loving you is (too) easy | h.rj
featuring: classmate!renjun x reader
word count: 2241
summary — you could never stop loving renjun, not even if you lied to yourself about wanting to. you can’t even remember how you started loving him, only that it comes as easily as breathing, and even when you shouldn’t, you just don’t know how to let him go.
author’s note: yeah so the Yearner™ in me comes out occasionally and so this fic was written as a short one shot to get the feelings off my chest, some of it is based on personal experience lol
Huang Renjun is an unintentional heartbreaker. He is the kind of guy to catch your eye and then make you fall in love, not the swift, swooping feeling in your stomach that they describe in the movies but rather a slow, gentle descent, as if there is a parachute adding air resistance and causing you to slowly drift to the ground. It is slow, inevitable and not in the least bit scary, except speed can be hard to judge from that kind of altitude and the drop may look deceivingly long.
But when you hit the ground running with heavy fabric trailing behind you and just one misstep will drag you across hard, concrete ground, only then will you feel the crack in your ribs and the painful, violet bruise blooming across your chest. It will hurt every time you brush against it, you know, even though your heart is only half-squished and not broken, and could probably heal given enough time, but there are some things that you will always wonder if you should regret.
Loving Huang Renjun is one of them.
It is easy to fall in love with him, you have found. When the snarky comments fade in the quiet moments where it is just the two of you, hidden in a dark corner of the classroom while your classmates’ footsteps shuffle outside. All sound becomes muffled in that space, half-awake and barely stirring, dark like the morning before the sun rises, in between stiflingly quiet and overwhelmingly loud.
Your shoulders are pressed together and you can hardly breathe, not out of fear of being caught but of the strange familiarity that comes with being pressed up so closely against Renjun. His elbow rests on his left knee, his right hand supporting him by his side, and as he turns towards you to whisper in your ear, low and hesitant, it is all you can do to shake your head when he asks if you think you will be found.
”Good,” he murmurs, mischief and a hint of pride glimmering in his eyes, so bright that they are almost like a torchlight in the dark, and he turns away. You miss the heat of his breath against the shell of your ear, and you almost bring a hand up to your ear longingly before you catch yourself. You have only known him for a few days, and yet you are already missing his warmth.
You have only known him for a week, and already his speech patterns are becoming familiar to you. Subtle, timely snarks in between properly-held conversations, the pause he takes when he’s serious, the way his laughter is unrestrained and inelegant and unceasing.
His mannerisms become familiar to you too—the way he leans into the touch of his best friend, whose arms are around his neck, one hand comfortingly reaching up to hold his friend’s. The way he walks, spine straight and standing tall, even if he’s only a few centimetres taller than you, steps steady and assured.
You don’t think you’ve ever seen him hesitate, but the confidence can be abrasive sometimes. He charges into things he believes in with full force, with a quick, biting tongue that shuts down any opposition, and it is only when you call him—Huang, always by his surname, there is another Renjun in the class—that he visibly stills. You can see the gears in his head coming to an abrupt, grinding halt as he recalibrates, tense fingers relaxing, the throbbing vein in his neck subsiding, his eyebrows detangling themselves from whatever knot they’ve worked themselves into.
A minute shift, but you catch it all the same.
He is the first to call you by a shortened version of your name. You don’t know why, but it seems fitting that he is the one, and your heart warms the second you hear it. You grow to become accustomed to it, to hearing that one syllable slip from his lips with such a casual tone that it should be banned, really, because who is he to be calling you like that? But you accept it, if only because it is him, and slowly everyone takes to calling you that name.
When people only he knows and you don’t know begin to call you with that name, you bristle at it. Nicknames should be earned, not taken for granted, but somehow it was fine when it was Renjun and he had only known you for one and a half weeks, and his name tastes odd when you aren’t calling him “Huang”. Eventually you decide it is better that they call you by that nickname, since there is some sort of twisted satisfaction you get from knowing that he talks about you to his friends.
It only takes a month before you realise what kind of person he is. Petty, selfish, full of complaints, Huang Renjun is not an easy friend to have. There are times where, out of the blue, he comes to you with resentment frothing at his lips like black smoke, the tendrils curling around his tongue and seizing his throat, the red blood vessels in his eyes pronounced. And because you will only ever be patient with him, you listen.
You listen to the complaints, some valid and some not quite so, and you’re torn between wanting to reply and giving him space. You will figure out an odd sort of rhythm in the future, where you can tell what he needs from what kinds of things he says, where you learn to cup his prickles with calloused palms and ask him what is wrong, when you learn how to tell his tells just from the slightest change in his gaze.
Huang Renjun may be expressive, but some things he keeps well-hidden, like the various grudges he harbours against completely innocent people. You’ll never quite understand how his mind works, but you have been (fortunately or otherwise) granted an unending well of patience to deal with him, and somehow the way he handles you makes handling him feel like nothing.
Huang Renjun handles you far better than you handle yourself, especially when you’re tired and overwhelmed and spiralling past your bedtime. Lying in bed, eyes almost sliding shut from just how tired you are, blinking painfully as the glare of your screen starts to give you a headache, you can’t help but feel comforted when he breaks down your problem and tells you his thoughts.
