act normal when he brushes against your fingers when it takes he from your hand. fails spectacularly.
“and,” you continue, eyes flicking to his for a second before focusing somewhere behind him. notably, the crooked bill nye ‘science rules!’ poster taped to the wall. “i just…wanted to see you.”
and jake, quite literally, forgets how to form words for half a second, but you don’t notice. your knee is still against his and he thinks he’s memorized the smell of your shampoo at this point.
“anyways—” you clear your throat and the shyness in your tone makes jake forget how to breathe.
“—there’s this documentary they’re playing at the theater tomorrow.” you pause, as if gauging his reaction but jake’s pretty sure he’s blacked out right now. “it’s about—um—deep sea ecosystems? something about bioluminescence and predator-prey adaptations and this super weird jellyfish migration they just discovered.”
jake blinks hard. shakes himself back to reality. realizes this definitely, 100%, isn’t a fever dream. but surely, he’s dreamt of something like this before.
“that…sounds amazingly weird,” is all he can manage to say, nodding slowly.
“i figured,” you give a little half-shrug, “maybe you’d wanna go with me?” then you nudge his shoulder this time. “if you’re not still crippled by then, that is.”
there is a full three seconds of stunned, stunned silence.
then, jake scrambles to sit up straighter, eyes wide, “yes. yeah—yes, i’d love to. with you. to see the jellyfish. yeah.”
you smile at him, “cool.”
and jake can’t stop smiling back. he’s 98% pretty sure he looks like an idiot, but 100% knows he doesn’t care in the slightest.
you push up from the bed before grabbing your backpack and slinging it over your shoulder. “alright then,” you say, clapping your hands together. “i should go. rest up, okay?”
“i will. i will,” jake nods quickly, still a little dazed. “can’t be too crippled for tomorrow.”
you let out a soft laugh as he follows you to the front door. and when you step outside, you pause in the doorway—hovering like there’s still something on the tip of your tongue.
jake’s hand lingers on the doorknob. you glance up at him. open your mouth, then close it again.
then finally, quietly—you try again.
“i, um…” you tuck a loose strand of hair behind your ear. “about the other night…”
jake’s heart rate spikes.
your eyes flicker up to meet his, and they’re a little unsure. as if searching.
“i wasn’t sure,” you admit. “when you didn’t show up to school and didn’t answer my texts…i didn’t know if maybe—”
you trail off for a second, then finish in one quick breath:
“if maybe you regretted it.”
and jake—bruised and aching and completely out of his mind for you—feels the air knocked out of him all over again.
his entire body goes still before he reboots all within 0.5 seconds. “no,” he says. fast. too fast, jake. “god, no.”
your eyes lift again.
“i didn’t regret it. not even a little bit,” his voice stumbles, his nerves are on fire, and his chest tightens with something dangerously close to hope. “i think…i think i relived it a million times in my head, honestly.
jake lets out a small chuckle—partly pathetic, but entirely sincere. “i meant it,” he murmurs. “every second of it.”
you shift your weight from foot to foot, “okay.” a reassured smile rests on your face. “just checking.”
jake exhales, rubs the back of his neck, and looks at you with something boyish and sorry. “i don’t regret it, but i do regret not checking my phone. that was stupid.”
you smirk at him, “a little bit.”
jake grins, releasing a short breath of relief as he leans a little against the doorframe, “i’ll do better.”
you hum, giving him a certain, knowing look.
“i’ll hold you to it,” your voice drops a little, and before jake can fully process the shift, you lean in—just barely, but yet just enough—and place the lightest kiss to his cheek.
and jake goes completely still. because it’s not dramatic, and it’s definitely not cinematic by any means.
not when you’re both standing in the middle of his apartment hallway, under a flickering light his super refuses to fix no matter how many maintenance requests his mom files. not when there’s a suspicious cloud of weed-scented air coming from the new college neighbors, who obviously do not care about the no smoking indoors sign. and especially not when jake’s ankle is still swollen, his ribs still sore, and he’s wearing star wars pajama pants with a hole in them that he’s praying you didn’t notice.
but it’s warm. and real. and so vulnerable it makes jake’s heart yearn in the most inconvenient way. like breathless honesty wrapped in nothing but silence and the glow of someone who cares.
you pull back slowly, your cheeks a shade pinker than before, your eyes still on his. and jake—well, he’s pretty sure his entire body is red head to toe. his cheek tingles from where your lips just were and his senses are so hyper-focused on you, he doesn’t even notice the pain of his wounds anymore.
“goodnight, jake,” you say finally before turning and going down the hall. and jake stands there, watching you—entirely, irrevocably, shamelessly, gone.
when you’re finally out of sight, jake finally stands up straight, snapping himself out of it and shuts the door behind him, limping his way back to his room when—
his eye catches the clock.
10:43PM.
crap.
you really need to stop walking home this late.
and suddenly, jake’s adrenaline kicks back in. not from the kiss. okay, maybe a little from the kiss. but mostly because it’s you, and you’re walking home alone, and, yeah, you live a five minute walk away from his but what if something happened, and then—
yeah.
with no hesitation, jake locks his room door, goes into his closet, and grabs his suit—still battered and bloodied and roughened up, but it’ll do.
two minutes and one-struggle-to-put-on-a-suit-when-half-crippled-later, jake is quietly hobbling out of his window, praying his mom is asleep.
he swings himself easily onto the rooftop of his own building, easily spotting you already a block down. he keeps to the rooftops, stealthily going from building to building until—
his damn ankle.
his ankle—which he clearly forgot about for a hot business second—catches on a loose gutter and the next thing jake knows is pain, the taste of concrete in his face, and a loud-and-not-so-subtle crash, bang, clang.
“crap, crap, shit—” jake stands up, dusting his suit off, one leg propped up as he balances on his good one. “ouch, god—”
“spidey?”
oh god.
jake freezes. peeks over the edge.
and there you are—fifty-something feet below, staring up at him, brows furrowed, arms crossed.
“oh—” jake gives an awkward wave from where he is. “—y/n! hey! hi. what’s—uh—what’s up?”
jake steps back to duck out of sight, muttering a stream of whispered curses to himself before inhaling sharply and flinging himself down from the rooftop, landing right in front of you with the composure of someone with a screaming ankle and bullet-shaped wound in their abdomen.
you arch a brow. “…is this the part where you admit you are following me, after all?”
jake straightens up slowly. and painfully.
“i—what? no. i was, uh…” he gestures vaguely down the block. he has no idea what he’s pointing to. “getting pizza. dollar slice. late night craving.”
“uh huh,” you squint, clearly not believing him. “if i promise to stop walking home this late, will you stop stalking me from rooftops?”
jake pauses. tilts his head. “define stalking.”
you let out a small laugh, half-exasperated, half-fond.
“fine then,” you say, shrugging, “c’mon then. you’re already out. i’m coming with you.”
jake blinks. “…coming with me to…where?”
“to get pizza,” you’re walking now, already turning without second thought. “duh.”
ten minutes and two lukewarm pizza slices later, you’re sitting shoulder to shoulder on your fire escape. the air is thick with humidity and smells faintly of marinara, melting cheese, and rusted metal. there’s a low buzz of cars below in the distance, and the stars up above are mostly hidden.
you’re chewing in silence. jake, on the other hand, is holding his slice in his hand in fear—too nervous to even lift his mask up to eat it. thankfully, you don’t notice. or if you do, you don’t mention it. either way, he’s relieved.
you knee bumps his. “so why do you do it?”
jake startles slightly, his eyes dragging over to you beneath his mask, “why do i…do what?”
you take another bite, still staring out across the street. “spider-man. why do you do what you do?”
he follows your gaze to the building you’re looking at. gives a weak shrug.
