脷 .ᐟ TONGUE. 2 in which, your ‘relationship’ with James couldn’t be messier, a situationship based on fights and low-key hookups, tearing at each other like it’s second nature—all sharp words, dirty looks, and the kind of tension that never really goes away. because the thing about james? he knows exactly how to hurt you—and you hurt him right back…
❛ 赵雨凡 𝑥 idol!reader ❜ 𓈒𓈒 based on my baby @tinygladiatorworm ‘s request 𖤼
⚠︎ MDNI ! smut, a LOT of angst~, multiple sexual scenes, denial, toxic dynamics, ghosting, avoidant behavior (?) situationship, idol hiatus, health problems, ethel cain mention, ( that’s a whole trigger warning ) social media posts,yearning nsfw : unprotected sex, missionary, multiple positions, crying during sex (angsty sex ) spooning sex, oral (fem receiving) body worshipping, semi-public foreplay, dry humping, shower sex, oral fixation, multiple orgasms.
𓏸 19k ╱ 𝓶. list. ♪♫ 𝑝laylist
TONGUE ࿇ part 1. part 2.
It was Mina who finally said the thing.
Of course it was Mina -she had the patience to wait until the moment was right and the precision to choose her words without excess, which meant that when she spoke it had the particular weight of something that had been considered thoroughly before being released.
It was a Sunday. Rare day off, or close to one- no company schedule, just a morning of your own before the final week of pre-release preparation began.
“It was the right thing,” you told her when she asked about the whole situation, less like a position being defended and more like something being confirmed to yourself. “I don’t regret it.”
“My body just-” you stopped. Started again. “I’ve been feeling off. You know that. And the doctor said the bloodwork is clean, so it’s just-” you shook your head. “Stress. The comeback. The schedule.”
Mina looked at you across the table, her coffee cup held in both hands in the unconscious mirror of yours, and her expression was so specifically careful- so precisely calibrated to the exact amount of honesty you could currently tolerate - that you understood she’d decided what she was about to say some time ago and had simply been waiting for the right Sunday morning.
“Your body,” she said, gently, “has been trying to tell you something for six weeks.”
“Mina.”
“I’m not saying it to make you feel bad,” she explained. “I’m saying it because you’re the most self-aware person I know in every direction except this one. You analyze everything. You see everything. And this-” she held your gaze, “-you’re looking directly at it and calling it stress.”
“It is stress.”
“Yes,” she said. “It is. And what’s causing the stress?”
The silence that followed had a specific texture -5he kind that existed when the answer was present and both people knew it but one of them wasn’t ready to say it out loud yet.
“The comeback,” you said.
Mina’s expression didn’t change. She didn’t push. She simply held the quiet with you, patient and immovable, and let the silence do what silences do when they’re given enough room -expand, and fill, and eventually reveal the shape of what was living in them.
The bathroom door opened. Hye-ri emerged in a cloud of steam and sheet mask, took one look at the kitchen table, and reversed direction with the swift social intelligence of someone who understood immediately that she had walked into a conversation that was not finished.
“I was never here,” she said, disappearing back down the hallway. “But I love you guys ! Fighting !”
The Sunday light moved across the table as you sketched out a small laugh. Your coffee was getting cold.
“I miss him,” you said. Very quietly. To your coffee cup, more than to Mina. The first time the words had existed outside your own head, and they sounded, out in the air, smaller than you’d expected and larger than you could manage simultaneously. “Which is stupid. I made the right call and I know I made the right call and I still-”
“It’s not stupid,” Mina said.
“It’s so counterproductive.”
“Those aren’t the same thing.”
“I don’t wanna miss him,” you said, and heard the specific texture of your own voice saying it -the distinction that mattered, the difference between what was true and what you wanted to be true, the gap between them that you’d been living in for six weeks and calling by other names. “I want to be fine. I am fine. In every way that counts I made the right-”
“You can make the right decision,” Mina said softly, “and still grieve it.”
You performed the showcase the way you performed everything -completely and precisely.
The formation issues were resolved. The bridge transition was clean. Your body knew the choreography the way it knew breathing, and so it did what it did, and the lights were bright and the crowd was loud and for the duration of the set you were exactly and only what you were on stage -present, professional, the dance machine, all of it.
Afterward, in the wings, you bent forward with your hands on your knees and breathed.
Hye-ri appeared beside you, still coming off stage herself, and put a hand briefly on your back. Said nothing. You straightened after a moment and smiled and it was real, because the performance high was real, because whatever else was happening in the background of your body -the stage still gave you the thing it had always given you -that clean, temporary, complete aliveness that nothing else quite replicated.
One more week, you told yourself. Get through the release week. Then you can be a person again.
You’d negotiated.
Release week was seven days -press appearances, music show performances, fan engagements, content shoots. Seven days of concentrated, high-visibility, high-demand activity that you had obligations to your members and your company and three years of work to see through.
Seven days.
You could manage seven days.
Your body, which had been listening to these negotiations with the patient skepticism of an entity that had been ignored for six weeks and was running low on goodwill, received this latest proposal in silence.
Release week arrived with the particular atmospheric pressure of something that had been building for months.
Monday was three back-to-back press interviews, a photo shoot for a digital magazine spread, and an evening fan live that ran an hour over schedule because the fans were in the specific mood of people who had been waiting for new music and were vibrating with it their energy coming through the screen with a warmth that you found genuinely moving even through the low-grade nausea that had showed up mid-afternoon.
You ate small amounts between schedules, drank water constantly, kept the antinausea prescription in your bag and used it twice on Monday and told no one.
Tuesday was the first music show performance.
You were in hair and makeup at five-thirty am, which meant your alarm had gone off at four forty-five, which meant you had woken at three am and not gone back to sleep, which was becoming its own subsidiary pattern that you were also not examining.
Ji-eun worked in focused silence, reading your tiredness in the particular way she had, and when she got to the outer corner of your right eye she paused for a fraction of a second.
“The lash is gonna be a pain,” she said.
“When has it ever not been,” you deadpanned.
She worked around it carefully, the way she always did, and the lash did what it always did- curled upward like a small rebellion, refusing to be corrected, the single detail that never quite cooperated regardless of technique or product or effort.
You looked at it in the mirror.
Did not think about the person who would have noticed it from forty feet away and said nothing and noticed it anyway.
Did not think about that. Definitely not.
“You look beautiful,” Ji-eun said, setting down her brush with the quiet satisfaction.
You looked at yourself in the mirror. The full construction of you -flawless and deliberate, the armor fully assembled, every surface of the public self precisely rendered. You looked exactly like what you were supposed to look like.
You looked, from the outside, completely fine.
“Thanks,” you said with a genuine smile, grateful in a way.
The performance on Tuesday was good.
Wednesday’s was better.
Thursday’s -the third music show, the one with the largest live audience component, the one that mattered most in terms of chart impact-Thursday’s was when it happened.
It happened the way most real things happened -inconveniently, incompletely, without regard for timing or audience or the seven cameras currently pointed at the stage.
You were in the second verse when you became aware of your body in a way that was distinct from the usual performance awareness -not the productive, kinetic consciousness of a dancer in the middle of choreography, but something else. Something underneath.
A quality of physical information arriving from a direction you’d been ignoring for weeks, insistent and escalating, like a notification you’d been swiping away finally demanding to be read.
You kept dancing.
You kept dancing because that was what you did, that was the thing you’d built your entire professional identity around -the capacity to keep going, to absorb and continue, to be present in your body as an instrument of the music regardless of what your body was privately communicating.
You made it to the end of the second chorus.
In the formation change before the bridge - James crossed your mind- or rather his eyes.
Your vision went briefly strange. Not dark exactly. More like the quality of the light changed, the stage brightness doing something it shouldn’t, the edges of your visual field making a decision you hadn’t authorized.
You corrected. Automatically, physically, the muscle memory doing its job while the rest of you registered what was happening with a calm that was less composure and more dissociation.
Hye-ri was two counts to your left. She caught the correction -you knew she did because you knew her, knew the micro-adjustment in her peripheral focus that meant she’d seen something. She held her formation. Kept going. Trusting you.
You got through the bridge.
And got through the final chorus.
You were in the last eight counts -the outro formation, stationary, the lights shifting to the end configuration- when your body made its final and non-negotiable statement on the subject of six weeks of negotiation.
You folded.
Not collapsed -not the dramatic buckle that the cameras would have made something of. A fold. A sitting down, essentially, your knees making contact with the stage floor in the last two counts of the song, graceful enough in the moment that two seconds passed before anyone in the audience understood it wasn’t choreography.
Hye-ri was beside you before the music stopped.
The next few hours had the quality of something experienced through broken glass.
The backstage area. The company doctor who had been on site for the broadcast. The cold pack at the back of your neck. Soeun’s face, the sleepiness entirely absent, replaced by something wide-eyed and young that you registered and felt guilty about in the dim practical way of someone running low on processing capacity.
Mina’s voice on the phone somewhere nearby, calm and authoritative, the big-sister register fully activated. Your manager’s face doing the thing it did when it was holding several difficult things simultaneously and not allowing any of them to surface.
“I’m fine,” you said, twice. Then stopped saying it, because even by your standards the evidence against it was fairly compelling at this point.
Dr. Yeon arrived. She’d been called while you were still on stage, apparently -someone had made that call in real time, which meant someone had been watching closely enough to see it coming.
She didn’t say I told you so, because she was a professional and a decent person. But she looked at you with the expression of someone who had said the relevant things two weeks ago and was now simply proceeding with the next appropriate steps.
“Hospital,” she said. Not a question.
“The schedule-” you started.
“Hospital,” she repeated, firmly
You looked at Mina.
Her eyes were very steady and very bright and she was holding herself with controlled stillness.
“Okay,” you said.
Mina took your hand and you let her.
ᴺᴼᵂ ᴾᴸᴬᵞᴵᴺᴳ 눈,코,입(Eyes, Nose, Lips) - Taeyang ♫♬♪
The hospital room was quiet -a manufactured quiet, the absence of noise rather than the presence of peace, the hum of equipment filling the silence where silence would otherwise have lived.
The lighting was the kind that made everyone look like they needed to be in a hospital, which you supposed was appropriate given that you were, in fact, in a hospital, a fact that still carried a faint quality of unreality even as you lay in the bed with the IV line in your arm and the monitors doing their steady work.
Dehydration, primarily. That was the immediate clinical language for it.
Significant enough to require intravenous correction, combined with the weight loss and the disrupted sleep and the sustained nausea, presenting as a body that had been running on insufficient resources for an extended period and had reached the end of its reserves.
Not dangerous in the acute, alarming sense.
But real nonetheless, th kind of real that required a building and a bed and a machine tracking your fluid intake.
Your members were in the waiting area. Your manager was on the phone. The company’s PR team was, presumably, having a series of conversations that you’d deal with later, when you were in a position to deal with anything that wasn’t the IV line and the quiet room and the odd lightness of finally having been stopped.
You stared at the ceiling.
It was smooth. No cracks. No interesting imperfections. Nothing to read.
You thought: this is what I did.
Not accusatory. Not self-punishing. Just factual, in the way that things became when you ran out of energy to frame them otherwise.
This was what six weeks of not reading the thing had looked like, accumulated. This was the story your body had been writing while you called it stress and schedule and bibimbap and mild iron deficiency and all the other names that were true in the peripheral way and false in the central one.
