Hire AI/ML Engineers to Transform Your Business with Intelligent Solutions
In today’s fast-evolving digital landscape, businesses are rapidly adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to stay competitive. From automation to predictive analytics, AI is driving innovation across industries.
To successfully implement these technologies, companies need skilled professionals. That’s why many organizations are choosing to hire AI/ML engineers who can build scalable, data-driven solutions.
Why Businesses Need to Hire AI/ML Engineers
AI is no longer optional—it’s a necessity for growth and innovation.
🚀 Accelerate Digital Transformation
AI helps automate workflows, improve decision-making, and enhance operational efficiency.
📊 Data-Driven Insights
Businesses generate massive data daily. Skilled engineers turn this data into valuable insights.
💡 Competitive Advantage
Companies leveraging AI outperform competitors with smarter strategies and faster execution.
If you're planning to integrate AI into your operations, working with AI developers for hire can give you a strong competitive edge.
Key Services Offered by AI/ML Engineers
When you hire AI engineers in India, you gain access to a wide range of services:
✔ Machine Learning Development
Custom models tailored to your business needs.
✔ Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Chatbots, sentiment analysis, and conversational AI.
✔ Computer Vision
Image recognition and video analytics solutions.
✔ Predictive Analytics
Forecast trends, demand, and customer behavior.
✔ AI Automation
Streamline operations and reduce manual work.
A reliable machine learning development company ensures these solutions are implemented effectively.
Benefits of Hiring Dedicated AI/ML Engineers
💰 Cost Efficiency
Reduce hiring, infrastructure, and training costs.
⚡ Faster Time-to-Market
Quick onboarding ensures faster project delivery.
🔄 Scalability
Easily scale your team as your business grows.
🧠 Access to Top Talent
Work with experts skilled in modern AI frameworks.
Businesses often prefer dedicated AI developers to ensure consistent performance and focus.
Industries Leveraging AI/ML Solutions
AI is transforming multiple industries:
🏥 Healthcare – diagnostics and patient analytics
🚚 Logistics – route optimization and forecasting
🏭 Manufacturing – predictive maintenance
💳 Finance – fraud detection and risk analysis
💻 SaaS – intelligent applications and automation
Partnering with AI outsourcing services helps businesses implement these solutions faster.
Real-World Use Cases of AI/ML
AI/ML engineers help build impactful solutions such as:
🤖 AI chatbots for customer support
📊 Predictive analytics for forecasting
🔍 Fraud detection systems
🎯 Recommendation engines
📦 Supply chain optimization
To implement these use cases effectively, many companies choose to hire AI developers remotely for flexibility and scalability.
How to Hire AI/ML Engineers: Step-by-Step
Step 1: Define Your Requirements
Outline your goals, budget, and technical needs.
Step 2: Choose the Right Model
Dedicated, contract-based, or full-time hiring.
Step 3: Evaluate Expertise
Check technical skills and past projects.
Step 4: Onboard Quickly
Start development without delays.
Step 5: Scale Your Team
Expand resources as your project grows.
Working with AI consulting services can simplify this entire process.
Why Choose AquSag Technologies?
AquSag Technologies provides a reliable solution for businesses looking to scale with AI.
✅ Pre-Vetted Engineers
Access skilled professionals with proven experience.
✅ Flexible Hiring Models
Choose what fits your business needs.
✅ Fast Onboarding
Start your project quickly.
✅ End-to-End Support
From development to deployment.
Whether you need NLP, automation, or predictive analytics, hiring NLP developers for hire ensures high-quality AI solutions.
Challenges in Hiring AI Talent
❌ Talent Shortage
AI experts are in high demand globally.
❌ High Costs
Full-time hiring can be expensive.
❌ Long Hiring Cycles
Traditional recruitment takes time.
This is why businesses are turning to AI automation services and external hiring models.
Future of AI/ML in Business
The future is driven by:
Generative AI
Real-time analytics
Autonomous systems
Intelligent automation
Companies that invest in AI talent today will lead tomorrow’s market.
Conclusion
AI is transforming how businesses operate, innovate, and grow. To stay ahead, companies must adopt intelligent solutions powered by skilled professionals.
The best way to achieve this is to hire AI/ML engineers who can deliver scalable and impactful results.
Not out loud, obviously. Yeosang would never let him live it down if he knew the chain reaction he’d caused from one stupid conversation at the kitchen counter. But still…. this was absolutely his fault.
Yunho stared at himself in the dark reflection of the microwave while the bleach processed in his hair for the second round, looking vaguely like a raccoon that had developed anxiety and access to student loans. The tiny salon smelled aggressively like chemicals, the fluorescent lights too bright for someone running on four hours of sleep and terrible decisions.
“What made you wanna go blond?” the stylist asked and because Yunho valued his dignity at least a little, he didn’t answer, “Because my roommate said blondes ruin her life and unfortunately I’d let her ruin mine on command.” Instead he’d shrugged and said, “Wanted a change.”
Which was technically true. Because before this, Yunho had at least been pretending he had his feelings under control. That illusion died three nights ago. It had been late. Almost one in the morning. You and Yeosang had come back from closing the campus café together smelling like coffee beans and sugar syrup, both of you exhausted and slap happy in that way people only got after working customer service too long. Yunho had been half asleep already, stretched across his bed with one airpod still in when he heard your laughter echo from the kitchen. Normally he tuned it out. He’d learned how to live around you a long time ago.
How to ignore the way your voice carried through walls. How not to think too hard when you wore his hoodies around the apartment and he wanted to hurt himself inside you with just said hoodie on. How not to stare when you sat cross legged on the couch beside him with wet hair after showers smelling like vanilla and coffee. He’d gotten good at surviving you. Mostly.
But that night he got up for water. And then he heard Yeosang say, “So your thing is just emotionally unavailable tall guys?” Your laugh came immediately after. “No, my thing is blondes unfortunately.” Yunho paused in the hallway going completely still. “I’m serious,” you continued. “Blondes are actually my weakness. It’s embarrassing.” And that was it. That was the moment his brain apparently vacated his body permanently.
Because the next morning he woke up thinking about it. Then he thought about it during class. Then during basketball practice. Then while brushing his teeth. Then at three in the morning while sitting cross legged on his bed researching hair bleach like he was preparing a dissertation.
Can dark hair go platinum in one session?
Will bleaching destroy natural waves?
Best blond shades for warm undertones.
The worst part? He knew it was pathetic. You’d all been friends since freshman year. Back when the three of you were living in tiny dorms with broken AC and surviving off instant ramen and campus vending machines. Back before Yunho had learned every version of your laugh by memory. Before he’d memorized your coffee order. Before the two of you ended up splitting rent on a shitty off campus apartment at the end of sophomore year because housing prices near campus were criminal.
Two years. Two years of shared grocery trips. Shared laundry. Shared late night study sessions. Shared space. Two years of wanting you so badly sometimes it physically hurt to look at you too long. And somehow you still had no idea. Or maybe you did. Yunho honestly couldn’t tell anymore. Sometimes he thought you had to know. Especially when your eyes lingered on him too long or when you’d fall asleep against his shoulder during movie nights without thinking twice about it.
Other times you treated him so casually he felt insane for even hoping. So yes. Maybe bleaching his hair because of one overheard conversation was humiliating. But Yunho had reached a point where he’d do a lot worse if it meant seeing you look at him differently for even half a second.
“Alright,” the stylist said finally, returning to his chair. “Ready to see it?” No. Absolutely not. But Yunho nodded anyway.
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By the time you finally made it home, your entire body felt held together by caffeine and spite. Your café visor was shoved into your tote bag, your hoodie sleeves pulled over your hands, technically it was Yunho’s hoodie, as you unlocked the apartment door with a tired sigh. The hallway outside still smelled faintly like somebody’s burned microwave dinner, and all you wanted was a shower and unconsciousness.
The apartment lights were dim except for the living room glow. A video game soundtrack echoed softly through the space, one you recognized from how many times Yunho plays it. Mortal Kombat. “You alive in here?” you called, kicking the door shut behind you. “Barely,” Yunho answered from the couch.
You smiled automatically at the sound of his voice. “Good. I brought your favorite croissants before they tossed the leftovers.”
“Chocolate ones?”
“Obviously.” You stepped into the living room, already pulling the paper bag from your tote. “Yeosang tried to steal one and I told him I’d…” The rest of the sentence died instantly and your footsteps stopped as Yunho looked up from the couch. Blonde. Your brain fully disconnected from your body for a solid three seconds. He was sprawled lazily across the couch in grey sweatpants and an oversized black shirt, one arm hooked behind his head while the PS5 controller rested loosely in his other hand. The TV painted shifting colors across him, catching against pale blonde hair that fell messily over his forehead like he’d been running his hands through it for hours.
Your mouth opened. Closed and then opened again. “What did you do to your hair?” One corner of his mouth twitched. “Dyed it.” Like it was no big deal. Like he hadn’t just casually altered your brain chemistry. You stepped closer without meaning to, still staring at him. “Why are you blonde?”
Yunho shrugged, eyes flicking back toward the tv too casually. Way too casually. “Wanted a change.”
You narrowed your eyes. “Since when?”
“Since today?”
You made a disbelieving noise under your breath, still frozen in the middle of the living room while your heartbeat started doing deeply embarrassing things. Because Yunho had always been attractive. That was the problem. You’d spent years trying very hard not to think about it too much. But this? This felt targeted. Like a personal attack he had no idea he was doing. His hair looked soft enough to touch. The blond made his eyes look darker somehow. Sharper.
And the worst part was how relaxed he looked about it, stretched across the couch like he had no idea he’d just walked straight out of every bad decision you’d ever made. Yunho glanced back at you again finally, slower this time because you were still staring. Not subtly either. Your fingers tightened around the paper bag slightly as your eyes dragged over his hair again before you could stop yourself and a tiny flicker of satisfaction crossed his face so fast you almost missed it. “You hate it?” he asked.
You laughed once in disbelief. “Hate it?” you repeated. “Yunho, you look insane.” His eyebrow lifted. “Insane bad or insane good?” The apartment suddenly felt very warm. Very small. You swallowed once and completely betrayed yourself as you mumbled. “Unfortunately insane good.” You tore your eyes away from him with actual effort and shoved the paper bag toward him before you could continue staring like a Victorian man witnessing an exposed ankle.
“Here,” you muttered. “Your croissants before I decide you don’t deserve them anymore.” Yunho snorted softly, setting the controller down on his stomach so he could take the bag from you. Your fingers brushed for barely a second, just enough to make your stomach flip.
“You’re so generous,” he said dryly.
“I know.”
You dropped onto the opposite end of the couch quickly, mostly because standing near him suddenly felt medically unsafe. The cushions dipped under your weight while Yunho pulled one of the croissants from the bag immediately, peeling the paper back. You watched him take a bite. Unfortunately that was somehow attractive too. This was a nightmare. You exhaled through your nose, trying very hard to regain control of yourself before saying something humiliating. “Your postseason championship tomorrow,” you said, tucking your legs beneath you. “You ready?”
Yunho’s expression shifted slightly then, the teasing easing into something softer. Their intramural basketball team had somehow made it all the way to finals. Which normally wouldn’t have mattered much except Yunho was annoyingly good at basically everything. Half the campus showed up to games just to watch him play. “Mm,” he hummed around another bite of croissant. “Kinda nervous.”
You blinked, shocked. “You? Nervous?”
“A little.” He shrugged one shoulder. “Coach has been acting like this is the NBA finals all week.”
You smiled despite yourself. “That’s because you’re carrying the entire team.”
“That is actually true.”
“There he is.” You pointed at him. “Arrogant again.”
Yunho grinned and, God, the blonde hair made his smile worse somehow. Brighter. You hated this. “You’re coming though, right?” he asked and you softened immediately. “Of course I am. I even switched shifts for it,” you added. “Yeosang’s covering close tomorrow.”
Yunho stared at you for a second too long. Something warm flickered behind his eyes. Then he looked away first, rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly. “Cool,” he said quietly. And suddenly the apartment didn’t feel casual anymore. Not with his blonde hair glowing gold under the tv light.
Not with the way he kept glancing at you between bites of croissant.
Not with the heavy feeling sitting low in your stomach every time he smiled.
You were in so much trouble.
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The next afternoon was somehow worse. You’d spent the entire morning telling yourself you were being ridiculous. It was hair. Just fucking hair. People dyed their hair every day. Millions of people probably woke up blonde every morning and somehow society continued functioning. So why had you spent half your shift replaying the image of Yunho sprawled across the couch in your head?
Why had you almost poured whole milk into an iced americano because you’d gotten distracted thinking about it? Why had you caught yourself staring into space while wondering if it was as soft as it looked? You were losing your mind.
By the time your shift ended, you practically threw your apron into your locker and headed for the employee bathroom. The game started in less than an hour. You’d been going to Yunho’s games ever since freshman year when he’d somehow convinced you to attend one “just this once.” That had turned into every home game. Which had turned into wearing his jersey number. Which had turned into you owning a black and red fitted shirt with a giant white 08 on the back.
You absolutely refused to examine how that happened. The shirt was already folded in your bag. You changed quickly, pulling it over your head and fixing your hair in the mirror. The familiar number stretched across your back with JEONG right above it. A small smile tugged at your lips before you jumped as a knock sounded on the doorframe.
Yeosang stood there holding a box of pastries, immediately narrowing his eyes. “Why do you look guilty?”
“I don’t.”
“You absolutely do.”
You grabbed your bag. “I’m leaving. Have fun closing.” Yeosang stepped directly into your path. “Not until you tell me what’s wrong.”
“Nothing’s wrong.”
Unfortunately, after years of friendship, he had developed an almost supernatural ability to tell when something was bothering you. Or when you were lying. The café had mostly emptied out now, most like you, were heading to the game. You finally signed, groaning. “It’s Yunho.”
“See? I knew it.”
“You always know it.”
“What’s he done now?”
You hesitated. Because somehow saying it out loud felt embarrassing. Extremely embarrassing. Yeosang waited patiently. Then impatiently. Then dramatically until you blurted it out.
“He dyed his hair.”
Yeosang blinked. “What?”
“He dyed his hair.”
“And?”
“He dyed it blonde.”
Yeosang laughed. A little too loudly. “Oh my god! Are you serious?”
You groaned. Then immediately regretted opening your mouth at all. Because once you started talking, everything spilled out. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”
Yeosang barked out another laugh. “Oh, you’re down bad.”
“Shut up.”
“You are.”
“I know.”
“You know?”
“I know.”
Yeosang looked delighted as you looked miserable. “Every time I close my eyes,” you complained, “I just keep thinking about running my fingers through it and pulling on it while he…”
Yeosang immediately held up both hands. “Nope. Don’t need your nsfw details.”
You laughed despite yourself. “I wasn’t even going to say anything.”
“That sentence was headed somewhere awful.” Yeosang jokingly physically shuddered. “Please save that conversation for literally anyone else.” You laughed harder now, the tension easing slightly from your shoulders as Yeosang pointed toward the door. “Go.” He grabbed a towel and started wiping down a nearby counter. “Go watch your blonde basketball player.”
You rolled your eyes and headed backwards toward the exit. “He’s not my basketball player.”
Yeosang’s laugh followed you all the way out the door. “Sure he isn’t.”
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The gym was already packed by the time you arrived. Not professional sports packed. Not thousands of people screaming packed. College packed. Students crammed into bleachers. Friends holding homemade signs. The marching band warming up in one corner. The scent of popcorn and sweat and polished hardwood filling the air. The noise hit you immediately and you loved it.
You slipped through the crowd, making your way toward your usual section. A few people recognized the shirt you were wearing and smiled knowingly. Yunho’s number. As usual but you ignored the looks. At this point half the athletic department had apparently decided you and Yunho were dating years ago. The fact that neither of you had corrected them probably wasn’t helping.
The teams were already on the court warming up. And then you saw him and your feet almost stopped moving. God. That wasn’t fair. The basketball uniform had always looked good on him. That wasn’t new. The black and red jersey stretched across broad shoulders you’ve spent years pretending not to notice. His shorts hung low on his hips. His long legs seemed to take up half the court whenever he moved. Normally that was already enough to make maintaining a friendship feel like an Olympic sport. Now add the blonde hair and you were finished. Absolutely finished.
The bright gym lights caught the bleached strands every time he moved. Against the uniform it stood out immediately, making him impossible to miss even among dozens of players. Several girls nearby were staring and you immediately hated them. Then realized you were doing the exact same thing. Which somehow made it worse.
A whistle blew and warmups ended and the game began. You tried, you really did, to focus on the actual basketball. For maybe five minutes. Then Yunho stole the ball and the crowd erupted. You found yourself leaning forward automatically as he moved with an ease that always fascinated you. Confident. Fast. Certain. The version of Yunho most people knew was relaxed. Sweet and easygoing. Basketball was different. There was a sharpness to him here. A confidence. An intensity. Every movement looked deliberate. Every play looked effortless. And apparently blonde hair made all of it ten times more distracting.
Halfway through the first half he scored again and the crowd exploded all over again as Yunho jogged backward down the court breathing hard. Sweat glistening along his neck. You immediately looked away. Then immediately looked back. Which was a mistake. Because once again your brain had decided to imagine what that hair would feel like beneath your fingers. Pulling….. gripping…..
You shifted in your seat, clenching your thighs together and knew if this was one of those omegaverse stories Yeosang likes to read, the whole gym would smell how turned on you were right now. By halftime you had learned three things: One, Your roommate was going to win this game. Two, The blonde hair somehow looked even better than it had last night. And three….. You desperately needed to get your act together before he noticed the way you kept staring or wet you are as he glanced up and smiled at you.
