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Jul 8, 2021

NOT LIKE THAT ⤻ C. SOOBIN

member x pairing: choi soobin x f!reader

word count: 14.3k

genre + tropes: lifeguard!au, friends to lovers, mutual pining, soft steam, a lil bit of angst hehe

warnings: author doesn’t really know much about lifeguarding so if it’s wrong that’s awkward, members of txt as housemates and also two members of l*ona and also san from a*eez is there, both of them are oblivious :/, suggestive + steamy scenes,

note: i know he can’t swim okay and fun fact this doesn’t really pass the bechdel test but nobody say anything about it. first post on this blog, though and i really hope you enjoy! this is sort of long but only because i got carried away with it and i really don’t know when to stop which also means i didn’t edit it :( but it is what it is i think i’m pretty happy with it and i hope you enjoy reading

It’s mostly empty today, giving you a chance to tilt your head back to rest your heavy eyelids. Your housemates kept you up all night with their incessant chatter, filling up your dreams and slumber with contagious laughter and a beckon to join them. You did, eventually; reluctantly falling into the warm arms of your best friends as they soothed your worries with their tales of joy and laughter.

It’d been a good idea at the time, but you work mornings. Early mornings. Before-the-Sun-Rises early.

You scowled that morning, walking into headquarters with a headache and bags underneath your eyes. The schedule greeted you and even though you had it memorized, you’d checked it anyway. Thankful that you at least had an easy stand and a laidback partner that’d arrive a few hours into your shift, you had settled into your stand just as the sun was starting to ascend into the cloudless sky.

Underneath the umbrella shade, you’ve managed to spend the first few hours relaxed. The stand is a tall, wooden structure – a giant chair dug into the sand that seats two and allows you a complete view of the water. You’ve taken the right side of the stand, the wooden beach chair covered with your towel and your red hoodie hanging off of one of the arms. It’s homey, enough, with the umbrella taken from headquarters in the holder and shielding you from the sunlight.

You can’t make yourself fall asleep even if your body is screaming at you to just surrender to it, but spending the morning on the beach reminds you that your job isn’t as bad as it was this morning. When you peel your eyes open again, you fight a yawn, covering your mouth as you hear some chatter from behind you. When the conversation finally reaches you, begrudgingly you lean forward off of your seat to spot the voice that you recognize.

Choi Soobin stands at the base of the stand with sunglasses on the tip of his nose and his red hoodie zipped all the way up to his collarbone. Beside him is a girl that looks at him like he’s roped the moon for her, stars captured in her eyes as she laughs at the worst dad-joke you’ve ever heard in your life. He looks proud of himself at her laughter, soaking up her encouragement like she’s the sun and he’s itching for a tan. But then, he looks up at you and tosses you a wave and the precious bubble that they’ve built for themselves burst.

You look at the girl, whose smile drops at your presence. Disappointment flashes across her cute features and she takes a step away from soobin, thanking him for walking her in from the parking lot. Soobin doesn’t look away from you until you wave back. Only after you lazily raise a hand at him does he turn back to the girl by his side and pat her shoulder awkwardly, a contrast from the way he was just chatting her up. She turns to walk away, her beach bag falling down her shoulder as she moves up the beach to get closer to the water.

“Morning!” Soobin greets you chirpily, climbing up the stand and tossing his bag of stuff between the two chairs.

“I thought Taehyun was supposed to be here,” you say, leaning back onto your chair.

“We switched. I like it here better.”

You watch him with a crinkled nose as he sets up, humming a tune that you can’t place a name to as he unzips his hoodie and tosses it precariously onto his chair. He hangs his bag off of the side of the stand before facing the ocean, hands on his hips while he inhales deeply, like he’s never smelled the sea before. Soobin’s the longest lasting lifeguard here; he’s been here all his life, he smells the sea everyday.

Your eyes squint, watching him wave at a couple passing the stand. Turning your gaze away from him, you stand up and shimmy out of your shorts.

“I’m going for a swim.”

He turns to you with a grin, briefly letting his eyes trail down your body before he shrugs. “Have fun! I’ll go in when you come back.”

You climb down without another word, stomping across the sand to the ocean. When you look over your shoulder at the stand, he’s finished adding his name to the chalkboard and turns it to you when he sees you looking. Even from where you stand at the edge of the water, you can see a bright yellow “STEVE” drawn next to your sad, pathetical scribble of a name. He gives you a thumbs up before moving to hang it back up on the back of the stand and you let the water dig you deeper into the sand before you move to jump in.

The day had started out badly, what with the no sleep and the early morning start and the long shift. It was worse now that he was here. You didn’t not like him, technically, but you had spent too much time liking him when he didn’t like you to harbor any good feelings toward him anymore. As you get deeper into the water, you turn onto your back momentarily in the slight hope that you blind yourself from the sunlight. At least if your eyes go, you don’t have to spend the rest of your shift with him on the stand. But, knowing him, he’d find a way to magically heal your injuries with his stupid smile and his stupid hands and the way he knows everybody on this stupid island. You’d have to thank him and he’d look you in the eyes and say, “oh, it’s not like that,” in front of everybody again.

At the memory, you squeeze your eyes shut tightly before you turn back around and dive underneath the waves, sending a wish out to the universe that time will run today and that your shift will be over in the blink of an eye.

The popsicle is sweet. Orange in color and flavor, it cools you down as the sun sinks beneath the horizon. You’re lucky enough to live just feet away from the ocean with a sprawling beach as your backyard. As you and your housemates do weekly during the summertime, you sit around a raging bonfire with snacks and drinks in hand as the weekend opens up. Plans are being thrown out, tomorrow and Sunday being filled with dinners and brunches and parties with the tourists but you sit quietly, chewing on your popsicle as the humidity sticks to your skin.

In the distance, you can hear the gentle waves of the ocean but when you turn toward the sea, you can barely see the dark tide. You sigh, leaning into the raggedy camping chair that was dragged out here when you first moved in a year ago. Your butt pokes against a growing hole in the seat, but you’re not falling through yet so you haven’t made a move to get a new one. To your left, Beomgyu makes a jab at Yeonjun, earning him a whack that you can hear echoing around the fire. A smile worms its way onto your lips, but you remain silent.

They have energy that you can’t muster up. All six of your housemates manage to come alive with the stars, but you get one glance at the night sky and you come crashing down to earth like a falling meteor. They’ve never faulted you for being a day person, but even a year later, you wish you were a little more of a night owl. You can feel exhaustion settling into your bones, your head feeling much heavier than it was this morning. Just as you’re about to stand up and call it a night, someone arrives at the fire with heavy paper bags in hand.

Soobin sets down the paper bags dangerously close to the bonfire as your housemates get up to greet him. Yeonjun pulls his best friend into a tight hug, Beomgyu and Kai not far behind him. The girls stay seated with you, kicking back the bags that teeter toward the dancing flames in front of everyone. He’s the only one here who doesn’t live in the house, too attached to his family home to give it up but there are times where it feels like he spends more time here than he does at home.

“Where’s Taehyun?” You ask around your popsicle, inquiring about your housemate.

He looks at you as Yeonjun peels Beomgyu off, dragging him into the sand. Soobin kneels down to the bags, waving at your other housemates before he answers you, picking things out of the bag in a meticulously precise manner. A bag of chips, a bunch of bananas, some bottled punch, all tossed into the sand.

“With the car, he’s trying to squeeze into the driveway,” he tosses you a small bag of hot fries, the corner of his mouth lifting when it lands in your lap. “You like these, right?”

You hold what’s left of your popsicle in your mouth, lifting the snack-size bag. You actually don’t like them, but he does and you remember lying to him when you first met. It’d escaped your lips before you could even stop it, but his eyes had lit up and he had spent the entire seven hours of your shift talking to you about the stupid snacks. You had lied to him so much about them that you had forced yourself to buy them from the vending machine for a month and had forced yourself to eat them.

