So can you make like mixed sfw + a lil smut headcanons for Kyungjun from Night Has Come?🤭
Go Kyungjung | boyfriend headcanons
pairing: Go Kyung-Jun x gn!reader
genre: fluff, smut (mdni!), wc: 676
warnings: smut, edging, public sex, bj
a/n: English isn’t my first language so please bare with any grammar mistakes
@nyxayss: (>᎑<๑)/♡
sfw
- mean tease: if you're listening to music with your airpods and your phone lies somewhere out of your reach, he would just turn off your bluetooth
- runs away with your phone, asking you to catch him
- the type of boy who's mean to you to show he's interested: if you're wearing a ponytail, he's tugging on your hair, will search up weird stuff on your phone and claim that the school ministry can see it because you were using the school WiFi
- always chilling in your room just because he likes spending time with you
- emotionally intelligent, so he will pick up on anything you're trying to hide from him, bugging you about it until you finally spill it out
- at the beginning of your relationship he'd try to hide it but he's super emotional
- totally cries while watching sad movies but leaves the room with a weak excuse so you wouldn't see
- likes fashion trends and will gift you stuff (if there's a new sneaker dropping, trust you and him are the first to have them)
- forces you to play basketball with him, using the excuse of helping you with your form to keep his hands on your body at all times -> will cheer excessively, high fives and spinning you in the air for every time the ball even brushes the hoop
- takes a bunch of selfies with your phone and claims that you'll ask him for pictures anyway so he might as well do it beforehand— you'll actually find pictures of him in your phone on days you didn't even notice him snatch it
- he knows your passcode and you know his
- matching wallpapers
- falls asleep on your shoulder all the time, no matter the location
- deliberately "forgets" his stuff at your place like old T-Shirts or occasionally even a jacket just to watch you claim it, wearing the over sized stuff like a trophy
- always shares his food with you and won't hesitate to grab yours either, you're getting his first bite and he's taking your left-overs
- seats you on his lap at every occasion and likes resting his chin on your shoulder cause that way he can lazily kiss a trail up your neck
- won't hesitate to throw hands if someone is either chatting you up or bothering you — he doesn't see the difference, just your discomfort and that's making him mad
- super silly, so he'll be in for everything: build a bear, indoor playground (acing, challenging you to keep up with him)
- the second the word "bet" or "challenge" leaves your mouth, he's in
- spontaneous dates: knocks on your window just to show you that he's so athletic, he can make it up there
- spontaneous sleepovers: delieberately comes over when it's super late so he can be like "I'll just crash here, yeah? It's already super late and I'm so tired-"
- will send you thirst traps of himself
nsfw
- insane stamina like he can go multiple rounds as a warm up
- a mean tease: will edge you for hours because he loves the look of frustration on your face
- will ask you a million times what you want him to do because he loves how colorful your vocabulary gets when you're frustrated
- public sex, risks accepted cause he couldn't care less if someone saw "Shh. It's okay, just focus on me."
- acts of service for every blowjob — if you wake him up with one, he'd play personal assistant all day
- if you're the one initating the sex, you're not living it down easily "Are you that down bad for me? You need me to take care of you?"
- easily manhandles you
- lives for hickeys, on you to mark his territory and on him because he loves seeing how you seemingly can't get enough from him
- films you a lot especially while riding him but he wouldn't show it to anyone — the material is just for him to rewatch later
- FaceTimes you before going to sleep and on certain days he'd ask you to help him out, show a little more
- even tho he’a really pristine in general, in bed he’s messy, cumming on your face, your chest, your stomach — whatever he’s in the mood for
It started as a secret for safety. Kyungjun had insisted... it was better that no one knew. And honestly, part of you agreed. Being Go Kyungjun’s girlfriend in public came with a target on your back. So you let him keep it in the shadows. But neither of you expected Hyunho to be a problem.
You hadn’t even thought Hyunho liked you like that. But then came the snacks, the way he started showing up early just to walk with you to class, the excuses to sit beside you during lunch. And Kyungjun? He noticed.
He always noticed.
It started subtly. Kyungjun would go quiet when Hyunho was around. His eyes would follow him with a coldness that made your skin prickle. But lately, it was getting worse.
Today, during break, Hyunho had snagged the seat beside you before you could react. He leaned close, whispering some stupid joke in your ear that made you laugh. Kyungjun watched from the other table, jaw clenched, fingers drumming an uneven rhythm on the tabletop.
You shot him a look across the cafeteria — one that said be cool — but he didn’t return it.
When the bell rang, Hyunho offered to carry your books.
"I’m not helpless, you know," you teased.
He grinned. "Doesn’t mean I don’t wanna help."
You rolled your eyes but let him take one of your textbooks. That was a mistake.
Because Kyungjun was waiting for you by the side stairwell.
The moment you stepped into the dim space between classes, he pulled you in roughly by the wrist.
"Ow — Kyungjun, what the hell?"
He slammed the stairwell door shut behind you. "Don’t let him touch you."
Your heart pounded. "It was a book. He was just being nice."
Kyungjun stepped in close. Too close. "You think he doesn’t want more than that? You think he’s not looking at you like he wants to steal you from me?"
You blinked. "Maybe if you didn’t keep me a secret, he wouldn’t even try."
His jaw twitched. You knew that struck a nerve. For a second, he looked away. Then he leaned in again, voice low. "If I could take you everywhere and let everyone see you’re mine, I would. You know that. But that guy? He’s crossing a line."
You stared at him. Angry, breathless, a little turned on by the way he said mine.
"So what do you wanna do? Punch him in front of the whole school? Start a fight and blow our cover?"
Kyungjun didn't answer. Instead, he cupped your face and kissed you. Rough, desperate, all teeth and frustration.
You melted into him. Just like you always did.
When he pulled back, his eyes burned. "If he touches you again, I’m ending it. I don’t care who sees."
The next day, you tried to put some distance between you and Hyunho. But he was persistent. During gym class, he ran beside you during warm-ups. During lunch, he slid into the seat beside you again. You glanced over at Kyungjun.
He didn’t sit with you today.
Your phone buzzed under the table.
Kyungjun: Meet me. Locker hall. Now.
You slipped away five minutes later, making an excuse about the bathroom. Kyungjun was already there, pacing like a caged animal.
"You ignoring me now too?"
You shut the door behind you. "What do you want me to do, Kyungjun? He’s not getting the hint."
He stalked over, grabbing your chin. "Then let me give it to him."
"You said we had to keep this secret. That was your rule."
His hand dropped to your waist, yanking you flush against him. "Maybe I changed my mind."
Your breath hitched. "You serious?"
He kissed you again. This time slower. Deeper. His hand slid under your shirt, fingers gripping your waist like he was afraid you’d disappear.
"Yeah," he murmured against your lips. "I’m done hiding. If Hyunho wants to see who you belong to, I’ll show him."
Your heart slammed against your ribs.
It wasn’t long before someone opened the locker room door and gasped.
"Shit," you whispered.
Kyungjun just smirked, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, then casually reached over and laced your fingers together.
a/n: sooo I was thinking of Go Kyung-jun and just the whole class, realistically we don't know how long they were in the game but I'm guessing for a couple of months at least, so they were missing, fully. How shocking and heartbreaking would it be for the city to find out the whole class is missing, it would be huge. So what if Go Kyung-jun had a girlfriend outside of his class?
The first time Go Kyung-jun disappeared, it was an ordinary morning.
That was the part that ruined me later.
Not the phone call. Not the police station. Not the funeral with no body, no ashes, no proof, just a framed school photo on a wooden stand and a line of white chrysanthemums wilting beneath fluorescent lights.
It was the morning before all of it, the stupid, normal, careless morning I kept returning to like a loose tooth I couldn’t stop worrying with my tongue. The kind of morning no one respects because nothing in it announces itself as the last. The sky had been pale and thin, the kind of washed-out blue that made the apartment buildings look flat and tired. My uniform collar had been crooked. I remembered that because Kyung-jun had noticed it before I did, had clicked his tongue like I was personally embarrassing him, and reached over to fix it with fingers that were too rough for something so small.
“You go out looking like this?” he’d said, like he was disgusted, like his ears weren’t turning red because we were standing close enough for me to smell the mint gum on his breath.
I’d swatted his hand away even though he was already done. “You always act like you’re my stylist.”
“Someone has to. You dress like you lost a fight with your closet.”
“You dress like you bully mirrors.” He had laughed then, sudden and loud, head tipping back a little, sharp teeth flashing under the weak morning light. Kyung-jun always laughed like he expected the world to flinch from it. Like joy, for him, was another kind of threat.
Then he had walked backward down the sidewalk, hands shoved into his pockets, his schoolbag hanging off one shoulder, too big and too broad and too careless for the narrow street. He had smirked at me when I told him to hurry up before he was late.
“You worried about me?”
“No. I’m worried your teachers might finally realize you’re a lost cause.”
“Liar,” he’d said, pointing at me like he’d caught me doing something embarrassing. “You’re obsessed with me.”
I’d rolled my eyes. He’d grinned wider. And then he’d turned around. That was it. That was the last clean thing. The last version of him I had before the world split open.
By lunchtime, he wasn’t answering my texts. By the end of school, his phone went straight to voicemail. I told myself he was being annoying. I told myself he was probably sleeping through class, probably fighting with someone, probably doing that thing where he saw messages and decided responding too fast made him look pathetic, as if I didn’t already know exactly how pathetic he could be when no one else was watching. I sent him a voice message calling him an asshole. I sent three question marks. I called once, twice, five times, then stared at the screen until the letters of his name blurred into a dark little wound.
The call from his grandmother came at 7:42 p.m.
I remembered the time because I spent months staring at it in my call history until the phone replaced it with a date, and then I stared at that too, as if time itself had done something wrong by moving.
When I answered, her voice was not a voice at first. It was breath. A broken, shallow sound, like she’d been running though I knew her knees hurt too much for running, like she was holding the phone with both hands and still couldn’t keep it steady.
“Halmeoni?” I said, already standing. She said my name once. Just once. And everything inside me went quiet.
There are certain kinds of fear the body understands before the mind does. My hand tightened around the phone until the edges dug into my palm. I could hear the television playing in the living room behind me, some variety show with canned laughter bursting too brightly through the walls. Outside, someone’s scooter whined past the building. Somewhere, a dog barked and barked, sharp and ordinary, furious at nothing.
“What happened?” I asked.
She tried to answer. I heard her inhale. I heard the wet, trembling catch of her mouth opening and closing around words that would not come out right.
“Kyung-jun,” she said. My heart kicked once, hard enough to hurt.
“What about him?”
“He’s gone.”
For one stupid second, I thought she meant he had left the house. I thought she meant he had stormed out after an argument, that he had been rude, that he had slammed a door, that he had done what he always did when something pressed too close to the soft places he kept hidden. I almost felt relief. I almost said, I’ll call him. I almost said, He’ll come back.
Then she said, “His whole class.”
My fingers slipped on the phone. “What?”
“They’re gone. All of them,” she whispered, and then the whisper broke, and suddenly she sounded very old. Older than she had that morning. Older than she had ever sounded pouring me tea, scolding Kyung-jun for eating too fast, pretending not to notice when he sat too close to me at the table and stole fish from my bowl. “The school called. The police are there. No one knows—no one knows where they are.”
I do not remember getting my shoes on.
I remember the floor tilting. I remember my bedroom doorframe under my hand. I remember saying his name, not to her, not really, but into the apartment, into the air, into whatever part of the world had swallowed him. I remember my mother asking what was wrong from the kitchen and the way I could not look at her because looking at another living person would make it real. I remember my throat closing so tightly that my first sob came out silent, my whole chest convulsing around nothing.
Then sound returned all at once.
“No,” I said, and it was ugly. Small. Childish. “No, no, no, no, no.”
His grandmother was crying. I had heard her cry once before, softly, when Kyung-jun got into a fight so bad he came home with his cheek split and blood dried black beneath his nose. She’d cried in the kitchen where he couldn’t see, wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist before turning around and yelling at him for being an idiot. That cry had been tired. Worried. Human.
This was different.
This was an animal sound trapped in an old woman’s body.
“I’m coming,” I said.
I don’t know how I got there so fast. I must have run the whole way because my lungs burned by the time I reached the building, and my legs felt strange under me, too light and too weak, like they belonged to someone who had already fallen. His grandmother opened the door before I knocked. Her hair was loose from its usual careful bun. One side of her cardigan had been buttoned wrong. She looked at me, and whatever strength she had been using to stay upright simply left her.
I caught her before she hit the floor.
For a moment we stood there in the doorway holding each other like two people caught in the same wave, her hands clutching the back of my hoodie, my face pressed into the powdery smell of her shoulder. She was crying into my hair. I was crying into her cardigan. Neither of us said his name, because his name had become a door we could not open without falling through.
Inside, the apartment looked exactly the same.
That was cruel too.
His shoes were still by the entrance, kicked sideways because he never put anything away properly unless his grandmother threatened to hit him with a slipper. His jacket hung on the back of the chair. A half-empty bottle of banana milk sat on the table, the straw still punched through the silver top. His grandmother had made stew. I could smell it on the stove, warm and rich and untouched, the scent filling the little apartment like an insult.
“What did they say?” I asked, wiping my face with my sleeve because my hands were shaking too badly to do it properly.
She told me what she knew. It was almost nothing.
The class had left school. The school said there had been a planned activity, but no one could confirm the location. The bus driver had been found unconscious at a rest stop with no memory after a certain point. Phones were dead. The GPS data stopped at the same time for everyone. No ransom. No accident reports. No bodies. No wreckage. Just an entire class folded out of the world like someone had taken scissors to the day and cut them cleanly from it.
His grandmother kept repeating, “He would have called me.”
And I kept saying, “I know.”
Because he would have.
He was careless with teachers and cruel with classmates and loud enough to make strangers turn around in restaurants, but he called his grandmother if he was going to be late. Not always politely. Sometimes it was just, “I’m not dead, stop nagging,” before hanging up. But he called.
He would have called me too.
Even if it was only to be annoying. Even if it was only to send a voice message saying, “Yah, why are you blowing up my phone like a psycho?” Even if he pretended not to like it. Even if he made me want to throw my phone at a wall.
He would have answered.
After a while, I went to his room.
His door creaked the same way it always did. His grandmother kept telling him to fix it, and he kept saying he would, and then he never did because Kyung-jun lived as if every tiny responsibility was a personal attack. The room smelled like him. Laundry detergent and cheap cologne and something warm beneath it, sweat and skin and the ghost of him pressed into the sheets. His desk was messy. Textbooks open and abandoned. A pen without its cap. A receipt from a convenience store crumpled beside his keyboard. His bed was unmade, blanket twisted from the morning, pillow dented where his head had been.
I stood there staring at it until the room blurred.
Then I crawled onto his bed and broke.
Not prettily. Not the kind of crying that belongs in dramas, with tears shining silently under soft lighting. I cried like my body was trying to reject the truth before it could settle inside me. My mouth opened around sounds I could not control. My fingers twisted in his blanket until the fabric burned my knuckles. I pressed my face into his pillow and breathed him in so hard it hurt, as if there might be enough left of him in the cotton to keep him real. As if he was hiding in the smell of his own bed. As if grief was a thing I could outsmart by refusing to lift my head.
At some point his grandmother came in. She did not tell me to stop. She sat on the edge of the mattress and touched my hair with trembling fingers.
“He loves you,” she whispered. I squeezed my eyes shut.
“He’s coming back,” I said into the pillow. The words were muffled. Wet. Desperate enough to humiliate me if anyone else had heard them. His grandmother’s hand stilled.
Then she said, very quietly, “Yes.” But she did not sound like she believed it.
Six months later, the police asked the families to hold funerals.
They did not use the word ask at first. They dressed it up in gentle voices and official phrases, grief counseling language and practical advice, all those careful, padded words adults use when they have run out of answers and want their failure to sound kind. They said the investigation would remain open. They said search efforts would continue if new evidence appeared. They said absence of bodies did not erase hope, but the human mind needed ritual, closure, a place to mourn.
Closure.
I hated that word so much I felt it in my teeth.
The funeral hall smelled like flowers and polished wood and too many people breathing in one room. Every missing student had a framed photograph. Every photo had a black ribbon in the corner. Kyung-jun’s picture was one from school, his tie slightly loose, his expression caught somewhere between bored and irritated. He looked like he might step out of the frame just to complain about how ugly the photo was.
I stood in front of it for a long time.
People moved around me in dark clothes. Mothers collapsed against fathers. Fathers stared at the floor with red eyes and clenched jaws. Someone wailed from the far end of the hall, a raw sound that rose and fell until it became part of the air. The classmates’ younger siblings stood confused and frightened at the edges, dressed in black too big for them, holding white flowers they didn’t know what to do with.
Kyung-jun’s grandmother held my hand so tightly my fingers went numb.
I did not cry at first.
I couldn’t.
I stared at his face until the edges of the photograph sharpened unnaturally, until I could see the tiny strand of hair falling near his eyebrow, the slight curl of his mouth like he was about to say something mean. I kept thinking, he would hate this. He would hate the flowers. He would hate the crying. He would hate people looking at him like he was something sad and finished. He would lean down to me and mutter, “Why does everyone look so ugly when they cry?” and I would hit his arm and he would grin because he got the reaction he wanted.
Someone guided me closer with the incense.
I looked at the portrait.
My knees gave out.
It happened so suddenly that I didn’t feel myself falling until hands caught me under the arms. The sound that came out of me did not feel like mine. It was too loud. Too torn open. It scraped through my throat and filled the funeral hall, and I hated myself for it because Kyung-jun would have teased me, would have called me dramatic, would have said, “Yah, you trying to make my funeral about you?”
And then I cried harder because for one second I heard his voice so clearly I turned my head, looking for him. There was no one there.
After that, time became something I survived rather than lived in.
I graduated.
People said that like it meant something. Like walking across a stage and receiving a paper could close the year behind me. Like the world had not kept moving with a hole in it. I packed my things for university in the city and found one of his hoodies at the back of my closet, black, oversized, the sleeves stretched because he always yanked them over his hands when he was bored. I sat on the floor holding it for almost an hour. It barely smelled like him anymore.
That was the day I understood why people begged ghosts to haunt them.
For a while, I went to his grandmother’s every weekend. Then every other weekend. Then when classes got heavy, once a month. She never blamed me. She said I had to live. She said Kyung-jun would be angry if I didn’t.
“He’d say something awful,” she told me once, pouring tea with hands that had grown thinner. I smiled because she was right.
He would have called me stupid for crying. Then he would have sat beside me and nudged my knee with his until I leaned into him. He never knew what to do with softness when anyone could see it. He acted like tenderness was something embarrassing that happened to other people. But in private, when his room was dim and the city lights cut pale lines across the walls, he would hook a finger through mine and pretend it was nothing. He would rest his chin on top of my head and complain that I was heavy even though he was the one pulling me closer.
A year passed.
Then more.
His case became one of those strange tragedies people talked about in low voices when documentaries needed content. The missing class. The impossible disappearance. The cold case with no bodies and no ransom and no answers. Sometimes people at university brought it up without knowing I had loved one of the boys in the photos. I learned to sit very still when they did. I learned how to hold a pen without breaking it. I learned how to say, “Yeah, I heard about that,” in a voice calm enough to pass as indifference.
But at night, I still checked.
