Hi guys! Nini here and welcome to my blog!💛🌻This list is for easier navigation. If you have a request or scenario you want me to do, just send me a message I'll see what I can do😊💌
happy birthday, nini! ♥️ your stories literally keeps my stress awayyy. i hope you always find reasons to write & inspo for every single plot 🥹 and may your personal life be joyfullll :'))
have the best dayyyy— cake for you 🍰
y'all are sooooo cute honestly i'm so grateful for all the love🥺🤍 thank you so much~!
i read the first part last monday at work and had the hardest time trying not to cry, i was literally having chest pains. araw-araw ko ata nirere-read kasi i go to your page everyday hoping for an update kahit alam kong wala pa malamang HAJDHDJFJJD
just finished pt 2 and WOW 😭😭😭 ANG HUSAY TLG 😭😭😭😭 but also hindi ko inexpect yung tbc again napasigaw aq ng NOOOOOOOO out loud pero ok lang willing to wait po so much!!!
been a silent fan of your work for so long, but this time i just had to say something. you’ve put into words such a complex range of emotions for both seungcheol and op/yn and it’s amazing to read. sobrang immersive ng pagkasulat at paglatag mo ng kwento, damang-dama ko lahat. 🥹
ok yun lang sorry ang haba wala atang sense rawr but thank you for sharing your beautiful work with us!!!!! mabuhay k po, hbd (in advance?) 🩷
halllooooooo~ welcome to my channel eme tbh same. merong lines sa fic na to that hit too hard even for me, the kind of pain na you can feel even on the tip of your fingers. kumbaga yung sakit tagos sa kalooban ba ganon😅
the tbc...... i didn't expect it to take this loonnnnnng also but the whole story won't fit in one or two posts only😭 tysm for loving my fics. honestly this fic, i doubted myself the most because in real life i don't really believe in 2nd chances. If that chapter of my life is done, then that's it. But for this fic ghaaaaad I was on a rollercoaster myself. as in kinakausap ko na yung sarili ko while writing the lines legit, that's why i'm so so so so happy a lot of you loved it🥺
thank you soooooo much, see you on the next oneee🫣🤍
your new cheol fic just tore my heart into pieces in every possible way 😭 your writing is incredibly good; the build up and intensity of their conversation really had me bawling my eyes out. i felt every bit of their emotions and heartbreak (i have never experienced one btw lol) i can’t wait to read the second part even though i’m scared about what’s gonna happen to them 🥹
thank youuuuuuuu ~ sorry for the late reply and 2nd part is already out but i'm so happy you enjoyed it even when it hurt that bad😭😅
i'm still writing the rest of it until now so we'll see how much more their story will unfold, see you on the next fic~!!!
location unknowin - choi seungcheol scenario pt. 2
hellloooo ~ first let me just say thank youuuuu. the first part was very painful but the love you've showered that fic really warmed my heart🥺 consider this next one gift to you for my birthday😅😊
Three years changed the shape of Seungcheol’s life.
Not the center of it. That part, unfortunately, had stayed exactly where you left it.
In his Thirties now. Older in the face, a little sharper around the jaw, a little quieter in the eyes. Not in a sad way anymore, not always, at least. Time had done what time always did, it healed but not really. Almost.
People who met him now would’ve thought he moved on.
His apartment was different. His routine was different. His life was, by every practical measure, different.
The old apartment had been gone for two years now. He lasted one year there after you left and that alone had nearly broken him. Too much of you in every room. Too much memory trapped in ordinary things.
He had tried to survive in that place because some pathetic part of him felt like leaving would be another betrayal. Like if he moved out, it would mean admitting you were really gone. But in the end, staying there had become less about honoring what you had and more about punishing himself with it.
So he left.
One afternoon he signed a lease, hired movers, and spent the next week packing his life into cardboard while discovering all the strange ways a person can still be haunted by someone who hasn’t lived there in a year.
The new apartment was bigger. Better, objectively.
On the twelfth floor instead of the sixth. Better light. A real kitchen with enough counter space for two people to cook without elbowing each other every five seconds. Floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room that let the city spill gold across the hardwood at sunset. Two bedrooms, even though he only needed one.
Mingyu had looked around the first time he visited and whistled low
“Damn. This is nice.”
Seungcheol had nodded, carrying plates from one box to the cabinets “Yeah.”
Then Mingyu said because he was unfortunately observant when he wanted to be “She would’ve loved this place.”
Seungcheol froze with a stack of bowls in his hands. It was only for a second.
Then he kept moving, set the bowls down carefully, and said without looking up, “I know.”
Because that was the truth of it.
Even when he was choosing a place you would never live in, he still thought about what you’d like. The big kitchen because you always complained about cramped apartments with no prep space. The windows because you loved natural light and would’ve filled every sill with plants if he let you.
The extra room because once, years ago, you had told him that if you ever bought a place, you wanted one extra room “just in case.”
He bought the apartment with an extra room then never let himself step inside it for the first three months after moving in.
It stayed empty except for unopened boxes and a folded treadmill he never used because running outside was still easier than being alone with his own thoughts indoors.
That was the thing, really. People assumed heartbreak healed in straight lines if you worked hard enough. Therapy, time, healthy coping mechanisms, routine.
Seungcheol learned that wasn’t how it worked.
What changed was not the existence of the hurt.
It was what he did with it.
At twenty-seven, after you left, pain had turned him into a ghost haunting his own life. He stopped eating, stopped sleeping properly, stopped going home if he could avoid it. He wore grief like a punishment because some part of him believed he deserved to.
At thirty, he no longer believed punishment was the same thing as love.
That lesson cost him a therapist, eighteen months of actual work, and more uncomfortable honesty than he’d ever given another human being in his life.
The first session, he barely spoke. The therapist, a woman in her forties named Dr. Han with kind eyes and absolutely no patience for emotional evasion had asked him why he was there.
Seungcheol sat on her office couch in silence for so long he almost considered getting up and leaving.
Then he said, “I ruined the best thing in my life because I was too scared to say what I actually felt.”
Dr. Han had nodded once, as if men walked into her office every day carrying that exact sentence in their chest
“And what did you actually feel?”
He stared at the rug between his shoes “Terrified,” he admitted
“Of her?”
“No.” The answer came immediately “Never of her.”
“Then of what?”
And there it was. The question he’d spent years dodging in one form or another.
He should’ve had a clean answer by then. Something concise and intelligent and mature enough to justify the mess he’d made.
Instead he said the ugliest truth he had “That if I gave her the future she wanted and somehow failed at it, I’d ruin her life.”
Dr. Han lets the silence stretch then, gently she says “That’s a very big burden to put on yourself.”
Seungcheol laughed once without humor “You think?”
“I think,” she said, “it’s also a convenient one.”
He looked up.
She held his gaze calmly “If you convince yourself the stakes are so high that you have to be perfect before you commit, then you never actually have to risk being imperfect in front of someone you love. You know they say love is a verb, it’s an action. Meaning you work for it. But that’s also very different from running from it.”
The words hit hard enough to leave him breathless.
He hated her a little for that.
Mostly because she was right.
Therapy was not dramatic. It wasn’t one breakthrough and then some swelling orchestral score while the broken man put himself back together. It was repetitive and embarrassing and often deeply irritating. It was Dr. Han asking him the same questions in different forms until he ran out of polished half-truths and had to answer honestly.
It was admitting that love had never been the problem. Vulnerability was. Failure was. The idea of being needed and not measuring up was. The possibility that if he became a husband, a father, the center of a family, and then did it badly, he would destroy more than just himself.
“You talk about commitment like it’s a test you have to pass before you’re allowed to take it,” Dr. Han told him once
He rubbed at his jaw and said, “Shouldn’t it be?”
“No.” She leaned back in her chair “It should be a choice you make with someone, while understanding you’re both human enough to do it imperfectly.”
That realization came too late to save you.
But it changed the man he was after you.
Slowly, painfully, he got better. Not in the easy, cheerful way people use the word when they mean “he smiles more now.”
He got better in real ways.
Mingyu nearly cried the first time he opened Seungcheol’s refrigerator and found actual produce.
“Holy shit,” Mingyu said, staring into it like he’d discovered a religious miracle “Spinach. Eggs. Chicken that is not expired. Who are you?”
Seungcheol, standing at the stove in sweatpants and an old T-shirt, barely looked up from the pot of stew simmering in front of him “Get out.”
“I’m serious.” Mingyu shut the fridge and turned around dramatically “Three years ago I had to come here every other day because I was convinced I’d find your corpse on the floor with a protein bar wrapper in your hand.”
Seungcheol rolled his eyes, but there was no real heat in it “You’re exaggerating.”
“I am not.” Mingyu looked around the apartment, then back at him with the kind of fond exasperation only old friends earned “I’m just saying. This is good. You’re… good.”
Because Seungcheol was better.
He was also still in love with you.
Both things had been true for so long now that they no longer felt contradictory.
You had disappeared from his life with almost surgical precision it was almost impressive. No accidental sightings at cafés. No tagged photos from mutual friends.
He did run into Jongin once.
It happened a year and a half after the breakup outside a convenience store near Seungcheol’s office. Jongin was walking out with a coffee in one hand and a paper bag in the other when they nearly collided at the door.
For a second, both of them froze.
Seungcheol’s first thought, ridiculously, genuinely was ‘I might get punched’.
He would’ve taken it, too. But Jongin just stared at him, expression unreadable behind dark sunglasses, and said, “You look better.”
Seungcheol blinked “Uh…” It was not his most eloquent moment.
Seungcheol braced himself for the rest of it, for the accusation, the coldness, the older-brother contempt that would’ve been fully justified.
Instead, Jongin sighed
“She’s… okay” he said.
Seungcheol’s entire body went still. That was it. Two words and suddenly every nerve in him was on fire.
He hadn’t asked about you in over a year. Not because he didn’t want to, but because he’d promised himself he would respect your absence if it was the last decent thing he could still do for you.
Hearing even that much felt like being handed water after crossing a desert.
He swallowed hard “Good.”
Seungcheol looked down at the pavement because he didn’t trust his face.
Jongin studied him for another second, then put his sunglasses back on. “Take care of yourself.”
And left.
No punch. No forgiveness either. Just that one devastating sentence left behind like a verdict.
The encounter with your mother had been worse.
That happened a year later at a fundraiser his company sponsored. He almost didn’t recognize her at first in the crowd. Elegant as ever.
Then she turned and saw him. For a heartbeat, neither of them moved.
Seungcheol felt Eighteen again. Awkward and too aware of himself, standing in your parents’ kitchen for the first time while your mother sized him up over a bowl of fruit and asked what his intentions were with her daughter in the calmest voice imaginable.
Back then, he had said something earnest and slightly ridiculous about wanting to make you happy.
Now, years later, he stood in a crowded ballroom with a champagne flute in his hand and no defense at all against the sadness in her eyes.
“Mrs. Y/L/N,” he said quietly, setting the glass down before he could drop it.
She gave him a small smile.
“Seungcheol,” she said
He didn’t know what to do with his hands “I—hello.”
“You look well,” she said. It was a kindness. An obvious one. A social mercy offered to keep the interaction from becoming unbearable.
Seungcheol almost wished she’d slapped him instead.
“I’m trying,” he said before he could stop himself.
Something in her expression shifted. Not softer. Not exactly. But sadder.
“I know,” she said quietly.
And there it was again—that awful thing people did when they could see you had suffered too. As if your pain somehow softened what you’d done. As if remorse was enough to make tragedy feel fair.
It wasn’t.
He cleared his throat “I’m sorry.”
Your mother’s eyes flickered with something old and tired “There’s nothing to be sorry about to me, dear.” she pauses, pats his arm once then “Take care, okay”
Then she left. He stood there long after she walked away, staring into a ballroom full of strangers and wanting, with a violence that embarrassed him, to go back in time and be a better man before it mattered.
But life didn’t work like that.
So instead he kept doing the only thing left to do. Become a better version of him. Not for the fantasy of earning you back. That part took him a while to understand.
He became one anyway.
At first every therapy session, every balanced meal, every honest conversation, every night he forced himself to go home before ten instead of hiding in the office. Every piece of growth still had you at the center of it.
As if becoming healthier was some delayed offering he could place at your feet one day and say look, I did it, I’m finally the version of me you needed.
Eventually Dr. Han had called him on that too
“You can honor what losing her taught you,” she said, “without turning self-improvement into another way of waiting for her.”
That sentence annoyed him enough that he spent an entire week thinking about it.
So little by little, he learned how to build a life that wasn’t just grief management.
He cooked because feeding himself properly was part of being alive, not because he was proving something. He left work at reasonable hours because ambition no longer needed to be a hiding place.
He ran because he liked the discipline of it, the quiet rhythm of morning streets and sore muscles and lungs that burned for a reason he chose.
The apartment changed too. What had once been a carefully maintained shell slowly started to look lived in. It looked like the home of a man who planned to keep living.
And in many ways, he did.
But some things never shifted.
He still woke up before sunrise and reached for the empty side of the bed on the mornings after dreams about you.
Three years, and his mind still made room for you automatically.
Not because he was trapped in the past. Because you had been woven into the blueprint of what home meant to him so deeply that even in your absence, he kept building with your silhouette in mind.
He never dated.
People tried.
His coworkers set him up twice before realizing his version of polite disinterest was not normal first-date nerves but the blank, courteous refusal of a man whose heart had already made its choice years ago and refused to revisit it.
Mingyu once asked him, over beers on the balcony, whether that was healthy.
Seungcheol leaned back in his chair and looked out at the city
“Probably not,” he said
Mingyu snorted “Great. Love that for you.”
Seungcheol smiled faintly.
After a beat, Mingyu added “Do you still think about her every day?”
The honest answer came so quickly it barely needed considering
“Yes.”
Mingyu was quiet for a moment “That sounds exhausting.”
“It used to be.”
“And now?”
Seungcheol looked down at the beer bottle in his hand, then out at the skyline again where the last light was bleeding orange into glass and concrete.
“Now it just… is.”
Mingyu didn’t say anything to that, maybe because there was nothing to say.
Some loves don’t end cleanly enough to become lessons and then disappear. They just change form. From daily presence to ache. From ache to scar. From scar to something almost livable.
Seungcheol had made peace with the fact that maybe you would always be that for him.
Not a wound anymore. Just a permanent landmark.
And maybe that was why, on a quiet Sunday morning in early autumn, three years after he watched you walk out with your life in suitcases, he stood in his kitchen making breakfast and felt—if not happy—then at least steady.
The apartment was bright with clean sunlight. The windows were cracked just enough to let cool air drift in. A pan of eggs sat on the stove, toast cooling on a plate, coffee already poured into the mug Mingyu bought him as a joke that read World’s Saddest Domestic Man.
There was music playing low from the speaker on the counter. Not one of your songs. Just some soft indie thing he’d found last month and liked enough to keep replaying.
He slid eggs onto a plate, set the pan in the sink, and reached for his coffee.
Then the intercom buzzed.
He frowned.
Mingyu had a key and never buzzed. No delivery expected. No one from work would be insane enough to show up at his apartment on a Sunday before ten.
The buzzer sounded again.
Seungcheol set down his mug and crossed the kitchen, wiping his hands absently on a dish towel as he hit the intercom button.
“Yeah?”
For a second, all he heard was static.
Then a woman’s voice—
=
“OPEN THE DOOR YOU COWARD”
Jongin pulls it open only to be greeted with the sight of you glaring at him.
He chuckles acting like he’s about to slam it closed and when you wedge your bag just in time before it closes.
“Well hello to you too, welcome back” he laughs, finally letting you inside his apartment.
You haven’t been here in a year. After the breakup, Jongin took the big brother role of making sure you actually eat and not just wither away alone. After taking all your stuff from the apartment you used to share with Seungcheol, he didnt even give you a chance to think.
It’s like even after all these years, even after adulthood, Jongin could see his little sister needed him even when you didn’t say it.
So that’s what he did for the past 3 years. Become that pillar you needed until you could stand by yourself again. At first it was hell just watching how miserable you were.
No lie about that.
Some nights he’d hear you from his room sobbing, random moments through the day you’d break into tears, or just you staring off into nothing.
The worst? the not eating, not sleeping, becoming a version of you that barely lived.
As much as he hated watching all of that, he also knew he couldn’t just push you to be better in an instant. For a decade, he never had to worry about this. About his baby sister crying over a heartbreak, he never saw this coming.
So instead he let you heal, he let you hurt. Let you be you even with only the broken pieces. And slowly as time passed you did.
He can still see those moments you pause, staring blankly off into space as if you remembered something. But atleast now he doesn’t have to worry if you actually ate or slept.
“My old landlord didn’t even give me a chance to extend for the time being, meanwhile my new landlord kept saying the new unit isn’t done when he said last month it was ready to move into. Can you believe it?”
You rant as you go inside his apartment, one luggage behind you.
“I told you, you can stay here again-”
You chuckle, shaking your head, “Yeah, no thank you. I love you but you hover like eomma”
“I think my worries were valid, I came home once and found you on the floor crying over a pasta jar”
“Rude, I was heartbroken.”
He chuckles, walking towards the couch and taking the seat beside you
He checks on you, in that protective big brother way “Work has been good?”
“Mhm, the new project assigned to me is perfect for the new apartment. Won’t be too far”
“You’ve been eating right? Sleeping?”
“Yes, eomma” you roll your eyes dramatically but know he only means well. He did witness you at your lowest so you don’t blame him.
“Good, did Jaehyun call you?”
“Mhm, gave me the key before his flight. You two sure I can stay there?”
Jongin hums, reaching for his phone “Don’t worry about it, he’s barely home plus he’s been bugging me about the vacant room”
“Yea well you did say you were moving in then abandoned him last minute”
“I had reasons, and valid ones. Anyways, you’re going there later this week right?” he asks
You nod “Yep, the rest of my stuff will be sent here though so I’ll just take what I need. Hopefully my new landlord calls soon”
“No rush, maybe this will be the chance for-”
“Are you ever done with your match making agenda?” you cut him off, no bite to it. More of that usual sibling banter whenever your brother plays cupid.
“Never.”
That makes you laugh. Remembering how it all began. Jongin barely left you alone the first few months after the break up, he literally took you with him to the grocery, when he’s going on a quick errand, lunch or dinner with his friends.
Which is exactly how you met Jeong Jaehyun, your brother’s friend since college. You’ve heard of him but never met him in person until that one dinner. You were quiet, eating at the end of the table while the rest chatted.
He arrived late and sat infront of you. The two of you exchanged maybe four words in total but he made a lame joke that only you laughed at.
And apparently that was the olive branch your brother was hoping for. At first you weren’t suspicious at all, used to being dragged around like you were five again.
Then suddenly whenever you’re there, Jaehyun is too. Sometimes just the three of you. And when Jongin sensed you were feeling more at ease with him, he even asked Jaehyun to pick you up when he couldn’t.
But much to your brother’s dismay, nothing happened beyond friendship. You and Jaehyun realized that early on.
It’s like you gained another older brother. Jaehyun was easy to talk to, didn’t demand words when you ran out of things to say. He just… stayed even when you didn’t have anything to say. Cracked dad jokes you still laugh at.
=
It’s almost comical and sad how fast Seungcheol hoped it was you but it wasn’t.
It was the woman from 12B who had locked herself out twice in one month and now waved at Seungcheol in the elevator like they were old coworkers bonded by mutual embarrassment.
Miyeon.
Twenty-nine, marketing, recently moved in, always carrying either a tote bag full of groceries or a laptop that looked heavier than she was.
The first time they met, she had been crouched in the hallway at eleven at night with takeout containers balanced on top of a cardboard box, trying to keep her front door from swinging shut while digging through her bag for keys.
Seungcheol had wordlessly stepped in, held the door with one hand, and taken the containers before they tipped over
She looked up at him, startled “Oh my god, thank you.”
He shrugged “Your hands were full.”
“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s done for me all week.”
After that, things became… familiar.
Not in a way that meant anything. Just civil.
The kind of civil that comes from living on the same floor and being roughly the same age and occasionally ending up in each other’s orbit because apartment buildings had a way of making strangers overlap.
He helped her carry a shelf she ordered online because the delivery guy left it downstairs and she absolutely could not get it into the elevator by herself. She started saying hi when they crossed paths. He started nodding back.
Sometimes they exchanged actual sentences.
It was harmless.
That was the word Mingyu used when he found out.
“Harmless,” he repeated over drinks, grinning in the way that meant he was about to be insufferable “So you and your pretty neighbor are making progress.”
Seungcheol didn’t even look up from the pan he was washing “There is no progress.”
Mingyu sat at the kitchen island eating strawberries directly from the container Seungcheol had bought that morning “You had dinner with her.”
“She asked if I wanted the extra pasta she made because she accidentally cooked enough for six people.”
“And?”
“And I said yes because I’m not stupid.”
Mingyu pointed a strawberry at him “Exactly. Progress.”
“It’s not progress,” Seungcheol said flatly “It’s food.”
Seungcheol dried his hands and went back to chopping garlic “We’re neighbors”
“Right,” Mingyu said “Neighbors who text”
“We text about building stuff”
“Ah yes” Mingyu nodded solemnly “The deeply erotic bond of discussing trash disposal schedules.”
Seungcheol threw a dish towel at his face.
If she had any interest in him beyond friendship, she kept it hidden well enough that Seungcheol could ignore the possibility and keep things where they were safest: polite, uncomplicated, surface-level.
The truth was, Miyeon was easy company. She didn’t ask too much. Didn’t push.
Didn’t flirt in the obvious, exhausting way some people did when they were trying to decide whether a man was available.