You never did learn how to love them, but you also never told him how much you despised the snack and it was just far too late to do it now.

“Yeah,” you lied, tearing open the bag and pulling the popsicle out of your mouth. You held the open bag toward him. “I’m in the middle of eating something else, though.”

His eyes drop to your lips, then to the popsicle in your hand. He stares at it in just the right way to make your stomach twist, but he shakes his head, averting his gaze. As you pull the bag back in toward yourself, he pulls out a matching bag.

“I’ve got my own!” He exclaims with a smile.

“What about me?” Yeonjun asks, sitting up from the sand.

Soobin gives you an entertained smile and looks over his shoulder at his friend. He takes out a small bag of chocolate from the bag and tosses it over to him. Yeonjun almost fumbles it due to Beomgyu’s interference, but he triumphantly holds it up before tearing it open and pouring it down Beomgyu’s throat.

“You missed a great save, earlier,” Soobin says to you. The bags are emptied and abandoned by the fireside when he gets up, walking over to sit lazily in the sand by your side. He leans back on his elbows, opening up his own bag of hot fries and taking two in his mouth. “It was literally minutes after you left, but I pulled a guy out of the water and had to perform CPR, it was great.”

“You’re celebrating having to perform CPR on a tourist?”

“No, I’m celebrating that I saved his life. He was so grateful and so beat up by the waves that he gave me his dinner reservations at the country club tomorrow.” He looks up at you. For a moment, you think he’s going to ask you to dinner. There’s a certain passion that he’s always had. It makes his cheeks pink during the midday shifts and lights his eyes up in the darkest times of the night and you always find yourself imagining how he’d look at you if he were as passionate about you as he was about life. You’d always thought it’d look a little bit like now, his cheeks lifted with a smile, his eyes creased in joy, the fire creating dancing fires on his skin. But then, he opens his mouth and the illusion is shattered. “Do you think Heejin’s interested?”

You don’t even feel disappointed at his question. All you do is fight the urge to roll your eyes as you both cast a glance at one of your housemates. Heejin laughs loudly at something Yeonjun says to her, shaking her head at him as Hyunjin rolls her eyes, picking up one of the chip bags that Soobin brought. You can’t even be mad at Heejin, who’s as beautiful as she is perfect. All you can do is wake up every morning and wish to be more like her. Envy is a terrible disease, you hope you get better.

“Probably,” you reply.

“Are you interested?” He waits until you look at him quizzically. “I mean, if you were her – would you be interested?”

“Oh,” you lick your bottom lip. “Listen, Soobin – It’s not like that.”

His smile widens at your words and he lets out a short laugh. “Didn’t we move on from that?”

Now you roll your eyes. He moves on from things quickly, you’ve learned, much quicker than you do. You feel terrible for not being able to shrug off your resentment and your hurt, for not being the laid back, easygoing person that you portray yourself to be. It’s not his fault that he doesn’t like you and it’s definitely not his fault that he’s the kind of guy that you can fall in love with. You know that by now, half a year later, you should be able to look at him and not have a bitter taste in your mouth.

But, you’re sure you remember things a lot differently than he does. Just friends don’t do what you guys did. Just friends definitely don’t look at each other the way you guys did. But when your gaze is captured by Heejin again, you wonder if maybe you’re just a little delirious. He said it wasn’t like that, maybe you just did your thing and read too much into it like you always did.

“It’s funny, Binnie,” you lie, bringing your popsicle back up to your lips.

“It makes me sound like a jerk.”

“Maybe you are.”

You look back at him and find him already looking at you. In the glow of the bonfire, you can see his lips are red from the hot fries. Stained a cherry color that makes you think that maybe the stale fries in your hand aren’t that bad after all. You tear your eyes away from him, immediately ashamed of yourself for the thought.

“I’m kidding, ask her. She likes the food there.”

Out of the corner of your eyes, you see him tip the bag into his mouth. He chews loudly before getting up and brushing the sand off of his pants. Before he goes to talk to her, he thanks you and your name falls off of his lips. It lands on you before you can even process it, watching him steal Heejin from her conversation and woo her away from the crowd. You have to pretend to be interested in Hyunjin and Beomgyu’s antics at Taehyun’s arrival, pretending like you’re not watching them as they take a seat by the water.

You remind yourself that you absolutely cannot be friends with Soobin. It’s not his fault, you just can’t be around him without feeling like you deserve to be turned into stone by Medusa. Whenever you find yourself in his presence, you find yourself wishing to be more like someone he’d like, or you find yourself wishing that he was less charming. You find yourself hurting yourself with your poisonous thoughts because of a situation that you can’t control and as much as you admit to yourself that you don’t like him like that anymore, you have never really gotten over him.

And he was never yours, anyway.

Have you always been this way? A monster painted in the green shades of jealousy? Did he really bring this out of you or had you always just been this way?

“I’m going to call it a night guys,” you say. You force yourself out of your spiralling thoughts, standing up and spilling your still full bag of hot fries. “I’ve got another early shift tomorrow.”

“You’re leaving me with them?” Hyunjin asks, but there isn’t any malice in her words. “I can’t believe you have to be responsible and like, a morning person. Awfully gross of you, if I do say so myself.”

She sends you off with a laugh and you mirror hers, turning toward the old, tall beach house of yours and walking away from all of the regret that lingers on the sand.

Despite the slow drizzle of rain, you stay seated on the red board among the calm waves. It isn’t a terrible storm, it’s rather calm – a remnant of whatever remains in you anytime you let your emotions get the better of you. With a tilt of your head, you let droplets of rain land on your skin. They kiss your neck gently, running down your bare arms while the ocean washes over the tops of your knees that sink in the water. You’re out here alone today, no partner in the stand with you due to unpredictable weather. The truth is, you don’t even have to be out here either, but you need the pay and you can’t stay around the house all day.

It’s been a week since Saturday. Heejin dressed beautifully for dinner, though she was adamant to the entire house that it wasn’t a date. It was just two friends going to grab dinner while pretending they were rich heirs. She swore up and down to you as you did her hair that she didn’t even like Soobin that way, reminding you that she knew how much you had liked him. Just like everyone else in the house, she was oblivious to the fact that your cheeks still flushed when the sunlight caught him the right way and the way that your knuckles always turned white when he was brought up in conversation. Nobody knew how much you still pined over him, not even you.

You know yourself, you think. You know that of course you still like him, but you loathe him more. You hate him for taking your heart in his hands during your first summer here. You hate him for holding your cheek as the sun set and ghosting his lips over yours before pulling away to talk about something else. You hate him for trapping you between him and the walls with an insatiable hunger in his eyes only to walk away from you but most of all, you hate how you had confessed to him in front of all of your friends and he had shut you down completely.

The thought of that humiliation makes you open your eyes to the gray clouds above you, a scream wanting to rip from your throat. What would be worse – daring God to strike you down with a lightning bolt or dunking your head underwater and trapping yourself with the board? Instead, you bury your face in your hands and groan quietly at yourself before lifting your head at the sound of your name.

Soobin stands on shore with a megaphone in his hand. You aren’t too far out, still close enough to shore to hear him order you back to land and call you a childish name. His hood is pulled up over his head and in his other hand, you can see your own hoodie hanging from his fingers. Like a patient mother, he lowers the megaphone after his announcement and places it on his hip, jutting it out and tapping his foot like he’s waiting for you to obey him.

“Oh my god, please just strike me,” you murmur, casting your gaze upwards again. “Please. Strike me.”

The clouds don’t obey you. There’s no lighting, no thunder, no cosmic force that gives you an out. It’s with a heavy sigh that you paddle back to shore, dragging the paddle board behind you. Your feet dig into the sand as Soobin hands you your sweater and when you reach to take it, he exchanges what he’s holding to pick up the paddle board instead.

“What are you doing?” You ask, wiping the water off of your face. “Shouldn’t you be at home?”

