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[haneurin]

— noted.

Husband!James Chao x Wife!Reader

SYNOPSIS: Some marriages don't end with a scream. They end with a light that never got fixed, a mug someone forgot how to ask about, and all the small moments a person learns to carry alone before anyone else even notices something's wrong.

TAGS/WARNING: husband James, married couple angst, second person pov, quiet angst, no happy ending i'm allergic, unrequited effort, one shot, character study, grief, loss of a parent, marriage falling apart, non-linear narrative, bittersweet, healing after heartbreak, therapy mention, hospitalization, yeeeeeet

w.c: 9984 | unedited, based on this request by @andimgoingbackto505

Some people leave all at once. Others leave so slowly you could set a clock to it—one flickering light, one unanswered question, one small moment at a time—until one day the leaving is already finished, and all that's left is the telling.

You've noticed it every morning, that half second stutter right as you flip the switch, like the bulb is deciding whether it's worth it today. You could mention it. It would take four words.

The light's doing that thing again.

But you've done the calculations by now—something you've gotten used to doing for quite some time—and you already know how it goes. He'll say he'll look at it. He won't look at it. In two weeks you'll mention it again, lighter this time, because by then it won't matter, not in the way that gets fixed.

So you don't say anything. You flip the switch twice, out of habit, the way you'd pat down a pocket for keys you already know aren't there.

James is at the table behind you, laptop open, two mugs of tea going cold by his elbow—one for him, one poured out of habit for you, because he still makes tea for both of you most mornings, and you still drink it most mornings, even though you've never once preferred it over coffee. You mentioned that once, early on. He nodded, said he'd remember, and then kept making tea anyway, and at some point it stopped being worth correcting. You used to tease him about the forgetting.

You're going to give yourself a caffeine allergy from sheer abandonment.

He used to laugh at that. You can't remember the last time he laughed at something you said instead of something on his screen.

"Morning," you say, mostly to see if he says it back before you're all the way through the doorway.

"Mm," he says, not looking up.

You used to think mm meant he was thinking. Now you know it just means he heard a sound and produced one back.

You stand there a second longer than the moment requires, watching the top of his head, the way his hair still looks slept-in even after he's showered, and you consider, briefly, asking him something real. What he's reading. Whether he slept well. Whether he remembers what today is, three years to the day since the mug. He wouldn't. You've stopped expecting him to carry dates the way you do.

Your own mug is still full when you set it down in the sink an hour later, untouched, gone cold the way it always does.

The first mug you ever cared about broke on a Wednesday, four months into being someone's wife, in an apartment you hadn't fully unpacked yet.

You sat on the bathroom floor with the pieces of it in your lap. Your college roommate had given it to you the week before your wedding, and months later, doing dishes, you'd found something dumb and sweet written on a sticky note taped to the bottom, something about hoping you'd always have someone to make you tea even on the days you didn't ask for it. You'd laughed reading it. You hadn't cried until it broke. Now the mug was in pieces, and so, a little, was the last physical link to a version of your life before this one, back when your biggest worry most days had been whether you'd graduate on time.

James found you like that. New husband, still learning where you kept things.

"Hey," he said, crouching in the doorway, and for one second you thought he was going to sit down next to you on the tile. You thought he was going to ask what was wrong, really ask.

"It's stupid," you said, already apologizing for taking up space with it. "It's just a mug."

"Yeah." He straightened back up. "I mean—it's a mug. We'll get you a new one."

"It's not about getting a new one."

"Okay." He said it like he was humoring you, kind but slightly puzzled, the way you'd later learn was his default setting for anything that didn't have an obvious fix. "What's it about, then?"

You didn't have the words for it yet, not really, not in a way that would have made sense out loud at four months married. You just shook your head.

"Nothing. Forget it," you said and watched something in his shoulders relax at being let off the hook.

He said it kindly. This would be something you would remember on a later day, turning it over and over—he wasn't unkind. He just didn't understand you weren't crying about the mug itself. You needed him to understand why a broken mug could do that to a person, and to just sit on the floor with you until it stopped, and instead he stood in the doorway with the specific discomfort of someone waiting for permission to leave.

He went to get the broom. He was trying to help. You would spend the next three years trying to explain to yourself why that felt like being told to hurry up.

You picked up the last few shards yourself, careful of the sharp edges, and by the time he came back with the dustpan you'd already swept most of it into a neat little pile, and there was something almost funny about it, in retrospect, the two of you crouched on the tile together finishing a job you'd started alone.

"There," he said, once the floor was clean, brushing his hands off. "All better."

It wasn't. You didn't say so.

You didn't cry about mugs again after that. Not because you got braver. Because you learned, in thirty seconds on a bathroom floor, that some kinds of sad don't get sat with in this house. They get swept up.

You bought a replacement a few days later, something plain from the same store, and James noticed it on the shelf and said, "Oh good, you got a new one," pleased with himself, like the matter had been resolved. You never told him you'd never once used it.

It sat in the cabinet for years, untouched, a stand-in for something that couldn't actually be replaced, and some part of you found a strange, private comfort in that, in having one small object in the apartment that was allowed to just exist without being asked to perform its function.

You've stopped waiting for him to ask if you're okay before you say you are. It saves time. His and yours.

The tea goes cold in the sink the way the coffee used to, back when it was still coffee, back when he still asked what you wanted before he made it.

Your mother called on a Friday to tell you your father was in the hospital, and you don't remember getting to your car. You just remember being in it, hands too tight on the wheel, calling James on speaker because your hands were shaking too hard to hold the phone to your ear.

"Hey, I'm actually about to head into a meeting," he said, and you could hear him already gathering something, papers maybe, the small shuffle of a man mid transition into something else.

"It's my dad." Your voice did something strange on the word dad. "They think it's his heart. I'm driving there now, I don't—James, I don't know what I'm walking into."

A pause. You would replay this pause for the rest of your life, trying to decide how long it actually was versus how long it felt.

"Okay," he said. "Text me updates. I'll come by after, if it's serious, obviously I'll come, just, this meeting's kind of a big one, I can't really—"

"It's fine," you said, because it was faster than making him finish the sentence. "Go to your meeting."

You hung up before he could hear what your voice was about to do.

The waiting room smelled like hand sanitizer and old coffee, the chairs a shade of blue that seemed designed specifically to be forgettable. Your mother was already there, sitting very upright, hands folded so tightly in her lap that her knuckles had gone pale.

"They took him back twenty minutes ago," she said, when you sat down beside her. "Nobody's told me anything since."

You held her hand. She held yours back, hard, and for a while neither of you said anything, just watched the doors that led back to wherever your father was, willing them to open with news that wouldn't undo the rest of your lives.

Your phone buzzed twice with texts from James. How's it looking? Then, twenty minutes later, Sorry, meeting ran long, on my way now. You typed back stable, we're waiting and put the phone face down in your lap, because you didn't have it in you, right then, to manage his guilt on top of your own fear.

A nurse finally came out around nine, told you both your father was stable, that you could see him for a few minutes if you wanted. Your mother went first. You waited another twenty minutes, alone in the blue chair, watching the door, and when it was finally your turn, you found your father sitting up in bed looking smaller than you'd ever seen him, an IV taped to the back of his hand, and he smiled at you like it was any other visit.

"Don't look so worried," he said, voice a little rough. "I'm not going anywhere yet."

"You scared the hell out of me."

"I scared the hell out of myself too, if it helps." He patted the edge of the bed, and you sat, and he held your hand the way he used to when you were small and couldn't sleep, and for a few minutes neither of you said anything at all, and it was, strangely, one of the most peaceful moments of the whole night.

James arrived just as you were leaving your father's room, apologizing before he'd even fully reached you, already explaining the meeting, already reaching for logistics—had you eaten, did you need him to grab your mother's car, should he call ahead to the pharmacy for whatever medication got prescribed. You let him do all of it, grateful, in the moment, for someone to hand the small tasks to, and it wasn't until much later, driving home in separate cars, that you noticed he'd never actually asked you how you were doing, only what needed to be done.

He came by later that night. He was sorry, genuinely, you could see it on him, the particular guilt of a person realizing too late that they picked wrong and couldn't unpick it. He held you and said the right words and you let him, because you needed to be held and you weren't made of stone yet, not this early.

"How's your dad?" he asked, once you'd stopped shaking.

"Stable. They're keeping him overnight for observation. They think it might have been a minor cardiac event, but they won't know for sure until more tests."

"That's good, though. Stable's good."

"Stable's good," you agreed, and didn't say the rest of it, which was that stable had felt like the word people used when they weren't ready to say fine, and you weren't sure yet which one your father actually was.

But something in you noted it down anyway. Noted: when it is actually bad, he will still ask you to wait.

You didn't say any of this out loud. You'd already learned that the things you said out loud in this house got answered with logistics—I'll come by after—instead of what you actually needed, which was just for someone to say go, I'm right behind you, don't do this alone.

You went to the hospital alone. Your father was fine, in the end—stable, a scare and not a goodbye, that time.

You've gotten good at going to things alone. You don't think about it as a skill you had to build until you notice how naturally it comes now, how little it costs you to walk into a room already knowing you might be the only version of yourself in it.

There's a particular version of James that comes out at dinner parties, and you used to love that version. You still do, in the abstract, the way you might love a photograph of someone.

It was his coworker's birthday, a rented-out corner of a restaurant, twelve people and too much wine, and James held court at the far end of the table doing an impression of their boss that had everyone wheezing, while you watched him from four seats down doing something you'd gotten unfortunately good at, which was being fully present in a room while feeling entirely absent from it.

He was warm in a way that reached every person there except you. He asked the guy next to him three follow up questions about a hobby you were fairly sure he didn't care about. He refilled someone's wine before they'd noticed it was low. He remembered, unprompted, that another coworker's dog had surgery the week before, and asked how she was healing. At one point he caught the eye of the waiter and ordered a round of shots for the table without anyone asking, and the whole table cheered his name, and you cheered too, because it was easier than being the only person not smiling.

You tried, once, to insert yourself into the conversation near your end of the table. Someone was talking about a trip to Portugal, and you mentioned you'd always wanted to see Lisbon, and the woman across from you said "oh, you should go, it's beautiful," and then the conversation moved on without you, the way water moves around a stone, not unkindly, just without noticing it was there.

Later, when James got up to use the restroom, you caught his sleeve as he passed behind your chair, a small, instinctive reach, and he paused just long enough to say "you good?" without actually stopping, already halfway to standing, and you said "yeah, fine" to his back, because he was already three steps away by the time you finished the sentence.

You had been standing four feet away from James for the better part of two hours and he had not once asked you a single question.

Later, in the car, you tried to explain this to him and it came out smaller than it was, because it always did. "You were really on tonight," you said, which wasn't what you meant.

"Yeah, Seonghyeon's a good time when he's had a few," James said, still riding the high of the room, still warm from it. "You have fun?"

"Sure," you said, and meant nothing by it, and he didn't hear the nothing, because he never did anymore.

"I feel bad, I didn't really get to talk to you much tonight," he added, almost as an afterthought, eyes on the road. "Next time, remind me to sit closer to you."

"Sure," you said again, and let it go, because you already knew there wouldn't be a next time that looked any different, and pointing that out would only turn a quiet car ride into an argument neither of you had the energy for.

The birthday had been a Friday. You remembered because you spent the drive home trying to figure out if you were being unfair, replaying the night for evidence, looking for the one question he must have asked you that you'd simply missed.

There wasn't one. You checked twice.

You didn't bring it up again after the car. Some part of you had already run the numbers on what bringing it up again would get you, and the answer was always the same shape: a brief, sincere apology, a promise to do better, and then, within a month, the exact same evening at a different restaurant with different people. You'd stopped keeping score out of hope that things would change. You kept it now mostly to prove to yourself, later, that you hadn't imagined any of it.

You've learned to gauge the temperature of a room by how much of James is left over for you once everyone else has had their portion.

The plant on the windowsill had been dying for two weeks and neither of you had said anything about it either.

It was small, this one. You knew that. You'd bought it on a whim from a grocery store checkout line, something green and cheerful for the kitchen, and it did fine for months, and then it didn't, and you'd both just watched it go a little more yellow every few days without either of you doing what would have fixed it, which was simply watering it.

You brought it up once, the way you brought most things up now, sideways, testing the weight of it before committing to the whole sentence.

"The plant's looking rough," you said, rinsing a glass at the sink, not quite looking at him.

"Yeah." James didn't glance up from his phone. "We should probably do something about that."

"We" meant you, and you both knew it, the same way "we should talk about the kitchen light" had meant you, the same way most of the "we"s in this apartment had quietly, over time, come to mean you alone while he kept the pronoun for company.

"I can water it," you said. "I just don't know if it's past the point where watering it does anything."

"Probably not," he said, still to his phone. "Things usually bounce back if you catch them early enough."

You looked at the plant for a second too long. You weren't sure, later, why that particular sentence was the one that stuck. Maybe because it wasn't wrong. Maybe because he said it about a five thousand won grocery store plant with more attention than he'd said anything to you in the better part of a month, and some small, embarrassing part of you had wanted, just once, to be caught early enough too.

