→ NOTES: MDNI, unprotected sex, creampie, quickie, read at your own risk! English is my second language <3
***
What's the price of fame?
Time?
Money?
Or effort?
For James, it's freedom.
And the concept of living in fear that someone will find out the forbidden things he's doing behind the shadow.
"J-James! Don't! The staffs are all outside!"
You hiss through clenched teeth, your voice barely a whisper, your heart burning with fear. Sweat streams down your forehead, rolls down your eyelashes, and stings your eyes. The man behind you pretends not to hear, continuing to place small kisses on your bare shoulder covering in peach scent and a hint of weariness.
James had begged Keonho nonstop so the child would let him be the special MC for M Countdown, all because he wanted to see you for a while after the interaction with Babymonster. He waited all morning in order to avoid the staff and pull you into an empty room for a little cuddle, only to be chased away. He's fucking furious!
"You don't love me..."
The sound escaping his throat deepens, tickling your ear and sending shivers down your spine. The room is dimly lit by a few rays of light filtering through the door gap, scattering faintly on the floor. It isn't as dark as the terrifying scenarios you are imagining as you leave this place and face dozens of staffs and idols.
You are trapped in James' muscular arms, his lower body violently thrusting against yours. Your are terrified, but no matter how much you squirm, it's no use. He just keeps moaning softly in your ear like a dog in heat sulking at its mate.
"I missed you..."
His soft lips suddenly presses against yours. He tightens his grip, forcing you to kiss him.
Being caught off guard, you squeeze your eyes shut, your lips presses together, James has to bite you hard enough to make you open your mouth so his tongue could slip inside.
James only needs one hand to hold you still, his other hand has already undressed you. He keeps caressing his dick at the entrance of your hole without putting it in. And you're miserable, your hips automatically thrusting, soaking the soft flesh with your juice. His tongue intertwines with yours relentlessly, fueling your desire, leaving your breathless and your skin tingling with longing.
"You love it, but why did you ignore me earlier?" He interrupts the kiss.
You are both embarrassed and nervous. Your hand finds its way to his hair and slightly pulls his head back. "Hurry up! It's almost my turn!"
"Don't worry. I've planned it all."
James holds your hips and knees, lifting you up as if you are a feather. You instinctively wrap your legs around his waist. The ideal position for his cock to be positioned just below your private part, he gently thrust his hips. Slow and sensual, not as messy as the kiss just now, yet burning with a numbing heat.
It's your turn to kiss him, trying to suppress the moans that threaten to escape your lips. Despite the efforts, the frantic sounds of teeth and lips sucking are just embarrassing.
Your hands clutch his neck, weakly clinging to keep yourself from falling as he thrusts aggressively below, causing your whole body to jolt. James is seriously careful, supporting you with his fingernails digging into the delicate skin of your thighs and waist, leaving numerous red, tingling marks that are slowly losing their sensation. It hurts, but it's pure bliss at the same time.
Rarely having such intimate private time, James feels like a caged beast. His only prey is now in his grasp, whimpering amidst this temporary lovemaking, after a long separation due to his busy schedule. He's sure he'll make it up to you properly when the time is right.
But for now, he cannot hold back any longer.
Your mind is clouded with pleasure, yet you still hope the tiny room could keep the slapping sounds of bodies from escaping. His warm dick, not yet fully pull out, thrusts deep inside again, stirring up every nook and cranny, each thrust brings you close to orgasm. James knows your body well, intense thrusting isn't enough, he also toys with your nipples, teasing your clit until it's puffy. Juice oozes from your pussy down to his thick cock, dripping and soaking his pants, and your back arches because of the overwhelming excitement he's giving.
How is he going to explain this to everyone...?
Knock, knock!
"Hello, is anyone there?" A rushed Martin calls from the door, "James? Where are you? Get ready to continue the show!"
You are flustered, frantically patting him on the shoulder, gesturing him to stop. Unfortunately, James Chao is not afraid of anything in the world. He suddenly becomes the most evil man in your eyes as he continues to destroy your poor vagina, then pulls out a pinkish underwear from his pocket and shoves it straight into your mouth. Feeling the taste of yourself on your tongue makes you wince. James' lips curves into a sly smile, he moves more gently to lessen the noise.
"I know! Wait a minute, I'm a little busy."
His eyes glued to yours, a mischievous smile appears on his handsome face as he watches his girlfriend pouts. He's surprisingly calm, using his usual tone to answer the boy as if he is the most innocent man in the world.
"Hey, I spilled water on my pants, they're soaking wet. Can you get me another pair?"
The teenager's voice echoes back, "Why didn't you say so earlier? How am I supposed to find one now?" Martin is about to leave to find the stylist, "Hurry up, we only have a few minutes left!"
The clattering sounds of his heels soon fade into the air. James removes the panties from your mouth and places a quick peck on your cheek as an apology.
"Were you scared, honey?"
Before you could answer, he bucks his hips forward, forcefully penetrating your flushed and swollen pussy after countless intense thrusts, causing your eyes to roll back. A high-pitched moan would have escaped from your lips if he had not quickly covered your mouth.
"My little bunny is so cute and obedient today."
Not obedient, but unable to fight back. The strength of a well-built twenty-year-old is no joke. He has been bullying your sensitive hole while remaining erect the whole time. Your lower body is limp and weak, even though you try to cling to his shoulders, your grip keeps slipping, he holds you tightly in his hands.
James inhales the scent behind your neck, growling and chanting pet names. His erection grows even more aggressive, ready to receive waves of ecstasy. You has reached your second orgasm before he finally cums deep inside. You're just too exhausted to blame him for forgetting to use a condom, collapsing into his arms right away and breathing heavily.
He sits down on the ground, lifts you onto his lap, and quickly puts your underwear back on before his cum spills and drips onto the floor. James whispers in your ear, "Keep it nice and clean, okay?"
You're on the verge of fainting.
Outside, some members of Babymonster are calling your name.
He chuckles, suddenly feeling a little guilty, worrying that you wouldn't have the energy to complete the performance.
pairing. flynn rider ! martin / f ! rapunzel reader
warnings + info. oneshot, fantasy au, tangled retelling, strangers to lovers, not exactly parallel to the movie so don't be confused if some things are different, kissing, violence, imagine messyhaired!tin ok?, features many people you know and love ;)
synopsis. a handsome thief hiding from his crimes picks the wrong tower to climb into, and the girl locked inside it has been waiting her whole life for an excuse to leave.
wc. 18.3k
maddy's note. i marinated on this idea for ages and finally it has come to fruition so i cannot wait for u guys to read it 😇! ik my martin girls are heavily deprived so this ones for u guys hehehe but especially for meri @griinspire and pearl @marsgirltyshi and lili @chocom0ka (and seulbi but she's Gone off blr) because no one does martins gf like they do 😏😏!!!
there is no playlist for this because, well, it has a soundtrack of its own and quite frankly i'm a little lazy to compile songs rn............. #iseethelighttruther
tagging 90% of Core15 bc they yell at me @kaikaikoi @hyuneskkami @hollyoongs @aerinettes
Once upon a time, in a kingdom nestled between green mountains and a sea the color of jade, there was born a princess.
Of course, like any other fairytale, she was not born ordinary. On the night before her birth, a single drop of moonlight was said to have fallen from the sky and rooted itself into the earth, blooming into a flower that glowed gold from root to petal. The palace healers, desperate to save the queen who lay dying in childbed, ground the flower into a tea and poured it past her lips, and by morning the queen lived, and by evening the princess was born with a single lock of hair that shone like sunlight caught in silk.
The kingdom rang bells for three days. The king wept. The people lit lanterns and floated them on the river in thanks to whatever gods had seen fit to spare their queen and gift them a princess who glowed.
But the flower's magic had not vanished when it was boiled into tea. It had simply moved—into the girl. Into her hair, which did not merely shine but healed, which did not merely glow but sang low and golden when the right words were spoken over it, undoing wounds, softening age, drawing sickness out of the body like poison from a wound.
There was a woman in the kingdom—never young, never quite old, a woman the years seemed to slide off of like water off stone—who had known about the flower long before the healers ever found it. She had kept it hidden for a hundred years, using its magic to keep herself exactly as she wished to remain. When it was taken from her and given to a queen and consumed by a birth she had no part of, something in her curdled.
She was called, by then, only Mother.
She came for the princess on a night when the moon was new and the palace slept heavy with relief. She did not take the flower. She took the girl instead, because the girl was the flower now, and she carried her from the palace in the dark and up into the mountains, to a tower with no door, only a single window round as an eye, hidden behind a curtain of waterfall and stone.
She raised the princess as her own. She told her that the world outside was full of people who would tear her apart for the power in her hair, that the tower was the only place she would ever be safe, that Mother's love—sharp-edged and conditional and always, always followed by but you know I only want what's best for you—was the only love the girl would ever need.
The king and queen sent lanterns into the sky every year on their daughter's birthday, thousands of them, gold as the flower that had saved the queen's life, in the small and stubborn hope that somewhere, somehow, their daughter would see them and know she was being waited for.
The girl in the tower saw them. Every year, from her window, she watched the far-off sky fill with floating light and never once knew they were for her.
She only knew that something in her chest ached every time the horizon lit up gold, and she never could explain why.
The king and queen never stopped hoping. Every year, when the lanterns had all burned low and drifted back down to the water, the queen would stand alone at the highest window of the palace a while longer than anyone else, watching the dark where the last of the light had gone, and the king would come find her there, and neither of them would say anything at all, because there was nothing left to say that eighteen years of the same silent vigil hadn't already said a hundred times over. They kept her room exactly as it had been. They never once let themselves call it a memorial, because a memorial was for something that was over, and they had never once let themselves believe it was over.
The kingdom, for its part, grew used to the grief the way kingdoms do—folding it quietly into tradition, into the yearly ritual of light, into a story told to children at bedtime about a princess who might, one day, come home. Most had stopped truly expecting it. The lanterns kept rising anyway. Hope, it turned out, didn't require belief to keep going. It only required someone willing to light the wick one more time.
You had lived eighteen years in that tower, and in that time you had become, out of sheer boredom and stubbornness, extremely accomplished.
You could grind ink and paint mountains that looked like the ones you'd never climbed. You could play the gayageum until your fingers bled and then keep playing anyway. You'd taught yourself to read faster than Mother liked, to argue better than Mother liked, to want more than Mother liked, though you were careful never to let her see the wanting directly. You kept it folded small, tucked behind your ribs, brought out only at night with the shutters closed, when you traced the shapes of mountains you'd painted from imagination and wondered what they smelled like up close.
Kono did not approve of the wanting.
Kono was small, no longer than your forearm, built more like a lizard than the great serpentine dragons painted on temple ceilings, but for the two soft antler-like horns that curled back from his brow and the faint iridescent sheen to his scales that shifted blue to green to gold depending on how the light caught him—the exact shifting, you'd always thought, of oil on water, or of a fish turning in a stream. He had a long tail he liked to wrap possessively around your wrist, small clawed feet that could grip silk without snagging it, and an expression, for a creature with no eyebrows, of near-constant and deeply personal disappointment in you.
He had been left on your windowsill as a hatchling the summer you turned nine, small and starving and furious about it, and had simply never left, and you had never really asked why a mountain temple's guardian creature had abandoned his post to live with a girl in a tower, and he had never told you.
He was, as far as you'd ever heard, meant to bring luck. You mostly found this funny.
"I'm just saying," you told him, that particular evening, standing at the window with your chin in your hands, watching the light change over the tree line, "that if I have to hear one more story about how the outside world is full of ruffians and cutthroats waiting specifically for me, I might actually go looking for the ruffians and cutthroats just to see if they're more interesting than staying here."
Kono made a small, unimpressed noise and flicked his tail against your neck.
"You're right, you're right. Bad plan." You sighed, and the sigh fogged faintly against the cool evening air. "But it's my birthday in three days, Kono. Eighteen years old, and I've never once stood in actual dirt. Do you know how insane that is?"
He blinked his round eyes at you, which you had long since learned to interpret as yes, obviously, I have been here the entire time, why are you telling me this like it's news.
You didn't get to finish making your case, because that was the exact moment something enormous and irritable and coated in mud came flying over the tree line, followed at some distance by two men on horseback who were shouting in a way that suggested this was not a friendly race.
You watched, chin still in your hands, as the fleeing shape—a horse, you realized, a truly furious-looking horse with no rider—thundered off in one direction, and the men gave up the chase and doubled back toward the waterfall instead, toward the tower, toward the one place in this entire kingdom that was not supposed to be findable.
Kono went rigid against your shoulder.
You, if you were being fully honest with yourself, felt something in your chest that was not quite fear. It sat right alongside the fear, close enough to be mistaken for it, but it wasn't fear.
It was closer to finally.
His name, you would learn—though not for several more extremely tense minutes—was Martin Edwards, and he arrived through your window the way a cat arrives through a window: badly, loudly, and with absolutely no acknowledgment that he might be intruding.
He tumbled onto your floor in a graceless heap of limbs, dragging a satchel that clinked with something metal, and had approximately one and a half seconds to register that the tower he'd chosen at complete random to hide in was, in fact, occupied, before you brought the singing bowl down over his head with every ounce of strength eighteen years of restless boredom had built into your arms.
The bowl rang out, low and resonant, an actual musical note hanging in the air over the sound of him crumpling sideways into your dried-flower arrangement.
You stood over him, bowl still raised, breathing hard, and felt, for the first time in your entire life, genuinely and thoroughly alive.
He groaned. He was, you noted with some irritation, extremely tall even lying down, all long limbs folded wrong across your floor, and even unconscious his face had the specific, punchable quality of someone who had never once in his life doubted that he was the most charming person in any room he walked into.
Kono skittered down your arm to the floor and approached the stranger with the deep suspicion of a creature sizing up a rival. He sniffed once at Martin's outstretched hand, apparently found it lacking, and turned his back on it with as much dignity as a small dragon draped in mud-splattered iridescent scales could manage.
You dragged the intruder—with considerable effort, and a truly staggering amount of complaining directed at Kono, who offered zero help—into your wardrobe, and shut the door, and sat down hard on your bed with your heart going like a struck drum.
Ruffians and cutthroats, you thought, a little hysterically. Right on schedule.
He woke up loud, which you supposed made sense, given everything else about him so far.
"—okay, okay, I'm awake, I'm awake, get the—" He kicked the wardrobe door open with a force that sent your good winter coats sliding off their hooks and staggered out into the room with both hands raised, blinking against the lamplight, and then his eyes landed on you, standing across the room with the singing bowl held out in front of you like a shield, and something in his face actually, genuinely, lit up.
"Oh," he hummed. "Hello."
"Don't move," you said.
"I'm not moving." He did not stop moving. His eyes were doing a slow, assessing sweep of the room—the window, the wardrobe, you, the bowl, back to you—that you didn't love the feeling of. "Nice place. Very—cozy. Homey. Round. You don't get a lot of round rooms."
"I said don't move."
"I'm being extremely still." He took a single, deliberate step sideways, testing you, and you swung the bowl an inch closer to his skull, and he froze with both hands up again, and something that might have been the beginning of respect crossed his face. "Okay. Fair. Noted."
Up close, in better light, he was infuriatingly good-looking in a way you resented on principle. Tall—taller than anyone had a right to be in a low-ceilinged tower room. This ruffian was blond in a country where you'd never once seen hair that color (not that you’d really seen any other existing humans).
He had this odd and loose, careless confidence that suggested he'd never had to work particularly hard for anything, including, apparently, avoiding capture, since two very large men had chased him halfway across a mountain and he still looked more amused than afraid.
"Who are you," you snarled, "and how did you find this tower?"
"Martin Edwards." He said it like it should mean something to you. When your expression didn't change, an emotion flickered across his face—annoyance, maybe, or the specific wound of a man whose name usually did land. "You've truly never heard of me."
"I've never heard of anyone. I live in a tower."
"Right. Yes. Fair point, very fair, I did notice the—tower situation." He gestured vaguely at the room, the window, the general concept of your entire life. "Look, I didn't find this place, I was being chased, I saw a hole in a wall of rock, I went through the hole. This was not a planned visit. I have no interest in your—tower. Your life. Any of it. I just need to lay low for a bit and then I will be very happy to climb right back out that window and never think about any of this again."
You considered him. You considered the satchel, which he'd dropped by the wardrobe door, and which had made a very specific metallic clinking sound when he fell.
"What's in the bag?"
His whole body changed—just slightly, just for a second, a flicker of genuine alarm before the easy charm slid back over it like a curtain. "Nothing that concerns you."
"It's in my room."
"It's in my possession."
"You're in my tower."
"Okay, fine, guess that’s—actually a decent point." He exhaled through his nose, glanced at the window, seemed to calculate something, and then said, with the air of a man laying down a very reasonable trump card: "Tell you what. You let me leave, quietly, no fuss, and I forget this entire evening ever happened. Bag included. Everyone wins."
You should have said yes. Later—much later, with the wind in your hair and your heart still going too fast in your chest—you would think about how easy it would have been to say yes, to open the window, to let him climb back out into the night and never know what you'd almost missed.
Instead you looked past him, out your one round window, at the darkening sky, and you thought about lanterns you'd never seen up close and mountains you'd only ever painted from guesswork, and you heard yourself say, "No."
He blinked. "No?"
"You're going to take me somewhere."
"I am not."
"There's a light show. Lanterns. Every year, on the—" you almost said my birthday, and swallowed it, some old instinct telling you not to hand a stranger that particular thread to pull. "There's a light in the sky, every year, from the direction of the kingdom. I want to see it up close. You're going to take me, and then you can have your little… bag back."
"You don't have my bag."
"I know where you left it," you said, which was true, and gestured with your chin at Kono, who had, in the general chaos, quietly and with great personal satisfaction dragged the satchel across the floor and was now sitting on top of it with the smug posture of a creature who understood exactly what leverage was.
Martin looked at the dragon. The dragon looked at Martin. Something passed between them that you didn't fully understand yet but would come, over the following days, to recognize as the opening shot of a genuinely long and deeply petty war.
"That thing is sitting on my satchel," Martin gasped, in the tone of a man who could not quite believe the indignity of his current situation.
"His name is Kono."
"I don't care what his name is, he is sitting on my—"
"He's very protective," you said, not entirely truthfully, since Kono's motives had far more to do with spite than protection, but you weren't about to admit that. "So. Lanterns. Then your bag. Then you go wherever it is men with bags full of clinking things go."
Martin looked at you for a long moment. He truly looked, in a way that made you resist the urge to fold your arms over your chest, and then rubbed both hands down his face and groaned like a man who'd already lost an argument he hadn't realized he was having.
"You," he chuckled in what you assume to be sarcasm, "are going to be a problem."
"Probably," you agreed, and found, to your own surprise, that you were smiling.
"For the record," he added, already turning to inspect the window, testing the give of the shutter with one hand, "I don't actually do this. Escort duty. Tour guide. Whatever this is."
"You don't have much choice."
"I have plenty of choice, lady. I'm choosing to be gracious about a bad situation, there's a difference." He glanced back at you, something assessing in the look, like he was recalculating you from scratch now that the singing bowl had been lowered. "How far is this light show, anyway?"
"I don't actually know."
"You don't—" He closed his eyes briefly, the particular patience of a man doing math he didn't want to do. "You dragged me into a hostage negotiation for a destination you don't know the distance to."
"It's in the direction of the kingdom. I've watched it every year from the window. It can't be that far."
"'Can't be that far' has gotten men killed, you know."
"You'll live," you said, with far more confidence than you actually possessed, and went to go retrieve your good travelling shoes, leaving him standing by the window looking like a man reconsidering every choice that had led him to this particular evening.
You changed, too, while he waited—out of the loose sleeping robes you'd been in when he'd fallen through your window and into the good hanbok you'd been saving, the one Mother had commissioned for a birthday you weren't allowed to leave the tower to celebrate.
Pale jeogori embroidered along the collar with thread the color of new leaves, the chima falling in soft, heavy folds you'd never actually walked any real distance in, sash tied the way you'd practiced a hundred times alone in front of a mirror with no one to see it.
It felt strange, dressing for a world you'd never been allowed into. It felt stranger still, catching your own reflection in the dark window glass, to think that you might actually look like you belonged there.
Were you… scared? No. Surely not. You wanted this. It’s practically your life’s purpose. But what about Mother? She had kept you safe and protected from the evils of that world for all your life and wouldn’t this be taking that protection for granted?
"You're stalling," Martin called, from somewhere near the window.
"I'm preparing."
"You've re-tied that sash three times."
"It has to sit correctly or it'll come loose on the climb down."
"It's a piece of fabric, not a structural pillar—"
"Do you want my help escaping or not?"
That, at least, bought you the silence you needed to finish, smoothing the last fold flat with hands that weren't quite steady, and when you finally turned around he'd gone quiet in a different way, something briefly, helplessly caught in his expression before he covered it with a cough and a very deliberate glance toward the window.
"Ready?" he asked.
"Ready," you said, and meant it more than you expected to.
Getting out of the tower took considerably longer than getting in, mostly because you insisted on doing it via the long braided rope of your own hair—which made Martin's expression do something complicated and slightly ill when you explained the general mechanics of your situation—and partly because you stopped four separate times on the way down to look at things. A bird. The particular texture of the moss on the tower's stone base. Your own hands, dirt-smudged for the first time in your life, which you held up in the fading light like they belonged to someone else.
"You're doing something weird with your face," Martin said, from where he was waiting with visibly diminishing patience at the base of the waterfall.
"What thing."
"The—" he gestured at your entire self, "—wide-eyed newborn puppy thing. It's very slow."
"I've never touched a river before."
"You've touched water before."
"Not river water. It's cold. It's moving. Did you know it does that? Just—moves, constantly, going somewhere—"
"Incredible information. Truly a marvel of the natural world. Can we—"
"Give me one more minute."
You did not give him one more minute. You gave him closer to ten, crouched at the edge of the water with your skirts hiked up and your bare feet in the current, laughing—actually laughing, a real sound you weren't sure you'd made before, not like this, not from somewhere this deep—while Martin stood a respectful distance away with his arms crossed and an expression that was trying very hard to stay annoyed and mostly failing.
"You know," he said, eventually, watching you, "for a girl who apparently thinks the entire world is trying to eat her alive, you're taking this remarkably well."
"I never said the world was trying to eat me."
"You have the exact energy of someone who was told that, yes."
You didn't answer that, because it was uncomfortably accurate, and instead climbed back up onto the bank and reached for the little cloth bag Mother had never let you leave without, purely out of habit—and then remembered you'd left the tower entirely, that Mother was three days out at her own errand, that there was no one to sneak anything past anymore, and the freedom of that thought hit you somewhere just under your ribs hard enough that you had to sit with it a second.
Martin was watching your face do something complicated.
"You okay, Princess?"
You blinked at him. "What did you call me?"
"Princess." He shrugged easily, like he'd been waiting for an excuse. "Means gongju. You know. Lost girl, hidden tower, guarded like she's made of something precious—you have to admit it tracks."
"I'm not a princess."
"I didn't say you were. I said it tracks." He was grinning now, delighted with himself in a way that made you want to throw something at him. "There's an actual missing princess, you know. Whole kingdom's been mourning her for eighteen years. Lanterns every year on her birthday, the whole thing. I’m guessing that’s what you’re trying to see. Funny coincidence, a girl locked in a tower wanting to see the exact same lanterns."
"Coincidences happen."
"Sure they do." He fell into step beside you, hands tucked behind his head, entirely too pleased with the theory he was clearly not going to let go of. "Or, alternatively, I could just call you 'princess.' Would you prefer that? Since you don't know what it means. I mean, I'm sure a sheltered young lady like yourself, freshly escaped from an entire lifetime in a stone tower, wouldn't be familiar with a word like that. It’s English. Very obscure. Very advanced."
"I know what it means, I was born here, same as you."
"Do you though? Prove it."
"I'm not proving anything to you."
"Because you can't."
"Because it's beneath me."
"There it is," he said, snapping his fingers, delighted. "Gongju behavior if I've ever seen it."
"I will push you into the river."
"You're welcome to try, princess."
"You know what's funny," Martin said, a little while later, once you'd both fallen into an easier walking rhythm and the sun had dropped low enough to gild the tops of the trees. "You never actually told me your name."
You hesitated. It wasn't that you didn't have one—Mother had given you one, early, though she'd used it so rarely, always preferring darling or sweet girl or, when she was displeased, no name at all, just a long and pointed silence—it was that saying it out loud to a stranger on your first night outside a tower felt like handing over something you weren't sure yet was safe to hand over.
"I'm not telling you."
"Why not?"
"Because you'll use it against me somehow. You seem like the type."
"I am offended." He didn't sound offended. He sounded thrilled, the way he sounded about most things that gave him new material to work with. "Fine. Keep your mystery. I'll just keep calling you gongju, then, and everyone we meet is going to assume you actually are the missing princess, and it'll be your fault when the whole kingdom starts a rumor."
"Nobody's going to believe that."
"You'd be surprised what people believe about a girl who climbs out of a tower on a rope made of her own hair."
You didn't have a good answer for that, mostly because it was, again, unfairly accurate, and you settled instead for shoving him lightly with your shoulder, which did nothing except make him laugh.
"Say it, then," you said. "Princess. If that's what you're going to call me, I want to actually hear you say the real word, not just the joke version."
He said it—properly this time, no mockery in it, the vowels landing soft and familiar in a way that startled you a little, like hearing a song you hadn't realized you knew the words to.
"There," he said. "Happy?"
"You're still not calling me that."
"I'm absolutely calling you that. It's efficient. It's accurate, probably. And frankly," he added, glancing sideways at you with something almost gentle underneath the usual smugness, "it suits you better than whatever your actual name is going to turn out to be."
"You don't even know my actual name."
"I don't need to. I've got a working theory and I like it. A sheltered young lady," he said, drawing the words out with exaggerated care, "freshly liberated from a tower, apparently unfamiliar with basic Korean vocabulary—really, it all fits."
"I am not unfamiliar with basic—"
"Prove it. What's gongju mean, then, if you know it so well?"
"It means princess, and you know I know that, you're just being insufferable on purpose."
"On purpose and very successfully," he agreed, entirely too pleased with himself, and you gave up trying to win the argument and let yourself, instead, enjoy the specific, unfamiliar pleasure of being teased by someone who clearly wasn't trying to hurt you with it.
You did not push him into the river, mostly because you were fairly sure you'd fall in with him, but you thought about it, hard, the entire rest of the walk, while he hummed something tuneless and infuriating under his breath and Kono rode along in the fold of your sleeve making small disapproving noises every time Martin so much as glanced in your direction.
You noticed, though you weren't going to say it out loud, that he never actually stopped. Princess. Not once, the rest of that day, or the day after, or any of the days that came after that. It stuck the way nicknames only stick when the person using them has decided, somewhere below the joking, that they mean it.
The wanted poster was nailed to a tree at the first crossroads you came to, curling slightly at the corners from weather, and you might have walked right past it if Martin hadn't gone abruptly, suspiciously quiet beside you.
You looked. Then you looked again, closer, and had to physically bite down on the inside of your cheek to keep from laughing.