“i…didn’t really have a choice, i guess,” he offers quietly.
that makes you turn. “you’re being forced to do this?”
“no—no, not like that,” he’s quick to shake his head. then he pauses. thinks for a second. “it’s more like…one day, i woke up with these powers. and i realized i could do something with it, you know? like something good. and if i have the chance to…shouldn’t i?”
you’re silent for a second. then you glance over, studying the smooth fabric of his mask like you’re trying to see the face beneath it.
“so you fight crime and get beat up on the daily…willingly?” you shake your head, a small scoff escaping your nose. “you’re better than me, spidey.”
jake lets out a short breath—half of a laugh, half of a sigh. “someone has to. i mean, if i just sit back and watch bad things happen…then it’s like the bad things happen because of me.”
you nod slowly, your lips pressing together in thought. “yeah. that makes sense.”
there’s another pause. quiet, mutual. a pocket of space in the noise of the city where nothing exists but your knees pressed side by side and the pizza box going cold between you. you shift beside him, letting your legs dangle freely off the fire escape. “you’re a good guy,” you say eventually, turning to shoot him a soft smile.
jake swallows hard. his heart’s somewhere in his throat, and he doesn’t quite trust his own voice not to crack, so he simply nods—just once—and turns his gaze back out to the horizon.
“welp,” jake finally says, voice low, a little reserved, “i should probably get back to…you know. my thing.”
you tilt your head, eyes narrowing playfully. “like walking your favorite citizens back home?”
“that part—” jake scoffs under his breath, then smirks behind the mask, “—is already done.” then, because spider-man is still jake, he throws up a finger-gun for good measure. he hates himself.
you roll your eyes, but the same smile stays on your face, “you’re unbelievable, spider-man.”
“i try.”
jake slowly rises to stand on the narrow ledge, glancing down at you one more time. the moonlight hits your cheek just right. you’re still holding the crust of your pizza slice, legs swinging, your eyes slightly narrowed like you’re trying to figure something out. and for the third time in twenty-four hours, jake still feels like his heart might give out.
he gives you a little salute, meant to be casual, but he feels anything but. and then, without thinking—he says it.
“see you tomorrow.”
a beat of silence.
jake’s face blanks. his body completely stills.
you blink up at him.
“…tomorrow?”
crap. crap, crap, CRAP.
jake’s silence goes for a second too long. then he scrambles for cover.
“i mean—uh—hypothetically,” jake stammers, waving a gloved hand vaguely. “like, if you’re…out again. tomorrow. late at night. which you shouldn’t be. because, you know. laws.”
you give him a look. “laws?”
“yup,” he taps his chest with two fingers. “spidey laws.”
you let out a small giggle and lean back against the railing, arms loosely wrapped over your knees. “right. goodnight, spidey.”
jake clears his throat and bids a small, “night, y/n,” before shooting his web to the corner of the next building and swinging himself out of sight.
and jake doesn’t stop smiling the whole way home.
not even when he peels the suit off with a small wince. not even when he collapses into bed, muscles aching and bruises throbbing and heart racing.
but the panic eventually sets in.
and it’s early evening the next day by the time it does for jake.
jake stands in front of his closet, yanking hangers out as he quickly skims and tosses another outfit into the rejected pile.
sunghoon lies on the bed behind him, sprawled out horizontally, lazily twisting a rubik’s cube with one hand and scrolling on his phone with the other.
“you know,” sunghoon says without looking up, “it’s literally just a movie. actually, it’s barely even that. it’s a documentary.”
jake whips around, ignoring sunghoon’s comments, holding up a navy button-up in one hand and a graphic tee in the other. “which one says i-tried-but-didn’t-try-too-hard-because-i’m-not-100%-sure-what-we-are-quite-yet-but-just-enough-try?”
“…okay,” sunghoon says, twisting the cube into a perfect, one-colored side. “i’m just…gonna ignore everything you said. but go with the navy.”
“perfect,” jake grins at first, before his eyebrows furrow slightly. “wait, wait, wait. do you think she suspects anything?”
sunghoon lowers the cube. looks at jake. “about you liking her? bro, you kissed her—dude, it’s so obvi—she knows, trust me.”
“no,” jake hisses, yanking off his shirt and then buttoning the navy one on. “about me. like me me. like, spider-man me.”
sunghoon pauses. eyes jake. “what? why? what did you do?”
jake tries to fight back the dumb grin growing on his face as he runs his hand through his hair. “i walked her home.”
“okay…” sunghoon gives him a look that says he’s not impressed. “and i walked my grandma home last week, what’s your point—”
jake rolls his eyes and glances at him through the mirror. “as spider-man.”
“wait—” sunghoon gasps. “so you did end up using your lil guy!”
jake turns to sunghoon, face horrified, “can we please stop calling it my lil guy—”
but before sunghoon can respond, a sudden crackle of static cuts through the air from where jake’s police scanner sits on his cluttered desk.
“—reports of an assault in progress near 37th and bay. suspect is armed. five victims. officers en route. any nearby units respond.”
the air stills.
sunghoon immediately sits up.
jake’s head jerks towards the tracker.
sunghoon’s already reading the look in his best friend’s eyes, “don’t.”
jake doesn’t answer.
his eyes are locked on the scanner. his jaw tightens. his mind already racing.
assault in progress. you. suspect is armed. documentary. weird jelly fish. 37th and bay. you. five victims. y/n.
y/n. y/n. y/n.
sunghoon watches him carefully, like someone trying to talk a bomb out of detonating.
“jake. don’t even think about it.”
“i’m not!” jake blurts, too fast, too high, and the crack at the end gives him away.
sunghoon groans. “dude. you have another date. with y/n. you’ve been waiting for this for so long.”
“i—i know,” jake’s voice rises in panic. and he’s trying so hard not to panic. “but what if no one gets there in time? w—what if…it’s close. i can handle it. i’ll be quick.”
“jake.” sunghoon gapes at him. “quick? you literally limped up the stairs today. you barely beat that guy from the other day!”
jake doesn’t hear him.
in fact—
jake’s navy button-up is already off.
“i’ll be fine!”
“you still have a bullet scar in your stomach!”
“exactly, sunghoon. scar. practically healed. no biggie!”
sunghoon throws his hands up. “you can’t be serious—”
“i’ll be done and early to the theater. i swear, hoon.” jake is already tugging the suit halfway over his upper half, wincing at the movement but powering through. “i’ll swing in, swing out. three minutes, tops.”
sunghoon groans louder.
and jake is already yanking the window open.
“jake.” his friend’s voice softens slightly. “don’t blow this. you like her. she likes you.”
jake pauses, foot on the ledge, mask in hand. he turns back towards sunghoon, lips tight, shoulders tense.
“i do like her,” he murmurs.
he pulls the mask down over his head anyways.
“but you know me, sunghoon. you know i can’t be the guy who looks the other way.”
and sunghoon does know. of course he knows.
this was always a losing battle from the start. because he knows his best friend, he knows jake. knows his heart wasn’t just made of gold, but forged in it. soft and stubborn, foolish yet fearless. the kind of heart that doesn’t back down, even when it knows it should. the kind that tries anyways.
so sunghoon doesn’t push any further. he presses a hand to jake’s shoulder and gives it a firm pat.