The central one sat in the quiet hospital room with you.
You’d been grieving. You’d been missing an essential piece of you, while rehearsing and performing and doing press interviews.
Here you were.
Thinking that 3 years were easy to forget just like that.
And somewhere in the building with the practice rooms and the corner canteen table and the tape on the booking boards that no longer had your initials on it -James was, presumably, living his life. Existing in the spaces you’d removed yourself from.
You wondered if he’d already found someone else with wild lashes to point out. Wondered if he was noticing someone else’s weird traits-
The thought arrived without armor, which was the hospital room’s contribution in your defense.
You missed him.
Not the fights, exactly. Not the pattern, which had been the right thing to end and remained the right thing to have ended.
The specific him. The particular person underneath all of it.
The one who had said it’s not nothing in the dark with the armor completely down, then had made sure you know it had been, indeed, nothing.
James found out the way he found out most things he wasn’t supposed to know yet -too early, too suddenly, with no adequate preparation and no one to blame for the lack of it.
It was Keonho’s phone. They were in the dorm living room, the five of them -James on the floor with his back against the couch, Keonho on the couch itself, Martin in the kitchen doing something that involved more cabinet opening than was strictly necessary for whatever he claimed to be making.
A mug cake of some sort.
Keonho’s phone lit up. Then lit up again. Then produced the specific rapid-fire notification pattern of something spreading quickly.
“What,” Keonho said. Not a question -the flat observational what of someone reading something that was outpacing their ability to process it.
James didn’t look up from his own phone. “What.”
“There’s a- hang on.” his voice had shifted into the careful register of someone managing, which was the register that made James look up.
Keonho was watching something. His face had done the thing faces did when they received weird news.
“Keonho dude,” James said.
Keonho turned his phone around.
The video was forty-three seconds long.
It had been filmed from the audience -mid -distance, slightly angled, the kind of footage that existed in the age of everyone having a camera in their pocket and no one quite being able to stop themselves from pointing it at things.
The quality was decent.
Clear enough to see the full choreography of the outro formation. Clear enough to see the lights shifting to their end configuration. Clear enough to see, in the last two counts of the song, the moment your knees made contact with the stage floor.
James watched it once.
Then he took the phone from Keonho’s hand and watched it again, and the second time he watched it with focused attention of someone who knew the person on the screen in a way that the forty thousand people in that venue did not.
He handed the phone back without speaking.
Martin had appeared in the kitchen doorway at some point during the second viewing. The cabinet sounds had stopped. The three of them sat in the living room with the television still running its indifferent programming and the notification sounds still coming from Keonho’s phone, muffled now against the cushion where he’d placed it face-down.
“She okay?” Martin asked.
James said nothing.
He was looking at his own phone. His contacts. The entry that was no longer there -removed not by him but by the one-sided erasure that he’d understood immediately.
No error message, no bounce-back. Just the specific quality of a door that had been locked from the inside.
He’d counted the days. Not deliberately.
Twenty-three days since the last time your name had been accessible in his phone. Since the last time he could have said something if he’d had something adequate to say, which he hadn’t, which was its own separate problem.
“James,” Keonho said. Quiet. Not pushing.
“I saw it,” James said.
“Dude... How you feeling ?”
“I’m fine, why wouldn’t i be?”
Neither Keonho nor Martin said anything to that, which was the correct response.
He stood up. “I’m going to the studio.”
“It’s eleven bro,” Martin said.
“I know what time it is.”
He got his jacket from his room, his headphones, the specific small kit of things he brought when he went to the studio late -which was not infrequently.
It had become somewhat more frequent in the last months, which he was also not examining.
He passed back through the living room. His members were both looking at him with wide eyes.
At the door he stopped, and didn’t turn around.
“She’ll be fine,” he said. To the door, more than to them. “It’s not that bad.”
The walk was cold. October doing its thing, the air sharp the city running its quieter late-night version of itself. He walked with his headphones around his neck instead of on, which he didn’t notice until he was already at the building entrance.
He took the elevator to four, sat down at the board in the smaller suite, and opened a blank session.
For a few minutes he just sat there.
He was thinking about a morning six months ago, You’d been in his bed, after what he categorized as the best sex of his life.
It had started lazy and deep. You’d straddled him without a word, knees bracketing his hips, sinking down onto him inch by inch until he was buried completely inside you. No rush. Just that tight, wet heat gripping him as you rolled your hips in long, luxurious strokes. Your palms pressed flat against his chest, thumbs brushing over his nipples while you watched his face like you were studying every flicker of pleasure.
He remembered the way your breath hitched when he sat up to meet you, wrapping one arm around your back and pulling you closer so your breasts pressed against him. Skin on skin. Sweat already starting to slick between you. He’d taken one of your nipples into his mouth, sucking gently, then harder when you moaned and clenched around his cock. Your fingers threaded into his hair, tugging just hard enough to make his scalp sting in the best way.
At some point the pace changed. He flipped you onto your back, spreading your legs wide and driving into you deeper, slower, grinding against your clit with every thrust. You were so wet it was obscene -the sound of it filled the room every time he sank back in. Your hands roamed everywhere: down his back, nails digging into his ass to pull him harder into you, then up to cup his face so you could look him in the eyes while he fucked you.
That’d been the part that almost broke him.
The eye contact. The way you whispered his name like a secret, your thumb brushing his lower lip. He’d felt exposed, raw, like you were seeing straight through every wall he’d built. His thrusts grew rougher, more desperate, chasing that feeling of being completely known. You came first -back arching, thighs shaking around him, pussy pulsing so tightly he had to bury his face in your neck to keep from losing it right then.
He followed seconds later, groaning against your skin as he spilled deep inside you, hips stuttering, every muscle locked tight. You held him through it, stroking his back in those long, meaningful caresses that felt less like afterglow and more like absolution.
For a long time afterward you stayed connected, his cock softening inside you while your fingers traced patterns along his spine.
He’d almost cried then -something thick and unfamiliar rising in his throat -because no one had ever touched him like they actually wanted to keep him.
The statement dropped at nine the next morning.
He read it in the kitchen, standing, having not slept. The coffee was in his hand but he’d stopped drinking it without noticing.
He read through the official language to what it actually said. Indefinite hiatus. Immediate effect. Stable condition. He knew the translation of these words in context, had been in this industry long enough to understand what the gap between official statements and actual situations generally contained.
Then he got to your message. The part at the end, the one that was clearly yours and not a PR team’s -the rhythm of it, the specific direction of it, turning outward the way you always did.
Spend it on something that gives it back to you.
He read it several times.
Juhoon came in while James was still standing at the counter with the statement on his phone and the coffee going cold beside him.
He poured himself a cup, leaned back against the opposite counter, and looked at James the way he sometimes did -not pushing, just present, running his own quiet assessment.
“You saw it,” Juhoon said.
“Yeah.”
A pause. Juhoon drank his coffee.
“She okay?”
“Stable. That’s what it says. I don’t fucking know.”
Juhoon nodded slowly. Another pause, longer this time, the comfortable kind between two people who didn’t need to fill space. Then, in the register of someone who had decided to just say the thing: “Bro, you’ve been going to the studio until three in the morning since she blocked you. I’m not blind.”
James said nothing.
“Like I’m not trying to get in your business,” Juhoon continued, “but it’s been almost a month of you walking around like that. I think even the cleaning staff noticed.”
“I’m fine.”
That was a big fat lie wrapped with no caution tape.
“You said that yesterday. And the day before.” Juhoon set his cup down. “When’s the last time you actually ate a full meal that wasn’t vending machine stuff?”
James didn’t answer, which was its own answer.
Juhoon exhaled through his nose -not quite a laugh, not quite exasperation, somewhere between the two. “I knew it. I literally knew it.” He looked at James with the specific expression of a friend who had been watching something develop for a long time and had opinions about it that he’d been sitting on. “Can I ask you something honestly?”
“You’re going to anyway. Suit yourself.”
“Did you ever just -tell her? Like actually tell her, not the James version of telling her where you say half the thing and let her figure out the rest.”
James looked at the counter.
“That’s a no,” Juhoon said.
“It’s complicated.”
“It’s always complicated with you two, that’s like -that’s the whole thing. That’s been the whole thing for three years.” Juhoon picked his cup back up, shook his head slightly. “She’s not a mind reader, man. Like she’s smart, but there’s a difference between her noticing things and you actually saying them out loud.”
“I said things.”
“She blocked you.” Juhoon looked at him evenly. “I’m not trying to be harsh. I’m just - well dude she blocked you.”
James was quiet for a moment. “I know.”
“So.”
“So I know,” James said. “I know that. I’ve been aware of that.” He looked at the statement on his phone, still open, your line still sitting there. Spend it on something that gives it back to you. “I just didn’t think it was going to -I thought there was more time.”
Juhoon was quiet for a beat. Then, more gently: “Is she -do you actually…” he paused, choosing words with slightly more care than usual. “Like is this just the situation being unresolved or is it actually serious for you.”
James didn’t answer immediately, which was, for him, the most unambiguous answer available.
Juhoon absorbed this with a small nod, the kind that meant he’d suspected as much and was filing the confirmation away without making a production of it. “Okay,” he said simply.
“She’s in a hospital,” James said. “And I can’t reach her. And the last thing I said to her was-” he stopped.
“There’s nothing I can do right now.”
“No,” Juhoon said. “There really isn’t. Right now.” He let the right now sit there, intentional and specific. Then: “Go make something. You always think better when you’re making something. Go do that.”
James picked up his coffee. Drank it. Put the cup in the sink.
“And eat something,” Juhoon said, to his back. “Real food. Not the vending machine thing.”
James got his jacket.
“I mean it about the food,” Juhoon called from the kitchen.
The front door closed.
Juhoon stood alone in the kitchen for a moment, looking at the space where James had been standing, and then looked down at his own coffee and said quietly, to no one: “Three years, man, fucking insane.”
You’d spent the first month at your parents’ house, which had been Mina’s quiet suggestion and your manager’s logistical arrangement and your own eventual agreement, and which had turned out to be the right thing in the way that right things sometimes weren’t obvious until you were already inside them.
Your childhood bedroom with its slightly outdated posters and the window that overlooked the neighbor’s persimmon tree had been the right amount of small, the right amount of removed from everything.
Your mother had cooked things you hadn’t eaten since you were fifteen. Your father had asked very few questions and watched television with you in the evenings in the comfortable silence of a man who understood that presence was sometimes the whole offering.
You’d seen a therapist. Twice a week, then once, then when you needed it -Dr. Lim, who was in her fifties and had a direct manner that you’d initially found confrontational and had come to deeply appreciate. Who didn’t let you manage your way through sessions the way you’d managed your way through everything else, who had a particular talent for waiting until you ran out of other explanations before the real one surfaced.
You’d talked about the industry. About the particular machinery of it, the relentless forward momentum, the way it consumed the private self in increments small enough to miss until there wasn’t much of it left.
You’d talked about the members. About Mina’s Sunday morning kitchen and Hye-ri’s bathroom floor vigil and Soeun’s rice balls delivered with the matter-of-fact love of someone who didn’t know how to perform care and therefore simply performed it.
You’d talked about painful stuff.
About what it meant to make the right decision and still have it cost something real.