Yunho had always been good at pretending. That was probably the only reason he’d survived the last few years. Because if he hadn’t learned how to hide things, you would’ve figured him out sometime during freshman year. Back before there was an apartment. Before shared rent. Before he realized he was completely screwed. The game should have had his full attention. It was the championship. The biggest game of the season. The final game of his college career.
And yet every few minutes his eyes drifted toward the bleachers anyway. Toward you. They always did. The first time he’d looked over after warmups, he’d almost forgotten what play they were running. Because there you were as always wearing his name and number. And Yunho hated how much he liked it. Actually, hate wasn’t the right word. The truth was much worse. He loved it. Loved it in a way he would absolutely never admit out loud.
Because the second he started examining why seeing you wear his number made him feel the way it did, he’d have to confront some very uncomfortable truths about himself. Like the fact he was possessive. Not in an unhealthy way. Not in a controlling way. Just… Yours. His brain immediately corrected. No. Not yours. You weren’t his. He knew that. But every time he saw another guy talking to you for too long, something ugly twisted in his chest.
Every time someone flirted with you at parties. Every time some idiot from one of your classes made you laugh. Yunho had to sit there pretending he was perfectly normal about it. So yes. Watching you wear his name and number did something to him……
Yunho snapped back into the play when the whistle blew again. He intercepted a pass, pushed the ball down court, and scored. His teammates slapped his shoulders as they ran back and the crowd cheered but he barely heard them. Because his eyes were already looking toward the stands again and you were watching him. A smile pulling at your mouth and his chest tightened immediately. God. He was pathetic. Absolutely pathetic. He immediately turned away. Then looked back three seconds later because apparently he had no self control anymore.
He kept glancing at you for the rest of the half. Through every possession. Every timeout. Every basket. Until finally midway through the second half he ended up at the free throw line and the gym quieted as Yunho bounced the ball once. Twice. Then glanced toward the stands out of habit again and immediately regretted it. Because you were looking right at him. Your chin resting against your hand. Looking at him like he was the only thing in the entire gym worth paying attention to. The shot nearly rimmed out but Yunho caught himself at the last second and the ball dropped through the net.
You weren’t even pretending to watch anyone else anymore. The scoreboard overhead glowed brightly against the gym lights, the numbers changing every few possessions. The opposing team was better than expected. Every time Yunho’s team started pulling away, they clawed their way back. The tension in the building kept rising. Students stood. The bench stood. Even the coaches looked stressed. And through all of it, Yunho somehow looked completely composed.
His blonde hair was darker now with sweat, the strands sticking slightly to his forehead as he moved across the court. The jersey clung to his back. His breathing had become heavier over the course of the game, but he never seemed to slow down. You’d watched him play dozens of times. Maybe a hundred. But tonight felt different. Everything felt different. Every glance toward him and him towards you lingered a little longer than it should. Every smile he gave a teammate made your stomach flutter. Every time he pushed his hair back from his face, your brain short circuited.
The scoreboard buzzed. Two minutes remaining. The game was tied and the entire gym seemed to collectively hold its breath. You shifted forward on the bleachers, elbows on your knees now. Nobody around you was sitting anymore. The student section was practically vibrating as the opposing team scored and groans erupted. Then thirty seconds later Yunho answered with a three pointer that nearly blew the roof off the place and you found yourself shouting before you even realized it but the sound was swallowed by hundreds of other voices.
Yunho pointed toward a teammate as they ran back down the court. One minute left. Then forty seconds. Then thirty. The score stayed tied and every possession felt life or death. You could see the exhaustion on every player now. The way they bent slightly when the play stopped. The sweat soaking through uniforms. The desperation. Twenty seconds. The opposing team missed. The rebound bounced loose and one of Yunho’s teammates grabbed it. Ten seconds. Nine. Eight. You stood fully now, heart pounding as the gym felt deafening.
Yunho sprinted across half court and the ball found him immediately. Everyone in the building knew who was taking the final shot. Even the other team. Two defenders closed on him instantly. Five seconds. Four. The noise became unbearable. Three. Yunho stepped back, just enough space to aim as time seemed to slow. You saw the ball leave his hands. Saw the arc. Saw the blonde hair falling into his eyes as he watched it fly and the entire gym froze……
For a split second there was silence. Pure silence. Then absolute chaos. The buzzer sounded. The scoreboard flashed. His team had won and the gym exploded. Boomed. Students screamed. The bench stormed the court as teammates tackled each other. People jumped onto the hardwood from the stands and the sound hit like a wave. And through all the madness, all the celebration, all the movement… Your eyes found Yunho immediately. He was laughing. Head thrown back. Arms spread as his teammates nearly knocked him over as they swarmed him.
For a moment he disappeared entirely beneath the crowd before he emerged again. Breathing hard and grinning. Flushed from exertion and adrenaline. You got up and made your way down the bleachers and onto the court and for a split second, you considered leaving.
The idea hit you the moment you reached the court through the chaos of celebration. Students were spilling onto the hardwood. Teammates were hugging each other. Coaches were getting drenched in water bottles. Everyone seemed to be shouting at once. Then you saw her. Standing beside Yunho. Red hair. Pretty. One of the cheerleaders. And not just any cheerleader. You knew exactly who she was. Brandy. Unfortunately. Because sophomore year, long before you’d let yourself admit your feelings for Yunho, he’d gotten drunk at a Halloween party and disappeared upstairs with her.
You’d spent the rest of that night pretending it hadn’t bothered you. Just like you’d spent the next years pretending a lot of things. Now she was standing entirely too close to him. Laughing. Touching his arm. Looking up at him with the kind of smile that made your stomach immediately sink. The championship high vanished from your system so fast it was almost impressive. You stopped walking. The noise of the gym suddenly felt distant. Stupid. This was stupid.
Yunho wasn’t your boyfriend. He could talk to whoever he wanted. He could fuck whoever he wanted. He’d done exactly that for years. And yet all you could think about was the way she’d reached up a second ago and touched his shoulder while laughing and how you wanted to break her hand for doing it.
Your jaw tightened and before you could stop yourself, you turned. You’d just leave. Nobody would notice. The team would celebrate. Yunho would celebrate. You’d text him congratulations later. Simple. Except apparently the universe had decided you weren’t getting away that easily. Because before you’d taken more than three steps, you heard your name and you froze.
“Y/N!”
You looked back as Yunho was already jogging toward you leaving the conversation with Brandy entirely.She looked confused as he disappeared and your heart did something deeply embarrassing as Yunho reached you a moment later, slightly out of breath from both the game and weaving through the crowd. The smile on his face hadn’t disappeared since the winning shot. “Where are you going?”
You shoved your hands into your pockets. “Nowhere.” His eyes narrowed immediately. The same way they always did when he knew you were lying. “Uh huh.” You shrugged. “You were leaving.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You literally turned around.”
“I changed directions.”
Yunho stared at you and you stared back. Then, to your horror, a tiny smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. Like he knew exactly what had happened. Like he was enjoying it as you kept glancing at his sweat damp hair. “I’m gonna go shower real quick,” he said. “We’re all going to Murphys to celebrate.” The little sports bar was only a few blocks from your apartment. Close enough that most students walked there. You nodded. Trying very hard to act normal. “Okay.”
His smile widened slightly. “Then we can go together.” The words landed harder than they should have. Because he could’ve gone with teammates. Or literally anyone else. Instead he’d said we. Like it was obvious. Like of course he was going with you and a warmth spread through your chest despite your best efforts. “You sure?” you asked and the question came out before you could stop it and something flickered across Yunho’s face. Confusion. Then amusement. Then something softer. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
You opened your mouth and closed it again. Because you couldn’t exactly say because Brandy looked like she wanted to climb him like a tree. So instead you shrugged. “Just asking.” Yunho watched you for a second. A long second. The kind that felt dangerous. Then one of his teammates shouted his name from across the court and the moment broke. “Give me twenty minutes,” Yunho said, backing away. “Don’t disappear.”
Your stomach flipped as the grin he gave you was quick. Easy. Familiar. Then he turned and headed toward the locker rooms as you kept standing there watching him go. Watching the blonde hair. Watching the way students stopped him every few feet to congratulate him. Watching three separate girls try to get his attention in the span of thirty seconds.
And for the first time all night, a realization settled heavily in your chest. The jealousy wasn’t getting better. If anything, it was getting worse.
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Murphys was exactly what every college sports bar eventually became on a championship night. Packed and overly loud. Impossible to move through without bumping into somebody. The moment you and Yunho stepped through the front doors, a roar erupted from somewhere near the back where most of the team had already claimed several tables. Someone immediately started chanting his name. Another teammate nearly spilled a beer trying to get his attention. You couldn’t help smiling. This was his night. The culmination of four years of practices, games, injuries, early mornings, and everything in between. And somehow, despite all the attention immediately being directed at him, Yunho still glanced over his shoulder to make sure you were following.
The small gesture shouldn’t have affected you but it did unfortunately. His hair was still slightly damp from the shower, the blonde strands softer than before and pushed loosely back from his forehead. A few pieces had already fallen forward again, framing his face in a way that should probably be illegal. He’d traded the basketball uniform for black jeans and a dark grey henley that fit entirely too well across his shoulders. You hated how aware you were of every detail and the way half the women in the bar immediately noticed him.
“Over here!” one of his teammates yelled. The team occupied nearly an entire section of the bar now, pitchers and baskets of food already covering the tables. The second Yunho approached, someone shoved a shot glass into his hand. Then another. Then another. And another. “Champions drink free tonight!” someone shouted. The chanting started almost immediately and Yunho rolled his eyes then knocked back the first shot anyway.
You found yourself laughing despite everything. For a little while, it was easy. The energy was infectious. Everyone was celebrating. The game replayed on televisions mounted around the bar and every few minutes somebody brought up the final shot again. Every single retelling somehow made Yunho look more embarrassed.
You were watching him grin through another round of congratulations when your stomach suddenly dropped. Her. Brandy. She’d arrived sometime in the last ten minutes. You hadn’t noticed until now. Until she stood near the opposite side of the table talking to a few people from the athletic department and entirely too interested in Yunho. You tried ignoring it. Really. You focused on your drink. Focused on conversations around you. Focused on literally anything else. Then you looked up again and she was moving closer.
Your jaw tightened as she stopped right beside Yunho who didn’t seem to notice. Or maybe he did. You couldn’t tell as someone handed him another shot and he accepted it with a laugh as Brandy laughed too. At something that wasn’t even funny. Your grip tightened around your glass as she kept finding reasons to move closer, reaching out and touching Yunho’s arm while saying something. The movement lasted barely a second but it still made something unpleasant twist in your chest.
You immediately looked away and moved towards the bar having no idea Yunho was trying. He really was. He’d spent the last ten minutes being cornered by teammates, congratulated by professors he barely knew, handed enough shots to tranquilize a horse, and somehow Brandy had attached herself to his side like a particularly persistent barnacle. Ordinarily, he would’ve felt a little bad. Brandy was nice enough. Kind of. Not really.
They’d hooked up exactly once nearly two years ago after a Halloween party, discovered they had absolutely no chemistry beyond mutual attraction, and never did it again. Since then they’d been friendly. Casual. At least, Yunho thought they’d been casual. Apparently Brandy had different ideas. Because she kept laughing at things that weren’t funny. Kept touching his arm. Kept finding excuses to lean closer. And Yunho kept trying to politely create space without making a scene.
His attention wasn’t even on her. It hadn’t been all night. The problem was that his attention was currently locked on the opposite side of the bar. Specifically on you. And the guy sitting beside you. Sean. Of course it was Sean. Yunho knew Sean. Everybody knew Sean. Another player. Not on the basketball team, but one of the soccer guys. Tall. Built. Annoyingly good looking. And blonde. Naturally blond and that realization hit Yunho like a personal attack.
Of course. Of fucking course. The universe apparently had jokes tonight. Because there you were, sitting at the bar with Sean occupying the stool beside you. Laughing and smiling. Looking comfortable. And all Yunho could think about was that stupid conversation he’d overheard about blondes being your weakness.
His jaw tightened as Sean leaned closer to hear something you said over the music and you laughed and Yunho immediately hated him. Not rationally. Not fairly. Just instantly. “You even listening to me?” Brandy’s voice snapped him back for half a second. “What?”
“You haven’t heard a single thing I’ve said.”
And he still wasn’t as a fresh wave of irritation rolled through Yunho. Which was ridiculous. Completely ridiculous. You weren’t his girlfriend. You could talk to whoever you wanted. You could date whoever you wanted. Fuck whoever you wanted. The same rules he’d been reminding himself of for years. The problem was they weren’t working anymore.
Yunho immediately looked again. And hated that he looked again. Because the second he saw your smile directed at someone else, that ugly feeling in his chest returned. Stronger this time. Possessive. Frustrated. Dangerously close to becoming something he couldn’t keep hidden much longer. And judging by the way Sean had started leaning even closer, Yunho was rapidly running out of patience.
Sean was halfway through telling some story about getting thrown out of an intramural soccer game when Yunho finally reached his limit. “Fuck it.” Before he could talk himself out of it, Yunho started walking towards you and the moment you felt his presence, you turned. And immediately forgot how to function.
Yunho had one hand braced against the bar behind your stool. The other settled on the counter beside your drink. In one smooth movement he’d essentially wedged himself into the tiny space behind you. Not touching. Technically. But close enough that you could feel the heat radiating off him. Close enough that his shirt brushed the back of your shoulder when he shifted. Close enough that the familiar scent of him immediately invaded your senses and your brain completely short circuited.
Sean looked up and grinned immediately. “Jeong!” Yunho nodded once and to Sean’s credit, he didn’t seem remotely threatened. Or aware. “Hell of a game,” Sean continued. “That shot was ridiculous.”
“Thanks.”
“You saved your whole team.”
“Someone had to.”
Sean laughed and Yunho smiled politely. Meanwhile you sat frozen between them. Because while Sean was carrying on a perfectly normal conversation, Yunho remained exactly where he was. Behind you. Practically looming as his arm still rested along the bar behind your stool. You grabbed your drink then immediately regretted it because your hand was shaking slightly. Wonderful.
“You guys still living together after graduation?” The question landed like a grenade. Sean looked genuinely curious when you looked startled and Yunho looked calm. “Yeah,” Yunho answered before you could and your eyes immediately flicked toward him as Sean nodded. “Nice. Makes life easier.”
“It does.” The answer came instantly. Like Yunho hadn’t even needed to think about it and something warm stirred in your chest as Sean smiled. “Honestly, I don’t know how you two do it. I’d kill most of my roommates after two years.”
This time you laughed. “So would I.”
Yunho looked down at you immediately. “You wound me.”
“You leave dishes in the sink.”
“They soak.”
“They rot.”
“They marinate.”
Sean barked out a laugh and you laughed too as Yunho smiled. And for a brief second the jealousy disappeared entirely. Because this felt familiar. Comfortable. The two of you slipping into the easy rhythm you’d built over years. Then Sean smiled at you again and the jealousy came roaring right back. Yunho’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly as his eyes lingered on Sean for a moment longer than necessary then dropped to you.
“Oh, there he is.” You followed Sean’s gaze to see another soccer player waving him over from a crowded table near the back as Sean stood. “My roommate is going to drink himself into a medical emergency if I leave him alone any longer.”
“Probably a good idea then,” you said as Sean pointed toward Yunho. “Again, congrats on the win.”
“Thanks.”
And just like that, Sean was gone and the moment he disappeared into the crowd, the space beside you was empty for approximately half a second before Yunho sat down. Like he’d been waiting for the opportunity. The stool Sean had vacated hadn’t even stopped spinning before Yunho claimed it. You stared into your drink to hide your smile as the bar remained loud around you. Students celebrating. Glasses clinking. Music playing overhead.
But suddenly all of your attention narrowed to the person sitting beside you as Yunho leaned forward against the bar. His blonde hair had dried almost completely by now. Which somehow made it worse as you heard him mumble almost to himself. “You really do like blondes, don’t you.”
You froze. The words weren’t loud. But they were loud enough and Yunho froze too, his eyes widening slightly and for a second neither of you moved before you furrowed your brows. “What?”
Yunho stared straight ahead. The picture of regret. You could practically see him replaying the last five seconds in his head. Trying to decide if there was any possible way to pretend he hadn’t just said that.
“What did you just say?”
A faint flush crept up the back of his neck and his ears turned red and the realization hit you immediately. Yunho was embarrassed. Genuinely embarrassed. And somehow that made your pulse jump even harder.
“You told Yeosang you like blondes.” His words landed between you and your brain stopped working. For a moment you weren’t even sure you’d heard correctly. “You… heard that?”
Yunho rubbed the back of his neck. “Maybe.”
Your jaw dropped. “Yunho.”
“It was an accident.”
“You eavesdropped on us?”
“I was getting water.”
“You were eavesdropping while getting water.”
“I was not.”
“You absolutely were.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You dyed your hair.” The words slipped out before you could stop them and Yunho finally looked at you. “You dyed your hair because of that?” you asked quietly and Yunho let out a short laugh. Not amused. More like someone caught red handed. “Maybe.” His jaw tightened as his fingers flexed around an empty beer bottle. For a moment he looked like he was debating whether to keep hiding. Then something in his expression shifted.