"I'll water it tonight," you said, and you did, and it didn't help, because some things you let go too long, and by the time anyone notices, the noticing doesn't undo the neglect. It just names it.

It had still been green the night your father was in the hospital. You remembered watering it once you got home, hands still unsteady, because it felt like the one thing in the apartment you could still keep alive without anyone's help.

James noticed you doing it, that night. He stood in the doorway of the kitchen for a second, watching you tip the little watering can over the leaves with more care than the task probably required, and he didn't ask why you were doing it at eleven at night, didn't ask if you were okay, didn't ask anything at all. He just said, "You're going to overwater it if you're not careful," and went to bed.

You stood there a while longer after he'd gone, watering can still in your hand, listening to the apartment settle into its usual nighttime quiet, and you thought, not for the first time, that you were becoming fluent in a language made entirely of things left unsaid.

You thought about that sentence more than you should have, too. You still don't fully know why. Maybe because it was the only sentence he offered you that whole night that wasn't about logistics, and it had been a warning about a plant instead of a question about you.

You thought about the plant more than you'd like to admit. Not because it mattered. Because it was the last small piece of the apartment still allowed to visibly struggle without either of you needing to explain it, apologize for it, or perform being fine about it for the other person's sake.

You think about the plant sometimes, how you both watched it go quietly yellow for two weeks before either of you said a word, how easy it turned out to be to let something small and dying keep dying just because naming it out loud felt harder than not.

You didn't know yet that you were practicing for something bigger.

The second call came on a Thursday, not a Friday, which felt wrong in a way you couldn't articulate for weeks afterward, like grief should at least have the decency to be consistent about its timing.

You were at your desk when your phone lit up with your mother's name, and something in your chest dropped before you'd even answered, some animal part of you that already knew, the way you sometimes know a room is empty before you've turned the light on.

"Sweetheart." Her voice wasn't panicked this time. It was worse than panicked. It was flat, hollowed out, already past the part where panic would have helped. "It's your dad. It was fast. I need you to come home."

You don't remember standing up from your desk. You remember being in the stairwell, then in your car, then nowhere at all for a while, some stretch of the drive you'd never fully get back, your body doing the driving while the rest of you sat somewhere outside it, waiting to be let back in.

James was already home when you got there, some early meeting having ended, and for one small, terrible moment, relief moved through you before anything else did. He was here. He would know what to do. You wouldn't have to hold this by yourself.

"Hey," he said, at the door, and something in his face told you your mother must have called him too, must have known you wouldn't be able to say the words yourself. "I'm so sorry. I'm so, so sorry."

He pulled you in, and for a few seconds it was almost enough, his arms around you, his chin on the top of your head the way it used to be when things were easier between you, and you let yourself have those few seconds, because you needed them more than you'd needed anything in a long time. You could feel his heart going fast against your ear, faster than yours, and some part of you registered, distantly, that he was scared too, in his own way, and you almost let that be enough.

Then he pulled back.

"Okay," he said, already shifting, already reaching for the version of himself that knew how to manage a situation instead of sit inside one. "Okay. I'm going to call the funeral home your mom mentioned, see what needs to happen first. Do you want me to call your brother, or do you want to?"

"James." Your voice came out smaller than you meant it to.

"I just want to make sure everything's handled," he said, already halfway to the kitchen, phone in hand. "I know you're not going to want to deal with logistics right now, so let me take that off your plate, okay? That's the least I can do."

You stood in the doorway of your own home, coat still on, and watched your husband walk away to make phone calls, and some part of you understood, even through the fog of it, that he genuinely believed this was help. He wasn't wrong that logistics needed handling. He wasn't cruel, standing in the kitchen with the funeral home on hold, reciting your father's full name to a stranger in a calm, competent voice. He was doing the one thing he knew how to do with grief, which was solve it, organize it, get ahead of it before it could get any bigger than it already was.

What he didn't do was ask you to sit down. What he didn't do was ask what you needed, or notice that you were still standing in the doorway in your coat, alone, while he built a to-do list out of your father's death in the next room.

You sat down on the couch by yourself. You cried by yourself, quietly, the specific kind of crying you do when you've learned, without meaning to, that loud grief in this house gets handled instead of held.

The days between the death and the funeral blurred into a single long errand, phone calls and flower arrangements and a suit fitting for James that he handled with the same brisk competence as everything else. You went through your father's closet with your mother one afternoon, and James offered to come, and you told him it was okay, you'd rather it just be the two of you, and he said "of course, whatever you need," and you understood, even as you said it, that this was one more piece of grief he was going to let you carry alone without ever quite calling it that.

The night before the funeral, you sat at the kitchen table trying to write something to say, a few words for the small gathering afterward, and James sat across from you with his laptop, ostensibly working, occasionally glancing over.

"You okay?" he asked, once, around midnight.

"I don't know what to say about him," you said. "There's too much. I don't know how to fit thirty years into three sentences."

"You don't have to say anything if you don't want to."

"I want to. I just don't know how."

He was quiet for a moment. "What was the last thing he taught you? Just start there. Don't worry about the rest."

It was, you'd think later, one of the better things he said to you that whole week, and you almost told him so, almost let it crack something open between you right there at the table. But then his phone buzzed, and he glanced at it, and by the time he looked back up the moment had already folded itself away, and you finished the three sentences on your own.

The funeral was four days later. James wore the dark suit you'd picked out for him and stood beside you at the receiving line, greeting people, thanking them for coming, and he was good at it, warm in that particular way of his, remembering names, asking after people's flights, making the kind of small, gracious conversation that made everyone say afterward what a lovely husband you had, how supportive, how present.

You stood next to him through most of it feeling like a guest at your own father's funeral.

An old coworker of your father's hugged you too long and told a story about a fishing trip you'd never heard before, and you found yourself crying real tears for the first time all day, not because of the grief exactly but because of how much you hadn't known, how much more there apparently was to learn about your father that you'd never get the chance to ask him about now. James squeezed your shoulder from beside you, brief, automatic, and then turned to greet the next person in line.

Your brother found you outside during a lull in the reception, sitting on the curb away from everyone, and sat down next to you without a word, the way siblings do when words aren't really the point.

"You holding up?" he asked, eventually.

"Not really." You looked at your hands. "I keep waiting for it to feel real and it just feels like a very long, very bad day that hasn't ended yet."

"Yeah. That's about right." He bumped his shoulder against yours, the same gesture your father used to do. "James seems to be handling it well, at least. He's been running around all day making sure everything's smooth."

"He's good at that part," you said, and something in your voice must have carried more than you meant it to, because your brother glanced over at you, studying your face for a second.

"You okay? With him, I mean. Not just today."

"I don't know," you admitted, surprising yourself with how easily it came out, out here on a curb, away from everyone. "I don't really know anymore."

He didn't push. He just put an arm around you and let you sit there, quiet, until someone came looking for you both, and you never finished the conversation, but it stayed with you longer than almost anything else from that day, the fact that it had taken your father's funeral for you to say even that much out loud to anyone.

Somewhere near the end of it, an old family friend took both your hands and said how lucky you were, how it must help so much having a husband like that beside you through something like this, and you said thank you, you said yes, you're right, because it was easier than explaining that lucky wasn't the word you'd have chosen, that the version of him everyone else got to see that day wasn't the one you'd been living with in the four days since the phone call, the one who'd handled everything and asked you almost nothing.

That night, back home, the suit hung over the back of a chair and the house was quiet in the specific way houses get after everyone else has gone home and the two people left in it don't know what to say to each other.

"You did really well today," James said, sitting down next to you on the couch, careful, like you might break. "I know that was a lot."

"You handled everything," you said, and you meant it as something closer to an accusation than he seemed to hear it as.

"I wanted you to not have to think about any of it." He reached for your hand. "I know it doesn't fix anything. I just didn't want you carrying that too, on top of everything else."

You looked at him for a long moment, this man who had organized your father's funeral with the same competence he brought to everything else in his life, who had never once, in four days, asked you what your father's laugh had sounded like, or what you missed most already, or whether you wanted to talk about him at all.

"I didn't need you to fix it," you said, quiet, more tired than angry. "I needed you to sit with me in it."

Something in his face shifted, confusion first, then something closer to hurt. "I was there the whole time."

"You were in the room," you said. "That's not the same thing."

"I don't know what that means. I don't know how to be there in some other way that isn't actually being there."

"I know you don't," you said, and that was somehow worse than if he'd argued with you, the honest admission that this wasn't a choice he was making, it was simply the shape of him, and you didn't know what to do with a problem that had no villain in it, only two people standing on opposite sides of a gap neither of them had built on purpose.

He didn't have an answer for that. You didn't either, not really, not one you could say out loud without it turning into a fight neither of you had the strength for that night. So you let it go, the way you'd learned to let most things go in this house, and you sat next to him on the couch in a silence that wasn't peace so much as exhaustion, and somewhere underneath both of those, something in you quietly, permanently, closed a door it would never fully open again.

You start watching him differently after that, quietly, without meaning to. Not for reasons to be angry. For reasons to hope. Some small, stubborn part of you keeps waiting for the moment he finally connects the dots on his own, the way you used to believe he would, back before you'd learned better. 

You weren't supposed to hear any of it.

You'd gone looking for a second bottle of wine in the garage fridge, his mother's house layout still only half familiar to you even after all these years, and the porch door had been left open a crack, his voice and his mother's carrying out into the hallway before you'd realized what you were about to walk into.

Dinner had been ordinary up until then. His mother had made too much food, the way she always did, and James had spent most of the meal telling a long, exaggerated story about a client meeting that had gone sideways, and you'd laughed in the right places and eaten less than you meant to, distracted by something you couldn't quite name yet.

"You've been quiet," his mother was saying, once you'd stepped away to look for the wine. "Ever since the funeral, honestly. You and her both, but you especially."

You stopped where you stood, wine bottle forgotten in your hand.

"I've had a lot going on," James said, and you knew that voice, the flat, closed one he used when he wanted a conversation to end before it had properly started.

"You did everything right, that week," his mother went on. "The calls, the arrangements, all of it. I told everyone how well you handled it."

"I did what needed doing."

"You did." A pause, the clink of a mug being set down. "I just wonder sometimes if she needed you to do something else instead."

"Like what?"

"I don't know. Just be there, maybe. Not manage it. Just be in it with her."

You held your breath without meaning to, some small, foolish hope rising in your chest that you hadn't let yourself feel in months, the hope that he might actually hear it this time, might finally understand what you'd tried to say to him on the couch that you still weren't sure had landed at all.

The silence on the other side of the door went on a beat too long. You thought, for one suspended second, that maybe it had worked, that maybe his mother's voice could do what yours hadn't been able to.

"I was there," James said, finally, quieter than before. "I didn't leave."

"I know you didn't leave," his mother said, gentle now, the way she got when she was trying not to push too hard on something fragile. "That's not always the same as showing up, my boy."

You waited. You wanted so badly for him to say something back, anything that told you the sentence had actually reached him.

"I don't know how to do it the other way," he said, after a moment, and his voice had something rawer in it than you were used to hearing. "I've never known how. When something's broken I fix it. I don't know how to just—sit there and not fix it. It feels like doing nothing. It feels like failing her twice."

"It's not the same as failing her," his mother said. "But I understand why it feels that way to you."

Instead you heard the small electronic buzz of his phone, and his voice, already shifting gears. "Sorry, hold on, I have to get this, it can't wait."

You heard his mother sigh, quiet, the specific sigh of someone who has just watched a door close that she'd hoped might stay open a little longer.

You stood in the hallway a moment longer, wine bottle still in your hand, and then you went back to the kitchen like you hadn't heard any of it, because you didn't know what you would do with your face if you had to sit across from him at dinner having just heard how close he'd come, and how easily a phone had been enough to pull him back from it.

You made it through the rest of the meal on autopilot, laughing when it seemed right to laugh, answering when someone asked you something, and the whole time some part of you kept replaying his voice saying it feels like failing her twice, turning it over, trying to decide if it should have made you feel worse or better, and settling, eventually, on something that was neither.

He never mentioned the conversation to you. You never mentioned that you'd heard it.

It became one more weight you carried alone, filed next to the doorway, next to the couch, next to all the other places where you'd watched him almost arrive somewhere and turn back at the last second, and you stopped, somewhere around then, expecting the next almost to be the one that finally landed.

That hope runs out slowly at first, then all at once, in a moment so small you almost miss its significance while you're standing inside it. 

You dropped a plate on a Sunday afternoon, nothing special about the day, just the two of you home, him at the table with his laptop, you drying dishes at the counter, and it slipped from your hands and shattered against the tile, loud in the quiet apartment, the kind of sound that used to make you flinch even when you weren't the one who'd dropped anything.

James looked up. "You good?"

"Fine," you said, and you crouched down to start gathering the pieces, and you noticed, almost clinically, that your hands weren't shaking. That there was nothing rising in your throat, nothing pressing behind your eyes. Just the plate, in pieces, and you, picking them up, the way you'd pick up anything else that needed picking up.