About the difference between ending something and being done with it, which were not - Dr. Lim had pointed out with characteristic directness-the same thing at all.
You’d talked about James approximately three times before you stopped needing to talk about him as a category and started being able to talk about him as a person -specific and complicated and genuinely, permanently significant in the architecture of who you were, which didn’t require resolution to be true.
You’d find out that talking about James was like talking about yourself, in the way that everything he’d done - or everything you’d let him do- reflected on who you were as a person.
You hadn’t contacted him.
He hadn’t contacted you -couldn’t, technically, the block still in place on your end for the better part of the year.
You’d thought about lifting it, in the way you thought about things you weren’t ready to do yet, turning the idea over occasionally to check its weight. It was lighter than it had been. Not weightless. Just lighter.
By month four you were dancing again, in the small studio your parents’ neighborhood had, a local place that smelled of old mirrors and someone’s forgotten lunch and that contained exactly zero professional-grade anything.
You’d gone in off-hours, alone, and run through things you already knew -old choreography, the muscle memory of three years intact and waiting patiently under the surface of everything that had happened.
The first time you’d danced through an entire piece without stopping to negotiate with your body about whether it was going to cooperate, you’d stood in the middle of the studio floor afterward and felt something so uncomplicated it had taken you a moment to identify it.
Relief. Just relief, plain and complete.
By month seven you were having conversations with your company about returning, careful ones, the kind that involved Dr. Lim and your physician and your manager and a degree of deliberateness that the old version of you would have found excessive and that the current version understood as simply necessary.
The company had been, to their considerable credit, patient in a way you hadn’t entirely expected. The hiatus had cost them something too, and they hadn’t weaponized it, which told you things about the relationship you filed away with appropriate gratitude.
R3SET would have a comeback in the spring. You’d be on it. That was the plan, still in its early stages, but real -the kind of real that existed on paper and in calendars and in the careful, forward-facing energy of people who had decided on a direction and were beginning to move in it.
The MC offer had come through a separate channel, a variety production company rather than HYBE, which was part of why it had landed differently -it wasn’t the return of the idol, the big-stage comeback announcement, the thing that required a full machine mobilization. It was smaller than that.
A weekly music show, live broadcast, the kind of hosting gig that required presence and personality and genuine knowledge of the industry rather than a specific performance mode.
Two co-hosts. Gyuvin, who you’d met twice at industry events and who had the particular gift of making any room feel like it had been waiting for him to arrive, and Dohoon, who was newer, quieter, with the specific attentiveness of someone still learning how everything worked and paying very close attention in the meantime.
Your manager had sent the offer on a Tuesday, which felt appropriate, and you’d read it twice and then gone for a walk and come back and said yes.
Not because it was safe -it wasn’t, exactly. Live television had its own demands, its own relationship with the unpredictable. But it was yours in a way that felt important. Something chosen, something that fit the shape of who you were returning as rather than who you’d been before, which was not the same person, which was fine, which was the point.
The announcement went out on a Thursday.
By Friday morning your name was trending again, for the first time in a year, and this time the feeling that came with it was different -not the hollow unreality of the hospital morning, not the dissociation of watching your own crisis unfold on someone else’s phone screen.
Just the particular warmth of people being glad to see you, which the industry could make you forget was real until it reminded you.
‘she’s back’ was everywhere. Fan edits assembled from old footage. The comments section of your old posts reactivating.
Hye-ri sent approximately forty messages in the group chat in the space of ten minutes, an escalating series that began with a string of capital letters and ended with a voice note that was mostly just screaming with some words in it.
Soeun sent a single photo: a rice ball, from a convenience store, with a small drawn heart on the wrapper in pen.
Mina sent nothing for two hours and then called, and when you picked up she said your name once in the way she sometimes said it -the full weight of years of knowing you in a single word -and then said “I’m so glad” and that was the whole call, thirty seconds, and it was exactly right.
You sat in your childhood bedroom with your phone warm in your hand and the persimmon tree doing its October thing outside the window and felt, with a completeness that had taken a year to arrive at: ready.
Not the performed version. Not the managed version assembled for public consumption. The actual thing -the quiet, solid, unglamorous readiness of the someone who had rested and repaired and done the work and was now genuinely, simply prepared to return.
You looked at your reflection in the old mirror on your bedroom wall. The slightly different person looking back -same face, same rebellious lash at the outer corner of the right eye doing its usual thing, same specific person. But the way you were sitting in yourself was different. Less braced. Less prepared for impact.
The lash curled upward in the mirror, faithful and unreformed.
You looked at it for a moment.
Let yourself think of him, briefly, with the lightness that a year of actual processing produced -not the sharp guilty thing, not the defended thing, not the named grief of the hospital ceiling.
Then you put your phone in your pocket and went downstairs, where your mother was cooking something that smelled like your childhood, and you sat at the kitchen table and let it be a good evening.
The first day of filming was a Tuesday in November.
The studio was a different building -not HYBE, a broadcast facility across the city, which had its own geography and its own particular smell of stage equipment and coffee from the production staff’s perpetual supply. You arrived with your manager and your stylist, the professional bubble reassembling itself around you with the practiced ease of a machine that had been waiting rather than dismantling.
Ji-eun was there. She looked at you when you sat down in the makeup chair -a full, genuine look, the kind between two people who had history -and then smiled and picked up her brush.
“You look good,” she said. And then, more quietly: “You look like yourself.”
“Getting there,” you said.
She worked in the comfortable silence you’d always had, and when she got to the outer corner of your right eye she paused for the traditional fraction of a second, and you both said nothing, and she worked around it the way she always had, and the lash did its thing, and you looked at yourself in the mirror when she was done and decided you were ready for whatever the day was.
Gyuvin found you at the craft table between the makeup suite and the studio floor, loading a cup with coffee at a speed that suggested he’d been awake since five and was not complaining about it.
“Okay so first of all,” he said, without preamble, turning around and seeing you and immediately operating at full social capacity, “I’m a huge R3SET fan and I’ve been trying to figure out how to say that without it being weird for approximately two weeks.”
You looked at him with an amused smile. “That was pretty weird.”
“Yeah, I know. But now it’s done and we can just be normal.” He extended a hand with the easy confidence of someone who’d decided how this interaction was going to go and was correct about it. “Gyuvin. I’m really glad you’re doing this.”
“I know who you are,” you said, shaking his hand. “I watched your show from the hospital. It was good.”
Something shifted briefly in his expression -not pity, just recognition, the acknowledgment of a real thing being mentioned without drama. “Thank you,” he said simply.
Then, pivoting with the smooth gear-change of someone who understood when to move forward: “Dohoon’s already on the floor running lines with the floor director. He gets nervous before live things, it’s actually very endearing, don’t tell him I said that.”
“I already heard that,” Dohoon said, appearing from around the craft table corner with the specific dignity of someone who had definitely heard it and was choosing grace.
He was younger than you’d expected in person - not young, just carrying the particular quality of someone still assembling their public self, not entirely sure yet how much space they were allowed to take up.
He bowed politely, straightforward and genuine.
“I watched your performances a lot,” he said. “When I was a trainee. The footwork in the second comeback stage-” he stopped himself, seemingly deciding this was too much. “Sorry. I just wanted to say I’m glad you’re back.”
You looked at him, at the earnest specific quality of it, and felt something warm and uncomplicated.
“Thank you,” you said. “Really.”
The floor director appeared and swept all three of you toward the studio, Gyuvin already talking at a pace that suggested the live broadcast format had found its correct person, Dohoon falling into step with the quiet attentiveness you’d already identified as characteristic.
You walked onto the studio floor under the lights -different lights, different stage, different version of the machine -and stood at the hosting position in front of the cameras and felt the room settle into its pre-broadcast hum around you.
The lights were warm. The floor was solid. The cameras were ready.
You were ready.
The floor director counted down.
Gyuvin straightened beside you, Dohoon on your other side, both of them finding their positions, and you found yours -natural, easy, inhabited rather than performed.
Five. Four. Three. Two.
You smiled. The real one, the one that lived in the corners of your eyes.
One.
The year had a shape to it, from James’s side.
Not a clean one.
Just the irregular, unglamorous shape of someone learning to carry an absence without drawing attention to the carrying.
He was good at it, technically. He’d had practice -not with this specifically, but with the general discipline of keeping interior things interior.
It was the skill he’d developed youngest and refined longest, and it served him here the way it always had, with the small additional cost that this time the underneath was doing considerably more than usual.
Nobody said anything directly. This was a Cortis characteristic -they had an unspoken agreement about the limits of intrusion, a collectively maintained understanding that presence was available without being forced.
Juhoon occasionally appeared with food or a suggestion to leave the studio at a reasonable hour.
Seonghyeon, who had the particular quality of someone who processed things by being physical, started dragging James to the gym in the early mornings, never explaining why, which meant they both knew why.
Martin sent memes at random hours, which was his version of checking in.
Keonho cooked elaborate meals approximately once a week and made enough for everyone without comment.
Nobody asked directly.
James was aware of this and grateful for it in the specific way he was grateful for things - privately, thoroughly, without saying so.
The song sat in a session file on his laptop.
He didn’t listen to it often. Once a week, maybe, in the first few months -not obsessively, not with the quality of picking a wound, but with the particular need to check that the thing existed somewhere outside of himself. That it was real, that the four studio nights had produced something actual rather than just the sensation of having produced something.
It existed. That was enough.
He didn’t release it. Didn’t show it to his label, didn’t bring it to any of the collaborative sessions that his schedule produced. It wasn’t for that.
It was for you to still have somewhere to live in him. It was entirely yours.
The fans noticed things anyway, during their performances. Or thought they did -the internet had a talent for reading things into performances that may or may not have been there, and he’d learned not to engage with the discourse.
He’d meant all of the words he’s sung. He always meant all of it. That was the thing about performing something you couldn’t say -the stage absorbed it, held it, gave it somewhere to go that the interior couldn’t contain indefinitely.
The second song on the Cortis comeback was not about you, technically. The lyrics were someone else’s, the concept was the team’s, the choreography was collaborative.
But something in the space between the notes had been filled with something that was his alone, and Juhoon had apparently felt the difference.
“Don’t say anything,” James had said, eventually.
“I wasn’t going to, motherfucker,” Juhoon said.
The R3SET comeback announcement came six weeks later.
James found out on the same day as everyone else, which was how these things worked when you had no particular access to someone’s professional calendar anymore.
The concept photos dropped at midnight -the industry’s preferred timing for maximum impact- and by seven in the morning the internet had done what it did.
He didn’t see the photos immediately. He was in early practice, which he’d been doing more of since the year had given him the particular gift of understanding what mattered and what was noise, and his phone was in his bag.
Seonghyeon saw them first.
He appeared in the practice room doorway between run-throughs with his phone extended. “R3SET dropped their comeback concept photos,” he said. “Midnight release.”
James looked at the phone.
He processed them with the industry-reading part of his brain first. Clean aesthetic. Strong concept. Good styling choices. Blah blah blah.
That took approximately three seconds.
Then the other part engaged and the professional reflex became entirely irrelevant.
You were in the center frame of the main concept photo, which was where you belonged and always had, and you looked -
He stood there with Seonghyeon’s phone in his hand and took in the photograph and didn’t immediately have a word for it, which was unusual for him.
He was generally a person who had words for things. Precise ones, specific ones, the right ones rather than the approximate ones.