News articles. Police updates. Forums filled with theories so cruel and stupid I wanted to reach through the screen and shake strangers by the throat. I checked unidentified patient lists once. I checked hospitals after disasters. I checked because hope had become ugly inside me, not bright, not pretty, but stubborn and half-starved, dragging itself across every empty day with bloody hands.
I did not believe he was alive in the way happy people believe things. I believed because the alternative was a room I could not enter.
The day I saw him again, it was raining.
Not hard. Just enough to turn the sidewalks dark and make the city smell like wet pavement and exhaust, the kind of cold spring rain that clung to hair and lashes. I had left class early because the lecture hall felt too tight, too full of other people’s bodies and pencil scratches and bright laptop screens. My head hurt. My coat was thin. I stopped outside a convenience store to buy an umbrella I didn’t need, mostly because I wanted something to hold.
The bell above the door chimed when I stepped out. Across the street, an old woman stood beneath the awning of a pharmacy.
For a moment, I noticed only her. Small frame. Gray cardigan. Plastic bag hooked over one wrist. Hair pulled back in a careful bun. My body recognized her before my mind did.
Kyung-jun’s grandmother.
Everything inside me went quiet in that same terrible way it had when she called.
She looked older. Smaller. The rain made the sidewalk shimmer between us, headlights dragging long ribbons of white and red across the wet road. People passed in both directions, umbrellas bobbing like dark flowers. A bus groaned at the curb. Someone laughed behind me, bright and careless.
Then someone stepped out of the pharmacy behind her.
Tall.
Too tall.
Black hair damp at the edges. Shoulders broad under a dark jacket. One hand holding the door, the other wrapped around the strap of a bag like he was still learning how to use his own fingers. His face was thinner than it used to be. Sharper. The lines of it cut deeper, cheekbones more pronounced, jaw tight in a way that looked less like arrogance now and more like something wired beneath the skin. There was a pale mark near his temple. Another at his throat, half-hidden by his collar. His mouth was the same.
That was what destroyed me.
Not the height. Not the shoulders. Not even the eyes.
His mouth.
The same mouth that had smirked at me under the weak morning sun. The same mouth that had called me a liar, a brat, a psycho, pretty when he thought I was asleep and couldn’t hear him. The same mouth I had kissed in stairwells and behind school buildings and once in his grandmother’s kitchen when he was supposed to be taking out the trash.
It opened slightly.
He saw me.
The city stopped making sense.
For a second, neither of us moved.
His grandmother turned, following his stare, and the plastic bag slipped from her hand. Oranges rolled across the wet pavement, bright and absurd, one bumping against the curb and stopping there like the world had chosen that tiny detail to prove it was still real.
Kyung-jun stared at me as if I was the ghost.
His eyes were darker than I remembered. Not in color. In depth. Like something had been carved behind them and left open. The boy I loved used to look at the world like he could beat it into giving him what he wanted. This boy looked at me like he had crawled through hell and found my face at the exit, and now he was afraid that if he blinked, the devil would laugh and take me back.
I stepped off the curb without looking. A car horn screamed. Someone grabbed my sleeve and cursed, but I tore free, because the only thing my body knew was his name. It broke out of me before I reached him, loud enough that people turned.
“Kyung-jun!”
His whole face collapsed.
His jaw trembled once, hard, like he hated it. His eyes went wet so fast it looked painful. He took one step toward me, then another, and then I was running, shoes splashing through shallow puddles, rain needling my face, breath tearing out of my lungs in broken pieces.
He caught me so hard it hurt.
His arms came around me like a lock. One beneath my shoulders, one around my waist, lifting me off the ground with a rough sound punched from his chest. I hit him and held on. My hands clawed at the back of his jacket, bunching the fabric in my fists, searching for proof under layers of cloth and rain and impossible time. He was solid. Warm. Shaking. His hair brushed my cheek. His breath struck the side of my neck, ragged and uneven, and then his face was buried there, pressed so hard against me it felt like he was trying to disappear into my skin.
“You’re here,” I sobbed. His fingers dug into my back. “You’re here, you’re here, you’re here—”
“Shut up,” he said, but the words broke in the middle.
I cried harder.
His body jerked around a breath that was almost a laugh and almost a sob, ugly and strangled and nothing like the boy who used to laugh like a weapon. He set me down but didn’t let me go. His hands came up to my face, rough palms cupping my cheeks, thumbs dragging beneath my eyes as if tears offended him personally. He looked at me with a kind of panic I had never seen on him before, not even in old fights, not even when blood ran from his nose and he grinned through it because losing scared him less than being seen as weak.
Now he looked terrified.
His eyes moved over my face too quickly. Forehead, mouth, jaw, hair, eyes again. Like he was counting pieces. Like he had to make sure time had not taken anything from him. His thumb caught on my lower lip. He swallowed.
“Yah,” he whispered. “Why are you crying so ugly?”
A laugh tore out of me, half-sob, half-hurt.
I hit his chest with both hands.
It should have been harder. I meant for it to be harder. But the second my palms struck him, I felt bone beneath jacket, the unfamiliar sharpness of him, and my hands curled instead. His chest rose under my fingers. He was real. He was breathing. He was looking at me with rain caught in his lashes and tears sliding down his face like he was furious at them for existing.
“You died,” I said, voice splitting. “You died. They had a funeral. I had to stand there and look at your picture. I had to—”
His mouth twisted.
“I didn’t die.”
“You were gone.”
“I know.”
“You were gone.”
“I know.”
His voice snapped on the second one, not at me, not really, but because something inside him could not stand the words either. His hands slid from my face to the back of my head, fingers tangling in my rain-damp hair with no gentleness left. Not hurting. Holding. Possessive in a way that would have made me shove him before, would have made me tell him I wasn’t something he owned.
But his hands were shaking. He pressed his forehead to mine. His breath came hot against my mouth. “I tried,” he said.
The rain kept falling.
“What?”
His eyes shut. For one second, his face changed completely. The street vanished from him. The pharmacy. His grandmother. Me. He was somewhere else. Somewhere bright and cruel and endless.
“I tried to come back,” he said, so quietly I almost missed it under the hiss of tires on wet asphalt. “Every time.”
Every time.
The words dropped between us like something with teeth.
I wanted to ask. I wanted to know. I wanted to peel the truth out of him with my bare hands and also never hear a single word of it. Because whatever had happened to him lived in his face now. It lived in the way he flinched when a car horn blared again. It lived in the way his hands tightened on me when someone brushed past too close. It lived in the hollow under his cheekbones, in the swollen exhaustion around his eyes, in the strange, feral stillness of his shoulders.
Kyung-jun had always been restless. Always moving, tapping, leaning, shoving, laughing, picking fights with the air if no one else volunteered.
Now he was too still.
Like if he moved wrong, something would start over.
His grandmother was crying behind him. Quietly at first, then not quietly at all. I looked over his shoulder and saw her with one hand over her mouth, eyes fixed on us, the abandoned oranges bright around her feet. She looked like someone watching the dead return and not trusting God enough to thank him yet.
Kyung-jun noticed me looking and turned his head slightly.
“Halmeoni,” he muttered, voice rough. “Stop crying. People are staring.” She made a choked sound that might have been a laugh if grief had not ruined it.
“You awful boy,” she sobbed. “You awful, awful boy.”
His mouth trembled.
Then his face hardened like he hated that too, hated being seen, hated that his grandmother’s love could touch him where everyone could watch. He pulled me against his side without asking, one arm clamping around my shoulders, his palm spread wide over my upper arm like he had no intention of letting the city test him. He bent, picked up the bag with his free hand, then snapped at a man who had stopped too obviously nearby.
“What are you looking at?” The man looked away immediately. I almost cried again because that was him. That was my Kyung-jun, cracked down the middle and still somehow capable of being an asshole to strangers.
His grandmother wiped her face with a trembling hand. “We should go home.”
Kyung-jun did not answer right away.
His arm tightened around me.
I felt it before he said anything. The conflict running through him, sharp and silent. Grandmother. Me. Home. Hospital appointments, police questions, recovery, missing years, a life that had apparently returned without asking him if he knew how to live in it. His jaw worked once. His eyes flicked down to me.
I knew that look.
Not exactly. Not anymore. But enough.
He was asking without asking, because asking made him vulnerable and Kyung-jun would rather swallow glass than sound like he needed anything.
“You can come with me,” I said. His grandmother looked at me. Then at him.
Kyung-jun’s face closed too fast. “I didn’t say anything.”
“You never do.” His eyes flashed, and for one second, beneath the trauma, beneath the rain, beneath the impossible years between us, the old irritation sparked alive.
“Still annoying,” he said.
My throat tightened around something almost like a smile.
“Still ugly when you lie.”
His gaze dropped to my mouth.
The air changed.
It was not soft. Nothing about him was soft right then except the way his hand moved from my shoulder to the back of my neck, fingers sliding under my hair, warm against rain-chilled skin. His eyes held there, on my mouth, like he had dreamed of it so often the real thing had become dangerous. Like touching me had already ruined him and kissing me might finish it.
“Kyung-jun, go with Y/N, call me when you want to come home” his grandmother said gently.
He blinked, jaw flexing but nodding. Then he looked back at me.
“You still live in the city?”
I nodded.
“Alone?”
I nodded again.
His expression sharpened immediately. “Of course you do. Stupid.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
“You’ve been missing for two years and you’re already insulting my life choices?”
“You made bad ones while I was gone. Not my fault.”
I stared at him through tears. His mouth twitched. Not a smile. Not quite. More like the ghost of one pressing against a bruise. Then his face crumpled again, so quickly that I barely saw it before he pulled me in and kissed me.
The first touch was not careful. It was desperate enough to frighten both of us.
His mouth found mine with a sound that disappeared into my breath, and for a second there was no street, no rain, no grandmother pretending not to cry while watching us like her heart was being torn apart and stitched back together in the same moment. There was only him. His hand at the back of my neck. His other arm locked around my waist. His mouth hot and trembling against mine, tasting like rain and salt and something ruined. He kissed like someone proving a point to the dead. Like he had argued with the universe for two years and finally gotten his hands on the evidence.
I cried into it.
I couldn’t help it. Tears slipped between our mouths, wetting his upper lip, and he made a low, broken sound that would have embarrassed him if he had been whole enough to care. He pulled back just enough to breathe, forehead still pressed to mine.
“Don’t,” he rasped. I shook my head, unable to stop. “Don’t cry like that,” he said, but his own voice shook so badly the command fell apart. His thumb dragged over my cheek again, rougher now, almost angry. “You think I can handle that right now?”
A laugh scraped out of me. “Sorry my crying is inconvenient for you.”
“Yeah. It is.”
“You’re such an asshole.”
His eyes closed. For the first time, he smiled. Small. Real. Devastating.
“I missed you too.”
My apartment looked different with him inside it.
That was the first thing I noticed when I unlocked the door hours later, after his grandmother made us come back so she could feed him first, after she pressed food on me too with shaking hands and watched Kyung-jun eat like every bite was proof, after police called twice and he ignored the second call until his grandmother slapped his arm and told him not to be rude to detectives. After he packed nothing because he had nothing from before except the clothes he’d come back in and a phone the police had given him that he kept staring at like it belonged to someone else.
He stepped into my place and made it smaller.
He had always done that. Taken up too much space. Filled rooms with shoulders and noise and bad attitude. But now there was a strange caution to him, a pause at the entrance as his eyes moved over everything: the narrow hallway, the shoe rack, the kitchen light I had left on, the stack of textbooks on the table, the blanket folded over the couch. His gaze snagged on ordinary objects like he expected them to change while he wasn’t looking.
I closed the door behind us. The click made him flinch. Only slightly but I saw it.
His head turned fast, eyes cutting to the lock, shoulders rising before he forced them down. The movement was so controlled it hurt worse than if he had jumped. Kyung-jun, who used to slam doors just to make people look at him. Kyung-jun, who used to grin when someone startled. Kyung-jun, who used to fill silence before silence could make him think.
I pretended not to notice.
“You can shower,” I said quietly. “I have towels. Clothes might be—”
“I’m not showering.”
I looked at him. His mouth set. I understood too slowly, then all at once.
He did not want a closed bathroom door between us. He did not want water loud enough to hide sounds. He did not want to be alone in a room with steam on the mirror and no way to see what was coming.
“Okay,” I said.
His eyes narrowed. “Don’t say it like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you feel bad for me.” I held his stare for a second.
Then I kicked off my shoes and walked past him. “Fine. Stay dirty.”
His brows twitched.
There. A spark.
“Yah.”
“What?”
“You got mean.”
I put my keys on the counter. “You were gone for two years. I had to develop a personality.”
“You already had one. It was bad.”
I turned around.
He was still by the door, hands hanging at his sides, looking too large and too lost for the little entranceway. The overhead light carved shadows beneath his cheekbones. His hair had dried messily, falling over his forehead in dark pieces. Without rain between us, without the shock of the street, the changes in him were harder to ignore. He was thinner than before, stripped down to sharper edges. His wrists looked too bony where his sleeves rode up. There were marks near the inside of one elbow. Medical. Old bruising faded yellow-green under the skin. His lips were dry from biting.
My throat tightened. He saw me looking. Of course he did.
“What?” he snapped.
“Nothing.”
“Liar.” The word landed between us differently than it had that last morning.
You’re worried about me?
No.
Liar.
I looked away first because if I didn’t, I would cry again, and he had already told me he couldn’t handle it. I went to the kitchen and filled a glass of water. My hands felt strange around the cup, clumsy and too careful. Behind me, I heard him move at last. Slow footsteps. Then nothing. When I turned back, he was standing in the middle of the room, staring at the wall near my desk.
At the photo. I had forgotten it was there.
It was small, tucked into the corner of the mirror, half-hidden behind a postcard and an old university schedule. A picture from before. One of the only ones I had printed. Kyung-jun in his school uniform, scowling at the camera because I’d taken it without warning, one hand reaching toward the lens like he was about to snatch my phone. Behind the fake annoyance, there was a smile beginning in his eyes.
He stared at it for so long the glass nearly slipped from my hand.
“That’s ugly,” he said. His voice was flat. I walked over and held the water out. He didn’t take it.
“Take the water.”
“I said it’s ugly.”
“I heard you.”
“Why’d you keep it?” The question was too sharp. Too defensive. He still wasn’t looking at me. I lowered the glass slightly.
Because it was the only thing I had that looked alive, I thought. Because after the funeral, every official photo made you look dead. Because sometimes I woke up and couldn’t remember your voice right away, but I could look at that picture and remember the exact insult you threw at me after I took it. Because forgetting one tiny thing about you felt like killing you myself.
I said none of that.
“You owed me money,” I said instead. His head turned. I shrugged. “I needed evidence.” For half a second, he only stared. Then the sound that came out of him was almost a laugh.
It broke before it could become one. His mouth twisted, his eyes shining too bright again, and he turned away like I had done something unfair by making him feel a normal thing. His hand came up, rubbing roughly over his face.
“Fuck,” he muttered. I stepped closer. He tensed.
I stopped.
The space between us suddenly felt alive. Full of everything we had not been able to say across two years and whatever nightmare had held him. Full of every unanswered call, every birthday he missed, every night I fell asleep with his hoodie twisted in my hands. Full of every time he must have woken inside that game and realized it had started again. Full of the fact that I had mourned him in black while he was somewhere dying in ways I could not imagine.
“What happened?” I asked.
He went very still.
The apartment changed with the question.
The refrigerator hummed. Rain ticked against the window. Somewhere upstairs, a chair scraped across the floor. Ordinary sounds, thin and harmless, gathering around us as if they too were waiting.
Kyung-jun’s hand dropped from his face.
For a while, he said nothing.
Then he walked past me to the couch and sat down heavily, elbows on his knees, head bowed. The posture did not suit him. Kyung-jun sprawled. Kyung-jun took space. Kyung-jun leaned back like the world had been built for his comfort. Seeing him folded forward like that made something cold slide beneath my ribs.
I sat beside him, close enough that our knees touched. He looked at the contact. Then at me. His knee pressed harder into mine.
“We didn’t go to some class trip” he said.
“I know.” His eyes flicked up. “The police said the trip records were fake,” I said. “Or planted. Or something. They never explained it clearly.”
He scoffed. The sound was automatic, bitter. “Of course they didn’t.”
“What happened?” His hands clasped between his knees. His fingers tightened until the knuckles went pale.
“You won’t believe me.”
“Try me.”
His mouth curved, but there was no humor in it. “Always so confident.”
“Kyung-jun.” The way I said his name made him look at me, like the sound of his name in my mouth pulled something in him loose.
His gaze dropped again, this time to my hands. They were folded in my lap, gripping each other too tightly. After a second, he reached over and pried them apart with rough fingers. Not gentle, exactly. Kyung-jun had never been good at gentle in a way that looked clean from the outside. He hooked his hand around mine and held on. Hard.
“There was a game,” he said. The room seemed to tilt. “Some fucking game we used to play in high school. Not like—” He stopped, jaw flexing, and let out a humorless little breath. “Not some phone game. Not a joke. We woke up in a youth center. It looked real. Felt real. People died.”
His thumb dug into the back of my hand.
“They died, there was a winning team, and then it started again.”
I did not move. I barely breathed. He kept staring at our hands as if my fingers were the only reason the room was still here.
“At first we thought… I don’t know what the fuck we thought. We didn't remember we had played it over and over until they pulled us out. Bodies started dropping and everyone started acting like animals, and every time we got close to figuring something out, it reset.” His voice thickened. He swallowed hard. “You die in there, you feel it.”
My stomach turned.
“You died?” His silence answered before he did. He laughed once. It was horrible.
“Many times.”
The air left me. He looked at me then, eyes sharp with something almost angry, like my fear hurt him and he wanted to punish the room for making me show it.
“Don’t look like that.”
“How am I supposed to look?”
“Not like that.”
“Kyung-jun—”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” he snapped. The words cracked through the apartment. I flinched. He saw. His face changed. The anger vanished so quickly it frightened me, leaving something raw and young underneath. He let go of my hand as if he had burned me.
“Shit,” he muttered. “I didn’t—”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not.” His jaw clenched. He stared at the floor. “Don’t say that when it’s not.”
I swallowed.
That sounded like him too. Mean little mouth. Brutal honesty when softness would have been easier. But beneath it, something had shifted. Before, he snapped because he wanted control. Now he snapped because control was all he had left, and even that kept slipping.
I reached for him slowly this time, giving him space to pull away. He watched my hand like it was dangerous. When my fingers touched his wrist, his eyes shut. Just once. Briefly. But the breath that left him shook.
“I thought you were dead,” I whispered. His hand turned under mine, fast, catching my fingers before I could move away.
“I thought you forgot me.” The words were so quiet I almost didn’t understand them. Something inside me tore open all over again.
He looked furious at himself the second they were out, eyes flashing, mouth hardening like he wanted to shove the sentence back down his own throat. But it was too late. It sat between us. Small and naked and bleeding.
“You thought what?”
He stood abruptly.
I startled, looking up as he paced two steps away, then back, then stopped because there wasn’t enough room in my apartment for whatever was moving through him. His hands went to his hair, pushing it back from his face.
“It was two years,” he said. “I don’t know. In there, time was fucked. Sometimes it felt like days. Sometimes forever. Every time it started again, I remembered less at first. Faces got blurry. Voices got—” He cut himself off. His throat worked. “I kept trying to remember yours.”
My eyes burned.
He turned on me suddenly, pointing like he was accusing me of something.
“Your laugh was annoying as hell. That helped.”