“I wanted you to look at me.” The words landed like a punch and your breath caught as Yunho laughed once. “Actually, no. That’s not true.” He shook his head. “I wanted you to want me. I’ve wanted you for a long time,” he admitted and you could have swore your heart stopped beating. “Since freshman year, probably. You remember when you got sick during finals?” You stared at him. Of course you remembered. You’d spent three days miserable in your dorm while Yunho kept showing up with soup and notes. “I remember.”
“I skipped practice for that.”
Your chest tightened. “I know.”
“You don’t.” His eyes locked onto yours. “I skipped practice because I couldn’t focus knowing you were sick.” Yunho looked away briefly before continuing. “I tried getting over it.” A small laugh escaped him again. “Didn’t work.” Your throat felt tight. “I dated other people. Didn’t work.” The noise of the bar washed around you but neither of you seemed to notice anymore. “Then we moved in together.” He smiled faintly. “Which was probably the worst decision I’ve ever made.”
Despite everything, a tiny laugh escaped you as Yunho’s gaze softened. “Do you know how hard it is living with someone you want?” The air left your lungs because of you did. “You wear my hoodies.” His voice was lower now. “You fall asleep on my shoulder. You wear my name and my number.” Your eyes dropped briefly to the black shirt and when you looked back up, Yunho was already watching you. “I like when you wear it.”
Your heart nearly stopped. “You do?”
“Yeah.” Yunho’s jaw flexed. Then he admitted the thing he probably never intended to. “It makes me feel like you’re mine.” The words settled heavily between you and Yunho immediately looked away. Like even after everything, that confession felt too revealing. Too possessive. Too honest. But it was already out there now. And suddenly so many things made sense. The way he’d always noticed when you wore the shirt. The way he’d smiled every time. The way he’d looked at you during games. The way he’d dyed his hair. The way he’d looked at you tonight and slowly, Yunho looked back and his expression was completely open now.
“I want you.” The words were barely above a whisper, yet somehow they hit harder than anything else he’d said. Your heart was beating so hard it hurt and for a moment neither of you moved. Neither of you breathed. You simply stared at each other before you stood and the movement made Yunho blink, eyes following you immediately. Confused, hopeful and a little worried.
“You want me.” It wasn’t a question but your words made Yunho’s throat bob as he nodded like he couldn’t trust his voice anymore and the look in his eyes nearly destroyed you as a tiny smile tugged at your lips. “Then come have me.” And for a second, Yunho simply stared. Like his brain had completely stopped functioning.
Then his chair scraped against the floor so loud heads turned to stare a little as he followed you out the bar.
═════════ ═════════ ═════════
The front door of your apartment barely clicked shut behind you before the tension that had been building all evening, for years, snapped like a live wire. Yunho’s hands were already on your waist, spinning you around and pressing you back against the wood paneling as his mouth found yours in a deep, hungry kiss finally. His tongue slid against yours with urgent need, tasting faintly of the drinks you’d had and the shots he downed. He pulled back just enough to breathe the words against your lips, voice low and rough. “You want me?”
You laughed softly, the sound turning into a gasp when his hips rolled forward to pin you tighter. “Obviously, blondie.” He grinned and then moved. Both of you pulled and tugged at each other’s clothes not wasting anymore time because you already waited years and both of you were impatient now. Shirts tugged over heads, pants shoved down legs, socks kicked aside, Yunho almost tripped once, until both of you stood in nothing but underwear, breathing hard as Yunho’s gaze raked over your body, pupils blown wide, before he bent and lifted you effortlessly.
Your legs wrapped around his waist as he carried you down the short hallway, mouth never leaving yours except to nip at your jaw, tongue gliding against your skin as he shouldered open the door to his bedroom and lowered you onto the edge of the bed wasting no time to start kissing his way down your throat, across your collarbones, pausing to suck lightly at the swell of each breast still covered by your bra. You reached behind yourself and unclasped it, letting the fabric fall away and Yunho’s hands immediately replaced it, palms warm as they cupped and squeezed, thumb stroking over one nipple before he leaned down to take it into his mouth. “Fuck….” You gasped as groaned against you, sucking harder, letting his teeth graze before moving to do the same thing to your other one as he hooked his fingers into the waistband of your panties and drew them down your thighs, slow and deliberate.
He gave one more little nip at your nipple before sliding down and dropping to his knees between your legs, hooking one over his shoulder as he kissed the inside of one thigh, then the other, working higher with open mouthed presses of his lips and your fingers threaded into his hair, gripping the bleached strands as he finally reached your center and his tongue dragged a long, flat stripe up your folds before circling your clit.
He took his time, licking and sucking with focused attention, occasionally dipping lower to push his tongue inside you in slow, deliberate little thrusts. A low groan vibrated against you when his own hand slipped into his boxers to wrap around his dick, stroking in time with the rhythm of his tongue just enough to edge himself as your hips started rocking against his face and the wet sounds of his mouth to fill the room. “Yunho…. I’m….” You could feel it, between the way he would rotate plunging his tongue insult to moving back up to suck your aching clit into to his mouth. You could feel your wetness, juices leaking against his chin, smearing, covering his face.
“FUCK!” Your orgasm slammed against you, coming with a sharp cry, thighs trembling around his head while he kept licking through every pulse and your grip tightened in his hair, eyes rolling back a little as he kept going until you couldn’t take it anymore. You tugged him upward by his hair and didn’t miss the way he moaned at his hair being pulled. “I need you inside me now.”
Yunho stood in one fluid motion, you certainly did not have to tell him twice. He shoved his boxers down, catching your ankles and pulling you toward the edge of the mattress, lifting you into his lap as he sat back on the bed, kissing you as you both could feel his tip aching against you, precum smearing at your entrance. “Look at me.” His voice was rough, raspy, as he pressed his forehead against yours. “You want this?” He held you up, giving enough space for the head of his dick to just barely slip inside you. “You want me to bury myself inside you and make you mine?”
“Please….” You hated that it sounded as if you were desperate and begging but you literally were and it was enough to make him groan as held you, sinking you down onto him in one smooth glide and both of you moaned at the stretch, at the years of wanting finally released. He held you there for a moment, forehead staying pressed to yours, letting you adjust to the deep fullness until you began to move, rising and sinking in steady bounces.
Every downward stroke seated him fully, the angle hitting that perfect spot inside you. It didn’t take long before the pressure crested again, you were to full, the knowledge of him taking you almost too much and you could feel it already, hitting you to fast. You clenched around him and felt yourself squirt, wetness spilling over his thighs and Yunho’s control fractured. “Holy shit, baby….” He laid you flat on the bed and drove into you harder, hips snapping forward while you kept coming in messy pulses around him. He leaned down to kiss you, swallowing your cries as your hands yanked at his hair which only fueled him to pound into you faster.
Another orgasm rolled through you, legs shaking uncontrollably, your moan formed into a cry of his name and Yunho pulled out, mouth returning to your pussy to lap at the fresh slick while you were still coming, tongue slipping inside you again as your walls clenched with aftershocks, and the moan he let out like you watching and having you come apart was the best thing to ever happen to him almost made you come again if he hadn’t pulled back and flipped you onto your stomach.
His hands gripped your hips to pull you back onto your knees, pressing you down into the mattress with one big hand between your shoulder blades, gripping his dick in his other hand, teasing his tip at your ass for a minute before moving it back down and thrusting back inside your overstimulated pussy from behind, going a little slower now, savoring the way you gripped him. “Always wanted this,” he murmured, voice thick. “Wanted you like this, taking every inch.” One hand slid around to your front, fingers finding your swollen clit. “Whose pussy is it?”
You tried to answer but all you could manage for a moment were whimpers, small little cries. “Yours,” you gasped, pushing back to meet him. “It’s your pussy.” The words seemed to ignite something in him. His pace quickened, hips slapping against your ass with each deep thrust as he pulled you upright against his chest, one arm banded across your waist to hold you steady while he continued pounding up into you. The new angle keeping him buried to the hilt, and the steady friction soon had you coming again, body arching back into him.
“Fuck…” Yunho reached up, hand wrapping around your throat, tilting your head back as he could feel his dick twitch. “Mine.” He groaned, thrusts frantic and gone as held you there right, coming, groaning your name as he filled you, hot pulses flooding deep inside you while his arms tightened around you, keeping you close through the aftershocks, pressing kisses along your shoulder and neck as both of you caught your breath, the room quiet except for the sound of your mingled breathing.
For a long moment, neither of you moved. The room was quiet except for the soft hum of the fan in the corner and the sound of your breathing slowly finding its rhythm again. The adrenaline that had carried you from the bar to the apartment was finally beginning to settle, leaving behind something warmer. Softer and real as Yunho rolled onto his back with a groan, one arm immediately reaching for you before you’d even fully settled beside him. Like it was instinct. Like after spending years wanting you, he couldn’t quite convince himself that this wasn’t some elaborate dream his brain had invented.
Then, after a moment, Yunho smiled. Dangerously teasing. The same look he always wears whenever he knows he was about to win an argument. He tilted his head slightly and chuckle escaped him. “You really do like blondes, huh?”
You laughed immediately, then reached up and pushed the hair back from his forehead, fingers lingering there and the teasing expression disappeared from Yunho’s face as he watched you. Watched the fond smile pull at your mouth.
“Mhmmm,” you hummed then you leaned forward and pressed a kiss to his cheek. “But I like just Yunho too.”
And for a second, he simply stared before the biggest smile you’d ever seen spread across his face. And somehow, impossibly, that smile was better than the blonde hair.
summary: trying to figure out what is up with red room staff
includes 🧺 escape room with its fake gore,, sfw,, reader is smart but impressionable,, reader is smart but just a little dumb like all smart people are,, slow burn is slowing down or is it?
previous pt. - au masterlist
you've been working at red room for exactly six days, and you've already developed a theory about the staff dynamic.
actually, you've developed several theories. you're a puzzle-solver. it's what you do.
you start noticing things. not just the obvious things, though there are plenty of those, but the small details. the way the locks on the game doors are industrial-grade. the way the camera feeds are higher resolution than anything you'd expect from a niche escape room. the way the sound system in the control room could probably fill a concert venue.
you notice these things because you're standing in the control room right now, waiting for jason to finish his call, and you're trying very hard not to stare at the equipment rack.
it's beautiful.
not only in a "this is expensive" way—it obviously is, you're pretty sure that processor alone costs more than your monthly rent—but also in a "someone built this with terrifying precision" way. the cables are color-coded. the labeling is handwritten but immaculate. the whole setup hums with the quiet confidence of something designed by someone who knew exactly what they were doing.
you recognize the brand on the server housing. you saw it once in an article about high-end security systems. the kind of thing that doesn't just show up in a retail space.
"like what you see?"
you jump. jason is hanging up the phone, watching you with that particular expression he gets sometimes. the one that says he's cataloging your reactions.
"sorry," you say, stepping back from the rack. "i didn't mean to snoop. i just… this is impressive. did you build it?"
jason's expression flickers. something careful settling into place. "roy handles most of the tech. he's got a gift."
that tracks. you've seen roy with computers. the way his fingers move, fast and certain. the way he troubleshoots problems before you can even finish describing them. it's the same ease he has with the puzzles, but sharper somehow.
"he's good," you say.
"the best," jason agrees, and there's something in his voice that makes you look at him. pride, maybe. or something heavier.
you file it away.
another day, you notice that roy harper is always within twenty feet of the front counter.
not in a creepy way. in a way that would be endearing if it weren't so statistically improbable. he finds reasons. refilling the waiver clipboard. adjusting the already-straight framed newspaper clippings. checking the fog machine levels for the third time.
"you know," jason says from his usual throne behind the counter, sprawled in a chair that definitely violates multiple workplace safety guidelines. "if you're gonna hover, at least bring snacks."
roy flips him off without looking away from you.
you're learning their language. flipping off is affection. eye-rolling is agreement. sarcasm is the primary mode of communication.
"just making sure the new hire is settling in," roy says, leaning against the counter with practiced casualness. his sleeve rides up just slightly and you catch a glimpse of ink disappearing under the fabric. you look away quickly. you barely know him, staring at his tattoos feels invasive but your brain files it away anyway. tattoos. multiple. could be relevant later.
jason snorts. "she's been here six days. she knows where the coffee maker is."
"i'm good," you confirm, smiling at roy. "really. the job is mostly just smiling and handing out waivers. i can smile and hand things out."
"you're great at smiling," roy says immediately. then his ears go pink. "i mean. professionally. your customer service smile is... very serviceable."
jason makes a sound like a dying seal.
you bite your lip to keep from laughing. "thank you. i pride myself on my serviceable smile."
the door chimes. a group of college kids piles in, already loud, already taking photos of the decor. you straighten automatically, slipping into work mode.
"welcome to red room!" you call out, warm and professional. "first time?"
roy lingers just long enough to watch you handle the group. waivers, rule spiel, the whole routine. you catch him smiling softly at something. when you glance over, he pretends to be very interested in a speck of dust on the counter.
jason kicks him under the desk.
"go do something," jason mutters. "you're embarrassing yourself. you're embarrassing me. i'm not even related to you."
"you're always related to me in spirit," roy shoots back, but he pushes off the counter and retreats toward the back hallway.
you watch him go without meaning to. the way he moves is interesting. loose-limbed, easy, but with a kind of coiled awareness underneath. like he's always tracking exits and entrances even when he's relaxed.
probably from working in a haunted house, you tell yourself. you'd develop situational awareness too if people jumped out at you all day.
but something about it niggles at you.
the college kids enter the room and roy quickly runs to the control center. the game is simple and doesn't require an actor, so he's on the support line. you and jason are alone at the counter for a moment, which means jason immediately fills the silence.
"so," he says, dragging the syllable out like he's about to ask something deeply personal. "roy."
you look at him warily. "roy."
"what do you think of him?"
"i think he's... tall?"
jason's grin is immediate and predatory. "tall. right. that's the word you'd use."
"what word would you use?"
"oh, i don't know. i'm not the one who kissed him."
you groan and drop your forehead onto the counter. "we're never going to move past that, are we?"
"nope." jason says cheerfully. "that story's getting told at your wedding."
you lift your head just enough to glare at him. "wedding?"
"funeral, whatever. same vibe."
before you can respond—or throw something at him—the back door swings open and roy reappears. he shouldn't be leaving the kids back there without surveillance assistance but you guess being slightly reckless is just his style.
roy is holding what looks like a small container of apple slices. cut into shapes.
specifically, bunny shapes.
you blink.
roy notices you looking and freezes mid-step. something flickers across his face—embarrassment? panic?—before he shoves the container into the small fridge under the counter with exaggerated casualness.
"meal prep," he says.
you stare at the fridge. then at him. "bunny-shaped meal prep?"
"bunnies are... nutritious."
jason is watching this exchange with the expression of someone who has front-row seats to the funniest thing he's ever seen.
"right," you say slowly. "bunnies. full of vitamins."
roy's ears are doing that pink thing again. "they're aesthetically pleasing. it's a known fact that food tastes better when it's shaped like something. science."
"science," you repeat.
"peer-reviewed." roy grabs jason's shoulder. "ain't it right?"
"yeah," jason rolls his eyes. "my personal favorite, actually."
you have approximately seventeen follow-up questions, but a new group enters before you can ask any of them. tourists this time, a family with two teenagers who look deeply unimpressed by everything. you pivot to customer service mode automatically.
when you look back, roy has vanished. hopefully back to his work and not another detour that could raise your suspicion.
for now, the container of bunny-shaped apple slices remains in the fridge.
you file it away.
the day passes in a blur of waivers and rule explanations and one particularly memorable moment where a guy tried to negotiate the "no touching actors" rule like it was a used car deal. "what if i just, like, high-five them? from a distance? with consent?" you handle it with a smile that's only slightly strained. you wouldn't tell him that the only person who can violate the rule without consequences is you.
by late afternoon, things have quieted down. you're organizing the clipboard stack when roy reappears, now wearing a different shirt—sleeves short, probably because the back rooms get stuffy—and carrying a bag from somewhere.
"thought you might want this," he says, setting a coffee on the counter in front of you.
it's exactly how you order it. you haven't told him how you order it.
you look up, surprised. "how did you—"
"lucky guess." he's trying to play it cool, but there's a hopeful tilt to his expression that makes something warm curl in your chest.
"thank you," you say softly.
he shrugs like it's nothing, but he's smiling.
jason materializes behind him. "where's mine?"
"you have hands."
"i have emotional needs."
you sip your coffee and watch them bicker, feeling oddly content. this is nice. the easy rhythm of it. the way roy glances at you occasionally to make sure you're still smiling.
then you notice something.
when roy shifted to argue with jason, his sleeve rode up further, revealing more of the tattoo you glimpsed earlier. you don't mean to stare. you really don't. but your eyes catch on the edge of it, visible just below his shoulder.
it's a word. you can only see the end of it.
—son.
that's all you catch before you force your gaze away, face warming. stop staring at his skin. that's rude. that's objectifying. that's—
something-son.
your brain, ever helpful, immediately supplies the most obvious completion: jason.
he has jason's name tattooed on his body.
you take a very long sip of coffee and try not to make a face.
okay, you think carefully. okay. there could be explanations.
brothers? no, you've heard them earlier. they're not related. they've been very clear about that.
best friends? people tattoo best friends' names sometimes, right? that's normal. platonic. fine.
really good friends? the kind of friends who—
no. stop. you're spiraling.
but you can't help it. you start reviewing every interaction you've witnessed between them. the way jason watches roy with something that looks like pride. the way roy automatically gravitates toward jason's position in any room. the inside jokes. the shared language. the way jason kicked him under the desk earlier. familiar, comfortable, intimate. the way jason has been asking about your thoughts on roy, joked about weddings and funerals being the same thing.
oh no.
oh no, oh no, oh no.
you're not the kind of person who gets in the way of something real. you're not. if roy and jason have something—if that tattoo means what you think it means—you need to step back. gracefully. supportively.
even if the thought makes your chest ache.
you set the coffee down carefully.
roy notices immediately. "you okay?"
