What Happens When You Fall Epilogue (M) I BTS Namjoon x F!Reader
🩺 Pairing BTS RM (Kim Namjoon) x Reader (Orthopedic Surgeon!Reader)
🩺 Genres Medical!AU, Friends with Benefits, Mutual Pining, Angst, Smut, Celebrity x Non-Celebrity, Long Distance, Emotional Drama, They are two idiots infuriatingly in love
🩺 Rating 18+ (minors DNI)
Two years. One rule: no feelings.
You broke it somewhere along the way.
Now you’re left with him on one side—and everything else on the other.
🩺 Epilogue of the Fall Series Read Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4
A/N THIS IS THE EPILOGUE READ PART 4 FIRST OR YOU WILL BE SPOILED
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You don't do feelings.
That has always been the policy.
Right up there with sterile technique and not cutting corners and keeping things clean, manageable, contained within the borders of a life you built carefully enough that nothing could fall in without your permission.
The policy, it turns out, did not account for Kim Namjoon.
Minho didn't come home last night.
You notice this at seven in the morning when you emerge from your bedroom in search of coffee and find his door open, his bed undisturbed, the apartment holding a space that has been empty since evening. His keys are not in the pink bowl by the door. His jacket is not on its hook.
He knew.
Of course he knew — Minho, who catalogues things before you know they're worth cataloguing. He put it together in the two seconds it takes him to put anything together. And he took himself elsewhere, without announcement, without making it a thing, because that is what Minho does — he creates the space you need and then removes himself from it and never once asks for credit.
You stand in the kitchen doorway and feel something warm and enormous for your best friend.
Behind you, from your bedroom, the sound of movement.
Then Namjoon appears in the hallway.
Slightly disheveled. Your oversized sweatshirt that he found in your room at some point in the night and apparently adopted. His hair pushed back, his face carrying the specific softness of someone who has slept properly for the first time in days, which you take as medical credit because you told him to rest and he did and you are choosing to consider this a personal victory.
He looks at you.
You look at him.
"Coffee," you say.
"Please," he says.
You make coffee.
He sits at the kitchen counter and watches you do it with the attention of someone who has decided that watching you make coffee is worth his full presence, which is — you note this, you are noting everything now, you have stopped pretending you're not — one of his most consistently devastating qualities.
"Minho's gone," you say.
"I know," he says. "He texted me."
"What did he say."
Namjoon looks at his phone. "'You owe me twelve years of emotional labor and also dinner. Enjoy. Don't do anything I wouldn't do. Actually do everything I wouldn't do. You've earned it.'" He sets the phone down. "And then a very specific emoji combination that I'm choosing not to interpret."
You hand him a mug.
Your fingers touch his on the handle.
Neither of you lets go immediately.
"Hi," he says.
"Hi," you say back.
The morning comes through the kitchen window in the warm light yellow of a Seoul spring, catching the steam rising from the mugs, falling across the counter in long warm strips. The city outside is doing its reliable thing. The apartment smells like coffee and cedarwood and the accumulated evidence of two people who have stopped pretending.
You are leaving in forty hours.
You don't say that.
Not because you're avoiding it — that time is done, you are finished with avoidance as a strategy, it has been formally retired effective last night in a hallway. You don't say it because you have both, wordlessly, agreed that these hours are not for logistics. They are for this. For the coffee and the morning and the ordinary, extraordinary reality of being in the same room without anything between you.
The logistics will wait.
They are, for once, not going anywhere.
What follows is not something either of you planned.
It is breakfast made badly in his kitchen — or your kitchen, the lines have blurred, he is in your sweatshirt which is oversized on you and a few inches too short for him and he has learned where Minho keeps the good pan and neither of you is examining this too carefully. He reads to you while the eggs cook, unprompted, something from his own notes, from his songs, and you tell him he doesn't need to do that, and he reads another paragraph anyway, and you eat standing at the counter because you forgot to sit down and then it seemed too late to bother.
He falls asleep on the couch at some point in the late morning, his head finding your lap with the easy certainty of something that knows where it belongs, and you let him, reviewing discharge notes on your tablet and pretending you're being productive and watching his face do the unguarded, weightless thing it does when he sleeps.
You are not being productive.
You are memorizing him.
You are allowed to do that now.
His phone goes off. Then again. Then Minho's name appears three times in rapid succession and you silence it with the practiced efficiency of a woman who has decided that Minho however beloved, is not getting these particular hours.
Namjoon stirs.
"Was that—"
"Yes," you say.
He settles back.
"Are you sure—"
"Sleep," you say.
He sleeps.
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He wakes up in the early afternoon and looks at you with the slow, warm, fully-conscious look of someone who knows exactly where they are and is pleased about it.
"Hi," he says.
"You say that every time," you say.
"You're always here," he says. "I'm always surprised."
"You need to stop being surprised."
"Working on it," he says. He sits up slowly, carefully — the ankle, which you examined this morning with the focused displeasure of a surgeon whose patient has been non-compliant and whose patient had the grace to look genuinely apologetic about it. He shifts to face you. "Can I tell you something."
"You're going to tell me regardless."
"True." He looks at you. Really looks, with the full, unhurried quality of it. "I'm proud of you."
You blink.
"The Dodgers," he says. "The position. All of it." Something in his voice that is careful and genuine simultaneously, the way he says things he's thought about before saying. "I should have said that before. I should have said it the moment I knew, which was when the article surfaced and I was—" He pauses. "I was so hurt that I didn't say the thing I should have said first, which is that what you've built is extraordinary. What you've done is extraordinary. And you deserve every part of what's waiting for you in Los Angeles and I'm sorry it took me this long to say it to your face."
Your chest does the thing.
"Namjoon—"
"I mean it," he says. "I need you to know that I mean it. This isn't—" He shakes his head slightly. "I'm not being gracious about losing something. I'm genuinely, specifically proud of you. You moved to a country that wasn't yours and you built something from nothing and you did it the hard way and you are one of the most competent people I have ever encountered and I have encountered—" The corner of his mouth. "A statistically significant number of very competent people."
You look at him.
"Thank you," you say. Quietly. Meaning it completely.
He nods.
Then "You need to send me an autographed Shohei Ohtani jersey."
You stare at him.
"I work for the Dodgers now," you say. "I'm the head physician. I'm not a—"
"You will have access."
"That's not what access means—"
"Signed," he says. "Ideally personalized."
"I cannot ask Shohei Ohtani to sign a jersey for my—"
You stop.
The word you were about to use sits in the space between you.
He looks at you.
"For your—?" he prompts, entirely too pleased with himself.
"For my person," you say, which is the word you were going to say anyway and you both know it.
His smile arrives in the full version. Dimple and all.
"Signed," he says. "Personalized. Please. For your boyfriend, preferably. If that's ok with you."
That is more than ok.
And you know that he doesn't mean the autograph.
"I make no promises," you say.
"You just said please," he says.
"I said please as part of quoting you—"
"It still counts," he says. "I heard it."
You throw a cushion at him.
He catches it.
You are both smiling.
The smiling settles into the comfortable quiet of the early afternoon, the apartment holding its warmth, the light coming through the curtains at the low angle of a day that is already partway through itself.
He looks at you.
Something shifts in his expression — the ease of it still there but underneath it something more careful arriving.
"There's something I need to ask you," he says.
You wait.
"The company," he says. "They want to put out a statement. A real one — not the damage control from before, not the clinical personal acquaintance language that meant nothing and helped no one." He pauses. "Something that says the truth. That you are — that we are—" He stops. Starts differently. "Something that makes it clear that what was done to you was wrong and that the people responsible will be held accountable. Something that gives you your name back." He looks at his hands briefly. "And something that makes it harder for anyone to come after you again. Because if we are together, and we are, then you are adjacent to my world whether we announce it or not and I would rather you be protected inside it than vulnerable at the edges of it and I know that's a lot to ask, I know going public is not a small thing, I know what it means and what it comes with and I am not going to pretend it doesn't come with things that are—"
"Namjoon."
"—difficult, and I want you to know that if you're not ready, if you need more time, if you want to wait until you're settled in LA before any of this becomes—"
"Namjoon."
"—official, that is completely valid and I will tell them to hold it, I will tell them indefinitely, I will—"
"Namjoon." Your hand covers his. "Stop."
He stops.
Looks at you.
His expression is doing the thing — the open, unguarded thing, the thing that surfaces when he is genuinely nervous and is not managing it well, which you find both slightly alarming and completely endearing because Kim Namjoon, who has stood in front of stadiums full of people and spoken into the silence of them, is nervous about asking you this.
"Okay," you say. Quietly. Steadily. "Tell them to put out the statement."
He blinks. "You don't have to decide right—"
"I've decided," you say. "Do it."
"Y/N—"
"I don't want to live like that," you say. Simply. The truest version of it, arrived at somewhere between three AM on a bedroom floor and the hallway where he was waiting and all the hours since. "In the shadows of it. Afraid of a photograph, afraid of a wrong angle, afraid of who's standing outside with a long lens waiting for something to use." You look at him steadily. "I'm not afraid of being yours. I never was. I was afraid of everything else that comes with it." A pause. "But you got on a plane. You sat on my floor. You crossed an ocean when I wasn't brave enough to cross the street." You squeeze his hand. "The least I can do is let you tell the truth about us."
He looks at you for a long moment.
"You're sure," he says.
"I'm sure," you say.
"It's going to be—"
"Loud for a while," you say. "And then it won't be. That's how it works." You give him a look. "I'm a doctor. I have dealt with difficult things before."
"This is different from—"
"I know it's different," you say. "I'm still sure."
He exhales.
Long and slow, the breath of someone releasing something they've been holding carefully.
"Okay," he says.
"Okay," you say back.
He looks at your hand over his.
Then he turns his hand over, the way he always does, and closes his fingers around yours.
"For what it's worth," he says, quieter now, "I'm going to spend a very long time making sure you don't regret it."
"I know," you say.
"I mean that."
"I know you do," you say. "That's why I said yes."
The afternoon light moves across the floor in slow degrees.
Outside, Seoul does its thing.
Inside, something settles — not loudly, not with any announcement, just with the quiet certainty of a decision made by two people who have finally stopped making decisions alone.
He picks up his phone.
Types a message.
Sends it.
Puts it face down on the cushion beside him.
Looks at you.
"Hi," he says.
"You already said that today," you say.
"You're still here," he says. "I'm still surprised."
You shake your head.
But you're smiling.
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His phone buzzes twenty minutes later.
He looks at it. Shows you the screen without saying anything.
HYBE, official channels, posted simultaneously across every platform with the quiet, total efficiency of a company that has received its instructions and moved.
In response to recent events, HYBE and BTS wish to address the violation of privacy directed at our artists and their personal connections. The deliberate targeting of private individuals for the purpose of harassment, defamation, or financial gain is a matter we take with the utmost seriousness. Legal action is being pursued against those responsible.
Additionally: Kim Namjoon is in a committed relationship with Dr. Y/N L/N. We ask that fans extend to him the same respect and support they have always shown — understanding that our artists are people first, and that the people they love deserve to live without fear.
We thank you for your continued care for all seven members.
You read it.
Then you read it again.
Committed relationship.
In print. Official. Sent to however many million people follow those accounts, which is a number you are choosing not to calculate right now because it will not help you remain a functional human being.
It doesn't go unnoticed that they added your title to your name. As if trying to mend how you were treated before.
You look at Namjoon.
He is already looking at you — his phone in his hand, his expression doing the careful, attentive thing of someone watching to see how something lands. Not anxious. Not performing calm. Just — present. Waiting.
"Committed relationship," you say.
"Yes," he says.
"In those exact words."
"Those exact words."
You look back at the screen.
At the statement.
At the number of reposts already climbing in the corner, the internet doing what the internet does — moving fast, the energy of it shifting, the weather of it changing direction. You can feel it even from here. People coming forward now, saying the things that were drowned out during the storm: leave him alone. he's a person. she's a person. this isn't yours.
Not everyone.
But enough.
Enough that it matters.
The people they love deserve to live without fear.
You said yes to this.
Twenty minutes ago, in the afternoon light of this apartment, with his hand in yours and his nervous rambling finally stopped and your own voice coming out steadier than you expected — you said yes. You chose it. Deliberately. With full information.
You are choosing it again right now, reading it in print, feeling the full weight of what committed relationship means when it is attached to his name and distributed to the world.
You are still choosing it.
"How are you feeling," he asks.
You look at him.
Really look — at the apartment and the afternoon light and the man on the couch beside you who sent a text twenty minutes ago and sat quietly with you while it became real and is now watching your face with the full, unhurried attention of someone who wants to know the true answer.
"Like I put something down," you say. "Something heavy." A pause. "Like I've been carrying it for a long time and I didn't know how heavy it was until just now."
He nods slowly.
"Lighter," you say.
"Yeah," he says. Soft. "Me too."
You look at the statement one more time.
The people they love deserve to live without fear.
"Okay," you say.
"Okay," he says.
You put your phone face down on the cushion.
He puts his arm around you.
You let him.
Outside, the internet continues its weather. The tide turning. The storm passing the way storms do — loudly and then not, the aftermath quieter than the thing itself, the sky after it cleaner than before.
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He tells you about the members in the late afternoon, while you are both on the couch with your legs tangled together in the unselfconscious way of people who have stopped keeping careful track of where one of them ends and the other begins.
"They're excited," he says.
"To meet me."
"They already know you," he says. "I mean — they know of you. They've heard me talk about you for two years." He pauses. "Which in retrospect is something I should have examined more closely as a personal behavior."
"For two years," you say.
"Extensively," he says.
"What did you tell them."
He looks at the ceiling briefly. "That you were brilliant. That you were difficult in the specific way of people who know they're right. That you made the worst coffee I've ever had and served it with complete confidence." A pause. "That you were — that talking to you felt like—" He stops. Finds it. "Like coming up for air. That's what I told Jimin. When I finally admitted it to him. I said she feels like coming up for air."
The afternoon light comes through the window.
You look at him.
"Jimin cried," he adds.
"Of course he did," you say.
"He's very emotionally available."
"I know. I've met him."
"He also said, and I'm quoting, finally, oh my god, I have been waiting for you to say that out loud for fourteen months, you are the most frustrating person I have ever loved." He pauses. "He's not wrong."
You smile.
"They want to meet you properly," he says, softer now. "When they come to LA. All of them. Not as—" He gestures vaguely at the general concept of his public existence. "Not as that. As mine." He looks at you directly. "I want to introduce you as mine. As my person. The most important thing in my life that isn't the six of them." A pause. "And you're the most important thing that isn't the six of them. I want you to know that. I want them to know that. I want it to be — real. Official. Out loud."
Your throat is tight.
"Okay," you say.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah," you say. "Okay."
He exhales.
Like he was waiting for that.
Like he's been waiting for that for a long time and is glad to finally be on the other side of it.
"The concert," he says. "LA. September."
You look at him.
"Section 114," he says. "I'll leave the ticket."
And this time — this time, unlike the night in the hospital when you said okay knowing you wouldn't be here, unlike every version of yes you said while planning the exit—
you mean it.
"I'll be there," you say. "and I'll fly to Tampa, the last week of April."
He looks at you for a moment.
Like he's checking.
Like he's reading the difference between this yes and all the previous ones.
He finds it.
Something in his face settles — quietly, completely, the expression of a man who has been waiting for the version of you that means what you say and has just received it.
"Okay," he says.
Just that.
Okay.
Everything in it.
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The morning of the flight arrives with the particular gentleness of days that are ending something — the light softer than it has any right to be, the apartment holding its warmth, the city outside making its ordinary sounds.
You dress. He watches.
You make him eat before you'll let him do anything else, because this is who you are now, because you have decided to commit to it fully and without apology, and he eats with the easy compliance of someone who finds being taken care of by you entirely acceptable and has stopped pretending he doesn't.
"I'll call," you say.
"I know," he says.
"Not every day, necessarily—"
"Every day," he says. "Or when you can. Either."
You look at him.
He looks back.
You know what this costs. Both of you. The time zones and the schedules and the distance measured in flights. You know that love doesn't solve logistics. You know that choosing someone and being able to keep them are two different questions.
You know all of it.
You are choosing it anyway.
"Don't disappear," you say.
"I won't."
"I mean it."
"I know." His hand at your jaw. Warm and steady. His. "I won't."
You kiss him once — clean, certain, a punctuation mark rather than a question.
Then you pick up your bag.
"Text me when you land," he says.
You pause at the door.
"That's my line," you say.
The dimple.
God, the dimple.
"Borrow it," he says.
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The plane is quieter than you expect.
Or you are quieter than usual — the particular interior stillness of someone who has just gone through something that rearranged the furniture and is now sitting with where everything landed.
Window seat. Seoul shrinking beneath you in stages — the Han River first, silver in the morning light, then the city grid, then the suggestion of mountains at the edge of everything, and then just cloud, and then just sky, and then nothing that looks like anything you know.
Except.
You are beginning to have a theory about home.
The theory involves a man who reads to you while eggs cook and falls asleep with his head in your lap and says hi every time he sees you like he's still surprised you're there and probably will be for the rest of his life, which you are finding you do not mind at all.
Your bag is in the overhead.
Except for one thing.
The book.
The New York book, carried from surface to surface for weeks, treated with the care of something that means too much to interact with casually, now in your lap, now finally — finally — being opened.
The pages fall to the front.
And there, tucked against the inside cover with the deliberateness of someone who knew exactly what they were doing—
a card.
His handwriting. Small and careful, the way it gets when he's being intentional.
You read it.
I found this in a shop on 72nd Street at approximately 11 PM on a Wednesday because I couldn't sleep and I walked until I found something that felt right to bring back to you.
I don't know what we are. I'm not sure we've ever known. But I know that when I find something worth keeping, the first thing I think is — she would like this. I've been thinking that for two years. I don't see it stopping.
You are the most specific person I have ever met. Not in a small way. In the way that makes the world more interesting just by being in it. In the way that makes me want to write things down so I don't forget what it was like to be in a room with you.
I don't know what the future looks like. Mine has a lot of airports. Yours has a lot of operating theaters. I know they don't sit neatly together. I've never been particularly interested in neat.
I'm interested in you.
Whatever you want that to mean. However much room you have for it. I'm not asking for more than you can give. I just want to be somewhere in the picture — whatever size, whatever corner. I'll take it.
For as long as you want to let me.
I'll be in LA in September. Section 114, if you want to come.
— N
P.S. Minho already has his ticket. He bought it before I asked him. I didn't even tell him about the concert yet. He just sent me a confirmation number and a single period. I don't know what to do with either of us.
You sit with the card in your hands for a long time.
The plane hums around you.
The clouds outside are vast and unhurried, the sky above them the impossible blue of high altitude — the kind that exists above the weather, above the noise, above everything that happens at ground level.
He bought this book in New York.
Before Seoul. Before the hallway. Before I love you in the morning light with the cedarwood. Before any of it was certain. Before you'd said anything true. Before you were anything other than two people who were supposed to be nothing and were, quietly and comprehensively, everything.
He already knew.
He came back anyway.
He sat on your floor and crossed an ocean and said I needed to see you like it was the simplest fact in the world.
And Minho — Minho who bought his ticket before he was even asked, who sent a confirmation number and a period, who has been watching this happen since a couch two years ago with the patient certainty of someone who knew, who has always known, who will probably bring this up at every available opportunity for the rest of your natural lives and you will let him because he has earned it—
You laugh.
The real kind. The surprised kind. The kind that arrives before you decide to let it, warm and ridiculous and entirely genuine, and the woman in the seat next to you glances over and you shake your head and look back out the window and let it finish.
You look at the card again.
I'll take it.
For as long as you want to let me.
You fold it carefully. Tuck it back. Close the book with both hands around it, holding it the way you hold things that mean too much to handle carelessly.
Your eyes are wet.
You let them be.
Because here is the thing about tears — the thing you know as a doctor, the thing you learned in medical school and in operating theaters and in the back hallways of hospitals at odd hours: they are not weakness. They are the body's most honest response. The system releasing what it's been carrying. The accurate physiological expression of something real.
You have been carrying this for two years.
You are allowed to put it down in the form of tears at altitude on a plane to Los Angeles.
You let yourself cry.
Quietly. Without apology. Looking out at the clouds above the weather while Seoul disappears behind you and Los Angeles waits ahead and somewhere below, in a city that smells like cedarwood and old paper and the particular warmth of a place that has been genuinely lived in, a man with a dimple and a notebook full of songs about you is holding his phone.
Your phone buzzes.
Namjoon🫀 3:57pm landed yet?
Namjoon🫀 3:57pm i know you haven't, it's too soon, i just wanted to say...
Namjoon🫀 3:58pm actually never mind i'll say it when you land
Namjoon🫀 3:58pm text me when you land
A pause.
Then:
Namjoon🫀 3:59pm i love you. that's what i was going to say. i love you.
You close your eyes.
Feel the warmth of it.
The simple, enormous, completely unmanageable warmth of it.
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In medicine, there are cases that defy explanation.
Full recoveries from things that should not recover. Healing that exceeds every projected outcome, that surprises the physicians, that makes statisticians uncomfortable and poets reach for their notebooks. The body doing something the imaging said was impossible. The patient walking out of a room that the numbers said they shouldn't walk out of.
They call it a miracle.
The word is imprecise. It admits defeat, in a way — admits that something happened outside the framework, beyond the variables, in the space where science runs out of language and human nature picks up where science leaves off.
You have seen it.
Not often. But enough.
Enough to know that some things heal by forces that cannot be fully documented. That some fractures close in ways that imaging cannot predict. That the body — and the heart, which is a body, which follows its own logic, which has its own will — sometimes simply decides to recover.
Decides to choose.
You open your eyes.
Outside the window: clouds. Sky. The vast, unhurried blue of somewhere above the weather.
You pick up your phone.
You 4:07pm Haven't landed yet. Found the card. I'll be there. Where you can find me.
A pause.
Then, because you have decided — completely, irrevocably, without a single remaining reservation — that policies exist to be updated when the evidence demands it:
You 4:08pm I love you. That's all.
The three dots appear instantly.
Like he was already holding his phone.
Like he was always going to be.
Namjoon 🫀 4:08 pm I know. I love you too. That's everything.
You lean your head back.
Close your eyes.
And feel, rising through you like something that has been waiting a very long time to be allowed — like a patient sitting up in a bed they were supposed to stay in, like a recovery that surprised everyone in the room, like a fracture healing clean and complete and exactly the way it was always supposed to —
warmth.
Just warmth.
The simple, enormous, completely unmanageable warmth of someone who has finally, after two years and one couch in November and a thread she didn't cut and a man who crossed an ocean and sat on her floor —
stopped arguing with the truth of it.