"Want help?" he asked, already half back to his screen, the question more reflex than offer.

"No, I've got it."

He went back to whatever he was doing. You finished gathering the shards into your palm, careful of the sharp edges, and you carried them to the trash, and it was only standing there, dropping the pieces in one by one, that you realized what was missing.

You thought of the mug, years ago, how you'd sat on the bathroom floor with the broken pieces of it in your lap and cried like the world had ended, how James had gone to get the broom because he hadn't understood there was anything else to get. You thought of how much you'd needed, that day, for someone to ask what the mug meant instead of what needed sweeping.

You finished cleaning up. You started dinner. James said something about work, and you said something back, and the evening moved forward the way evenings do, ordinary, uneventful, nothing to point to, nothing anyone watching would have called an event.

Later, brushing your teeth, you caught yourself in the mirror for a second too long, looking for some sign of what just happened, or didn't happen, and you didn't find one. You just looked like yourself. A little tired, maybe. Otherwise unchanged, at least on the outside, in a way that felt almost like a magic trick, like something enormous had just happened entirely out of view.

You tested it again a few days later, half on purpose, the way you might press on a bruise to check if it still hurts. You let a glass slip at the sink, not quite an accident, and watched it shatter, and felt exactly as little as you had the first time. James didn't even look up from the couch. "You okay?" he called, distracted, and "Fine," you called back, and neither of you moved from where you were standing, and that, more than the glass itself, was the part that stayed with you.

You didn't cry that night. You didn't cry the next time something broke, either, or the time after that, and somewhere in the space where the crying used to live, something quieter and more permanent has taken up residence instead, something that doesn't flinch, doesn't reach, doesn't wait around hoping to be asked what it actually needs.

You'd stopped being surprised by him. More than anything else, that was how you knew something in you had finally, fully changed.

The kitchen light is still flickering when you finally leave.

You'd known for three days that today would be the day, ever since the lawyer's office had called to confirm the paperwork was ready, and you'd spent those three days moving through the apartment like a stranger casing it, noticing things you'd stopped noticing years ago. The chip in the counter from the time you'd dropped a cast iron pan. The height marks penciled on the doorframe from your niece's visits, never painted over. The kitchen light, still flickering, still unfixed.

You'd started packing two nights ago, quietly, while James was asleep, folding things into boxes with the particular efficiency of someone who has rehearsed a version of this moment in her head more times than she'd ever admit out loud. It didn't take long. You were surprised, packing, by how little of the apartment actually felt like yours to take.

You notice the flickering light again this morning, packing the last box, the half second stutter every time you walk past the switch, and you think, distantly, that you should probably mention it to whoever buys the place next, save them the two years it took you to stop bothering to ask.

It isn't a big morning. That's the part you'll turn over later, if you let yourself, though mostly you don't. There's no fight loud enough to remember, no single sentence you could point to as the one that ended it. James is at the table, laptop open, tea going cold at his elbow—same as always—and you're standing in the doorway with your coat already on, saying the words you've been carrying around for three days, since you finally admitted to yourself that you'd already decided.

"I'm leaving."

He looks up. It takes him a second to understand you don't mean for the day.

"What?"

"I'm leaving," you say again, and your voice doesn't shake, and you notice that, too, filed away with everything else you've stopped reacting to. "I already talked to a lawyer. I have a place. I didn't want to do this without telling you first, so. I'm telling you first."

He stands up so fast the chair scrapes against the floor, loud in the quiet kitchen. "Wait. Wait, hold on. What's going on? Did something happen? Did I do something?"

"No," you say. "Nothing happened. That's kind of the whole point, James. Nothing's happened in a long time. Nothing keeps happening, over and over, for years."

"I don't—" He runs a hand through his hair, the gesture he makes when he's trying to think faster than he's able to. "We're fine. We've been fine. Haven't we been fine?"

"We've been fine," you agree, and you almost smile, except it doesn't reach anywhere close to your eyes. "That's sort of the problem, James. Fine is all we've been in a long time."

"I don't understand."

"I know." You say it gently, because there's no version of this that isn't at least a little bit true. "I don't think you're ever going to understand, and I've spent a long time being angry about that, and I'm just—I'm tired now. I'm not angry anymore. I just don't want to keep doing this."

"So talk to me. Tell me what it is. I'll fix it." He's moving toward you now, hands out like he's trying to catch something falling. "Whatever it is, just tell me and I'll fix it."

"There's no fixing this one," you say, and something in your chest aches at how easily it comes out, how many years you spent unable to say this sentence and how simple it feels now. "You can't fix this. I don't think you've ever been able to, and I think some part of me has known that for a long time and just didn't want it to be true."

He crosses the kitchen, reaches for your hand the way he used to on the bathroom floor, on the cold tile, in every hard moment that used to end with the two of you closer instead of further apart. "I'm not ready to lose you."

You look at his hand around yours for a long moment before you answer.

"You said that to me once before," you say. "A long time ago. Different circumstances. I believed you then."

"I mean it now too."

"I know you do." And you do know it—it's the strange, quiet grief underneath all of this, that you have never once doubted he loves you, not really, not even standing here with a bag by the door. "That was never the problem. You loved me. I don't think you ever stopped."

"Then why—"

"Because loving someone isn't the same as showing up for them," you say, and something crosses his face, quick and startled, like he's heard those words somewhere before and can't place where. "You were never unkind to me, James. I want you to know I know that. You just weren't ever really there. Not when it counted. Not in the ways I needed. And I kept waiting for you to notice, and then I stopped waiting, and I don't think I even noticed when I stopped."

He's quiet for a long moment, jaw working the way it always does before his mouth catches up.

"Give me examples," he says, finally, and there's something almost desperate in it. "Real ones. Tell me the moments. I want to know exactly where I failed you, I want—I want the list."

"I don't want to give you a list, James. I've spent years quietly keeping one for myself, and I'm not going to hand it over now like a final exam you can study for and pass. That's not what this is."

"That's not fair. How am I supposed to fix something if I don't even know what it is?"

"Maybe that's the answer," you say, quieter now. "Maybe if I have to hand you a list before you can see it, it was never really seeing at all. It was just me, translating myself for you, over and over, for ten years, and I don't have anything left to translate with."

He flinches at that, small and visible, like the words landed somewhere real for once.

"Then what do you want from me?" he asks.

"Nothing." You say it as gently as you can, because it's the truest and hardest thing you've said all morning. "I don't want anything from you anymore. That's what I'm telling you. I've spent years wanting things from you that you were never going to be able to give me, and I'm tired of wanting. I'd rather just stop."

"I can change," he says, quieter now, some of the fight going out of him. "Tell me what to do differently. I'll do it. Whatever it is."

"I believe you'd try." You squeeze his hand once, the last time you'll let yourself do that, and then you let go. "But I don't think you can want to change something you never fully understood was broken. And I don't have it in me to keep explaining it. I've been explaining it for years, James, in a hundred small ways you never quite heard. I'm done explaining."

"So that's it? Ten years, and that's it, you just—leave?"

"That's it," you say, and it costs you more than your voice lets on. "I loved you for ten years. I'm not saying that to be cruel, I'm saying it because it's true, and I think it's the truest thing I can leave you with. I loved you the whole way through this. I just can't keep doing it the way it's been."

You pick up your bag. He doesn't stop you, not because he doesn't want to, you can see that he wants to, desperately, but because some part of him already knows, the way you did, that there's nothing left to say that would actually change the shape of this morning.

At the door, you pause, the way you always do, checking without meaning to that everything's where it should be.

"The light in the kitchen still flickers," you say. "It has for two years. I never told you because I already knew how it would go."

"I would have fixed it," he says, quiet, and you can hear that he means it, that in this one small moment he actually believes it.

"I know," you say. "That was never really about the light."

He follows you to the top of the stairs, doesn't say anything else, just watches you go, and you can feel his eyes on your back the whole way down, and you don't turn around, because you know if you do, some part of you might not make it the rest of the way to the car.

You sit in the driver's seat for a long moment before you turn the key, hands on the wheel, looking up at the window of the apartment you'd shared for ten years, half expecting to see him there, and he isn't, and something about that is its own small, quiet grief, that even now, at the very end, he isn't watching you leave.

You close the door behind you gently. Some part of you, even now, doesn't want to make it a bigger sound than it needs to be.

He stands in the kitchen for a long time after the door shuts—not moving, the tea gone fully cold now, the light stuttering on and off above him like it's trying to get his attention one last time.

He goes to fix it that same afternoon: climbs onto a chair, unscrews the old bulb, replaces it with a new one. The kitchen holds steady and bright for the first time in two years, and he stands there under it for a long moment, feeling neither relief nor grief but some third, unnamed weight, watching a small broken fixture finally get fixed one day too late to matter to the only person who'd ever needed it fixed.

His mother comes by two weeks later, lets herself in with the spare key she's had since the wedding, and finds him sitting at the kitchen table with the laptop closed for once, doing nothing, which she tells him later frightened her more than anything he could have said.

"You have to eat something," she says, opening the fridge to a depressing collection of condiments and little else.

"I'm not hungry."

"I didn't ask if you were hungry." She starts pulling things from her bag, groceries she'd clearly brought with her, anticipating exactly this. "You're going to eat something anyway."

He watches her move around the kitchen, the same kitchen where she'd told him, months ago, on a porch he wasn't sitting on right now, that being there wasn't the same as showing up. He thinks about telling her he understands now, that he's spent two weeks understanding it over and over, in new and worse ways every day, and decides against it, because saying it out loud would mean admitting how long it took.

"She's not coming back, is she," he says instead, not really a question.

His mother pauses at the stove, doesn't turn around. "I don't know, sweetheart. I don't think that's really the question you should be asking yourself right now."

"Then what should I be asking?"

"Whether you understand why she left. Not whether she's coming back. Whether you actually understand it." She looks at him then, and there's no judgment in it, just a tired kind of love. "Because if you don't, even if she did come back, you'd end up right back here eventually. And I don't think either of you could survive that twice."

He doesn't have an answer for that either. She lets him not have one, sets a plate in front of him, and sits with him while he eats it, mostly in silence, and it's the first time in two weeks he's felt like someone was actually in the room with him instead of just present in it, and the irony of that isn't lost on him, even as tired as he is.

He finds the mug three weeks later, at the back of a cabinet he almost never opens, wrapped in a dish towel like someone had meant to protect it. Not the one that broke, all those years ago—a different one, newer, the replacement he'd bought the same week, the one he doesn't remember you ever actually using.

He turns it over in his hands for a long time. He thinks about a bathroom floor in an apartment they don't live in anymore, about crouching in a doorway instead of sitting down on the tile, about all the small doorways he'd stood in over the years instead of stepping all the way through.

He tries, that night, to write you a letter, though he isn't sure that's really the right word for it, only that he has more to say than he has anywhere left to say it. He gets four sentences in before he deletes all of it, because everything he writes sounds like an argument for why you should come back, and somewhere in the last three weeks he's started to understand that isn't actually what this is supposed to be about.

He doesn't find your handwriting again until months later, packing away what's left of the closet you never fully emptied—a spiral notebook wedged behind a shoebox of shoes you must have decided, in the rush of leaving, weren't worth taking.

He almost doesn't open it. Some small, worn-out respect for your privacy nearly wins out, nearly sends it straight into a donation box unread. But he opens it anyway, sitting on the closet floor in a room that still half smells like you, and finds pages of short, unsigned lines, dated only by year, sometimes not even that. Not letters. Not quite a journal either, not in the way he understands the word. Just observations, brief and unaddressed, like you'd been keeping a private ledger nobody was ever meant to read.

Noted: when it is actually bad, he will still ask you to wait.

He reads that line four times before he understands it's about him. Before he places it, faintly, distantly, to a Friday years ago, a hospital hallway, a phone call he'd once asked you to postpone. He hadn't thought about that day in years. You, apparently, never stopped.

He keeps reading, even though every page costs him something. Noted: warm to everyone in the room but me. Noted: he fixes things instead of feeling them. Noted: I stopped waiting for him to notice, and I don't know when that happened, only that it did. Some entries are longer, a few lines instead of one, small scenes he half remembers and half doesn't, a version of his own marriage rendered in handwriting he'd know anywhere, unsparing and strangely gentle at the same time, like you'd been trying, even in private, not to make him more of a villain than he actually was.

There are dozens more, spread across what he now understands was the length of the entire marriage, small and precise and unnervingly calm, like you'd trained yourself to record without feeling, the same way you'd eventually trained yourself not to cry over broken plates. He recognizes some of the moments immediately. Others he doesn't recognize at all, which unsettles him more than the ones he does, the possibility that whole evenings had mattered enough for you to write down and not enough for him to remember.

Near the back, the entries thin out, and the last one is dated only a few weeks before you left, three lines instead of one.

I don't think he's ever going to understand. I used to think that was a tragedy. Now I think it's just a fact, and facts don't need me to be angry at them anymore, they just need me to stop waiting for them to change.