“you better not be late.”
jake offers a crooked salute with two fingers—part promise, part apology—
and falls backwards out the window.
a flick of his wrist, a few shots of web, a sharp whoosh of air as jake swings into the wind—and the night cleans the rest of his loud thoughts out of his head.
because as much as he wants to see you—as much as he’s worrying about being late—he can’t think about that right now.
and so one fight, a couple hard punches to the gut, a potentially dislocated shoulder, and a webbed-up criminal later—
jake is limping his way back across a rooftop ledge, blood in his mouth and the taste of guilt already rising up like bile behind it.
he lands with a grunt just outside his window on the fire escape, cracking it open and tip-toeing in. he stumbles into his room—still half-messy from earlier—navy button-up on the floor, rubik’s cube on the bed.
jake groans softly, one hand pressed into his side, the other slowly dragging his mask off.
his jaw aches. his ribs throb. his other ankle is definitely going to bruise. but his heart?
sinks when he finally turns on his phone.
6 missed messages.
3 missed calls.
all from you.
Y/N (7:41PM) :
hey! just got here early :)) but no rush!!
Y/N (7:57PM) :
are u on ur way?
Y/N (8:03PM) :
jake? is everything okay?
Y/N (8:16PM) :
im going in now…meet me inside when u get here?
Y/N (9:45PM) :
jake if u forgot u can just tell me
Y/N (10:12PM) :
i hope ur okay
jake stares at the screen. sits on the edge of his bed, defeated. like he might fall apart.
because jake has seen a lot in his short lifetime.
he’s seen back alleyways soaked in red. he’s seen broken glass way too many times a teenager ever should. he’s seen someone take a swing at him with a crowbar. he’s seen bruises bloom on his ribs and vanish before anyone could ask questions. he’s seen criminals twice his size fall, and he’s seen friends—good people—get hurt anyways.
but this?
this wrecks him.
this has jake in shambles.
because he missed it. he missed you.
and before he could talk himself out of it—before he even knows what he’s going to say—he’s tapping on your name and pressing the call button.
it rings once. twice. three times.
“jake?” your voice is soft. cautious. like you didn’t know if you should answer, but did anyways.
jake swallows hard, voice caught in his throat.
“i’m sorry.”
a pause. it hangs in the air and jake already wants to scream.
“i’m so sorry,” he says again, voice low, words falling out fast, as if trying to outrun his own guilt gnawing at him. “i—i didn’t mean to—i was gonna be there, i swear i was gonna be there, but then something happened and—”
“hey,” your voice cuts through. not loud, not pressing, not angry. “it’s okay.”
but it’s far from it. not in jake’s head. not when the image of you sitting alone in the dark theater has already carved itself into his brain. not when he can hear the disappointment in your voice.
jake licks his lips. he can hear the shift of your weight rustling against your bed. maybe you’re curled up somewhere in the dark. maybe you’re still in the outfit you wore to the movies. maybe you cried, and maybe you didn’t. and maybe jake will never know.
“no, no it’s not,” jake manages. he winces—at the pain growing at his ribs, at the mess he’s made, at himself. “i—i didn’t even text, i—god, i’m such an idiot—”
“you’re not an idiot, jake,” you say. and your voice is tired, but never cold. “i was just…worried.”
“i’m okay. i promise. and i promise i didn’t forget,” he whispers. “not even a little.”
and there’s so much more jake wants to say.
“…did something happen?” you ask gently.
jake’s fingers tighten around the phone.
“yeah,” jake says, the sound barely coming out. “kind of.”
another beat passes. a small exhale from you.
“do you want to talk about it?”
and jake’s throat closes up.
because he wants to. god, he wants to.
he wants to tell you everything—about the fight, the chase, the guy with the knife, the way his side still burns, the way he pictured you waiting outside the theater for him with every swing and every hit he took and every punch.
he wants to tell you he didn’t forget. that you were the only thing on his mind the whole time.
but he can’t. he knows he can’t.
“…i—i can’t.”
you’re quiet again. but this time, jake can feel the shift even over the phone.
and it’s not annoyance, it’s not cold. jake doesn’t think a single bone in your body could ever hold an ounce of bitterness.
just disappointment. sadness.
“…okay.” your voice barely goes through. jake squeezes his eyes shut. his fist balls up the sheet under him. “i’m sorry,” he whispers again.
you inhale through your nose, “it’s okay. i just—i didn’t know if something happened. i didn’t know if you were hurt...or if i said something wrong.”
jake’s stomach twists—sharp and awfully close to throwing up. and this time, it’s not from the amount of times he took it to the gut today.
“no,” he blurts, too quickly but he doesn’t care. “no, it wasn’t you. you didn’t do anything wrong.”
another long, still silence.
“alright…well,” you murmur eventually, voice light in that way people use when they’re trying not to sound disappointed. “i’ll see you at school then, i guess?”
“yeah,” jake nods, even though you can’t see him. “yes. yeah, tomorrow.”
you don’t say anything else.
and neither does he.
you end the call first.
and jake stays frozen, still on the edge of his bed, phone still pressed to his ear even after the line goes dead with a soft click.
he shuts his eyes, letting the dark swallow him whole. and as he groans, rubbing a tired hand over his face—wincing at the physical pain, but mentally cursing at the emotional one—jake can’t stop hearing your voice in his head.
everything is too much.
halls buzzing, lockers slamming, sneakers squeaking. the overhead lights are way too bright, and the air smells like gym socks and cafeteria mystery meat.
and it’s all overwhelming. well, it should be, at least. especially for someone who has heightened senses that feels everything a hundred times more than the regular human being. sharper, louder, closer.
but jake barely notices any of it. he’s already halfway down the corridor, eyes immediately locking in on you the second he walked through those doors. and as far as he’s concerned, nothing else matters.
you’re at your locker, spinning the combination without looking, when jake finds himself next to you before he knows it.
he clears his throat, “hey.”
you glance over.
“oh,” you say, blinking. “hi.”
jake steps a little closer, a little hesitant, nerves jumbled in his gut. “look, y/n. i’m really sorry. i still am.”
you shake your head almost immediately, pulling out a book and shutting your locker gently. there’s a polite smile on your face as you look over at him, “jake. it’s okay. really.”
"it’s not—” he says, frowning, his voice coming out rougher than he intends. his ribs still hurt. his ankle’s still swollen. his face still bruised. but none of that stings half as much as the way you’re not meeting his eyes right now. “you had every right to be pissed—”
“i wasn’t pissed, jake,” you cut in gently. “i told you. you just worried me…that’s all.”
that makes jake shut up. his throat closes up. because worried might be worse. worried means you care. and he let you down anyway.
and that’s it for a moment. the silence that follows stretches a little too long—lockers clang in the background, someone yells about running late to class. the world keeps moving—but jake doesn’t.
“i’m glad you’re okay,” you finally say, voice quiet as your gaze skims across his face, lingering just a moment too long on the faint bruise along his jaw.
jake exhales slowly. tries not to flinch under the weight of your concern. because how? how can you still look at him like that—with care, with softness—when he doesn’t know what he even did to deserve it?
and the worst part is, he’s terrified he already lost you before he ever even earned you.
“…so,” he says, the word catching in his throat awkwardly yet hopeful all at once, “how about we try again?”
your head tilts, an unreadable curiosity replacing the worry in your eyes.
jake lets out an uneven breath of nervous laughter as he searches your eyes. “tomorrow night? you, me. that corner diner with the insane milkshakes and greasy burgers. then we can regret it together afterwards.”
you only look at him for a beat. then, just slightly, your shoulders relax. and jake watches it happen in real time—the way the tension lifts just slightly, the curve of a small smile tugging at your lips.
like sunlight cutting through a cloud. like a sign from the universe that maybe, just maybe, he didn’t completely ruin everything.