“Well, yeah, but I went to the grocery store for Kai and you guys and ran into Mr. Bang who told me that you were clocked in today – which, didn’t surprise me, I guess.” He drags the paddle board behind him as you walk back to the stand. “So, I came here.”

“You just left us without groceries?”

“I mean, I have the groceries in my car, I’ll just drop them off after work.”

Underneath the stand, you zip up your hoodie and watch him lean the paddle board against the wood ladder. You climb up without another word, pulling your hood up when you reach the top. His bag is laying by the foot of his chair, towel and belongings messily tossed around. As he climbs up, you grab his spilled contents and hand it to him when he gets to the top, ignoring his quiet thanks as you settle into your seat. It’s quiet between the two of you, nothing surrounding you but the soft patter of the rainfall on the umbrella stretching over your heads.

It didn’t used to be this way. When you first moved here and first got this job, you would wish for days like this where there would be nobody at the beach but you and Soobin. He never let you sit out here alone, knowing that you wanted the extra hours and that you were good company. You two could spend days out here just talking. He learned about your past and you learned about his upbringing here, he’d tell you the in town gossip and you’d tell him the happenings of the house. There were days like this where he’d tackle you into the sand after dancing with you. There were days where you would abandon the chairs and sit at the edge of the stand to lean into each other.

It didn’t used to be this way, but things changed in the blink of an eye.

“How’s San?” He breaks the silence. “Talk to him lately?”

You turn toward him, lips pressed into a thin line. You only dated him for two months – right after Soobin rejected you and only to get over the sting of it. He was a great guy, but the truth was you had spent more time convincing yourself that you liked him than admitting that you only said yes to his offer because you wanted to prove to everybody that you’d moved on just fine. It was your fault that you two had broken up, to everyone’s shock but yourself. He had been fun and a great distraction, but he didn’t line up in your life the way you had desperately convinced yourself that he had.

“Yeah,” you lie, watching him meet your eyes. “A little bit.”

“Oh,” he pauses. “Yeah, that’s cool. So… you’re going to his party, then?”

You nod. You’re too good of a liar, you decide, and you don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing.

“It’s his birthday, I wouldn’t miss it.”

Soobin looks lost in thought, looking out at the ocean like he’s searching for an answer. There are bags underneath his eyes, making you bite your tongue before you ask him how he’s doing. He’s that kind of person who will do a grocery run for an entire household before he does it for himself. You’ve witnessed him offer the shirt off of his back without realizing it’s his last one left. Soobin is the kind of guy that will spend his life taking care of everyone else without taking care of himself and when you guys were closer, that was your job.

You didn’t mind. It was an honor to run your hands through his hair and let him sleep in your lap. You would give yourself up to make sure he was okay and you wonder now who’s taking care of him – if anyone’s taking care of him because he won’t do it himself. Your fingers itch to reach out to him, but you cover them up with the sleeves of your hoodie and reach for your backpack, digging for your phone in the side pocket. Your lies can’t catch up with you, especially in front of him and you comb through your text messages before sending one to San.

“Anyway, this weather,” he continues finally. “I bet it’s gonna rain all over his beach party.”

“He’ll just have to take it indoors.”

“But that’s boring, so high school. Did I ever tell you the time he had to do that during his senior year? Yeonjun and Wooyoung wouldn’t let him breathe because his basement was so small and his parents went to bed at like nine,” he babbles.

You let him finish his story, ooh-ing and aah-ing at the correct times, laughing when he did and listening to him talk about how badly San embarrassed himself. Before you can even interrupt, Soobin launches into another story of how embarrassing San is but you’re focused on your text messages in front of you, barely listening to what he’s saying to you.

San’s eager to hear from you, extending an invitation to his party immediately and to dinner tonight. You look up at Soobin, who animatedly explains what happened at Yeonjun’s birthday and how San almost never recovered from the humiliation. He’s not even looking at you, he’s still watching the ocean, searching for somebody else that needs rescuing. It’s like he hopes that somebody is out there in the rain, drowning and taking on too much water so that he can leap into action and bring them back from the brink of death. He doesn’t even notice that you’re half-involved in the conversation, talking too much to allow you time to respond.

In the entire year that you’ve known Soobin, you can admit that there are more times where it seems like he doesn’t notice you. He sees everyone else and everything else that’s in action, but he just doesn’t see you. Being close to him was like giving yourself whiplash, the way that he would spend nights on the beach with you holding your hand only to wipe his palms on his shorts when someone approached you guys in the mornings. Or, how he would reject every other girl that tried to dance with him only to push you in the direction of a cute tourist. Or, worst, how he would spend days at a time looking for somebody that wasn’t you.

Someone in the water, someone in the crowd, somebody who wasn’t you.

“I mean, isn’t that just humiliating?” Soobin finishes, finally looking at you. He meets your eyes, then drops his eyes to your lit up phone. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t be, I’m just–”

“Are you texting him right now?” He reaches for your phone and you snatch it away from him before he can reach it.

“That’s none of your business.”

Soobin scoots his chair closer to yours, a devious smile sprouting on his lips as he scoots closer to you. His hands reach for the small device in yours as you reach out, attempting to hold the phone away from him. A giggle leaves him, contagious in energy and drawing one from you as he starts to stand up. You stand up in defiance, dropping your arms behind your back as you guys laugh with each other among the rainfall.

“What’s he saying?” He asks. “Ooooh, I love you so much, let’s kiss at my party and hold hands.”

“Shut up!”

Soobin says your name in a mocking tone, continuing to pretend to be San. “Wanna come over and play volleyball against me? I’m so good at beach volleyball, I could teach you.”

“Ew, stop, you don’t even sound like him!”

His chest bumps against yours as you back into the side of the stand, your phone still behind your back. Your eyes meet his round ones, dark pupils staring into yours at your proximity. Your heart races so loudly you can hear it in your ears, the grip on your phone loosening by the second. Soobin’s hands brace himself against the railing, pushing himself off of you, giving you just barely enough distance to catch your breath. It’s just like last summer, all over again and you’re suddenly dying to pull him against you.

But, you didn’t do that summer. You never had the courage to press your lips against his and kiss him like there was no tomorrow. All summer, you spent time with him and yearned for him, letting your chest catch on fire every time he looked at you and letting your mind go numb whenever he laced his hand with yours. But, you never let yourself really kiss him. His lips barely tracing yours in the sand didn’t count, that wasn’t a real kiss, not the kind that would make your heart stop and your lungs fail.

“What does he sound like?” Soobin leans down, coming eye to eye with you. His hood is falling off of his head, leaving his hair tousled and unkempt. “Tell me.”

“He…” You lose your breath, watching his eyes fall from yours to your lips when you speak. “He sounds different.”

“Different, how?” His eyes trail back up to yours, taking in every feature like it’s his first time seeing you, like you’re something he needs to memorize. “When he’s with you? I’ve known him all my life, I know how he sounds.”

“No, you don’t. Not the way I know how he sounds.”

You see his shoulders tense briefly, his face remaining unchanged. You know the look that crosses his gaze, like he wants to say something but he doesn’t.

“Yoo-hoo! Excuse me?”

A sudden voice makes you both jump. Soobin leaps away from you like you’ve burned him and you fling your phone into the sand behind you accidentally. Both of you turn away from each other, you toward your phone and him toward the woman with a white, floppy hat on.

“Yeah?” Soobin calls down with a cough.

“Is the beach open today?” She asks and you start to climb down the ladder, completely ignoring her and Soobin. “Can me and my family swim?”

He gives her the spiel on the dangers, that there’s no lightning and no thunder, that he’ll be around for a couple of hours if they really want to. You, oppositely, fall to your knees and pick up your phone, shaking off the sand and pulling a face at the state of it. You know that your housemates are going to make fun of you again for it, but when your phone lights up, you read the text message on the screen and give a sigh of relief. Maybe you won’t have to spend the night at home at all.