He sits on the closet floor for a long time after that, notebook open in his lap, reading his own marriage back to him in your handwriting, understanding, far too late for the understanding to be of any use, exactly how long you'd been keeping score, and how quietly, and how alone.

He doesn't cry, not right away. That comes later, alone, in a kitchen that is finally, uselessly, bright.

In the weeks after, he starts doing something he's never done before, which is sit. No laptop, no phone, no problem to organize. He sits on the couch some evenings and does nothing at all, just lets whatever he's feeling exist in the room with him instead of immediately reaching for a way to manage it, and it's harder than almost anything he's ever made himself do, and he thinks, more than once, that you would have found that almost funny, how long it took him, how simple it should have been.

He runs into a mutual friend at a coffee shop, months later, who asks carefully how he's doing, the way people do when they already know the answer isn't good. He tells her the truth, mostly, that he's doing the work, that he sees someone now, a therapist, twice a week, that he's trying to understand the shape of what he did wrong instead of just apologizing for it in the abstract. She tells him, gently, that she's glad, and that she hopes it helps, and something in her tone tells him she isn't sure it changes anything for you, and he understands that, and doesn't ask.

His therapist asks him, in one of their early sessions, to describe a moment when he knew something was wrong and did nothing about it. He starts with something small, safe, a work example, and she waits him out, patient, until eventually he tells her about the couch, the night of the funeral, you were in the room, that's not the same thing, and how he still, sitting here months later, doesn't fully understand what you meant.

"What do you think she meant?" his therapist asks.

"That being present isn't the same as being available," he says, slowly, working it out as he says it. "That you can be in a room with someone and still leave them completely alone in it."

"Do you believe that's true?"

He's quiet for a long moment. "I think I'm starting to."

"What would it have looked like," she asks, "to actually be available, that night?"

He doesn't have an answer, not right away, and he tells her so, and she tells him that not having the answer yet is fine, that recognizing the question is most of the work. He leaves that session feeling worse than he has in weeks, and also, somehow, like he's finally moving instead of standing still.

He sets the mug down on the counter and doesn't put it away again. The notebook goes on the shelf beside it, closed, not hidden. He leaves them both there for a long time, small and ordinary, sitting out in the light, questions he never got to ask in time, still waiting, the way some questions do, for an answer that was never going to come.

Some mornings, still, out of habit, he starts to make two cups of tea before he remembers there's only him now. He stands in the kitchen holding a mug he doesn't need, in a room that is finally, permanently bright, understanding, at last, exactly what it took to get here, and exactly how much of it he can never give back.

“Some things don't break all at once. They just go unfixed long enough to stop mattering.”

masterlist

© haneurin. All Rights Reserved.

Please do not copy, repost, translate, adapt, or claim this work as your own.

This story is a personal creative project and may not be re-uploaded to any platform without permission.

[toomanyfanficrecs]

HSAKJSWKJASKJSAK cried my way through this OMFG so good 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖

okay bye guys, read this SMASHIING piece of work that should be in the louvre, i stand by my view on this, holy mary mother of christ i hope that i never get divorced bahaha

love you lots bye xx

[hybridlungs]

LOVE ON THE GRAM

Running your uni's confession Instagram account is pretty funny most of the time, but some of the submissions are sounding more and more like they're talking about you...?

keonho x fem!reader. 1.9k words. fluff. crack (?). sort of smau.

notes: shout out to all the confession accounts out there i love you. this may be my greatest fic ever

The bus rattles and shakes violently as you furiously scan through the list of Google form submissions for your anonymous student Instagram account. It's been about four whole weeks and they still haven't gotten around to fixing the suspension. One slight incline feels like a huge speed bump. Or maybe more like three speed bumps. One after the other.

In fact, the start of some hill almost causes you to crash face-first into the back of the head of the guy in front of you. Considering he's here on about 70% of your bus rides to and from uni, that would be a genuinely horrifying scenario. At least it would make for a good post. “Today I permanently embarrassed myself in front of a really cute boy” sounds vague enough for someone to read it and not realise it's him. 

You immediately then think about how much more embarrassing it would be to post something about yourself on your own Instagram page. Sobered, you go back to parsing through messages like “hiiii someone pls go out w me?” and “Fuck Prof Jeon this guy can't do anything”. There are about five different Professor Jeons they could be talking about, but hey. You still affirm their complaints. 

The next stop is yours, and you reach out to hit the stop button, careful to avoid the thick dark hair of bus boy. Unfortunately, he seems to sense your movement and stiffens up considerably. Awkward. You pretend nothing happened and stare out the window until the bus grinds to a wobbly halt.

When you hop off the bus and pass bus boy as you always do, you can feel eyes observing your every move.

—

It’s 7:30 in the morning. You have to fight the brain fog especially hard today when your bus trundles up to your stop. Who the hell came up with early lectures? Who the hell even gave you an early lecture? You genuinely consider quitting uni, but think better of yourself.

The bus is especially busy today, which is kind of unheard of on a Wednesday morning. Thankfully, there’s still some seats left, and you opt to take a further one near the back of the bus, flopping very unceremoniously down. Your back kind of hurts, but whatever. Your head kind of hurts, and this doesn’t really count as a whatever, so you decide to save your scrolling time for later and zone out instead.

Intense jolting and tottering signals that the bus is about to stop. When you look up, you realise it’s not bus boy’s stop, but he’s waiting, rugged up in a thick black puffer jacket, behind an elderly couple. You smile briefly. Yeah, you really shouldn’t have expected anything more stylish from him.

You turn away and absentmindedly observe the nice brick facade of this one neighbouring house. Apparently ‘absentmindedly’ undersells how much you were focusing, because you almost jump out of your skin when a mild voice addresses you.

“Um… is this seat free, or…?”

It’s bus boy, and it’s the first time you’ve heard him speak before. It’s a fittingly cute voice.

“Sure,” you tell him, shuffling your stuff over, and he awkwardly plonks down next to you. His huge ass jacket means your arms are touching. You decide not to think more about it for your own sake.

The bus ride feels like it’s moving at 0.75x speed today. His measured breaths have never been so acutely noticeable to you before. The way he fidgets at the cuffs of his puffer takes up about 40% of your active thinking space. Not to mention how he’s got his knees neatly pressed together so that he’s not manspreading into your space…

You close your eyes to clear your head of these thoughts. No way will you let yourself be swayed by this guy so easily. And then you open your eyes again, because yikes, the next stop is yours.

“Excuse me, I’m getting off here,” you politely tell him, gathering your items together.

He stares almost a little blankly at you with huge, doe-like eyes. No movement. Um.

“Are you going to move…?”

Even more silence. You’re running out of time now.

“I have to leave. Sorry.” 

After he still doesn’t even twitch, you reach out to hit the stop button, which is coincidentally very close to his face. That probably scares him enough into action.

“Oh my god. I’m sorry I’m so sorry,” he manages to get out, frantically jumping out of his seat. Unfortunately, he manages to drop his phone in the process and has to perform the Retrieval of Shame, which just intensifies the burning red of his ears. 

Oooooookay then. The bus stops, you get off, and make tracks for the right lecture hall. If he wasn’t cute, you’d be pissed, but he’s forgiven. For now, anyway.

—

This morning, bus boy isn’t on the bus. It makes for a significantly less interesting bus ride, to say the very least. What’s exciting though is the fact that today is the one point in your timetable where you and your best friend Stella have aligned midday breaks, so you can go out to eat lunch together. It’s probably the only thing that powers you through the droning of this assistant lecturer. 

As soon as it’s over, though, you shove your stuff into your bag at record speeds before getting out of the building. You end up hitting the optimal racing line as you speedwalk to the food court, where Stella is already waiting for you at a table.

“Hi!” she excitedly says, as if this is the first time talking to you in years and you two actually hadn’t messaged each other for the entirety of yesterday evening. 

“Hi,” you equally excitedly respond. “What do you want to get?”

“I’m feeling like some kimbap,” she decides.

“Sounds good,” you agreeably tell her, and you two accordingly head over to the right storefront. You’re squinting at some spam, egg, and carrot kimbap when Stella gently nudges you.

“Um,” Stella says, “do you… like… know the guys sitting in the booth over there? They’re looking at you.”

You covertly scan your peripheral vision. It’s bus boy and who you assume to be his posse of friends, who probably realised Stella caught onto them, because they’re looking in the complete opposite direction like they think they’re being inconspicuous. 

“Yeah, the guy on the far right takes my bus,” you inform her slowly. “Well. Anyways. Kimbap?”

“Kimbap,” Stella confirms, and you two get lunch pretending you witnessed nothing and no one is staring at you. By the time you turn around, they’re gone anyway.

—

Great weather today. Your fingers would genuinely be falling off by now if not for this handwarmer you had the tact to bring. Every breath you let out swirls around you in a cloud of thick mist. Maybe the bus will be a little warmer…!

When you get on, though, it is definitely not any warmer – in fact, it might even be colder. You sadly assume your usual spot behind bus boy, who for some reason, is only wearing a T-shirt and paying the consequences for it. His teeth are clattering, his arms are folded together in some attempt to retain warmth, and he has this one crumpled tissue that he occasionally has to rub his running rose on. If you’re miserable, he’s probably ten times more miserable than you.

It’s made worse by the fact the bus takes a wrong turn at the big intersection, which extends your trip by around five or so minutes. Bus boy sniffles tragically like a damsel in distress. By the time your stop rolls around, you’re feeling bad enough for him that when you get up to leave, you hold out your handwarmer to him. He looks at it dumbfoundedly. 

“It’s for you,” you clarify. Maybe it’ll stop him from freezing into an ice cube.

He takes it with no small amount of joyful shock. “Thank you so much.”

You nod and hop off the bus. Today, you might actually be late for your lecture, but it’s late enough into the week for you not to care about running.

—

You stretch out your fingers as you upload today’s posts at the bus stop near campus. The boyfriend’s roommate one definitely made you laugh a bit. Horrifying. The last one, though- Hold on. Wait a second. You suddenly realise how… familiar it is. Handwarmer? Didn’t you do that? This feels mildly suspicious.

Whatever. You chalk it up to coincidence, because lots of people share handwarmers around, and the bus is here anyway, so you don’t really have much room for concern. Clearly now is the time when most students are leaving, because this stop alone fills up the majority of the bus. You’ve got a seat though, so no complaints from you.

You continue looking through your submissions for another post. “to the boy in my music comp class plz never cut ur luscious hair” sounds like a good one. You’re about to copy it into Canva when the bus stops to pick up a lone new passenger, who ends up being bus boy.

The only seat left now is the one next to you. He doesn’t even need to ask anymore. You put your stuff on your lap and he obligingly sits down. Uncaringly, you continue your task at hand, editing the post number and replacing the text inside. It’s fun work. Bus boy also seems to think so, because he starts craning his head to look at your phone. Okay then.

Once he gets a good look at your screen though, he immediately recoils, head slamming into a metal pole. It rings out like a bell of doom. Holy shit. It says a lot about everyone else’s emotional state when they just look away tiredly.

“Are you okay?” you ask, mouth agape.

He doesn’t care for your concern or for his head, instead horrifiedly staring at you dead in the eyes. “YOU run the confessions account?!”

“Um, yeah? Please keep it down though,” you tell him.

“Oh my god I’ve been confessing my love for you,” he genuinely freaks out. “I didn’t realise it was you I’m sorry!!!”

So you weren’t going crazy. “Hey, you’re fine. I think you’re cute.”

“YOU THINK I’M CUTE?????” He’s even more distressed now. Some really nasty looks are going in his direction now. What’ll more of them do to him? 

“Yeah. Wanna exchange numbers?”

“EXCHANGE NUMBERS?” He fumbles with his phone, unlocks it, and immediately puts it in your hands like you’re going to change your mind.

You pass your phone over, which he holds as if it’s some kind of sacred object, and tell him your name. He repeats it slowly like he’s engraving it onto his soul.

“I’m Keonho. Ahn Keonho,” he supplies as you finish typing your number into his contacts and switch phones back with him.

“Thanks Keonho,” you tell him, and he almost giggles a bit at the sound of his name. “This is my stop, by the way.”

“I know,” he gravely replies before thinking about what he just said. “Wait but like in a totally normal cool way!!!”

You laugh at him as you stand up. “See you tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” he says, a little entranced, maybe even a little hopefully. “Tomorrow.”

The bus door neatly closes behind you. You smile to yourself the whole way home. And really, no one'll know if you spend the afternoon refreshing your Google Form just for one special submission.

—

extras:

[toomanyfanficrecs]

how late can I be to the Cortis one-year-anniversary thingy that I made 🥲 I need to js reblog immediately instead of commenting wtf 😭

I REMEMBER READING THIS Y'ALL 😭😭 it was so funny 😭😭 SO CUTE 😭😭 concept is peak but the writing is peaker 😭😭💕

we've got a uni confessions account too 😭 and I've always wondered if someone's ever accidentally spoken about the person running it 😭

Anywho, banger of a fic guys, everyone get on the train asap, don't even check if you have a ticket 🙏 mama don't stop writing 💖💖

(I'm saying this as someone who doesn't really read keonho fics, okay guys, trust me here)

Okay love you byeeeee xx

[octoberdeaths]

ONE LAST CALL

Pairing : James Chao x f reader!