Which was exactly why, a few weeks later, she was standing barefoot in his kitchen on a Friday night in one of his spare aprons complaining about how small his cutting board was while he stirred a pot of stew on the stove.
“Why do you only own one decent knife?”
“Because I only need one decent knife.”
“That’s insane”
“You’re dramatic”
Miyeon scoffed “You’re thirty and live like someone who only discovered seasoning last year.”
He glanced over his shoulder at her, offended “I can cook.”
“You can cook three things really well and six things acceptably.”
“That’s still cooking.”
“That’s survival with garnish”
Seungcheol snorted.
This was how most things with Miyeon happened. Small and casual and easy enough not to threaten anything. She was slicing carrots now, hair clipped up messily, muttering to herself about his tragic knife situation when the doorbell rang.
Seungcheol frowned and checked the stove clock.
A little after eight.
“You expecting someone?” Miyeon asked
“No.”
The bell rang again.
Seungcheol lowered the heat under the stew and reached for the ladle “Can you get it? I need to stir this before it sticks.”
Miyeon pointed the knife at him “If it’s a serial killer, I’m suing”
She padded out of the kitchen while Seungcheol laughed under his breath and stirred the pot, tasting the broth once before adding a little more pepper.
From the entryway, he heard the front door open and Miyeon’s voice, muffled
“Hi?”
Then a second voice. Soft. Female. Familiar in a way that made something deep in his chest seize before his mind could catch up.
Seungcheol went completely still.
The ladle slipped in his grip and tapped against the rim of the pot.
No.
It couldn’t be.
He stood there, heartbeat suddenly loud in his ears, straining to hear over the low music and the hiss of the stove.
Miyeon came back into the kitchen a moment later, looking mildly confused.
“Uh,” she said, “I think it’s a new neighbor from 12D? She’s asking for help because her door got stuck.”
Seungcheol was already putting the ladle down.
He didn’t think. Didn’t ask which unit. Didn’t stop to figure out why every nerve in his body had gone tight and electric.
He just wiped his hands quickly on a towel and walked toward the front door.
And the world stopped.
You were standing in his hallway.
A suitcase in one hand. Apartment key in the other. Then you looked up and saw him
Everything in you went still.
You blinked once, like your own eyes didn’t trust what they were seeing. Your gaze flicked from Miyeon standing by the open door, to Seungcheol a few steps behind her in a black T-shirt with flour dusted faintly on one sleeve, then back to Miyeon again.
Then to him.
He knew exactly how it looked. Miyeon in his apartment. Dinner half-cooked behind him. The domestic warmth of a Friday night already settled into the space.
For one awful second he saw the scene the way you must have seen it, how neatly it fit together, how easy it would be to misunderstand.
Your mouth parted then closed again.
“Sorry,” you said quickly, too quickly, already backing away “I—uh. Never mind. I think I got it.”
You turned before either of them could answer.
Seungcheol’s body moved on instinct “Y/N—”
But you were already hurrying down the hall toward the neighboring unit, dragging your suitcase behind you with one wheel bumping awkwardly. He heard you muttering under your breath, something halfway between a curse and a prayer.
“Oh my god, of course. Of course this would happen. That’s fine, that’s actually fine, cool, great—”
Seungcheol was after you before he could think better of it “Wait.”
You crouched by the door of 12D, jamming the key into the lock with visibly shaky hands “No, no, you don’t have to— I really got it, it’s just stupid and the lock’s weird—”
The key stuck halfway. You yanked it back out and hissed under your breath.
“Okay, maybe I don’t got it,” you muttered
Seungcheol stopped a few feet behind you, trying very hard to keep his own face neutral despite the fact that his pulse was absolutely losing its mind.
Three years.
Three years and this was how he saw you again, fighting with a stubborn apartment door while trying to flee from the sight of him with another woman in his kitchen.
Perfect.
“Here,” he said carefully “The doors on this floor stick if you don’t pull them toward you first.”
You froze mid-struggle then slowly turned your head to look at him.
Up close, the shock of seeing you was somehow worse.
You were older, obviously—three years would do that—but not in any way that made you less you. Your face had softened in some places and sharpened in others. Your hair was shorter than he remembered, falling just past your shoulders now instead of the middle of your back. There was a tiny gold hoop in one ear he’d never seen before. No ring on your left.
His eyes caught that last detail and then he hated himself for noticing it at all.
You looked at him like you were trying to decide if this was real gthen your gaze dropped to the door handle and you thrust the key toward him without a word.
Seungcheol took it. He cleared his throat and crouched in front of the lock before that silence got any stranger.
“Pull the door toward you,” he said, more to fill the air than because you needed the explanation twice “Then turn.”
He did it in one motion, the lock clicked immediately.
Your apartment door swung inward “…I hate that that worked so fast for you.”
Despite everything, Seungcheol let out a short laugh “There’s a trick to it.”
You straightened slowly, adjusting your tote higher on your shoulder “Apparently.”
The hallway fell quiet.
Miyeon was still by his door, hovering with the kind of bright-eyed stillness of someone very aware they had just accidentally stepped into something and had no idea how big that something was.
You noticed her too. Your eyes flicked past Seungcheol, then back. He saw the exact moment you remembered what you’d walked in on and wanted the floor to swallow you whole.
“So,” you said, voice going oddly formal “thanks. Sorry for bothering you.”
“You weren’t bothering me”
“Still. Bad timing.”
Something in the way you said it made Miyeon speak up immediately.
“Oh my god, no, it’s not—” She waved both hands as if trying to physically bat away the implication. “I mean, it is timing, obviously, but not like… weird timing? Well, okay, weird timing, but—” She stopped, horrified at herself
“It’s okay,” you said, and your voice softened a little “I kind of walked into whatever this is.”
“Dinner,” Miyeon blurted “It’s just dinner.”
Seungcheol closed his eyes briefly “Miyeon”
“What? I’m clarifying.”
You blinked “Miyeon?”
The way you said her name made Seungcheol realize he had not actually introduced anyone, because of course he hadn’t. He was too busy trying not to have a cardiac event in the hallway.
He opened his mouth but Miyeon beat him to it
“I’m his neighbor,” she said quickly, stepping out of the apartment and offering you a hand with the same energy one might use to approach a startled deer “From 12B”
You stared at her outstretched hand for half a second before taking it
“Y/N,” you said
Then silence again. A deeply stupid, hallway-shaped silence where all three of you seemed to be waiting for someone else to decide what happened next.
You shifted your suitcase upright and glanced into your apartment, where unopened boxes were stacked in the entryway.
Seungcheol’s gaze followed automatically. You were moving in. Right next door.
The realization hit him so hard he nearly missed your next sentence.
“I should probably finish getting things inside”
“Right,” he said, far too quickly. “Yeah. Of course.”
You nodded. Then, because apparently the universe hadn’t done enough to him tonight, you looked at him properly for the first time since he stepped into the hallway.
Not at his shoulder. Not past him. At him.
And the expression on your face wasn’t anger. Wasn’t even hurt, not exactly.
It was something stranger than that. Something almost dazed. Like you still hadn’t caught up to the fact that the man you hadn’t seen in three years was standing in your hallway in socks, smelling faintly of soap and cooking garlic, looking just as shocked to find you here as you were to find him.
You were already bending to grab the suitcase handle, trying and failing to look like your hands weren’t trembling
“Do you need help?” he asked
Your head snapped up “What?”
“With the boxes,” he said, gesturing toward the stack just inside your apartment “Or the suitcase. I can—”
“No.” The answer came too fast, then softened immediately “I mean. No, it’s okay. I can manage.”
He nodded once “Right.”
Another pause then you gave a tiny, painfully polite smile and said, “Thanks for the door.”
It was such a ridiculous thing to thank him for after everything that for one wild second Seungcheol wanted to laugh and cry at the same time.
Instead he just stepped back “Anytime.”
The second your apartment door clicked shut, you dropped your forehead against it and whispered, with all the dignity of a woman whose life had just been personally insulted by fate
”Fuck.” You stayed there for one beat. Then another.
Then your whole body snapped back to life at once
“Fuck, fuck, fuck—what the fuck?”
You shoved your suitcase upright with one hand, pacing three frantic steps into the entryway before turning around and pacing right back
“No,” you muttered, running both hands through your hair. “No, absolutely not. That is actually insane. That is psychotic behavior from the universe.”
The apartment looked the same, a bunch of unopened boxes accumulating over the weeks Jaehyun hasn’t been home, your luggage and a few boxes he took from your brother’s place so you can travel lighter.
And yet somehow the entire place felt different now. Cursed, maybe.
Haunted by Choi Seungcheol in black socks and a domestic-looking kitchen and a woman named Miyeon chopping vegetables in his apartment like that was a thing that happened now.
You started pacing again. He lived next door.
Next door.
Not across the city. Not in some neighborhood you could avoid. Not in the vague abstract way exes exist where you know they’re somewhere out there but the odds of physically colliding with them are low enough to preserve your sanity.
No.
He was one wall away.
You spun toward the stack of boxes by the couch and pointed at them like they had personally lied to you
“This was supposed to be safe!”
You fumbled for your phone in your back pocket with the urgency of someone calling emergency services.
No. Not emergency services. Worse.
Jeong Jaehyun.
The actual owner of this apartment. The reason you were here in the first place. The so-called friend who had told you, so casually, Stay at mine for a few weeks, it’s empty most of the time anyway, while neglecting to mention that “mine” came with one devastatingly familiar ex-boyfriend attached to the neighboring unit.
You hit call.
He picked up on the third ring, sounding far too cheerful for someone who was about to be verbally assaulted
“Hell—” “What the fuck, Jeong Jaehyun?”
There was a pause then a bark of laughter loud enough that you had to yank the phone slightly away from your ear
“Well hello to you too.”
You stared at the wall in disbelief “Are you laughing?”
“I’m trying to figure out which specific crime I’ve committed before I apologize”
“You didn’t tell me”
“About what?”
You made a strangled sound and started pacing again, stepping around your suitcase “About your neighbor.”
He was still smiling; you could hear it in his voice. “I told you I had neighbors.”
“Not like that!”
“Baby, I live in an apartment building. By definition—”
“Jaehyun.”
“Okay, okay” He laughed again, softer this time “What happened?”
You stopped in the middle of the living room, one hand braced on your hip, and lowered your voice into the dangerous calm of a woman one minor inconvenience away from committing a felony.
“What happened,” you repeated, “is that I locked myself out for thirty seconds because your stupid door hates me, so I knocked next door to ask for help—”
“My door doesn’t hate you, you’re just dramatic.”
“—and your neighbor opened the door,” you barreled on, ignoring him, “except not your neighbor, Jaehyun. My ex.”
Silence. Real silence this time. Just pure, startled dead air.
Then, very slowly “…What?”
You laughed once, high and humorless “Yeah. What. Exactly.”
Then, “No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Yes!”
“Choi Seungcheol lives next door to me? So that’s who he is. Been living next to him for a year and I never knew”
You threw your free hand into the air even though he couldn’t see it “Apparently! Which would’ve been such useful information maybe an hour ago, before I rolled a suitcase into the hallway and accidentally found him playing house with some woman named Miyeon.”
“What do you mean playing house?”
“I mean there was a woman in his apartment!” you hissed. “She answered the door! He came out from the kitchen with that look men have when they’re in the middle of cooking something and suddenly I was in a hallway living through my own personal nightmare”
On the other end of the line, Jaehyun made a sound that was halfway between concern and someone trying very hard not to laugh in your face.
You heard it immediately “Don’t”
“I’m not laughing”
“You are literally laughing”
“I’m not laughing at you”
“Jaehyun”
“I’m laughing at the sheer statistical absurdity of this”
“Are you sure it was him?”
You stopped pacing and looked at your phone like it had offended you personally
“Jaehyun.”
“What? Trauma does weird things to memory. Maybe it was just some other broad-shouldered Korean man who ruined your life and knows how to fix sticky apartment locks.”
You gasped “You’re sick.”
“I’m trying to help.”
“You are absolutely not trying to help.”
Jaehyun hummed “How did he look?”
You closed your eyes. That was the worst part. He looked good. Annoyingly, offensively good.
Older, yes. More settled somehow. Hair a little longer on top than he used to keep it. Softer around the edges of his expression, but broader too, like time had turned him into a calmer, steadier version of the man you once knew how to read with one glance.
And domestic.
That was what kept replaying in your head, to your absolute irritation.
“Oh no,” Jaehyun said immediately, voice brightening with evil “That reaction tells me he looked hot.”
“He looked… fine,” you said with all the dignity of a liar caught on CCTV
Jaehyun was quiet for a beat then gentler, “Did he say anything?”
Your throat tightened unexpectedly. Nothing dramatic had happened in the hallway. No confrontation. No grand speech. No unresolved pain spilling out in front of a stranger.
Just awkwardness. Shock. That small, impossible little hi after three years of silence. and somehow that had been worse.
“He asked if I needed help with the boxes or anything” you said
Jaehyun snorted “Classic.”
You frowned “What does that mean?”
“It means men are emotionally constipated creatures and ‘do you need help with the boxes’ is basically a love letter under stressful circumstances.”
Despite yourself, a laugh slipped out. You hated that he was right enough to be annoying.
“I’m moving out.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Yes, I am.”
“You need a place for three weeks while your lease gets sorted. You are not uprooting your life because the universe decided to prank you.”
“I absolutely am.”
“No, you’re absolutely not.”
“I can’t stay next door to him.”
“Why not?” The question came too fast, too simply.
You lowered your arm and stared at the ceiling in silence.
Why not?
Because seeing him had made your chest hurt in a way you thought time had already dulled.
Because three years was enough to build a life around the absence of someone, but apparently not enough to stand in a hallway and look at them without every old wound remembering its name.
Because you didn’t know if you could survive hearing him laugh through the wall. Smelling his cooking in the hallway. Running into him in the elevator looking half-awake on a Sunday morning and discovering all over again that you still knew the shape of him too well.
“Because it’s weird,” you said finally, because it was easier than saying any of that
Jaehyun made a skeptical noise “That’s not the real reason.”
“It’s enough of one.”
“Y/N.”
You groaned “What?”
“Do you still love him?” The question knocked the air out of the room.
You sat there very still, phone pressed to your ear, eyes fixed on the white ceiling above you as if it might offer a better answer than the one already sitting in your chest.
Jaehyun didn’t rush you. That was one of the reasons he had become important to you over the last couple of years. He joked constantly, flirted with everyone, treated life like a thing meant to be enjoyed loudly and with expensive luggage. But when it mattered, he knew how to wait.
And this mattered.
You swallowed. “I don’t know what I feel,” you said quietly
It wasn’t a lie. Love after that much time didn’t look the way it used to.
Jaehyun was silent for a moment “That sounds suspiciously like a yes you don’t want to say out loud.”
You rolled your eyes even as your chest tightened “You’re unbelievable.”
“I’m perceptive.”
“You’re nosy.”
“Also true.”
You let your head fall back against the couch “I don’t want this to become a thing.”
“What thing?”
“You know.” You waved a hand vaguely at the air “A whole… dramatic thing. I’m not doing that. I’m not nineteen. I’m not twenty-seven. I don’t have the emotional range for some tortured reunion arc where I cry in a hallway and make bad choices.”
“First of all, ‘reunion arc’ is my phrase. Don’t steal my material.”
You laughed despite yourself.
“And second,” he continued, “no one said it has to be dramatic. You can just… live there for a few weeks. Be normal.”
“Normal?I just found out my ex of nine years lives next door to the apartment I’m borrowing from my pilot friend. There is no normal.”
“There can be hallway nodding.”
“I don’t want hallway nodding.”
“There can be tense elevator silence.”
“That’s worse.”
“There can be him carrying your groceries once and both of you pretending it’s not deeply symbolic.”
“Jaehyun!”
He burst out laughing again, and this time you couldn’t even be mad because the absurdity of the situation was finally catching up to you too.
A helpless laugh escaped you, half horrified and half hysterical.
“This is insane,” you said, laughing into your hand. “This is actually insane.”
“I agree,” Jaehyun said cheerfully. “But it’s also kind of funny.”
“It is not funny.”
Then his voice gentled again “Hey.”
“What”
“You don’t have to decide anything tonight ”
You looked toward the hallway, toward the door you’d just locked like it could keep the entire evening out.
Jaehyun continued, “Stay tonight. Unpack a little. Breathe. If by tomorrow you still want out, we’ll figure something else out. But don’t make a panic decision just because the universe has terrible comedic timing.”
You picked at a loose thread on the couch cushion.
It was good advice. Annoyingly good.
“I still think you should’ve warned me,” you muttered
“I genuinely did not know your tragic love of your life was my tragic hot neighbor.”
“Please never phrase it like that again.”
“No promises.”
“Jaehyun.”
“Okay, okay.” You could hear the smile in his voice “For what it’s worth, if I had known, I absolutely would’ve told you.”
That, at least, you believed. You sighed “Fine.”
“Fine as in you’re staying?”
“Fine as in I’m not dragging my suitcase back into the street tonight.”
“I’ll take it.”
“Also,” Jaehyun added, way too casually, “if you do accidentally fall back in love with your ex through a series of increasingly intimate neighborly encounters, I expect full updates.”
“Goodbye.” “Y/N—” You hung up.
=
Three days later, Seungcheol found himself standing in front of apartment 12D at eight-thirteen in the morning with two iced coffees in a cardboard carrier and the full awareness that he had absolutely lost his mind.
He had not meant to end up here.
That was the story he was going with, anyway.
The truth was more embarrassing.
He’d been awake since six after another run he barely remembered, showered, changed, made breakfast he didn’t taste, and spent the last forty minutes pacing around his kitchen trying to come up with a reason not to knock on your door like some desperate man in a romance film written by people who had never experienced shame.
He had already seen you twice in the last three days.
He’d told himself it was casual. Neighborly.
Maybe he just wanted to see your face in daylight without the buffer of an elevator mirror or a giant cardboard box between you.
He adjusted his grip on the coffee carrier and knocked.
Once.
Then, because he suddenly became aware that his heart was beating like he was about to be executed, he took half a step back and tried to school his expression into something that didn’t scream ‘I have not been normal about this situation for seventy-two hours.’
There was movement inside. Footsteps. A lock clicking. The door opened.
And Seungcheol’s brain shut off.
A man stood there. Tall. Broad-shouldered. Shirtless.
Sleep-rumpled hair, low-slung gray sweatpants, one hand still on the doorknob and the other rubbing absently at his jaw like he’d just rolled out of bed and had not expected a visitor before coffee.
For three full seconds Seungcheol genuinely thought he might be standing at the wrong apartment.
No, this was your door. He knew this was your door. He had watched you unlock it. He had literally fixed the lock himself. Apartment 12D. The one right next to his.
The man blinked at him.
Then looked down at the coffee in Seungcheol’s hand, back up to his face, and said, in a voice still rough with sleep, “Uh… good morning?”
Seungcheol’s entire nervous system went hot. Not because of the man himself, because of what the man’s presence implied.
Something ugly and immediate crawled under his skin before he could stop it.
The thought did absolutely nothing to make the feeling go away.
You can date, he told himself instantly. You can move on. Of course you can.
It’s been three years, and he is not entitled to a single thought about who stands in your apartment at eight in the morning looking like he slept there.
He stood there with two iced coffees in his hand and all the hard-earned calm of the last three years threatening to leave his body through sheer humiliation.
The man frowned a little, clearly trying to figure out why a stranger was staring at him like he’d just stepped out of a horror movie
“Can I help you?”
Seungcheol snapped back into himself so fast it almost hurt.
“Sorry,” Seungcheol said, finally forcing his face into something resembling polite composure. “I think I might have the wrong—”
He stopped himself.
Wrong apartment made no sense. He knew it wasn’t the wrong apartment.
The man raised an eyebrow.
Seungcheol adjusted his grip on the coffee carrier, mind scrambling for something plausible, anything that didn’t sound like ‘I came over here because your… because the woman staying here is my ex and I’ve been operating at a reduced level of sanity ever since I found out she lives next door.’
“Actually,” he said, the lie forming in real time, “I was wondering if maybe some mail got delivered here by mistake.”
The man blinked “Mail?”
“Yeah.” Seungcheol nodded once like this was a perfectly normal thing to say at eight in the morning to a shirtless stranger “I’ve had a couple things end up at the wrong unit before. Same floor, similar numbers.”
The lie was terrible. He knew it. The man definitely knew it. Still, the stranger glanced back into the apartment as if considering it.
“Uh. I don’t think so?”
He looked at Seungcheol again, gaze dropping to the coffee carrier and then lifting back up with mild suspicion “What name?”
“Choi.”
The man’s expression shifted “Choi.”
“Okay,” he said slowly “No, I don’t think there’s any mail for… Choi.”
“Right ” A beat of silence.
Seungcheol should leave.
That was the obvious move. He had already embarrassed himself enough for one morning. He could nod, apologize for disturbing him, walk back to his apartment, and spend the next six hours staring at the wall while trying not to imagine the exact sleeping arrangement in apartment 12D.
Instead he stood there, rooted in place by one brutal question clawing at the inside of his throat.
Who are you? He was not going to ask that. Absolutely not.
The man shifted against the doorframe, still looking at him with cautious curiosity. Up close, he was younger than Seungcheol first thought. Llate twenties maybe, handsome in an annoyingly effortless way, the kind of man who looked like he belonged on a cologne billboard or in business class smiling at flight attendants.
Seungcheol hated that he noticed any of it.
“Sorry,” the stranger said after a moment, rubbing the back of his neck “I got in late last night, so if something did show up I probably wouldn’t know. You can check with the front desk maybe?”
“Yeah,” Seungcheol said “No, it’s fine. Sorry to bother you.”
