#festivefrivolity

[honeymoonjin]

𝑝𝑎𝑖𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑔: fanboy!taehyung x artist!reader

𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑑 𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑡: 13.7k

𝑠𝑢𝑚𝑚𝑎𝑟𝑦: still bitter about a scandal that ruined your painting career, you’re recommended a getaway by your therapist to a small island off the coast of seoul. expecting a tranquil location to wallow in self-pity, you’re startled when on your first night, you encounter an avid fan of your work. instead of annoying you for an autograph, kim taehyung ends up being the very thing you need to fall in love with art again.

𝑤𝑎𝑟𝑛𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑠: sexually explicit content, reader suffers from poor mental health but nothing serious, unprotected sex, oral (f receiving), fingering, praise, that’s kinda it, it’s pretty soft tbh

--

The breeze is light here, broken by the gentle rise of the sand dunes behind you. It runs over your skin like water, a warm current that lasts long after the sun slips below the horizon line.

You sit for hours watching it, the tail of pinks and oranges and ochres that reflect thickly on the top of the water, the shallow crests of low tide. There’s a pull in your heart, a twitch at your fingers. The you a year ago would’ve had her paints out already, an easel with legs precariously shoved in the dry sand. The you a year ago would have been tossing up whether cadmium yellow or cadmium orange would suit the last slip of sun above the water, and whether you should wait til it was gone entirely to save making the decision.

Then again, the you a year ago would never have needed to come here.

The you today just waits, silently, you don’t even know what for. You’d been told this was a getaway. That you just needed some time to recover your muse, or some bullshit like that. But the more time you sit in silence and watch the sky blacken to navy and the stars prick the darkness with dazzling clarity, you think your therapist was wrong. How was this a getaway when all your problems were still festering inside you?

“Oh my god, Y/n L/n?”

You groan and sink back into the sand, head cushioned on the warm piles. Just your fucking luck. “You’ve got the wrong person,” you call out with eyes squeezed shut, praying the stranger will leave you alone. The last thing you needed was a green reporter or psycho fan to spill your location to the rest of the world. You can only imagine the headline. Disgraced painter Y/n L/n found hiding away on a tropical island eight months after she ruined the Met Gala.

“Oh my god, it is you! I’m a massive fan, wow!”

Fuck. At least there was a chance they’d keep quiet. You crack open an eye, staring up at the figure beside you, cast in shadow. From the glint of moonlight, you can see a crown of ruffled hair that’s a faded teal. It reminds you of the impressionist painting of a mountain lake that threw your work into the public eye. Just as faded as the dye on his hair, that time feels worn and aged, like from another life. A reminder of how far you’d fallen. “Look,” you confess lowly to the silhouette, “I just wanna be left alone, I’m not- I’m just here for a break from...everything.”

The figure shifts his weight in the sand, raising an arm to scratch at the back of his neck shyly. “I don’t mean to disturb you,” he apologises. With the slight breeze, his baggy clothes buffet around his lean figure and in the darkness he looks like some vengeful angel, towering over you with the moon behind him. But his voice is so soft, so genuine, so- so warm. Perhaps not vengeful, then, but definitely an angel. “You’re a hero of mine, I wanted to thank you for how much you’ve inspired me, saved me. Gosh, it’s crazy that you’re even here, I-”

“I’m sorry,” you force out, sitting up, wincing as grains of sand work their way down the nape of your neck, “really, I am. But I’m not the person you’re thinking of. Not anymore, at least.” You hate the way your voice rings out so thinly in the night air, nothing like the deep honey of his. You hate the way you sound broken.

He senses it too; he takes a step back, turns towards the dunes. “I should be going, I guess,” he murmurs. “For what it’s worth, I hope I see you around. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

You don’t respond, wrapping your arms around your hunched knees and staring at the silver ocean until you can no longer see him in your peripheral vision.

—

It’s over a week before you see him again. Though you’d never admit it to anyone, you keep an eye out for the boy with the teal hair. There wasn’t enough light that day to make out his face but still, with hardly any people for miles, you hadn’t anticipated he’d be all that difficult to find.

Truth be told, there had been a deep curl of regret and dissatisfaction that took root inside you shortly after you left. He was just trying to be nice, and you could use a friend. Could use someone.

You had asked for privacy when your therapist began recommending a break, a getaway, but you hadn’t expected it to this degree. The place you were staying at was a rundown bungalow just behind the dunes, tucked away in a sliver of land where sand met forest, rising up into hills. The only people you saw were the employees that ran it: a maid that stopped by every day at 1pm, even though you had already made the bed and cleaned up after yourself; an older gentleman that delivered you fresh groceries every couple of days in his ancient-looking four wheel drive; and finally, the electrician you’d had to call out a few nights prior after the power went out.

The mysterious fan hadn’t been dressed like an employee; then again, it was long past the workday when he’d approached you. Mulishly, you find yourself lugging a picnic blanket and a pillow down to the beachfront every evening, monitoring every inch of the coastline that stretches around this edge of the peninsula.

It’s only on the ninth night, when you’re folding up your rough blanket with a disappointed grumble, that a sudden yap catches your attention. You whirl around, toes sinking deeper into the light sand, and gasp as a familiar silhouette approaches, stumbling down a sand dune to your left.

He hasn’t seen you yet; so focused on the tiny fluffball that tugs restlessly at its leash. It’s a lot earlier tonight than the last time you’d seen him, and there’s enough remnants of sunlight in the sky to cast him in a warm golden glow.

He’s in baggy clothes like last time, a long-sleeved white t-shirt with a v in the center, unbuttoned and sagging over the shoulder of the arm that’s getting yanked along, and some tan linen shorts. It’s hard to tell with how he sinks to his ankles in sand with every step, but he’s barefoot, almost sliding down the steep dune more so than walking.

You can’t hear him at this distance, but his lips are moving, parted in a boxy grin as he responds to the constant yipping of the tiny dog at his feet. He’s gorgeous, tanned skin to fit the honey of his voice - the voice you’ve been unable to shake from your head - and the roots of his hair are the colour of brown sugar, lightening into the dyed teal ends, whipping over his cheeks and neck in the seabreeze.

He turns off when he reaches the base, following his dog, who pulls in your direction, short bursts of energy that get cut off by the length of the leash. Your heart jumps, and you find yourself waiting in anticipation, breath caught in your throat.

But the moment he glances up and sees you, he halts in his tracks. Stepping back, his smile falls, bowing his head to you apologetically and pulling on the leash so that the small black-and-tan puppy at his feet turns around with him.

They start walking away from you, and you don't have time to think before you're calling out to him, jogging over with your blanket and pillow forgotten behind you.

He stops walking, though he doesn't turn, and when you finally come to a stop beside him, he keeps his head down.

"Look, I'm sorry about yesterday," you rush out, slightly out of breath, "I was in a really shitty mood, and I had kinda come here to get away from...everything in the first place. I wasn't expecting a fan, and I reacted badly. I'm sorry."

Even after standing still, you can't seem to catch your breath. You haven't seen him this close, in this much detail, and it makes the air catch in your lungs. His eyes are an intense burnt umber, dancing over your face with an unreadable depth to them. He's taller than you, but not bulky. Though his shoulders are wide, he's lean, with a narrow nose and soft cheeks. The wind plays with the ends of his hair, revealing glimpses of a strong brow. He's beautiful.

"I didn't mean to bother you," he says after a moment, and you almost jump at the timbre of his voice so close to you, "I should be the one apologising. I'll leave you alone, honestly. I can find another place to go for a walk, or go at a different time-"

"Do you walk here a lot at this time?" you interrupt, the euphoria of finally holding a conversation after so long loosening your tongue. "You haven't been back since that night."

He tips his head to the side, shoulder jerking when his dog impatiently tugs at the leash, quiet snuffles and yips of disapproval ignored in the air between you. There's a flicker of something in his eyes - surprise? Amusement? "You were looking for me?"

"I-" Your voice fails you, and you realise how pathetic you must look. Your shoulders sink. "I was... I wanted to apologise," you land on finally.

That strange flicker in his eyes settles into a grateful warmth. "I normally do, yeah, but I had to go back to the mainland to pick up this guy." With a genuine smile, he glances down to the ball of fluff that's now lying over his bare foot. "I stayed there while he got his first lot of vaccinations. You can pat him, if you want."

You can recognise that offer for what it really is; an olive branch. In other words, he's apparently not holding a grudge against you for being an asshole. You smile gratefully, crouching down to pat the tiny animal. "What's his name?"

"Yeontan," he answers cheerily. "he's nine weeks old!"

You coo, chuckling at the soft fur wriggling beneath your fingertips, at the wet nose prodding at your palm for more pats. "Yeontan..." you muse. "Why does that name sound familiar?"

You hear a sheepish laugh from above. "Your, um, your painting of the old barn in Icheon? There's a kennel that's beside it in shadow, but you can just make out the name Yeontan painted on the front. I-" He breaks off awkwardly, falling silent.

Your hand freezes, and you feel yourself slump from a crouch to sitting fully on the sand, still hot from the afternoon sun. Yeontan. A detail you couldn't even remember painting, yet he'd named his dog after it. The dog continues to cover your hands in slobber and stray fur, but you just stare at it blankly.

"I'm sorry," the man winces, tone low with defeat. "You probably think it's stupid. I swear I'm not one of those crazy obsessed fans! There was just..." His voice changes then, closes up to cut off any emotion. "I shouldn't say. Sorry."

Your shoulders slacken. "You don't have to keep apologising," you say softly. After a moment's thought, you push up off the sand to stand up again, grains clinging to the skin that's damp from the dog's affections. The handsome stranger's face is stricken, reluctant as he watches you get up. You miss the boxy smile he'd held when he made his way down the dunes. You wonder if he'll ever smile that way at you. "I wanna hear. What you have to say."

Hand flexing on the leash, he looks down at Yeontan and back up at you, eyes squinted slightly as the sun glares onto his face; a radiant, sharp orange. "One of the reasons I'm such a fan of your work is the emotion you can actually see on the canvas. I don't even know how to explain it, but I feel it. And with the Icheon barn painting - I actually saved up for years to buy the original - there's something so sad and lonely about that kennel, that patch of shadow. The rest of the scene is so bright and open, it feels like a party that the kennel wasn't invited to. I don't know, it's stupid. But I thought if I ever bought a dog, I'd name it Yeontan so that it wouldn't feel so alone." He faces the horizon as he speaks, wincing into the light, and a broken laugh bubbles out of his throat once he's done. "Like I said; it's stupid."

But you don't think it's stupid at all. "Did it work?" you ask instead, nose prickling as tears build behind your eyes. The more he spoke, the more you remember the painting. It was your last work before the Met Gala disaster, and after everything went down in flames, desperate online tabloids went back to it, citing it as a 'cry for help'. You hadn't really painted it like that though, not really. You'd seen that beautifully painted barn in the countryside when you were driving between cities to visit your parents, and was taken by the dilapidated dog kennel tucked just beside it. Painting it wasn't some sort of clue to your nosedive, but more like a solidarity with that kennel, the dog that once lived there. The story that had been forgotten. And to hear this man had seen it, had wanted to ease the suffering just like you had... The emotions inside you, ones that had felt so dull and monochrome, now churn inside you in indecipherable technicolour, too many to count. But you think one of them might just be hope. "Did- did getting Yeontan work?"

He's looking at you now. He stays silent for a moment, the softest smile tugging at your lips, and it takes your breath away, watching the colours of sunset play across his skin while his brown eyes seek yours out intensely. "Yeah, it did," he answers eventually, his voice almost a whisper. It's only once he starts speaking that you realise the two of you have moved closer inwards without realising, so that it would only take a half step forward to be pressed against him. "But I think talking with you has helped more."

You let out a breath you didn't know you were holding. The whirlpool inside you settles, leaving you feeling lighter than you have in years. You don't know what it is about this man that makes you feel...sane again, but you want more of it. "I think talking with you has helped me too," you confess, voice lilting in uncertainty. "Can... can I see you again? I don't even know your name, but-"

"Taehyung," he answers immediately, and even with the fall of night, the sun well and truly gone, his eyes are bright. "I could come back tomorrow?"

Your toes flex in the sand fighting the urge to jump in relief. "Yes! Yes, I'd like that," you chime, a smile tugging at your lips. "It was nice to meet you, Taehyung."

"The pleasure is all mine."

--

You sleep well that night. You can’t remember the last time the peaceful rays of sun have woken you so gently, but you certainly aren’t complaining.

You’d spent the past week or so moping in your cabin until late afternoon and then moping on the beach. Only now, after finally meeting the boy again - Taehyung - you realise how much you’ve been wasting your time buried in your own thoughts. Now all you want to do is explore. You’d been told on the ferry over here that the island was only a few hours’ walk around the coastline, and that your cabin, a street of shops and a small village of houses were the only signs of life. No bar to drown your sorrows at. No club for finding faceless strangers to make you forget who you were for a few hours. All your coping vices had been replaced with open stretches of nature in all its colours; the cool grey rocky beaches on the southern shore, the lush greens of the hilly forests, the glinting turquoise of the sea, and open plains of pastel sky for miles and miles.

The walk isn’t particularly intensive, but it’s long, and your feet ache in their sandals by the time you reach the docks again, having marked a full loop around the island. The dock, empty this late in the morning, leads directly to the main street via a cobblestone path that weaves between dunes, flax bushes, fields and a skinny stretch of trees, and you follow it to the center of the island, resting in a small cafe.

There’s no free WiFi here, so you sip at a tall glass of homemade strawberry lemonade and watch the streets through the storefront window. From your seat, you can see the people wander back and forth, the odd few with kids, but almost all are retirement age. Slow-moving couples with walkers and canes, elderly men jangling the keys to their vintage cars (that surely didn’t have much road to drive on), women with age-spotted skin and heavy beaded jewellery.

You can’t work out how Taehyung fits in this picture. It’s almost impossible to picture him walking down the same street as everyone else; his dyed hair, clothes two sizes too big, tall and slender frame hurrying down with a dog leash in one hand and a grocery bag in the other-

Wait.

You straighten up, eyes widening as you watch the man himself pauses to let Yeontan cock his leg on a patch of grass by the intersection. Physically, he’s entirely incongruous with the rest of the villagers, but he looks entirely at home, glancing up to smile in recognition at every figure that passes by him. One goes so far as to reach up and ruffle his hair playfully as she talks, and his face brightens with crinkled eyes and a boxy grin, greeting her warmly.

The same feeling of longing and dissatisfaction stirs you from the other time you saw that smile. You want to be the one that makes him so happy. You frown, unconsciously chewing on the end of the paper straw. It’s too hot in here. There’s not enough ventilation, and with the sun streaming in, the heat just pools inside, sticking to your thighs and arms. That’s why you leave the cafe before finishing your drink. The heat.

The lady has left by the time you cross the street, and you fake a cough noisily as you pass him, eyes cast away but face turned so he’d easily recognise you.

“Y/n!” Your heart warms, keens at the calling of your name, and you turn to him, smiling broadly. Taehyung grins when Yeontan rushes over to greet you too, whole body rocking with the force of his tail wagging. “Fancy seeing you here,” he remarks, and you take in a deep breath of air, feeling lightheaded with his attention back on you.

“I decided to explore a bit,” you answer, eyes dropping down to the supermarket bag in his hands, white plastic taut and digging red lines into his palm with the weight of it. “Retail therapy?”

He laughs goodnaturedly, but there’s a flush of pink high on his cheekbones, standing out beside the strands of green that he’s tucked behind his ears. “It’s actually, uh, something for tonight. I didn’t know if you’d- If you still-” He breaks off his stammering with another laugh, this one more self-conscious, and the pink deepens to red. “I thought you and I could paint together. I bought us some materials just in case you didn’t bring your own.” You fall silent, mouth slack and parted in surprise, so he continues on, lifting up his hand for a moment, bag rustling, then changing his mind and letting it fall again. “There isn’t a proper art supplies store here, so it’s just from the toy store. I know you’re probably used to proper stuff, but a bad worker blames his tools, you know! Not that you would- that you’re a bad-”

“You paint?” you ask finally, ending his nervous rambling.

His whole body slackens a bit, like you’ve cut some tension from him, his head dipping down to break eye contact. “Um. I’m- learning,” he answers with an uncertain wobble to his voice.

You tilt your head to the side with an expectant smile. “That’s really cool. How long have you been studying?”

He swallows, looking up to send you a hesitant smile. “I, um, I studied the instructions on the back of a paint-by-numbers kit in the toy store. Just now.” His voice lifts at the end of each sentence like it’s a question, that same bargaining smile plastered on his face.

You let out a genuine laugh, the first one you’ve had in a while. In too long. “Is that so? I better bow down to the maestro then.”

“Hey!” he whines playfully, shoulders rocking forward like a toddler feeling sorry for himself. “I learnt everything I know so far just from your art. And did you hear that speech I gave you about The Barn at Icheon? That was pretty good, right? You have to admit, that was good.”

His hand, the one loosely holding Yeontan’s lead, reaches out to grasp gently just above your elbow as he speaks, rocking you slightly like he’s pleading for you to agree. You find a constant stream of laughter bubbling out of your throat as he does so, feeling so light in the sunny midday breeze. “Okay, okay, that was good,” you confess, “you get a point for that.”

Once your laughter subsides slowly, you find yourself looking up at him with a residual smile, the same of which is spread on his face, eyes glimmering with something fond. He waits for the air between you to fall silent, tongue slipping out just slightly to wet his lips as you hold his gaze. “Y/n,” he asks softly, your name like molten sugar on his tongue, thumb unconsciously rubbing at the sensitive skin in the crook of your arm, “will you paint with me?”

Though the thought of painting still sours inside your chest, with his skin on your skin and his smile just for you, you feel like you could do anything. There’s only one answer. “Yes, I’ll paint with you, Taehyung.”

--

Painting with Taehyung is less painting with Taehyung and more staring desolately into the middle distance as Taehyung decides to make the clouds purple, bottom lip sucked between his teeth in focus.

“Don’t overthink it,” he stresses for the millionth time, glancing over at your blank canvas, “I’m not judging you.”

But it’s not about him judging you. If it wasn’t for him, you don’t think a paintbrush would have ever found its way into your hands again, certainly not so soon. It’s just that- you feel an overwhelming burden, a historical pressure of all your mistakes before. If you put brush to canvas now and create a work of art, then was your complete mindblank for the Met Gala all for nothing? Though your therapist advised against it, you had rather become attached to the idea that you’d somehow gotten artistically injured somewhere, and that eventually you’d broken completely, irreparable. It made the constant white void easier. Your first death.

“Happy little accidents,” Taehyung says lightly, dipping heavily into orange and catching a dollop on his wide-leg jeans. Not noticing it, or not caring, he swipes the orange into the canvas in a wonky line down past the horizon line, forming the neck and body of what looks vaguely like a giraffe. “And, um, happy little- happy little trees. If you want we could turn around and face the forest?”

Though a glum cloud is settling in your stomach you flick him a soft smile. “So you watch Bob Ross too? I thought you said you learnt everything from me.”

Using the same brush, he scoops out some black, using a pinkie finger to mix the colours together inside the bristles, a murky brown. “Maybe just a little,” he admits, daubing rough patches onto the giraffe, half of them overlapping the edges of its body. There’s an endearing quality to his carefree worksmanship, and you can’t deny that his painting looks good, wonky lines and all. “But don’t worry, you’ll always be my first,” Taehyung adds, not looking at you but smirking all the same.

The double entendre isn’t missed on you, but still, as you sit on a picnic table right on the edge of the village, blank canvas in front of you, you can’t bring yourself to laugh at it. All you can see is the paint drying on the tip of Taehyung’s finger, the messy pots of basic acrylics, and the warm smile that doesn’t leave his face.

He’s having fun. How long has it been since painting has been fun for you? Annoyed, you grab the clear green plastic brush from the set, dipping it into black. Muscle memory tingles across your knuckles and down the muscles of your wrist, an instinct to hold the brush in a certain way, tap off the excess, but your frustration overrides it, and you take the paintladen brush and smear it directly across the center of the canvas, a gaping maw of glossy shadow that bulges on the lower edges, gravity pulling at the thick stripe. You go completely still once it’s done. Staring.

Taehyung looks over after a moment, watching you carefully. “Is everything alright? If you didn’t want to paint, we didn’t have to-”

“It’s terrible,” you interrupt, a frown marring your face. “I fucked it up.”

“You didn’t,” he chastises softly, pushing his canvas to the side and leaning over your shoulder. “It’s a promising start. Maybe the duck pond is black in your world.”

Your eyes slide lower, unfocused. “Maybe the whole ocean is black in my world,” you murmur.

He’s silent for a moment,  unsure what to say. “Then how will the fish see?” he asks in a light tone, bumping your shoulder gently with his, but you just let out a broken sob, tears spilling over your cheeks like they’d been triggered by his contact. Taehyung’s mouth opens in a rounded o, eyes wide, and as the dam breaks, you feel an arm find your back, rubbing soothingly, and long, warm fingers wrap around the hand that holds the brush limply, cradling it. “We can fix it, it’s okay,” he soothes in a kind whisper, “here; it’s that mailbox now, yeah? And behind it is the candy shop-” His voice cuts off while he guides your shaking hand to the green, mixing it with white in the plastic pottle to make a pale pastel. You feel the pressure of the brush in your hand shift as he moves the bristles over the canvas in a roughly rectangular shape, but you’re unseeing, crying tears that sting like turpentine into that black ocean behind your eyelids, letting him move you.

The two of you stay like that for what feels like an eternity, you curled in his embrace as he quietly paints for you, commenting on each step of the process so you know what he’s doing, even with your eyes closed. At one point, your energy leaves you, and you collapse into him, pressing your cheek against the stable warmth of his chest, heartbeat audible through his thin t-shirt. He doesn’t complain, just adjusting his stance to better support you and resting his chin on your head.

“I’m sorry,” you blubber thickly at one point, tasting salt.

“You don’t have to be,” he assures, “just keep breathing. Look; let’s put some trees in, hm? One for you and one for me.”

You open your eyes with a sniffle, feeling your hand lower in his secure hold, and you twist around your head to watch him dip the filthy brush in a green which has already been tainted by white and red in places. Your eyes follow it up again, until he fearlessly swipes in the graceful branches of the fir trees which cover the highest points of the island. You look at the rest of the painting, and a disbelieving giggle bubbles out of you, a smile across your face despite everything.

Unlike the mental image you’d been plotting in your head with the narration, this square of canvas has a line of slightly leaning buildings stacked beside each other tightly, colours smearing on the borders. In the middle of the uneven grey strip of cement down the middle to mark out the road, two trees stand proud, mostly green but with bleeding patches of muddy purple and brown too. Entire drops of paint spatter and run, creating a chaotic but vivid daydream of the end of the street in front of you.

“A lot better in your head, wasn’t it?” Taehyung asks knowingly. You laugh again, the last few tears pressed out of the corners of your wet eyes. “It’s okay,” he replies easily, “it was better in my head too. But the one in our heads is boring, don’t you think? If I wanted to see the street in front of me exactly, I’d just look up. Or take a photo. But nobody can visit this place we’ve painted. It’s just here, brand new because of us. I think I like that more.”

You sit up, wiping your eyes with a tired smile. “There’s no way you learnt all that from me,” you deflect, voice still raw from crying. “But yeah. I think I like this one more too.”

“I’m glad,” he answers softly, letting go of your hand and removing his hand from your back at the same time. You suppress a shiver at the sudden absence of heat. “I’ll let this dry and hang it up right beside The Barn at Icheon.”

You laugh again, sniffing away the last dregs of self-pity. “You better not,” you warn playfully, “as semantically poignant as it is, it’s an awful paintjob.”

When Taehyung smiles, it’s bright and boxy. And it’s just for you.

--

Time passes, but not like in the real world. Out here on this island, you start counting the passage of time by how many occasions you’d met Taehyung. Then, once you’ve seen him too often to count, you let yourself lose track of time completely, remembering only the moments spent with him like vignettes on a fragile chain.

The two of you always meet in the town or on the beach, speaking about everything and nothing. One day, while waiting beside the blue metal mailbox for Yeontan to pee (though Taehyung still insisted it looked better black) you tell him of the time you accidentally turned all your clothes yellowy-green after accidentally putting an apron in the wash that had an opened sampler of chartruese in the pocket. On a rainy afternoon when you’d gotten caught in the downfall walking through the forest, Taehyung told you, while wringing out rainwater from his rumpled maroon sweater, that he was meant to be studying agricultural sciences on the mainland, but his grandmother was sick and so he bought a place nearby to care for her.

“One good thing about being on the island,” he’d chimed cheerily, dark teal and brown plastered to his cheeks and forehead, “is that property is super cheap here. My grandma paid half and I paid half, and now the one-bedroom I live in is all mine.”

“But isn’t that sad?” you’d questioned, feeling the ground turn to mud beneath your shoes. “Living on the island, I mean? You should be in a big city, partying with your friends, living life. This place is like one massive retirement village.”

Taehyung had just shrugged. “My grandma likes it. And I like living for someone else, you know? Makes me feel good.”

Long after you’d gone home, warming up by the radiator in your beachside bungalow, those words had stuck with you. You wonder if, with all this time he’s been spending with you, he’s starting to live for you, too. You wonder if maybe that’s a bad thing.

But still, time passes in this hazy, episodic way. Money continues to filter out of your bank account each week you stay, but you hadn’t worried about your finances for years now, enough successful exhibits from your productive days keeping a healthy sum.

Though he never pushes as much as last time at the picnic table, Taehyung keeps you creating. Backs of napkins, tourism pamphlets, the kids colouring sets at the local diner. No matter how scrawled or indecipherable, the soft-hearted boy compliments your work all the same, slipping the scraps into his pocket with a joking promise that he’s going to frame them. Somehow, every unthought, unplanned line of ink or lead or pigment that lights the page feels like one less needle buried deep inside your heart, one small salve to ease the burden. You don’t know if Taehyung knows it, but in all the ways that count he’s a better artist than you.

When he’s around you, the world is lusher, more vibrant. Your time alone is grey and muted; a dull beach, an empty bungalow. With him, you feel like the sky is bluer and the trees are greener. The bonfire you sit in front of now casts an intense orange glow on everything around it, including Taehyung’s hands as he deftly impales marshmallows onto a skewer.