A broken sound slipped out of me.
“And your face,” he continued, voice roughening around every word, “because you always looked at me like you wanted to hit me.”
“I usually did.”
“Yeah. I know.” His mouth twitched, then trembled. “I kept thinking, if I forgot that, I’d really die.”
I stood. He watched me, breathing harder now, shoulders rising and falling beneath his jacket. I crossed the little space between us. For once, he did not make a joke. For once, he did not move first.
I reached up and touched his face.
His skin was warm. Real. Slightly rough beneath my palm. A tiny muscle jumped in his jaw. His eyes stayed on mine with a desperation so intense it felt less like looking and more like being held down by it. The old Kyung-jun would have smirked. He would have said something filthy or stupid or mean to cut the tension before it could cut him.
This one only stood there and let me touch him like he needed it more than pride.
“I didn’t forget you,” I said. His lips parted. “I tried,” I whispered, and that hurt him; I saw it land. “Not because I wanted to. Because everyone kept telling me I had to live. They said I had to move on. They said I was young, that you’d want me to be happy.”
His eyes darkened.
“I would not say that.”
I let out a watery laugh. “No. You’d say something awful.”
“I’d say if you got some ugly boyfriend while I was gone, I’d haunt you.”
“There were no boyfriends.” His whole face changed. The relief was so fast, so violent, that he looked away from me as if I had caught him doing something obscene.
I should have teased him.
Before, I would have. I would have laughed and said, What, were you worried? I would have poked at him until he snapped, because that was how we loved each other then, with teeth and stupid little wounds neither of us meant to make deep.
But now I only watched the tendons in his neck shift as he swallowed.
“No one,” I said. His gaze came back slowly. “I couldn’t,” I admitted. “Not when I still—”
The word love hovered at the back of my throat, too bright, too enormous for the small room. Kyung-jun stepped into me before I could finish.
His arms went around me with a force that stole my breath. He bent over me, face pressing into my hair, one hand splayed between my shoulder blades, the other locked low at my waist. He held me like the world had already taken me once and he was not stupid enough to trust it again. His body was shaking. I felt it everywhere we touched. A tremor running beneath muscle and bone, down his arms, through his hands, into me.
“I’m not leaving,” he said. It came out harsh. Almost like a threat. My cheek pressed against his chest. His heart beat too fast under my ear.
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.” His hand tightened. “You don’t. You go to class, I’m going with you. You go buy water, I’m going. You go to the bathroom—”
I pulled back enough to look up at him. “Absolutely not.”
His eyes were wet again, but his mouth curled. “Why? Shy now?”
“You’re insane.”
“Yeah,” he said, and the smile vanished. “Probably.”
The honesty hit harder than any joke.
His gaze moved over my face, slower now, not counting pieces this time but memorizing them. There was hunger in it, yes, but not simple hunger. Not the easy, cocky kind he used to wear when he wanted me to blush. This was deeper. Worse. A need scraped raw by terror. He looked at my mouth like he had imagined it in the dark. Like he had survived on memory until memory wasn’t enough, and now that I was here, breathing in front of him, his body didn’t know how to be anything but starving.
“Kyung-jun,” I whispered.
“What.”
“You need sleep.”
He gave me a look. “Wow. Romantic.”
“You look like you’re about to collapse.”
“I’m fine.” I stared at him. He stared back. Then his jaw tightened. “I said I’m fine.”
The room filled with all the things that sentence could not hide. The dark crescents beneath his eyes. The way he stood too close to me and still looked afraid the distance might grow. The way he kept glancing at the door even though he had checked the lock twice. The way his fingers flexed whenever there was a sound in the hallway.
“You don’t have to be,” I said.
His expression went cold so fast it was almost impressive.
“Don’t start.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“I’m saying you can sleep here.”
“Obviously.”
“On the couch.”
His face offended itself.
“The couch?”
“Yes.”
He looked at the couch, then back at me as if I had personally betrayed him. “After two years, you’re putting me on the couch?”
A laugh burst out of me before I could stop it. His eyes caught on it. The anger in his face fell fast. For a second, he just stared, and the room softened around the edges.
“What?” I asked, wiping under my eye. His mouth pressed into a line.
“Nothing.”
“Liar.” He looked away, but not fast enough. Color had risen faintly along his cheekbones. I touched his sleeve. “What?”
“Your laugh,” he muttered. My chest hurt. He still wouldn’t look at me. “Still annoying,” he added, weaker, voice shaking slightly.
I stepped closer and wrapped my arms around his middle. He let me. More than let me. His body folded around mine almost instantly, chin dropping to the top of my head, hands finding my back again. He exhaled like he had been holding his breath since the street, since the game, since the first time he woke up and realized dying had not freed him.
“We can share the bed,” I said into his shirt. “But only sleeping.”
“Who said I was thinking anything else?” I tilted my head back to look at him. His brows lifted, almost like before. Almost. “What?” he said. “You think I’m some kind of pervert?”
“I think you’re you.”
“Exactly. So, yes.” I shoved his chest. He caught my wrist and pulled it back around him.
“No,” he said. The word was quiet. My breath caught. He looked down at where my hand rested against him, fingers curled in his shirt. “Don’t move away yet.”
There was no joke after it. No smirk. No insult to cover the soft underbelly of the request. So I didn’t move.
I stood there in the middle of my apartment, wrapped around the boy I had buried without a body, feeling his heart slam beneath my palm as if it was trying to make up for every beat I had missed. Outside, the rain kept threading silver down the window. The city moved on unaware, cars passing, people laughing under umbrellas, neon signs bleeding color into puddles. Somewhere in that same city, police reports were being written. Families were being called. A whole class was being returned to a world that had already mourned them and moved their desks and packed away their uniforms.
But inside my apartment, time narrowed to the shape of his hands.
After a while, he let me lead him to the bedroom. He hesitated in the doorway. I felt it through his hand before I saw it. The slight resistance. The way his fingers locked around mine.
“It’s just my room,” I said.
His eyes swept over the bed, the window, the closet, the lamp, every shadowed corner. “I know.”
“You can leave the door open.”
His mouth tightened. “I’m not scared.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“I’m not.”
“I know.”
He glared at me, but it was ruined by exhaustion. “Stop agreeing with me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m some injured dog you found in an alley.” My eyes moved over him before I could stop them. The bruises. The scars. The hollowed exhaustion. The boy still standing because falling would mean trusting the floor. His gaze sharpened.
“Don’t,” he warned.
I looked back at his face. “Okay.”
He waited, suspicious. I squeezed his hand once and turned down the blanket. He watched like the bed might bite. Then, very suddenly, he said, “I want to marry you.”
My hands froze on the blanket. The silence afterward was enormous. I turned around slowly.
Kyung-jun stood in the doorway with his shoulders tense and his chin lifted, defensive already, like he had thrown a punch and was waiting for one back. His face was serious in a way that made my stomach drop. No teasing curve to his mouth. No theatrical arrogance. Just those dark, damaged eyes fixed on me with too much certainty for the soft yellow light of my bedroom.
“What?” I whispered.
“I said I want to marry you.” My heart lurched so hard it was almost pain.
“You just came back from being kidnapped and tortured.”
“Yeah. I noticed.”
“Kyung-jun.”
“What?” His voice rose, sharp with embarrassment now, with fear disguised badly as irritation. “You want me to wait? For what? So some counselor can tell me my feelings are a trauma response? So people can say I’m unstable? I already know I’m fucked up. Congratulations. Still want to marry you.”
I stared at him.
He rubbed a hand over his mouth, angry at himself, at me, at the room, at whatever had made the words come out before he could dress them in cruelty.
“I’m not saying tomorrow,” he muttered.
“That’s surprisingly reasonable.”
His eyes flashed. “Don’t make fun of me.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
I looked down at the floor, my vision blurring, my heart thumping so loud I'm surprised he hasn't complained about it yet. “I’m just...trying not to cry.” That shut him up. His face shifted again, the anger breaking at the edges.
I stepped toward him carefully. He did not step back. When I reached him, I touched the front of his jacket, smoothing nothing, fixing nothing, just laying my hands there because I could. Because once, for two years, I had only been able to touch cotton that no longer smelled like him.
“You can want that,” I said. His throat moved. “Cause I want it too. But you also need to heal.” His expression hardened. I held his jacket tighter before he could pull away. “And I’m not saying that because I don’t want you. I’m saying it because I do. I want you alive. Actually alive. Not just back.”
The words hit him somewhere deep. His eyes lowered. For a long moment, he said nothing. Then, in a voice so low I felt it more than heard it, he said, “I don’t know how.” I closed my eyes. There it was.
The thing under everything. Under the jokes. Under the snapping. Under the possessive hands and the marriage demand and the way he kept looking at me like I was the last piece of shore after a shipwreck.
I stepped into him and wrapped my arms around his neck. He bent immediately, face dropping to my shoulder.
“We’ll figure it out,” I whispered.
His laugh was bitter against my skin. “That sounds stupid.”
“Yeah.”
“Like something people say when they don’t know shit.”
“Probably.” His arms tightened around me.
“Say it again.” My eyes burned.
“We’ll figure it out.”
His breath shook. Again, I thought he might say. Again, like a boy asking for one more story before sleep. But he only held me, silent and trembling, until the worst of it passed through him.
When we finally lay down, he didn’t take off his jacket at first. He lay on top of the blanket, stiff as a corpse, eyes open and fixed on the ceiling. I lay beside him in the dim light, listening to the rain soften against the glass. The space between us was only a few inches, but it felt cruel.
“You can come closer,” I said.
“I know.”
He didn’t move.
I turned on my side. His profile was sharp in the dark, lashes lowered but not closed, mouth tense. He looked like he was bracing for something. A vote. A scream. A body hitting the floor. The start of another loop.
I reached out and touched his hand. His fingers closed around mine so fast it hurt.
“Sorry,” he muttered immediately, loosening his grip by force.
“It’s okay.”
He turned his head toward me. “Stop saying that.”
“Then stop apologizing.”
“I didn’t apologize.”
“You literally just did.”
“No, I didn’t.” I smiled despite everything. His gaze dropped to it. The room stilled again.
Slowly, as if sudden movement might shatter whatever fragile thing had survived between us, he turned onto his side. His hand came up, hovering near my face. Waiting. That, more than anything, made my chest ache. Kyung-jun had never hovered. He took, grabbed, pulled, crowded. He tested the world with his hands and dared it to complain.
Now he waited. I leaned into his palm. His breath caught.
There was something unbearable about being touched by him after so long. Not because it was new, but because it was familiar in a way my body had almost convinced itself it invented. The rough pad of his thumb beneath my cheekbone. The warmth of his palm. The faint tremor he could not quite hide. His eyes kept moving over me, over and over, like he was afraid sleep would steal the details.
“I used to think about this,” he said.
My throat tightened. “About my bed?”
“Don’t ruin it.” I almost laughed. He brushed his thumb across my cheek. “About your face. Your voice. Stupid things.” His mouth twisted. “You yelling at me. You pretending you weren’t jealous. You getting mad when I bought you coffee because I said your taste was childish.”
“You said only babies drink sweet coffee.”
“You did drink sweet coffee.”
“I still do.”
He stared at me.
Then, very softly, “Good.”
The word broke me more than it should have.
Because it meant I had stayed real in some tiny way. Because it meant the world had not taken every version of us. Because sweet coffee, crooked collars, ugly crying, stupid insults — they had survived too, buried under horror, waiting for him to come back and be cruel about them.
His hand slid to the back of my neck.
“Come here,” he said. It was not really an order. I moved closer anyway.
He pulled me into him, under the blanket this time, his body curling around mine with desperate heat. He was bigger than I remembered. Or maybe I had made him smaller in grief so I could survive the size of missing him. His chest pressed against my back, knees behind mine, arm locked across my waist. His breath stirred the hair near my ear. The whole bed seemed to hold its breath with us.
For a while, neither of us spoke.
Then, barely audible, he said, “I thought I’d never do this again.” My fingers covered his hand on my stomach. He turned his palm upward and tangled our fingers together.
“I’m here,” I whispered. His forehead pressed to the back of my neck.
“Yeah,” he said. A minute passed. Then another. His breathing did not slow. I knew he was afraid to sleep.
Maybe he knew I knew, because his hand tightened once, warning me not to say it. So I didn’t. I lay there in the dark with his body wrapped around mine and let silence do what words would ruin. The city lights shone through the curtains in thin silver lines. Rainwater tracked down the window like veins. His heart beat against my back, too fast, too alive, and every time it stumbled into a harder rhythm, I squeezed his hand until it steadied.
Sometime, when my eyes began to shut slowly, his mouth brushed the nape of my neck. Not a kiss, not quite. A touch. A check. A prayer he would deny making.
“You better not disappear,” he murmured, voice thick with exhaustion. My eyes filled again. I turned carefully in his arms.
He resisted for half a second, then let me face him. His eyes were half-lidded, dark and ruined and still so painfully him that I could barely stand it. I touched his cheek. He leaned into it before he could stop himself.
“You disappeared first,” I whispered.
His mouth twitched faintly.
“Yeah,” he said. “My bad.” A laugh broke out of me, quiet and wet. His eyes softened. Then he kissed me again. This one was slower.
Not less desperate. Never that. The desperation was still there, threaded through his fingers in my hair, in the way his body shifted closer, in the way he breathed against my mouth like every inhale had to pass through me first. But there was something else under it now. Recognition. Grief. The ache of two people touching across the grave everyone else had already built.
He kissed me like he was tired of dying. Like he was angry he had lost time. Like he loved me so much it had nowhere clean to go, so it came out in trembling hands and bitten-back sounds and his forehead pressed to mine afterward, his eyes shut tight.
By four in the morning, the room has stopped pretending to be night and has not yet become morning.
It is that strange, thin hour where the dark turns gray at the edges, where everything feels suspended and unclaimed, where the city outside my window has gone quiet enough that I can hear the building breathing around us. Pipes knock faintly behind the walls. Rainwater gathers at the window ledge and drops in uneven little taps against the metal frame. Somewhere far below, a car passes through the wet street with a soft hiss, tires dragging through puddles, then fades until there is nothing left but the low electric hum of the refrigerator and Kyung-jun’s breathing beside me.
Not sleeping. He has been lying beside me for hours with his eyes open. I know because I have been awake for all of it.
At first, I pretend not to notice. I lie still beneath the blanket with my hand trapped in his, my fingers numb from how tightly he keeps remembering I am there. Every few minutes, his grip changes. Not loosening exactly. Testing. His thumb presses into my knuckles, then slides over them as if counting. His palm warms mine, then tightens again like something inside him startles awake without warning. Once, when the pipes groan too loudly in the wall, his whole body goes rigid beside me, the muscles in his arm locking so suddenly that my wrist aches. He does not move after. Does not speak. Does not explain. He just stares at the ceiling as if something has written instructions there in the dark.
I watch him through half-lowered lashes.
His face looks worse in the almost-morning. The shadows are gentler, but somehow less forgiving. In the yellow lamp glow, he looked wounded. In this hour, he looks haunted. Like whatever brought him back forgot to return all of him. His hair is messy against my pillow, black strands falling over his forehead, and his eyes keep fixed upward, dry and too dark, the skin beneath them bruised with exhaustion. His mouth is slightly parted. Not soft. Not relaxed. Ready. As if breath itself is something he might need to fight for.
Every now and then, he blinks too fast. Like he is trying not to see something. Or trying not to sleep because sleep is where it waits. I understand it slowly. Not as a thought at first, but as a coldness spreading beneath my ribs. The game had nights.
The dying would not have waited politely for daylight. The fear would not have given them neat hours to survive in. There must have been dark rooms and locked doors and hallways too silent to trust, clocks crawling toward whatever time meant death, classmates whispering and accusing and waiting for the announcement that would ruin someone. There must have been the terrible moment before sleep, when exhaustion became a trap. When closing your eyes meant surrendering the one piece of control you still had. When waking might mean relief, or blood, or another beginning.
And now he is here, in my bed, in my apartment, in a world that insists it is real because the blanket is soft and the rain is wet and my hand is in his.
But if he sleeps—If he wakes up somewhere else—I turn my face into the pillow to hide the way my mouth trembles. Kyung-jun notices anyway. His head shifts on the pillow. His eyes move to me. Immediate.
“What?” he asks. His voice is rough from disuse and too much staying awake. It scrapes through the dark quietly, but the sharp edge of him is still there, stripped down and hoarse.
I shake my head once.
His fingers tighten around mine.
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Act like I’m stupid.”
I look at him then.
He is already looking at me so hard it feels like being held under light. The old Kyung-jun would have smirked after saying it. Would have made some cutting little comment, something ugly enough to make me roll my eyes and forget the tenderness underneath. This Kyung-jun only watches me with a kind of brittle intensity, as if my face is a language he has been studying in the dark for two years and he still cannot trust his own translation.
I swallow.
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“I’m thinking.”
“Dangerous.”
It should be funny. It almost is.
The word comes out faintly, more habit than joke. There is no real bite behind it. He looks too tired to sharpen himself all the way. Too raw to hide under the familiar shape of cruelty. His thumb moves once over my fingers, dragging across the same place again and again until my skin tingles.
I let the silence settle. Then I begin to sit up. It happens fast. Too fast. Before I have even pulled my hand from his, Kyung-jun is upright.
The blanket twists around his waist, his hand clamping around my wrist, not enough to hurt but hard enough to stop me cold. His eyes are wide in the dim room.
Scared. It flashes across him nakedly before he can kill it.
“Where are you going?”
The words are quiet, but there is something terrible under them. A crack. A drop. A boy standing on the edge of losing the room, the bed, the girl beside him, the proof that this has not been another cruel loop designed to let him breathe before choking him again.
I freeze. My heart squeezes so hard my own fear forgets what it was doing.
“I’m not leaving.” His grip does not loosen. I say it again, softer. “I’m not leaving, Kyung-jun.”
His eyes flick over my face, then to the door, then back. His breathing has changed. He is trying to make it quiet, trying to force it down before I can hear how uneven it is, but I can hear it. I can feel it through his hand on my wrist. Each breath comes like it has to push past something lodged in his chest.
“Then where?”
“I want to take a bath.”
He stares.
I wet my lips. “I thought it might help. My nerves feel…” I stop, because the lie is not fully a lie, and that makes it harder to say. My nerves are ruined. My body feels wrung out, hollowed by shock and crying and the impossible weight of having him beside me again. But that is not why I am getting up. “The warm water might help.”
His gaze stays on mine. The room holds still. He knows.
Maybe not exactly. Maybe not the whole small, careful plan forming in my head — the salts under the sink, the big tub I used to love because it made my apartment feel softer than it was, the heat loosening his muscles, the steam making the room warm enough that sleep might creep up on him without feeling like a trap. But he knows there is something gentle in it, and gentleness is the thing that scares him most right now.
His throat moves.
“I’ll come with you.” He says it like he expects me to argue. I don’t. I nod.
Something in his face loosens so slightly I would have missed it if I had not spent two years keeping every piece of him alive in my memory. His fingers slide from my wrist to my hand. He does not apologize this time. Does not pretend he was not afraid. He just holds on and gets out of bed when I do, moving too carefully for someone his size, like the floor might shift if he trusts it too much.
My bedroom feels colder once we leave the blanket behind.