The stranger nodded once, already halfway to shutting the door, then paused.
“Do you want me to let…” He trailed off “Never mind.”
Seungcheol’s stomach dropped.
Let who know? You?
“Anyway. No mail.”
“Right,” Seungcheol repeated, because apparently that was all his vocabulary could manage this morning.
Another awkward beat then the stranger glanced down at the coffees in Seungcheol’s hand.
He stepped back another pace “Sorry again.”
“No problem.”
The door started to close.
Then, just before it shut completely, the stranger leaned his head out once more and added, “Hey does your lock sticks too? Mine does that, had to do this whole pull routine everytime”
“Yeah, no yea I called landlord to fix mine after I moved in”
“Right right, yea I’ll do that. Thanks. My uh-”the stranger pauses looking behind for quick second “Anyways thanks”
Then he shut the door.
Seungcheol let himself into his own apartment, set the coffees on the kitchen counter, and stood there with both hands braced against the marble.
For a full minute he didn’t move.
Then he looked up at the wall your apartment shared with his and muttered, with deep feeling
“What the fuck.”
=
By the time Mingyu found him, Seungcheol had been beating the absolute hell out of a heavy bag for twelve straight minutes.
Not working out. Not training. Exorcising something.
The gym was crowded and in the far corner, by the hanging bags, Seungcheol was one punch away from being reported to management.
Mingyu stopped in the doorway of the boxing area and just stared.
Seungcheol’s back was to him, shoulders slick with sweat beneath a black sleeveless shirt, hair damp and falling into his eyes, jaw set so hard it looked painful. Every hit landed with enough force to make the chain above the bag groan.
Thud. Thud.THUD.
The bag swung violently.
Seungcheol followed it, gloves coming up again with a level of focus usually reserved for mortal enemies and final boss fights.
Mingyu looked around as if maybe there was a camera hidden somewhere.
Then he walked closer, squinting “Did the bag insult your mother?”
No response just another vicious right hook that made the bag snap sideways.
Mingyu nodded “Okay. Cool. Good talk.”
At this point Seungcheol wasn’t even pretending to be in a normal headspace. There was no rhythm to it, no measured combinations, no controlled footwork. This was just raw, deeply personal violence being redirected onto gym equipment.
Mingyu folded his arms and watched for another thirty seconds.
Then Seungcheol landed one particularly unhinged uppercut and Mingyu finally stepped in, grabbing the side of the bag before it could swing back and decapitate someone
“Hey, Rocky. Time out.”
Seungcheol lowered his gloves, chest heaving looking genuinely annoyed to find Mingyu standing there.
“What?”
Mingyu blinked “What? That’s what you’re going with? What did this bag do to you?”
“I’m working out.”
“No,” Mingyu said flatly, “you’re having an emotional event with boxing gloves on”
Seungcheol looked away, which, to Mingyu, was as good as a confession.
“Oh my god” Mingyu’s eyes narrowed “This is about a girl
Seungcheol’s head snapped back. “What girl?”
Mingyu stared at him.
Then slowly, “I don’t know, man, maybe the one who moved in next door and displaced your entire nervous system?”
Seungcheol glared at him.
Mingyu pointed at him triumphantly “Aha.”
Seungcheol yanked one glove off with his teeth and then the other with considerably more aggression than necessary “You’re annoying.”
“And you’re at the gym trying to fistfight your feelings instead of using your words like a civilized adult, so honestly I think I’m doing great.”
Seungcheol tossed the gloves onto the bench and grabbed the towel around his neck, scrubbing at his face.
Mingyu waited and because he knew Seungcheol well enough to understand that silence was often just foreplay for a breakdown, he didn’t interrupt.
Eventually Seungcheol dropped the towel around his neck again and stared at the heavy bag like it had personally wronged him.
“Have you ever stayed over at a friend’s house?”
Mingyu blinked “What?”
Seungcheol kept his eyes on the bag “Like… if it was a girl.”
“You mean a girlfriend?”
“No.” Seungcheol frowned, “I meant a friend who’s a girl.”
Mingyu’s eyebrows climbed so high they practically left his forehead
“Why would I stay over at a girl’s house if she’s not my girlfriend?”
Seungcheol finally looked at him “It can happen.”
“Can it?”
“Yes.”
Mingyu looked around dramatically, as if checking whether a hidden production crew might pop out and explain what slow-burn nonsense he had accidentally wandered into.
“What evening televesion drama are you currently living in?”
“I’m asking a normal question.”
“No, you’re not.” Mingyu counted on his fingers “A normal question is ‘hey, do you know a good dentist’ or ‘do you think I should buy an air fryer.’ You are asking me if men sleep over at women’s apartments platonically.”
Seungcheol went very still.
Mingyu grinned like a puppy being handed his favorite treat “Oh my god. Tell me everything.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“That’s never true when someone says it like that.”
Seungcheol drank the water in one go, crushed the cup in his hand, and tossed it into the trash with far more force than the cup deserved.
Mingyu watched him “You went over there.”
Silence.
“With a reason.”
Silence.
“…Did you take her coffee?”
Seungcheol looked like he wanted to die.
Mingyu slapped a hand over his mouth. “No, you did not.”
Seungcheol pinched the bridge of his nose “Can you shut up for five seconds?”
“I can’t,” Mingyu said immediately. “Absolutely not. You brought your ex coffee like a man in a K-drama and found something in her? Are you kidding me? This is the best thing that’s happened to me all month. Was it another guy? It was another guy wasn’t it.”
Mingyu made a strangled sound and bent at the waist, laughing so hard he had to brace his hands on his knees.
Seungcheol stared at him with a flat, murderous calm look “This is not funny.”
“Oh, it’s devastating for you,” Mingyu said “Which is exactly why it’s hysterical for me.”
Seungcheol looked like he was debating whether homicide in a public gym would be worth the paperwork.
Mingyu straightened, still grinning “Okay. Start from the top.”
“No.”
“Cheol”
“No.”
“Did you at least see her?”
Seungcheol’s silence answered that one.
Mingyu sobered a little, enough to study his friend’s face properly now that the initial entertainment had worn off. Under the annoyance, under the embarrassment, there was something else there.
The kind of discomfort that had nothing to do with a bruised ego and everything to do with old feelings being dragged into fresh air.
Mingyu’s expression softened by a degree “You didn’t see her,” he guessed
Seungcheol exhaled through his nose.
“The guy answered the door,” he said at last, voice clipped
Mingyu nodded slowly. “And?”
“He was shirtless.”
Mingyu pressed his lips together.
“Ah,” he said, in the tone of a man approaching a wounded animal with a snack and a prayer “So this is less about hospitality etiquette and more about your soul leaving your body.”
Seungcheol glared at him “I’m not jealous.”
Mingyu blinked “ I didn’t say anything about that”
“I’m serious.”
“Right.” Mingyu nodded solemnly “That explains why you nearly punched a hole through a forty-kilo heavy bag”
Seungcheol rubbed a hand over his face “I’m not saying it means anything.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I know she can do whatever she wants.”
“Of course.”
“I know she has every right to move on.”
Mingyu folded his arms “And yet.”
Seungcheol’s mouth flattened.
“And yet,” Mingyu echoed helpfully and Seungcheol just stared at the floor.
Then, because apparently humiliation was a team sport today, he muttered, “He knew how to open the lock.”
Mingyu paused.
“The lock.”
“The door,” Seungcheol snapped. “The stupid door on her apartment. He knew the trick, he even asked me if my door was like that. Maybe he’s getting it fixed for her”
There was a beat of silence then Mingyu’s face crumpled.
“Oh, you poor bastard.”
“Don’t.”
“No, because that’s so much worse than being shirtless.”
Seungcheol looked genuinely offended “How is that worse?”
“Because shirtless can be random. Shirtless can be a circumstance. Shirtless can be ‘I run hot when I sleep’.” Mingyu ticked the points off on his fingers with maddening seriousness
“But knowing the lock? That implies familiarity. Repetition. Experience. He’s had enough encounters with that stupid door to know its little personality quirks.”
Seungcheol looked like he might actually throw up.
Mingyu put a hand over his heart “Oh my god, you’re spiraling.”
“I’m not spiraling.”
Seungcheol snatched his gym bag off the bench “I’m leaving.”
Mingyu caught his elbow “Wait, wait, wait. Did you ask who he was?”
“No.”
“Did he ask who you were?”
“No.”
“Did you tell him why you were there?”
Seungcheol gave him a look.
Mingyu nodded “Right. Obviously not. So let me get this straight.” He held up a hand and started counting
“You went to your ex’s apartment with coffee after three years of no contact because she suddenly lives next door. A shirtless man answered. You panicked, lied about missing mail, discovered said shirtless man knows her door better than you do, and then came here to commit felony assault on sports equipment.”
Seungcheol slung the bag over his shoulder “When you say it like that, it sounds dramatic.”
Mingyu stared at him in disbelief “When I say it like that?”
Seungcheol started walking toward the locker rooms.
Mingyu hurried after him. “Cheol!”
“Cheol, come on, I’m helping.”
“You are absolutely not helping.”
“I am!” Mingyu insisted “Look at me. I’m a voice of reason.”
Seungcheol barked out a laugh so disbelieving it bordered on rude.
“Here’s my professional opinion,” he said, tossing the towel over his shoulder “Do nothing stupid.”
Seungcheol pulled off his gloves with unnecessary force “I wasn’t planning to.”
“Going to her apartment with coffee at eight in the morning was already stupid.”
Seungcheol shot him a glare.
Mingyu grinned wider. “Exactly.”
He started backing toward the door, hands raised in surrender before Seungcheol could physically remove him from the premises.
“Take a shower,” Mingyu called “Drink the coffee yourself. And for the love of god, if Shirtless Door Guy shows up again, try not to challenge him to a duel.”
Seungcheol deadpanned, “Get out.”
Mingyu saluted. “Text me if you discover he’s secretly her husband.”
The locker room door slammed shut behind him before Seungcheol could throw something heavier.
Left alone at last, Seungcheol braced both hands on the edge of the open locker and stared into the metal shelves like they might contain answers.
They didn’t.
All he had was the image of your apartment door opening. A stranger standing there. And the ugly, immediate twist in his chest that refused to go away no matter how many times he reminded himself he had no claim to anything anymore.
=
The next two days were a masterclass in psychological warfare.
Not because anything actually happened but because nothing happened.
And Seungcheol, left alone with his own brain and a wall thin enough to remind him you existed but thick enough to keep him from knowing how you existed, was proving once again that he could take one bad piece of information and turn it into an entire cinematic universe of suffering.
By day one, he had already built at least five possible explanations for Shirtless Door Guy.
By day two, those five had somehow multiplied into categories.
Category two: situationship.
Category one: boyfriend.
The obvious one. The one his chest hated most. The one that made his jaw tighten every time he thought too long about the man standing in your doorway like he belonged there.
In some ways worse, because it implied a level of intimacy without commitment and for some reason that made Seungcheol want to break something expensive.
Category three: friend who occasionally stayed over and happened to be weirdly comfortable in other people’s apartments. This one Mingyu championed because Mingyu had decided the only thing funnier than Seungcheol’s jealousy was feeding it alternate theories like treats at a zoo.
Category four: cousin.
He knows it’s the least likely because he knows all your cousins from both sides of the family. A decade together provided him with that cheatsheet so he disregarded that category.
Category five: husband.
That one had lasted all of three seconds before Seungcheol nearly gave himself an aneurysm and banned himself from further speculation for the rest of the afternoon.
The ban lasted forty-five minutes.
By the time he showed up to therapy on Wednesday, even he knew he sounded pathetic.
Not just pathetic. Unhinged.
His therapist, who had spent the last two years patiently helping him become a man who actually sat with discomfort instead of swallowing it whole and pretending it didn’t exist, had listened to the entire story with the calm professionalism of someone who had seen a lot.
Seungcheol had sat on the couch with his arms folded and said, “I know how it sounds.”
His therapist, Dr. Han, had made a note on her legal pad “You brought her coffee.”
“I know.”
“And a man answered the door.”
“Yes.”
“Shirtless.”
Seungcheol closed his eyes “Yes.”
Dr. Han tapped her pen once against the page. “And now you’re spiraling because you don’t know who he is.”
“I’m not spiraling.”
Dr. Han looked at him over the rim of her glasses.
Seungcheol sighed “Fine. I’m spiraling a little.”
“A little?”
Seungcheol glared.
Dr. Han held up a placating hand. “I’m not mocking you.”
“You’re about to.”
“I am about to point out,” Dr. Han said carefully, “that you spent three years learning how to tolerate uncertainty and yet one shirtless man has apparently undone several months of excellent emotional progress.”
Seungcheol stared at the carpet.
Then Dr. Han laughed. Not cruelly. Just one startled, disbelieving laugh that she immediately covered with a cough.
Seungcheol looked up, offended “Did you just laugh at me?”
“I laughed,” Dr. Han admitted, still trying to get her face back under control, “because the human brain is a ridiculous place and yours is currently staging a full-scale relapse over what may very well be a cousin.”
“It’s not funny.”
“No,” Dr. Han agreed, mouth still twitching, “but it is very human.”
So by Thursday evening, he was already in a bad way.
He’d worked late and still got nothing done.
He’d gone for a run and spent half of it mentally composing casual things to say if he happened to run into you in the hallway, then hating himself for it.
By eight-thirty he was in his kitchen rinsing rice when he heard it.
Your laugh faint through the wall, but unmistakable.
Seungcheol froze with his hands under the running water.
At first it was just voices muffled, overlapping, impossible to make out. One lower, one yours. Then a burst of laughter again, clearer this time, bright and loose and warm in a way that hit him square in the sternum.
This was your real laugh. The one he had spent nine years learning like a second language.
He stood there listening despite himself.
A sharp, startled little squeal that went right through him.
Then there was a thump from the other side of the wall. Your voice, louder now.
A protest. Another laugh and then you squealed.
Because he knew that sound too. Knew it in the worst possible way.
It was the sound you used to make when he grabbed you around the waist from behind while you were washing dishes. When he threw you over his shoulder because you were being annoying on purpose. When he dug his fingers into your sides and you twisted away, shrieking and laughing and calling him evil while he kissed your cheek just to make you squirm harder.
For one horrible, blinding second, his brain supplied an image it had absolutely no right to create.
Another man making you laugh like that. Another man close enough to pull that sound out of you.
Another man—“Nope.”
The word came out loud in his empty kitchen. Seungcheol shut off the faucet so hard water splashed on the counter.
Before his better judgment could catch up, he dried his hands on the nearest towel, marched to the front door, and crossed the hallway in about four angry strides.
He knocked. Too hard to be casual.
There was a beat of silence inside, then footsteps.
The door opened and there you were.
Hair loose and a little messy, cheeks pink from laughing. You looked so at home in the doorway that Seungcheol almost forgot why he was there.
Your expression shifted from mild confusion to surprise.
“Hi.”
He opened his mouth but nothing came out. Because now that he was actually here, on your doorstep, under your eyes, he had absolutely no legitimate reason for interrupting whatever was happening inside.
You frowned slightly “Everything okay?”
Seungcheol’s brain, in a final act of betrayal, grabbed the first domestic object it could think of.
“Can I borrow a ladle?”
You blinked “Huh?”
He heard himself double down “A ladle,” he repeated, as if that clarified anything
“Mine… broke.”
Your eyebrows lifted. Behind you, there was movement and then shirtless door guy appeared.
Not shirtless this time, which Seungcheol resented less than he wanted to admit. He stepped up behind you. Too close, Seungcheol noticed immediately, far too close for the current state of his blood pressure and leaned slightly to see around your shoulder.
“Who is it, babe?”
Seungcheol’s entire internal operating system crashed.
His face did not move. Years of discipline and emotional repression and executive composure held the line with military precision.
Inside, however, every single thought in his body started screaming at once.
Babe? Babe?! Who the fuck is babe? Why is he calling her babe? Why is he standing that close? Why does he look comfortable? Why am I going to die in this hallway?
You, on the other hand, looked equally horrified though Seungcheol, in his current state, misread it as the embarrassment of being caught.
Jaehyun, blissfully unaware that he had just set off a controlled explosion in another man’s psyche, looked from you to Seungcheol and immediately brightened with recognition
“Oh,” he said “Mail guy.”
Seungcheol stared at him.
You turned to look at Jaehyun “Mail guy?”
Jaehyun waved vaguely toward Seungcheol. “He’s the next door neighbor, baby. Missing mail”
You looked between them, clearly trying to piece together a puzzle you had not asked to solve but before any of you could say another word, another voice cut into the hallway.
“Cheol?”
All three of you turned.
Miyeon was standing in the open doorway of 12B.
“The washer is stuck again,” she said “And I think it ate one of my socks.”
Silence.
Seungcheol felt it happen.
The exact second your eyes slid from Miyeon to him. The exact second you clocked the nickname. The domestic familiarity in her voice.
Oh no.
You definitely noted the Cheol.
He saw understanding flash across your face. Not correct understanding.
Not even close. Just enough to make his stomach drop.
He saw it in the way your expression changed subtle, but there. And Seungcheol, because God clearly hated him, also saw the way Jaehyun’s posture shifted beside you when Miyeon appeared.
He straightened a little. Not possessive, not exactly. But protective enough that it looked terrible in context.
Miyeon’s gaze bounced between the three of you.
Then slowly back to Seungcheol.
“Oh,” she said. Just one syllable but it carried the full weight of I have clearly walked into something and I don’t know what it is but I’m absolutely going to think about it later.
Miyeon blinked. “I just asked about the washer.”
“Right. I know. I mean—” He stopped, because nothing after this was going to improve “Give me five minutes.”
“Sure,” she said, way too neutrally. “Take your time.”
She disappeared back into her apartment.
The hallway somehow got worse.
You crossed your arms loosely over your middle and looked at Seungcheol with an expression he couldn’t read at all now.
Jaehyun leaned against the doorframe behind you “You fix her appliances too?”
Seungcheol’s jaw tightened “Sometimes.”
Jaehyun nodded, gaze far too innocent “Neighborly.”
Something in the way he said it made Seungcheol realize, with dawning horror, that this man thought he and Miyeon were together.
Or at least involved.
This was hell. Actual hell. And the worst part? Judging by the way your mouth pressed into a line, you might have been thinking the exact same thing.
Seungcheol looked at you. You looked right back. There was too much in that look and not enough at the same time.
Too much history. Too much assumption. Too many things neither of you were saying because there was a man behind you and a woman across the hall and all of it was balancing on the edge of becoming deeply humiliating.
“So,” you said after a second, voice polite in that way he had already learned to fear, “you needed a ladle?”
He almost closed his eyes “No.”
Jaehyun snorted. You glanced over your shoulder at him, then back to Seungcheol, and somehow your face got even more unreadable
“Right.”
Jaehyun, still leaning in your doorway with the relaxed confidence of a man who had no idea he was currently the villain in someone else’s emotional spiral, offered brightly, “Good luck with the sock.”
Seungcheol looked at him with then he looked at you one last time. You had already stepped back half a pace, fingers curling around the edge of the door like you were ready to close it the second hallway theater was over.
“Goodnight,” you said
Three years ago, that word used to come with a kiss. With his name. With your hand reaching for his shirt while he tried to leave the room and you dragged him back for one more minute.
Now it was just a door between you and a smile that didn’t quite reach your eyes.
“Night,” he said quietly.
As your apartment door clicked shut, Seungcheol had the sinking certainty that somehow this had gone even worse than the fake mail.
well... hello there. i hope you're ready😅 i guess this fic really became the outlet for all my 'big feelings' these past few weeks. so yea, i hope you love it🤍
The first sign should have been how easy the night felt.
Not in some dramatic, movie-scene kind of way. Just in the ordinary, quiet way that had always belonged to the two of you. The kind built from years instead of sparks. The kind that settled into your bones so deeply you forgot there had ever been a version of yourself that didn’t know him.
By the time Seungcheol pulled up outside the bar, your cheeks were warm from two cocktails and a shared pitcher your friends had insisted on ordering “for old times’ sake.”
You weren’t drunk enough to stumble, but definitely tipsy enough that everything felt softer around the edges. You spotted his car immediately and grinned before he’d even fully parked.
“There’s my boyfriend,” you announced to absolutely no one, because your friends had already gone back inside to pay the bill
Seungcheol stepped out before you could make your way down the curb by yourself. He had one hand shoved into the pocket of his dark coat, the other reaching automatically for you.
Always steady. Always there. Even after nine years, your body knew exactly where to go.
“You waited outside alone?” he asked, brows pulling together as he looked at you
You took his hand and swayed into him with a smile “For like… thirty seconds. Maybe forty. I was brave.”
“Brave, huh?”
“Mhm”
“You can barely stand straight”
“I’m standing great”
“You’re leaning on me”
“That’s because I love you” you said matter-of-factly, as if it explained everything.
His mouth twitched. It was always like this when you’d had a little too much to drink. You got softer, clingier, somehow even more affectionate than usual, which Seungcheol claimed shouldn’t be physically possible considering you were already attached to him on a normal day.
But he never seemed to mind. If anything, he indulged you more. Let you talk too much. Let you hold onto his arm. Let you ramble about your friends and your shoes and how pretty the moon looked from the parking lot.
Tonight was no different.
He opened the passenger door for you and waited until you were seated before buckling your seatbelt himself because you kept getting distracted halfway through.
“Your hair smells nice,” you informed him while he clicked the belt into place
He gave you a look. “Thank you?”
“I’m serious. Come here.”
You caught the collar of his coat and tugged him closer until his face was inches from yours. He let himself be pulled down with the patience of a man who’d spent nearly a decade learning every version of you.