You don't do feelings.
That was the policy.
Right up there with sterile technique and not cutting corners and keeping things clean and contained and safely within the borders of a life you built carefully enough that nothing could fall in without your permission.
You built it carefully.
You built it well.
And then he walked through Minho's door.
And you felt a thread.
And you didn't cut it.
And two years later, thirty thousand feet above the weather, with his card in your hands and his words in your chest and Los Angeles waiting at the end of a flight you chose on purpose —
you understand, finally, what the title of this story was always trying to tell you.
Not the season.
Not the injury.
Not the thing that breaks when the structure fails.
The fall.
The one you've been in since November.
The one you tried to stop and couldn't.
The one that was never a mistake — never a lapse in judgment, never a complication to be managed, never a case to be closed.
Just the most human thing.
Just two people, choosing each other, past every reasonable objection, past every policy and every exit and every no feelings said in good faith and broken in better faith —
choosing each other anyway.
Some fractures heal beyond what science predicts.
Some recoveries exceed every projected outcome.
Some people choose each other across oceans and time zones and two years of nothing that was always everything —
and the physicians call it a miracle.
And the poets call it inevitable.
And you —
you look out the window at the clouds above the weather and smile, quietly, to yourself, with the warmth of someone who has finally stopped arguing with the most obvious truth of the last two years —
and call it exactly what it is.
That's what happens when you fall in love.
End of the Series.
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Authors Note:
I am trying very hard not to cry as I write this.
I am failing. Completely and without dignity. 😭🖤
A month ago I was sitting in my bed watching seven men perform like they had something to prove to the universe, in the middle of one of the most difficult and uncertain periods of my life. And they came back — again — at exactly the right moment, the way they always seem to, the way I have stopped questioning and started just being grateful for.
And somewhere between the light sticks and the music and whatever it is that happens to you while watching a BTS concert (even if it's virtually) that you cannot fully explain — this story came to me.
I want to be very clear that this was supposed to be a short creative exercise. A smutty one shot. Something small and contained that I would post once and move on from. 🫠
Turns out I am constitutionally incapable of that. Words just — come. They keep coming. I have no control over them. They pour out and they become things I didn't plan and I end up fifty thousand words deep into a story about a surgeon and a man with a dimple and suddenly I am crying on a Tuesday night about bones and love songs and what happens when you fall. 😭
And the response.
I was not prepared.
I am still not prepared, honestly. Every time someone tells me they've read a chapter more than once. Every time someone leaves a comment that makes me put my phone down and stare at the ceiling. Every time you pick up a breadcrumb I left — and sometimes a breadcrumb I didn't even know I left — and give it meaning that makes the story richer than I knew it was. Every beautiful, funny, devastating question you ask that I am physically incapable of answering in under four paragraphs. 🥹
You did that. You made this story bigger than it was when I wrote it. And I am so grateful I don't have the words for it, which is saying something given how many words I apparently have. 😭🫶🏼
Thank you.
To every single one of you reading this from whatever corner of the world you're in, whatever time it is, whatever you're going through — thank you for being here. Thank you for falling with us. I hope you found the joy in the small things. The tree. The book. The dimple. The thread she didn't cut. 🤍
This is not goodbye.
Because I am already deep into a Namjoon POV that was also supposed to be one chapter and has also decided to become its own entire thing because apparently that's just who I am now. 😭 So our WHWYF couple is not done with us yet.
I hope you're there for the next part of the journey. 🖤
synopsis in an attempt to finally ask your fuck buddy to be your boyfriend, you take him camping, your plans are soiled when he brings along his friend, jungkook.
warnings y/n is the bigggggggest simp for namjoon, accidental blow jobs, outdoor sex, plot twist (no spoilers!), pwp if you squint, drinking, black oc headcanon, somnophilia, overuse of italicization, JOONS MF ARMS, jungkook with rings <3, prior context so we not confused joon did what y/n is doing now before (ofc in a different setting) so this is an unspoken boundary that they have explored prior (it’ll make sense when you read it !)
read me outdoor sex, that’s it.
In theory this was a good idea, sacrificing your comfort for the devastatingly beautiful Kim Namjoon who showed a hint of interest in you was worth it.
With one minor hiccup.
Namjoon had invited others, his friends, to what was supposed to be your third date. Namjoon liked nature, he was one of those people that loved the beauty of the outdoors and its grounding qualities, so you had the perfect plan: camping! You were raised in the fast paced city of Seoul, never stepping foot in the countryside, but for him, Namjoon, you planned an entire weekend trip to a camping resort you’d heard about from a friend of a friend. It would have been the perfect place to ask him to be your boyfriend…if he hadn’t invited his friends.
You try your best to keep your facial expression in check despite the utter disappointment you feel that they’ll be joining you, it’s hard, but you manage a smile. Namjoon introduces you to only two other people; Jungkook who's a year younger than you guys and only recently transferred to SU and Stacey. In any other circumstance you’d be happy to meet the people closest to Namjoon, Jungkook seems nice enough and Stacey is a foreigner, she's not black like you, but you could probably relate to each other in terms of experiences in Korea.
And yet you can’t see the joy in them being here.
You take the opportunity to softly break the news to Namjoon and question as to why they’re there when they begin to lug their equipment to your reserved camping lot. You stand beside Namjoon who is busy unpacking the trunk, looking back to make sure they’re out of ear range before you bring it up.
“So… you brought your friends?” Namjoon hums, carefully placing both of your tent wraps on the leaf filled ground. The weather is perfect for camping. Winter had winded down a little over a month ago and the warm temperature and beauty of spring was great for camping.
…And out door fucking if Namjoon was down for that.
You twist your lips to the side, “I wish you would’ve told me, I would’ve brought my friends as well.” You lie, it’s better to lie than be embarrassed that he didn’t know this was a date… right?
“You still can! Just call them, the park's last minute reservations close in an hour,” Namjoon informs you, swinging both your backpacks onto his ridiculously buff arms courtesy of his military service. “I didn’t know you wanted to bring your friends that bad,” Namjoon gives you a look of uncertainty, “I thought this was a double date.” No you didn’t want to bring your friends, that was a lie what does he think y—wait.
Come again?
Namjoon chuckles when you pause in your tracks, your lips parting in surprise, “Well.. don’t look so shocked,” he teases that dimple you love oh so much making an appearance on his cheek. “I'm not that clueless, Y/n.” You shake yourself out of your initial shock swallowing.
“I just—oh my god, Joon, I was so upset!” You exasperate, lightly hitting his arm.
“I know I could tell, you’re so easy to read.” He chuckles again continuing your walk after nudging your arm, “I’m sorry for not asking beforehand, Kook just met Stacey and wanted to take her out somewhere inexpensive. You know college is expensive as hell and all that stuff,” Oh you understand, “plus this place is notorious for wildlife sightings. It's better to have a group to push down and make a run for it than just us you know?” You gawk at him and he laughs lightly nudging your arm again, “kidding! I’m kidding.”
By the time you two reach the patch of land designated for your camping—or glamping as you like to call it despite Namjoon correcting you—Jungkook is halfway done setting up his tent, the little plot of land next to him is cleared out the words ‘TENT PLACEMENT #2’ written out in the dirt with white spray paint on the left. Ah, so direct.
Stacey takes it upon herself to get to know you a little better informing you that she’s not just white, but half Asian and she’s been living in Korea for quite some time, you nod along to what she says barely giving any responses as your eyes focus on Namjoon’s hands and arms while he sets up your tent with ease, he didn’t even ask for help…
So ridiculously hot.
Jungkook prepares the small dining area behind you guys, setting up small lanterns around the makeshift kitchen he’s made, he briefly explains to all of you to turn them on when its dark as they’ll kill any bugs that venture into your lot.
And Namjoon had the audacity to say it wasn’t glamping.
Night came fairly quickly, the mountains in the far distance shrouded in darkness standing tall and intimidating from your spot by the fire. Despite it being Spring the nights lingered with Seoul’s winter breeze and of course you needed to fit the camping experience and set up a fire—well Jungkook and Namjoon did all the heavy lifting collecting the wooded pieces and assorting them to perfection.
And if you thought Namjoon was hot before nothing compared to watching him easily handle five logs onto his shoulders and set them down without as much as a groan.
His arms will be the death of you.
Jungkook, Namjoon’s friend, noticed you shivering and offered you a blanket while Namjoon added the finishing touches to the fire you took the heavy material with a smile missing the distasteful look Stacey sent you.
“How long have you and Joon been together?” She asks as you wrap yourself in the thick wool blanket.
You look back at Namjoon to make sure he’s engrossed in helping Jungkook cook the food before you lean towards her whispering, “We’re not together yet! I’m going to ask him to be my boyfriend later on, probably tomorrow to be honest.” She licks her lips humming.
“You must really like him, huh?” Your brows furrow at the tone she takes on, but nod nonetheless because of your course you like Joon you wouldn’t be caught dead sleeping in the woods if you didn’t. “Just be careful alright? I’ve heard some things about him in relationships, just watch out.” You would ask her what she’s heard but you hear a very clear and loud: ‘Dinner!’ Ending your conversation.
By the campfire you enjoyed surprisingly good sandwiches and half watered down beers Stacey’s prior warning fading into the back of your mind the more beers you downed. Jungkook took it upon himself to indulge you in all the hilarious mishaps of their childhood together while Namjoon blushed furiously (cutely) Stacey seemed to only get more touchy and flirtatious as she drank more beers leading Jungkook to take her to the tent so she can sleep off whatever lingering horniness she was feeling.
When he returns Namjoon offers him another beer but he refuses, “I need to be able to drive into town in the morning, I forgot my sunscreen.” You perk up reaching into your bag.
“Here you can use some of mine…it is scented though if you have a problem with that—“
He’s quick to cut you off shaking his head, “No, no, thank you.” You hand him the small bottle catching sight of the rings lining his fingers.
“Those are sick,” You compliment him, he looks down at his hand smiling proudly, he wiggles his fingers.
He shows you his other hand which is also covered in slightly less rings than the other, “Thanks, I got them from a friend's shop, she has some on sale right now, you want the info?” He asks followed by a small yawn.
“Sure in the morning though, you look ready to pass out.” Jungkook stifles a chuckle.
“Stacey is not easy to put to sleep while she’s drunk.” Namjoon laughs at that.
“Oh yeah we know.” Your face grows hot as you recall her very loud ’no I don’t want to go to sleep, why won’t you fuck me?’ ‘Kooooookie, I’m horny.’ oh and who could forget: ’just the tip? Please pleaseee?’ If that’s what she’s like drunk you can’t imagine what she was like sober and horny. You don’t blame her though you were a few beers deep and desperate to get back to your tent, but first to spare you and Namjoon the embarrassment of having his childhood friend hear you two go at it, you want him to get well into a deep sleep before that happens.
“Alright I’ll catch you guys in the morning.” You say your goodbyes to Jungkook watching him disappear into his tent enclosure.
Huh, they look kinda similar in the dark, you think looking between your tents.
“You ready to turn it in?” Namjoon questions, as the fire begins to die down.
“In a minute I’ll be in, wait up for me?” He hums kissing your cheek before he leaves your little fire set up for your shared tent. Once the zipper comes down you take a minute to take it all in, you actually find yourself enjoying the outdoors; it differs from Seoul, quiet, but loud in its own naturistic way. You also used the time to adjust yourself making sure your bra looks good under your shirt and spray a tiny bit more perfume on yourself.
You ventured out to the small bathroom station that was a short walk from your campsite filling a bottle with water to completely put out the fire. The door creaked open giving you half a heart attack before you fully got a good look at the figure looming in the doorway, Stacey.
“Jesus Christ you scared the shit out of me.” You sighed, rubbing your chest to calm your rapid heart beat.
“Sorry gotta take a piss, and maybe vomit.” She choked holding her mouth, you capped your bottle of water leaving Stacey alone in the bathroom. On your way back to your campsite you wondered if you should have helped her back to the tents, but reckon that if she could get there while shitfaced she can make it back.
After putting out the fire you pushed your boobs up over your shirt exposing an unnecessary amount of cleavage, checking your appearance on your phone to make sure your attempt at seduction wasn’t too obvious. You close out of your camera app smiling at the drying wood, you were more than ready to enjoy a semi private hook up with Joon and then a good night's rest with lots and lots of cuddling.
With a small dilemma.
Earlier when you thought the two tents looked similar you weren’t kidding and right now they look almost identical. If you were slightly more buzzed you would have gone for the left tent, but that’s Jungkook and Stacey’s and yours is on the right. You slowly unzip the tent hearing Namjoon’s light breaths, you always thought he'd be a snorer because of his large build, but no, only light comforting breaths.
Crawling, you hit your head on the lamp hanging from the tent ceiling, but you don’t turn it on wanting it to be dark. You don’t want to wake up Namjoon.
What guy doesn’t like being woken up with a blowjob? Plus you owe him for waking you up in a similar fashion a few weeks back.
You briefly turn around to zip up the tent, the darkness fully encompassing your surroundings, you barely see Namjoon’s face and squinting doesn’t help, but nevermind that you need to get to work. Slowly, you lift the cover, the same one from earlier that Jungkook gave you. He must’ve offered it to Namjoon, you make a mental note to thank him in the morning since it is quite cold.
Once fully settled underneath the blanket you feel up his legs, he switched his shorts for sweats and unfortunately for you when you reach upwards your fingers brush over a tied knot, “Son of a bitch,” you mumble, why’d he tie them? Gently you sit back on his calves, still under the cover of the blanket you delicately unravel it pausing when you feel him shift, but he doesn’t move much, your ass is on his leg’s keeping him in place. When you deem him unaware (when you get impatient) you get back into position leaning forward your ass high in the air, you only lower his sweats enough to free his cock, huh no boxers. Namjoon’s never gone commando before to your knowledge. After every hookup he at least fell asleep in boxers, but maybe he was too tipsy to remember to put some on, you brush it off for now licking your hand, it’ll make things easier.
He’s soft when you take him into your slick hand twitching when you grip him properly, still asleep though. Your stomach coils with heat and want when you hear a low confused groan and then another when you open wide stretching your mouth around his length. You go slow at first, you have to, maybe it’s because you're buzzed but he feels thicker.
“Wha…” You bob your head faster as he begins to fully wake up, “fuck,” he rasps egging you on, leaning down you take more of him into your mouth and partially down your throat, his groans grow louder in volume breaking off into lower throaty moans, his hand reaches under the blanket fisting your curls, something hard akin to metal scrapes your head, but the pain meshed with the heat growing in your stomach makes you moan, which makes him moan. “God, fuck, fuck,” He guides your head up and down the grip on your hair tightening when you trail your tongue over a vein running under his cock. You shift on your knees rubbing your thighs together to alleviate some of the pressure between them because this is turning you on way more than it should.
“Fuck, Stace, I’m gonna come.” Everything freezes, or maybe you just freeze up because he—Jungkook is breathlessly asking, “Shit, baby why’d you stop?” You remove your hand first, your mind blank, but it’s not it’s loud, so fucking loud because this can not be happening. You sit up slowly, the taste of him weighing heavy on your tongue, the blanket falls with your movement, the darkness giving you a momentary shield, but it doesn't last.
“I-I didn’t know,” You choke out your eyes teary, in the darkness you can make out Jungkook sitting up and reaching forward clicking on that God-awful light. He squints when the light floods his eyesight, but when it registers, what just happened and who you are his eyes double in size looking you over once, twice just to confirm that you, Namjoon’s…girlfriend? Gave him head just now. His panicked expression only makes you ramble more, your tears actually spilling over as you try to explain, defend yourself. “I-it’s so d-dark I couldn’t tell, I-I thought this was our tent! I-I just — I’m drunk, I-I couldn’t t-tell, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” You sob through your explanation as Jungkook pulls the blanket over his crotch to cover his still hard cock. It might have began throbbing because of you crying, but you don’t need to know that information. “I was-wasn’t trying to assault you or anything-oh m-my God I’m an awful p-person—“
Jungkook reaches over to comfort you, but you flinch so instead of touching you his hand hangs awkwardly in the space between you, he puts his hand down sighing, “It’s okay, okay? Breathe.” You take some much need deep breaths, surprised by Jungkook’s calm demeanor especially because of your current situation. He does actually touch you this time rubbing your forearm. “I’m not upset, okay?” You nod wiping your tears, “Joon can never know.” Your eyes meet his, your brows furrowed, you open your mouth to speak, but he beats you to it, “He won’t understand like I do, he’d never be able to see you the same.” The admission puts you back on the brink of hyperventilation, but Jungkook’s gesturing you out of the tent. “Go, I don’t know when Stacey is coming back, I don’t want to fuck things up with her.” God, how could you have forget about her?
“Okay, I-I really am sorry, Jungkook.” Jungkook lets out a heavy breath, nodding.
“I know.” He asserts, glancing back you catch a small reassuring smile on his lips, “Goodnight.” You don’t say it back, quickly leaving the tent.
Jungkook lays back onto the blankets, lightly biting into his forearm as ropes of cum spurts from his twitching cock, smearing his abdomen and the blanket.
Jesus fucking Christ.
read me i feeeeel like i could add more to this but idk what… yk? so for now it’s a one shot! also my cover image wouldn’t come out right so for now there’s no cover
Summary: You and Namjoon had been hooking up for months, it was nothing serious, you were just friends. He didn't usually care who else you slept with, but when his best friend Hoseok moved back home from studying dance abroad, he made it clear that you were off limits.
Rather than the stars in the sky,
I'd like to see the stars on your shoes.
Without Namjoon knowing
(J-Hope) Converse High- BTS)
"Fuck Joon, right there!" you gasped as Namjoon fucked into you placing your legs over his muscular shoulders and gripping your hips.
He grunted as he felt you clench around him at the edge of orgasm. Picking up the pace of his thrusts was all it took for you to let go, your thighs shook as you came on his thick cock. Not far behind Namjoon pulled out of you pumping himself a few times before cumming all over your lower abdomen.
You let your legs fall from his shoulders and he leaned down to kiss you before throwing himself down on the bed beside you. "Shit Y/N, we keep fucking like THAT, and I might just fall in love." He joked.
You rolled your eyes smirking at your friend. "I'm insatiable, I know." you tried not to laugh as you said this. Namjoon looked over at you and the both of you busted out into a fit of laughter.
This was how you always joked with him, the two of you were good friends and were obviously physically attracted to each other. You kept things casual and had clear boundaries there was never any problem with it. Luckily sex hadn't changed your friendship one bit, as soon as he pulled out of you, you were back to joking and hanging out.
When your laughter died down Namjoon sat up "I'll go get you a towel to clean up." He got up and put his boxers on before walking out of his bedroom and going into the bathroom across the hall.
You laid there waiting for a few seconds for him to come back. He walked back into the bedroom and handed you the towel to wipe off with. You got cleaned up and dressed, now you were chilling on his couch waiting for his friend Hoseok to come over so the three of you could pick something to watch.
You met Hoseok a handful of times before; he was a good friend of Namjoon's and he moved away temporarily to have more opportunities to learn dancing. You knew him before he left although you weren't close, you had hung out a few times due to having mutual friends.
He'd been back for a few weeks now and you'd seen him when hanging out with friends. The two of you had talked a bit and you knew him more now.
You planned to stay at Namjoon's house for the night, the two of you were going to watch movies, so when Hoseok called him to hang out, he invited him to join you.
==============================================
When he arrived, he was cheerful as every other time you'd seen him, a huge smile on his face and a bright persona. Though that's not the only thing you noticed about Hoseok. He was tall, shorter than Namjoon but still a nice height, skinny but with a bit of muscle, and he had an amazing fashion sense.
He obviously likes baggy clothes, jeans especially, but this time he was wearing a pair of white sweatpants with a brown shirt that was a little oversized.
He greeted both you and Namjoon then took a seat beside you on the couch while Joon went to his bedroom to change because in his words he "didn't match the vibe." He was the only one in jeans and wanted to get comfortable too. Like Hoseok, you were wearing sweats.
It's a little awkward sitting there with him. You've made conversation before but not in this type of situation. You stand up from your spot on the couch. "I'm gonna grab a drink. You want anything?"
He thinks for a moment. "Just water please." You walk over to the kitchen area that is joined to the living room and open the fridge to grab some water bottles. Shamelessly Hoseok watches as you walk and bend over to open the fridge drawer where Joon keeps his bottled water.
Namjoon walks back into the room just in time to see his friend eyeing you from behind. He coughs standing in the doorway between the hallway and kitchen area, Hoseok immediately pulls his eyes away from you and looks up at Joon.
You stand up straight and turn around to see Joon standing there in a pair of light gray sweatpants and a black t-shirt, it's so simple but he looks fucking good.
Both of you make your way back to the couches and you hand Hoseok a bottle of water.
"I'm hungry, we should order pizza." You suggest to the guys. Namjoon immediately pulls his phone out and asks what toppings you want. You and Hoseok, both tell him what you want, and he orders.
"They won't deliver here so one of us has to go get it. Is that ok with you guys?"
You both tell him that's fine and you offer to go because you were the one who wanted it in the first place and because you thought you should leave them to hang out alone for a little while. There must have been a reason Hoseok wanted to see Joon and you wanted to give them time just in case even though it just seemed like he wanted to see his friend.
Soon you leave Namjoon's apartment to pick up the pizza. The place he ordered from isn't too far so if it's not busy you'd be back in no time.
====================================
"So, what's up with Y/N? Are you guys together?" Hoseok questions "No. Why? Did she say something?"
Hoseok raises his eyebrows at how eager his friend seemed at the question of your relationship. "Nah, it's just that almost every time I call or see if you're down to hang out with Y/N, and not to mention the way you looked at me earlier." He points out "So you guys are just good friends, or like a sibling type vibe?"
"You were staring at her ass, Hoseok anybody would have pointed it out." Namjoon told him. "And we're just good friends. I enjoy spending time with her."
"So, you wouldn't mind if I... I don't know...got to know her?" Namjoon looked at him as if he just said something completely insane.
"I don't think you're her type." Namjoon says flatly. It wasn't even a little bit true though he was almost positive that personality wise Hoseok was someone you would like, not to mention that on top of being insanely attractive and having fucking impeccable style Hoseok was a dancer A fucking dancer! That's literally the cheat code to being good in bed.
Hoseok looks at him confused. "You sure there's nothing going on with you two? Just tell me, I won't judge."
"Nothing, I just care about her." Hoseok nods, understanding "Ah so you like her." Namjoon is quick to shake his head "It's not like that." he sighs. "I like what I have with her right now, so if you're not serious just leave her alone."
Hoseok was confused at the last bit but went along with it.