"fine!" your voice comes out an octave too high. "great coffee. amazing!"
he narrows his eyes slightly but doesn't push.
jason, on the other hand, is watching you with an expression you can't quite read. curious. calculating. like he's watching someone solve a puzzle in real-time and he's fascinated by where they're going wrong.
you avoid eye contact with both of them for the rest of the shift.
that night, lying in bed, you stare at the ceiling and compile your evidence.
evidence #1: roy has a tattoo that ends in "son." the most obvious completion is "jason."
evidence #2: they're not brothers.
evidence #3: jason is intensely protective of roy. you've seen it multiple times now—the way he tracks roy's mood, the way he inserts himself into conversations when roy seems off, the way he teases but never too harshly.
evidence #4: they have a level of comfort that goes beyond normal friendship. finishing sentences. knowing what the other is thinking. roy brought you coffee and jason immediately asked where his was… not seriously, but the reflex was there. like he expects to be included in roy's gestures.
evidence #5: the way roy said "meal prep" about those bunny-shaped apples was defensive. like he was hiding something. what do you hide about shaped fruit? unless it's not for him. unless it's for someone else.
you sit up abruptly.
jason likes bunny-shaped apples.
it's absurd. it's ridiculous. it's also the only explanation that fits all the pieces.
you flop back onto the mattress with a groan.
you're going to have to talk to roy about this. soon. because you refuse to be the person who accidentally inserts herself into something that's already there.
even if you really, really hoped—
doesn't matter.
you'll handle it tomorrow.
you find roy in the back room the next afternoon.
the building is quiet except for the distant hum of a game in progress. roy is sitting on a storage crate, fiddling with something on a tablet, the furrow between his brows making him look focused in a way you haven't seen before.
you knock on the doorframe. he looks up, and the furrow immediately smooths into a smile.
"hey! break time?"
"kind of." you step inside, pulling the door mostly closed behind you. "can we talk? for a second."
something in your voice must tip him off, because his expression shifts. he sets the tablet aside, giving you his full attention. "sure. what's up?"
you open your mouth. close it. the carefully rehearsed speech you'd run through a dozen times last night suddenly feels ridiculous and invasive and too much.
but you can't keep going like this. you can't keep smiling at him across the counter, letting yourself hope, if his heart already belongs to someone else.
"i need you to know," you start, the words tumbling out before you can stop them, "that i'm not the kind of person who gets in the way of something real. i'm not. and if i've been misreading things, if i've been… if i'm stepping into something that already exists, i need to know. because i would never want to be that person. the person who—"
roy holds up a hand, looking bewildered. "whoa, slow down. what are you talking about?"
you take a breath. the next part is harder.
"i saw your tattoo," you say quietly. "the one on your shoulder. i wasn't trying to stare, but i saw it ends with 'son.' and i know you and jason aren't brothers. and i've seen how you two are together, how protective he is, how you always gravitate toward each other, and i just—" you stop, throat tight. "i support love in all its forms. i really do. and if you and he are... if that's what the tattoo means, then i need to step back. gracefully. i can do that."
silence.
roy stares at you.
his face cycles through approximately four distinct expressions in the span of three seconds: confusion, comprehension, dawning horror, and then—when he finally understands what you're implying—a kind of profound, soul-deep disgust.
"you," he says slowly, "think i have jason's name tattooed on me."
you wince. "i know it's presumptuous to assume…"
"you think me and jason—" he makes a gesture between the two of you that might indicate romance or might indicate vomiting. it's hard to tell. "you think jason todd and i are—"
roy makes a sound. it's not quite a word. it's more like a deflating balloon combined with a wounded animal.
"we're not—" he drags a hand down his face, then reaches for the collar of his shirt. "okay. no. we're ending this right now."
he yanks the fabric down, twisting to show you the full tattoo.
it's script, green ink, running along the curve of his bicep. six letters, clear as day in the fluorescent light.
your brain grinds to a halt.
"it says poison," roy says flatly. "and even if it did say jason—which it does not—it would be because we were matching tattoos for a bet we lost, not because we were—" he shudders. "i need to go shower. in bleach."
you stare at the word. poison.
all the air goes out of your lungs. "oh my god."
"yeah."
"i thought…"
"i know what you thought. i could see you thinking it. you have a very loud thinking face."
you bury your face in your hands. "i'm so sorry. i'm so, so sorry. i was trying to be supportive!"
roy laughs. it's strained, a little breathless, but it's real. "you thought i was in a secret workplace romance with my best friend and you were ready to bow out 'gracefully' because you didn't want to be a homewrecker."
"when you say it like that, it sounds insane."
"it's a little insane."
"i thought i was being mature."
he laughs again, softer this time, and the tension in his shoulders starts to ease. but something else is creeping in behind his eyes. a quieter thing.
you see it when he looks down at the tattoo, fingers brushing the edge of the ink.
"that one," he says, voice losing its teasing edge, "isn't from a bet."
you go very still.
he lets his shirt fall back into place, but he doesn't look at you right away. his gaze is somewhere else.
"there's a lot of ink on me," he says slowly. "some of it's from my time with the navajo. after my dad died, i was taken in, and some of those stories... they stay with you. you wear them."
he traces a different spot, somewhere higher, hidden by fabric. "this one though." he taps the shoulder again. "this one i don't really remember getting."
your chest tightens.
he's not looking at you. that's okay. you don't need him to.
"there was a time," he says carefully, "when things weren't good. i wasn't good."
the word addiction hangs in the air between you, unspoken but unmistakable.
you think about the careful, hovering way jason orbits him. the way roy's sleeve covered that tattoo until today, when he let you see what is beneath.
like he's not hiding anymore.
"thank you for telling me," you say quietly.
that makes him look at you. his eyes are searching, wary, waiting for something. pity, maybe. discomfort. the thousand small rejections people give when they don't know how to hold something heavy.
you don't give him any of that. you just meet his gaze and hold it steady.
it startles roy, "you're not running?"
"i already did my running for this lifetime," you say with a smile. "character growth."
something shifts in his expression. cracks, just a little.
the moment stretches, warm and fragile, and you're both still looking at each other when the door swings open.
jason leans against the frame, arms crossed, grinning like a cat that's cornered something particularly amusing.
"so," he says, loud enough to make you both flinch. "i heard everything."
roy's face goes through another cycle of expressions. this one ends somewhere around murder. "how long were you standing there?"
"long enough." jason's grin doesn't waver. he looks directly at you.
your face is on fire. "i was being supportive."
"i'm touched." he presses a hand to his chest in mock sincerity. "truly. but i'm far too beautiful to be tied down. you two can have each other."
he saunters off down the hallway, whistling.
roy exhales slowly. "i'm going to kill him."
you're both quiet for a moment. then roy looks at you, and his expression has gone soft again. vulnerable, but not scared.
"so," he says. "just so we're clear. the only person i'm interested in, romantically, is—"
he doesn't finish. he doesn't have to. your heart does something complicated in your chest.
from down the hall, jason's voice echoes, "gross!"
roy flips the direction of the voice without looking.
you laugh. being there in that moment feels like stepping into sunlight, warm rays tickling your cheeks and hazing your sight.
the clothes start to register later that week.
it's stupid, really. you should have noticed sooner. but you've been distracted—by the puzzles, by roy, by the growing attraction between you two—and apparently your brain decided "clothing brand awareness" wasn't a priority.
until roy shows up to a staff meeting in a jacket that you know costs more than your entire wardrobe.
you know this because you saw the same jacket in a store window last month. you took a picture of the price tag to send to your group chat as a joke.
it was not a joke price.
he drapes it over the back of a chair like it's nothing, like it's a ten-dollar thrift find, and you stare at the logo like it might confess something to you.
then you look at his shoes. those are expensive too. and his watch—you've seen that watch before, you're almost certain, in some spy movie.
your eyes drift to jason. his boots are the same brand you noticed on a customer once who told you, very proudly, that they cost eight hundred dollars. his jeans are the kind that don't have obvious labels but somehow look like they cost money.
you look down at your own clothes. target. perfectly fine. absolutely not worth a criminal investigation.
okay, you think. okay.
you start paying attention after that.
evidence #1: coffee machine
the break room has a coffee maker that costs more than your first car. you know this because you looked it up. it has settings for different roast profiles. it has a steam wand. it has personality, according to the website, which seems like a lot for something that just makes caffeine.
roy catches you staring at it one morning.
"good machine," he says, pouring himself a cup. "worth every penny."
"how many pennies are we talking?"
he shrugs. "bought it years ago. doesn't matter if it lasts."
you do the math in your head. even years ago, that machine would have been a significant investment. for an escape room that doesn't exactly have high foot traffic.
"must have saved up," you say carefully.
roy makes a noncommittal sound. he's not looking at you. his focus is on the coffee, on the careful way he adds cream, on anything that isn't your face.
you notice his hands. they're steady. they're always steady. but there's something in the way he holds the mug that makes you think he's not as relaxed as he's pretending.
evidence #2: control room
there are six tablets in the control room. they're used for monitoring games, tracking puzzle completion, and communicating with actors. standard stuff.
except these tablets are the latest model. the expensive one. the one with the screen that costs extra because it's somehow even clearer than regular screens.
you pick one up, turning it over in your hands. the weight is familiar—you've held one before, at an electronics store, when you were trying to convince yourself you didn't need it.
"you okay there?"
you look up. roy is in the doorway, leaning against the frame, arms crossed. his posture is easy. his eyes are not.
"these are nice," you say, setting the tablet down carefully.
"they get the job done." something passes over his face. too quick to read. "we invested in quality. less replacement, less hassle."
"that's smart."
he nods. the moment stretches.
you don't ask the obvious question. where did the money come from?
but you're thinking about it.
evidence #3: eavesdropping
it's late. the last game of the night is wrapping up—a group of birthday-party teens who've been screaming for forty-five minutes straight. you're in the hallway outside the control room, waiting to grab your bag from the counter, when you hear voices.
jason and roy. they must have left the door cracked.
"—can't keep doing this." that's jason. his voice is lower than usual. serious in a way you rarely hear.
"i know." roy's voice is tired.
"she's not stupid. she's already looking at things, connecting dots."
a pause. you shouldn't be listening to this. you know you shouldn't be listening to this. your feet are rooted to the floor.
"she's going to figure it out soon. if you don't tell her, it's going to hurt."
tell her what?
you hold your breath.
"jason—"
"it's scary but it has to be done." there's something in jason's voice now. something that sounds almost gentle. "you need to be on the same page."
you hear roy exhale—a sharp, frustrated sound. then footsteps approaching the door.
you scramble backward, trying to look casual, heart pounding.
the door swings open. roy stops short when he sees you.
"hey," he says, and his voice is carefully light. "you waiting for something?"
"just grabbing my bag." you smile. it feels too wide. "long day."
he studies you for a moment. you don't know what he sees, but something in his expression shifts. softens.
"yeah," he says. "walk you out?"
you want to say no. you want to go home and process what you just heard. but your mouth says, "sure," and then you're walking beside him through the dim lobby, your bag strap cutting into your shoulder, your thoughts racing.
the night air is cool against your skin. the streets are quiet this time of evening, the usual city hum dialed down to something almost peaceful. you and roy walk side by side, your pace matched to his, your hands tucked into your jacket pockets.
it's becoming a routine. him walking you home after late shifts. the comfortable silence that settles between you. the way your shoulders brush occasionally, neither of you moving away.
tonight, though, the silence isn't comfortable.
your brain is too loud.
you keep thinking about the control room. the equipment. the way jason's voice had sounded when he pressed his ginger friend to tell you something. the way roy had looked at you in the doorway—searching, like he was trying to figure out how much you'd heard.
you glance at roy. he's looking ahead, hands in his own pockets, expression relaxed. but you've learned to read him better now. the slight tension in his jaw. the way his shoulders aren't quite as loose as they usually are.
he knows something's on your mind.
you should let it go. you should file it away, observe, and collect more data before you say anything. that's what you usually do. that's what your brain wants to do. treat this like an investigation, find all the pieces, assemble them in the right order, and be the columbo.
but that's how you ended up accusing him of being in love with jason.
maybe it's time to try a different approach.
"hey," you say.
roy looks at you immediately. "hey."
"i have a question."
his step falters just slightly. "okay."
you take a breath. "do you and jason have other jobs? like, besides red room?"
he's quiet for a moment. then, "no. we don't have other day jobs."
you nod slowly. you believe him. that's the thing—you've gotten good at reading his tells, and this doesn't feel like a lie. it feels true.
which means the money is coming from somewhere else.
"okay," you say. "then i have another question."
roy stops walking. turns to face you fully. there's something in his expression now—wary, but not closed off. waiting.
you stop too. face him.
you could spiral about this. you could go home and build a theory board and drive yourself crazy trying to figure out the angles. you're good at that. it's what you do.
but you're also trying to be better. at communicating. at trusting. at letting people tell you things instead of assuming you already know.
"i've noticed things," you say carefully. "the clothes you and jason wear. the equipment in the control room. the tablets. the coffee machine."
roy's eyebrows lift slightly. "the coffee machine?"
"that thing costs more than my security deposit."
he huffs a laugh. "okay, that's fair."
"so i've been thinking," you continue. "you said you don't have other jobs. i believe you. which means the money for all of that is coming from something else. and i've been running through possibilities in my head, and i keep coming back to one that makes sense."
roy's expression has gone very still. "yeah?"
you meet his eyes. "are you committing tax fraud?"
he stares at you.
you stare back.
then roy harper throws his head back and laughs.
it's not a small laugh. it's not a nervous chuckle. it's a full, loud, genuine laugh that echoes off the buildings around you. he has to brace his hands on his knees. a guy walking his dog across the street gives you both a very strange look.
"i'm being serious!" you protest, though you're fighting a smile now because his laugh is infectious and also because he's laughing instead of running and that feels like a good sign.
"i know," he wheezes. "i know you are. that's—" he straightens up, still grinning, wiping at his eyes. "tax fraud. that's what you landed on."
"you have to admit it fits."
"it really doesn't!"
"expensive things, no visible income stream, a business that doesn't exactly seem to be turning a massive profit." you're ticking off points on your fingers now. "you have to see how it looks."
roy is still grinning, but there's something softer underneath it now. something that looks almost like relief.
"i see how it looks," he says. "and for the record? no tax fraud. no fraud at all. i promise."
you wait.
he exhales, running a hand through his hair. the gesture is familiar. it's nervous, a little self-conscious. you've seen him do it before, usually right before he says something he's not sure how to say.
"the money," he says slowly, "isn't from anything illegal. it's just... old. from before."
"before what?"
he hesitates. then, with the air of someone pulling off a bandage, "before i screwed it up. both of us, actually. jason and i, we were adopted. by people who had money. a lot of money."
you blink. "adopted?"
"yeah." he's watching your face carefully now, like he's waiting for something. "jason was adopted by bruce wayne. i was oliver queen's ward for a while."
you keep blinking.
bruce wayne. the bruce wayne? billionaire bruce wayne? the guy who throws galas and owns half of gotham?
and oliver queen. your star city local billionaire? the one who's always on the news for philanthropy, communist speeches, and weird hobbies?
you open your mouth. close it. open it again.
"bruce wayne," you repeat.
"mmhm."
"adopted jason."
"yeah. it was a whole thing."
"and oliver queen adopted you."
"i was his ward, technically. but basically the same thing. for a while, anyway."
you stare at him. he stares back, looking increasingly nervous.
"you're telling me," you say slowly, "that you and jason are both the adopted sons of billionaires. and you use their money?"
"it's not like we're still getting allowances," roy cuts in quickly. "that's not—i'm not—look, it's complicated. but the money we have now? that's from before. from when things were good. and we've been careful with it. the room doesn't make a lot, but it covers costs, and we don't need much. the expensive stuff—" he shrugs, looking almost embarrassed now. "some of it's old. some of it we bought because we could, back then, and it's lasted. the coffee machine was a gift from ollie. before everything fell apart."
the way he says before everything fell apart makes your chest tighten.
"so you're not committing tax fraud," you say.
"definitely not."
"you're just... retired billionaires' kids who started an escape room."
roy laughs again, softer this time. "that's one way to put it."
"you have to excuse me but i have to google it," you pat your pockets looking for your phone. "just fact checking."
"i understand."
you've never followed celebrity news more than your friends gossiped about so you hesitate about where to even look. once you get ahold of your search engine, you indeed land on the headlines that prove roy's claims to be true.
not that they become less crazy.
you consider this. it's not what you expected. it's not even close to what you expected. but the pieces are starting to shift in your head, rearranging themselves into a new shape.
"you said you screwed it up," you say quietly. "with your adoptive families."
his smile fades. just a little. just enough.
"yeah," he says.
"i don't want to read it from the newspapers."
"you probably can't. they made sure to erase anything too bad."
"and if i were to hear it from the source?"
roy takes a minute.