“okay,” you breathe, a small laugh escaping with it. “that…actually does sound kinda fun. maybe not the grease part, but…yeah. at least we can suffer together.”
you then step closer, nudging him lightly with your shoulder, a playful glint in your eye, “you’re paying, by the way.”
jake grips the straps of his backpack with both his hands, smiling at you like a child offered candy. “done and done.”
“alright, well,” you step back with a glance down the hall, “i should probably head to class.”
jake nods back, eyes still watching you, “yeah, yeah, right. me too.” but he doesn’t move. just keeps watching you, unsure if he should try pinching himself.
you look back at him one last time, “jake?”
jake’s half-way on his heels when he stops at the sound of your voice again. “yeah?”
“it really is okay,” you reassure. and it’s real. honest. grounded. and everything jake needs to hear.
he smiles, a little too lopsided and voice a little too fragile when he speaks again, “i’ll see you?”
“counting on it,” you grin before turning back and making your way to class.
the rest of the day blurs for jake. he aces the pop vocabulary quiz in english, he steals some of sunghoon’s fries from his tray, he accidentally dents his locker door when closing it because he forgets he has literal super strength.
but it all passes in a haze. muted and unimportant.
because the only thing that cuts through the noise is the thought of you.
every hour stalls. every minute another reminder that the best way to distract himself from the chaos of his head is the same thing that causes it in the first place—
seeing you.
obviously.
“you know,” his voice comes from above, playful and easy, “i probably sacrifice at least two churros a night just making sure you get home safe instead of saving the world out there.”
“jesus christ—” you jolt back, nearly tripping over your own feet as jake—spider-man—drops down beside you later that night on your walk back home. you instinctively swat at the air as if that threatens him. at all.
“wrong guy,” he quips, sticking the landing in a crouch and straightening up. “but i do appreciate the enthusiasm.”
your face drops and give him a deadpan stare. “you really gotta stop doing that.”
“me?” jake clutches his chest dramatically through the suit before jutting a thumb behind him towards absolutely nothing. “i could totally leave right now and earn myself some churros.”
you huff out a breath, rolling your eyes even as your lips twitch towards a smile, “then why are you still here, spidey?”
“because,” jake answers simply, falling into step beside you, “it’s part of my friendly-neighborhood-spider-man-civic-duties to make sure my favorite citizen gets home safe.”
you snort, shaking your head lightly as you tilt your head at him, “fine. let’s get going then.”
jake smiles beneath the mask—too wide, too hopeful, too much. and you don’t see it, but he feels it—feels you—in every corner of himself. and jake hates how badly he wishes this could just be him. no mask, no lies, no secret. just jake. just you.
once you two make it a block or two (jake lost count), jake coughs a little too awkwardly, breaking through the quiet, “sooo…what ended up happening with that aquarium guy?”
you falter for half a second. it’s quick, but jake notices. not because his jake-tingle makes him notice everything, but because he’s watching. especially you.
you start walking again just as fast, trying to pretend the question didn’t rattle you at all before you clear your throat, “what guy?”
“y’know,” jake gestures vaguely, hands flailing, “the guy-guy. the one who took you to see the belugas—”
oh no.
jake stops. shuts his mouth.
he did it again.
you stop too. turn to look at him slowly.
“…how do you know about the belugas?”
jake looks at you. the lenses of his mask widen. then narrow. blink. squint.
“i—uh—” jake rubs the back of his neck, the suit suddenly feeling a little too tight, a little too warm. “i saw a billboard. yeah. i was swinging around the other day and—and there was this massive ad. big and blue and very…beluga-like.”
there’s a beat.
reason #1115 why jake’s going to launch himself into orbit.
but you buy it anyways, settling with a small side-eye before walking again, “okay…right.”
“yeah,” jake exhales under his mask, recovering with a casual shrug, “anyways. belugas…the aquarium guy?”
you hum, the sound barely audible as if you’re thinking, “he’s…cool. he’s alright.”
and jake’s heart caves in a little.
okay, maybe a lot.
he pretends to nod, to be chill, to not feel like maybe he’s witnessing his entire world fall apart in front of him right now and he can’t do anything about it.
“damn,” he manages to squeak out, voice lighter than how he feels. “just alright?”
you glance at him briefly before looking back at the sidewalk, “no, no—he’s…he’s really nice,” you say and jake swears he can feel the syllables in your voice individually bruise his ribs. “he’s just…confusing. i don’t know.”
and jake, because he’s jake, watches you. watches the way your voice dips quieter. watches the way your shoulders curl in just a little, watches the way your mind trails off.
“confusing…” he says slowly, carefully, testing the ice. “like you…don’t like him?” and jake doesn’t know why he asked that. he doesn’t know if he wants to hear the answer.
“yes. no. i—i don’t know. i think i do.” a small pause. you kick a pebble. “but sometimes it’s hard to tell if he…if he actually cares? or if i made the whole thing up in my head.”
jake blinks hard. looks away. swallows. bites the inside of his cheek to keep everything in. because you didn’t make it up. not even a little. and god, if only you knew how desperately he cares—how much of his life he’s unintentionally rewritten around you.
his heart screams to tell you everything. that this is his chance, that he can fix everything right here, right now.
but his brain knows better.
“i think…you should give him a chance.”
you look up, surprised. and jake doesn’t know why—but that hurts too.
“seriously,” his eyes flick forward again. “he’d be lucky. you’re smart. and thoughtful. and…even though you have the survival instincts and awareness of a sea turtle, you’re…fun. and honestly kind of unbelievable.”
and for a spilt second, jake forgets.
forgets that he’s not just jake. forgets he’s not just a teenage boy talking to his crush. forgets that to you, right now, he’s not the awkward guy that stammers next to you in chemistry and accidentally breaks glass beakers in his hand. forgets that he’s spider-man—the one you seem to trust a little more freely than the boy who let you down.
and that’s what hurts the most.
because when you glance up at him now—there’s that feeling again.
the pocket of air that only ever exists between you and him. a space that feels warmer than the rest of the world, like the universe took a breath and exhaled only around the two of you.
and it’s always there, somehow—whether he’s wearing the mask or not. whether it’s spider-man and you eating cold pizza on your fire escape. whether it’s you and jake laughing over a lame pun your teacher used in class. and jake knows that air. craves it. has memorized the shape of silence it holds.
but right now, it feels more like spider-man gets to live in it. not jake. and that realization twists something sharp and quiet inside his chest.
because jake’s the one who likes you. jake’s the one who knows you like your matcha lattes even with the grainy oat milk that makes the texture weird. the one who knows you only ever take chemistry quizzes with your favorite pink pen because you think it gives you good luck. the one who gets to share sour patch kids with you under the lab table when you both think no one is looking. but jake’s the one who messed up.
and spider-man’s the one who gets to be here now.
he looks at you—you standing there, eyes soft, smile just a little sad—and he’s willing himself not to say anything stupid. not to ruin the moment. not to cross that line he drew. not to let it get to his head every time he realizes the only way he can be close to you right now…is by being someone else.
and so jake locks in.
the next morning, he wakes up early—which, in jake terms, really means waking up at his regular time and only hitting snooze twice instead of his usual six. he throws on a hoodie that he sniffed to make sure it smells like detergent and not like it’s overdue for a wash, looks in the mirror, and brushes his hair. like actually brushes it, and not just run his hands through it and hopes for the best. he walks the full twenty minutes to the café where he studied with you, orders your usual—the matcha latte with the grainy oat milk—adds a smiley face and heart on the side of the cup next to your name, and books it to school. he arrives early to school, for once, and goes straight to your locker—not before dodging a frisbee mid-air, a frantic girl running with an art project in hand, and a couple making out aggressively by the vending machine.