Because what you don’t want to admit to Soobin is that you do know what San sounds like. He was fun, that’s all he was to you because he was a good kisser, and good at making you forget, and good at making you say his name so much you forgot about Soobin. While you had spent those two months waking up and going through your days pretending like Soobin hadn’t ripped your heart out, he had spent those two months doing a good job at making you forget all about him – for a moment at least and he didn’t even know he was doing it.

“You okay?” Soobin calls down to you.

You look up at him, turning your phone off and scrambling to your feet. “I gotta go.”

He says your name, almost pleadingly. “Come on, I’m sorry – stay.”

“No, it’s not you,” you lie. Your skin is still flushed from how close he was, your heart still racing – for him, for San, for yourself. You’re not sure anymore.

He doesn’t say anything in response, watching you half-heartedly climb up the ladder to retrieve your things. You do it in silence and when you climb back down to retrieve the paddle board, he stops you and tells you he’ll bring it back himself. You look up at him, but he’s not looking at you anymore, he’s looking out to sea.

“Is that a hickey?” Kai yells.

You turn around and deliver a sharp slap against his bicep. He retaliates by pulling down your hood and pressing down on your head, exposing your neck further to him and earning a sharp gasp. The kitchen is usually quiet at half past eight, but as the morning rays shine in through the bay window in the room, your housemates are pouring in. The built-in booth by the window is only occupied by you and Kai, who you try to kick off of you. He obliges, but only to turn to the boys.

“Guess who has a hickey?”

Yeonjun gives you a glance as he clambers in, eyes squinted with tiredness while Beomgyu covers his mouth at Kai’s announcement. You hear a soft “oh my god” from him, followed by Taehyun slamming his bowl of cereal down on the table.

“You’ve only been seeing him for a couple of days again and he’s already giving you hickies?” He asks, interrogating you like he’s your father.

“I gave him some too,” you shoot back.

Hyunjin comes into the kitchen shortly, looking less tired than the boys and entirely more put together. Kai repeats the news, earning you a smirk from her who pulls Taehyun out of the booth so she can slide in next to you.

“Was it as good as you remember?” she asks, stealing a grape from your bowl. “I remember last summer when you came home and you–”

You push her lightly, interrupting her sentence just as Heejin walks into the kitchen, Soobin trailing slowly behind her. He looks tired, eyes red and sweatpants hanging low on his hips when he walks in. You note how his eyes run over you briefly before he follows Heejin, leaning on the counter while she pours them both a cup of coffee.

“You slept over?” Yeonjun asks. “And you didn’t even say hi?”

“He fell asleep as soon as he got here,” Heejin replies, pulling a stray chair up to the table.

Yeonjun makes a noise. “Ugh, why bother coming over then?”

“Closer than my house.”

“Now that everybody’s really here,” Kai pushes your head again, much to your dismay and you have to push him to get his hands off of you. “Did everybody see that?”

“Oh my god, leave me alone, it’s my day off.”

“You know, I always knew you two would date again,” Kai continues. “It just makes sense to me. You and him are just – yeah, it makes sense to me, doesn’t it make sense to you guys? I mean, she’s– and he’s–”

“Leave it alone,” Yeonjun speaks up, chewing on Taehyun’s cereal. “It’s just a hickey. That’s barely a sign of commitment.”

The table falls silent, but only for a moment. There’s never a dull moment in the house and before you know it, they’re talking about something else entirely. Across from you, Soobin holds his mug of coffee, but he doesn’t drink it. He eases himself into the conversation and you watch him wake up. From where you sit, you can see the sunlight catch the brown of his eyes and the color of his lips. He almost glistens in the sunlight, tipping his head back in laughter and dodging a grape that Hyunjin throws at him. He looks entirely happy to be here until he notices your gaze.

When you meet eyes, his smile drops altogether. It doesn’t falter or return, it just drops. He looks at your neck before he drops his eyes to his coffee, staring intently at the mug like he’s reading a fortune in the small ripples of movement in the liquid. It takes someone calling for his opinion for his demeanor to return and you feel trapped in the booth, your bowl of fruit suddenly a daunting task to finish.

“Can I get out?” You ask, picking up your bowl. “I think I’m gonna go for a swim.”

“Need a lifeguard?” Beomgyu jokes, raising his eyebrows at Soobin.

“Off duty,” he replies shortly, pretending to be immersed in his coffee as you scoot out of the booth.

Your friends continue their morning chatter as you place your fruit on the counter and walk out of the kitchen door. You’re quick to kick off your flip flops, abandoning them on the small deck of the house before you walk into the sand, marching toward the beach. You really don’t have any intention of swimming. No, you’d rather just walk out to the beach and stand at the edge of the water until you’re knee deep in sand, contemplating your life.

You don’t regret how you’ve spent the last few days at all. It’s been fun and like you always have with San, you’ve spent the last few days forgetting that Soobin exists at all. In between the touches and the whispers and the hickeys you barely had time to remember how much he affected you. Still, you can’t really lie and say that you didn’t think about him at all. A moment where San’s tongue was pressed against the base of your throat left you wondering how Soobin would do it. A curious thought if he would like your touch as much as San does. It didn’t matter, because as soon as you thought about it you reminded yourself that you would never have him in that way.

You could barely have him as a friend without wanting to spontaneously combust in jealousy and resentment. It was both exhausting and humiliating.

When you reach the shoreline, you kick emptily at the incoming wave and splash yourself with seawater. It hits your exposed legs and the cloth of your top as you contemplate actually jumping in or not. Nobody would know if you didn’t, nobody would really care either. Your housemates are good people and they’re good friends, they don’t care if you change your mind at the shore and yet, you wonder if you should at least wet your hair so you can at least pretend that you went in a little bit.

“Are you going in or are you just gonna stand there all morning?” Soobin’s voice draws your attention from the white sea foam and you turn around to see him approaching you.

He’s still in his sweatpants, his cropped shirt exposing his midriff to the morning sun deliciously. You’re sure he doesn’t miss the way your eyes dip to his exposed skin before rushing back up to his face and you capture your bottom lip between your teeth as you turn back around toward the sea.

“I don’t know, the water’s cold.”

“It’s always cold.” He comes to a stop by your side, hands in his pockets.

“Yeah, but I’m cold.”

Soobin looks at your attire, at your small tank top and your tiny shorts that cover up the small swimsuit you both know you have on underneath. Then, he looks at you with raised eyebrows and looks away with a shrug.

“It’s seventy degrees.”

“I’m always cold.”

You watch his lips part like he has something smart to say, but he shuts them before he lets anything out. He looks down at you one more time before looking back at the water, hands moving to the waistband of his sweatpants.

“I’ll go in with you,” he says, shucking off his sweatpants and tossing them onto the sand behind you.

“You didn’t even drink your coffee and you look like you’re about to pass out, I’m going to have to end up saving you.”

“Maybe you’ll have to give me mouth-to-mouth.” His shirt is next, tossed next to his sweatpants before he runs into the water, red swim trunks bright against the deep blue water. You watch him splash in, falling face first into the sea and disappearing underneath the surface.

You take the few seconds he’s under to think, time slowing around you as you contemplate shedding your clothes and diving in with him. He’s hot and cold, not that you’re any better, but either way, completely and utterly exhausting. He refused to meet your eyes after seeing your hickey and now he’s beckoning you to join him in the water. What are you going to do, say no?

You peel off your outer layer of clothes, treading into the water lightly, not as chaotically as he did. When his head finally pops up, he’s barely a foot away from you. The two of you stand in the water, face to face as he shifts closer to you.

Soobin is an enigma of a person, eyes studying you so intently you feel like you must be from another world. Your mind races, trying to fill in the blanks of the silence, struggling to figure out what he’s thinking. There’s nothing more that you want to know than what he’s thinking in this moment. What does he think of you? What does he feel for you? What is he thinking when he looks at you like this? You almost feel important in his gaze, like you matter to him.