It’s cooler at nighttime these days. At some point, you’d both exchanged sandals for sneakers, t-shirts for sweaters. Taehyung seems to fancy heavy cable knits and thick trousers even in mild weather, and you wonder if he’d still wear clothing typical of an elderly gentleman even if he was on the mainland in a modern city instead of around the older generation on the island.

Tonight, you’d tried and failed a traditional Korean barbecue over the open flame. While Taehyung had shoved his cut of pork right into the fire, ending up with a charred outside and raw inner, you’d diligently held yours above the flames, turning and turning until the muscles in your arm screamed and you had to give up and admit perhaps the meat from the local butcher was cut too thick, and that a bonfire was good for nothing more than toasted marshmallows.

“This is where it’s at, this is it,” the young man enthuses confidently, each skewer laden with four or five marshmallows, bunched together, “dessert for dinner. The way it should be.”

You’re content to sit back and let him work excitedly, wrapping the edges of the picnic blanket low over your shoulders and lap. Though Taehyung is always devastatingly handsome, he’s the most gorgeous like this: focused in his element and surrounded by all the colours and textures of nature, a painting come to life. The heat of the flames is curling his hair lightly, making teal ends flick at his temples and the nape of his neck. His hair was growing out steadily, but still he chose not to cut it, and you can’t deny the length suits him.

“There’s more brown than green now,” you mention softly. “Soon it’ll look like dip-dye.”

Taehyung glances back at you over his shoulder with a rougish grin, shuffling around so he faces you fully. “What; is this your way of saying it looks bad?”

“No,” you defend with a pout, reaching for the near-full packet of marshmallows. “I’m just curious if you’re gonna leave it like that.”

Taehyung hums like he doesn’t fully believe you, and he leans over to shove his hand in the packet at the same time that you’re rummaging for the soft sweets, your knuckles brushing together. You shiver at the contact. Somehow, that’s been the first time you’ve shared skin contact since that day at the picnic table. Wide-eyed, you wait til he’s grabbed a bunch and pull your own hand away, empty and white with powder.

“Sorry,” he adds reflexively, but you just shake your head. How are you supposed to tell him that you liked the feeling of his skin on yours? Taehyung pops a pink marshmallow into his left cheek, letting it bulge and slur his speech as he gives you a broad grin. “You could dye it for me! My hair, I mean. Pick a colour.”

Against your will, you smile back, cheeks puffing at the thought. “I have no idea how to dye hair, Tae.”

Something flickers in his eyes when you say that, or maybe it’s the dancing flames reflected in them. He chews quickly, swallowing with a jerk of his jaw, and licks the rest of the white powder off his lips. “I bet it’s a whole lot easier than painting a picture.”

You scoff, but there’s no bite to it. “Oh, so you didn’t want me to paint one of my works on your hair, then? Don’t fancy Jeju Dusk on your scalp?”

Taehyung grins at the name, recognising the title of one of your earlier paintings - one that had been relentlessly criticised for its blending of techniques, something that later became your signature. “That’s my second favorite piece, you know? I have a print of it at home, and I saw the original in the Leeum Museum last year.”

You remember the director of the Leeum fondly. In your beginning years, he’d fought for your works to be shown in some of the frequent exhibitions they held. Even though you’d barely made a name for yourself, and had only recently moved to Seoul, Director Kim Namjoon took you in like a mentee and gave you a job himself as his PA. The experience you’d gotten there, as well as that vital exposure, had kept you business-savvy throughout your career, and once you were in a position to give back, you donated almost all of your original canvases to the museum in his name. Maybe one day you’d return home to Seoul and tell Namjoon of the boy who lived on a faraway island, the boy who taught you to open up again. Would Taehyung still be with you then? Though it hasn’t been long, it’s hard to comprehend a life without Taehyung. All you can visualise is a great absence, a lack. You banish the thought from your mind with a shake of your head, glancing back up to see the boy himself boldly setting a skewer of marshmallows on fire in the orange heat. “I hope that’s your one,” you joke weakly as he puffs out the blue and orange that lick at the blackening lumps.

“Aren’t you going to ask me what my favorite work is?” he asks instead, ignoring your statement.

You stay silent for a moment, observing the way he discards the charred skewer in his lap and delicately toasts the other one, swivelling the base so that each side of the marshmallow stack warms to a golden brown. Once he pulls it out, he hands it to you with an expectant quirk of his brow. You take the stick with a slightly suspicious smile. “What’s your favorite, Taehyung?”

“Your next one,” he answers immediately, gaze locked on yours.

You blame the heat radiating off the bonfire for the warmth in your cheeks as you suppress a smile. “Alright then,” you say decisively.

“Alright what?”

“Alright, I’ll dye your hair for you.”

He grins broadly, eyes crinkling into crescent moons as he starts eating his thoroughly-burnt marshmallows. “Tomorrow,” he announces, melted strings of pink and white pooling in the corner of his lips. “Let’s meet at the convenience store and you can pick the colour.”

You smirk at the way he devours the toasted marshmallows with childish glee. “You’ll regret that when you come out of this with highlighter orange hair.”

He chucks his leftover stick into the grocery bag you brought your supplies in, letting himself collapse backwards onto the heated sand. “I think I could pull it off,” he deflects calmly. “Just you see.”

Breath taken away by the peace on his face as he closes his eyes, your mind works dizzily, desperate to find something to keep him talking, to keep this moment between you alive. “Maybe you could get a job as air traffic control. Or a streetlight. Just you wait; it’ll be orange orange.”

Taehyung’s face warms in a lazy smile as he hums. He looks so peaceful lying there that you’re tempted to join him, but you choose instead to shuffle back from the fire so that you can see his face better. His hair’s splayed out over the sand, and you can see the warm flickers from the bonfire play over his neck, his jaw, and the tip of his nose. Taehyung’s right; orange does suit him. “I had a dream, you know. Last night.”

You feel - with the gentle breeze and the silence of the sea surrounding you - that perhaps you’re in a dream right now. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” his low voice hushes, barely louder than the popping of wood on the fire. “We weren’t on the island, we were in Seoul. Your wing of the Leeum Museum.”

You laugh shallowly, not wanting to make much noise for a reason you couldn’t quite pinprick. “I don’t have a wing at the Leeum.”

“You did in my dream,” he defends resolutely, the beginnings of a boxy smile tugging at his lips. “Anyway, we were in your wing, and I remember being so confused because I didn’t recognise any of them. But you told me they were all new. They were paintings of m-” he cuts himself off a beat too late, lips pressed together.

Your heart falters, a rush of adrenaline that flows to the ends of your fingers and toes. You fight to keeo your voice steady. “Maybe it was a premonition.”

Resting on his stomach, Taehyung’s hands twitch, his fingers twisting together. His smile flattens into a tense line and his eyelids squeeze shut tightly. “I don’t wanna get my hopes up,” he admits quietly after a short pause of thought.

Looking back, you can’t remember your thought process, or where your boldness comes from. Maybe something about the way the moment felt detached from reality, a timeless bubble of the two of you that sat adjacent to your real life, separate from consequence. Maybe it was the brief glimpse of pink as he wets the inner seam of his lips. Maybe you’ve just wanted this for too long to think rationally anymore.

Whatever it is, you swallow past the dryness in your mouth, bend down, and press a kiss to his lips.

Taehyung goes completely still at first. You’re cross-legged on the sand, knees faced to his side, and when you kiss him, it’s on enough of an angle that you feel his nose brushing your cheekbone, and you can feel your hair falling down either side of your face like silken rain. He stays still, though, and you press a little harder, just for a moment, before his lack of response shatters your streak of confidence.

With a minute sigh of regret, you lift off of him, ready to sit up again and apologise profoundly. But before there’s more than a few centimeters of air between you, his hand is suddenly snaking around the nape of your neck, fingers slipping up into your hair as he pulls you back down.

When you collide again with a gasp, his mouth is parted, and his teeth scrape against your bottom lip with his urgency. Losing your balance, you throw your outside arm over him, palm plunging into the sand just beside his head, and let your upper torso rest on his his.

“Taehyung,” you sigh onto his lips, shivering when his free hand rests hotly on your waist, thumb slipping under the hem of your shirt to rub maddenly over the sensitive skin of your stomach. “Oh, Taehyung.”

His lips are sticky with the remains of the toasted marshmallows, and tentatively you seek out that sweetness, kissing deeper, letting your tongue slide over the pinkened skin. He holds you so gently, like you’re made of glass, yet his mouth on yours is pure fire, and your breath comes in little gasps, bursts of oxygen that only fan the flames higher. It takes you a few moments to realise the humming in his throat and the motion of his lips are words, so softly spoken, but once you do you slow your movements to a languid stream to better hear them.

“...so beautiful, I’ve wanted to do this for so long, I must be dreaming…” He speaks with his eyes half-lidded, like he doesn’t want to fully lose sight of you, uttering words between sweet kisses, strong hands cradling you so carefully. He presses his lips against yours one last time and moves his hand from your neck to your face, thumbing tenderly at your cheekbone. “God, I’m so lucky to be by your side,” he gasps. “And when you paint new works and attend exhibits, I’ll still be by your side.”

His words are sweet, but something about them strikes an odd note in your chest, and you pull back slightly, shaking off his hands.

He looks at you with wide eyes and swollen lips which are parted in a confused pout. “Is something wrong?”

“It’s my paintings,” you whisper disbelievingly, “isn’t it? That’s why you think you like me. You like my paintings, and you think it’s somehow the same thing.”

He frowns, shuffling back to sit up, further apart from you than you’d been all night. “No,” he says automatically, “I like you, I just… I think you’re talented, and I want to help you-”

“It’s not your place to help me,” you snap back, and Taehyung flinches. “I’m not some- some out-of-order printer that just needs some TLC to start pumping out pages again. You’re a fan, Taehyung, not a fucking therapist.”

He lets those words sit in the air until they sour, staring at you with eyes shiny and lips trembling. “I know that,” he says, voice cracking, “I know that. I just- Just because you had issues with the Met Gala exhibit doesn’t mean you have to run away and hide, you know?”

Your mouth falls open. “I… I didn’t have issues with the Met Gala, okay, Taehyung? I blanked. Every time I tried to paint something for the exhibit, it sucked. I hated it. And then, eventually, I stopped being able to paint anything at all. It was like I just- I just couldn’t. And the Director kept calling, but I couldn’t answer him because I was so fucking humiliated, and you get the day of the Met and the walls are empty because Y/n L/n is a fucking failure. So it’s not- You can’t fix me, Taehyung. I’m just broken.”

The fire spits, crackles, as it smoulders down, nothing more than hot coals that barely light the surroundings. Taehyung, face slowly darkening to shadow, doesn’t say anything. Just sits. Waits.

You sniff, looking down at your hands. “My point is, Tae-” and you scoff at yourself for using a nickname at a time like this, “You shouldn’t like me. I have nothing to give you anymore.”

Sand sticks to your bare legs when you stand, but you make no attempt to brush it off. Though it’s nearly complete darkness, you see Taehyung’s hair shift as he tips his head up to watch you. Rather than speak back, he waits in the pitch black of the extinguished bonfire and lets you go.

Later, in the unforgiving silence of your bungalow, you find yourself gravitating not towards your bed but towards your suitcase, to the small wooden chest of travel paints you had brought never expecting to use.

It’s easier to paint than to think on your regrets and mistakes, and so you let your mind go black, your palette filling with shades of brown, ochre and beige, as well as a single swatch of teal.

--

The entire next day sees you in a sleep-deprived fervour, the entire main room of your bungalow cleared out and transformed into a makeshift studio, paintings drying on emptied bookshelves, sheets of old newspaper covering the carpet covered in stray spots of colour, the kitchen bench housing your mismatched array of paints and tools.

After finishing your first painting, you’d collapsed onto your bed as the sun began to rise, too exhausted to wash the dried paint off your hands and brow. But it only took a few moments of rest before you felt yourself sinking into a glum quicksand, sucked in by all the emotions swirling in your chest. Suffocated by the sole image of Taehyung, sitting alone on the sand in the dark as you walked away.

So, you’d gotten up, fed the itch in your hands and picked up a brush once more, and let yourself be taken by the mindless haze of work, of colours and angles and perspectives, starting to paint the knuckles on one canvas while you waited for the eyes to dry on another.

Just after 10am, your housekeeper had knocked on the door, and you’d had to play sick so that she wouldn’t come inside. If they kept your deposit or charged you damages for a stray lick of paint on some surface, what did it matter?

You threw yourself so intensely into these paintings, that weren’t art so much as sighs of relief, or buoys in a churning sea. It was all too easy to let your mind latch onto the task of mixing colours, of choosing techniques, of mastering proportions. Normally, you’d work in front of a landscape, or take a photo and paint it later, wanting to get things right, but Taehyung comes to mind with startling clarity.

Soon, your bungalow fills with artworks - some painted on newspaper, or pages of a book when you run out of canvases. Vistas of those moments with him like clustered vignettes: his eyes with orange glints reflected in them from that night with the bonfire; his hands wringing his sodden sweater the day you got caught in the rain; a boxy smile, the first time he ever grinned at you like that; and finally, just as your hands begin to shake too much to hold the brush steady, a lone silhouette walking down a dune, tiny dog tugging at the leash in his hand. The memories flow in reverse, like some sort of undoing, a wish to go back in time and do things right, to be better for him, to do right by him.

When you set the brush down one final time, fingers trembling with exhaustion, it’s nearly midnight. You realise with a dull pang that you’d forgotten to go down to the township to buy Taehyung hair dye. You realise he probably wouldn’t have come down either.

Your face is stiff in places where swipes of paint have dried, and your hair is tangled, thrown up a half-hearted ponytail that keeps threatening to slip, but as you stare around the chaos of the room, at the fevered paintings of him, only him, always him, your heart knows what to do. Whether you like it or not, you can’t go back in time and start new, start fresh. But you can go forward, and you know exactly where your feet will take you.

Well, maybe not exactly, because you’ve never been to Taehyung’s house. But shoving on some sneakers and wrappin yourself up in a jacket, you figure you can find it. The island’s population was barely fifty, and all the houses were in the same sleepy neighborhood behind the main street.

It’s after knocking on exactly twenty-six doors that you realise maybe you should just ask if the stranger knew Taehyung’s address, rather than leaving when somebody unfamiliar answered the door. Shivering, even with the thick padded jacket you’re bundled in, you decide that the next house better be the last. If they didn’t know where Tae was, you could just come back and pick up where you left off tomorrow.

The street is so silent that your sneaker soles on the gravel fill the void entirely, amplified in the chilled night air. As you went on, and the moon passed the center of the sky, less and less people even opened their doors, some that did scolding you for waking them at such an hour. You’d feel bad, only your mind’s entirely locked on one single person.

The next house you reach is small, like most of them, but looks particularly well-groomed compared to most. A gleaming white postbox with the number 13B rests beside the driveway and footpath, both of which are bordered by lush, freshly-mowed grass, almost black in the darkness. Like a beacon, a single lamplight shines white-yellow above the front door, and your eyes ache with the warm brightness as you knock.

After fifteen or so seconds, you hear muffled movement inside, and straighten your back expectantly, mentally running through your speech. A light turns on behind lacy curtains to the left, and eventually a blurred silhouette approaches in the foyer, unlocking the door.

You put on your most sympathetic smile and take in a breath when it cracks, revealing an older woman in mismatching winter pyjamas. “I’m so sorry to wake you, ma’am, but I was wondering if you knew a boy called-” As your eyes search the old woman’s face, you freeze. You know those eyes. “K-Kim Taehyung?” you finish, blinking widely at the woman who somehow looks so familiar.

Rather than grumble about the time or huff, she smiles broadly, lips tugging up in a boxy smile. “Well, of course, he’s my grandson!” The smile drops, brows furrowing in concern. “Is he alright?”

You suck in a breath through your teeth, eyes widening. “I- oh my goodness, I’ve heard so much about you,” you gush, her eyes crinkling fondly at your words. “Sorry, uh- yes, Taehyung is okay, I just-” You stop yourself, trying to steady your racing heart. “Mrs. Kim, you probably don’t even know me, but I did something bad and I need to make it right with him and I just… I think I’m in love with your grandson.” The moment you finish, something in your heart settles at the sound of the words lingering in the air.

She takes her time to reply, letting the words sink into her with a thoughtful sigh. “Darling, am I right in assuming your name is Y/n?”

You swallow quickly. “Yes, that’s right.”

She nods with a fond smile, a glimmer in her eye. “Then I think there’s something you should come see.”

“Inside?” After she waves you in and guides you to slip off your shoes and step into some house slippers instead, you find yourself awkwardly following her down a homely, perfumed hallway. “By the way, I’m so sorry for waking you.”

She waves it off before you even finish your sentence, sending you a kind wink. “No bother to me, lovie. I’m just glad you didn’t wake the dog.”

“The dog?” you mumble to yourself, before halting suddenly as Mrs. Kim pauses in front of a door, hand resting on the glass knob.

“My grandson’s been visiting me more lately, you see,” she explains, turning the knob to reveal a room in complete darkness, nothing inside visible. “He had so much to tell me and so much to do, became as hyper as a boy on Christmas morning! He told me not to go in here, but I couldn’t help myself.”

You step inside on her indication, breath caught in your throat as your eyes struggle to adjust. “I don’t understand…”

“Lovie, don’t worry about whatever went wrong with you two. You love him and… Maybe I’m just a hopeless romantic, but it’s clear he loves you too.” And with that, she flicks the light on and the room comes into focus.

A barn. That’s the first thing you see. A painting of a bright, sprawling barn with a tiny dilapidated kennel in its shadow, wobbly letters spelling out YEONTAN. On the wall directly across from the door rests the original painting of The Barn at Icheon, close to a meter wide and half a metre high. The question of why he’d keep this prized possession of his in a random room barely bigger than a closet dies on your tongue as you turn, seeing the other walls.

A sketch of a bird you’d seen and wanted to show him, clumsily sketched on the back of a receipt with a pen from the lady at the grocery store checkout; a smudged map of your old neighborhood in Seoul that he’d made you draw on a napkin when you were explaining to him how far away the art supply store was; a tourism pamphlet that you and Taehyung had found on a park bench, drawing little Bigfoot silhouettes on the pictures of mountains and mermaids on the beaches. Every one of these thoughtless scrawls, careless scribbles and hurried drawings are here, each one framed or mounted like in a gallery, in order of the time they were made. You turn around slowly, barely noticing Taehyung’s grandmother in the doorway, giving you a knowing look. Finally, on the last wall, the trail of pieces disappear with a final creation, a canvas.

Feeling tears gather in your eyes, you look at the black smear of a mailbox, the wonky shops, the two tall trees incongruously planted in the middle of the street. And, in the bottom right corner painted meticulously in teal, the same teal as his hair, Y/n and Taehyung.

You let out a sob, turning back to Mrs. Kim. “Thank you for showing me this,” you make out in a voice thickened with tears, “but I really need to see him. Can you please give me his address?”

With a look of warm empathy, she steps forward to clasp your shoulders gently, maternally. “He told me about what happened, luvie. He doesn’t blame you.”

Trembling, you wipe the wetness from your cheeks and sniff. “He should,” you admit sullenly, “he’s too good for me. He’s been nothing but kind and patient and caring and all I’ve done is let him down.” Something occurs to you, and you frown in confusion. “Wait… Did he stop by and tell you?”

Her hands squeeze your upper arms comfortingly before dropping them and stepping back. “Oh honey,” she coos, and your heart stops as she steps aside out of the doorway, letting another, taller figure enter the room.

“Taehyung,” you whisper in shock, but before you can even comprehend his presence, his arms are around you, pulling you against his chest in a tight hug. You feel thick layers of pressure and worry evaporate off of you with a single moment, lungs filling with the familiar scent of him, body relaxing with his chin resting on your head and his arms cradling you. For what feels like a small eternity, you let yourself be fully enveloped in him, an indescribable catharsis of finally being in his arms once more. As your tears dry on the soft flanelette of his pyjama shirt and your fingers clutch at his back, you feel a thought transform into a certainty. “I love you, Taehyung,” you confess quietly, and his whole body shudders with a sob, arms tightening around you even more.

“I love you so much,” he confesses lowly, chest rumbling against your ear as he speaks. “And please don’t ever call yourself broken. You’re not. I didn’t love the art, I loved you. Because the art is a part of you Y/n, whether it’s perfect or not.”

“Tae,” you breathe shakily, his name the only word on your lips.

A soft voice comes from the hallway, Taehyung’s grandmother quietly excusing herself to “leave the two lovebirds alone.” You barely notice, lost in the way Taehyung gently rocks you back and forth in his arms, soothing you.

“I missed you,” you hear Taehyung whisper into your hair, nuzzling his nose gently.

Though you shiver at the feeling, you let out a teary laugh. “I saw you a day ago.”

“But it wasn’t the same then,” he insists softly, and a slow breath escapes you weakly. “It’s okay; you’re here now. You-” he breaks off to swallow, and when he speaks again his voice is much quieter, paper thin. “You won’t walk away again, will you?”

You answer by tipping your head up to look him in the eyes warmly, rising onto the tips of your toes so that you can reach his mouth, pressing a kiss against it tenderly. “Never,” you answer surely, “I promise.”

When he smiles, it’s beautiful - that big, boxy grin you saw that day on the dunes, that day you agreed to paint with him, and so many times since. But it never fails to make you melt, lips automatically returning the gesture. “Now,” he announces with a bemused lilt in his voice. “As much as I love this makeout session in my grandma’s closet, it is 2am. Shall we go get some rest?”

Sleep comes quickly once you have Taehyung’s arm around you and your face in the crook of his neck, and you let it take you, knowing you’ll have time to savor the feeling of sleeping beside him for many days to come.

--

You take him home the next day.

He hadn’t ever been to the bungalow before, but now there was something you desperately wanted him to see. You hadn’t cleaned up before you’d suddenly began roaming the streets of the island, and as he stares around at the chaos, you kind of wish you had. “It’s pretty messy, but…”

“No,” he deflects, mouth parted and eyes wide in wonder, “don’t apologise, this is- wow.” He steps further into the room, stepping over discarded paint tubes, dried canvases and uncleaned brushes. He takes a moment to take in each work. Every single one of them a snapshot of him. “How- When did you do all this?”

You bite your lip, loitering in the entryway. “From when I got back that night until I decided to come looking for you.”

He furrows his brow, fingers gently skimming the top edge of the painting that rests on the easel in the center of the room, the first one you’d painted. His teal growouts, his uneven eyes, the moles dotted so intricately on his face. Your Tae. “You haven’t been able to pick up a brush in months, and then...all this?”

“This was easy,” you say with a shake of your head, “it was easy because it was you.”

He turns, then, glancing at you over his shoulder with eyes brimming with affection. “You really love me.”

A disbelieving grin stretches across your lips. “The midnight confession didn’t make it clear enough?”

“It’s not that, I- I can read it,” he explains, stepping back over to you. “The Barn at Icheon is filled with loneliness, and a lot of your other works talk about fear or curiosity or patience. But this is all love. And it’s me.”

“It’s you,” you confirm with a soft smile, “I love you, Taehyung. So much.”

His eyes light up, then, a cheeky glimmer as his hand reaches out, gripping your elbow and giving it a playful shake. “If I’m your mojo then, you should paint something else today,” he bargains, “I wanna see your genius in action. The black mailbox sadly doesn’t qualify.”

Your mouth drops open in mock outrage, shoving his chest with a whine. “That’s not fair! You said you liked it better black.” Looking around at the disaster zone of the bungalow, you sigh. “I also don’t think I have any paintable surfaces left. I missed the housekeeper so I’ll probably get a fine as it is.”

“Use me, then.”

“Haven’t I painted you enough?” you fire back, but Taehyung just shakes his head emphatically.

“Paint on me. Here,” he says, and his hands leave yours in order to find the hem of his shirt, peeling his shirt off and tossing it into a far end of the room. “A big old waterfall, right down the middle. Rock pool at the bottom.”

“Stop it!” You blush fiercely, hands coming up to cover your cheeks as your eyes feast on his chest, the smooth planes and taut skin, a beautiful golden bronze. “Taehyung…”

For the first time, he doesn't press further. Instead, his shoulders sag, teasing facade slipping. "I'm sorry, you don't have to. I'll stop."

Inexplicably, you find yourself wanting to prove you aren't fragile anymore, unbroken just as he'd insisted you were last night. "I can do it," you protest, stepping away from him to fossick for some usable brushes. "Lie down, then."

Taehyung freezes. "Uh. Yeah, yeah, okay, gimme one sec, I'll just-" With the enthusiasm of a boy having his first kiss, Taehyung hunkers down on the newspaper-covered carpet, shuffling some tools and tubes and palettes out of the way. He looks beautiful like that, chest rising and falling shakily with anticipation, warm brown eyes widened on you. "You don't have to paint a waterfall, you know," he assures hurriedly. "Whatever you do will be perfect."

Heart leaping at his words, you feel a streak of confidence deep inside you, and instead of sitting beside him, you straddle his hips with a newly-filled palette in one hand and a brush in the other. "I want you to guess," you announce from above him, eying his chest and wondering how the colours might fill the space. "Guess what I'm painting. It'll be fun!"

Taehyung's throat bobs with a harsh swallow, nodding quickly. "O-okay, yeah, let's do that," he agrees weakly.

You smile warmly, and begin dipping into a forest green, coating the tips of the bristles. Bending down, you mark a single point of green on the top of his chest, just below his collarbone. The moment the cool paint touches his skin, Taehyung shudders, eyes falling shut. "Okay?" you check. He nods again, chest heaving, and so you continue tracking colour, gradual swoops downwards. Each drag of the brush makes Taehyung's breath catch, and you watch as goosebumps break out on his bare arms.

"Feels nice," he mumbles, lips barely moving like he didn't even intend to speak.

Your lip twitches, but still you focus, topping up the brush whenever the lines became too spotty. After trailing down to just above the level of his belly button, you raise the brush again, starting a new form on the other side of his chest, this one smaller. "Any idea what it is?" you question, but Taehyung just sighs airily.

Once you're finished with the forest green, you wipe your brush off on the edge of your palette and go for a deeper shade, pressing in shadows under each swipe of green. It's once you're working on the bottom half of the second structure that you begin to feel a hardness between your legs, the point where you're straddling him. Shocked, you look up, but Taehyung's covered his eyes with the back of his hand, face turned to the side with reddened cheeks.