when you close your locker door shut, you look up surprised—jake in your view, holding the matcha out like an olive branch. if olive branches wore oversized hoodies and had a mild existential crisis fifteen minutes ago.
you blink. then you smile and take the cup. jake gives himself a mental high five. nailed it.
and when you softly ask him to walk to you to your first class? jake nearly does a backflip. (he doesn’t. he plays it cool. barely.)
when chemistry rolls around later in the day, jake’s the first one to say hi this time. when the teacher is busy not looking, jake leans in and says a really, really stupid joke about ionic bonds and valence electrons and regrets it immediately but you laugh. you laugh and jake’s day is immediately better than any other day he’s had this week. at some point, you nudge his knee and when jake looks down—your hand is there, holding out a pack of sour patch kids. jake takes it as a good sign. or maybe a sign of impending life-long romance. either way, he takes one and tries not to make it weird. (and he still does. he accidentally eats two at once and chokes a little. but it’s fine.)
when the bell rings and class is over, you’re both packing up when you glance over and smile at him, “I’m excited to see you later tonight.” and jake thinks he misheard. thinks he’s hearing things because just three weeks ago, the most he’s ever said to you was either something about the periodic table or…running out of the classroom after breaking a glass beaker with his bare hands. but then your hand lands on the sleeve of his hoodie and gives him the slightest squeeze, and jake malfunctions.
jake gives you a thumbs up. because he panicked.
he panicked and thumbs-upped (he will never learn).
but you smile anyways and say your cute little goodbye before leaving class.
and the rest of the school day is irrelevant to jake because the rest of the school day doesn’t involve you. well, except in his head. sure, jake goes to lunch. sunghoon won’t stop talking about the new valorant expansion pack and how his computer lags everytime he tries to peek a corner—but jake’s just thinking about how your hair looked in the sunlight this morning when you asked him to walk you to class. sure, jake gets his pop quiz back in history with a big, fat, b minus written on top in red marker. normally, he’d spiral, because he really should be getting his history grade up. and normally, he’d wince at the mental image of his mom scolding him later over it—but he’s too busy replaying your laugh in his head. sure, jake goes to robotics club after school. he’s supposed to help calibrate the parts for their new battle bot but he accidentally installs a cord backwards, and now the bot is stuck running in circles—because jake sim is currently preoccupied.
preoccupied mentally drafting a speech that goes something like, “hey, i like you. a lot. possibly way more than i should but i don’t really care because you always smell good and your smile makes me want to rip my hair out and the memory of kissing you is in my dreams everynight. can i be your boyfriend? please? maybe? i’ll buy you weird oat milk drinks forever and buy you more beluga stickers even though, respectfully, you probably shouldn’t own any more.”
it’s still a work in progress.
and later that evening, jake is pacing back and forth in his bedroom, mentally preparing himself for tonight. his spider-man suit lies crumpled somewhere in the back of his closet half-covered by a flannel, a calculus textbook, and one sock he still can’t find the missing half to. he makes a mental note to wash the suit. eventually. later. not tonight. tomorrow. whatever. not important.
because tonight, he’s just jake. just jake, a regular teenage boy. just jake, a regular teenage boy with no responsibilities except to make his crush and hopefully soon-to-be-girlfriend happy.
just jake, nervously fixing the collar of his nicest hoodie, debating whether or not to wear the cologne his mom got him two birthdays ago. just jake, combing his fingers through his hair and wondering if you like it better pushed back, down, up, messy, styled, or, hell, shaved off entirely because he will do it if it gets him one (1) smile from you. just jake, practically grinning to himself because he’s going to see you.
jake checks the time again. 7:24PM. he’s early, which is good. which is the plan. because early gives him time to get to the diner first. early gives him time to find the best booth, which is the one near the corner window so you two can watch the sunset together and sit far from the kitchen door to avoid the smell of peanut oil. early gives him time to breathe and mentally run through everything he wants to say.
hi y/n. you look really pretty. i missed you—wait no, you saw her literally three hours ago, don’t say that—i was thinking we could split the strawberry milkshake together—wait is she lactose intolerant?
jake grabs his phone, wallet, the flowers he picked up at the corner deli on the way home. it’s wrapped in too much plastic, a little crooked, one of the carnations is sticking out, but it’s pink and soft and entirely you coded.
and jake makes his way to the diner, sneakers scuffing against the sidewalk, heart doing backflips in his ribcage as he turns the corner and sees the neon lights of the diner come into view just a few more blocks down. one of the lights of the sign is flickering in and out, going back and forth from diner to din_r. it’s perfect. you’re perfect. he just needs to get there.
buzz. buzz.
jake looks down at his phone in hand.
incoming call : GUY IN CHAIR 🧠
“yo, i’m gonna call you in, like, a few hours,” jake answers without thinking, barely breaking his pace, “i’m on my way to the—”
“jake.” and sunghoon’s voice is tense. urgent. the kind of urgent that tightens something in jake’s chest.
jake stops.
“it’s bad. really, really bad,” sunghoon’s voice is strained and jake doesn’t like it. doesn’t like that feeling in his gut. the pull, the weight, the way his skin pricks, the way every muscle in his body tenses.
jake shuts his eyes closed. exhales sharply. runs a hand through his hair. “how bad?”
“like…warehouse near the port is up in flames and there’s a hostage situation and no one’s close enough to get there in time.”
and just like that, jake feels it. the way the air changes, that familiar shift in gravity. that tug in his chest like a string being pulled into two opposite directions.
jake doesn’t say anything. he looks back down the street, stares at the diner. he’s so close. so close to getting there. so close to getting to you. “i can’t, sunghoon. not tonight,” he swallows hard, his voice cracking on the words. “i—i don’t even have my suit.”
there’s a beat. “jake,” sunghoon says, softer yet not any less urgent. “they’ve got kids.”
jake’s eyes flutter closed again. presses the heel of his hand to his forehead like he can press the guilt away. he doesn’t move. and for a second—just one—he thinks maybe, maybe, he could keep walking. just this once. just tonight.
but he knows better.
the responsibility. the pull.
the price of the mask.
it’s never not there.
his grip tightens around the bouquet. the plastic crinkles. he sighs, slips out a curse word or two under his breath, and—
“jesus christ,” jake mumbles, already turning on his heel. “tell the fire department i’m on my way. and tell them to hurry.”
and jake’s already running—sprinting back in the opposite direction back to his apartment. sunghoon hangs up and jake?
jake doesn’t stop.
he doesn’t even look back.
jake doesn’t know what time it is. doesn’t care. smoke still clings to his skin, the faint sting of ash burned into the fabric of his suit. his lungs ache, and his hands are scraped raw from tearing open too many metal doors and carrying too many people to safety.
but he’s alive.
they’re alive.
and yet. all jake can think about—is you.
you, maybe waiting in that booth. you, maybe sipping a milkshake through a striped straw, twirling it slowly and glancing at the door every couple minutes. you, maybe checking your phone. frowning. getting up. leaving.
god.
he doesn’t even stop to change. just swings home, crawls through his fire escape, throws a hoodie over his soot-covered suit, runs a wet hand through his hair, and jumps back out the fire escape again. he swings and swings until he lands in an alleyway near the diner, tripping over a trash can and throwing a curse word at it as he stumbles into the street and—
runs into you.
your arms are crossed tight against your chest, your head’s down. you’re walking the other way, unaware of the chaos behind you.
jake’s voice cracks before it can even form your name. “—y/n. y/n, i—”
you stop mid-step, your head turning at the sound. and when you turn and see him, you pause—the expression on your face unreadable.