This required a moment.
You looked like yourself. That was the first thing, and it was not a small thing -a year ago, in the last months before everything, there had been something in the way you were presenting yourself publicly that he’d noticed and not been able to name, a quality of effort in the surface that suggested you were working harder than you should have needed to.
He’d noticed it and said nothing, which was its own entry in the running catalogue of things he’d noticed and said nothing about.
That quality was gone.
You looked settled inside yourself in a way that a year of actual repair produced and nothing else did. Not relaxed, not softened -you were still precisely, recognizably you, the same specific presence that had been stopping him mid-thought for years. But inhabited differently.
And within that -within the settled, familiar, three-years-known specificity of you- something that hit him in the chest with the particular force of things that had been managed at a distance for a year and were suddenly no longer distant.
You were devastating.
Not in the industry sense, not the calculated aesthetic impact of a well-executed concept photo, though it was that too.
Not in the safe, catalogued way beautiful women usually were- where you could admire the symmetry, the lighting, the careful construction of a concept shoot and then file it away under art or aspiration.
No. This was the other kind. The kind that reached into his chest, wrapped around his lungs, and squeezed hard.
His thumb hovered over the screen, trembling slightly.
Jesus Christ.
He felt it in his body before his mind could catch up: the sudden, stupid stillness in his chest. Lungs suspended mid-breath.
It was -in the specific and undefended privacy of the three seconds before he handed the phone back- a lot.
He handed the phone back.
“Good concept,” he said.
His voice came out normal. This was the skill, the one he’d been practicing the longest, and it served him.
“Yeah,” Seonghyeon said. “It is.”
They went back to practice.
The variety show offer arrived three weeks later.
His manager brought it to him in the standard way -scheduled meeting, proposal documents, the professional framing of something being pitched for consideration.
A cross-group variety program. Six episodes, a production company with a good track record, the kind of format that leaned into genuine chemistry rather than manufactured conflict.
“The full lineup,” his manager said, sliding the document across.
He looked at it.
Cortis -himself, Juhoon, Seonghyeon, Martin, Keonho.
And one additional act.
R3SET.
He read your name on the document with full composure.
“The production company reached out to both labels simultaneously,” his manager continued, professionally unaware of or professionally choosing not to read the room. “They’re pitching it as a legacy act collaboration -both groups debuted around the same period, different concepts but complementary. They think the chemistry is there.”
Chemistry, James thought. That was one word for it.
“The format?” he said.
“Episodic. Each episode has a different challenge structure -travel, cooking, outdoor activities. Very unscripted. They want the real dynamic.”
The real dynamic. Funny.
He looked at the document again. At the lineup. At your name next to his in the clean administrative language of a production proposal, as if the history contained in those two entries was simply information, simply text, simply names on a page.
“I need a few days,” he said. He didn’t.
“Of course,” his manager said.
He took the document home. Sat with it on the kitchen counter for an evening while the dorm did its weeknight business around him. Juhoon passed through once, saw the document, looked at James, and made the diplomatic decision to refill his water and leave without comment.
An hour later Juhoon appeared again. Leaned in the doorway.
“Is it the R3SET thing?” he said.
James looked up.
“Seonghyeon’s manager mentioned it,” Juhoon said. “The variety show.”
“Yeah.”
“And?”
James looked at the document. At the lineup. At the specific administrative reality of six episodes, unscripted, real dynamic.
“I don’t know yet,” he said.
Juhoon nodded. Didn’t push. Stayed
“She’s doing well,” Juhoon said, eventually. “From everything I’ve heard. She’s back, she’s good. She sounds like herself again.”
James said nothing.
“That’s all I’m going to say,” Juhoon said. And left.
James sat with the document for another hour. He pulled the document toward him Read it again from the beginning. Six episodes. Unscripted. Real dynamic. He picked up his phone. Texted his manager two words.
I’m in.
Closed the document.
Went to bed.
Simple as that.
The variety show production schedule arrived on a Monday.
First meeting -all cast, production team, initial briefing on format and episode structure - Thursday, eleven am, the broadcast facility across the city. Standard pre-production stuff, the kind of meeting that existed to let everyone shake hands and establish a baseline before cameras were involved. His manager had forwarded the details with the administrative neutrality of someone who had learned not to editorialize.
James had read it. Put his phone down. Picked it up and read it again, which was becoming a recurring motif in his life whenever your name was involved in anything.
Thursday. Four days.
He slept adequately.
He was fine. just fine.
Thursday morning he woke up fine.
Got dressed fine -the particular care he took without appearing to take care, the version of himself he put together when something mattered without announcing that it mattered.
Dark jacket, clean lines, the kind of thing that required no comment. He’d stood in front of the mirror for approximately forty-five seconds longer than usual and then left the room before it became something.
Juhoon was in the kitchen. He looked at James in the way he sometimes looked at him.
“Eat something, hyung,” Juhoon said.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Eat something anyway or you’re gonna bitch about how you’re hungry.”
James stood at the counter and ate half a piece of toast, which was apparently what fine looked like on Thursday morning.
The five of them took the van together -James, Juhoon, Seonghyeon, Martin, Keonho -which meant forty minutes of the particular Cortis energy, Martin talking at a pace that suggested he’d had too much coffee too early, Keonho asleep against the window with the enviable ease of someone whose nervous system had not received the Thursday morning memo.
Seonghyeon was on his phone. Juhoon sat beside James and said nothing, which was the most useful thing available.
ᴺᴼᵂ ᴾᴸᴬᵞᴵᴺᴳ Strangers - Ethel Cain ♫♬♪
James looked out the window.
The city was doing its November thing -grey and particular, the trees stripped to their architecture, the light the flat specific quality of a season that had committed to itself. He watched it pass and thought about nothing deliberately and thought about everything anyway, which was how it worked when the thinking was below the level of decision.
He was fine.
He was going to walk into a room and you were going to be in it and he was going to be fine, because a year had passed and he had built something solid and equilibrium meant equilibrium, it meant the thing held under new conditions, it meant-
“We’re here,” Martin announced.
The broadcast facility had a different geography than HYBE -different smells, different light quality, different ambient sounds. James had been here before for other projects, knew the layout well enough to navigate without thinking.
The production team’s assistant met them in the lobby and took them up to the third floor meeting room, talking about the schedule in the bright, efficient way of production assistants everywhere.
The meeting room had a long table. Several production staff already seated. Coffee and water at intervals. A small catering spread that nobody was eating yet.
No R3SET.
James sat down -second from the end, which was where he sat in rooms like this, the position that gave him the widest sightline without being visibly strategic about it. Juhoon sat beside him. Martin immediately reached for the catering spread. Keonho poured water. Seonghyeon was already in conversation with someone from the production team about the episode structure.
Normal. All of it normal. The ordinary machinery of a pre-production meeting assembling itself around him.
He poured coffee. Drank it.
The door opened.
He heard you before he processed that it was you -a voice in the corridor, saying something to someone outside the room, the particular cadence of it landing somewhere in his chest before his brain had completed the identification.
Then you walked in.
And everything-
Everything single thing that James had spent a year building -the equilibrium, the organized weight, the solid carefully-constructed fine collapsed.
It proved insufficient. In the space between the door opening and you stepping through it.
The year was on you in the best way, in the way he’d seen in the photograph but hadn’t fully understood until now, until the actual specific physical reality of you was in the same room.
Your face, your sweet sweet face, your long hair draped over your chest, all of it significantly more than he had been prepared for despite believing he was prepared.
You were talking to Mina beside you, something low and quick, and you hadn’t seen him yet, and he had approximately three seconds of that -of watching you exist in a room without you knowing you were being watched.
And then something happened in his body that he hadn’t expected and didn’t have immediate language for.
It started in his chest. Not the metaphorical chest, not the poetic shorthand for emotional experience -the actual physical chest, a sensation that spread outward from somewhere behind his sternum with the slow insistent quality of something that had been waiting for the right conditions to make itself known. Down into his stomach, which turned over once, deliberately, like a held breath released in the wrong direction.
He set his coffee cup down. Carefully. Because his hands needed to do something specific and he needed to do it carefully.
This was not what equilibrium was supposed to feel like.
You crossed the room with Mina, talking to the production team lead who had come forward to greet you, and your eyes moved across the table in the natural survey of someone entering a room and orienting themselves.
They found him.
One second.
Something moved across your expression -too fast and too layered to read in full, a whole vocabulary of a year passing through your face.
You looked away first, or he looked away first, or it was simultaneous -he couldn’t reconstruct it afterward with any accuracy.
He looked at the table.
His hands were still.
His stomach was not.
Am I making you feel sick -the line arrived from somewhere, something he’d been listening to in the studio months ago, late and alone the way he did his best listening, Ethel Cain’s voice asking it with the specific quality of a question that already knew its own answer.
He was, in fact, feeling sick.
He hadn’t thought about the line in months. It arrived now with the precision of something that had been filed and was now being retrieved because the conditions finally matched.
He felt so sick indeed, that his stomach seemed to want to crawl out of its shell, and the space where you lived, in his ribcage stored there for comfort, was burning like thousands of fires.
It started without announcement.
He was looking at his folder -had looked away when you’d found him across the table, one second of eye contact and then back to his own folder, the professional management reflex executing itself automatically -and the production team lead was talking, and the room was doing its meeting thing, and James was sitting in his chair with his hands flat on the table on either side of the open folder.
And then his eyes were wet.
Not -it wasn’t a gradual thing. It wasn’t the dignified film version of emotion, the single meaningful tear navigating a composed face.
His eyes were wet and his throat had done something that he couldn’t reverse and his stomach had turned over with a violence that was nothing like the manageable discomfort of the morning.
This was different.
This was -he didn’t have a word for it and his mind was not currently in a condition to locate one, because his mind was busy with the overriding physical fact of his eyes being wet in a meeting room with eight other people in it and the production team lead still talking and Juhoon two feet to his left.
He pressed his thumb into the table edge.
Breathed.
The wetness didn’t stop.
Because you lived inside of his ribs, like a sickness.
He moved. He stood up, which required his body to cooperate and his body did cooperate, performing the physical action without the usual sense of decision preceding it.
He kept his head down -not dramatically, “Sorry,” he said. To the room, not to anyone specifically. His voice came out level. “One minute.”
He walked to the door and left.
He made it to the men’s bathroom twenty feet down the hall and through the door and to the sink and stood there with both hands braced on the porcelain and looked at himself in the mirror.
His eyes were wet and his face was doing something he didn’t have experience managing because he didn’t have experience with this, with the specific thing that was happening, which was apparently: crying.
Get a fucking grip, he thought.
His eyes stayed wet.
He turned the cold tap higher and pressed his hands against his face and stood there in the particular specific silence of a broadcast facility bathroom while somewhere down the hall a production team was running a meeting he had walked out of, and somewhere in that meeting room you were sitting at a table for the first time in a year, and his body had apparently decided that the year of careful construction was no longer relevant information.
One year. Twelve months, a couple hundred days, and it had taken approximately four seconds for you to fuck it up all over again.
It had just been you walking into a room, talking to Mina, your voice reaching him before he’d processed that it was you, landing somewhere in his chest with the accuracy of something that had always known where to go.
He pressed his thumb into the edge of the sink. The physical pressure of it grounding him in the present tense.