It was, unmistakably, him—same jaw, same insufferable eyebrows, same general air of a man who thought quite highly of himself—except that whoever had drawn it had rendered his mouth as a row of crooked, gap-toothed, wildly uneven teeth, snaggled in every direction like a fence that had lost a fight with a storm.
"That is not accurate," Martin yelled, very fast, snatching the poster down off the tree before you could get a proper look.
"That is—that is artistic license, that is a hack sketch artist with a grudge and no talent, my teeth are—" he actually opened his mouth to demonstrate, tilting his head back, and you had to admit, unwillingly, that his teeth were in fact very straight, surprisingly white, entirely unremarkable in the best possible way. "See? Perfect. Immaculate. I have never once in my life had a complaint about my teeth, I get compliments on my teeth—"
"From who?"
"From—people. Women. Discerning women with excellent taste who appreciate a good—"
"It says here you're a wanted thief," you hummed, reading over his shoulder now that he'd lowered the poster in his outrage, "with a reward of—" you did the math and had to stop and reread it, "—that is a genuinely enormous amount of money."
"It's inflated. That's a—that's a gross exaggeration of my worth, I'm not worth that much, this is clearly a—"
"You're arguing that you're worth less than a wanted poster says?"
"I'm arguing that the number is inaccurate, there's a difference, the number is clearly designed to encourage overzealous bounty hunting, it's a scare tactic—"
"So you agree you're worth stealing."
"That is not—that is not what I said, you're twisting my words, this is exactly the kind of thing I was worried about when you insisted on coming along, you're going to misquote me to guards at some point and get us both—"
"I'm just reading what's written."
He scoffed and kicked a rock. "You're reading it with inflection."
"I'm reading it with my normal voice."
"You said 'genuinely enormous amount of money' like it was a personal insult to me specifically."
"You seem more upset about the teeth than the wanted part."
"Because the wanted part is accurate," he said, with the flat honesty of a man too distracted by dental slander to bother lying. "I am wanted. I did steal something. The teeth, though. The teeth are slander."
"What did you steal?"
He hesitated—and it was the first genuinely unguarded pause you'd seen from him all day—and then folded the poster into quarters and shoved it into his satchel with a little more force than necessary. "Doesn't matter. Ancient history. Water under the bridge."
"You stole it approximately six hours ago."
"Extremely ancient, in relative terms." He set off walking again, faster than before, and you had to jog a few steps to catch up, Kono digging tiny claws into your shoulder to keep his balance.
"You're not going to tell me."
"I am not."
"Is it the crown," you guessed, because you'd caught the edge of gold in the satchel earlier, glinting when Kono had dragged it across the floor, and you watched his shoulders go very slightly, very deliberately stiff.
"No," he said, in a tone that meant yes, and you decided, generously, to let him have it, mostly because you were far more interested in the actual horse that had just come thundering around the bend in the road, nostrils flaring, eyes locked on Martin with an expression of pure, personal, long-simmering rage.
"Oh, no," Martin said.
"Is that—"
"That is Woojoo, yes, that is my horse, that is a long, complicated relationship—"
Woojoo did not stop for pleasantries. He came at Martin like a man settling a debt, and the next several minutes dissolved into a genuinely spectacular chase around a small clearing that involved Martin climbing a tree, Woojoo standing guard at the base of said tree with the patient menace of a creature who had all the time in the world, and you sitting on a fallen log with Kono, watching, thoroughly entertained.
"He's not usually like this," Martin called down, from somewhere in the upper branches.
"He seems very consistent, actually."
"Okay, he's exactly like this, every time, it's—we have history, this horse and I, it's complicated—"
"He's a horse."
"He's vindictive, is what he is, he's been trying to get me arrested for two years, that's not normal horse behavior, that's a personal vendetta—"
Kono made a small, delighted chattering noise beside you, which you were beginning to understand meant something close to finally, someone gets it, and when you glanced down at him he was watching Woojoo with what could only be described as newfound professional respect.
"What exactly did you do to him," you called up, watching Woojoo pace a slow, deliberate circle around the base of the tree, occasionally rearing to paw at the lowest branch just to remind Martin he had options.
"I didn't do anything, he's just been like this since I acquired him."
"You stole him."
"I acquired him. There's a nuance."
"From who?"
"From a royal stable, technically, but in my defense he was clearly unhappy there, high-strung, difficult, the stablemaster hated him—I did him a favor, honestly, and this is the thanks I get, two years of relentless, targeted footwear-based revenge—"
Woojoo, as if personally offended by the retelling, reared up again with a furious whinny and got one hoof solidly against the trunk hard enough to shake the branch Martin was gripping, sending down a small shower of leaves and one extremely undignified yelp.
"He understood that," you gasped and shook your head. "He understood every word of that and he took offense."
"Horses don't understand language."
"This one might."
"This one is a menace, is what he is," Martin said, adjusting his grip with the particular caution of a man who had recently reconsidered his life choices, "a genuine menace who has decided, for reasons known only to himself, that his sole purpose on this earth is making my life difficult—"
You decided, watching the standoff continue with no signs of resolving itself, that this was likely to go on for some time if left entirely to the two of them, and so you climbed down off your log, brushed off your skirts, and walked directly up to Woojoo with far more confidence than you actually felt.
He swung his great head toward you, ears pinned, nostrils flaring, and for a moment you thought you'd badly misjudged the situation—and then, slowly, his ears came up, and he leaned his head down toward you with something almost curious, blowing a warm breath across your palm when you held it out.
"There," you murmured. "See? I'm not the one who stole an apple from your feed bag."
"You heard about the apple thing—" Martin's voice, muffled and betrayed, from somewhere above.
Woojoo made a low, satisfied sort of noise, nudging his nose against your shoulder, and you had the distinct impression, ridiculous as it was, that you had just been recruited onto a very specific and very committed team.
It took another twenty minutes, a great deal of undignified negotiating, and—eventually—you stepping in to physically stand between horse and man with your hands raised in a gesture of peace, before Woojoo agreed, with visible reluctance, to a temporary truce, on the condition—as far as you could interpret from a horse's expression—that he got to walk close enough to occasionally, "accidentally," step on the back of Martin's boot.
"This is humiliating," Martin muttered, as you all set off again, horse and dragon flanking either side of you like a pair of extremely judgmental honor guards.
"I think it's going great," you said, and meant it.
The hanok appeared out of the trees just as the light was going properly gray, low and wide-roofed in the old style, warm lantern-light spilling from its paper windows, smoke curling from a chimney with the smell of something roasting.
"Absolutely not," Martin said, the second he clocked it. "No. We're walking past this. This is a place I have specifically, personally, at great cost, learned to walk past."
"Why?"
"Because it's full of the single worst collection of degenerates in this entire kingdom, and every single one of them would sell me out for a fraction of that reward money without blinking."
"So we're not going in."
"We are absolutely not going in."
You went in.
In your defense, you hadn't fully decided to defy him so much as your feet had simply kept walking while your brain was still weighing the pros and cons, and by the time Martin caught up to grab your sleeve you were already three steps through the door. Into a low, smoke-hazed room packed with the strangest assembly of people you had ever seen in your entire—admittedly very limited—experience of people.
There was a man built like a small mountain, missing most of his teeth, gently carving what appeared to be a delicate wooden hairpin. There was someone in the corner whose face you genuinely could not parse in the low light—too many angles, somehow, like looking at a person through cracked glass—quietly mending a fan.
There were twin brothers arm-wrestling with murderous focus over what turned out, on closer inspection, to be a single dumpling. Someone had a pet weasel draped around their neck like a scarf. Someone else appeared to be knitting something with visibly too many needles. The whole room smelled like woodsmoke and old rice wine and something underneath that you couldn't place and didn't especially want to.
Every single head in the room turned when the door swung shut behind you.
"We're leaving," Martin said, very quietly, into your ear.
"Is that Martin Edwards?" said the mountain-sized man with the hairpin, in a voice that dropped the temperature of the room several degrees.
"No," Martin said.
"That's definitely him," said someone else.
"That is not—okay, fine, hi, yes, hello everyone, lovely establishment, we're just passing through—"
What followed was, by your private accounting, one of the strangest and best evenings of your entire life.
It started with the reward money—someone in the back producing a slightly more accurate wanted poster, teeth and all, and passing it around with escalating commentary, the twins, apparently named Seonghyeon and Juhoon, abandoning their dumpling war entirely to lean over and study Martin's face against the drawing with academic seriousness—and slid, somehow, without your ever quite catching the exact moment it happened, into a full-throated, half-drunk, wildly enthusiastic taunting song, the whole room joining in verse by verse, about every humiliating thing anyone in the establishment had ever heard about Martin Edwards.
The man with the weasel started it, banging a wooden cup against the table for rhythm, and it snowballed from there the way these things always seemed to in a room full of people who'd clearly been waiting years for an excuse.
Oh, the boy who came from nowhere, with his smile and his fine clothes—thinks he's someone, thinks he's special, thinks the whole wide kingdom knows,
sang the man with the weasel, and the twins picked it up without missing a beat, still slightly out of breath from the dumpling war,
but we remember when he begged us for a bowl of rice, a place to sleep—now he struts around in silk scraps calling himself something deep!
"That is one time," Martin said, to no one in particular, to the entire room, to the universe. "That was one specific winter,that is not a fair representative sample of my—"
Nobody was listening. The person with too many needles had abandoned her knitting entirely to conduct the room like an orchestra, and Namjoon's booming baritone came in over the top of everyone else's,
Oh, his teeth are crooked as a fence line, oh, his hair's a rooster's crest, and the last time that he tried to smolder a fisherman's wife laughed so hard she fell in the river and had to be fished out herself —
which was, you gathered, not even remotely true and possibly the single funniest thing anyone had said all evening, judging by the way Martin's whole face went scarlet and the room dissolved into fresh, delighted chaos.
"That last one isn't even true—" Martin tried, over the singing, and got roundly ignored, and you watched, absolutely delighted, from your seat on an overturned barrel, as an entire room of strangers dismantled him verse by gleeful verse, and did not, notably, join in—not because you weren't tempted, but because you found it far funnier to simply watch his face while it happened, the specific, put-upon suffering of a man who could not decide whether to laugh or storm out and kept landing, over and over, on some helpless combination of both.
There was something underneath the teasing, too, that you only half caught—a warmth in it, the particular rough affection of people who'd known someone a long time and had earned the right to be cruel to him in a way that was really just another word for fond.
Namjoon clapped Martin on the shoulder hard enough to stagger him mid-verse and called him boy in a voice gone suddenly soft under all the noise.
You found yourself wondering, not for the first time that night, exactly how long ago it had been that a much younger Martin Edwards had first shown up in a place like this with nowhere else to go, and exactly what had happened to him before that, that a room full of thieves and degenerates had ended up feeling, to him, like the closest thing to family he had.
You filed the thought away to ask about later. You had a feeling it wasn't a question he'd answer easily, or sober, or with an audience.
"You're not even going to defend me," he said to you, mid-chorus, over the noise.
"I'm having a wonderful time."
"That is betrayal, that's what that is—"
"They're not even wrong about the teeth thing."
"They are entirely wrong about the teeth thing, my teeth are fine—"
Somewhere around the fourth verse, the man with the hairpin—whose name, you'd gathered, was something like Namjoon, though it was hard to be sure over the singing—leaned across the table toward you with the particular intensity of someone who had decided you were the most interesting thing in the room.
"You," he pointed. "You have good energy. You've never danced on a table before, have you?"
"I've never been in a room before," you said, honestly, which seemed to delight him even further.
"Well," he said, standing, extending a huge, hairpin-carving hand toward you with genuine ceremony, "there's a first time."
You should have said no. You thought, distantly, of Mother's voice, of every warning about the danger and filth of the outside world, and then you thought about how good it had felt, hours ago, to have your bare feet in a river for the first time in your life, and you took the enormous man's hand and let him haul you, laughing, up onto the low wooden table.
It turned out you were, against every expectation, a genuinely excellent dancer—eighteen years of solitary practice in a round tower room had to be good for something—and the room roared its approval as you spun, skirts of your hanbok flaring out around your ankles, hair flowing, laughing so hard your ribs ached.
Martin stood below the table with an expression that had stopped being annoyed several minutes ago and had settled into something else entirely, something he was clearly trying very hard not to let show on his face and failing at almost completely.
The twins abandoned all pretense of arm-wrestling entirely to bang out a rhythm on the tabletop with the flats of their hands, and the man with the weasel produced, from some hidden pocket, a small reed flute he turned out to play with startling skill, weaving a quick, bright melody underneath the room's continued heckling of Martin, who had by now given up defending his teeth entirely and switched to a full, aggrieved commentary on the general injustice of his evening.
"This is not what I agreed to when I climbed through that window," he called up at you, though he was smiling despite himself, that same helpless, undone expression creeping further across his face with every spin you took. "I signed up for hiding. Quietly. In a tower. Not—this. Not a full musical indictment of my character followed by you personally providing the evening's entertainment."
"You're welcome to join me," you called back, breathless, delighted, and watched with enormous satisfaction as his face went briefly, thoroughly panicked.
"Absolutely not."
"Coward."
"Strategist. There's a meaningful difference between the two—"
Namjoon, still clapping along from below, tipped his head back and roared with laughter loud enough to rattle the paper windows, and even Kono, perched safely on a high shelf out of the way of the chaos, seemed to have relaxed enough to bob his small head faintly along with the flute's rhythm, which you filed away as further evidence, alongside the nose-attack yet to come, that his feelings about Martin were considerably more complicated than his usual sniffing disdain let on.
It was, of course, at that exact moment—you spinning, laughing, glowing in the lanternlight, framed perfectly in the hanok's single paper window—that the door burst open.
Mother stood in the frame, still dressed for travel, face utterly, terribly still, and every single sound in the room died at once.
You would replay the next thirty seconds for years afterward and never fully be able to piece together the order they happened in.
Mother's eyes found yours across the room and something in them cracked open—not relief, you understood, even in the moment, even through the roaring in your ears. Not relief. Fury, dressed up as fear, the way it always was.
"You," Mother said, and her voice, even pitched low, even across a room gone suddenly silent, carried the way it always had, carved out of something colder than the room's actual temperature. She didn't shout. She never shouted; shouting would have meant losing something, and Mother did not lose things, she simply took them back. "Get down from there. Now."
You didn't move. You were aware, distantly, of how strange it was—that a woman who had raised you for eighteen years, whose voice had shaped nearly every rule you'd ever lived by, could stand in a doorway and still make your whole body want to obey before your mind had caught up to deciding whether it should.
"I was just—"
"I don't care what you were just. Look at you. Look at what he's done to you already." Mother's eyes flicked, briefly, murderously, to Martin, standing frozen below the table. "This is exactly what I warned you about. Exactly. One night outside that tower and already you're—" she gestured, sharp and contemptuous, at the whole scene, the hanok, the strangers, your loosened hair, "— this."
"This is the most fun I've had in my entire life," you said, and heard your own voice shake only slightly.
Something in Mother's face did something complicated—not softened, not exactly, but shifted, the fury underneath it briefly, dangerously exposed. "That tower kept you safe."
"That tower kept me contained."
"There she is," said someone—one of the guards behind Mother, you realized, a whole detail of them, come looking for the man on the wanted poster and finding, instead, considerably more than they'd bargained for.
The room dissolved into chaos.
Later, you would understand that half the hanok's patrons had their own reasons to want no part of a run-in with royal guards, and so what happened next was less an act of loyalty to you or Martin specifically and more a matter of shared, practical self-interest—but in the moment it felt like nothing short of a miracle.
The mountain of a man with the hairpin suddenly hauling a table sideways to block the door, the twins scattering rice wine across the floor to send the first guard through it skidding, the person with too many needles somehow managing to tangle an entire coil of yarn around someone's ankles.
"Move, move—" Martin had you by the wrist, hauling you off the table and through a low doorway at the back of the hanok you hadn't even noticed, past a stack of firewood that Namjoon shoved aside with one huge hand to reveal a narrow black gap in the wall, barely wide enough for the two of you, sloping down into the dark.
"In, go, go—" and then you were falling, more than climbing, into a tunnel that smelled of packed earth and old stone, Martin's hand fused to your wrist. Kono was a frantic weight against your collarbone, the sound of shouting and splintering wood fading fast above you as the two of you half-ran, half-stumbled through absolute blackness.
The tunnel was narrower than it had looked from the mouth of it—low enough in places that Martin had to duck, cursing under his breath every time his shoulder caught stone, and twice the passage forked without warning, no light to guide the choice, nothing but Martin's hand tightening around yours and a muttered "left, I think, left—" that you had no way of verifying and every reason to simply trust.
Somewhere behind you, muffled through packed earth, you heard the unmistakable scrape of the firewood being shoved aside a second time, and a voice—not Mother's, one of the guards, sharp and close in a way that made your stomach drop—calling that they'd found the passage.
"Faster," Martin breathed, and you didn't need telling twice, your bare palm scraping stone as you half-felt your way forward, heart slamming so hard you could feel it in your throat. The darkness pressed close enough on every side that for one disorienting stretch you lost all sense of which way was even forward anymore, trusting nothing but the grip of his hand and the sound of his breathing just ahead of you.
A light bobbed somewhere behind—torchlight, catching the tunnel wall in a brief orange smear before you rounded another bend and lost it again—and you thought, with a clarity that cut cleanly through the panic, they're going to catch us, and then, right on its heels, absurdly, I don't even care, this is the most alive I have ever felt in my entire life.
You should have been terrified.
Some distant, sensible part of you understood that you were, technically, terrified—Mother's face, the guards, the very real danger of the last thirty seconds—and yet underneath the fear was something so bright and enormous it eclipsed nearly everything else, something that had been building all day, all evening, every single moment since your feet first touched river water, and it broke open now in the pitch dark of that tunnel as something you could only describe as pure, uncut joy.
You were laughing. You realized it somewhere in the second minute of running, blind, hand in hand with a wanted thief, chased by your own mother's guards, and you were laughing so hard you could barely breathe, and Martin—somewhere ahead of you in the dark, breathless himself—started laughing too, and the two of you burst out of the far end of the tunnel into open moonlit air still half-doubled over, gasping, giddy, alive in a way you didn't have words for yet.
You collapsed against a fallen log at the tunnel's mouth, chest heaving, hair a wild mess around your shoulders, and looked up at the stars—more of them than you'd ever seen from your tower window, spilled out edge to edge across the whole enormous sky—and thought, with a clarity that startled you: this. This is what I wanted.
"You," Martin said, still catching his breath beside you, staring at you like he was seeing something for the first time, "are a genuinely terrifying person."
"I danced on a table."
"You incited a riot."
"I think that was mostly you."
"No, that was—okay, that was a little me, but you—" he gestured at you, helplessly, at your wrecked hair and your flushed face and the grin you couldn't have wiped off if you tried, "—you're supposed to be the sheltered one. The tower girl. And instead you're out here dancing on tables and outrunning royal guards on your first day of freedom like you were made for it."
"Maybe I was."
Something shifted in his face when you said that—quick, unguarded, gone almost before you could catch it—and for a second neither of you said anything at all, just sat there in the moonlight with your shoulders nearly touching, breathing hard, the tunnel's dark mouth still gaping open behind you.
"Princess," he said, quieter now, no teasing in it at all.
"That's not my name."
"I know." He was still looking at you. "Doesn't mean it's not true."
You let the silence sit for a moment, the two of you still catching your breath, the tunnel's dark mouth gaping open behind you like something that had swallowed the version of yourself who'd walked into that hanok an hour ago and spat out someone slightly different.
"Can I ask you something," you said, eventually.
"You're going to anyway."
"That man. Namjoon. He called you boy like he'd known you a long time."
Something in Martin's face shuttered, just slightly, the easy grin dimming a few degrees without fully disappearing. "Long time's a strong way to put it."
"How long?"
He was quiet long enough that you thought he wasn't going to answer at all, picking at a loose thread on his sleeve with more focus than the thread deserved.
"I grew up in an orphanage," he said finally, not looking at you. "Not a nice one. The kind that stops feeding you the second you're old enough to feed yourself, more or less. I left when I was about twelve, lived rough for a while, and that place—that hanok, all those people you just watched sing an entire ballad about my teeth—that was the first place that ever fed me without asking anything back the first time I walked in half-starved and half my current size. So. Long time. Longer than I usually admit to strangers who hit me with singing bowls."
"I'm not a stranger anymore."
"No," he agreed, glancing at you sideways, something almost surprised in it, like he was only just now noticing that fact himself. "I suppose you're not."
"Is that why you steal things? Because nobody ever gave you anything, so you decided to just take it instead?"
"That's very poetic. Did you rehearse that."
"I'm asking a real question."
He exhaled, long, and looked back up at the stars instead of at you. "Something like that, probably. I used to tell myself it was about the money. One good score, enough to disappear somewhere nobody's ever heard the name Martin Edwards, buy myself an island, live like a king who answers to nobody."
He shrugged, and the shrug didn't quite land the way he probably wanted it to. "Lately I've started to suspect it was never really about the money at all. Might've just been about proving I could have something. Anything. That nobody could take away from me the way everything got taken when I was a kid."
You didn't say anything right away. You thought about eighteen years in a round tower, about a woman who called your safety love and meant, underneath it, control, about how you'd never once had anything that was fully, unquestionably yours either—not your name, not your time, not even, until tonight, your own two feet standing wherever they wanted to stand.
"I think," you said slowly, "we might have more in common than you'd expect from a lost girl and a thief."
"You admit it, then. Princess."
"I admit nothing. I'm making an observation about orphaned longing, don't twist it into something else."
He laughed at that—a real laugh, surprised out of him—and some of the tightness went out of his shoulders. "Orphaned longing. You really did rehearse that."
"I did not."
"You absolutely did, you've been sitting on that phrase since the tunnel."
"I have never sat on a phrase in my life," you said, with as much dignity as you could manage, and he laughed again, and the two of you sat there a while longer in the moonlight, not saying much else, letting the quiet settle into something that felt less like the awkward silence of strangers and more like the comfortable kind that came, usually, from people who'd known each other a great deal longer than one very strange day.
The next two days passed the way you imagined a fever might—bright and disorienting and slightly unreal, every hour crowded with more new things than you'd experienced in the previous eighteen years combined.
You learned that Martin snored, faintly, when he slept sitting up against a tree, and that Woojoo had apparently made it his personal mission to step on his boots at every possible opportunity for the rest of what you assumed would be their entire acquaintance.
You learned that Kono had strong opinions about which berries were safe to eat and communicated them via a truly impressive range of disapproving noises. You learned the names of three separate mountain ranges, none of which matched the ones you'd painted from imagination, and found—to your surprise—that you liked the real ones better.
You found a stream on the first afternoon, cold and clear and shallow enough to wade into without fear, and spent nearly an hour there simply standing in it, letting the current pull at the hem of your hanbok, while Martin sat on the bank pretending not to watch you and failing at it almost entirely.
When you splashed him—deliberately, gleefully, without an ounce of remorse—he retaliated with such wounded overcommitment that the two of you ended up soaked through within minutes, both of you laughing too hard to properly aim, Kono shrieking indignantly from a dry rock where he'd wisely relocated at the first sign of hostilities, and Woojoo watching the entire spectacle from the treeline with what you could only describe as profound equine disappointment in both of you.
You learned, too, in quieter moments, the shape of things Martin didn't say out loud.
The way he went very still and unusually gentle whenever you flinched at a loud noise, some old tower-bred instinct you hadn't fully shaken; the way he always, without seeming to think about it, put himself slightly between you and the road whenever another traveler passed.
The way he never once, not even once, asked why a girl who'd apparently never left a tower before knew so much about anatomy or herbs or the exact temperature at which honey turned to poison in the wrong hands, information you'd absorbed purely from Mother's paranoid insistence on preparing you for dangers that had never once, until this week, actually arrived.
You also learned, gradually, and against your own better judgment, that you liked Martin Edwards considerably more than you'd planned to.
He tried the smolder on the second evening, apropos of nothing, while you were both crouched by a small campfire waiting for a rabbit he'd insisted, with wild overconfidence, that he knew how to properly cook.
You caught him doing it out of the corner of your eye first—a slow, deliberate turn of his head toward you, chin dropping slightly, eyes going half-lidded and soft in a way that was clearly meant to be devastating, one eyebrow lifting with the practiced precision of a man who had, you suspected, spent real time perfecting this exact expression in the reflection of still water.
You stared at him.
He held the look.
You kept staring.
He held it a little longer, jaw set, the corner of his mouth doing something you assumed was supposed to read as rakish,and you watched, fascinated, as the muscles around his eye began, very slightly, to twitch with the effort of maintaining it.
"What are you doing," you said finally.
The smolder collapsed instantly, entirely, like a tent losing its center pole. "Nothing."
"You were doing something with your face."
"I was not doing anything with my face, that's just my face, that's how my face looks—"
"Your face looked like you were having some kind of episode."
"That," Martin said, with wounded dignity, turning very deliberately back to the fire, "is called charisma, and it has worked on every single—you know what, never mind. Forget it. Rabbit's probably done."
"Try it again."
He looked at you, suspicious. "Why."
"I want to see if it's worse the second time or if that was just a fluke."
"It is not going to be worse, it is going to be exactly as devastating as the first time, I simply chose not to fully commit to it because I was distracted by the rabbit—"
"Prove it."
He set his jaw, visibly gathering himself, and tried again—chin dropping, eyes half-lidding, that same eyebrow rising with what was clearly meant to be effortless, smoldering confidence—and made it a full three seconds before a piece of ash popped from the fire close enough to his knee that he flinched, hard, breaking the whole expression apart into a startled yelp that had absolutely nothing rakish about it whatsoever.
You laughed so hard you had to set down the stick you'd been roasting your portion of rabbit on, doubling over, and Martin sat there looking deeply, personally betrayed by an ember.
"That doesn't count," he said, with the flat, aggrieved certainty of a man who knew perfectly well that it counted completely. "That was an unrelated incident. The face itself was flawless right up until the interruption."
"I've genuinely never seen anything less flawless in my life."
"You've been alive for four days outside a tower, your knowledge is extremely limited—"
"I've seen Woojoo make a more convincing case for himself."
"Now you're just being cruel."
"I'm being honest," you said, wiping at your eyes, and he huffed, and threw a small twig at you that you batted easily out of the air, and the two of you settled back into an easy quiet, the fire popping softly between you, Woojoo a dark, watchful shape at the edge of the clearing, apparently satisfied enough with the evening's proceedings to have stopped glaring, for once.
The rabbit was not, in fact, done, nor would it ever really achieve a state you could confidently call cooked, and you ate it anyway, sitting close enough to the fire that your shoulders kept brushing, and somewhere in the space of that meal—burnt, underdone, genuinely one of the worst things you'd ever eaten and yet somehow, impossibly, one of your favorite meals of your entire life—you caught yourself watching the firelight move across his face and thinking, with a lurch you weren't at all prepared for, oh. Oh, no.
Kono, curled in your lap, looked up at you with an expression you were beginning to read with alarming fluency, and it said, quite clearly: I saw that. We are going to discuss this later.