“jake?” your brows furrow. “what the hell—where did you even come from? and why do you smell like—” you stop yourself. exhale shortly. shake your head. “you know what? never mind. i—i’m going home.”
you turn again.
and jake panics.
he starts after you, picking up his pace to match yours “wait—look, y/n, i’m so, so, so sorry. i swear i can explain—”
that’s when you stop in your tracks. you turn, finally facing him. and the emotions written on your face are everywhere—confused, hurt, tired, and somewhere beneath all of that—still soft.
“okay,” you say, looking him in the eye. “then explain.”
jake opens his mouth.
closes it.
he swallows. his lips open again.
"i—"
his throat burns. and it’s not from inhaling a building’s worth of smoke from earlier.
"i can’t. it's...complicated."
silence.
you stare at him. eyes wide. quiet. sad. disappointed. the kind that hurts jake more than if you were angry.
when you speak up again, your voice is quiet, barely above a whisper, “look, jake. i don’t know what’s going on with you. and i’m not mad. but…you’re just really confusing. and clearly, you’ve got something going on.”
you take a breath and fold your arms tighter around yourself, “—and while this was fun and all…i just—i don’t know if this is going to work out anyways.”
jake blinks. his stomach drops. he takes a step closer. “wait—no, y/n, i—”
and you keep going. “plus,” you let out a small laugh but it’s the worst kind of laugh—the kind that’s awkward and forced, like it’s there only to preemptively make up for the words coming after. “i’m just gonna be honest with you.”
jake doesn’t breathe.
you look him in the eyes.
“i think i like someone else anyways.”
and that does it. jake’s world tilts sideways. the words hit him like a punch—no, worse, because he’s felt bad punches before. this feels like that moment in freefall right before the web catches you, except this time there’s no web. just the fall.
“you…like someone else?” is all jake manages to let out before the words get caught in his throat. he thinks he might throw up.
you nod. slowly. hesitantly. and jake feels like he’s unraveling.
he doesn’t know what to say. he wants to scream, he wants to cry, he wants to tear his stupid hoodie off and tell you everything.
that he missed the date because he was saving lives.
that he wanted to tell you he’s falling for you.
that he bought the damn bouquet and practiced a stupid speech and picked the booth with the best view and no peanut oil smell.
that he only missed it because he was trying to be good. good enough. worthy.
but all that comes out is air.
because he can’t tell you. because he shouldn’t tell you. because spider-man doesn’t get to be selfish. because jake doesn’t get to be just jake.
your fingers fidget as you glance back down at the ground. you rock slightly on your heels before your voice breaks the silence again, “but hey. no hard feelings, yeah? friends?”
and that might be the final blow.
and jake doesn’t even know how to respond. his brain stutters. because what is he supposed to say—”friends? no? actually, i wanted to ask you to be mine tonight, and now i can’t even tell you why i missed it?”
so instead, jake does what jake always does.
he pretends. he nods, forces a smile—too quick, too wide, the kind that pulls at his cheeks but doesn’t reach his eyes.
“yeah,” he says. his voice cracks, but he clears his throat like that’ll fix anything. “yeah. of course. friends.”
you nod back and offer a tight smile, “i’ll see you at school, then. goodnight.”
then you turn.
and you walk away.
jake doesn’t move. the weight of your footsteps fade, but the words still echo in his ears.
friends. someone else. no hard feelings.
his chest feels hollow. like someone scraped everything out and forgot to fill it back in. like he just lost something he never even got the chance to have in the first place.
and spider-man’s the one who saved the day. and it should feel like a win, but it doesn’t. because although spider-man saved the day, jake’s the one who let you down.
jake was too late. too late, too secretive.
too much of everything and still not enough of what you needed.
“maybe it’s not as bad as we think.” sunghoon’s voice is cautious, but not exactly convincing from his slouched position in jake’s desk chair, spinning slowly like he’s debating whether now’s a good time to leave (it’s not. he’s been trying for the past hour. jake made him stay.)
jake lets out a guttural groan in response, already face down on his bed, limbs sprawled out in distress. a pillow is smushed over his head, in attempt to block out the agonizing, soul-crushing reality that is his life.
“it’s over, sunghoon,” jake muffles into his mattress. “over with a capital O. capital V. all the damn letters—over before it even started.”
jake flips over, sending the pillow to the other side of the room, “she likes someone else,” he says hollowly, staring blankly at the ceiling. “i was so preoccupied with everything else that i didn’t even notice she—who else could she even—”
jake cuts himself off mid-rant. because it doesn’t matter.
doesn’t matter who you like.
doesn’t matter how it happened.
it just matters that it’s not him.
that you like someone.
and it’s not jake.
jake presses a hand to his head, “god. i’m such an idiot.”
sunghoon lets out a low whistle and starts fiddling with one of jake’s pens, “okay. you’re not an idiot. you did what you had to do, and you did the right thing.”
jake lets out a small sigh, quiet and defeated, finally looking at his friend, “but when do i get to stop sacrificing to do the right thing?”
silence stretches out between them. the ceiling fan above them whirs. the clang of metal pots and pans echo from down the hall—which means jake’s mom is attempting to make meatloaf again. which means the fire alarm will probably go off in ten minutes, maybe eight. the room smells faintly of jake’s two-birthdays-ago cologne, and the burnt tinge of unwashed spandex crumpled somewhere in the room.
sunghoon taps the pen against the desk, eventually breaking the silence, “so talk to her. as spidey.”
jake sits up in his bed and gives sunghoon a look.
“talk to her as spider-man, tell her to give ‘jake’ another chance,” sunghoon repeats, throwing air quotes around his friend’s name.
jake gestures to the ceiling. the wall. the existential void of absolute nothingness around him. “sunghoon. that’s…messed up. morally. ethically. logistically. probably emotionally.”
“i mean,” sunghoon shrugs casually as if this is the answer to all of jake’s problems, “spidey’s already friends with her, anyways. and you told me yourself—it feels like she’s closer to him than she is to you.”
jake throws both hands in the air. “WE’RE THE SAME PERSON.”
he then lets out an inhuman noise and flops backwards onto his bed again, “whatever, man. this is probably for the best anyway,” he mutters. “spider-man should’ve never gotten involved in the first place. it’s safer this way. especially for her.”
a beat passes. jake stares up at the glow-in-the-dark stars still stuck to his ceiling from the sixth grade. he blinks once.
“plus, let’s be honest. i’d probably screw it up more somehow. say something dumb and let it slip that it’s been me all along.” jake pauses. “—or honestly, she probably already knows i’m spider-man. which is even worse, because now she probably hates both versions of me.”
sunghoon’s quiet for a moment. just keeps spinning slowly in jake’s chair, the wheels creaking faintly. “…so what? you’re just gonna stop walking her back home now?” he finally says, lifting a brow. “isn’t that for her safety too?”
and yeah.
yeah, he has a point.
so jake doesn’t stop.
he just stops being seen.
and that’s what jake does for the next few days.
so jake falls into this routine without really meaning to. he goes home from school, puts on his suit (it’s clean now, don’t worry), and spends the next few hours either returning stolen bikes or webbing carjackers to brick walls or showing tourists the right direction.
and somehow, someway, jake still finds himself in the same spot at the end of the day—sitting crouched on the ledge of the rooftop across from your bus stop, a hoodie pulled over his mask, hands stuffed in his sleeves.
at 10:32PM, your bus rolls up right on the dot.
at 10:33PM, you step off. same oversized totebag on your shoulder. same way you pull your phone out and unlock it in the same three motions. same streetlight that flickers just before you pass it.