Warning : emotional manipulation, deception/catfishing, relationship insecurity, jealousy and possessiveness, emotional cheating/blurred boundaries, betrayal, breakup, intense angst, vulnerable conversations, heartbreak, toxic relationship dynamics, mentions of mental/emotional distress. Synopsis : The first thing you learned about loyalty tests was that nobody ever came to you because they were happy. They came when something already felt wrong. A girlfriend would send you a username at two in the morning with a paragraph explaining how her boyfriend had been acting strange, how he followed a new girl, how he stopped saying goodnight, how he suddenly started taking longer to reply. Sometimes they had proof. Most of the time, they had nothing except a feeling sitting painfully in the back of their throat.

© octoberdeaths 2026

Your job was simple. Make a fake account, make yourself interesting, flirt just enough, and see what happened. You had become good at it. Almost too good. You knew exactly how to make someone curious without appearing desperate, how to compliment without making it obvious, how to give a guy every possible opportunity to cross a line and then sit back and watch whether he did.

You never thought much about the people behind the usernames. That was probably the only way you could do the job. They were names on a screen, faces on profiles, strangers whose relationships existed outside your life. If they passed the test, you sent the girl screenshots and wished them both well. If they failed, you sent the screenshots anyway. You never involved yourself beyond that. You didn't judge. You didn't comfort. You didn't care.

At least, that was what you told yourself.

The request that came through on a rainy Thursday evening looked exactly like every other one. A girl named Annia had filled out the form, attached her boyfriend's Instagram username, and written a long explanation about how she thought he was losing interest in her. You almost skipped over it because the words were familiar enough to blur together. He had been distant. He was online but didn't answer her. He had started spending more time with his friends. He didn't seem excited when she called. She was convinced there was another girl.

You opened his profile.

@ James Chao.

He was damn handsome, and that was the first thing that caught your attention. His jaw was sharp enough, too clean and defined beneath the soft shadows of his face, like one wrong move and it could cut your entire bloodline’s throat. His nose was straight and sharp, perfectly balanced against his features, while his dark, slightly narrowed eyes carried this naturally intimidating look that somehow made it impossible to look away. There was a handful of pictures with friends, some stupidly blurry photos, a couple of pictures from places he'd visited, and one recent photograph that Annia had probably taken because she was tagged in it. He looked normal. Maybe a little tired. There was nothing suspicious.

You scrolled through their interactions. Annia had commented on nearly everything. Sometimes twice when he hadn't replied. She liked every post within minutes. At first, you thought it was cute.

Then you noticed the comments.

"Who is she?"

"Why are you following her?"

"You didn't tell me you were going there."

"Why didn't you answer me when you were online?"

You kept scrolling.

There was nothing from James that looked like cheating. If anything, his replies looked exhausted. He reassured her constantly. He explained where he was. He apologized when he didn't answer quickly enough. He even seemed to avoid interacting with other girls entirely, probably because he knew it would turn into another argument.

You frowned at your phone.

The request suddenly felt less straightforward.

Annia had written, I just know he's interested in someone else.

But you couldn't find anyone.

Still, a test was a test.

You created the account that night.

A fake name. A few stolen-looking aesthetic pictures that didn't belong to anyone you knew personally but not really showing face properly either. Nothing too perfect. You made her believable. Twenty-one, university student, slightly shy, interested in music and photography. You gave her enough personality to seem real without making her suspiciously fascinating.

Then you followed James. You expected him to follow back. He didn't. That was fine. You waited two days before liking one of his posts.

Nothing. Another day. Another like. Still nothing.

You almost laughed when you realized you were actually being ignored by the man you were supposed to test.

So you finally sent him a message.

"hey, sorry if this is random 😭 I think I've seen you around before?"

You stared at the screen after sending it, already knowing he probably wouldn't answer.

Three hours passed.

Then your phone buzzed.

"Maybe? Where?"

You smiled despite yourself.

"I'm not sure, that's why I asked lol. You just looked familiar."

His reply came a few minutes later.

"Fair enough. What's your name?"

You told him the fake name. Aeri.

He told you his.

As if you didn't already know.

The conversation was painfully ordinary at first. Where he lived. What he studied. What music he liked. You asked questions because that was what you were supposed to do, and he answered because he seemed naturally polite. You flirted lightly, just enough to test the waters.

He didn't flirt back. When you complimented his picture, he thanked you. When you told him he was cute, he responded with a laughing emoji and changed the subject. When you asked if he was single, there was a pause. Then he said, "I'm seeing someone."

No hesitation. No coyness. No it's complicated.

You should have ended the test right there.

Instead, you asked, "Oh, sorry. I didn't know."

"It's okay. You couldn't have known."

The next morning, you woke up to a message from him.

"Hope you have a good day."

You stared at it for a long time. It was nothing. It meant nothing. He was simply being nice. You reminded yourself of that as you replied.

"you too :)"

You didn't know then that this was how it would start. It started with him being lonely. And you being the first person in a long time who didn't make him feel guilty for admitting it.

Over the next few weeks, the conversations became routine. James would message you after class. Sometimes he'd send you a song he'd been listening to. Sometimes you'd wake up to a picture of his terrible breakfast with a caption complaining that he couldn't cook. You learned that he hated being asked what was wrong because he usually didn't know how to explain it. You learned that when he was stressed, he became quieter rather than angrier. You learned that he apologized too much.

You also learned about Annia. He brought her up himself. "She got mad at me again today." You stared at the message. "What happened?" There was a long pause. "Nothing, really. That's the problem."

He explained that he'd been studying with a group of friends. One of them happened to be a girl he'd known for years. Annia had seen a picture someone posted and spent the entire night asking him why he was sitting beside her.

"I told her nothing happened. It never does. I don't even talk to other girls like that because I know she'll get upset."

You didn't know what to say. This wasn't what you had expected. You were supposed to find evidence that James was unhappy because he had feelings for someone else. Instead, you were watching a boy slowly become tired of having to prove he wasn't doing anything wrong.

"Do you still love her?" you asked eventually. The typing bubble appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again. "Yeah."

Then another message. "I think I do." You swallowed.

"Then why does it sound like you're unhappy?" This time, his answer came quickly. "Because loving someone doesn't mean everything feels good all the time."

There was something painfully vulnerable about how he said that. He wasn't blaming her. He wasn't calling her crazy. He wasn't pretending he was perfect. He simply sounded tired.

"I just wish she trusted me," he added. You looked down at your phone. And for the first time since you started the account, you felt guilty. James had done anything wrong. Because you were sitting there pretending to be someone else while he was telling you the truth.

You could have sent Annia the screenshots and told her that her boyfriend was loyal. You could have deleted the account. You could have blocked James and walked away.

Instead, you typed, "You deserve to be trusted."

James didn't reply immediately. When he finally did, it was only four words.

"I like talking to you."

Your heart sank. You liked talking to him too.

And that was the first moment you realized the test wasn't going the way it was supposed to.

You were supposed to be testing James.

You definitely weren't supposed to wonder what his voice sounded like when he was tired, or what he'd look like if he were sitting across from you instead of existing behind a profile.

And the worst part was that James still hadn't crossed the line. Every time you gave him an opportunity, he stepped back. Every time you flirted too much, he reminded you that he had a girlfriend. He was loyal.

He had always been loyal.

And somehow, that made falling for him hurt even more. You couldn't even convince yourself that you were falling for some horrible guy who deserved to have his relationship ruined.

You were falling for someone who was trying desperately to do the right thing. And he didn't even know the person he was getting attached to didn't exist.

You started pulling back after that, or at least you tried to. You answered later. You stopped initiating conversations. You left some of his messages sitting there for an hour, then two, pretending you had a life outside of the little screen where he'd somehow become important. It should have been easy. You had ended conversations with strangers before without thinking twice. You had deleted fake accounts, blocked people, wiped entire message histories and never looked back. But with James, every time you tried to create distance, you found yourself staring at his last message and wondering whether he'd noticed. Eventually, he did. "Did I do something?"

You were sitting on your bed when the message came through, knees pulled against your chest, phone resting loosely in your hand. You stared at it until the screen dimmed. "No. Why?" His reply was immediate.

"You've been quiet." You swallowed. "Just busy."

That single word shouldn't have made you feel anything. It did.

You typed a longer explanation and deleted it. Then another. Deleted that too. Finally, you sent, "Sorry. I didn't mean to make you worry." The typing bubble appeared almost instantly.

"You don't have to apologize." You smiled faintly.

Then another message appeared. "I just got used to talking to you." Your chest tightened.

You hated how honest he was. Not because it made him easier to manipulate, but because it made everything harder. James wasn't trying to replace Annia. He wasn't looking for an excuse to cheat. He wasn't secretly waiting for another girl to come along. He was simply lonely, and somehow you'd become a place where he could breathe. And you had no right to be that place. Still, you kept talking.

Maybe that was selfish. Maybe it was worse than selfish. You knew exactly why he was talking to you, even if he didn't know who you were. He felt understood. He felt safe. He could say things without immediately having to defend himself, and you liked being the person who made him feel that way.

One night, he called you. Not a video call. Just audio.

You stared at the incoming call until your hands started sweating. You'd never heard his voice before. For a second, you considered letting it ring out. Then you answered. "Hello?" His voice was softer than you'd imagined. "Hey." You smiled before you could stop yourself. "Hi." There was a small silence, the kind that felt awkward only because neither of you knew what to do with it.

"I don't know why I called," he admitted with a quiet laugh. "I just didn't feel like texting."

"It's okay."

"You sound nervous."

"I'm not."

You laughed under your breath. "Maybe a little."

He laughed too.

And somehow, hearing it through your phone made everything worse.

The conversation lasted nearly an hour. He talked about his day. You listened. He complained about Annia, then immediately felt guilty for doing so. He told you he didn't want you thinking badly of her.

"She's not a bad person," he said quietly. "She's just scared."

You looked down at your blanket.

"Scared of what?"

"Losing me, I guess."

"That's the thing," he continued. "I understand it. I really do. But sometimes I feel like I'm being punished for things I haven't even done."

Something in his voice cracked slightly on the last word. You went quiet.

"James?"

"Yeah?"

"Are you okay?"

He breathed out slowly.

"Yeah. Sorry."

"You don't have to say sorry."

"I don't know why I tell you all this."

"Maybe because you trust me."

He was quiet for so long that you thought the call had disconnected.

Then, almost too softly to hear, he said, "Yeah. I think I do."

You closed your eyes. The guilt was becoming unbearable.

After the call ended, you sat in the dark with your phone still against your ear. You thought about Annia. You thought about James. You thought about the fake girl whose name he had been saying with a smile.

Then you opened the loyalty-test account and looked at the profile. It suddenly felt disgusting. You had created a person who didn't exist, and James was slowly giving that person pieces of himself. You couldn't tell him the truth. You didn't even know what the truth was anymore.

A few days later, Annia messaged you.

"Anything?"

You stared at the message.

You had enough screenshots to prove James was loyal. More than enough.

"No. He's not cheating."

She replied almost immediately.

"Are you sure?"

You hesitated.

"Yes."

"Did he flirt?"

Your fingers hovered over the keyboard.

"Not really."

That was the truth.

"What do you mean not really?"

You sighed.

"He knows I'm interested, but he keeps reminding me that he's with someone."

There was a long pause.

"So he's losing interest in me."

You frowned.

"No. That's not what I said."

"Then why is he talking to you?"

You didn't have an answer you could give her. Because the real answer was that James wasn't looking for another girl. He was looking for somewhere he could feel understood. And you'd accidentally become that somewhere.

That night, James messaged you again.

"Can I ask you something?"

"Sure."

"Do you think I'm a bad boyfriend?"

You immediately sat up.

"Why would you think that?"

"Because she keeps saying I'm different now."

You stared at the screen.

"Are you?"

He took a while to answer.

"Maybe."

"But I don't think it's because there's someone else."

Your heart stopped for a second.

"Then what is it?"

His reply came after nearly a minute.

"I'm tired."

You didn't know what to say.

"I'm tired of being scared that everything I do is going to become another argument. I'm tired of checking my phone and knowing I'm going to have twenty messages asking where I am. I'm tired of feeling like if I don't answer in five minutes, I've done something wrong."

You read every word slowly.

"I still love her," he continued. "That's what makes me feel like such a terrible person."

You pressed your lips together.

"You're not terrible for being tired."

"Feels like I am."

"You're allowed to be tired."

There was no response for several minutes.

"I wish I could talk to you in person."

Your stomach dropped. You stared at those words until they blurred. Because you wanted that too. God, you wanted that too. And that was when you finally understood how far gone you were.

This wasn't a loyalty test anymore. It hadn't been for a while. You were falling in love with James while he was falling for someone you had invented. And neither of you knew how to stop.