"Shut up," you told him, out loud, and Martin glanced over.
"I didn't say anything."
"Not you." You nodded down at Kono, who flicked his tail smugly. "Him."
"That thing has never liked me."
"He doesn't like anyone."
"He likes you."
"I raised him from an egg, that's different."
"Sure." Martin was smiling now, small and real, none of the practiced charm from earlier, just something quieter underneath it. "He's very protective. It's actually a little sweet. In a—weirdly feral, judgmental sort of way."
"Don't call my dragon feral."
"I would never," he said, entirely unconvincingly, and you laughed, and Kono made a noise of deep personal offense, and somewhere above you the first stars were coming out over a sky that would, tomorrow night, on the night of your birthday, fill entirely with gold.
The village you passed through the next morning was small and half-asleep, a scatter of tile-roofed houses along a single dusty road, a well at the center where two old women stood gossiping over their buckets, a market just beginning to set up its stalls in the cool early light—and you stood at the edge of it for a long moment, just looking, before Martin had to physically steer you forward by the shoulder.
"You're doing the thing again."
"I've never seen a market before."
"You've never seen anything before, that's becoming a running theme of this trip." But he said it gently, none of his usual bite in it, and let you drift from stall to stall at your own pace—a woman selling dried persimmons strung on twine, a man with a cart of polished wooden combs, a girl not much younger than you hawking little clay bells that chimed high and sweet when you touched them.
You bought nothing, because you had no money, a fact that seemed to strike Martin as personally intolerable the moment he noticed you eyeing a small painted fan for the third time.
"Here," he said, and before you could stop him he'd produced a string of coins from somewhere inside his jacket—you didn't ask where, and strongly suspected you didn't want to know—and pressed them into the fan-seller's hand with the easy, practiced charm of a man who did this sort of thing often, emerging a moment later to hand you the fan with a small, exaggerated bow. "For the gongju."
"You don't have to do that."
"I know I don't have to. I'm choosing to. There's a difference, I keep telling you this."
You turned the fan over in your hands—painted with a scene of cranes over a lake, delicate, nothing like the practical, sturdy things Mother had ever allowed you—and felt something in your chest go warm and a little overwhelmed, the specific ache of being given something small and unnecessary and entirely, purely kind.
"Thank you," you said, and meant it more than the words could really carry.
"Don't get used to it," Martin said, though his ears had gone faintly pink again, the way they did whenever you caught him being sincere. "I have a reputation to maintain. Ruthless. Self-interested. Very hard to impress."
"You just bought a stranger a fan."
"I bought you a fan, that's different, you're not—" he seemed to catch himself, some thought crossing his face he clearly hadn't meant to say out loud, and cleared his throat instead. "Anyway. We should keep moving. Overlook's still a few hours off, and I'd like to actually get you there with enough daylight to see the view properly."
You let him change the subject, mostly because you weren't sure you were ready either to examine what he'd almost said, but you tucked the fan carefully into your sleeve, next to Kono, who eyed it with mild suspicion before apparently deciding it posed no threat to his position and settling back down.
The two of you left the village with Woojoo laden down, somewhat improbably, with a small sack of persimmons Martin had also bought—"for the horse," he'd said, unconvincingly, though you both knew perfectly well who was going to end up eating most of them—and walked the rest of the morning in an easy, comfortable quiet, broken only occasionally by Martin pointing out landmarks, or you asking questions about the world that he answered, more and more, without any of the teasing he'd led with the day before.
"Can I ask you something," you said, somewhere around midday, watching the road unspool ahead of you toward hills that were, slowly, beginning to look less like mountains and more like the gentler rise of land near a coast.
"You keep asking me that like I have a choice."
"Why haven't you left? You could've, a dozen times by now. You've got your satchel, you've got a truce with Woojoo, you could've slipped off in the night and I'd never have caught you."
He was quiet for a moment, watching the road rather than you. "I've thought about it."
"And?"
"And I keep not doing it," he said, simply, like the answer surprised him as much as it seemed to surprise you. "Which is new. Historically I'm very good at leaving. It's sort of my whole thing. Get in, get what I need, get out before anyone gets attached, especially me." He glanced sideways at you, something wry and a little helpless in it. "You're making that considerably more difficult than usual, gongju."
You didn't have a response for that—not one you trusted yourself to say out loud, anyway—so you reached over instead and took his hand, the way you had at the tunnel's mouth, easy and instinctive, and he let you, lacing his fingers through yours without missing a step, and the two of you walked the rest of the afternoon that way, hands linked, saying nothing else about it at all.
You reached the overlook above the harbor just as the sun was beginning its long slide toward the water, the whole kingdom spread out below you in a way you'd only ever seen painted, and painted badly, from your own imagination—the palace roofs catching the last light, the sea beyond the harbor gone molten copper, boats coming in for evening with their sails full and orange.
"There it is," Martin said, quieter than you'd heard him yet, standing close beside you at the edge of the outlook. "Home of your mysterious lantern people."
You didn't answer right away. You were looking at the palace—the actual palace, not the vague shape you'd always imagined from your tower window, but real, close enough now to make out individual roof tiles, individual windows catching fire in the sunset—and something in your chest was doing something you didn't entirely have language for. A pull. An ache, low and old, like a bruise you hadn't known was there until someone pressed it.
"You okay?" Martin asked.
"I don't know," you said, honestly. "It feels like—" you struggled for it, and gave up trying to find the exact shape of the feeling, settling instead for the closest true thing you had. "It feels like coming home to a place I've never been."
He was quiet for a moment, watching you rather than the view.
"In all honesty," he said, "I think you're going to like it there. Whatever it turns out to be, wherever it turns out you're from. I think the whole world's better with you loose in it, gongju. Bowl and all."
You looked at him with the last of the sunset gold across his face, that ridiculous, sincere, unguarded expression he clearly hadn't meant to let you see—and you thought about tunnels and rivers and burnt rabbit and a hanok full of strangers singing about his teeth, and you thought, with the same clarity you'd had at the mouth of that tunnel two nights ago: this. I want this. Whatever this is turning into, I want it.
"Come on," you said instead, because you weren't brave enough yet to say the other thing, and reached for his hand, lacing your fingers through his like it was the easiest, most obvious motion in the world. "There's a boat down there with our name on it. I have a light show to see."
Below you, the first lanterns of the evening were already beginning to lift off the water, small and gold and multiplying, rising slow and steady into a sky gone the deep, glowing blue of early dark—and somewhere out past the harbor, thousands more were waiting to join them, waiting, though you didn't know it yet, for you.
Martin's hand tightened around yours.
"After you, princess," he said, and the two of you started down the hill together, toward the water, toward the light.
The boat Martin found—borrowed, he insisted, with a straight face that fooled absolutely no one, from a dock crowded with a dozen identical little wooden craft, all of them clearly rented out for exactly this evening, exactly this purpose—was small and low and smelled faintly of fish, and rocked alarmingly when you first climbed in, enough that you grabbed for his arm and he grabbed for the side of the boat and Kono, riding in your collar, made a noise of profound and specific betrayal at being jostled.
"Careful," Martin said, steadying you with a hand at your waist that lingered maybe half a second longer than strictly necessary, and you were fairly sure, from the way his ears had gone slightly pink, that he'd noticed it too.
Woojoo, denied entry to the boat on account of being an entire horse, watched the proceedings from the dock with an expression of deep personal injury, and had to be bribed with the promise of an extra ration of feed before he'd agree to wait, tail swishing, ears pinned, radiating the specific fury of a creature left behind on the one night that mattered.
"He'll forgive you eventually," you said, as Martin pushed off from the dock with a long oar, the little boat gliding out onto water gone glassy and still with the coming dark.
"He has never forgiven me for anything in his entire life. I stole an apple from his feed bag once, two years ago, and I am fairly sure he still brings it up in whatever passes for a horse's internal monologue."
"Poetic justice."
"You're supposed to be on my side."
"I'm on Kono's side. And apparently Woojoo's. You seem to have accumulated a great many enemies for one man."
"They're not enemies," Martin said, settling the oar and letting the boat drift, "they're—creatures with very high standards who happen to have chosen me as their personal project. It's a compliment, really, if you think about it correctly."
"I don't think that's what a compliment is."
"You'll come around."
The kingdom had gone properly dark behind you now, the palace a black shape against a sky just beginning to prickle with stars, and the harbor water held every scattered lantern-light in perfect, trembling reflection, so that it felt, floating there, like you were suspended between two skies—one above, one below, and you in the exact still center of both.
"It's almost time," you said, quiet, watching the palace. Something in your chest had gone tight and expectant, the same old ache from the overlook, except closer now, close enough that you thought you might be able to name it if you sat with it a little longer.
Martin didn't say anything. He'd gone still too, watching you rather than the palace, in a way you were becoming increasingly, helplessly aware of.
And then the first note sounded—a low horn, from somewhere within the palace walls, carrying clean and mournful across the water—and the sky above the towers began, all at once, to fill with gold.
all those days, watching from the windows
You had watched this exact sight, every year of your life, from a single round window a mile up a mountainside, small and distant and never once close enough to feel the heat of the paper or hear the soft rush of a thousand wicks catching flame at once. You had painted it, badly, from memory, over and over, never quite able to get the specific quality of the light right, the way it wasn't quite gold and wasn't quite orange but some living color in between, restless, warm, endlessly multiplying.
Nothing you had ever painted came close.
now i'm here, blinking in the starlight
now i'm here, suddenly i see
standing here
The lanterns rose in waves, not all at once but in long, cascading pulses—a hundred, then another hundred, then more than you could count, drifting up from courtyards and rooftops and the decks of boats all across the harbor, joining together into a slow, vast river of light climbing the dark sky. The water around your little boat filled with their reflections until it was impossible to say, looking down, where the true lanterns ended and the false ones began—gold above you, gold below you, and you sitting in the very middle of it with your breath caught somewhere behind your ribs.
"Oh," you said, which was not remotely adequate to the size of what you were feeling, but was all you had.
"Yeah," Martin said, softly, and when you looked over at him he wasn't watching the lanterns at all. He was watching you, your face lit gold and trembling with reflected light, your eyes wide and wet in a way you hadn't quite noticed until you felt the first tear slip free and had to laugh, embarrassed, wiping at it with the back of your wrist.
"I've waited my whole life for this."
"I know."
"I didn't even know what I was waiting for. I just knew that every year, this light showed up in the sky, and something in me hurt, every time, and I never understood why, and now I'm sitting here and I still don't fully understand why except that it feels like—" you struggled for it again, the same struggle as the overlook, except this time you didn't let yourself give up on finding the words.
and the world has somehow shifted.
"It feels like they were waiting for someone. And some enormous, stupid, hopeful part of me has always believed, without any evidence at all, that the someone was me."
Martin was quiet for a long moment, and when you glanced at him his expression had gone soft and unguarded in a way you'd only caught glimpses of before—at the campfire, at the mouth of the tunnel, never allowed to sit still on his face long enough for you to really look at it.
"For what it's worth," he said, "I think it probably was."
all at once, everything looks different... now that i see you.
Reaching into his satchel, he drew out two lanterns—small, folded flat, clearly purchased at some point during the walk down from the overlook, though you hadn't noticed him buying them, too absorbed in the view—and passed one across to you, along with a little punk of glowing incense to light the wick.
"I got us our own," he said, almost shy about it, which did not suit him at all and which you found, helplessly, endearing anyway. "Figured you shouldn't have to just watch other people's."
Your hands weren't quite steady as you unfolded the paper frame and touched the flame to the wick, the lantern blooming gold between your palms, warm and alive, straining gently upward the way they all did, wanting badly to join the great river of light rising above you.
"Make a wish," Martin said. "Isn't that the tradition? Birthday girl gets a wish."
You looked at him, sharp. "I never told you it was my birthday."
He had the grace, at least, to look faintly caught out. "You didn't have to. Lost princess, mysterious lantern obsession, refuses to give her real name, gets misty over a light show that happens on one specific night of the year—I put it together somewhere around the singing-bowl incident, honestly."
"You've known this whole time."
"I've suspected this whole time. There's a difference. I was being polite about it."
"You've been calling me gongju for two days as a joke."
"I've been calling you gongju for two days because I was fairly confident, and also because it made you make that specific face you're making right now, which I happen to enjoy a great deal." He nodded down at the lantern cupped in your hands, steering neatly away from the moment before you could examine it too closely. "Make your wish, princess. Before it burns your fingers."
You held the lantern a moment longer, warm light spilling up between your hands onto your face, and thought—not about the kingdom below, not even about the parents you didn't yet know you had, waiting somewhere in that dark palace with a hope they'd never once let themselves fully abandon. But about the man sitting across from you in a stolen boat, teeth genuinely, infuriatingly perfect, watching you like you were the only light on the entire water worth looking at.
You didn't say the wish out loud. But you let it go anyway, watched it rise and catch the current of wind that carried it up to join the thousands of others, and when you looked back down, Martin was still watching you, close enough now that you could count, if you'd wanted to, every one of his eyelashes.
"Your turn," you said, a little breathless.
He lit his own lantern, let it rise, and didn't look away from you while he did it—no smolder this time, none of the careful, practiced charm from the campfire that had made you laugh at him. Just him, looking at you, plain and raw and slightly disbelieving of his own luck Like a man who'd broken into a random tower to hide from two very angry brothers and found, instead of an empty room, the entire rest of his life.
"I'm not going to tell you what I wished for," he said, "but I will say it involves considerably less running from armed men than my last several wishes."
"That's a low bar."
"I'm a man of variety."
You laughed—you couldn't help it, the sound coming out watery and warm—and somewhere in the laugh, without either of you quite deciding to, the space between you closed, his hand finding yours again in the bottom of the boat, and you found yourself leaning in, slow, the way the whole evening had been slow and inevitable since the moment he tumbled through your window, and he leaned in too, and for one full suspended second, gold light drifting down all around you like something out of a legend, you thought—this. This is the thing I've been aching for every single year I watched it from too far away.
Kono chose that exact moment to launch himself, with great personal indignation, off your shoulder and directly onto the bridge of Martin's nose.
"Ow—" Martin reeled back, more startled than hurt, batting uselessly at the small dragon now clinging to his face with all four clawed feet and radiating profound betrayal. "Your dragon just—he attacked me, did you see that, he full-on—"
"He's protective," you said, laughing so hard you had to hold the sides of the boat to keep from tipping, tears mixing with the ones already on your face, watching Kono glare down at Martin from the very tip of his nose like a small, furious guardian spirit who had absolutely no intention of allowing anything interesting to happen without express supervision.
"He is feral, is what he is—"
"He likes you," you said, wiping your eyes, still laughing. "This is how he shows it. Trust me. If he actually hated you, you'd know."
"This does not feel like liking, this feels like an assassination attempt—"
Kono flicked his tail, unbothered, and settled himself with great satisfaction directly between the two of you on the boat's narrow bench, clearly intending to remain there for the foreseeable future, a small, smug, iridescent chaperone against a sky still falling gold, lantern light rippling gently across the water in every direction, thousands of tiny floating wishes drifting home at last to a girl who'd spent eighteen years wondering, in the quiet dark of a tower window, whether anyone out there was waiting for her.
They had been. All along. And now, impossibly, so was he.
You looked at Martin over the top of Kono's indignant, iridescent head, both of you still laughing, both of you still close enough to feel the warmth radiating off each other in the cooling night air, and you thought that whatever happened next. Whatever the palace held, whatever answers waited for you at the bottom of that harbor, whatever Mother would do when she finally caught up to you, because you had no illusions that she wouldn't—this part, right here, the boat and the gold light and the ridiculous, wounded dragon and the ridiculous, wonderful man across from you, was a part you were never, ever going to forget.
"Happy birthday, gongju," Martin said, quiet, over the top of a still-hissing Kono, and you thought, looking at him, that for the first time in your entire life, you actually believed it.
Later—much later, after the last of the lanterns had burned low and drifted, spent, back down toward the water, after Woojoo had forgiven you both just enough to let Martin scratch behind his ears without incident, after Kono had finally abandoned his post between you to curl up, smug and victorious, in the fold of your sleeve—you rowed the little boat back toward shore in a silence that wasn't empty at all. It was full instead of everything neither of you had quite said yet, the two of you sitting close enough that your knees kept knocking together with every small motion of the water.
You didn't know yet what waited for you at the top of that hill—what the palace would say when a girl with hair like sunlight walked through its gates for the first time in eighteen years, what Mother would do when she finally caught up to the two of you, what it would cost, in the end, to keep any of this. You only knew that you didn't want the night to be over, that some small, stubborn, hopeful part of you had already decided, somewhere between the singing bowl and the lantern light, that whatever came next, you wanted to face it with your hand in his.
"What happens now?" you asked, quiet, as the shore came slowly closer, torchlight from the docks beginning to flicker gold across the water to meet you.
Martin was quiet for a moment, considering the question with more weight than his usual answers ever carried.
"I don't know," he admitted, finally. "I've never actually planned past the running-away part before. Usually there isn't a now. There's just the next place to be, and the next, and I never stick around long enough to find out what comes after."
"And this time?"
He looked at you, truly and deeply gazed. It was the way he had at the overlook, at the tunnel's mouth, at every unguarded moment he'd let slip through the cracks of his own careful charm over the past four days—and something in his face settled, like a decision he'd already made without quite admitting it to himself.
"This time," he hummed, "I think I'd like to find out."
The boat bumped gently against the dock, and somewhere above you, one last, late lantern rose alone into the dark, gold and small and stubborn, chasing after all the others that had gone before it—and you thought, watching it go, that it looked exactly like hope.
Morning came in gray and soft, mist lying low over the harbor the way it did most mornings this close to the water, and you woke tucked against the base of a fishing boat with Kono curled warm against your throat and Martin already awake beside you, satchel across his shoulder, watching the fog with an expression you didn't much care for.
"You're making a weird face," you said, sitting up, voice still thick with sleep. "This like... stiff, deciding-something face."
"I don't have a stiff, deciding-something face."
"You absolutely do. You had it right before you climbed through my window and you have it right now."
He exhaled, and some of the careful blankness dropped away, replaced by something more honest—nervous, almost, in a way that didn't suit him nearly as well as the sarcasm usually did. "I want to do this properly. Whatever this is turning into." He nodded down at the satchel, at the unmistakable shape of the crown inside it. "I know people who'll take this off my hands for real money, enough that neither of us has to run from anything ever again. I want to trade it, clean, and come back for you, and then—I don't know. Figure out the rest. Together, if you'll have me."
"You could just give it back."
"I could," he agreed, "and normally I'd have laughed you out of the harbor for suggesting it. But I'm finding, lately, that a lot of things that used to make sense don't anymore, and a lot of things I never used to consider are starting to sound like exactly what I want." He reached out, tucked a loose strand of hair back from your face, unbearably gentle about it. "Wait for me here. I won't be long."
"You'd better not be."
"Princess." He said it soft, like a promise rather than a joke, and pressed one quick, warm kiss to your forehead before you could think of anything clever enough to say back. "I'll be back before the fog burns off. I swear it."
You watched him go, satchel bouncing against his hip, Woojoo trailing reluctantly after him with the particular resigned loyalty of a creature who'd decided, against every instinct, to trust his rider one more time—and you sat there on the damp dock with Kono in your lap, watching the mist swallow him up, and told yourself, firmly, that the ache in your chest was nothing. Just morning cold. Just nerves. Nothing at all like fear.
The fog thickened instead of burning off, and the longer you waited the worse the ache in your chest got, until you couldn't sit still any longer and started pacing the dock's edge, Kono clinging tight to your shoulder, both of you straining to hear anything at all beyond the slow slap of water against the pilings.
You heard voices first. They were low and harsh, more than one man, coming from somewhere off along the tree line past the last of the boats—and against every ounce of good sense you had left, you went toward them instead of away.
You found the clearing just past the fog's thickest bank, and what you found there stopped your heart cold: Martin on his knees in the mud, satchel gone, two enormous men standing over him—one you'd recognize instantly from the way Martin had gone rigid at the mere mention of them days ago, though you'd never learned their names until this moment.
Sunghoon. Jay. Buff, scarred, furious, and entirely unbothered by the fact that Martin was bleeding from a split lip and still trying, uselessly, to talk his way out.
"You cut us out," Sunghoon was saying, low and dangerous. "Two years of work, and you cut us out for a girl."
"It wasn't like that—"
"Save it." Jay's boot connected with Martin's ribs, and you had to bite down hard on your own hand to keep from crying out. "We'll take the crown. And we'll take the reward for you too. Two birds."
And then, from somewhere behind them, a voice you knew better than your own heartbeat, cool and pleasant and utterly without mercy.
"Gentlemen," Mother said, stepping out of the mist like she'd been waiting there all along, "I believe I can make this considerably more profitable for everyone involved."
You didn't understand, in the moment, what you were watching—only that Mother produced a small purse of coin, that Sunghoon and Jay's fury seemed to shift, calculating, weighing a better offer, that Martin's face went from pained to something close to horrified the second he understood what was happening.
"Don't," he said, to Mother, voice raw. "Whatever you're planning—leave her out of it. She doesn't have to be part of this."
"She has always been part of this," Mother said, almost gently, crouching down to his level with the particular tenderness she'd once reserved, you realized with a sick lurch, entirely for you. "You simply made the mistake of thinking you'd earned a say in it."
You didn't see exactly what happened next—a scuffle, Martin shouting your name once, sharp and desperate, before something struck him and the sound cut off—because Mother had already turned, unerringly, toward the tree line where you stood frozen, and her eyes found yours through the fog with a precision that told you she'd known exactly where you were the entire time.
"There you are," she said, soft, and something about the softness was so much worse than the fury from the hanok. "Come along, darling. I think it's well past time we had a talk."
You ran. You didn't get far.
By the time the fog burned off, you were sitting in the belly of a small, windowless room that smelled of salt and old rope—not the tower, you understood dimly, some hidden place along the coast Mother had clearly kept in reserve for exactly this kind of contingency—wrists bound loosely, more out of formality than real restraint, because Mother had never needed rope to keep you where she wanted you. She'd only ever needed your own heart, turned carefully against itself.
"He left, you know," she said, arranging herself on the room's single stool with the composure of a woman discussing the weather. "The moment those men offered him a way out, he took it. The crown. The reward money for turning you in besides, I'd imagine—a tidy sum for very little effort." She sighed, and it might almost have sounded sympathetic, if you hadn't spent eighteen years learning exactly how much genuine feeling lived underneath that particular sigh. "I saw the ship myself. Sailing out with the morning tide. I'm so sorry, darling. I did try to warn you what the world was like."
"You're lying."
"Am I?" She tilted her head, and something flickered behind her eyes—not doubt, never doubt, but the faint, familiar satisfaction of a woman watching a plan click neatly into place. "You've known him four days. I've kept you safe for eighteen years. Which of us, do you truly think, has earned your trust?"
You wanted, badly, to believe it was a lie—every instinct in your chest screamed that it was—and yet some old, deep, tower-shaped part of you, the part that had spent a lifetime being told the world was cruel and that Mother alone could be counted on, curled up small and aching and terribly, terribly willing to believe her anyway. That was the cruelest part of it. Not the lie itself, but how easily, after everything, it still found purchase.
"I want to go home," Mother said, standing, brushing invisible dust from her skirts. "Not the tower—somewhere new, somewhere he'll never think to look, somewhere I can keep you properly this time. You'll thank me for it, eventually. You always do."
You didn't answer. You sat very still in the dim, salt-smelling dark, and thought about a boat full of lantern light, and a man who'd bought you a fan for no reason at all, and a dragon who'd bitten his nose out of pure, ridiculous devotion—and something in you, quiet but absolutely unshakeable, refused, even now, even with the doubt gnawing at your ribs, to fully believe the story Mother was selling.
Martin woke in a cell.
His head throbbed, his ribs ached with every breath, and it took him several long, disoriented minutes to piece together that the last thing he remembered—Mother's voice, your name torn out of his throat, the world going dark—had apparently ended with him here, iron bars, straw floor, and a guard outside who addressed him, with unmistakable relish, by the exact reward figure printed on his wanted poster.
"They're saying you kidnapped a girl," the guard said, almost cheerful about it. "Some noble's daughter. Word is the hanging's set for sundown. Shame about the teeth, by the way—heard the sketch was more flattering than the real thing."
"I did not kidnap anyone," Martin gritted, with the flat, exhausted fury of a man repeating himself for the fifth time, "and my teeth are fine—" and then stopped, because none of that mattered even slightly next to the one thought currently eclipsing everything else in his skull: she thinks I left her.
He didn't remember much of what happened after that—only that somewhere past midnight, a small, furious, iridescent shape came skittering through the cell's single high window, having tracked him across half the coastline on nothing but sheer stubborn will. Not long after, the cell door groaned open from the outside to reveal Namjoon's enormous, grinning face, flanked by the twins, the man with the weasel, and, filling the corridor behind them with visible, righteous indignation, one extremely large, extremely unimpressed horse.
"Heard you got yourself in trouble," Namjoon said. "Figured we'd come see if the rumors about your teeth were the only thing worth breaking you out for."
"I could kiss every single one of you," Martin said, already moving.
"Please don't," said one of the twins, Juhoon. "We heard about the fisherman's wife."
He found you by the coast road at dusk, Mother's carriage rattling ahead through the last of the fading light, and there was no time for a plan, no time for anything except Woojoo breaking into a dead run with Martin bent low over his neck and Kono clinging, white-knuckled, to his collar, the whole ragged, impossible rescue party thundering after a carriage carrying away the only thing that had ever made the running feel like it was going somewhere.
He caught them at the cliff road, where the trees gave way to open sky and the sea spread out gray and endless below, and Mother, seeing him, didn't so much as flinch.
"Persistent," she said, stepping down from the carriage alone, something cold and final settling into her face. "I did wonder if you'd manage it."
"Let her go."
"She's not yours to demand things about." Mother's eyes flicked past him, to where you'd appeared in the carriage doorway. His wrists finally free, staring at Martin like you couldn't quite trust the sight of him—bruised, breathless, undeniably, impossibly there. "Tell him, darling. Tell him what you told me. That you understand now. That the world outside only ever takes."
"I told you I didn't believe you," you said, voice shaking but clear, stepping down onto the road. "I still don't."
Something in Mother's composure cracked, just slightly, just enough. "You would choose him. After everything I've given you. Everything I've sacrificed."
"You didn't give me anything," you said, and the words came out steadier than you felt, eighteen years of swallowed truth finally finding air. "You took me. There's a difference. I've only just learned it, but I've learned it completely."
What happened next happened fast, and badly, the way real danger always does—Mother lunging, a blade you hadn't seen catching the last of the light, Martin throwing himself between the two of you with no more thought than he'd given anything else reckless and right over the past four days, and then the sharp, terrible sound of metal finding flesh, and Martin going down hard onto the cliff road with blood already spreading dark across his side.