"I'm sorry," he croaks out once he feels you stop. "Didn't mean to."

With a fond smile, you lean down, careful not to smudge the wet paint, and gently kiss the corner of his mouth. His fingers twitch and his lips part in surprise, but he otherwise stays still. "It's okay," you soothe, "if it's any consolation, I feel the same way right now."

Like a switch is flipped, Taehyung lifts his hand and tucks his chin, looking down at where the two of you are pressed together, then back up at your face. "Seriously?"

You laugh warmly. "Taehyung, I love you and you're currently lying beneath me, half-naked, writhing every time the brush touches you. Of course I'm turned on."

His cheeks flush hotter and he bites his lip. "You can- you can keep going. Keep painting."

Obediently continuing to fill in the shadow across his stomach, you grin. "Still no guesses on what I'm painting? I'm almost done, you know."

He cranes his neck down further, but the angle prevents him from seeing much. "Some-something green? I'll be honest with you, my focus really isn't-fuck!"

You suppress a laugh as he shudders, hands reaching out to clutch at your pants. Having finished the shadow, you'd mixed a paler green to add some light points on the tops, and one of those swipes had just happened to land across the top of one of his nipples, already stiff from arousal. You continue dipping colour here and there, smirking at the paint that covers the dark brown of his right nipple.

"You tease," Taehyung complains with furrowed brows. "Fuck, that felt good. Please tell me you need to paint the other one too."

You hum in mock thought, transferring your brush to the hand with the palette so that you can reach out, swiping a thumb over the sensitive flesh. Taehyung's whole body jerks, his hips beginning to grind under you, the dull friction pulling a pleasured sigh from your lips that's blessedly drowned by his drawn-out moan. "Why the pout, Tae? This was your idea."

"Next time I'm holding the paintbrush," he promises, hips moving slowly beneath you, eyes lidded as they focus on you, "then you won't be so cocky."

His words send a hot rush of arousal through you, and you rock your hips unconsciously, swallowing a moan. "Next time," you repeat breathily, "but for now I'm almost done."

It only takes a few more touches of pale green, followed by two vertical strokes of brown, before you're putting your tools aside, and standing up off of him.

Taehyung groans in complaint when your hips leave him, his casual grey sweatpants tented and a faint sheen of sweat on his forehead. "Where are you going?"

"Come see," you guide, tugging at his hand. "I have a mirror in my room."

He gets up, palming himself with a pout before following you down the hall, pulled along by your interlocked hands. Once in front of the mirror, Taehyung lifts his eyebrows at just how wrecked he looks. Bottom lip swollen from biting at it, hair mussed and sticking up, and a burst of green slowly drying on his torso. "It's...trees?"

"It's us," you explain softly, "like that painting we did together the first time." From beside him, you reach around to gently tap each figure, two tall fir trees, the one on his right taller than the one on his left. "One for you and one for me."

Before you can pull your arm back, his hand comes up to flatten yours against his chest, hands going cold where the paint is still wet in places.

"Tae, you'll smudge it."

"Y/n," he said slowly, head turning to look at you, eyes brimming with affection, "will you let me make love to you?"

Your breath catches, and rather than trusting your voice, you nod wordlessly.

With a deep exhale, he bends down and joins your lips with his, a hand coming up to bury itself in your hair, keeping you close. His lips are hot against yours, passionate and wanting, and your stomach warms with desire. Clumsily, your fingers find the hem of your shirt, lifting it as far as you can before you have to break apart from him, flinging it away once it clears your head.

"The bed?" Taehyung pants in the moments his mouth is free, and you nod, shucking off your jeans before getting onto the mattress in just your bra and panties. "God, you're beautiful," he chants, "how did I get so lucky?"

He slips out of his sweatpants and joins you sitting on the edge, but your eyes linger on his face, the way his eyes soften and crinkle when they meet yours. "I'm the lucky one," you reply simply.

You shiver when a large palm runs up your bare thigh, warm and grounding. "Can I go down on your first?" he asks with a pleading gaze.

You laugh weakly. "I'm definitely the lucky one." In confirmation, you lie yourself back, scooting so your head rests on the pillows.

Hand now having slid down your leg to rest over your ankle, he wraps his fingers around and lifts it off the bed delicately, your knee crooking and legs parting. Smoothly, he slips himself in the gap, lying on his stomach and letting your raised leg rest on his shoulders. With eyes heavy on you, he leans forward slowly and licks a strip over your clothed pussy, a dull kiss of friction across your clit. You groan, head lolling back, and he takes it as his initiative to continue, sucking at the juices that have dampened your panties until the whole crotch is wet, your thighs shaking slightly with your increased sensitivity.

"Tae, please," you breath out, "I wan' more."

A finger slips below the hem of your panties, just over your hipbone. "Should we take these off?" You nod with a needy whimper, lifting your hips to give him easier access.

He sits up to slide them down your legs, calmly spreading your thighs again when you get the self-conscious urge to close them. With only your bra on, you feel so vulnerable, but rather than scaring you, you feel at peace, so happy to be having this moment with Taehyung.

When he shuffles back into place again, he takes his time, his warm breath tickling your inner thighs. At your needy wiggle of your hips, he chuckles and rubs soothingly at the top of your leg where it's crooked over his shoulder, finally dipping his head again to lick at you.

He starts out maddeningly light, the very tip of his tongue flicking slowly over your clit, tentatively venturing out to dip between your folds. You reach out for his hand, needing something to anchor you, and he smiles against you as he interlocks your fingers, keeping you grounded.

"So good, Tae," you encourage, moaning openly when his tongue trails lower and dips between your folds, over your entrance. "Fuck, so good."

Rather than answer verbally, Taehyung doubles his efforts and begins to speed up, lapping at your core and suckling your clit.

Every breath is a moan or a whimper, overtaken by pleasure, but you let yourself drown in it, letting Taehyung eat you out like a man starved. With one hand on your upper thigh and one entwined with yours, he's got no fingers free to play with you, but expertly he brings you to your peak with just his tongue, thrusting it inside you as his nose nudges at your clit.

When you feel your orgasm quickly approaching, your moans heighten and your back begins to arch, hips grinding against him desperately. Taehyung chuckles, the sound vibrating against you and making you shudder, and his hand slips high to press against your waist instead, holding you in place for him. Your thighs tense around him, praises and curses and his name spilling from your lips incoherently.

It's one last nibble at your clit, pulling it into his mouth and dragging his tongue over it, your vision whites out with the force of your orgasm, jerking beneath him and crying out wantonly, overcome with pleasure. He works you through it diligently, groaning as you come down from your high with weak shivers, his tongue never ceasing until you push at his head from oversensitivity.

He lets your leg down carefully, kissing his way up your bare stomach, the swells of your breasts and your throat until his lips are on yours and you can taste yourself on him, feel the ends of his hair tickling against your cheeks.

"That was incredible, Tae," you pant out, feeling boneless beneath him as he takes charge of the kiss, tugging at your lips and licking into your mouth. "I need you," he gasps, and you moan throatily when his clothed crotch grinds against your bare core, the fabric of his underwear catching on your sensitive clit. He's hard, probably painfully so, and all you want is to feel him inside you.

Desperate, your fingers slip behind you, arching your back so that you can deftly release the clasp of your bra, pulling it off hastily before reaching for his underwear. "I need you too, Tae," you plea, "please hurry."

His fingers, slightly cool from the air, slide down your stomach and between your thighs, making you jump as he slips two inside, thrusting them slowly. You're still sensitive, and his mouth falls to your ear, hushing you and pressing encouraging kisses to your temple as you whimper. "Doing so well for me," he praises, "just gotta make sure you're ready, okay?"

"O-okay," you make out, sucking in a breath when he pulls out and presses a third finger inside you, picking up his pace. Gradually, the prickling overstimulation warms into pleasure again, and you rock your hips to seek more friction, free hand coming up to wrap around his neck and shoulders, holding him close.

With no bra on, your full chest is flat against his, and as the paint dries it drags over your nipples, making you arch your back, seeking out the friction.

The warmth between your legs tightens with the extra stimulation, and your breath begins to catch, feeling another orgasm oncoming.

"Close?" Taehyung murmurs in your ear as he widens the gaps between his fingers inside you, scissoring to stretch you even more. You nod hastily, moans getting stuck in your throat, pushed out with every gasped breath. Taehyung hums in response, and you whimper when you feel his fingers slipping out of you completely. Before you can protest, the blunt head of his cock slips between your sopping folds, Taehyung running it up and down to coat himself in your slick.

"Fuck, yes, please Tae, I'm ready," you babble, legs lifting to wrap around his hips, attempting to pull him in closer.

He chuckles, but it's cut off prematurely by a hissed breath of pleasure as he lines up and begins to sink his length into you, a delicious feeling of fullness after his fingers left you so empty. Taehyung enters you slowly, letting you adjust, and you feel completely enveloped by him; his voice in your ear, his hand in yours, his cock inside you.

"Need you, Tae," you whine once he stills, bottomed out, "please move."

"Are you ready?" You wiggle your hips with a groaned yes, arm tightening around him as he pulls back. He stops when just his head still rests inside you, pauses for a moment with a moan as you clench around him, and then plunges back in with one slick thrust.

You cry out, satisfied smile stretching tiredly across your face as he finally begins a steady rhythm, favoring deeper thrusts that make your toes curl. "Yes, Tae, so good!"

"God, you're still so tight," he groans throatily, "so good for me."

On the edge before, you find yourself close after only a few minutes, and you tell him with a shaky breath. Taehyung lets out a relieved exhale as he continues to thrust into you. "Thank fuck," he huffs out, panting a word at a time, "I'm not gonna last, you drive me crazy."

You press your head against his, nuzzling at it as you unwrap your arm from around his shoulders, instead seeking out your clit for the needed friction to push you over the edge. The added stimulation has you clenching, and Taehyung swears desperately, his pace picking up but shuddering as he gets close.

The two of you pant loudly into the otherwise silent room, filling each others' ears with whimpered moans and slurred praises, until you finally catch the tip of your peak, and with one final drag of his cock inside you, you're falling apart, not suddenly and violently like the first time, but rather a slow, hot wave of pleasure that works its way out from your core, down to your toes and fingertips, clenching tightly around Taehyung until he curses and spills inside you, shuddering through his release.

"I love you so much," you whisper once you come down from your high, a contented exhaustion seeping into your bones.

"I love you too," Taehyung says with a final press of his lips on your temple.

---

"This one's gorgeous. I love the broad lines on the ocean compared to the texture of rocks on the shore. This is at the island, you say?"

You hum in confirmation, smiling at your old friend. "You should see, it, Joonie. There's this little cluster of houses and shops right in the middle but the rest is just open nature. Forests, beaches, everything in the middle. I go there every year."

Kim Namjoon, Director at the Leeum Museum in Seoul and avid nature buff, takes one last look at the landscape canvas and grins. "Ah, twist my arm..." You follow him as he moves down the line of mounted canvases, stopping at a familiar portrait. He furrows his brows and cocks his head. "I feel like I've seen this guy before, something about the face... He didn't have green in his hair though, I must be confused."

You laugh at your friend, spying a shock of red through the swathes of people. "You have seen him before," you explain, catching the figure's eye, "you would have seen him here tonight."

In front of you, Namjoon raises his brows. "Oh, really? Who is he, then?"

Over Namjoon's shoulder, you watch Taehyung approach, turning heads with his scarlet dye. He gives you a wink, and you grin back. "He's my husband."

[yoonia]

Spotless Minds [M]

➬ Character | Hoseok x reader

➬ Genre | Past Lovers!AU, New Beginning, inspired by Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Minds (yes, the movie)

⟶ Word count | 36k words

⟶ Summary | He was a man who had wanted too much, and you were a woman who had lost so much. Once the wounds from the past come in the way for you to embrace your future with the man you love, the option for a new beginning comes in the form of erasing the painful pages of your past to allow yourself to heal and to begin again. Even if he was also a part of it.

⟶ Ratings & Warnings | +18/Mature, angst with a happy ending, explicit sex scene, public sex/outdoor sex which is probably a bit unhygienic, penetrative sex, unprotected sexual activities (please use condoms, kids), mentions of shower sex, oral sex (f receiving), fingering, intense foreplay, body worship, nudity/public nudity, alcohol consumption, mentions of a character’s death.

⟶ Part of the @ksmutclub​‘s ‘Festive Frivolity’ Spring Project

➬ Story Masterlist | Main Masterlist | Mailbox

➬ Crosspost | AO3 | Wattpad 

It was a warm morning when Hoseok left his home.

His spirit was high when he first went out to start his day. Yet right this moment, just as he reaches the crowded street with people passing him by, the less joyful he is slowly becoming.

His footsteps are still light as he continues to walk down the sidewalks, but his nerves are all over the place. He fumbles with the strap of his briefcase hanging on his shoulder as he walks by, as he tries to put his attention elsewhere just so he can make it all the way to where he needs to be.

He still has about an hour left before he has to be in his office. With no more time to spare, he makes a quick turn to make a short stop at the diner a block away from his office building. He looks around the moment he enters the room, smiling brightly with relief when he finds the seat that he usually takes completely vacant while you have taken the seat that you have always chosen to sit on for your morning meal.

Without any hesitation, Hoseok slides into the booth, sitting down and facing you while you have your eyes looking out the window beside you.

The morning sunlight streams through the windows, directly illuminating the entire dining room and bringing its warmth within. But Hoseok could not care less about any other part of the room, nor the other crowd bustling around him in that small diner.

He only has his eyes on one thing; you.

The only thing he cares about doing now is to admire you silently, to revel on the beautiful sight before him, admiring how serene you look as you look out the window, as if you are watching closely at the world evolving and moving around you. His chest feels warm as he watches you marvelling the life outside this small diner with eyes full of wonder, and he enjoys absorbing as much sight as he could to keep all of this in his memories. He wants to remember how the sunlight brightens your face, making you glow so bright, so captivating to his eyes that he barely notices anything else around him.

“The usual?” the waitress comes by his table, pulling his attention away from you briefly.

“Yeah, the usual. Thank you,” Hoseok give her a quick answer before his eyes return to you again, while you don’t even notice the exchange ever happening, still lost in your own world.

He has no problem with it at all, however, for it only gives him more chance of being able to continue watching you, staring at you as much as he could.

His lips curl into a small smile when a smile grows on your face and your eyes sparkle with joy. He has no idea what it is you are currently watching out there, but he always feels glad to see it when you are smiling, even if he is not the one to put it on your face. Your hair falls over to the side of your face and he clenches his fists tightly on the table, resisting the urge to lean forward and tuck the stray strands behind your earlobe to get it out of the way.

But he cannot do it. No matter how much he wishes for it, he can no longer do anything to reach out to you.

Not when you are too far out of reach even when you are close. Even when you are right there, right in front of his very own eyes.

One year ago, he would be sitting in this booth, enjoying his breakfast and coffee while chatting along with you. The sound of your laughter to his silly jokes would be enough to help him make it through the day, no matter how rough his day would be, and your hands would find each other on the table, refusing to let go until the very last minute of your morning together. You would be looking up to him with curious eyes filled with awe and love, giving him the very same look that you are currently giving to the rest of the world instead of only to him, and you would give him a warm smile that could always make him feel more alive. You would be sitting here together before the two of you would part ways to your separate workplaces with a parting kiss that would linger on his lips even until later, until he could be reunited with you again when the day was over.

Today, you are sitting on the next table, without even noticing him sitting there all alone. Your eyes are searching at anything else but him, as if he is merely a shadow, just another patron amongst the rest.

Today, he is invisible to you. Just another person that you would look past without any recognition in your eyes even if you are looking straight at his way. His name will no longer be the one you call when you smile and his hands will no longer be the ones you reach out to when you feel lonely.

Because he is no longer a part of your memory and he has no place in your heart. He is no longer the person who is worth a single glance coming from you when you walk past by, when you are moving on with your new life in which he is no longer a part of.

It was years ago when Hoseok first began coming into this diner in the morning, before making it a tradition which he had to do before going about with his day. The tradition which he had built together with you once you started living with him.

Yet he still comes into this place each and every morning even after you had stopped being a part of his life all those months ago. Because this place was the final piece of thread that he could still hold on to from the relationship and the love that he had lost. The final piece of what he had with you that he still had left.

It was only about a month ago when you suddenly walked through the front door, finding your way into the diner on your own. Seeing you there had him hoping at first, allowing him to think that maybe there was still a tiny piece of your memory left behind to lead you here. The hope had kept on building the more he kept seeing you coming to this diner every morning since then, though it would always shatter apart each time you fail to return his gaze or whenever you show no sign of acknowledging his presence nearby.

But that never stops him from coming back. Always with a new hope that maybe one day things will change, that maybe next time you will finally notice him, or remember the reason why you always feel the pull that leads you back into this diner at the exact same time you used to share your mornings with him.

A part of him knows that those hopes are nothing but wishful thinking. But he keeps them with him the whole time anyway, for those thoughts have become the only thing keeping him alive and breathing since the day he was forced to let you go.

He continues to watch you from the distance as you pay for your meal and ready to go, dreading the fact that he will have to watch you walk away from him. Again.

He still has his eyes on you when you finally leave your booth, passing his table on your way out of the diner.

Look at me.

Turn to me.

He keeps watching you closely with hopeful eyes, inwardly begging for you to notice him, to at least give him a brief glance, to give him a small smile like the one you would give to the waitress at the front, or better yet, to find any semblance of recognition the moment you meet his eyes. In the end, he would never find out if you have ever seen him the way he wants you to before you are suddenly gone, for he always turns to look away on the very moment you are walking past by his table. The only thing you leave behind once you are gone from his sight would be the shadow of your footsteps and the jingle sound of the bell above the front door as it snaps back to close.

Pathetic, he curses at himself, groaning defeatedly at his inability to face the truth, to face the disappointment of having you not knowing who he is. Even if the sweet words you had always whispered to him at night still remain in his mind, only for him to remember.

Slipping a few cash under his empty plate to pay up for his meal, Hoseok pushes himself out of the booth and forces himself to walk out. This part is always the hardest, when he is forced to keep his chin up and his shoulders straight as he returns to his life and goes on about his day.

To continue living without you being a part of it as if you had not taken a huge part of him with you when you left.

Hoseok arrives at his office floor not long after with his shoulders squared up, the false facade of his strength pulled back up to mask the hollowness he is carrying as he walks past the other staffs.

There aren’t many employees present this early, and every single one of them is busy with their mornings that they are barely paying attention to his arrival. Yet Hoseok still feels as if he has hundreds of eyes following him with pity.

He says nothing to anyone he walks past and makes his way straight into his office, not even taking a moment to acknowledge his assistant’s nervous greeting other than giving him a courteous nod before he swiftly closes the door behind him gently, shutting himself from the world outside.

This is simply unfair. Nothing about this is fair, he wonders with a sigh.

How is anything fair when the world and all those other people around him can still live normally as if nothing had happened, as if you were never a part of his world. While he is left here, alone, wallowing on his loss and pain and not knowing how on earth he is supposed to continue living with a missing piece of his heart having been taken away.

Once he is seated behind his desk, Hoseok leans back and looks up to the ceiling.

His young assistant, Wooyoung, is going to be knocking on his door anytime soon to offer him either tea or coffee before starting the day, just the way he always does. So Hoseok revels on this moment of peace to have a sense of clarity. Though he will always end up doing the same thing at moments like this, which is to close his eyes and recall his morning rendezvous with you from the diner.

He could still see your face when he closes his eyes. Today, you were wearing a light blue satin blouse with white lilies embroidered around its neckline and had matched it with a pair of dark blue jeans. He cannot help but wonder if you would ever remember how you first bought that top.

He still remembers everything about that day.

You had been terribly nervous that morning, since you were about to have an important meeting at work. You had decided to leave the diner in haste with less than five minutes to spare, carrying a takeout coffee with you, and had accidentally spilled them all over your sweater on your way out. There was no time to rush back home to change, and he still remembers clearly the way your eyes grew misty and how he had cupped your face in his hands to stop those tears from falling and ruining your makeup to further ruin your day.

He kept himself calm enough to be able to pull you away from the diner and find a small boutique nearby. You were still too shaken and emotional from having your morning—and your favourite sweater—ruined that he was the one who pulled the blouse from the rack, knowing just what you might have picked. He even stayed with you as you changed, then waited patiently as you fixed your makeup and helped calm yourself down. He didn’t care that he was going to be late for work and had walked you all the way to your workplace, making sure that you were doing okay before he kissed you goodbye and finally made his way to his office.

With a deep exhale of breath, Hoseok shakes his head, shaking the memory away as he opens his eyes.

He reaches out to one of his drawers, pulling out the small note which he had kept hidden there for months—the one that he had found the morning after you erased him from your life.

He knows that he was supposed to throw it away, yet he could never do it. Not when it is just another piece of you that he could still hold on to. The only piece that is left from that day to remind him of what had happened. It had somehow kept him from going insane, while it also helps him realise that he is not dreaming. That this is his reality.

Flipping the note between his fingers, Hoseok begins to reminisce the moment when his life fell apart.

He still remembers that night as clear as day, when he came in late after working overtime and back into the apartment he shared with you to find you standing in the middle of the living room.

The pain in your eyes had spoken a lot more that he could already feel his world tilting away from its axis even before you said the words.

“I have to leave,” you told him then, your eyes were beginning to moist with tears as the words came spilling out while you had your hands wrung together with nerves.

“What are you talking about?” Hoseok asked you, refusing to believe that it was actually happening, that you were actually telling him this.

“I’m sorry, Hoseok. But I have to,” was the only explanation you ever gave him. The only thing you could manage to give him, before you began sobbing and words failed you. “I can’t take it anymore. It’s too painful. I’m so tired of pretending that I’m okay, that everything is okay and that I’m happy when the truth is I am not.”

Hoseok didn’t even notice it when he dropped his things so he could rush towards you. Not when he felt his world was falling apart. “No, don’t say that. I thought we’re good. We have been good. We can get through this together,” he pleaded, his hands gripping your arms as he forced you to look at him and begged you to change your mind.

But there was nothing he could do to stop your tears from falling, or to stop your heart from shattering to pieces. “I can’t. I thought I could, but all I’ve done is drag you down with me and I don’t know how to stop this. I can’t keep on doing this. It won’t be fair to you,” you told him, shaking your head desperately while he was doing the same only because he still couldn’t believe this was happening. That you were slipping away from him. “I can’t love you the way you deserve to be loved when I am holding in so much pain and guilt that has kept on growing the more I love you. I don’t even know if I resent myself more because of how much I love you, how deep I feel for you, or if I am simply feeling guilty to be feeling so happy when I am with you when I’m not supposed to—”

“______,” Hoseok kneeled down right before your eyes, completely powerless when he had no idea how to stop it from happening. “Please—”

“You deserve better, Hoseok. Someone better than me, someone who doesn’t have a damaged heart so she could love you to the fullest, the same way you love me,” you told him, doing your best to ignore the pleading eyes looking back at you. Cupping his face, you looked into his eyes. You seemed like you had truly believed that this was the best thing to do at the time and there was no way Hoseok could make you believe that it wasn’t. “One day, you will find somebody who deserves your love. I—I don’t think that the person is me.”

If you had thought that you could speak without breaking apart, that you were able to make him believe that you were strong enough to do this, to walk away, what had happened after you said those words showed none of it. It was obvious that you were hurting just to tell him all of this, to push him away so he could be with someone else, that the tears only began to come out stronger.

“Don’t—” Hoseok begged, shaking you in his arms as if he could bring some sense back into your mind. “I don’t want anyone else. I only want you!”

You opened your mouth but nothing but a few painful sobs came out. Leaning down, you pressed your lips against his, kissing him gently. As if sensing that it would be your final kiss, Hoseok pulled you closer to him and deepened the kiss. With one hand entangled in your hair and the other holding your waist against him, he kissed you harder than he had ever kissed you before. He gave you a punishing kiss, something that he knew would have been engraved on your lips forever if only it was possible, the kind of kiss that nobody else could ever give you even if they tried.

For a moment, everything faded. The pain, the heartache, the confusion, all ceased to exist the moment he was lost in the kiss, as he devoured you like you were his last breath. Perhaps you were, as he knew that he could never exist without you. When he felt you kissing him back with the same desperate need, his heart swelled with hope. His grip on you tightened, and his brain went a mile a minute to plan out on how he was going to pull you into the bedroom and show you how much he could fix all of this. All he had to do was to make love to you, to remind you how good you were together, how much you could never be able to live without each other.

The one thing that Hoseok was not expecting to see when you pulled away was to see a sense of clarity showing in your eyes when you looked at him. Your smile was nothing like the one he used to see coming from you, not the one that you had always given him when you were together even though the smile made you seem content.

Though it was obvious that you were putting up a facade to hide what you were feeling inside, it only made him feel like he had already lost you.

Your lips trembled for a brief moment, before you took a deep, shaky breath and whispered to him for the last time, “Goodbye, Hoseok. I love you.”

There was nothing he could do other than watch you walk out of the apartment, carrying only your purse and an overnight bag with you as if you were only leaving to visit your family instead of walking out of his life.

But hours later, once he was done picking up all the pieces he was left behind as and managed to lift himself up, he finally noticed that everything around him had changed. He finally noticed that the entire apartment had been cleared out of your belongings—the living room had been stripped out of the framed pictures you had laid out since you first moved in, the kitchen had been stripped out of the utensils that you had normally used to cook him dinner, and all the artworks and drapes that you have placed around the room for years were no longer there.

With a racing heartbeat, Hoseok rushed into the bedroom that he had shared with you for years, only to find out that the same thing had happened there. Your belongings were nowhere to find, the wardrobe which he had shared with you had been emptied out of your clothes and accessories. Everywhere he looked, he found nothing of yours, not even a single piece of you left or any tracks of you ever existing inside his home.

As if you were never there.

Hoseok spent the whole night trying to contact you, from calling your phone to locating your friends, but nothing could lead him to find you. Not even your family had known where you were off to. He did everything he could to find you so he could get an explanation, an answer, anything that would stop him wondering where and how had things gone wrong. He spent the whole night and the next morning feeling lost and angry, forcing himself to hate you, suspecting that you had planned this all along, while constantly wondering how long you have been ready to leave him like this, to break him apart and dump him like he was nothing.