It became noticeable before either of you admitted it. James started looking for you in the spaces between everything else. He'd check his phone after waking up, not because he was expecting a message from Annia, but because he wanted to know whether you had written. He'd open the fake account almost unconsciously, scroll through your old messages, then lock his phone again when he realized what he was doing. Sometimes he would type something and delete it three or four times before finally sending something stupid like, "What are you doing?" even when there was no real reason to ask. You began to understand that he wasn't simply enjoying your company anymore. He was waiting for it.

Annia noticed.

At first, she asked him why he was always on his phone. James told her he was talking to a friend. She asked which friend. He didn't answer immediately, and that silence was enough to start another argument. She wanted his phone. He refused. She accused him of hiding something. He told her there was nothing to hide, but he was already tired before the conversation even began. Eventually, he walked away from it.

That was new.

James had spent months explaining himself whenever Annia became upset. Now he was beginning to realize that there were arguments he didn't have the strength to keep having. When her messages came through while he was talking to you, he'd see her name flash across the top of his screen and leave it there. Sometimes for ten minutes. Sometimes for an hour. He didn't wanted to punish her, but he didn't want to leave you either.

And that frightened him more than he wanted to admit.

One evening, you were halfway through telling him about something insignificant that had happened during your day when his messages stopped. You assumed he'd gotten busy. Then, almost twenty minutes later, he sent, "Sorry."

"Everything okay?"

"Yeah. Annia's calling."

You felt something uncomfortable settle in your chest.

There was no anger in his response. If anything, he sounded ashamed.

"I just wanted to keep talking to you."

He immediately followed it with, "That's probably messed up."

You didn't know how to answer him because, in a way, it was.

And you were beginning to feel like you were stealing something from him that he had never agreed to give you. Still, you couldn't bring yourself to disappear.

James began craving things he'd never even had. Your face was the first one. He had seen the fake pictures, of course. He knew what you supposedly looked like. But those pictures weren't enough anymore. He wanted something real. A photograph you hadn't carefully chosen. A blurry picture taken without preparation. A face that existed outside the screen.

One night, completely out of nowhere, he asked, "Can I see you?" You stared at the message.

"You've seen pictures of me."

"I know."

"Then?"

"I mean properly."

"I just want to know what you look like when you're not posing."

You went to the bathroom and stared at yourself in the mirror, suddenly feeling like the biggest liar in the world. The girl in the photographs wasn't you. The person James had been speaking to wasn't exactly you either, because you'd carefully chosen every part of her. You had given him a personality built from pieces of yourself, but softened and rearranged until she was someone easier to love. And now he wanted the real thing. The terrifying part was that you wanted to give it to him.

A week later, he asked again.

"Do you think we'd ever meet?" You swallowed.

"Maybe."

"I keep thinking about it."

"About meeting me?"

"Yeah."

He admitted it slowly, almost embarrassed.

"Sometimes I'll be somewhere and I'll see someone who looks like you, and I'll think it's you for a second."

Your eyes stung. You couldn't tell whether that made you want to cry or smile.

James had started yearning for a person he couldn't touch. He wanted to hear your voice without a phone between you. He wanted to sit beside you somewhere quiet. He wanted to know what your hands looked like, what perfume you wore, whether you'd laugh when you were nervous, whether you'd look away when he stared too long.

He wanted ordinary things.That was what made it hurt.

He wasn't fantasizing about some impossible romance. He wanted to take you somewhere for coffee. He wanted to walk beside you. He wanted to hear you complain about something stupid and then watch you laugh at yourself. He wanted to know what it felt like to exist around you instead of waiting for your name to appear on his screen.

And eventually, he stopped pretending to himself. He was falling for you. He realized it on an ordinary Tuesday.

Annia had called him several times that afternoon. He'd watched her name light up his phone without feeling the usual panic. Instead, he felt an exhausted heaviness. He knew answering would mean another conversation about where he'd been, why he hadn't replied, who he'd been with, why his location hadn't updated.

He turned his phone face down.Then he opened your conversation. There was nothing new. Still, he scrolled upward. He read your messages again. A small smile appeared on his face. He missed you. The distinction terrified him. He put his phone down and covered his face with both hands, sitting there in complete silence.

Somewhere between the late-night calls and the stupid songs and the conversations that lasted until neither of you had anything left to say, his heart had started moving somewhere else. And he didn't know how to stop it.

He was scared. But underneath the fear was something warmer, something almost painful in how badly he wanted it. He wanted you. He wanted to meet you.

He wanted to know whether the feeling in his chest would become even worse when you were standing in front of him.

And somewhere deep down, he had already started imagining what it would feel like to finally look at your face and realize that the person he'd been waiting for all this time was real.

Annia found out on a Sunday evening. She was sitting on James's couch while he showered, his phone charging on the table beside her and when the screen lit up with your name, she looked at it without thinking. She had been suspicious for weeks. She had already learned to recognize the little changes in him the way his attention drifted whenever his phone buzzed, the way he smiled at messages he refused to explain, the way he had stopped arguing with her whenever she accused him of something. She had convinced herself there was another girl. She just hadn't expected to find you.

The first message she saw was harmless. I missed you today. She stared at it for several seconds, then opened the conversation.

She kept scrolling. And scrolling.

The farther she went, the colder her face became. There were nights when James had told her he was tired and gone to bed, only to stay awake talking to you until nearly morning. There were messages where he'd admitted how unhappy he was. There were messages about wanting to meet you, wanting to see your face, wondering what you looked like when you weren't posing for photographs. There were pieces of him she'd begged him to give her that he'd apparently given to a stranger instead.

Then she found the messages from you. The flirtation.

The fake identity. The careful questions you asked him about. Annia's hands started shaking.

For a moment, she couldn't understand what she was looking at. She had paid you to test him. She had trusted you to tell her whether her boyfriend was cheating. And you had taken her money, created a fake woman, and then fallen in love with him. Or at least, that was how it looked.

When James came back into the room, drying his hair with a towel, he immediately noticed her expression. "What's wrong?" he asked.

She looked up at him, and there was something so furious and wounded in her face that his smile disappeared. She grabbed her phone and scrolled far enough to show him all the conversations between you and Annia. All the things that would prove how she bought you just to test James and your whole personality was fake. "Ask her," she said. James frowned and took her phone. He read the last message. Then the one before it. His face changed slowly as he realized what he was seeing. "Annia..."

His eyes moved across the screen. His breathing became shallow. He reached the messages where you sent a screenshot to Annia where you'd asked him whether he still loved her. His thumb stopped. There was a screenshot of the original request. A screenshot of the payment. A screenshot of the instructions she'd given you. And suddenly everything he'd believed about the last few months cracked straight down the middle.

"You paid her?" he whispered. Annia laughed bitterly. "Yeah. I did." James looked at her. "You paid someone to test me?" he muttered. "I was scared."

"You paid a stranger to pretend to be someone else and flirt with me?"

"I thought you were cheating!"

"I wasn't."

"You weren't but now you are definitely cheating with ke with that fake girl who's not even real!"

His voice broke across the room. "why the fuck did you do this?"

Annia's eyes filled with tears, but she was too angry to wipe them away. "Because you were pulling away from me! Because every time I asked you what was wrong, you said nothing. Because you stopped looking at me the way you used to. I thought there was someone else."

"There wasn't."

James looked down at the phone again. His thumb trembled against the screen. "How long?" Annia swallowed.

"How long what?"

"How long did she know?"

"From the beginning."

His eyes closed. The words seemed to physically hurt him. From the beginning. Every message. Every late-night conversation. Every time he'd told you something he was ashamed of. Every time he'd admitted he was lonely. Every time he'd said he missed you. You knew. You had known the entire time.

"She knew who I was," he whispered. "She knew about you. She knew I was in a relationship."

"Of course she did. That's the entire point."

James looked at her sharply.

Annia's voice shook with anger. "You think she just randomly found you? I gave her your account. I gave her everything. I told her what I suspected. I paid her to see if you'd cheat."

"But she stayed."

Annia went quiet. James stared at the screen.

"She stayed after she knew I wasn't cheating."

"I don't care."

"I do."

That answer seemed to hurt her even more.

"Why?" she asked.

James couldn't answer. Because the truth was humiliating. Even after learning that you had lied to him, his first instinct wasn't hatred. It was to wonder whether you had meant any of it. Whether the voice he'd heard on those late-night calls had been real.

Whether the things you'd told him had come from your own heart or from some script you'd written before sending the message. Whether you'd ever actually smiled when he made you laugh. Whether you'd ever waited for his messages the way he'd waited for yours.

Annia saw the confusion on his face and became even angrier.

Annia's voice cracked. "Nothing she told you was real."

He looked back at the phone. Nothing. The word settled somewhere deep inside him. He opened your conversation again. He found the first message you'd ever sent.

"hey, sorry if this is random 😭 I think I've seen you around before?"

He remembered exactly where he'd been when he'd received it. He remembered smiling. He remembered thinking you seemed sweet. He remembered the first time you'd told him he deserved to be trusted. He remembered your voice. He remembered falling asleep after one of your calls with the stupidest smile on his face. His eyes burned. James nodded slowly, like he was trying to convince himself that he could survive. He scrolled further. There was the message where he'd told you he wanted to see you. His chest tightened. He'd been so vulnerable with you.

He'd told you things he had never known how to say to Annia. Not because he didn't care about Annia, but because talking to you had felt effortless. He hadn't known he was giving pieces of himself away to someone who was collecting them as evidence.

And now he didn't know which parts had belonged to you and which parts had belonged to the fake woman.

"Did she ever actually care about me?" he whispered.

Annia's expression hardened.

"Does it matter? What the fuck is actually wrong with you James just leave that fake ass bitch why are you so fucking invested in her? And the fuck you were telling her you were not fucking happy with me huh? Oversharing every shit with a complete stranger i see." she spat furiously.

James looked at her.

"Yes. It matters." James mumbled without looking up.

"Why? why the it matters? WHY THE FUCK DO YOU NOT JUST BE PLEASED WITH ME? AM I NOT ENOUGH?" she screamed.

"Because.. i think I'm in love with her." He said it so quietly that she almost didn't hear him. Then his face crumpled. He simply sat down on the edge of the bed, elbows resting on his knees, phone hanging loosely between his hands. He stared at the floor for a long time. "I told her everything."

Annia didn't speak entirely too shocked.

"I told her things I couldn't even say properly. I told her I was scared. I told her I was tired. I told her I didn't know what was happening to me." His voice trembled. "I told her I missed her." His eyes filled. "I told her I wanted to meet her."

Annia crossed her arms, trying desperately not to cry herself. "Are you being fucking serious rn James, are you really in love with that bitch? how could you do that with me?"

"I don't give a shit. Everything happened cause of you now fucking leave." James wiped his face quickly, embarrassed by the tears even though there was no reason to be.

Without saying anything further Annia grabbed her handbag and phone leaving his house muttering some bullshit to herself.

The door had barely shut behind Annia when James finally let the silence swallow him. He stood in the middle of his room with his phone in his hand, staring at your name until the letters started to blur. His chest felt too tight to breathe properly. He had spent the last hour trying to arrange the pieces of what he'd just learned into something that made sense, but nothing fit. You had been a stranger. He could remember the laugh you'd tried to hide when he said something stupid. He could remember how safe he had felt telling you things he had carried around for months. He could remember lying awake at three in the morning just hoping you'd come online. All of it was now contaminated. His thumb hovered over your number. He should have blocked you. He should have thrown the phone across the room. Instead, he pressed call.

You answered after the second ring. "James?" The sound of your voice nearly destroyed him. For one horrible second he just listened to you breathe, and his eyes filled before he managed to speak. "How long?" His voice was so quiet you almost couldn't hear it.

You didn't pretend not to understand. You went completely still on the other end. "James, I—" "How fucking long?" he snapped, the quietness disappearing all at once. "How long have you known my name? How long have you known what I looked like? How long have you been sitting there reading everything I sent you and knowing I had no idea who the hell I was talking to?" You opened your mouth, but he didn't give you time. "Was any of it real? Tell me that. Just once, don't make me drag an answer out of you. When you stayed up with me until four in the morning, were you bored? When I told you I was scared of losing people, were you taking notes? When I called you because I couldn't sleep, were you laughing about it afterward? When I told you I missed you, did you send that to Annia too? Did you two sit there together and talk about what an idiot I was?" Your throat tightened. "No."

"No?" He laughed, and the sound was awful. "That's all you've got?" He started pacing, one hand pressed hard against his forehead. "You don't get to say no like that fixes anything. You knew I was loyal. You knew. I told you from the beginning. I told you I had a girlfriend. I told you I wasn't looking for anybody. You watched me say no to you over and over again, and instead of leaving me alone, you stayed. You kept showing up. You kept letting me trust you."

"I never meant for this to happen," you whispered.

"Then why didn't you stop it?" The question came out broken rather than angry. "That's what I can't fucking understand. At the beginning, fine. You were doing your stupid job. You got your proof. I was loyal. It should've ended there. Why did you stay?" You couldn't answer him. He heard your silence and breathed out shakily. "Exactly." He sat on the edge of his bed, staring down at the floor. "You want to know what hurts the most? It isn't even the test anymore. It's that I started believing there was somebody out there who actually liked me. Not what I could give them. Not somebody keeping score of how quickly I replied. Not somebody waiting for me to screw up so they could throw it back in my face. You made me feel like I could talk without measuring every fucking word first. I thought that was you."