You sniffed dramatically near his neck. “See? Nice.”
Seungcheol laughed under his breath and pressed a kiss to your forehead before shutting the door.
The drive home was only twenty minutes, but you filled every second of it with chatter.
You told him about how one of your workmates was thinking of quitting her job because her manager was “an energy vampire.” You recounted, in painful detail, the argument between two girls in the bathroom over whether texting your ex counted as cheating if it was “just closure.”
He listened to all of it.
One hand on the wheel, the other resting on the center console where your fingers kept finding his. Every time you laced them together, he squeezed once in acknowledgment, eyes still on the road.
That was another thing about Seungcheol. He paid attention even when he acted like he wasn’t. He knew when you were pretending to be okay. Knew when your silence meant exhaustion versus hurt. Knew the difference between your real laugh and the polite one you used around strangers. Knew you liked the heater on in the car even when you’d spent the entire afternoon complaining about being too warm.
Nine years did that to people, you guessed. Or maybe it only did that when love lasted long enough to become muscle memory.
By the time you got home, your words were starting to slur at the edges.
“Baby,” he said, amusement threaded through his voice, “you’re trying to open our neighbor’s door”
You blinked at the number on the wall.
“Oh”
“Yeah. Oh.”
“I knew that”
“Sure.”
Once inside, the apartment greeted you with the familiar hush of late night. It looked exactly like home. Exactly like the life you’d built with him piece by piece since you were twenty and stupidly in love and convinced that nothing in the world could touch you as long as you had each other.
You kicked off your heels in the hallway and immediately groaned
“My feet hate me”
“That’s because you insist on wearing shoes that look like medieval torture devices”
“They’re cute”
“They’re dangerous”
“They’re fashion”
He bent to line them neatly against the wall while you wandered toward the bedroom, pausing halfway to look back at him
“Did you just call me fashionable?”
“I did not”
“You implied it”
“I implied that you make bad choices”
You gasped “Wow.”
Seungcheol smiled despite himself and followed you down the hall.
The routine that came next was one the two of you had done so many times it required almost no words. He disappeared into the bathroom and came back with your makeup remover, cotton pads, and a fresh glass of water.
“Drink first” he said, holding it out.
You obeyed with a tiny pout, taking a few sips while he stood between your knees. Then he set the glass on the bedside table and tilted your chin up with one hand, carefully wiping away your makeup with the other.
You watched him through half-lidded eyes.
Seungcheol had always been beautiful in a way that irritated you a little. Not because you minded looking at him—God, never that—but because he carried it so casually, as if it had never occurred to him what his face did to people. Tonight he was in a black sweater and slacks from work, sleeves pushed up to his forearms, hair slightly mussed from running his hands through it.
His expression was focused, gentle in the way it only ever was with you.
“You’re staring” he murmured
“You’re pretty”
“You say that every time you drink”
“Because it’s true every time I drink”
He snorted and swiped the last of your eyeliner away “Close your eyes”
You did, because even tipsy you knew better than to argue when he was cleaning around your lashes. A moment later his thumb brushed the corner of your mouth, wiping away the smear of lipstick you’d missed. The touch lingered for a second longer than necessary.
When you opened your eyes, he was still looking at you. There was a softness in his face that made your chest ache.
Nine years.
You had met him at eighteen, when everything in your life felt like it was still being sketched in pencil. Back then he’d been loud confidence and broad shoulders and a grin too pretty for his own good. He had driven you insane. He had also walked you home after your night classes because you once admitted you hated the dark and then acted like it was no big deal. He had remembered your coffee order after hearing it one time. He had kissed you for the first time outside a convenience store while rain soaked through both your hoodies and you’d laughed against his mouth because it was so ridiculously cliché.
You had become adults with him.
Not all at once, but slowly. Through exams and part-time jobs and tiny apartments with unreliable heating. Through fights about money and whose turn it was to buy groceries and whether either of you could survive assembling IKEA furniture without ending the relationship. Through promotions and funerals and weddings and all the unremarkable Tuesdays in between.
You knew the exact shape of his hand. He knew how to calm you down from a panic attack in under five minutes. You knew he got quiet when something at work was wrong. He knew you couldn’t sleep if you were angry, no matter how much you pretended otherwise.
Your whole youth was tangled up in him.
Maybe that was why, sitting there in the warm quiet of your bedroom with his hands on your face and your heart a little loose from alcohol, the thought slipped out so easily.
“We should have a baby.”
The room went still.
“Think about it. They’d be so cute.”
Seungcheol set the used cotton pad aside “A baby?”
“Yeah” You laughed softly “Our baby. Little cheeks, little hands… they’d probably get your eyes” Your own voice had gone dreamy, words spilling before you could stop them.
“And maybe my nose. Or your nose. I don’t know. But they’d be cute either way”
He exhaled through his nose, the corner of his mouth lifting.
“Cute?” he repeated
“The cutest,” you said firmly “Objectively.”
He gave a small hum, brushing your hair back from your face. “You’re really thinking about this right now?”
“I’m tipsy, not delirious.” You reached for his wrist “I mean it. We’ve been together forever.”
Forever. The word came easily too.
You looked up at him, still smiling, and added in a softer voice, “I want one someday”
There it was. The truth underneath the teasing.
You had never been the girl who dreamed about marriage before she could legally drink, or planned names for children she didn’t have. But twenty-seven had arrived with a strange kind of clarity. Not panic exactly. Just a steady awareness that life was moving. That your future wasn’t some abstract thing waiting on the other side of adulthood anymore. You were in it. Living it.
And when you pictured the next version of your life, Seungcheol was there. He always was.
So yes. Someday, you wanted a baby.
“Maybe,” he said after a second
You frowned a little “Maybe?”
Seungcheol smiled, but it was smaller this time. Careful around the edges “Yeah. Maybe.”
You studied him through your tipsy haze, trying to fit his answer into something that made sense. “You don’t want kids?”
He was quiet for just a beat too long. Then he shrugged one shoulder and said, “It’s not really part of the plan yet. Maybe in the future”
The words were gentle. The tone was gentle. There was nothing cruel in it, nothing dismissive. He even reached to smooth his thumb over your cheek like he always did when he thought too hard about how to phrase something.
But still, something in your chest dipped.
It was subtle enough that if you’d been fully sober, maybe you would have hidden it better.
“Not part of the plan,” you repeated
“Hey” He crouched a little closer, reading your face too easily. “That’s not what I mean”
“Then what do you mean?”
He looked at you for a moment, and you could almost see him choosing his words
“I mean,” he said carefully, “I don’t think this is a conversation we should have while you’re half asleep and a little drunk”
You opened your mouth to protest on instinct “I’m not that drunk”
He raised an eyebrow.
You considered it. “Okay. Maybe a little.”
“A little” he echoed, clearly unconvinced
You pouted, and his expression softened immediately.
“Baby” He touched your jaw. “I’m not shutting you down”
“But you kind of are”
“I’m not” He sighed, then leaned forward to press a kiss to your forehead “I just don’t want us to talk about something important like this when you won’t even remember half of what I say tomorrow”
“I would remember”
“You forgot your own passcode three times on the way up”
“That was because the hallway was judgmental”
Seungcheol laughed despite himself, the sound low and fond, and for a second the knot in your chest loosened.
Then he said, quieter, “Let’s talk when you’re sober, okay?”
You looked at him. It would have been easy to leave it there. Easy to nod and let him guide you under the blankets and trust that tomorrow or next week, or next month there would be time to circle back. You had always trusted him with your tomorrows. That was part of loving him. Part of loving someone for so long that your future started to feel shared by default.
But maybe even then, some tiny part of you felt the shift.
Not because of what he said. Because of what he didn’t.
You had known Seungcheol for nearly a decade. Knew the difference between hesitation and uncertainty. Knew when he was buying time because he genuinely wanted to think, and when he was buying time because he didn’t want to say the thing sitting heavily on his tongue.
Tonight, he looked like the second kind.
You didn’t call him on it. Maybe because you were tired. Maybe because your head was fuzzy and warm and you didn’t want to turn a soft midnight conversation into something sharp.
Maybe because part of you was afraid that if you pushed, you’d hear something you weren’t ready for.
So you only said, “You promise?”
His eyes met yours immediately “Promise what?”
“That we’ll talk about it”
Something unreadable flickered across his face then he smiled again, gentler this time, and tucked a strand of hair behind your ear.
“Yeah,” he said. “I promise.”
The room was quiet except for the low hum of the heater and the distant traffic outside your apartment building.
You traced lazy shapes over his stomach through the sweater. “If we had a baby,” you mumbled, already half asleep, “you’d be a good dad.”
His hand stilled in your hair, you didn’t notice.
“I mean it,” you whispered. “You’d be the best one.”
For a long moment, he said nothing.
Then his arm tightened around you, just enough that you felt the pressure even through the haze pulling you under. When he finally spoke, his voice was so soft you almost missed it.
“Go to sleep”
You smiled against his chest, taking it as agreement. As shyness, maybe. As him not knowing what to do with praise.
“Okay,” you murmured.
He kissed the top of your head.
You fell asleep in minutes, safe in the warmth of him, in the familiar rhythm of his breathing, in the certainty that whatever had gone unsaid tonight would sort itself out because it was the two of you. And the two of you had survived too much, loved too long, built too much for one strange conversation to mean anything.
You didn’t know that Seungcheol stayed awake long after you fell asleep.
Didn’t know he stared at the ceiling with one arm around you and the other clenched quietly in the blanket. Didn’t know he replayed every word you’d said until they stopped sounding sweet and started sounding like a deadline he hadn’t realized was already at the door.
We should have a baby. I want one someday. You’d be a good dad.
The worst part was that he could still hear how happy you’d sounded saying it.
As if it were simple. As if the future was still one shared thing the two of you were walking toward at the same pace.
He turned his head and looked down at you sleeping against him, your cheek pressed to his chest, one hand curled into the fabric of his sweater. Even now, even in sleep, you stayed close. Trusted him so completely it made his chest ache.
Nine years.
He knew exactly how old you were when he first kissed you. Knew the dress you wore on your first real date. Knew the way you cried in the bathroom after your grandmother’s funeral because you didn’t want anyone else to see. He knew the sound of your laugh from another room.
He knew he loved you. That wasn’t the problem.
The problem was that lately, love had started feeling terrifyingly different from certainty.
Seungcheol swallowed hard and looked back at the ceiling.
He had plans. That was the thing. Or maybe not plans exactly—more like timelines, milestones, a shape of life he had convinced himself still made sense. Work harder now. Build more now. Save more now. Buy the bigger apartment first. Get promoted again. Get stable enough that when he gave you everything, it would actually be everything. No corners cut. No fear attached.
He’d always thought there was time.
Time before marriage became urgent. Time before children became a real conversation instead of a vague someday. Time before he had to admit that while you were picturing the next step, he was still trying to secure the ground beneath the one you were already standing on.
And underneath all of that, buried somewhere he hated looking was the quieter fear he never said aloud
What if he wasn’t built for the life you wanted as naturally as you were? What if loving you wasn’t the same as being ready for the things love was supposed to grow into?
He closed his eyes.
Beside him, you shifted in your sleep and tucked yourself closer, your knee brushing his thigh. Instantly, automatically, he adjusted the blanket around you so you wouldn’t get cold.
It was muscle memory. Devotion without thought.
And somehow that made it worse.
Because he could take care of you in a thousand tiny ways. Could pick you up from bars at midnight and clean your makeup off and remember your favorite soup when you were sick and hold you through every bad day.
He could love you with his entire body.
But tonight, with one drowsy confession and one hopeful smile, you had laid your future in his hands so casually, as if of course he would want the same things on the same timeline, as if of course nine years meant you were moving in one direction together.
And for the first time in a long time, Seungcheol had looked at the road ahead and felt the terrifying possibility that maybe you weren’t.
His jaw tightened.
Tomorrow, he told himself.
Tomorrow, when you were sober, they would talk properly. He’d explain better. Tell you it wasn’t a no, not really. Just not yet. Tell you he needed more time. Tell you that wanting you forever and being ready for forever to change shape were not the same thing, no matter how much he wished they were.
Tomorrow, he’d say it right.
Tomorrow, this would still be fixable.
He looked down at you one last time, your face peaceful in sleep, trusting and warm and heartbreakingly unaware.
Then he kissed your forehead so lightly it didn’t wake you.
And in the dark, with you curled safely against him and the apartment wrapped in silence, Choi Seungcheol lay awake beside the woman he loved and felt, for the first time, the faint beginning of something breaking.
=
It didn’t happen all at once.
That would’ve been easier, maybe.
A single fight. A single cold answer. A single moment you could point to and say there, there’s where things changed.
But it wasn’t like that with Seungcheol. It was quieter. Meaner in its own way because it was so hard to catch at first. Hard to accuse. Hard to name.
It started after that night.
Not immediately, not in any way obvious enough to set off alarms.
The next morning he’d still kissed your forehead before leaving for work. He’d still texted you around lunch asking if you’d eaten. Still brought home the strawberry milk you liked from the convenience store downstairs because he’d noticed you were running low.
If anything, he was almost too normal, as if he’d made a private decision overnight to be extra careful with you.
And maybe that was the problem.
Because the conversation never came back.
Not really.
A few days after your tipsy confession, you had brought it up again while folding laundry in the bedroom, your voice light on purpose.
“So,” you’d said, pairing two of his socks together “About what we talked about the other night…”
Seungcheol, sitting at the edge of the bed answering emails on his laptop, had glanced up “Hm?”
“You said we’d talk when I was sober”
He’d gone still for a second. Not enough that anyone else would’ve noticed. But you did.
Then he’d smiled and shut the laptop halfway “You really want to do this while sorting my ugly socks?”
You’d laughed “They are ugly”
“They’re comfortable.”
“They look like something a middle-aged dad would wear to barbecue.”
“Wow. Rude.”
“You’re dodging.”
His smile had faltered, just barely “I’m not”
“You are a little”
He’d rubbed a hand over the back of his neck and looked down at the floor for a moment before saying “I just… don’t know if I have much to say right now.”
The answer had confused you more than hurt you “What do you mean?”
“I mean I’m thinking about it”
That was all you got. I’m thinking about it.
At the time, you let it go because Seungcheol had always been the kind of person who needed time with important things.
He liked certainty. Liked plans, lists, contingencies. He was the one who researched every apartment before signing a lease, who compared interest rates for weeks before opening a savings account, who kept emergency numbers pinned to the fridge and a flashlight in the kitchen drawer in case the power went out.
He took things seriously. That was one of the reasons you trusted him so much.
So you told yourself that was all this was too. He was thinking. Processing. Taking your future seriously because you mattered enough to be taken seriously.
But then one week became two.
And by the third week, something in the apartment had started to feel off.
It was never dramatic. Never enough to point at cleanly. Seungcheol still came home at the same time most nights. Still kissed you hello. Still asked how your day was and listened when you answered. He still slept beside you, still draped an arm over your waist in bed, still reminded you to bring an umbrella when the weather app said it might rain.
Yet there were more moments now where you’d look over and find him somewhere else entirely.
Sitting at the dining table with his dinner untouched, phone dark in his hand, staring at nothing.
Answering your question a second too late, like he’d had to swim back up from wherever his mind had gone.
You’d catch him looking at you too, sometimes. Not in the easy, affectionate way he always had. This was different. Quieter. More troubled. Like he was trying to solve something and hated every answer he came up with.
Then the walls started.
Small ones at first.
He’d say work was stressful, but wouldn’t elaborate.
You’d ask what he was thinking about, and he’d just smile and say, “Nothing, baby.”
You’d curl into his side on the couch and feel him hold you, but not quite melt into it the way he used to.
It was subtle enough that you spent days wondering if you were imagining it. Maybe you were being sensitive. Maybe work really was just hard right now. Maybe you were reading too much into a man being tired.
But you knew Seungcheol.
You knew his moods. Knew his silences. Knew the different shades of them the way other people knew traffic routes or song lyrics.
There was his exhausted silence, where he still reached for you automatically. His irritated silence, where he got clipped and restless and cleaned things aggressively. His upset silence, where he needed twenty minutes alone before he came back ready to talk.
This was none of those. This was distance.
Slow, deliberate distance that he was trying so hard to disguise as normal that it only made your chest tighten more.
By the third week, you couldn’t ignore it anymore.
It was a Thursday night, and the two of you were making dinner together because you had both gotten home early for once. The apartment was warm with the smell of garlic and sesame oil, music playing low from your phone on the counter. You were rinsing vegetables at the sink while Seungcheol chopped onions beside you.
But tonight there was too much space inside it.
You had been talking for the last ten minutes, mostly carrying the conversation by yourself while Seungcheol answered with hums and one-word replies.
You dried your hands on a towel and looked over at him.
He was focused on the onions, expression blank, shoulders slightly tense under his T-shirt. Not angry exactly. Just far away.
“Cheol”
“Hm?”
“You’ve been quiet”
He glanced at you, then back at the cutting board “Have I?”
“Yes” You leaned a hip against the counter “Like… really quiet. Is something wrong?”
He shrugged one shoulder, the motion casual enough to be irritating “No. Just tired.”
You watched him for a beat.That answer had become his favorite lately. Tired. Busy. Fine. Nothing.
You tried to keep your tone light “You sure?”
“Mhm”
“Because it kind of feels like you’re on another planet”
A small smile tugged at his mouth, but it didn’t reach his eyes “I’m listening.”
“That’s not the same thing”
He didn’t answer. The knife kept moving. Chop, chop, chop. A little too precise. A little too fast.
You turned back to the sink, rinsing the last of the mushrooms and trying not to let irritation get ahead of you.
“Anyway,” you said, shaking the water from your hands “One of my workmate invited us both to the wedding next month”
This got his attention, if only slightly “Us?”
“Yeah. Plus one. So you’re getting dragged with me”
He hummed.
You set the mushrooms aside and smiled to yourself “Apparently she’s doing one of those super pretty outdoor weddings. Garden venue, fairy lights, the whole thing. Very her.”
“Sounds expensive”
“Probably” You laughed “She deserves it, though. She’s been planning this since before she even had a boyfriend.”
That got the tiniest breath of amusement out of him, so you kept going.
“And of course the second she gave me the invite, Yuna from accounting was like, ‘So when is it your turn?’”
You rolled your eyes fondly as you said it, expecting him to make fun of nosy coworkers with you. “I swear people hear ‘nine-year relationship’ and immediately turn into aunties at Lunar New Year”
The knife stopped. Not loudly. Not with a slam. Just a sudden stop in the middle of the chopping rhythm.
The kitchen went quiet except for the low music and the simmer of broth on the stove.
Something in your stomach tightened.
You turned.
Seungcheol was staring down at the cutting board, jaw tense. After a second, he set the knife down carefully beside the onions and let out a slow breath through his nose.
Not a huge reaction.
Just a sigh but it was enough.
“Cheol?” you said, more carefully this time
He reached for the dish towel and wiped his hands on it even though they weren’t wet
“What?” he asked
You stared at him. “What was that?”
“What was what?”
“That sigh”
He gave you a look like he genuinely didn’t know what you meant, which only made your pulse tick up “Nothing”
“No, it wasn’t nothing” You set the towel down on the counter “I mention weddings and suddenly you look like you’re about to walk into traffic”
He huffed a laugh, but there was no humor in it “You’re being dramatic”
“Am I?”
“Yes.”
“Then tell me what’s wrong”
“Nothing is wrong”
“Seungcheol.”
His jaw tightened at your tone.
You took a breath and tried again, softer “You’ve been weird for weeks”
That made his eyes flick up to yours “0Weird?”
“Yes, weird.” You crossed your arms loosely, not defensive yet but getting there. “Quiet. Distracted. Like you’re somewhere else all the time. And every time I ask, you say you’re tired or busy or fine, and I’m trying not to make a thing out of it, but you literally just tensed up because I mentioned a wedding, so—”
“I didn’t tense up because of a wedding”
“Then what was it?”
He looked away first and there it was again that tiny, infuriating withdrawal. That refusal to just meet you in the middle and say the thing.
You laughed once, short and disbelieving “Okay. So it is something”
Seungcheol exhaled slowly, both palms braced on the counter now “Can we not do this right now?”
The words hit harder than they should have. Not because he raised his voice, he didn’t. If anything, he sounded tired. Worn thin. But that was exactly why it stung. Because it made you feel like you were being unreasonable for asking your boyfriend why he’d been shutting you out for nearly a month.
“Do what?” you asked
“Turn this into an issue”
You blinked at him “Turn this into an issue?”
He rubbed a hand over his face “You know what I mean”
“No, I actually don’t”
The air in the kitchen shifted, subtle but undeniable. The kind of tension that makes every small movement suddenly feel louder.
You stared at him, waiting.
Seungcheol dropped his hand and looked at you with an expression you couldn’t quite read. Frustration, maybe. Guilt. Something tired and cornered all at once.
“I’m just not in the mood to talk about weddings” he said finally
Your chest went tight “Weddings,” you repeated slowly “Plural.”
He said nothing.
You swallowed “This is about us.”
His silence was answer enough.
The realization landed like cold water. It wasn’t just work. It wasn’t stress. It wasn’t your imagination or him having an off month or some passing mood he hadn’t figured out how to explain.
This was about you. About the two of you. And somehow, he had been carrying it alone for weeks.
Your voice came out quieter now. “Why didn’t you say that?”
Seungcheol let out a breath that sounded almost like a laugh, except there was nothing funny in it “Because every time I try to think about it, it turns into something bigger than I know how to handle”
You stared at him “Think about what?”
He looked at the onions instead of at you “Everything.”