He only found the answer when he arrived late at his office the next day, completely worn out and wounded, only to have his life shattering apart the moment he found the note that had been mistakenly left behind by his assistant on his desk together with that morning’s post mail.

“Dear Mr. Jung Wooyoung,

Ms. _______ has had Mr. Jung Hoseok and Ms. Min Hana erased from her memory. Please never mention their relationship to them again.

Thank you.

The Eden Initiative.”

Months had passed since it happened, since the night you walked away. Yet things have yet to change to be any better for him.

He has no clue how to handle this. To handle the pain of losing you and the fact that you had chosen to erase him from your memories. On purpose.

While he had questioned your decision at first, he couldn’t help but try to understand the reason behind your choices. Perhaps he had been selfish enough to think that everything was doing okay, to overlook the fact that no matter what he had done to try and heal you and make it all seem better, there was nothing he could have done to fix the past. And he was selfish enough to think that as long as he could show you how much he loved you, as long as he could spoil you rotten and make you feel like you were living in a glorious and painless dream, then you would have been alright. That every smile you gave him was a sign that you were happy, that he had made you happy.

He should have known that you could never be truly happy as long as you were haunted by the shadow of your past.

Yet it would never be easy for him to accept the fact that in order for you to erase that shadow, you had no choice but to erase him as well.

Looking out his apartment’s window, Hoseok clutches a glass of bourbon tightly in his hand.

He was never much of a drunk. As a matter of fact, he hated being one or to even think that he should rely on alcohol whenever things get tough. But alcohol has been the only thing strong enough to take control of his mind and take away his sorrow that it has become his only escape and his remedy to fill his hollow heart.

In this height, he could only see the bright lights flashing in various colours from the city, the sounds coming from the world outside has been dulled by the concrete walls and the wall-to-wall windows, allowing him to listen to the voices inside his mind more clearly.

It is now almost midnight and the city is still thriving. Meanwhile, nothing could stop his world from slowly dying. He has been throwing himself into his work to get through all the sorrow, to fill the emptiness that he feels.

To be able to forget.

But none of it ever helps, for each time he comes home at night, back to this place, his memory of you will still linger. You may have erased every part of you from this apartment, yet you will always be there in his mind, for his memory of you and everything that you had shared together remains just as strong as the love he still feels for you.

Turning away from the window, Hoseok takes a look around at the spacious living room.

The soft ivory coloured leather sectional sofa that has taken over the room was chosen because you loved them, along with all the wooden furnitures which compliment the whole set. He recalls how he had chosen this apartment together with you even before you finally moved in. He remembers how you had spent hours and hours collecting pictures from Pinterest and other reference websites to decide how you were going to decorate every single room to make it feel more like home.

But now, no matter how picturesque his whole apartment looks, it certainly no longer feels like home without you in it.

He had wanted all of this. The big city life, a good job with good pay that he could save up with, a fancy apartment right at the heart of the city, a successful life for a brighter future.

The only thing that has been making it even more worthwhile was the fact that he had always had you beside him, you were his inspiration and the biggest motivation he ever had for him fight his hardest to build this life, to gain everything he has today. None of this would ever be possible if it wasn’t for you.

Hoseok shuts his eyes. He cannot even remember what his life was like before he met you. How much he had fallen for you so quickly since the first time he laid his eyes on you.

It was at that night when he began believing fate for the first time, and when he felt like it none of the choices he has ever made could go wrong. He remembers finding you through the crowd, admiring your beauty while lights were dancing around you, as if they were simply there to help him find you. He remembers how he had stolen you away the night he met you, the first of the many times he would continue to steal and sweep you off of your feet years after.

You had called it an instant attraction whenever you reminisced the first time you met him, and it had always made him happy to know that he was not the only one who was instantly falling so deep and feeling like everything was coming into place when it happened. Because you had shared the same exact feeling.

From that night on, you had made his life so much better. He had loved how easy life had been thanks to you. It was the way you had always looked at life with a positive light, to be able to deal with any kind of ordeal with spontaneity, while continue to have a heart which was big enough for you to care about everyone around you. Your big heart was the sole reason which had made him love you the most.

Unfortunately, it was also the part of you which had made him lose you in the end.

Life was perfect when you were in it. Everything had been perfect. You had somehow become a huge part of his life and now he feels as if he has lost his purpose, that he had lost his reason to continue on with everything he has now.

Things had been going on so smoothly in his life together with you then, so good that neither you or Hoseok was ready when the past came barreling into your life and put everything into a halt. Things had happened before you ever had a chance to continue on with everything you had planned together for the future.

Hoseok takes a deep, shaky breath and takes a drink to smooth the ache inside his chest away. He wants nothing more but to embrace every memory he has of you no matter how much it hurts, but he refuses to dwell into the part which hurts the most. The part where the dark past showed itself right when neither of you was prepared.

Nobody could ever prepare for it, he realises, cursing at fate for playing with his life and tearing his heart apart for his choices.

Chugging the rest of his drink, Hoseok grabbed the remote control and switched the TV on, feeling suffocated from the deafening silence. The midnight news was about to come on and he let the volume on to fill the entire room as he turns back to face the window after refilling his glass.

The sound from the TV soon becomes nothing but white noise in the background as Hoseok is once again lost in his thoughts. This is what he does at night before he would let himself drift away into his dreamless sleep. He would replay every single conversation you have made with him, every single promise, every single dream you shared with him, all while picturing that you were still there with him.

Suddenly, a familiar tune comes out from the TV, snapping Hoseok right out of his stupor. His grip on the glass tightens as he slowly turns to the TV, watching sideways with a glare as the commercial runs on the screen—

“—have the desire to move on from past trauma, an incurable phobia, or a terrible loss? Specialists, experts, and neurologists have gathered to find the perfect cure which will allow you to see the future with a brighter light and an easier way to leave the past behind you. Introducing you our latest creation, the Ventura project, where our specialists will take away selective, undesirable memories, and open up a way for you to create new memories for the future. Head on now to our lab for your first free consultation with our experts and experience our treatment first hand.

Exclusive, only at The Eden Initiative.”

6 YEARS AGO

“What do you mean you can’t go?”

You were standing in the doorway to Hana’s dorm room, watching her incredulously as you realised that she had made a change of plans—again—without even bothering to let you know anything about it.

It took you the whole morning to pack up, filling the heavy suitcase that you were now holding on your right hand. Meanwhile, your left hand was clutching tightly on the wooden door, holding back from exploding. You had chosen the best sets of outfits, summer dresses, and had even bought a few new pair of bikinis, all packed up nicely for this trip. After dragging the heavy suitcase all the way from your small student apartment to the dorm building, you found Hana lounging on her bed, still in her PJs, her suitcase still unpacked, with not a single sign of her leaving this room anytime soon.

While it was her idea to have this summer trip in the first place.

Rolling her eyes as if you had just said something ridiculous, Hana pushed herself up and sat on the bed. “I’m saying that I can’t go. I have—plans,” she said, avoiding your eyes.

“You have plans?” you scoffed. “Damn it, Hana. You made plans with me! It was your idea to take this trip.”

Instead of looking at least a bit remorseful, Hana only shrugged. “I’m sorry?”

Resisting the urge to throw something, you only looked at her. Actually looked at her. And you began narrowing your eyes when you noticed that she was still refusing to look at you and she was starting to act like a skittish kitten.

“Alright, what is this all about—exactly?”

Sighing dramatically, Hana made an expression which made it seem like she would have preferred to do something else rather than explaining herself. You immediately found out the reason why when she finally spoke.

“The students from my class are going on a study tour for one of the courses I took. They’re going to be visiting some places that have to do with our core class and the electives I’m taking next semester, and then there’s a trial course planned at the end of it where we can all practice by getting involved in an actual court and solve some work cases. I decided if I really want to continue with law school, it would be great to join the tour,” she said, though from the looks of it, it was obvious that she was not telling you the whole truth.

“So—only because it’s good for your studies?” you prodded further. Knowing her, there would always be something else. Because there had to be a reason why she had not said anything about any of this before today. “Is that all?”

She fell to a beat of silence first. Then she looked at her feet, her hands pulling the seams on her blanket as she finally confessed. “The guy that I was telling you about will be there too,” she murmured, looking away sheepishly.

“A guy? So you changed your mind and ditched your best friend over a guy?” you scoffed, before laughing bitterly. “This is so like you. Only you would drop everything and everyone just because of some boy,” you told her while shaking your head. “What did he promise you?”

“He—didn’t,” she sighed. “I just thought that going on this tour will help me get closer to him, and—you know, maybe I can finally make a move on him.”

Closing your eyes, you held back from pinching the bridge of your nose even when you felt your head beginning to pound simply from hearing what she was telling you. “Please don’t tell me that he doesn’t even know you.”

“No, that’s not—I mean, he knows me. He’s been acting as a TA in my class. So he knows my name,” Hana insisted, before she slunk back on her bed, adding, “Well, I think he does. We just haven’t gotten a chance to talk.”

“Fuck, Hana,” you groaned, gritting your teeth while you resist the urge to pull a hair. “Is this the same guy you told me you saw in the convention? Who made you get the wild idea of ditching Psych and switching into Law?”

When she said nothing, you immediately knew the answer. “Are you even serious right now?”

You felt so frustrated, just as you had always felt when you had to deal with these phases of hers. Taking a deep breath to calm yourself down, you began wishing that you could find some way to snap her back to her senses. Something that you had realised time and time again would be something that was impossible to do when it came to Hana.

Your head throbbed as you remembered the catastrophe that happened in the first year of college.

It was Hana who had insisted for the two of you to apply in this campus in the first place after high school. Even though it was the pre-law program that they were offering which had caught your interest, it didn’t take long for you to change your mind to choose Liberal Arts for your major on that first year, while Hana was adamant that she was going to take Psychology major at some point.

Until one day, when she attended the convention which was held on campus and came back with a new determination that she was going to take their pre-law program instead.

You had been extremely supportive when she had insisted that she was taking it in your place, that she had become so invested to it after hearing you talked about it a lot. That was until you learned that she had only applied Pre-Law because she had met some cute guy on their convention stand which had caught her eyes. She insisted that it was love at first sight and she had to fight to be with him.

It sounded ridiculous, but that was Hana for you. She had always believed in fairytales and happy endings, but had also been the one who would fall for all the pretty things and would do anything to gain them. But she had always kept her head in the clouds, and more often than not, she would always forget to snap back to reality until it would be too late, and it would always be you who was left to pick up the pieces and put her back up on her feet.

“Hana, I already told you. First, you can’t make life-altering decisions over some—guy. Worst of all when it’s a guy you barely even know. You moved majors and switched dorms to chase him around and yet here you are, admitting that he hasn’t even noticed you. And now what? You’re changing plans because of him already when you still have no idea what good it will do to you.”

“Look, I like him, alright?” Hana argued defensively. “I get it, I’m not like you. I’m not spontaneous and I don’t always have major plans to make big decisions. I wouldn’t have been here if it wasn’t because my Dad was an alumnus. But I know this is real. I can feel it.” But then her gaze clouded, and her shoulders slumped as she added defeatedly, “Even if I can’t find any nerve to talk to him, it would still good for my studies.” Once again, she looked down, and even you could tell that she didn’t even believe her own words as she said them out loud.

Shaking your head, you already knew that this talk was getting nowhere. “Whatever. Do what you want. Call me when you’re done living in your fantasies cause I’m going to spend the whole summer actually living a real life,” was all you told her, before pulling your suitcase with you as you walked out the door.

—

Still feeling frustrated and enraged after leaving Hana’s dorm, you felt like you wanted to either pull out your hair or scream out loud as you made your way back to your student apartment. Noticing that you had too many eyes on you that would have made it impossible for you to erupt in public, you walked to the nearest park and did the next best thing.

You pulled out your phone and called your best friend. The other best friend. The one person who was sane enough to know what to do at times like this.

“Yo!” You heard Joohyun’s voice from the other side of the call as she answered at the second ring.

“Hey, am I calling you at a bad time?”

“Nope. I just sat down on the couch to give my swelling feet some rest. Cleaning house is not fun nor it is easy to do when you’re in the second trimester. What’s up? How’s college life doing for you so far?”

Closing your eyes, you pictured Joohyun sitting on her couch, lounging back with her legs up. She was the lucky one to stay back home, living a steady life with a baby on the way. A part of you was envious, while the other part—well, not really. You couldn’t possibly handle being a young mother at this age. Not when you still had a big dream waiting ahead.

“I suppose it’s going great. But that’s not what I’m calling you about. I just needed someone to listen while I vent.”

“You know I’m all ears, baby girl,” she said, much to your relief. So you began telling her everything.

Joohyun already knew about the drama happening at the beginning of college, and she knew how your effort of trying to stop Hana from making what could have been the biggest mistake of her life had caused a rift between the two of you. It had even made Hana stop contacting Joohyun at some point because, being the most logical one, Joohyun had taken your side instead of hers.

It was always that way with Hana. She had always been hard to deal with since you were kids, always wanted to have it all whenever she had her eyes on something she liked, and however she wanted to get it done. She had always been the ambitious one, though sadly, her desire to aim for the best had never been followed with any logical and proper ways to help her get it. Leaving nothing but a pile of mess and regrets trailing behind her.

You remembered how back when you were little and she would be that one kid who would have a tantrum over the coolest toys and refuse to share. The only reason why you and Joohyun had become her only friends back then was simply because neither of you would back down on her demands, yet at the same time, you were the only two kids in the class who were willing to stay and play with her when nobody else would.

You recalled how she had become class president at school because she wanted to have all the fame and the pride of being a leader, only to ditch all the responsibility she had as one, leaving you and Joohyun to fix all the mess she left behind. Or when she joined the cheerleaders' squad in high school because she wanted to be a part of the popular crowd, ditching you and Joohyun so she could trade her friends with all the fancy ones, until she found out how hard cheerleading actually was. She only wanted the attention, but not the long hours of practice and risking injuries.

You had, at some point, blamed yourself on how she had always been able to make you give in to do as she pleased, to enable her whenever she was reckless, which had made it impossible for her to listen to reasons. But you had never given up on her, neither did Joohyun.

Because no matter how stubborn and obnoxious Hana could be, she was also a good friend. A friend who would listen and who would fight the hardest to protect her friends when they got hurt—just like how she fought for you when you had your first heartbreak or when she dragged all the adults she could find to help when Joohyun broke her arm from climbing a tree—and that was the reason why you could never walk away from her even after having the biggest fight of your lives.

After months of no communication, Hana convinced you to take a trip together for a summer vacation. It was a way for her to ask for a truce and to make up for all the resentment she had given you. That was until she cancelled at the last minute and ditched you without warning.

Joohyun listened patiently as you spoke with no sign of her getting surprised to the change of event. The three of you had been friends since kindergarten, having been born and raised in a small town where everyone knew each other. And if there was any other person who had been on the other side of Hana’s reckless and unrealistic decision making, it would be Joohyun.

“What are you cancelling the trip for? Forget Hana. Go and have fun, enjoy the sun, show your bikini and strut down the beach like you own it. You don’t owe anything to her and you know she does this all the time. She always got what she wanted when we were kids and had always been stubborn even when she couldn’t. She’s obviously forgetting that we’re all practically adults now, with real responsibilities, and she needs to get out of her head,” Joohyun said on the phone. “She’ll come around once summer is over. She has to get back to reality someday. Meanwhile, you get to have fun without her holding you back.”

“You’re right. I’m going to have fun even if I have to go on this trip on my own,” you sighed dramatically on the phone, though you felt a bit better now after finding some resolve.

“That’s the spirit,” Joohyun said, chuckling and sounding more excited for you. “You probably won’t always be alone. I can feel it. Who knows, you’ll get to meet some Prince Charming that could sweep you off of your feet.”

“I highly doubt it,” you said, chuckling and shaking your head. Even though she was married, Joohyun had always been a romantic at heart and she never stopped hoping that her friends would find the same kind of happiness and love she had. That was what marrying her high school sweetheart did to her. “But thanks for the pep talk, Momma.”

“You’re welcome. Have a nice trip, get wild, let loose, and do—whatever it is you do on an island. I know I would if I were you. It’s been a while for me since I get to do fun things.”

“Momma, the last time you got frisky was with your hubby and you ended up getting that baby growing in your belly,” you reminded her with a laugh.

“Shit, you’re right,” she said, her voice laced with wonder and you could tell that she was rubbing her pregnant belly when she whispered, “No regrets there, though.”

I sure hope not. “Thanks for listening, Joohyun. I’ll call you once I got there,” you told her as you bid her goodbyes and ended the phone call.

—

By sunset the same day, you already felt so much better and had the summer vibe taking over to help you forget about your stress.

You had gone straight to chase your flight after the phone call you had with Joohyun. After having a smooth travel, a quick check-in at the hotel which was way prettier and more comfortable than you had initially thought it would be, you went straight to your first summer party at the beach.

You had left the hotel for an early dinner and had a few drinks to loosen up when a guy around your age came by to your table. He was amused when he found out that you were in the resort on your own, then sat down to give you a few warnings about trusting a stranger during your trip before handing you a flyer that he was spreading at the joint.

“Come by to the beach and join our party. Don’t worry, I’ll make sure you’ll be safe,” he said then, giving you a wink before leaving you to finish your drink.

The party had started by the time you arrived. Groups of young men and women filled out the beach, some playing by the waves, some of them playing volleyball, while a few others seemed to be trying their hardest to set up the bonfire. The breeze was nice. You had learned from the young female receptionist at your hotel that this side of the beach would be safe enough for you to play in the water, and you were glad that you had decided to put on a pair of bikinis underneath your summer dress.

“Hey, you made it!”

You turned to see the same guy who had handed you the flyer for the party running towards you. Wearing a sleeveless shirt and a pair of shorts, the tan on his skin was visible and it looked like he had been under the sun for quite a while.

“Yeah, hi. I figured I didn’t want to miss it on my first night here,” you told him, making his eyes gleam.

“Cool. I’m Chance, by the way,” he said, offering his hand for your to shake.

“I’m ______,” you answered with a firm handshake. “So are you from around here?”

Chance nodded. “Yep, I live around the area. It was the local kids’ idea to have this party to welcome all the tourists coming in during term break.”

“Nice,” you muttered as you looked around, watching the fun starting and getting louder as the bonfire was finally lighted up.

“Come on, I’ll show you around.”

You followed your new buddy, Chance, as he led you to the heart of the party, introducing you to some of the local boys and girls who were responsible for the party. “If you lose me in the crowd and you’re in some kind of a trouble, just holler at them and they’ll come to help you,” he said, before leading you towards the long table where the coolers filled with bottles of beer and other booze were located.

Grabbing a bottle of cold beer, you walked with him back into the party as he gave you a long list of places which you could visit while you were in town. He had even given you his number, just in case you would need any guide to take you to places. It wasn’t long before he was called out by the group playing volleyball and he ran out to join them to fill the empty spot, while you joined the circle forming around the bonfire.

A DJ was playing near the bonfire and everyone was dancing along with the music, having an absolute blast. At first, you only stayed to the side, watching everyone and enjoying the music.

It was then when you noticed him.

He was a part of the group having a dance battle around the bonfire. You had no clue what it was that had pulled your attention solely to him. His moves were on point and he seemed to enjoy himself when he was dancing. His bright smile never faltered no matter how tiring his routines were, his laughter was contagious that his friends shared the same joy as he did as they moved with the music. Even you had a smile on your face that widened the more you continued watching him.

Then, as if he could sense you watching from the distance, his eyes turned to find you and your gazes met. A spark of electricity ran through the air somehow, making you feel as if time and space stopped while you had your eyes locked on his. And you somehow knew that he was probably feeling the same way when his smile slowly grew, his eyes glimmered softly as he ran his gaze on you.

You glanced away from him, feeling flustered for having been caught watching. Then you took your time to look around, taking in the other girls who had just started vying for his attention. It was obvious that you were not the only one who was attracted to him.

A tug of jealousy came over you and it made you feel hot for a moment. So you decided to walk away, heading to the coolers to grab a fresh drink after finishing your first already during your earlier walk. Just as you leaned down to pull out a fresh bottle of beer, a hand joined yours. You looked up and your eyes popped up in surprise when you saw him—the same guy who you had been watching dancing by the bonfire—standing there with a smile on his face.

“Hi, there,” he said, giving you the same smile that had you so entranced on him earlier.

“Uh, hi,” you responded, barely getting the words out while your heart was hammering inside your chest.

In your shock, you had straightened up from the cooler empty-handedly, while he moved up slowly after he got what he needed. “Here you go,” he said, surprising you by handing a bottle of cold beer.

“Thanks.”

“Are you here on your own?”

“I am,” you stammered, now surprised that he had chosen to stay instead of running back to his friends. And that he was now talking to you. “I was supposed to come here with my best friend but she ditched me.” The words came flowing out like a river and you shook your head, regretting that you had spilled out something embarrassing the moment you had a chance to speak.

“What a shame—” he muttered, and he was saying it without any judgemental look on his face. “This is a nice party though, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it is,” you sighed, relieved that he didn’t comment further on your mishap or show you any pity for being ditched. A series of celebrations whoop snapped your attention back to the bonfire and you noticed how the crowd had increased around it. The sky was starting to grow darker and the night breeze was beginning to build up so everyone had moved closer to the heat. Even the DJ set had maxed the volume of the music so everyone there could dance. “Seems like the party is just getting more hyped now.”

The guy standing next to you followed your gaze and chuckled softly. “You’re not that into parties?”

“No—I mean, I do go to parties, once in a while. But nothing like this one,” you admitted to him. “I was only here to check things out since I just got in today and see what it’s all about. I was actually thinking that this should be my last drink before walking back.”

You had thought that the guy would be more interested in going back to the party that he had gotten his beer, but you were surprised to see him still looking at you. His eyes flickered to the bottle in your hand when you lifted it up, and you could swear you noticed him looking a bit disappointed when you said you weren’t staying long. “Is there a chance for me to change your mind so you could stay?”

Your heart fluttered. “I don’t know. Maybe,” you said with a shrug. But then another series of loud whooping came from the party and the loud beat from the speaker made you wince, obviously proving otherwise.

“How about we walk down the beach and find some place where we could talk,” he suddenly said, no doubt catching your skittish reaction to the loud noises coming from the crowd.

Looking up to him, you expected to see a sign telling you that he was only making an offer just to be nice. You never expected to see a hopeful look in his eyes and a hint of anticipation as if he was waiting for you to say yes. “You’re not going to lure me to anywhere secluded so you could attack or murder me, are you?”

He laughed at your reaction. “You wouldn’t know unless you come with me,” he offered with a smile.

The moment you nodded your head, he quickly took your hand, as if he was making sure that you wouldn’t run away. Your heart was hammering ninety to nothing, threatening to make your chest explode. Though it was not because of fear, and more because of the adrenaline running through you of having someone stealing you away from the party and taking you into the unknown.

You moved together through the crowd that seemed far away now while it felt like you were in your own bubble with him. He kept glancing down at you as he pulled you away, obvious that he was gauging at your reaction to see if you were still willing to follow. You made one quick glance at the bonfire, catching Chance’s gaze that seemed unconcerned and was somehow more excited as he saw you walking away with this mystery guy. The fact that he was not chasing you down or stopping this guy from kidnapping you made you feel easier for a moment, and you had found that there was nothing in his touch that made you feel uncomfortable. You had even believed that you might have seen Chance and his friends throwing their thumbs up at you.

Boys.

You had broken free from the party and had gotten to the quieter part of the beach, though still not straying too far away from the crowd when he suddenly stopped. You had looked over your shoulder just as someone lighted up a firework and he must have noticed you doing it.

“I’m sorry, I probably shouldn’t have taken you away so suddenly from the party,” he sheepishly said, and you quickly started shaking your head.

“I didn’t say no, did I?”

“No, you didn’t,” he said, beaming with a smile. “Which is surprising since you didn’t even ask for my name. Didn’t anyone taught you not to walk away with a stranger?”

“Oh, right,” you told him with a surprised laugh. “Well, I’ve always acted on impulse. Sorry, my name is _______. What’s yours, mystery man?”

“My name’s Hoseok. Though I like ‘Mystery Man’ better. It makes me sound a bit more sexy and dangerous.”

You continued to walk slowly down the beach, barefooted, carrying your flip flops in your hand while he had his shoes in his, and finally making an actual conversation to get to know each other instead of walking in silence. You were surprised to find that he was studying at the same campus as you were in, though he had arrived a day before you did, slipping away from the campus ground right after his final class ended and before vacation started.

“What are you studying?”

“I’m on Pre-Law. Poly Sci major, though I haven’t decided what I’ll be specifying on later in law school,” he answered, making you pop your eyes once again.

“I almost took the program,” you shyly confessed with a chuckle. “I’m studying Liberal Arts now with History minor. I would’ve taken Architecture Engineering for a better option but it would have required me to move to another campus for a better program and I was too lazy to get through the whole process again.”

“What made you change your mind?”

“I didn’t want to be in school for too long and I found out that all the textbooks that I had to read to study law were thicker than bricks,” you chuckled, and he smiled as he listened. “I got interested in art and painting since I was in school. I’ve always had more fun creating stuff, rather than reading and memorising theories. It’s kind of hard to explain.”

“Passion is not supposed to be explained.” His voice was deep when he said this, but it was his eyes that drew you in, pulling you into their depths that you could easily drown in them. You were so lost in his eyes that you didn’t even notice that you had stopped walking.

His presence, together with the soft breeze and the steady rhythm of the waves, left you so mesmerised that you didn’t notice that he was growing closer and closer. He was brushing his fingers gently on your free hand, distracting you from him as he slowly lowered his head, until you felt the feathery touch of his lips against yours.

You caught a whiff of his sweet cologne when you took a deep breath, as you were trying to still your heartbeat when he pressed his lips a little harder on yours. Just as you began to return the kiss, he suddenly pulled away, looking sheepish and red on the face when he realised just what he did.

You were both flustered that you were rendered speechless for a moment. A part of you wanted to continue and see where this was going, but another part of you felt like it was too much too soon and you were not sure if he kissed you because he wanted it the same way you did or if he had only gotten carried away with the situation. He seemed nervous and you had no idea how to bring things back to the way it was a minute ago. Then you looked away, your gaze falling on the sight of an old structure appearing just at the top of the hill at the edge of the beach nearby.