ᴺᴼᵂ ᴾᴸᴬᵞᴵᴺᴳ Sparks - Coldplay ♫♬♪
A soft knock sounded on the door.
“James?” Your voice. “The staff… they need everyone back for the briefing. They sent me to-”
The door opened and you stepped inside.
And the second your eyes met his in the mirror, everything shattered all over again.
Your warm eyes met his, like you’d already known what position he occupied in the room without seeing him - the same navigational certainty that had always existed between you, the compass needle finding north before the map was even consulted.
For a moment neither of you moved. The tap running. The mirror holding you both.
Your lips started quivering first.
He watched it happen. Watched you try to stop it -the small visible effort of someone attempting to tuck something away for a more convenient moment, your jaw tightening, your teeth catching your lower lip.
The mental slap he could practically see you administering to yourself, the furious internal instruction to hold it together, to not be -this.
Not here. Not in front of him.
It made no sound. That was the thing that undid him entirely. No sound -just your tears spilling out of your eyes like fountains, you biting your lip so hard it hurt, just because you couldn't cry.
Because you'd spent months rebuilding yourself to be stronger, less naive.
It was a huge let down and betrayal to see that your body still recognized his to this level.
That it always would.
James turned around from the mirror.
His breath hitched violently. The sound of it involuntary, wrenched out of him by the sight of you standing at the door of a broadcast facility bathroom crying silently with your teeth in your lip -a sight that hit him somewhere below the level of thought, somewhere that didn’t have the option of management.
“Don’t-” he tried.
Too late.
His own tears spilled over. Hot and humiliating, sliding down his cheeks. He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth, the gesture instinctive and entirely useless, trying to hold in something that had already left the building.
Pride had lost.
It had never stood a chance. Not in this room. Not with you standing at the door looking like the last year had happened to you the same way it had happened to him -not cleanly, not neatly, and absolutely not with the resolved quality of someone who had made a right decision and been at peace with it.
You crossed the room.
Not all the way. You stopped a foot away from him and leaned against the wall beside the sink, close enough that the space between you was a chosen distance rather than an accidental one.
You pressed the back of your wrist to your own mouth in the same gesture he’d just used -both of you apparently sharing the same futile reflex- and looked at the ceiling in the way you did when you were deciding something about gravity.
You stared at the ceiling. He stared at the sink. The tap ran between you, filling the silence with something neutral and constant, and the year sat in the room between you like a third party that hadn’t been invited and wasn’t leaving.
Thirty seconds passed.
Maybe more.
“I’m not-” you started.
You stopped.
Pressed your wrist harder against your mouth and tried again. “I’m not going to be able to have a conversation right now,” you said. Your voice was wrecked at the edges, thin, the managed version completely gone. “is that okay?”
“Okay,” he said.
Another silence.
He reached over and turned the tap off and the quiet that followed was immediate and different -denser, the absence of the running water making everything else louder..
“I didn’t think it would-” you started again.
And he waited when you interrupted yourself.
“I told myself I was prepared,” you continued. To the ceiling. “I knew you were going to be here. I’ve known for weeks. I thought I’d-” a breath that was not quite steady, “- i don’t know why this is happening.”
He said nothing. What could he possibly say without crying like a goddamn pussy?
You lowered your gaze from the ceiling. Looked at the wall in front of you instead -the neutral middle ground of a tiled surface that required nothing from either of you.
“I’ve been fine,” you said. “This year. I want to say that clearly -I’ve been actually fine. And i hope you have been too.”
“I know,” he said, although it hurt him.
“So I don’t know why I’m-” you gestured vaguely at your own face, at the evidence currently decorating it, the gesture frustrated and slightly helpless. “I don’t know why my body is doing this.”
He looked at you sideways. “Yeah you do,” he said.
You pressed your lips together. “Don’t,” you said.
“Okay,” he concluded. “The hosting thing suits you,I’ve seen some of the-” he stopped himself. Recalibrated. “You seem good on it. Natural.”
“James,” you said, your bottom lip trembling.
“Yeah?” his voice trembled.
“Stop.”
He did.
The silence that followed was the longest one yet -not the comfortable silence you both already knew.
This was the silence of two avoidants standing a foot apart in a broadcast facility bathroom, both crying, both fully aware of approximately ten thousand things that needed to be said, and neither of them capable of saying any of them.
Your breathing had steadied slightly. His had too.
“I should go back,” you said. Not moving.
“Yeah,” he said, not moving either.
“The director’s going to send someone else,” you said.
“Probably Martin,” he said.
“Martin would make it worse,” you said.
“Definitely,” he agreed.
A silence. And then -almost against your will, by the sound of it -a small exhale that was almost, not quite, the ghost of a smile.
He felt it in his chest like a struck match.
“Okay,” you said, pushing off the wall. “Okay.”
You crossed to the sink. Ran cold water. Pressed it to your eyes with efficient composure, by necessity, because the day continued outside this room regardless of what had happened inside it.
Your reflection appeared in the mirror. You looked at it with the neutral assessment of a technician checking equipment. He stood behind you, a foot of space. The mirror showing you both.
You looked at your own face for a moment.
Then your eyes moved in the mirror -not to his face, not all the way there, but somewhere in the direction of his reflection. The almost-look. The periphery.
“You have-” you started. Gestured vaguely at your own eye. “Your-“
“I know,” he said.
He reached up and pressed the back of his fingers to his own cheekbone, clearing the evidence. The gesture rough and unsentimental.
“Okay,” you said again. The forward-motion word. You straightened your jacket, the small act of reassembly, the putting-back-on of the surface that the bathroom had temporarily removed.
You didn’t look at him when you walked to the door, hand on the handle, then you opened the door.
And in the space of the opening -in the moment between the door still closed and the door open enough for the corridor to enter the room -you said, to the handle, to the gap, to the space between staying and going:
“I don’t know what to do with you.”
You didn’t tell him that you didn’t know what to do without him. Because that was admitting a bunch of things you’d buried.
He didn’t answer so you walked out, not expecting more of him than what he’d always shown.
The remaining filming days were unbearable.
Charged, the way air was charged before weather, the way a room felt different when something had happened in it that hadn’t been resolved.
The production team was pleased. The director kept using words like authentic and natural chemistry in the debrief notes that circulated between episodes.
James read those words in a group message and looked at his phone for a long moment and put it face down on his desk.
Natural chemistry.
That’s one way to put it.
Episode four was a travel segment -a day trip to a coastal town two hours from the city, two vans, the cast split across them, and a loose itinerary that the production team described as go wherever feels right but had in fact been extensively scouted and mapped in advance.
You were in the first van.
He knew this before the vans departed, had registered the configuration with the awareness he’d developed over four filming days of knowing exactly where you were in any given space without appearing to track it.
The production team released them in loose pairs and small groups with cameras following at a distance, the unscripted format doing its job of making everything look accidental.
James walked with Juhoon along the harbor front for forty minutes. They talked about things that had nothing to do with anything -Juhoon had been reading something, had opinions about it, James listened and offered his own and the conversation moved forward with an easy momentum.
He was fine.
The show aired three weeks later.
Thursday night, eight episodes, released weekly -the standard format, the production company’s familiar rollout.
James watched the first episode alone in his studio on his laptop.
It was good television. He could see that clearly, the way it was easier to see things from the outside -the dynamic was compelling, the mixed-group chemistry genuinely worked.
Martin and Keonho’s energy balanced against the quieter members in a way that created natural contrast. Mina and Soeun had good interactions with Juhoon and Seonghyeon. Nothing that crossed any invisible lines.
He watched the table scene from episode one, the first interaction he had with you after the bathroom moment.
Forty seconds, forty seconds too much, so he closed the laptop.
By episode three the fan forums had developed a vocabulary.
It started, as these things started, with a clip - a background interaction that neither of you knew was being filmed, thirty seconds of the two of lof you sitting down at the set.
The comments assembled their case with the industry of people who had been watching both groups for years and now had, for the first time, sustained footage of them in the same frame.
The forums had moved past speculation into something more like excavation, going back through years of archived footage and industry events with the specific energy of people who had been handed a key and were now locating the lock.
Stage crossings at award shows. A single frame from a year-old behind-the-scenes video in which James was visible in the background of a shot that was ostensibly about someone else.
And in that background, barely in frame, he was looking in a direction that corresponded to where you had been standing. Something purely coincidental.
A fan-taken photograph from an industry dinner -both groups present, separate tables -in which you were mid-laugh and he was beside you, not looking at the camera, looking at you with an expression that the fan who’d taken the photo had captioned at the time : cute group moment - and that was now being screenshotted and analyzed with forensic intensity.
one commenter said : that’s not a ‘cute group moment’ expression. that is something else entirely.
I found the original post. this photo is from two years ago. TWO YEARS.
okay so this has been going on for at least two years possibly longer and they’ve both been just. existing in the same building. I need to sit down
The digging produced timelines. Cross-referenced schedules, corroborating fan accounts, a general industry consensus assembled from fragments -the kind of picture that was never complete but that was complete enough.
Nothing explicit, nothing confirmable, just the aggregate weight of years of small things that meant more in retrospect than they had in the moment.
Your name and his, trending adjacently for the first time, the fan shorthand assembling itself with the creative efficiency of a community that had been waiting no - dying- for a subject.
Then the end of the show aired.
The final episode -with a studio segment, a paired game, the forty seconds clip in the previously released episode that had already done its damage -generated the kind of response that production teams privately hoped.
The clips moved through the usual channels. The fan analysis assembled and reassembled itself with new material. The forty-seven thousand posts became a different, larger number.
And the specific four seconds from episode six- a paired game, a moment where the challenge had required James to catch something you’d thrown and he’d caught it without looking because apparently his hands had simply known where to be -became the new center of gravity.
he caught it without looking. without LOOKING. he didn’t even glance. his hands just knew. I’m sick.
I need everyone to understand what it means that his hands just knew.
three years. they’ve been in the same building for three years. I’m not okay.
someone who knows things please tell me there’s something there because I have invested emotionally and I need to know it’s real.
Your name and his, in that order or the reverse, everywhere.
“Unnie,”
Hye-ri put her phone down on the dorm kitchen table and looked at you across it with the expression of someone who had reached the end of something.
“I know what you’re gonna say,” you chuckled humorlessly. “This is getting weird. They need to stop over analyzing things. There’s nothing to analyze.”
“Have you really seen all of it?” she raised an eyebrow.
“I’ve seen enough”
“And? Thoughts? Prayers?”
You wrapped both hands around your mug. “And nothing,” you said. “There’s nothing to say. Though i’m really praying they drop this before i go crazy and start filing lawsuits”
“Unnie,” Hye-ri breathed. “I love you. You know I love you. But oh my god, you are so fucking stupid.”
Your eyes widened, surprised. “Huh?”
“I’ve been watching this for three years and then watching you be hospitalized and then watching you rebuild… and I have said almost nothing because it wasn’t my place and you weren’t ready.” She paused. “Are you ready yet? Because I’m watching thousands of people on the internet understand your life better than you’re allowing yourself to and it’s becoming genuinely freaking difficult to watch.”
You said nothing, still busy being shocked.
“Soeun has opinions,” Hye-ri said. “Soeun, who falls asleep mid-sentence, has opinions about this situation and has had to be physically restrained from expressing them.”
“Hye-ri-”
“What are you going to do,” Hye-ri asked quietly.