He knew what that meant, Namjoon definitely liked you but didn't want to say so. Hoseok nods his head, and they drop the topic and begin to talk more about Hoseok's time in the states.
==================================
Within about 20 minutes you're back at Joon's apartment eating pizza and watching one of the Batman movies. You were seated sideways on the couch with your feet on Joon's legs and Hoseok sat on the floor in front of the middle cushion so he could spread himself out more.
You weren't paying that much attention to the movie that was playing in front of you. You had no interest in Marvel or DC movies. You wanted to pick something else but ended up watching this after the two boys wouldn't back down.
There were better things to do anyway like thinking about the two extremely fine men you had right in front of you.
Namjoon, who was sitting next to you, tall and muscular, his dark hair was getting longer, and it made him look more mature. His voice always made you crazy especially during sex. He was amazing at talking you through it.
You had started to become something that you hoped was more than friends, but he was always so laid back about what you were doing that you didn't think he would want anything more. You were willing to put your feelings for him aside in case it would ruin your friendship.
And Hoseok who you didn't know all that well. You were curious about him though. You definitely thought about what it would be like to fuck him, multiple times throughout the movie. He had a sort of confidence to him that wasn't overwhelming or arrogant, he was a dancer and you wanted to know what his stamina was like. He could probably go all night and barely break a sweat.
At some point your mind started to merge your thoughts into having them both at the same time Namjoon pounding you hard while you took Hoseok's length in your mouth. Even though you'd never seen Hoseok's dick you had a feeling it was long and on the skinner side.
You thought about Hoseok fucking you fast and rhythmically, keeping his pace while you sucked on Joon's thick cock, and he told you how good you were doing.
The images in your head so vivid you could almost feel it.
"You okay Y/N." Namjoon asks, pulling you out of your thoughts. You hadn't realized but you'd been shifting your legs and staring into space for some time now. "Yeah, I'm good. Just trying to get comfortable." You tell him. You fixed your legs one last time before looking at the tv again.
You weren't good. There was no getting comfortable. Your panties were soaked, and you were horny.
Namjoon might have picked up on that, he knew your body well and you were afraid he could tell, and you didn't feel like explaining what got you this way.
You tried sitting as still as possible and paying attention to the movie, but that fucker definitely knew. Joon started to rub your feet reaching up to your calves. You started to breath shakily as his hand reached up past your knee to your inner thighs.
You shot him a look; Hoseok was sitting right in front of you. All it takes is him to turn his head and he would see Namjoon caressing you over your sweatpants.
Namjoon dismissed it and leaned his body closer to you in order to reach higher. You grabbed a blanket off the back of the couch and threw it over your legs. If Hoseok saw what was happening, you would be embarrassed but there was no way you were going to tell Namjoon to stop.
As Namjoon touched farther and farther up your legs, he kept his eyes on the tv. Hoseok turned his head ever so slightly just enough for you to see the smirk on his face. You froze. He knew what was happening behind him.
"You sure you're alright Y/N? I can feel you squirming from down here." Hoseok said in a concerned tone as he turned to fully look up at you. You knew that he knew what was going on. He was teasing you.
Quickly you kicked Namjoon away and sat up straight bringing your legs closer to you. "It's just hot, I'm gonna take a shower. You guys finish the movie."
Before either of them can speak you jump up off the couch and rush into the hallway past the bathroom.
Neither of them says anything or look at each other but Namjoon knew that Hoseok saw, and Hoseok knew that Namjoon knew he saw.
==========================================
You had taken a nice shower in Namjoon's bathroom, and you were headed into his room where your bag was to get spare clothes. You decided to put your sweatpants back on because you only brought clothes for tomorrow and an extra pair of sleep shorts, but you would not be wearing those in front of them, especially now when they both looked like they could go feral for you at any second.
You weren't mad about it though.
You chose to wear one of Joon's t-shirts because you always did, they were comfortable as hell.
You walked back over to the living room area and the boys were both sitting on opposite sides of the couch turned to face each other. They both looked up at you. "You feel any better?" Namjoon asked smugly. Hoseok looked as if he was holding in a laugh, and you glared at both of them.
For the next hour or so you guys just hung out watching whatever was on and talking about random things. Hoseok was getting tired, so he decided it was time for him to go.
He and Namjoon did that man hug thing where they handshake and pat each other on the back, then Hoseok walked over to where you were sitting and gave you a side hug. It surprised you; he had never hugged you before but due to his usually cheerful and welcoming personality it didn't seem weird or out of place.
"See you, Namjoon." He waved at his friend as he went to walk out the front door. He stopped to look at you one last time. "Let's hang out again soon." He suggested anyone who wasn't looking at him would have thought it was a general comment, but from the way he locked eyes with you and smirked you had a feeling he was talking about you specifically.
You wave at him one last time before he walks out the door. Now it was time to scold Namjoon for being so reckless. "What the fuck were you thinking?" you question him. He looks over at you with big eyes. "Are you crazy he might have seen." Namjoon rolls his eyes at you.
"It's fine, Hoseok's cool, he doesn't care, he does the same shit."
"That's not the point, it's embarrassing" You stand up walking over to the kitchen area to get more to drink. You stand next to the counter and Namjoon comes to stand in front of you. He places his hands on your hips. "How was that embarrassing?" He asks quietly, "I'll just tell Hoseok not to bring it up."
"Don't tell him that!" Namjoon looks down at you confused so you explain. 'What if he didn't actually see and you brought it to his attention!" You didn't think of the possibility that you read the signs wrong and maybe he didn't see, and you were overreacting and being weird for no reason.
Namjoon leans his face down closer to yours, lips inches apart. "Hoseok won't say anything no matter if he did or didn't see."
You're prepared to argue back the close proximity and the way Namjoon is looking at you makes the words catch in your throat. His lips dust over yours and you tilt your head up more, wanting to kiss him. He pulls back before your lips can fully touch, one of his hands drops from its place on your hip down to the waistband of your sweats.
He looks at you asking permission to continue and you nod your head. He lets his lips touch yours and slides his hand into your pants and begins to rub your clit over your panties making you gasp. He pulls his lips from yours "Does this embarrass you Y/N? You don't seem embarrassed with my hands making you feel good." You do your best to glare at him and he lightly grabs your throat, turning your head up more. "Answer me Y/N, are you embarrassed right now?" You shake your head.
"Use your words baby."
"N-no, it's different though, no one else is around." You begin to buck your hips into Namjoon's fingers needing to feel more. You wished you decided not to wear panties after your shower. "Joon, more." you whined. He pulled his hand out of your pants and took your hand in his. He guided you to the bedroom and as soon as you made it to the bed you kicked your pants off and waited to see what he was going to do next.
He pulled his shirt over his head revealing his muscular chest and torso to you. No matter how many times you saw his body it amazed you. He stood over you and motioned you to lie on your back, you laid back and he immediately hooked his fingers on the waist of your panties and pulled them off of you.
You instinctively spread your legs for him to have access. "So impatient" he tsked. Wasting no time he dipped his fingers into your already wet cunt, pushing in and out slowly while rubbing your clit with his thumb.
He began to stretch you out with his fingers in preparation. You began to clench around him, and he pulled his fingers out not wanting you to cum yet. You wanted to yell at the feeling of his fingers leaving you. You knew he wanted you to cum around him, so you weren't going to complain just yet.
He quickly shoved off his pants and boxers and you shifted to make room for him on the bed. "You wanna ride me tonight baby?" You nodded your head. It wasn't your favorite position, but you didn't mind it. You knew Joon loved it and seeing the way his face twisted in pleasure when you were on top was enough to motivate you to do it whenever.
He laid down and propped himself on some pillows and you began to stroke his thick length slowly but firmly. As he got harder pre-cum began to leak from his tip down to the base. He put his arms out for you to grab and helped you on top of him. You positioned his cock so you could sit and began to sink onto him. He groaned when he felt your tight walls squeeze around him.
"Relax baby, just go slow." he tells you softly. You're having trouble accommodating the thickness of his cock inside of you, he notices and begins to softly rub circles into your clit to help you relax.
You lowered yourself more, now he was fully inside you and you took a second before moving up and down bouncing on his cock. "Fuck Y/N, just like that."
He started to push his hips up into yours making it harder to concentrate on riding him, your legs began to tremble, and Namjoon pulled you into a messy kiss. Your pace began to slow so he hooked his arms under your knees and lifted you just enough for him to fuck into you and speed up.
You grabbed onto his shoulders digging your nails into him and moaning loudly. "Taking me so fucking well." He grunted, keeping his pace inside of you. You started to tighten around him and grab him even tighter than before.
"Cum with me baby." He breathed out. Just like that you came around him legs shaking as his thrusts slowed and became sloppy you felt him twitch inside of you before shooting his cum into your messy pussy.
He dropped your legs and laid back, resting your head on his chest for a moment catching your breath before speaking "You owe me $50 for that." You told him. You were on birth control but if he came inside you, you always took the pill just to be safe.
He laughed, "I'll run out and get you a pill tonight."
You sat up and moved backwards so that his now soft cock would slip out of you. You both cringed at the feeling.
You put your underwear back on and told him you were going to the bathroom to get cleaned up again.
While you showered again, he left to grab you a 'morning after' pill.
======================================
The next day you were back at your own apartment, and you got a text from an unknown number.
Unknown: Hey Y/N, it's Hobi.
Hobi? Who's Hobi? The name sounded familiar. Ahh Hobi. you'd heard Joon call Hoseok that a few times before. You wondered how he got your number, not that you cared that Hoseok was cool, but you were still a little worried about the previous night.
You: Hey Hoseok, how'd you get my number?
Hoseok: I asked Joon to give it to me. Anyway, what are you doing later?
He left out the part where Namjoon told him no, but he went through his phone to find it anyway. You weren't his girlfriend, and he wasn't in charge of you so there was no reason for Namjoon to gatekeep your number from him.
You didn't have any plans for today and you were bored sitting at home.
You: Probably just chillin at home. Why?
Namjoon was working until late tonight so he wouldn't be able to hang out today and you and Hoseok had other mutual friends but none that were as close as Joon or close enough to have random hang outs.
Hoseok: Would you wanna come over later? I've been working on a new dance routine, and I need some opinions. I don't know if you know anything about dance, but I need someone who will be honest about how it looks.
Why in the world would Hoseok need your opinions on his dancing? You'd seen videos of him dancing before and he was amazing, however he moved the beat followed it was as if the music was following him instead of the other way around.
You had no experience with dance, it always looked cool to try but you never took it up. It sounded fun to see such an experienced dancer in action, you wondered if he invited anyone else.
His texts, although unexpected, didn't seem odd, maybe he really hadn't picked up what was going on behind him last night, or maybe he just didn't want to make things awkward, so he was trying to be normal.
You: Sure. It sounds fun!
=========================================
A few hours later you arrived at Hoseok's place, he had texted you his address and you agreed on a time to go over.
His apartment was very similar to his style. He had name-brand everything he obviously loved supreme and a lot of his furniture and decorations were bright colored, but it matched so well and wasn't overwhelming.
It was a completely different vibe from Namjoon's apartment where he had mostly neutral tones and light/ pale colors. Joon's space was calming while Hoseok's made was fun and bright.
You sat on the floor of Hoseok's dance studio, which was an empty master bedroom with a mirror that stretched across the longest wall. Hoseok explained that this was the best space for him to dance in the apartment, so he made it a practice room and he uses the smaller bedroom as his actual room.
The space wasn't huge but if he wanted to, he could fit 3 or 4 more people in here to dance with him.
You were holding his phone and he told you to press play on the song when he gave you a signal. He stretched for a moment and then signaled for you to press play, as soon as the music it was like he had tuned out everything around him, you wouldn't be surprised if he forgot you were there.
You watched as he danced, entranced with his movements. When the song finished, he looked over at you and caught his breath.
"What do you think? Please be honest." You pressed your lips together and tilted your head. You were going to be totally honest. "The routine was amazing, it's your face that's throwing it off." His eyes widened and he seemed to be caught off guard.
"No, I didn't mean it like that!" you said panicking.
"Damn Y/N I didn't mean to be that honest." Hoseok laughed.
"Your face is perfect, it's really nice actually, your side profile is really pretty" you said, not meaning to compliment him that much, your cheeks beginning to turn red in embarrassment at your rambling.
Hoseok took a seat on the floor in front of you trying not to laugh. You sighed "It's your expression i was trying to say you're so concentrated you almost look angry." He nods his head. "I noticed that in the videos I've seen before too, try to give more facial expressions."
"You've seen my dance videos before?"
When Hoseok was gone, he would send his friends videos of new routines or moves he thought were cool and Joon would show you a lot of them. He was really proud of Hoseok, and he loved to show off his best friend's talent.
"Joon showed me a few." you told him. "Seems like Joon shows you a lot of things." Hoseok said in a teasing manner.
Oh, shit he definitely saw.
Your eyes widened.
"Start the music, I'll try again." Without a word you restarted the song and pressed play.
==========================================
Hoseok went over the routine a few more times, his expressions had gotten better and now you told him everything was perfect.
The both of you sat up against the mirrored wall and you asked him questions about dance and how he got into it. It was a light and easy conversation that soon turned in a different direction.
"Did you really think I wouldn't see?" He questioned. You were tired of the topic before it even started. "Don't even try to act confused. I know you know what I'm talking about."
You sighed in defeat. "That was all him! I didn't tell him to do that."
"You didn't seem like you were against it." Hoseok said smirking.
You groaned at the fact he wouldn't drop it. "Why are you so worried about it anyway?"
"Well for one, it was happening right behind me, I can't say I'm mad about it though. Just kinda wish it was me touching you like that."
Your jaw dropped; you didn't know what to say to that because to be honest you wanted to know what it would feel like for him to touch you.
Hoseok turns to face you completely, bringing his face closer to yours. "Do you want that too?" You gulp nodding your head. Hoseok gently places a hand on you, softly stroking your thigh getting closer and closer to your now aroused cunt. "Namjoon wouldn't be mad, would he?" Hoseok teases as his fingers reach the bottom of your shorts.
You lean forward and brush your lips over his "Are you gonna fuck me, or do you get off just talking about Namjoon." you question softly but teasingly, giggling at Hoseok who leans back in shock at your words.
He shakes his head and it's like a whole different Hoseok appears, his features darken, and he gets onto his knees to lean over you. "Act like a brat and you'll be treated like one." Hoseok grabs your chin and tilts it up wards, with his other hand he reaches down to unbutton your shorts.
Suddenly he stops and stands up shaking his head. "This won't do." he thinks for a moment as you look up at him. "Show me how good you can be, and I'll let you cum." You know exactly what he wants.
Eagerly you get on your knees playing with the hem of his sweats with one hand and cupping his clothed dick with the other, feeling it get harder before you pull his pants and boxers down with one movement.
Just like you imagined the other night he was long and on the skinnier side you were sure it would make a bulge in your stomach if he fucked you the right way. Wasting no time, you took his length in both your hands and looked up as he threw his head back. You smirked as quiet groans fell from his lips. You wanted to make him cum as quickly as possible so you could feel him inside you.
You began to lick his tip ever so slightly, just brushing over him with your tongue and the way he would tense and squirm made you curious as to how he would react to your mouth. Without warning you took him into your mouth bobbing your head back and forth as he put his hands in your hair making sure not to grab you too tightly.
You took him in as far as you could, changing your pace and often stopping to give a little extra attention to his leaking tip. His moans became louder and more frequent and you felt his cock twitch in your mouth.
"Y/N pull me out i'm gonna- '' He came in your mouth, ropes of cum squirting down your throat. You continued to suck and pump him until nothing more came out and you swallowed every last drop. When you pulled away he was looking down at you wide eyed in disbelief. "Fuck Y/N, get up here."
You stood up off your knees and Hoseok pulled you into a deep kiss letting his arms fall and his hands roam your ass. He slapped it, maybe a little too hard making you squeal in surprise. He turned you around so that you were facing the mirror wall as he lightly gripped your throat forcing you to look in the mirror at yourself, your hair messy and the light amount of mascara you wore runny.
"You still want this." Hoseok asked you making sure you were ready to continue. You nodded your head and pushed your ass back onto his already re- hardening cock. He shoved your shorts down leaving you in your panties while he played with your clit. With his free hand he lifted your shirt and unclipped your bra.
He let go of you and helped you step out of your shorts that were now down around your ankles and you did the same with your panties.
When you were completely stripped of your clothes you faced the mirror again and Hoseok held one of your legs up as you used the mirrored wall to keep your balance while he rubbed his tip against your wet cunt. You sucked in a breath. "Don't tease." You whined .
He finally pushed himself into you after what felt like forever giving you slow deep strokes. When he got a good pace and balance he moved the two of you back from the mirror so you could see yourself. One of his arms holding up one of your legs while the other arm held you upright and close to him.
"Look how pretty you look, taking me so fucking well." All you could do was moan in response. He set your leg down and you leaned forward, he grabbed onto your arms and began to pick up his pace thrusting in and out of you. Your head dropped forward as your legs began to tremble and Hoseok let go of one of your arms and held across your stomach while letting go of your other arm. He spanked you once more "Head up baby, look at me." He motioned for you to look in the mirror.
You began to clench around him feeling your orgasm approaching and he felt it too, that's why he quickly pulled out. He wanted you to cum together but he wasn't ready yet.
As you were ready to yell at him for ruining your orgasm he turned you around to face him and picked you up walking over to a wall he leaned himself against it and placed his arms under your knees. He was in total control thrusting in and out of you at whatever pace he pleased. You were dripping down his cock onto both of your thighs practically screaming in pleasure and gripping his back so hard you were sure it was going to leave marks.
One again you began to clench around him, this time impossibly tight, he had to slow down because with the way your pussy was gripping him he could barely move inside you. "Hobi" you gasped out. "I'm cumming!" That motivated him to go faster and you continued to clench and pulse around him not long after you came. He latched his lips around a spot on your neck sucking hard as he finally came inside you. His thrusts were crazy and sloppy slowing down until they stopped all together and his now soft dick fell out of you.
He set you down and both of you leaned on the wall for support both sweaty and out of breath. Your legs were trembling and you thought they might give out. You looked at eachother absolutely speechless "Holy shit."
===================================
A few days later you were at home looking in the mirror at a big purple bruise prominent on your neck. You knew Hoseok had done it on purpose, probably to make Namjoon jealous.
After the time in his dance studio you and Hobi –you considered yourselves pretty good friends now– had texted a few times and haven't really talked about it. You were kind of surprised he wasn't bringing it up or teasing you every chance he got.
You haven't seen Namjoon since your day with Hoseok but you had talked a few times and as far as you knew he had no idea what happened and you wanted to keep it that way because even though you weren't together you thought it'd be weird to tell him you had sex with his best friend.
He texted you asking if you'd want to come over and you agreed and made plans to hang out later. In the meantime you needed to figure out how to cover this hickey. It wasn't a problem until now because you had nothing to do but you didn't want it to be extremely obvious.
Makeup wasn't helping so you opted for wearing a hoodie and hoped for the best.
===================================
When you got to Namjoon's apartment there was a little detail you noticed he left out of your conversation earlier.
A smirking Hoseok sat on the couch eyeing you up almost the whole time you were there.
"Aren't you hot Y/N? What's with the Hoodie?" You glared at him trying your best to ignore him and his sly comments.
==========================================
Later on Namjoons apartment felt like it was getting warmer by the second you had to take the hoodie off or you would have sweat to death. The lights were low and Joon didn't seem to be paying that much attention to you so you took it off.
"Damn Y/N what happened to your neck, that thing is nasty." You panicked and Joon leaned in more to get a better look. "Is that a..." You cringed at his words wanting to disappear into the couch. For some reason you were more embarrassed than you should've been about this.
Hoseok was chuckling from his spot on the floor and your cheeks went pink. Namjoon caught on to what happened and looked like he was seconds away from beating Hoseok to a pulp.
The boys broke out into an argument that you were the center of. It was petty and stupid and there was probably a better way to handle it, but the only thing you could think about was how fucking fine they both looked when they were mad.
You stood up tired of the yelling and hoped this would shut them up, you took off your shirt catching both of their attention. "Both of you shut the fuck up and come here." You told them sternly, turning on your heels and walking to Namjoon's bedroom.
Quickly and quietly, they did as they were told not wasting any more time.
===================================
Thanks for reading please lmk what you think!
I'm working on a seokjin story next. And possibly a 'Like Crazy' Pt 2
Namjoon was furious. He was not the eldest son, nor the son to inherit the Empire next, but he was the son expected to control and look after his brothers– both younger and elder. This job was incredibly bothersome, especially considering none of his brothers seemed to listen to a word he said. A cow could take command better than his brothers. Yet he tried. He tried to keep them inline, to keep his brothers out of harm's way, or rather keep others out of others' way to minimise them causing harm.
His brothers, especially the youngest three, were impulsive. They acted with little thought, and no care for repercussions that would fall on their big brother. Namjoon often wondered if perhaps his brothers were disciplined more, or even just experienced the repercussions of their actions–instead of him– then maybe life would be a little easier. Namjoon didn’t believe he was perfect, by no means, but he was smart. He knew when to act, and how to avoid detection.
His brothers did not.
Honestly, he was beginning to think they wanted to be caught. He wouldn’t be surprised.
Their father wanted them married by the end of the year, which gave them six months. Namjoon wasn’t opposed to marriage. He just hadn’t met a woman he could deem adequate enough to want to dedicate his life to. He wanted someone intelligent, beautiful, and confident (but not too much), a woman he could bond with. Noble women could be educated, and usually they were, but it seemed to be surface knowledge. They didn’t read because they liked to, they didn’t like to look at art or even take walks through the gardens. They were boring. He didn’t want to be bored.
At dinner his father had announced a party will be held in three days, all his sons were expected to be there the entire night. There would be no excuses. They will meet the women, they will mingle and dance, and they will find a bride, sooner rather than later.
Seokjin hadn’t been there, much to everyone's surprise. They were quick to make an excuse, he was unwell and resting. It was clear their father didn’t believe a word out of their mouths, but said nothing. When dinner ended everyone left but Namjoon. Somehow, Seokjin’s absence was his fault. Namjoon, of course, knew nothing of his eldest brother's plans to not join them for their usual dinner. It was a once a week tradition, and although none of the princes enjoyed it, they all went to keep peace and appearances.
Namjoon was stressed. He was tired. He was angry.
His brothers walked all over him, after everything he did for them. They had no respect for him. Was it because he was the middle child? Not quite the eldest, but not the youngest. Just somewhere in the middle? He was sick of it. Seokjin was the eldest, and yet nothing was expected of him. The man couldn’t even get himself married– no, wouldn’t. He wouldn’t get married, not even to help his own brothers.