"we were young. and stupid. we made choices that—" he stops. breathes. "they weren't right to judge us the way they did. but we weren't right either. and it is what it is."
you don't push. you want to. your curiosity is a living thing, always hungry, but you can see the weight of this on him. the way his shoulders have tightened again. the way he's not quite looking at you.
instead, you reach out and bump his arm with your knuckles.
you've reached your building. you stop at the bottom of the steps, and roy stops with you, shoving his hands in his pockets like he always does at this moment. like he's not sure what to do with them.
"thanks for asking," he says. "instead of…"
"instead of assuming you were in love with jason again?"
"i was going to say instead of assuming the worst, but sure. that works too."
you grin. "character growth."
"character growth," he agrees.
there's a pause. the streetlight buzzes softly overhead. somewhere in the distance, a car honks.
"i wasn't trying to pry," you say. "about the money. about your family. i just…"
"you noticed things," he finishes. "it's what you do."
"it's what i do," you echo.
from somewhere above you, a window opens. a voice calls out, "are you two gonna kiss or just stand there? some of us are trying to sleep!"
you both jolt apart like you've been electrocuted.
"sorry!" you yelp at the same time roy shouts, "mind your business!"
the window slams shut. you look at each other.
roy bursts out laughing. you follow a second later, the tension breaking into something giddy and ridiculous.
the door closes behind you, and you lean against it, heart racing, face aching from smiling.
you still have questions. so many questions.
you spot the weapons the next afternoon.
it's not like you were looking for them. you were in the back storage room, hunting for extra waiver forms—the front desk ran out, there's a group of ten arriving in twenty minutes, and jason is nowhere to be found. standard red room chaos.
the door to the secondary storage closet is cracked open. you push it wider, reach for the light switch.
and you freeze.
there's a bow. the same bow you saw the first time behind the scenes.
not a prop bow. not the foam-and-plastic kind that hangs on the game room walls for ambiance. a real bow. compound. sleek metal, pulleys, and a stabilizer. it's resting against a case of something—you lean closer—arrows.
real arrows.
you're still staring when a voice booms from directly behind you:
"ah yes! the new props!"
you nearly launch out of your skin.
jason materializes beside you like he's been there the whole time, which he absolutely hasn't been, because you would have noticed a six-foot-something man with that much presence standing three inches from your elbow. he's smiling. it's the smile he uses on customers. wide. reassuring. completely fake.
"props," you repeat.
"for the new room," jason says, voice still too loud. "gotta take them apart, make sure everything's secure and safe for the games. you know how it is."
you do not know how it is. you have never known how it is. you are very certain that taking apart real weapons is not a standard part of escape room maintenance.
but jason is looking at you with those eyes that see everything, and his smile hasn't wavered, and you realize with sudden clarity that this is a performance. he's not explaining things to you. he's covering.
for your benefit. because you found something you weren't supposed to see.
you smile back. "makes sense. safety first."
"safety first," jason echoes.
the moment hangs. neither of you moves.
"waiver forms," you say.
"counter," he says. "under the register."
"great. thanks."
you turn and walk away very calmly. you do not run. you do not look back. you are a normal person who definitely believes that those were props and that jason definitely needs to take apart real combat-ready weaponry for safety reasons.
you are a normal person.
you get the forms. you hand them to the waiting group. you smile. you explain the rules. you do not think about the bow.
you think about the bow. you think about the suit. you think about the way jason's voice went artificially loud the second he saw you looking.
that was for my benefit. he was covering.
your brain, which has been running a background process on this since you started at red room, kicks into high gear.
no day jobs, they said. money from billionaire adoptions, they said. but the money doesn't explain the weapons. the real weapons. the suit with armor.
what kind of people keep combat-ready equipment in their storage closet?
what kind of people need to take apart real weapons to make them look like props?
what kind of mistakes do you make as a teenager that ruin a relationship with a billionaire and leave you with a storage closet full of weapons?
you hand a waiver to a woman who thanks you. you smile automatically.
not tax fraud. not just tax fraud.
they have night jobs.
they're in something. something that requires weapons and armor and the kind of money that comes from...
your mind skitters over possibilities. private security. mercenary work. crime.
the mistakes they made as teenagers. the ones that drove them away from their families. the ones roy said weren't entirely their fault but also weren't entirely right.
illegal weapons market. trafficking. something with enough money to fund an escape room front and enough danger to need real armor.
jason's protectiveness over roy. the way he hovers. the way he watches.
not romance.
operational security.
roy's an asset. a partner. someone who knows too much to be left alone.
you glance up. jason is standing in the doorway to the back hallway, watching you. his expression is unreadable. when he catches your eye, he smiles again—smaller this time. almost genuine.
you smile back.
you are about to date someone in organized crime.
probably.
you're filing the completed forms when you hear it.
the back hallway is quiet. no games running, jason somewhere in the control room. you're alone at the front desk, sorting papers, trying very hard not to think about bows and suits and what jason is doing with them right now.
roy's voice drifts through the cracked door. soft. softer than you've ever heard him.
"...yes, i promise. no, no monsters. i checked under the bed twice."
you freeze. your hand hovers over the filing box.
"okay, okay, three times. yes, the purple one with the stars."
there's a pause. his voice drops further, so gentle it makes something in your chest ache.
"be safe, bug."
the call ends. you hear movement. you should move. you should not be standing here, frozen like an idiot, obviously eavesdropping on something private.
the door swings open.
roy stops short when he sees you. his ears go pink immediately. "uh. family stuff."
you nod slowly. your brain is already running.
bug. he said bug. wiretap. surveillance equipment. code name for an asset. a contact. purple one with the stars. a coded location. a drop site. a meet-up point. he checked for monsters. he checked under the bed.
that's counter-surveillance.
he's checking for bugs. he's checking for people listening.
he's a criminal. almost certainly involved in something dangerous. something with weapons and armor and coded phone calls about monsters and stars.
he's also looking at you like you're something precious.
you have terrible taste in romantic interests.
roy glances at his watch. you glance at yours without thinking. it's 7:45 pm.
his expression shifts. "gotta go. important thing."
you try to keep your face neutral. "oh?"
"yeah. just…" he's already grabbing his jacket from the hook by the door. "prior commitment. very important.'
you watch him pull the jacket on. watch him check his phone. watch the way his whole demeanor changes. shoulders squaring, focus sharpening, like he's shifting into a different gear.
you should be terrified. you should be calling your mother. you should be drafting a very polite email about "unforeseen personal circumstances" and never setting foot in red room again.
instead, you feel something weirdly like satisfaction.
the pieces are coming together. not the right pieces—you know from experience that you're probably missing something—but closer. the shape of it is starting to emerge from the fog.
it's pretty ironic that i moved to the point where roy is about to tell his life story around the same time in this au and in girl next door au. it's pretty tricky not to repeat myself in the different aus... but here we go anyway!!
All of a sudden, corporations aren't concerned about climate change anymore.
The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence has sparked an intense, ground-level resource crisis. In May 2026, a major public utility scandal in Fayetteville, Georgia, shattered the illusion of the "clean, digital cloud."
Homeowners in a local subdivision first noticed a problem when their household water taps experienced sudden, severe drops in pressure.
An investigation revealed that a massive, 615-acre data center campus operated by Quality Technology Services (QTS) had drawn roughly 29 million gallons of unmetered water through two unauthorized industrial hookups.
The discovery ignited a fierce political revolt across Fayette County. At the time, local residents were under strict emergency drought mandates to conserve water and stop watering lawns.
Meanwhile, the data center project — dubbed Project Excalibur — escaped without a single penalty fine despite operating outside normal monitoring channels for up to 15 months, racking up $147,474 in retroactive charges.
County officials defended the decision by stating that the developer was their largest customer and they had to be partners. QTS claimed the water was used for temporary construction, concrete preparation, and dust mitigation, maintaining that the finished facility will eventually operate on a water-efficient closed-loop cooling network.
The Georgia incident highlights a massive blind spot in the AI boom: the heavy physical toll on municipal infrastructure.
Globally, the International Energy Agency projects data center water consumption to exceed 1.2 trillion liters by 2030, driven largely by the cooling demands of machine learning chips, signaling that communities are no longer willing to sacrifice their natural resources to fuel the digital race.
The coffee shop is fourteen steps from the office entrance. You counted once during your second week in Seoul, when counting things felt like the only way to make the city smaller. Fourteen steps across a sidewalk that never stops moving, through a glass door that chimes when it opens, into a narrow space that smells like roasted beans and warm milk and something faintly sweet you can never quite place.
It becomes your anchor before you realize it does.
You don’t speak Korean well. You speak it the way a child speaks—in fragments, with long pauses where grammar should be, smiling too much to compensate for everything you can’t say. Your company flew you here because you’re good at what you do, good enough that they built a team around you and trusted you to train them in a language you share and one you don’t. During meetings, the technical English flows fine. But the moment someone cracks a joke in Korean, the moment the conversation slips into the casual current that carries real connection, you’re standing on the bank watching it pass.
So the coffee shop becomes the place where none of that matters. You walk in, you point at the menu or say the words you’ve practiced, and someone hands you a cup. Simple. Transactional. Safe.
You don’t notice her specifically at first. There are three or four people who rotate behind the counter, and in those early weeks they all blur into the same polite smile and the same rehearsed gamsahamnida. But somewhere around the third week, you start recognizing a pattern in the rotation. She works mornings. Monday through Friday, almost always. Blonde hair pulled up in a ponytail, bangs across her forehead, a face that looks like it belongs somewhere more interesting than behind an espresso machine.
She’s quiet. Not unfriendly—she smiles when she takes your order, and it’s a real smile, not the customer-service kind that starts and stops at the mouth. But she doesn’t make small talk. Doesn’t ask how your day is going. Doesn’t try to upsell pastries. She takes the order, makes the drink, writes something on the cup, slides it across the counter. Done.
You appreciate the efficiency. You appreciate not having to fumble through pleasantries you don’t have the vocabulary for yet.
It takes about a month before you realize she’s been watching you too.
Not in an obvious way. You catch it in small things—the way she’ll glance up when you walk through the door, a half-second recognition before she drops her eyes back to whatever she’s doing. The way she starts reaching for a cup before you’ve even reached the counter on days when the line is short. The way she pauses, just slightly, pen hovering over the cup, as if she’s thinking about what she’s about to write.
You figure she’s just good at her job. Baristas learn regulars. That’s how it works.
Then one morning, your coworker Jun—one of the few on your team who speaks enough English to be dangerous—comes with you.
"You come here every day?" he asks, looking around the small shop with mild interest.
"Pretty much."
"What do you usually get?"
"Depends on the day."
Jun gives you a look like that’s not an answer, and you shrug because you don’t know how to explain it in a way that doesn’t sound weird. The truth is your order has become a kind of barometer, a shorthand for how you’re feeling that you didn’t consciously develop. Black coffee when the day ahead is dense with work and you need to be sharp—something bold, no sweetness, just the clean bitter bite of arabica against your tongue. A latte when you woke up feeling good, when the city felt a little less foreign, when you actually understood most of what the cab driver said—the warmth of steamed milk softening the espresso into something gentle, drinkable, forgiving. An espresso—small, bitter, over quick—when things are heavy. When you stayed up too late staring at your apartment ceiling wondering what you’re doing here. When you missed home in a way that sits in your chest like a stone.
You don’t think about it as a pattern. But she does.
You know this because on a Thursday—a black coffee Thursday, meetings stacked from nine to five, your Korean phrasebook open on your phone under the conference table like a cheat sheet—she slides your cup across the counter and you see what she’s written.
Not your name. She always writes something that’s almost your name but not quite, letters rearranged or swapped in a way that suggests she heard it once and is working from a half-memory. You’ve never corrected her. It doesn’t bother you. It’s kind of endearing, actually, this mangled version of yourself that exists only on coffee cups.
But today, underneath the misspelled name, she’s drawn a small flexed arm. A tiny bicep emoji, rendered in Sharpie.
You look up. She’s already helping the next customer, but there’s the faintest curve at the corner of her mouth. Like she knows you’re looking.
You take your coffee. You go to your meetings. You survive them.
And on the walk back to your apartment that night, you realize you’re still thinking about a drawing on a cup.
❤︎
The next morning is a latte morning. You slept well. You understood a joke in the elevator. Small victories.
She has your drink ready before you reach the counter, and when she slides it across, there’s a tiny sun drawn next to the misspelled name.
"How did you know?" you ask. In English, because your Korean isn’t ready for this question.
She blinks at you. Tilts her head slightly. "Hm?"
"The—" You gesture vaguely at the cup, at the sun, at the whole impossible thing she’s apparently been doing. "How did you know I wanted a latte today?"
She looks at you for a moment, and something in her expression shifts. Not surprise, exactly. More like she’s deciding something.
"You look like latte today," she says. In English. Accented, careful, but clear.
You stare at her.
"You speak English?"
She holds up her hand, thumb and forefinger close together. "Little bit." Then, quieter: "Your face is different. Latte days, espresso days. Is different."
You don’t know what to say to that. Someone you’ve never had a real conversation with has been reading you more accurately than anyone in your life right now, and she’s been doing it through coffee orders and whatever crosses your face in the thirty seconds between the door and the counter.
"That’s…" You laugh. Not because it’s funny but because it’s disarming. "That’s kind of terrifying."
She smiles. Really smiles. It changes her whole face—pushes her cheeks up, narrows her eyes into crescents, makes her look younger and warmer and like someone you want to keep talking to. There’s something about the way the morning light catches her face when she smiles like that. It reminds you of the color of honey held up to a window—golden, translucent, warm in a way that has nothing to do with temperature.
"Terrifying," she repeats, testing the word. "I don’t know this word."
"It means scary. But in a good way. I think."
"Scary good?" She looks skeptical.
"Yeah. Like—you’re good at reading people. That’s scary."
She considers this, then nods once, satisfied. "Scary good. Okay. I keep this."
The person behind you clears their throat. You take your latte and step aside. She’s already moving to the next order, ponytail swinging as she turns.
But when you glance back from the door, she’s watching you leave. And the smile hasn’t fully gone away.
❤︎
You try Korean the next time.
You’ve been practicing. Not for her specifically—or at least that’s what you tell yourself—but because the language classes your company arranged meet twice a week and you’ve been paying more attention lately. You learned how to say how long have you worked here and where are you from and your coffee is really good, and you’ve been repeating them in your apartment like prayers.
So on a Wednesday—latte Wednesday, second one this week, things have been okay—you step up to the counter and say, in your best Korean, "Have you been working here for long?"
At least, that’s what you mean to say. What comes out is something closer to have you been long here working, which is grammatically backwards and probably sounds like a malfunctioning translation app.
She stares at you.
"Sorry," you say immediately, switching to English. "My Korean is—"
"No, no." She waves her hand, and then she laughs. It’s a small sound, almost private, like she didn’t mean to let it out. "I understand. It’s okay. Your Korean is…" She searches for the word. "Cute."
"Cute is not what I was going for."
"What were you going for?"
"Competent. Professional. Maybe even impressive."
She shakes her head slowly, lips pressed together like she’s trying not to laugh again. "No. Cute."
"Great."
"Don’t worry." She leans her elbows on the counter, and it’s the most relaxed you’ve ever seen her at work. "My Korean is also not so good."
This catches you off guard. "Wait—you’re not Korean?"
"No." She taps her nametag. It says Vivi. "I’m from Hong Kong."
"Hong Kong?"
"Mm. My Korean is…" She makes a seesawing gesture with her hand. "Okay. Not perfect. I still say things wrong sometimes. People are polite about it, but I know."
Something unlocks between you. Not dramatically—it’s not a movie moment. But the air changes. Two people fumbling through the same foreign city in a language that doesn’t quite fit either of them, and suddenly the distance between the counter and the customer isn’t quite as wide.
"How long have you been in Korea?" you ask.
"A long time." Something flickers across her face. "Many years. Since I was young. But still…" She shrugs. "Still not home. You know?"
You know.
"I’ve been here two months," you say. "I still can’t read half the signs on my street."
"Which street?"
You tell her the neighborhood—your Korean is good enough for that—and she nods.
"I know this area. There’s a good tteokbokki place near the station. You know it?"
"I don’t even know what that is."
Her eyes go wide with something that looks like genuine offense. "You’ve been here two months and you haven’t eaten tteokbokki?"
"I eat a lot of convenience store kimbap."
"That’s—" She puts her hand over her heart like you’ve wounded her. "That’s so sad."
"I’m surviving."
"Surviving is not living." She says this quietly, and for a second it sounds like she’s not talking about food anymore. Then she straightens up, pulls a napkin from the dispenser, and starts writing on it with her Sharpie. "Here. This place. You go. Tell them you want the cheese tteokbokki. It will change your life."
She slides the napkin across the counter. Her handwriting is neat, precise—the address in Korean with a small arrow pointing to what you think is a landmark.
"Thank you," you say. "Vivi."
She looks at you, then down at her nametag, then back at you. "Vivi is… it’s not my real name. It’s what I go by here. What people call me."
"What’s your real name?"
She hesitates. Just a beat. "Maybe one day," she says. And smiles like she’s filed the question somewhere she’ll get to later.
"I get it. My name’s—" You say your name. Slowly, clearly.
She repeats it back. Gets it slightly wrong. The same slightly wrong that’s been showing up on your cups for weeks.
"Close," you say, and you say it again.
She tries again. Closer, but still not right. A consonant softened, a vowel shifted.
"We’ll work on it," you say.
She smiles. "We will."
❤︎
You go to the tteokbokki place that night. She was right. It changes something, if not your life then at least your evening. You sit alone at a tiny table, burning your tongue on cheesy rice cakes, the chili oil blooming across your palate like a slow fire, and you feel less alone than you have in weeks.