You looked at your mug. “I don’t know, i don’t even know what i’m feeling. I just don’t wanna be bothered with that. I just wanna do my job, and not be confronted with this all the time” you said. “because i don’t know if i have enough self control anymore.”
“I know it’s not an answer,” you continued. “I know.”
Hye-ri looked at you for a long moment. Then she picked up her phone, put it back in her pocket and reached across the table to cover your hand with her red-nailed one and said nothing.
The wrap event was at a venue the production company used regularly -a private room above a restaurant in the city, warm and low-lit, the kind of space that encouraged the end-of-project loosening that these events were designed to produce. The full cast, most of the production team, the ambient atmosphere of something finished and celebrated.
James arrived with Juhoon and Keonho, found the bar, acquired a drink, and began the social navigation of the room.
You were already there.
You were across the room with Hye-ri and the producer, saying something that made the producer laugh. Your hair was down, which was unusual enough that he noted it, and you were wearing something he hadn’t seen before, a black prada dress.
You looked so devastatingly beautiful that he had to look somewhere else.
The evening moved forward with its own momentum. Drinks, conversation, the genuine warmth of a cast that had spent weeks together and had produced something they were collectively proud of.
Martin gave an impromptu toast that was both entirely sincere and completely absurd, talking about how much fun he’d had, and about the cookies the staff gave away on set.
Soeun fell briefly asleep against Hye-ri’s shoulder - surprising- and was nudged back awake with fond efficiency.
James talked to the director for twenty minutes about the editing process, to Keonho about something unrelated to any of it, to a production assistant about the schedule for the release rollout. He was present and functional and socially competent and fine.
He was aware of where you were in the room the entire time.
An hour in, the room had loosened into its later-evening configuration -smaller clusters, people drifting, the formal structure dissolved.
James had found his way to the room’s edge, not antisocially but in the way he sometimes needed to at these events, a few feet of breathing room.
You appeared beside him.
Not like you’d sought him out - but like you’d been heading for the same breathing room and had arrived at the same edge by the same instinct.
The room moved and talked around you. Someone’s laugh carried from across it. The warm low light did its work but you were close enough that he was aware of the specific warmth of being in proximity to you, which was a thing his body had catalogued years ago and had not, apparently, stopped cataloguing.
He couldn’t, the weight of it pressing right between his heart and lungs like a hot stone.
There was no part of him that could stand with you, next to you and not feel like the whole world was shaking at his feet.
So James did what James did best. He grabbed his glass, aimed for the closest exit and started walking.
Because being the asshole in the story was easier than being the man who loved. Who yearned.
This had been something he’d come to terms with -although his brain and his heart were two completely opposite organs that didn’t seem to want to collaborate- somewhere in him, he knew that what he felt for you wasn’t pointless arousal, anger or attraction.
Surely he did feel all those things all at once, but a whole year of thinking had brought out a simple explanation out of him. James didn’t know how spell the word ‘love’, didn’t know what it was, what he knew though, was that he’d put everything on the line just to feel your wrath.
Whether you were angry, sad, disappointed or disgusted at him, it was you that he held on to.
That thought had taken a whole year to form, and he still didn’t know what to do with it.
He was only grateful he got to see you, to live in your small world.
So when you followed him into his own small world - when the door to the hallway he’d escaped to opened and you were standing in the frame of it, the warm light of the party behind you and the cooler light of the corridor finding your face, his breath caught in his throat.
The door fell shut behind you.
You looked at him across the corridor.
“Do I bother you that much?” you said. Your throat bobbed.
He wanted to tell you that you didn’t. In fact, he wanted to tell you so many things but he didn’t want it to feel like he’d started thinking them just because you had left.
Like absence had manufactured something that wasn’t already there.
“I think,” he said, and his voice came out wrong, too low and too careful, “I think you should go back.”
“Do I bother you that much?” you repeated, harder this time, like you wanted it to cut.
No. The answer was no, had always been no, the word bother doing almost none of the work required to describe what you did to him.
“Yes,” he said.
You stood your ground, because you knew James, and you knew that when his voice cracked like that, he was most likely lying.
“I don’t understand you. We were good-“ you looked down at your shoes, “we were back to normal just a day ago.”
“No we weren’t. We never were.” James spoke, voice constricted. “We were working.”
You looked up at him, taking a faithful step toward him. “You’re really gonna act this way? Even after everything? After a whole year?”
He looked at you.
You were closer now -the corridor was narrow, the private venue’s hallway not designed for that kind of distance,
ᴺᴼᵂ ᴾᴸᴬᵞᴵᴺᴳ PURPLE RAIN - PRINCE ♫♬♪
“You don’t know what acting this way means,” he said. Quiet. The heat not in his voice yet, just the control that preceded it.
“I know exactly what it means,” you said. “It means you walked away. Again. Because something got too close and you needed the exit.” You looked at him with the directness that you got when you’d decided to stop managing the look. “I’ve been watching you find exits for so long James. I know the walk.”
“You also know how to leave,” he retaliated.
“Don’t do that,”
“You blocked me,” he said. “On everything. You were in a hospital and you had me blocked.”
“I was in a hospital because-” you stopped yourself again, the sentence running somewhere that cost too much, “-that’s not-” you shook your head. “I’m not doing this. I’m not standing in a hallway at a wrap party telling you about that-“
“You followed me in here,” he cut you.
“Because you walked away,” you said. “Again. You were standing next to me and you just-“
“I wasn’t walking away from you,” he denied.
“Then what were you doing.”
He said nothing.
“James.” Your voice lower now, the anger finding its quieter register, which was more dangerous than the louder one. “What were you doing.”
“I was-” he stopped. “I couldn’t stand next to you and-“ he stopped again. Started differently, because the first direction was the edge of the thing and he was so tired of the edge. “I couldn’t stand next to you and act like the last year didn’t happen and the three years before it didn’t happen and we’re just -two people at a party being normal about it.”
“Nobody asked you to be normal about it,” you retorted.
“Nobody had to ask,” he said. “The room is full of people. The cameras have been full of people for weeks. Everything is-” he exhaled, “-everything is happening in front of an audience and I don’t know how to-” he stopped.
“You don’t know how to what,” you said, bitterly.
The corridor was very quiet. The party sounds from behind the closed door -muffled, belonging to a different world.
Just the two of you, the amber light and the question.
“I don’t know how to be in the same space as you,” he said, “and not feel it.”
The sentence arrived quietly, like he just couldn’t hold it back.
“Feel what,” you said. The question not aggressive. Genuinely asking, the way you asked things when you needed to hear the actual word rather than the approximate one.
He held your gaze.
“All of it,” he said. “Everything. Take your pick.”
You were quiet for a moment. “That’s still evasive,” you said softly.
“I know,” he said. “I’m still learning.”
“James,” you said.
“I’m not-” you stopped. Started differently. “I’m not angry at you for walking away just now. I know why you did it. I know the walk because I have the same walk. I’ve been using mine for years, so it wouldn’t be fair to blame you.”
He looked at you.
“I’m angry at the amount of times,” you continued. “That’s what I’m angry at. Not you specifically. Just -the amount of times we did that.”
“Yeah,” he admitted. Low. “Me too.”
The corridor did what corridors did in these conversations -provide a container just barely large enough for the thing trying to exist inside it.
“The filming’s done,” you said.
“Yeah,” he said.
“So there’s no more-” you gestured vaguely at the concept of structured filming days and production schedules and the machine that had been providing the structure, “no more excuses for us to be in the same rooms. For now.”
“No,” he said.
“Which means- i’d like to end things maturely. I’d like you to know things i haven’t told you. So we can- so I can finally move on.”
It tasted cruel coming out of your mouth and he felt every bit of it.
End things? Why the fuck did this hurt so much when things were already over?
“I missed you.” you started, eyes already filling way too fast. “I missed being known. You knew things about me that i never told you. And nobody else has known me the way you did, cause no one was paying that kind of attention.” your voice went thin at the edges. “And then you weren’t here and I had to figure out how to- how to be, all over again.”
James’ jaw hung open just the tiniest bit, like he had never prepared himself to hear that today.
“God, i don’t want to be corny… i just want you to put it in your stupid head- i want you to know, cause i can’t keep this to myself James. I’m so tired and i don’t want to do this anymore.”
The water in your eyes started overflowing, tears falling down your cheeks with absolutely no consent. “And i know what you’re gonna say, that’s what everyone says. That i knew this wasn’t a relationship, that i knew we weren’t serious. But how can you expect me to not feel like this, when- when i spent 3 years of my life growing beside you, seeing you, knowing you. How can anyone fucking expect me to be chill about this?? Please tell me.”
“Because you cracked me open and you read me like a fucking book. And i- I could never be simple when it comes to this.”
His eyes started welling up uncontrollably, like they had the other day, insanely fast, cruel and mean.
“Y/n” his voice cracked.
“No- no, let me finish” you wiped your eyes almost aggressively, “You can’t tell me to shut up anymore. I’m done being a little immature bitch-im done looking for fights- just because fighting was the only way i knew how to get close to you without admitting I wanted to be close to you.
“I just wanna be the bigger person, i want you to know that even if we weren’t good for each other- i had never felt something so real and so fucking brutal.” your voice shook under the force of your tears, “And sometimes- god im so fucking stupid- sometimes i just feel like i don’t wanna be anywhere except with you.”
James couldn’t say anything, his voice was stuck in the depth of his throat- or down to his chest- he didn’t know, all he knew was that he wanted the tears to stop.
“y/n - please.” he looked at the ceiling, bottom lip quivering with restraint.
“What? Does it hurt? Does it hurt you knowing that i felt all of this ?” you got closer, invading the space he’d carefully guarded. “That you could never feel the same things for me? That you fucked me like you loved me for 3 fucking years even though you knew you couldn’t feel those things?”
James’ mouth opened, like he just couldn’t believe what you were saying. Like he wanted to scoop you up and put you in his head so you could feel -for one second- the way you undid him.
“What the- what the fuck are you even saying?” his voice trembled, eyes pouring, “you always think you know what’s going on in my head. Fuck. Y/n you don’t know shit.”
“Because you don’t let me, just for once, tell me. Tell me.” you got closer, chin tipping up to look at him.
James’ composure faltered, he erased the last of the space between you both and cupped your chin -grabbed it between his fingers with equally devotion and anger.
“You-” he swallowed his tears, “you know it. You know me, y/n. Do you want me to get down on my knees and tell you what i feel?”
Seeing him so close was like going back home, you thought. You couldn’t breathe anymore, something cruel squeezing your lungs.
“You’ve played the same games I played, so don’t act like you were a saint. We both fucked around, but this?” he pointed between the both of you. “It’s never been nothing.”
Your eyes were wide, shining with fresh tears. The black Prada dress suddenly felt too thin, the air between you charged like the seconds before lightning. He could smell your perfume, the faint salt of your tears, the warmth of your skin that had haunted his dreams for a year.
“We’ve never been ‘nothing’ y/n. You know it. You know there wasn’t a moment where i didn’t need you.”
James sounded like a totally different person, like the year had matured him maybe a tiny bit.
“So please love me again,” he continued, the words spilling out like they’d been waiting behind every exit he’d ever taken. His thumb brushed your lower lip, shaking. “Don’t leave me. Love me again and -and if you never did, you can start now.”