"It was me," you said, and your voice cracked. "The account was fake. The pictures were fake. The name was fake. But the things I said to you weren't."

He went silent.

You kept going before you lost the nerve. "I didn't plan to fall for you. I didn't expect you to matter to me. I wasn't pretending when I waited for your messages. I wasn't pretending when I missed your voice after we hung up. I wasn't pretending when you told me you were having a bad day and I sat there worrying about you for hours. I should've stopped. I know that. I should've told you the truth the second I realized I couldn't keep pretending. I didn't, and that's on me. You can hate me. You should hate me. But don't tell yourself every feeling I had was fake just because I was too cowardly to tell you who I was."

James pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes. "Don't." His voice was barely there. "Please don't make this harder."

"I don't know how to make it anything else."

"You already did." He swallowed hard. "You made me love somebody I couldn't even touch."

The words knocked the air out of you.

He stared at nothing, tears slipping down his face now without any attempt to hide them. "Do you know how many times I imagined meeting you? I used to think about stupid things. Nothing huge. I'd think about sitting across from you somewhere and watching you talk. I'd wonder what you'd look like when you were tired. I'd wonder whether you'd laugh at me if I got nervous. I wanted to know what your hands looked like. I wanted to hear you say my name without a phone between us. I wanted one real fucking memory with you." His breath hitched. "And now I don't even know what face I'd be looking for."

You started crying. He heard it.

For a moment, his anger disappeared completely. What remained sounded young and devastated. "Please don't cry." You covered your mouth. "I'm sorry." "I know." His voice trembled. "I know you're sorry. That's the problem. I don't want your apology. I wanted you." You couldn't speak. He looked at your name again, the same name he'd searched for every night, and whispered, "I wanted you so badly that I stopped noticing how little I knew about you."

"I'm here," you said through tears.

"No." He shook his head even though you couldn't see him. "You're not. That's what I've finally understood. The person I fell asleep talking to was never really there. The person I kept reaching for was made out of a lie." He took one ragged breath. "And I can't keep doing this to myself."

You knew what he was going to say before he said it.

"I need you to never call me again."

Your chest collapsed.

"James—"

"I mean it." His voice was gentle now, which somehow hurt more than the shouting. "Don't send me another message. Don't make another account. Don't try to explain it again. I need one thing in my life that isn't manipulated, and right now I don't even trust my own memories." He wiped his face with the sleeve of his shirt. "Maybe one day I'll be able to think about you without feeling sick. Maybe one day I'll understand that whatever happened between us meant something to you too. I don't know. I can't think that far ahead."

"Do you hate me?"

He was quiet for so long that you thought he'd hung up.

"I wish I did."

The call ended.

You stayed there with the phone against your ear long after the line had gone dead, crying so hard your shoulders hurt. Across town, James dropped his phone onto the mattress and bent forward until his forehead rested against his hands. He had wanted you. He still did. That was the cruelest part. Knowing the truth hadn't erased the attachment it had only taken away the one thing that made it bearable the belief that somewhere, somehow, you had been reaching back for him too.

A month passed, and somehow the world kept moving as if nothing had happened. James went to class, came home, and learned how to exist without checking his phone every few minutes for your name. You did the same from your side. You deleted the photographs, deleted the conversations, and tried to convince yourself that removing the evidence would make the memories disappear with it. It didn't. There were still songs that made your chest ache. There were still nights when your hand instinctively reached for your phone because you wanted to tell him something, only for the reality of what you'd done to hit you again. James had broken up with Annia two weeks after the call. There hadn't been some explosive final argument. He simply sat across from her one evening and admitted that he couldn't keep pretending their relationship was still something it had once been. Annia cried. He told her he was sorry, but he couldn't stay with someone when the trust between them had become so damaged that neither of them knew how to breathe inside it anymore. He didn't mention you. He didn't tell her that some part of him was still waiting for a person he had promised himself he'd never speak to again.

Then, on an ordinary Friday night, you opened your phone and stared at his contact for nearly an hour. You had typed his name into the search bar so many times during the past month that you had stopped counting. Every time, you'd closed it.

Tonight, you didn't. Your hands were trembling as you opened the conversation. There was nothing there except the last message you'd received from him. You read it again I need you to never call me again. Your eyes burned immediately. You almost closed the app, but instead you typed three words.

"Can we meet?"

You stared at them. Deleted them. Typed them again.

"Can we meet?"

Your finger hovered over send for what felt like forever before you finally pressed it.

James was lying on his bed when your message arrived. He saw your name and froze. For several seconds, he genuinely wondered whether he was imagining it. He sat up, opened the message, read it once, then again. His heart started beating so hard it made his chest hurt. He had spent a month trying not to wonder where you were. He'd told himself that if you ever contacted him, he wouldn't answer. He'd rehearsed the anger in his head enough times that he thought he knew exactly what he'd say.

But seeing those three words destroyed every rehearsed response.

His thumb hovered over the keyboard.

"Why?"

He deleted it.

"No."

Deleted.

He put the phone down, walked to the other side of his room, stood there for nearly a minute, then came back and picked it up again.

Finally, he typed, "Where?"

You answered with a place you both knew, your hands shaking so badly you mistyped it twice.

"Tomorrow?"

James stared at the message.

Then he replied.

"Okay."

You put your phone down immediately and covered your face with both hands. Tomorrow suddenly felt terrifying.

For the first time, there would be no fake photographs.

No invented name.

No carefully chosen words. No screen protecting either of you.

James was finally going to meet the girl who had been hiding behind the person he'd fallen for.

And you had absolutely no idea whether he'd look at you and see the person he remembered, or simply see the liar who broke his heart.

The next afternoon, you arrived twenty minutes early and immediately regretted it. You sat at the corner table with your hands wrapped around a cup you hadn't touched once, watching people come through the café door and wondering how many times you were going to mistake someone else for him. Every time the door opened, your stomach tightened. You had spent a month imagining this moment and somehow none of those imagined versions had prepared you for the reality of actually sitting there.

You had wondered whether he'd be angry, whether he'd walk away, whether he'd look at you with the same softness he'd once had in his messages. You had even wondered whether you'd recognize him without a screen between you. Then the door opened again, and you knew immediately. James walked in wearing a dark jacket, his hair slightly messy from the wind, eyes moving across the room until they landed on you. He stopped.

For several seconds, neither of you moved. He had seen the fake photographs, but the girl sitting in front of him looked nothing like the carefully curated version he'd been shown. You were prettier in a way fake photographs hadn't managed to capture softer, more natural, completely real.

Your nervous expression, the way your fingers nervously played with the edge of your sleeve, the tiny crease between your brows when you realized he was staring at you none of it belonged to the fake girl. And somehow that made everything worse for him.

He walked over slowly. You stood up too quickly, almost knocking your chair backward, and caught it with both hands. "Hi," you said. Your voice sounded smaller than it had over the phone. James swallowed. "Hi." And then there was nothing.

No anger spilling out immediately. Just two people standing across from each other after a month of silence, both suddenly unsure what to do with their hands. You looked down first. "You can sit." He nodded and pulled out the chair opposite you. The silence returned. You could hear cups being placed on tables nearby, the low murmur of conversations, someone laughing at the counter. James looked at you once, then away. You looked at him, then down at your lap. Neither of you touched the drinks.

Eventually, you whispered, "I don't know what I'm supposed to say." James gave a faint, humorless smile. "Neither do I." You nodded. Your throat felt tight. "I wanted to meet you because... I didn't want the last thing between us to be a phone call." He looked at you. "Why now?" You took a shaky breath. "Because I realized that if I never saw you, I'd spend the rest of my life wondering what would've happened if I'd just been honest." His eyes lowered. "You should've been honest from the beginning." "I know." You didn't defend yourself. "I'm not asking you to forgive me." He was quiet. "Then what are you asking for?" You looked at him properly for the first time. "Five minutes. Just five minutes where I'm not pretending to be anyone."

Something in his expression shifted.

You slowly held out your hand across the table, but stopped before reaching him. "My real name is—" You told him. "I'm twenty. I study—" You told him that too. You told him where you were from, what you actually liked, the stupid little things you had lied about without realizing they would someday matter. "I don't like the music I told you I liked," you admitted with a nervous laugh. "I only chose it because I thought you'd like me more." James almost smiled. "You could've just asked." "I was scared." He looked at you for a long moment. "Of me?" You shook your head. "Of you finding out who I really was and deciding I wasn't worth staying for."

He looked down at the table.

"That's ironic," he murmured.

You swallowed. "I know."

James finally looked at you again. His expression was still wounded, but the anger wasn't as sharp as you'd feared. He studied your face as though he was trying to reconcile it with every memory he'd carried for the past month. "You look different." You gave a nervous little laugh. "Worse?" "No." He paused. "Better." Your cheeks warmed immediately. "The pictures were bad." A tiny smile tugged at his mouth. "They really were." You laughed quietly, and for the first time since he'd walked in, the tension loosened by the smallest amount.

Then his smile faded.

"I wish I'd met this version of you first."

Your eyes filled.

"So do I."

And there it was the truth neither of you had been able to say over the phone. Sitting across from each other, awkward and wounded and still carrying everything that had happened, you finally existed in the same room without a fake name between you.

James looked at you for another long moment before quietly saying, "Tell me something real."

You wiped beneath your eye.

"Anything?"

"Anything."

You thought for a second, then smiled through the tears.

"I've missed you every single day."

His expression broke.

He looked down, breathing shakily, because hearing it from your real voice was somehow more painful than every lie he'd uncovered.

"I missed you too."

After that for a while, neither of you said anything. James kept looking at you as though he was trying to memorize the face he'd spent so long imagining, and you couldn't tell whether that was comforting or terrifying. The silence wasn't hostile anymore, but it wasn't easy either. There were too many things sitting between you, too many memories that belonged to a person who technically hadn't existed, too many nights where he'd loved the sound of your voice without knowing who was actually speaking. You could feel yourself shrinking beneath his gaze, fingers tightening around the edge of your sleeve.

Eventually, you glanced at the time on your phone even though you hadn't actually registered what it said. "I think I should go." James looked up. "Already?" You forced a small smile. "I think we've said enough." The truth was that you couldn't bear sitting there much longer, watching him decide whether you were worth another minute. You pushed your chair back and stood, reaching for your bag. "Thank you for coming, James. I really mean it. I just thought..." You stopped, swallowing the rest. "It doesn't matter. I should leave."

You turned before he could answer. You managed two steps.Then his hand closed gently around your wrist.

You froze.

James had stood so quickly that his chair scraped against the floor. He wasn't gripping you hard his fingers were warm and trembling, almost uncertain, like he was giving you every opportunity to pull away. You looked down at his hand, then slowly back at him. His expression was nothing like the one you'd imagined during the month apart. There was no hatred in it. There was fear. The kind that made his eyes look tired and unbearably honest. "Don't go yet." Your lips parted. "James..." "Please." His voice cracked slightly. "Just sit down for a minute."

You sat.

He didn't immediately let go of your wrist. His thumb moved once against your skin before he seemed to realize what he was doing, and his hand loosened. He could have pulled away completely. Instead, he kept his fingers there, barely holding you, as though he needed the reassurance that you were actually sitting in front of him.

"I broke up with Annia," he said.

You looked at him quietly.

"I know that doesn't mean anything to you. I didn't do it for you." He paused, searching for the right words. "I left because I'd already become someone I didn't recognize in that relationship. I was constantly afraid of saying the wrong thing, constantly explaining myself, constantly trying to prove something that shouldn't have needed proving. The test didn't create that. It just forced me to look at it."

Your eyes dropped.

"And then there was you."

He breathed out slowly.

"I don't want to pretend I didn't fall for you. I did. I still have." His voice became quieter. "I tried not to. I spent the entire month telling myself that whatever I felt belonged to a lie. But every time I remembered you, I wasn't remembering a photograph. I remembered your voice. The way you'd laugh when you were embarrassed. The way you'd go quiet when you didn't know what to say. The stupid little things you told me. Those memories happened to me. I can't erase them just because the beginning of them was wrong."

You felt tears gather in your eyes.

"I don't know how to trust you yet," he continued. "I don't know if I can wake up tomorrow and suddenly feel normal about any of this. I probably can't. There are going to be moments when I remember how it started and it hurts all over again. There are things you're going to have to earn from me. And there are things I'm going to have to learn to give without being afraid."

You nodded, barely breathing.

"But I don't want to walk away from you either."

Your eyes met his. James looked terrified saying it.

"I spent a month trying to convince myself that losing you was the right thing. Maybe it was. Maybe we needed that distance. But sitting here with you now..." He glanced down at your intertwined hands. "I don't want to leave this café and go back to pretending I don't care."

A tear slipped down your cheek.

You wiped it away quickly. "Then what do we do?"