The next morning, you tell her.
"You went?" She claps her hands together once, a quick bright movement that doesn’t match her usual composure. "Was it good?"
"I burned the entire roof of my mouth."
"That means it was good."
"It was incredible. I almost cried. From the spice and from the experience."
She laughs again, louder this time. The other barista—a college-aged kid whose name you still don’t know—looks over in surprise, like this is not a sound he hears often.
"Okay," she says, pulling out another napkin. "Next recommendation. You like chocolate, yes?"
"How do you know I like chocolate?"
She gives you a look. "You buy the chocolate croissant every time we have it. Which is Tuesday and Friday. You always look sad on the other days when there are none."
"I don’t look sad—"
"You look a little sad." She’s already writing on the napkin. "There’s a bakery. Ten minutes walking from here. They make a chocolate tart that is…" She pauses, searching for the English word. "Jinjja mashisseo. Really, really good."
"Your Korean is better than you think," you say.
"For food words, yes. For immigration paperwork, no." She slides the napkin across. "Go today after work. Trust me."
You go. She’s right again. The chocolate tart is dark and rich and slightly bitter at the edges, the ganache dense enough to coat the roof of your mouth, and it’s the best thing you’ve eaten in this country that didn’t come from a recommendation on your phone.
This becomes the rhythm. She writes you napkin guides to the city—a jjigae place for rainy days, a fried chicken spot that delivers, a convenience store that stocks imported snacks—and you report back each morning like a food critic delivering verdicts to an audience of one. Your conversations stretch from thirty seconds to two minutes to five, and the people in line behind you start to notice, but you don’t care much and she doesn’t seem to either.
Your cup still has the misspelled name. Every single day. You’ve told her the correct spelling three times now. She nods, she repeats it, and the next morning the same wrong letters appear on the cup.
You’re starting to suspect she’s doing it on purpose.
On a Saturday, you see her outside the shop.
You almost don’t recognize her. She’s in a varsity jacket, grey hood pulled over a white blouse, pleated dark skirt, hair down instead of in the work ponytail. She looks younger. Softer. Like a different version of the person who’s been handing you coffee every morning.
She’s sitting on a bench near the Han River, watching joggers pass, and she doesn’t see you until you’re almost next to her.
"Vivi?"
She startles. Looks up. And then her face does that thing—the shift from surprise to recognition to warmth, all in the space of a breath. Up close, out of the fluorescent light of the shop, you notice things you haven’t before. The way her skin catches daylight like it was made for it. The faint scent of vanilla and something floral—not perfume exactly, more like a lotion she put on without thinking. It mixes with the autumn air and the distant mineral smell of the river, and something about the combination is so specific, so her, that you know you’ll remember it.
"Oh. Hi." She scoots over on the bench, an invitation so automatic it seems like instinct. "What are you doing here?"
"Running." You gesture at yourself—gym clothes, headphones around your neck, slightly out of breath. "I try to do this on weekends. You?"
"Just… sitting." She looks back at the river. "I like watching the water. It’s quiet here."
You sit. The bench is small and your shoulders are almost touching. She doesn’t move away.
"You run a lot?" she asks.
"Three or four times a week. Gym on the other days."
She looks at you sideways, a quick assessment she probably thinks is subtle. "I can tell."
"Was that a compliment?"
"Just an observation." But her ears are pink.
You sit in silence for a while. It’s comfortable, the kind of silence that doesn’t need to be filled. Joggers pass. A cyclist rings his bell. The river catches sunlight and throws it back in pieces.
"Can I ask you something?" you say.
"Mm."
"Why do you keep spelling my name wrong?"
She goes very still. Then, slowly, a smile creeps across her face. Not the customer-service smile, not even the warmer one she gives you at the counter. Something closer to mischief.
"I don’t know what you mean."
"You absolutely know what you mean. I’ve spelled it out for you. I’ve written it down. You still put the wrong letters on the cup."
"Maybe I’m just bad at spelling."
"In three different languages?"
She presses her lips together, fighting a grin. "Maybe."
"Vivi."
"It’s…" She looks down at her hands in her lap. Her fingers are slim, fidgeting with the edge of her jacket sleeve. "It’s because you make a face. When you see it. You look at the cup and your eyebrows do this—" She demonstrates, scrunching her brows together and then relaxing them, a pantomime of mild confusion resolving into amused resignation. "Every time. And it’s…"
She trails off.
"It’s what?"
"Cute." She says it to the river, not to you. "I told you. Your Korean is cute and your face when you read the cup is cute and I just… I like seeing it. So I keep doing it."
Your chest does something involuntary.
"So you’ve been deliberately misspelling my name every day for weeks because you like my confused face."
"Yes."
"That’s—"
"Scary good?" She looks at you now, and she’s fully smiling, and the sunlight is on the river and on her face and you’re in trouble.
"Yeah," you say. "Something like that."
❤︎
After the bench, things shift. Not dramatically—you’re both too careful for that—but the edges soften.
You learn her morning routine. She gets to the shop thirty minutes before it opens, sets up the machines, puts on music. If it’s a good day, she hums along. You know this because you started arriving early enough to catch her through the window, swaying slightly behind the counter with her eyes closed, and you always wait until the music stops before you walk in because some things aren’t meant to be interrupted.
The humming. There’s something about it. She hums songs you don’t recognize—not the K-pop that plays on the shop speakers, something else, something that sounds rehearsed in a way that goes deeper than casual singing. Sometimes she stops mid-phrase and her jaw tightens, just for a second, before she switches to a different melody. You file this away. You don’t ask.
She learns your schedule. She knows you have late meetings on Tuesdays and that you’ll come in earlier than usual, looking tired. She knows Fridays are lighter and you linger longer at the counter. She starts making your drink before you order on days when the pattern is obvious, and on the days when it isn’t—when you’re somewhere between moods, between coffees—she asks.
Not "what do you want?" Not the standard barista question.
"How are you today?" she asks. And means it.
And depending on what you say, or don’t say, or how you say it, she decides.
"You made me a cappuccino," you say one morning. "I’ve never ordered a cappuccino."
"You looked like you needed something warm but not heavy. You had your thinking face."
"I have a thinking face?"
"You have many faces. I am learning them."
One Tuesday, you bring her chocolate. Not from the bakery she recommended—from an import shop you found in Itaewon that stocks European brands. Dark chocolate with sea salt. You put it on the counter when you pick up your coffee.
"What’s this?" she asks.
"Napkin recommendations go both ways."
She picks up the bar, reads the label, and her face does something complicated. You don’t realize until later that it might have been the face of someone who hasn’t been given a small, thoughtless gift in a very long time.
"Thank you," she says. Quietly.
"It’s just chocolate."
"It’s not just chocolate." She puts it under the counter, somewhere safe. "You thought of me. That’s different."
The next morning, there’s a small wrapped pastry next to your coffee cup. Something homemade—a kind of egg tart, golden and delicate, still warm.
"Did you make this?" you ask.
"It’s called dan tat. Egg tart. From home." She adjusts the cup on the counter, lining it up with the pastry like a place setting. "My mother taught me."
You take a bite right there at the counter. The custard is silky, the pastry flakes in your hand, and it tastes like someone’s kitchen and someone’s care. Rich and clean, with a sweetness that doesn’t announce itself, that builds slowly across the tongue the way good caramel does, the way certain wines open up only after you’ve been patient with them. It’s the kind of flavor that makes you close your eyes.
"Vivi," you say. "This is incredible."
She looks at the counter. She looks at your hands holding the tart. She looks everywhere except directly at you, and her ears are pink again.
"I’m glad," she says. "I’ll make more."
She does. Not every day, but enough. And you bring her chocolate, and she brings you tarts, and neither of you calls it what it is.
But the misspelled name stays. Every morning, without fail. Your private running joke that neither of you ever officially agreed to.
One rainy morning, she draws a small umbrella next to it. Another day, a tiny coffee cup. Once, on a day when you ordered an espresso—a bad day, a heavy day—she draws a small heart.
She doesn’t mention the heart. You don’t mention the heart. You both know it’s there.
You see her outside the shop a second time. This one isn’t accidental.
It’s a Sunday, and she texts you—she gave you her KakaoTalk after the bench, just her username, no explanation, and you added her and neither of you mentioned it—a single message:
Vivi: Are you busy? There’s a market in Mangwon I want to go to but I don’t want to go alone.
You are not busy. Even if you were, you would not be busy anymore.
The market is crowded, loud, and overwhelming in the best way. Stalls selling fish and produce and street food and flowers, ajummas shouting prices, kids weaving between legs. She moves through it like she belongs, stopping at vendors she knows, exchanging rapid Korean that’s better than she gives herself credit for. The air is thick with competing aromas—sizzling scallion pancakes, roasted sweet potatoes splitting open in their skins, the bright green punch of fresh perilla, sesame oil darkening in a pan. You breathe it in like it’s language, like it’s the Seoul you’ve been trying to learn but can only taste.
"You said your Korean wasn’t good," you say, watching her haggle over a bag of tangerines.
"For market Korean, it’s fine. For feelings Korean, it’s terrible." She peels a tangerine in three quick motions, separates a segment, and holds it up to your mouth. Not hands-it-to-you. Holds it up. Like you’re a child, or a lover, or something in between that doesn’t have a name yet. "Eat."
You open your mouth before your brain catches up. Her fingertips brush your lips as the segment lands on your tongue—citrus and sunlight and the faint salt of her skin, a flavor you will never be able to separate into its parts. Sweet and cold and bright, the juice sharp against the roof of your mouth, but underneath it, barely there, the warmth of her fingers. She pulls her hand back and you swallow and neither of you acknowledges what just happened, except that her ears are pink and you’ve stopped breathing.
She peels another segment. Eats it herself this time. Looks straight ahead at the stall.
"Good?" she asks.
"Yeah," you say. Your voice sounds strange to you. "Really good."
She nods. Peels another one. Holds it up again.
This time you take it with your hand. Your fingers close over hers for a half-second, and the touch is so small it shouldn’t register, but it does. It registers everywhere.
She buys too many things. Vegetables, fruit, a bag of dried anchovies, sweet rice cakes wrapped in plastic. You carry the bags because she lets you, and walking through the market with grocery bags feels so domestic, so ordinary, that it aches.
The crowd thickens near the produce section and she reaches back without looking and grabs your wrist. Her fingers wrap around the bone, firm and sure, the grip of someone who’s used to navigating crowds but not used to having someone to pull through them. She leads you between stalls and her hand stays on your wrist and your pulse is right there, right under her thumb, and you wonder if she can feel it hammering.
She doesn’t let go until the crowd thins. When she does, she doesn’t acknowledge it. But a minute later, at a stall selling roasted chestnuts, she steps back to let someone pass and her shoulder presses against your chest and she stays there. Just a second too long. Warm and solid and real against you, her hair close enough to your chin that you can smell her shampoo—something clean, faintly herbal, like chamomile steeped too long.
"Sorry," she says, stepping forward. Not looking at you.
"You’re fine."
She’s more than fine. She’s the most interesting thing in a market full of interesting things, and you’re carrying her groceries and your wrist still feels warm where she held it.
At a street food stall, she orders hotteok—sweet pancakes filled with brown sugar and nuts—and hands you one without asking if you want it. The dough is crisp and golden and the sugar inside has gone to molten caramel, so hot it burns the tip of your tongue, and she laughs when you wince and reaches up to wipe a crumb from the corner of your mouth with her thumb. The same thumb. The tangerine thumb. She does it without thinking this time, the way you’d brush lint off someone’s shoulder, and then she freezes when she realizes what she’s done.
"Habit," she says. Her ears are pink again. "Sorry. I—"
"Don’t be."
She looks at you. Her thumb is still near your mouth. The market noise is everywhere—vendors shouting, oil sizzling, a child laughing two stalls over—but in the twelve inches between your face and her hand, it is completely quiet.
She drops her hand. Picks up her own hotteok. Takes a bite.
You think: this. This is what the city has been trying to give you. Not the job, not the language, not the apartment or the coffee or any of it. This. A woman touching your face in a crowded market and not knowing what to do with the fact that she wants to.
"Vivi," you say, standing in the middle of a market with a pancake in one hand and grocery bags in the other and people flowing around you like water around stones. "Can I ask you something weird?"
"You always ask before you ask. Just ask."
"Why don’t you want to go to markets alone?"
She takes a bite of her hotteok. Chews. Swallows. "Because markets are for sharing. If you eat alone in a restaurant, that’s fine. If you cook alone in your kitchen, that’s fine. But a market is—" She gestures at the crowd, the noise, the colors. "A market is supposed to be noisy with someone. Otherwise you’re just standing in someone else’s noise."
"That’s the loneliest thing anyone’s ever said to me in front of a pancake stall."
She laughs. That real laugh, the sudden one. "I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be sad. I just—" She looks at you. "I’m glad you came. That’s what I mean. I’m glad I’m not standing in someone else’s noise."
"Me too."
You walk her to the subway. At the entrance, she takes her grocery bags back, redistributing the weight across her arms with practiced efficiency. She’s done this a thousand times. Carried things home alone.
"Thank you for coming," she says.
"Anytime. I mean that."
She nods. Starts to turn. Then stops.
"Your name," she says. "On the cups. I want you to know—I learned how to spell it correctly a long time ago. After the first week, maybe."
"I know."
"You know?"
"Vivi. I’ve known for weeks."
She stares at you. Then a smile breaks across her face, slow and wide and helpless, the kind of smile that doesn’t belong in a subway entrance on a Sunday afternoon, the kind that belongs somewhere private where no one else can see it.
"And you never said anything."
"I like my misspelled name."
"You’re strange."
"Says the woman who’s been deliberately getting it wrong for months."
She’s still smiling when she disappears down the steps. You stand there for a while after she’s gone, holding a tangerine peel in your pocket and a warmth in your chest that the November air can’t touch.
❤︎
Four months in, you know the following things about her:
Her favorite color is pink, but she’ll deny it. She moved to Korea when she was young for a dream she describes only as "something that didn’t work out," and she says it with the practiced lightness of someone who has rehearsed the sentence until it doesn’t hurt anymore. She can cook Cantonese food from memory but uses a recipe for everything Korean. She thinks dramas are predictable but watches them anyway. She’s afraid of dogs, which she’s embarrassed about. She takes the subway home and transfers at Hapjeong. She lives alone.
She knows the following things about you:
That you came here for work and stayed because the work is good and going back feels like giving up. That you go to the gym because it’s the one place where language doesn’t matter—gravity is the same in every country. That you love chocolate the way some people love wine, with specificity and opinion and mild snobbery. That you call your mother every Sunday evening and it’s the only time you speak your first language all week and afterwards you feel both better and worse. That you are lonely in a way you have stopped trying to name.
She knows this last thing because you told her. Not directly. You said, "Seoul is amazing but sometimes I miss having someone to do nothing with," and she looked at you with an expression that cut straight through the careful distance you’d both been maintaining.
"I know," she said. "I know exactly what you mean."
It happens on a Friday. Late afternoon. You leave work early because the project milestone hit and your team celebrated with delivery chicken and beer in the conference room and you were part of it, really part of it, laughing at jokes you mostly understood and making one of your own in clumsy Korean that landed well enough to get a real laugh from Jun. You feel good. Buoyant. Like maybe you belong here after all.
You go to the coffee shop even though you don’t need coffee. She’s wiping down the counter, the post-lunch lull emptying the place out. She looks up when you walk in and something in her expression tells you she can read the frequency you’re broadcasting.
"Latte day," she says.
"I already had coffee. I’m good."
She tilts her head. "Then why are you here?"
The honest answer is: because I wanted to see you. The answer you give is: "I had a good day. I wanted to tell someone."
Her expression softens. "Tell me."
So you do. You tell her about the milestone, the chicken, the joke that landed. She listens the way she always listens—completely, with her whole face, asking small questions that show she remembers details from weeks ago. She remembers Jun’s name, remembers that he’s the one who speaks English. She remembers the project timeline you mentioned once, offhandedly, over a Tuesday espresso.
"You’re happy," she says when you finish. Simply, like she’s identifying something.
"Yeah. I think I am."
"Good." She folds the rag she’s been holding, sets it down, and says, "Come. Sit."
She makes two drinks—a latte for you, something with honey and milk for herself—and brings them to the small table by the window. She sits across from you, and it’s the first time you’ve ever been on the same side of the counter.
Everything about it feels different. Closer. Real. She smells like espresso and vanilla and the faintest trace of whatever she bakes with at home—butter, sugar, something warm that clings to her the way smoke clings to a campfire. You’ve been around coffee every day for months but it’s never smelled like this, like it’s become part of someone rather than just something they serve.
"Can I ask you something personal?" you say.
"Maybe."
"The dream. The one that didn’t work out. What was it?"
She wraps her hands around her mug. She has a way of holding warm things—both palms pressed flat, fingers curled, like she’s trying to absorb the heat through her skin.
"I was a performer," she says. "Singer, dancer. In a group. We trained for years and debuted and then…" She makes a gesture, fingers opening outward. Dissolving. "It ended. Not because we were bad. Just… circumstances. Business decisions. Things we couldn’t control."
She says it evenly, without self-pity. But her eyes have gone somewhere else.
"I’m sorry," you say.
"Don’t be. It was a long time ago." She sips her drink. "I stayed because I thought maybe something else would come. Another chance. Another group. Another… something. But it didn’t. And then I was just here, and years had passed, and I wasn’t a performer anymore. I was a person who used to perform. Who makes coffee now."