"Martin—"
"I'm fine," he said, which was so obviously, catastrophically untrue that you didn't even bother arguing, dropping to your knees beside him, hands already pressing hard against the wound, some old instinct screaming at you to sing, sing the old words, the ones Mother used every time she needed the magic, and you opened your mouth to do exactly that—
"Don't," Martin said, gripping your wrist with what strength he had left, eyes finding yours through the pain with a clarity that cut straight through everything else. "If you do that—if you use it now—she'll never let either of us go. Not really. Not ever. She'll just keep finding a reason to need you broken enough to fix."
"I can't just let you—"
"You can," he said, "trust me, princess, please—" and reached, with the last of his strength, for the small blade at his own belt, the one he'd used to fillet fish and cut rope and once, memorably, threaten a very rude tax collector, and before you fully understood what he meant to do, he'd taken hold of your long braid and cut, clean through, several feet of gold-shot hair falling away into the dirt at once, severed for good.
The change was immediate and terrible. The cut length dulled from gold to something ordinary and plain even as it fell, and Mother—mid-motion, reaching for you, for the hair, for the magic she'd spent a hundred years stealing—made a sound you would never, for the rest of your life, be able to fully forget.
Her hands went first, skin creasing and thinning before your eyes, decades collapsing into her all at once, unstoppable now that the last thread keeping her young had been severed for good.
She staggered back toward the cliff's edge, aged a hundred years in the space of ten seconds, and the wind off the sea did the rest, catching what was left of her and scattering it, gray and weightless, out over the water until there was nothing left standing on the road at all.
You didn't watch it finish. You were already turned back to Martin, hands shaking, pressing uselessly against a wound that wasn't healing, that had no reason left to heal, because the magic that could have done it lay scattered in cut hair and ash somewhere behind you.
"Hey," Martin said, voice going thin, "hey—don't do that face, the face you're doing—"
"Don't you dare," you said, furious and breaking all at once. "Don't you dare talk to me about faces right now—"
"I'd do it again," he said, eyes already starting to lose their focus, "every time, exactly the same, I just want you to know that, in case I don't get to—"
"You're not finishing that sentence."
He smiled anyway, small and lopsided, teeth perfectly, infuriatingly straight even now, and his eyes slid shut.
You didn't remember deciding to cry. You only remembered the tears coming, hot and helpless, one falling from your cheek straight onto the wound at his side—and the low, golden hum that followed, faint but unmistakable, the last living echo of magic that had never fully left you even with the hair gone, because it had never really lived in the hair at all. It had always been in you.
The wound closed. Color came back into his face all at once, like a held breath finally released, and his eyes opened, blinking up at you in dazed, disbelieving confusion.
"You're supposed to be dead," you told him, half laughing, half sobbing, hands still shaking as you cradled his face.
"Rude," he said, voice cracked but unmistakably, wonderfully himself, "extremely rude, waking a man up just to insult him—"
You didn't let him finish that sentence.
You kissed him before you'd fully decided to, both hands still fisted in the collar of his shirt where you'd been holding him together only seconds before, and it wasn't gentle — you didn't have gentle left in you, not after watching the color drain out of his face, not after the terrible, endless second where you'd genuinely believed you were about to lose him on a cliff road with the sea crashing below and no way left to fix it. It was too much all at once, everything you hadn't let yourself say out loud over four impossible days crashing out through your mouth against his instead — the fear, still shaking through your hands where they'd found his jaw; the relief, hot and overwhelming, closing your throat; the something else underneath both of those that you'd been carefully not naming since the moment he tumbled through your window and hadn't stopped, apparently, not even once, not even now.
Martin made a low, startled sound against your mouth — surprise, mostly, and then something that wasn't surprise at all — and his hand came up to cradle the back of your head, careful even now, even freshly healed and half out of his mind with everything that had just happened, fingers threading into what was left of your hair like he needed the proof of it, needed to know you were real and warm and still here under his hands. You felt him breathe out, shaky, against you, felt the last of the tension bleed out of his shoulders the way it never quite had, not fully, not once in the entire time you'd known him.
"You scared me," you said, when you finally, barely, pulled back far enough to speak, forehead pressed to his, both of you still breathing like you'd run the whole cliff road twice over. "You scared me, don't you dare ever do that again—"
"No promises," he murmured, and you could feel him smiling against your mouth, that same infuriating, undimmed confidence creeping back in even now, even bloodied, even seconds from death and back again. "Apparently I throw myself in front of knives for you now. New personality trait. Very inconvenient."
"Martin."
"I mean it, though." His thumb traced along your jaw, slow, and when you met his eyes there was nothing left of the joke in them at all, just something steady and stripped bare, more honest than anything he'd let you see across four days of careful, practiced charm. "I'd do it again. Every single time, exactly the same, no hesitation, and I need you to actually hear that, not just — not just as something I say to be dramatic on a cliff. I mean it."
"I heard you the first time. Right before you nearly died proving it."
"Poor timing, historically my specialty," he agreed, and kissed you again before you could argue, slower this time, both of you steadier now, no longer shaking quite so hard, just close and warm and unwilling, for a long moment, to be anything but exactly where you were—his hand still tangled in your hair, yours still fisted in his ruined, blood-stained shirt, the whole world narrowed down to the small distance between your mouths and the specific, dizzying fact that he was alive to kiss you back.
Somewhere nearby, Kono shrieked with pure, unrestrained delight, launching himself in a small iridescent blur to land on Martin's shoulder and chirp something that sounded, for the first time in their entire acquaintance, like approval rather than threat.
Woojoo, standing a few respectful paces off, huffed out a long breath through his nose and, for once in his entire life, looked almost pleased about something Martin had done—ears forward, head tossed once as if in reluctant, grudging blessing, the closest thing to a truce he'd ever offered.
You laughed, breathless and wet-eyed, breaking the kiss just far enough to rest your forehead against his again. "Even Kono's happy. Do you understand how significant that is? He's never once been happy about you."
"I earned it," Martin said, hoarse, still smiling like he couldn't quite stop. "Nearly dying for you apparently buys a man some goodwill, even from a judgmental little dragon who's hated me since the moment I fell through a window."
"Don't get used to it."
"Too late," he said, and pulled you back in before you could answer, no urgency left in it now, just something slow and certain and entirely unhurried, the two of you kissing on a cliff road at dawn like you had all the time in the world left to spend exactly like this.
The palace gates opened at dawn to a girl with short, plain, ordinary hair and a face the king recognized, the moment he saw it. With a certainty that needed no proof at all—some things a parent simply knows, in the body, before the mind has caught up to explaining why.
The queen reached you first, running down the palace steps in a way queens were certainly not supposed to run, and you didn't need eighteen years of stolen memory to understand, the instant her arms closed around you, exactly what you'd been missing every single night you'd watched those lanterns from too far away.
There was a great deal to explain, after—a kingdom's worth of grief to untangle. A name to relearn that had been yours all along, a wanted man's record to quietly, thoroughly clear, which the king accomplished within the hour with the particular efficiency of a father who had just gotten his daughter back and had no patience left for bureaucratic nonsense.
Martin stood through most of it looking deeply, uncharacteristically nervous, hands shoved in his pockets, until the king finally turned to him and said, simply, "You brought her home," and something in Martin's whole posture eased for what looked like the first time in his entire life.
Kono took up permanent residence on the windowsill of your new rooms, deeply unimpressed by the palace's excessive number of servants and considerably more impressed by the quality of the kitchen scraps. Woojoo was given, over Martin's strenuous objections, an official post as a royal guard's mount, a position he apparently found so satisfying that his campaign of vengeful boot-stepping slowed, within a few months, to something almost like fondness.
Namjoon and the rest of the hanok's strange, loyal patrons were invited, formally, to the palace for the next year's lantern festival, and caused, by every account, an enormous and thoroughly enjoyable scandal.
And every year after that, on the anniversary of the night a stranger fell through a tower window and a girl hit him with a singing bowl, the two of you took a small boat out onto the harbor when the lanterns rose. They were gold and endless, filling the sky the way they always had—except now, for the first time in either of your lives, you watched them from exactly where you were always meant to be.
"Happy anniversary, my gongju," Martin said, every single year, and every single year, you believed him a little more.
if she's here
it's crystal clear
i'm where i'm meant to go
sorry idk if im allowed to send in msgs even if it's not a request, I just wanted to say I just discovered your blog and THANK YOU FOR HAVING MORALS!!
The amount of cortis fan blogs I've found on here, gotten excited, and then found out they were writing smut for all the members is insane.
It genuinely blows me how people can excuse it with "they're 18", LIKE YALL COULDNT WAITTTT
Mind you, martin literally turned 18 barely 4 months ago its so creepy how people couldn't wait for them to turn "legal" so they can write smut, its so gross. (And lowks in my opinion, objectifying)
Anyways, really sorry for the rant 😓😓 but I just wanted to say that rq 🙇🏽♀️ thank u for being cool, and ur work is supa goated 🥹🥹
you are allowed to send in messages!! i love hearing about any stories or rants you guys have<3
YOU ARE SO WELCOME!!! unfortunately, not many people have those nowadays..
i also encounter this problem, i find some really cute keonho fluff, go to the account to hopefully see more, only to find threesomes between keonho, seonghyeon, and juhoon...... it's disgusting
i think that the weirdos argument is that 'they're 18 here in the US (or etc.), so they're legal!!!' .... so no. they might be legal here in the US or anywhere else, but in korea, they ARENT 19. and even then, you shouldn't be writing smut for them, they are FRESHLY of age. and honestly if you do, you're just as much of a predator as they are... just waiting to pounce on them 💔💔
don't be sorry for sharing!! this is a really infuriating topic that we shouldn't even have to talk about.
you are literally the sweetest anon, have an amazing day/night, and don't be afraid to drop some more messages here too!! 🤍
synopsis: martin does nothing but pass notes in class to cure his boredom, soon one day he believes he has found his longtime pen pal. or the one where martin is down bad…
genre: fake texts, one shot au, non!idols, student au, fluff
♯ __┆⭑ DIRTY MONEY 💵 James thinks you look even prettier with his pre-cum on your lips. That’s it .ᐟ.ᐟ.ᐟ
─── No further synopsis for drabbles.
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⋆ | [💵] | ໒꒰՞ ܸ. .ܸ ꒱ᩙა. Alpha! Zhao Yufan x Fem!R𝖾𝖺𝖽𝖾𝗋 ── mature, mdni, omega x alpha, omega verse, privileged fem reader, lwky bimbo reader, hyperfem reader, dubcon! (under biological influence), degradation, dirty talk, swearing, praise kink, overstimulation, knotting, mirror sex, explicit sexual content, angst-ish at the start, pre-cum as lipgloss. That’s it. Read at your own discretion. it's really tame so you'll be fine.
Word count: 2.2k
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WAZI🦨: wrote this for Riki on another blog, felt like making it for James too. Especially because I haven’t posted anything on here in a while.
James heard about you before he ever set eyes on you. A snickering drunk alpha, tugging at his patience, thin darkened lips slurring mentions of a "delicate lil' thang caught up at GAKE with the gang. Word is she dropping stacks at yo charity." Enraged was an understatement; there's not a single word capable of describing just how much your nosy behavior truly irks him.
This little stunt you pulled an example of just that. Inadvertently making yourself a target for the nastiest of scum, while simultaneously letting people in town know that James has a weak spot with deep pockets.
There's something seriously wrong with you that he's yet to figure out.
How can someone be so naive? What's your problem? What are you looking for? Always sticking your nose in his business, without so much as a clue of what that business even is.
The young alpha finds you two blocks away, still in these shady parts of town, eyes trained to the GPS on your phone, smaller figure adorned in a pricey pink wool set. You looked like the type of prize people here don't have mercy on. A gambler's luck if you'd only be robbed and left for dead.
"James? Oh wow! Thank goodness you're here," you gasp as he emerges from the distance. "I tried talking to those men but I think I might've made them uncomfortable. I don't know what happened, I was just trying to—"
"Stop talking."
The command wasn't loud, but the sheer, cold weight behind it cut you off instantly. James didn't look like an angry street fighter; he just looked exhausted by your existence. His brows furrowed at your guilty expression, the same one you always wore when he finds you like this, tail tucked between your legs.
"No baby, I promise, this time I was just trying to help, I didn't mean to—" The blond didn't let you finish, didn't need to. He's heard you make this promise a thousand times before.
"You never mean to," James interrupted, his voice dropping into a quiet, dangerous register. "You just throw money around in a place you know nothing about, thinking you're doing something good."
"Am not, I just wanted to—" you cried out, voice cracking as your teeth sunk raw into your lip, copper scent breaching his heightened senses.
"You are," he bit back, taking a step into your space until the small of your back hit a rusty, dented lamp post. "Spending money down here is going to get you in trouble. And when you get into trouble, I'm the one who has to come get you out of it. I'm not up for cleaning your messes. So stay in your own parts, doll. You're too much of a hassle in mine."
Your eyes swelled with tears at every word, fingers tightening at the straps of your new Coach purse, scent spiking in distress—slightly bitter, decaying, devastated, and utterly submissive. His alpha should've stood down, should've reeled his anger back in at the sight, but your scent hit him like a drug, nothing in comparison to his highest hit of nicotine.
James wanted more of it. He wanted to be mean, wanted to tear you apart right there on the pavement just to see you break for him.
"Go home," he commanded, his voice dropping a register so low it had your knees ready to give out as if to plead for forgiveness. "Go do the mindless shit you do all day, and stay out of here. I don't wanna tell your ass twice."
You listen; you always do. You can be good when he asks you to be. Something he appreciates far too much about you. Your silhouette faded in the distance, leaving James to his clenched fists and a sick mind already playing with the image of your flushed, tear-stained face and glossy, swollen lips.
Twenty-four hours later, frustrations wore off, the "cruel" alpha agenda washed out with it. In its place stood a man lost to his biology and consumed in the feverish heat of want. James' rut hit him like a bullet train, every thought a jagged, lustful depiction of you, your tears, your mouth, that scent.
He doesn't knock—never done that before, why start now? He sneaks through the balcony door of your pristine apartment, reeking of sweat, desperation, and a driving need for your touch. You're sitting at a vanity, silk pajama shirt hanging loosely by your shoulder as you brush your smooth hair, a stark contrast to his own greasier mop top. The alpha ran a quick hand through his dark hair, blond streaks reflecting light with every movement.
When your eyes land on his lean figure, you start to apologize profusely, mouth an overflowing river of "sorry's" and "I didn't mean to's". He paid them no mind, just inching closer and closer until the gap between you was filled entirely with him and only him. You remained seated, voice dying down the closer his crotch got to your eye level.
"I told you to stay away, doll," he growls, fingers tangled in the loose strands of your freshly tamed hair, pulling your head back so you'd have no choice but to look up at him. His eyes hooded, pupils blown wide with need.
"Anyone ever tell you how pretty your mouth is?" he questions, free hand already working his belt open, unzipping his denim jeans before pressing your lips against the bulge beneath his briefs. You slowly pull them apart to suck at the fabric, nose engulfed in his musky basil scent, tongue lapping at a damp spot by his length.
"Shame you can't shut it," he breathes out.
James' thumb lingers on your bottom lip as he pulls you away, dragging the drop of salt-heavy moisture across the soft peak of your pout. He watches with a sick, possessive sort of satisfaction as the light from your vanity mirror catches the wetness.
His pre-cum.
Giving your mouth a gloss that looks more expensive—and far more enticing—than anything else you've ever bought.
"Look at you," he rasps, his hand tightening in your hair just enough to tilt your chin up further. "Crying over me yesterday, and now you're sitting pretty with my mess. Better than Dior, isn't it? Tell me it's better, doll."
you can’t find your voice.
You're eye-to-eye with the heavy, dark cotton of his briefs, the heat radiating off him hitting your face in waves. The bulge there is terrifying—furious and twitching—as you stare, a fresh load of dampness seeping through the cotton, mere inches from your nose.
He lets out a jagged breath, his scent thickening and cloying, like smoke to your pink room. "I spent all day thinking about how much I wanted to ruin that pretty face of yours. To make you pay for being so fucking stubborn."
He doesn't wait for your apology. He reaches down—fingers already slick from playing in his own arousal—and shoves two of them into your mouth.
"Taste them" he commands, his voice vibrating through your skin. "Suck them."
The taste is sharp—musk, salt, and the raw essence of his full-blown rut.
You wrap your tongue around his fingers, your eyes welling with fresh, overwhelmed tears as you look up at him through your lashes. James' head falls back, a low, guttural growl ripping from his chest at the sensation.
He's losing it; the nonchalant "bad boy" is drowning in the feeling of your warm, wet mouth working for him. Working to please him.
"Yeah, just like that," he moans, his hips involuntarily thrusting at your face. "So good when you're quiet. So fucking cute when you're listening."
He withdraws his fingers with a wet pop, the string of saliva connecting his fingers to your lips. Before you can even catch your breath, his hands are at his waistband.
He doesn't go slow. Shoves the briefs down, and for a second, the sheer size of him—flushed, veined, and leaking—makes you want to crawl away, hide from it.
But you don't. You're "good." His good omega.
James grabs your shoulders, his thumbs digging at your collarbones as he forces you to stay. He leans down, his dark eyes glaring into yours.
"You wanted to be in my world so bad?" he mutters, voice a dark promise. "Here it is. This is the only part of me you get to handle. Now, kiss it. Put that mouth to work, show me you're worth the trouble you cause me."
You lean in, your breath hitching as your lips graze the furious, drooling tip. The moment you swirl your tongue around the crown, James' knees nearly buckle. He lets out a low curse—something filthy and nasty—his grip on your hair turning desperate. He's addicted. He hates it, but he loves it like he can't live without it, and he'll make sure that by the time he's done, you don't remember a single thing about his world except for the way it feels inside you.
The alpha's head snaps back, a strangled sound ripping from his throat as you take him in. He expected tentative; he expected a "good girl" who would shy away from the sheer weight of never being exposed to something so explicit. Instead, you wrap your tongue around the head of his cock with practiced, devastatingly skilled suction that has his fingers spasming violently in the roots of your hair.
"F-fuck," he wheezes, his hips giving in to the involuntary, desperate thrusts in your mouth. "Where did you... How did you... who taught you to use your mouth like that?"
He's shaking, the nonchalant "bad boy" persona completely forsaken by the way you're working him. You don't stop, swirling your tongue around each vein, drawing him in deep until his eyes roll to the back of his head.
James is at his limit—the sticky heat of his pre-cum lubricating your tongue, his wolf screaming how that isn't enough. He doesn't want to spill on your face; he needs to be inside you. Needs to claim his good omega, show her he's proud of her working so hard to please him.
He hooks his arms under yours, hoisting you up with a low grunt. You're as soft as cotton candy in his calloused hands, a complete contrast to him.
He carries you two steps to the bed, but he doesn't lay you down on the fluffy white blanket, no. He sits back against the headboard, his legs splayed out, pulling you onto his lap—making you face the vanity mirror, forcing you to see the absolute wreckage you've become.
"Look at yourself," he rasps against your ear, his voice a sharp edge between praise and condescension. "Look at how fucking slutty you look."
He shoves your silk pajama top up until it's bunched up above your breasts, leaving your chest heaving and bare, your nipples peaked in the cool air. Below, your cunt is a tight mess of heat and slick—your body screaming for a friction only he can provide.
"Baby..." you sob, the pet name catching in your throat as he positions you. You look ruined—hair matted to your forehead, lips puffy and swollen—but the way James looks at you, eyes bloodshot and entranced, makes your soul shatter.
In this moment you couldn't be more beautiful.
"Tell me..." he mutters, voice faint and needy, his hands bruising your hips as he guides you down. "Tell me how it feels to have me back..."
"It's t-too much," you choke out, teeth grinding in pure, agonizing pleasure as you slowly lower yourself onto his length.
You can feel him everywhere—deep inside you, his cock pressing relentlessly into your g-spot, each inch sending a wave of pain and pleasure through you. The bulge of his cock digs into your stomach, and every time you sink down, the tip kisses your cervix, slamming into it with a sharp, grounding force.
"Fuck," he swears, pulling away from the nape of your neck to catch sight of your expression in the mirror—eyes puffy, lips parted, trembling beneath the weight of him.
"You're lucky you're so damn..." he groans, breath hitching as he feels your walls clench tight around him. "Agh—fuck." He shudders, hips stuttering for a moment as his orgasm looms closer.
He doesn't want to waste a drop on your face; his wolf is crying to be buried in you, to fill you up until you're leaking him out, just to pump it all in again.
"That's it... you're close already?" he laughs, even as he keeps driving up into you without missing a beat. The tell-tale swell at the base of his shaft begins to pulse, his knot growing with a brutal finality, settling you onto him for as long as his wolf desires.
"J-James! Please!" you sob into his shoulder, voice cracking as your stomach coils impossibly tight, tension burning through your entire body. You pant into his mouth, your cries muffled as he finally crashes his lips against yours, his knot stretching you out until you can't think, can't breathe, can't talk—just a good, sweet omega taking everything her alpha has to give her.
synopsis: after being forced to spend a long night with your ex boyfriend james when your both of your mothers plan to go on a short holiday together, you find out that he is willing to do anything to get you back, after he found out you believed that he cheated on you.
content: exes to lovers, reader lowkey kinda hates james at some point, james is really persistent, implied sex (im really bad at writing smut so i just left it out 😭), suggestive language
you gave a soft, yet frustrated knock on the door, tapping your foot impatiently on the ground below you, dreading the night that was about to take place.
the night your mom had been planning for a few weeks now that you were absolutely not looking forward to. the night where your mother and james’ mother were taking off on an overnight stay at a luxury mansion that they were personally invited to in order to “take a break” from their normal lifestyle. which, honestly wouldn’t bother you on the average day, but what you found irritating was as to why your mother had suggested that you to spend the night at your ex boyfriends’ house, james to “keep you safe”, which you not only was perfectly capable of doing by yourself, but you knew was a bold-faced lie. deep down, you knew it was just for his mother and your mother’s sake, to try and get you and him to get used to eachother after the break up.
and to your surprise, his mother insisted. his mother had always been surprisingly nice towards you, despite the slight awkwardness you had towards his son. you wondered how an innocent, sweet, straightforward woman like herself was cursed with having to be permanently stuck with someone as confusing and disingenuous as james.
after what felt like forever, the door opened, james’ mother immediately reaching out to give your mother a warm, embracing hug. you stood a few steps behind annoyingly, not really wanting to interact with james at all.
once they had finished hugging, you trudged forward, making your face now visible to james’ mother, who smiled upon seeing your face again.
“y/n!!”, she yelled, ecstatic, way more happy to see you than her son was who was looming awkwardly in the corner. “how are you honey?”
“im amazing”, she pulled you into a hug squeezing you tight like she never wanted you to let go.
after pulling away, you didn’t even bother to look at james who seemed like he was about to make an effort to actually talk to you for once, as his mother ushered you and your mother inside.
she had led you guys into the living room, where your mothers motioned for you and james to sit down on the big couch. you and him sat down, so seperated to the point where you could fit at least four people between you and him.
“some ground rules”, james’ mother spoke. “no fighting, be in bed by one at the latest, and finally, y/n, try to feel at home. and if my son does anything to bother you, i’m just one phone call away.”
james scoffed, rolling his eyes before his mom motioned him to stop. you exchanged glances with her, her flashing a smile at you, which have you some sense of reassurance, in which you returned the smile back.
“hopefully you two will be mature enough to tolerate eachother just for one night”, your mom spoke.
you nodded, forcing a smile through your teeth as you looked over at james, who was already looking towards you uncomfortably.
and with no further words, which was surprising to you, they made their way to the doorway, in which you and james followed to say your final goodbyes. sweet hugs and goodbyes were exchanged, as you gave james’ mother one final wave when they exitted his house.
“be safe!!, and please don’t argue, for our sake!” your mother yelled, as she made her way onto the street.
the door slammed with a huge thud, perfectly mirroring the thick tension between you and james right now. you walked past him unbothered for the second time this night, brushing past his shoulder without looking back, making your way back to the living room.
————————————————————————
it had only been a few minutes since you and james had been left alone and you already felt like you wanted the ground to swallow you whole. since your parents left you and him had been using your phones to avoid all contact with eachother, which was honestly doing more harm than good, especially in the sense that you and him couldnt just avoid eachother all night.
“are you hungry?”
“nope. ate just before i left actually.”
“oh. well, do you want me to turn on the tv?”
“nope”.
he sighed, clearly frustrated and sank down deeper into the chair, knowing it would be hard to get through to you.
“well, do you want to do anything?”, he continued, a deep desperation in his voice.
“james”, you cut him off abruptly. “please, just leave it”.
he rolled his eyes back, turning on the tv anyway despite your denial. your muscles stiffened up, balls forming slowly into little fists as annoyance started to simmer within you.
“turn it off, please”, you argued.
“finally, she speaks”, james replied, a sigh of relief finally escaping his lungs.
“i’ve been speaking to you this entire night, but clearly you haven’t been listening that well enough to realise”, you bit back.
“barely. you wont even look at me.”
“why do you care?”, you asked him. “we broke up, remember?, finally looking into his eyes.
he started at you for a second, his eyes locked onto yours, and slowly moved down to your lips. no answer.
you scoffed and rammed your phone into your jean pocket. “typical”. im using the bathroom”, you told him, before storming off upstairs quickly, desperate to get away from him.
————————————————————————
you faced the bathroom mirror, inhaling the warm fresh air from the open window outside. your mind loomed on the awkward encounter between you and james a few moments before, trying your best to figure out where it all had went wrong.
the relationship between you two had not always been so hostile. at one point, you and him were inseperable. you two were childhood friends, basically attached to the hip; which soon developed into boyfriend and girlfriend as you and him got older. those were the best two years ever. your parents were your biggest supporters, had always rooted for you and wanted you guys to be a thing practically since birth.
but at the time of the breakup, things came crashing down. you had seen another girl kissing him, in which you immediately ended things with him. on that day, he had tried so hard to convince you it was just a mistake. bombarding your phone with messages, and trying to get to your house. he’d throw rocks at your window, standing awkwardly with gifts in the front porch, which you declined, and often send you long paragraphs that you were too upset to reply to. your mom tried to get you to give him a chance after a few days, in which she stated how sweet it was that he was trying to win you back. and it was; but she didn’t get it.
he would show up unannounced when your parents weren’t home, with love letters and expensive foods, looking like a complete wreck. and he was quite persistent with these offers.
you knew, deep down that he would never cheat, but you distanced yourself away from him for your own good, and over time, that pent up frustration and anger built up until it couldn’t anymore. and that is what made this night the strangest of all. it was the first time you and him had interacted post breakup, and you were honestly interested to hear what he had to say for himself this night.
but it had barely even been an hour into the evening, and you had already started to become irritated by his presence. you seriously contemplated staying in the bathroom the whole night, just to avoid him. it was crazy how things changed really. a few months ago, you would have been dying to spend some free time with james at his house without any prying eyes, having him all to yourself; but now, being in the same proximity as him for even at least five minutes felt strange, especially as you weren’t really giving him a chance to fix things and blew him off at every moment.
you wish that you could do something as petty as ignore him for the whole night, but you knew temptation would get the best of you, or either that, james would come looking for you. and you honestly couldn’t tell whether you wanted that or not. however, eventually you would get tired, and in need of actual rest, and food. and you weren’t willing to starve just because you couldn’t be around your ex.
and you basically avoiding him for the whole night was letting him win, and you felt like it was fair to give him a chance.
you rubbed your eyes, and grabbed for the door, closing it shut behind you. you made your way down the staircase slowly, bracing yourself, trying to keep things together as much as you could.
you stumbled backwards slightly, taken aback at the unusual visage that you saw before you.
james was waiting. for you. outside his bathroom.
he rested his head against the corridor wall, staring at you silently, his eyes tracking your every uncomfortable movement as the silence between you boiled.
you avoided eye contact, slowly trying to press past him, as he purposefully walked into you, not letting you past, matching your movements as you tried to switch from side to side, trying your best to wriggle through his large wide body.
