✮⋆˙ jake sim x fem!reader, college au, smau, humor, romance
synopsis. after jake drunkenly agrees to a bet to make y/n l/n to fall for him, he knows he’s screwed either way. if he loses, he owes his friends more money than he has. if he wins, he'll risk her finding out. what he doesn’t expect is how easy it feels with her . . . or how hard it becomes to remember this was all supposed to be fake.
warnings - language, possible drug/alcohol consumption, angst, suggestiveness, mentions of abuse, etc.
taglist - open! leave a comment to be added!
a/n - i set a fixed schedule for this one so you can expect new chapters on mondays at like 3:00 pm est :3
playlist
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CHAPTERS
profiles - “the blind leading the blind” & “registered flex offenders”
It pulses through the walls, bass heavy enough to rattle the picture frames on the wall and make the floor hum beneath bare feet.
From upstairs, Y/N can hear laughter and chatter, a dull thrum of voices beneath the deafening music. Someone shouts. The front door opens and slams and opens again.
She stares at her reflection for a moment longer than necessary.
Five minutes.
That’s what she promised Giselle. She would come downstairs, make an appearance, be social enough that no one could accuse her of hiding, and then she would disappear back into the relative quiet of her room.
Parties are exhausting. Drunk people are worse. Drunk boys are the worst of all.
Still, she smooths invisible wrinkles from her clothes and heads downstairs.
The living room is crowded when she reaches it, a sea of bodies pressed together, colored lights washing everyone in a flashing rainbow that could give a blind person a headache. Conversations blur together, barely audible over whatever music Giselle had decided on tonight. She barely makes it past the couch before something solid collides into her.
A hand grips her arm to steady itself.
“Shit, sorry.”
She looks up, already annoyed.
It's a boy, one who looks vaguely familiar but not enough for Y/N to remember his name. His cheeks are flushed, eyes glassy in that unmistakable way that says he’s several drinks in and clearly not in control of his faculties. He’s smiling like he finds the whole world hilarious and exciting.
“You almost spilled that on me,” she says evenly, glancing at the red cup tilting dangerously in his hand.
He looks at it like he forgot it was there. “That would’ve been tragic,” he says, words slow and loose. “I would’ve had to apologize.”
“I don’t like being touched,” she replies, removing his hand from her arm.
His smile falters for half a second. “We know each other.”
“Barely.”
The music swells between them, thick and vibrating.
He studies her, eyes flitting up and down her body and around her face. As if he's trying to make out whether she's joking or not. She's not.
She steps around him without another word, rolling her eyes as she does so.
Jake turns to watch her disappear into the kitchen, where her friends greet her with warm smiles and cheers. Within seconds she looks different, she's still composed, but her body language is softer around them. Like she's allowing herself a small fraction of warmth, carefully rationed.
Jake exhales through his nose.
“She’s mean,” he mutters later, collapsing onto the couch beside his friends.
They’re half-sprawled across cushions, red cups balanced precariously on the coffee table. Someone has turned the music louder. The room feels smaller now.
“Who?” Sunghoon asks, already grinning because he knows.
“Y/N,” Jake says. “She acts like everyone’s beneath her.”
“She kind of does,” someone laughs. “She's so snippy.”
“Frigid,” another adds.
Jake rolls his eyes, but the word sticks in the air linger than it should.
Across the room, with her friends, she doesn’t look frigid. She looks content, happy even. But still untouchable.
Karina, one of Heeseung's friends, leans forward slowly, her eyes gleaming with something Jake is sure he's too drunk to place. She’s not as drunk as the rest of them. Not really.
“I bet you couldn’t get her to date you,” she says lightly.
Jake snorts. “Please.”
“No, seriously.” Her smile sharpens. “Miss ‘I Don’t Do Relationships.’ You couldn’t do it.”
He feels something prickle under his skin, his ego, maybe. Or the memory of her brushing past him like he was irrelevant.
“I could,” he says, a little too quickly. “I’m lovable.”
The group laughs.
“Lovable,” Sunghoon repeats, stifling a laugh as he takes another sip of his drink.
Karina reaches for her phone.
“Before the end of the school year,” she says. “You make her fall for you.”
Jake hesitates this time.
He knows he should laugh it off. He knows this is stupid and mean spirited. But everyone’s looking at him, waiting for him to back down. And he’s already had too much to drink to make the smart choice.
“A thousand dollars,” she adds.
The weight of that number lands squarely in his chest.
Jake’s bank account flashes across his mind uninvited. Rent. Textbooks. The awkward conversation when he can't join his friends for something because he has to stretch his paycheck another week.
“If you lose,” she continues smoothly, “you pay.”
He swallows.
“And if I win?”
“You get the thousand.”
The world seems to go quiet around him, the music and voices muffled as Karina stares excitedly at him.
He shouldn’t.