“Cheol—” “I don’t know,” he cut in, sharper than before, and that made you fall silent. He shut his eyes for a second, like he regretted the tone immediately, then spoke more evenly
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
You laughed again, but this time it came out brittle “Maybe start with the truth?”
His face changed. Not much. Just enough that you knew you’d hit something and because your own hurt was starting to push past your patience, you kept going.
“The truth about what happened after that night,” you said “Because ever since I brought up kids, and then marriage, and literally any future thing involving us, you’ve been acting like being in this apartment with me is some kind of pressure test you’re failing.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Then tell me what is fair, Cheol, because from where I’m standing, I asked one question about our future and you’ve been halfway out the door ever since.”
His head snapped up “Halfway out the door?”
“Yes.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“Is it?” Your voice rose before you could stop it “Because you won’t talk to me. You won’t tell me what you’re thinking. You just keep going quiet every time anything remotely serious comes up and then acting like I’m crazy for noticing.”
“I’m not acting like you’re crazy”
“You’re acting like this is all in my head”
He pushed away from the counter, finally facing you fully now “Because you keep cornering me into conversations I’m not ready to have.”
The words rang through the kitchen. For a second, neither of you moved. You just looked at him, pulse hammering in your throat.
Cornering. Not ready.
It shouldn’t have hurt as much as it did, but it did. Maybe because you suddenly felt foolish for every gentle attempt you’d made these past weeks. Every time you’d tried to check in, tried to understand, tried to hand him openings so he wouldn’t have to force the words out all at once.
You had thought you were reaching for him.
Apparently, he thought you were trapping him.
Your voice went dangerously calm “Cornering you”
Seungcheol’s expression shifted the second he heard his own words thrown back at him “That’s not—”
“No, go ahead” You nodded once “Say it properly. I’m cornering you by asking why my boyfriend of nine years suddenly can’t have a normal conversation with me about marriage without looking miserable.”
“I do not look miserable”
“You sighed like I’d just asked you to donate a kidney” you laugh bitterly
“Because I’m tired of every conversation lately somehow circling back to this”
Your eyes widened “Every conversation?”
“Yeah”
“What are you talking about?”
“The baby thing. The wedding thing. Your coworker asking when it’s our turn, your friend sending engagement photos, your mom making comments at dinner last weekend—”
“My mom asked if you wanted more rice”
“And then she asked when we were giving her grandchildren”
“So that’s what this is?” you asked, incredulous “You’re upset because people are asking normal questions?”
“It’s not about other people asking questions, and it’s not their business”
“Then what is it about?”
Seungcheol dragged a hand through his hair, agitation starting to show now in the hard set of his shoulders “It’s about the fact that I can feel you waiting for an answer every time it comes up”
“Waiting for an answer,” you repeated
“Yes.”
“You mean because I thought we were going to have a conversation about our future?”
“See?” he said, voice tightening “That. You say it like it’s one conversation, but it’s not. It’s loaded now. Every mention of marriage or kids or ‘our future’ feels like there’s already a right answer and I’m just taking too long to give it.”
Something in your chest cracked, tiny and sharp “A right answer?”
“I’m not saying you’re doing it on purpose”
“But you are saying that being with me feels like some test you can fail”
“I’m saying I need space to think without feeling like every week I owe you a decision”
The second the words left his mouth, his expression changed. He knew. He knew exactly how bad that sounded.
Your face went hot “A decision.”
“Baby—” “No.” You took a step back before he could reach for you “Don’t ‘baby’ me after that.”
Seungcheol swore under his breath and looked away, frustrated with himself now. “That’s not what I meant”
“Then what did you mean?” Your voice shook, and you hated that it did “Because from where I’m standing, it sounds like being with me for nine years still somehow hasn’t been enough time for you to know if you want this.”
“That’s not what I said”
“You didn’t have to”
You folded your arms tighter around yourself “Do you know what the worst part is?” you asked quietly
Seungcheol’s eyes lifted to yours
“I wasn’t even asking for a ring. Not tonight, not tomorrow. I wasn’t trying to force some deadline on you” Your laugh came out thin “I just wanted you to talk to me. To tell me what was going on in your head instead of making me stand here for three weeks wondering why the man I love suddenly feels miles away”
He looked stricken for a second, but you were too hurt now to stop.
“You could’ve just told me you were scared,” you said “Or unsure. Or not ready. I would’ve listened. I would’ve understood that. But instead you shut me out and made me feel clingy and dramatic for noticing”
“I never said you were dramatic”
“You didn’t have to say it” Your eyes burned “You just kept acting like every time I reached for you, I was asking for too much”
“That’s not true.”
“Then tell me what is true, Seungcheol” Your voice cracked on his name “Because right now I honestly don’t know what I’m standing in.”
He went quiet. And that, somehow, was the worst part. Not anger. Not defensiveness. Just silence.
Silence from a man who had once known exactly how to hold your heart and now stood three feet away looking like he couldn’t decide whether to protect you from the truth or himself from saying it.
When he finally spoke, his voice was low.
“I don’t know if I’m ready for all of that yet.” The words landed between you with a dull, devastating weight.
You stared at him, waiting for more. For some follow-up, some reassurance, some I’m just scared but I still know it’s you. Some version of this that hurt less.
It didn’t come.
“All of that,” you repeated
He swallowed “Marriage. Kids. The whole next step.”
You nodded once, very slowly “After nine years.”
Seungcheol shut his eyes.
And that was it. Not a yes. Not a no. Just him standing there in your kitchen with his face turned away like even he couldn’t bear the shape of what he’d admitted.
Your throat tightened so badly it hurt to speak “Okay”
His eyes opened immediately “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Say it like that”
“Like what?”
“Like you’ve already decided what I mean”
You laughed, and this time there was no humor in it at all “You mean the meaning you refuse to explain?”
He took a step toward you “I’m trying”
“No,” you said, stepping back just as quickly “You’re not. You’re trying not to say it.”
His face fell and for one awful second, you saw it. Saw the possibility that maybe he really didn’t know how to say whatever was inside him without breaking something. Maybe he was drowning in it too. Maybe this hurt him too.
But hurt didn’t erase hurt. Not when you were the one standing here feeling like your entire relationship had just tilted under your feet.
You looked away first, blinking hard.
Everything looked so stupidly normal for a moment that didn’t feel normal at all.
“I can’t do this while you keep talking in half-sentences” you whispered
Seungcheol’s voice softened immediately “Then let me finish.”
You looked at him. And there it was—that knife-edge pause before the real wound. Before the thing neither of you could unsay.
He inhaled, shoulders tense, eyes fixed on yours.
“I love you,” he said “You know I love you.”
Your stomach dropped, because people only started sentences like that when they were about to ruin something.
And suddenly, with the kitchen too warm and your heart beating too hard and his face looking more unfamiliar than it had in nine years, you understood with sick certainty that this wasn’t just an argument anymore.
This was the beginning of the crack. The one that, once it opened, might not close the same way again.
You stared at him across the kitchen, the steam from the pot curling up between you, and for one horrible second you couldn’t hear anything except the pounding of your own heart.
Then you asked, very quietly “Is there?”
Seungcheol blinked “What?”
“A future here” Your voice shook despite how hard you tried to keep it steady “Is there?”
“Baby—” “No.” You cut him off so fast it surprised even you “No, don’t do that. Don’t ‘baby’ me and then say nothing again”
He inhaled slowly, jaw tightening “I’m not saying nothing.”
“You are” Your throat burned “That’s all you’ve been doing for weeks. Saying just enough to keep me from pressing too hard and then pulling away the second it gets real.”
His shoulders tensed “I’m trying to be honest with you.”
“Then be honest” You took a step toward him, hands trembling at your sides. “Tell me now. Tell me while we’re finally talking instead of waiting until tomorrow, or next week, or the next time you decide you’re ‘ready.’ Tell me before we go right back to walking in circles and pretending you’re not building a wall between us.”
“You think I’m pretending?” he asked.
“Then what is it, Seungcheol? What do I call this? Because from where I’m standing, it feels like I’ve been trying to talk to my own boyfriend for three weeks and getting shut out every single time”
He dragged a hand through his hair, turning away for half a second before facing you again “You keep acting like I’m doing this to hurt you.”
“Then why are you doing it?”
“I’m trying to figure things out”
“At my expense”
His eyes flashed “That’s not fair.”
“Neither is this!” The words burst out of you louder than you meant them to, bouncing off the kitchen walls. Your breathing had gone uneven.
“You don’t get to disappear inside your own head and leave me standing here guessing whether my relationship is still intact,” you said, voice shaking “You don’t get to go quiet every time I mention our future and then act like I’m pressuring you for wanting to know where I stand.”
“I never said you don’t deserve to know”
“Then tell me”
Seungcheol exhaled sharply, palms flattening against the edge of the counter as if he needed something solid to hold onto
“I don’t know what you want from me right now”
You laughed, and it came out broken “Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
“I want the truth.”
“I am telling you the truth.”
“No, you’re giving me pieces of it” You wiped angrily at your eyes before the tears could properly fall “You’re saying you love me, but you don’t know if you’re ready for marriage, or kids, or the next step, and somehow I’m supposed to just… what? Wait around until you decide if the life we’ve built is actually going somewhere?”
His face tightened “That’s not what this is.”
“Then what is it?”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked away. And that tiny movement, that split second of him looking everywhere except at you, itdid something ugly to your chest.
“God,” you whispered, shaking your head “There really isn’t an answer, is there?”
“That’s not true.”
“Then say it.”
“I—” “Say it, Seungcheol.”
His jaw flexed hard enough you saw the muscle tick. “I can’t give you some clean answer right now,” he said finally, voice rough.
You just stared at him. And then you nodded once, because suddenly everything in you had gone very still.
“That is an answer”
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes, it is.”
“It’s not a no.”
“But it’s not a yes either.” Your voice was terrifyingly calm now, the kind of calm that only came when you were hurt enough to stop sounding hurt “And after nine years, I think I deserve more than maybe.”
“Stop doing that”
“Doing what?”
“Making it sound simple.” His own voice rose for the first time, not shouting, but close. Frustration, fear, exhaustion, all of it starting to crack through “It’s not simple.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not!”
“Why?” you shot back “Why is it so hard to tell me if you see a future with me?”
He looked wrecked. That was the worst part. Not indifferent. Not cruel. Just… wrecked. Like he hated this too, hated himself maybe, hated the shape of whatever truth he was trying and failing to say.
But your heart was too raw to be softened by it.
“Do you know what I think?” you asked, voice trembling. “I think you’ve already been having this conversation in your head for weeks. I think you already know what you’re scared of saying out loud.”
“That’s not fair.”
“You keep saying that, but you won’t tell me what would be fair!”
Seungcheol shoved away from the counter and paced two steps back, hands on his hips “Because every answer I give you just makes this worse.”
“Because you won’t finish one!”
“Because you won’t let me breathe!”
The words cracked through the room. You froze.
So did he.
For a second, the apartment went silent in the way it only does after something has been said too loudly, too honestly, too ugly to pull back.
Your mouth parted.
“Breathe,” you repeated softly.
Seungcheol’s face changed immediately. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“You need to breathe because of me?”
“No.” He took a step forward “No, that’s not—”
“Because I asked if you still saw a future with me?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Then what did you mean?” Your voice broke. “What part of this is so suffocating, Seungcheol? Loving me? Being with me? The fact that after nine years I thought maybe I was allowed to ask where this was going?”
“Stop twisting my words.”
“I’m not twisting anything! I’m trying to understand why my boyfriend suddenly looks trapped every time I talk about a life with him”
“I am not trapped.”
“Then why do you look at me like this?”
You saw it in the way his shoulders dropped, just a fraction, like the fight went out of him for a moment and left only something exhausted behind. He looked at you with a kind of helpless anger, but under it there was guilt too. So much guilt it made your chest ache even through the hurt.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” he said again, quieter now “I don’t know how to say this without hurting you.”
You laughed through the tears that had finally started slipping free “You think you haven’t already?”
His eyes flicked to the tears on your face and he looked stricken. He took another step forward, instinctive, and you stepped back so quickly your hip hit the counter.
“No,” you whispered, holding up a hand. “Don’t.”
His whole body stilled. The sight of that almost undid you right there, because Seungcheol was not a man you had ever had to stop from touching you.
In nine years, you had never once flinched from him. Never once needed space from him. If anything, he had always been your safest place, the one person you moved toward without thinking.
Now you couldn’t bear the idea of his hands on you while he stood there unable to tell you if he still wanted the life you thought you were building together.
“Just answer me,” you said, and your voice was so small now it scared you. “Please. I’m asking you one thing. Do you still see a future with me?”
He looked like he was in pain.
His throat worked once. Twice and then he said the worst possible thing.
“I don’t know.”
It was quiet, barely above a whisper but it hit like something physical.
For a second, you genuinely couldn’t breathe. The room seemed to tilt, the kitchen blurring at the edges while those three words settled into your chest like glass.
You stared at him as if maybe you’d misheard.
Seungcheol looked horrified the second it was out of his mouth, like he wanted to grab it back, reshape it, turn it into something softer and less devastating. But it was too late. It was already here, hanging between you, impossible to unsay.
“Okay,” you whispered
His face crumpled a little “Don’t—”
“No, it’s okay.” You nodded too quickly, blinking through tears “No, I get it now.”
“You don’t.”
“I do.”
“You don’t,” he said again, more urgently this time, stepping toward you “I’m not saying I don’t love you. I’m not saying I want to leave.”
“But you don’t know if you want this.”
“That’s not what I—” “You just said you don’t know if you see a future with me!”
“I said I don’t know right now!”
“And what am I supposed to do with that?” you cried, the restraint finally snapping “Tell me, Seungcheol, what am I supposed to do with that? Go to sleep next to you tonight like nothing happened? Keep cooking dinner with you and folding your laundry and acting like my boyfriend didn’t just tell me he doesn’t know if he wants a future with me after almost a decade together?”
He scrubbed both hands over his face, breathing hard now, and for the first time since this started, you saw something dangerously close to panic in him.
“I’m trying,” he said, voice rough “I’m trying so hard not to say this wrong.”
“You already did.”
The words landed like a slap.
He looked at you for a long second, chest rising and falling too fast. The kitchen had gone silent except for the stove, where the broth had started to boil over in thin angry spits against the burner. Neither of you moved.
Then he said, very quietly, “I can’t do this tonight.”
Your head jerked up “What?”
“I can’t” He shook his head once, backing away from the counter “Not like this.”
Your heart dropped all over again.
“Not like this?” you repeated “You think I’m the one making this impossible?”
“I’m not saying that”
“You are leaving me in the middle of this conversation.”
“I need air.” The second he said it, you laughed in disbelief. Of course. More space. More time. More distance.
“Unbelievable,” you whispered
Seungcheol was already reaching for his keys on the counter by the front hallway, movements abrupt now, agitated in a way you had never seen from him with you. Not in all nine years.
You had fought before, of course you had. About money, about schedules, about stupid little things and painful big things. But he had never walked away. Never left the apartment while you were still crying. Never chosen distance over staying and figuring it out.
You followed him out of the kitchen, panic beginning to rise under the hurt.
“Seungcheol.”
He didn’t answer, too busy shoving his feet into his shoes by the door.
“Seungcheol, don’t do this.”
He finally looked up, and his face almost made you stop. He looked awful. Pale, furious at himself, eyes bright with something he was trying very hard to keep down.
“I can’t stay right now,” he said
Your breath hitched “You’ve never left.”
“I know.”
“Then don’t start now.”
His jaw clenched so hard you thought he might break a tooth.
“Please,” you said, and there it was, that note in your voice you hated, the one that made you sound younger, smaller, more desperate than you wanted to be “Please don’t walk out on me. Not like this.”
He shut his eyes for one second and when he opened them, he still looked torn apart. Still looked like leaving was the last thing he wanted to do.
But he opened the door anyway.
“I need to clear my head,” he said hoarsely “I’ll come back.”
“Cheol—” “I’ll come back,” he repeated, like saying it twice would make this feel less like abandonment.
Then he stepped outand the door closed.
For a moment, you stood there staring at the door like your body had stopped understanding how to move.
The apartment went silent around you.
He left.
The thought didn’t land all at once. It came in pieces.
He left.He actually left. Seungcheol left you crying in your apartment and walked out the door.
Your knees went weak. You made it two stumbling steps toward the couch before the first sob tore out of you so hard it doubled you over. One hand flew to your mouth like you could shove the sound back in, but there was no stopping it.
It just kept coming. Sharp, ugly, helpless. The kind of crying that feels less like tears and more like your body giving up on holding itself together.
You sank to the floor beside the couch because your legs wouldn’t hold you anymore.
Your chest hurt. Not in the poetic way people wrote about heartbreak.
In the real way. The brutal, humiliating, physical way. Like your ribs had been cinched too tight around your lungs. Like every breath had to be dragged in around the ache of what had just happened.
I don’t know.
Nine years. Nine years of loving him, growing up beside him, building a life so intertwined you couldn’t remember where yours ended and his began.
Nine years, and he didn’t know.
You thought back to that night in bed—tipsy and smiling and stupidly happy, tucked into his chest while you told him he’d be a good dad.
You thought about the last three weeks of silences and smiles and walls you had tried so hard not to name.
Had he already known then? Had he been lying there next to you, holding you while you fell asleep against him, already feeling this doubt and saying nothing?
The thought cracked something open inside you. You curled tighter into yourself on the floor, one hand pressed to your sternum as if you could physically hold your heart together there.
And somewhere under all that hurt, under the shock, the anger, the grief, one thought kept repeating itself so softly it was almost worse than the rest.
He left. Not because he didn’t love you. Somehow that would have been easier to understand.
He left because he did love you and still couldn’t stay.
And that was the part that terrified you most.
Because if even nine years of love wasn’t enough to make him stay and fight through one terrible conversation, then maybe you had just watched the beginning of the end and hadn’t even realized it until the door clicked shut behind him.
=
Seungcheol woke up with a crick in his neck and the taste of stale whiskey in his mouth.
For one disoriented second, he didn’t know where he was.
The ceiling above him was unfamiliar—too high, too white, with a hairline crack running through one corner. The couch under him was too short for his legs, one arm numb from sleeping twisted beneath his body. Somewhere nearby, a fan hummed softly, and from the kitchen came the sound of cabinet doors opening and closing.
Then memory hit him all at once.
Seungcheol sat up so fast his head throbbed.
“Fuck.”
His voice came out hoarse, rough with sleep and alcohol and the weight of what he’d done. He scrubbed both hands down his face and forced himself to breathe through the nausea curling in his stomach, not from the drinks, not really, but from the sick realization settling heavier with every passing second.
He left.
He had actually left you.
Not for an hour to cool off in the parking lot. Not for a walk around the block. He had driven to Mingyu’s place because he hadn’t trusted himself to go back,
The night after that had blurred in ugly pieces. Mingyu handing him a glass. Seungcheol sitting at the edge of his friend’s couch with his elbows on his knees, staring at the floor like if he looked hard enough it would tell him how to undo what he’d said.
Mingyu asking, “Did you guys fight?” and Seungcheol laughing once, bitter and exhausted, because fight didn’t even begin to cover it.
He remembered saying things in fragments.
Seungcheol had every intention of going home after that. He remembered standing up, grabbing his keys, saying he needed to fix it now before morning made it worse. He must have sat back down for one second.
One second had turned into him passing out fully clothed on Mingyu’s couch, phone dead in his pocket, with the apology he meant to give you stuck somewhere between regret and sleep.
Now it was morning and he had left you alone all night.
A cold dread flooded his chest.
He was already on his feet before Mingyu rounded the corner from the kitchen, holding two mugs of coffee.
“You’re up,” Mingyu said carefully. “You look like shit.”
Seungcheol grabbed for his phone on the side table. Dead. Of course.
“What time is it?”
“Almost nine.”
“Nine?”
Mingyu’s expression shifted the second he saw the panic on Seungcheol’s face “Cheol—”
“I need to go.”
Mingyu exhaled slowly. “Call me later.”
Seungcheol barely nodded.
The drive home felt endless.
Every red light was an insult. Every slow car in front of him made his hands tighten around the wheel until his knuckles blanched white. His mind kept cycling through the same images over and over: you crying by the door, your voice breaking when you said don’t walk out on me, the way you’d looked at him after he said I don’t know—as if the floor had opened under your feet and you were trying very hard not to fall through it in front of him.
He had never hated himself more.
He tried to rehearse what he would say the second he got home. None of it felt big enough.
The apartment building looked exactly the same as it always did. Same old security guard downstairs. Same potted plant in the lobby that had somehow survived years of neglect. Same elevator with the sticky third-floor button.
Everything was insultingly normal.
He unlocked the apartment door and stepped inside.
Silence.
The first thing he noticed was the kitchen.
It was spotless. No burned pot in the sink. No chopped onions left on the board. No evidence of the mess from last night at all. The counters were wiped clean, dishes dried and put away, stove polished back into order like nothing had happened there.
That, more than anything, made dread crawl up his spine.
You had cleaned. You had spent the night in the apartment alone and crying and somehow still gotten up to scrub away the evidence of the fight before he came home.
“Baby?” he called, voice cautious, already moving toward the hallway “I’m home.”
The apartment was too quiet. No TV murmuring from the bedroom. No music from the bathroom. No kettle boiling. Nothing.
His chest tightened.
“Y/N?” He reached the bedroom doorway and stopped so abruptly it almost hurt.
You were standing beside the bed with your back half-turned to him, folding a sweater with slow, mechanical hands.
The room looked wrong. Your overnight bag sat open on the duvet. Two more tote bags were lined up neatly against the wall. Your suitcase stood upright by the dresser with the zipper already closed. Beside it was a smaller weekender bag and the toiletry pouch you always kept under the bathroom sink.