“are you ever going to look at me?” he asked, his voice low and raspy.
you didnt respond. you stared at the wall next to you, refusing to look him in the eye.
“y/n”. he softly grabbed your chin, pulling your face to look at his, the familiar touch causing a tingle to run down your spine, which caused you to push his hand off of your face out of fear.
you clamoured past him rapidly, trying to make your way downstairs but you couldn’t make it that far as he grabbed onto your wrist, pulled you back and lifted you up into the air with his hands around your waist and pinned you against the wall forcefully, trapping your arms above your head, leaving you with no room to exit as his large frame practically swallowed you whole. he noticed you were avoiding eye contact again, so he forcefully lifted your chin up, making you glare into his eyes.
“get off of me james”.
“no, not until you talk to me. i miss you so much baby”, the nickname baby making your chest stiffen.
“you’re an asshole, james”.
“for what?”
“you know what. this. this whole “operation get back together with me. you planning a small getaway between both our moms in order to win me back, a pretty low move to me.”
“ you seriously think that i planned this?”
“clearly. you obviously feel guilty for what happened and want to get back into my good books.”
“what i did? y/n, you seriously think i would cheat on you? that girl came onto me and i pushed her away the moment she kissed me. and you didn’t even give me a chance to explain y/n. you blew me off.”
“because i was sad, and i didnt know what to believe”, you argued back, finally letting your feelings burst out after having to hide them for so long.
“the apology letters y/n, they were all for you. i tried my best to make sure that i could clear up things so that you wouldn’t hate me. i went all the way to your house, walked over there every single day thinking of what to say to you, trying my best not to screw it up. the flowers, the expensive gifts, your favourite foods that i got shipped to your house. all for you. every single one. it was always you, y/n, nobody else. and i get that you hate me, and you think im the biggest dick in the world, i just hoped that everything would haveeant something to you.”
you let out a rough sigh, somewhat unmoved with his answer.
“enough”. you rolled your eyes, trying to get away from him.
he grabbed your face again, engulfing your face within his palms and switching his gaze between your eyes and your lips.
“look y/n, even if i did plan this, i did it so i can prove that i love you. prove that you’re the only girl that will ever be in my heart. give me a chance, baby. im sorry.”
“you think that you can just come here, give a lousy apology and somehow i’d take you back? please, stop”.
“im not forcing you to forgive me y/n, i just wanted you to hear it. from myself.”
“just go away james. i hate you”.
“you don’t mean that.
“yes i do”.
“no you don’t. you’ve never had it as good as me. you can pretend you're over me, but i know you remember how good i made you feel. and if there’s one thing that’s for certain, i’m definitely sure that how good your body still remembers exactly how good I made you feel. how you used to sound when i finally pushed you over the edge.” your face dropped, a confident smile forming through his lips, knowing that he had just gone so far to the point where you didn’t even have anything to say to defend yourself. his hand started looming over your jean button, stroking your lower belly. the nerves down there started to tense up, your thighs involuntarily clenching together, which james noticed. your breath hitched, looking down towards your lower half, then looking back up to find james smirking at you, his annoying grin making you want him to finally eat his words after all the cockiness he has given you this night.
“dont flatter yourself”, you replied, putting on a calm and collected front to mask the embarrassment and arousal that still lay within you.
he chuckled lightly, his hand still on your jeans, slowly lowering towards your zipper. “im not flattering myself. you’re just a bad liar. and your body clearly misses me just as much as you do, which is why you still haven’t pushed me away.”
“you’re disgusting”, pushing his hand off you.
“disgusting, but not wrong”, he leaned over, your breath brushing your ear. “never wrong.”
“you are wrong. completely wrong.” you told him, anger coursing through your veins, trying your best to push back every single feeling you had ever felt towards him.
“really, then tell me how you really feel about me. tell me that the past two years meant nothing. tell me you dont want to see me anymore. and ill back away, right now, walk downstairs, and respectfully leave you alone for the rest of the night, and never bother you again.”
you opened your mouth to reply back, but the words died in your throat. you just stared at his lips, your chest rising and falling rapidly whilst nothing comes out. there was nothing else you could do to argue, because you knew he was right deep down. you couldn’t say it; you could nevee tell him you didn’t love him anymore, because you did. you always did.
no answer. he glanced at you again, his tongue darting out to lick his bottom lip as he rejoiced inside, knowing that you had basically just admitted defeat.
he leaned forward, placing a small kiss on your lips to test the waters, pulling back just enough to read the conflict written across your face. he went back in again, placing another kiss on your lips, but a more hard and aggressive one this time. his hands crept under your shirt, feeling the skin, as you released a soft gasp, as you melted slowly into his touch, finally breaking down for him. you kissed him back slowly, your mouths moving in sync against eachothers, your heart pounding as you placed your hands plush against his chest. using this as a signal, james deepened the kiss, his arms tangling into your hair, pulling roughly at the strands a few times, before breaking the kiss, tucking the locks of stray hair behind your ears, switching his direction to your neck, leaving hickeys in every single spot, trapping you against the wall with his hands resting against either side. your legs turned into jello, each kiss on the neck leaving you more sensitive than the last, as you latched onto his shoulders, clasping them tightly for support so that you wouldnt fall down.
without warning, james turned to face you again, wrapping your legs around his waist, and carrying you up to what seemed to be like his bedroom, turning his light on and closing the door. he softly laid you out onto the bed, yet again kissing you, but nothing like the way he’s ever kissed you before. the kiss was punishing, deep, like he wanted to prove something to you. you had never encountered this flamboyant, cocky side of james often, but you were loving it. he took of your shirt undid your jeans, discarding them on the ground, leaving you in just your underwear.
“do you trust me baby?” his doe eyes burning deeply into yours as his body lay over you, dominant and intimidating.
you nodded, biting your lip hard, in an attempt to shoo away the butterflies that were erupting in your stomach.
he took off his shirt, revealing his toned body and abs, which you had hated that you missed seeing so much, his thick bulge becoming more prominent through his pants as you looked down, you gulped, as he caught you staring, taking this as a signal to take off your underwear, leaving you just in your bra.
“god, how i missed this pussy”. you felt the cold air, trying to close your legs as james forced them open spreading them apart, leaving wet kisses up your thigh, the placements of his kisses inching closer and closer to your core.
everything after this became a blur of tangled limbs, loud moans and deep thrusts as your head sunk further into the pillow, arousal pooling through you as james made you see stars.
and lets just say, after that long night, you had made the good decision to give james another chance.
Brothers bsf James who fucks you in your room while your brother and his friends are downstairs ,forcing you to be quiet even though James is fucking you SOO good 🥹
PLSSSS TELL ME U SEE THE VISION
A secret, late-night encounter in a locked bathroom turns intensely passionate as your brother's best friend risks everything for a stolen moment, blurring the line between dangerous thrill and deep possession.
pairing: james x fem/reader (y/n)
genre: secret relationship, brother's best friend, smut, possessive male lead
note: im posting this soo late and im also soo sorry for this, i will try to be more active. i really hope that you will enjoy reading this ♡
°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔* °❀
Your brother's best friend was never supposed to become your secret secret. Every stolen glance, late-night visit, and whispered conversation had to stay hidden. With your brother just downstairs, one wrong move could expose everything—but James never seemed afraid of getting caught. In fact, he almost seemed to enjoy the risk.
The house was loud with your brother and his friends watching the game downstairs. You quietly excused yourself, saying you needed something from the bathroom, hoping for a moment away from all the noise.
You had barely closed the door when you heard footsteps in the hallway. A few seconds later, the handle turned.
James slipped inside, leaning against the door with a teasing grin, his dark eyes never leaving yours. "Sneaking away without telling your boyfriend? That’s a little cruel."
"You..." You tried to hide your smile, crossing your arms as you looked up at him. "Your ego is unbelievable. I only left for a minute." You glanced toward the hallway, lowering your voice. "Besides... you’re the one who followed me. If my brother finds out, that’s on you."
James's grin turned into a quiet smirk as he glanced back toward the door. "Then you should be quiet... unless you want everyone downstairs to know we're in here together."
The lock clicked with a soft, final sound. The noise from the game downstairs became a muted background hum. In the sudden, close quiet of the bathroom, the only sounds were the low whir of the fan and the sharp, shared breaths between you.
James didn't wait. The moment the latch slid home, his hands were on you—one tangling in your hair to tilt your head back, the other anchoring at the small of your back to pull your hips flush against his. His mouth found yours with a hunger that was anything but quiet: a desperate, consuming kiss born of weeks of stolen glances.
He kissed you like he was trying to erase the distance the door had just created, as if he could taste the risk on your lips and found it intoxicating.
The air grew thick and charged. The cool porcelain of the sink pressed against your lower back where he guided you. His body was a solid, warm line pressed against yours, every point of contact sending shivers along your spine.
The world tilted as he lifted you effortlessly in one fluid motion, setting you onto the edge of the cold marble vanity. The ceramic jars and bottles rattled soft protests. James stepped into the space he had created, slotting himself between your knees, never breaking the searing contact of his lips. His hands bracketed your hips, fingers digging into the soft flesh of your waist, pinning you right there against the mirror.
When he finally pulled back, it was only by a breath, his forehead resting against yours, his panting breath mingling with yours in the humid air.
"Missed you," James growled softly.
His chest rose and fell heavily against yours. The hard lines of his body pressed intimately against your inner thighs, a deliberate, undeniable pressure.
He tilted his head, his lips brushing the corner of your mouth before tracing down to the sensitive skin just below your ear. His voice was a rough, velvet scrape against your neck. "Been watching you all night. Sitting there... looking so fucking innocent." A low chuckle vibrated through him. "Drives me crazy."
One of his hands left your hip, sliding slowly up your side, following the curve of your ribcage beneath your thin shirt. His thumb swept a slow, maddening arc just below the swell of your breast. His eyes, dark and unreadable in the shadowed light, held yours in a silent challenge.
"I missed you too, but this is risky," you murmured softly.
The words hovered between you like a confession. His thumb stilled its motion against your ribcage, the distant roar of the television downstairs sounding like a faint background blur.
James's gaze flicked down to your lips, then back up to your eyes. The corner of his mouth lifted into a sharp, knowing smile. "That’s the point," he whispered, his voice barely audible over the fan. "The risk is what makes it real."
He leaned in again, but his lips didn't find yours this time. Instead, they brushed against your jawline—a feather-light touch that contrasted sharply with the firm, possessive grip of his hands on your hips. He inhaled deeply against your skin.
"Your brother is thirty feet away, yelling at a screen. He has no idea," James whispered, his teeth lightly grazing your earlobe. "That I’m up here... and that I have you like this."
He pulled back just enough to see your flushed face, his expression a intoxicating mix of possessive pride and raw desire. The crisp white cotton of your t-shirt slipped over your head with a soft whisper, joining a growing pool of fabric on the floor. His own shirt followed, discarded onto the cold tile without a second thought.
His breath hitched as his palms flattened against your bare back, spanning the delicate ridge of your spine. "Fuck," James muttered, the word a rough, reverent exhale against your collarbone.
He bent his head, his lips and teeth mapping a hungry path across your collarbone and over the slope of your shoulder. Every touch was both a claiming and a question. His hands roamed your sides, tracing your waist before sliding up to cup the swell of your breasts over the lace of your bra.
"Look at you," James rasped, his eyes dark as his thumb brushed over your peak through the lace, his jaw tight with restraint. "You have no idea what you do to me."
The delicate clasp of your bra gave way under his practiced fingers. The lace fell away, joining the forgotten heap on the floor. The cool bathroom air hit your bare skin, making your nipples harden immediately—a reaction James claimed with an immediate, possessive growl.
His mouth closed over one peak, his tongue swirling hot and insistent before his teeth grazed it with just enough pressure to make your breath hitch. His other hand palmed your opposite breast, his thumb rolling the hardened peak in a synchronized, maddening rhythm.
"So fucking perfect," James muttered against your skin, his voice a low vibration. "Taste so good."
He was lost in you. One of his hands slid down from your breast, past your stomach, his fingers splaying over the flat plane before dipping beneath the waistband of your pants. His hips pressed forward, the hard length of him an insistent promise through the denim of his jeans.
His fingers scraped roughly against the skin of your hips as he hooked them into your waistband, dragging your pants and lace thong down your legs in one swift motion. The fabric pooled around your ankles. He didn't pause; his own belt buckle clinked sharply, his jeans and boxers shoved down his hips and kicked aside.
James's hands returned to your waist, his bare skin scorching hot against yours. He shifted your weight, turning you around with a firm, guiding pressure until your back was flush against his bare chest, facing the large, foggy mirror above the vanity.
"Quiet now," James commanded in a low, guttural growl, breathed directly into your ear. "Look."
His erection pressed firmly against the cleft of your backside, a hard, heated line of tension. One hand splayed possessively across your lower stomach, holding you snug against him, while his other hand slid down between your thighs, fingers tracing through your wet warmth. He watched your face in the mirror, his own expression a mask of intense concentration.
"See that?" James whispered, his eyes locked on yours in the reflection. "That's us. Right here. With him downstairs."
His fingers found your clit, circling it with a firm, rhythmic pressure that made your muscles tense. His own hips stilled, focusing every drop of sensation into that single point of contact. In the mirror, a heavy flush spread across your chest and neck.
"You make a sound..." James warned softly, his voice thick with strain. "One little sound... and he'll hear. He'll know."
His arm tightened around your waist, anchoring you as his body aligned behind you. With a slow, relentless push, he entered you. The stretch was profound and incredibly deep, mirrored perfectly in the glass—the way your eyes fluttered shut for a second before forcing them open to meet his, the cords in his neck standing out with the effort of his control.
James went still, buried to the hilt, letting you both feel the full, shocking reality of the connection. "Fuck..." he choked out in a whisper. "Look. Watch me take you."
He began to move—a deep, measured rhythm that was devastating in its intensity. Every withdrawal was slow and agonizing; every thrust was a deliberate, deep reclamation. His eyes never left the mirror, watching every ripple of pleasure that crossed your face. The only sounds in the room were the soft, wet slide of your joining, the ragged pull of your breathing, and the ever-present cheering of the crowd from the television below.
Your mouth opened to let out a gasp, but James's hand came up, his palm clamping firmly over your lips to seal the sound inside the quiet room.
"That's it. Keep it in. Swallow it," James rasped near your ear, biting down gently on your lobe. "Let him have his game. This is ours."
He could feel the vibration of your suppressed cry against his hand, and it fed straight into his fevered rhythm. His thrusts grew sharper, deeper, and more possessive. His free hand slid down your stomach to find your swollen clit again, his thumb pressing and circling in perfect time with his thrusts.
"You feel that?" he panted against your hair. "That's for me. All of it."
The mirror was fogging at the edges from their heat. James increased the pace, his hips snapping forward, the sound of skin meeting skin punctuation in the steamy air.
"Think he'd recognize that sound?" James whispered, his voice dropping to a raw growl. "Your pretty little noises? But he's never heard you like this. He's never seen you like this. For anyone but me."
His palm remained an unyielding pressure against your lips, tasting your skin and sweat. Moving his hand from your mouth, his fingers tangled deep into the hair at the nape of your neck, using the grip to pull your head back, arching your spine against his chest and exposing the long line of your throat to the steamy air.
James's thrusts grew faster, a brutal, piston-like drive that shook the vanity. "Look," he commanded, his dark eyes burning into yours through the fogged glass. "Look at the fucking view. Your brother's best friend, taking you raw in his bathroom while he cheers for a touchdown downstairs."
He ground deep, holding himself there to make you feel every inch of him. "You're so wet. Soaked because of me. Because you love the secret almost as much as I do. Admit it."
His hand in your hair tightened, forcing your gaze back to the mirror. "This is what you are now. Mine. Right under his nose. My dirty little secret."
He felt the telltale tightening first—a clenching deep within you that made his own breath catch. A violent tremor ran through your body as your inner muscles rippled around him in a rhythmic, pulsing wave. James's hand slammed back over your mouth a fraction of a second before your climax tore through you, stifling the loud cry that would have alerted the whole house.
"That's it... take it... fucking take it all..." James rasped into your ear, his body rigid as he fought his own release.
As the last aftershocks shivered through you, he pulled out in one smooth motion. His hands were on your shoulders, turning you around and guiding you down onto your knees before you could fully process the movement.
James loomed over you, one hand cradling the back of your head while the other wrapped around the base of his length, thick and glistening.
He looked down at you, his chest heaving, his expression utterly feral. His thumb stroked over your bottom lip, his voice a dark, commanding whisper. "Open."
Your head tipped back, your lips closing around him. His fingers tightened gently in your hair, holding you there as his hips gave a helpless, shallow jerk forward. His other hand gripped the edge of the vanity, white-knuckling the marble. The sight of you taking him unravelled the last of his control completely.
The climax hit him like a physical blow. His release was hot and sudden, spilling deep into your mouth with a guttural, choked-off sound that was half groan, half curse. "Fuck... y/n..."
He rode it out, his body trembling with the intensity. When it finally passed, he slumped slightly against the vanity, his breathing ragged. His hand in your hair softened, his thumb stroking a slow, soothing arc along your scalp.
"Swallow," James whispered, his voice a low, husky request, his eyes searching yours in the dim light.
He watched your throat work, his expression shifting from raw heat to a deep, satiated intensity. Leaning down, he pressed his forehead to yours, his skin damp with sweat and his breath warm against your lips.
"You have no idea what you do to me," James exhaled softly. He kissed you then—slow and deep, tasting himself on your tongue. When he pulled back, his dark eyes were earnest. "We should get cleaned up. Before someone wonders where we vanished to."
He pushed himself up with a soft grunt, extending a hand to help you to your feet. He reached past you, turning on the tap and wetting a hand towel under the cool water. Gently, he wiped the dampness from your throat, your collarbones, and your face, his touch remarkably tender.
Once he finished, he tossed the towel into the sink and reached for his clothes, dressing quickly. Jeans zipped, shirt pulled over his head, he turned back to you, cupping your face in both hands.
"You okay?" James asked softly.
"Mhmm, perfect," you murmured, a heavy-lidded smirk tugging at your lips.
James let out a soft, breathless laugh. "Perfect? You have no fucking idea. You wreck me every single time."
He held you there for another moment, breathing you in, until a sudden collective groan echoed from downstairs—a missed play in the game, snapping him back to reality.
He pulled back, giving your shoulders a firm, grounding squeeze. His voice dropped to a practical, conspiratorial murmur.
"You go first. Wait a minute after I leave. Go straight to the living room okay? Don't look like you just..." His eyes raked over your flushed face, messy hair, and dazed expression. He smirked, unable to help himself. "...well, don't look like that. Fix your hair. Splash some water on your face."
As he unlocked the door and prepared to slip out, you reached for your shorts. Stepping into them, you took a quick step forward, but your foot caught on the hem of your discarded underwear pooled near the floor. You wobbled violently, grabbing the edge of the towel rack for dear life with a loud clatter.
James spun around instantly, catching your waist before you hit the ground, his eyes wide with concern—until he looked down and saw you tangled in your own lace thong like a trap.
He let out a quiet, muffled snort of laughter, shaking his head as he unhooked the lace from your ankle. "Dangerous and graceful. A real double threat," he whispered dryly, pressing a quick, amused kiss to your nose before winking and slipping out into the hall.
a / n : mm mm mmmmmm idek good gawd he just looks so big in that picture i cant take this no mooooooorrrreeeeeee (꩜///꩜).
dirty!ryul who loves hearing you scream but doesnt wanna be rough with you so he goes the slow pound straight to your cervix route instead.
dirty!ryul who stares straight at you watching you fall apart with a deadpan expression and has no idea how intimidating it is.
dirty!ryul who wants a unconventional form of pay every time you talk to a guy longer than need be.
dirty!ryul who just gently caresses your neck to afraid to choke you.
dirty!ryul whos favorite hobby is making your legs shake.
dirty!ryul who hates seeing you cry but loves knowing hes making you feel that good.
dirty!ryul who wants it extra gross, sweaty, slobbery and nasty sometimes so no matter how hard you protest for him to shower first something else is harder so he wants you the second he comes back from practice.
dirty!ryul who plays with and occasionally braids or ties up your hair instead of pulling it.
dirty!ryul who refuses to go hard if hes going fast and wont go fast if hes going hard.
dirty!ryul who grinds against you and riles himself up in public on purpose a few hours before your going home so that you know whats cumming coming.
dirty!ryul who wants to hear you loud and clear no matter whos around and hates when you try to be quiet.
dirty!ryul who loves when you grab at him and scratch him up ( and comes closer for you when you do ).
dirty!ryul who loves watching you twitch while you finish.
dirty!ryul who never feels like getting up in the middle of the night so he eats you instead.
dirty!ryul who unintentionally shoves it deeper leaning down to check on you thinking he may have hurt you by accident.
৻ꪆ SUMMARY : You and your lifelong best friends with mutual, unspoken lust finally break the tension during a late night game of Truth or Dare, exposing your true feelings.
৻ꪆ CONTENTS : MDNI (18+) ⋆ dom!ryul ⋆ down bad ryul ⋆ extremely needy ryul ⋆ built up tension ⋆ clothes ripping ⋆ choking ⋆ unprotected sex ⋆ mutual pinning ⋆ aftercare
taglist : @amyishere123 @444pondju
৻ꪆ PAIRING : ryul x f!reader
৻ꪆ WORDCOUNT : 3.6k
The rain is drumming a steady, mindless rhythm against your bedroom window, the kind of white noise that usually puts you straight to sleep. Tonight, though, you’re wide awake, propped up against a mountain of pillows with a half empty bag of sour gummies balanced on your stomach.
At the foot of your bed, completely taking up all the legroom, is Ryul.
He’s wearing a pair of grey sweatpants, and a faded t-shirt that stretches tightly across his shoulders when he shifts. Right now, he’s aggressively tossing a small plush pillow into the air and catching it with one hand, his eyes glued to the TV screen where some low budget horror movie is playing on mute.
"I'm telling you, if she goes into the basement, I’m turning this off," Ryul mutters, his voice carrying that low, edge it always gets when it’s past midnight. He catches the pillow without looking, his fingers sinking into the fabric.
"Oh shut up, Ryul," you laugh, nudging his thigh with your foot. "You cried during the trailer. Don’t act tough now."
Ryul scoffs, turning his head to look at you. The dim glow of the television catches the sharp line of his jaw and the soft, dark mess of his hair. A lazy, lopsided smile tugs at the corner of his lips. "I did not cry. I had a hair in my eye. There's a difference."
"Right. A very emotional hair."
He rolls his eyes, but the smile stays, warm and familiar. It’s the same look he’s given you for years. The one that used to just mean we’re idiots, but lately, has started making your chest feel tight. You try to blame it on the two mixed drinks you both knocked back an hour ago, or the suffocating humidity of the summer night, but you know better.
The truth is, the air between you two has been changing. It’s heavy. It’s the way his eyes linger on your mouth a second too long when you laugh, or how his hand always finds the small of your back whenever he guides you through a crowded room.
You’re both so hopelessly into each other it’s practically pathetic, a mutual, unspoken longing that neither of you has had the guts to voice. So instead, you play the roles of perfect best friends, ignoring the way the tension thickens every time your skin accidentally brushes his.
Ryul tosses the plush pillow aside, suddenly sitting up and crossing his legs. He rests his elbows on his knees, leaning in closer to you. The sudden shift in proximity makes your pulse hitch.
"I'm bored," he announces, his dark eyes locked onto yours. "The movie sucks, you're making fun of my fake tears, and I’m too wired to sleep."
"Well, what do you want to do then?" you ask, tilting your head.
Ryul's gaze drops to your lips for a fraction of a second before snapping back up. A mischievous, slightly smug glint flashes in his eyes. "Let's play a game."
"Like what?"
"Truth or Dare," he says, a low chuckle escaping him. He reaches over, his fingers lightly brushing against your ankle as he moves, sending a sharp jolt of adrenaline straight up your spine. "No backing out, no chickening. Just honesty. You down?"
You swallow hard, your heart suddenly hammering against your ribs. Looking at the intensity in his face, you get the distinct feeling that this game is going to cause some serious problems.
"Fine," you challenge softly, holding his gaze. "You go first."
Ryul chuckles, a low, rumbling sound that vibrates right through the mattress. He leans back on his hands, tilting his head as he studies you, his dark eyes narrowed in playful calculation.
"Alright, let's start easy," he says, a smirk playing on his lips. "Truth or dare?"
"Truth," you say instantly, keeping your defensive walls up.
"Weak," he teases, rolling his eyes. "But fine. What's the biggest lie you've told me this month?"
You snort, leaning back against your pillows. "Easy. I told you your new haircut looked fine the day you got it. It actually looked like a bird tried to build a nest in it for the first twenty four hours."
Ryul gasps, throwing a hand over his chest in mock offense. "Wow. Remind me never to trust your compliments again.”
"My turn," you say, your voice dropping a fraction. "Truth or dare?"
"Truth," Ryul says, his eyes locked onto yours. He doesn't blink.
You lean forward, resting your chin in your hands. "Have you ever actually read any of those romance books you found on my nightstand, or were you just pretending to judge me?"
Ryul’s smirk fades into something a little more private, a little more intense. He holds your gaze, his voice dropping an octave. "I read a few chapters of one. The one with the dog eared pages." He pauses, his eyes dropping to your mouth before rising back up. "I wanted to see what kind of things make you lose it."
The sudden shift in his tone catches you completely off guard. Your throat goes dry, your heart doing a sudden, violent flip. He's testing the waters. He’s pushing the line that you’ve both spent months pretending didn't exist.
"Your turn," Ryul murmurs, his gaze heavy as he shifts closer, his knee now firmly pressed against your thigh. The heat radiating off him is suffocating. "Truth or dare?"
You catch your breath, refusing to let him win this little game. "Dare," you challenge, your voice steady despite the adrenaline spiking in your veins.
Ryul’s eyes darken. A slow, predatory smile creeps onto his face. "I dare you to sit on my lap for the next three rounds."
Your heart hammers against your ribs. You swallow the lump in your throat, holding his gaze as you slowly crawl over the space separating you, your movements deliberate, keeping your eyes locked onto his the entire time.
When you settle onto his lap, straddling his thighs, you hear his breath hitch. You can feel the rigid tension in his muscles, the way his hands twitch against the mattress like he's fighting the urge to grab your waist.