Why did he have to take the blame for every issue his brothers have caused? Tripped a maid down the stairs? Namjoon why didn’t you stop them? Got too rough with Jeongguk and cut his cheek in training? Well Namjoon should have been there to keep them in line. Namjoon, Namjoon, Namjoon.
Seokjin sat on the hallway floor, back against his door as he fiddled with his fingers. His plan had gone to shit. He had no intention of being so late. He was going to show up, you in arm, dressed in the most beautiful gown and announce his engagement to his family. He was supposed to bask in his mothers joyful praises and loll in the thankful songs of his brothers, who would forever be in his debt, while they all whined in jealousy. His father would applaud him for finding such a beautiful bride, pat his back and scold his brothers for being so difficult.
“Follow in your brother's footsteps!” he would say.
Instead, he was sitting on a freezing floor, thinking of how to get back into his room without damaging his doors. He really liked his doors.. His plan was to get food, surely you were hungry, and lure you out with the smell. His plan could have been perfect if he had taken into account that he had missed dining with his family, angering his father and ultimately, Namjoon. But he hadn’t thought of this, too wrapped up in getting you to open up the doors. Instead he very proudly had jumped off the floor and rushed off toward the kitchen to have a feast prepared for you. He knew he shouldn’t be rewarding this behaviour, but he was going to give you the benefit of the doubt, he assumed you were scared and how could he blame you for this? Being in the presence of a prince, and one as attractive as himself, must have been incredibly overwhelming to a commoner such as yourself.
He will just prove to you that he is as kind as he is handsome.
When Namjoon had first begun his rampage through the palace he had every intention of tearing his eldest brother's head from its shoulders and kicking it out the nearest window. Yoongi had mentioned that Seokjin had gone for a walk that afternoon, promising to be back for dinner. So the eldest had actively missed out on meeting the women lined up for them, and then purposely skipped dinner with their father, clearly more than happy with getting Namjoon in trouble. The more he learned, the more heated he began to feel.
Oddly enough, when arriving in the hallway that his brother's room resided in he found the eldest prince with his head to the door, speaking so softly he couldn’t hear a word he uttered– which was odd considering how loud the man usually was. Namjoon watched as the elder man pushed off the door, a determined look on his face as he ran off down the halls in the opposite direction. A few beats passed before his door creaked open, a head poking out. Hair covered the face, but it was clearly a woman. Namjoon wasn’t sure which emotion was currently winning, curiosity or anger. Did his brother really skip out, and cause him trouble, for a woman?
The door quickly shut again, the girl disappearing back into the room. Namjoon had decided he would approach the woman, find out who she is and confirm his suspicions. Anyone in the court knows not to involve themselves with the princes at certain hours of the week, so who did she think she was to ignore the rules? To get him chastised for an action that he didn’t even do?
Namjoon had advanced toward the room, reaching for the door but his actions fell short when the door yanked open and a much smaller body collided with his own.
Fire.
His body was on fire.
Namjoon quickly shoved the body away, jerking himself backward as he examined his body looking for something, anything that would indicate harm, but he found nothing. He looked up, finding the woman on the floor, staring up to him with wide eyes. Messy damp hair hung over most of her face, pretty pink lips parted slightly in shock. Neither said a word, only staring for a minute before the girl scrambled to her knees and bowed, head to the floor. You didn’t speak, no apologies, just head to the floor.
Why did this irritate him?
He wanted you to look at him again.
“Who are you?” He asked, finally seeming to find his voice again.
Seokjin couldn’t remember the last time he had gone to the kitchen. For a while the prince had actually been banned at some point of time and just never bothered to go back, not that he had ever really needed to, the maids could do it for him. Only Jeongguk enjoyed going down to the kitchens, snooping through the ingredients, picking at the food while being cooked and for a while, watching the maid he was so enraptured by. Admittedly, Seokjin had never understood his brother's obsession with the dirty girl, she was less than average, filthy and all bones. He remembers laughing and teasing his brother, loving how angry and defensive the younger one got.
But now he understood.
Upon his arrival Seokjin’s eyes instantly landed on the remaining two chefs. One stood by the doorway, carrying in freshly washed pots, and the other looked ready to shit his pants. At first, the prince didn’t understand the instant look of fear that hit the man's features, but the sight of the gruesome scar over his right eye made him light up.
“Chef Geum, it has been some time.”
The head chef, Ho Geum, was especially cautious of the royal family, especially the eldest two. The older sons, Seokjin and Yoongi were both excellent cooks, their nannies had taught them as children and young teens per their request. Their nanny had believed she was doing a good thing, encouraging a hobby, helping them with independence. Unfortunately this made the princes far more pedantic toward the meals they were served. One wrong flavour, a change to a recipe, and there would be hell. He had learnt this the hard way.
//flashback; three years//
The kitchen staffed six chefs, two for deserts and four for the other three meals a day. They were older men, sweaty and exhausted. They not only cooked for the royal family, but the other staff, and any guests that the palace seemed to constantly house. There was never a moment for breaks or rests. These four chefs often rotate shifts overnight, two on and two off, allowing a few hours breaks to rest before jumping back in for the breakfast routine.
Prince Seokjin had been 21 when the incident occurred. The current head chef, had been on his first week and unaware of all the rules in place. There were just so many, and it was hard to keep up with them all. His previous employers had no issue with his food experimentation, in fact they encouraged it. They were foodies after all, and would often brag to guests about their creative chef who prepared the greatest dishes in the whole of Korea. Eventually Emperor Munpyo caught wind of the rumours and demanded he had the chef for himself.
Who could turn down an offer like that?
He quickly learnt his creative dishes weren’t appreciated. The fifth night of his new job he found two of the princes in the kitchen entryway, the taller of the two with a friendly smile on his plump lips, while the shorter looked at him with an expression that mirrored someone staring at a bug on the wall.
The smile never left the taller prince's face, not when he cut off the chef's index fingers. Not when he pinned poor Geum to the large counter, giggling at the way he squirmed and begged to be let go. The shorter brother hadn’t smiled throughout most of the ordeal, keeping his lips slightly pursed as he watched his brother explain every single thing wrong with every dish that had been served that evening. Seokjin had demanded the chef keep his eyes on him, he should be respected. Unfortunately, because his focus was directed to only one of the princes, he failed to notice Yoongi standing by the furnace with a metal ladle resting over the heat. The metal had begun to melt before the prince was satisfied. He quickly pulled the ladle out, and stalked over to the cook who had finally caught on to the younger princes movement.
No amount of begging, or screaming, helped the man. In fact, the begging only seemed to fuel the excitement the prince felt, because for the first time in the hours they had been down in the kitchen, he grinned. It had made him sick. His smile had seemed so kind, almost childish. It was such a sweet smile to give to someone right before you disfigured them. Yoongi had stood over him, his face hanging above the chefs who could only sob a blubbered apology, begging him to stop before he had even started.
The pure excitement on Yoongi's face had haunted the chef’s dreams even to this day. The smile on his lips as the prince pressed the underside of the burning ladle into his eye. The laughter sounding in the emptied kitchen that moulded into his pained screams. Geum was probably lucky he hadn’t seen the look of pure glee on the scarred prince's face as he pushed the burning utensil harder, or the elated look he had as the skin melted on his face.
When Yoongi had finally pulled away, it took a bit of force to rip the ladle from the skin that had melted onto it. The chef was quickly let go, and the princes watched as he rolled over, dropping from the counter top to the floor with a grunt. His hands shakily cupping over the face wound, hands still bloody from the elder prince's punishment. It was probably for the best that the chef had been looking to the floor, sobbing, otherwise his good eye would have seen the way Yoongi had admired the skin burnt to the ladle.
He would have seen the prince pluck off a chunk of burnt flesh, and eat it.
//flashback end//
“Y-your Highness, it is an-an honour to see you again.” Geum stuttered out, bowing deeply.
The prince quickly waved the man off, walking further inside as he looked through the baskets of fresh vegetables. “I need you to cook a meal,” He told the man, turning to look back at him.
“Something romantic.” He added, nodding to himself. “I’ll need deserts as well, so wake up the rest of the staff.”
The two cooks looked between each other, raising a brow before looking back to the prince.
“My prince, was the dinner not up to satisfaction?” They inquired, the blinded chef looking to his companion in shock.
“I wouldn’t know, I wasn’t there– do you have doubts about your work?” Seokjin grinned,
The two men quickly shook their heads, stuttering out incoherent sentences before the prince cut them off again, walking back toward the kitchen's exit.
“Have it in my room within the hour.”
You didn’t look up when he spoke, irking him further. His jaw clenched as you kept your head down, slightly shaking at the shoulders.
“Y/n.”
“Y/n, look at me when I speak to you.”
The words were familiar. Seokjin had said the exact same thing to you only hours earlier. Only this time you obeyed, his tone of voice didn’t feel as mischievous as Seokjin’s. And while yes, Seokjin had sounded playful, he still had an edge to his words, one that you were willing to ignore. This man held no mirth to his tone, there was a lingering anger to his words. You weren’t sure why, maybe he was angry at you for touching him? You weren’t aware of who he was, but by the fabric at his feet, and the attitude he spoke with, you were sure he was important. Was this the Emperor that Seokjin had wanted you to meet?
The air around him was suffocating. You wonder if he knew how stifling his presence was.
Ruffling of fabric filled your ears, making you peek up slightly. The man had squatted down to your level. You quickly tried to avert your gaze back to the floorboards but his hand shot out, grabbing your chin. He seemed to freeze when he touched you, fingers tensing on your skin making his nails dig into the flesh.
“I didn’t ask your name, I asked who are you?”
You frowned, is that not the same thing?
A soft grunt left your lips when he jerked your face upward to meet his gaze. He was handsome, even with the glare he was shooting your way. You weren’t sure how to answer his question, because who even were you here? You could imagine his reaction now if you told him: ‘I’m Y/n, and I’m not from here– wherever here is. I’m a homeless woman from what I can only presume is the future.’
Yeah, no. You would rather keep that information to yourself.
“I-I.. I don’t know.” You finally admitted, cheeks burning in embarrassment.
You barely knew where you were, you clearly weren’t home. You weren’t from here, from this time. That much you had gathered during your small meltdown in the room. You felt guilty when Seokjin tried to coax you out of the room, complaining about how late he was running. But the realisation of just how fucked of a situation you had gotten yourself into had dawned and you just wanted to hide. Which is exactly what you had done. Definitely not your finest hour, but how else is someone supposed to react?
You had been so relieved when the prince had told you he was leaving for a moment. It was a moment to escape. Once his footsteps had disappeared you had every intention of grabbing the clothes you had woken up in, and making a run for it. You had quickly changed back into the dirty, slightly damp silk nightgown, even putting the robe back on, deciding it was way too cold to leave it behind, and you were ready. You didn’t have any ideas of where to go exactly, but the feeling in your gut promised anywhere was better than here.
Clearly, your master escape plan didn’t go as you had hoped because the second you opened the door you almost broke your nose. The body clearly didn’t appreciate the unwanted contact, because within a split second you were on the floor. A new wave of fear had washed over you, terrified to do anything, so you had quickly moved into a bowing position.
The energy pulsing off this man was a true force. It shook you to the core. You feared speaking the wrong words, or even moving. You felt like a small animal, too scared to make a move, fearing the slightest movement of muscle would trigger an attack from the predator ahead.
Clearly your words hadn’t satisfied the man, how could it? You weren’t sure you would be convinced if some random woman claimed she didn’t know who she was either.
“Namjoon, what are you doing here?”
You froze at the icy tone. The man, who you could now only assume to be Namjoon, didn't budge. His gaze stayed on you, even if you were no longer looking at him. The floor seemed like the safest bet right now. You knew the other voice, it was the Prince who found you. He had spoken so much during the few hours you both had shared, that you could probably pick up on his voice from anywhere. You couldn’t tell if you were relieved for him returning, or annoyed. While you were glad that he was back, the only familiar thing you had so far in this place, you weren’t sure he could be of much help in this situation. You were convinced that the man before you was the Emperor. The way he spoke, the power he emitted.. There was nothing else he could be.
“I would appreciate it if you got your hands off my fiancé.” He spoke again, walking further into the room.
Seokjin wasn’t sure how he felt about the situation before him. While on one hand he was happy to see that the room was unlocked, allowing him to come back into you, he was bitter to find his brother's hands on you. He had barely been gone twenty minutes, he hadn’t expected any of his brothers to go to his room. Usually Namjoon would go off to his room to wallow in self pity before taking any anger out.
Either way, Namjoon had no right to be touching his woman.
“Fiancé?” He echoed, making no move away from you. If anything, his hand only tightened.
Huffing, Seokjin stomped forward. He grabbed the pale green collar of his brother's shirt and tugged him off you. The taller man hit the floor with a grunt.
“What the fuck Hyung!” He hissed, rubbing the back of his head.
Namjoon wasn’t sure why his chest had constricted at the news his brother had dropped. He wasn’t sure why his skin burned when he touched you, or why his lungs felt strangled when your eyes looked into his own. What he did know was that he didn’t like it. He didn’t like how he was feeling, and he didn’t like that his brother was claiming you.
“Who is she, Jin-Hyung?” Namjoon asked calmly, having pushed himself off the floor and brushed imaginary dust from his outfit.
Both brothers looked at you, still bowed to the floor.
“My future wife, was that not clear?” Jin asked dumbly.
Namjoon rolled his eyes, crossing his arms over his chest. “What clan is she from?” He pushed. Seokjin was frustrating, as per usual, but Namjoon noticed he was slightly nervous at the question.
“She isn’t from here.” The elder shrugged, still avoiding answering directly. Moving around his little brother to crouch down beside you. His heart ached seeing you pressed to the floor, shaking in fear. But he couldn’t deny the butterflies in his stomach from seeing you in such a submissive state. Would you behave this way for him?
He rested a hand on your back, grinning when you didn’t flinch away. Even with the materials on your body, he could still feel the burning sensation as if he were pressing against your bare skin. Would the feeling intensify if you had been stripped bare?
“You never answered my questions.” Namjoon pressed, crossing his arms over his chest.
“And you never answered mine, and you best watch your tone Namjoon.” Seokjin scolded, not bothering to look at his brother. Instead, he gently took your chin between his fingers, just as Namjoon had been doing only minutes before. Seokjin’s grip was feather light, almost as if he wasn’t even touching you.
“My love, are you okay?” He murmured when your eyes met his. “Did he hurt you?”
You shook your head, making him smile in relief before he stood up, pulling you along with him. Seokjin’s arm curled around your waist, forcing you into his side as he looked back at the man standing across from you. His eyes were glued to the arm around your hips making you squirm uncomfortably. The movement only seemed to make the man's grip tighten on you.
“Y/n, meet my little brother Namjoon, Namjoonie, meet my soon to be wife, Y/n.”
Wife.
The word made your stomach twist. He kept saying that, you didn’t know him, and he you. How did he expect you to marry him? He hadn’t even consulted you on the idea. What made him think you even wanted him? You wanted to leave. You wanted to find your way home.
But what if there wasn’t a way home…
Jeongguk was a heavy believer in the spiritual realm, and a romantic at heart. He believed in the after world, reincarnation, he believed in true love and soulmates, and that there was always fate there to guide him to where he needed to be. He had believed Jin-i to be his soulmate, but soon after her death, despite the immense sadness he felt, he knew she hadn’t been the one. Fate had been kind to him, showing him a glimpse of what he could feel, promising that it had only been the beginning of how love would feel. It had allowed him some practice before true love found him.
Jin-i could have been a problem. If she had lived, what would have happened when he found his soulmate? He had always swore to be a loyal husband, so an affair would have been out of the question. Of course, there was always the option of just completely removing Jin-i from the situation, but he wasn’t too sure if that would have sat right with him.
Thankfully, he didn’t have these stresses anymore. He would be alert, ready to find the woman he was destined for, and all the while, better himself for her. Although, he wasn’t sure what more he could improve on.
Well, maybe he was.
Despite being 25, Jeongguk hadn’t been very experienced with women. He had dozens of them ready for him at any given moment, women that would do anything he desired and more. They had been used before, but not to the same extent his brothers had used them. Jeongguk had only used the women when his hand would no longer work, and even then he would only let them suck him off. He wanted he and his soulmate to experience sex together, for the first time, to be each others firsts. That plan very quickly went out the door.
He had been devastated to realise Jin-i wasn’t his soulmate. His promise to himself, to remain a virgin, had been ruined. After Jin-i’s husband's unfortunate death, Jeongguk, admittedly had little self control at the moment. He had slit her throat, and as she bled to death, he fucked her. A poor, and messy choice on his behalf. But the sight had been so exciting. The blood that covered her face and body, getting all over him as well was a feeling he wished to someday replicate. She had choked out incoherent words, clawing at any bare skin her nails could find with leaky eyes.
She had never looked prettier.
He had been devastated at first, guilt eating away at him. He was saving himself for his soulmate, and he was soiled. Jin-i had ruined him.
Would she be disappointed in him? He wouldn’t be able to blame her.
It had admittedly taken the prince a while to realise Jin-i wasn’t his fated one, and in his distraught state, he had.. Let himself go a little. The concubines had dropped in numbers, quitting or going missing after the youngest prince got his hands on them. He was too rough, too demanding, too unstable. Most women left bloody and bruised after their hours with him, weeping and begging the Emperor to release them of their duties.
Jeongguk had felt something in his chest. It ached, and pulled. It had felt that way since morning, and he had tried his best to ignore it. He was on his best behaviour. But the light tingle in his chest had turned into full fledged throbbing, it was like something was trying to tear its way out of his ribs. Nothing was easing the pain. So he had decided to let the pain lead the way. Whatever it was, the closer it got, the more the pain eased, the further he got the more it hurt.
He probably looked crazy, running around the halls with a hand to his chest, bursting in and out of different rooms. But he didn’t care, all he could focus on was the pang, pang, pang in his chest. The familiar hall that roomed Seokjin and Yoongi came into view, and the ache began to ease more. Jeongguk stumbled slightly, hand to the wall as he moved further down, passing Yoongi’s quiet room first, but the ache remained.
“You can’t be serious about this.” Namjoon’s voice echoed, catching the younger's attention.
“We’re in love, Joonie. Is this not what you all wanted?” Seokjin scoffed, his tone of voice lower than usual. He was pissed.
Jeongguk kept voice, his brother's voices getting cleared and the ache nearly disappearing. Fate was leading him somewhere, he was sure of it.
Seokjin’s door was wide open, Namjoon standing closer to the doorway with a ridged back. The eldest brother stood slightly to the side, one arm on his hip and the other seemed to be wrapping around something–or someone. The youngest prince stood just outside the door, head peeking around the corner of the door only just out of sight. The ache was gone, back to an itch. Whatever fate wanted him to find, it was in there.
“You just met her, how could you love her?” Namjoon groaned, head dropping into his palm. His larger body was blocking off whoever stood beside their elder brother, irking the youngest prince. He was curious.
“Oh what do you know, Namjoon?” Seokjin sneered, pulling away from the body beside him to step closer toward his brother. “Just because you’re so unloved, everyone else has to be too?”
Namjoon’s shoulders shuddered as he sighed, shaking his head. But he said nothing, letting Seokjin step closer, jabbing a finger into his chest. “She will be my wife, it is destiny.” The elder nearly whispered, the words only just ghosting Jeongguk’s ears.
Jeongguk was weighing his options, unsure if he should make his presence known. But it didn’t seem he had to. Seokjin seemed to have spotted him over Namjoon’s shoulder, raising a brow to the younger brother. In shame the youngest brother shuffled into the doorway, head hanging too embarrassed to make eye contact.
“I’m sorry.” He mumbled pitifully.
Namjoon raised a brow, looking between the youngest and the eldest. “How long have you been listening?” He asked.
He shrugged. “Not that long.”
Seokjin eyed up the younger boy, purposely shielding you away from him. The young boy looked erratic. Sweat beading on his forehead, a red flush on his neck and cheeks, and his body shaking. Some would think he looked ill.
“Why are you here, Jeongguk?” Jin asked.
The younger boy frowned, itching at his neck. Why was here? He had only been following where fate had demanded, he hadn't thought he would find himself here. He himself was beyond confused.
“I’m not sure hyung,” He paused, thinning his lips in thought. “I just thought something of mine was here.”
It was a weak explanation, but it was true. The elder man grinned, stepping closer toward his brother gently patting his hair.
“What could you have possibly thought could belong to you here?” The tone was almost condescending. This bothered the younger prince, but he simply shrugged. He had nothing to answer with. He knew he had nothing in this wing of the palace, let alone his eldest brother’s room.
Namjoon seemed just as bothered by the eldest boy's tone, shoving the man slightly. He seemed unprepared for the force given, stumbling over and revealing you, wide eyed at the entire situation unfolding. The moment Jeongguk’s eyes fell to yours, the ache returned tenfold. He almost doubled over in pain, his hand shooting up to his chest, nails digging into the fabric of his dark shirt.
“Her.”
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A/N; two more brothers thrown into the mix!! Poor Jeongguk just wants love 🥹 and namjoon isnt sure what he wants. Pls let me know your thoughts bbies! thank you for reading :))))
Pairing Kim Namjoon x (f)reader
Rating pg13 | 16+
Genre/Tropes Dad!Tan, first time parents
Warnings Some details of birth, nothing overly graphic though, all soft fluff, and buff dad!namjoon
WC 454
Crosspost AO3 - herecomessatvrn
Summary Together, you made life, and in that moment, you were no longer the only girl in his life.
A/N Thank you so much to @codeinebelle on tumblr, for your support and signing up for my tag list. Here's some Namjoon for you. <3
“You made a person, baby,” he said softly, looking back at you. “She's so small. So perfect.”
He couldn’t look away for too long, and already you knew as he cradled her in big arms against a strong and solid chest, that another girl had him wrapped around her little finger. And you were perfectly okay with that.
You felt that you had run a marathon. You were exhausted, and every breath was made with effort. You could honestly say, in that moment, this was the worst pain you had felt, and you sobbed as you closed your eyes and felt your husband's hand brush sweaty hair from your eyes.
Your hearing was muffled as you recovered, and the pain ebbing away, and among the sounds of the doctor and nurses, you heard a small gasping breath and a cry that would not stop.
You opened your eyes, everything came into sharp focus and you saw as a baby, your baby, was placed on your bare chest and covered in a blanket. You were stunned for a moment, but your arms wrapped around quickly, holding the child tight to your chest.
You looked down at the whimpering child and then up to the brown eyes of your husband, smiling so wide, you were sure the dimples would never leave his face. Namjoon was speechless, as he crouched down to press his forehead to yours, and then placed a kiss on your temple.