“Hey, is that a house?”

Your voice snapped Hoseok out of his trance and he looked over his shoulder, following your gaze to finally see it. “Looks like it.”

He pulled you closer towards the rocky hills and stopped when you were still in a fair distance from it. The sun had not been gone long and there was still enough light from around you to allow you to see it.

Both of you fell silent as you looked up at the structure. The beach house was perched on top of a rocky hill, with wooden walls and tall windows overlooking the ocean. The white paint from the house was chipped all over the place, the back porch that was facing the beach seemed like it was close to collapsing, and there there was a wooden staircase from that back porch leading down the hill to the beach, some of the steps appeared worn out and broken in places. The house had seen better days, and you were sure it had looked beautiful at its prime.

“Let’s go take a look closer and see if we can go inside,” you offered as you began to pull him closer, only to have Hoseok pulling you back and stopping you from moving ahead.

“No!” he shouted, looking at you with wide eyes. “No, it could be haunted. And it looks broken down.”

Staring back at him, you started laughing incredulously, “Seriously? You’re afraid of an old house?”

Hoseok shook his head. “I’m afraid of what’s in it,” he tried to reason with you while his eyes went back and forth between you and the old worn-down beach house.

“Oh, come on, you wuss,” you laughed at him and gently began pulling him with you again. “Don’t worry, Mr. Lawyer. I’ll protect you.”

You tried to make your way towards the old house again, still holding his hand so he would follow you. But his grip on you was stronger and your body was pulled towards him instead.

All of a sudden, you were pressed against his chest, your palms landing on his shoulders that you could feel his heartbeat racing. He opened his mouth to speak, before deciding against it and lowered his head instead. Your brain shut off when his lips grazed against yours. It took you a moment too long before you realised what he was doing, what you were doing. That you were kissing him. Again.

You barely had a chance to feel it before, but you noticed that his mouth was warm and soft. He kept it easy with you at first, trying to be careful about it as the awkwardness from the previous kiss had just dissipated. But as the kiss lingered, your whole body thundered with need and you returned the kiss just as gently as he was pressing his lips on yours.

Just as you pressed harder against him, he suddenly pulled back. His eyes were on yours, searching, once again looking for a sign that you didn’t want any of this.

But you did.

The need to feel his lips on yours again hit you like a blow in the gut. Without saying a word, you reached out and grasped the back of his neck to bring him closer, taking his lips back on yours. This time, he didn’t hold back. He pulled you hard against his chest as he devoured your lips, his hands running down your body, feeling every curve.

His tongue slipped along your lips and you willingly parted them for him, allowing him to possess your mouth, to take over and taste. His mouth and tongue tasted like beer with a mix of candy, his touches were warm and gentle, sending heat running down south that you melt against him. You didn’t think it would be possible to get closer, but somehow you did, and it felt like the line where your body ended and his began was beginning to blur as your lips continued to meld and locked to one another.

A cold breeze passed you by, giving your skin the chills that you shuddered and pulled back with a gasp.

“Should we find someplace warmer? Or at least hidden?” he offered, looking at you with a fully concerned gaze in his eyes. He ran his hands down your bare arms, rubbing against the goosebumps forming on your skin.

A sly smile grew on you when you offered, “We could always run into the house. It’s literally right there.”

“Still not an option,” he said, pulling back as he began leading you back to the party.

Once again, the moment you looked away from him, your eyes fell on something else which caught your attention. “Hey, look at that. There are some rocks a little further down,” you told him, pulling him until he saw what you were seeing. “Why don’t we keep on walking and see if they can hide us from prying eyes?”

“Aren’t you afraid that I might actually hurt you?” He wiggled his eyebrows. “What if I’m a serial killer and you had just given me an idea just where to dump your body?”

Running your hands up his shoulders, you pulled yourself up and brushed your lips against his. Just as he made a move to catch your lips and kiss you, you moved away to nip his earlobe and whispered softly, “If you know how to make me feel good, then I won’t mind getting hurt at all.”

“Fuck me,” he groaned, his chest rumbling with desire from your touch alone.

“I might do just that, Mr. Lawyer,” you teased him, not even bothering to wonder just where you had gotten this much confidence from when you then added, “Just say the word.”

His eyes darkened. Then he began stalking closer, bringing the sparks you felt from his warmth back between you and stronger. Suddenly the only thing reminding you of where you were was the whiff of sea air and the sand getting between your bare toes, the chill was forgotten as he wrapped his arms around your waist. With a sly smirk, Hoseok pulled you up, surprising you as you were lifted off the ground. In a frantic state, your arms moved around his neck while your legs were wrapped around his waist.

“You’re going to carry me there?”

Instead of answering, he only started walking towards the rocks and ducked his head to capture your mouth. You dug your fingers through his hair as he took over your lips, drinking you in while his hand made its way up your thighs and the other clutched tightly at your waist to keep you up. Afraid of being dropped down as your knees buckled around him, you locked your ankles on his back, locking you tighter against his body.

Nothing else seemed to make sense when he slid his tongue inside your mouth, his teeth moved to nip at your lips, before he brushed it with his to wipe away the pain and you let him suck at his tongue. The way he carried you made it possible for his crotch to brush against the apex of your thigh, the bulge poking from his pants kept rubbing against your covered slit as he kept on walking. The touch, along with the way he was devouring your mouth, made your body pulse with desire and you moaned softly into the kiss.

You were hot and breathless by the time he made it to the rocks. While you were still in a daze, Hoseok found a dry spot between the towering sides to set you down. You were both relieved for being back on the ground but hated that you no longer had anything pressing the throbs happening at your core.

But then he sat back over you, his eyes speaking louder than words as he looked down with a similar desire in his eyes. With one swift move, he jerked his shirt off, revealing his bare chest for you as he hovered on top of you. And you did just the same, pulling your dress up and over your head, leaving the barely-there bikini for his eyes to see.

“Wow,” he whispered as he looked down your body, his eyes taking every inch of you to register in his memory. “Were you planning on taking a dip in the water?”

“Maybe,” you exhaled a sigh and reached out to run your hands up his bare chest, feeling the lines of his flat abs with your fingers. “But that was before I saw you.”

His lips slowly curled up to a grin. “Good thing you did before someone else caught you first.”

His lips found yours while his hands were busy making a quick work of taking your flimsy bikini off of your body. Every touch he made on your skin and every kiss he gave was gentle, but at the same time, everything felt so intense. He had every bit of intensity and playfulness together that you were kept getting off balance and it was enough to put your mind in a daze as he took over. Within moments, you were left naked on the beach, lying beneath his deep gaze with your heart thrumming wild in your chest.

The only reprieve you had for knowing that you were not crossing the line of becoming a sudden exhibitionist was the fact that you were hidden among the rocks. Your hands reached up and pulled at his belt just as his lips found the pulse on your neck. He tossed his discarded shirt behind you, making it a pillow between your bare back and the wall of rock behind you and placed your crumpled dress under your hips to shield you from the sand. And then he made his way back down, climbing down your body with his lips trailing south.

He stopped just as his kisses reached the valley of your breasts, his breath fanning against your skin when he whispered, “I want to take my time with you, but I don’t want you to get cold.”

“Then please warm me up, Mr. Lawyer,” you gasped just as his lips brushed softly against the underside of your breasts. The cold breeze and the tension had left your nipples turning as hard as rocks, yet he seemed to be deliberately avoiding them and kept touching and kissing on the soft skin around them instead.

It was both teasing and torturing, your heart fluttered while every part of your body pulsed with need. Arching your body up against his face, you whispered your pleas, making him chuckle before he finally made his move.

With a smile, Hoseok descended. His mouth closed over a nipple and you gasped, your fingers were buried in his hair once again so you could cling onto him. He did it gently, yet the moment his mouth latched onto your hardened nipple, everything erupted from inside you. The flutters happening inside your chest exceeded tenfold, and it brought a rush of heat down between your legs that your hips started moving up to chase him. He pressed your bare breasts up and into his mouth, kneading them with his palms and taking his time to revel in their softness, while his tongue tasted one bud after another with pure hunger.

Your hips kept bucking up, searching for traction as the pulse happening in your core grew more intense. He reached down with one hand resting on your hips, keeping you steady. His tongue made another lap around your hard nipple before his teeth came into the mix. Your gasp came out breathless as he gave your nipple a final suck while a squeal slipped out through your lips when he did the same with the other breast.

You pushed yourself up when he began crawling down and leaned back against the wall of rocks behind you, his shirt made it less feel rough and gritty against your back. He was heading south, moving lower with hot kisses trailing down your skin. His eyes kept flickering towards you, allowing you to see the dark desire in his gaze, and he seemed intent on reaching down soon and making a stop right about—

There.

A long gasp came out of you when his mouth latched on to where your body pulsed the most. You clutched at his head as his tongue slid in all the right places, moving in the perfect rhythm that made it seem like he was strumming your body like a musical instrument.

Closing your eyes, your mind wandered for a moment to marvel at the predicament you had found yourself in. This was crazy, even for someone like you, who had been known as the most spontaneous one between your best friends. But this—being at the beach, completely naked with a stranger sucking at your cunt in a way no other man could ever do it for you before—was completely otherworldly.

You inhaled sharply as he sucked at your heat, his action pulling you back to him so you could focus on the now. On him. His hand crawled down your thigh before lifting your leg up to rest on his shoulder.

Then his other hand worked its magic between your folds, moving almost rhythmically as his tongue was before his deft fingers found your entrance and he pushed inside.

It felt like the world around you was ready to break into pieces as you mewled at his touch. With your head falling back down on the sand and your hips swivelling down against his face, you were ready to embrace it, to shatter in his arms and come apart so he could sew you back into one piece.

Hoseok rolled his tongue and sucked on your clit while his fingers found the hidden spot inside your folds. Then it happened, just the way your body needed to and more. You were shuddering in his hold, your leg shivering as it dangled over his shoulder while the other was kicking on the sand. He moved up, his hand still working on you while his lips crawled up your stomach, stopping when he returned to your breast. He didn’t give you time to come completely down from your initial high when his mouth latched on, sucking a nipple inside his hot mouth as his fingers pushed deep inside your tight walls, and that was it. It was too much and too intense that you shuddered hard against his palm, hanging on to his hair for dear life as you came apart, crying out random words before your brain could register his name for you to call out between your cries of pleasure.

Your knees started to give out when he finally released you and he closed on your waist. Your skin sizzled to the touch of his palm. Your whole body still humming with your climax and running hot despite the chill that it took him a few gentle rubs up and down your waist to bring you back to him.

“Are you okay, baby?” he asked you gently as he crawled on top of you.

You nodded against his chest, feeling his lips on your forehead when you briefly closed your eyes. The spot where you were at was dark. The moonlight helped you see things, and it fell on his back perfectly to accentuate the lines of his face and his body. In a daze, you ran your fingers down his bare chest, feeling every bulge of his muscles as you made your way down to his waist and began pulling his belt.

“I’ll be better if this goes away,” you whispered against his lips when he lowered himself to kiss you, letting you taste your arousal from his tongue.

He let you kiss him deeply until he earned a few lazy moans coming from you and pulled away with a chuckle. You watched him as he fumbled with his belt and quickly shucked his pants and briefs away.

The waves crashed in the distance as you pulled him back to you, allowing you to see more of him now that he was closer and the moonlight was falling in all the right places. His naked cock twitched when you looked down on it. It looked hard and heavy, so stiff as it led to the peak that you wondered if it hurt. His length looked stunning and already your pussy walls throbbed at the sight of it, begging to be filled. The throb increased further when your fingers encircled him to feel his girth, your body could register it already that he would fit perfectly inside you, to fill you up with his width until you would erupt in his mercy once again.

You worked on him a little with your body propped on one elbow, jerking your hand up and down his length. His eyes glazed over with lust as he caught your hand in his and he carefully guided your rhythm while his other hand was holding on to the towering rock nearby.

“You are beautiful,” he said, his voice cracking up with tense and you were glad to see him slowly coming undone in your hand for a change.

“Condom?” you asked him, licking your lips as your eyes flickered back and forth between his impressive cock and his beautiful face. If only the space between these rocks wasn’t so small, you would have climbed down and taken him in your mouth. But there was another place where you wanted him to be. You widened your legs a little to ease yourself from the way your walls are clutching with anticipation.

His breath hitched when your question finally sunk in and he nodded stiffly, his whole body had coiled tight while he was trying his best to hold back that you started moving your hand slower to stop him from erupting too soon. Then he reached down to the back pocket of his pants to find his wallet and produced a square tin foil in his fingers.

Taking it from him, your hands were shaking when you tried tearing the foil open. His hands instantly came sliding down your thighs, as if he could not stay away from you much longer. He pressed against you, his lips nipping down your neck and fingers working down your folds again.

The lubricated disc has popped out halfway from the foil when your hands rested on his shoulders, holding on as he strummed your body to reach to another peak of pleasure, your legs opening for him to slide his body in between. You revelled on the pleasure he was giving you, forgetting that you were desperate to have him sheathed so he could be inside you. Then his fingers dived in, hitting just the right spot, sending you lurching forward with a cry.

And the condom fell from your fingers.

“Shit!”

“What?” Hoseok pulls away immediately, looking down on you in panic. “Did I hurt you?”

You swallowed the frustrated whine that was stuck in your throat. “No,” you sheepishly said. You could feel your face paling. “I dropped it.”

Hoseok blinked. It took him a few seconds before it registered to him, “The condom?”

“Yes,” you answered him with a small voice.

“It’s okay, isn’t it? I mean, it was in a package—”

“Uh, no, it wasn’t,” you told him while feeling around in the sand. The moonlight was not strong enough to illuminate around your legs so you rub against the sand and felt around until you found it. You lifted it up for him to see. The condom was already out of its package, which probably happened when it fell, and the disk was now coated with sand, all sticky and gritty.

Hoseok stared at it, completely dumbstruck, before he snorted and began to laugh. You let out a whine and tried to be angry at him for laughing, but then he fell on top of you with his face buried on your shoulder and you couldn’t help but laugh along with him.

“What are we going to do?” you whined as you toss the soiled condom aside. That got Hoseok sobered up.

“I could run somewhere to buy one.”

“What?” you looked up at him, pouting at the thought that you may have to wait longer. “Don’t you have a spare?”

Hoseok gave you a sweet smile and shook his head. “No, I don’t,” he said, snickering. “I didn’t exactly plan on stealing a lady away from the party and have wild, hot sex on the beach tonight.”

You rolled your eyes and scoffed, “Funny.” You looked up to him, readying yourself for disappointment. But there was something in the way he was looking at you, and the fact that you were not the only one unprepared to be so entranced to one another when you had just met made your heart feel bigger, swelling with pride and a hint of a deeper need of having him inside you. “Just tell me you don’t have anything.”

He shook his head. “I don’t have anything,” he said with a shy grin. “I don’t normally do something like this.”

“Me neither,” you admitted, before biting your lips when the weight of his gaze drew your heat back. “I’m on the pill.”

Your words could have acted like an enchantment, because it made him groan and his dark lust came back alive. His fingers continued their prevent press against your sensitive skin and you lied back, opening your legs wider.

“You sure?”

The only response you gave him was a push of your hips against his crotch, brushing your soaking folds along his length and felt it hardening again. It took you only seconds to feel the heavy weight of his cock hitting against your folds. “Yes, fuck me.”

With a deep groan, Hoseok reached between your legs and parted your folds with his fingers. He touched your clit gently, adding pressure until your legs began to shiver and he felt your arousal dripping further onto his digits. Using one hand, he lifted one thigh while he used the other to guide himself. A soft whimper escaped you as you felt him at your entrance. Then his hands found your hips again, holding you up as he pressed forward. Your soft moan and his low grunt mixed together when the delightful tip of his cock slid inside. Your walls wrapping his girth so perfectly as he parted his way in, a gasp leaving your lips when your pussy pulsed around him.

Hoseok stopped briefly to take a quick breath, relishing at your tightness for a moment, before slipping deeper, taking his time as he pushed further until his body was flushed against yours.

Your pussy pulsed harder around his girth. He was thick and perfect inside you that you could feel your body ready to erupt the moment he would make a move. The pressure you felt from his fingers on your hips was the warning he gave you before he pulled back, moving slightly away from your depth, then came back in with one firm thrust.

You cried out at the pleasure, your body was overcome with the sensation that placed your mind in a haze. Soon Hoseok began moving in an easy rhythm, keeping his hands on your hips to hold you in place as he rocked against you. You reached to your sides, bracing on the rocks on either side of you to lift yourself up and started rocking into him, urging him on to continue moving faster and reaching deeper.

His gasp that came out when he was hitting you deeper was the reward you earned, and then he was quick to match your pace. Your bodies rocked and shifted together, your head falling back at the rise of the pleasure running up and down your body, while the breeze from the ocean was caressing your tender nipples.

Your body came alive as the rush of your orgasm came rising so quickly the faster he began thrusting his cock inside you. The adrenaline helped made everything feel more intense. To be in a public beach, right in the open where people could see you, with nothing else but elements of nature sheltering you, and this beautiful stranger was rocking your world like nobody else ever could before. Your senses were heightened that you felt like you were flying up so high with bliss.

Refusing to close your eyes, you watched him as he got lost in his own pleasure.

His dark eyes were looking down on you with so much tenacity that you were instantly drowning in them. But you managed to take in everything, to learn everything about him as you let him take you to your peak, as you revel on him and the pleasure he was giving you.

The expression he was making when he worked his hips, to each time he pushed deep and hard into the hilt and you clenched tight around him, was a beautiful sight to see. You registered the guttural noises that came deep from his throat, his heavy breath, the delicate way his fingers ran down your skin when he positioned your body so he could reach deeper. But most of all, you learned how delicious it felt to have his cock plunging inside you, its vein and girth rubbing against your walls as he moved in and out of you in a rapid pace, and the amazing way he was moving his hips to find the perfect rhythm to bring you to pleasure.

His grip tightened on your hips, the flat muscle planes of his abs began to coil as he continued to slump against you with every shift you made into each other. Then he began picking up speed, and you could hear yourself groaning along with him through the sound of your sex and the pulsing pleasure running in your blood.

As he rushed into climax, he reached down on you again, teasing your tender flesh, touching you the same way he did when he sent you to your release just moments ago without ever reducing his pace.

You had thought it would be impossible for your body to go again after he made you cum with his mouth and the touch of his fingers alone, but he thrust you to the edge of your climax, sending you plummeting into bliss with your voice hitting a higher pitch. Jerking you hard against him, he released into you with a throaty grunt, squeezing everything as he touched your skin, elongating the moment with a few more thrusts and wringing it for every ounce of pleasure that he could get out of you.

It took a moment before everything came to a halt.

Your legs were shaking around him and your body jolted when he gently pulled out. You were still high in bliss that you couldn’t move, hands and toes buried in the sand. His shirt pressed and crumpled on your back and your dress growing wet against your ass that you felt as if the chilling breeze was colder than it actually was.

He sat back and lifted you up against him, carefully cleaning the mess between your legs with your bikini top as his cum began to spill out. His steady palm rested on your back, holding you up to his chest. His mouth descended, kissing your hair, head, ears, before catching your lips to slowly clear you out of your daze.

Above you, the wind rushed over the rocks, while the sky had grown a whole lot darker that you could see stars popping at the edge of the vast ocean. You stayed like that for a little while, just holding on, like two lost souls finding themselves stranded with only each other to hold for comfort and you refused to let go.

—

It took a moment before the remnants of your intense climax pulsing through your body started to descend, and for your breath to grow steady enough for you to begin to speak.

“I think we got sand everywhere,” you laughed as you looked down on your legs and what apparently had become of your clothes.

His chuckle sounded lazy when he spoke, “That’s usually what happens when you have sex on the beach.”

You perked up. “Are you speaking from experience?”

“You would know,” he said, pulling you back onto his lap and pressed to his chest so he could kiss your bare shoulder. “You were the one giving me that experience.”

Your heart fluttered that your laugh came out easy after hearing his words. A chill breeze suddenly passed over you and you shuddered against his chest. “Should we find someplace where there’s no sand while possibly get warmer?” he offered while tugging you close.

“What are you suggesting?”

“How far is your hotel?”

“It’s another block away,” you told him, sighing tiredly when you realised that you had failed to consider making a plan of going back there after the party.

Hoseok bit his lips as he thought about it for a moment before making another offer. “My hotel is closer. Why don’t we go to mine so I can tuck you in a bundle of blanket until you are warm?”

You took a moment to consider your answer first, wondering if it would be a good idea to follow a stranger home. Thought that thought came before you realised that you had done so much more with this beautiful stranger to suddenly become aware of this strange occurrence happening to you.

“That works for me,” you finally answered, which was clearly what Hoseok was hoping to hear, because he immediately held you close and pressed his lips on yours.

Hoseok lingered, not in any rush as he kissed you, tasting you slowly, nipping at your tongue with his teeth. He made you feel giddy for no reason and you loved the feeling he gave you as he held you tight. With him, you wanted to laugh, to cling to him, to fall apart, perhaps doing it all at once and doing it all over again. He was everything in a single package. Passionate, silly, romantic, careful, yet you knew that there would be so much more that you would be happy to find out about him. Which scared you, because that only meant that you were willing to see him again.

Looking into his eyes, you knew then that you wouldn’t mind having a chance to spend more time with him. Even if it was only for this one night.

You had never been this swept away by anyone in a long time, if ever, and suddenly, you wouldn’t mind to have him sweeping you off of your feet through a single night of loving.

—

Once all the tingles on your body and the soreness slowly faded, you finally left the beach and walked hand in hand to the hotel where Hoseok had been staying.

Both of you had tried to clean yourselves up as much as you could before you walked away from the beach, yet as you arrived at the hotel, you still found that you were carrying sand with you all the way back. They had latched themselves on your dress, on a few parts of your bikini—though you had let Hoseok carried your soiled bikini top in his pocket—and your flip-flops, and many of them were on Hoseok’s clothes and shoes.

The moment you got into his room, you instantly stripped naked, still finding sand even with clothes off—thankfully, none on your private parts. After leaving your half soaked dress and soiled bikinis at the corner of his room, together with his clothes and soiled shoes, and leaving trails of sand all over the floor, Hoseok then carried you straight into the shower where you could wash them all off. Together.

It took another hour and a half before you finally made it into his bed. Though not all of those time were wasted only for cleaning all that sand.

The hot water felt like heaven on your skin, especially after leaving the beach feeling all sticky with sweat and humid air coating your skin, and with the remnants of his cum that he had failed to clean up still running down your legs the entire trip here and sand sticking up in places.

Then all that rubbing, scrubbing, and touching had later awakened every part of your body which you had thought would lay dormant and exhausted after the intense and highly daring sexual intercourse down the beach that your body began to pulse. The need was yet again awakened under his touch and neither of you fought against it.

The minute you were squeaky clean and neither of you could take it anymore, Hoseok lifted you up and took you against the shower walls. Three orgasms and shaking legs later, you finally crawled into his bed. You still felt the heat for his touch when you slid under the comforter, yet you didn’t go any further than having a lazy make out session under the comforter to give your body some time to rest and adjust so you could gain back your energy some. You only stopped once you were both breathless, but still high in adrenaline that you continued to talk instead of giving in to sleep.

“You met Chance?”

“Yeah, he came over when he found me sitting alone in the pub outside my hotel. He was the one who invited me to the party,” you told him. “You know him, don’t you?”

Hoseok nodded with a smile. “I’ve been here a few times before, mostly in the summer or on long weekends, and I have known Chance for a couple of years. We hang out together whenever I come to visit. He’s a pretty cool dude.”

“Well, that’s good news cause the only thing that gave me enough assurance that you weren’t a serial killer was knowing that Chance seemed happy seeing me leaving with you,” you admitted, laughing as you told Hoseok how Chance had reacted when you looked over to him just as you were about to leave the party.

“Oh, he probably did feel happy about it. I’m sure he’s never going to live it down and we’ll be hearing about it a lot for the rest of our trip,” he said, then he suddenly stopped. He looked down on your face, his eyes seemed both hopeful and hesitant when he added, “That is—if you still want to continue seeing me.”

Looking up into his eyes, you realised how much you wanted it. He was a marvellous lover who knew exactly how to please you and you wanted to see where this could lead to. This summer was all about having fun and finding joy away from the stress you had left behind in the city and in campus, and you hated the thought of letting him go so soon.

You knew you were probably setting yourself up for a heartbreak, but you brushed it off as harmless fun. “Yes, I do want to.”

His eyes lit up when he heard your response. He seemed relieved and pleased that he captured your lips in his to express how happy he was to find that you wanted him just the same.

He was still looking down at your face when he pulled back, suddenly chuckling to himself.

“What?”

“Nothing, it’s just—” he hummed, shaking his head as he leaned back on his pillows. “I wasn’t even supposed to be here this summer. I was supposed to watch over some of my juniors who are going on a study tour all through summer break. I decided not to go with them cause I’ve been working so hard the past semester and I thought I needed a break from all of that. Thought that going to a beach would be a nicer break.”

“Really?” you looked at him, surprised. “Do you regret not going?”

“Hell, no. I’m glad I took this trip instead,” he said, leaning down to playfully brush the tip of his nose against yours. “I got to meet you.”

“I’m also glad that I came here,” you whispered against the corner of his lips before you let him press his mouth on yours. Hoseok pulled back before the kiss could get any deeper, his eyes lit up with a new shine when he wiggled his eyebrows playfully and offered—

“Glad enough to go another round?”

His enthusiasm was just as addicting as his smile, you realised then with a giggle. Instead of answering him, you moved on top of him and straddle his hips. Giving him one last kiss, you reached down between you and led his cock at your entrance. Taking your sweet time, you lowered yourself down on him, letting him fill you up once again before he could take you to places of wonders like never before.

—

Once summer vacation was over, your whole body was filled with pure bliss. Even your heart and soul were humming and you felt more alive.

You had ended up spending the entire vacation with Hoseok, enjoying the town, the beaches, bar hopping, hooking up—okay, not just a hookup, because it had ended up to be filled with tons and tons of sex and hot making out in between whenever you needed to give some time for your body to rest. You had decided to move to Hoseok’s hotel room during the final week of your stay since you practically spent almost every night there.