You lean in close, your face inches from his, mimicking his earlier posture. You can smell the clean, sharp scent of his cologne mixed with the faint sweetness of the drinks.
"Truth or dare, Ryul," you whisper, your eyes dropping to his lips in a deliberate, agonizingly slow tease.
You think you’ve won. You think you’ve caught him off guard.
But Ryul just stares up at you, his pupils completely blown, the easygoing best friend completely vanishing from his expression.
He doesn't break. Instead, his jaw tightens, and before you can even register the shift, his large hands come up, wrapping firmly around your hips. He grips you tight, his fingers digging into your skin through the fabric of your clothes, and effortlessly hauls you a fraction of an inch closer until there is absolutely no space left between your bodies. You can feel the hard, pulsing heat of him pressing right against you.
"Truth," he rasps out, his voice thick, entirely stripped of its usual playfulness. He tilts his head up, his breath hot against your lips, completely commanding the space. He tilts your hips just a fraction, a subtle, pressured movement that forces a soft gasp from your throat.
His grip on your waist tightens, pinning you in place, making it entirely clear who is in control of this game now.
"Ask me your question," Ryul murmurs, his dark eyes burning into yours, completely undone. "But choose your words very carefully."
The air in the room is suddenly so thick you can barely breathe it in. Every ounce of playfulness is stripped away, replaced by a heavy, suffocating weight that has been building between you for years.
Ryul doesn't let go of your hips. If anything, his fingers dig deeper into your skin, anchoring you to him as if he's terrified you'll pull away, or as if he’s entirely lost the capacity to let you go. The heat rolling off his body is suffocating, making you dizzy as you sit stranded over his thighs.
"You're not asking," Ryul says, his voice dropping to a rough, ragged whisper that sends a violent shiver straight down your spine. He leans in closer, his chest pressing hard against yours, forcing your back to arch slightly. "What's the matter? Forgot the question?"
"Ryul—" Your voice breaks, a tiny, breathless sound that betrays exactly how undone you are.
Hearing his name on your lips makes something click behind his eyes. The last thread of his restraint completely snaps.
He lets out a low, guttural growl, his grip shifting from your hips to the back of your thighs, effortlessly lifting you up just enough to pull you flush against him. The friction of the movement makes your breath catch in a sharp gasp.
Ryul tilts his chin up, his eyes fixed entirely on your mouth, completely gone by the sight of you looking so helpless beneath his gaze.
"Screw the game," he mutters, his breath hot against your skin as he buries his face in the crook of your neck, inhaling sharply. His lips brush against your pulse point, sending a jolt of pure adrenaline through your veins.
"I'm sick of pretending. I'm so fucked up for you, it’s driving me insane."
You wrap your arms around his shoulders, your fingers instantly tangling in the soft, messy strands of his hair, pulling him closer.
The sheer desperation in his voice triggers something wild inside you. You lean back just enough to look at him, your chests heaving in sync.
Ryul’s eyes are completely dark, filled with a raw, predatory hunger you’ve never seen in him before. His hand slides up your torso, his large palm burning through your shirt as he grips your jaw.
"If I kiss you right now," he breathes, his thumb pressing firmly against your bottom lip, dragging it down just a fraction, "I'm not stopping. Tell me to stop now, or I swear—"
You don't let him finish. You lean down, closing the distance, and press your lips to his.
The collision is explosive. Ryul lets out a sharp, ragged breath into your mouth, his hand immediately moving from your jaw to the back of your head, fistfuls of your hair anchoring you to him as he deepens the kiss with an intense, desperate urgency. It’s rough, uncoordinated, and utterly perfect driven by years of suppressed longing.
He tastes like the sweet liquor you drank earlier, but the heat of his mouth is entirely his own. He devours your lips, his tongue sliding past yours in a frantic rhythm that leaves you completely breathless, whimpering softly into his mouth.
The sound only seems to make him wilder. His other hand tears at the hem of your shirt, his rough palms making direct contact with the bare skin of your waist, sending waves of intense heat crashing through you as he pulls you closer, desperate to eliminate every single inch of remaining space between you.
Ryul pulls back just an inch, his lips wet and swollen, his chest heaving violently against yours. His eyes are entirely filled with a wild, feral intensity as he stares up at you. He looks completely unhinged, caught in the grip of a hunger that has been rotting away at him for years.
"Your shirt," he pants out, his voice a ruined, gravelly rasp against your mouth. "Take it off."
You don't even have time to move before his hands are under the fabric, bunching it up and hauling it over your head in one violent, impatient motion. The material catches slightly on your arms, and you hear a sharp rip along the seam as he literally tears it away from your body, tossing it blindly over the edge of the bed.
The cool air of the bedroom hits your bare skin for a split second before Ryul replaces it with the scorching heat of his own body.
He hovers over you, his eyes scanning every inch of your exposed skin with a terrifyingly hungry gaze. His jaw is clenched so tight a muscle leaps in his cheek.
"You have no idea," he rasps, his large hands coming down to pin your wrists to the mattress on either side of your head. His grip is like iron, completely restricting your movement. "No idea what you do to me. I've sat on this exact bed for months watching you, wanting to do this, wanting to ruin you until you couldn't think of anyone else."
He leans down, burying his face in your chest, his mouth devouring the sensitive skin of your collarbone. He bites down, not enough to break the skin, but hard enough to force a loud, high pitched whimper from your throat. He sucks firmly on the mark, his tongue soothing the sting in a slow, torturous rhythm that makes your hips instinctively roll up against his.
The friction makes Ryul let out a sharp, choked sound. He breaks away from your neck, his eyes snapping to yours, completely broken by the contact.
"Don't move like that unless you want this over in two seconds. I've been waiting too damn long to rush this." he warns, his voice shaking with a dangerous level of restraint.
With one hand now pinning both of your wrists above your head, he uses his free hand to reach down, his fingers gripping the waistband of your shorts. Dragging them down your legs along with your underwear, exposing you completely to his heavy, burning gaze.
The vulnerability makes you shiver, your knees instinctively trying to close, but Ryul immediately wedges his thigh between yours. He forces your legs wide apart, his large hand sliding up the inside of your thigh, his rough palm sending waves of electric heat crashing straight to your core.
"Look at me," Ryul commands, his voice dropping to a dark, breathless whisper as his fingers brush against the aching, damp center of you. You gasp, your back arching off the bed, but his hand on your wrists keeps you pinned. He stares directly into your eyes as he slips one long finger inside you, testing how ruined you already are for him. "Let me see exactly how much you want this."
Ryul lets out a dark, approving hum as his finger slides deep inside you, the slick friction of the movement drawing a broken cry from your lips. He doesn’t wait, immediately adding a second finger, stretching you open with a slow, deliberate rhythm that makes your mind go completely blank.
"You’re so wet for me," he pants, his thumb pressing firmly against your sensitive core, rubbing in tight, agonizing circles. "You've been thinking about this too, haven't you?"
You can only nod frantically, your hips rolling upward, desperately seeking more of the blistering friction. Your pinned wrists twitch against his iron grip, wanting nothing more than to wrap around his neck and pull him down.
"Please, Ryul..." you whimpered, the word slipping out before you can stop it.
"Please what?" he says, his pace quickening, his fingers turning you completely inside out. He leans down, his face inches from yours, his breath dragging heavily across your lips. "Tell me what you want."
"You. I want you."
Ryul’s jaw tightens, a sudden, fierce flash of possessiveness taking over his features. He abruptly withdraws his fingers, leaving you cold and aching, but before you can even protest, he’s unbuttoning his pants. He kicks them off along with his boxers, and when he moves back over you, the sheer size and heavy, throbbing heat of him pressing against your thigh makes your breath hitch.
He grabs your knees, pushing them all the way up toward your chest, completely opening you up, exposing you to his dark, unblinking gaze. He settles his weight between your thighs, the broad head of his length catching against your wetness.
"Look at me," he says, his voice dropping to a rough whisper. He reaches up, his large hand wrapping securely around your throat—not cutting off your air, but grounding you, pinning you to the mattress beneath his palm. "Keep your eyes on me."
You look up at him, your chest heaving, completely consumed by the feral, ravenous intensity in his eyes.
With one heavy, unyielding thrust, Ryul drives himself all the way inside you.
The sudden, stretching fullness forces a loud, high pitched gasp from your throat. He buries himself to the absolute hilt, his hips slamming hard against yours, the sheer impact sending a violent shockwave of pure desire straight to your core. Ryul freezes for a fraction of a second, his entire body rigid, his eyes blowing wide as he absorbs the tight squeeze of your walls.
A ragged, pained groan rips from his chest. “God, you're so tight," he chokes out, his fingers tightening slightly against your neck as he begins to move.
He doesn’t ease into it. Driven by years of agonizing restraint, Ryul begins to pound into you with a relentless pace. Every thrust is deep, hard, and punishing, his hips meeting yours with a wet, heavy slap that echoes in the quiet room. He completely dominates your body, the angle of his thrusts hitting your sweetest spot over and over until you’re sobbing his name into the space between your mouths.
Ryul lets out a harsh, broken breath against your ear, his movements becoming more frantic, more desperate as the friction between your bodies reaches a scorching breaking point. His entire body is slick with sweat, his muscles locked tight under the strain of trying—and failing—to hold himself back.
"Ryul, please," you sob out, your hands desperately clawing at his broad shoulders, your hips instinctively rising to meet every heavy, punishing thrust.
The sound of his name on your lips completely ruins him. He lets out a low groan, his grip on your waist tightening until his fingers dig deeply into your skin, pinning you flat against the mattress. He changes the angle, his hips slamming into yours with a sudden, devastatingly deep rhythm that makes your vision go completely spotty. You are entirely at his mercy, completely consumed by the sheer power of his body moving against yours.
"I can't—" Ryul gasps out, his teeth brushing against the sensitive skin of your neck as he bites down softly, his breath hitching violently. "I'm gonna cum. I can't hold it."
He doesn't give you a chance to answer. With one final, devastatingly hard thrust that buries him to the absolute hilt, Ryul stiffens completely. A ragged, animalistic sound rips from the back of his throat as his body shudders violently over yours, filling you completely with his thick release.
The intense sensation triggers your own arousal, your walls squeezing tightly around him in a series of helpless, overlapping spasms that leave you completely undone, crying out into the quiet room.
Ryul collapses against your chest, his heavy weight a comforting, suffocating presence as you both try to catch your breath.
His heart is hammering wildly against your ribs, his breath hot and ragged against your collarbone. He doesn't move away, keeping himself buried deep inside you as his hands slowly move up to cup your face, his thumbs gently wiping away the stray tears at the corners of your eyes.
The bedroom is completely quiet now, save for the sound of your overlapping, shallow breaths and the distant rhythm of the rain still tapping against the window.
Ryul doesn't move for a long time. He remains draped heavily over you, his forehead resting against the crook of your neck as his chest slowly expands and contracts against yours. The sheer intensity of what just happened hangs thick in the humid air, turning the initial wild adrenaline into a warm, heavy, and deeply intimate haze.
Slowly, Ryul shifts his weight, sliding out from inside you with a soft, quiet gasp escaping his lips. The sudden absence leaves you feeling cold, but he doesn't let the space last. He immediately pulls you against his side, wrapping one large arm around your waist and dragging you flush against his chest.
Your back is pressed to his front, his chin resting right on top of your head. His skin is still radiating an intense, comforting heat, and his heart is still drumming a frantic rhythm against your shoulder blades. His fingers lightly trace lazy, mindless circles across the bare skin of your stomach, his rough touch sending faint, lingering ripples of pleasure straight to your core.
"Hey," he whispers after a long silence, his voice incredibly low, vibrating right through your back. He presses a soft, lingering kiss to the crown of your head, his grip on your waist tightening just a fraction. "You okay?"
You nod against his chest, your fingers reaching down to interlace with his. "Yeah. More than okay."
Ryul lets out a breathy, quiet chuckle, his thumb rubbing comforting strokes over the back of your hand. The tension that had been rotting away at your friendship for months is completely gone, replaced by a deep, undeniable intimacy.
"Good," he murmurs, his eyes half-closed as he inhales the scent of your hair. "Because I'm not going back to how things were before tonight.”
The easy, uncomplicated safety of a platonic friendship had vanished the exact moment the game started, fully shattered by the sheer weight of what had been hidden beneath the surface for so long.
There was no going back to mindless late night hangouts, no pretending that the space between you was just empty air, and no putting the carefully built walls back up. Everything had been rewritten in the span of a single night.
As the quiet settled deeper into the room, the reality of it became entirely clear. The familiar dynamic you had protected for years was gone, completely consumed by the realization that you could never look at each other the same way again.
The friendship hadn't just changed it had been entirely undone, leaving behind something far more intense, permanent, and entirely unavoidable.
Author’s note : FUCKKKK this was a request but the app tweaked and it’s gone now.. anon, hope you’ll be able to stumble upon it still. Not comfortable writing smut so that’s for now
The front door of their little house clicked shut behind them, sealing out the last of the afternoon light and the distant hum of well-wishers still lingering near the church. James set the small overnight bag down carefully, then turned to face you. His dark hair was slightly mussed from the drive, the white collar of his shirt open at the throat where he had loosened his tie the moment they left the parking lot. A faint flush colored his cheeks, and his eyes, usually so steady, held a quiet, almost disbelieving heat.
“We’re home,” he said, voice low. “For good.”
You stood in the entryway, still in your simple ivory dress, the soft fabric brushing your knees. Your braids rested neat against your shoulders and back, the ends brushing the fabric when you moved. The house smelled of lemon polish and the faint sweetness of the peonies James had brought home two days earlier, now arranged in a glass vase on the side table. Late sunlight filtered through the half-drawn curtains, laying long gold bars across the hardwood floor. Everything felt both familiar and brand new, as if the walls themselves were holding their breath.
James stepped closer. His hands found yours, fingers threading together. “You look beautiful,” he murmured. “All day I kept thinking I must be dreaming. Then I’d catch your eye during the vows and know I wasn’t. Kept thinking about getting you back here. Getting my hands on you properly.”
You gave a small smile. “I kept waiting for someone to stand up and say there’d been a mistake.”
“No mistake.” He lifted one of your hands and pressed a slow kiss to your knuckles, then turned your wrist and kissed the soft inside of it. “You’re my wife. I’m your husband. That’s the truth of it now. And I’ve been waiting all day to show you what that means.”
The words settled between you like something solid and warm. James’s gaze drifted to the small gold band on your finger, then back to your face. He reached up and gently touched one of your braids, his fingertips lingering against your cheek afterward before sliding down to rest at the side of your neck, thumb stroking the pulse there.
“Come here,” he said.
He guided you into the living room, where the old couch waited beneath the open window. A soft breeze stirred the sheer curtains. Outside, a neighbor’s wind chime rang faintly. James sat first, then drew you down beside him, close enough that your knee brushed his. For a moment neither of you spoke. The quiet of the house wrapped around you both. No guests, no cameras, no toasts left to make. Just the two of you and the soft tick of the clock on the mantel.
James’s thumb traced slow circles over the back of your hand, then higher, along the inside of your wrist. “I kept thinking about this part,” he admitted, voice rougher now. “The drive home. Walking through that door with you. Having you all to myself. Wondering how long I’d last before I got to touch you like I’ve been wanting to.”
“Me too.” Your voice was steady. “I kept wondering what it would feel like. To be alone with you like this. Really alone.”
He turned more fully toward you, one arm resting along the back of the couch, the other already sliding to your waist. “And? What does it feel like?”
You met his eyes without looking away. “Like I can finally breathe.”
A small smile curved his mouth, but there was heat under it. He leaned in and kissed you, gentle at first, almost careful. The kiss deepened quickly, his lips warm and sure against yours, tongue brushing yours with quiet intent. One of his hands came up to cradle the side of your face, the other settling firmer at your waist, fingers pressing into the fabric. You felt the solid heat of him through the thin layers, the steady rise and fall of his chest. When he drew back just enough to speak, his breath brushed your cheek, warmer now.
“I’ve wanted to do that all day,” he said. “Properly. Without an audience. Wanted to get my mouth on you and keep it there.”
You answered by kissing him again. This time the kiss held more urgency, more of the long day of waiting. James’s hand slid from your waist to the small of your back, drawing you closer until there was almost no space left between you. The soft fabric of your dress whispered against his shirt. Outside, a car passed on the quiet street. Inside, the only sound was the quiet catch of breath between kisses.
James’s mouth trailed from your lips to the corner of your jaw, then lower, brushing the sensitive skin just below your ear. He nipped lightly there, then soothed it with his tongue. You felt him smile against you when your breath hitched.
“That okay?” he asked, voice roughened.
“Yeah.”
He kissed the same spot again, slower this time, then found your mouth once more. The kiss grew deeper, hungrier. His fingers traced the line of your spine through the dress, pausing at the small buttons that ran down the back, then sliding lower to rest at the curve of your hip, squeezing once. He didn’t rush. He simply held you, kissed you, let the heat build in the quiet room until the air itself felt charged. When his hand came back up to cup the side of your breast through the fabric, it was deliberate, testing, thumb brushing slow over the peak.
When he finally drew back, his eyes were darker, his breathing uneven. “We don’t have to hurry anything,” he said. “We’ve got the rest of our lives. But I want you to know I’ve never wanted anyone the way I want you right now. I want to learn every sound you make. Want to feel you under me. Want to take my time undoing every button and then take even longer with the rest.”
You rested your forehead against his. “I feel the same. It’s new for me too. All of this.”
Understanding passed between you without needing more words. James’s hand came up to cup your cheek again, thumb stroking gently over the warm brown of your skin, then down to your bottom lip. “Then we take it slow. We learn each other. There’s no one else here but us. But I’m not going to pretend I haven’t been thinking about this. About getting you out of this dress. About what you’re going to feel like when it’s just us.”
He kissed you once more, long and thorough, until the last of the day’s formality melted away. When the kiss broke, he stood and offered his hand. You took it. Together you walked through the soft afternoon light toward the hallway that led to the bedroom you now shared. The door stood half open, the white curtains already stirring in the breeze from the open window. The bed was made with the pale blue sheets James had chosen the week before, the ones he said looked like the sky after rain.
At the threshold he paused and turned to you again. His free hand found the small of your back, then slid lower, resting possessively. “Still with me?”
“Always.”
He smiled, that quiet, private smile that belonged only to you now, edged with something hungrier. Then he guided you inside, closing the door softly behind you both. The room smelled faintly of clean cotton and the lavender soap you’d left on the dresser that morning. Sunlight pooled on the floorboards. James’s hands settled at your waist, warm and steady, then pulled you flush against him so you could feel exactly how much he wanted this. Hard against your stomach. Unapologetic.
“I’ve imagined this moment a hundred times,” he murmured against your braids. “Coming home with you. Having the whole night ahead of us. Learning what makes you sigh, what makes you smile like that. What makes you grip the sheets.” His lips brushed your temple, then lower, along your jaw. “I want to take my time with you. Every button. Every kiss. I want to make sure you feel how much I love you. And how badly I’ve been wanting to get inside you.”
You turned in his arms so you could see his face. The late light caught the gold in his eyes. “I already do,” you said. “But I want to feel it again. And again.”
James’s laugh was soft, almost reverent, but his hands were already sliding up your back to the first of those small buttons. “Good. Because I plan on making you feel it all night.” He kissed you once more, deeper this time, the fabric shifting under his fingers as he worked the first button free. Outside, the wind chime sang again. Inside, the only world that mattered was the quiet space between your bodies, the shared breath, the promise of the long evening still unfolding.
He paused, forehead resting against yours. “Tell me if you want me to stop. Or slow down. Or anything at all.”
“I won’t want you to stop,” you said. “Not tonight.”
James’s eyes closed for a moment, as if the words had settled deep. When he opened them again, the look he gave you held equal parts tenderness and heat. “Then let me take care of you,” he said. “Let me show you how it feels to be mine. Properly. Completely. For the first time. I want to taste you. Want to feel you open up for me. Want to hear what you sound like when I finally get to have you.”
His mouth found yours again, and the kiss carried everything the day had built. The vows, the drive home, the quiet of the empty house. Hands moved with careful purpose, but there was no hesitation now. The soft sounds of fabric shifting filled the room as more buttons came undone. Somewhere beyond the window a bird called once and fell silent. The light continued its slow golden slide across the floor.
James guided you gently toward the bed, never breaking the kiss for long. When the backs of your knees met the mattress he eased you down, following, bracing his weight so he wouldn’t crush you. The sheets were cool against your bare shoulders. His body was warm above yours, hard where he pressed against you. One of his hands traced the line of your arm from wrist to elbow, then higher, as if memorizing the shape of you. Your braids spread across the pillow behind you. His other hand slid down your side, over the curve of your hip, and stayed there, gripping.
He rolled his hips once, slow and deliberate, the hard length of him grinding against you through the remaining layers of clothing. The friction was sharp and sweet. He did it again, deeper this time, watching your face the whole while.
“You’re steady,” he murmured, almost to himself. “Even now. Makes me want to see how long that lasts.”
“So are you. Mostly.”
He smiled against your mouth, then kissed deeper, rolling his hips again so you could feel every inch of him. The dry drag of fabric between you, the heat building with every slow grind. “Guilty. I’ve never done this either. Not with anyone who mattered. Not like this.” His voice dropped lower. “I want it to be good for you. I want to get it right. Want to take you apart slow and put you back together. Want to be the first and the only one who gets to know what you feel like when you’re mine. Want to push inside you and stay there until you forget everything else.”
You lifted a hand to his cheek. “We will. Together.”
James kissed the palm of your hand, then your wrist, then the soft inside of your elbow. Each touch was deliberate, unhurried, but there was an edge to it now, a promise. He kept moving against you, slow grinds that made the bed creak faintly, the pressure building between your bodies until it felt almost unbearable. The air thickened with shared breath and the quiet rustle of clothing being set aside piece by piece. When at last there was nothing left but skin and the fading light, James rested his forehead against yours once more, one hand sliding between your thighs with careful intent, fingers finding the heat of you.
“I love you,” he said, voice rough. “I’m going to keep saying it until you get tired of hearing it. And I’m going to keep touching you until you forget how to say anything else. Want to feel you take me. Want to be the first one inside you. Want to move with you until neither of us can think straight.”
“I won’t get tired of it.”
He smiled, and the smile turned into another kiss, deeper, slower, full of the promise of everything still to come. Outside, the first hints of evening began to cool the air. Inside your shared home, the two of you moved together with the careful wonder of people who knew they were discovering something entirely new, something that belonged only to them, and would for the rest of their lives.
summary. every neighborhood has a girl next door. James has spent most of his life pretending he hated her, only to realize he never hated her at all
genre. enemies to lovers, fluff
warnings. mentions of death/die, alcohol consumption, reader and James are the same age, Ni-ki from enhypen is in this
wc. 3.3k
It was Christmas time, and James hated you. Or at least, thatʼs what he kept telling himself. It wasnʼt just a simple beef between neighbors and classmates; it was deeper than that. You were smart, he knew it, but the way you showed off your smarty pants doesnʼt sit right with him.
You had embarrassed him in front of his family—just because you could, and read his diary aloud when you were nine in front of your friends. “Dear diary, she smiles so pretty and I think I like her.” You declared at that time. James genuinely thought it was just that. But oh lord, he was so wrong. Loudly wrong. As if invading his privacy wasnʼt enough, you somehow convinced his own mother that you were the better child.
You also liked being the center of attention, especially during Q&A sessions in class. James was the opposite. He liked living a slow life, and not being seen with a lot of people. But to his knowledge, he was seated with you during junior until this senior high school time. Every time you answered a teacherʼs question, the entire class would turn to look at him. Heʼd rather die than to be in that position over again.
On the other hand, you were not someone as cocky as how James would describe you. You were popular, pretty, and smart. Someone who always caught peopleʼs attention at the school hall. You were only doing those annoying things with James, simply because you liked the reactions coming out of him every time you did something that got under his skin.
“Can you get out? Itʼs my room.” He stood next to his door as he placed a hand on his waist, staring at you whoʼs lying on his bed.
“No.” You turned a page of the “Little Women” novel in front of you. “Why not?” He frowned like a lost deer. Are you freaking serious right now?
“Because our families are there. Iʼm not going to bother them.”
“You better be joking.” He scoffed. “Weʼre not that close, you know? So stop pretending like we are.”
You let out an ʼouchʼ and looked up at him. “Look, why do you hate me so much?” You closed the novel and sat up straight.
“Do you have to ask?” He grabbed his phone in his pocket and sat on his study chair, showing his back to you. He didnʼt even bother to come and lie next to you. Even though deep down, you slightly wanted him to do that.
“Do you like me?”
James gasped and turned his chair to look at you. “Ew, thereʼs no way on Earth Iʼd do that.”
“Then, answer me.”
James choked on his own words. He couldnʼt even answer a simple question. Why did he hate you? Was it because of the diary story? Was it because youʼre smart? Was it because youʼre popular, and you donʼt have time to hang out with him at school?
Every time James looked for a reason, he still couldnʼt find it. His brain seemed to stop working. In fact, he didnʼt hate you that much. Thatʼs why it was so hard for him to find excuses. The sound of It Had To Be You by Frank Sinatra echoed in his room, leaving a loud silence between the two of you.
“I donʼt like you.”
You let out another ʼouchʼ. “That was harsh.”
“Okay, I donʼt like you.” James smiled sarcastically at you from ear to ear. He looked silly, and you just wanted to eat him alive.
“You sound like you donʼt mean it. Just accept the fact that you like me.” You blew him a kiss as you lay on your back on his pillow and started reading “Little Women” again. James remained silent. Part of him disliked the idea of liking you, and another part wondered if it would really be that bad.
Months passed, and itʼs already Summer. You and James got closer but still fought over the smallest thing ever. James couldnʼt deny ever since last Christmas, he was thinking maybe a little too much about you. How your smile never seemed to fade, how your dark orbs shone every time it looked at him, and how your hair fell every time you pulled out your hair tie.
You and James have been friends since forever. Jamesʼ family moved into the house next to yours when both of you were five. And ever since then, you and James became inseparable.
Your classmates decided to go on a summer vacation to the nearest beach. Some of you went enjoying the beach under umbrellas, and some (especially the boys) played football on the sand.
James was a part of the team as well, and you cheered for him, making him smile throughout the entire round. He didnʼt have that many friends since he was labeled as a nerd by your classmates. When the first round ended, James got kicked out because he couldnʼt score a goal.
He absentmindedly went to sit next to you, making the girls let out an ʼohʼ. They often asked why you liked being around him, and you simply shrugged over the question. “Maybe because heʼs nice?” You said at that time.
“That was a good round.” You put your arm over his shoulder and patted him.
“I know itʼs the worst. Stop being optimistic.” James answered sarcastically, his lips slightly forming a pout. Oh, you wish you could peck those cute lips of his.
“I still enjoyed it, though.” You observed him as a smile formed on your beautiful face. “I donʼt find this round interesting anymore since youʼre not in it.”