Then, he reaches out for you. His hand comes to the side of your neck, softly touching you and pulling goosebumps onto your arms. Slowly and tantalizingly, his thumb brushes over the hickey Kai was so adamant on showing off to everyone in the kitchen. Unwittingly, you tilt your head and give him more access, watching his eyes dip over the curve of your jawline and onto the hickey. You can’t read him, eyes almost lulling shut at the feeling of his thumb continuing to stroke the surface of the orchid bruise you sport embarrassingly.

The waves lap at your shoulders, at his chest. It washes over you and you attempt to time your breathing with every fifth wave, but every time you think you’ve caught your breath, his finger moves again. Your jaw squares when his hand shifts ever so slightly, almost quivering when he instead runs his thumb over the line of your jaw. His breath is steady, a solid inhale and exhale you can hear when he pulls you into him.

“You should really get your head underwater,” he says finally.

“What?”

He gives you a light push before splashing a large wave at you, soaking your head completely. For a moment, all you hear is his laughter while you wipe the water out of your eyes, your hands in your now wet hair as he sends the sound of his laughter out into the waves. You reach out, pushing him and forcing yourself to laugh too. Your heartbeat is uneven, your knees weak at the sudden intimacy that’s now ruined while he swims away from you.

“God, you’re so mean!” You call to him and deeper into the waves, he turns to you and sends you a smile.

“What’re you gonna do about it? Give me a hickey?”

“You wish,” you scoff, but your eyes move to his collarbone, watching the waves hit it, hiding and revealing his neck as he treads water.

“Come on, you’re thinking about it, aren’t you?”

“Right, I am. Just like you’re thinking about giving me one, aren’t you?”

His eyes glisten as you slowly swim over to him, the coldness of the water keeping you grounded to reality. You couldn’t float away now even if you wanted to.

“Too bad you’re not the one giving them to me,” you say, catching up to him. “It’s just not like that.”

He splashes you again, but his smile isn’t as wide as it just was and you’re unsure if you’re just imagining it or not.

San finds you at the party as soon as you arrive, his hands on your hips and his fingerprints on your skin. With your arms wrapped around his neck, you happily accept a kiss from him, wishing him happy birthday when you pull away. Your housemates pile in behind you and you take the moment to slip away while they occupy him, all six of them quick to pull him into their own, little perfect storm. You move through his home to his beach property, eager to sink your toes in the sand and get wasted before you can really think anything through.

Your eyes search through the small crowd he’s gathered. It’s not the busiest party on the block, but you can definitely get lost in all of the people if you close your eyes and let yourself get pulled into them. Still, you unknowingly find yourself looking for him, wracking the crowd to spot a head that pokes out above the crowd, somebody who makes the room light up and still foolishly makes your heart race.

You don’t know how you feel about him anymore. You can’t differentiate between the resentment you have for him and the longing. It’s like you’re just watching him move through life, desperate for his attention and hating him whenever he doesn’t give it to you. You wish that you were a better person. If you were, you’d move on and be with someone because you want to be, not because they give you a good distraction. You would just take a deep breath and ask him what he wants or what he doesn’t want from you – but that requires not only becoming a good person, but the kind of courage that you’ve never possessed.

You’d have to look him in the eye, knowing that you could get your heart stomped on again and completely accept it. That was something that you’d never be able to do. That kind of courage was something that you’d never be able to have. But when you finally see him, you let out a short breath and you think for only a moment that perhaps you do hate him for making you love him, but you’d rather have him in your life than not at all.

He spots you a moment after you find him, a wide smile on his lips and a wave sent in your direction. He brings his pointer finger to his thumb, making a circle and mouthing ‘wow’ so exaggeratedly you can see it from where you stand. Before you have a chance to move toward him, though, you hear your friends pour out from the house, the man of honor following shortly behind.

“Happy birthday,” you say again, turning around and embracing him.

“Thank you,” he thanks you, pressing his lips to your temple gently. “Want a drink?”

“Sure, anything’s fine.”

San wraps an arm around Yeonjun, pulling him away from the group as he drags him to go get drinks. Your friends disperse quietly, Heejin brushing your elbow and gesturing for you to follow her, but you decline, sure in your spot. For a moment, you’re completely alone in the party and you think you prefer it this way. People are mingling, wrapped in each other’s presence as they lock lips and move their bodies against each other. You can hear laughter layered atop chatter and you look around, looking at life and you find yourself completely fine on the deck by yourself.

Seated at the edge with your toes in the sand, you expect the next person to approach you to be San but Soobin himself breaks from the crowd and walks toward you. His walk is fine but you can tell from the rose hues in his cheeks and the crescent of his eyes that he’s a little tipsy, leaning dangerously toward drunk. A lightweight, you can guess he’s had exactly one shitty beer before your arrival and he comes over to you with a smile on his lips and a hand outstretched toward you.

“Come on, I wanna show you something,” he says, words starting to slur together before he gulps down the remainder of what’s in his cup. He tosses the cup onto the deck, waiting in front of you to take his hand.

“I’m waiting for San,” you reply quietly, but he leans down and takes your hand.

“Please?” He asks, eyes widening. “It’ll be quick, I’ll return you to the birthday boy in a minute.”

You look around, spotting San by the drink cooler with Yeonjun and a couple other friends. They look lost in conversation, joy in their features as they laugh with each other and you can’t find a reason to say no to Soobin. So, you let him take your hand and you let yourself get dragged away. You expect him to take you to the shore, but he takes you inside, instead. Soobin takes you into the house San grew up in and visits in the summertime between school, leading you down to the basement where you’re completely alone.

He drops your hand in the middle of the well lit room, humming to himself when he goes to an old record player along the wall. You watch his back, wringing your hands together before you look behind you at the staircase leading back up. There’s a feeling in your gut telling you to turn on your heel and walk back upstairs. You’re thinking that maybe it’d be a better idea to be with them tonight instead of a drunk Soobin. You should walk back to the beach, fall into San’s arms and spend the night with him instead but before you can make a move, a soft tune fills the room and you turn around into Soobin’s sudden embrace.

“What’re you doing?” You ask with a laugh, leaning into his arms like you’ve always done it.”

“I’m dancing with the prettiest girl at the party,” he says, resting his chin on your head as you start to dance to the tune.

He’s as good at dancing as you remember, even when inebriated. The tune that fills your ears is a familiar one, the same song that he’s always humming, the one you can never remember the name of. Like he can feel the unease on top of your skin, he hums along to the tune melodiously. He was born for this, you think, closing your eyes as you lean your head against his chest. The record is soft along with Soobin’s deep tone, but he’s all you can hear. You can’t even hear the sounds of the party outside, unable to focus on anything but him.

His scent, his hands on the small of your back, his chin atop your head, his presence, his being. You are completely engulfed in him and it blurs your thoughts. All the humiliation you feel whenever you think of him sheds from you, all of the resentment you taste on your tongue when you have a conversation with him falls with the sigh you let out. For one moment only, you feel blissful and there’s a part of you that’s memorizing every detail of the ticking seconds so you can remember it later.

“I miss you,” he says. “I really miss you.”

Confusion seeps into your pores, your eyes blinking slowly at his sudden confession. You pull away immediately and relish in the way his hands stay on your waist.

“I never left.”

“But, you did,” his hold loosens. “We’re not the same anymore and I really miss…”

“Oh.” The smallest slice of disappointment sears through your heart and you take another step away from him. “You don’t miss me, you miss what we used to be.”

“No, I miss you,” Soobin protests. His eyes are round, big doe eyes that look down at you like he’s seeing you for the first time, really seeing you. “I miss waking up with you and spending rainy days with you, I miss how easy it was with you before… before everything changed.”

“Before I admitted I had feelings for you?”

He blinks and second by second you can feel your heart sinking lower into your stomach.

“Before I changed everything because I thought you might’ve liked me too?” You blink hard, refusing to let yourself cry in front of him. “I don’t know about you, Soobin, but I couldn’t do those things without having feelings for you. How do you do all of the things we did and then embarrass me in front of all of our friends like that?”