By the time you were back on campus, once you have noticed that the sparks between you and Hoseok were still present even when you were no longer in paradise, you both instantly decided to become exclusive and you were going to officially start dating. Just as you had thought, Hoseok was a sweetheart. He was everything you had ever wished to find in a person who could sweep you off of your feet. He was attentive, sweet, funny, and the whole package which he had shown you during the vacation was all real.

The blissful new beginning you were having with Hoseok made everything that had happened between you and Hana slipped right out of your mind. The moment you were reminded of your best friend, you had pulled out your phone to contact her. Until you remembered how the day you left had ended and how angry you still were at her.

Admittedly, going on to that vacation had led you to find Hoseok and allowed you to let loose for a while. But it made the rift between you and your friend grew more intense. You hated not talking to her, yet you hated it even more when you had to be the one making amends first when she was the one being unreasonable.

So you decided to wait. You figured if she did get what she wanted and her plan worked out, she might still be enjoying her time with her crush just the way you were enjoying your new relationship with Hoseok.

In the end, Hana was the one who reached out to your first, asking you to meet up after a few weeks of silence.

Her voice never gave away what she was thinking of planning, but you had agreed to see her so you could talk, and perhaps introduced her to your new boyfriend if the mood was right. She finally set things up to see you at a small cafe right outside of the campus after a long week of piling assignments. Arriving on your own with Hoseok still on the way to meet you there later, you found her already waiting in one of the booths. You had no idea what you had expected to find, but it certainly was not this.

Hana was sitting alone, her eyes downcast while her hand was stirring on her coffee absentmindedly. Her eyes looked tired, and terribly broken, and no matter how angry you were when you parted ways, it tugged your heart to think that her plan didn’t quite work out.

“Hey,” you gently called out to her, stopping right beside the booth instead of slipping in. You knew this look on her well enough to know that startling her would not be the best thing for you to do.

Still, her eyes popped up as if she was somewhere else and was not aware that you were coming. “Hi, you came,” she murmured softly, before gesturing you to sit down.

Everything fell silent for a moment, so you took the time to order your drink while you waited for the right time to finally speak. When your coffee finally arrived, you opened your mouth only to have her cutting you off by speaking up first.

“I’m sorry,” she quickly blurted, as if she had been holding it in for so long already and it was on the verge of slipping out. You wanted to respond with a ton of questions but decided otherwise. Leaning back in your seat, you kept your eyes on her and gave her a chance to speak first. “I’ve been such a bitch and I apologise. I had no idea what came over me.”

Actually, you had some idea about what came over her. But you chose to say nothing.

Because this was not the first time she was doing everything she could to chase out what was not hers, to let go everything and broke all promises just because she wanted what was impossible for her to have that she would be willing to sacrifice others no matter what the outcome would be. Before you had any chance to ask her anything, Hana sighed deeply and began talking.

“I tried, you know. I tried to find a chance to make it happen with him, but things didn’t exactly go as planned. I was never placed in the same group he was responsible for, therefore I had never given a reason to try and get closer. Each time I made a plan to make that chance to happen, things kept getting in the way and he felt further away from me the closer it was to the end of the term,” she said, sighing deeply. “That was why the moment I heard one of the TAs talking about the tour, I instantly applied to join, since it would mean that I could finally have a chance to get closer to him if we were out of the campus.”

You nodded grimly, holding back from saying anything when nothing you could say would ever help make this better. “Did it work, though?”

Hana didn’t say anything at first. She took a sip of her coffee and placed the mug back down, holding it in her hands. “Not even close,” she chuckled bitterly. “He wasn’t even in the tour. They said he had other plans already and he was already giving his TA position to another senior for the next semester.”

That was when you looked up and noticed her red-rimmed eyes, the bags under them, and the way her lips kept curling down. You could tell that she was upset. And when it came to Hana and her dramas, this would only be the first part before it would only get worse. “I’m sorry,” you offered hesitantly, not sure what to say. The voice inside your head was pushing you to say it, the painful words that Joohyun would throw at her if only she was here—’I told you so’—but you chose to keep it to yourself and sighed. “Did you at least get to learn something from the tour?”

“I suppose I did,” she said, shrugging lazily, which only told you that it was nowhere close to the truth. Hana blew a deep breath and raised her face, forcing a smile at you. “Enough about me. How was your trip? I should’ve figured you would still go. Joohyun told me you did.”

Knowing it would be best to move on and not dwell on it, you returned her smile. “Yeah, I did go. I wasn’t going to unpack all that weight out of my luggage and waste the new bikinis I had bought for the trip,” you told her, before adding playfully, “The ticket was pretty expensive too. I used the refund from your ticket to pay for my extra expenses. It was the least you could give me in exchange for letting me go on my own. I’ll pay you back once I got paid.”

That last part made Hana laughed. “That’s not necessary. I’ll feel less guilty about all the drama I caused if you could actually put it in better use,” she said, waving you off. “Anything good happened on your trip?”

The change in her mood helped you a little to remember how your summer went. You told her everything about the flight, the nice quaint hotel you were staying at—without bothering to tell her that you had only stayed there at the beginning of your trip—and all the nice little shops you have found. Her eyes lit up with jealousy when you told her about your new friends, Chance and his gang, and the beach parties you went to with them.

Then you stopped when you were hesitant to mention Hoseok.

Hoseok had been a significant part of your trip which had made it all turn out even more magical. The fact that your relationship with him had progressed into something more and it felt so real had made such a defining change in your life. You knew that you would have to tell her about him at some point if he was going to be a permanent factor in your life just like Hana was, but it seemed insensitive to bring him up after what she had just shared with you.

But as you fell silent, Hana noticed that there was more to tell, judging from the way she was raising her brows. Knowing that she was going to meet Hoseok if he really was going to pick you up after this meeting, you decided to just let her know about it.

“I, uh—I also met someone,” you carefully said while gauging on her reaction. She gave nothing away at first when she reacted,

“You did?”

“Yeah, it was an instant attraction, the kind that you would talk about. We’re kind of together now. We made it official the moment we got back,” you quickly added, suddenly wishing that you could end this conversation as soon as you could when you noticed a hint of jealousy and disappointment brimming in her eyes.

They disappeared when she slowly blinked.

“Who is he? What is he like?”

“Well, actually, he—” you started, only to stop when you looked up and saw a glimpse of Hoseok passing by at the front of the cafe.

You were facing the entrance where you sat down while Hana had her back to the door, so she didn’t see it when Hoseok walked up to the front window and saw you. She was still looking at you when you nodded your head at him.

“Um, he promised that he was going to meet me here, and I think I just saw him outside. So I guess you can see him for yourself.”

You continued to tell her about how you first met him and how things went so smoothly until you began falling for him. She listened to you attentively, though her eyes seemed vacant as if she would have preferred to be somewhere else rather than to listen to your love story. But you couldn’t stop talking.

It felt like an eternity as you waited for Hoseok to enter the cafe, making a stop at the counter to order his drink, before he finally made his way towards your booth. Your smile instantly grew when you met his eyes, when his panty-melting smile and dark gaze took over his face just for seeing you there.

“Hey, baby. Am I interrupting?” he asked you the moment he got to you, immediately greeting you with a chaste kiss.

“Not really, I was just talking about you,” you told him, still with a smile on your face which seemed to refuse to go away. Scooting in your seat, you let Hoseok slide into the booth and took the seat right next to you. “Hana, this is my boyfriend, Hoseok. You probably know him or have seen him at least. He’s in the pre-law program too. Babe, this is my best friend, Hana.”

Hoseok took his time to look away from you, finally looking at Hana, who suddenly looked dumbstruck as she took in the sight of Hoseok right before her eyes.

“Hi, it’s nice to finally meet _______’s friend. You know, I think I’ve seen you before,” Hoseok said to her as he offered his hand for her to shake. Hana’s wide eyes had narrowed down when she reluctantly took his hand and quickly pulled back.

“Uh, yeah—” she said with a small voice. “I took Professor Soo’s class last semester. You might have seen me there.”

You had kept your eyes on her the entire time, long enough to notice the change on her expression—how her shock had turned into jealousy, then to hurt, and how her face immediately turned crestfallen as she looked down to avoid his eyes.

You knew Hana almost all your life to know everything there was to know about her. And it didn’t take rocket science to figure out what was wrong with her when you saw her hands turning into balls of fists on the table. It certainly didn’t take long to put two and two together and to finally understand what was happening.

Hoseok was the same guy that she had been talking about all this time.

The same guy that she had been chasing for and dreamt about. The guy that she had wanted when he almost never knew she existed close by.

PRESENT DAY

Waking up in the morning has always given you a good feeling.

Choosing this flat had been a good idea. You feel this each time the warmth of the morning sun falls perfectly in place to wake you up, not too hot and not too bright, and you barely ever need a thick set of curtains to cover the windows and block the sunlight away.

But the one thing that you love the most is the fact that all you have to do is push yourself up the bed to be able to look out the window each morning to see the perfect view of the park and the river nearby, just across the street from your flat. It serves as the perfect sight to relish on as you prepare yourself to work. Watching people doing their morning runs and passing by the side of the park to go about their day is uplifting in its own way.

Though it only works that way in the morning or daytime, because looking out to that side of the street at night are often too scary and too dark that you always keep all the curtains closed tight.

It doesn’t take you long to get ready for work.

Just an hour later, you are locking the door to your flat and ready to walk down the street, giving short greetings to your friendly neighbours as you walk past by.

Then, just like always, you find yourself taking a quick detour right after you got off the subway instead of heading straight to the small art gallery you are working at to have your quick breakfast.

A smile grows on you as the diner comes into sight. You cannot exactly remember what it was that had pulled you in to visit the diner on that first morning. You had been walking down these streets for months without even giving a glance at this place until it happened, your legs pulling you to enter this place as your stomach begged to have its morning fill.

But you do remember the reason why you keep coming back.

Stepping into the diner has somehow made you feel like you are coming home. You cannot tell why, though you figure it might be due to the way its interior is set up, making it look more like a family-friendly place instead of just a regular diner for city workers and townspeople.

And then there is the food and their signature black coffee that will always remind you of home—of your mother’s cooking, to be exact. Their pancake and sausage meal deal and their bacon and eggs have always smelled delightful. They taste just as wonderful as well. But your favourite would be their waffles, mixed in with their in-house yoghurt, the one choice of menu which had the waitress raising her eyebrows the first time you ordered it.

Living in the city and away from your family has always made you feel homesick, but you have found that this place helps you a lot to make you feel better about it. Sitting in the booth you regularly choose each morning, you look out the window. People watching has always been a thing that you love doing, for some reason. Not knowing anything about the people you see leaves you wondering about their lives, about what places they are going to or where they are coming from, and what stories they carry with them. It always helps to fill the void that you have constantly been feeling whenever you do these things.

You are grateful for what you currently have as you live alone in the city. You love living in your small flat, you love your new job in the gallery, and most of all, you love the comfortable life that you have here. Yet, for some reason, you cannot help but feel like there is something missing. As if your life is incomplete.

And no matter what you do, you cannot seem to figure out what it is that your soul seems to be searching for.

—

“Where do you want this?”

You had just finished mixing the salad for dinner and turn to your mother for your next instruction. Weekends are usually spent lounging in your flat, alone, binging TV series that you have missed out on during your busy days. Except for this weekend, when your mother had called you to come home to celebrate your sister’s engagement with a simple family dinner at home.

Your mother turns from the stove where she has been fixing the soup, making a quick check on your work before nodding her approval. “Place it in the middle of the dinner table then come back here to check on the chicken in the oven.”

“Right, gotcha.”

The voices coming from the living room becomes louder as you walk into the dining room. Everyone is currently watching a sports game on TV, something that your father enjoys doing and everyone else seems to share the interest to join him each time. Your sister’s fiancé is probably there with your father, as he—surprisingly—shares the same interest in sports like your father and your younger brother. Meanwhile, your sister is still on her way home after her late shift in the hospital, leaving you to take the job of becoming your mother’s assistant in the kitchen.

Soon enough, once the game on TV is done and all the food have been served on the table, everyone in the house gathers together for the celebration dinner. Your sister barely has time to change out of her scrubs before she finally sits down with her fiancé, all while complaining how her feet were killing her after the long hours of work in the hospital today.

In place of your date—for being the only one single left in the family, when even your younger brother, Yeonjun, had invited his girlfriend for dinner—you had invited your best friend, Joohyun to sit with you at the table.

“So, _______, how’s your job in the gallery? I heard you are getting another promotion this month?” your sister suddenly asks you, changing the subject after talking about the engagement and sharing how her fiancé had popped the question during the main course. She has her brows raised and her eyes are expectant for your response, and you know that she is only placing the attention on you just so her future in-laws—who are sitting across your parents—would stop asking her about the unplanned wedding date.

You look over between your sister and her fiancé. “Oh, right. Yes. I am, uh—I have been promoted as the assistant curator and will be in charge of choosing art pieces and will be in touch directly with the artists and the clients that we’re representing instead of just handling the administration. And I’ll get to arrange my working hours so I can find time to work on my own artworks.”

Your sister beams with pride as she nods her head in approval. “Congratulations! That’s good news!”

Her enthusiasm makes your smile. You have taken the news quite well when they informed you about it, but having someone in the family actually being happy for you is even more rewarding. But Soyeon has always been supportive of your choices ever since you left home for college, more than anyone else.

With your Dad working as a contractor and your older sister working in the town’s hospital as a nurse and now marrying a doctor, and your brother Yeonjun now studying pre-med in college, everyone has been questioning about your choice of taking an art major in college then diving into the art business.

Perhaps they feel apprehensive about it simply because everyone had been expecting for you to sell your own paintings and artworks, instead of somebody else’s works. It took them about a year to finally be cool about it. Especially your Dad.

Which is why it surprises you when your parents look up and appear terribly excited about it.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were getting promoted? This is good news. We should have gotten some extra cake or drinks to celebrate,” your Mom suddenly says, looking at your Dad. “Isn’t it?”

Your Dad nods, looking more interested than he usually does when he talks about your job. “Yes, it is. Congratulations, sweetheart,” he says, smiling at you before he turns back to continue his chat with Soyeon’s future father-in-law.

“Um—thanks,” you exchange a surprise glance with your sister once your parents look away.

The attention given to you has made you feel somewhat giddy, though you are also curious. For the past year, things have been quite interesting between you and your family. It seems that everyone has been treating you nicely. Really nice, in fact, that you sometimes feel like they are doting you on purpose for some reason as if you are still everyone’s little girl.

Shaking your head, you brush it off and tell yourself that maybe your family had decided to support your choices. Not that they had never been supportive at all. It’s just that they have always been able to find things to comment on about your choices.

First, it was on your choice of college major. Then, it was about your move to the city years ago and then about getting the new job at the art gallery after you had been working in a different company for years. And now, with your sister being engaged, you had come home this weekend expecting to have someone commenting—or asking—about your love life. Or lack thereof. But nobody seemed to mind when Joohyun made an appearance and sat by your side to join dinner.

Nobody from your side of the family, at least. Because once the subject of the new upgrade in your job has passed and the wedding date planning forgotten, your sister’s future mother-in-law suddenly starts showing her interest in you.

“_______, why aren’t you with a date tonight, dear? I’m sure so many guys in the city would have been smitten by you already. I’m not convinced that you are truly single,” she says, making your face flush in flames.

You can feel Joohyun coughing beside you before she takes a hefty drink from her glass of wine.

“I, uh—I’m not in any kind of relationship at the moment,” you respond to her bashfully. “I want to focus on my career first since it hasn’t been long since I started working in the city’s main gallery, and being in a relationship would distract me from getting to the top.”

“She always says that,” Soyeon waves her hand dismissively. You can tell that she is holding back from rolling her eyes when she adds, “Seokjin and I had tried to introduce her to our friends before but nobody seems to be able to catch her eyes. Jin had gotten to know a few young doctors at the end of his residency which we thought would get along with _____, but—” she stops and makes a dramatic shrug.

“Oh, well—but we all know that she’s always so stubborn about picking her males,” she jokes with a wink.

When you respond to her, you don’t even bother to stop yourself from rolling your eyes. “Though I really do appreciate your concern and eagerness of getting me into the dating scene, I really don’t think that it’s really the right time for me to get involved with anyone. And I already told you guys that I couldn’t find anything in common with your doctor friends. I need someone who I can talk to for hours, not someone who gets me clammed up and sneaking phones under the table so I can Google what on earth they are talking about.”

You can feel your face pinched with annoyance when you think back at those double dates that your sister and her fiancé had taken you to in the past. Seokjin, your sister’s fiancé, had once warned you about young doctors who love talking about their work and what they do when they are meeting with a new person, and that they tend to do it to either make them look more interesting or to simply get laid in the end.

Neither has ever worked on you.

You would eventually get bored and lose interest so quickly. Having to pull out your phone in the middle of a conversation where you were supposed to get to know each other really pulls the fun away from dating. Not to mention, no matter who good the person they try to introduce you to is, you will always feel like they are not good enough. That something is amiss.

“You should give your sister a break, Soyeon,” Seokjin pulls your sister close to him taking her attention away from you while the annoyance on her face dims to his touch. “One day, the right man will come her way and it doesn’t have to be us who are responsible for making it happen.”

“I know. I just want the best for my baby sister, that’s all. And I know that living alone in the city can be lonely,” your sister sighs, her nose scrunching for a moment with a concerned look in her eyes before she lays her head on Seokjin’s shoulder.

Watching them together and hearing her words tugs something inside your heart. In a way, she is actually right about something.

You have been feeling quite lonely, though it doesn’t simply mean that you want to force yourself to meet someone just to fill in the void. But when you look at them together—to see the way Seokjin is looking at her and how a smile can easily grow on her face each time they exchange gazes, you do realise that you want it. You want to feel what they feel and have the same thing they are having.

But somehow, thinking about finding someone to fill that gap still feels—wrong.

—

Once the dinner has ended, and Seokjin left your family’s house with his parents, you find yourself sitting in the back porch with Joohyun, sipping on the leftover mimosa from dinner. Your parents had retreated into their bedroom while your sister—after hours of working in the hospital and taking a few glasses of mimosas and red wine after dinner—had passed out in her own bed.

You have been talking about the past, reminiscing the final years you spent living in this town before moving into the big city while catching up with all things that have changed in the past year. Though Joohyun seems to speak carefully a few times each time you try to bring up a few things about school which had skipped your memories, sometimes taking her time to remember some details before filling in on a few blanks for you. As if she has been the one away from all of this instead of you.

“Nothing fun has ever happened in this town,” Joohyun sighs, once again comparing things that have been happening around her with your stories from the city. She has been one of your old friends who had chosen to stay behind in this town when everyone else began to chase their dreams and start their new lives elsewhere, including you.

It was purely her choice, add that to the fact that she ended up getting hitched to her high school sweetheart right after graduation and is now with two daughters. One of the reasons why she was so quick to accept your invitation tonight was all because her husband had taken over diaper duties so she could have a night out with you.

Even if that night out means intruding a family dinner and drinking mimosa while listening to crickets singing in the backyard.

“So far, I can tell that the most fun you’ve had was prom night. I’m almost sorry that I skipped it,” you mutter softly, while she suddenly snaps her head toward you so fast that you nearly jump out of your seat.

“You remember prom?” she asks, though she quickly answers her own question with a shake of her head. “I mean—Of course, you would. I even forgot that you weren’t there.”

She has this far off look in her eyes that concern you. But judging from the way she was holding her drinks, you start to realise why she has been so off all night. “I think you’ve got too much to drink already,” you chuckle as you try to steal her glass away from her, only to have her dodging your hand.

“No! You are not taking this away from me,” she says with a pout. “I haven’t had any alcohol for months. Months! You would need to drink as much as I do when you have two small daughters.”

“Alright, Momma. Whatever you say,” you finally pull back with your hands up to surrender. “But yeah, I missed that whole fun during our prom night cause I had to catch up on a last-minute submission to apply for college. I don’t miss it, though. I had my own fill of fun through college, thank God.”

Joohyun lets out a snort that is very unladylike. “Yeah, you had always had such a big dream of living in the city, of trying to reach for the best things in life—mostly to not follow what your parents had wanted you to do.”

“I know,” you grin at the thought of refusing to follow your father’s footsteps so you could continue his business or to follow your mother’s, who had been working as the head nurse in the town’s hospital at the time. “It’s like the more people were telling me how hard it would be to get what I wanted, the more I feel challenged to grab them and prove them wrong.”

Joohyun laughs. “I still remember the look on your Dad’s face when you told him that you were either going to law school or art, but then you chose art only because your Dad said it was a useless major.”

“Yeah, I remember. Kind of a bummer, though. I could’ve been a good lawyer. I think,” you tell her, before your brows begin to crease when you find it hard to imagine yourself studying the big books all those law students drowned themselves in when you saw them in campus’ library. “But dreaming about having my paintings up for people to see gave me a happy thought too. So no regrets here.”

“Good for you,” Joohyun slurs her words as she brings her glass to clink it against yours.

“People and their big dreams—I really can’t picture myself being like you, having big dreams and actually working on getting them,” Joohyun sighs. “Hey—Do you still dream about having a house by the beach too?”

“The beach? Well, I do love the beach but—” you stop, frowning when you think about it. You have been imagining how lovely it would be to live by the beach. You enjoy the solitude of it, the sounds of the waves and the white sands that would be able to serve comfort after dealing with long, busy hours of living in the city.

But what stops you is the fact that you simply cannot remember how or when you had first started having that dream, to someday own a small house by the beach, preferably a white wooden house with a porch overlooking the ocean where you can watch the waves. The other problem is the fact that you cannot remember ever talking about it with anyone before.

“Have I really told you about that?’ you ask her, looking up curiously.

She looks at you, furrowing her brows for a moment and scoffs, “Only a hundred times before. You always talked about it—” she suddenly stops, looking unsure for a bit just like she always does when she is drunk, before adding, “I think?”

“Hmm—must have slipped my mind,” you wonder, while her lips curl to a flat smile.

—

Tonight will be the last night of your stay at your parents’ house and you had retreated to your bedroom early.

It had been a long week before this weekend. After spending the weekend socialising and doing a lot of catching up with your family, the exhaustion is finally catching up to you. You had just gotten back from returning Joohyun’s favour of joining her family dinner and had only sat for a couple of minutes with your parents in front of the television when the headache started.

You had been having these weird headaches for a while now, with intense pounding striking in your head and everything spinning as it gets worse. It usually takes a few pills and a few hours of sleep to shake it off, but lately, it feels like these headaches have been coming to you more regularly that you are starting to worry. Stress and long hours of work might have been the cause of it, Soyeon told you, yet you still wonder if you should meet up with your doctor once you are back.

You had excused yourself to sleep early as you had to catch the early morning ride back to the city, ignoring all the worried looks everyone was sending you as you walked up the stairs.

The moment you are secured in the shelter of your childhood bedroom—with everything in it had already been changed to fit your more mature stature, from the bed and the other furnitures—you take a seat at the edge of your bed and enjoy a moment of silence.

No matter how much you love being back home with your family, you cannot shake the feeling that has been weighing you down. How everyone’s constant attention and doting has left you questioning if something had happened or that something had changed while you have been away. You are here this weekend for your sister, yet it feels like you are the one that everyone has been waiting for. That you are the one to celebrate instead of them. While at the same time, your family has also been treating you as if you are a piece of glass, fragile enough to be broken if not handled carefully. And being at the center of it has made you feel exhausted, suffocated, and what's more, curious to know what the hell is wrong with everyone around you.

Trying to not think too much of it, you lie down on the bed after popping a few pills your Mom had handed to you and let sleep take over. It does not take long before you fall deep into slumber, then finding yourself getting lost in a long dream.

You are not someone who would normally have vivid dreams. Until tonight.

For some reason, you find yourself standing on a beach and looking out into the ocean. The sound of the rushing waves is filling your senses as if you are really there. Then another sound begins to come to the surface. A voice. A male voice that sounds terribly familiar that it makes your heart starts hammering so fast while at the same time a certain kind of warmth begins to grow inside your chest.

“_______.”

You look over your shoulder and see nothing, before turning back to watch the waves again, finding them surprisingly calm. Everything seems to stop moving. Except for you.

You wait for a moment to have the voice return to you. The only thing you could hear is your rushing heartbeat and the sound of your breathing. You can no longer hear the waves as the ocean seems to have frozen the moment you first heard the voice.

“_______.”

Whipping your head around, you turn around completely this time to make sure there is nobody around.

“Hello?”

The beach is deserted, but the voice seems to continue to speak, calling you in a series of whispers. “_______.”

The voice is coming from somewhere on the other side of the beach, you realise. Before you know it, you start walking, getting closer to where you think the voice is coming from. At the other end of the beach, you see lines of rocks spread over the blanket of white sand. Right there, the waves are still moving and chasing each other, crashing against the rocks, but still no sound is heard other than the whispers of your name coming to you through soft echoes.

All of a sudden, everything stops. Even the voice ceased to come with the wind, and you found yourself turning to look at the rocky hill instead of watching the waves.

Right up there, at the top of the hill, stood a wooden beach house, lone and tall against the wind. Its walls are painted in white, looking bright and pristine, its strong roof are painted in dark red. The back porch are placed overlooking the ocean, with a wooden swing that you could see yourself sitting in to enjoy the scene of the rushing waves and the sun setting into the horizon. A long, wooden set of stairs are built down the rocky hill, linking the side of the house and into the beach.

You walk closer to be able to see it clearer, stopping when the wind breezes through you and you can hear Joohyun’s voice echoing in the distance,

“Do you still dream about having a house by the beach?”

As you look up to the house, someone’s face comes to your mind. A warm smile that gets your heart racing, the same soft voice which was calling for you is now whispering to you through the wind,

“Are you happy with me?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t ever forget that. I love you.”

You keep looking at the house, with the memory of the man whose face you cannot remember, while tears continue to flow down your cheeks.

1 YEAR AGO

“You look beautiful.”

You were getting ready for work, in the middle of finishing your makeup when Hoseok sneaked up behind you. You looked up to see his face through the reflection in the mirror just as he snaked his arms around your waist. He returns your gaze on the mirror when he pulled you back, your back pressed to his chest, and he kept his eyes on yours as he leaned down to press his lips gently on the crook of your neck.