But pride is louder than reason, and the fuzziness of the alcohol makes it feel okay. It might be mean, but it's not like she'd actually fall in love with him anyways. There's no way he could hurt someone like her.
“Fine,” he says.
Karina doesn’t look surprised. She pulls her phone out and points it at him.
“Say it properly.”
Jake leans toward the phone, the room spinning slightly as he does.
“I, Jake Sim,” he says, forcing a crooked grin, “will make Y/N L/N fall in love with me before the end of the school year.”
“And if you fail?”
He exhales.
“I owe you a thousand dollars.”
Cheers erupt around him. Someone claps his back hard enough to knock the air from his lungs. A shot is poured in celebration.
Karina saves the video.
Across the room, in the kitchen surrounded by her closest friends, Y/N checks the time on her phone.
Four minutes and twenty-eight seconds.
She doesn’t notice Jake watching her from across the room now, something unreadable flickering behind his drunk smile, a smile that seemed a bit less easy than it had before.
By Sunday afternoon, Jake's hangover has dulled into something manageable, a faint pressure behind his eyes, and a dryness in his throat, but at least the throbbing headache was gone. What hasn’t dissipated, however, is the awareness of what he agreed to.
The video sits in his camera roll now. In it, he looks careless. Confident, even. Slightly slurring his words but coherent enough to sound convincing.
I, Jake Sim, will make Y/N L/N fall in love with me before the end of the semester.
The worst part isn’t how stupid he looks, it’s how sure he sounds. Like he genuinely believed he could break down those mile high walls she seemed to keep up at all times.
He leans back in his desk chair, staring at the faint crack running along his ceiling. There is still time to back out. He knows that. A thousand dollars is a lot, but it isn’t impossible. He could ask his parents for help, swallow his pride, frame it as an emergency. He could pick up more shifts. He could just… lose.
But losing would mean admitting he couldn’t do it.
It would mean that when she looked at him in a crowded living room, flushed and smiling and used to attention and saw nothing worth entertaining, she was right.
He exhales slowly and pulls his laptop closer.
This isn’t like flirting with someone at a party. It isn’t a string of late-night texts or lingering eye contact from across a dimly lit room. She doesn’t exist in those spaces. She doesn’t linger where it’s easy.
They don’t share a single class. They had different majors, different buildings, different schedules. He’d scrolled through her social longer than he’d like to admit, hoping for even one hint. There wasn’t one.
They don’t share a friend group either. His friends know of her. Hers know of him. But the circles don’t touch.
Which means if he wants this to work, it can’t be accidental.
It has to be deliberate.
The realization sits heavy in his chest, less poignant than the dread he'd been feeling since he woke up, but more persistent. Because now he knew he had to plan it, to consciously choose to move forward, unable to place the blame on alcohol this time.
He tells himself it isn’t malicious.
He isn’t planning to humiliate her. He isn’t planning to expose anything private or cruel. It’s just a bet. Just conversation. Just getting her to lower her guard a little, to go on a few dates with him.
People fall for each other all the time. That part isn’t inherently evil.
Still, something about the way she softened around her friends lingers in his mind. She isn’t careless with herself. She doesn’t give people access easily.
Which is exactly why they picked her.
His phone buzzes against the desk, another notification from the group chat. He doesn’t open it. Instead, he opens his search engine. He scrolls longer than necessary, skimming through articles written by her.
He comes across the directory of some local newspaper, her name is listed in bold print as a senior intern. Investigative journalism, is listed beneath a photo of her holding a campus press badge.
He stares at that line for a moment.
Of course she wants to investigate people for a living.
He closes the tab and sits there, fingers hovering over his keyboard.
If she doesn’t share his classes, and she doesn’t frequent his spaces, then he needs a reason to enter hers. He needs a reason she can’t dismiss, a fool-proof plan.
He opens google and searches her name again, scrolling past the articles and blog posts, finding a link leading to the student success center's website.
Y/N L/N, Student Success Center, Writing Coach
He reads the title twice.
The blue hyperlink beneath her name glares at him, "Schedule Appointment," written in bold letters.
He leans back slowly.
That would give him time, and a believable reason to actually speak to her.
It would also mean lying.
Not a dramatic lie, nothing world-changing, but still intentional. He would have to fabricate something. Create some fake paper or something of the sort.
He stares at the screen longer than he should.
He could still choose not to do this.
The thought surfaces again, quieter this time but steadier.
He imagines canceling the bet, handing over the thousand dollars, letting the whole thing die before it even starts. He imagines her never knowing, never seeing the look on her face when she realizes she was right to look down on someone like him.
Then he imagines watching her walk past him for the rest of the semester, unaffected. Unimpressed. Untouched.
Something tightens in his jaw.
He tells himself it’s about the money, and nothing else, not his damaged ego or his desire to prove he's worth speaking to, just the thousand dollars he definitely couldn't afford to lose.