The confession hung there, raw and bleeding. His eyes were wet, spilling over without permission, tracking down his cheeks.
You made a small, broken sound and surged forward like you needed it in order to breathe.
He met you halfway.
The kiss was devastating. A year of absence crashed into the moment your mouths met -desperate, open, messy. His lips were urgent against yours, tasting salt from both your tears.
You gasped into him and he swallowed it, tongue sliding against yours like he was trying to memorize every texture again.
Your hands fisted in his shirt; his cupped your face, thumbs wiping at your tears even as more fell. You were both crying through it, foreheads pressed together between kisses, breaths hitching, noses bumping, teeth grazing in the need to get closer.
“I missed you,” he mumbled against your mouth, voice cracking. “Fuck, I missed you so much it felt like dying.”
You answered by kissing him harder, tongues tangling, bodies pressing flush. His hands roamed -down your sides, gripping your waist, pulling you against him so he could feel the heat of you through the thin fabric. You arched into him, and the groan he let out was pure yearning.
A broken sob escaped you and he swallowed it greedily, tilting his head to kiss you harder, deeper, like he could crawl inside you and never leave.
In the narrow hallway, your back met the wall with a soft thud and his mouth moved to your jaw, your neck, sucking lightly, then harder, like he needed to leave proof that this was real.
One of his thighs pushed between yours, pressing up against the heat between your legs, and you gasped into his mouth, grinding down instinctively. Your fingers pushed into his hair, tugging, and he shuddered, hands sliding under the hem of your dress, palms greedy on your thighs. His hands roamed lower, sliding down the curve of your ass, squeezing hard through the thin Prada fabric before hiking your dress up your thighs. Cool air hit your skin as his palms found bare flesh, groping, kneading, pulling you tighter against the hard line of his cock straining in his pants.
You moaned into the kiss, one leg hooking around his hip, opening yourself to the pressure. His hips rolled forward, grinding his erection against your core in slow, filthy drags that made you both shudder. The friction was electric, too much and not enough. Your fingers pushed into his hair, tugging sharply, and he growled, biting your lower lip before soothing it with his tongue.
“I missed this,” you whispered brokenly between kisses, tears slipping into your mouth. “Missed you -your hands, your mouth-”
He answered by shoving your dress higher, one hand slipping between your bodies to cup you over your panties. His fingers pressed firm circles against your clit through the damp fabric, and your head fell back against the wall with a whimper. He chased the movement, mouth latching onto your throat, sucking a mark just below your jaw while his fingers worked you relentlessly.
“James- we can’t- not here..”
“I don’t care,” he growled against your throat. “I need you. Now. Always.” And that was enough.
You touched him everywhere you could reach -chest, shoulders, the line of his jaw, the hard press of his cock already straining against his pants.
“Wet already,” he breathed against your skin, voice cracking with emotion and lust. “Always so fucking wet for me. Even after everything.”
You reached down, palming his cock through his pants, stroking the thick length with desperate need and he bucked into your hand with a choked groan, forehead pressed to yours, eyes locked even as tears blurred them.
The hallway was silent except for your ragged breaths, the wet sounds of kissing, the rustle of fabric.
His free hand shoved the neckline of your dress down, exposing one breast. He palmed it roughly, thumb flicking over your nipple, then bent to take it into his mouth -sucking, licking, teeth grazing while his fingers kept rubbing your clit faster.
You were panting, grinding shamelessly against his hand, so close already. “James -here -please-”
He switched to your other breast, sucking harder, hips thrusting against your thigh in time with his fingers. The tension coiled tighter, the risk of someone opening the door only heightening everything.
His cock throbbed under your palm; you squeezed him through the fabric and he moaned around your nipple, the vibration shooting straight to your core.
James straightened suddenly, crashing his mouth back to yours in a filthy, tongue-heavy kiss. Two of his fingers pushed your panties aside and slid into you without warning, your slickness making it so easy -deep, curling, stroking that spot that made your knees buckle.
You cried out into his mouth, clenching around him, tears pouring faster as the pleasure mixed with the overwhelming ache in your chest.
“I love you,” he gasped against your lips, fingers pumping steadily, thumb circling your clit. “I fucking love you-don’t leave me, please don’t-”
That was his leap of faith. He’d never said things so straightforwardly before and here he was, telling you just how much he adored you.
You were right there, teetering on the edge, when distant laughter from the party filtered through the door, shattering the moment just enough.
James pulled his hand back with a pained sound, but he didn’t let you go. He rested his forehead against yours, both of you breathing hard, bodies trembling, faces streaked with tears and flushed with need.
Your hand was still on his cock; his fingers were still glistening with you.
“We can’t -not here,” he rasped, but his hips twitched forward anyway, seeking more contact.
You nodded shakily, but kissed him once more- slow, deep, lingering. “Take me home.”
He didn’t need to be told twice. He fixed your dress with shaking hands, you straightened his shirt, and then he grabbed your hand, lacing your fingers tightly like he was afraid you’d vanish.
You slipped out the side exit without a word to anyone, like you’d done so many times before.
Only this time you knew something different.
In the cab, you couldn’t keep your hands off each other.
The back seat was dark, the driver politely ignoring the heavy breathing and closing the backseat-front seat window.
James pulled you half into his lap, kissing you slow and deep, one hand under your dress stroking the slick mess between your thighs, the other tangled in your hair. You ground against him, whimpering, tears still slipping down your cheeks.
He kissed them away, murmuring, “I’ve got you. I’m here. I’m not leaving.”
By the time you reached your dorm, you were both trembling with need.
The door to your dorm barely clicked shut behind you before James had you lifted in his arms, your legs wrapping instinctively around his waist.
The short cab ride had done nothing to cool the fire between you -only stoked it.
His mouth was on yours again, hungry and uncoordinated, as he carried you the few steps to the bed and laid you down like you might break.
Clothes came off in a desperate haze. He peeled the black dress from your body with shaking hands, kissing every inch of skin he revealed. Your bra and panties followed, then his shirt, pants, and boxers -until there was nothing between you but a year of aching absence.
He hovered over you for a moment, eyes drinking you in, tears still glistening on his lashes.
“God, you’re beautiful,” he whispered, voice thick with emotion. “I thought I remembered… but this-”
He leaned down, pressing open-mouthed kisses along your collarbones, the valley between your breasts, the soft plane of your stomach.
His hands mapped you reverently -cupping your breasts, thumbs brushing nipples until they tightened, sliding down your sides to grip your hips.
He sucked marks into the sensitive skin just above your hipbones, like he needed to claim you all over again.
When he finally settled between your thighs, spreading them wide with gentle but insistent hands, you were already dripping. He groaned at the sight, a low, wrecked sound that vibrated through you.
He started slow, almost worshipful -pressing soft, lingering kisses to the inside of your thighs, then higher. The first broad swipe of his tongue through your folds drew a broken sob from deep in your chest.
He licked you like a man starved, savoring every drop. His tongue was warm and velvet-soft, flattening to drag from your entrance up to your clit in long, deliberate strokes, then circling the swollen bud with precise, teasing flicks. He hummed against you, the vibration making your hips jerk.
“James-” Your fingers threaded into his hair, tugging as fresh tears slipped down your temples.
He didn’t answer with words.
Instead, he sealed his mouth around your clit and sucked gently, tongue fluttering rapidly against the underside while two thick fingers slid into you, curling upward to stroke that perfect spot inside. The wet, obscene sounds of his mouth filled the room- slick, hungry lapping mixed with his low, appreciative groans.
He was completely pussy-drunk, lost in the taste of you, the way your walls fluttered around his fingers, the way your thighs trembled against his ears.
You came the first time with a sharp cry, back arching off the bed, thighs clamping around his head.
He kept going -didn’t even slow- licking you through every pulse and aftershock, fingers pumping steadily. Tears streamed down your face from the intensity, mixing with the sweat on your skin.
He pulled back only long enough to look up at you, lips shiny and chin wet, eyes dark and glassy with tears of his own. “One more,” he rasped. “I need to taste you again. Please.” Then he dove back in, even more fervent.
This time he fucked you with his tongue- pushing it inside as deep as it would go, curling and thrusting while his nose rubbed against your clit.
His fingers replaced his tongue on your clit, rubbing tight, fast circles, the overstimulation had you whimpering, hips grinding against his face, but he held you down with one strong arm across your stomach, devouring you like he’d never get enough.
You came harder the second time, a full-body shudder that left you sobbing his name, gushing against his tongue as he drank every bit of it.
Only then did he crawl up your body, kissing a wet trail up your stomach, between your breasts, until his mouth found yours.
You tasted yourself on his tongue as he kissed you deeply, sharing the evidence of your pleasure.
You reached between you, wrapping your hand around his cock -thick, heavy, burning hot and leaking steadily at the tip. He groaned into your mouth, hips twitching, but when you tried to shift downward, he caught your wrist gently.
“No,” he whispered, eyes wet and earnest, voice cracking. “Not tonight- fuck -I need to be close to you. Inside you. Please, baby. Let me feel you.”
He settled between your legs, bracing on his forearms so he could watch your face.
The blunt head of his cock nudged at your entrance, slick and ready before he pushed in slowly -inch by inch- stretching you open with that perfect, burning fullness you’d missed for a year.
The sensation was overwhelming: the way your walls yielded and clenched around every ridge and vein, the heavy heat of him filling you completely until his hips pressed flush to yours.
You both gasped, foreheads touching, tears falling freely again.
“Fuck… you’re so tight,” he breathed, voice trembling. “So warm and wet and- fuck, I love you. I love you so much.”
He stayed buried deep for a long moment, just feeling you pulse around him, savoring the squeeze.
Then he began to move -slow, deep rolls of his hips that dragged his cock along every sensitive inch inside you. Each thrust was deliberate, pulling almost all the way out before sliding back in to the hilt, grinding against your clit on every downstroke.
The wet, rhythmic slap of skin filled the room, mingled with your shared sobs and gasps.
You wrapped your legs around his waist, heels digging into his back, pulling him deeper. “Harder, James -please-”
He gave it to you, thrusts growing firmer, faster, but still so full of emotion.
His cock felt impossibly thick inside you, stretching you perfectly with every plunge, the head nudging against that spot that made sparks explode behind your eyes. When you clenched around him particularly hard, he moaned loudly, a raw, broken sound that vibrated through his chest.
“Yes- fuck, just like that. You feel so good, so so good baby.”
You switched positions naturally, rolling so he was spooned behind you, chest pressed tight to your back.
One of his arms banded around you, hand cupping and kneading your breast, the other sliding down to rub firm circles on your clit. He thrust up into you from behind -deep, grinding strokes that kept him buried as much as possible.
His mouth was at your neck, kissing, sucking, murmuring against your skin: “I missed this. Missed feeling you around me. Never letting you go again.”
Tears soaked the pillow beneath your cheek; his fell onto your shoulder. The emotion was devastating -relief, love, grief, desperation- all of it pouring out with every thrust.
You came first again, walls clamping down hard around his cock, pulsing and fluttering as pleasure tore through you with a shattered moan.
The sensation broke him. James groaned deep in his chest, hips stuttering as his orgasm hit. His cock throbbed violently inside you, swelling even thicker as he came hard -thick, hot ropes of cum flooding your walls in powerful pulses.
“Y/N -fuckfuckfuckfuck” He kept thrusting through it, shallow and desperate, drawing out every wave as your pussy milked him dry.