“Thank you,” your voice came out as a whisper. The touch of his lips on your skin had sent your body shivering that you became breathless. “You don’t look so bad yourself.”

Hoseok chuckled, looking pleased with himself, though you suspected it more to the fact that he could still make your body react so easily to him even after years of being together and not so much for your compliment. But he did look striking this morning. Wearing his dark grey suit over an ivory coloured shirt which he had left unbuttoned at the top, his hair was looking slick and brushed aside, you suddenly felt like the most fortunate woman to be in his arms.

“I should be, if I want to look good enough to walk beside you.”

“Oh, shut up,” you scoffed at him and looked away, hiding your flushing cheeks the best you could even if he could still see it through the mirror. Though you also knew that nothing could escape his eyes. The way he was chuckling against your neck as he pressed his lips right beneath your earlobe confirmed it for you.

“I mean it,” he said, tipping your chin so you could meet his gaze on the mirror. “You always manage to amaze me, every single time. It feels like I probably shouldn’t let you go to work today just so I could keep you to myself.”

Hoseok tightened his hold around you while you laughed, your head falling on his shoulder.

“Stop making me blush, silly,” you sighed while running your hand on his arm and enjoying how perfect it felt to be in engulfed in his warmth like this. Years had passed and he still knew how to make your heart race, how to make you happy, and how to make you forget about everything bad in the world. “As much as I’d love to stay home and let you lock me inside your illusive palace, I really need to get to work. We both do.”

“I know,” Hoseok gave a dramatic sigh, then he gave you another squeeze and turned you around. He looked straight into your eyes, smiling softly as he slowly leaned down until his lips were hairbreadths away from yours. “But tonight, you are mine. All mine to keep, all mine to admire, and all mine to love.”

“I’m all yours,” you whispered to him as you wrapped your arms around his neck. “Always.”

Then his lips found yours, kissing you the way he knew would make your toes curl and your skin flush with warmth. Your heart fluttered wildly like butterfly wings when he pressed you into his chest, letting you feel how his heart was reacting the same way to you.

It was during moments like this one, when you were safe in his arms and drowned in his sweet kisses, when you could truly believe that you could face anything that fate may throw at you. You believed that even if the world tilted off from its axis, as long as you had him by your side, you knew that everything would always be right again.

—

Half an hour later, you were walking down the street, hand in hand with your lover as you made your way to the diner a block away from his office building and just right around the corner from yours.

It felt like your life with Hoseok had been beautifully crafted it was almost too good to be true. Perhaps it was. And perhaps it was the reason why you would sometimes have this fear bubbling in your chest that you might have it slip away from you the moment you put everything for granted.

Every morning, you would wake up to his kisses. Sometimes, when there was enough time, then he would spend all morning spoiling you, to make you feel loved—either he did it on the bed or in the shower. Then you would walk together and spend almost an hour long at the diner for breakfast and coffee and a light chat about your plans for the day. Until you were done and you would walk out the door together, stopping just to share a quick kiss before going separate ways.

You loved being with him, to share all these routines each day and to come home each night to be in his arms again. But most of all, you loved him.

Being with him had always made you feel safe. You felt complete and whole whenever he held you in his arms. Each night, you would lie down next to him in bed, either talking about your day or reminiscing the past and planning for the future. You would talk about the night you met him, about the haunted house by the beach that you saw that night. You had made a painting of the house one time and gifted it to him on his birthday, except that you had made it look like the house wasn’t as broken as the way you found it then.

With strong walls and structures, fully built stairs leading down the beach, fresh white paint and fully painted roof at the top, you had made it look like a pristine dream house. You had even added a wooden swing on its porch, as you had wished to have one if you could live nearby a beach one day.

“Our past, present, and future,” was what you had named the painting with.

“One day, I will build us a house by the beach. Even more beautiful than the one we saw. One day, once we have built our lives together and ready for an entirely new page and a new adventure,” he promised you with teary eyes the day you gifted the painting to him, and he continued to remind you of that promise every night when he made love to you until you fell asleep in his arms.

You could only wish that your happiness didn’t have to come with sacrifices. That you didn’t have to let go anything—or in this case, anyone—to be with Hoseok.

Sometimes, you would lie down at night and your mind would wander off to the past, and you would always begin wondering what would have happened if only things had gone any different then.

Though you had rarely thought about your painful past when your happiness would overshadow them so easily, your mind had always been able to speak to you the loudest at night, and nothing could stop you from going through your memories when it happened. Nothing could stop you from thinking back to the falling out that you had with your old best friend just as you were starting your life with Hoseok.

After the day you introduced Hoseok to Hana for the first time, it took you a while before you were able to confront her about your suspicions, to make her admit about her secret admiration to Hoseok. Though it wasn’t because you had no courage to face her and talk about it, but more because she kept avoiding you until days later. She had practically run out of the cafe once Hoseok joined the two of you that day, then disappeared out of sight and had always found reasons to avoid you at any cause.

The moment you finally caught up to her one day, everything was finally revealed and things didn’t quite end the way you wished it could.

Once she finally admitted that Hoseok was the same guy she had been pining over for a whole year, everything else fell apart. While you were throwing strings of apologies, Hana was being defiant, demanding you to let Hoseok go. For her.

“I saw him first!”

“Hoseok is not a thing to be handed over, he is a human being,” you snapped. “This isn’t like kindergarten where you could claim to find something first just because you liked them and forced others to hand them to you. We’re adults, Hana. Things in real life don’t happen that way. You don’t just sit there and wait for things to come your way, you work for it!”

Hana’s face pinched as if getting hit with reality was not something she was expecting to get. Though, in all honesty, she was never one that was used to getting someone talking to her so bluntly the way you would. “That’s not fair. You know I liked him! You were supposed to be supporting me.”

“No, I didn’t know. I never knew anything because you have been all secretive about the guy you kept talking about. You’ve been avoiding me the whole year whenever I tried to talk to you, so how the hell was I supposed to know anything about him? How is it my fault?”

Hana looked away, narrowing her eyes at the wall behind you like a child being scolded. “I didn’t want to talk to you because you wouldn’t shut up about me changing majors.”

“Because you were being irrational! There are many ways you could have done to let someone know you like them instead of choosing the stalker-ish ways you did,” you responded, practically waving your arms to the air. You had told her all of this over and over again until you had grown tired of hearing yourself saying it, yet nothing could get through her once she had her mind set on something.

Your friendship with Hana may have started because you were similar to one another that way, yet you hated how it made her more defiant to admit and accept it when she couldn’t get what she wanted.

“And what are you supposed to do now that things are falling apart, Hana? You’ve thrown away something that you’ve planned out all through high school just for a guy and I know that the minute you don’t get what you wanted, you’ll be throwing everything away.”

After knowing her for years and witnessing her simply tossing away things that didn’t go her way, you knew exactly that it would be the first thing she was going to do. That was the reason why you had been so hard on her for switching majors and ruining her own plans, why you had been so adamant to make her think twice about it and had made sure she would be in it one hundred percent instead of just focusing on chasing a man.

For a brief moment, Hana didn’t say a thing. There was a glimpse of clarity and fear sparkling in her eyes, yet everything was gone the moment she turned to look at you with her sharp gaze. “Then you could let him go.”

“Oh, for fuck sake,” you nearly flipped. It was already so hard to keep your emotions at bay whenever you had to deal with her. But this was all too much. “Grow up, Hana! You can’t always expect to have everything you wanted to be handed to you by someone else.”

Just like always, Hana knew how to get under your skin.

You had thought that all this time, Hana would actually learn something from all her mistakes, that she would learn how to deal with things maturely and to learn to listen. You had hoped that all the ‘I told you so’ speeches you have given her would have done pretty well to help her learn something out of her messes. Yet, for some reason, Hana never changed for the better.

At this point, you have had it.

This would be the first time you were fighting tooth and nail because you had a reason to.

You had finally found something real with someone. Something special. And if she thought you would let that go just to appease her, then she was dead wrong. But it was the fact that you were so done with her attitude that made you become so defiant against her that day.

“You can’t force people to want to be with you. Hoseok is with me, I’m sorry about it, but it’s not like I did this on purpose. I didn’t meet him on that vacation to steal him away from you. It was you who ditched me so you could chase him and follow him around and I’m sorry that it worked the other way but I can’t help change that for you. Grow up and move on.”

Perhaps you were a little too hard on her. But you just couldn’t deal with all her obstinate ways any longer. All the anger and resentment you had for her had been piling up for the entire year that everything just came out through all the painful words you said to her. And that same anger was the reason why you turned and walked away from her after speaking up.

Because you were tired of it and you felt so done dealing with her. Done with trying to get through to her and trying to get her to see things the right way. You knew that she would never see reasons, and she would never change no matter how hard you tried to make her open her eyes and start seeing things differently. And you were not staying behind to pick up all of her pieces and fix her mess.

Not this time.

For days and weeks you avoided seeing her. But once the anger had finally started dwindling down, all you felt then was regret. You regretted for being so harsh on her, and for being the one who was responsible for breaking her heart.

You had even tried to break it off with Hoseok at some point, only to have him coming back and never giving up on you. His kisses were all he needed to give to remind you of the sparks you felt when you were with him, his touches were all you needed to find yourself falling down on your knees and falling deeper for him. Hoseok had always done a good job of reminding you just how good you were together, that you had something that was too good to let go of.

At the same time, every effort you made to contact Hana for any kind of reconciliation had gone futile.

She had shut herself completely from everyone and from the world around her. Punishing herself as she was punishing the whole world for what had happened to her. It took you a long time before you finally realised that this was not a simple heartbreak for Hana. Because what had broken her the most was not for the fact that she had lost her chance with Hoseok, but because it was you who had broken her heart.

The next time you heard any news coming from Hana was the day when you found out that she had been skipping all of her classes and failed her semester. At the end of the next year, you heard the news of her leaving college altogether and moved to another city across the country to start new. In a place where nobody knew who she was.

The entire fall out had you feeling miserable for a long time, but the damage was done, the choices were made, and there was nothing you could do to fix it.

But you had Hoseok to remind you that life had to go on no matter what. That you deserved your own happiness. He was there to help you heal, and things went on while you held on to hope that someday, one day, you and Hana would cross path, once you were both mature enough to handle things without screaming at each other and things would be better by then.

You continued to build your life with Hoseok once you had managed to overcome the pain of losing your best friend and the guilt that you constantly felt for having your heart beating like crazy for him. You managed to graduate and joined Hoseok as he was finishing his law school, and you moved in together in the fancy apartment which he afforded to buy after getting his new job at the law firm downtown while you began building your own career.

Everything was finally set in place. Your life was so beautifully crafted that you still couldn’t believe that everything was real. But the guilt still lingered, laying dormant as it stayed deep inside your heart, hidden underneath the joy and happiness you shared with the man you loved.

It was as if that feeling of dread was simply waiting for the right moment to come out.

If only you knew then that fate was cruel. That even if it had been so giving, it would always be ready to take everything back from you whenever it wanted to. Life was good and everything was perfect that you let yourself blinded from the world around you.

You just didn’t realise then that it was only the calm before the storm and you were definitely unprepared to face it when it finally arrived.

—

The storm came to you in the middle of the night.

Snuggled in Hoseok’s arms, it made you feel like you were untouchable and safe, and nothing could take away the warm feeling you were having inside your chest. It almost felt like you had barely fallen asleep when your phone started ringing. The sound didn’t even register in your brain until much later, once the ringing was close to stopping.

You didn’t even look at the screen when you answered the call.

“Hello?” your voice croaked. When there was no voice responding to you from the phone line, you had thought that maybe the call had died. That was until a faint whisper was heard right when you were ready to put the phone away and go back to sleep.

“Hello? _______?”

The voice startled you enough to snap you awake. “Mom?” you called out while pushing yourself up on your elbows. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m sorry for waking you up so late, Honey,” your Mom spoke, and your heart stopped. Your Mom wouldn’t normally call you this late. Not unless something happened.

“It’s alright. Did something—what happened?”

“________,” Your Mom began to speak, before she finally gave you the news that tilted your world sideways. “It’s about Hana—”

—

Nothing about it felt real.

For the next few weeks since the night you received the news, everything became a complete blur while you moved and flowed into motion in an autopilot mode.

From packing up your things to leaving the apartment at dawn.

Getting on the ride back home with Hoseok.

Seeing Hana again for the first time after years apart.

And then the funeral.

You had a hard time processing everything even as you were going through all of them. You probably wouldn’t have been able to function at all if it wasn’t for Hoseok. He was there the whole time, holding you up with his arms around you, as if he wanted to protect you from all the pain.

You couldn’t even understand a single thing that people were telling you while you were there.

Not even when Joohyun sat you down and held your hands when she told you every single thing you needed to know about Hana.

She had been sick for a long time. She had found out about it first not too long after she left campus and moved across the country. She had kept it all to herself ever since, deciding to fight against it all on her own, that not even her family knew anything about it until it was far too late.

Everyone had told you the same thing. How Hana had shut herself from everyone, how she had been distant after she moved away. Nobody ever knew what she had been going through because she kept everything a secret. Promising everyone that it would be better for her if she was left alone.

She was fighting her battle on her own until the day that she lost.

Except she didn’t look like she had lost. She looked as if she was sleeping as she was lying there, her face looking as peaceful as she would be as is she was simply having a long nap instead of succumbing to her pain.

That is not Hana. She is alright. She is healthy. She is living her best life somewhere across the country the way she had wanted it to be.

You refused to believe that it was her inside the wooden casket even as they lowered it into the ground. You refused to believe it because you had spent years believing that she was happy and that you would one day be friends again. You refused to believe it because that was what her family kept telling you whenever you asked about her each time you reunited with them when you came home to your family for the holidays.

That is not Hana. This is all a lie.

You kept on telling yourself the same thing. Over and over again, begging silently for everything to be nothing else but a dream. A terrible dream. Until you finally snapped and fell into Hoseok’s arms after you said your final goodbyes.

Weeks after you returned home to the city, back to the apartment you were sharing with Hoseok, you were nothing but a shell of what you used to be.

You were simply there, existing, but not fully functioning. You still did everything you were supposed to be doing—eat, shower, sleep, go to work. But for the rest of the time when you were not trying to convince Hoseok and yourself that you were still living and breathing, you spent it all by being holed up in the bedroom, curling under the blanket or sitting with your knees to your chest while letting yourself drown in sorrow.

You were thankful that Hoseok was always there to take care of you and had kept you strong. But you could feel that his patience was waning thin. And yet, you couldn’t help it. It was hard to continue living when the guilt would constantly start eating you up inside.

“Babe, are you sure you’re not hungry? You barely ate anything at dinner.”

You were sitting on the bed when Hoseok entered the room, carrying a tray of desserts and a tall glass of fruit smoothie after he had caught you picking on your dinner earlier. The TV in the room was on, playing some series that you had probably watched before, but you were not actually watching it. Not when your mind was too busy to pay attention to what was showing on the screen.

“I’m not hungry,” you answered him, sighing. You could hear him exhaling deeply before he placed the tray away and climbed onto the bed to join you.

“Baby—” he said, pulling you into his arms. “You can’t go on like this. I know you’re grieving, but don’t punish yourself like this.”

You looked up to him to deny it, to defend yourself so he would let you be. But the moment you looked into his eyes, when you saw the love and compassion he was giving you instead of the resentment you were hoping to see, the words you wanted to speak were lost in you.

“What if we go away for a while? We can go on a little vacation so we could forget everything for a little while? Hmmm? It might help you heal and give you time to recover, to stay away from everything that makes you think of all the bad stuff,” he offered you while he kept kissing your face.

“Hoseok,” you whispered, only to have him cut you off by taking your lips in his. He knew you too well to let you say anything, because he knew that you wouldn’t give in that easily. You would have said no and continued dwelling in your sorrow, while he could do nothing else but to watch you silently and wait until you would return to your old self.

But he was done waiting, and you could feel it from the way he was kissing you and how his hands were gently moving down your body to ease the tension.

I don’t deserve him, you realised even as you were lost in his kiss. And it made you feel more broken just to think about it.

“I don’t know—” you muttered against his lips when you broke away from the kiss. You turned your head down, letting your hair fall over your face so he couldn’t see the pained look in your eyes. But this was Hoseok, the man who had loved you for years and had always been able to read you like an open book.

Hoseok reached out to push your hair out of the way, just in time to see the way your eyes are flooded with unshed tears. He placed a finger under your chin and tipped your face up, making you look up to him.

“Why? Tell me what’s wrong. Please. Tell me how to fix this. Tell me how to fix you. Because I can’t stand seeing you hurting any longer and I just want you to be able to let go,” he pleaded with loving eyes, his lips kissing the tip of your nose gently, and your heart clenched further in pain.

How could he be so patient and so beautiful, you wondered silently as you got lost in his eyes, as you felt his heartbeat under your palms.

Your bottom lip quivered and you looked away, letting out a shaky breath. “You can’t,” you broke down when the words began to come out, and a stray tear fell down your cheek.

“You can’t fix it. Nobody can,” you sobbed against his chest, as if the moment you let that first tear fell, everything that you had been holding inside you just kept on pushing out. Your hands reached out to him, clutching onto his shirt when the dam which had been holding your emotions inside you broke apart and you began to cry harder. The need to hold him grew stronger now that he was so close, while you needed him to hold you so he could keep you from falling apart.

Hoseok held you tighter against him, letting you cry out into his chest.

You cried for the pain and the loss of someone who you had cared about for years.

You cried for the love you had for Hoseok.

You cried for the memory of all the regretful things and all the painful words you said to Hana when you last met her. It was the memory of that day, of the last fight you had, which had made the guilt felt even stronger, when you realised that the last thing you had ever said to her would be those hateful words which then pushed her away, instead of all the unsaid words you could have given her after years of being friends with her.

And that the last memory that Hana ever had of you was the moment you turned away from her to choose to be with the man that you loved.

It felt like your whole chest was caving in and you couldn’t breathe. You didn’t want to lose him. You couldn’t lose him. But you had no idea how to survive from the pain in your chest either.

“Talk to me, baby,” Hoseok begged you. His lips were buried in your hair as he kept on kissing your head while he held you in his arms.

You could only shake your head from side to side. No matter how hard you tried to push it away, you could still feel like everything was falling apart. You couldn’t deny the guilt that was eating you up inside for building your love and happiness while Hana was suffering. Alone. How were you supposed to fix that? How could anyone?

“It hurts. Hoseok, it hurts.”

“We can get through this, baby. You can get through this, just let me in. Let me help you,” he said, pulling away slightly just so he could lean down and kiss you. He kept kissing your face, your nose, before taking your quivering lips in his while his fingers continued to chase away your tears. Though each time he would wipe them clean, fresh tears kept falling.

“No, you don’t understand,” you cried softly, stopping when a sob took away your breath and he held you up to his chest before you could push yourself away.

“Then help me understand, baby. Tell me how to make it better,” he begged you with his eyes searching through yours, refusing to let you hide yourself away from him. You had been hiding away for too long and he was adamant on making it better and to help you to move on from the pain.

But he didn’t understand. He couldn’t understand why the pain just won’t go away.

“You can’t—” you finally managed to speak through the intense sobbing coming out of you. You began fighting him and pushing him away, but he refused to let you go. The more you fought away from his hold, the more he tightened his arms around you. Until you finally grew tired and gave in. “It’s me.”

“What?”

“It’s me. It’s all my fault. I broke her heart,” you cried. You finally looked up to Hoseok, crying harder as you finally admitted the guilt that had been clawing inside your chest. “She wanted you for a long time and then I took you away from her, then I left her—” you sobbed harder. “I left her because I didn’t want to let you go. And now she’s gone. It’s all my fault.”

Hoseok kept his fingers under your chin so you couldn’t look away as he spoke to you. “She’s not gone because of you. Didn’t you hear what they said? She was sick for a long time. She just hid it from everyone—”

“And she wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t for me! Even if she didn’t want to talk to anyone about it, she would’ve had me. I was the only person she could talk to, I’ve been that person for years before I—” your sob took your words away, “before I—” you cried harder just as her face came into your mind, when you recalled the day when you turned away from her and the way she looked at you when you refused to grant her wish.

You fell against Hoseok’s chest when you felt your heart breaking apart once again when you realised, “I hurt her.”

Hoseok held you close, letting you cry out your misery for a moment before he began to speak again. “Everybody hurts once in a while, sometimes a few times in their lives, and people always deal with it in different ways. Hana chose to deal things in her own way, moving away from everyone so she could move on and it’s never your fault that things didn’t end up well for her,” he calmly said to you with his hand brushing your hair gently. He pulled away so he could look at you in the eyes when he added, “______, even her family knew what happened between you and Hana, and they never blamed you for everything that had happened.”

“But—”

He stopped you from talking by cupping your face with his gentle hands. His thumbs continued to wipe the tears away, even as they kept on coming. “No, ______. Look at me and listen.”

The firm tone of his voice and his grip on you startled you that it stopped you from crying for a moment. You looked up, turning your tear-streaked face up to meet his, allowing him to see all your pain. His eyes were filled with the heartache he was feeling inside when he looked back at you, the ache that came from seeing you breaking apart.

“It’s you who I want, ______. Always you. It has been that way since the moment I laid my eyes on you and nothing has changed ever since,” he said, looking straight into your eyes to make you see how much he meant every word, to let you see all the love he had for you and the pain he felt for seeing you so broken. “If you want to blame someone, then blame me. Blame me for falling in love with you and choosing you instead of any other.”

You opened your mouth to speak, yet the only thing coming out through your lips was a few broken sobs. Hoseok didn’t give you a chance to find your voice again. He noticed how your walls were starting to crumble and you were finally listening to his words, so he took that chance to remind you of what you had with him and what you had to fight for.

He caught your lips with a punishing kiss, taking and giving at the same time until the sobs you were making were no more, until your tears of pain were replaced with the tears that came out from the deep love you had for him. The moment your lips touched, you could feel all the tension and the pain weighing inside your chest were slowly lifted. His kisses and his touches had always been able to act as a remedy to your pain and he was reminding you of it all with the way he moulded his lips against yours.

You gasped softly into the kiss when he gently laid you down on the bed and climbed on top of you. He took that brief second of your lips parting to slide his tongue inside, pushing himself into the warmth of your mouth.

His words still echoed inside your mind and your heart was now beating harder when you realised how much he loved you. And you melted easily into his arms with the love that you had for him, while you felt desperate to hold him now as the fear of losing him suddenly became stronger.

You relished the way he was touching you, the way his heart was beating at the same pace to yours. Then, as you slowly began to calm down, the tension on your muscles and nerves were now gone, his hands came down your body to leave a trail of his gentle touch that brought you back alive, then you felt him bunching your nightshirt up and you pushed yourself up to let him pulled it away from your skin.

Hoseok continued to kiss your tears away while his hands made their way down, gripping you at your thighs and gently pried them open so he could settle between them, his lips continued to find their way back to your lips to each time a sob escaped from you, before he began trailing his kisses lower. He started kissing at your jawline, moving slowly as he lowered himself and his lips made a hot trail down your neck, to your collarbones, never stopping as he reached down your bare breasts, taking in one pert nipple and then the other and carried on down your stomach.

His hands found your waist and began pulling your panties down your hips as he continued to make his way down. You kept your eyes closed for a moment, letting every touch of his lips and his fingers fill up your senses until they were the only things you could feel, until nothing else in the world mattered. The only thing you cared about was the delightful sparks of pleasure now rushing up and down your body, and the way his warm breath on your skin made all the heat came pooling at your center.

He was taking his time and it felt as if he was no longer kissing your pain away, that he was now marking on your skin, engraving a part of him onto your body until your broken pieces could be knitted back into one piece.

Hoseok rolled your panties off of you and tossed it down on the floor before he began climbing his way back up, slowly. His lips came back on your skin, starting from your ankles and into the insides of your thighs where his kisses suddenly lingered. You released a moan when you felt his warm breath fanning softly against your folds only for him to move around it, your hands landing on his head to stop him from moving too far away, twisting his hair around your fingers as he moved his kisses much closer to where the intense pulse of your need had started to rise, sucking on your soft skin all the way around your folds.

Bending your legs up, you hooked them over his shoulders while he positioned himself at your center. He ran his hands down your thighs and spread them wider, holding on to them tightly as he descended and placed his mouth on you, as he pressed his lips at your folds until you released another gasp.

His tongue flicked over your clit and he slid a finger inside, making you cry out when he found your g-spot right away. He pressed and rubbed against it, while he kept working his mouth at your heat, moving his lips and rolling his tongue around your clit then going up and down your soaking slit.

Your painful sobs had been replaced with soft cries of pleasure at this point, while you began crying fresh tears that were nothing like the ones you had from being hurt. Your legs tightened around him when you could feel it coming closer, the climax and the need for release came rolling out of your center and making your toes curl.

Sex with Hoseok had never been less than amazing.

You fit together like gloves, like you are meant to be. You had said it and feared it, that you could never survive it if you would lose this, and it was obvious that Hoseok was doing all he could to remind you of this.

He licked and sucked, still pumping his fingers inside you, and you came minutes later with a loud moan. Your inner walls pulsed as the orgasm worked its way through you. The climax erupted inside you in a few intense waves, the emotion you had piling up inside and all the anticipation he had given you had caused all of that, and your body hummed with your release for a few moments too long.

He waited until you came down from your high before he pulled away, kissing the insides of your thighs again as he gently lowered your legs off of his shoulders and he climbed his way back up.

“Come here,” you begged him breathlessly, tugging his arms with your trembling hands. He caught your hands in his once he was hovering on top of you and kissed each knuckle. You reached down and bunched on his shirt the moment he let go so he could strip himself out of it, then continued to tug on his boxer pants.

Every movement you made to help him strip out of his clothes was haste, rushing with the need to be able to touch him, to make contact to his skin so you could feel that he was real. You took a moment to run your eyes over him once he was finally bare, taking him all in before pulling him back down on top of you, welcoming him back between your legs.

There was fire in his eyes, a determination to fix you and bring you pleasure to make you forget about all the pain.

He reached down between you without ever looking away, using one hand to fist himself and guide his cock on your entrance while he parted your folds with the other to allow himself in. He gave you one gentle kiss on your lips as the tip of his cock nudged at your entrance.