and jake watches you go home. makes sure you’re okay. makes sure you’re safe. all without making himself seen.
and only when your apartment window lights up does he finally feel okay, finally swings away, the wind cold and sharp in his lungs—but not as cold as the air around him whenever you’re not there.
he does this again the next night. and the next. and the next.
and at school, jake falls into rhythm here, too—if you can call it that.
you still sit next to him in chemistry. still copy formulas off the board. still hand in the same worksheets, laugh politely when the teacher makes a pun about avogadro’s number.
but you don’t share your sour patch kids anymore. and jake doesn’t make any stupid chemistry jokes to make you laugh either, because…he can’t think of any. because all the funny ones were ones he saved for you, and they don’t feel worth saying out loud anymore.
you talk to him, sure. when you need the answer to question six, or to ask if he got the quiz grade back. but there’s space between you now. quiet, aching space. and jake doesn’t know how to fill it.
but by the end of the week—
all routines fly out the window.
because it’s friday night. and jake swings to the usual rooftop across from your bus stop, a half-eaten churro in one hand—courtesy of the sweet old lady who bought it for him after he showed her where her train station is. because it’s 10:30PM when jake lands on the roof, tossing his backpack to the side when he looks up and—
he freezes.
because sitting there, cross-legged on the ledge—on his ledge—backlit by the moonlight and the yellow glow of the streetlamps below—is you.
jake chokes. he stumbles back, the eyes of his mask blown wide immediately, “what the—y/n?! what are you—how did you—wh—”
and you’re sitting there, blinking and staring at him, unfazed. like you’ve been waiting. you don’t move. you just raise a brow.
“okay, so first you start walking me home every night, then you stop showing up, but still choose to stalk me from a distance? i don’t get you, spider-man.”
and jake is so confused right now. “i—what’s going on?” jake sputters, arms half-raised in shock and disbelief. “how are you even here right now, how did you even get up here?”
“you’re not exactly subtle, y’know,” you deadpan, ignoring his question as you tilt your head up at him. “every night you walk me home? i know this is where you drop your bag off and wait for me to get off that bus. i know you sit on that rooftop across from my place to make sure i’m okay every night. your silhouette is literally not that subtle.” then you gesture vaguely around the rooftop. “also, the webs everywhere? kinda a dead giveaway, don’t you think?”
jake’s mouth opens. nothing comes out. and if it weren’t for the mask, he’d be catching flies.
you stand now, arms crossed tight as you take a step closer to him. you take a deep breath before you ramble, “i don’t know. i’m just—i’m so confused, spider-man. i told the guy i like that i liked someone else. and i don’t even know if that was true or if i just panicked. but the truth is, i don’t even know if the guy i actually like likes me back, or even knows how to talk to me, or if i’m just completely losing it—”
“—wait.” jake tilts his head, still frozen in his spot. “wait, which guy? like the guy-guy? aquarium guy?”
you groan and start pacing, squeezing your eyes shut like you’re trying to make sense of the situation as well.
“yes. yes, of course the guy-guy, aquarium guy—who else would i be talking about? there’s no other guy—”
“you just said you told the guy-guy you liked someone else.”
“i did! i think! i—look, i don’t know! maybe i said it just to protect myself from the fact that the guy-guy doesn’t like me back. but now i might actually like this other guy—”
“okay, okay—hold on, back up,” jake steps back to process. holds up both his hands. “so there’s guy-guy you maybe like…and now a new guy…?”
jake’s mind is reeling. his insides might come out. who is the new guy? is jake even guy-guy? no. yes. maybe? jake has to be guy-guy. or else he’s gonna scold sunghoon for being very unoriginal for the aquarium date idea.
you stop pacing. you turn to him with wide eyes, like you’re mentally begging yourself to shut up, don’t do it, but your mouth moves anyways.
“…you,” your voice is quiet. barely audible. but yet, so loud and clear and more than anything else jake has ever sensed before. “i like you.”
and for a second there, jake thinks maybe he misheard, because it sounded a lot like you just said you liked him. spider-man. and there’s absolutely no way. there’s no way you said that. there’s no way you meant that.
there’s no way this is happening.
there’s no way the girl he’s been hopelessly staring at from across the cafeteria for god knows how long now, the girl he’s been walking home at night to make sure she’s safe even she didn’t know, the girl that witnessed him choke on two sour patch kids at once in the middle of chemistry—is standing here. on this rooftop. telling him that this entire time he’s been tangled up in a love triangle…with himself?
and jake? jake is actively malfunctioning. he says nothing. he does nothing. he thinks nothing.
and you seem to take jake’s stunned silence as pure horror—
because you panic.
“oh my god. oh my god—i’m insane,” you whisper, moreso to yourself than him. “i knew it. i knew that guy-guy shattered my brain and messed me up so bad i’m actually losing it.”
you start pacing again. and jake’s legs don’t work, so he just watches.
“like—i don’t even know what you look like under that mask. what if you’re, like…thirty? what if you don’t even have a nose?” your voice rises in disbelief at your own choices. “what if i’m just projecting everything onto this idea of you, because you’re sweet and funny and walk me home and call me your favorite citizen and—god, i’m actually going delusional—”
jake takes a few more steps back, shaking his head once, then twice, like he’s trying to physically undo the entire past five minutes of his life. or reset his entire nervous system.
his hands fly to his hair as he turns away from you, staring up at the sky, muttering incoherent words to himself before he lets out a groan, “i—what the hell—i can’t believe i’m doing this, i’m gonna hurl. oh god—”
then, he turns around. takes one unsteady step towards you. his heart is racing. but without another word—
he yanks the mask off.
and his hair is a mess (from the mask). his cheeks flushed like he’s been sweating (he has). his eyes wide like he’s terrified (he is).
“y/n.”
your jaw drops.
you blink once. twice.
you stare at his face. at his hair. at jake.
“…JAKE?!”
your voice echos—loud. probably throughout the entire city, if jake’s being honest. your arms flail so wildly it looks like your brain is about to evacuate your body. you blink hard, like if you do it enough times, this fever dream might just break.
“are you kidding me right now?!”
jake flinches. his eye twitches.
you immediately start pacing again—back and forth, borderline hyperventilating, “YOU? you’re spider-man?! YOU??” you shout again, turning to point at him like he committed fraud. “how—hell—you literally broke a glass beaker last month—this can’t be real—”
jake raises his hands defensively, “okay, to be fair, you caught me off guard by asking me—”
“OH MY GOD,” you groan, throwing a hand into your hair, fisting a small bunch. “i told you i liked you while you were you pretending not to be you. that’s…that’s messed up, jake!”
“okay—yes, i see how that was a little—”
“you…you called me pretty but ignored my texts but still walked me home that night and…i’m so confused right now.”
jake scratches the back of his neck with one hand, the other dropping uselessly to his side, mask still in hand, “well…yeah. but also, like, i thought you picked up on it.”