“You did so good, baby. She’s perfect.” He was gentle as he rubbed soft circles over your child's head, almost afraid that he would somehow break this too.
The nurses came in, helping clean up both you and your baby, and then the doctor came over carefully instructing Namjoon what to do as he cut the umbilical cord. Soon after, they wicked her away, to measure and wrap, and you still felt like you were soaring. Not yet feeling any of the pain or soreness that you knew was to come.
Namjoon had squeezed hsi large body onto the bed next to you, credlign you, rubbing your shoulders, and helping to fix your hair that had fallen out of the ponytail. You just wanted it out of the way. When a nurse came back to the bedside, your baby was wrapped in a soft yellow blanket. A white cap on her head.
“Here you go, daddy,” she said with a smile. “Support her head,” the bundle was passed off into large hands, and Namjoon was so careful, and his eyes wide.
“Yeah! Just like that. You got her. You’re a natural.”
You sat up a little, looking at him with a soft smile. You saw the sparkle of tears in his eyes.
Summary: “No I’m a surprise,” you say sounding all sassy and smiling where your cheeks fluff up and you look like a pufferfish and it always gets Namjoon. His eyes are crescents, dimples peeking from his cheeks.
“What would they say if they saw the big bad Kim Namjoon like this?” you ask raising your brow not as good as Namjoon but it gets the job done.
note: Hello, I am back after months with this piece. Feedback is always appreciated! Thank you for reading.
➡Mafia!Namjoon x reader
➡Warnings: 18+, Mentions of sex, reader’s family not letting her eat
Namjoon hates parties. Sure he’s the CEO, of one of the biggest crime syndicates in the world, the biggest and most feared in South Korea so he could have sent his associates or one of his brothers to attend this party but he was there for a very specific reason. Y O U.
With a frontal name of BigHit Inc., run by the most fearsome mafia BTS behind it, the most fierce crime lords and not by the old fashioned guns and murders way well, that sometimes yes, but mostly financial crimes, stealing money and intellectual property theft done so well they’ve been thriving the last few decades when their fathers, mafia bosses, seven families joined hands together to be sworn allies promising to take down and gain power over the corrupt government. Now run by their sons seven men, most of them educated in Ivy League schools. 5 of them even hold dual degrees, their leader Kim Namjoon or RM even holds a fucking Ph.D. A born genius, his IQ only amplifying his true potential. His members' capabilities, work ethic complimenting the jobs they pull off together as a team. This team was perfect and solid in all ways made to rule. As if fate had brought them together.
The party was boring as usual. All of the crime lords and mafia bosses with their families were here. It reminded Namjoon of the party, similar to this where he first laid his eyes on you. His gaze traveling from the bar section of the huge ballroom towards you at the opposite end where you were forced to make small talk. You stared back at him with the same intensity. Your eyes catching his gaze, latching onto his dragon eyes drowning in those dark orbs that stared at you. You weren’t afraid, not even intimated. No sign of a blush. You weren’t swooning like those other girls. You simply stared back at him equally fierce taking his presence in. Your own doe-like eyes even if not as sharp as his, held enough power to not only draw the attention of the most powerful, eligible bachelor, most feared CEO of an empire himself but also spark something in him. And ever since then your life and these parties have been different. You solely come here to see him. And the same for him. To see you.
What Namjoon and you shared was special. With your family owning amalgamation of big companies, reputable among the mafia bosses and crews it came with lots of curfews for you the heiress to your father. You were an asset. One that would be traded someday. To a man that would be chosen for you, based on his family, money and what value he can derive for your father and his business. And you shall be his dutiful wife, produce an heir and then wait for death inside some mansion. This was your fear. You were disgusted whenever any thoughts of how your future would be like crossed your mind. Amidst all the chaos, uncertainty and lack of control in your own life, you met Namjoon, your Joon. The man changed your entire perspective on love, intimacy and boy he had you pining for him even yearning. But what you didn’t realize is he was yours since he saw you for the first time two months ago.
Namjoon’s at his usual spot. By the bar. Waiting for you. With a drink in his hand. There was no way he could take you on dates given your family. The curfews. And that bullshit about what girls and women can and cannot do. He hated the way women were treated. He was lucky that his father was not as stupid as the others. He made sure that his sister was sent away to Switzerland to study, and live her life the way she wants to like any normal girl. And she was happy and so was his mother who lived in Japan with her own small business, even enjoying life. He hoped one day he can go away somewhere with you. Away from all this. Take you on dates. Hold your hand while he walks next to you. Kiss your cheeks whenever he wanted to. Make you giggle with all the cheesy compliments and then make out till his heart's content. Right now he had to settle for stealing glances in between. Carefully brushing his hand whenever he walked near you. This is all the affection or physical contact he’d get. On a good day, when people at the party would be preoccupied with taking some political party member down or something like that Namjoon would sneak you out to the roof, or to the parking lot inside his car to steal kisses. Heated kisses. Passionate kisses. One where he’d drag your soft lips between his teeth just to hear that moan. Running his hands all over your body while you clutched his torso, held on to his pecs and squeezed his biceps for dear life gasping for air. His plump lips swollen, his shirt buttons open, neck and collarbones littered with hickeys and marks you’d leave every time you had one of your little adventures. Namjoon would give anything to mark you just one small hickey but he couldn’t and he won’t risk your family finding you out. You have stylists and beauty consultants that will scan every inch of your body and he couldn’t afford to get you in trouble. So he holds back and tells himself that he’ll wait for the day, that one day you’ll be his.
All these thoughts suddenly clouding his mind made him feel so empty his forehead sweaty. He decided to step out to the balcony a little disappointed that he’s not seen you yet. He made sure your family was invited. He knows you’ll be there with them as your parents like to show you off like some diamond jewelry piece or an ornament they possess. The thought of you being married to someone else makes Namjoon’s blood boil. And even at these parties the way the other men scan your body, while you’re in your tight-fitting dresses draping your body perfectly makes him want to take his gun out and shoot them all. He looks over to the night sky sighing and drinking his third glass of scotch. Namjoon suddenly feels a pair of hands right above his navel and he’s ready to smack that person but he hears your voice and jolts instead trying to turn.
“Boo!”
“Were you supposed to meet me here?” Namjoon asks with a grin, lifting a brow as if he didn’t just get scared and pulls your wrist around his waist towards his back so he can hug you.
“No I’m a surprise,” you say sounding all sassy and smiling where your cheeks fluff up and you look like a pufferfish and it always gets Namjoon. His eyes are crescents, dimples peeking from his cheeks.
“What would they say if they saw the big bad Kim Namjoon like this?” you ask raising your brow not as good as Namjoon but it gets the job done.
“If I didn’t hear your voice, but only felt hands and if it weren’t you, they’d be dead princess” he responds voice deep and low holding that timber, his the last four words whispered into your ear. His breath making you feel ticklish so you giggle. He looks around to check if any eyes were on him and then, quickly pulls you into a hug. You smell divine as usual. Namjoon dips lower and places his chin near your neck. He loves it. The smell of your perfume, your shampoo combined with your own sweet natural scent. Makes him feel like some kind of animal, primal instincts kicking in and he knows if he keeps his head there he’s a goner. But what he feels now is different than usual. Your body is warmer to his touch. He’s used to how you normally feel. And right now you feel warm, your skin hot when he slots his fingers on your forehead brushing your hair to the side.
“Looks like you’re running a fever are you okay princess?” he asks his voice suddenly all serious, brows furrowed his gaze boring to where his hands meet your skin.
You want to say that you’re okay, but you’re not. You feel sore everywhere. Your legs hurt from wearing heels. Your dress is too tight and you’re hating the way it feels all over your body. It’s making you feel uncomfortable. The material just feeling torturous against your feverish skin. You haven’t had proper meals because your family starved you so don’t look bloated for today’s event. They wouldn’t even feed you when you were sick. You threw up twice but they still made you come here. You need an IV probably. You thought you’d text Namjoon but since they were going to make you attend this party anyways might as well be here and get some serotonin from seeing him. You were always trained to say you’re okay. Making yourself seem strong. Your needs were never to be put first. But right now the way Namjoon looks at you, with so much care and concern makes your heart ache so you give in, tell him and you just want to sit down because you don’t know when your dizziness will be back. You want to cry because you’re so annoyed and irritated your brain a mess.
“No” you squeak out. You eyes now glossy and Namjoon’s heart just breaks at that. Only after a few seconds does he realize how your face gives away the exhaustion after he looked at it a little longer. The bags under your eyes can be seen. Even if the concealer did a good job of hiding the dark circles Namjoon can see how truly tired and exhausted you must be feeling. Your cheeks more hollow. Your posture barely making you stand straight or still. Fidgety. Weak. You lean into his arms. Your forehead meets his shoulder. His black blazer feels so soft. You sigh. you want to just stay there. Namjoon carefully pulls you off him while he cups your cheek and tells you that you both should move somewhere more private. You nod and sneak out of the room. Thankfully the party today was at a hotel, one of Seoul’s biggest and Namjoon makes some calls while you’re walking his hands securing you by his side while you make your way out. Namjoon notices how it’s hard for you to match his stride today. Even though the man is 70% legs you usually keep up with him by walking faster or leaping. But today you’re barely able to keep up with his slowest smallest strides. You walk for what feels like an hour but it’s just been two minutes. You’re back at the reception lobby and you see someone guide you and Namjoon to the elevator. The next thing you know you’re in a hotel room.
Namjoon leads you towards the bed once you’re in the room and the door is locked. A few seconds later you hear rustling and you know they’re the guards placed outside the door for security. You sit on the bed your legs finally catching a break from carrying you and the stupid dress around with those stupid heels. You loved wearing heels but not today sis. In your hazy state you try to pull them off only that you forgot to remove the strap first through the small metal buckle. The dress making it a struggle to bend over and reach for the straps. Namjoon sees your struggle and can’t help but let out a small giggle. You look up at him with those doe eyes, confused and there it goes his heart sinks again. He makes way his towards you, leans down on both his knees. He gently takes your right foot into his palm and with the other hand makes quick work to get you out of your heels. Within seconds he was able to accomplish what you were trying so hard to do. And with one of your problems gone, you just fall back onto the plush bed all grace forgotten. Once the head hits the soft cloud-like mattress you let out a sigh of happiness and then a groan. Your feet are still hanging downwards to the floor, your back was on the bed arched so you can rest your head down. But more comfortable than standing or walking right now but you’ll take it. Too tired to move you give up fatigue finally settling in.
“Move up sweetheart you’ll hurt your back” you hear Namjoon say but you have no energy. You don’t even respond sleep already taking over you. Especially now that you were safe, away from those eyes, your parents probably thought you’ll be talking to some guy impressing someone but little did they know you’d be here a few floors above the party with Joon. You don’t know what to call your little arrangement or these little sneaking out sessions are. You don’t know what Namjoon is to you. The two of you haven’t talked about it. It’s weird because you’ve talked about fate, why Namjoon hates seafood and how much you love the rain, the fraud patterns in his business but never about what Namjoon is to you. Not that you need a label, and not that maybe calling him your boyfriend would be a label like that, you’d actually like it. All you know is Namjoon likes you, for sure I mean he wouldn’t be kissing you like a starved man, you shoving your tongue down his throat or else. You know you love him but you don’t know if he loves you yet. It’s too much to ask for. Given the circumstances. You’re just glad you found him. And whatever moments you’ll get to share you’ll cherish them now and forever. You start thinking about all these moments while sleep pulled you in completely and you don’t hear Namjoon call your name again. You don’t hear him trying to wake you up. You don’t feel his hands cupping your cheek. You sure as hell don’t even feel his lips peck yours which is the first time in a while now. You don’t feel him undo some buttons and zips to get you off that dress. You don’t even feel the way he tucks you in.
All you now know is you wake up in a blanket nest. Soft blankets against your cheek, your hands, your legs. You sigh at this feeling smiling to yourself. You’re moving and stretching. Feeling like a new person. You’re fully awake now even though you haven’t opened your eyes and that’s when you hear him
“Can you hear me now sleepy head?”
you know he’s only teasing you but you pout before opening your eyes to see him at the other side of the room with an amused smile.
“New person who dis” you reply only making him laugh. Namjoon’s shirtless. He’s wearing his dress pants, his blazer hung at the corner neatly next to your dress. And that’s when you realize you’re wearing his shirt while you napped.
“What time is it” you ask yawning. and when Namjoon says you register you’ve napped for three full hours. He makes his way towards you. He slowly climbs on the bed stretching his arm out for you and you waste no time in jumping to his embrace with your new-found energy. Namjoons smiling at that. He can never get used to how perfectly you fit against him. He’s the one sighing in comfort now. Sometimes Namjoon can’t tell if you know that he loves you or not. The way you make him feel. The way you make him crave your heart.
You peek up from his shoulder to look at him, his eyes never leaving you.
“Hi” you whisper smiling at him
“Hii” he replies back matching your hushed tone dimples on display and you can’t help but poke them. From here you can see how versatile Namjoon is. His expressions outside the usual are deadly. His sharp dragon eyes, jutted jaw, furrowed brows he looks dangerous and lethal. But now all you see is a soft dimpled giant with the cutest button nose and crescent eyes. His eyes hold so much warmth.
He gently cards fingers through your hair asking if your feeling better to which you nod. You reach up to peck his lips. And once you slot your lips onto his plush and soft ones you want more. You move your hand to the back of his head lightly carding your fingers through his hair spurring him on. Namjoon takes this incentive and slots his lips back to yours. You look so damn good in his shirt and now his mind is going crazy. Thoughts racing. He tilts your head so he can angle himself better. Little sucks and swipes of his tongue against your lips and mouth have your knees weak. He knows how to claim his jackpot already knows what makes you react and what you like. One hand reached down to knead your ass. You moan against his mouth breathless as you take him in. Lips swollen, luscious and glossy. Your eyes are unrelenting. And he decided it is at this moment, he has to tell you. He fears the worst will happen. That you’ll say no. And he might never get to see you again. Ever. But the way your body molds in his arms, the way you only always react to him, the way you make his heart always beat faster.
“Y/N I really re-really like you” there it was. That slight stutter. To Namjoon each second felt like a minute now but your eyes become wide and yoU smile a million-watt smile a second later. His hopes are back up. A warm feeling in his chest. Like a lightbulb inside him was lit. You can see him glowing. Now that the weight of his worries is halved. You cup his cheeks. And he thaws in your affection.
“I like you too Joon” you say voice barely above a whisper. You feel like a teenager confessing to her crush. You cheeks are painted red and Namjoon hasn’t seen a beautiful sight before. And now it’s actually your turn to get something off your chest.
“Heck I might even love you Kim Namjoon what are you doing to me” you say before you can think more and it has Namjoon visibly gasping and he pulls you in for another kiss. This time softer. Truly holding you against him. The way you belong to him. And the way he belongs to you. No more unsaid words. No more doubts.
“fuck baby girl be mine I love you too” he whispers inbetween kisses. You want to say something back but his lips are back on yours, molding them, tongue exploring. Leaving kisses at the corner of your mouth. On your chin. Your jaw. Slowly making its way down to your neck. You’re already so far gone you’re a whiny mess. Your body jolting backwards each time his lips touch the skin on your neck. fuck, you were so sensitive and that had his mind filled with filth. Moans dripping when he sucks and licks so gently. Your hand on his pecs, gripping his biceps or at the nape of his neck. Gentle touches, gets him so riled up and you know it. Moments with you like this lets him break his facade. Dive into his desires.
“So sensitive for me” Namjoon mutters to himself continuing his ministrations. One hand at the back supporting you, holding you strong. Another rubbing circles at your stomach for a few seconds, then holding you by the shoulder the next few seconds or groping your breasts softly making you whimper and suck in breaths.
Only when he slips his hand under his shirt on you does he realize the added warmth to your skin is from your fever reminding him of exhausted state and whatever you have going on will only make it worse if you don’t get to rest. Namjoon feels how flaccid and sunken your tummy feels. Not the way it usually does. He can easily notice all the inches you’ve lost. And suddenly there’s a change of energy.
“Those assholes, fuck princess let me take care of you” he says letting you go. His eyes have already changed. The hurt and anger you could see in them made a shiver run up your spine. You can never get used to his eyes. The anger he is actually capable of. He’s always so kind, gentle and sweet to you but that’s just one side. Within minutes there’s food at your room. Everything that you like is here. Gimbap but with extra cheese. Kimchi-jigae with egg-fried rice rather than normal rice because you like it that way and even some dessert. This man really put in everything he knew about you. You looked at him with so much adoration it only made his face turn red while he looked down and scratched the back of his head. Kim Namjoon was shy right now all dimples and smiling. You giggled and pulled him towards you so the two of you can enjoy this meal. You don’t know when your phone will start blowing up. You don’t know when you’ll have to leave, go away from Joon, his warmth, his comfort and his solace. So you take in this moment with everything it has to offer. Grateful that even the few minutes you spent awake with this man made you feel loved to the extent where you're always at a loss of words.
What Happens When You Fall Part 4 (M) I BTS Namjoon x F!Reader
🩺 Pairing BTS RM (Kim Namjoon) x Reader (Orthopedic Surgeon!Reader)
🩺 Genres Medical!AU, Friends with Benefits, Mutual Pining, Angst, Smut, Celebrity x Non-Celebrity, Long Distance, Emotional Drama, They are two idiots infuriatingly in love
🩺 Rating 18+ (minors DNI)
Two years. One rule: no feelings.
You broke it somewhere along the way.
Now you’re left with him on one side—and everything else on the other.
⚠️ Warnings — mentions of suicidal ideation • mental health struggles • patient loss • media harassment and defamation • sasaeng behavior • invasive press coverage • career-threatening professional pressure • workplace harassment • jealousy • emotional breakdown • explicit content (18+) • it gets worse before it gets better • bring tissues
🩺 Part 4 of the Fall Series Read Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 🩺 Main Masterlist
There is a phenomenon in trauma medicine called the lucid interval.
It happens most often with epidural hematomas — a head injury, a period of unconsciousness, and then a window of startling, deceptive clarity. The patient wakes up. They are alert. They answer questions correctly. They smile at the right moments. From the outside, from the outside of someone who doesn't know what's coming, they look like someone who is getting better.
They are not getting better.
The bleeding is continuing underneath. The pressure is building. The clarity is not recovery — it is the last coherent thing the brain produces before the damage becomes irreversible, the final organized transmission of a system that is about to go dark.
You learned about this in your second year of medical school.
You have thought about it every time you've watched someone rally before they didn't.
The hours between three and five in the morning feel exactly like that.
After Minho goes back to bed you return to your room and lie in the dark — a body that has given up on sleep but hasn't yet received the information that it's allowed to stop trying. The ceiling is the same ceiling it has been for a year. The ceiling of the apartment you share with Minho now, have shared since he said just move in properly, you're here every night anyway — casual, matter-of-fact, the way he says things that mean more than the words he uses. Your room. Your ceiling. The familiar dark of a space that became yours gradually and is now, in seventy-two hours, going to stop being yours.
Seventy-two hours.
You do the math without meaning to. Three days. The flight is booked. The boxes are shipped. The contract has been signed and the life waiting for you in Los Angeles has been waiting patiently, the way good things wait, without demanding anything, trusting that you'll arrive.
You will arrive.
You lie in the dark and you know this and you also know that somewhere across an ocean a man has a phone with yes on the screen and has not said anything since, and that in approximately fourteen hours you are expected to attend your own farewell party at a restaurant in Itaewon that Hyejin chose because she has better taste than anyone and wanted to mark the occasion properly, and that you would rather do almost anything else on earth than sit in a room full of people celebrating a decision that currently feels like the most expensive thing you have ever chosen.
You don't sleep.
At Five-thirty you pick up your phone.
You don't know why you do it.
That's not true.
You know exactly why you do it.
You do it because the lucid interval is ending and some part of you, the part that has always pressed on bruises to know their dimensions, needs to know the full shape of the damage before the lights go out.
The article loads at 5:47 AM.
You check the clock before you open it — force of habit, the same reflex that makes you note the time before you call a death. Because some moments deserve a timestamp. Because some things, once they happen, you need to know exactly when they did.
BTS Leader RM's Secret Affair: The Woman He Was With While Dating Model Park Sooyeon — A Full Timeline
The headline alone is a weapon assembled by someone who knows how weapons work. Every word load-bearing. Secret — because secrets are interesting. Affair — because affairs are shameful. Full Timeline — because timelines imply evidence, and evidence implies truth, and truth implies that whatever comes next has been verified by someone responsible.
It has not been verified by anyone responsible.
You know this.
You read it anyway.
The article is long.
Not long in the way of something that has a lot of true things to say. Long in the specific way of something that has very few true things and has padded them extensively with implication, inference, and the particular rhetorical technique of presenting conjecture in the same sentence structure as fact until the reader stops noticing the difference.
It begins with her.
Park Sooyeon, twenty-nine, described as a longtime girlfriend of the BTS leader — which is accurate, you will grant them that much, the one true thing in fourteen paragraphs. Four years. The article lingers on this. Four years of what is described, in language that is doing a great deal of heavy lifting, as a stable, serious relationship — the implication being that stable and serious are things that deserve protection, things that someone chose to violate, things that the person reading this should feel appropriately outraged on behalf of.
Then: you.
You are not described so much as positioned.
Placed in the story at a specific angle, in specific light, so that the shape of you looks exactly like what they need you to look like. Not a person — a foreign body. A tumor. Something that attached itself to the host without permission, that does not belong, that needs to be identified and extracted before it causes further damage.
You are positioned as the reason a stable relationship fell apart. The intruder. The other woman. The thing that inserted itself into something that was working and broke it simply by being there.
You are not, in this article, a surgeon. You are not the person who moved to a country that wasn't hers and built something from nothing. You are not the researcher whose paper changed a conversation, the physician who gets called at midnight because they want the best one, the woman a man sent a photo of a tree to because he saw it and thought of her immediately and couldn't not.
Your proximity to him cancels everything you are.
That is the point of it.
That is the machine working exactly as designed — reducing you to a single function, a single sentence, a side character in someone else's story who exists only in relation to him and has no other discernible qualities.
You are nobody.
You are a tumor.
And the article is the surgery.
The timeline is the centerpiece.
Whoever built this is good at their job, which makes it worse — they have taken real things, verifiable things, the photo of you and Minho at Gwanghwamun, the photo of you leaving his building, the timestamped posts and the tagged locations and the digital breadcrumbs that exist because you were not careful enough and because someone was patient enough to wait for you not to be — and arranged them in a sequence that tells a story. A specific story. The story of a woman who inserted herself into a relationship that was still ongoing, who used a friendship as a vector, who knew exactly what she was doing.