Seungcheol’s brain struggled to catch up to what he was seeing. For a second, all he could do was stare.
“What are you doing?”
You didn’t turn around, didn’t even pause in what you were doing. You just folded the sweater once more, set it into the open bag, and reached for the next thing.
He took a step into the room “Y/N.”
Now that he was closer, he could see you properly and god you looked wrecked.
Your eyes were swollen nearly shut, the skin beneath them puffy and dark from not sleeping. Your lips were dry. Your hair was tied back in a loose, messy knot that looked like you’d done it with shaking hands. You were still in yesterday’s oversized sleep shirt and sweatpants, like maybe you’d never really gotten dressed at all.
He felt physically ill.
“What are you doing?” he repeated, but softer this time. Not angry anymore. Scared.
You zipped the side compartment of the bag and finally spoke, your voice flat and scraped raw.
“I called my brother”
Seungcheol went still.
“He’s picking me up”
The words landed like a punch “What?”
You bent to pick up a stack of folded T-shirts from the chair by the window, not looking at him “He’ll be here soon”
“No.” He crossed the room in three quick steps “No, what do you mean he’s picking you up?”
You pulled the bag slightly away from him before he could touch it, still avoiding his eyes “It means I’m leaving for a while.”
The air rushed out of him “Leaving where?”
“Jongin’s.”
“For a while?” His voice cracked around the words “What does that mean?”
Now you looked at him and the sight of your face nearly undid him.
There was no anger in it. That would’ve been easier. Anger he knew how to handle. Anger he could meet. But thi this hollow, scraped-out exhaustion, this grief so deep it had gone quiet was infinitely worse.
“It means I can’t stay here right now,” you said
“No.” It came out immediate. Instinctive. A refusal before he even had time to think.
You gave a tiny, humorless laugh and looked back down at the bag “You don’t really get to decide that.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Act like this is some done deal.” He ran a hand through his hair, panic starting to climb up his spine “You’re packing a suitcase because of one fight?”
Your hands stopped. Slowly, you turned to face him fully.
“One fight?”
The look on your face made his stomach drop.
“Is that what you think last night was?”
Seungcheol opened his mouth, then closed it again “No,” he said quickly “No, that’s not what I meant.”
“Then what did you mean?”
“I meant—” He exhaled hard, frustrated with himself already “I meant we can talk about this. I know I fucked up. I know I did. But you don’t need to leave.”
You stared at him for a long moment then you laughed again, and it sounded like it hurt.
“You left.”
His whole body went still. The words weren’t loud. You didn’t throw them at him or spit them out in anger. You just said them plainly, like a fact you were too tired to dress up.
“You left me in the middle of that conversation and didn’t come back.”
“I know.”
“I called you twelve times.”
His stomach twisted so hard he had to look away.
“My phone died,” he said hoarsely “I went to Mingyu’s and it died and I— I fell asleep there. I swear to God I didn’t mean to stay all night.”
The second the explanation left his mouth, he knew how pathetic it sounded. How useless. Like some teenage excuse for missing curfew, not the truth of a man who had abandoned the woman he loved at the worst possible moment and then been unreachable until morning.
You looked at him with red-rimmed eyes and nodded slowly “Okay.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, stepping closer “I’m so sorry. Baby, I know how bad this looks, I know—”
“It doesn’t just look bad, Seungcheol.” Your voice shook for the first time “It was bad.”
“You know what happened last night?” you asked, tears already gathering again0
“I didn’t sleep. At all. I cried until my chest hurt. Until my throat burned. I sat on the kitchen floor by myself wondering if my boyfriend of nine years had just told me he didn’t know if he wanted a future with me and then decided I wasn’t even worth coming back for.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why not? That’s what it felt like.”
“It’s not true.”
“Then what is true?” Your voice rose suddenly, cracking on the last word “Because I don’t know anymore. I don’t know if you meant what you said, I don’t know if you regret it, I don’t know if you just panicked, I don’t know if you’re still trying to decide whether I’m someone you want to keep building a life with— I don’t know anything except that I begged you not to leave and you left anyway.”
Each word hit him like a blow.
Seungcheol’s hands curled uselessly at his side “I know. I know and I’m sorry.”
“Sorry doesn’t fix what you did.”
“I know it doesn’t” His own voice broke now, low and rough “I know it doesn’t. But please don’t leave like this.”
You stared at him “Like this?”
“Without letting me explain”
“Explain what?”
“Everything. night, what I said, what I meant—I was overwhelmed and I handled it horribly and I panicked and I said the worst possible thing because I was scared and angry and not thinking straight, and then I made it a thousand times worse by leaving. I know that. I know.”
You looked at him for a long time, chest rising and falling unevenly.
“You still don’t get it.”
His heart sank “What?”
“This isn’t just about what you said.” Tears spilled over before you could stop them, and you wiped at them angrily “It’s about the fact that I don’t feel safe here right now.”
He went pale “Safe?” he repeated, horrified
“Not like that.” You swallowed hard “Not physically. I mean—” You pressed a hand to your sternum like it hurt to even say it
“I mean emotionally. I can’t sit in this apartment and pretend everything is fine while I wait for you to figure out if you still want me here.”
“Baby, I do want you here.”
“Do you?”
“Yes!”
“Then why did you say you didn’t know if you saw a future with me?”
Seungcheol opened his mouth and stopped. Because there it was. The question that mattered. The one all of this kept circling back to no matter how much he tried to outrun it.
He knew the answer, or at least part of it. Because he’d felt cornered by the future and ashamed of not being ready and terrified that saying the wrong thing would make him lose you.
Because he’d been carrying doubts that weren’t really about loving you but about whether he was enough for the life you wanted, and instead of saying that plainly like a grown man, he’d let it rot in silence until it came out as something crueler and less true.
But none of that changed what you heard.
He looked at your suitcase by the dresser and felt panic flood him all over again.
“Don’t go to Jongin’s,” he said
Your eyes flashed “You do not get to tell me where I can go right now.”
“I’m not telling you—” He stopped, started again “I’m asking. Please. Stay. Just for today. Let me fix this.”
“You can’t fix this in a day”
“I know.” His voice dropped, raw and urgent now “Then let me start.”
Something in your face wavered, but only for a second then you straightened, wiping at your cheeks with the heel of your palm.
“No.” The single syllable cut deeper than shouting would have.
Seungcheol stared at you “No?”
“No.” You took a shaky breath “I can’t stay here if this is what we’ve become.”
“That’s not what we’ve become”
Your voice shook violently now “How can you possibly know that when twelve hours ago you couldn’t even tell me if there was still a future here?”
He had no answer. Not one that didn’t sound like another excuse. Another half-truth. Another plea without enough substance to hold your weight.
You laughed bitterly when he stayed silent.
“Exactly.”
“Don’t,” he said quietly “Please don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I already lost you.”
Your face crumpled for the first time.
“You might have,” you whispered.
The words knocked the breath out of him “Don’t say that.”
“Then what do you want me to say?” you shot back, tears spilling again “What do you want from me right now? Because I have nothing left to give you this morning except honesty, and the honest truth is that I cannot be in this apartment with you today. I can’t wake up next to the bed we share and not hear you saying I don’t know. I can’t stand in that kitchen and not picture you walking out the door while I begged you not to. I can’t do it.”
Once the words run out, you’re breathless, hot angry miserable tears running down your face again.
And Seungcheol’s eyes burned too. He took one careful step closer. Then another. Slow enough that you could stop him if you wanted to.
This time, you didn’t move away.
“I know leaving last night might be the worst thing I’ve ever done to you,” he said “I know that. And if you need space from me today, if you need to go to your brother’s and breathe and hate me for a while, I’ll let you. I won’t stop you.” His voice dropped to almost nothing
“But don’t leave thinking I don’t love you. Don’t leave thinking I don’t want this with you. That part isn’t true. Even if I said it in the ugliest possible way.”
You covered your mouth with your hand and cried harder.
Seungcheol stood there and let you, because he had finally run out of ways to ask for grace he hadn’t earned.
The doorbell rang. The sound cut through the room so sharply both of you startled.
You wiped at your face with shaking fingers, inhaled once like you were trying to pull yourself together, and reached for the handle of your suitcase.
The bell rang again.
Seungcheol got to the door first, when he opened it Jongin stood on the other side in an expression already grim before he even looked past Seungcheol into the apartment.
He had always liked Seungcheol. More than liked, really. He trusted him. For years Jongin had teased you mercilessly about how disgustingly perfect your boyfriend was. the one person your brother had never once worried about hurting you.
Until now.
Jongin’s eyes flicked from Seungcheol’s face to the swollen, crying mess of you in the hallway behind him.
And something in his expression changed instantly.
“Hey,” Jongin said softly to you, stepping inside “You ready?”
You nodded once, but the second he held his arms out, your face crumpled all over again. The suitcase handle slipped from your fingers as you crossed the hallway and buried yourself into your brother’s chest with a broken sob.
Jongin caught you immediately.
“Hey, hey.” His hand came up to cradle the back of your head, eyes lifting over you to Seungcheol’s face “It’s okay. I got you.”
Seungcheol had never hated himself more than he did in that moment.
Jongin held you close, his jaw tight as he looked at Seungcheol over your shoulder. No accusation. Not yet.
Seungcheol swallowed hard “Jongin—”
“Not now,” Jongin said quietly. Not rude. Not aggressive. Just final.
You pulled back after a moment, wiping your face with both hands, and bent to grab the suitcase again. Jongin took it from you without a word.
“I can carry that,” Seungcheol said immediately, taking a step forward on reflex. Jongin’s gaze met his and for the first time in nine years of being in your family’s orbit, Seungcheol saw something close to disappointment there.
“I’ve got it,” Jongin said. The words weren’t sharp, they didn’t need to be.
His heart climbed into his throat. You were going to say goodbye.
He didn’t know if he could survive hearing it but when you finally spoke, your voice was quiet and exhausted and somehow even more devastating than goodbye would have been.
“I need a few days.”
Seungcheol nodded too quickly “Okay.”
You stepped into the hallway, shoulders small and slumped, and Seungcheol had the insane urge to grab your wrist and beg all over again. To drop to his knees if he had to. To tell you he would tear himself apart and put every broken piece on the table if that was what it took to make you stay.
He didn’t because this was the first thing you had asked of him all morning that he could actually give.
Space.
The thing he had taken so selfishly last night now had to be offered back to you with no strings attached.
So he stood in the doorway and let you go.
And Seungcheol was left standing alone in the doorway of the apartment the two of you had shared for years, staring at the empty hall while the silence rushed back in around him.
=
Three days turned into a week.
A week turned into two.
Two turned into three, and by the time the fourth week came around, Seungcheol had stopped checking his phone with hope and started checking it with the dull, compulsive misery of a man reopening a wound just to make sure it still hurt.
Every message he sent stayed undelivered.
Every call went straight to disconnect, as if the line itself refused him before it even had a chance to ring.
At first, he told himself you just needed space.
A few days. Maybe a week. Long enough to breathe, to cry, to hate him properly, to decide whether you even wanted to hear his voice without it making things worse.
He respected that, at least in the beginning. He texted once the first night after you left.
I’m sorry. I know I don’t deserve a reply, but I’m sorry.
I’m not going to push. I just need you to know I meant what I said. I love you. I’m sorry.
I’ll wait until you’re ready. Please eat. Please sleep if you can.
By the second week, the messages got less measured.
Can we please talk?
Just tell me you’re okay.
I know you’re angry. You have every right to be. I just need to know you’re okay.
By the third, they got worse.
Please.
Please don’t do this like I’m nothing to you.
I know I don’t get to ask for anything right now but please, Y/N.
I’m losing my fucking mind.
Undelivered. Every single one. He tried Jongin once. That call didn’t even make it through the first ring before it was declined.
After that, Seungcheol stopped trying to force his way into your silence and started doing what men like him did when they couldn’t fix the one thing that mattered:
he ran himself into the ground.
He stayed late at work so often that his team stopped pretending not to notice. If he wasn’t there, he was at the gym. Or running until his lungs burned and his knees ached and his T-shirt stuck to his back with sweat. Anything that made him too tired to think.
Anything that meant not going home.
Home was the shape of your absence.
Your side of the bed untouched except for the nights he’d rolled over half-asleep and reached for you before waking up to cold sheets and the ugly realization that you were still gone.
He washed your pillowcase once and nearly had a breakdown because it meant losing the last faint trace of your shampoo.
By the fourth week, he looked as bad as he felt.
Mingyu stopped making jokes and started just showing up with food, dropping it in Seungcheol’s fridge without comment because the one time he’d opened it and found nothing but water, beer, and half a container of kimchi, he’d looked genuinely alarmed.
“You need to stop doing this to yourself,” Mingyu had said one night while Seungcheol laced up his running shoes for the second time that day
Seungcheol hadn’t even looked up. “Doing what?”
“Pretending if you stay moving, you won’t have to feel it.”
He tied the knot tighter than necessary “I already feel it.”
Mingyu had gone quiet after that, because there wasn’t much to say to a man who looked like he’d already been living with the consequences of one bad night for a month straight.
And still some stupid, fragile part of Seungcheol kept believing this wasn’t the end.
That if he gave you enough time, eventually you’d answer. He held onto that hope with both hands.
It was the only thing keeping him from fully losing it.
So the morning he came back from a jog and found the front door unlocked, he didn’t think much of it at first.
Just frowned, chest still rising and falling from the run, and pushed the door open with his keys in hand.
“Hello?”
He stepped inside, dropping his gym bag by the door and toeing off his running shoes. The apartment smelled different.
Not wrong. Just… familiar in a way that hit him before he even understood why.
Then he saw the suitcases.Not one. Three.
For one impossible second, his heart leapt so hard it hurt. Seungcheol forgot how to breathe.
The sight of you after a month was so overwhelming it made his knees weak.
“Y/N,” he said, and your name came out like a wound
Your expression didn’t change. You shifted the blanket in your arms and spoke first, “I just came to get the rest of my stuff.”
The world tilted.
He looked at the luggage again, suddenly seeing it for what it was. Not temporary bags this time. Not a few days’ worth of clothes.
Everything.
His mouth went dry “What?”
“I’ll send the rest of the rent and utilities by the end of the week,” you said, still not looking at him “And the papers are signed. I removed myself from the joint lease and the internet account. The key’s on the counter.”
For a second, Seungcheol genuinely thought he might throw up. He turned toward the kitchen on instinct, eyes landing on the small silver key sitting beside the fruit bowl.
No.
No, no, no.
He looked back at you so fast it made his head spin “What are you talking about?”
His voice had gone sharp with panic “What do you mean the papers are signed?”
You were trying so hard not to cry. He could see it in the way your lips pressed together too tightly.
“I mean I’m moving out, Seungcheol.”
The sentence hit him like a car crash. He stared at you. Actually stared, like if he looked hard enough the words might rearrange themselves into something survivable.
This wasn’t supposed to be how this ended. Not after one fight. Not after one month. Not after nine years of being each other’s first and only real home.
“You can’t be serious.”
You laughed softly, and it was the saddest sound he’d ever heard “I wish I wasn’t.”
“Y/N—”
“No.” You shook your head once, fast, before he could get closer “Please don’t make this harder.”
The room spun with panic.
“Harder?” he repeated, voice breaking “You walk into our apartment after disappearing for a month and tell me you’re moving out, and I’m the one making it harder?”
Your face crumpled for half a second before you forced it back under control “I didn’t disappear.”
“Yes, you did.” He took a step toward you “You blocked my number. You blocked my messages. Jongin wouldn’t answer me. I had no idea if you were okay, if you were sick, if you—”
“I was trying to survive what you did to me.”
The words sliced through him so cleanly he stopped moving.
“I know that sounds cruel,” you whispered, voice shaking “and maybe it is. But I didn’t know how to talk to you without breaking all over again. Every time I thought about hearing your voice, all I could hear was that night.”
“I know,” he said hoarsely “I know what I said.”
“It wasn’t just what you said. It was how you looked at me when you said it. Like I was asking for too much by wanting to know if the man I’ve spent almost a decade loving still saw a future with me.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“But it doesn’t change the fact that when I close my eyes, all I hear is you telling me you don’t know.”
He felt himself unraveling by the second “Baby—”
“Please don’t call me that right now” The plea was so soft it hurt more than if you’d shouted.
You took a shaky breath and looked away from him, toward the living room instead. Toward the couch where you used to curl into his side every night. Toward the dining table where you’d had breakfast together on Sundays and fought over crossword answers .
“I loved you through every version of us,” you said quietly “The broke college version. The overworked version. The version that fought over dishes and bills and whose turn it was to buy detergent. I loved all of it because it was still us.”
Your voice broke on the last word.
Seungcheol stood frozen, every muscle in his body screaming at him to go to you, hold you, stop this somehow. But your posture was all wrong for that now. Closed off. Guarded. Like one wrong move from him would send you running.
“I know,” he whispered
“And I kept waiting for this to feel less awful, I thought maybe if I stayed with Jongin long enough, if I gave us both space, maybe I’d be able to come back and hear you out properly. Maybe I’d be less angry. Less hurt. Maybe I’d stop hearing that one sentence over and over in my head.”
Your eyes met his “I didn’t.”
Seungcheol’s voice came out ragged “Then let me try again.”
Your face twisted with pain “Cheol—”
“No, please.” He crossed the room before you could stop him, then halted a few feet away when he saw you tense “Please, just let me say this once. If after that you still want to leave, I won’t stop you. I swear.”
You closed your eyes for a second. When you opened them again, you looked exhausted.
“Okay.”
That tiny mercy almost broke him more.
Seungcheol dragged a hand over his mouth, trying to steady himself enough to speak. His heart was pounding so hard it made his voice shake.
“I was scared,” he said. “That’s the truth of it. Not of you. Not of loving you. Never that. I was scared of how serious everything started feeling all at once and how behind I was compared to where you already were. I was scared because you were talking about kids and marriage and forever, and all I could think was that you deserved someone who heard those things and felt nothing but certainty. And instead I felt terrified”
You stared at him silently, tears still slipping down your face.
“I thought if I could just figure it out by myself first, if I could get to a place where I had a plan and money and some version of my shit together, then I could come back to you with a yes that looked the way you deserved.” His laugh cracked in half “But instead I let myself get so twisted up in my own fear that I made you feel like I wasn’t sure about you. And that—” he swallowed hard
“—that is the biggest mistake of my life.”
Seungcheol’s own eyes burned.
“I love you,” he said, voice cracking completely “I have loved you since I was eighteen years old and stupid enough to think that was all it took to keep someone forever. I love you now, and I will love you when I’m forty and sixty and mean and gray and probably still annoying as hell. You are it for me. You have always been it for me.”
He took another step forward. You didn’t move.
“But if I’m too late,” he whispered, “if I hurt you too badly for that to matter anymore… then say that. Don’t hide behind bills and lease papers and keys on the counter. Just tell me this is really it.”
That did it.
The sob you’d been trying to hold in finally broke free, and you turned away from him, crying hard enough your shoulders shook. The sound tore straight through his chest.
He almost reached for you.
Almost.
Instead he stood there with his hands clenched at his sides while you cried in the middle of the apartment the two of you had built together, because he had finally learned what it meant to be the reason you were hurting.
“I hate it,” you cried, turning back to him with tears all over your face “Because it would be so much easier if I didn’t. It would be easier if I could hate you for what you said and for leaving and for making me feel like nine years somehow still wasn’t enough. But I can’t. I still love you and that’s the worst part.”
“Then stay,” he whispered.
Your face crumpled harder “I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I believe that you love me,” you said “I do. And maybe part of me even believes you when you say you were scared, not uncertain about me. But that doesn’t change what happened. It doesn’t change that when I needed reassurance most, you gave me doubt. When I begged you not to leave, you left anyway. When I needed the person I love to hold the line with me, you walked out and let me spend the whole night wondering if my relationship was over.”
Seungcheol lowered his head. Every word was deserved.
“And now,” you whispered, “even if you say all the right things, I don’t know how to unhear the wrong ones.”
He pressed a hand over his mouth to keep from making a sound.
“I keep thinking about having kids with you,” you said, tears sliding down your cheeks. “About marrying you. About every future version of us I used to picture so easily. And all I can hear is maybe. I hear you telling me you don’t know. And I can’t build a life on maybe, Seungcheol. I can’t.”
He looked up at you with red-rimmed eyes “So that’s it?”
Your knees nearly gave out and you had to grab the back of the dining chair to steady yourself, crying openly now, no longer trying to keep it pretty or controlled.
“I don’t want it to be,” you sobbed “Do you understand that? I don’t want this. I don’t want to leave you. I don’t want to pack up nine years of my life into suitcases and divide furniture and change addresses and learn how to be a person without you in every part of my day.” Your voice cracked so hard you had to stop and breathe around it
“But I also don’t know how to stay with someone who made me feel like loving me for nearly a decade still somehow wasn’t enough to know.”
Seungcheol covered his face with both hands. A broken sound left him.
“Fuck,” he whispered into his palms “Fuck.”
He dragged his hands down his face and looked at you again, devastated.
“I know I don’t deserve to ask this,” he said, “but if there is even the smallest part of you that still wants to fight for us, I will do whatever it takes. Therapy, time, space, whatever you need. I’ll spend the rest of my life making sure you never doubt me again. Just don’t end us like this. Please.”
You shook your head through tears.
“I can’t be the one who teaches you how to choose me after all this time,” you whispered
Seungcheol stopped breathing. It was such a simple sentence but it destroyed him.