Hoseok pulled back and thrust into you with a powerful thrust and the world spun into oblivion. Right at that moment, all you could feel was him, filling you up so perfectly and making you feel so full of him that nothing else mattered anymore. There were no feelings of guilt nor the shadow of old memories to remind you of how you had walked away from your best friend when she felt lost. There were no heartbroken friends begging you to let go of your happiness for them. The only thing existed was just the two of you. There was only the universe that you had created together in this bed existed for you to care about.

You closed your eyes and did your best to focus solely on the way he was loving you, to relish on the rush of pleasure that came pulsing inside your body. As you cried out at the rising pleasure taking over you to each time he pushed himself in, the tip of his hard cock hitting home base, you buried your face at the crook of his neck, biting his skin to drown your moans.

He gripped harder at your hips and had you throwing your legs around his waist so he could reach deeper, and his bare chest grazed over yours as you both found a rhythm to move together as one. Your bodies were slick with sweat as he kept pumping his cock in and out of you, thrusting hard and quick in a fluid pace that had your legs shaking, your heart pounding, and the pleasure rushing so fast that you could barely hold on.

Hoseok kissed you, drawing the air out of your lungs and you didn’t even notice it until then that you had been crying out his name. You clawed at his back when you felt yourself climbing to the top, rising to the peak of your pleasure, desperate to tie you together forever as you prepared yourself to embrace your climax. He thrust as he climaxed, filling you up with his hot cum, and he kept on moving his hips, sliding his length against your pulsing walls until his release triggered your own, sending you spiralling under his control and you were thrust to the edge until you came with a loud moan which he drowned in his kisses.

He held you close, his hips began to move slower as he prolonged your orgasm with a few more lazy thrusts until the remaining spasms of your release began to cease.

Pressing his forehead against yours, Hoseok whispered breathlessly while his eyes were looking straight into yours. “Are you happy with me?”

“Yes.” There was no denying it. You were happy when you were with him. His presence, his love, the compassion he had for you had always been able to make you happy.

Your answer earned a sigh of relief coming from him. Your heart swelled as his smile grew slowly on his lips. Then he descended on you, capturing your lips on his while whispering to you, “Don’t ever forget that. I love you.”

“I love you too. I really do,” you whispered to him back between each gentle kisses, before you let him deepened the kiss and sealed your love together with it.

Hoseok rolled off of you when his cock softened in your warmth, pulling you into his arms as he laid down on the bed and tucked you in the crook of his neck.

You closed your eyes, relishing on the way Hoseok’s naked body was pressed against you and his protective arms were wrapped around your frail body. You listened closely to the sound of his heartbeat while you hid away from his eyes.

Hiding your face from him was simply a way for you to hide the feeling that suddenly came rushing inside you when the pleasure slowly began to subside.

Hoseok fell quickly into his slumber not too long after, while you lied awake in his arms with your mind spiralling with tons of questions, fear, dread coming over you. You couldn’t let him know that you were still aching, though a part of the pain had been dulled and overshadowed by his love. You couldn’t let him know that what he had thought was the beginning of your healing process, was actually the start of your fall.

Closing your eyes, you let your tear fell as you felt yourself slipping away from him, as you suddenly felt as if the world that you have built with him was beginning to fall apart.

PRESENT DAY

“Welcome to The Eden Initiative. How may I help you?”

Hoseok raises his head, trying his hardest to keep his face stoic to hide the way his nerves are spiralling out of control inside him. The female receptionist keeps her bright smile on her face as she waits for Hoseok to finally speak. She must have gotten used to dealing with nervous patients such as he is to be able to stay calm and nonchalant about it.

“I—yes, I’m sorry,” Hoseok shakes his head, trying to get himself together. “My name is Jung Hoseok. I have an appointment for a consultation regarding an upcoming treatment.”

“Certainly. Let me check your name. Will this be your first appointment?” The receptionist speaks to him with a cheerful voice, though it sounds a bit robotic, and Hoseok could only nod pensively. “Will you please wait a moment while I inform the specialist that you’re here?”

“Sure,” Hoseok says, following the receptionist’s guide to head out towards the waiting room.

Hoseok stops right at the doorway, feeling like his legs had turned to stone.

The waiting room feels cold and forlorn. He can see a few other people sitting there, waiting, keeping their distances from each other. He looks around for a while, trying not to pay too much attention to them as he tries to find an empty spot. If his unsteady nerves are anything to go by, then he knows that they would be sharing the same uneasiness as the one he is feeling inside, which means that his prying eyes are clearly unwarranted.

He is relieved to find an empty seat far in the corner, away from the solemn-looking patients. He keeps his eyes looking on the ground as he makes his way across the room, only finding them doing the same thing and not looking his way once he is seated.

In the end, as minutes continue to pass by slowly, his curiosity gets the best of him and Hoseok cannot help but take a quick glance around.

His eyes fall first at the young woman sitting the closest to him. Her eyes are empty, the bags under those eyes are dark and deep, her hands are clenched tightly on her lap with a soiled handkerchief in her tight clutch. He cannot help but wonder if you were like this the day you came into this facility to do your treatment, if you had looked just as broken as she is when you asked for their help.

Hoseok quickly looks away and presses a hand over his chest just as pain strikes right at the center of his beating heart. He cannot think about you, not right now. So he takes a deep breath, steadies himself before looking the other way. Then his gaze falls to a couple sitting in the corner. An old man is there with a younger woman who appears to be his daughter. Each of them carrying an urn on their laps and neither were speaking or looking at each other.

On the other corner was a lone man, sitting on his own with a cardboard box on his lap. He has his head down, but Hoseok could see him stealing glances left and right, looking so tense is if he is planning to bolt right out of here anytime soon. Hoseok looks away just as the man glances right at his way and pretends as if he is more interested in reading a random brochure that had been placed on the coffee table in front of him.

“Mr. Jung Hoseok.”

Hoseok looks up to find the receptionist now standing in the doorway. She still has her smile on her face and a folder of files hugged against her chest. “The head specialist is ready to see you now. Will you please follow me?”

Hoseok says nothing as he rises from his seat. He keeps his eyes low to avoid the other patients’ gazes and keeps his chin up as he follows her lead down the hallway. She stops right in front of the door at the right end and gives it a few knocks. A muffled voice calling out, “Come in,” is heard and she opens the door for them to enter.

Everything feels like it is moving in a slow-motion when Hoseok is led to take a seat in front of the specialist’s desk. The receptionist leaves the room after handing out the folder she carried with her, and silence fills the room for a moment as the man in the white coat sitting behind the desk takes his time to peruse through it to find whatever information he is looking for inside that folder.

“So—Mr. Jung Hoseok,” the specialist suddenly starts speaking, startling Hoseok who has been staring absentmindedly on the desk between them. “My name is Kim Namjoon. Feel free to call me Namjoon.”

“Right,” is all Hoseok could say before Namjoon looks down on his files again.

“I see that you’ve filled in the form on our website with all of your basic data already. It says here that you are looking for a selective memory to be terminated?”

All of a sudden, Hoseok feels like his tongue has turned into sandpaper that it takes him a while to find his voice again. “Yes, that’s right,” he says, looking down on the printed form which he had filled a few nights ago.

Namjoon smiles patiently before he retrieves a new set of papers from his drawers. “Very well. I hope you don’t mind filling up some more questionaries regarding this selective memory you wish to be removed,” he says as he hands the set of papers to Hoseok. “I also have a few questions later once you are done. I know you may have tons of questions too.”

Hoseok straightens up on his seat before he begins filling up the form in his hands. It has all the standard information needed for the procedure from what he wishes to be removed—names, events, dates, a few other intricate details that may help find the selective parts of his memory that he wants to get rid of.

His hand is shaking a little when he is about to write down your name that it takes him a few try before he could get it right. Then he adds Min Hana into the list. He doesn’t have any vivid memory of her aside from her being her junior at one time and your best friend before things fell apart. But each time he remembers her, the only thing that comes to mind would be your crestfallen face, the guilt that haunts you, and the tears cascading your face when you were standing at her funeral and watching her being placed to rest.

He writes down the dates and events starting from his first meeting with you, his first meeting with Hana, the first time he officially asked you to be his girlfriend, and other important dates that he could remember.

He had always been thankful for his photographic memory which had allowed him to remember every significant moment he shared with you. But now he despises it, for he will have a long process of getting rid of every single one of them so he could erase all the pain, the heartache, the loss he has been feeling since you left.

And it is even harder now that he had gained more memories about you for the past few months alone.

There is a reason why he had always been tracking you down—taking chances to see you every morning at the diner, walking past by your gallery at lunchtime with the hope that he could catch a quick glimpse of you, sometimes attending your events without appearing right before your eyes just to see how well you are doing. For some sick reason, he has been collecting those memories on purpose, to be able to witness and remember how you are now as you are living your new life, just so he could see you be happy and free without any guilt weighing you down from living your life.

Because it had been the only wish he has ever had, the one last wish he wants to fulfil before he would erase you from his memory. For you to be happy.

Now that he knows that you are finally free, it is time for him to let go.

Namjoon has more questions for Hoseok once he is done filling up all the forms, similar questionaries to help the specialists decide on when the procedure could take place added with a few more technical questions to answer—things like his insurance policy, his health records, emergency contact that the facility should keep in touch with in case needed, then he needs to write down the list of people that would know everything about him and his relationship with you so they could be informed and warned about the treatment he was having.

“It says here that you prefer to have the procedure at your personal space. Would it be your apartment?”

“Yes,” Hoseok answers firmly. “It would make things easier when it’s done somewhere private.”

“Good thinking,” Namjoon agrees. “Alright, so I have all of your information for now. The next step would be setting up a health check to make sure that there will be no obstacles during the procedures. You can take it in our clinic so we could charge it as a whole package if you’d like.”

“Yes, I’d like that option.”

“You will have to collect every piece of item which used to belong to her or anything that might remind you of her. Every single one—a photo, an old ticket from a movie, pieces of jewelry, anything. Compile them into one box or a package and place them right in front of your door for our staff to retrieve when they come in for your procedure. And remember to make sure that nobody would come to your apartment on the night our staff is doing their work.”

“That wouldn’t be a problem,” Hoseok quickly says, not bothering to tell the specialist that you had taken everything you had ever owned with you when you left. Although he cannot think of anything that he may still find in his apartment which leads back to you.

He might still have something left. An old piece of clothing, a piece of memento from those times you travelled together with him that he may have kept in his personal drawers, photos and videos that are still saved in his phone and computers.

He suddenly recalls the blouse he had seen you wearing after you had taken the treatment and suddenly wonders if you had forgotten that you had bought that blouse with him.

Unless you had somehow bought the exact same thing after the treatment for no reason at all.

“Will it be possible if the memory we erase return to us one day?”

Namjoon looks down on his notes for a moment and carefully shakes his head. “We haven’t had any complaint or any report about our clients or patients gaining their memory back. Although nobody can deny the power of human’s minds. Some things may happen without us being conscious of allowing it to, but they can happen.”

Nodding his head, Hoseok tries to not think about all of this too much. He hates having to do this, to erase you from his life, for every single memory he had built with you had always been the greatest.

But he also cannot continue living with all the guilt and pain he has been left with since the day you went away, or to continue having a false hope that you may one day remember him again.

Hoseok wipes away the mist that had built up on the bathroom mirror during his hot shower and takes a good look of himself.

Brushing his wet hair aside, he begins shaving his stubbles, brush his teeth, and finishes up by doing the rest of his night routines before going to bed. With a slow exhale of breath, he straightens up his back and finds his resolve before finally stepping out of the bathroom.

He comes to an immediate stop as he enters his bedroom. His new bedroom. It certainly still feels like he is in another dimension, still not used to the new place that he is now living in.

When the specialist from The Eden Initiative told him to eliminate everything that would remind him of you, the one certain thing that he needs to let go first would be his fancy apartment. The whole apartment was built together with you, ever since the day you had chosen it together on the first year you joined Hoseok to live in the city. Every part of it held your touch and it would be impossible for him to take out every little piece and change everything before this night finally arrives.

The facility had given him a few weeks to prepare before he had to go through the procedure, so he used that period of time to find himself a new place. For the sake of his new memory, he had chosen someplace bigger, a medium-sized penthouse which is located a bit closer to his office building. Which would make a lot of sense for him to purchase something so lavish when he had just gotten a promotion at work.

He had bought all new furnitures to fill up his new space, avoiding the soft and bright colours that you would have chosen by picking up every colour in the shades of grey and black with cherry wood accents.

With all the preparation set and done, and all the clearance from the facility having been approved, it is finally happening. Tonight is the night when he is finally letting go.

Hoseok climbs up his new bed, puts on the heart monitor device around his wrist, and finally takes the sleeping pill which had been given on the last day of his consultation with the doctors in the facility. He lies down for a moment, waiting silently for the drugs to start working with his eyes locked on the ceiling. His mind is void of any thoughts, any expectation, just the way he had been trained to do by the health specialists who had been guiding him with all of the preparation needed to be done before this day.

Tomorrow will be a new day.

He had thought that he would crumble and break apart at the very last minute instead of feeling so calm and ready. But it feels like he has been ready. That his heart has been settled to get through this.

All for a new beginning.

It takes two hours before the heart monitor on Hoseok’s wrist sends a report to the expert staffs waiting outside his apartment to let them know that he has fallen into a deep sleep.

The staffs move in swiftly in the dark, setting up all the devices, the monitors, and begin the procedure without interrupting with Hoseok’s peaceful slumber. The entire procedure is painless, and as promised, Hoseok would not feel a thing even if the treatment takes a whole night long.

While the staffs are busy digging through his memories, delicately picking up all the pieces that he had chosen to erase, Hoseok is currently enjoying his time, as he is having one of his finest moment of being lost in the most beautiful and peaceful dream he had ever gotten all his life.

In his dream, he finds himself back at the beach where he had first met you years ago.

He is walking down the beach with you, holding hands with the sound of the rushing waves becoming white noise in the background. You are happy and free, and so is he. You are looking at him with eyes filled with joy and love, just the way you used to look at him, and it feels like his life is once again complete. His heart swells with so much love and happiness that he refuses to let your hand go, even when you pull him into racing you to the edge of the beach.

You stop walking when a beach house comes to sight, the same old wooden house that he saw with you the first night he met you. Except that the structure no longer looks old and worn out the way he found it then, with all the white paint still looking fresh and all the wooden structures still standing strong.

“Let’s go take a look closer and see if we can go inside,” you tease him while pulling him closer, only to have him laughing and pulling you back to him.

“No, it could be haunted!”

You only laugh at him. The sound comes out so freely and it makes him smiling wide. He always did love the sound of your voice, your laughter, and to see you as happy as this.

“Oh, come on, you wuss,” you continue to laugh at him. “Don’t worry, Mr. Lawyer. I’ll protect you.”

“I know you would,” Hoseok whispers to you as he pulls you close.

This time, you make no move to fight back or to pull away, and you melt into his arms when he presses his lips on yours. He kisses you hard, and you return it just as hard. His fingers sink into your waist, digging into your flesh through the soft fabric of your summer dress, while your fingers are buried in his hair as you pull him closer. You open your lips for him to enter, for him to take over your mouth and taste you for the last time.

In a flash, you are both on the sand, with you lying underneath him and he is on top of you, inside you, his hands touching every inch of your bare skin while he is making sweet love to you. This is what he had been missing the most, to be with you again and to touch you the way he used to. To be able to love you and to feel your love vibrating from every part of your body, from the way you are calling out to him as he brings you into the peak of your bliss.

As he keeps on pushing, thrusting, moving slowly and steadily until he could begin to quicken the pace and chase for his release, embracing it together with yours, he descends on you and presses his mouth on yours so he could swallow your cries of pleasure while he releases his climax into you.

He keeps on kissing you when you are both breathless, and he pulls away as his heartbeat settles to calm. Hoseok opens his eyes, his gaze turning warm when he finds you crying. Pressing his forehead against yours, he runs his fingers to wipe away your tears.

“I’m sorry,” you whisper through the soft sobs coming out of your trembling lips.

“Don’t be,” he whispers back, kissing your temple gently as he embraces you tightly one last time. “I understand. I’m sorry for not being able to fix you.”

Hoseok closes his eyes, relishing on your warmth for the last time while the world around him is falling apart, disappearing from his memory bits by tiny bits until there is no more.

“Are you happy with me?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t ever forget that. I love you.”

Hoseok wakes up to warm sunlight peeking through the thick curtains blocking the windows.

He feels calm and serene the moment he opens his eyes. His whole body feels refreshed, as if he had just woken up from one of the longest sleep he has ever had his entire life. Looking at the time, he notices that he still has a lot of time before he has to rush out to work.

He takes a long, hot shower, taking his time to get ready before leaving his apartment. There is a lightness in his footsteps as he walks down the street. The sun feels like it has never been so bright and so warm that he relishes the comfortable feeling as he continues to travel by foot.

Just a block away from his office building, he suddenly feels the need for some breakfast and coffee, despite knowing that he could always send Wooyoung to get them for him once he is at work. The young assistant will always be ready to do it even if he never asked him to. No matter how often Hoseok explains to the younger staff that it is not his duty to grab him coffee every morning, the guy seems to enjoy doing his coffee run for some reason.

Perhaps I should bring him coffee this time for a change and surprise him, Hoseok wonders while chuckling softly.

Just then, he takes the last turn heading to his building, stopping short right across a small diner that is located right at the corner.

Eyeing the diner for a bit, Hoseok can feel his stomach pulling with hunger, his mouth drools as he eyes on the menu posted on their windows—the sight of pancakes and their bacon and eggs on their poster really looks delightful. But at the same time, he suddenly feels as if he is getting swamped with a somber mood, overtaking the brightness that he has been feeling all morning just by staring at the place.

He stands there, debating whether or not he should cross the street and have some quick breakfast before work, when suddenly, a strong scent of coffee and freshly baked bread wafts through the air.

He looks around to find where the wonderful scent is coming from. Then his eyes fall on a small coffee shop just around the corner, looking new and less crowded compared to the diner he was looking at.

Deciding that waiting for a chance to cross the street would take too long, Hoseok turns on his heels and makes his way to the coffee shop instead for his quick meal.

There is something different about today.

You can feel it the moment you wake up when morning comes. In fact, you had woken up about half an hour before your alarm had gone off and you couldn’t go back to sleep that you spent the entire time looking out the window in silence.

The sky is bright outside and your room feels warm. But for some reason, your entire body feels cold even if you had woken up still bundled in your blanket until you kicked it away.

Even if you had waited a while before finally began preparing to go to work, you have managed to finish on record time and you still have around fifteen minutes to spare from the usual time you would leave home when you walk out of your flat.

You head out straight to the subway and instantly catch the ride without having to wait for too long, and the delightful feeling of having everything smoothed out all morning stays with you as you walk down the street-walk, past the fancy buildings and the non-moving traffic on your side.

The positive vibe continues to hang above your head that you practically skip on the sidewalk, humming along the way. Yes, humming. Something that you rarely do in public yet it is happening.

Then your spirit continues to run high when you can see the gallery at the corner of your eyes, right down the block, and you still have a little over an hour to spare. Which is surprising, even for you. You have never once been late to work ever since you started working in the gallery, but this much of spare time is too much of a leisure for you to have.

Just as you stop at the crossroad near the gallery, your stomach begins to churn. Not for the usual tension you would occasionally have before dealing with important meetings, but for hunger. You eye on the diner, the usual place that you would go to when you need to grab some breakfast before work, before you catch the sight of the small coffee shop right across the street.

Cool Beans.

Interesting name. And that is a yummy scent of coffee. I guess a simple non-greasy breakfast and coffee would be nice for a change, you wonder as you walk across the street, joining the morning crowd rushing to work to grab your quick breakfast.

It doesn’t take you long before you finally have your classic breakfast sandwich and a cup of hot latte. The line isn’t too long since the place is new and most people had chosen to grab their coffee to go. Taking your tray, you choose to sit on an empty stool right by the windows and facing out to the street. This spot would be perfect for your people-watching routine while you enjoy your coffee.

You are lost in the view outside for a moment while you are taking a few bites of your sandwich before you finally begin to notice the man sitting right next to you. He has his head down as he is so focused on reading some files scattered around him while sipping slowly on his coffee. You have no idea what it is about him that had pulled your attention on him. It might be his calmness, his rapt attention, or perhaps it is just the way he carries himself as he sits there, leaning back on his chair.

Then you look down on one of the papers which he had placed merely a few inches away from you, noticing the picture on the top of the page which reminds you of something you have seen before.

Similar to the beach house that you saw in your dream.

“That is a nice house,” you accidentally blurt it out as you are wondering about it. Right when you are about to apologise for the interruption, the man raises his head and turns to look at you. Instead of glaring at you for being distracted, he gives you a friendly smile.

Damn, he’s beautiful, you wonder. This time, the words remain in your head instead of slipping out of your lips. Thankfully. Though barely.

“That one is quite splendid, isn’t it?” he nods at the picture with an interesting gleam in his eyes.

“W-what?” you have been lost in admiring his smile that you could barely register that he is speaking to you. Though you are quick to snap out of it. “Right. Yes, it is.”

Shaking your head, you smile apologetically to him for being so stunned with no reason at all. “Sorry, I’ve wanted to have my own house, preferably near the beach, so the house in the picture really drew me in.”

The man raises his brows, clearly looking interested to hear more as he leans a bit closer. “You’re looking for a beach house?”

“Well—” you shrug, “Not right away. Maybe in 2, or 3 years? It’s just that there’s something about being close to the beach or having access to be at the beach at all times that has me interested. The solitude, and being somewhere away from the crowded city. Not to mention the beautiful view of the ocean would be more interesting to look at after a long day compared to looking at other buildings or dark, secluded parks—don’t get me wrong, I love living in the city. But sometimes it can be too much, you know?”

“I think I understand what you mean,” he says, still smiling warmly as if none of your presence or your random rambling is bothering his morning at all. You involuntarily wince when you realise that you really have been rambling.

“Sorry if I talk too much. I get this way when I’m interested in something,” you apologise while tucking your hair nervously behind your ears. “Do you work in real estate? Or maybe something that has to do with properties?”

“Close enough,” he chuckles, his eyes wandering to watch your fingers for a brief moment. “I’m a lawyer. I normally do general practice law, but I’m currently handling a few real estate and property planning cases on the firm where I am working at since we’re a bit of understaffed at the moment. Though my job mostly stays in helping out clients to look into the legal papers which they will need to deal with before signing anything, and help do some cross-referencing on real estate law on each location for them.”

“Well, I handle art pieces and artworks so I have no idea what you are talking about,” you dramatically sigh, before laughing when he does.

“To make it fair, I enjoy artworks, of any kind, but I don’t have any in-depth knowledge to talk about them,” he calmly says, and you slowly feel more comfortable talking to him.

Just as comfortable as old friends would.

“It’s probably too soon to start searching now, isn’t it? I just got promoted about 4 months ago and I haven’t been able to save up enough money to even think about buying properties,” you ask him, suddenly feeling the urge of actually looking for your dream house getting stronger.

The man only shrugs. “Someone wise once told me that it’s never too soon to research on things that you want to gain.”

“That’s some good advice. I should remember that,” you tease him. “Who said that? Your lover?”

“My boss,” he chuckles.

You are swooning, you realise. Terribly. Not only does his laughter and smile are both addicting, but there is also a lightness in the air around him that you can feel as you are sitting there next to him, listening to him talk. And then there are those beautiful eyes of his that speak just about anything.

“My name is Jung Hoseok,” he says, giving you a confident and endearing smile that is so wide and bright that it is enough to drown you, while offering a hand for you to shake.

“I’m ______,” you shyly return his smile while taking his hand in yours. “It’s nice to meet you, Hoseok.”

The smile that he gives you sends sparks running rampant through your entire body, as if every part of you that had been lying dormant has finally come awake. The depth of his gaze on you feels like it is anchoring you in place and it takes a great amount of effort to look away from him.

“So, as a lawyer, what advice would you give me if I want to start looking into buying a property in near beach areas?” you casually ask him only to be able to briefly look away from his intense gaze, though you find yourself searching for his eyes only seconds later and you are surprised to find him still looking at you the same way.

“A lot of research will help you, and if you can get in touch with someone who can help you with financial planning and also someone to advise you on the legal matters of buying a piece of land, then you’ll get your work cut out for you.”

“Really?” you tease him, raising your brows. “Then it’s a good thing that I ran into you this morning, isn’t it, Mr. Lawyer?”

The way he laughs at the new name you had given him pulls your heartstring and you find comfort in the way his eyes gleam brightly against the sunlight. There is something about him which makes you feel warm and fuzzy, and it makes you think of home.

When his laughter dies down and he looks at you with a warm smile, you begin to feel as if the hollowness you have been feeling lately are being knitted back together until you no longer feel the void existing inside your chest. All of a sudden, you feel like you don’t want to go away so soon and you refuse to let this feeling—whatever it is—disappear. Returning his gaze with your own, seeing the same amused and hopeful look in his eyes as he looks at you, you already know that you are going to be late for work today.

Really late.

And you don’t mind it at all.

— © 2020 Yoonia, all rights reserved. reposting/modifying of any kind is not allowed. translations are not allowed.

Author’s Note: Thank you for reading! Please let me know what you think about this story. Please leave lots of likes, comments, reviews, and tell your friends if you enjoyed the story.

[ksmutclub]

Festive Frivolity - Spring Project

WELCOME TO THE SPRING PROJECT FOR KSC!

K Smut Club is proud to present our first Spring project, Festive Frivolity, in collaboration with @ficswithluv, and @bangtansmutcentral.

This project is all about Spring. Entries can be fics, moodboards, fanart, video edits, fanedits, etc.

Rules:

You must be a member of at least one of the collaborating clubs/networks, you can sign-up after you have been accepted if it is still within the deadline.

You must use the tags #FestiveFrivolity and #ksmutclub within the first 5 tags on your piece

You must reblog this post.

For a Collaboration:

If you wish to do a collaboration with another member of the club you can, make sure to speak to them first and fill in the appropriate sections in the signup form. All members of a collaboration must fill out an application and be members of the club.

Theme Ideas:

Spring Break

Spring Festivals from around the world

New Beginnings

Spring Carnivals

Important Dates:

March 1st: Project Signups Start

April 20th: Signups Close

May 15th: Project Deadline @ 7 pm ET (-04:00 UTC)

May 18th: Masterlist Posted

Here is the link to sign-up.