The apartment is dark except for the lamp near the couch and the faint blue wash of city light through the windows. We walk barefoot through the hallway. His hand stays locked around mine. Not romantic in the simple way it used to be when we would walk home after school and he would pretend he was holding my hand only because I was “slow” and “needed supervision.” This is different. His palm is damp. His fingers are cold. Every step he takes beside me feels measured against the possibility of waking somewhere else.
At the bathroom door, he stops. Just for a second. I glance back.
He is looking into the little room with a wariness that makes my chest ache. My bathroom is not frightening. It has never been frightening. It is small but pretty, tiled in soft cream, with a narrow window above the tub and a shelf crowded with bottles I always mean to organize. There is a separate bathtub tucked against the far wall, wide and deep, curved like something made for quiet. I bought eucalyptus salts once because the packaging looked calming and expensive, even though I knew I would probably only use them twice. A little wooden stool sits beside the tub with folded towels stacked on top. A candle I have never lit sits near the sink, dusty around the rim.
It is ordinary. Sweet, even. Kyung-jun looks at it like ordinary things cannot be trusted. I squeeze his hand. He looks down at me. Just those eyes, dark and sleepless, asking something he would rather die than put into words.
“You can keep the door open,” I say. He swallows. Then he shakes his head once.
“No.” The word is barely there. Not because he wants privacy. Because closing the door means choosing to believe nothing waits outside it. Because maybe he is tired of being afraid of doors. I nod and step inside first. He follows.
The bathroom light is too bright when I turn it on, and he flinches before he can stop himself. His jaw tightens immediately, anger rising instinctively to cover the crack, but it dies before reaching his mouth. He lowers his eyes and exhales through his nose, slow and hard.
I don’t say anything. I turn on the bath instead.
The pipes groan, then water spills into the tub, loud at first, rushing and silver under the light. Steam begins to lift almost immediately, softening the mirror, blurring the sharp edges of us. I kneel beside the tub and test the temperature with my fingers, letting the heat bite gently at my skin. Too hot. I adjust the tap. The sound fills the room until there is no need to talk, and maybe that is mercy. Maybe that is why I chose this. Water can cover silence without demanding it be explained.
Kyung-jun stands behind me.
I can feel him there.
Not touching now, but close enough that his shadow falls over my shoulder. When I reach under the sink for the salts, he shifts as if the movement startles him, then stills again. I pour a handful into the water. The crystals disappear in small white swirls, dissolving into the heat, and the faint smell of lavender and something herbal rises with the steam.
I expect him to say something. Lavender? Seriously? Are we old ladies now? Or, What is this rich-person bath nonsense? Or, You always buy useless stuff. He says nothing. That is worse. I turn. He is staring at me.
The bathroom light catches the hollows under his eyes. The steam beads faintly at his hairline. He looks too tall for the room, shoulders nearly filling the space between sink and wall, hands hanging at his sides like he does not know what to do with them if they are not holding onto me. His face has gone unreadable, but not in the old way. Not bored. Not cruel.
Bare. There is no audience here. No classmates to impress. No hallway to dominate. No game to survive by being louder than fear. Just him. Just me. Just the water filling the tub between us like something waiting to be crossed. I stand slowly.
The tile is cool beneath my feet. My oversized sleep shirt clings faintly where my palms are damp from the bathwater. For a moment, neither of us moves. The water keeps running. Steam curls upward. The mirror clouds at the edges until our reflections begin to fade, two blurred figures in a small warm room at the hour when nightmares usually have teeth.
I take one step toward him. His eyes lower to my mouth. Then back to my eyes. I lift my hand and touch his cheek. He closes his eyes.
The reaction is so immediate, so helpless, that I feel it down to my bones. He leans into my palm before pride can stop him. Enough for my thumb to feel the slight tremor in his jaw. Enough for the air to leave him like he has been standing in armor too heavy to breathe inside.
I kiss him.
Softly at first.
Because he feels like something cracked that might cut both of us if I move too quickly. His lips are still beneath mine for half a second, frozen in surprise or restraint or the exhaustion of wanting too much. Then he melts.
There is no other word for it.
His shoulders drop. His hands come to my waist, not grabbing, not claiming, just landing there like he has finally found somewhere to put all the shaking. His mouth opens against mine with a sound so quiet it disappears into the rush of bathwater. He kisses me back slowly, deeply, like speed would make it less real. Like if he rushes, the moment might tear. Like he has imagined this in so many versions of hell that now the real thing has to be handled with both hands.
My fingers slide into his hair.
He shudders.
The sound he makes then is almost nothing. A breath caught too low in his chest. It goes through me anyway, warm and painful, and my eyes sting behind closed lids because this is the boy I mourned and the boy who came back and the stranger made out of everything that happened while I was not there to hold him.
When I pull back, his eyes stay closed. His forehead rests against mine.
“Don’t stop,” he whispers. It is not seductive. It is ruined. I kiss him again because I cannot answer without breaking.
This time his hands tighten, but still not with the old carelessness. He holds me like someone trying to remember gentleness from another life. His thumbs press into my sides through my shirt. His breath shakes into my mouth. I feel him keeping himself still, feel the strain of it in every line of his body. Want and grief and terror have tangled so tightly inside him that none of them know their own names anymore.
I draw back just enough to touch the hem of his shirt. He opens his eyes. For a second, I see the question there. Not refusal. Not embarrassment. Permission. I give him time to pull away. He doesn’t. So I lift the shirt slowly.
The fabric rises over his stomach, his ribs, his chest. I keep my eyes on his face because this feels too tender to watch like discovery, too sacred to turn into anything else. His arms lift when I need them to. His breath catches when the shirt passes over his head. His hair falls messily back into his eyes after, and for one fleeting, devastating second, he looks like the boy from before, annoyed and beautiful and too proud to admit he likes being touched.
Then I see the marks.
Not all of them. Not clearly. The bathroom is warm and bright and full of steam, but my mind refuses to take him apart like evidence. Still, there are things I cannot miss. Faint bruising near one shoulder. A thin healing line along his side. Small round medical marks near the inside of his elbow. The sharpness of his collarbones where they never used to be so sharp. The places where his body has been maintained, restrained, neglected, returned.
My hands still. His gaze drops to them. Then to my face. A muscle jumps in his jaw.
“It’s ugly,” he says. Quiet. Flat. Like he has already decided what I am allowed to think. I step closer and press my mouth to the center of his chest. His entire body locks. Under my lips, his heart slams once, hard.
I stay there for a moment, my hands resting carefully against his sides, feeling the heat of him, the breath he is holding, the life beneath skin that was supposed to be gone. When I lift my face, his eyes are shining again, but his mouth is twisted with something angry and helpless.
“Don’t do that,” he says.
“What?”
He looks away.
“Make it worse.”
I touch his jaw and bring him back to me.
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“How?”
His throat works.
“You make me want to live,” he says, and looks furious the second the words leave him. The bathroom seems to go silent beneath the water. I stare at him. He stares back like he wants to fight me for hearing it.
Then his face crumples at the edges, not enough for anyone else maybe, but enough for me. Enough that the boy who once called love embarrassing stands half-undressed in my bathroom at four in the morning and cannot hide the fact that survival has left him more frightened than death did.
I reach for his hands. He lets me.
“You are alive,” I say.
His fingers curl around mine.
“For now.”
The words are barely audible. Cold slides through me.
I want to argue. I want to say no, no, don’t say that, don’t put it in the room. But I understand too well what he means. Not that he wants to die. That he does not trust life to hold. That every time something good appears, he expects the lights to change, the announcement to play, the game to start again.
So I do not correct him. I lift his hand and press his knuckles to my mouth. His eyes shut.
“You’re here now,” I whisper. He breathes out unsteadily. “For now,” I add, because maybe that is the only truth his body can accept. His eyes open. Something in them softens, breaks, stays. I let go only long enough to take off my shirt.
His gaze follows the movement, but it does not feel like being looked at in the way I remember from before, when he would stare too long just to make me blush and then grin like he had won something. This is not that. This is quieter. Reverent in a way he would hate if I named it. His eyes move over me and stop, not hungry or careless, but stunned by proximity. By trust. By skin and breath and the fact that I am standing in front of him, not a memory he had to fight to keep, not a face blurring at the edges of some nightmare loop.
Just me. Real enough to be cold in the steam. I reach behind myself to unclasp my bra. His hand moves before he thinks, then stops halfway. Waiting again. That almost undoes me.
I finish it myself, letting the straps slide down my arms. The air touches me, warm and damp. I do not cover myself. Because he looks as if any sign of shame would kill something fragile in him. Because this is not about being seen beautifully. It is about being seen safely. It is about telling him with my body what words keep failing to prove.
I am here. I trust you. You can be here too.
His eyes lift to mine. There is no smirk. No comment. No old, sharp joke to ruin the softness before it can touch him. He only whispers my name. And it sounds like something he said in the dark to keep from disappearing.
I turn off the water. The sudden quiet is enormous.
Steam drifts around us, softening the room until the edges blur. We undress the rest of the way without speaking, speech feels too rough for what is happening. Clothing falls in small, ordinary sounds. Fabric against tile. A soft scrape. The whisper of a drawer opening when I take out two towels and set them within reach. We do not look away like strangers. We do not stare like lovers about to become reckless. We simply make space for each other’s vulnerability and try not to crush it with our hands.
When I step into the tub, the heat takes me by surprise.
It closes around my ankles, my calves, then my thighs as I sink down carefully. My body, wound tight for hours, resists it at first. Then the warmth reaches my hips, my stomach, my ribs, and something inside me loosens so suddenly that my eyes fill again. I turn my face away before Kyung-jun can see.
Too late. He sees everything now. He steps in after me.
For someone so tall, he moves slowly, lowering himself into the water behind me with a careful breath. The tub is big enough, but still, he fills it. His knees bracket mine. His body settles against the curved porcelain, and for a moment he holds himself away from me, as if the last inch matters. As if even now he thinks restraint is proof of goodness. Or control. Or survival.
The water shifts around us. Warmth rises. My back is almost touching his chest. Almost. Neither of us breathes properly. Then his hands come to my waist. He pulls me back.
My body slides through the water until I am flush against him, back to his chest, his legs around me, his arms folding over my stomach like gates closing. Heat surrounds me from every side: the bathwater, the steam, his skin, the trembling breath he releases against my shoulder. His chin lowers to the curve where my neck meets my shoulder. For a second, he just holds me there. Not kissing. Not talking. Holding.
His body shakes once. Then again. I cover his forearm with both hands. The water rocks gently against the sides of the tub.
“You’re warm,” he murmurs.
The words are so small I almost miss them.
I close my eyes.
“So are you.”
His arms tighten.
“No,” he says, voice rough. “I mean… you’re warm.”
Like that is proof too.
Like in the game everything had become cold eventually. Floors. Skin. Fear. Dead hands. Reset mornings with fake sunlight and no real warmth. Like the mind can be trapped somewhere so long it forgets the simple fact of another living body.
He presses his nose into my hair and inhales.
Not in that teasing way he used to do when he would complain about my shampoo and then bury his face in my neck anyway. This is different. He breathes me in like a person starved of air. Like scent is memory made physical. Like the lavender in the bath and the soap on my skin and the faint trace of rain still clinging to my hair are all anchors he can tie himself to before the world starts drifting again.
“I forgot your shampoo once,” he says.
My fingers still against his arm. His mouth is near my ear, but his eyes are not on me. I can feel it. He is staring at the water, or through it, or at something that is not in the room.
“In there,” he continues. “I remembered your face. Your voice. The way you used to look at me like you were deciding if prison was worth it. I would look at the pictures I had of you in my phone, rewatch the videos over and over until I thought I'd be sick of your voice or laugh, but I never did,”
A breath that is almost a laugh leaves me. His mouth brushes my temple, not quite a kiss.
“But the shampoo—” He stops. His throat moves against my shoulder. “I couldn’t remember it. It was such a stupid thing. I knew it was sweet. I knew I used to say it gave me a headache. I knew I liked it. But I couldn’t remember exactly.”
My chest hurts so sharply I press his arm harder against me.
“I thought that meant you were going,” he says.
The water feels suddenly too hot.
“Like pieces of you were getting taken. First that. Then maybe the way you looked at me. Or the way you felt against me. Then one day I’d wake up and know I was waiting for someone, but not who.” His voice thins. He swallows and presses his mouth to the side of my head, hard, as if stopping himself from saying more might physically hurt less. “I got scared.”
Kyung-jun saying scared is worse than crying. It is the bravest thing I have ever heard him do. I turn in his arms.
The movement makes water spill against the sides of the tub, a soft slap against porcelain. His hands loosen just enough to let me shift, then tighten again the moment I am facing him. I settle between his legs, knees tucked around him, water lapping at my ribs. His face is close now. Too close for hiding. Steam clings to his lashes. His hair curls slightly damp at the ends. His eyes are red-rimmed, furious with himself and still unable to stop.
I touch his cheek.
“You remembered enough.”
His jaw tightens.
“You don’t get it.”
“Then tell me.”
He looks away. I wait.
The old Kyung-jun hated waiting. He would fill silence by force, slash it open with mockery, make someone else uncomfortable before discomfort could settle on him. This Kyung-jun sits in the water with me at four in the morning and lets silence gather because there are no jokes strong enough to carry what he has brought back.
When he speaks, his voice is lower.
“At night, it was worse.”
My thumb stills against his cheek. He looks past me, toward the tiled wall.
“The game had rules. Times. Votes. Executions. People screaming at each other like screaming made them less likely to die.” His mouth twists. “Everyone got ugly. Me too. Maybe I was already ugly, so it wasn’t a big change.”
“Don’t.”
His eyes flick to mine. I do not look away. His expression shifts — irritation, old and familiar, rising for half a heartbeat — then it fades because he is too tired to pretend he does not understand why I stopped him.
He exhales.
“At night, you’d sit in a locked room with someone, not knowing if they'd kill you while you were passed out. We didn't even sleep, we just dropped the second the clock turned 12. Sometimes, before it was midnight and everyone had hid I would hear crying through the wall. Or someone praying which was stupid cause God had clearly not been there to save us...” His gaze drops to the water. “Sometimes you woke up and someone right next to you was dead.”
My throat closes. The water ripples between us.
He drags his wet hand up my back, not sensual, not searching. Grounding. His palm settles between my shoulder blades. His fingers spread there.
“One time,” he says, and the words come slower now, like each one has to be pulled through something thick, “I knew I was going to die. It was already happening, and all I could think was that I hadn’t said it to you.”
The room blurs. His eyes return to mine.
“I love you.”
The words land without performance. No smirk. No defensive bite. No embarrassment twisted into cruelty. Just truth, raw and plain and almost violent in its openness.
“I love you,” he says again, as if the first one might not count if he does not carve it deeper. “I loved you before. I loved you when I was acting like a piece of shit. I loved you when I picked fights over stupid things because I liked when you looked at me. I loved you when I said you were annoying. I loved you when you cried at that movie and I pretended I wasn’t watching you instead of the screen. I loved you when I didn’t say it because I thought saying it made me look weak.”
His mouth tightens.
“I was so fucking stupid.”
I shake my head, tears slipping silently now, warm down my face despite the steam. He wipes one away with his thumb. His hand is wet, so it does nothing except smear more warmth across my skin.
“I regret that,” he says. “More than dying. I swear to God. Every time I thought it was over, that was the thing. Not the pain. Not them. Not even being scared. It was you, standing somewhere outside all of it, not knowing. Maybe thinking I didn’t love you enough. Maybe thinking I was gone with all those stupid words still stuck in my fucking mouth.”
A sound breaks in my chest. He leans forward and kisses my cheek where the tear fell. Then the other. Then my forehead.
Each kiss is slow. Careful. Heavy with something that makes my hands tremble against his shoulders. He is not trying to lead us anywhere. Not trying to turn the moment into heat because heat would be easier than grief. He is kissing me like apology can be physical. Like love, if repeated enough against skin, might erase the silence he left behind.
“You don’t have to regret it,” I whisper. He stills. “You’re here now.” His eyes close. My fingers curl at the back of his neck. “You’re here,” I say again, because he needs it more than he needs air. “And I know. I knew then too.”
His eyes open. I swallow around the ache in my throat.
“I knew you loved me.” His face changes. It twists, almost in pain. I hurry before he can look away. “Not because you said it. You didn’t. Obviously.”
A broken little breath leaves him.
“But you’d walk on the outside of the sidewalk and pretend it was because I was too dumb to avoid cars. You brought me medicine when I had a fever and left it at my door. You remembered what convenience store drink I liked but made fun of it every time you bought it. You fixed my collar. You called me annoying when I cried but stayed until I stopped.”
His eyes are full now. He looks furious at them.
“So yeah,” I whisper. “I knew.”
For a moment, his face is so open I almost cannot look at him. Then he pulls me into him.
Water surges around us, spilling over the edge in a small wave that neither of us cares about. His arms lock around me, one hand cradling the back of my head, the other spread over my spine, pressing me against him until there is no space left for grief to sit between us. My face fits into the crook of his neck. His skin is hot from the bath, damp beneath my cheek. His heartbeat hammers against my chest.
“I’m going to say it all the time now,” he mutters into my hair.
I close my eyes.
“Okay.”
“You’ll get sick of it.”
“I won’t.”
“You will. You’re like that.”
“I’m really not.”
“You are.” His voice shakes. “And I don’t care. I’ll say it anyway.”
His mouth finds my shoulder. A kiss. Then another, higher, against the curve of my neck.
He kisses like someone counting places he thought he would never touch again. Shoulder. Neck. Jaw. Temple. The corner of my eye. My forehead. He kisses the tears before they can cool. He kisses my hairline and breathes there, raggedly, like he has found shelter beneath my skin.
“I love you,” he says against my temple. My hands slide up his back. “I love you,” he says again, lower. The words tremble through him. “I love you. I love you. I love you.”
I begin crying harder, silently at first, then not silently. My shoulders shake. He holds me tighter immediately, one hand cupping the back of my head, fingers threading through wet hair. He does not tell me to stop this time. Does not say I look ugly. Does not panic at the sight of it. He just presses his mouth to my forehead and takes every sound like punishment he has decided he deserves.
I pull back enough to look at him.
“You don’t have to earn staying,” I say. His brows draw together. “You don’t have to say enough perfect things to make up for being gone.”
“I wasn’t gone by choice.”
“I know.”
His eyes flash.
“No,” he says. “You don’t.”
The words hit harder because they are not cruel. Only true. His hand slides from my hair to my cheek, holding me still, not forcefully but with a desperate focus that makes my breath catch.
“I tried to get out,” he says. “I tried so many times. I wasn’t just sitting there thinking about you like some sad drama lead.”
A tiny laugh breaks through my tears. His mouth curves for half a second, then disappears.
“I fought. I lied. I threatened people. I did stupid things. I did smart things too, sometimes.” His expression darkens. “I hurt people. Sometimes because I had to. Sometimes because I was scared and angry and didn’t know what else to do. And then it would reset, and they would look at me like nothing happened, and I’d forget what I’d done, or what they’d done, and everyone just kept… starting again.”
His breathing roughens. My hands tighten on his shoulders.
“Do you know how crazy that makes you?” he whispers. “Looking at someone eating breakfast after you watched them die? Hearing someone laugh after they begged? Wondering if this time they’ll kill you first, or if you’ll do it to them because you remember something they haven’t remembered yet?”
My stomach turns. He looks down.
“I wasn’t good in there.”
The confession falls between us quietly. The bathwater laps against my back.