On the eve of your birthday, stressed from all the planning and disappointed that you can’t get the present that you want and unsure how everything is going to work out, he stays up late to walk you through it while you’re anxiously typing back strings of exclamation marks and question marks.
He takes the one thing he can do something about, the birthday present, and somehow helps your best friend to ship it from a country that’s 11 hours away by plane, and you only find out a month later when you actually receive the gift.
Between the two of you, you sign up for competitions together where you have to work together under what feels like—at least to you—intense pressure and time constraints, staying up late the night before to discuss your strategy over a call, bleary-eyed and half-asleep, yawning every other word, his hair mussed. He’s always wearing that dark grey T-shirt he swears he has multiple of, from his teenaged moody phase when he only wore things from a black-and-white monochrome palette, and you’ve come to recognise both his room and the sound of his voice.
That is how he slips into your life, all witty quips and a sense of humour that the two of you share, which means he always gets your jokes first and knows you better than anyone else. If it were anyone else trying to predict your moves or explain your actions you would be annoyed, but somehow if it is him then it is fine.
It is not the first time you have made exceptions for him.
Between the “study” calls that end up with you talking late into the hours of the night, the shared glances in class when both of you think about the same thing at the same time, and the conversations you share over repetitive canteen meals, Huang Renjun manages to burrow his way into your heart. He snuggles inside it, soft and warm and comfortable, like a squirrel finding a perfectly-sized hole in the bark of a tree trunk, and you cannot bear to ask him to leave.
The first time he likes someone else is quite early on, before the friendship is properly established, and you hear it from someone else’s mouth and your heart stops. You’re sure you do a terrible job of hiding it, prying immediately and asking suspiciously concerned questions and even going so far as to ask him yourself, and you’re honestly unsure how none of you realised that you had this big, fat crush on him all along.
It ends up being just a phase, and after a month or so of prying, poorly-concealed jealousy masked as friendly nosiness, he confesses that he no longer likes them. The way the relief washes over you, like a boa constrictor has just released its grip on your lungs, is inexplicable.
Halfway through the year you resolve to confess your feelings, deciding that after sixth months, it is impossible for you to continue being friends with him without telling him how you feel. It’s only when Chenle talks you out of it, offering to do reconnaissance and coming back to you with the heart-shattering news that he only sees you as a friend, that you put a hold on your feelings for a moment and take a month to distill the information into something more comprehensible.
You barely survive that month of reduced contact and emotional distancing from him, which is about the same time that you realise the emotional dependence you have come to have on Renjun. There’s something so easy about trusting him, about involving him in almost every aspect of your life, to the point that without him there you feel empty.
He has been so carefully and imperceptibly woven into your life that you could not find the loose ends to unravel the tapestry if you wanted to, and tugging relentlessly is only going to result in ripped heartstrings and ruined masterpieces.
You make it another month before you confess. It is a period of confused happiness, all the emotional complexity of the situation compressed and shoved down to the pits of your heart. Out of sight, out of mind. At least, that is what you tell yourself as you establish routines for conflict management—“I don’t need space to be left alone,” he tells you, “I’m not your mother. I’d rather we just talk about it.”—and you figure out safewords for when to talk seriously without being snarky or mean to each other, a safeguard against the bantering dynamic the two of you have developed.
In the three months of dating him you never go on one proper date, because his disapproving parents would never let him, and Renjun is not one to lie to his parents. Instead, you make do with covert glances and bus rides home and nudging your knee against his when you’re seated next to him, but nothing much changes from when you were just friends. There is a sort of paranoia in trying to keep it low-key at his request, and you can’t help but feel like you’re too obvious to keep it a secret.
Three months into dating Renjun, after a school trip that he wasn’t on, you end up breaking up. It starts with a perfectly normal conversation where he brings up feeling unhappy that you rarely contacted him while on the trip, and devolves into a lot of thinking on your part on whether the mental burden is worth the label, since functionally it has all stayed the same.
But even after breaking up, you’ve never been good at enforcing boundaries with Renjun, particularly, because he’s always been an exception. The texts he sends you are more dispersed, now, but there’s still something about the way he barely bothers to greet you before he jumps into it, like he’s picking up on a conversation you left off, that screams familiarity.
It’s exactly what he used to do before, and you would have replied with “good morning/afternoon/evening”, just to get a quick response from him before continuing with the topic at hand. Old habits die hard, you suppose, but loving Renjun is a habit you can’t decide if you want to break.
He does, of course, have his shortcomings, like not setting boundaries with anyone or being easily annoyed, holding onto small things and being too loud at inopportune timings, but they’re often overshadowed by the weight you’ve placed on his redeeming qualities, like his patience with you or his attentiveness, or his organisational skills and his determination.
Well. It is hard to stop loving someone. In a platonic capacity, you would use the word freely, but in a romantic capacity you would (secretly) also say you love him. In some complicated, indecipherable way, you don’t think you could ever stop loving him, even if he never knew how to treat you like a romantic partner instead of just his best friend.
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