“WHY WOULD I THINK YOU’RE SPIDER-MAN?” you practically screech, your steps halting as you spin to face him, full disbelief painted all over your face.
jake blinks. “i don’t know! i figured the voice, the walk…literally anything—”
“i don’t listen to people’s walks, jake!” you pace faster now. like if you don’t move, you might actually implode.
jake makes a desperate, helpless noise before he tries again, “look, y/n—can..can you just stop for a second and—”
“no, jake! i’m spiraling!” your voice hits a new level of pitch that makes jake wince. again. “i told two different guys i liked them this week and it turns out they’re the same guy and somehow that makes it worse?! do you know how emotionally unstable this makes me? i ranted to you about YOU—and you let me! oh, you’re so done for jake si—”
and that’s when he does it.
jake shoots a web.
it catches your waist.
and your rant cuts off mid-sentence as you’re suddenly pulled into him.
with a small yelp, you crash into his chest, hands reflexively splayed across his alarmingly solid chest. your nose is inches from his collarbone, and jake’s hands settle on your waist, immediately grounding you in place.
and you don’t have time to orient yourself—and jake doesn’t give himself time to pause or doubt it before he does it.
jake kisses you.
no hesitation, no overthinking, just all of jake—crashing his lips onto yours, immediately silencing you.
and you don’t stop him.
you can’t stop him.
because your lips are already moving against his, messy and fast and a little too much. your fingers fist into the fabric of his suit like you’re trying to anchor yourself and you swear—you swear—you can feel his heartbeat under your fingertips. and all of the sudden, you’re hyperaware of everything. how his mouth is warm and desperate and tastes a little like cinnamon churros and familiarity. how the air between you is sharp, your noses brushing, breath mingling in short gasps—all too much and not enough all at once.
and when you pull away briefly to take a breath—realization hits you. your palm smacks against his chest once. then again. then rapid fire.
“wait, wait. wait. did you just web me?” the words tumble out of you in a half-laugh, half-accusation. and to be frank, you don’t know if you should be angry or attracted right now.
and jake’s still breathless, forehead practically resting against yours, as you feel his chest rise and fall with each shaky exhale. his voice is low, steady. a little hoarse.
“y/n—” jake whispers, so close you can feel the shape of the words against your mouth, “—shut up.”
and then he kisses you again. slower, this time. deeper. like an apology, like a confession, like something that feels way too big to name.
jake’s hand curls tighter around your waist, the other sliding up gently, carefully, until his fingers find the back of your neck, holding you there like he’s afraid you’ll disappear in his hold.
and all you can do is lean in. closer and closer, like if you press hard enough, you’ll disappear into him. disappear into that small pocket of space that only exists between you and him and never come back out.
it’s uncoordinated, a little too frantic. but it’s everything. the shock, the nerves, the confusion all blur into static. and this time, when jake pulls back, just barely, you cant help the tiny, unintentional whine that escapes your lips as you chase his without thinking.
jake exhales a breathless, shaky chuckle against you before he kisses you again. a quicker one this time. and then another. then one to the corner of your mouth. and then your jaw. and then he’s pulling back again, this time slower, eyes fluttering open just as yours do too, his hands still around you, the web still holding you against him.
“hi,” jake whispers. it’s soft and raw and boyish. and so, so real. “it’s me.”
his thumb brushes along your jaw as he swallows hard. your heart stumbles, your eyes searching his face—his stupidly soft brown eyes, the little scar on his chin, the mole near his cheek you’ve always noticed. it’s all him.
the boy who walked you home. the boy who doesn’t know how to talk to you in class. the boy you fell for. all this time.
you’re still pressed to his chest, body still tangled up in his arms, lips still tingling, mind still fuzzy. your voice comes out in a whisper, “i can’t believe it’s been you this entire time.”
he nods, a shy, crooked smile on his face, “it’s always been me.” and then his expression falters, just slightly. “i didn’t mean to lie to you. or miss our dates. i just…i didn’t know how to be this,” he gestures to his suit, “and how to be just jake, either.”
and you just blink, unmoving in his arms, still a little breathless. because there’s something in his voice. something fragile.
“so…so that day you missed school? and you were all beat up?”
jake presses his lips together, guilt painted all over his face, “yeah, i actually did get into a fight. i lied about that part.”
your eyes narrow, “with who, jake?”
jake shrugs like it’s no big deal. “some guy with six arms. real tentacle problem. you should’ve seen the damage i did on him though.”
your mouth gapes.
“i’m kidding—” jake laughs, eyes sparkling now as his nose slightly bumps against yours. “it was a bank robber. kind of. honestly, it’s all a blur now. all i remember was thinking about kissing you that same night after the aquarium.”
you let out a scoff, part processing, part amused. “and the diner night? when you suddenly showed up out of no where?”
jake nods, pulling you in just a little tighter. “suit was under my hoodie the entire time. not fun, by the way. spandex gets sweaty…fast.”
“gross,” you mutter, scrunching your nose as you instinctively tug your hands away from his chest—only to stop halfway, leaving them right where they are anyways. then, after a beat, you slap his chest again. “i can’t believe you told me to give yourself another chance. i don’t know if i should be mad at you or kiss you again.”
jake makes a face and gives a tiny shrug, “well, if you’re asking for my opinion…” he tilts his head. “i definitely have an answer. but i might be biased.”
you roll your eyes, letting out a small laugh as your hands find the back of his neck now. “this is insane, jake. you’re genuinely insane,” you whisper quietly, eyes flickering from the spider emblem on his chest then back to his face.
jake grins down at you, eyes bright, one hand brushing a stray strand of hair away from your cheek.
“yeah? well you like both jake and spider-man,” he tilts his head. “so i think that makes you just as insane.”
you gasp dramatically, smacking his arm like you’re offended. jake laughs, that easy, familiar sound filling the room between you—and the air goes warm again.
there it is. that space. the one he’s always had with you—except now, it’s his. fully his. not just spider-man’s, not a half-version hidden behind a mask.
just jake, who also happens to wear spandex and save the city.
just jake, who sucks at high school history and has feelings for the pretty girl in his chemistry class.
and just jake—who finally doesn’t have to choose between you and the suit.
you breathe in, watching him carefully. “so…” you begin. “now what?”
jake pauses.
and then he smirks.
that boyish, reckless, completely jake smirk.
”how about i take you on a proper date?”
your brows lift, your head tilts. “yeah.” you beam up at him. “i’d like that. tomorrow?”
jake shakes his head slowly, leaning in briefly with a mischievous smile on his face.
“now.”
you blink.
“…now?”
“JAKE—” your scream cuts through the sky as you’re being flung between skyscrapers, clinging yourself around jake’s neck, legs around his torso like your life depends on it.
which, to be fair, is quite literally the case right now.
“—WE’RE NEVER DOING THIS AGAIN—”
jake just laughs, a breathless, exhilarating sound—his mask back on, one arm tight around you as the other shoots another web out, latching onto the building you two swing past.
“are you sure?” he yells over the fast wind. “because you look like you’re having so much fun—“
“JAKE—“
another swing. another scream. another terrified, stupid, perfect laugh.
the city blurs below. the stars blur above.
and somewhere in between it all, you feel his heartbeat against yours.
jake’s grip tightens—instinctively, protectively—as you fly past neon signs and glowing windows and the tiny people beneath and the hum of a city that never sleeps.
and in that moment, your panic settles into something else. something warmer.
so don’t try to stop him.
you just hold on tighter.
𖢥⁺₊°˖ tenk u again for all the love & support, always <3 (& special ty for my love ronnie @heejamas for the beluga dolphins fun fact & being my support throughout this entire proces <333 hehehe)
do you ever think about writing a smau? I feel like you’d be good at it
omg bc i was lowkey thinking abt it but ultimately idk how good i would actually be LOLL i feel like u need top tier humor for making a good smau and idk if my humor matches honestly and also making them seem like SOOO MUCH EFFORTTT so honestly respect to smau creators bc they're better than me fr..when i made the nodoubt!jake texts i almost lost my mind fr LOL
hey for the colored font does it work on mobile?? it doesn’t seem to work for me :(
hi!!! i'm not sure if adjusting it on html works on mobile,, i only make my posts with colored fonts on my laptop so i'm not really sure if it's the same!! sorry :(
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