I think of the boy he was before. Cruel, yes. Sharp-tongued. Violent. A bully when he wanted power and attention. Someone who laughed at fear because fear in other people made him feel larger. I think of what a place like that would do to him. A game built out of suspicion and death. A world where being mean might feel like armor. Where guilt would reset but memory would not always be merciful enough to vanish completely.
I touch his face again. He flinches at the tenderness, barely.
“You’re here with me now,” I say.
His eyes close like the words hurt.
“That’s not an answer.”
“No,” I whisper. “It’s not.”
His lashes lift.
“I don’t know what happened in there yet. I don’t know what you did. I don’t know what was done to you.” My voice shakes, but I keep going because he deserves truth more than comfort dressed as lies. “But I know you came back carrying it. And I know you’re telling me instead of pretending nothing happened. That has to mean something.”
He stares at me for a long time. Then his face crumples.
He fights it. His mouth presses tight. His chin trembles once. His eyes shine and his brows pull together like anger can still hold the pieces in place if he just hates himself hard enough.
“I don’t want to be like before,” he says. My heart gives one hard, painful beat. His hand drops to the water, fingers flexing beneath the surface. “I don’t mean—” He stops, frustrated, searching for words he has never had practice using. “I’m still me. I’m not going to come back all nice and polite and bowing to every bastard who looks at me wrong.”
Despite everything, my mouth trembles toward a smile. His eyes catch it. A faint spark answers, then dims.
“But with you,” he says. “I don’t want to waste time being a coward.”
“You were never a coward.”
He gives me a look.
Even traumatized, exhausted, naked in a lavender bath at four in the morning, Go Kyung-jun can still make disbelief look insulting.
“I was,” he says. “With you, I was. I acted like wanting you didn’t scare the hell out of me. I acted like if I made you mad first, you couldn’t see how bad I had it. I picked fights because if we were fighting, at least you were looking at me.”
“You were terrible at romance.”
“I know.”
“You once threw a snack at my head because I said another boy was cute.”
His eyes narrow faintly. “He was ugly.”
“He was a kid.”
“He breathed through his mouth.”
I almost laugh again.
This time, he watches it happen with something like wonder and grief mixed together, like my almost-laughter is a thing he wants to put somewhere safe.
Then the softness returns to his face, solemn and stripped bare.
“I don’t want to do that anymore,” he says. “Not the stupid parts.”
“You’ll still fight with me.”
“Obviously.”
“Obviously,” I echo, and the corner of his mouth moves.
“But not like before.” His thumb traces the wet curve of my shoulder, absent and careful. “Not leaving things unsaid because saying them feels embarrassing. Not acting like I don’t care when I do. Not making you guess if I love you.”
My throat tightens. He leans forward, pressing his forehead to mine.
“I love you,” he whispers again.
I close my eyes.
The words are beginning to change the room. It doesn't erase the two years of death and impossible loops and police files and empty funerals. But it changes something. Making the bathroom warmer than the water. Making the dark outside the window less endless. Each time he says it, the silence that lived between then and now loses one small inch of power.
“I love you too,” I whisper. His breath catches. As if he did not know. As if the whole night has not been built from it.
His hand comes up to my neck, palm warm and wet, fingers curving carefully beneath my jaw. He kisses me slowly. So slowly the kiss becomes less a kiss than a place to rest. His mouth moves against mine with a tenderness that feels learned in pain. There is no hunger pushing it forward, no urgency except the urgency of staying. I can taste salt on him. Tears, maybe mine, maybe his, maybe both of ours until it no longer matters.
When he pulls back, he does not go far. His nose brushes mine.
“You really kept that ugly picture?” I let out a tiny, watery laugh. The old shape of him flickers there, fragile and familiar.
“Yes.”
“Should’ve picked a better one.”
“You wouldn’t let me take better ones.”
“Because you take pictures like someone’s grandmother.”
“Your grandmother liked that picture.” His mouth softens at the mention of her. For a moment, he looks down at the water.
“She cried a lot?”
The question is almost too quiet. I nod. His jaw tightens.
“I was all she had,” he says.
I touch his arm.
“She still has you.”
His eyes close.
“Yeah.”
But it does not sound like relief yet. It sounds like a debt. Like another person he came back to wounded by his absence. Like living has given him everyone’s grief to hold in his hands.
“She never gave up,” I tell him.
He opens his eyes.
“Neither did you,” he says. I look away before I can stop myself. His hand catches my chin, gently but firmly, turning me back. “Don’t.” I blink. “Don’t act like it was nothing.”
The words settle heavily. I try to swallow, but the ache will not move.
“You had the worse part,” I whisper.
His eyes harden.
“No.”
“Kyung-jun—”
“No.” This time there is anger in it, but not at me. At the unfairness. At the years. At the idea that pain must be ranked before it is allowed to matter. “You buried me.”
I stop breathing.
His face changes as he says it, like the words have shown him a picture he cannot bear.
“You stood there,” he says slowly. “At some funeral with my picture. People saying I was dead. You had to—” His voice breaks, and he looks away, but his hand stays on me. “Don’t tell me that was nothing.”
The bathroom blurs.
I remember the white flowers. The black ribbon. His school photo. His grandmother’s hand crushing mine. The way my knees vanished beneath me. The ugly sound I made in front of everyone. The shame of crying for someone who should have been there to mock me for it.
“I hated you a little,” I admit. His eyes snap back to mine. I wipe my cheek with the heel of my hand, but it is useless. Everything is wet in here. My face, my hands, the air itself. “Not really,” I say quickly. “Not in a way that made sense. I just… you were gone. And I didn’t know where to put it. Everyone kept looking at me like I was sad, and I was, but I was angry too. Because you left me with all this love and nowhere to put it. I couldn’t call you. I couldn’t yell at you. I couldn’t tell you I missed you. I couldn’t even be mad at you properly because everyone thought you were dead, and you’re not supposed to be mad at dead people.”
Kyung-jun stares at me. The water cools around us by degrees, but neither of us moves.
“I was mad that you weren’t there to be awful about your own funeral,” I whisper.
His mouth trembles.
“I would’ve been awful.”
“I know.”
“I would’ve said the flowers were tacky.”
“They were.”
“And that everyone looked like shit.”
“They did.”
His eyes shine.
“And I would’ve told you to stop crying.”
I nod, tears slipping again. “Yeah.”
He leans forward and kisses them.
“I wouldn’t now,” he whispers against my cheek. My breath catches. He kisses the other cheek. “I wouldn’t.” His mouth rests at my temple. “I’d let you cry,” he says, voice raw. “I’d probably be useless, probably say something stupid. But I’d stay.”
I close my eyes and fold into him.
He holds me like he is trying to prove it retroactively. Like he can somehow go back to that funeral and stand beside me, alive and warm and scowling, and undo the black ribbon on his own picture. Like if he keeps his arms tight enough now, he can reach every version of me who slept in his hoodie and woke with his name already hurting in her mouth.
The bathwater is no longer as hot.
Steam fades slowly from the mirror, revealing us in blurred fragments. His shoulder. My hair. His arm around my back. The curve of the tub. Two faces too close together to see clearly.
Kyung-jun notices the change before I do.
“You’re getting cold.”
“I’m okay.”
He gives me a look that is pure, exhausted disdain.
“You’re shaking.”
“So are you.”
His mouth tightens. Neither of us moves.
Then, after a moment, he says, “Can we stay a little longer?”
I nod immediately. His relief is quiet but visible. A small loosening around his eyes. A deeper breath against my hair.
We shift again so I am back against his chest, his arms around me beneath the cooling water. I turn the hot tap on with my foot, just enough to warm the bath again, and he huffs softly behind me.
“What?” I ask.
“You’re weirdly skilled at that.”
“I’ve had years of practice surviving without you.” The words slip out before I can soften them. His arms tighten. I feel his mouth press against the back of my head.
“Don’t,” he murmurs.
“I’m sorry.”
“No.” His voice is low. “Say things like that. I need to hear it.”
I stare at the water. It shimmers under the bathroom light, broken by our breathing.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” I whisper.
“You think not hearing it makes it better?” I say nothing. His chin settles on my shoulder. “I need to know what I missed,” he says. “Even if it makes me feel like shit. I need to know you were here. That you kept going. That you hated me a little.” His breath trembles. “That you loved me anyway.”
My fingers trace the back of his hand under the water.
“I loved you the whole time.” His chest rises sharply against my back. “I hated that too sometimes,” I admit. “It felt pathetic. Like everyone else knew how to move forward and I was still standing in your room waiting for you to come home.”
His lips touch my shoulder.
“Not pathetic.”
“You would’ve called it pathetic before.”
His silence lasts long enough to answer.
Then he says, “Yeah.”
I close my eyes.
“I was an idiot.”
“You were seventeen.”
“I was an idiot at seventeen.”
“Still are a little.”
His mouth brushes my skin, and this time I feel the faintest smile there.
“Careful.”
The word has no threat in it. Only memory. Only the softest ghost of who he was before the world took him apart. The quiet stretches.
For the first time all night, his breathing begins to slow. Not sleep. Not yet. But the rhythm changes. His chest against my back rises and falls less violently. His hand stills over my stomach, fingers splayed, thumb resting near my ribs. The heat, the salts, the water, the dark hour turning slowly toward dawn — all of it begins to gather around him. Not forcing rest. Inviting it.
His head lowers until his forehead rests against my shoulder.
“I don’t want to wake up there,” he says.
The sentence is so soft I almost think I imagined it. My eyes open.
The bathroom is dimmer now, or maybe my eyes have adjusted. The light above us hums faintly. Outside the little window, the sky has begun to turn the color of watered ink.
“You won’t,” I say.
His hand tightens.
“You don’t know that.”
“No,” I whisper. “I don’t.” He goes still. I turn my head enough that my cheek brushes his hair. “But if you wake up scared, I’ll be here.” His breath shakes against my shoulder. “And if you wake up and you don’t know where you are, I’ll tell you.”
His fingers curl against my skin.
“And if you wake up and think it was a dream, I’ll be really annoying until you believe me.”
A faint, broken sound leaves him. Almost a laugh. Almost a sob.
“Promise?”
I turn in his arms again.
The water moves around us, warmer now, softer. I cup his face in both hands. His eyes are heavy but terrified beneath it, exhaustion dragging at him while fear claws him awake. He looks at me like a boy at the edge of a dark room, refusing to step in unless someone promises to hold the door open.
“I promise,” I say.
His eyes search mine.
“Say my name,” he whispers.
“Kyung-jun.”
His face tightens.
Again, his eyes say.
“Kyung-jun.”
His hands come up over mine, pressing them harder to his cheeks.
“Again.”
“Kyung-jun.” His eyes close. The breath that leaves him is not relief exactly. But it is close.
I lean forward and kiss his forehead. Then the bridge of his nose. Then his mouth, gently enough that he does not have to kiss back if he is too tired.
He kisses back anyway. Because he is Kyung-jun. Because even broken, he reaches. Because need has always been the most honest thing about him, even when he used to dress it up as arrogance. When I pull away, his eyes stay closed.
“I love you,” he murmurs.
“I love you too.”
His mouth moves faintly. “Good.”
I almost smile.
“Bossy even half-dead.”
His eyes open a sliver.
“Not half-dead.”
“No?”
“No.” His hand slides to the back of my neck, heavy and warm. “I came back.”
My throat tightens.
“Yes,” I whisper. “You did.”
He looks at me for a long moment, and something in his gaze settles. Enough that when I shift back against him, he lets his head fall to my shoulder again. His arms close around me beneath the water. The world narrows to heat and breath and the slow pale line of dawn growing behind frosted glass.
He does not sleep yet. But he rests. And for Kyung-jun, for this hour, for this first night after the dead gave him back, that is enough. His lips move against my shoulder one last time.
“If I start acting like an asshole again,” he murmurs, voice thick and fading, “hit me.”
I turn my face toward his hair.
“I already do.”
A faint breath touches my skin. This one is almost a laugh.
“Yeah,” he whispers. “Harder next time.”
Then he goes quiet.
Held against me in cooling bathwater, his heartbeat steadying slowly at my back, his fingers still tangled with mine beneath the surface like even rest has to be learned through touch. I stay awake with him as the night thins. I keep my hand over his. I keep breathing where he can feel it. And when the first gray light of morning slips into the bathroom, soft and uncertain and real, Kyung-jun is still there.
Ko Kyung-Jun x reader: No One Noticed (But You Did)
A Part 2 to my one-shot titled "Umbrella" on my page, although this could kind of be read separately, lots of studying what Kyung-Jun's inner thoughts would be like with a crush Idk lol
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Kyung-Jun felt like a complete idiot, a fool, when he came home from school yesterday. Embarrassment bubbling inside him, making his cheeks feel hot. More than embarrassed, he found himself angry. Angry at himself for allowing a moment of weakness to slip out of his tough exterior. And most of all, you had been the one to bring that out. At that moment, it was like Kyung-Jun was a normal teenage boy, conversing with a friend and goofing around. Walls lowered themselves a bit for the real Kyung-Jun to peek out.
He felt even more of a fool now in school the next morning, walking to class with the pointy tip of a certain someone’s black and white polka-dotted umbrella sticking out of the top of his backpack. Why did he even bring it? Kyung-Jun was a taker. He took from people and didn’t give back. He took money from Joo-Won and Da-Bum. Took answers from someone else’s homework. Took basketballs from the gym. Took snacks and drinks from students. He took anything he wanted from anyone. So why was he giving back her umbrella? She had said he didn’t even need to, was it just because it was girly and he didn’t want it?
No. Really he hated owing anyone anything. He didn’t want to have her have one over him, an excuse to bring up what happened yesterday. A moment of weakness, that’s all it was. And he didn’t want to be reminded of it again. He was having a bad day from the moment he woke up yesterday. The disapproving and judgemental stares from his father and older brother started the day. A hard smack on the back of his head from his father after hearing from his homeroom teacher he skipped class one too many times the past week. Hyun-Ho being extra cheeky with his remarks. Da-Bum being absent, letting the anger inside Kyung-Jun continue to build, not having an outlet to unleash it on. Jun-Hee’s perfect attitude irritating him. Then Seung-Bin and Jin-Ha annoying him with their idiotic conversations. But worst of all? Just as he was about to go outside, which was pouring rain by the way, he suddenly remembered what the date was. His mother’s day of passing.
So, he walked home in the rain. Letting it soak him and make him cold. Not even bothering to use the hood on his windbreaker, feeling the raindrops fall from his now ungelled hair onto his face. Threatening to mix in with the tears brimming in his eyes. But he roughly wiped his eyes with his wet sleeve, not letting them fall because Kyung-Jun doesn’t cry. It was just a bad day. That’s all it was.
So when you insisted on shielding him from the rain with your stupid umbrella, it wasn’t your action per say that made him take a step back. It was your face. Your expression. The concern, no the curiosity, that was laced within. He suddenly felt exposed. Like you saw past the anger and aggression he presented and was looking at the complicated boy within. He knew that there was no way you could suddenly understand his actions, the reasons for his behavior. Or suddenly see all his weakness he felt he had, but it was that look of concern and curiosity that was enough to make him falter. Confidence dropping. The fact that you seemed to actually want to ask if he was truly okay had his head reeling. And then just your behavior in general, you were talking to him seemingly unafraid. Your nonchalance, your normalcy, your aloofness… it was suddenly rubbing off on him.
No one noticed him in that way, but you did. And it made him feel a mix of emotions. So maybe bringing your umbrella back wasn’t just because he didn’t want to owe you, but also to interact with you again. To assess you, in a way. Because he couldn’t figure out your intentions. You spoke to him, willingly. No one does that, he thinks he doesn’t even want that. So were you maybe some kind of threat to him? Going to expose the moment of vulnerability he had grudgingly shared with you?
But he knew better than that, because he had actually been noticing you for some time.
How could he not? Because just as he arrived to the classroom, late as usual, he was reminded of where you sat. Where he sits, in the corner of the classroom by the door, you sit directly opposite of him on the other side. In the corner, by the window, which he noticed you frequently gazed out at. Despite the distance of three rows between you, every time he laid his head down on his desk to take a nap, he had a perfect view of you. When he’d wake up, there you still were.
And of course, he also happened to live right near you. Taking the same main road home every day after school. Depending on who left school first, one would be in the other’s view walking home. And still though, yesterday had been the first time the two of you had a full conversation, if you’d even call it that.
The class was filled with chatter and laughs. The homeroom teacher getting ready to silence them to take attendance. As Kyung-Jun took out his blue neck pillow, pushing the umbrella to the side to grab it, he eyed you. You were sitting slightly hunched over, your head in your hand. You looked unamused, or tired. A slight frown featured on your face. Kyung-Jun had learned pretty quickly that you seemed to be a very transparent person. In both senses. You were expressive, and your expressions often told when you disliked something you ate, were bored with class, annoyed by Heo-Yool’s antics, irritated by So-Mi’s snarky comments, and even the disapproval etched on your face when you caught him picking on the weaker students.
And you seemed to also be transparent in the sense that you were rather unassuming. You kept to yourself, not going out of your way to stop him from calling Da-Bum out to the gym to “play” basketball for instance. You didn’t seem to have any close friends, always walking home alone from school. You talked to your classmates mainly only when spoken to and sat at lunch with Yoon-Seo and Se-Eun, though it was evident the latter had a closer relationship. And yet you weren’t totally quiet either, like you lacked a presence or something. If So-Mi for instance, or anyone for that matter said something to you that bothered you, you were quick to remark, but without getting heated about it. It was like you didn’t care about things, but he felt that you did inside. Which led him to continue his silent observations, curious in who you were beneath the simple and aloof personality you had. Just maybe, he felt a small invisible string, pulling him to you.
And he was suddenly ripped from his deep thoughts about you, from no other than yourself. He watched you sneeze, rather loudly he thought, and then not even a full second later, another sneeze.
Your eyes widened, your hand coming up to cover your nose. You turned to Yoon-Seo next to you, your hand covering your mouth partly so he couldn’t tell what you were saying, but then Yoon-Seo was unzipping her bag and pulling out a packet of pocket tissues. From the front of the classroom, the teacher began taking attendance, the class silencing. And then if on cue, you sneezed again! He was still looking at you, your face flushed now. He caught Heo-Yool who sat in front of you snickering. You mumbled a “sorry” to anyone who could hear for your disruption.
The teacher continued down the line, getting to your name. Kyung-Jun watched as you opened your mouth to say you were here when you literally sneezed again. Kyung-Jun couldn’t help himself, he laughed.
Several heads turned. Including Seung-Bin and Jin-Ha who seemed surprised to hear a laugh erupt from him. Especially because it wasn’t a sarcastic one, he was genuinely amused by the situation. Were you sick? From yesterday? He couldn’t help the boyish grin that fell on his face, of course you were suddenly sick. Not even being without your umbrella for long after giving it to him and yet here you were, pulling your vest back and forth from your shirt as if you were feeling hot. It even looked like your nose was a bit red.
He couldn’t adjust his expression back to his usual scowl quick enough because you finally turned to look at him, having heard the laugh too. Finally you’re looking at me. He forced a cough out of himself, making his expression look normal. Your face suddenly flushing more upon eye contact.
“Are you feeling alright?” The teacher called out to you. “I think you should go to the nurse just in case. Go now so you don’t miss the quiz later.”
“Yes Miss.” You gathered your things, getting up from your desk. He heard Yoon-Seo whisper “are you okay?” in which he heard you softly reply with, “yeah, I think I caught something from the rain yesterday, I didn’t have my umbrella with me.”