But even after he spilled everything, he didn’t stop. He stayed rock-hard, the overstimulation making him shake and whimper, but the feeling was too good.
“Don’t stop,” he begged hoarsely, still crying, voice wrecked. “Please, don’t let me pull out. It’s too much- too good. I can’t-”
You pushed back against him, meeting every thrust, and he kept moving -kept cumming in smaller, intense waves that made his whole body jerk. His cock pulsed again and again inside you, more cum leaking out with every thrust, making everything slicker, messier.
He buried his face in your neck, sobbing against your skin as another orgasm ripped progressively through him, hips grinding deep.
You turned your head for a messy, tear-soaked kiss, tongues sliding lazily as he kept fucking you slow and loving and frantic all at once.
The year apart dissolved completely in the heat, the tears, and the devastating certainty that this had never been nothing.
It had always been everything. Filled every single corner of every single room you’d been in.
And neither of you left.
The room was quiet except for the slowing rhythm of your breathing and the occasional sniffle as tears finally began to ease.
James stayed buried deep inside you from behind, his arm wrapped tightly around your waist, chest pressed flush to your back. His cock still twitched with aftershocks, warm and full inside your slick, cum-filled heat. Neither of you moved to separate.
You couldn’t. Not yet.
He pressed soft, lingering kisses to the nape of your neck, his breath shaky. “I’m not leaving,” he whispered, voice hoarse and raw. “Not tonight. Not ever again if you’ll have me.”
You turned your head just enough to meet his eyes over your shoulder. Fresh tears welled up. “I thought we were done. I really believed it this time.”
“I know.” His hand slid up to cup your cheek, thumb brushing away the wetness. “I was so fucking scared you’d never see me again.”
You squeezed around him instinctively, and he groaned softly, hips giving one lazy thrust before stilling again. “I was cruel too,” you admitted, voice small. “Blocking you. Pushing you away when I needed you most. I was hurting and I wanted you to hurt with me. But God, James… I never stopped loving you. Even when I hated you.”
His eyes shut tight, another tear slipping free. “I love you. I’m shit at saying it, shit at showing it the right way, but I do. So much it terrifies me. You’re the only person who’s ever seen all the ugly parts and still made me feel like I’m worth something.”
ᴺᴼᵂ ᴾᴸᴬᵞᴵᴺᴳ Jealou$y - The Nbhd ♫♬♪
You stayed like that for a long while- tangled, joined, whispering truths you’d both buried for years. Soft confessions. Apologies. Promises. The kind of vulnerable honesty that only came after devastating sex and shared tears.
His hand stroked your stomach, your breasts, anywhere he could reach, grounding himself in your warmth.
Eventually the tenderness shifted. His cock, still half-hard inside you, began to thicken again. You felt it -slow, deliberate swelling that made you gasp. James kissed your shoulder, then your neck, teeth grazing.
“Again?” you whispered, a small, breathless laugh breaking through.
“I can’t help it,” he murmured, rolling his hips slowly, stirring the mess of cum and your arousal. “You feel too good. Being inside you again it’s fucking addictive.”
The heat built quickly. You pushed back against him, and he groaned, pulling out just long enough to turn you onto your back so he could kiss you properly -deep, slow, emotional. Then he was lifting you, carrying you toward the small en-suite bathroom on unsteady legs.
The shower was tiny, barely enough room for both of you, but that only made it better. He turned the water on hot, steam filling the space as you stepped in together. Water cascaded over your bodies, washing away sweat and tears but not the need.
James pressed you against the cool tiles, mouth devouring yours while his hands roamed -slick with water, sliding over your breasts, pinching nipples until you moaned into him.
You wrapped your arms around his neck, one leg hooking over his hip. His cock, fully hard again and flushed dark, slid against your stomach.
He lifted you effortlessly, pinning you to the wall. “Wrap your legs around me, yeah?”
You did, and he guided himself back inside you in one smooth, deep thrust. The stretch was even more intense after everything -your walls sensitive and swollen, still slick with his earlier release.
He groaned loudly, forehead pressed to yours as water poured over your joined bodies.
“Fuck, Y/N… so warm. So fucking tight even after I filled you up.” He started moving -deep, rolling thrusts that ground his pelvis against your clit with every stroke.
The wet slap of skin mixed with the sound of running water. His cock dragged along every ridge inside you, thick and veined, hitting that perfect spot over and over.
You cried out, nails digging into his shoulders. Tears mixed with shower water on your cheeks. “James -harder. I need you.”
He gave it to you. Thrusts turned punishing but loving -powerful snaps of his hips that lifted you higher against the tiles. One hand held your ass, the other braced beside your head. His mouth moved to your neck, sucking marks, then to your breasts, licking water from your nipples before biting gently.
You clenched around him deliberately and he moaned, deep and broken. “Yes -squeeze me just like that. Fuck… I feel everything. You’re gonna make me cum again too soon my pretty girl.”
The angle, the heat, the steam, the overwhelming emotion -it all built fast. You came first, walls pulsing hard around his cock, sobbing his name as pleasure crashed through you.
James followed right after, burying himself to the hilt with a guttural groan. His cock throbbed violently, pumping more thick ropes of cum deep inside you. He kept thrusting through it, shallow and desperate, whimpering against your neck as overstimulation made him shake.
But he didn’t pull out. Instead, he lowered you slightly, still buried deep, and reached between you to rub your clit with slick fingers while grinding slowly.
“One more,” he begged, greedy. “Please, baby. I need to feel you cum around me again.”
You were oversensitive, trembling, but the way he looked at you -eyes wet, desperate, full of love- made you nod. He fucked you through it, slower now but no less intense, water streaming between your bodies, until you shattered again with a broken cry.
Only then did he ease out, both of you boneless and clinging. He held you under the spray, kissing you softly as the water began to cool.
Voices suddenly filtered in from the main dorm area -your members returning home, laughing and calling your name.
James froze, then smiled against your lips, a little dazed and wicked. “Guess we made it just in time.”
You laughed breathlessly, pressing one last kiss to his mouth. “Stay the night anyway. We’ll figure it out.”
He nodded, eyes soft. “I’m not going anywhere.”
So he didn’t go anywhere.
He stayed.
Became the better man he always told himself he’d be once he found the courage.
The morning after the wrap party, you woke tangled in his arms, his face buried against your neck, breathing steady and warm. Neither of you spoke much at first. Just quiet touches, soft kisses, and the shared understanding that everything had shifted.
Your members teased you mercilessly when they saw him sneaking out later that day, but the smiles on their faces said they’d known this was coming.
A few days later, he showed up at your dorm with a ridiculously corny bouquet of red roses and a handwritten letter -actual pen and paper and no chat gpt involved, slightly crumpled from how many times he’d rewritten it.
The letter was long, rambling, equal parts apology and love confession, ending with: “Will you let me take you on a real date?”
You said yes, he kissed you right there in the doorway, slow and reverent, like he still couldn’t believe he was allowed.
Your first official date was simple but perfect: a late-night drive to a quiet beach outside the city, where no one would find you and snap photos, blankets in the trunk, cheap convenience store snacks, and hours of talking under the stars. He held your hand the entire way home.
That night, back at your place, the sex was different -less desperate hunger, more deep, aching worship. He laid you out on his bed and took his time again, licking and sucking between your thighs until you came twice on his tongue, then fucked you slow, eyes locked, whispering “I love you” with every thrust.
Over the next weeks, you rebuilt in quiet, beautiful ways. Brunch dates ( in your bedroom unfortunately - there was only so much fame allowed) where he stole bites from your plate. Late studio nights where he brought you coffee and rubbed your shoulders. Public outings were careful at first -disguises, quiet corners- but the the thrill of risking to be seen together, even subtly, felt like freedom.
As your career with R3SET soared -comeback stages under blinding lights, sold-out tours that took you across continents, and the quiet pride of watching your members shine beside you -he was there. Cheering the loudest from the wings, waiting with warm arms and quiet understanding after exhausting schedules.
“You’re always the best thing in any room you’re performing in,” he’d said one time, towel drying your sweat after a long show in Seoul.
One month in, he took you to a private listening of Cortis’ finished project. Sitting in the dark, his hand on your thigh, fingers tracing lazy circles, you listened to the song. He’d included his song in the album, the one he’d written about you.
And now you were certain, that by being honest, you’d gotten everything you wanted.
In the car afterward, you couldn’t wait -you rode him in the backseat, windows fogged, your dress hiked up, his hands gripping your ass as you bounced on his cock. He came so hard he saw stars, burying his face between your breasts and murmuring how perfect you felt squeezing him.
Two months later, he talked to the girls properly -nervous, respectful, and endearingly awkward. They approved. Not that you would’ve left him anyway.
That same night, back at your dorm while the others were out, he fucked you against the kitchen counter, then bent you over the couch, pounding deep from behind until you were sobbing his name. He loved pulling your hair just enough to tilt your head back for messy kisses, loved the way your pussy fluttered and milked him when you came.
Three months in, during a quiet weekend getaway to a cabin in the mountains, he told you he was in therapy -working on the exits, the fear and the walls. You cried in his arms, proud but also insanely full. Like you suddenly realized how fulfilled you were been at such a young age.
Six months later, you both got a secondary apartment to share. It was private but yours- filled with your combined chaos and growing collection of memories and polaroids.
The sex only got better with time: lazy morning blowjobs where he’d eventually pull you up and fuck you slow and deep; shower quickies that turned into long, steamy sessions against the tiles; nights where he’d edge you for an hour with his mouth and fingers before finally giving you his cock, making you cum so many times you lost count.
You read in his arms, learned more about yourself than you’d ever did anywhere else, learned how to love him correctly, appropriately, learned how to not be so addicted to the chaos.
Your story had never been nothing. It had always been tongue-tied and beautifully, spoken aloud.
In the end, it was always his tongue that undid you both. Not just the wicked, reverent way it worshipped between your thighs.
But the way it finally learned to speak the truth.
oh my shit fuck. I actually am so grateful for this request cause i fucking loved writing this. Idc if it’s ass and if some don’t like it. I loved it. 🤤 loved writing it.
please do interact ! makes my days frfr
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MAJOR SPOILERSSSS!!!!! 💗💕
Okay first of all, holy fuck this was so amazing!! The way OP writes is genuinely so beautiful and heartfelt, there were so many times reading this I felt like I was intruding.😭😭😭 Second of all, what the actual freak. There was again a few times reading this where I had to put my phone down and stare at the wall for a FAT minute.😭💀 One that specifically comes to mind because I had to put my phone down for two hours, was of course "So please love me again," "Don't leave me. Love me again and -and if you never did, you can start now." WHAT THE FUCKKKKK I'm actually not okay, even just re-typing that felt like murdering myself😭😭 it took me 10 hours just to finish reading both parts of this that how emotional I was oml😭😖😭I literally love you so much @ptolemaea4a I said it before and I'll say it again, you're mind is beautiful!! Excited to see what you conjure up next 🙂↕️😘💗💕💗💕
(Sorry if I sucked your dick for too long 😬😬 feel like I'm gonna get post comment clarity about this later but I genuinely don't care rn😭😭)
Okay I fucked up by adding the see more thing💀you have to go through the whole fic anyway to see what I said bc it will NOT let me edit for some reason LMFAOOO