Soobin’s lips part, your name on the tip of his tongue. Just like that night six months ago when you poured your heart out to him on one of the coldest days of winter. With your feet in the cold sand and your friends surrounding you, he pulled you in that morning and held you against him and you had been foolish enough to confess to him just how much he meant to you. You will never forget the way he pulled away from you and the look he passed onto you, the confusion, the disgust. He practically jumped away from you at your confession, putting an arms distance between you two as he looked at you and loudly announced that whatever you thought you guys were, it wasn’t like that.

The pity of your friends was worse, much worse than getting rejected by Soobin who left without much of another word. Heejin tried helping you, walking you home and running a warm bath for you. Hyunjin offered to beat him up, stating that she’d done so before and she wouldn’t hesitate to do it again and the boys–they were friends with him first, you couldn’t expect them to take your side on anything but you weren’t ready for the looks they would send you. Every time they gave you that look, like they were looking at a kicked puppy, you could feel yourself reliving it all over again.

“I liked you,” he said, the words spilling from his lips, slurring together as he stares at you.

“Fuck you, Soobin.” You turn on your heels to leave, ready to make up a dumb excuse to leave early.

“No, I liked you,” Soobin takes a hold of your hand. “I really did and I still do, I like you, I lo–”

“Don’t,” you snap.

In the middle of the basement, you stand with your hand in his while the music fills in all of the gaps between you. Your heart beats in time with the slow beat and you can feel your palm shaking in his. You look at him with clear eyes and realize that his are filled with nothing but fog. Your shoulders have never felt heavier, watching him try to formulate a response and you shake your head at him.

“Don’t say it.”

“Why?”

“You don’t mean it, you’re drunk.”

He jerks back like he’s been slapped, dropping your hand altogether and what you’ve always known fills your head. That you’ve finally said it out loud and he realizes that it’s true – he doesn’t mean it. He doesn’t like you, he never has.

“I’m in love with you,” he confesses instead and your breath catches in your throat. His brows are drawn together in a tight frown, written with perplexity and the softest anger you’ve ever seen. “I’m in love with you and you’re trying to tell me that I don’t mean it? Who are you to tell me what I mean and don’t mean?”

“But, you don’t mean it! You turned me away six months ago in front of all of our friends, should I go get them and see how they remember it?”

“It was a mistake, I was– I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t–”

“Nothing you say is a good enough reason for what you did. You broke my heart and you’re breaking it all over again.” You hate how your voice quivers, but even worse, you hate how his confession doesn’t feel as good as you thought it would. It feels horrible. Heavy and tainted, smelling like the beer on his breath and the perfume on your wrists. It tastes like seawater that you’ve accidentally ingested, burning your throat because you breathed it instead of air.

“What do you want me to say?” He asks, losing the calm demeanor that you’ve only ever known. Even when turning you down he’d been soft around the edges. Even afterward, he’d been determined not to make it awkward, kind in manner and demeanor. Now, he’s different. Sharp tongue and rough edges, running his hands through his dark hair and leaving it poking up in odd places. “I was stupid. I went home and I thought about all of it and I just– I had already hurt you.”

“So, you just never told me, then? ‘Oh, I hurt her already, better just let her sit in her feelings and never talk about it again!’”

“Seriously? The second I said it wasn’t like that you turned around and got into bed with San.”

“Oh, so it’s my fault? For trying to move on?”

“I’m not going to confess to someone who has a boyfriend, would you?” He laughs emptily. “You dated him for two and a half months. By the time you broke up with him, you didn’t even look like you cared about me and now four months later I’m not even sure you like me.”

“So, it is my fault,” you repeat.

He looks at you.

“No, it’s my fault. I– this was a mistake,” he shakes his head. “I shouldn’t have…” Soobin trails off, turning around and going to the record player, turning it off. “I shouldn’t have tried to be in your life again.”

“No, maybe you shouldn’t have.”

He looks over his shoulder at you, his eyes shining with tears and you swallow yours down, turning on your heel swiftly and climbing up the stairs at twice the speed. You don’t even turn back to the party, running out of the front door and down the street. Attempting to distance yourself from the party, you walk and walk and walk until you end up back at your home. Digging through your purse for your keys, you fail to find them and instead fish out your phone with shaky fingers, typing through hot tears as you lie to your friends and San about how sick you’re feeling.

You thought you’d been heartbroken six months ago, but this hurts much more than that. Through the blur of your tears, you walk around to the back of the house to sit on one of the sandy chairs on the deck and hold your face in your hands. Your palms grow wet, capturing your tears and heartbreak with only the soundtrack of the ocean keeping you company.

You’ve established that you’re not a night owl. You don’t enjoy the night as much as you love the morning, you don’t find the beauty and joy in the stars in the same way you do the sunlight. You’ve always thought him to be the sun, but maybe he’s always been the moon. Just out of reach, just something that you’ve always known was beautiful, but always knew wasn’t meant for you. Some people are made for each other, you’re the kind of person that believes in soulmates and as you spend another sunset on the stand, you’re hit with the realization that maybe, he just wasn’t made for you.

The realization hits you square between the eyes, sending you into your chair after you climb the stand and taking the air from your lungs. You’ve cried as much as you can for the past few days, arriving at work with huge sunglasses to hide the red around your eyes. You pull them out of your bag when you settle into your seat, putting them on despite the sunset shift. It really isn’t like anybody is around to see you, but in the odd case that someone magically shows up, you’re all set. You suppose that the sunglasses are actually just for you.

Like you have all week, you spend the rest of the evening watching the late night swimmers exit the water, counting the surfboards and bright swimsuits as they pass you by. The last person you see comes from the water slowly, a tall figure who you recognize instantly by the way he walks and the way he shakes the water out of his hair. If you had any energy left, you’d sink lower in your chair and pull up your hoodie, deepen your voice when he walks by and you wish him a good evening. There’s a part of you that wonders, though, if he recognizes you, too. It’s not like you’re hiding.

From behind your sunglasses, you watch him as he approaches the stand without shying away. When he gets closer, you make a note to yourself, observing how tired he looks – just as tired as you do. Is he losing sleep over it, too? Or, is that just a you thing? He stops at the base of the stand for a moment, just out of eyesight before you hear him climbing up. Without a word, he reaches the top and sits on the edge of the stand, legs dangling off with his heels hitting the wood ladder.

The silence envelops you, but it isn’t as awkward as you thought it’d be. It’s an eerie serene, like you’ve woken up in the eye of the storm. You know that there’s chaos just around the corner, but for now, you’re okay. It makes you shift with ease in your seat, setting your sights on the water instead of the boy in front of you. The same boy who you’ve always wanted to love, but the boy you were sure just wasn’t yours to have. If he was, wouldn’t you have found a way to have him by now?

Neither of you say anything for a minute, then two minutes, then three minutes. It’s the kind of silence that comes with comfort. You’d never been a fan of silence until you met Soobin. He showed you how much you can say in the absence of sound, how much love could come with the kind of quiet that came with sitting aside somebody special. Things are different now, much different. You know you both are sitting here, skin stinging with an invisible shade of red and purple from injuries you handed each other in the name of love. The thing is, you have always believed in soulmates and you have always reached out for love, but before him, you never knew how much it would hurt.

“You know,” he begins softly, breaking the silence as the last rays of sunlight finish their descent. He doesn’t look at you, choosing to keep his vision aligned with his front. “You were never a mistake to me.”

Your arms cross instinctually after you remove your sunglasses, unable to will yourself to say anything back to him. Rising from your seat, you ignore the way your knees shake with wavering nerve and take the few steps to sit beside him. There’s always been a space between you that you’ve always been aware of. Even when you are inches away from him, nose to nose, chest to chest, there’s always something there that pushes you two apart. It’s almost laughable now, when you look at your proximity, when you feel his arm brush against yours.