The story of the other woman.
You are reading this at five forty-seven and you can feel the machine running.
You can feel, underneath the scaffolding of implication and assembled evidence, the shape of the thing that built it.
This did not happen organically.
The logical part of you — the part that is still functional, the part that has been holding the rest of you together through four days of controlled damage — starts assembling the pieces the way it assembles everything: methodically, without mercy, following the evidence to where it leads. The precision of it. The timing of it — the middle of his biggest comeback after four years, the peak of his visibility, the moment when maximum damage is available to anyone willing to aim for it. The specific selection of details, the ones that are real and the ones that are real-adjacent, arranged with the editorial intelligence of someone who understands exactly how much truth you need to make a lie structurally sound.
Someone paid for this.
Someone paid for this the old fashioned way — cash in an envelope, a tip quietly delivered, a source who decided that close to the situation was worth whatever fit inside a ginseng bag and wouldn't show up in a bank statement.
Someone looked at Kim Namjoon at the peak of everything he has built and decided that this was the moment, and this was the angle, and this was the woman they could attach to it to make it stick.
You are the weapon.
You were selected to be the weapon.
And the rage that arrives at this realization is so clean and so complete that for approximately thirty seconds it displaces everything else — the jealousy, the grief, the seventy-two hours you have left in this city, the suitcase in the corner and the book on the desk and the yes you sent that you cannot unsend. Just rage, pure and clarifying, the specific fury of someone who has watched their own life be disassembled and packaged and sold to a machine that has never once been interested in what was true.
Thirty seconds.
Then the page loads the photos.
They have photos together.
Of course they do. Four years produces photographs — this is the nature of four years, the accumulation of evidence that two people existed in the same space and chose each other consistently enough to be documented. This photo is from two years ago, an event, both of them dressed for it, her hand in the crook of his arm and his head tilted toward her in the specific, unconscious way of someone whose body has learned the geography of another person.
He is smiling.
The dimple is there.
The particular smile — the one you know, the one that has been causing you problems since you saw it, the one that lives in the corner of his mouth like it has always lived there — is directed at her, and she is looking up at him, and they look like what they are, which is two people who have spent four years choosing each other.
You stare at the photo for a long time.
The rage does not leave.
It just — makes room.
For the other thing.
The green, crawling, deeply undignified other thing that you have absolutely no right to feel and are feeling comprehensively, the thing that has no clinical name and no professional framework and no place in the life of a woman who does not do feelings and has built herself very carefully around that principle.
She was here first, says the green thing.
She stayed, says the green thing.
She is still here, says the green thing, and you are leaving in seventy-two hours and she is beautiful and the songs have her face and you called it nothing.
You close the article.
You open it again.
You are not thinking clearly.
You know you are not thinking clearly.
You read the article a fourth time anyway, looking for the place where it stops being about you, where the machine loses its grip, where the scaffolding shows through enough to make the whole thing fall down.
It doesn't fall down.
It stands.
Not because it's true — you know, in the part of you that is still functional, that the timeline is constructed and the overlap is manufactured and that someone received a significant amount of money to make this specific shape out of these specific pieces at this specific moment.
You know this.
And you are still jealous.
And you are still furious.
And the photo is still there — his face, her hand, the dimple you are apparently not going to recover from — and it is six in the morning and you have seventy-two hours and somewhere across an ocean a man is sitting with yes on his screen and the full weight of a machine that someone aimed at him is landing on both of you simultaneously.
You love him.
The thought arrives at 6:12 AM without announcement, without the courtesy of a warning, without any of the cushioning you would have appreciated given the circumstances. It just — lands. Clean and final and completely, devastatingly on time in the way that only too late ever is.
You love him.
You have probably loved him for longer than tonight. Longer than the voice notes and the tree and the book from 72nd Street. Longer than the concert in Gwanghwamun and the hospital hallway and the amber lamp. You have probably loved him since somewhere between the Han River and a parking structure and a couch in November, and you have been calling it other things — nothing, casual, just this — because the truth of it was too large to look at directly and you are, apparently, a coward in exactly the specific way of people who are fearless about everything except the things that matter most.
You love him.
And the universe where that means something — where you could look at him and say it out loud, where the timing was right, where your world and his had enough overlap to hold it — that universe ended at 4:47 AM when an article loaded on your phone and someone who received cash in a ginseng bag decided that you were the most useful weapon available.
You think about Sarah.
You think about the worst Tuesday of your life — the ferry, the blood, the thirty-one minutes, the phone ringing in a coat pocket. You thought, sitting on the floor of that locker room at Mass General afterward, that nothing would ever break you that completely again. That you had found the outer limit of what grief felt like and survived it and that was the worst of it.
You were wrong.
Because it is 6:12 in the morning and you are sitting on the cold floor of your bedroom with your back against the bed frame and your phone in your hand and the full, irreversible knowledge of something you cannot fix sitting in your chest like a wound that presented too late, like a fracture that went undiagnosed until the bone gave way entirely —
and you love him.
You love him and the article is already everywhere and the machine is already running and you are leaving in seventy-two hours and you told him it was nothing and he believed you and the version of this story where you get to say I love you and mean it and stay —
that version is over.
You were the best surgeon in the room.
You still lost the patient.
Some things, you learned at twenty-three on the worst day of your life, cannot be fixed by steady hands and good intentions. Some damage is already done before you arrive. Some bleeds you cannot stop no matter how long you stand there with your hands pressed to the wound.
You know this.
You have always known this.
You just never thought it would apply to him.
Park Sooyeon.
You find her Instagram at six twenty-seven in the morning and you know, with the clear-eyed self-awareness of someone watching themselves do something inadvisable in real time, that you should close the app. That nothing you find here is going to make anything better. That the responsible, emotionally intelligent, thirty-one year old adult version of yourself would put the phone down, close her eyes, and rest before what is going to be a very long day.
You scroll anyway.
She is — you have to be honest with yourself, and you are nothing if not honest with yourself, it is practically the only quality you have consistently maintained through everything — she is extraordinary looking. Not in the constructed way of someone whose image is professionally managed. In the ordinary, Tuesday-morning, this is just her face way that is somehow the most difficult kind. Dark hair. Precise features. The kind of presence that photographs find naturally because it doesn't try to be found.
She posts thoughtfully.
Of course she does.
An exhibition at the Seoul Museum of Art, three weeks ago. A book — you recognize it immediately, the spine, the cover design, the specific edition because you have the same one, because Namjoon mentioned it in a way that made you want to read it and you did, in two days, and you never told him that. She read it too. She read it because he loved it or he read it because she loved it or they read it together, which is somehow the worst possible version, two people in the same city reading the same book and talking about it in person, in the same room, in the same language, without a screen between them.
Her most recent post is ten months old.
Just before the military discharge timeline, you calculate without meaning to.
You do the math.
The math does something to you.
You know his music.
You have always known his music, in the way you know things you've absorbed without fully admitting to absorbing them — background at first, then familiar, then something you reached for on late nights without examining why. You know the albums in order. You know which tracks he produced and which ones he wrote and which ones he wrote at specific points in his life that you can now, with two years of context, map onto what was happening to him.
You know the love songs.
You have always known they were about someone.
You put your headphones in.
You press play.
And at six-forty-three in the morning you listen to Kim Namjoon sing about a woman he loved — the specific, particular, bone-deep love of someone who is not using the word carelessly, who has thought about what it means and used it anyway — and now those words have her face.
Her face.
Park Sooyeon, who is beautiful and thoughtful and still in Seoul and has not told anyone it was just sex.
You listen to the whole album.
Then you start it again.
The jealousy arrives again somewhere in the second listen and it arrives without warning and without any of the dignity you would have preferred.
You have felt jealousy before, in the ordinary, manageable way of a person encountering a feeling they don't enjoy and dispatching it efficiently. This is not that. This is the low, crawling, comprehensive variety — the kind that starts in your chest and spreads outward until it has colonized everything, the kind that is not about wanting what someone else has but about knowing, with sudden and terrible clarity, exactly what you feel and exactly how much it costs.
She got four years.
She got four years of him — the real years, the early years, before the military service and the comeback and the album that is currently making him the most visible he has ever been. She got him in the apartment with the cedarwood smell and the books everywhere and the succulent on the kitchen windowsill that refuses to die. She got mornings. She got the version of him that reads dense philosophy at two AM and texts people about it and means it as intimacy.
She got to stay.
And you—
You have seventy-two hours.
You feel ridiculous.
You feel jealous and ridiculous and furious at yourself for feeling jealous because you are a thirty-one year old adult who chose this, every piece of it, deliberately and with full information, and you do not get to feel this way about the consequences of your own decisions.
You feel it anyway.
Minho knocks at seven.
Three quiet knocks, the specific pattern of someone who suspects you might be asleep and doesn't want to fully commit to waking you but needs to check. You've been staring at the wall for forty minutes.
"Come in," you say.
He opens the door in his scrubs — the pale blue pediatric ones, the ones with the small bear pin on the breast pocket that one of his patients gave him almost a month ago and that he apparently hasn't taken off since. He takes in your room. The lights still off. You fully dressed on top of the covers. The phone in your hand. The specific quality of your face, which you know is not good because you can feel it.
He doesn't say anything immediately.
He reads the room the way he reads everything — quickly, accurately, deciding what's needed before he speaks.
"Did you sleep," he says.
"No."
He comes in. Sits on the edge of your bed, the way he has sat on the edge of your various beds and various couches since you were twenty-three and sharing a terrible apartment near Vanderbilt and taking turns having crises in each other's doorways.
"Show me," he says.
You hand him your phone.
He reads the article. You watch his face do the controlled, careful thing it does when he's managing his reaction — the slight tightening, the deliberate neutrality, the jaw that works once and then goes still.
He hands it back.
"Minho," you say.
"It's not true," he says.
"The timeline—"
"Is wrong."
"Some of it lines up. Some of the—"
"Y/N." His voice is quiet and firm and entirely certain. "I was there. I watched it end. I watched him after it ended." He looks at you directly. "It was over before you. I promise you that."
You look at your phone.
At her face on the screen.
"How long before," you say.
Silence.
You look at him.
His expression does the thing — the brief, controlled thing of someone who has the answer and is deciding whether the answer helps or hurts.
"Minho."
"A month," he says. Quietly.
A month.
You do the math again.
You wish you hadn't.
Because a month is — not long. A month is the overlap zone, the grey area, the place where over and beginning exist in the same breath. A month is long enough to be true and short enough to feel like almost-not-true, and the almost is doing a lot of very loud work in your chest right now.
"Four years," you say. You read that part of the article three times. "They were together for four years."
"Yes," Minho says.
Four years.
You think about what four years means. Four years of the same city, the same rooms, the same person choosing you consistently enough to accumulate that kind of time. Four years of albums and tours and all the enormous complicated machinery of his life, navigated together. Four years of her being the face the songs had.
One month later: you.
On a couch.
Just once, you had both said.
No feelings.
You look at Minho and feel it resolve — the way a diagnosis resolves when you finally have the right imaging in front of you and everything that was confusing suddenly isn't. The jealousy. The grief. The rage at a woman you've never met. The five AM crying. The article that felt less like an attack on your reputation and more like watching someone use you as a weapon against a person you would never, under any circumstances, willingly hurt.
That's what broke something in you.
Not the headlines about you. Not the comments about your face or your career or your motives. Not even the professional fallout, the hospital whispers, the Dodgers call.
The trucks outside his building.
The wreaths.
The footage of him walking through a corridor of cameras with his head down and his ankle still healing, moving through a crowd that was loud and aimed and there because of you.
That is what you couldn't eat.
That is what cracked the thing open.
It was never about the article.
It was never about her.
It was always this.
You love him.
You love him and they used you to hurt him and you let it happen and you are sitting on your bed at six in the morning not because your reputation is in pieces but because his was the last thing you ever wanted to damage.
And you are not ready to lose him.
The knock at your door at seven-fifteen is lighter than Minho's.
Two knocks, then a pause, then one more — Hyejin's pattern, the one she developed sometime in the last year, the one that means I'm here, take your time, I'm not going anywhere.
"It's open," Minho calls.
She comes in still in her work clothes — the black ER attending uniform of someone who has been on her feet since yesterday evening, the specific tiredness of a night shift settling into the lines of her face and the set of her shoulders. She takes in the room. You on the bed. Minho on the edge of it. The lights still off. The quality of the air.
She sits in the chair by your desk without being asked.
Neither of them speaks for a moment and you realize, with the distant clarity of someone watching something from slightly outside themselves, that this is exactly what a shift change looks like. Minho arriving. Hyejin arriving. You, the patient, lying in the bed between them, being assessed, being kept stable, being watched over by people who know what they're looking at.
You almost say this out loud.
You would laugh if you had anything left to laugh with.
"She's beautiful," you say instead. To the ceiling. To both of them. To the room.
Neither of them disagrees.
That's how you know it's bad.
"The songs are beautiful," you say. "He wrote beautiful things about her. I've been listening to them for two years and they had her face the whole time and I didn't know and now I do and I can't—" You stop. "I can't make myself not know it."
Hyejin leans forward slightly.
Minho stays where he is.
"And she's here," you say. "She's in Seoul. She's not getting on a plane. She fits in his world in a way that I don't, that I never did, and I knew that, I've always known that, and I chose my career and I chose to leave and those were the right choices, they are still the right choices, and I still—"
You stop.
Your throat is doing something.
You have not cried in front of people since medical school. You have not cried in front of Minho since the night you lost your third patient in one week during residency and sat on a bathroom floor in Boston and called him because you didn't know what else to do. You have not cried in front of Hyejin ever, in two years of friendship, because you are careful about that, because you keep the soft parts of yourself in places people have to earn the right to see.
They are both here.
They have both earned it.
The tears arrive without drama.
Just — there. Present. The quiet, exhausted variety of someone who has been holding something for too long and has finally reached the moment where holding it is no longer an option.
"I love him," you say.
The room goes very still.
Not shocked — neither of them is shocked, you can see that, you can see that this is the thing they have both been waiting to hear, the thing that has been evident to everyone in the room for months except possibly you. But still. The weight of it, said out loud, at seven in the morning, in the low winter light coming through your curtains — it lands.
"I love him," you say again, because the first time felt like an accident and this time you want it to be a choice. "I love him and I'm leaving in three days and I told him it was nothing and I—" Your voice breaks, properly, the clean fracture of it. "I told him it was just sex."
Minho makes a sound.
Not words. Just — a sound. The specific, quiet sound of someone absorbing something painful on behalf of someone they love.
"Because it's better this way," you say, and even as you say it you can hear how hollow it is, how little it holds. "Because my world and his are not the same world. Because I have a contract and a career and a life I chose on purpose and I am not — I don't know how to be the person who stays. I have never been the person who stays. I leave before it can cost me anything and this time—" You press your hands flat against your thighs. "This time it already cost everything and I left anyway."
Hyejin gets up from the chair.
She crosses to the bed and sits on the other side of you, the side Minho isn't on, and she doesn't say anything, she just puts her hand over yours on the duvet and holds it, the warm, steady pressure of someone who knows when words are insufficient and presence is the only available medicine.
Minho puts his hand on your shoulder.
The three of you sit in the low morning light.
You in the middle.
Both of them on either side.
Like a shift change.
Like a vigil.
Like the people who love you deciding, without discussion, that this is not a moment you should spend alone.
"You're not leaving because you're not brave enough," Minho says, eventually, quietly. "You're leaving because you worked for something real and you want it and you're allowed to want it. Those things don't cancel each other out." A pause. "You can love him and go. You can want your life and grieve what it costs. That's not a contradiction. That's just — what it is."
"It doesn't feel like just what it is," you say.
"No," he says. "It doesn't."
Hyejin's hand tightens over yours, slightly.
You look at the suitcase in the corner.
Half-packed. The book on the edge of the desk where it has been for two weeks, untouched, the thing you cannot put in the suitcase because putting it in the suitcase means accepting everything it means.
"He's going to be okay," Hyejin says. Careful. Honest. The voice she uses in the ER when she's telling someone a true thing they need to hear rather than a comfortable thing that won't hold up. "Not right now. But eventually."
"Eventually," you say.
"Yeah."
You think about eventually.
About the distance between now and eventually, and what fills that distance, and who fills it.
You think about Park Sooyeon, who is beautiful and still in Seoul and has four years of songs with her face on them.
You think about a book in a shop on 72nd Street at eleven PM, bought because he thought of you.
You think about seventy-two hours.
"I have a party tonight," you say, to no one in particular.
Minho makes the sound again.
"The farewell one," you say.
"I know," he says.
"I really don't want to go."
"I know."
A pause.
"You're going," Hyejin says. Not unkindly.
"I know," you say.
The three of you sit in the quiet.
Outside, Seoul is fully awake now, the city going about the business of a morning that does not know or care that you are sitting in the middle of your own wreckage, that you are leaving in seventy-two hours, that you love someone you told it was nothing, that somewhere across an ocean that someone has a phone that says yes and has said nothing since.
The city hums.
The light through the curtains shifts.
Minho squeezes your shoulder once and stands, because he has a shift and his patients need him, because the world does not pause for the matters of the heart, because being a person who takes care of other people means sometimes you have to leave even when leaving is hard.
He looks at you before he goes.
Just looks.
The look of someone who has known you for ten years and loves you and is choosing, in this moment, to say all of it without saying any of it, because you both know it already and some things don't need words.
He leaves.
The door closes softly.
Hyejin stays.
She stays the way she stays when a patient needs monitoring — not intrusively, not demanding anything, just present, her hand still over yours, both of you watching the winter light move across the floor in slow degrees as the morning arrives.
"He knew," you say, after a while. "Before I said it. He knew."
"Everyone knew," Hyejin says, gently.
"Except me."
"You knew," she says. "You just needed longer to say it."
You look at the book.
Seventy-two hours.
Some fractures, you think, are clean.
And some run so deep you don't find them until you're already broken.
This one started on a couch in November.
You never had a chance.
The restaurant Hyejin chose is in Itaewon, warm and low-lit, the kind of place that knows what it's doing — good acoustics, better wine list, tables spaced far enough apart that conversation stays private. She made the reservation three weeks ago, before everything, in the version of this evening where you were simply a colleague and friend leaving for something extraordinary and the occasion deserved to be marked properly.
That version of this evening still exists, technically.
You are sitting inside it right now.
Everyone is here. The attendings who wrote your references with genuine investment, who pushed your name into rooms you hadn't entered yet, who handed you cases that were too complicated for where you were in your training because they saw what you were becoming and wanted to accelerate it. The residents who learned something in your theater and will carry it forward — you can see it in the way they move, the way they hold instruments, the small economies of motion that get passed down from surgeon to surgeon like a language that lives in the hands. Colleagues who covered your shifts without complaint, who argued with you about methodology with the productive hostility of people who respect each other enough to disagree properly.
They are all here.
They are all genuinely happy for you.
That's the part that makes it harder, not easier — the genuine quality of it. There is no performance in this room. These people know what the Dodgers position means. They have earned the right to know — the same long hours, the same sacrificed weekends, the same quiet, relentless choosing of the career over everything else — and so when they say it, they mean it. They understand exactly how many people attempt what you have done and how few arrive where you are standing. Head physician. Sports medicine. The full medical department of one of the most storied organizations in American baseball, handed to a thirty-one year old orthopedic surgeon who published a paper two years ago on tibial stress fracture management in elite athletes that three separate institutions cited within six months of publication.
They know.
"The research alone," someone is saying, on your left, the colleague whose cologne is doing something deeply aggressive in a small space. "The citation rate in the first year — do you understand how rarely that happens? You changed the conversation. That paper changed the conversation."
You nod.
You smile.
You say something appropriate about the collaborative nature of the research, the support of the institution, the colleagues who contributed — all of which is true, all of which you mean, all of which you are saying from approximately six inches behind your own face while the rest of you is somewhere else entirely.
"And the Choi case," he says, leaning in slightly — close enough that the cologne arrives ahead of him, which at this point feels like a personal choice. He has had two glasses of wine and has arrived at that specific, familiar brand of confidence that has nothing to do with the wine and everything to do with a man who has decided, across multiple professional interactions, that your patience means something it does not mean.
"The complexity of that reconstruction—" He shakes his head slowly, the gesture of someone performing being impressed. "I finished my fellowship two years before you and I have never seen a tibial plateau fracture of that severity managed with that outcome. Not once."
He says it like he's handing you something.
You accept it with the grace of someone who has been doing that for forty minutes — not warm enough to be encouragement, not cool enough to be a scene. The careful, exhausting middle ground of a woman who has had this specific conversation with this specific type of man and knows exactly how it ends if she missteps in either direction.
He is, evaluated with the detached objectivity of someone assessing a scan, handsome.
Good jaw. Good shoulders. The kind of face that photographs well and is aware of this fact. He is exactly the man that a reasonable person, at a farewell party in a warm restaurant in Itaewon, might find worth a second look.
You find him about as interesting as a clean X-ray.
He leans closer.
His cologne announces the movement before he makes it — something expensive and synthetic, aggressively present, the scent equivalent of a man who has decided that taking up space is a form of charm — and it settles into your sinuses and does the one thing you did not need it to do tonight.
It reminds you of what it isn't.
It isn't cedarwood. It isn't the warm, layered smell of a space full of books and quiet and a person who exists in it completely — who burns incense without making it a thing, who keeps a succulent alive through sheer neglect, who says love in the dark like it costs him nothing because to him it doesn't, because he means it, because he has always meant it.
He shifts closer, shoulder nearly touching yours, voice dropping to the register men use when they've decided something is happening.
"Remarkable," he says, looking at you. "Truly."
"Remarkable," you agree.
You mean the cologne.
He thinks you mean something else entirely.
Across the street, through the warm glass of the restaurant window, in a city he is absolutely not supposed to be in right now — a fact he is clearly not thinking about, because he is not thinking at all, because he got on a plane anyway —
someone is watching.
You don't know that yet.
You will.
"Head physician for the Dodgers," someone else says, for what is at minimum the fifth time this evening. You have stopped counting. "Do you understand what that is? Do you understand how few people—"
"She understands," Hyejin says, materializing at your elbow with the quiet efficiency of someone who has been monitoring your vital signs from across the room and has decided intervention is warranted. She squeezes your arm once — warm, firm, the pressure that means I see you, stay with me, almost over. "She's just tired."
"I'm fine," you say.
Hyejin gives you the look.