"That’s not all you are."
"No?" She looks at you. Really looks. "What else am I?"
And you want to say it. You want to say: You’re the person who reads me better than anyone. Who makes egg tarts that taste like home. Who misspells my name every day because she likes my face. You’re the first person in this city who made me feel like I wasn’t just surviving.
But you’re sitting in a coffee shop on a Friday afternoon and the light is coming through the window and landing on her hands and her hair and the curve of her mouth, and sometimes the right words are too heavy to carry across a small table.
"You’re my favorite barista," you say instead.
She laughs. Short, surprised. "That’s not very high praise. You only come to one coffee shop."
"Exactly. I only come to one. I wonder why."
Her laughter fades to a smile fades to something else. She looks at you, and the distance between your hands on the table is about six inches, and neither of you closes it.
"I should get back to work," she says softly. "Before the evening rush."
"Yeah. Of course."
She stands. You stand. And for a second you’re both just standing in the narrow space between the table and the window, too close for strangers and not close enough for what you’re becoming.
"Thank you for telling me about your day," she says.
"Thank you for listening."
She reaches out and adjusts the collar of your jacket. A nothing gesture. The kind of thing someone does without thinking, the way you’d straighten a picture frame as you walk past it. Except her fingers brush your neck and she freezes, hand still on your collar, and her eyes meet yours, and the six inches between you on the table has become two inches of air between her fingers and your skin.
She smells like honey. Not the processed kind, not the bear-shaped bottle from a grocery store. The real kind—dark, amber, complex, with floral notes you can’t name and a sweetness that sits at the back of your throat like a word you forgot how to say. You will remember this smell for the rest of your life. You don’t know that yet. But you will.
She pulls her hand back. "Your collar was crooked," she says.
"Thanks."
"See you Monday."
"See you Monday."
You leave. You walk home. You don’t go to the gym. You sit on your apartment floor with your back against the couch and your phone in your hand, and you think about asking Jun if he knows how to say I think I’m falling for someone in Korean.
You don’t text Jun. You text your mother instead. She asks how you’re doing and you say good, really good, and she says you sound different, and you say maybe I am.
❤︎
Monday. She’s there. Of course she’s there. She slides your coffee across the counter—latte, she read you right again—and the name is misspelled and there’s a tiny star drawn next to it.
"Good weekend?" she asks.
"Yeah. Really good." You’re looking at the star. "You?"
"Quiet. I cooked a lot. Watched a drama. The usual." She straightens a stack of napkins that doesn’t need straightening. "I thought about texting you."
"You should have."
"I know." She looks at the napkin stack. "I typed something and then deleted it. Three times."
"What were you going to say?"
"I don’t remember." This is a lie, and you both know it’s a lie, and she knows you know it’s a lie, and she tells it anyway because some truths need more runway than a Monday morning coffee counter can provide.
Tuesday, she’s quieter than usual. Not withdrawn—she still makes your drink, still draws on the cup (a small cloud, because it’s overcast, because she annotates the weather now like a meteorologist with a Sharpie). But there’s something behind her eyes. A distance that wasn’t there before.
"Hey," you say. "You okay?"
"Mm. Just tired."
"Vivi."
She looks up.
"You told me once that my face is different on different days. Latte face, espresso face. Well. You have faces too. And this isn’t a tired face."
Her jaw works, like she’s chewing on something she doesn’t want to swallow. Then: "I got a phone call last night. From home. My mother. She wants me to come back."
The floor tilts. Just slightly. Just enough.
"Come back as in visit?"
"Come back as in come back." She says it flat. Factual. The way you’d report the weather. "She says I’ve been here long enough. She says whatever I came here for, it’s not coming. She says—" Her voice catches, and she clears her throat, and the customer-service composure slides back into place like a mask she’s worn so long it fits better than her real face. "She says a lot of things. Mothers do."
"What do you want?"
"I don’t know." And for the first time since you’ve known her, she sounds like she means it completely. Not the practiced I don’t know of someone deflecting. The real one. The one that sits in the body like nausea. "I’ve been here so long that I don’t know if I’m staying because I want to or because leaving means I failed. And I can’t tell the difference anymore. Does that make sense?"
"It makes perfect sense."
"You’re supposed to say don’t go."
She says it lightly, almost joking, but her eyes aren’t joking.
"Don’t go," you say. Not lightly.
She stares at you. The espresso machine fills the silence.
"I have to get back to work," she says. And turns away. And you stand there with your coffee getting cold and the word don’t still hanging in the air between you, heavy and useless and too small for what it’s trying to carry.
Wednesday, she’s bright again. Almost too bright. She makes you try a new drink she invented—honey, oat milk, a shot of espresso, a sprinkle of something she won’t identify. It’s good. It tastes the way she smells—warm and layered and sweet without being simple. She wants to know if it’s good and you tell her it’s incredible and she beams and writes an exclamation mark on your cup next to the misspelled name.
You don’t bring up the phone call. She doesn’t bring up the phone call. You talk about the chocolate tart from the bakery and how your team is doing and whether she’s watched the new season of the drama she likes, and it all feels normal, and underneath the normal there is a low hum of something you can’t name, like a frequency just below hearing.
The following week, you start staying later at the shop. Not by much—ten minutes, fifteen—but enough that the morning regulars clear out and it’s just you and her and the hiss of the espresso machine. She lets you linger. Sometimes she talks while she cleans, wiping down counters and restocking cups, and her voice in the empty shop is different. Quieter. More open. Like the absence of an audience gives her permission to be someone she keeps folded away during business hours.
She tells you about Hong Kong. The harbour at night, the neon reflecting off the water. Her mother’s kitchen, small and always warm, the sound of oil in a wok. The way Cantonese sounds compared to Korean—rounder, she says, more musical in the tones. She tells you she sometimes dreams in Cantonese and wakes up disoriented, her brain taking a full minute to remember which city she’s in, which language the day requires.
"Do you ever think about going back?" you ask.
She doesn’t answer immediately. She’s organizing cups—small, medium, large—stacking them with a precision that looks automatic.
"Sometimes," she says. "But going back means… admitting it’s over. All of it. The reason I came, the person I was supposed to become. If I go back, I’m just… someone who tried something far away and it didn’t work."
"There’s nothing wrong with that."
"I know." She places the last cup on the stack. "But knowing and feeling are different languages. And I’m not fluent in either."
One evening, you come by after the shop has closed. You didn’t plan it—you were at the gym, ran longer than usual, and your route home takes you past the coffee shop out of habit now, the way rivers follow paths they’ve carved. The lights are still on inside. She’s sitting at the window table with a notebook open in front of her, pen in hand, staring at the page with an intensity that tells you she’s not reading what’s written. She’s somewhere else.
You knock on the glass. She startles. Sees you. And the smile that comes is different from all the others you’ve catalogued—not the customer smile, not the amused one, not the warm one. This one is relieved. Like she was waiting for an interruption she didn’t know how to ask for.
She opens the door. "The shop is closed."
"I know. I was just passing by. You okay?"
"I was writing." She looks back at the notebook on the table. "Trying to write. It’s not going well."
"What are you writing?"
"A letter. To…" She hesitates. "To someone I used to know. From the group. We haven’t spoken in a long time and I thought maybe if I wrote it down…" She trails off. "It’s stupid. You don’t write letters anymore. Nobody does."
"Can I come in?"
She steps aside. You walk into the dark shop—only the counter lights are on and the table lamp she’s been writing by—and it feels different at night. Smaller. More intimate. The espresso machine is quiet for once, and without its hum the space holds only the sound of your breathing and hers.
She makes you a coffee anyway. Muscle memory. She doesn’t ask what you want, just starts pulling a shot, and you sit at the table and look at the notebook. The page is in Chinese characters, dense and precise. Cantonese—her private language. The one she keeps for herself, for the thoughts that don’t belong to Korea or to the person Korea asked her to be.
"Is the letter in Cantonese?" you ask.
"Mm." She sets the coffee in front of you and sits down across the table, in the same chair as the Friday afternoon. "It’s the only language I write for myself in. Korean is for work, for daily life. English is for… you, mostly." A small smile. "But Cantonese is mine. I keep my journals in it. My letters. The things I don’t want anyone here to read."
"Because no one around you reads Cantonese."
"Because no one around me reads Cantonese." She wraps her hands around her mug. "In the group, I was the only foreigner. Everyone else was Korean. So everything was Korean—rehearsals, conversations, arguments, jokes. All of it. I learned to think in Korean, to dream in Korean, to feel in Korean. But at night, when I was alone, I’d write in Cantonese. It was the only place I didn’t have to translate myself."
She says this looking into her mug, and her voice is steady, but something underneath it is not.
"Vivi."
She looks up.
"You don’t have to tell me anything. But if you want to, I’m not going anywhere."
She holds your gaze. The lamp throws shadows across her face that make her look older, or maybe just more honest. In this light, she looks like a painting you’d see in a museum and stand in front of for too long—something rendered in oil and amber, all warmth and depth, the kind of beauty that isn’t about symmetry but about the specific way a face holds its history. You want to memorize her. You want to study her the way you study a wine you know you can’t afford—every note, every layer, every subtle thing that makes it irreplaceable.
Then she closes the notebook. Pushes it aside.
"Not tonight," she says. "Tonight I just want to sit here and not think about letters or languages or any of it. Is that okay?"
"That’s okay."
So you sit. The shop is dark and closed and quiet and you drink coffee you didn’t need at an hour when caffeine is a bad idea and she sits across from you with both hands on her mug and neither of you speaks for a long time. It’s the silence from the bench again, the one that doesn’t need filling, and in the warm half-dark of the closed shop it feels like the realest thing that’s happened to you in this city.
At some point, she reaches across the table and puts her hand on yours. Not holding it. Just resting there. Her fingers are warm from the mug.
You don’t move. She doesn’t move.
"This is nice," she says quietly.
"Yeah."
"I wish—" She stops. Shakes her head. "Never mind."
"What?"
She doesn’t answer. Instead she stands, picks up the mugs, carries them to the sink. You follow her because the alternative is sitting at the table while she walks away from you and you’re tired of watching her walk away from you.
She’s rinsing the mugs when you reach the counter. The sink is behind the bar, in the narrow space where she works every morning, and you’re standing on the wrong side of it for the first time. Her territory. The spot where she makes your coffee and draws on your cups and exists in a version of herself you only see in fragments through the counter.
She turns off the water. Turns around. And you’re right there.
The space behind the counter is small. Built for one person, not two. Your chest is inches from hers and her back is against the sink and her hands are wet and she’s looking up at you with an expression you’ve never seen before—not the smile, not the composure, not the warmth. Something underneath all of those. Something stripped.
Everything slows down.
You notice the way her breath catches—a tiny hitch, barely a sound, more a pause in the rhythm of her breathing. You notice the way her eyes drop to your mouth and stay there for one second, two seconds, three. You notice the pulse in her throat, visible in the low light from the table lamp, quick and alive. You notice a single drop of water on her wrist, tracking down her forearm, catching the light.
She smells like espresso and honey and the clean mineral scent of tap water and underneath all of it something warm and specific that is just her, that you have been cataloguing for months without admitting what the catalogue is for. You want to close the distance. You want to close it so badly that your hands ache with it, that your jaw tightens with the effort of staying still, that every nerve in your body is leaning forward even though your feet haven’t moved.
Her chin tilts up. Barely. A fraction of a degree. An invitation so small it could be accidental, except nothing about the way she’s looking at you is accidental.
You lean in. Slowly. Giving her time to stop you. Giving her time to decide.
Her eyes close.
Your mouth is close enough to feel the warmth of her breath. Close enough that you can taste the honey from her drink in the air between you. The space between your lips is the width of a word. A name. A single syllable you haven’t earned yet.
And then her hand comes up and presses flat against your chest.
Not pushing. Just… there. A boundary drawn with a trembling palm. You can feel her fingers shaking through your shirt.
"I can’t," she whispers. Her eyes are still closed. "I want to. But I can’t."
You don’t ask why. You don’t need to. The can’t tells you everything—not don’t want to, not shouldn’t. Can’t. Like the word is a wall she built and she’s standing on the other side of it, pressing her hand through the only gap.
You step back. One step. Enough.
She opens her eyes. They’re wet.
"I’m sorry," she says.
"Don’t be."
"You should go," she says. "It’s late. You have work tomorrow."
"So do you."
"I do." She steps sideways, out of the narrow space, and the distance between you doubles, triples, becomes normal again. Becomes bearable again. She picks up the rag from the counter and folds it, unfolds it, folds it again. "I’ll see you tomorrow."
"Vivi."
She stops folding.
"I’m not going anywhere," you say. "Whenever you can. If you ever can. I’m not going anywhere."
She nods once. Doesn’t look at you. Her jaw is tight and her hands are still shaking and she is the most beautiful thing you have ever been close to and not touched.
You let yourself out. The door chimes behind you. Through the glass, you can see her standing behind the counter, both hands braced on the edge, head slightly bowed. You watch for a moment. The ache in your chest is so specific it feels like a flavor—something dark and bittersweet, like the chocolate you bring her, like espresso without milk, like the aftertaste of almost.
You walk home. You lie on your apartment floor with your back against the couch and your hands on your chest where her hand was and you can still feel the ghost pressure of her palm. You can still smell the honey. You can still taste the air between your mouths.
You have never wanted anything the way you want her. Not the job, not the city, not the language or the life or any of the things you crossed an ocean for. You want her in a way that lives in your body, in your hands, in the back of your throat. You want to know what her real name is. You want to know what she tastes like. You want to sit across from her at a table that isn’t in a coffee shop and watch her wrap her hands around a wine glass instead of a mug and hear her laugh in a room where she’s not working.
You want time. That’s what you want. More time. And you don’t know yet that time is the one thing she’s already decided not to give you.
The next morning at the counter, she’s composed again. The mask back in place. She makes your coffee and slides it across and the cup has your misspelled name and a small moon drawn beside it—because it was late, because you were there after dark, because she annotates everything.
"I’m sorry about last night," she says.
"Don’t be. I meant what I said. I’m not going anywhere."
She looks at you. Really looks. And then she says, quietly: "You’re a good person. I want you to know that. However long you’re here, however long this—" She gestures between you, the first time either of you has acknowledged this as something that has a shape. "I want you to know you’re good. Okay?"
"Okay."
"Okay." She picks up a rag, turns back to the counter, and the conversation is over.
But the word however sits in your chest all day. However long. As if she already knows something you don’t. As if she’s already counting the days you’re not counting yet.
On Thursday, you decide. You’re going to ask her out. Not to a napkin recommendation. Not to a bench by the river. On a real date, with a real plan, in a real restaurant where you’ll sit across from her and there won’t be a counter between you.
You practice the Korean. Would you like to have dinner with me? You say it in the mirror. You say it in the shower. You say it walking to work, mouthing the syllables to the rhythm of your steps.
Thursday morning at the shop, she’s humming again. One of those songs—the ones that sound too rehearsed, too precise for casual singing. You stand outside for a moment, watching through the glass. She’s arranging pastries in the display case, moving each one with careful hands, and she’s singing softly, and even through the glass, even without hearing the words, you can tell this song means something to her. That it belongs to the person she was before she was the person making your coffee.
She looks up. Sees you through the glass. And for one unguarded second, before the smile arrives, her face is something else entirely. Open. Unprotected. The face of someone caught in the middle of a memory she hasn’t figured out how to put down.
Then the smile comes. And she waves you in. And you go.
"Caught me," she says, a little sheepish.
"You have a nice voice."
"I used to." She says this automatically, a correction so practiced it’s almost a reflex. Then she catches herself. "I mean. Thank you."
You don’t push it. You take your coffee—black today, you’ve got a long one ahead—and the cup has your misspelled name and a small music note drawn beside it.
At your desk, you look up restaurants. Somewhere nice but not formal. Somewhere you can talk. You find a place in Yeonnam-dong that does Italian food with Korean ingredients and has window seats and candlelight that doesn’t try too hard. You save the link.
You’re going to ask her. Tomorrow. Friday. After the evening rush clears.
You’ve run the scenario in your head so many times it’s worn smooth. You’ll go in. She’ll be wiping down the counter the way she does. You’ll say her name—Vivi—and she’ll look up, and you’ll say the sentence you’ve been practicing, and she’ll say yes because she has to say yes because everything you’ve built these past months—the napkins, the egg tarts, the misspelled name, the market, the bench, the collar—has been building toward a yes.
You fall asleep Thursday night with the restaurant link still open on your phone.
Friday comes.
❤︎
You wake up Friday morning and the city is different. Not literally—same skyline, same traffic hum, same slant of winter light through your apartment window. But you feel it the way you feel weather changing, a shift in pressure that has nothing to do with the sky.
You get dressed carefully. Not differently—she’d notice if you dressed differently and you don’t want to telegraph anything before you’re ready. But you iron the shirt. You pick the good jacket. Small concessions to a moment that hasn’t happened yet.
You eat breakfast standing at the kitchen counter. Toast, a banana, the last of the imported jam your mother sent in a care package. You check the restaurant link one more time. Still available for Friday night reservations. You don’t book it yet—you want to ask her first, want to hear her say yes before you lock anything down. Let the moment be uncertain. Let the yes mean something.
On the subway, you practice one more time. The sentence sits in your mouth like a coin—smooth, weighted, ready to spend. Would you like to have dinner with me? The Korean is right. You checked it with Jun without telling him why, disguised it as a grammar question, and he corrected one particle and you fixed it and now it’s perfect. It’s ready. You’re ready.