He felt his own face start to flush from simply being reminded of the umbrella in his bag. He was getting second-hand embarrassment from his own actions yesterday. He had to give you back your umbrella so he could forget all about it.
You were just about to pass him, your eyes darting to him. And he swore he could see a ghost of a smile, a small, but genuine smile. He just stared as you walked out, and he heard Seung-Bin whisper to him and Jin-Ha, “noisy snot-nosed bitch.” Jin-Ha immediately snickered.
“Shut the fuck up” Kyung-Jun replied. Not giving a chance to see their bewildered expression and lowering his head to his desk to take his usual nap. But instead of finding himself agreeing with the fact that you were being noisy, and well you did have a snot filled nose at the moment, all he could think of was that you looked kind of cute instead.
Sometime later, Kyung-Jun rose from a failed deep sleep attempt. It was break now. He knew why he couldn’t get a clear mind to sleep, his thoughts were occupied by you and your stupid umbrella. He hated how he knew he was letting this one act of kindness get to him. He couldn’t shake off that expression on your face yesterday, like you were taking a peek inside him. And it essentially felt like you really did. As he got up from his seat grabbing his umbrella-filled backpack, Seung-Bin and Jin-Ha rose too.
“Don’t follow me, I’m going somewhere. Alone.” He gave them a look, don’t press me today.
After he left, Seung-Bin muttered to Jin-Ha, “the fuck’s wrong with him today?”
Jin-Ha just shrugged.
Kyung-Jun opened the nurse’s office door, glancing around the room to see if anyone else was there to witness what was about to come. Aside from the nurse who glanced up from her paperwork at her desk to look at him, he saw a figure occupying the last cot in the back. You were facing the wall, your back turned to him and he briskly walked over.
“Excuse me, are you not feel-” and one piercing look from Kyung-Jun sent her mouth into a fine line. Most of the faculty knew about him, “the delinquent”. She didn’t press any further, but as he reached your cot and was standing over you, she was still watching curiously. Kyung-Jun sighed loudly, grabbed the curtain hanging on a rod above the cot and pulled the rings across to cover him and you.
Kyung-Jun just watched you. You were sleeping, your mouth slightly open. Your vest laid next to you, you must have been feeling hot, feverish perhaps. He quietly and slowly unzipped his backpack, he suddenly felt this was a perfect opportunity to give you back your umbrella without having to bring up yesterday, despite the certain lingering he felt in his mind… and his heart.
But as he placed the umbrella down, the hard and cool handle brushed against your thigh. You must not have been in a deep sleep either, because the sudden intrusion stirred you. You turned on your back, stretching a bit, slowly opening your squinted eyes.
She caught me. He looked down, but upon seeing your sudden movement causing your skirt to ride up pretty high, exposing your thighs, he turned his attention to the wall, finding it to be very intriguing. He felt his cheeks burn again. Idiot. It’s just thighs. “Her” thighs though…
She then looked down, seeing her state and adjusted her skirt. She noticed the infamous umbrella next to her then. “So, I take it you really don’t like polka dots then huh… did you end up getting a black one for yourself?” Your lips quirked up. He noticed your nose still red and slightly swollen. You had gotten sick because of him. Yeah it was your dumb actions that did so, but still because of him. He wondered again, Why had you done that for him, truly?
He composed himself, “No, I just don’t want your belongings, don’t wanna owe you anything.”
He noticed your expression faltered a bit, confusion striking your face. “You don’t owe me anything, I just saw you walking in the rain and well, I felt like shielding you from it.” You smiled a little now. “I did that because I wanted to, I wasn’t expecting anything back, not even my umbrella. I was even going to just get a new one figuring you’d keep it because you clearly didn’t have one.”
You were so honest, blunt. But in a way that he wondered if you even registered what you were saying to him. Did you even care if he decided to lash out at you?
You felt like shielding him from it? So, protecting him from it? Did you think he was some small and helpless weak animal that couldn’t handle a bit of rain? He felt anger bubbling inside him now. He was right earlier, he didn’t like that you saw this vulnerability in him, this weakness that you felt you needed to concern yourself with. You weren’t his mother.
“Well I didn’t ask for that, and I don’t want your umbrella. Any umbrella for that matter.” He mentally face-palmed himself, he sounded so stupid, not like his usual domineering and aggressive tone. “So don’t do something like that ever again, or even bring it up or I’ll-I’ll” he stumbled over his words, thinking of something to come back with. “Or I’ll kill you… or something like that.” He mumbled the last part. He needed to get out of here, this was a bad idea.
He looked off to the side, until he heard a breathy laugh, like you were trying to hold it in. He darted his eyes back to you, seeing your amused face. So now you think he’s a joke, unserious. Your face quickly morphed back to neutralism upon seeing the scowl on his face deepen, his eyebrows furrowing.
“I mean it.” He confirmed. “Stop aggravating me or I won’t stop Seung-Bin and Jin-Ha from wanting to harass you later.”
“But you always stop them. They, you never harass me.” You replied, your face softening.
Shit. So she has noticed me. Noticed I was practically singling her out from it all. Treating her differently than the others. Was that why she had done that, did she feel obligated to because I wasn’t outright mean to her or something? He didn’t know you, your inner thoughts and intentions were a mystery despite your expressive faces. He didn’t know if he could even trust them. He didn’t trust anyone.
“If that’s why you did it,” he gestured to the umbrella, “don’t. Just because I happen to find your presence less annoying and irritating than others doesn’t mean you have to start doing nice things to repay me for it or something.” He ran his hand through his hair, he decided to not gel it today, making it easy to run his hand through now. “Because if you do things like that, then you will annoy and irritate me.” It wasn’t a lie. From quietly observing her to now practically going crazy over what she did was annoying him. You couldn’t have just remained unassuming!
He watched your face carefully, waiting to gauge your expression. And he suddenly felt his heat twinge, like in pain upon seeing the hurt cross your face. Well, that’s expected. Deserved even for what you've been making me feel. But seeing the hurt on your face didn’t really make him feel any better, didn’t suddenly gain clarity from it. Instead, he just felt more confused by everything.
“Honestly” you took a deep breath then, “I wanted to approach you because I have been wanting to be friends.” You suddenly raised your hands to cover your eyes and cheeks, releasing a small laugh. It was obvious you suddenly felt embarrassed.
Kyung-Jun shifted. He was taken back. Lost at words, really. He felt that similar feeling he felt yesterday. The high stone wall he had up that guarded him so fiercely fell down a row, letting what was hidden behind peek out a bit.
“Friends… with me?” He laughed bitterly. “I think your sickness is messing with your head.”
Your fingers spread out, showing your eyes now. “I just thought that we both don’t have many friends, we walk the same way home. It’d be easy to hangout… or something.” She dropped her hands, sighing. “I realize how this sounds, but I mean it. I just watch you sometimes in school and I don’t know, I want to be your friend.”
Kyung-Jun didn’t know how to feel, could barely process your words before he felt his usual anger boiling up and down inside him.
“Why?” He heard his voice rise with that. “Do you feel sorry for me or something? Watching me and wanting to be friends with me because you pity me? Pity me because I’m a bully? Is that it?” He was getting increasingly accusatory, if he didn’t calm down the nurse who could surely hear all this would come and finally intervene. “I’m disappointed, honestly.” He whispered the last part so quietly, he didn’t know if you heard, didn’t care. “And I have friends by the way, I’m not some loner like Da-Bum.” He thought of his two “friends” in question. He really didn’t think of them as what one would call “true friends”. That’s because Kyung-Jun never had that. Never had a friend of that caliber to compare to. If Seung-Bin and Jin-Ha were the closest thing he had to a so-called friend, then maybe he didn’t even want any friends at all.
You pulled him out of his thoughts. Raising your eyebrow at his last remark. “I don’t pity you because you’re a bully, or whatever you think it is that I’m pitying you for. I don’t know how to prove my intentions to you, but I really just want to be friends. Does every person who asks you to be your friend you think they are pitying you?”
He scoffed at that. Come on. You weren’t that aloof, you knew nobody is asking to be his friend. Acting like he has a whole line of people out there. Now he just felt mocked.
You seemed to look inside him again, reading his expression. Your eyes widening at what you had said.
“Sorry.” You said, looking directly into his eyes. He wanted to look away, feeling exposed again but he had to hold his ground. “I understand how that sounds, I know your position in school… what I mean is, can you just try to see that I’m being genuine here?” No, it was actually quite hard for him to see that. She suddenly reached out, going for his hand, but stopped. Dropping it back at her side.
Good he thought. He didn’t know how he’d react if she suddenly touched him, not only reaching out with her words, but now with her hands as well. “I promise you” and she stared fiercely into his eyes now, looking very determined. “I never pitied you. I really just want to be friends… I could use a friend too, you know?” Her expression turned somber a bit. He recalled how she isn’t really close to anyone in class. Maybe she struggles too. Maybe they had some similarities with not being able to connect and be close with others. Maybe, just maybe, she had her own demons inside akin to his.
He released a long breath he didn’t realize he was holding, closing his eyes for a second.
Fuck it.
“We could try. I guess”. He tried to sound nonchalant.
Her eyes instantly brightened at that. She jumped up from her position on the bed, standing up now in front of him. She was a whole head and more shorter than him, he noticed. He saw the excited expression completely covering her features. A wide and toothy grin.
“I said I guess we could try being friends. Doesn’t mean we will” he clarified.
“Yes, yes, of course. Try” she emphasized.
Her smile was contagious. Or her sickness was. Because he suddenly couldn’t stop the corner of his lip from twitching upwards, threatening to curve into a grin, copying her.
And so a routine started between them. Now conversing on their walks home together, side by side, from school. The large distance between them, both physically and emotionally, was closing in. Because after all, he owed it to her, to himself, to try. You had noticed something in him, and he had noticed something in you too.
Faz um do Go KyungJun porfavorr, amo night has come e não tem quase nenhum dele 😓
notas da autora: sou apaixonada por cada personagem do cha woomin (por mais duvidosos que possam ser) espero que gostee <3! obs: prometo que é a última vez que mudo o layout dos posts...
desespero ── .✦
personagens: go kyung-jun x fem!leitor
sinopse: no caos após o fracasso do plano de junhee, kyungjun se torna sua âncora.
avisos: menções de morte, sangue, xingamentos, levemente sugestivo (?), ataque de pânico
palavras: 1300+
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você sente a água fria escorrendo pelo seu rosto, misturando-se ao suor e à sujeira grudenta que ainda paira sobre sua pele depois do caos no ginásio. suas mãos tremem levemente enquanto esfrega o sabão com força, como se pudesse lavar não só o corpo, mas também o pânico que se instalou no ar momentos antes.
o barulho dos gritos ainda ecoava na sua cabeça quando você finalmente se refugiou no banheiro. as mãos tremiam, manchadas do sangue de seus colegas, enquanto a água fria escorria pela pia. você se encarava no espelho, tentando permanecer firme, mesmo quando sua respiração falhava em manter o ritmo.
o plano de junhee era simples: ninguém vota para a máfia, ninguém morre. mas, é claro, nada nunca é simples nesse inferno. quando o tempo começou a se esgotar, o pânico tomou conta: alunos gritando, desesperados atrás dos próprios celulares, tentando votar em qualquer um antes que o relógio zerasse.
seu reflexo parecia distorcido, os olhos arregalados de medo, o rosto pálido. você desviou o olhar, incapaz de se encarar, sentindo o ar rarefeito nos pulmões. a parede fria e úmida parecia se fechar em você enquanto a crise se instalava, o coração batendo descompassado no peito, as mãos cobrindo a boca para tentar abafar os soluços que ameaçavam escapar.
a porta do banheiro se escancarou de repente, batendo contra a parede com tanta força que você quase pulou para trás. o som ecoou pelo espaço estreito, fazendo suas mãos tremerem ainda mais. você ergueu o olhar assustada, gotas de água escorrendo pelo seu rosto, encontrando kyungjun parado na entrada. ele estava ofegante, os ombros subindo e descendo em ritmo frenético, como se tivesse corrido por todo o colégio. o olhar selvagem, dilatado pelo medo, varria cada canto até finalmente se fixar em você.
— “porra…” a voz dele saiu rouca, carregada de um alívio desesperado que mal se disfarçava de raiva. — “você enlouqueceu? por que sumiu assim?” kyungjun gritou, cheio de desespero e raiva em partes iguais. e antes que você pudesse abrir a boca para responder, kyungjun atravessou o banheiro em dois passos largos. a respiração dele ainda era pesada, quente e irregular, e de repente você sentiu o corpo dele colar nas suas costas. os braços passaram ao redor da sua cintura com força, quase esmagando, como se quisesse ter certeza de que você era real, de que não ia desaparecer da frente dele.
o choque fez seu coração disparar ainda mais. a água gelada ainda escorria do seu rosto para o queixo, pingando sobre as mãos que continuavam apoiadas na pia, mas agora misturava-se ao calor desesperado do corpo dele colado ao seu. a respiração dele pesada contra a sua nuca. o cheiro dele invadiu seus sentidos, ancorando você de volta à realidade.
— "kyungjun..." seu nome saiu como um sussurro, um fiapo de voz sem força alguma. — “não faz isso comigo…” a voz dele saiu abafada contra o seu ombro, — “eu achei que tinha perdido você” as palavras dele morrem na garganta, roucas e entrecortadas, enquanto os braços apertam um pouco mais ao redor da sua cintura. você sente o tremor nele agora, o valentão que todo mundo teme, reduzido a isso: um garoto assustado que quase perdeu a única pessoa que o faz se sentir humano nesse pesadelo.
seu corpo amoleceu nos braços dele, a tensão escapando como ar de um balão furado. você virou um pouco a cabeça, o olhar fixo no reflexo dele no espelho, — "a gente vai morrer, não vai?" a pergunta saiu em um fio de voz quase inaudível, carregada de toda a desesperança que você sentia. o abraço dele na sua cintura se apertou mais e você sentiu o olhar dele endurecer sobre o seu reflexo, os olhos escuros fixos nos seus, uma determinação fria substituindo o pânico de segundos antes.
ele te virou bruscamente, as mãos agarrando seus ombros com desespero, o rosto dele próximo ao seu, os olhos queimando com uma intensidade que te fez prender a respiração. — "não, porra." a voz dele estava baixa, carregada de uma convicção inabalável. — "você não vai morrer! eu não vou deixar essa merda acontecer!" as mãos dele subiram para seu rosto, as palmas quentes envolvendo suas bochechas enquanto ele aproximava o rosto do seu, a respiração ofegante misturando-se à sua. os olhos dele, ainda intensos, perfuraram os seus.
— "você confia em mim?" a voz dele era um rosnado baixo, quase um comando. você não conseguia desviar o olhar. a gravidade da situação, o caos de minutos atrás, tudo parecia desaparecer diante da urgência nos olhos dele. sem palavras, você acenou, uma promessa silenciosa entre o desespero e a esperança. um pequeno sorriso surgiu nos lábios de kyungjun, sem que ele desviasse os olhos dos seus, e então, antes que você pudesse sequer processar, ele te puxou para um beijo.
o beijo começou urgente, como se o mundo inteiro pudesse desabar a qualquer momento. e, nesse inferno, provavelmente iria. os lábios dele colidiram com os seus com uma força que te roubou o ar, não delicado, mas faminto, desesperado por algo real em meio ao caos. suas mãos, ainda úmidas da água da pia, subiram instintivamente para o peito dele, empurrando de leve no início, como se quisesse ganhar espaço para respirar, mas logo se rendendo, os dedos se enfiando na camisa dele, puxando-o mais perto.
kyungjun não parou. as mãos dele deslizaram do seu rosto para os seus cabelos, emaranhando-se nos fios molhados, inclinando sua cabeça para aprofundar o beijo. um gemido baixo escapou da garganta dele, vibrando contra sua boca, e você respondeu com um suspiro ofegante, as respirações se entrelaçando em um ritmo frenético. suas costas bateram contra a borda da pia quando ele te pressionou mais, o corpo dele moldando-se ao seu como se quisesse fundir os dois em um só.
as mãos dele corriam livremente, descendo pelas suas costas, traçando a curva de seus quadris com uma urgência que te arrepiava, enquanto as suas subiam para o pescoço dele, unhas cravando levemente na pele, ancorando-se nele. ar no banheiro parecia mais pesado, e cada respiração era roubada no intervalo entre beijos. não havia tempo para delicadeza.
kyungjun separou a boca da sua por um instante, a testa colada à sua, a respiração em pesada, os lábios inchados e os olhos cerrados. aqueles mesmos olhos escuros que sempre te desafiavam, agora cheios de uma possessividade feroz, como se você fosse a única âncora dele nesse abismo. — "você é minha", ele murmurou rouco, a voz baixa e grave, ecoando contra sua pele como uma promessa irrevogável.
as mãos dele ainda apertavam sua cintura, os dedos cravados como se temesse que você evaporasse. — "e eu vou dar um jeito de tirar a gente dessa merda, não importa o que eu precise fazer. entendeu?” ele fez uma pausa, desviando o olhar por um momento, antes de te encarar de novo. — “nem que eu tenha que matar todo mundo aqui”
as palavras dele te atingiram com força, misturando o medo com uma estranha segurança. e você sabia que ele falava sério. antes que você pudesse responder, uma voz ecoou do corredor, abafada pela porta entreaberta, mas alta o suficiente para quebrar o momento. — “todos para o ginásio, agora!” era junhee, o tom urgente e autoritário ressoando pelos azulejos do banheiro.
kyungjun ainda te mantinha presa contra a pia, os olhos fixos nos seus como se quisesse prolongar aquele instante até o fim dos tempos. então, de repente, ele suavizou. um contraste quase cruel diante da fúria e do desespero de segundos atrás. quando se afastou, ainda próximo demais, você viu o canto da boca dele se curvar em um sorriso perverso, quase debochado, como se aquele momento de vulnerabilidade tivesse se transformado em algo só dele, um pequeno segredo entre vocês. ele respirou fundo, ainda mantendo uma das mãos na sua cintura, os olhos escuros te despindo. ele se inclinou ligeiramente, a boca próxima ao seu ouvido, e murmurou com aquela mesma firmeza que queimava em cada palavra:
— “lembra do que eu disse… eu vou tirar a gente desse inferno… custe o que custar.”
Warning's ✮⋆˙ this work contain's sexual content, if you are not comfortable please don't read, just ignore. You have been warned.
MINORS DO NOT INTERACT!