James swore you could possibly hear his heart thumping. That smile of yours could be the reason of his death one day. He shyly looked down, biting down a smile at your words. No, he couldnʼt act like this. You knew he hated you, he couldnʼt change that perspective yet. Not now.
“You look great, by the way.” Your voice brought him back to reality. He looked to the side only to find you already staring at him. Your sunglasses resting on your head, your shiny hair blown by the wind was the most gorgeous and breathtaking sight he has ever seen.
He cleared his throat. “You donʼt look bad either. I like it.” His voice came out low and dry.
“Yeah?” You raised your brows. “What did you like about it?” You whispered to him, sending him a shiver down to his spine.
“Em.. the swimsuit looks great. Your hair looks stunning.”
You giggled. “So youʼre saying Iʼm beautiful?”
“I guess so.” He drew his attention to the beach, avoiding eye contact. His cheeks heated up as soon as your eyes lingered on him.
“Thank you, baby.”
Baby?
He looked up at your now standing figure. You did a warm up before going into the water. “What did-”
“Come here!” You yelled at James. The poor boy was still confused with the new nickname you just gave him and now you wanted to play with him alone? On this beach? In front of your friends?
“Hello?” You yelled again. “Zhao Yufan!”
He still frowned at you. So you ran back to your umbrella and pulled Jamesʼ hands. “Letʼs go!”
And he followed you. Everything felt like a slow motion to him. Thereʼs no way the annoying-popular-pretty girl next door was his crush, and to his liking, rather to spend time with him than her friends. James couldnʼt process anything as he kept playing with you and followed the flow. He didnʼt want to rush this moment, especially if youʼre not feeling the same way as he did.
Tonight was one of Jamesʼ friendʼs party and he invited you to be his fake date since he didnʼt have any girls left to chose. At least, thatʼs what he said to you. You basically didnʼt mind if it meant you had more time to spend with him instead. “Do I look good?”
You did a turn in front of him in your white sundress. James bit his inside cheek to hold his excitement, seeing you in that dress awakened something inside him. It felt like butterflies filling his stomach and doing dances in it. “You look gorgeous.”
Your smile crept on your face as you clung your arms with his. “Thank you, baby.”
Not that sweet nickname again. It was the second time you called him that since last summer vacation.
“Ready?” He opened his car door for you.
“I was born ready.” You wiggled your brows at him and sat on the passenger seat as James closed your door and went around the car.
Nearly 20 minutes later, you and James arrived at his friendʼs house. You clung your arms around his again as soon as you got down from his car. You played the role of his fake girlfriend too good. His head spun.
“Iʼm going to get us a drink.” You looked up at him through your lashes and he nodded. You smiled at him before leaving for the drinks. He could've sworn he almost fell on the floor because of your smile.
James finally realized he never actually hated you. Youʼre not as annoying as how he remembered, and youʼre also not an attention seeker. It was just you. Everyone adored you, just like how he adored you. Youʼre popular amongst his friends. Maybe thatʼs why he hated you. He hated the fact of not being chosen, especially by you. But all this time youʼve been together, you always prove him wrong.
“Is that your girl?” A blonde guy bumped his shoulder on Jamesʼ as he sipped a cup of soda in his hand.
“Yeah.” James rubbed his nape.
“Holy shit, man! Youʼre insane!” He looked at James with an amazed face. “I told you, you have to get out of your zone and find some hot chicks.”
James saw youʼre coming to his way. “Ni-ki, stop.”
The blonde guy—Ni-ki—did exactly as he was told and sipped more of his soda. “Hi.” You beamed. “What did I miss?” You passed one cup to James and looked at both James and Ni-ki.
“Wait, Iʼve never seen you before. Whatʼs your name?” Ni-ki changed the topic as he offered his hand to shake yours. “Iʼm Ni-ki, by the way.”
“Iʼm Y/N. Nice to meet you, Ni-ki.” You shook Ni-kiʼs hand and smiled. Your voice trailed off his ear like a melody.
James looked at you then at Ni-ki then looked at your handshake. It seemed like it didnʼt have an end. James cleared his throat and separated your hand softly from Ni-ki. “I think weʼre going to the balcony. You know, just to get some fresh air.”
Ni-ki let the two of you leave and use the balcony. “Relax, I wonʼt take your girl. Unless you want me to.” Ni-ki winked at James before leaving to meet another group of friends.
“Is that your friend who hosted this party?” You stared straight to the front, sipping the last sip of your soda.
“Yeah, we have been friends since middle school.” James looked down on the road, there were a lot of teenagers standing and holding a cup on their hands chatting with each other.
“He seems like a good friend.”
“He is. He is my only friend.” James didnʼt know why heʼd said that to you. It slipped out of his mouth.
You looked at him, waiting until he looked back at you. When he did, he couldnʼt read your expression at all.
You nodded after a while and formed a thin smile on your lips. “Thatʼs nice. At least you have someone to rely on.”
The balcony door opened and Ni-kiʼs head showed. “Does anyone want wine?”
James glanced at you, finding your figure leaning to the balcony railing as you watched him. “I want it.”
“Iʼll be right back!”
“Wow. I never know you drink.” You chuckled.
James shrugged. “Uh... yeah. Iʼve been drinking since our first year at senior high school.”
Lie.
You formed an ʼohʼ as a response. Both of you remained silent until Ni-ki came back with two glasses of wine in his hands. “Here we go.” He put the glasses on the table at the balcony.
“Thank you, Ni-ki.”
“Thanks, man.”
“My pleasure, you lovebirds.” Ni-ki winked at both of you and closed the balcony door again.
You glanced at James. The boy seemed to hesitate taking a sip of the glass. “You sure you want to drink?” You rubbed his back, feeling concerned about him. He didnʼt need to do anything to prove it to you anyway.
“Yes.” He nodded and gulped. His Adamʼs apple bobbed up and down due to his anxiousness.
“You donʼt have to drink it if itʼs your first time.” You placed your hands on his and squeezed it. Jamesʼ eyes widened as he looked at you. He caught you off guard and thereʼs nothing more embarrassing than this moment.
“How did- how did you- ”
“Look, James. You donʼt have to do this. I knew it was your first time. Iʼve been with you since weʼre five, remember? I know when youʼre lying.”
His voice became raspy as he looked to the other side. “This is so embarrassing.”
“Nothing is embarrassing.”
“I always embarrass myself in front of you. Itʼs embarrassing.”
“No,” you cupped his face and forced him to look at you. “Youʼre not embarrassing. Itʼs cute when you try to act cool in front of me.”
His eyes became glossy. Did he want to cry?
“Can I, at least try it? Just for this time?” James didnʼt know why he asked for your permission. But he still did it anyway.
“Okay, baby. If you donʼt like it, you can stop drinking it. Okay?”
Baby. Baby. Baby. That word hung in Jamesʼ head a bit too many times. Whatʼs your intention for calling him that name? You didnʼt say you like him, nor did he make it obvious that he likes you.
James nodded and drank the wine like a thirsty kid. You frowned at the sight and held his empty glass before itʼs falling down on the floor. “Hey. Look at me.” You cupped Jamesʼ face again. His eyes were open-closed, his lips parted a bit and became glossy, his cheeks turned as red as tomatoes. He was drunk.
“Let me take you home.” You grabbed his car keys in his pocket and placed his arm over your shoulder as a support for him to walk.
By that, you drove back to your house. James mumbled a lot of things, but you couldnʼt catch it. Sometimes he whined, and the other time he stayed silent.
You parked his car in his garage and helped him walk to his bedroom. His parents were sleeping, thatʼs why you did it by yourself and didnʼt want to wake them up. “Youʼre so freaking heavy.”
James giggled. He fixed his black glasses to see the path to his bedroom clearly. “Thank you.” He mumbled when you put his body on his bed.
You breathed heavily and passed out next to him. You stared at his ceiling as you placed your hand on your chest, feeling your heart beating so fast. “You look so beautiful today. It makes me crazy.”
You looked over at him, finding him hide his face in the back of his arm. “Really?” You moved his arm to look at his now red face. It became more red than the last time you saw it.
He pouted, really pouted this time, and nodded at you. “I- I donʼt know how to explain it.”
“Well, you can go slowly.“ You ran your fingers to his hair, giving him a sense of relaxation. “Iʼll wait.”
“I just donʼt think I hate you.”
“I know.”
“...You knew?” His eyes widened, reminding you of a kitten who lost his mother.
“Remember how I told you that you liked me last Christmas?”
He nodded. “I just realized I donʼt really have any reason to hate you. Maybe all of it came from the jealousy I had if you end up not choosing me over your friends.”
“I was scared, like really scared, that one day you would leave me. Thatʼs why I always make a statement that I hate you because I read people would think about someone who hates them.”
“It may sounds weird and Iʼm sorry if it is, but I like you. So, so much. You canʼt imagine it. Every time you smiled, looked, and talked to me, or annoyed me I felt myself falling harder.”
Oh, sweet boy.
“Iʼm not saying this in order you have to be with me because I donʼt have friends.... I just feel like, I really need to confess how I feel to you. I feel like I always like you,” he stopped for a second. “No, I love you. I feel like I always love you.”
You stared at him and stayed silent. James started to wonder why you didnʼt utter a single word since his confession. Did he do something wrong? Did he hurt your feelings? Did he offend you?
Your mouth parted a little and closed again, as if youʼre hesitate to say something. He sat up straight and fixed his glasses. He met your eyes and tried to find the answer. “Did I - ”
“I love you too.” You cut him off. And oh, his expression was so precious to you. “I did all the annoying things just to get close to you. I hope you donʼt mind.” You smirked at him.
He was confused. This couldnʼt be real. Thereʼs no freaking way a girl like you liked him in the first place. He was just an ordinary guy. “This is not a joke, you know.” His dizziness was long forgotten because of your answer.
You gasped and put a hand on your chest, playing dramatically at his words. “Why did you think I was joking?” You moved closer to him as he slowly moved backwards. No, no.
“Thereʼs no way you would like me.“ His voice cracked. He looked down at his fingers and gulped.
“Did you realize Iʼve been calling you baby?” You moved closer and closer until thereʼs only a few inches left between the two of you. James nodded, the thought of you calling him baby made his heart beat like crazy.
“I spent most of my time annoying you. Did you realize why I did that?” You whispered to him.
“Y-yeah.. yeah.”
You smiled at him. “Good.”
Thereʼs a long silence after the conversation. Both of you sank down in your own thoughts. “Can I be your boyfriend?”
“Is that how you ask someone out?”
“Wait- do you wanna be- ”
“Yes, you can and I wanna be your girlfriend.”
His eyes turned glossy as he stared at you, your lips to be exact. He held your face and leaned forward. “Can I kiss you?”
“Of course.”
He pressed his lips on yours and both of you moved in sync. The kiss was messy, but you didnʼt mind. Thereʼs always room to learn. He broke the kiss and pressed his forehead against yours. “Did my glasses bother you?”
You shook your head. “No.”
He nodded. “I love you so much.”
“I love you too, baby.”
He grinned at you. “Keep calling me that, I like that nickname.”
“Okay, baby.” You pecked his lips again. “Can I sleep here tonight? I donʼt wanna wake your family up.”
Classic.
“Of course. I can sleep on the floor-”
“Youʼre sleeping next to me.”
“Next to you?”
“Why? You donʼt want it?”
“No! I want it.” He answered immediately, causing you to giggle. “Youʼre so cute.” You pecked his cheek and positioned yourself on his bed.
“Come here.” You opened your arms as he crawled and hugged your body. The two of you enjoyed the cozy moment and slept until the next morning.
IT’S JUST A SHAME, THAT’S ALL — THROUGH THE LENS FROM OUTSIDE
➪ pairing : ot5 cortis x 6th member reader
➪ summary : a continuation to part one , part two , and part three. life's been different without you but what a loss is to a family, it's a new job for someone else.
➪ other notes : if the last part drove me insane, this one demolished me. i hope you guys like it because i really did try my best. creds to @/norvixa6 on tiktok for the analog horror imagery. also this is barely edited it's like 4 am but i tried my very best to check any typos.
“how has it been two months already and still the same information since the first week ?!” your mother screams, hands slamming down on the table. “ma’am please calm down,” officer park tries to deescalate the situation. “no, my daughter went missing two months ago and all any of you do is twiddlƒe with your thumbs instead of looking for her !” your mom cries. “we are doing everything in our power to find y/n, not a day goes by when we aren’t.”
tears start running down your mom’s face, there hasn’t been a single day where she’s had a moment in peace. her whole life halted by your disappearance. “i promise you, we will find y/n,” officer park gently pats your mom on the back, handing her a box of tissues. “we have a new detective working on the case, we are not giving up.” from a few feet away, your brother watches in silence. he’s grown used to how your mom constantly cries.
the car ride home is uncomfortably silent, your brother’s become the chauffeur of the family. your mom hasn’t been able to drive since you disappeared. home isn’t any louder. your shoes are still by the door, slowly collecting dust. your jacket still hangs over a chair, one your mom forgot to move when you forgot it after your last visit. now no one moves anything, how can they ? “mom go lie down for a bit, dinner is on me,” he says, mimicking the same soft tone she used on both of you as children.
“how about we get thai takeout instead ?” she suggests, a lump forms in your brother’s throat. “…yeah of course, whatever you want, i’ll let you know when it gets here,” he forces a smile, nodding. your mom makes her way upstairs before calling out, “oh and chul, if there’s anything new, let me know please.” chul nods, “yeah i will.” but he knows deep inside that there won’t be any updates, it’s just a waiting game with no prize to win.
chul spends most of his days like he did before everything. he attends his classes at his university, works as a cashier afterwards, and goes home to sleep. nothing about his routine has changed yet it feels 10 times more tiring. he can distract himself from thoughts about you during the day but as soon as night falls, everything hits him like a truck. he doesn’t cry, but he’s lucky if he gets three hours of sleep. he hates himself for just thinking of this but a part of him has grown to resent you.
not because you ran away, no that would have been easier because at least you would have told someone. but what is he supposed to think when you suddenly disappear ? he knows what the company said, but he doesn’t care. he knows you, he knows his sister, you would’ve never left. though he knows that making a claim against a multimillionaire company with no proof would only result in loss, financial and emotional.
and with the way finances are going, he’d rather not start anything. almost immediately after you disappeared, the company cut off any source of income, claiming that you had breached the contract. royalties you had been receiving for years even before debut were all cut off. with a mix of mom’s medicine, her medical bills, mortgage, groceries, and miscellaneous bills, chul tried his best to pick up as many shifts as possible.
not because they’re about to go completely broke, but because life was starting to become less comfortable. it’s weird to think that the youngest person in the family was the one responsible for most finances. when mom stopped working after her chronic pain became worse, you told her not to worry about it, that you’d take care of it. now instead of just worrying about his tuition payments, he has to make sure expenses don’t fall through the roof.
one night, chul stares at your bedroom door before opening it. he winces at the creak, remembering how you’d complain that he never oiled the hinges. he walks in, closing the door behind him. he doesn’t bother turning on the light, just sits on the floor next to your bed, letting his back feel the plushness against your mattress. even though you hadn’t lived at home in a long time, your room still looks the same as it did years ago.
the only difference now is that you’re not coming home at all. his hands dig into his hoodie pocket, revealing three things. nicotine gum, nicotine patches, and cigarettes. before you even debuted, chul had the habit of smoking cigarettes on a weekly basis. it helped with his stress as much as he didn’t want to admit he was addicted to it. you’d immediately cover your nose when he walked by, harshly scolding him. “you’re so disgusting chul,” he’d just roll his eyes, “well it’s a good thing you’re not the one doing it huh ?”
it would always end in an argument, until one day when he stopped altogether. “you know, second hand smoking is also bad, how am i supposed to sing if i’m breathing in your smoke ?” chul raised his eyebrows in confusion. “i smoke with the window open, what the hell are you talking about ?” “that doesn’t matter, that shit penetrates the walls !” you stomped your foot in frustration. “you won’t even live here in a month, you’re moving to the dorms.”
“okay then if it’s only a few weeks until i leave, quit for now and then you can continue ruining your lungs,” you crossed your arms. “are you worried about your lungs or mine ? make up your mind.” “i’m worried about all of us ! you know mommy can’t be breathing it in either,” you stated, flailing your arms. chul hummed, you made a good argument. so he finally made the decision to go cold turkey.
“okay, just until you leave, i’ll stop smoking and i promise that any future smoking will be done outside, how does that sound ?” chul smooshes his cigarette into his ash tray. you blink at him before smiling brightly, “really ?!” chul rolled his eyes, “yes really.” you immediately wrapped your arms around him, squeezing him tightly. “i knew you loved me !” your voice muffled against his shirt. “don’t get ahead of yourself,” he awkwardly patted your back.
it’s been almost three years since that conversation and since then, chul hadn’t smoked. the first two weeks without smoking were absolute hell, just the aspect of not having anything to wind down after a hard long day sent cold shivers down his spine. yet, he kept his promise, doing everything to fill that void. his oral fixation was satisfied when he shoved a chapstick between his lips, a little gross but it sufficed.
after you left, he challenged himself to try one more month of not smoking, just to prove to himself and to you that he wasn’t addicted. eventually that challenge became his lifestyle, clean lungs and no lingering smoke smell on his clothes. but now chul looks down at the floor in front of him. “fuck,” he curses to himself, biting his cheek hard enough to make it bleed. he just needs something real, anything to make that ache go away.
he picks up the gum packet, reading the instructions on the back, effective in 10-15 minutes. “who the hell waits that long ?” he drops them on the floor again before grabbing the patches, turning it over, effective in 2-4 hours. “are these fuckers trying to kill me or something ?” he scoffs, throwing them on the floor, this time with more force. he sighs, turning his gaze to the pack of cigarettes. he can’t, he can’t just give it all up right now…but he needs it.
“just one,” a wobbly smile forms on his face, shaky hands ripping off the plastic wrapping. then- BUZZZZ. “shit,” chul jolts, dropping the pack. he reaches again into his pocket, now pulling out his phone. it’s an unknown number listed under the police department. he immediately answers, “hello ?” an unfamiliar voice speaks, “good evening, is this chul l/n ?” chul sits up straight, reaching for the nicotine gum. “yes, this is him.”
“my name is detective kang hyeok-jin, i was assigned to your sister’s case about a week ago,” detective kang introduces himself. “i know it can be very frustrating and repetitive to answer the same questions but i’d like to get some details about y/n so i can understand her disappearance as best as i can.” chul shoves three nicotine gums into his mouth, face contorting in disgust. “yeah of course, i’ll answer anything if it helps you guys find my sister.”
across town, a sleep deprived hyeok-jin asks chul several questions. he writes them down in messy handwriting, just enough for him to understand. “thank you mr. l/n, this was very helpful. i’ll dedicate myself to finding your sister,” hyeok-jin grips the phone tighter. “you’re not the first one to say that…but i hope that you’ll actually help,” chul sighs into the phone, obviously tired out by these two past months.
“i’m sorry to hear that, i know it hasn’t been easy for your family, i’ll do everything i can to get her back,” hyeok-jin sets his pen down. a small pause comes from the other line “yeah…thank you for calling anyway.” even though they aren’t face to face, hyeok-jin can sense the hesitation and defeat in chul’s voice. “i’ll let you rest then, i’ll keep you updated on anything and everything, please save my number into your phone, and have a goodnight.”
“alright, thank you, goodnight,” without another beat, the line is cut. hyeok-jin lays his phone face flat onto his desk, rubbing his hands over his face. he’s been looking over this case for only a week and he’s beyond confused. everything that should be there is there but your case file is small to say the least. the longest document is the company’s statement and proof that you breached your contract and could even be sued.
everything else is just…there. “hey boy, you should head home, you’ve been here two hours overtime,” lieutenant baek sun-woo calls out to him. “i’ll go home soon ! i was just reviewing the case you gave me,” hyeok-jin gives his supervisor a tired smile. “don’t you have a wife and a kid to get home to ?” the lieutenant asks. “i actually don’t have a girlfriend sir,” that statement is immediately welcomed with an up and down stare, “well that explains a lot.”
hyeok-jin tilts his head in confusion, but doesn’t have enough time to reply before lieutenant baek bids his goodbye. “go home before any chance of having a girlfriend disappears completely.” hyeok-jin forces out a laugh, “yes sir !” a few minutes later, the office falls completely silent, the only sound coming from the light over his head. hyeok-jin looks back down at your case, furrowing his eyebrows. missing person report. photos of the cctv footage. company statement. lack of witness statements.
the more he thinks, the more he’s confused. he flips through the interviews of different people you were close with, your family, your members, even workers from your favorite stores. they all said the same thing : you would have never left out of your own will. except for one person. when asked by the police if it seems likely that you’d run away, edwards martin stated “i would like to say no but y/n has always been a complicated person, so i’m unsure.”
hyeok-jin leans back in his chair, it would’ve made sense if everyone or most people had the same idea of you but to only have one person, specifically the last person that saw you ? “hey you’re not heading out yet ?” a familiar voice grabs his attention, it’s officer kim. “i’m about to leave, was just looking over some things,” he smiles at her. “good, don’t overwork yourself,” she nods, walking closer to him. “actually since you’re here, were you at the scene during the investigation with that one idol ?” he asks, pushing the case file to his friend.
“no, i was off that day but i did hear some things about it, why ?” she flips through it. “it just seems weird, almost like it wasn’t…thoroughly investigated, everything is so short,” he hesitates on his words, not wanting to overstep a line. “i can’t say much about it honestly, missing person cases are always weird to handle especially when her company is contradicting it as a whole,” officer kim frowns. “yeah…i’ll look more into that, thanks though,” hyeok-jin sighs, grabbing the file from her.
“also, shouldn’t you also be going home too ?” he asks officer kim. “normally yes but they changed me to night shift, just until one of the guys gets back from paternity leave,” she shakes her head. “oh i see, well make sure to stock up on energy drinks and coffee,” he cracks a joke making officer kim snort. “will do, thanks, now go home and sleep before your brain gives out,” she clears her throat, giving him a small wave. “thanks, have a good shift !” once left alone again, hyeok-jin exhales. he’s tired and confused but he does know something, tomorrow’s a new day.
when chul wakes up, he groans in pain. how did you even sleep on your bed every night when you were little if it’s harder than a rock ?! your unicorn plushie is directly under his neck, your lion plushie is tucked between his armpit. he sits up, rubbing his eyes. on your nightstand is his nicotine products, unopened patches, opened gums, and half unwrapped cigarettes. he looks around your room now that the sun is peeking beyond the curtains. it almost makes him sick, he hates being here during the day where he can see the remnants of your memory as a child.
almost immediately, he fixes your bed before grabbing his things and leaving the room. he thinks he’ll die if he stays in there for another minute. when he goes downstairs, he sees mom, buttoning up her bright pink vest. “mom you’re already leaving ?” he asks, grabbing her purse. “early bird gets the worm honey,” she smiles, looking at him. “seeing you go out like this every day worries me,” chul expresses his discomfort.
“not knowing where your sister is worries me,” she ends his argument. “please be safe then, and don’t stand or walk for too long,” hyeok-jin gives the older woman a tight hug. “walking is good for me, you know that,” she shrugs him off, walking to the front door. mom’s been avoidant lately, less affectionate and more sad, not on purpose but because her mind is clouded by worrying about you. he wishes everything could be normal again.
when lieutenant baek invites hyeok-jin out for lunch, he almost refused. it was weird, not in a suspicious way but he had never had a supervisor buy him lunch. yet here he is, stuffing his mouth with meat. “so hyeok-jin, you came from jeju island right ?” lieutenant baek asks him. hyeok-jin nods, swallowing his food. “how come you came to seoul ? i’d die to live on jeju,” the lieutenant chuckles, sipping a bit of his soup.
“i heard seoul is a good place for detectives to grow,” he replies, awkwardly smiling. “really ? i heard there was a lot of crime there,” he shakes his head at his superior’s words. “no, we just have a lot of tourists and most of them are respectful but there’s a handful that just ruin it for everyone. and even then a lot of the crimes are straight forward, a little burglary here, a little fight there, it’s all very simple,” he sighs.
“no wonder you’re going all in for this missing girl case,” the older man chuckles. hyeok-jin places his chopsticks down, wiping his mouth with a napkin “actually i wanted to talk to you about that.” the lieutenant looks at him, eyebrow raised. “why…did you put me on y/n l/n’s case ? i appreciate it of course, it’s an honor but it’s a big case for a newcomer no ?” he asks, looking off to the side. lieutenant baek hesitates to answer before exhaling.
“it’s a big case but it’s also a dead end.” hyeok-jin’s puzzled by his answer. “what do you mean ?” “you know how you had simple cases in jeju ? it’s similar to this one…whether her family and friends want to admit it or not, the girl probably ran away. there’s no proof otherwise and it’d be hard for her company to fake something like that so boldly.” lieutenant baek explains his thinking, it’s clear by now that he’s set on this idea.
hyeok-jin shifts uncomfortably in his seat, unsure of what to say. “when you have your children, you’ll understand that this is the type of things teenagers do when they’re pent up,” his superior attempts to reassure him. “it doesn’t make sense though-” “please don’t think too much about it kid, digging into it will only waste your time.” hyeok-jin shuts his mouth, beginning to become irritated.
“besides let’s say worst case scenario, the company was involved since apparently that’s folks favorite theory, she’s probably living a good life down low. i mean, think about it, people do a lot for money, money talks and money runs the world.” the older man waves off the situation. instead of arguing and possibly losing his job, hyeok-jin calms himself down “if you say so…”
chul’s day was uneventful to say the least, the same long and boring routine. school and work, nothing to celebrate but nothing to complain about. that is until he had to pick up mom’s medicine. he walked in and out of the pharmacy three separate times, waiting for his check for that week to hit his bank account. when it finally does, he’s only left with a few thousand won afterwards, even with the coupon the pharmacist offered.
as fucked up as it sounds, he’s glad that only a few people know that he’s your brother. he can’t imagine the looks of pity and people whispering under their breath “poor guy, it must suck being him” or even “wow he’s an idol’s brother but he could barely afford medicine.” he’d probably die out of the embarrassment. when he reaches home, the sun’s already gone down.
he’s about to reach for his keys, but having the habit of checking if the door is unlocked gets to him first. surprisingly, it’s open. chul furrows his eyebrows, did mom forget to lock it ? he quietly steps inside, just in case something’s happening. “i wouldn’t possibly be able to accept that,” chul hears mom talking in the kitchen. “it’s really okay don’t worry, you’re basically my second mom,” oh it’s martin.
chul stands outside of the kitchen, listening quietly to the conversation. “y/n isn’t here but i know she would have wanted me to help,” martin tries to persuade mom on something. “but it’s so much money…” mom sighs. “exactly, and i’m guessing chul’s been paying for your medicine, so think about it like this : i’m not only helping you, i’m also helping him,” so that’s what this is about, mom’s medicine.
chul remembers the first time you met martin. it was during a hot summer day in august, both of you were sweaty in boiling heat. martin had approached you, offering to push you on the swing after seeing you fail to get momentum which later led into a game of tag. it was cute and wholesome. what chul didn’t expect was for this to blossom into a friendship, the kind every kid desires to have.
as years passed and both of you grew, martin still chased after you, almost like a person running alongside a butterfly. wherever you went, martin soon followed. he liked martin for the most part, especially because you also never had a bad thing to say about him. when chul found out you’d be in the same group, he was relieved you’d have a best friend beside you and also someone he trusts fully.
chul steps back when he hears footsteps approach the doorway. martin is startled back when he sees chul, “you scared me sorry,” he laughs, a smile forming on his face. “nice to see you too,” chul nods, leading him to the front door. “oh by the way,” chul stops martin just as he’s about to leave. “the police assigned a new detective to y/n’s case.” martin doesn’t turn around, he pauses for a second.