“But, I don’t think…” he continues. His voice is barely above a whisper. If it weren’t for the silence that you’ve built for yourselves, you don’t think you’d be able to hear him. You always hear him. Always. You can pick his voice out from the crowd, you can hear him from across a room, but you can barely hear him now, losing his words with the pull of the tide and the dance of the breeze. “I don’t know, I don’t think we…”

“I know.”

You look at each other at the same time. Every what-if that’s crossed your mind has crossed his, you’re sure of it. You can see it in the way he looks at you, you can feel it in how he sits.

“I know,” you repeat.

He pauses and you can tell from the way his eyes shift that he’s thinking. Soobin sighs then, making a move toward you that you don’t stop. His hand comes to cup your jaw as he leans into you, pressing a kiss on your lips. You don’t move away from the pressure, shifting into the kiss like you’ve done it a thousand times before. His head tilts in rhythm with yours, lips moving in tandem as he holds you and kisses you like he’ll never get another chance to do it.

Maybe he won’t. Maybe you won’t get to kiss him again, either. The thought makes you feverish against the coolness of the growing nighttime and you think for a moment that he’s going to further ruin nights for you. Your one and only kiss with him is only with the company of the setting sun and the awakening stars. He deepens the kiss and you can feel deep in your bones that you will always think of him when you watch the sun set and now, confidently, you can say that he’s ruined that for you, too.

With still a hold on your jaw, he gracefully shifts his kiss from your lips to the corner, kissing a smooth trail along your jawline to the corner. Your eyes peel open just a fraction as his tongue pokes out, licking a soft trail to the base of your ear. His actions draw a soft moan from the back of your throat which only urges him to tighten his grip on you, palm against the base of your neck as he slowly kisses his way down. You lean back on the stand, allowing him to hold himself above you as he licks and nips at the base of your throat before coming back up to your lips.

He pauses for a moment, brushing your hair out of your face to really look at you and underneath his gaze, you feel warm. It’s the coil that starts to tighten in your stomach and the swell of your heart, the way his lips have swelled and the darkness in his eyes that grows when he leans back in toward you. He kisses your forehead, the tip of your nose, your lips and you wrap your arms around his neck in a weak attempt to hold him against you. You don’t ever want to let him go.

You feel his grip on your thigh, pulling your leg up to hook around his waist as he slots his hips against yours. He presses into you with a deep kiss, pushing himself against you and bringing himself even closer to you. As the coolness starts to settle around you, you feel your temperature rising as your fingers trail down his bare chest, around to his back down his spine. He shivers underneath your touch, his tongue carefully swiping against your bottom lip as you roll your hips.

“Wait,” he pulls away from you, leaving your back against the stand. “No, wait, I can’t.”

“What?” You question, propping yourself up on your elbows as you unhook your leg from him. He pulls himself away from you entirely, shaking his hair out of his face. “Soobin.”

He says your name, reaching out for you gently before he sits up straight and turns back toward the edge of the stand. “I’m sorry.”

Silently, you watch him almost jump off of the stand. You don’t know what you feel more, confused or embarrassed. He leaves quickly like he was never there in the first place and you try to catch your breath as your legs hang off of the edge, blinking hard as the darkness grows deeper around you.

He stops coming by the house and nobody seems to know why. They ask you one afternoon when you return from your shift and you shrug.

“Oh, I wouldn’t know, I don’t know” you reply with a shrug of your shoulders.

Not even you’ve seen him since that night, noticing that he’s taken up later shifts in avoidance of you and switching shifts and stands if he’s ever scheduled with you. You’re thankful for his initiative, grateful that you can still have your schedule and avoid seeing him. It’s much more peaceful this way, you assume, though you’re painfully aware of the fact that you’ll run into him sooner or later. This island is small and as the summer dwindles to a close and the autumn rolls in, you know that soon, tourist season will be over and you’ll be forced to see him.

So far, you’ve pushed it out of your head and replaced it with the coward’s way of thinking. Your search history is filled with overseas flights and opportunities that’ll take you away for the year, you’ve even reached out to your family in the slight fear that you might have to move back in with them again. That’s the last resort, you’ve decided, but when you sit on the couch next to Heejin, you weigh the options in your head and decide you’d rather see your family again than see Soobin.

“He doesn’t even work?” She asks you.

“Not the same shifts as me, I don’t see him a lot, I don’t know.”

“Something’s up,” Yeonjun says. “He’s been weird since July.”

You shrug again, leaning back on the soft cushions to shut your eyes with a soft sigh. They continue to conversations around you, Kai suggests that Soobin’s overwhelmed with work, Beomgyu tells Taehyun that maybe he’s just finally tired of them and Yeonjun hums in response to everyone. When you open your eyes at the pregnant silence that follows, he’s looking at you curiously and you shut your eyes again without the gall to hold the eye contact.

“Let’s go get pizza,” Heejin says, changing the subject. “I’m in the mood for pizza.”

You hear a murmur of grumbling and shuffling around you before Heejin shakes you awake.

“Do you wanna come with us?” She asks.

She’s giving you a look that makes you feel loved and you remember that she is way too observant for her own good. She found you outside that night, tears dried on your cheeks and shivering on the deck. You hadn’t told her what’d happened and she didn’t ask, but she checked in on you for two weeks after it happened and made sure that you were okay. You knew that she probably knew, but she was a good enough friend to keep it between you two.

“No, I’m just gonna take a nap, I think,” you reply softly.

“Any requests, then? Otherwise Yeonjun’s going to let the boys pick all the toppings again.”

You shake your head, mustering up a smile before she gives your hand a squeeze. She leaves gracefully, shutting the door behind her and you hear their cars pulling out of the driveway moments later, leaving you alone. The house is old and big, leaving you with the creaking of the floorboards and the soft breeze that seems to float by you from the cracks in the walls. You love it, you’ve loved it from the moment you stepped foot in it.

It’s rare that you get a moment to yourself in the house, usually always with at least one other person. In a household of seven, you find that loneliness is a foreign concept. You’d never liked loneliness anyway, never a real fan of the way it was more suffocating than having your head underwater. This house was the best thing to ever happen to you, nights spent with someone else in your bed and never having to go somewhere alone if you didn’t want to. While you settle into the silence, you curl your legs into your chest, resting on your side and shutting your eyes for a much needed nap.

But the second your eyes fall shut, the front door opens and you open your eyes with a tight sigh, assuming that somebody forgot their wallet or their phone or their dignity. You sit up and turn to the door, only to see Soobin walking in like he owns the place. His key is in hand, still holding onto the bottom knob as he sends you a blank stare and he looks behind him like he’s contemplating just running away.

“They just left,” you speak first, drawing his attention from the doorway.

“No, I know, I was just stopping by because I thought,” he sighs before shutting the door behind him. “I thought you went with them.”

“I can… go to my room. I was just going to sleep, anyway,” you start to get up, unable to stand the thickening air around you. It was awkward, way beyond awkward and you still felt like you’d tear up if you looked at him for too long. He must’ve felt the same way, looking everywhere else in the room besides you.

“No, I’ll be quick, I’m just going to– Yeonjun borrowed my– I’ll be quick.”

Without saying another word, he takes off toward the stairs and takes them two at a time to the second floor. Your hands grasp at one of the blankets crumpled into the corner of the couch, spreading it over you as you try to sleep peacefully. You can hear his footsteps above you, though, pulling you from any slumber that you could only dream of having. It makes you sigh, pulling the blanket over your head as you turn to face the back of the couch. He’ll be quick, he’ll be out in a minute.

But you count the seconds, which turns into minutes and when you finally hear him clambering down the stairs, you also hear him sigh, tiredly. Peeking out from the blanket, you look over your shoulder at the staircase to see him carding his hand through his hair, already looking at you.

“He took my airpods,” he says to you, coming to the couch opposite you and sitting down dejectedly. “He took them the day of San’s birthday party and told me to come pick them up when I needed them and it’s taken me this long to come over and I can’t find them.”