Let's start with foreplay
• Kyungjun takes his time with your body, exploring the areas that are most sensitive and responsive to touch
• He enjoys teasing you during foreplay (and not only), using his big, veiny hands, his lips, and tongue to stimulate your zones and places
• Also to get these noises, sighs, and moans out of you
• Kyungjun builds tension and arousal during foreplay, using gentle teasing and more intense stimulation to drive you wild
• Above all, Kyungjun respects his partner's boundaries during foreplay, checking in if they're comfortable
Moving forward
• He is the dominant one, you can't tell me otherwise, he takes charge of guiding the direction all this situation is going into
• He enjoys being in control of the pace, intensity, positions, and activities if you know what I mean. He is also not afraid to issue some commands guiding you
• I see him using his physical dominance to show his control, such as pinning you against the wall, holding you in place, grabbing you and tossing you around, and pinning your hands behind your back or above your head
• He enjoys teasing you and showing his control over your pleasure, using techniques like edging or orgasm denial
• Likes using handcuffs, ropes, bondage, or other props to further assert his dominance
Pleasuring you
• Kyungjun focuses on pleasuring you in every way possible
• He uses his hands, lips, and tongue paying close attention to your reactions
• He is skilled at finding your most sensitive spots and knows how to tease you
• Like I said his touch is firm, yet gentle (cause hurting you is the last thing he would do)
• He is not afraid of trying new things
• Loves to use his long fingers on you but listen, during oral... He is completely focused on your satisfaction and pleasure, he can't even think about himself
Pleasuring him
• Kyungjun likes to receive pleasure and likes it even more when you are the one to initiate it
• I don't think he cares much about how you are willing to pleasure him but his favourite is to receive a nice blowjob
• He can't get over the view of your eyes looking so politely at him, with your mouth full and your knees hurting on the ground, it looks so pretty
• Your tongue just drives him wild with desire for more
Aftercare
• After an intense round Kyungjun pulls you close, wrapping his arms around you tight, he holds you firmly but gently, providing a sense of security
• Peppers you with compliments (even tho he is not a very vocal person he has his moments during and after intimate situations), he reassures you showing the emotional connection you two share
• He might stroke your head or rub your back softly before heading to shower together
Hello! I liked the short story you made! But may I request another one? This time I want to request a kyung jun x reader(smut)! That's all, thanks again!
Kyung Jun x Black/Korean Fem!Reader (for this one)
~ Hey loves , I never forget about you guys , just going through a lot but I’m going to try to update a bit more since my depression slowly coming back , I also didn’t forgot about my girlies that read my Wattpad books💕~
Genre ~ Smut
Warning ⚠️: Rough sex , chocking , name calling
Small summary : it’s been a year since you been with Go Kyung Jun , it was hard being the girlfriend of the known bully anytime you saw him bullying someone you would yell at him to stop always allowing the injured person to run away , you were the only person that could get him to stop … at least until you weren’t around anymore , you were heading to you assigned room when two boys that were a bit taller then you as they seemed nervous before asking for you to talk to Go Kyung Jun about this friends that owned them money that they needed .. now here you were confronting you boyfriend and his friends
Standing frozen as you look between both boys who stood over you as one looked down nervously as he rubbed his arm while the other gave you pleading eyes before he spoke
“ Kim Y/n.. could.. could you h-help us please” the boy said voice nervous eyes unsure
“Sure what’s up , are you guys alright ..” reader says softly voice full of confusion and concern as she places her now closed book under her arm as her eyes look between both boys
“Well..” the one wearing glasses now looked up at you as he continued speaking
“I gave Kyung Jun’s friends some money to borrow ..and it’s been a while now and they haven’t paid me back yet .. I d-didn’t want to come to you about it but.. I really need it back” the guy with glasses says as he looks down at his feet once he was done talking
“And you to, huh” reader says with a sigh as she then looks at the other guy as he slowly nods his head before looking down to
“Okay.. I’ll talk to them but you can’t let them keep taking money from you or bully you ..it gets you nowhere you got to learn to stand up for yourselves” reader says as she looks at both boys who just give her a small nod , sighing as she knew they weren’t going to do what she said
“Come on , follow me” Reader says as she turns down the hall heading for the gym, she knew that’s where they would be right now since there was nothing to do at the moment
Walking down the hall as you feel you self become annoyed reaching the end of the hall as you stop in front of two double door grabbing a handle to the right door as you swig the door open not caring about the loud banging sound to made when it hit the wall , waking in to the gym with both boys quietly following behind you as your eyes lock on Kyung Jun as him and his minions turn to look at you
Stopping only a few inches away from the three as you look at them with annoyance and anger in your eyes , pointing at each one of them before saying anything
“Assholes did you take money from them” reader says as she looks at Kyung Jun’s two minions who she didn’t like one bit and they knew it but she didn’t care
“So what if we did..” the blonde headed one said as he’s now a inch away from you as you look at him eye now twitching as you close the space between you two looking up at him since he was taller giving him a innocent smile before raising your legs as your knee came in contact with his crotch with force as he grabs his crotch before falling to the floor screaming in pain as he let out curses your way
“Now .. did you take money from them” reader says as she now looks at Kyung Jun’s other friend who quickly nods his head as he shakes a bit in fear
“When we get home you have a week to pay them both what you owe and if you don’t which I’m going to ask them you and your friend will be in a hospital got it” reader says as he quickly nods turing her head to Kyung Jun who lets out a deep chuckle before pointing at the male standing behind you
“I’ll make sure he gets his money..” turning to the other male as he continues
“Does he owe you to” Kyung Jun ask as the male give a small nod
“See.. I’ll make sure they pay them back love” Kyung jun says as he gives you his innocent smile as you roll your eyes causing his smile to disappear as he walks closer to you
“Don’t be a brat I said they’ll get it back , yah” Kyung Jun says as he looks down at you causing you to laugh as you look up at him
“Fuck off .. you would lie for them in heart beat since they do whatever you say 바보” reader says as she looks at him with annoyance
~translation: Fool ~
“ 다시 말해 봐 ..” Kyung Jun says as he now closes any space you had left between you two
~ translation: say it again ~
“ 바보..” reader repeats boldly as she looks up at Kyung Jun who lets out a dark chuckle before looking straight ahead at the gyms double doors face now showing no expression
~ translation: fool ~
“너만 빼고 모두 방에 서 나가” Kyung Jun says as he looks down at you causing your brows to furrow as you hear everyone run towards the door jumping a bit as he calls out to his friends
~translation: everyone leave except you ~
“Guard the door” Kyung Jun says before you hear their footsteps continue towards the door before the doors were closed as you try to take a step back but Kyung Jun grabbed your wrist before you could
As you try to pull your arm from his hold only for him to drag you behind him as you start to become a bit nervous .. yeah you could put him in his place but when you angered him, he had a way to put you in your place and you DID NOT want to get caught by any of your other classmates especially not your half sister , Yeon Soo .. she already hated the fact that you dated Kyung Jun and she would probably kill you if she knew you were sleeping with Kyung Jun
Panicking as he stops by a table that was left in the gym as you shake you head no , you REALLY did not want to be caught as he rolls his eyes clearly the annoyed one now as he picks you up placing both hands under your plump thighs siting you on the edge of the table as he grabs your neck with a tight grip causing you to grab his arm with one hand
“ you want to act like a brat I’ll treat you like a fucking brat” Kyung Jun says to you his voice now deep and laced with venom as your breath gets caught in your throat panties becoming soaked this was the first time you got him this pissed off and you would be lying if you said it wasn’t hot but you wouldn’t tell him that of course
Keeping his hand around your neck as his free hand moves to your shirt as he quickly pops each button on your uniform shirt face palming yourself in your mind since you didn’t bring a sweater or a spare shirt , yet Kyung Jun didn’t care popping your final button as his hand slowly moves down your exposed stomach slowly going down your skirt as he lifts your skirt over your thighs eyes scanning your clothed cunt as he lets out a deep yet dark chuckle seeing how your soaked panties were now sticking to your soaked cunt
Slowly rubbing your clothed cunt as he feels your wet juices over your panties causing you to let out a soft moan growing as he lets go of your neck for a minute grabbing your panties as he rips them from your lower body , slowly dropping to his knees as he pushes your legs open slowly rubbing your inner thighs as he lets out a loud groan
Moving one of his hands from your thigh as it travels to your dripping cunt stopping as he runs in fingers through your juices as you let out a gasp from his cold fingers causing him to smirk eyes never leaving your soaked cunt , laying his head on one of your plump thighs as he pushes two of his longer fingers in your tight hole pushes his fingers in and out of your dripping hole at a fast pace quickly covering your mouth as to not make to much noise since your voice echoed throughout the empty gym
Grabbing a handful of Kyung Juns hair as he lets out a chuckle ouch if your leg open more every time you tried to close them as he picks up his pace curling his fingers at your sweet spot causing your toes to curl as you try to shake your head no for him to stop as you moans became louder
As you look down at Kyung Jun would lifts his hand from your thigh eyes still locked on your dripping cunt as he gives you soft kisses around your soaked cunt before violently sucking on your clit dropping your hand from your mouth as you place it in his hair trying to push him away with your hands and you keep a tight grip on his hair letting out a loud moan as you feel a knot forming in your stomach
“K-Kyung J-Jun.. s-stop” reader moan out as you feel a sudden vibration run through clit as you hear Kyung Jun “hmm”
“P-please ..c-cum-..” before you could finish what you were saying Kyung Jun pulled his head away as you feel the felt your self cumming Kyung Jun takes his fingers from Troy dripping cunt giving you a shit eating grin as he stands to his feet face full of your juices as you feel your self shiver from his gaze
“Turn around and bend over the table 애새끼” Kyung Jun says in a deep voice full of lust as it echoes through the gym giving you chills
Quickly hopping off the table as you turn you back towards Kyung Jun bending over the table as your huge breast press against the table feet barley touching the ground as your plump ass was now in eye sight of Kyung Jun you cunt dripping with slick that now ran down you inner thighs as your legs were spend apart
Groaning as Kyung Jun quickly removes his belt and uniform pants as his boxers fell with his pants taking off his jackets along with his shirt as his harden cock now stood up with excitement too dripping with precum as he holding your hips stoping for a minute grabbing the back of your shirt as he careful rips it off your body in unbuckling your bra before pulling it from under you as you let out a soft moan from the cold table coming in pant with your exposed chest cashing your nipples to harden letting out a gasp as Kyung Jun pushes his thick cock in you tight cunt as he lets out a loud groan grip tighten around your waist
Without letting you adjust to his size as he normally would he started pounded in your soaked cunt as you let out loud moans feeling as he removes one hand from your hip grabbing at your neck with a tight hold as he slams the rest of his length in you right hole as you nails scratch at the table
“K-Kyung j-jun .. s-slow fuck” reader tries to call out as she feel Kyung Jun pick up his pace not caring about your begging as he removes his other hand from your hip for a second giving you a hard slap on your ass letting out a loud moan as it echoed throughout the gym before grabbing your hip slamming your harder against his cock
“ Shut up or someone might hear you brat” Kyung Jun groans out as you feel his cock head hit you cervix causing your toes to curl letting out a loud moan as you feel tears run down you face as the sounds of skins clapping loud moans and groans echoed throughout the gym nails scratching at the table as your eyes roll back from the pleasure yet embarrassment from being heard as you feel a knot form in your lower stomach body now shaking as you look at Kyung Jun over your shoulder who looks at you with a smirk
“What’s wrong” Kyujg Jun says as he lets out a chuckle
“Why so quiet hm.. don’t want the be a brat now huh” Kyung Jun groans out as he feels you tighten around his cock
“F-fuck..” Kyung Jun breathes out before taking his hands from your hip pushing your lowers back in to the table gas he keeps a tight hold of your neck causing your back to arch a bit more then it was feeling he cock pushes deeper inside your dripping cunt as your walls tighten feeling as he cock twitches inside you cunt
Letting out a loud moan as your eyes roll to the back of your head feeling the knot snap in your lower stomach as your feel juices drip on Kyung Jun would keep his pace as his thrust became more sloppy before feeling his mmm release his seed deep in your womb as you let out a moan feeling your juices mix as they run down your plump thighs after a few minutes of catching your breath you feel Kyung pull out of your soaked cunt as you try to stand to your feet only to fall to the floor
“Fucking Kyung JUN” Reader yells as she looks at Kyung Jun who gives he a grin before handing her one of his jackets once he was dressed
“I can’t go to my room like this .. I share a room with my sister and her friend Kyung Jun ..please” Reader says looking up at him with pleasing eyes as his grin never left his face
“Maybe you’ll think about that before being a brat , I’ll carry you” Kyung Jun says as he gets you dressed willing your with your totem shirt
“You want me to die huh.. my Yeon soo would kill me , are you listening” Reader says as she watches Kyung Jun throw out the totem shirt
“Not my problem brat let’s go” Kyung Jun says before pulling you on his back slowly walking towards the gym door
Letting out a sigh as you hide your face in his back thinking of excuses to tell your sister not seeing the grin that Kyung Jun held on his face as he walked with your out the gym and down the hall heading for your room
a/n. this shit took so long omfg. whoever said writing was easy can suck my nonexistent left nutsack.
"i don't get why this is even a discussion."
"oh, cmon! you don't think the conflict around it is interesting?"
"whether its interesting or not doesn't matter because this shouldn't be an existing argument. if your partner or someone you love commits a murder and there's serious evidence pointing back to them, how could you just act like it's not even there?"
"dude, you're missing the point entirely. the question is not about what you would do in that situation, it's about what you should believe."
"that's so stupid. the only factor you should need is evidence. it doesn't matter if the accused is a long time friend, your partner, or even your child. sure, your judgment on their character is still relevant, but if their fingerprints were found at the crime scene there's just no way you can objectively ignore their culpability. at that point, you should either believe your partner is guilty or at best remain undecided."
"in that case, would you say that following the evidence is morally required?"
"absolutely."
"you don't think there might be other ethical factors to consider?"
"for example?"
"even though the evidence is strong, there's still a chance they might not be guilty. imagine how it would feel like to be innocent and have no one believe you, not even your own partner! by not supporting them you run the risk of seriously hurting them on a crucial time of need. and consider what this lack of trust would do to your relationship. could you really go on after seriously suspecting–and believing–they're a murderer?"
"are you saying you'd rather ignore the crimes of your partner, even when the truth is staring you in the face, just for the sake of love?"
outside of the ethical dilemma resonating through yoon yn's headphones, the girl shifted around on her seat. her limbs felt numb from remaining unmoving for so long and, even though the only companion by her side was her bag, the compact space paid no mercy on her back.
after finding a comfortable position she set her eyes on the view outside the window. sunlight hued over the fields of grass and the occasional farm, making the rural landscape imitate a painting in motion shaped by the most gentle brush strokes. the scene felt so engrossingly peaceful, she could almost feel the gale caressing her features despite the glass separating her from the world.
yn couldn't help but thank the scene–and the long lasting battery of her headphones–for giving her something to focus on, seeing as the ride to the resort her class was directed towards had resulted to be such an otherwise tiresome one.
"YES!"
an obnoxious voice popped yn's bubble in spite of the maximum volume she'd set for her podcast. distracted by the sound she turned to glance at the very back of the bus, where the students grouped up at the last row of leathered seats frowned in unison at heo yool–who mocked them with the cheekiest grin one could imagine. judging by their sullen looks, yn figured the citizens had lost yet another round of mafia, a game they'd been playing for who knows how long.
she recalled when her classmates had urged her to join the game the moment she stepped into the bus, which she declined, prioritizing her tranquility over the headache she knew they'd give her, yet promising she'd join in the next time.
after figuring out the source of that ruckus yn set her focus back on her podcast, purposely missing the eyes of the guy she'd been avoiding to the best of her abilities for days now.
just a few rows behind her, kyung jun's eyes never left yn as she disappeared between the sea of heads flooding the bus, and his scheme of intentionally leaving the space by his side unoccupied for her came to mind, especially remembering how his grand plan backfired when that fucking basketball-star-wannabe gave up his seat for her.
that annoying prick just couldn't get the memmo, couldn't he? to him, hyun ho had always been a nuisance; a pest that treaded on yn's heels at every chance he got–even when she used to hang onto the feared delinquent's arm.
"they're so loud," kyung jun muttered. he'd been trying to settle down the bittersweet echoes of his mind since the start of that damned school trip, in vain, since the blaring voices behind him made the flare that was his temper even harder to quell than any of those memories.
luckily, he needn't lift a single finger to make the commotion stop, and he was able to get some peace of mind thanks to his lackeys acting as spokesmen for his aggravation.
on the other side of the large vehicle, kim so mi sneakily took pictures of the class president.
"hey look, isn't he gorgeous?" the vice president called, showing what was sure to be one of her new favorite pictures to her friends seated behind: park ji soo, cha yoo joon and park woo ram. "doesn't this belong in a magazine? how can he look so gorgeous?" so mi repeated with a dreamy sigh, looking at her screen.
"i will tell jun hee tomorrow that you took a photo of him," woo ram threatened with a playful smile.
"oh yeah? what if i tell yn about all the videos you have?" so mi replied, pointing at the camera that always hanged around the guy's neck.
"please do, maybe i'll finally seduce her."
"oh my god," exclaimed yoo joon, "you are so delusional."
"why?" he lifted one of his hands in response to the very serious offense.
"dude, you barely talk to her."
"woo ram, you have the same chances of getting with yn as me and yoo joon of breaking up." ji soo stated.
the guy in mention glanced at his girlfriend, seemingly unaware of the joke. "that's zero, right?" question to which ji soo only rolled her eyes.
"i don't care what you say," woo ram brushed off. "i know she's the love of my life."
"ko kyung jun!" called out so mi.
like a tiny animal trying to save itself from a threatening predator, woo ram jumped to the empty seat by his side, hiding from the vandal's peripheral as much as possible while the rest of his companions laughed.
"fuck, kim so mi!" he cried out, "you trying to get me killed?"
"relax, he's not even looking," revealed the vice president with a cheeky smile.
as if they'd rehearsed it, the four students turned around to catch ko kyung jun's eyes still set on yoon yn, and by the looks of it, he didn't have any plans to cease his staring.
"not seeing them together is kinda weird," yoo joon pointed out.
"does anyone know why they broke up?" so mi asked to her peers, who all looked at each other expecting an answer none of them had.
"whatever," dismissed ji soo, "yn is better off without him anyway."
"yeah, she's been around us a lot more since then." agreed so mi.
"i bet kyung jun barely let her talk to us."
"right? he looks like the controlling type."
"i would never treat her like that." acknowledged woo ram, making his way back into the conversation only to get beaten back down by the three others.
the time inside the bus seemed to work differently than the rest of the world. minutes and hours mixed up in a disorienting spectacle that at least seemed to follow the sun setting over the horizon.
when they finally arrived to the resort, the only source of light were the numerous lamps adorning the streets and the inviting shine of the building before them.
with the bus door finally opened, the students of class 2-3 thronged the exit with overwhelming excitement. the trip had been longer that the teacher had promised and everyone was ready to get comfortable on their temporary rooms. of course, that included yn, who unfortunately had to wait for the rest of her classmates to take their suitcases out of the loaded trunk since her luggage ended up dropping to the back during the ride.
after everyone collected their belongings, the girl was able to retrieve her case at last. it was somewhat heavy but the tiny wheels at the bottom made it easier for her to slide the valise out of the bus' compartment. taking out the retractable handle, yn rolled her suitcase for at most six steps before someone else got ahold of it.
"what are you doing?" she questioned, but the guy simply walked away while pulling her luggage along and up the stairs.
"kyung jun."
at the sound of his name, he stopped. walking towards him, yn stood right between the entrance and the suitcase-stealer.
"what do you think? i'm helping you."
"i can do it myself." yn chided, staring him down harshly.
kyung jun had received many looks like that one throughout his life. from parents, teachers, students... they were all identical, ranging from disappointment to resentment and back. he was used to it. it was his day to day, how could he not be? yet he never imagined the same eyes that used to watch him with so much endearment would scrutinize him so cruelly.