Because that was the truth, wasn’t it? Not that he hadn’t loved you. Not that he hadn’t wanted you. But somewhere in all his fear and silence and panic, he had made the woman who had already chosen him for nine years feel like she had to convince him to choose her back.
You bent down, grabbed the handle of the nearest suitcase, and wiped at your face with your free hand.
“Please move,” you said, voice barely audible “I can’t do this if you keep looking at me like that.”
He didn’t move. Not because he was trying to stop you. His body just… wouldn’t listen.
“Cheol,” you whispered.
The sound of your voice saying his name like that finally snapped him out of it. He stepped aside.
You rolled the suitcase past him toward the door. Every wheel against the hardwood sounded obscene. Final. The second suitcase came next.
He watched all of it.
At the door, you stopped with your hand on the handle.
Seungcheol’s heart lurched into his throat.
You turned back one last time.
Both of you were wrecks now. Tear-stained, shaking, stripped down to the ugliest version of grief. There was no pride left in the room, no winning, no clean edge to hold onto. Just love and damage and the unbearable fact that sometimes they existed at the same time and still weren’t enough.
“I loved you well for a long time,” you said through tears
He nodded immediately, sob catching in his throat “I know.”
“And you loved me too.” Your face crumpled “But sometimes love isn’t the thing that ruins you. It’s timing. Fear. The wrong sentence said at the worst possible moment.”
Seungcheol shook his head like if he did it hard enough, he could stop this from becoming true
“Don’t do this,” he whispered “Please.”
You cried harder. The door opened.
Seungcheol took one involuntary step forward “Y/N—”
But you were already gone. The door closed behind you with a soft click.
And just like that, nine years ended not with screaming, not with hatred, not even with the absence of love but with too much of it, twisted up with fear and regret until it couldn’t save either of you.
For a long time, Seungcheol didn’t move.
He just stood there staring at the closed door, tears still sliding down his face, chest heaving around the silence you left behind.
Even the air felt emptier.
He looked at the key still sitting on the kitchen counter.
Then he broke.
His knees gave out first.
A sound tore out of him, raw, wrecked, the kind of sob that only comes when the body finally understands something the mind has been refusing for too long.
You were gone.
******************TO BE CONTINUED******************
big sorry for what i'm about to do... consider this my fair warning, my welcome back from the dead, my 'i've been hiding for weeks and wrote this with tears in my eyes' come back
hellloooo~ its been a while🫣 im going to let you in on a secret... this has been in my drafts since last year😅 it was suppposed to be the bday special last year but i ended up writing another one, then i thought why not post it now. just full of cuteness and fluffs, hope you like it!
to my luckiest charm, my buldak loving, my jeon wonwoo, i hope all good things come to you. be happy always, happy birthday uno🤍
A space filled with glowing monitors, neatly arranged figurines, and the soft hum of his gaming setup. You’ve always loved how focused he looks when he’s streaming, the way his glasses slightly slide down his nose as he leans toward the screen, completely engrossed in the game.
He’s live right now, his calm voice carrying through the slightly ajar door, chatting with his viewers. You tiptoe inside, careful not to disrupt his flow, a small tray of snacks in your hands. His viewers know about you but have never seen you. he’s protective that way. But you love these little interruptions, these secret moments that are yours alone to witness.
You place the tray quietly on his desk, just out of view of the camera. Wonwoo notices immediately, his lips twitching into a subtle smile as he mutes his mic for a moment. “Thanks, love,” he murmurs, his tone so soft it makes your heart flutter.
Before he can unmute, you lean down, pressing a quick kiss to his cheek. His ears turn red instantly, but he plays it off like a pro, his fingers never leaving the keyboard
The chat, though, picks up on everything
“Did he just smile?!”
“The girlfriend energy is real.”
“He’s blushing. We saw that.”
You giggle silently, watching as Wonwoo clears his throat and tries to focus. But you’re not done yet. Looping your arms around his shoulders, you press a feather-light kiss to the corner of his lips this time.
He freezes for half a second, his character taking a hit in the game, and you stifle a laugh
“Y/N…” he whispers, a mix of exasperation and affection in his voice
You just grin, slipping out of the room before he can say more.
Curiosity gets the best of you as you cozy up on the couch with your phone. Wonwoo’s stream is still going, but you’ve tuned in now not for the gameplay, but for the aftermath of your little interruption.
The chat is in full-blown chaos
“He’s so soft when he talks about her. We’re all just third-wheeling.”
“SHE BROUGHT HIM SNACKS?? Marriage material. Period.”
“Did anyone else see him freeze for like half a second? That kiss hit DIFFERENT.”
“WONWOO BLUSHING IS MY NEW FAVORITE THING.”
You can’t help but laugh softly, biting your lip as you scroll through. Wonwoo’s viewers are sharp—they don’t miss a single detail. Some are spamming heart emojis, while others are typing theories about how you must’ve kissed him again since he looked extra flustered for a few moments.
You spot one comment that makes you snort
“Legend says she’s the reason he can’t aim today.”
Wonwoo’s voice cuts through the stream, his tone steady but tinged with a softness only you can detect. “You guys are imagining things,” he says, adjusting his glasses like it’ll somehow hide the faint blush still dusting his cheeks.
The chat erupts:
“WE SAW IT, WONWOO. DON’T LIE.”
“Man’s trying to act cool, but we all know he’s whipped.”
“Can you blame him? She seems perfect.”
You feel your heart swell at the kindness of his community. They’ve always been so respectful, never prying too much, but it’s clear they adore seeing this softer side of him.
Still smiling, you type a quick comment from your anonymous account:
“He’s lucky to have her, but I bet she feels just as lucky.”
The chat agrees instantly, flooding the stream with affirmations. Wonwoo chuckles, as if he’s seen your comment and knows it’s you. “Yeah,” he murmurs, almost too quietly for the mic to pick up, “I really am lucky.”
And just like that, you’re blushing too.
=
GAMEBOI EP.18
You didn’t realize Wonwoo was streaming when you wandered into his gaming room. He’d been spending more time at his desk lately, and you missed having him to yourself. So, without much thought, you pushed open the door, spotting him seated comfortably in his chair, headset on, fingers flying across the keyboard.
He looked so effortlessly handsome that you couldn’t resist. You padded over quietly, and before he could react, you slid onto his lap, straddling him, your arms draping around his shoulders. His hands faltered on the keyboard for half a second before they steadied again.
“Hey,” you murmured, pressing a quick kiss to his cheek, not noticing the faint red light of his camera indicating he was live
Wonwoo’s lips quirked into a small smile, his gaze darting between you and his monitor. He moved his mic slightly to the side, speaking low enough so only you could hear.
“I’m streaming right now.”
Your eyes widened in surprise, but before you could scramble off, he rested a hand lightly on your waist, holding you in place
“It’s fine,” he murmured, his voice calm and reassuring
The chat, of course, noticed immediately
“Did someone just sit on his lap?!”
“Wonwoo is too calm for this. I’d be losing my mind.”
You buried your face in his shoulder, embarrassed, as he adjusted his glasses and continued playing
“Just my girlfriend,” he said smoothly, his tone as casual as if he were discussing the weather “She’s comfy, so she’s staying.”
The chat exploded
“Just his girlfriend??? SIR??”
“We’re all just gonna pretend that didn’t happen???”
“HE REALLY SAID SHE’S STAYING. DEAD.”
You peeked over your shoulder at the chat, your back still to the camera, and stifled a laugh. Wonwoo caught the sound and smiled, one hand subtly rubbing soothing circles against your side.
“What? She’s cute,” he added, his voice nonchalant but laced with affection “Can’t exactly say no.”
The chat was a mix of chaos and adoration
“They’re too cute. I’m crying.”
“Wonwoo’s girlfriend is living the dream.”
“He’s too calm for this. WHIPPED.”
You whispered against his neck “You’re gonna regret letting me stay here.”
Wonwoo tilted his head slightly to look at you, his expression soft
“Never,” he murmured, loud enough for only you to hear
And so, you stayed, perfectly content in his lap, while his chat buzzed with endless speculation and envy over how effortlessly lucky the two of you seemed.
As you stay nestled comfortably on Wonwoo’s lap, his calm demeanor makes you almost forget that he’s still live. That is, until his eyes flicker to the chat, and a faint smirk begins to tug at his lips.
“They’re having a field day,” he murmurs, his voice low and amused as he scrolls through the comments
You lean slightly to the side to sneak a glance at the chat, still careful to keep your back to the camera. What you see makes you stifle a laugh.
“He’s literally the calmest man alive. HOW??”
“Wonwoo’s girlfriend is living rent-free in my dreams right now.”
“She’s not even on camera, and they’re this cute. I can’t take it.”
“Sir, please blink twice if you’re okay.”
“Blink twice, huh?” Wonwoo says, reading that one out loud with a small chuckle. He glances at the camera and, for dramatic effect, blinks twice. “There. Satisfied?”
The chat goes wild.
You press your forehead against his shoulder, laughing quietly. “They’re obsessed,” you whisper, teasing him.
“You think?” he replies, his hand resting lightly on your waist as he continues to read “They’ve got good taste.”
You swat at his chest playfully, but he doesn’t miss a beat “Someone said you’re living rent-free in their dreams,” he says, his tone laced with humor. “Should I be jealous?”
“Oh, absolutely,” you quip back, matching his energy
He smirks, glancing down at you briefly “I’ll allow it—for now.”
The chat catches on immediately
“WHY IS HE SO SMUG?!”
“Wonwoo, don’t act like you’re not living the dream too.”
“This is relationship goals to the max.”
Wonwoo leans closer to the mic, his tone teasing as he addresses his audience “You guys really want hints, huh? Well, here’s one: she’s cuter than all of you combined.”
Your jaw drops at his boldness, and you lightly smack his shoulder, your cheeks burning. The chat explodes.
“STOP, I CAN’T HANDLE THIS.”
“HE’S SO WHIPPED. I LOVE THIS FOR HIM.”
“Wonwoo, PLEASE teach me your ways.”
You laugh against his shoulder, shaking your head at how effortlessly he handles everything. “You’re impossible,” you whisper, but there’s no real bite to your words
“And you’re stuck with me,” he murmurs back, his voice warm and steady, as the chat continues its collective meltdown.
=
GAMEBOI EP.19
Wonwoo leans back in his chair, adjusting his headset as he addresses the chat. “Alright, we’re doing a short Q&A today,” he announces, his calm voice carrying a faint hint of amusement
“But judging by the chat already, I think I know where this is going.”
The messages flooding in confirm his suspicion
“TELL US ABOUT HER!”
“What’s your favorite thing about your girlfriend?”
“How did you meet her?”
“When is she making her debut?”
Wonwoo chuckles, pushing his glasses up
“You guys are really persistent, huh? Fine, I’ll answer a few questions about her but don’t expect too much. Gotta keep some things private.”
The chat erupts with excitement.
The first question he picks catches him off guard
“How did we meet?” he reads aloud. He smiles softly, clearly fond of the memory
“We met through mutual friends. She wasn’t really into gaming at the time, but somehow, we ended up talking about it anyway. I think I managed to convince her I was interesting.”
You’re watching the stream from the other room, smiling to yourself as you hear his calm and collected tone.
Another question pops up, and Wonwoo reads it with a faint blush. “‘What’s your favorite thing about her?’” He hesitates for a moment, his gaze dropping to his desk before he smiles. “That’s hard to answer because there’s too much to choose from. But if I had to pick one… it’s probably how she makes everything feel easy. Like, no matter how stressful the day is, she has this way of making me feel calm.”
The chat immediately floods with heart emojis
“OMG STOP, THAT’S SO SWEET.”
“Wonwoo is too soft for this world.”
“They’re definitely soulmates. I’m crying.”
He clears his throat, clearly a little shy from how emotional he’s getting
“Next question.”
“‘Will she ever show up on stream?’” He smirks at this one
“Probably not. She likes keeping things private, and I respect that. But who knows? Maybe you’ll get another random cameo like last time.”
The final question he picks makes him laugh outright “‘Does she game with you?’”
He shakes his head “Not really. She says I’m too competitive, but she’ll sit next to me and give commentary. It’s entertaining, even if she doesn’t realize it.”
The chat loves it.
“She’s a queen, clearly.”
“The way he talks about her is so soft.”
“We need her commentary one day, please.”
Wonwoo glances at the camera, his expression warm “Alright, that’s enough about her for now. She’ll get a big head if she knows how much I talk about her.”
You roll your eyes, watching as the chat explodes in protests. He ends the Q&A with a knowing smile, saying, “Thanks for indulging me, though. I’m glad you guys like her as much as I do.”
And just like that, the chat turns into a mix of swooning and playful jealousy, but all you can do is grin, feeling incredibly lucky to have someone who loves you so openly, even if it’s mostly behind the scenes.
=
GAMEBOI EP. 20
The idea caught you off guard when Wonwoo asked, “Wanna play with me on stream?” His tone was casual, but you could see the glimmer of hope in his eyes.
You hesitated for a moment before agreeing, on one condition: you wouldn’t be on camera
“Deal,” he said, a soft smile tugging at his lips “But you better carry the team.”
You laughed at that “You know I’m terrible at this game, right?”
Now, sitting beside him in his gaming room, you had a controller in hand, your nerves barely contained as his stream began. Wonwoo was in his usual calm, composed mode, greeting his viewers like he always did.
“Alright, we’re doing something different today,” he announced, his voice steady “I’ve got a special guest playing with me.”
The chat immediately picked up on it
“Wait, is it HER???”
“OMG, SHE’S PLAYING?”
“We’ve been blessed. The queen has arrived.”
You could feel your face heating up, even though no one could see you. “Do they always hype things up this much?” you whispered
Wonwoo chuckled, muting his mic for a second to glance at you. “Get used to it. They’re like this every time I mention you.”
Once the game started, you tried your best to keep up, but your clumsy movements and inability to aim properly became painfully obvious. It didn’t help that the chat was fully invested in your gameplay.
“She’s adorable, I just know it.”
“Is she new to the game? Wonwoo, help her out!”
“THIS IS THE CUTEST STREAM EVER.”
Wonwoo was the perfect balance of supportive and teasing. “You’ve got this,” he said whenever you struggled. And when you accidentally ran straight into an enemy, he couldn’t help but laugh softly “Well, that’s… one strategy, I guess.”
“Hey!” you protested, pouting as you respawned. “I’m trying!”
Eventually, you managed to get a single kill, and Wonwoo clapped softly, genuinely impressed. “Look at you,” he teased. “A natural-born gamer.”
You rolled your eyes. “I think I just got lucky.”
“You mean we got lucky,” he said smoothly, glancing at the chat as it collectively melted
By the end of the stream, you were exhausted but couldn’t stop smiling.
As Wonwoo wrapped up, he leaned into the mic “Thanks for being nice to her, guys. She did great, didn’t she?”
The chat agreed wholeheartedly
“She’s amazing! Bring her back!”
“Stream of the year. We need more.”
“Wonwoo and his girlfriend are goals.”
He muted the mic for a moment, turning to you with a proud smile “Told you they’d love you.”
You grinned, leaning your head against his shoulder “I guess I’ll play with you again sometime… but don’t expect miracles.”
“Don’t worry,” he said softly, his voice just for you. “You’re my favorite teammate, no matter what.”
=
GAMEBOI EP. 21
It started as a simple task—helping Wonwoo reorganize his game room. The two of you spent hours sorting through cables, lining up monitors, and adjusting shelves. It was fun in its own way, especially since he’d sneak in a kiss or two every time you passed by him.
While rummaging through a box of his old gear, you pulled out a sleek mechanical keyboard. The pastel-colored keycaps immediately caught your eye, but what hooked you was the sound. As soon as you pressed one of the keys, a soft, melodic “click” echoed, and your face lit up.
“This is so cute!” you exclaimed, pressing a few more keys just to hear the satisfying sound
Wonwoo looked up from where he was sorting controllers, a small smile playing on his lips “You like that one?”
“I love it,” you said, grinning as you continued typing nonsense, the sounds filling the room “It’s so fun to press.”
He chuckled, walking over to take a closer look “That one’s been sitting in storage for a while. I didn’t know you’d like it so much.”
You pouted at him playfully “Why don’t you use it anymore?”
“It doesn’t match my current setup,” he explained, but his expression softened as he watched you happily tapping away “You can use it if you want, though.”
You waved him off “It’s fine! I don’t need a keyboard—I don’t even have a setup to use it with. But this one’s adorable.”
Wonwoo didn’t say much after that, just smiled knowingly and went back to organizing.
A few days later, he called you into the gaming room. You stepped inside to find a brand-new keyboard sitting on the desk, nearly identical to the one you’d fallen in love with, but customized just for you. The keycaps were a mix of soft pastel shades, and the switches made that same delightful click you adored.
Your jaw dropped “Baby, did you…?”
“I figured you should have your own,” he said casually, leaning against the desk with his arms crossed but the slight blush on his cheeks betrayed his nonchalant tone
“You kept talking about how cute it was, so… here.”
You rushed over, wrapping your arms around him tightly “This is the sweetest thing ever. Thank you!”
He laughed, returning your embrace “You’re welcome. Now you can pretend to game with me whenever you want.”
You pulled back, grinning “Who says I’m pretending? This keyboard’s going to make me a pro.”
The chat during his next stream couldn’t stop talking about the faint sound of your keyboard clicks in the background, further solidifying your place as their favorite off-camera addition to Wonwoo’s world.
Wonwoo was in the middle of one of his usual chill streams, chatting with his viewers while casually clicking through his game’s menus.
You were sitting beside him, happily typing away on your new pastel mechanical keyboard. Every now and then, he’d glance at you, a small smile tugging at his lips whenever he heard the familiar clicks.
At some point, you nudged him gently, grinning
“Hey,” you whispered, leaning closer “Can I show them my new keyboard?”
He raised an eyebrow, amused “You want to?”
You nodded enthusiastically, and he chuckled, turning back to his mic “Alright, so… she wants to show you something.”
The chat immediately erupted
“WAIT, SHE’S HERE??”
“SHOW US, QUEEN!”
“WE FINALLY GET TO HEAR HER???”
Wonwoo muted his mic for a second and turned to you, his expression soft “You can stay off camera. Just hold it up in front of mine, okay?”
“Got it,” you said, your voice full of excitement
He unmuted, and you carefully leaned over, holding your new keyboard up so it appeared on his screen, just above his handcam. The pastel colors gleamed under the soft lighting, and your fingers tapped a few keys, letting the viewers hear the satisfying clicks.
“OMG IT’S SO CUTE!!!”
“SHE HAS THE SAME VIBES AS HIM, I SWEAR.”
“THOSE CLICKS. I NEED THAT KEYBOARD.”
Wonwoo smirked, clearly enjoying the reaction “Yeah, I got that for her. She’s been obsessed with it ever since.”
You laughed softly, your voice reaching his mic “How could I not? It’s perfect!”
Your hands lingered in the frame for a moment longer before you pulled the keyboard back to your lap, laughing as the comments kept flooding in. “They’re so dramatic,” you whispered to Wonwoo.
“They always are,” he replied, his tone fond. Turning back to the stream, he added “Alright, that’s all you get. She’s shy.”
You rolled your eyes, nudging him playfully, but the warmth in his tone made your heart swell.
As he continued chatting with his viewers, you stayed by his side, quietly typing away, your keyboard’s clicks filling the background. And if he occasionally glanced at you with the softest smile? Well, that was just for you.
=
GAMEBOI EP.22
The moment you walked into the computer parts store with Wonwoo, your eyes lit up at the sheer number of shiny, colorful gadgets around you. It was like stepping into a candy store but for tech you didn’t understand.
Wonwoo had come prepared with a list and a clear purpose, but it was quickly derailed the moment you started wandering off “Ooh, look at this!” you exclaimed, holding up a pastel pink mouse from one of the shelves.
He glanced at you, amused “That’s a gaming mouse. Do you even know what DPI is?”
“Not a clue,” you said proudly, “but it’s cute, right?”
He laughed, shaking his head “Yeah, it’s cute.”
You put the mouse in the cart with zero hesitation, earning another chuckle from him “You know we’re here to buy parts for my setup, not to make yours prettier, right?”
“But what’s the point of a setup if it’s not cute?” you countered, already wandering off to another aisle
Every few minutes, you’d come back to him holding something pastel or RGB-lit “Babe, look at this fan! It lights up!” you said, spinning the blades
“That’s an RGB fan,” he explained patiently, trying not to laugh at how excited you looked
“Do you need it?”
“I already have better ones,” he said, gently taking it from your hands. But you’re adorable for trying.”
Not long after, you found a pastel purple keyboard and rushed over to him “This matches my mouse! Can I—”
“Yes,” he said before you could even finish, grinning “Just put it in the cart.”
You blinked “You’re not even going to argue?”
“Why would I? You’re clearly having the time of your life.”
The rest of the trip continued in the same way, with you picking up random items like cute cable organizers, a pastel monitor stand, and even a mousepad with tiny hearts on it. Wonwoo didn’t complain once, just followed you around with the cart, his smile growing wider every time you lit up at something new.
By the time you reached the checkout, the cart was a mix of his practical parts and your colorful additions
“You’re really letting me get all this?” you asked, slightly guilty but mostly excited
He shrugged, his tone casual but affectionate
“It’s worth it to see you this happy.”
As you leaned up to kiss his cheek, Wonwoo couldn’t help but think how easy it was to spoil you. Sure, his gaming setup wasn’t going to match with all the pastel you’d picked out, but he didn’t care. Seeing you this excited? That was worth more than any high-tech upgrade.