You sit up slowly, the blanket pooling around your thighs when you turn back to face him. His legs are spread, hands in his lap as he leans back and tilts his head toward the ceiling. He still won’t look at you.

“Sorry,” you pause. “I, uh, I think he’s got them on him. I can tell him you stopped by?”

A beat passes. Soobin finally raises his head to look at you, his lip between his teeth as he takes you in. His head shakes, eyes rolling as he looks away from you again. It makes you bite your tongue as the terrible kind of silence falls around you again and you can almost feel your skin crawling.

“I’m just gonna go,” you murmur more to yourself than him, standing up and wrapping the blanket around your shoulders. There’s so much that you want to say to him. It all rests in the back of your throat, just waiting to be spoken into the air but when he doesn’t even look at you leaving, you can’t bring yourself to say it.

You’d replayed those nights in your head over and over. You saw it every single time you were about to fall asleep, you reheard every word you said in the shower, you felt his lips against yours and his hips against yours; you would waste time on your slow shifts living in it and bake the heartbreak that you still haven’t swallowed. He’d confessed, you’d shot him down – terribly and left him without hearing him out. You ran into each other and made out, he left without explanation. You pass by him, looking at the way he studies his palms like he’s never seen them before and you swallow down every sliver of fear that lingers in your body.

“I’m sorry,” you tell him, stopping by the side of his couch.

He looks up at you. “They’re just airpods.”

“No, I’m sorry for what happened. For everything I said and for hurting you and for… For making you leave.”

Soobin blinks, peering up at you with a confused look growing on his face. He turns his hands over, palms against his thighs as he looks away from you for a moment before he turns back to you.

“Why are you sorry? It was my fault.”

It’s your turn to blink, lips parting to respond to him – except you come up empty. You wonder how long it takes your friends to get pizza.

“No–”

“No, it was my fault. If I’d just been less stupid the first time around none of this would’ve happened,” he says. “I should’ve been braver.”

“I should’ve been nicer.”

“I hurt you,” he stands up to walk over to you, awkwardly. “And then I…”

His lips drop to your lips. You look away from him, wrapping the blanket even tighter around your shoulders. How long ago did your friends leave? How long did it take them last time they left for pizza? The pizzeria isn’t that far from your home, it’s one of the first things Yeonjun told you when you moved in. Fascinated with the pattern of his socks against the hardwood, you start to take a step back toward the stairs.

“Can I say it again?” He asks. When you look up at him, he’s staring at you and you take a moment to admire how handsome he is. You feel starstruck looking into his eyes and you can almost feel the intensity in his gaze – the passion that he’s always held, that you’ve always admired and wished you’d be the subject of. “All of it, but better, this time.”

“Sure,” you reply after a beat.

“I miss you,” he says, taking a step toward you. “I miss the sound of your laugh with the rain and how you always make my day better and I miss being around you. I miss you even though it’s not the same anymore because I’d rather have you in my life than not have you at all, all because I love you.” He takes another step toward you, leaving you almost breathless, wondering how you’ve stumbled into a confession that you’ve waited an entire year to hear. It sounds better now, you admit to yourself, better than when his words blurred together and he looked at you with cloudy vision. Still, a sliver of doubt crawls into you, tearing you apart and wracking itself against your ribs so hard it makes your chest hurt. “I’m in love with you and I just, I can’t not tell you, anymore.”

You stand chest to chest, your heart beating so fast you’re sure that he can feel yours through your ribcage. There’s an emotion in his eyes that you recognize, fear written into his pupils while he scans your face for any sign of a response. With your lips parted, you feel yourself trying to catch your breath like you’ve ran a marathon before hearing this. It takes you a moment to gather your thoughts, mind blank and empty underneath his gaze, lungs empty at his second confession and all you can think to say is ‘yeah, me too’ but you hold it in. You have to say something meaningful because even if you’ve spent all your time avoiding him, you’ve spent all your time thinking about him.

About what you should’ve said or should’ve done, what you shouldn’t have said, what you shouldn’t have done. All your thoughts lead back to him, no matter what you start out with, no matter how incessant you are with yourself that you won’t think about him. But, Soobin lives within you. Everything reminds you of him, everything reminds you of what could’ve been and everything you do you do with the small hope that one day things will work itself out. He’d rather you in his life than not have you at all, the exact way you feel about him.

“Can I kiss you?” He asks you in the absence of your response. “Let me do it right, this time.”

“What?” You ask, dumbly, ready to smack yourself on the cheek at the way you sound.

“Only if you want, otherwise I’ll leave and Yeonjun can keep my airpods.”

“Are you being serious right now?”

“I can afford another pair?”

“Are you going to leave, again?”

You stare at him as his lips spread into a smile, hands moving to your waist to pull you against him and then, he slots his lips against yours, giving you the softest kiss you’ve ever received in your life. His lips are soft with intention, pressing gently against you as your hands land against his chest, roaming up to the nape of his neck and pulling him into you the way you know you’ve always craved. You had always imagined kissing him. From the moment you met him, you’d wondered what it was like to kiss him and finally, you knew that it was something that you would die happily doing. You wanted this for the rest of your life.

He tastes like seawater, but gentler than an accidental inhale – the taste when you take in a breath with your toes in the sand. With his lips moving against yours, he feels like home, bliss in your veins as your mind continues to blank with the simple pleasure of having him against your lips. He pulls you tighter against him, pressing your bodies together as his hands wrap around you, holding you against his frame and walking you to the wall beside the staircase. Your back hits the wall in tandem with his hand, trapping you against him as he comes to cup your face.

Soobin pulls away, looking at you when he does. His lips part, tongue swiping over his bottom lip when he takes you in before leaning in again. The kiss is gentler, even, softer against his lips as he tilts your head up with his fingers on your chin. You move with his direction, desperately holding him against you, almost blinded with lust as he continues to take things excruciatingly slow. You want to pull away and tell him that everyone will be back at any moment, but if he knows, he can’t seem to care less.

You feel his tongue slowly lick across your bottom lick, parting your mouth and leaving you thoughtless. His hands draw a sensual pattern along your spine, resting above your bottom against the dip of your spine and if you weren’t rendered speechless by his kiss, you would encourage him to touch you. Before you can move any further, you hear the soft click of the front door and Soobin pulls away from you, leaving you chasing after him in a way that makes your cheeks heat up.

Turning away from the door, you bring the sleeve of your hoodie to your lips as your friends clamber in.

“Whoa!” Yeonjun exclaims, seeing your position and when you look at him, he’s turning back toward the door. “Guys, I think we forgot the–”

The door closes behind him and you’re left alone with Soobin, who still has you in his arms. He leans against you, letting his head fall into the crook of your neck with a laugh.

“He probably has your airpods,” you tell him and he pulls away, planting a kiss on your forehead before he walks toward the door.

“We’ll continue this later,” he says to you, disappearing after Yeonjun.

The summer closes quietly and you never glance at another flight overseas. There aren’t any escape routes to take, not when you get to come home and fall into his arms. It’s only when autumn arrives and the tourists leave that you really get him to yourself. You get all of him, all of his words, all of his mornings, all of his nights. He’s more than the sun and moon, he’s the entire sky, day and night. Every single star was made for him, every cloud drawn by his hands and you get the front row seat to his happiness every day you wake up.

It’s almost sickening, how happy you are with him. Your friends always groan when you walk in together, they roll their eyes when you kiss and escape the bonfires to sit in the sand together. They call after you when you guys stray away from the fire again, telling you guys to use protection and reminding you guys how positively gross you are but all is forgotten when you lean into his hold, butts in the sand as the waves try to kiss your toes.

“You should really look at the stars,” he tells you, spotting the way your gaze is solely trained on him.

All of the stars are in his eyes, you want to say, but even that makes you want to cringe away from yourself. Instead, you settle for a shake of your head, earning yourself a soft smile from him. It’s all you need to see from him, you decide. This view is better than anything you can ever be offered.