The walk to the coffee shop is fourteen steps. You’ve counted a hundred times.
The door chimes.
And the person behind the counter is not her.
It’s the college kid. The one whose name you never learned, even though you’ve been coming here for months. He looks up when you walk in, and his expression is the standard customer-service greeting—polite, blank, waiting.
"Good morning," he says. "What can I get you?"
You look past him. At the espresso machine, the cup stacks she organized, the spot where she always stood. You look at the small shelf underneath the counter where she kept her things—her phone, her water bottle, the chocolate bar you gave her that she rationed for two weeks.
The shelf is empty.
"Where’s Vivi?" you ask.
The kid blinks. "Sorry?"
"Vivi. The other barista. Blonde hair, works mornings."
Recognition crosses his face, followed by something you don’t want to see. "Oh. She—she doesn’t work here anymore."
The floor doesn’t move. The espresso machine keeps humming. Outside, the city keeps going.
"Since when?"
"Her last day was Wednesday, I think? Or Tuesday? She gave her notice last week. Said she was going home."
Last week. She gave her notice last week. You saw her Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Four days. Four cups. Four misspelled names. She worked through her final shifts and she made your coffee and she drew on your cups and on Tuesday she told you about the phone call from her mother and when you said don’t go she looked at you and said I have to get back to work and she was already going. She was already gone. The leaving had already happened somewhere inside her and the rest was just her body catching up.
On Wednesday she was bright. Too bright. She made you that new drink, the honey one with the mystery sprinkle, and she wanted you to like it and you did, and now you realize she was giving you something to remember. A taste she invented. The last recipe.
"Did she—" You stop yourself. What are you going to ask? Did she leave a note? Did she mention me? You’re a customer. You’re a regular who stayed too long at the counter and brought her chocolate and practiced Korean in the mirror. You’re not someone who gets a forwarding address.
"Did she say where she was going?"
"Back to Hong Kong, I think. That’s what she told the manager."
Hong Kong. The harbour at night. Her mother’s kitchen. The sound of Cantonese, rounder, more musical. The language she dreams in. The language she kept for herself, for the thoughts that didn’t belong to Korea.
"Okay," you say. "Thank you."
"Did you still want to order something?"
You almost say no. You almost walk out. But then you see it.
On the pickup counter, pushed to the side, there’s a cup. A single paper coffee cup, empty, with the sleeve already on it. It’s sitting apart from the stacked clean cups, like it was placed there deliberately, waiting for someone specific to find it.
"Is that—"
"Oh. Yeah." The kid glances at it. "She left that yesterday. Asked me to keep it out. Said you’d know."
You pick up the cup.
Your name is written on the side in her handwriting, the neat precise strokes you’ve seen every morning for months.
Spelled correctly.
Every letter in the right place. No swapped consonants, no shifted vowels. Your name, exactly as it is. As it’s always been. As she’s always known how to write it.
Underneath, no drawing. No flexed arm, no sun, no umbrella, no heart. Just two lines, written small:
Thank you for the chocolate. —Wong Kahei
You stare at the second line. A name you’ve never seen before. Two words in a handwriting you’d know anywhere. Not Vivi. Not the name on the tag, not the name everyone calls her, not the name she gave the city she came to with a dream. Her real name. The one she kept for family. For friends from home. For the people who knew her before Korea, before the group, before the stage name and the coffee shop and the misspelled cups.
She gave it to you on the day she left. The only day she couldn’t stay to watch you read it.
You stand in the coffee shop for a long time. The kid behind the counter makes an espresso for someone else and the machine hisses and the door chimes when they leave and none of it registers.
She gave her notice last week. Four final days. Four misspelled names. On Tuesday she told you about the phone call and you said don’t go and she said I have to get back to work and she was already gone. On Wednesday she invented you a drink. On Thursday she hummed behind the counter and you stood outside watching her through the glass, planning a dinner you’d never get to ask about. The leaving had already happened inside her. The rest was just her body catching up.
The kid behind the counter is watching you. You realize you’ve been standing in the same spot for several minutes, holding an empty cup, and your eyes are wet.
"Are you okay?" he asks.
"Yeah," you say. "I’m fine."
The last time you saw her, she slid your cup across the counter and you took it without looking at the name because you’d stopped checking weeks ago. You took the cup and you said see you tomorrow and she said see you tomorrow and neither of you knew it was the last time.
Except she did.
She knew. And she still said it. Because what else do you say?
You put the cup in your bag. Carefully. The way you’d carry something that would not survive being dropped.
You walk to the office. Fourteen steps across a sidewalk that doesn’t stop moving, into a building where people are already gathering for the morning stand-up and someone asks if you want coffee and you say no, I’m good.
You’re not good.
But you sit at your desk and you open your laptop and you do the work because that’s why you’re here, that’s the reason the city gave you, the one that fits on a visa form and a job contract and a life that makes sense to explain. You’re here because you’re good at what you do. Everything else was just coffee.
Except it wasn’t. And you know it wasn’t. And somewhere over the Yellow Sea, heading south toward a harbour that shines at night, she knows it too.
❤︎
Months later, you’re still in Seoul. Your Korean is better now. Not fluent, but functional—you can argue with cab drivers, understand most of a drama without subtitles, make jokes that land more often than they don’t. Jun calls you a local. You’re not, but you’re closer.
The team is good. Your specialty has taken root here, and the people you trained are training others now, and sometimes you sit in meetings and listen to them explain concepts in Korean that you taught them in English and you feel a strange, displaced pride. Like watching your words translated into a language you’re still learning. Like watching something you built continue without you holding it.
You go to a different coffee shop. It’s closer to the office, actually. Better location. The coffee is good. The barista is a cheerful guy named Minjun who remembers your name after the second visit and spells it correctly every time and draws a smiley face on the cup because that’s what he draws on everyone’s cup.
It’s fine. It’s all fine.
You still have the cup. It sits on your desk at home, next to a framed photo of your team and a half-eaten bar of dark chocolate with sea salt. The ink has faded slightly. Your correctly spelled name. Thank you for the chocolate. And underneath, in the same steady hand: Wong Kahei. You could read it with your eyes closed. You have read it with your eyes closed.
Sometimes you wonder what she’s doing. If she found another dream in Hong Kong or if she let herself rest. If she cooks dan tat in her mother’s kitchen, the custard silky, the pastry warm. If she goes to markets with someone. If the noise feels like hers now.
If she ever thinks about a foreigner with bad Korean who loved chocolate and made a face every time he read his cup.
You went back to the coffee shop once. The original one. Two months after she left. Ordered a latte. Sat at the table by the window. The coffee was the same. Nothing was the same. You didn’t go back after that.
What you can’t explain to anyone—not to Jun, not to your mother, not to the version of yourself that’s supposed to be rational about things—is the specific way you miss her. It’s not abstract. It’s not a mood. It’s sensory. You miss the smell of vanilla and espresso that clung to her hair. You miss the weight of a tangerine segment placed on your tongue by fingers that tasted like salt and citrus. You miss the ghost-pressure of her palm on your chest in a dark coffee shop, trembling, holding you at the distance she couldn’t bear to close. You miss the way your name looked wrong on a cup, and how that wrongness became the most right thing in your day.
You miss her hands. You miss her voice. You miss the particular frequency of her laugh—the real one, the surprised one, the one the college kid looked up at because he’d never heard it before.
You miss the almost. The almost is the worst part. You can grieve something that happened. You can’t grieve something that was on its way to happening and stopped.
Sometimes, on Sunday evenings after you call your mother, you open KakaoTalk and scroll to her username. She hasn’t been active in weeks. The profile picture is still there—a photo of the Han River at dusk, no face, just water and light—and her status message is blank. She exists as a digital outline, a shape without content, a name that was always just a stage name wrapped around a real one she gave you too late.
You’ve typed messages to her. Dozens. None sent.
You: Hey, the tteokbokki place closed. Thought you should know.
You: I found a chocolate shop in Hongdae that would ruin you.
You: The bakery still has the tart. I went last Tuesday. It tasted the same.
You: I never got to ask you to dinner. I had the restaurant picked out. Italian with Korean ingredients. Window seats. You would have liked it.
You: I miss you.
You: I miss you, Kahei.
You delete them all.
One night, late, you’re lying on your apartment floor the way you did the night after the collar, after the Friday when everything in your chest rearranged itself around a person who made coffee for a living and read your moods through the thickness of a paper cup. The ceiling is the same ceiling. The city hums outside the same way.
You think about what she said at the market. A market is supposed to be noisy with someone. Otherwise you’re just standing in someone else’s noise.
You think about the fourteen steps. How you counted them once to make the city smaller and now they’re just steps and the city is as big as it always was and the thing that made it smaller was never the counting.
You think about the closed shop. The narrow space behind the counter. Her back against the sink. The way her eyes closed before you leaned in, like she was bracing for something beautiful and terrible at the same time. Her hand on your chest. I can’t. The tremor in her fingers. The honey-taste of the air between your mouths.
You would give anything to go back to that moment. Not to change it. Just to live in it longer. Just to stand in that twelve inches of almost and feel her breath on your lips one more time.
You reach for your phone. You open KakaoTalk. Her profile picture catches the light from your screen—the river, the dusk, the water holding the sky.
You don’t type anything. You just look at it for a while.
Then you close the app. You get up off the floor. You go to bed.
In the morning, you’ll walk fourteen steps across a sidewalk and through a different glass door and someone will hand you a coffee with your name on it, spelled correctly, and you’ll drink it and it’ll be fine.
Her name was Wong Kahei. She told you once, on a paper cup, on the day she left. She carried it through years of being someone else in a country that wasn’t hers, and she put it in your hands the only way she knew how—in ink, on something disposable, with no return address.
You kept it. You’ll always keep it.
Your name was always easy to spell. She just liked watching you figure that out.
You figured it out too late.
Sometimes, on your way to work, you catch the smell of honey from a bakery you've never been inside. It stops you for half a step. Just half. And then you keep walking, carrying a flavor you never tasted and a name you only said once, in a message you deleted before you could send it.
Some people leave you with scars. Some people leave you with stories.
She left you with notes of honey — faint, warm, impossible to place, lingering long after the cup is empty.
Outside your window, Seoul wakes up the way it always does—gradually, then all at once. Fourteen steps from your office, a coffee shop opens its doors. Someone turns on an espresso machine. Someone stacks cups. Someone writes a name.
The first satellite in a constellation designed specifically to locate wildfires early and precisely anywhere on the planet has now reached
"The first satellite in a constellation designed specifically to locate wildfires early and precisely anywhere on the planet has now reached Earth's orbit, and it could forever change how we tackle unplanned infernos.
The FireSat constellation, which will consist of more than 50 satellites when it goes live, is the first of its kind that's purpose-built to detect and track fires. It's an initiative launched by nonprofit Earth Fire Alliance, which includes Google and Silicon Valley-based space services startup Muon Space as partners, among others.
According to Google, current satellite systems rely on low-resolution imagery and cover a particular area only once every 12 hours to spot significantly large wildfires spanning a couple of acres. FireSat, on the other hand, will be able to detect wildfires as small as 270 sq ft (25 sq m) – the size of a classroom – and deliver high-resolution visual updates every 20 minutes.
The FireSat project has only been in the works for less than a year and a half. The satellites are fitted with custom six-band multispectral infrared cameras, designed to capture imagery suitable for machine learning algorithms to accurately identify wildfires – differentiating them from misleading objects like smokestacks.
These algorithms look at an image from a particular location, and compare it with the last 1,000 times it was captured by the satellite's camera to determine if what it's seeing is indeed a wildfire. AI technology in the FireSat system also helps predict how a fire might spread; that can help firefighters make better decisions about how to control the flames safely and effectively.
This could go a long way towards preventing the immense destruction of forest habitats and urban areas, and the displacement of residents caused by wildfires each year. For reference, the deadly wildfires that raged across Los Angeles in January were estimated to have cuased more than $250 billion in damages.
Muon is currently developing three more satellites, which are set to launch next year. The entire constellation should be in orbit by 2030.
The FireSat effort isn't the only project to watch for wildfires from orbit. OroraTech launched its first wildfire-detection satellite – FOREST-1 – in 2022, followed by one more in 2023 and another earlier this year. The company tells us that another eight are due to go up toward the end of March."
whew .... ive had many and to be honest its always been a struggle bc like it does take up so much of your time and energy as much as we don't want it to. i wish i had like a more comprehensive answer ... i guess it took me a while to realise that often these days jobs are often designed to make you hate them. designed around productivity, surveillance, understaffing, insecurity, the expectation that people will absorb more pressure for the same pay etc -_-. capitalism rewards extraction. it treats workers as infinitely adaptable machines rather than human beings with limits and reasonable boundaries so ... even if you love what you do ofc youre going to hate it on some level. and if you hate what you do and it's just there to pay the bills then ofc youre going to hate it even more. it's like idk to me it's almost a natural reaction at this point. so knowing that can take some of the mental pressure off imo. ofc its important to try and identify what is making it so bad whether its a shitty boss, a bad schedule, the challenges of the tasks themselves and seeing if theres any actionable ways you can actually change it. but like sometimes the nervous system is just ummm having a natural response to a shit situation and its not bc youre just not coping you know. that being said the past few jobs ive had ive had to like develop a proactive mindset about it all lest i succumb to #thedoom. again it's not easy and it's not even doable half the time. but i was basically trying to find the balance between avoiding self-gaslighting by telling myself it's all about mindset and also avoiding learned helplessness by just waiting for my circumstances to magically improve without action. so i tried to like ... think of coping as a skill i was building up like muscles. a long process but yeah.
think what initially helped was separating my identity from my labour as much as possible, because work culture really encourages people to fuse their self-worth to productivity. you are not your job title, your customer service voice or your manager’s opinion of you and it's so so hard to accept that when you spend most of your day hearing it but you have to try to reinforce that in your real life. like when have u ever liked or loved someone in your life bc theyre good at their desk job ? or purely because of that ? also lately i try creating tiny rituals that tell my brain work is over, like changing clothes immediately after getting home, taking a walk, showering, listening to the same comforting playlist after shifts, or refusing to check emails/msgs outside work if i can help it. and when possible, reduce unnecessary suffering at work instead of assuming your only choices are quit dramatically or silently endure forever which is a huge one for me nd hapens almost every shift. unforch i think sometimes survival looks like not going the extra mile or trying to be what theyre looking for and instead taking your full breaks, stopping unpaid extra labour, emotionally detaching from unreasonable expectations, scripting difficult conversations in advance, or sitting down and identifying the exact thing that is destroying you to see if there's literally any reasonable next step u can take to even somewhat mitigate the mental weight of it. and tbbh sometimes it is not even the job itself, but one manager, the commute, masking all day, sensory overload, moral injury, low pay, lack of autonomy etc and all of that is understandable.
at my new job im also trying to actively protect my nervous system. chronic workplace stress rly changes the way your body and brain function which is something i dont think managers gaf about. when people are trapped in survival mode for long enough they stop feeling like themselves. so the tiny boring things people dismiss actually do matter, not because they magically fix capitalism, but because they help you stay emotionally intact enough to think clearly and make decisions. things like eating regularly, sleeping consistently where possible, walking without your phone, stretching after or fuck even during shifts, getting daylight early in the day, reducing doomscrolling before bed, spending time with people who do not make you perform, allowing yourself low-effort evenings without guilt etc. just what fucking ever. anything to look forward to girl. its hard to find the energy after work to do anything esp when youre mentally ill or physically ill or you have other stuff going on. but even working up to doing something once every few weeks that builds your sense of self up outside of work is good. + knowing you don't have to earn rest through total collapse. burnout recovery isn't laziness. humans are not machines and you are allowed to have hobbies you are bad at, say no, lie down, do the bare minimum sometimes,seek comfort without monetising it etc. when it got too much at my last place before i got sick, i was trying to build a tiny escape route anyway instead of waiting for a perfect plan or time. like apply for one job a week. update your cv slowly. ask friends/family members/local career advice resources about their workplaces. research apprenticeships, remote work, union support, or retraining, learn one transferable skill online. save tiny amounts if you can. hopelessness grows in inaction WHICH I FKN HATE BC I LOVE INACTION!! but even small acts of agency remind your brain that your future is not fully closed off.
and please just above all take burnout seriously before it becomes complete collapse. people think burnout just means being a bit knackered when it can actually become panic attacks, depression, chronic illness flare-ups, emotional numbness, dissociation, inability to function, suicidal thoughts etc which im sure you know well enough. a lot of people minimise their suffering because the whole narrative atm is that everyone hates work or to be grateful you have a job, but being employed should not require the destruction of your mental health and i think thats smth we can all at least say is fair. i think mayeee sometimes coping with a job you hate is not actually about becoming better at tolerating misery. ive been trying to focus on keeping myself emotionally alive long enough to eventually leave, change direction, unionise, reduce my hours, ask for accommodations, or build a life where work takes up less of my soul fr example ive been trying to get to a writing class once a week for the past 2 yrs to have smth else to live for - haven't made it yet but hey its on the radar lol. you dont need to love your job to deserve a decent life nd thats my bottom line.
ive been trying to look into international resources that might be of help since you sent this while a few are mental health resources in general (which could still be worth looking into), there's some stuff about workers rights / possible options you may have depending on where you live in there too. sending a lot of love, i really hope things improve for you soon. sorry if the mental health stuff seems like an overreaction lol, i just know how bad i get bc of work. its rly no joke. x