Wonwoo’s next stream started like any otherhis calm voice greeting the chat as he settled into his chair, adjusting his headset. Except this time, you were sitting beside him, just out of the camera’s view, quietly unboxing all the cute, pastel-colored items you’d convinced him to buy during your trip to the computer store.
About fifteen minutes in, the chat picked up on something.
He glanced at you, smirking “They’re already asking about you,” he said softly, leaning closer to his mic “Wanna show them what you bought?”
You hesitated for a second before grinning “Only if you introduce it properly,” you teased, nudging his arm
Wonwoo chuckled, shaking his head “Alright, guys. She went on a pastel shopping spree, and she’s way too excited to show it off. But she’s staying off-camera, so don’t get your hopes up.”
Sliding into the frame, you held up the pastel pink mouse first “Ta-da! Isn’t it cute?” you said, your voice light with excitement as you turned it so the camera caught all the angles
Next, you grabbed the pastel purple keyboard and tapped a few keys, letting the soft, satisfying clicks echo through his mic
“This is my favorite,” you said proudly “It matches the mouse!”
The chat was eating it up.
“THE KEYBOARD IS PERFECT.”
“She really went full pastel gamer, huh?”
“Wonwoo, you’re gonna have to build her a whole setup now.”
One by one, you showed off the rest of your haul: the pastel monitor stand, the tiny heart-patterned mousepad, and even the cute cable organizers. Every time you held something up, the chat flooded with compliments and playful comments.
At one point, someone asked: “Wonwoo, how much of this trip was her idea?”
“All of it,” he replied immediately, smiling as he glanced at you “But I didn’t mind. She was like a kid in a candy store. How could I say no?”
You playfully elbowed him, making him laugh even harder “You’re making me sound so dramatic!”
“Because you were,” he teased. “But it was adorable.”
By the time you finished showing off everything, the chat was begging for more appearances from you. You shook your head, laughing
“This is Wonwoo’s stream, not mine!”
He leaned into his mic, his tone soft but playful
“Maybe for now. But if she keeps this up, she’s gonna have a better setup than me.”
The chat exploded with laughter and agreement, and as you sat back beside him, quietly typing on your new keyboard, Wonwoo couldn’t stop smiling. It was a simple, silly moment, but to him—and his viewers—it was perfect.
=
GAMEBOI EP. 23
During one of Wonwoo’s chill streams, he suddenly leaned back in his chair, a teasing smirk tugging at his lips. “So, I found something funny the other day,” he began, glancing at the chat
“Do you guys want to see a video of my girlfriend struggling to help me set up this chair?”
“YESSS PLEASE!”
“We love her content already.”
“Wonwoo, don’t expose her like this!”
He chuckled, reaching for his mouse “Don’t worry, her face isn’t in it—just her voice. But trust me, it’s worth it.”
As he clicked play, the video popped up on stream. The camera was propped up on a desk, capturing the scene of a partially assembled gaming chair and your hands fumbling with a screwdriver.
In the clip, your voice rang out, frustrated but determined
“Wait, wait—what do I do with this screw? It doesn’t fit! Are you sure this is the right one?”
Wonwoo’s voice came from behind the camera, calm and amused “Yes, it’s the right one. You just need to turn it the other way.”
“I am turning it the other way!” you huffed, the sound of the screwdriver slipping making him laugh behind the camera
“You’re turning it the same way,” he corrected, his tone dripping with laughter
“Wonwoo, I swear, if you’re filming this right now—”
The clip ended with you groaning dramatically while he laughed, and the chat absolutely exploded
“SHE’S SO CUTE OMG.”
“The frustration in her voice is sending me LOL.”
“Wonwoo, you’re a menace for recording this.”
Wonwoo leaned back, grinning as he read the comments
“Yeah, she was so mad when she realized I filmed it,” he admitted, his voice fond “But she eventually got the screw in. She just… needed a little extra guidance.”
You yelled from the other room, loud enough for the mic to pick up: “I got it in all by myself, thank you very much!”
Wonwoo laughed, turning his head slightly toward where you were sitting off-camera “Do you want to defend yourself, or are you going to let me keep telling my version of the story?”
“I don’t need to defend myself,” you called back “The chair’s standing, isn’t it?”
He turned back to the camera, shaking his head but smiling warmly
“She’s not wrong. The chair’s perfect. But man, that setup process was something else.”
The chat kept teasing both of you for the rest of the stream, and Wonwoo couldn’t stop grinning. He didn’t even care if they joked at his expense. it was worth it, just to share a little piece of your chaotic, everyday moments with his viewers.
=
GAMEBOI EP.24
Wonwoo was mid-stream, fully immersed in his game, when the chat suddenly noticed something. His posture stiffened slightly, and a small smile tugged at the corner of his lips—a telltale sign that something was happening off-camera.
The viewers were quick to pick up on it.
“SHE’S THERE AGAIN, ISN’T SHE?”
“It’s koala time, guys.”
“Wonwoo looks like he’s bracing for something LOL.”
And sure enough, a moment later, you appeared in the frame, just slightly out of view, your arms looping around his shoulders as you leaned into him
“Baby” you murmured, your voice soft and sleepy
He glanced at you briefly before returning his focus to the screen “You okay?” he asked, though his tone was already filled with fondness
“Mhm. Just wanted cuddles,” you mumbled, wrapping yourself around him like a koala. Your legs dangled over the side of his chair as you clung to him, your face buried in the crook of his neck.
Wonwoo smiled slightly, his free arm instinctively wrapping around your waist to steady you. “You’re gonna make me lose this match,” he teased, though there was no real complaint in his voice
“I don’t mind,” you replied, your voice muffled against his shoulder
He let out a soft laugh, shaking his head. “Chat, this is my life now. I’m trying to carry a team, and she’s over here trying to turn me into a human pillow.”
“Pillow privileges only for her!”
“She’s living the dream.”
“Wonwoo’s so whipped, it’s adorable.”
Eventually, the game ended, and he leaned back slightly, giving you a chance to reposition. “You good now?” he asked, looking at you with a playful smile
You shook your head, clinging tighter “Nope. Still need more cuddles.”
He sighed dramatically, though the grin on his face gave him away. “Guess I’m not going anywhere then,” he said, turning back to the chat
“Sorry, guys, looks like I’m stuck here.”
The chat erupted with laughter and affection, fully entertained by your antics. And as Wonwoo continued his stream, your arms stayed securely around him, your presence as comforting to him as it was chaotic.
=
GAMEBOI EP.25
Wonwoo decided to do something special for his birthday stream—a long, cozy session until midnight. His viewers were thrilled, and the chat was buzzing with excitement, sending him birthday wishes and teasing him about how he was spending his special day with them instead of celebrating offline.
As the clock ticked closer to midnight, Wonwoo glanced at the time with a subtle smile, clearly anticipating something. "Alright, guys," he said, leaning back in his chair
"I think it's about time to wrap things up soon. But before we go, I have a little surprise for you."
The chat erupted.
“WHAT SURPRISE???”
“Don’t play with us, Wonwoo!”
“You’re really gonna make this stream legendary, aren’t you?”
Just as the clock struck 12, you appeared from behind him, holding a small cupcake with a single candle lit.
"Happy birthday, Wonwoo!" you said softly, your voice warm and full of love.
Wonwoo turned his chair slightly, giving the viewers a brief glimpse of you as you leaned down to give him a quick kiss. The moment was fleeting—your smile, the cupcake, and your kiss—but it was enough to send the chat into a frenzy
“SHE’S REAL OMG.”
“The mystery girlfriend REVEALED!”
“Happy birthday, Wonwoo, but also WE LOVE HER!”
You set the cupcake down on his desk, grinning as you stepped back out of frame. "Alright, I’m out of here—don’t let them roast me too much," you joked, your voice teasing
Wonwoo chuckled, his ears turning pink as he adjusted his headset
"Thanks, love," he said softly, his tone full of affection. Turning back to his stream, he faced the camera with a shy but happy smile
"So… that’s my girlfriend. She wanted to wish me happy birthday."
“We’re simping for both of you now.”
“Wonwoo blushing is everything.”
“That was the CUTEST moment ever.”
He spent the next few minutes reading the flood of comments, thanking everyone for their birthday wishes, and promising not to turn his stream into a full-on romantic comedy.
But the way his smile lingered even after you left the room made it clear just how much that little moment meant to him and to everyone watching.
=
GAMEBOI EP. 26
Wonwoo decided to dedicate a stream to reading fan letters from his email, something he hadn't done in a while. You sat beside him, off-camera as always, but he had asked you to join in. "It’s more fun reading these with you," he had said earlier, convincing you.
As the stream began, he adjusted his mic and addressed his viewers
“So, today’s stream is a little different. I’m going to be reading some of the fan letters you guys sent to my email. And, uh… she’s here to help me.” He motioned toward you off-frame
“SHE’S BACK???”
“COUPLE STREAM PART 2 LET’S GO!”
“Read her the cute ones, Wonwoo!”
You laughed softly “Hi, everyone. Thanks for letting me crash your stream again.”
Wonwoo opened the first email, smiling as he scanned the words
“Okay, this one’s sweet. They said they started watching me during a tough time, and my streams helped them feel less alone.” He paused, his voice warm “That’s… really nice to hear.”
You leaned closer to read over his shoulder. “Aww, that’s so touching. Whoever wrote this, you’re amazing for sharing that,” you said sincerely
As the stream went on, Wonwoo read a mix of funny and heartfelt letters.
One fan shared how they accidentally spilled coffee on their keyboard while watching his gameplay, prompting you to laugh.
“See? That’s why I don’t keep drinks near my setup"
He shot you a playful look “That’s because you spill everything.”
“Hey!” you protested, lightly nudging him, which only made the chat explode
Finally, Wonwoo opened an email that made both of you pause. The fan had written a long message thanking him for being so genuine and mentioning how they admired the love and support they could sense between the two of you.
He glanced at you, a soft smile on his face “That’s… really sweet.”
You nodded, your voice gentle “It’s nice knowing people notice the little things. Whoever wrote this, thank you.”
“THEY’RE SO IN LOVE HELP.”
“This stream is making me believe in love again.”
“We need more streams like this!”
As the stream wrapped up, Wonwoo thanked his viewers, his voice filled with gratitude
“Thanks for all your letters and for always supporting me. And thanks to her for joining me. You make this even better.”
You smiled, nudging him again playfully. “Alright, don’t get too mushy on stream.”
As Wonwoo wrapped up the main part of reading fan letters, you couldn’t help but notice a recurring theme in the chat. Fans were flooding the comments with questions about your relationship. You glanced at him, raising a brow. “You seeing these?”
He laughed, scratching the back of his neck. “Yeah, I see them. Do you want to answer a few?”
“YES PLEASE!”
“Tell us the love story!”
“This is what we’ve been waiting for!”
You hesitated for a moment before shrugging
“Okay, just a few. Keep it simple, though.”
Wonwoo smirked, scrolling through the chat “Alright, here’s a classic one: ‘How did you two meet?’”
You chuckled "We met through mutual friends at a small get-together. I didn’t even know who he was at first.just thought he was the quiet guy sitting in the corner with a really nice smile.”
He grinned, glancing at you “And I thought she was the most interesting person in the room. She kept asking me random questions, and I couldn’t stop talking to her.”
Wonwoo picked another question. “Okay, next: ‘Where was your first date?’”
You smiled at the memory
“It was this little bookstore café. He said he wanted somewhere quiet where we could talk, and we ended up staying there for hours. I think the staff thought we were moving in”
Wonwoo chuckled “Yeah, we didn’t even notice the time. I remember she was so excited about the book sections, and she kept showing me things like, ‘Look at this! Isn’t it cool?’”
“I want a bookstore date now…”
“Wonwoo, you’re setting unrealistic standards!”
“Did you buy her a book that day?”
Wonwoo smirked at the last comment “Actually, I did. I still remember the title"
You laughed “And I still have it, thank you very much.”
He scanned the chat again “Last one: ‘What’s your favorite thing to do together?’”
You thought for a moment before answering
“Honestly? Just spending time together doing random things—like this. Whether it’s customizing keyboards, trying out games, or just sitting around talking, it’s always fun.”
Wonwoo nodded in agreement “Yeah, same. I don’t think it matters what we’re doing as long as it’s with her.”
The chat erupted with heart emojis and comments
“Get you a love like this.”
“The way they talk about each other is everything.”
“This is why we stan Wonwoo AND his girlfriend.”
After answering a few more light questions, you decided to let Wonwoo take over again. “Okay, that’s enough about us. Back to your regularly scheduled programming,” you joked, waving off-camera
Wonwoo smiled at the camera. “Thanks for letting her join in, guys. I think she liked it more than she’ll admit.”
You playfully swatted his arm as the chat filled with laughter and love for both of you.
=
GAMEBOI EP.27
The stream starts with a soft, familiar hum of music and the sound of Wonwoo adjusting his mic. The chat immediately lights up with excitement as he finally appears on screen, his signature calm smile gracing his face.
“HE’S BACK!!”
“Wonwoo we missed you so much!!”
“IT’S BEEN TOO LONG!!”
Wonwoo waves at the camera, his voice warm but slightly shy
“Hey, everyone. It’s been a while, huh? I missed you all too.”
He leans back in his chair, taking a deep breath. “First of all, thank you for being so patient. A lot happened over the past couple of months, and I wanted to take some time to just focus on life… and on someone really special”
His smile grows, and his eyes flicker off-camera for a second, as if acknowledging your presence.
“IS SHE THERE?!”
“OMG ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT HER??”
“LIFE UPDATE PLEASE.”
Wonwoo chuckles softly, rubbing the back of his neck.
“Okay, okay, so… some of you might’ve guessed, but yes, she’s been a big part of what’s been happening. We went on a little vacation recently,a much-needed one. And, well…” He pauses, then you suddenly popped up from the side, well... your hand did to show the faintest glint of a ring
“WAIT WHAT?!”
“OMG OMG OMG!!!”
“ARE YOU SAYING WHAT I THINK YOU’RE SAYING?!”
He laughs, his cheeks slightly pink “Yeah, I proposed. And she said yes.”
Even though you're off-camera, the faint sound of your laugh can be heard, and it makes the chat lose their minds even more
“CONGRATS OMG!!!”
“WE KNEW IT!!”
“This is the best comeback ever.”
Wonwoo looks genuinely touched by the overwhelming support.
“Thank you, really. I wanted to make sure everything was perfect before I came back. The past few months have been some of the happiest of my life, and I’m really grateful I got to spend that time with her.”
He glances off-camera again, this time with a small smirk
“She’s here, by the way. But don’t worry, she’s staying off-camera today… unless she wants to say hi?”
You laugh softly before leaning closer to the mic
"Hi, everyone. Thanks for being so sweet to him and to us. And yes, the ring is very pretty.”
“SHE’S HERE!!!”
“WE NEED A RING CAM!”
“Wonwoo you’re one lucky guy.”
Wonwoo chuckles, shaking his head
“Alright, enough about me. Let’s get back to what we’re here for: gaming. But seriously, thank you all for your support—it means a lot to both of us.”
As the stream goes on, the mood stays light and happy, with occasional comments from you off-camera and the chat constantly celebrating your engagement. It’s the perfect comeback, full of love, laughter, and warmth.
As Wonwoo continues chatting with his viewers, you can’t resist chiming in from the background. Your voice rings out in a playful, teasing tone
“I finally said yes, guys. Took him long enough.”
Wonwoo lets out an exaggerated sigh, rolling his eyes
“She’s not gonna let me live this down, huh?”
The chat explodes with laughter
“SHE’S SO FUNNY.”
“I CAN’T BELIEVE SHE SAID YES TO HIM AFTER ALL THAT TIME.”
“Honestly, I would’ve made him work harder for it.”
You lean in a little closer to the mic, just loud enough for everyone to hear. “Oh, don’t get me wrong, he had to earn it. I mean, the ring’s nice, but the real question is...did he pass the ‘How to Survive My Cooking’ test?”
Wonwoo laughs, holding up his hands in mock defense “Alright, I’m just gonna pretend I didn’t hear that.”
“Her cooking is that bad?”
“The real test of love.”
“Wonwoo deserves an award for surviving that.”
You smirk from off-camera “I’m just saying, if he survived the spicy noodle incident, he deserves a medal.”
Wonwoo shakes his head, smiling fondly at the camera. “Okay, okay, that’s enough teasing for one stream. We’ve got a game to play, but I’m just really happy to be back with you all. And to be with her… even if she makes fun of me all the time.”
You can’t help but laugh softly in the background
“What can I say? I’m the best part of this comeback.”
The chat is in full celebration mode now, with messages of congratulations mixed with requests for more jokes and stories from you
“I love their dynamic so much!”
“They’re a power couple. Period.”
“Please never stop teasing each other.”
Wonwoo glances at you again with a soft smile “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
hello again friend as a long time follower mo heheheheh before svt u were a huge nct account (this may come as a shock to some people hehehe)
so as a bday present for myself, i finally saw jaehyun. TOTOONG TAO TALAGA SIYA SIZZZ as a long time fan of his music and artistry, I HATE HOW TALENTED HE IS YOU JUST WANt more & more!!!! sorry not sorry but i’m just stating the facts PERO K-FANS DON’T APPRECIATE HIM UNLIKE INTERNATIONAL FANS LIKE HELLO THE R&B GENRE IS WHERE JAEHYUN LIVES & BREATHES (as a huge r&b fan myself) AS AN ARTIST. HIS STAGE PRESENCE, HIS MOVES, HIS SILLY SELF AAAAAAAAAAAAA WHOEVER SAID THAT HE’S NOT FUNNY 🚪here’s the door pls show your self out
ughhh i hope he releases another album soon (ALSO JAEHYUN PLS FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THE GOOD THINGS IN THIS WORLD RELEASE LOST) i hope he & haechan release an r&b album in the future (and pls play it at my funeral as THE COLLAB OF THE CENTURY)
DON’T GET ME STARTED ON HIS FACE CARd SIYA NA TALAGA PINAGPALA NSIANSHSJSJAHS HE HAS 0 PORES SERIOUSLY CLEAR SKIN
also jaehyun & cheol needs to have a dimple off (for scientific purposes AKA me) LEMME JUST POKE & PLAY WITH THOSE DIMPLES PLS PLS PLSSSS
bestieeee BESTIE THIS IS OH MY GOSH (im a bit late) but belated happy birthdaaaay and omg i'm so happy for you!!! ITAAS ANG BANDILA NG MANILA SWEET AS VANILLA
gosh i do miss writing for my neos, maybe one day😅 tampo pa ako dyan kay yuno sa pinsan eme nya char but one a more serious note (serious talaga) i do miss seeing my boy too, hopefully they come back soon.
and u know whaaat....... around the time you sent this.... i had a scxjh crossover draft.... hehe OKI BYEEE SEE YOU !!!!
annyeong nini! i hope you know that we are just here happily and patiently waiting for your works. take your time and don’t rush yourself, we trust that whatever and whenever you are ready will be the perfect time to release what you have in store for us.
until then, i am just happily re-reading and re-reading your works because nothing can compare to how good your works are! truly!
cheering from here to there! yahoooo (:
저자 니니 님 화이팅! ʕ •ᴥ•ʔ
annyeong ~ hi hello ~
this is probably the longest break i've taken since i started writing for svt😅 first, thank you so much. i saw this message weeks back when this was sent and i couldn't find the right words yet, guess i was too emotional. i'm going to sound like a broken record but thank you thank you thank you really🤍 (the yahoooo made me laugh-cry that day tbh🥺😹😭)
hello my besties🤍 first of all happy 1st of July, sorry I haven't been posting as much. Honestly after caratland and even before that I just really didn't have the bandwidth to think about anything else. Not in a sad way, more of I'm reflecting type of way.
Also I've been meaning to write new stories with other members, maybe work on some requests finally but I can't just come up with a story i love... I'd start writing and never arrive on a plot I can finish. Hence why the lack of new fics. As i have always said here, I dont want to post just for the sake of posting a new one.
Which brings me to here, I wrote this one fic (a new one. unreleased, not even final draft😭) while I was deep in my 'reflection week' mode. You can say I'm not over that angst era of my fics and honestly I love this new fic i wrote. I'll work on it and see if it's worth reading and worth your time. Right now you are witnessing me fighting my own self bcs i dont think it's good but also i worked hard writing it and yet i dont feel satisfied. Like you get me?😅 truly i am my harshest critic, a flaw i have yet to fix after all these years.
Until then i hope you can wait a bit more🥺 thank you and see on the next fic. Hope you have the great July ahead✨️
hello helloooo i have kwento for uuuuuu~ i went to caratland this weekend on impulse and it’s one of the best decisions i’ve made. i did get sick at the end (i used my sick leaves and actually got sick lol), but the memories are worth it. cheol was FINEEEEE LIKE CRAZY FINEEEEE, but the kicker was wonwoo was there too huhuhuhuhuhu sorry wonwoo lemme just go crazy over ur leader (uwi na ikaw pls di na ako galit eme) CRIED AROUND 3 TIMES MAYBE MORE
money was spent, but the memories won’t come back
ALL I CAN SAY IS SEVENTEEN FOREVER
omg bestieeeeee SO HAPPY FOR YOUUUUU, manifesting seeing them in kr when they come back as 13🥺🤍✨️ hope you feel better !!!!
Also so true, they are worth every pagod every gastos always😫 and omg cheol awa nalang talaga mapapa aespa whiplash talaga😹 HE LOOKS FINE AS HELL THANK U FOR THE PICS 🙏🙇♀️
UNTIL OUR THIRTEEN COMES BACK AS THIRTEEN AGAIN !!!!! SEVENTEEN FOREVER🩷🩵💎
nini's archive @scarletwinterxx - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