Across the table, Minho raises his glass in your direction. His expression is the complicated one — pride sitting on top of something more careful, the face of a person who is happy for you and sad for you simultaneously and has decided to let both be true without requiring them to resolve. He looks like what he is, which is a person who loves you and is watching you leave and has said everything he needs to say and is now simply present for the remaining time.
You raise your glass back.
You drink.
The toasts come in waves.
Each one genuine. Each one landing in the part of you that knows how to receive professional recognition and respond to it with appropriate grace. You have worked for this. You have earned every word being said in this room tonight. Eight years of early mornings and the kind of surgical record that doesn't happen by accident, a publication that changed a conversation, a reputation built case by case in a country that wasn't yours, and now a position that people spend entire careers not reaching.
You should feel it.
You feel a man sitting on a floor in New York reading a message that says yes.
You feel the weight of seventy-two hours that have become forty-eight without your permission.
You feel his voice at four in the morning saying love like it was just the accurate word, and the album playing in the dark of your bedroom with her face on every song, and the article constructed by someone who received an unreasonable amount of cash to dismantle two people at the worst possible moment, and the cast he should still be wearing, and the book on the edge of your desk that you haven't touched.
You feel all of it, simultaneously, while smiling at the appropriate intervals at people who are celebrating you in a restaurant in Itaewon, and the dissociation of it is so complete that for a moment you look down at your own hands holding a wine glass and don't entirely recognize them as yours.
This is what you chose, you tell yourself.
This is the life. This is the version where you got everything right.
The colleague on your left is still talking.
Something about long-term outcomes in cartilage repair. Something about a study he read. Something about the intersection of biomechanics and — you have lost the thread entirely, the thread was never really yours to begin with, the cologne has taken up permanent residence in your respiratory system and your mind is doing the thing it has been doing for days, which is returning, without your permission, to the same place.
To him.
To the dimple and the beautiful words and the beautiful woman whose face the beautiful words have and the forty-eight hours that are passing whether or not you are present for them.
You love him.
You love him in the specific, comprehensive, inconvenient way of someone who has been loving someone for two years while calling it something else, and the not-calling-it-what-it-was did not make it smaller, it made it larger, it grew in the dark the way things grow when they're not examined, and now it is fully grown and it is enormous and you are sitting at your own farewell party surrounded by people who are celebrating you and you cannot think about a single thing except him.
This is, you think distantly, the most expensive feeling you have ever had.
"Remarkable," you say again, to the colleague.
He beams.
You smile.
You check your phone.
Nothing.
The night air outside is cold enough to be honest.
October in Seoul has stopped pretending to be autumn — it has arrived at the real thing, the thing that comes after, the cold that doesn't apologize for itself. Your heels on the pavement. Your breath visible for a moment and then gone. The coat wrapped around you, collar turned up, the charcoal grey of it familiar against your jaw.
His coat.
You walk faster than you need to.
You always walk faster than you need to. It is one of your most consistent qualities — the pace of someone who has somewhere to be, who is always almost late, who moves through spaces with the brisk efficiency of a person whose time is genuinely limited and genuinely valuable.
Tonight you are walking fast because standing still feels dangerous.
Standing still means feeling the forty-eight hours.
You are two blocks from the apartment when you see the car.
Your brain registers it before you do.
Dark. Still. Parked against the curb outside your building like it has always been there. Like it belongs. The kind of car that exists in a world you have been standing at the edge of for two years without fully stepping into.
You know that car.
You stop walking.
Your heart does something that has nothing to do with the cold.
No, you think, with the weight of a thought that doesn't believe itself. He has four more days. He has a tour schedule and management and a company statement and every logistical reason in the world to be in New York right now. He is in New York right now. He is not—
You are already moving faster.
The stairs. The hallway. The slightly flickering third light that has been flickering for six months and that neither you nor Minho has gotten around to reporting. The left turn. The corridor. The door at the end of it.
You turn the corner.
You stop.
He's on the floor.
Back against the wall outside your apartment door, legs stretched in front of him, head slightly bowed — not asleep, not even close to asleep, just — done. The look of a man who got here and stopped. Who made the decision on a plane somewhere over the Pacific and carried it all the way to this floor and is now simply waiting for it to matter. His hair is pushed back, slightly disheveled, the kind that happens after a long flight and hands run through it too many times. His clothes are travel-wrinkled — the dark jeans, a brown leather jacket you haven't seen before, the kind of jacket that looks like it was chosen for a different kind of evening than this one. There are shadows under his eyes that weren't architectural the last time you saw him and have become so since.
No cast.
You notice it immediately, the doctor in you cataloguing it before anything else — the absence of the cast, the way he's sitting with his left leg at an angle that suggests he's been managing the ankle carefully, the absence of the boot that should be there, the evidence of a man who decided that medical advice was less important than whatever this was.
He looks like someone who has not slept on the flight.
He looks like someone who did not sleep before the flight either.
He looks, despite the jacket and the travel-wrinkle and the shadows that have taken up residence under his eyes — like the most real thing you have seen in two weeks.
Like everything that has happened since the article and the messages and the yes you sent with cold hands at midnight has been taking place at a slight remove from reality, and here, suddenly, without warning, is the actual thing.
Solid.
Present.
Exhausted.
Here.
In your hallway, at eleven PM, four days before he was supposed to be here, looking up at you like he crossed an ocean to do exactly this.
Because he did.
He crossed an ocean.
He got on a plane.
He is sitting on your floor.
Your chest does something that has no clinical name and several emotional ones you are done refusing to document.
"You're not supposed to be here," you say.
Your voice comes out wrong — too quiet, too unguarded, the voice of someone who has run out of the resource that keeps feelings off the face.
He looks up.
Your eyes meet.
Not a collision. Not a revelation. Just — recognition. The specific, comprehensive recognition of two people who have been trying to be strangers to each other and have just been reminded, by the simple fact of being in the same hallway, that it has never once worked.
He pushes himself up slowly.
Favoring his left side. The ankle. The bone you set and wrapped and gave specific, detailed instructions about that he has clearly been treating as optional. He rises to his full height and stands in the flickering light of the corridor and looks at you like he came four thousand miles to stand exactly here.
His expression is the one you haven't let yourself think about since the yes.
Not angry.
Not cold.
Heartbroken.
Openly, unguardedly heartbroken — everything visible, nothing managed, the face of a man who used up whatever he had left somewhere over the Pacific and arrived at your door with nothing remaining to hide behind. He is looking at you like he already knows how this ends. Like he came anyway because not coming was worse. Like sitting on your floor in a travel-wrinkled jacket was the only thing that made sense when nothing else did.
He thinks he is losing you.
You can see it in every exhausted line of him — the shadows, the jaw, the way he pushed himself up from the floor and stood and looked at you like he was committing the image of you to memory because he thought it might be one of the last times.
He got on a plane.
He crossed an ocean.
He sat on your floor.
And you — standing in the flickering light of this hallway in your party clothes and his coat and forty-eight hours and two years of everything you didn't say — feel something shift so completely and so finally that it is almost violent in its clarity.
The universe, it turns out, was not done with you yet.
It sent him anyway.
It put him on a plane when you were too afraid to board one yourself. It walked him through an airport and across a city and down this hallway and onto this floor, and now he is standing in front of you looking like the most heartbroken and the most extraordinary thing you have ever seen, and you love him, you love him so much it has rearranged something structural in you, and this time —
this time you are not running.
This time you are staying exactly where you are.
This time you are going to fight for him the way he just fought for you — without a plan, without a guarantee, without anything except the certainty that he is worth every complicated, inconvenient, beautiful thing that comes next.
You look at him.
At the brown leather jacket and the shadows and the ankle and the dimple that is not quite there yet but is coming, you can feel it coming, it is always coming with him.
You are so glad he got on that plane.
You are so glad he is standing here.
You are so glad, in a way that bypasses language entirely, that he did the thing you were too afraid to do — that he dropped everything and came and waited and looked at you like you were worth the ocean between you.
He is.
You both are.
"Yeah," he says.
Like the fact of being here is the least important part of this.
It is the most important part.
It is everything.
"I went to the restaurant," he says.
You blink. "What."
"Your party." His voice is rough. Travel-rough, sleepless-rough, something else underneath both of those things. "I got there late. You were still there." A pause. "I didn't go in."
You stare at him.
"You were there," you say.
"Outside." His jaw tightens slightly. Not anger — something more complicated. "There was a man. Sitting next to you. He kept—" He stops. Looks away. Looks back. "He was leaning in. Close. And I know I have no right, I know that, especially after everything, but I just—" His hand goes to the back of his neck. "The sight of him."
Something in you — the part that has been doing everything right, the part that has been managing and containing and making the responsible choices — fractures.
Not dramatically.
Just: gives.
You cross the distance between you and kiss him.
Not gently. Not tentatively. The kind of kiss that has two years in it, all of it, the couch and the Han River and the parking structures and the amber lamp and the voice notes and the book and the yes you sent and the yes you should have said instead, all of it compressed into this, into now, into his mouth under yours and his sharp inhale of surprise and then the way he responds, immediately, completely, like he's been waiting for exactly this.
You pull back.
Just enough.
His hands are on your face.
"You're an idiot," you say.
He blinks.
"You got on a plane," you say. "You're not wearing your cast. You flew for fourteen hours on an ankle that is — I don't even want to think about what that imaging looks like right now, and you—"
"Y/N—"
"You're an idiot," you say again, softer this time, and your voice is doing the thing, the unsteady thing, the thing you stopped being able to prevent approximately three days ago. "A complete, impossible idiot who got on a plane and—"
"I needed to see you," he says. Simple. Certain.
"I know," you say.
"I couldn't just—"
"I know."
"After everything, I couldn't just—"
"Namjoon." You take his face in your hands the way he takes yours — both hands, thumbs at his jaw, the gesture of someone who needs the person in front of them to stop talking for one moment and listen.
"I love you."
He goes completely still.
"I love you," you say again, because the first time felt like falling and this time you want it to feel like choosing. "And I'm sorry. I'm sorry for the yes and I'm sorry I didn't tell you about LA and I'm sorry I waited and I'm sorry I called it nothing because it was never nothing, it was never — it was always everything, it was everything from the first night, and I was so afraid of that, I was so afraid of what it meant and what it would cost and I just—" The words are arriving faster than you're managing them, two years of careful containment finally and completely done with being contained. "I built the exit before the thing even started because that's what I do, that's what I have always done, and you — you just — you were so—"
He kisses you.
Hard.
The kind that means stop talking, I heard you, I have you, stop.
His hands move from your face to your waist, pulling you in, and your back meets the door of your apartment and he reaches past you for the keypad — his hand finding the combination, because he knows it, because of course he knows it, because that is the kind of person he has been this entire time — and the door opens and he moves you both through it and kicks it closed behind you.
Inside.
Private.
Whatever happens now is yours — not a photo through a long lens, not a headline, not evidence in a thread assembled by someone with a long lens and a ginseng bag full of cash. Not the machine's. Not anyone else's.
Just yours.
His forehead drops to yours.
Both of you breathing.
The apartment dark and warm around you, the city outside, the cedarwood smell that has followed him across an ocean and is right here now.
"I love you," he says, against your forehead. "I have loved you since Minho's couch. I have loved you for two years and I would have kept loving you for two more and I would have waited — I would have waited, Y/N, if you had just—"
"I know," you say. "I know. I'm sorry."
"Don't disappear," he says.
The call back of it lands somewhere beneath your ribs.
"I won't," you say.
"You're still leaving," he says. Not a question. He knows. He has known since the article, since the contract surfaced, since the machine decided that information also belonged to it.
"In forty-eight hours," you say.
A breath.
"Okay," he says.
Not okay, that's fine. Not okay, I accept this calmly.
Okay in the way of someone who has gotten on a plane and sat on a floor and said I love you out loud and is now deciding, with full information, to stay in the thing anyway.
You pull back just enough to look at him.
The shadows under his eyes. The travel-wrinkled jacket. The ankle he has been walking on for fourteen hours that you are going to have to address shortly, medically, with the specific displeasure of a surgeon whose patient has been ignoring discharge instructions.
The dimple.
Present even now, even here, even in the middle of this — the small, devastating, impossible dimple that has been causing you problems since November and shows absolutely no sign of stopping.
You love him so much it is unreasonable.
You love him and you are leaving in forty-eight hours and you are done pretending either of those things are not true.
"You need to sit down," you say. "Your ankle—"
"Y/N—"
"Is going to be a whole conversation," you say. "But first—"
You kiss him again.
Softer this time.
The kind that has time in it.
The kind that says: we have forty-eight hours and I intend to spend them honestly.
He kisses you back.
The door is closed.
The city is outside.
Whatever this is — complicated and costly and completely, irreversibly real — it is yours.
Finally, completely, without apology.
Yours.
"Sit down."
He opens his mouth.
"Don't," you say. "I know what you're going to say and the answer is that I don't care. You have been walking on a healing fibula for approximately fourteen hours and the fact that you are upright is both a medical miracle and a personal insult, so sit down."
He sits.
The couch. Your corner of it, the one that has the compressed warmth of a piece of furniture that remembers being sat on by the same person often enough to have formed an opinion about it. He sits and looks up at you and says nothing, which is one of his most consistent and most disarming qualities.
You take off your heels.
Fifteen seconds. Bare feet on wood floor. Gravity, doing its reliable work. You go to the kitchen, fill two glasses of water, come back, hand him one, sit on the other end of the couch.
Not far. Not close enough to be a statement.
The distance of two people who said I love you in a hallway twenty minutes ago and are now, in the ordinary lamplight of a Tuesday night, figuring out what comes after that.
He drinks.
You drink.
The apartment does its quiet thing around you.
"Your ankle," you say.
"Is fine."
"One to ten."
"Y/N—"
"One to ten, Namjoon."
A pause. The pause of someone doing an honest assessment despite their preference not to.
"Four," he says.
"It was a seven three weeks ago and you've been on a transatlantic flight without your cast."
"Four," he repeats.
"I'm going to examine it later."
"Okay."
"That wasn't a question."
"I know." The corner of his mouth.
You look at him.
He looks back.
The lamplight. The travel-wrinkle. The shadows under his eyes that have graduated from concerning to architectural. The brown leather jacket. The ankle that you are going to address in clinical detail whether he wants you to or not.
"Okay," you say. "Later."
The silence that settles is not uncomfortable.
This is the thing about him — the thing you catalogued in the first hour and have been cataloguing ever since. The quality of his quiet. Most people fill silence because silence is a gap and gaps make them anxious. He has always known how to be in a room that isn't talking. How to let something breathe before he puts his hands on it.
He does that now.
Lets the room breathe.
You are, for once in two years, grateful for it.
"I need to tell you about Sooyeon," he says.
"You don't—"
"I need to." Quiet. Final. The voice of someone who has decided this is not negotiable. "Not because of the article. Because you deserve to hear it from me and not from something that was engineered to do maximum damage at minimum truth."
You look at your hands.
"Okay," you say.
He turns the water glass slowly. His jaw moves slightly, the small tell of someone working through something before they speak. His thumb finds the rim of the glass and stays there, tracing the same small arc, patient and deliberate and just slightly not at ease.
"We were together for four years," he says. "It was real. I'm not going to minimize that — she deserves better than revisionism and so do you." A pause. "It was also—" He stops. Chooses. "We grew apart. Slowly, and then all at once, the way things do when two people stop choosing each other actively and just — coast on what was there before." His jaw tightens slightly. "I was always busy. Always somewhere else, mentally. Broken promises. Missed plans. I'll make time becoming the sentence I said most often and meant least." A pause. "She found someone else."
The room is very still.
"She told me," he says. "Which I think was the honest thing to do. And it was — it was bad. It was ugly, in the way of things that end with that kind of damage. But—" He looks at the glass. "I forgave her. I want you to know that. I don't say that for credit. I say it because what the article implies — that she's a victim of something I did — is not the truth, and she knows it isn't, and I think someone paid her to tell a version of events that would stick, and I'm angry about that, but I don't want it to color what you think of her." A pause. "She made a choice under circumstances I contributed to. That's the whole of it."
You are quiet for a moment.
"The article said it was you," you say. "That you were—"
"I know what the article said." His voice is even. "It was constructed by someone who received a significant amount of money to construct it at the exact moment it would cause the most damage. The overlap in the timeline was manufactured to look worse than it was." He looks at you. "It ended in September. Properly, completely. A month before Minho's."
"A month," you say.
"I know."
You look at him.
He looks back.
There is something in his expression that is not quite finished — something else sitting behind the Sooyeon part, something he hasn't arrived at yet.
"There's something else," you say.
Not a question.
He looks at his hands.
For a long moment he doesn't speak.
You watch him go somewhere. Not far — he's still here, still on the couch, still holding the glass — but behind his eyes something shifts, a door opening onto a room he keeps locked, a place he has spent a year reminding himself he no longer lives in. His jaw tightens fractionally. His thumb stops moving against the glass.
"Military was—" He stops.
Starts differently.
"I have a very specific memory of the worst period of my life," he says, he doesn't look at you. "I went to a very dark place. I mean that — not metaphorically. I mean the kind of dark that has — edges. That you stand at the edge of and look down." A breath. "Minho knew. He's the only one who knew. Not the members, not management, not—" He stops. "Nobody."
"You saved my life," he says.
Not as a figure of speech. He says it the way he says true things — quietly, looking at you directly, with the full weight of someone who has chosen the accurate word and means every syllable of it.
"I don't say that lightly. I say it because it's accurate and you're a doctor and you value accuracy." A pause. His jaw works slightly. "I was a year into service when we met. The first year I managed. The structure helped — having somewhere to be, something to do, something that required all of me. But the second year—" He stops. Swallows. "The second year the structure stopped being enough and there was just — the inside of my own head. Too much time. Too much quiet. Too many nights where I couldn't find a single reason that felt—"
He doesn't finish that sentence.
He doesn't need to.
You understand what he's not saying. You understood it the moment he said dark place and edges and you filed it, carefully, in the place where you keep things that matter too much to examine all at once.
"And then Minho texted me," he says. "Said there was someone at his apartment. Said she didn't care who I was." The corner of his mouth moves — brief, involuntary. "I went because I couldn't trust myself alone that night. That's the truth of it."
He looks at his hands.
"And then you were on the couch. Not looking at me. Just — there. Existing like I was anyone." He exhales slowly. "And the next day there was a message about cortical bone remodeling and I thought — what is happening — and I replied. And you replied. And somewhere in the middle of all of that I started—" He pauses. "Looking forward to it. Every time. Not just the messages. Every leave. I would find reasons. Any reason. An excuse to be in the same building, the same room. I would go out of my way and I knew I was going out of my way and I did it anyway because—"
He stops.
His eyes are bright.
You realize, with a quiet shock, that he's crying.
The eyes, the jaw, the very deliberate way he is holding himself together around something that wants very badly to come apart.
"I was selfish," he says. "That's the thing I keep coming back to. I wanted you in my life and I kept finding ways to have that and I didn't think — I didn't let myself think — about what it meant. What proximity to me could cost you. What it would look like to someone with a camera and an agenda." His voice drops. "Someone used you to hurt me. They went through you to get to me and that—" He stops. His jaw tightens. "You don't deserve that. You have never deserved any of that. Everything you've built, everything you are — none of it had anything to do with me until I made it about me by being careless with something that should have been protected."
"Namjoon—"
"I'm not finished." Not sharp. Just — honest. The voice of someone who has been carrying this and needs to put it down properly. "You are one of the most extraordinary people I have ever known. And I let the world find out about you before I had the right to. Before you had the choice. Before you could decide what you wanted any of this to be." He looks at you. His eyes are still bright. "I'm sorry. I'm genuinely, completely sorry. Not for knowing you. Never for that. But for the cost of it. For making you pay for something you never agreed to."
The room is very still.
You look at him.
At the bright eyes and the jaw and the travel-wrinkled jacket and the man underneath all of it — the one who got on a plane and sat on your floor and is now sitting on your couch crying quietly about the ways he thinks he failed you while you are sitting here knowing, with the full irreversible certainty of someone who has finally stopped arguing with themselves, that you would pay it again.
Every bit of it.
For this.
For him.
"You didn't make me do anything," you say. Your voice comes out unsteady. "I made choices too. Every single one of them."
"I know," he says. "But some of the consequences were mine to protect you from. And I didn't."
A pause.
"You deserve someone who does," he says quietly. "I'm not sure I've been that."
You look at him for a long moment.
"You got on a plane," you say.
He looks up.
"You sat on my floor," you say. "At eleven PM. In a city you weren't supposed to be in. Four days before your tour resumes." You hold his gaze. "That's someone who shows up, Namjoon. That's what showing up looks like."
He looks at you.
Something in his face — the guilt, the careful management of it — shifts.
Not resolved.
But softer.
"I should have shown up sooner," he says.
"So should I," you say.
The silence that follows is the kind that had the ugly things said into it and is still standing.
Still warm.
Still, somehow, safe.
The silence that follows is the full kind.
The kind that has had something enormous placed in it and needs a moment to rearrange.
You look at him.
At the shadows under his eyes and the jacket and the ankle and the face of a man who just told you the most important thing he has ever told anyone and did it quietly, without drama, because that's how he tells true things — carefully, precisely, like each word is weight-bearing.
"You should have told me," you say. Your voice is not quite steady.
"I know."
"I would have—"
"I know," he says. "That's partly why I didn't. You were already—" He pauses. "You were already more than I knew what to do with. Telling you that felt like — too much to hand someone who was still deciding if I was worth the complication."
You stare at him.
"I was never deciding that," you say.
"I know that now," he says.
You shake your head slowly. "We are—"
"Catastrophic," he agrees.
"Genuinely. Historically."
"Record-setting," he says.
"There should be a study."
"Minho could write it."
"He'd make it a TED talk."
The laugh comes again — smaller this time, warmer, the kind that surfaces when grief and relief are sitting in the same room and don't know what to do with each other.
It settles.
The apartment holds it.
"The songs," you say.
He looks at you.
You look at your hands.
This is, objectively, the most embarrassing thing you are about to say tonight. And tonight has had some competition.
"I've been listening to your music," you say. "For two years. Really listening." A pause. "More than I've admitted. More than makes sense for someone who was supposed to be indifferent." You press your lips together. "And three days ago at four in the morning I put my headphones in and I listened to the albums and I—"
You stop.
Start again.
"I felt jealous," you say. "Of songs. I felt jealous of songs, which is possibly the single most ridiculous thing I have ever said out loud and I work with people who cry about femur fractures so the bar is genuinely high." A short, helpless breath. "I assumed they were about her. Because four years, because the timeline, because she has a face and the words suddenly had her face and I sat on my bedroom floor at four in the morning feeling things I had absolutely no right to feel about music that was never mine and—"
You stop.