“is that so ?” he asks in a low voice. “yeah,” “that’s good,” martin nods, “let me know if they say anything new.” chul hums, “i will don’t worry, goodnight martin,” with nothing more to say, martin opens the front door and leaves. chul doesn’t blame martin for acting weird, everyone handles bad situations differently. he knows it’s been hard on martin, he can only hope the members are all united on this.
it’s been a month since lieutenant baek took hyeok-jin for lunch. over three months since you’ve been gone. hyeok-jin knows that his lieutenant told him not to dig around but can he just stay still ? unfortunately however, hybe and bighit have not cooperated whatsoever. not outright refusing, rather just not responding at all. phone calls to higher ups in the company lead to an hour wait only for the call to suddenly hang up.
he doesn’t have any luck getting paperwork from them either despite the multiple attempts of contact. public records were extremely shortened and difficult to find. it’s just been a full month of frustration and lack of response. he crumbles up a piece of paper, throwing it into the trash can next to his desk. “why even have a phone number if no one fucking answers,” he grumbles to himself. he leans his head against his hands, letting out an exasperated sigh.
hyeok-jin thinks of the lunch with his lieutenant, trying to remember every word from that conversation. he doesn’t think lieutenant baek meant any harm, but the conversation still bothered him. he thinks of something the lieutenant said at the end of their conversation. “money talks.” he doesn’t have anything else to go off of, just hopes and dreams. his fingers tap against his desk, eyes landing on his computer.
he remembers something his professor said years ago “if you can’t follow people, follow the money.” so he leans forward, clicking through different government sites. “if no one wants to talk to me or answer my questions, i guess i’ll ask the numbers.” it’s his very last hunch, otherwise he’d be just like the past detectives that were handed this case. he can’t give up this easily without checking every end of a clue, he promised your brother that he’d try his best.
chul’s morning started off extremely rough. he was already late for his class, one which he had a test for. mom screamed at him for no reason other than the fact that it’s officially been three months since you went missing. he doesn’t blame her or argue back, he just wishes that she could see he’s also struggling just as much as she is. “i’m sorry mom,” he apologizes even though he has no reason to.
mom cries, “just go to school, i want to be alone,” she sniffles. “okay, i love you,” he leaves before she can say anything else. he runs the fastest he can to his university, missing the first half of his class. he apologizes to the professor, earning a harsh scolding. “i’m so sorry, can i still do the exam please ?” “it’s your time, not mine,” she rolls her eyes, handing him a copy of the test and a scantron. he exhales in relief, sitting down at his seat. he takes a deep breath, putting his pencil to the paper.
grades are put into the system almost as soon as class ends. chul fails the test horribly. not barely, horribly. he got a 15 on it, the worst he’s ever done on anything. it’s so bad he even agrees to have lunch with his friends, anything to try and cheer himself up. but all his friends seem to ask him about is how his family is doing. before you debuted, he had commented to his friends that his little sister was going to be in a kpop group, a mistake he now realizes.
“we’re fine,” chul bites into his sandwich, one his friend had bought him a few minutes ago. “bro if you ever need our help, we’re here for you,” his friend with glasses says as the others nod. “have you, you know, been online lately ?” his other friend with dyed hair asks, earning a shove from chul’s favorite gym bro. “i don’t like reading any of that shit, just jobless nobodies saying shit about my sister,” chul shakes his head.
“that’s good man, i seen a lot of shit a-and i don’t think your sister was like that but like i don’t know people be talking,” dyed hair rambles on. chul ignores him, not wanting to continue talking about you. “do you think talking about her will do you some good ?” glasses asks in a softer tone. “if he doesn’t want to talk about her then let’s not force him,” gym bro comes to chul’s defense. chul gives him a small smile before looking back at his sandwich.
quiet fills the table until dyed hair breaks it with a scoff. “i’m sorry but i have to talk about it, your mom’s out there protesting that nothing is being done for your missing sister but you don’t want to talk about it ? instead of defending her ? do you know what people are saying about her ? that she ran away, not to mention they’re also saying she was the yoko ono of the group-” chul stands up, chair scraping against the floor.
“shut your fucking mouth.” chul warns his friend, the others shocked by his sudden demeanor. “just because your girlfriend goes out and fucks a new guy every weekend doesn’t mean my sister was like that. what do you want me to say huh ? oh i think my sister got kidnapped ! oh i think my sister might have been trafficked ! oh i think my sister might be dead ! it’s been three fucking months and i know nothing, she’s all i think about !” chul’s voice breaks at the end.
“and from what it seems, you don’t know anything about me, let alone my sister so the next time you say anything about her, i’ll beat you to a pulp,” chul warned dyed hair before grabbing his backpack and leaving the cafeteria. no one calls out for him or chases to stop him, not that he was expecting that to begin with. he soon leaves campus, jittery and overwhelmed. chul can feel tears brim his eyes, vision becoming blurry.
as soon as he’s off school grounds, he dumps his backpack out. pencils, notebooks, folders, even his laptop falling onto concrete ground. he frantically reaches his hand into his bag, pulling out a pack of cigarettes and his lighter. he’s hyperventilating at this point, on the brink of having a panic attack. fuck being sober, fuck anything and everything. he puts the cigarette between his lips, lighter shaking in his hand as he lights it.
the first drag burns his lungs, almost like the first time he smoked. in 10 seconds, his heart rate and breathing slow down. but even when chul releases the smoke from his mouth, the ache in his soul and tears in his eyes don’t disappear, it only makes things worse. he thinks of you and how angry you would be at him right now. he reaches for his phone, trembling fingers scrolling through his contacts, pressing to call.
“martin,” chul’s voice is wobbly as the younger boy answers the phone almost immediately. “hey what’s wrong ?” martin asks, hearing quiet sniffling on the other hand. “i know that you might be busy but i really need to talk to you,” chul cries into the phone. “i’m on break, i have to go back soon but what happened ?” “today’s y/n’s three months since she went missing and everyone’s just talking about her like she’s gone forever and i don’t know what to do anymore, i just fucking smoked after quitting for three years,” he sobs, cigarette burning between his fingers.
“and you of all people know y/n wouldn’t have ran away,” he continues tethering between anger and heartbreak. when chul allows martin to talk, martin is silent to the point where chul think the call ended. “hello ?” “i’m sorry chul, i…i can’t say much, i…” chul doesn’t know why martin is responding so weirdly. “what are you saying ?” “i-i’m saying that i don’t know, everything’s just so…confusing- i’m sorry i have to go, i need to get back to practice,” martin cuts the conversation short.
“what ?” chul asks, softly hiccuping. “i put in the money for your mom’s medication, i’m sorry i can’t say anymore, bye,” before chul can respond, martin hangs up. chul looks down at his phone, “thanks anyway,” he mumbles to himself, tears running down his face. this isn’t the boy you talked so positively about. this isn’t the boy he’s known since martin was 12. chul can’t recognize martin anymore, the real martin would have fought for you.
that night, hyeok-jin stares at the papers in front of him, heart thumping against his ribs. the numbers didn’t add up. mixing or falsified tax records. training expenses that never existed or seemed exaggerated. payments to shell companies. contracts rewritten after signatures had been made. he was right, there was more than what meets the eyes, there’s years of fraud. how has no one noticed this ? …did they ever notice this ? his discovery is soon cut short when he hears running footsteps down the hall.
he snaps his head to the side, seeing multiple officers dashing. “detective kang !” officer kim sprints into the room. “you need to come with us right now,” she looks completely out of breath. “what happened, what’s going on ?!” his stomach drops as he gets up from his seat. “one of the cortis members…he had an accident,” she struggles to catch her breath. hyeok-jin’s confused, what does that have to do with him ?
“i mean is he okay ? but i’m not a cop so why do i-” “that’s not the reason why you have to come along,” she interrupts him. “we found y/n.” hyeok-jin freezes, eyes widening, “found ?” his friend nods. so many thoughts cross his mind yet he can only ask one question. “is she alive ?” his voice comes out quieter than intended. officer kim looks at him, her parted lips let out an exhale before pressing into a thin line.
idol!james x idol!reader (fluff + a makeout scene!nosurprisesthere)
your name was mentioned in an interview once when cortis was asked who do they go to whenever they’re having a hard time.
while the rest answered the other members or seek solace from family members, james mentioned you without hesitation.
“oh, how so?” the interviewer’s voice quipped with curiousity.
you just smiled, watching their group interview video while he stammered over his own words, trying to explain what exactly he meant.
“i-i just meant we’ve known each other since we were trainees and i find her comforting”
the boy shifted uncomfortably in his seat, hyper-aware of his members’ gaze now before continuing, “i mean i find her words comforting in tough times and we’re good friends, that’s all.”
“oh they’re really good friends, for sure.” martin added with a snicker, the rest giving their eldest hyung a knowing smile.
the interviewer laughed in response, “real good friends, huh?”
twitter was up in flames the day the interview was released.
prior to the charismatic and heart-strucking james of cortis everyone sees, you’ve known him before the idol persona, even before he was james of trainee a, when he was just zhao yu fan. days where he was your yu fan before he became everyone else’s james.
having trained together for years, chasing the same dream and practically growing up within the mirrors of the dance studio. somewhere in between striving to be the best and surviving to make the cut, seeds of friendship were planted and slowly, it blossomed into something precious.
in the form of late night dance sessions.
in the form of cheek straining laughs and mindless rambles.
in the form of convenience store ramen eat-outs at 3 am.
in the form of thrifting on your day-offs.
in the form of late night hangouts by the han river.
you were one of the very few trainees who could speak chinese so conversation flowed naturally. back then, you often act as a translator between him and the other trainees cause apparently james has a track record for being intimidating, so you being the bridge, really helped soften his perceived image. although he said it didn’t matter much to him, saying how he only cares how you think about him.
“okay but doesn’t it bother you everyone is somewhat scared of you”, swirling your straw in between your fingers as you watched james stretched across from you.
“i only care about how you think so no.” he said, in a matter of fact tone, earning him an eye roll from you, completely ignoring the implication of his words.
james doesn’t express his feelings outwardly, he rarely does but instead he disguises them as jokes, lighthearted enough as to not ruin the atmosphere. but whenever he does tells you how he really feels, and he’d do it spontaneously too, you take it to heart and keep it there, for safekeeping purposes, obviously.
“you know being with you made me less homesick” he casually said, slurping his ramen.
you stared at him momentarily, eyes softening before smiling to yourself. “i don’t feel lonely whenever i’m with you too, yu fan.”
“you’re cute when you blush” his hand reaching to pinch your cheek, before you swat him away.
“shut up.” idiot.
being each other’s safety net and showing up when worst comes to worst. when the news of trainee a dropped, you held him in your arms, hands running up and down his back, his form shaky under your hold.
“不要离开我” (don’t leave me), whispering against your shoulder, the crack in his voice made you held him closer, a silent reassurance you’ll always be there no matter what.
“do you think we’d make it someday?” you blurted out suddenly, flinching at the sound of your own voice. the dance studio was empty, with just the two of you.
james stopped what he was doing and turned to face you. from his point of view, you were sitting on the floor, nitpicking your nails when clearly there’s nothing wrong with them, shoulders tense, head hugging your knees. a heavy question to ask in their line of work, with no certainty underneath and that’s what makes it so terrifying.
the soft call of your name made you look up, not realising he had joined you on the floor and james was so close, you could feel his warm breathe. yet all you could focus on how his hands came up to cradle your face, and somehow this feels right. under his honeyed gaze, his warm touch, your worries slowly melted away.
“of course, we promised each other we would.” he gently whispered, smiling to himself. you couldn’t describe the look behind his eyes, he looked so vulnerable in the moment as his thumb brushed against the small pout on your lips. praying to god he can’t hear how hard your heart is beating right now. his eyes dropped to your lips for a brief moment before looking back at you, then pressing a kiss on your forehead.
“you’re stuck with my dumbass, remember?”
nothing changed when you both debuted in your respective groups. frequently mentioning each other on socials, asking fans to show support for each other’s comebacks. even when schedules become hectic, you two always make time for each other. facetime calls while eating, making plans on trying new restaurants when the other gets back. the boys would typically interrupt these calls by either acting weird at the background or pestering james until he pays attention to them.
one time, your group and cortis were promoting on inkigayo at the same time. as much as you told him not to, he still showed at your dressing room, bags of coffee in hand for your members and staff. in the hectic of the moment, james was able to steal you away, under the excuse he needed someone to take his pictures.
“i told you not to come”
“thank god i never listen to you.” he sneered, hand-in-hand as both of you walked down the hallway to cortis’ dressing room.
the minute the door opened, bursts of screams and laughter erupted. you bowed to the staffs upon entering, profusely apologizing for the intrusion. hugging the boys one by one, martin was just hooting all the while waiting for his turn. conversation immediately struck up with them asking how you were and every topic in between. over the years you’ve been friends with james, slowly you got to know the rest of the boys too. the feeling almost maternal, seeing them all grown up, chasing the same dream you have.
you were so caught up in the conversation that you didn’t noticed james was staring at you until keonho pointed it out.
“ah hyung, stop staring at her like that” his tone lighthearted and teasing, and james just played it cool, pretending to avert his gaze elsewhere, clearly caught redhanded.
“you know noona, me and james hyung recently wrote a song together, i think you’d like it” martin was doing everything in his power not to smile, and your gaze was focused on him, clearly missing james sending the boy glares from across the table. opting to investigate further just then your manager texted, needing you to come back.
“you didn’t have to walk me back, it’s just a few feet away”
“yeah i know but i wanted to” james replied, just arriving to the door of your dressing room. one hand leaning on the door frame, james wished you and your group goodluck.
“i’ll be watching and cheering the loudest” you let out a soft laugh, cocking your head to side, signalling him to go back. as you turned to enter, you heard him call out.
“今天看到你很漂亮”
true to his word, him and the boys did cheer the loudest from backstage. hooting and hollering like a bunch of wild monkeys, even louder when your group passed them in the hallways.
living in the spotlight has its cons of course. every item of clothing, every jewellery down to your shoes are observed closely. style pages would post what brands you wore for events, airport walkouts, stages and concerts. sometimes it’s normal to coincidentally have the same clothes as other idols.
what’s not normal is seeing the similarities and then hop on twitter, accusing you of dating each other. imagine seeing your name on the platform’s trending list because a fan spotted you wearing james’ vivienne westwoods earrings during your airport walkout earlier.
were they his? yes.
did you borrowed it from him? absolutely.
does he know you borrowed it? no.
is it true that you’re dating? next comment.
that same night, you sent a message on weverse, simplying saying he lend them to you cause it matched with your outfit that day. as soon as you did, a notification popped up.
“SO THAT’S WHERE MY EARRINGS WENT”
you chuckled.
“我回来时, i’ll give them back”
“😒😒😒”
“MUAH”
“do that too when you come back”
“don’t push your luck, yu fan”
the next day, cortis was heading to the airport and james was spotted wearing a particular red baseball cap, identical to the one you had. not to mention, you frequently wore it too, so much so that you had a collaboration with the brand. yet again, it was all twitter could talk about. it wasn’t long when james’s phone pinged with a text message from you.
“at this point, you’re doing it on purpose.”
“it matched my fit and i look hella good too” he typed back.
“ok but out of all the caps in world.”
“you have good taste, what can i say.”
as promised you gave him back his earrings, alongside with a vintage jacket you found while thrifting in london. let’s just say he’s more open with you borrowing his stuff now.
convenience ramen hangouts aren’t as frequent as it was before, instead it evolved to late nights in the studio. it’s much more private and peaceful, unlike the other aspect of your lives. james had asked you to accompany him in their recording studio, so you did just after a a quick takeout run.
opening the door to see a slumping figure of james zhao, he practically shot up from the couch before relaxing seeing it’s just you. you dropped the takeout bag on the table, shrugging off your jacket before joining him on the couch. like a cat curled up to you, james laid his head comfortably on your lap and on instinct your hands brushed his hair softly.
the quiet was interrupted when you asked him about the song martin mentioned before. his eyes comically open up and shot up from his position like a cartoon character. he adjusts his cap before mumbling it’s nothing but one thing you won’t accept is no for answer. when james turned around to look at you, all he was met with was a small pout in your lips, arms crossed, eyes on the floor, anywhere but his.
cute.
always so cute.
he chuckled, seeing you sulk like a child. he, while reluctant, pulled out his phone.
“but you have to promise not to laugh”
“promise.”
not long, a sultry but soft R&B track filled the studio, caught you off guard. a totally different vibe than his other drafts, this feels warm and intimate. right off the bat, you could somewhat understand what the song was about and the lyrics that followed only confirms what you were thinking.
hands locked above, love
twisting together continuously, love
calling each other's names, love
we ain't gotta fall in love
as the song progressed, james watched your expression like a hawk. you didn’t realized how fitting his voice was for this type of genre. it was hypnotising even.
at the end of every word, love
at the end of every word, you
the tension in the room was prinkling at your skin, an anxious james watching you so intently, that you’re trying hard to ignore, instead focusing on the song. a selfish part of you hoped he wrote it with you in mind, but it just seemed too on the nose. he would never wrote a song about you and played it for you, right?
love the way you dress
no matter how much you hide
you're different from anyone else
don't let this fade away
let's make it last forever ever and ever babe
the song soon came to end. thoughts raced through your mind and you wanted to form a coherent one before it got too awkward, totally unaware of how the quiet is slowly killing your best friend.
how many more songs are like this?
are all of them as explicit?
james couldn’t bear through the silence anymore and spoke up,
“it’s about you, if that’s what you’re thinking”
barely above a whisper, afraid you’d hear him but you did, loud and clear. you stood up from the couch, walked to where he’s standing. his head hung low, embarassed to even look at you in the eyes. your hands rested on his shoulder, gently massaging them to relieve some of the tension, before soothing up and down his arms.
from james’s perspective, every worst case scenario ran through his head and this is just your way of letting him down easily. he shouldn’t have let you listen to the song, he shouldn’t have even wrote it? he shouldn’t have asked you to be here with hi-
“can you look at me?” you sounded so gentle and he almost did. it was humiliating, to think you see him as anything more than just a friend.
“please” you pleaded with him, and that made him cave. hesitant still, james looked up at you, now hands placed on his shoulder. his expression was unreadable but his eyes says it all. he was scared, terrified even yet he was still holding out hope, that you’ll let him down slowly.
next thing he knew you were holding his face, pulling him down and felt the softness of your lips against his. james was dumbfounded, so much so that he didn’t knew what to do with his hands. instead savoured the moment with his arms stretched out like an idiot.
watermelon lipbalm.
the second he felt as if you were about to pull away, his arms closed in around your figure, kissing you back harder now. hands gripping your waist, yours tangled in his hair, driving him to the brink of insanity so he pulled you closer, till you’re molded against him, invading every aspect of your senses. heavy breathing echoed throughout the small space as he grew desperate, each time you tried pulling away for air, he’d tugged you back into him.
“would you do this everytime i let you listen to my demos?” he whispered in your ear, lips trailing down your neck, grazing the skin just enough to tease. accidentally whimpering at the contact, james harshly sucked on your sweet spot, trying to pry out more of the delicious sound from you.
the sudden ringtone of his phone jolted you both back into reality, rattling against the glass table. hesitantly letting go of you, james let out a frustrated sigh, cursing under his breath and murmured an apology. you’d expect him to answer the call, instead he just pulled you into a hug, while his phone continue to ring in the background.
“aren’t you gonna answer that?” arms around his neck, fingers playing with the hair on his nape.
“that can wait” he said, pecking you on the lips. finally the ringtone stopped, leaving you two in the quiet, comfortably in each other’s embrace. the events from ten seconds ago flooded your mind, closing your eyes in attempt to shake off the embarassment but you were grinning like an idiot.
“but you” he whispered, both hands cupping your face, almost cautious, like you were a fragile porcelain. his eyes carried a whirlwind of emotions, browns swirling with sincerity and devotion. the look of love that you’d always hope to experience one day.
“i’ve waited too long for you and i might die if i wait a second longer”
“well we don’t want that, now do we?” james broke into a smile, seeing you chuckle.
bonus cuts!
the next morning
“hyung why did you came back so late last night?” martin’s question echoed in their kitchen, causing james to momentarily to stop eating. he in fact, did got home at 3am, because he couldn’t stop kissing you.
“yeah, you even smelled like noona” juhoon added, taking a bite of his chicken. the two youngest weren’t paying attention until the mention of you, causing both heads to perk up immediately.
the oldest sighed, before explaining what happened. (well, the more age appropriate version) the whole table was dead silent for a moment, no one spoke up until martin asked, with the biggest grin on his face, “you kissed her, didn’t you?”
the blush creeping on his ears and him looking down, smiling was a dead giveaway, throwing the table into chaos. juhoon just nodded, looking somewhat proud while the other three were hollering, dramatically holding their head in their hands.
“i’m gonna text her” seonghyeon said, pulling out his phone.
friend!james x female!reader (nsfw! please be warned!)
it wasn’t supposed to go this way.
he’s just a friend, you said.
he’s martin’s friend. you reasoned.
every rational thought went out the window the moment james’s hands slide down your waist. head tipped backwards as his lips traced gentle kisses down the slope of your neck.
failed attempt escaping to the bathroom for some breathing room and instead getting cornered by the one person you’re running from.
“why have you been avoiding me, princess?”
hands gripping the marble sink, trying to form a coherent thought but with oh sweet james kissing down your neck, your sanity teeters. a whine is all you can give him at the moment, a sound he seemed to enjoy when his grip on you tightened, pulling you impossibly close.
sweet james who pays special attention and care towards you, especially the little things.
sweet james who lets you and only you call him “yu fan.”
sweet james who always pays for you and when asked, he’d answer “just because.”
sweet james who lends you his jacket without needing to have it back.
sweet james who holds your hand in public spaces, under the excuse he doesn’t wanna lose you in the crowd.
but sweet james who’s also very respectful, doing everything in his willpower not to take you for himself in martin’s bathroom sink.
sliding down the straps of your top, james traced kisses on your shoulders, stopping right above your cleavage. and you wished he hadn’t. you wished he’d just had his way with you already but james is a sweet guy, he’d would make you beg for it first.
his kisses continued up your neck whilst his hands went underneath your shirt, fingers pressing against exposed skin.
“did i do something wrong, baby?” he whispered desperately in your ear. his tone broke your heart into pieces, he could never do anything wrong in your eyes.
perhaps it was your fault. for ghosting him a week straight. making up every excuse under the sun just to not see him. it’s only because you were afraid to face the fact that you have feelings for your own friend.
very strong feelings that overread any miniscule gesture he does for you.
feelings that makes you hyper-aware whenever he stands or sits too close.
feelings that haunt not just your waking life but slowly takes over your dreams. often times you wake up with a dull ache in between that not even your fingers can satisfy.
maybe this is your punishment (or reward) for treating your own friend so badly. having the sweetest, gentlest man kiss you up and down, while his hand worships every curve of your body. the world can certainly be cruel.
“yu fan-” you gasped, feeling his lips sucking your sweet spot. he hummed in response, one hand reaching down to hook your leg to his waist, the other steadying you against the cold sink.
instinctively you grind against his bulge, sighing at the delicious friction. above you, james just watches in awe, sharp eyes watching your every reaction, smiling sadistically at your pathetic attempt to get off on him. can’t believe he got his poor baby so worked up.
“please touch me, i need you. please”
“i’ll do anything for you, baby.”
almost like you flipped a switch in him, your now not-so sweet james took off your shorts in one swift movement. not even realising until you felt his fingers stretching you out, knocking the air out of your lungs.
“fuck. you’re so wet, baby” james muttered under his breath as if he couldn’t believe it. as if he can’t feel you dripping down the base of his fingers.
“all for you, yu fan.” you breathed out. one hand gripping his forearm to keep you tethered to reality. pulling away completely, james kneeled in front of you, hands prying your legs open, placing one on his shoulder.
the tip of his tongue pressed on your clit, sliding down to your dripping hole before laying flat on your pussy. plunging his tongue in and out of you relentlessly whilst you moan his name from above.
“so so so good, yu fan.” you whimpered.
sweet james eating you like a starved man, nose brushing against your clit with every thrust. your fingers tangled in his hair, subtly moving your hips to match his rhythm. you completely missed how james look at you from below. honey eyes filled with adoration, like you’re the most precious thing in the world.
his hand reached up, toying with your sensitive nipple between his fingers. you cry out as he flicked his tongue, tracing slow circles on your clit. your cries grew when he adds pressure, hips bucking up on instinct but james’s hand kept you steadied, while you lost your mind on his tongue.
the whole room was electrifying, porngraphic moans and james’s names vibrating off the tiles. the party long forgotten, laughter and music beyond the bathroom walls blended into background noise.
your legs were shaking at this point and james isn’t letting up until you gush all over his face. he has imagined this, hell even dreamt about it for so long, being lucky enough to ravish you just as he’s done countless times in his dreams.
the fact that you’re here, on the verge of falling apart and he’s sure that you are, with the way you grind on him so urgently, the way your pleas grew louder, the way you cry out for him.
“please, yu fan-ngh! please please!” spreading your folds, james sucked and licked with vigor. harshly sucking your clit, the coil in your stomach finally snapped, lips repeating james’s name like a mantra, hoping to keep you grounded whilst you fall apart on his tongue.
lapping on your remnants, james helps you ride out your high, only stepping away when the sensitivity kicks in and you pushed his head away.
to say he was the happiest man on earth, was an understatement. pupils blown and a shit-eating grin on his face when the man finally stood up. his lips glistening, with some dripping down his chin yet all he can look at is you.
catching your breathe, you nearly tumbled to the floor when trying to put on your shirt, of course sweet james was right behind to catch you. hands on your waist, the man stood in front of you like a lovesick puppy, then leaning down to kiss you.
instinctively wrapping your hands around his neck, you sighed, pulling him closer and james uses it to his advantage to deepen the kiss. a knock on the door startled you two, followed by martin’s voice,
“noona, you okay in there?” a brief pause, then you looked at james and he just cocked his head to the side, lips curved in a mischievous smile.
“yeah, i’m okay. i’ll be out soon.” nose scrunched up, hoping you sound convincing enough, james’s hands ran along your back, caressing the sides before squeezing your hips.
a muffled alright and receeding footsteps made you sighed in relief, turning back to the male in front of you. sweet james biting his lips and a hungry look in his eyes, his inner thoughts almost screaming at you.
“round two back at my place or yours?”
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