"you used to love when i carried your stuff." he reminded her, scanning yn's face for a spec of something–anything–he hoped could save him from the pain her gaze struck him with.
the girl let out an exasperated sigh. why couldn't he leave her be? why was it that, no matter how much she wanted to distance herself, he always found a way to squeeze back into her life?
yn grabbed the handle of her suitcase and pulled. she wanted to leave, to get away from his side and free herself of his piercing eyes. unfortunately his strength surpassed hers, and she was forced to stay as he kept his grip.
"can you let go?"
"yn," he asked but the girl just focused on the luggage he kept hostage. "can we talk?"
"about what?" she sneered, speaking with as much disdain her troubled feelings allowed.
"you know what."
once again, she sighed. his antics were so infuriating; always pushing down the barrier she tried to put between the two.
"not now."
"then when?" he instantly snapped back, then took a deep breath to stop his grating tone. "you always say that but then you ignore me for days."
"look, i don't have time for this." for the second time, she attempted to retrieve her case. "i promised i'd help with the preparations for the class picture, so–"
"oh, c'mon," and still, he pulled back. "since when do you care about this school-spirit-bullshit?"
he was right, yn never involved herself with whatever activities the school came up with. time and time again, they'd skipped so many classes as to not get involved with all those school projects they both deemed as meaningless, deciding to spend their mornings strolling around parks and nearby shopping districts instead. but that wasn't an option anymore, and yn needed some way to blurr the images that kept torturing her with the agonizing nostalgia of a broken relationship.
"promise me we'll talk. tonight."
"sure," for the third time, she attempted to take back her luggage. but his answer was the same.
"no, yn. promise me."
with every fiber of her being, yn summoned the last shreds of her patience and met his gaze. his eyes held her captive, beseeching her in silence to unravel the troubles he was willing to share with no one but her, and the hypnotic pull of his gaze weakened her willpower to resist.
"i promise." she reluctantly gave in.
as kyung jun finally released the carry-on, yn didn't even bat an eye before snatching it up and walking away. however, as she made her way into the resort center, she couldn't help but feel frustrated with herself for falling for his tricks. all the effort she had put into avoiding him seemed to have gone down the drain so quickly, leaving her feeling defeated.
not wanting kyung jun to catch up to her, yn rushed inside the building.
warm lights illuminated the vast entrance, composed by a lounge area with leathered sofas that accentuated the beige walls with brighter colors and a water dispenser conveniently placed next to the cushioned seats. at the center, a beautiful statue engulfed by faint blue lighting towered over everything below. the perfectly crafted marble giant was impossible to miss, looking like a still guardian watching over the resort's grounds. yet that didn't stop yn from overlooking the sign with the qr code needed for the resort's wifi and facility app.
following the arrows pointing out the way towards the elevator, yn got in and pressed the button labeled dormitories. the heavy doors slid and shut before the steel cage trembled, signaling its vertical movement. suddenly, the girl felt the air tighten inside her chest, twisting her lungs in a way that seemed to strangle them. oxygen got caught up in her throat as images of cables snapping and an imminent fall to her death plagued her mind. in, out, in, out. yn's breath increased as rapidly as tidal waves when the lights malfunctioned and in between flickers, she saw a dark figure out of the corner of her eye.
the moment she snapped her head back to take a look, a faint bell announced the door sliding open. taking in the air as steadily as she could, yn grabbed her suitcase and escaped the cage of death. frightened and disoriented, she questioned if what just concurred has been a quick fever dream or reality. and if it wasn't, why did her mind torture her like that? as far as she knew, never in her life had she experienced something that'd cause this crippling fear of high spaces. so why...?
she shook her head and brushed off the uncanny feeling, dismissing it as a consequence from the tiresome trip and forcing herself to focus on finding the room she shared with ahn na hee and kim so mi, who'd invited her with overwhelming coercion. compared to the elevator ride, figuring out her way to her dormitory was a piece of cake. the girl left her stuff in an empty corner and took the stairs down towards the gymnasium. there, instead of getting scolded by the teacher like she expected, what greeted her was a plethora of different activities performed by her classmates.
in the middle of the room, a group of students flawlessly danced to the rhythm of the songs reverberating from a large speaker, followed by lee joo young and choi mi na silently fighting for the spotlight, and being interrupted by ko kyung jun, who apparently had nothing better to do than to mess with their practice by turning off the music while his two loyal followers, shin seung bin and kim jin ha, played a very dedicated match of ping-pong.
on opposite corners of the gym, jin da bum, choi joo won, lee yoon seo and oh jung won were consecutively separated in two pairs, all conversing with their respective best friends. up on the second floor, cha yoo joon and park ji soo, who never seemed to stay away from each other, watched from above. on the stage, band members im eun chan, nam yeon woo and baek eun ha dabbled with their instruments to make sure everything was perfectly in tune. lastly, jang hyun ho and kim dong hyun busied themselves by organizing all the sport equipment laying around.
"yoon yn!" called kim jun hee from a large set of tables surrounded by the other members of the student council which, of course, included kim so mi and her friend ahn na hee.
with no sight of their teacher around yn walked stress-free to said table, although not before catching park woo ram pointing his camera right at her, which made the guy hastily turning to film someone else.
"you're here," the class president stated. "we thought you got lost or something."
"sorry, i got caught up with something." yn replied. she didn't really care about these preparations, but she did promise to help, and yn wasn't the type to use that word lightly.
"yeah! i was going to text you but we've been so busy preparing everything." so mi ranted, sprinkling salt into the wound.
"i can see that," yn commented, deciding to ignore so mi's backhanded scolding.
"what happened, though? did you really get lost?" na hee asked.
"no, i got stopped by kyung jun."
"oh, right. he was a bit late too now that I think about it."
"is that jackass bothering you again?" hyun ho, who'd come closer to the table just as yn approached, joined in and put a hand on her shoulder.
"no," yes. "everything's fine."
truth be told, yn would rather drop dead than having to deal with kyung jun. however, she knew that telling her classmates about it wouldn't lead to a positive outcome. after all, the only person who had the courage to confront the delinquent was hyun ho, and, given their history, yn was certain his involvement would only make matters worse.
in another area of the bustling gym, the noticeable trio of vandals were causing a ruckus in the corner. as they tossed a basketball back and forth, jin ha hurled the ball at kyung jun, who was too busy gawking at yn's arrival to notice. the ball smacked him right in the chest–a painful reminder of how his focus seemed to always follow after her.
"shit, my bad!" jin ha exclaimed.
their leader squatted to grab the ball at his feet and got back up only for his gaze to fix back towards the girl who constantly distracted him and, of-fucking-course, hyun ho standing right next to her, as always. the sight made his blood boil and his knuckles turn white as he clenched the basketball in his hands, while his rapid heartbeats deafened any coherent thought telling him to settle down.
seeing this, jin ha and seung bin looked at each other before the latter sighed and came closer to his friend. throwing one arm around his shoulders, he spoke:
"why don't we go outside, man? get your head out the gutter."
"yeah," kyung jun agreed, seeing seung bin was clearly trying his best to support him. perhaps he was right, some air would probably do him good right now. "let's go." was the last thing he said before disappearing through the gymnasium's exit, just in time to miss the teacher entering from the other side.
after informing the class presidents about a problem regarding the other bus full of students set to accompany them on this field trip, he left, clearly in a panic because of the unexpected turn of events.
in the meantime, most of class 2-3 remained in the gymnasium. no more than a few minutes went by before the dancing group, who now were fixing their hair and makeup while sitting on the floor, called yn over. ever since they found out about her break up, the girls had been offered her to go out again and again, an opportunity they took to invite her to join their club with not-so-subtle comments.
"oh yn, you should hang out with us more!" were the kind of utterances she always received from the class' cheerleaders.
mi na had insisted on brushing yn's hair. taking the empty stop in front of her classmate, she felt the bristles effortlessly flowing through the roots of her hair to its ends. the conversation was an amicable one. the girls often taking their time to butter up yn and saying how cool it'd be to have her in their club–until the self proclaimed hairdresser decided to dive into something she'd been curious about.
"hey yn."
"yeah?" she answered, eyes closed while enjoying the soothing sensation of the hairbrush.
"why did you and kyung jun brake up?"
mi na found herself at a loss for words when she faced the disapproving and critical stares of the entire group. why would you ask that? their glares yelled in silence, making her feel like she just made a terrible mistake.
"that's between him and i, mi na." yn abruptly ended the change of topic.
why did they break up? that's a question she'd been asked countless times ever since her classmates took note of their separation. a query yn remembered avoiding like a plague, long before this trip. only this time, a strange, guttural discomfort buried into every corner of her brain as she noticed a spec of something missing, unable to put together if the same evasion came as a reflex or because she couldn't answer it herself.
"right," mi na's shame, reinforced by the brutal glares of the other girls, took over her face as her cheeks flushed. "sorry."
luckily for her, just as her face morphed into a cherry tomato, a painful ringing roared through the speakers before the absence of light engulfed the high schoolers in deep darkness.
"c'mon! what is this?" one said.
"what's going on?" asked another.
"hey, turn the lights on!" resonated a voice from above.
a loud clang similar to a metal pipe hitting a hard surface echoed over the four walls, followed by the piercing shrieks of several people. helping themselves with the flashlights provided by their phones, the students revealed a white figure in the middle of the room.
"quit joking around." before any more screeches could be heard, hyun ho launched a basketball to the sheeted ghost, making it fall to the ground just as pathetically as your average cartoon villain.
with the precision of a well-rehearsed act, the room was suddenly lit up, revealing the mischievous culprit behind the childish prank. and lo and behold, it was none other than heo yool.
the collection of complaints from everybody present synced in a perfect expression of annoyance and the occasional insult.
"guys, listen carefully." the class clown™ gathered his classmates' attention as he stood from the ground. "i've heard that, a long time ago, a high school girl killed herself here," he explained, playing the role of a surprisingly talented storyteller. "so there's a few things you should never do: don't look at the mirror and turn around at midnight. and if someone grabs your ankle when you're sleeping, don't look down. if you break these rules," he turned to the group of dancers. "a ghost will pop up!" dashing towards them with the form of a rogish halloween scare actor, he was met with the frightened squeals of the girls.
yn, whose interest in the paranormal had never been deep enough to scare her, grabbed mi na's hairbrush and hurled it towards heo yool. an action that encouraged the rest of the class to throw everything they had at hand, along with some despicable remarks and the teasing laugh of the insufferable rascal.
defeated by heo yool's stunts, the students decided they've had enough as one by one they exited the gym.
"are you coming, yn?" so mi asked.
the girl nodded before answering, "i'll be there in a minute. i want to get some water first."
at the entrance, so mi and yn parted ways. she approached the water dispenser and took one of the cardboard cups provided by the machine. ever since the lights of the gymnasium had turned off, the girl noticed an unusual taste in her mouth that reminded her of her frightening fever dream at the elevator. she felt it at the back of her neck: something eerily creeping behind her at every given moment. was it possible that heo yool's story actually got under her skin? trying to brush off the uncanny sensation, yn took a sip from the refreshment in her hand.
"yn!"
the call startled her, making the water get caught up in her throat. she coughed and patted her own chest as the liquid scraped its way down her larynx, like a tiny bug trying to escape a spider's web. once able to compose herself, yn glanced towards the voice.
"im so sorry!" joo won panicked in a stutter, "i didn't mean to do that, are you ok?"
"im fine." she wiped the water from her lips with her long sleeve.
joo won and his companion standing behind, da bum, stared at her in silence.
"do you want anything or...?"
a simultaneous no and a yes echoed trough the entrance, followed by a confused frown from the girl and whatever silent conversation the two guys were displaying with their eyes.
"do you think maybe you could," joo won took his sweet time to mutter his next words, as if scared. "talk with kyung jun?"
"excuse me?"
what the fuck...? did kyung jun put them up to this?
"we just, well," the spokesman of the duo halted. "we gave some money to his friends a few days ago and we just don't want to bother them."
oh.
"so you bother me?"
"no, no!" da bum spoke promptly and grabbed his friend's arm, pulling him along as he took a few steps to leave. "it's ok, yn. we won't bother you."
joo won released himself from da bum's grasp and walked towards yn. "please," he pleaded, holding one of her hands tightly with both of his. "he'll listen to you."
right as her heart started beating with enough sympathy to care for their situation, the front door opened. seung bin, jin ha and kyung jun walked into the building, the latter playing around with a basketball.
the three delinquents would've kept their saunter if it weren't for yn's presence, which made the group's top dog stop in his tracks. his companions did the same and all stared at the situation unfolding right in front of them. kyung jun's eyes stayed on the hands holding yn and after noticing his threatening glare, joo won leaped away from her.
"what's going on?" asked the fearful leader.
"you owe them money?" yn countered, her eyes flickering between the trio.
"what?" the blonde one laughed, brushing off the accusation.
"they do!" joo won blamed, but instantly went back to his helpless self when met with the bullies' threatening scowls. "please, i just need it for my tuition."
the firm glare of the girl pierced through the tough act of the tamer vandal, making him drop his facade as he approached the feeble boy, closed fist in the air.
"fuck, man! we're on retreat, why are you asking us for money now?"
"yeah," seung bin joined in, defending his friend. "what are you, a loan shark? we told you we'd give you interests. give us some time, dipshit!"
kyung jun, who'd only taken the role of observer until that moment, put down the basketball he held and intervened to slap both of his lackeys' heads. "did you do sports betting again? huh?"
like scolded puppies, seung bin and jin ha faced the floor as they stepped aside.
"da bum," he called, and the guy lifted his head to stare at the bully. "did you lend them money too?"
"huh?" as kyung jun stalked closer, da bum's heart raced faster with every step. his eyes frantically scanned the room, desperately seeking any distraction from the intimidating figure slowly closing in on him. "yes. but i can wait for my money. there's no rush." with a lump in his throat, da bum braced himself for whatever was coming next.
"how much?" kyung jun's open hand grabbed the side of da bum's face, forcing the terrified boy to look right at him. "ill pay you back."
"you will?" da bum stuttered.
"of course," his grin turned into something sinister, which allowed only da bum to see because of their proximity. "in return play basketball with me, yeah?"
he faintly smacked his victim's face twice before coming up to yn. "everything's alright here, yn. see? no need for this." kyung jun reached out to hold her hand but she pulled away before any contact could be made.
was she really so revolted by him she wouldn't even let him touch her? accepting his defeat, kyung jun hid his hands inside his jacket's pockets.
"right," yn looked at da bum and joo won, who were currently being pushed around by the other two, before turning back to kyung jun. "in that case, i'll get going."
"you're not coming with me?" just as yn started to walk away, his words pulled her back in.
"i'd rather not."
"are you sure?"
with a swift nod, kyung jun signaled seung bin and jin ha to go ahead and, bringing along the poor students they were about to torment, they disappeared down the hallway.
they were left alone, just like kyung jun liked it. only them, with nothing and no one around to interrupt their precious time together.
not a single second did he stop looking into her fiery eyes, which only seemed to hold a hostility that antagonized his own devoted regard.
"it's almost midnight."
both held each other's gaze, which kyung jun took as an invitation to step towards the girl. he stopped right in front of her and, unfortunately, yn's heart betrayed her mind as she internally screamed for it to cease its raising beats.
kyung jun's hands raised to yn's face, completely forgetting her previous rejection. for a second, he thought of apologizing, since she'd made it clear time and time again how much she now despised his presence. but how could he apologize for something he was barely conscious of? he couldn't help himself, not when she was merely inches away, not with her. maybe if he insisted–if he didn't give up–she'd finally understand why staying apart was never the world's plan.
"you promised me. remember?"
his hands were close. so close he could feel his fingertips grace her cheeks, a touch so minuscule, yet enough to make his skin crawl with anticipation.
he was too close.
yn stepped back just as she felt the fleeting spark. she would be dammed if she ever allowed him to touch her again, in more ways than one. or at least that's what she told herself as she fell right into another one of his tricks. kyung jun knew her well; too well for her liking. and with such measly words she found herself helplessly cornered by her own self-discipline and morals.
fucking bastard.
up in the vast dormitory area of the resort center, different groups of people were each caught up in their own conversations, without a single care in the world or the impending sinister feeling hanging over their heads like an invisible wrecking ball about to crash and destroy every single thing they ever cared for.
in her room, lee yoon seo was finally able to lose herself in her novel when her phone pinged. slightly annoyed by the distraction she took a closer look to her home screen, which displayed an app in process of downloading.
"i told you i didn't need this." she showed the screen to her roommate.
"it wasn't me." jung won answered, just as astounded.
our perspective changes and now we observe a group of various students, all gathered in one room. the class couple, the cheerleaders and members of the student council all sharing snacks and stories between them in perfect harmony until a knock interrupted.
"come in!" allowed the vice president.
"hey guys," the door opened, reavealing hyun ho accompanied by his best friend, dong hyun, who stayed on the hallway behind him. "has anyone seen yn?"
"how come you don't know? you're always following her." mocked woo ram before taking a handful of chips from one of the various bags scattered around the room.
"you're one to talk." ji soo muttered, which provoked woo ram to throw a scrambled napkin her way.
"i'm serious." hyun ho replied, "i've tried texting her but this wifi doesn't even work."
"she told me she was going to get some water, isn't she downstairs?" just as so mi finished her sentence, one by one every phone in the room chimed.
notifications spread throughout the resort like a 14th century pandemic, resonating around every room as if imitating the never ending bells that announced the beginning of the end.
back in the gymnasium, joo won stood shaking below the basketball hoop with his friend by his side, eyes shut tight as neither dared watch the nearing hit from the ball.
"joo won, stay right there." kyung jun sneered as he prepared himself to throw. he looked up, targeting the net as he bent his knees, faked a jump, and sent the ball right into the boy's stomach.
joo won kneeled in pain, groaning and grasping his abdomen with both hands in his best attempt to soothe the aching sensation puncturing his body.
yn watched the situation unfold as she sat on the rubber gym flooring, otherwise cold if it weren't for seung bin's zip-up laid out below her. it had been kyung jun who'd instructed the blondie to give up his hoodie, since yn declined on taking his own. not a single word was heard from the girl ever since stepping into the gym as the trio took turns tormenting their two victims, until now.
"i didn't come here for this, kyung jun."
almost ten minutes had passed and she was still waiting for kyung jun to approach her and start the conversation he so adamantly pushed onto her.
"c'mon yn, let me give it one more shot."
he must've lost his fucking mind, thinking he had her wrapped around his finger to waste her time in such a way. fed up, yn got up and snatched the basketball out of his hands before throwing it away. it rolled towards jin ha, who immediately picked it up to quite the sound of the bouncing that only seemed to raise the tension of the ex-lovers' quarrel.
yn opened her mouth to give kyung jun an ultimatum, a last opportunity out of her remaining patience, when a sudden ding emitted out of her skirt's pocket. she would've payed no mind to it if it weren't for the other five identical sounds that propagated right after.
each person in the room took out their phones and faced their screens, which displayed a virtual envelope eagerly waiting to be opened.
TAP TO VIEW YOU ROLE, read the text below.
"wasn't this the resort's app?" asked jin ha, to nobody in particular.
resort's app?
she never knew about any app.
"mafia?" seung bin laughed from his spot at the floor and showed his screen. "what's this about?"
"what the fuck is this?" kyung jun mumbled with a frown, clearly confused.
yn brought one hand to the back of her neck as the abnormal sensation from minutes ago reappeared. goosebumps started breaking out throughout her skin and every cell on her body seemed to tremble uncontrollably while she stared at the little black mirror on her hand. which, as she would soon find out, reflected the last version of herself with any shred of purity.