"I felt jealous of the songs," you say. "And I felt ridiculous for it. And I'm telling you because apparently we're doing the whole truth tonight and that's part of it."
He is very quiet.
You look up.
Something has moved through his expression — not amusement, not yet. Something softer and more careful, the look of someone who has just received a piece of information that rearranges several things simultaneously and is taking a moment to let it settle.
"You've been listening to the albums," he says.
"Yes."
"The ones before service."
"Yes."
"And you thought—" He stops. "You thought they were about her."
"Weren't they?"
"Some of them, yes." he says. "That's true. I'm not going to pretend otherwise." He looks at you. "But I have been writing about you since the day I met you, love. I wrote the first one on the transport back to base — six lines, terrible, didn't use it — and I haven't stopped." A pause. "None of those songs made the album. None of them have been released. None of them exist anywhere outside my notebook and the studio and the members who have heard them because I couldn't stop writing them and at some point Jimin noticed and then they all noticed and—"
"The members know," you say.
"All of them, yeah" he says as if it is obvious.
You stare at him.
"All six of them," you say.
"Jimin knew first," he says, with the expression of a man who has made peace with this. "He always knows first. It's one of his least convenient qualities." A pause. "He heard a demo about eight months ago and came to find me and said hyung this is about the doctor and I told him it was conceptual and he looked at me for approximately four seconds and said it really isn't and walked away."
You put your face in your hands.
"Everyone knew," you say, into your palms.
"Everyone knew," he confirms. "For a while."
"Before I did."
"Significantly before you did, yes."
You make a sound that is not quite a laugh and not quite a groan.
He watches you with the expression of someone finding something both endearing and deeply amusing and trying to be respectful about it, which he is not entirely managing.
"I didn't play them for anyone on purpose," he says. "Not at first. I didn't want to—" He pauses. "Saying it out loud felt like too much. Putting it in a song felt like too much. I knew if you heard them you would know exactly how I felt and I knew that would—"
"Scare me," you say, from behind your hands.
"Scare you," he says. "Yes."
You lower your hands.
Look at him.
"There are songs," you say slowly, "that you have written about me. That no one has heard. That you haven't released."
"Yes."
"That the members have heard."
"Some of them."
"That Jimin identified by listening to a demo."
"He's very perceptive—"
"Namjoon."
"Yes," he says, simple and certain. "There are songs. There have been songs since that November. There will probably continue to be songs because that's how I process things — I write them down, I always have, it's the only way I know how to be honest with myself about what I actually feel." He holds your gaze. "You are in everything I create. You have been for two years. I don't know how to write something true without you being in it somewhere."
The apartment is very quiet.
You look at him.
He looks back.
And then, because it is late and you are tired and the whole truth is apparently what tonight requires:
"I was jealous," you say again, quieter now. "Not of her specifically. Of the songs. Of whoever had a face in those words. Because I've been listening to them and I — I wanted—" You stop. "I wanted to be the person in them. And I felt stupid for wanting that. And then I found out she was beautiful and still in Seoul and I sat on my floor at five in the morning being jealous of a woman I've never met about music I wasn't even in."
He is very still.
Then something shifts in his expression.
It is not quite a smile.
It is something smaller and more private — the involuntary look of a man receiving confirmation of something he had hoped for and is trying not to make too much of and is absolutely making something of internally.
"You wanted to be in the songs," he says.
"Don't," you say.
"I'm not doing anything—"
"You're doing the face—"
"I don't have a face—"
"You have a very specific face right now and I need you to stop having it—"
"You were jealous," he says, and the smile is fully there now, soft and warm and slightly, molecularly smug in the way of someone who has just had two years of hoping confirmed in a single sentence. "Of songs you thought were about someone else. Because you wanted them to be about you."
"This is humiliating," you say.
"It's the opposite of humiliating," he says.
"It is extremely—"
"Everything I write is somehow about you. And I want you to hear them. The ones no one has heard yet. Not the members. Not Jimin." A pause. "I want you to be the first. The only one, for those." His voice drops slightly. "I wrote them for you, love. They were always going to be yours."
You look at him.
Something in your chest does something enormous and quiet.
"Okay," you say.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah," you say. "I want to hear them."
He nods.
Once.
Like that means something.
Like it means everything.
And then, because he is Kim Namjoon and he cannot entirely help himself:
"For the record," he says, "the jealousy—"
"Do not finish that sentence."
"—is very endearing."
"I will leave," you say.
"You won't," he says.
He's right.
You won't.
You look at him for a moment.
He looks back, still wearing the remnants of that smile, still slightly, molecularly smug about the jealousy confession, still warm in the way he gets when something has gone better than he hoped.
"Even Swim?" you say.
A beat of silence.
Very specific silence.
The kind that arrives when a man who has just been telling you that every love song he has written for two years is about you suddenly needs a moment to recalibrate.
"What about Swim," he says. Carefully. Each word placed with the deliberateness of someone who has just realized the conversation has taken a turn he was not prepared for.
"You said everything you write is somehow about me," you say.
"I did say that, yes."
"So." You look at him. "The title track. Salt on my tongue, she's stunning—"
"I know which song Swim is—"
"Is that one also about me?"
He stares at you.
Something moves across his face.
Several things, actually, in rapid succession — surprise, recalibration, the specific expression of a man whose ears are about to go red and who knows it and cannot stop it.
He opens his mouth.
Closes it.
Opens it again.
The ears go red.
"That song," he says, with the measured, careful dignity of a man constructing a sentence in real time, "is a metaphor. About the experience of being overwhelmed. About surrendering to something larger than yourself. It is a conceptual exploration of—"
"It has a very specific—"
"Metaphorical—"
"Namjoon—"
"Conceptual," he says, slightly louder, and his ears are red, you can see it even in the low lamplight, the tips of his ears going the specific shade of red that you have filed under Kim Namjoon is embarrassed and have not previously seen at this particular intensity—
And then he laughs.
That laugh that starts in his chest and has absolutely no performance in it, thrown back slightly, hand coming up to cover his face for approximately two seconds before he gives up and just lets it happen.
You laugh too.
The real kind. The sudden kind. The kind that arrives before you decide to let it, both of you dissolving in the lamplight of the apartment at midnight, you in your party clothes and him in his travel-wrinkled jacket and the ankle that you are going to examine and the two years of everything between you temporarily suspended in the pure, helpless absurdity of this particular moment.
"Conceptual," you repeat, when you can speak.
"Entirely," he says, still smiling, still faintly red at the ears. "One hundred percent."
"So that one's not about going down on someone? on me?"
"That one," he says, the smile settling into something that is warm and slightly dangerous and absolutely not going to give you a straight answer, "I will neither confirm nor deny."
"Kim Namjoon—"
"Every other love song," he says, with great confidence, "is about you. That one is—" A pause. "Conceptual."
"You said that with your entire chest."
"I said it with conviction, yes."
"That is not an answer."
"It's a conceptual non-answer," he says, and the dimple appears — fully committed, the full devastating depth of it — and you are done for, you have been done for since November, there was never a single version of this where you weren't completely done for, and that is no longer a problem you have any interest in solving.
He watches you, still smiling, the ears still slightly pink, the shadows and the travel-wrinkle and the ankle and all the weight of the last seventy-two hours temporarily lifted into the warmth of this — of the two of you laughing at midnight about a song that is either a metaphor or not and the man who wrote it who is not telling you which.
The laugh settles.
Slowly.
The way things settle when they've been fully spent.
The apartment resumes its quiet.
Different now.
Not the careful quiet of before — not the managed silence of two people deciding how much to give.
This is the quiet of after.
After the true things and the ugly things and the dark things and the songs that are about you and the song that is conceptually not about anything in particular.
After I love you in a hallway and you saved my life on a couch.
After.
He is looking at you.
Not performing looking. Just — him. With everything visible. The full, unguarded honesty of someone who got on a plane and crossed an ocean and sat on a floor and has nothing left to protect and no longer wants anything to protect.
The dimple.
Still there.
Faintly, in the low light, at the corner of his mouth.
You have been in love with that dimple since that November.
You will probably be in love with it for the rest of your life.
This is, you have decided, not a problem.
His hand is on the cushion between you.
Not reaching. Just — there. Warm. Present. The question it's asking is the same one it has always asked — patient, unhurried, giving you the full space of the decision.
You reach out.
Your hand covers his.
His fingers turn and close around yours.
The lamp holds its light.
the silence between you is the warmest thing you have ever been inside.
Full.
Certain.
Without a single unsaid thing left in it.
You look at him.
He looks at you.
There is nothing left to say.
There is, however, the whole of forty-eight hours.
You intend to spend every one of them honestly.
You move first.
Not dramatically. There is no dramatic gesture here, no decision that announces itself. Just the slow, deliberate closing of the distance between you — your hand still in his, your body turning toward him on the couch the way it has always turned toward him, before the decision catches up, before the reasonable part of you has had a chance to vote.
He watches you come.
Doesn't move. Doesn't reach. Just — receives, with the particular stillness of someone who has learned to give you the full space of your own choices, who has never once in two years taken anything you didn't give first.
You stop when you are close enough that the warmth of him is the temperature of the room.
You look at him.
He looks at you.
No performance between you. Nothing managed. Just the two of you in the lamplight with the city outside and the whole of what has been said tonight sitting in the room like a third presence — not heavy, not looming, just real. Present. The accumulated truth of two years finally occupying the space it was always supposed to occupy.
"Hi," you say.
"Hi," he says back.
His voice, in this register, has always been its own argument.
You bring your free hand up to his face.
He goes still under the touch — the complete, concentrated stillness of someone receiving something they have wanted carefully enough that receiving it requires a moment of just holding it. Your thumb at his jaw. The warmth of his skin. The slight roughness of the end of a very long day. You feel him breathe.
"I've wanted to do this," you say, "for a very long time."
"I know," he says.
"I kept not doing it."
"I know that too."
"I'm done not doing it."
"Good," he says, simply. Entirely. The one word carrying everything it needs to carry.
You close the last distance and press your mouth to his.
It starts slow.
Not tentative — there is nothing tentative about it, you are both well past tentative, tentative was two years ago on Minho's couch. This is slow deliberate, thorough, by two people who have decided that this time there is no reason to rush and have every reason not to.
He kisses you back with the focused, unhurried attention he gives to everything he cares about. His hand comes up — the one that isn't holding yours — moving along your jaw, into your hair, settling there with the warmth and weight of something that knows where it belongs.
You feel the breath leave him.
Feel the slight tremor in it — barely there, the crack in the composure of someone who has been patient for a very long time and is done being patient.
Oh, you think, distantly. There you are.
You shift closer.
He makes a sound low in his throat.
Your hand finds his chest — the brown leather jacket, the warmth of him underneath it — and you push it off his shoulders, and he lets you, shrugging it free without breaking the kiss, and then it's just the shirt and your hands and the full, undiluted warmth of him under your palms and you can feel his heartbeat.
Too fast.
The same as yours.
Good, you think. Good, I'm not alone in this.
He pulls back slightly — just enough.
Not ending. Just — pausing. Looking at you with his eyes dark and his mouth curved and the dimple present, which is, you think, almost unfairly devastating for a moment like this.
"Your coat," he says.
You look down at yourself. Still fully dressed. Party clothes, the coat, the whole architecture of an evening that was supposed to be something else.
"Right," you say.
He reaches up and takes the lapel of it — his birthday gift to you, the charcoal coat that has never once felt neutral — and slides it off your shoulders slowly. Carefully. Like something worth taking time over. He sets it aside and looks at you and his expression does the thing it does, the thing you have been cataloguing for two years without ever finding a clinical name for it.
"Hi," he says again.
"You keep saying that," you say.
"You keep being here," he says. "I keep being surprised."
"I'm always going to be here," you say, and mean it this time, because you have thought about what it means. Not a promise of geography. A promise of something more durable than geography.
He understands the distinction.
He always understands.
He brings you back to him.
His tongue is warm against your skin. As he traces patterns around the mount of your breasts. He pulls the fabric of your dress down and the cold air arrives immediately, sharp against your skin, and then he does — warm and unhurried — and the contrast between those two things is so complete that it takes your breath before he even tries to.
That's the thing you always notice first — his warmth. The specific, warmth of him, like he runs at a different temperature than the rest of the world, like being close to him is its own kind of climate. And right now he is very much occupied with proving this point — a slow, deliberate trail of kisses along the base of your neck, your collarbone, the curve of your shoulder, and then behind your ear where he bites, softly, with just enough intention to make your breath catch before you can stop it.
You shiver.
You feel the smile form against your skin before you see it.
He is, you realize, a little smug about it.
You find you cannot bring yourself to be annoyed.
"You want to know something," he says, his voice dropped to the register he uses when there is no one to perform for, low and warm and right at your ear. He presses a kiss to the place where your neck meets your jaw, slow and deliberate. "I always knew you were going to ruin me."
Another kiss. Lower. And you feel yourself getting wetter. If that was even possible. You don't know when it happened — the shift, the rearranging of the two of you — only that at some point the geometry changed and now you are sitting above him. His full length pressing at your center.
One ands found your hips certain and warm, the other rising briefly to push the fallen strand of hair from your face with the kind of gentleness that makes you understand, fully and finally, that this man has never once stopped paying attention to you.
He pulls back just enough to look at you — dark eyes, the dimple threatening at the corner of his mouth, the full weight of his attention directed entirely at you. "And I have payed the price, love. I am yours"
"But You are also mine" he says. Quiet. Certain. Not a claim — a fact he has known for a long time and is finally allowed to say out loud. "Because I have ruined you just the same."
You look at him.
At the truth of it on his face — open and unguarded and entirely his, the version of Kim Namjoon that belongs to no stage and no album and no one else in the world.
You don't know who moves first.
You stop caring approximately one second later.
Because this kiss is different from all the careful ones — the tentative ones, the almost-ones, the ones that stopped short of the full truth because neither of you was ready to arrive there.
Then his hand moves.
From your hip, lower, and then lower still — and every single thing stops.
Your breath. The room. The city outside doing its indifferent thing. All of it suspended in the half second before, your whole body going still the way it goes still before something it has been waiting for longer than it knew, bracing for a feeling it needed before your brain had the language for needing it.
His fingers unceremoniously bypass the hem of your underwear. He's done waiting, and you are too. With the way your hips move desperately and involuntarily to create friction between his fingers and your center.
He notices.
Of course he notices.
He notices everything.
"Look at you, my love. All wet and desperate for me" The smile that forms is different from the others. This one is something else entirely. Slower. The smile of a man who has been paying attention for two years and knows exactly what he has found and is not, in this moment, going to pretend otherwise.
His eyes don't leave yours when he pushes his middle finger between your folds. And somewhere in your primal brain doesn't want him to stop looking at you.
Not for a second.
He was right.
He ruined you.
Or more accurately — he found every broken piece of you, the ones you'd filed under acceptable losses and part of the deal and this is just how I am — and he put them back. Carefully. Unhurriedly. The way he does everything that matters to him.
And sealed them in gold.
You are his.
"Oh, Namjoon" his name drips out of your lips when he starts pushing a second finger. Pumping it in and out in the most devastating, exquisite, slow pace. And it is embarrassing how close you are, how little it takes for him to take you to your own climax. But you don't want to come so fast, not like this. Not before you have felt the entirety of him.
You are about to tell him when he speaks first. And his voice — God, his voice — has dropped to the register that belongs to no one else, rough and certain and stripped of every last pretense of self control, the sound of someone who has been patient for two years and is done with patience entirely.
"It's ok, Y/N. Come" His fingers thrust deeper inside you and you feel it, the white hot crescendo of sensations "We have time, babe. Come on my fingers so I can taste you after. And then I'll take you to your bed and fuck you until my name is the only fucking thing you can remember."
His hands know you.
That's the thing you keep arriving at — the specific, disarming fact of being known.
And with one final. Intoxicating movement of his wrist, with the fingers inside you, that somehow at one point became three. Between your wanting, which has become enormous and ungovernable, and his giving, which is complete and deliberate and without a single thing held back. You come loudly, desperately trembling on top of him. His voice at your ear through all of it — low, unhurried, saying the sweetest and most devastating things like he has been saving them, like they were always going to be yours, like he has been waiting two years for the right moment to say them out loud.
Like you are the thing he has set aside time for and the time is his to spend properly.
Your dress has a zipper at the back.
He finds it without looking.
Draws it down slowly, his knuckles warm against your spine, and you arch into the touch involuntarily, and he pauses.
"Let me show you," he says.
His forehead drops to yours — the gesture that is entirely his, that has meant things from the very beginning, that you have catalogued and refused to name and are done refusing. His breath is unsteady. His hands are warm and certain on your skin.
"Let me show you how much I am going to miss you."
A kiss to your jaw. Your cheek. The corner of your mouth.
"Let me show you how much I love you."
"Yes," you say.
No hesitation.
No door monitored.
No part of you pointing toward the exit.
Just — yes. Complete and immediate and the truest thing you have said tonight in a night full of true things.
He pulls back just enough to look at you.
Really look.
The way he has always looked at you. Except now there is nothing else in it. No management, no careful distance, no two years of wanting something and calling it something else. Just him, looking at you, with everything he is entirely visible.
"I've got you," he says, quietly. "I've always had you."
And then he keeps his word.
He takes his time. When he carries you to your bed and drops you ever so gently.
Because that is who he is — a man who takes his time with things that matter, who has never once rushed anything he cared about, who understands that some things deserve to be done properly or not at all. He moves like someone who has been waiting for this specific moment and has decided that now that it's here, now that there is nothing between you and nowhere to be and no more pretending —
he is going to make it count.
Every touch deliberate.
Every kiss placed with the focused attention of someone fluent in you — who knows where you are careful and where you aren't, who has learned the map of you in parking structures and hospital lots and the amber lamplight of a borrowed apartment and is now, finally, reading it without apology.
He fucks you relentlessly. With an all-consuming pace because his both taking his time with you and running out of it.
Hi comes with your name in his mouth.
Low. Reverent. The way he says the things he means.
And underneath all of it — underneath the warmth and the want and the two years of this finally arriving at its full and honest weight — something else. Something that has nothing to do with the physical and everything to do with what this is, what it has always been, what you are finally allowing it to be.
A promise.
Not spoken. Not formal. Not the kind that comes with conditions or timelines or the guarantee of easy. The other kind — the kind made in the dark between two people who have decided, with full information and clear eyes, that whatever comes next they are going to keep choosing each other.
Across oceans.
Across time zones.
Across the impossible calendar math of two enormous lives trying to leave enough room for each other.
He will keep finding you.
You will keep letting him.
That is the oath of it.
That is what this is.
There is a moment — you are not sure exactly when, time having become less relevant than it usually is — where he pulls back again, just slightly, and looks at you.
Really looks. Deeper. More specific. The way a place looks different once you know it well enough to love it.
"Hey," he says. Soft.
"Hey," you say back.
His thumb traces the curve of your breast and the tip of your nipple. Once. The gesture that has meant things from the very beginning, that you have been cataloguing since the first time and still do not have adequate language for.
"I've wanted to tell you," he says, low. "For a long time. All of it."
"Tell me now," you say.
He does.
Not in sentences — or not only in sentences.
He tells you with his hands at your waist and his mouth at your jaw, with the pressure that forms between the place where your bodies connect and the low, unhurried sound of his voice saying your name like it is the only word that matters in whatever language this is.
He tells you in the particular way of someone who has been a poet his whole life and has finally found the subject he was always writing toward.
You tell him back.
Not with words — or not only.
You tell him with the way your hands move and the way you moan his name and the full, unguarded honesty of someone who has spent two years being careful and has run completely out of careful.
You give him all of it.
The whole truth of it.
And he receives it.
Later.
The lamp still on. The city still doing its indifferent, beautiful thing outside the window. The apartment warm and quiet around you, holding all of this the way it holds everything — without judgment, with the particular warmth of a space that has seen its people through enough to know better than to interfere.
You are lying in the specific warmth of him. His arm around you, his chest under your cheek, the steady and now-unhurried beat of his heart against your ear. His other hand moving slowly through your hair — not deliberate, just present, the unconscious gesture of someone whose body has decided this is where it is and is at peace with that.
You listen to him breathe.
Even. Slow. Almost gone.
"Namjoon," you say.
"Mm."
"Your ankle."
A pause.
"I know."
"I need to look at it."
"Tomorrow," he says.
"Now."
"In a minute."
"You've been on it for fourteen—"
"Five more minutes," he says. The specific, familiar phrase. Five more minutes. Said in this exact context once before, on a video call across an ocean, with entirely different logistics and the same meaning.
Stay. Just a little longer.
You close your eyes.
Feel the warmth of him.
The lamp. The city. The coat on the chair across the room — his gift to you, the charcoal grey of it folded there in the low light.
"Five minutes," you say.
His arm tightens slightly around you.
Just slightly.
Just enough.
You lie in the warm quiet of the apartment and feel, moving through you like something that has been waiting a very long time to be allowed —
peace.
Not resolution. Not the clean, clinical satisfaction of a fixed thing. Something more honest than that. The specific, complicated, imperfect peace of two people who have told each other the true things and chosen each other with full information and are lying in the aftermath of it with the city outside and forty-seven hours and fifty-five minutes still ahead of them.
His breathing is even now.
You think he might be asleep.
"Hey," you say, quietly.
Nothing.
You smile.
You close your eyes.
You think about Los Angeles. About the flight in forty-eight hours and the life waiting there and the career you built and the person you are going to be on the other side of this. You think about voice notes and time zones and the specific mathematics of two people trying to leave enough room for each other across a very large distance.
You think about a book with a note inside it.
You think about text me when you land.
You think about the thread — the one you felt that November on Minho's couch, the one you told yourself you'd cut and never cut, the one that has been pulling taut ever since, the one that is apparently structural, the one that holds.
You don't cut it now either.
You have stopped trying.
"I love you," you say, to the lamplight, to the room, to the man asleep under your cheek who wrote songs about you for two years before you knew.
The city hums outside.
The lamp holds its amber.
Forty-eight hours.
You've never been more certain of anything.
The end.
Read the Epilogue
surprise surprise, bitches 🖤
yeah. it's done. it's really done. 😭
I finished before schedule and I simply could not sit on this and make you wait (by you I mean me) until Saturday when it was just sitting there, complete, ready, yours. that felt criminal. you have been so incredibly kind and patient and loud about this story in the best possible way and you deserve this today. right now. immediately. 🫶🏼
so go. run. bc Tumblr is annoying and it doesn't let me publish everything in one part 🏃♀️💨
the epilogue is up. my full author's note is there. tissues are recommended. I meant every word of it. 🥹