He gave a small, broken laugh.

"I don't know."

For some reason, that answer felt more honest than anything else he'd said.

You looked at him for a long moment. "I don't want to be that fake person anymore."

"Then don't be."

"I don't want you to fall for the version of me you think you know."

"I won't."

"You might not like the real me."

He looked at you with such tenderness that your chest hurt.

"Then I'll find out."

You laughed through your tears.

James smiled faintly.

"Let's start from the beginning," he said.

Your heart stumbled.

"Properly this time."

He released your wrist only to turn his hand palm-up between you.

"Hi," he said softly. "I'm James."

You looked at his hand, then at his face. For the first time, there was no fake account, no test, no hidden motive waiting behind the conversation.

You placed your hand in his.

"Hi, James. I'm—"

You told him your real name.

He repeated it quietly, almost like he was learning the shape of it.

There would be difficult days. There would be questions neither of you wanted to answer. There would be moments when James would remember the betrayal and instinctively pull back, and moments when you'd be terrified that he'd wake up and decide the real you wasn't the girl he'd fallen for.

But neither of you stood up. Neither of you left.

James turned your hand over gently, looking at it like it was something precious he had finally been allowed to hold.

"I don't want to rush this," he whispered.

"Neither do I."

"I want to know you."

"You can."

"Everything."

You smiled through the tears. "Everything."

He nodded.

Then, after a long silence, he whispered, "Can I see you again?"

Your smile trembled.

"Tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow."

And when you finally left the café that evening, there was no promise that everything would work out. No dramatic declaration that the past had disappeared. Just two people walking away from the same table knowing that, for the first time, whatever happened next would belong entirely to them.

No fake name, just you.

And James, choosing to stay long enough to find out who you really were.

EPILOGUE ˚˖𓍢ִ🦢˚

"Jamie, you're doing it again." He looked up from where he was lying with his head in your lap, completely shameless. "Doing what?" You tried to keep your face straight. "Being clingy." "I'm not clingy." His arms tightened around your waist. "I'm comfortable." You laughed under your breath, running your fingers through his hair. "You've been comfortable for forty minutes, my legs are going fucking numb rn." "Exactly. It's been forty minutes and you haven't complained once." "I complained three times." "I didn't hear you." "Because you were pretending to be asleep." "Maybe I was." You pinched his cheek lightly, and he caught your hand, pressing a kiss against your palm before settling back against you.

"You know," he murmured, "it's been a year and a year ago I thought I'd never get to do this." Your fingers slowed in his hair. "Do what?" "Be annoying and know you're actually mine to annoy." You rolled your eyes, but the warmth spreading through your chest betrayed you. A year had passed since that café. A year since you had introduced yourself properly, without a fabricated name or a carefully constructed version of yourself. There had been difficult weeks. There had been moments when James needed reassurance and moments when you needed patience. Neither of you had pretended the past disappeared. You had simply kept choosing to learn each other properly. Somehow, in the middle of all that work, James had become the biggest yearner you'd ever known.

He lifted his head and looked at you. "Can I tell you something?" "You always tell me things." "I know." He smiled. "I still get this weird feeling sometimes." "What feeling?" "That I'm going to wake up and find out you're not actually here." Your expression softened. "Jamie..." "I'm serious." He sat up beside you, his knee brushing yours. "I know you're real. I know your real name, your favorite food, the way you get quiet when you're upset, the fact that you steal my hoodies and deny it even when you're wearing one. I know all of that. But sometimes I still get scared I'm going to lose you." You reached for his hand. "You're not losing me." His fingers intertwined with yours immediately. "Good." He smiled, but there was something tender beneath it. "Because I love having you here." You squeezed his hand. "I'm here." "I know." He leaned closer. "Can I kiss you?"

You smiled. "You've asked me that a hundred times."

"I like asking."

"You can."

He moved slowly, giving you enough time to change your mind, but you didn't. His hand came gently to your cheek, thumb brushing along your skin as he leaned in. The first touch of his lips against yours was soft enough to make your breath catch. He didn't rush it. He kissed you gently, almost reverently, lingering for a moment before pulling back just enough for your noses to brush. You smiled without meaning to, and he kissed you again, a little deeper this time, his fingers slipping carefully behind your ear. Your hand found the front of his shirt, gripping it lightly as you melted into him. When he finally pulled away, he stayed close, forehead resting against yours, both of you smiling in that quiet, stupid way people do when they're too happy to hide it.

"I love you," he whispered.

You looked at him, cheeks warm, and smiled shyly. "I think I love you too, baby."

His eyebrows immediately lifted.

"You think?"

You laughed. "Yes."

"After everything we've been through, that's what I get?"

"I said I think."

He narrowed his eyes playfully. "That's unbelievable."

"Jamie—"

He suddenly reached for your side.

You squealed, jerking away. "No! Don't you dare!"

He laughed, chasing your hands as you tried to protect yourself. "Say it properly!"

"Never!"

"You think you love me?"

"I do!"

"That's not good enough."

You were laughing so hard you could barely breathe as he caught you around the waist and started tickling your sides. "Jamie, stop!"

"Say you love me!"

"I hate you!"

"Wrong answer."

You kicked your feet uselessly, laughing until tears gathered in your eyes. "I love you! I love you, you idiot!"

He finally stopped, laughing breathlessly as you shoved his shoulder.

"You are horrible."

He grinned and pulled you against him.

"Yeah," he murmured, kissing your temple. "But I'm yours."

And this time, there was nothing borrowed about it. Just two lovers dumb in love with eachother.

© octoberdeaths 2026

[toomanyfanficrecs]

"let's start from the beginning"/"properly this time"

OHHHHHH MY GODDDDDDD 😭😭 that was beautiful, I shed some tears omddd

I've always wondered about how far this sort of "testing" could go, so thank you 🙏🙏 for writing something this gorgeous 🙏🙏 and answering my unasked question!! 💗💗

im grateful to have stumbled upon your masterpiece xx

[juststelenadnp]

since wattpad is fucked and banned smut, heres sum for your troubles a badge you can put in your bio. 😭

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

[toomanyfanficrecs]

in honour of their one-year-anniversary...here are some of my cortis faves 💖

OKAY THIS IS NOT AN EXHAUSTIVE LIST I KNOW I FORGOT SOME BUT IM REALLY SLEEPY RN I'LL BE BACK AND ADD THE REST OF THEM THESE ARE JUST OFF THE TOP OF MY HEAD GEN DON'T COME AT ME <3

love y'all see you soon x

⚝ - smau

cy. james

things we do not say at dinner parties - @loserloveremployee

kiss it better - @jjudawn

everything other than dating - @hybridlungs

take me back! - @zhaomoji ⚝

OH LÀ LÀ - @hyuneskkami

k. juhoon

how to get a guy in ten days - @tmrwsuns ⚝

pretty when you cry - @coconhovr

sticky like - @yuahnfen

noona neomu yeppeo - @flwrhui ⚝

idiot off court! - @kaikaikoi ⚝

e. martin

plot twist - @hyuneskkami ⚝

lost in translation - @soupysnoopy1 ⚝

just saying - @whoischoking ⚝

parallel lines - @lovhyeon

shit, he's so pretty - @loveqnai

cheap shot - @jjudawn

accidentally became the face of a protest to impress one girl (gone democratic) - @backonmyswag

i'll take care of you - @marsgirltyshi

we never dated! - @bunnykao

for lovers who hesitate - @ourhyeons

it was always you - @carisd ⚝

#sneak dissers? thats that shi i don't like - @kaikaikoi ⚝

love on the brain - @cranialberry

rent-a-man - @altheangels ⚝

you're busy, he's obsessed! - @08rtin

paper hearts - @nooriiz ⚝

how to lose an idol in ten shows - @martinflms

mysterious stranger in my phone - @lettheleavesflow ⚝

dropping this edit by @rxinluver bc i can hehe

e. seonghyeon

mr and mrs camp counselor - @/cosmiho (this is a particular favourite of mine)

the genius & his anomaly - @hyuneskkami

lil sis got a bf!? - @backonmyswag ⚝

for lovers who hesitate - @backonmyswag

how to bag a nerd in ten ways - @ramenoil

a. keonho

hello army, delete that - @cortismoon ⚝

black cat black star - @bananagirl222 ⚝

who let that dawg out?! - @lilythinks

(i js don't read any keo fics apparently, wtf guys, my bad, there's some out there but i can't find them rn 💔)

ot5

soft launch - @ceuxnoirst ⚝

rating my boyfriends phases - @ramenoil ⚝

downbadism! - @demiurqe ⚝

crush on you - @inkofcortis

mind you, we're not even dating! - @eu4mi ⚝

365 one-year anniversary special - @hooniqlo ⚝

jealous type! - @adorhees ⚝

[toomanyfanficrecs]

about to make a rec list and OMFG are all the cortis fics i read just martin???

i have like zero jju fics which is TOTALLY wrong, mf i need to rec them more often instead of just commenting

UGH i also need to go to bed so this is a later today thing <3

[wonniiz]

i am actually the biggest sucker for fluff. yes i want my heart to get attacked by the huge amounts of love the two characters have for each other. yes i will giggle and kick my feet even if they do something as small as brush hands. yes i will start crying because they had their first kiss together. PLEASE FEED ME MORE FLUFF!! i love love love love love love LOOOOOVVVVEEE fluff

(fluff>>>smut imo)

[loserloveremployee]

THINGS WE DO NOT SAY AT DINNER PARTIES. - chao yufan.

synopsis: Y/N L/N’s biggest mistake was thinking James was still just the annoying boy from her childhood. because apparently people grow up, become attractive, and develop personalities. and now she has to deal with the unconveniences of the stated.

tropes: childhood friends (?) to lovers (?), age gap.

★ : woahh so surprise fic hehe, guys i SWEAR i'll update itip. pinky promise, life's been overly busy but this was something i've had in my drafts for like a while so i hope you enjoy :)

• word count: 7.9k

pt 2.

──────────────────────────────────────────────

The first thing you learnt about the reunions is that you never really knew where you were supposed to fit.

Not in a sad way. You were too young to understand why everyone seemed to naturally fall into their own little groups while you always ended up hovering somewhere in between them, trying to decide whether you were old enough to join or young enough that nobody would notice if you disappeared.

The four families had been close for as long as you could remember. Close in the way where nobody really announced when they were coming over because it was already understood. Someone would arrive with containers of food balanced carefully in their hands, your parents would start rearranging the house even though everyone knew there was never going to be enough space, and within half an hour the entire place would feel warmer and louder.

There were always familiar things.

The smell of your mother’s cooking mixing with whatever someone else had brought. The sound of adults laughing from the living room. 

The older girls sitting somewhere upstairs, talking about things you weren’t allowed to know about because apparently being younger meant you were automatically incapable of understanding anything.

Your sister and Martin’s sister had each other.

They were close in age, close enough that they had grown into their own little world together without even trying.

And then there were Martin, Juhoon and James.

They were the same age, which meant they had always existed as a group in your mind. Not because you never interacted with them, but because there was always a line you couldn’t quite cross. They had their own jokes, their own games, their own conversations that moved too quickly for you to follow.

You were the youngest.

Four years younger was not a huge difference when you were older, but when you were seven, it felt like a lifetime.

It meant nobody wanted you on their team.

It meant people laughed when you said you could keep up.

It meant James would look at you with that irritating little smile of his and remind you, every chance he got, that you were still “the child.”

Which was ridiculous.

You were not a child.

You could literally do everything they could do.

Probably.

Maybe not exactly as well.

But still.

“Why are you following us?”

You looked up from where you were sitting on the floor, immediately offended because, firstly, you were not following anyone, and secondly, James always had a way of making completely normal things sound like crimes.

The hallway smelled faintly like the food everyone had just finished eating, the kind of warm, familiar smell that stayed in the walls after a crowded afternoon. 

James stood a few steps away with Martin and Juhoon beside him, looking far too pleased with himself.

“I’m not following you.”

“You are.”

“I’m going somewhere.”

“Where?”

You opened your mouth. Then closed it.

Because unfortunately, you had not planned that far ahead.

James noticed before a small grin appeared on his face.

“That’s what I thought.”

You frowned. “You’re annoying.”

“You say that every time.”

“Because it’s true.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“It is.”

James shrugged, completely calm in the way only someone who was about to annoy you more could be.

“No, you just get angry easily.”

“I don’t.”

“You do.”

“I don’t.”

“You’re doing it right now.”

You hated that he always had an answer.

Mostly because you were seven and he was eleven, which meant he had four extra years of knowing things you didn’t. You were convinced that was the only reason he won arguments.

Not because he was right.

Definitely not because he was right.

————————

The second thing you learnt was that people leaving rarely did it all at once. Nobody packed a suitcase and announced that they were becoming a stranger. There was no exact moment where you could point and say:

That was the last time things were the same.

It happened slowly, almost politely.

Your family moving to a different neighbourhood was the first crack.

Not a dramatic one. Nothing like the movies where everyone cries and promises they’ll never lose touch.

You were too young for that kind of goodbye.

You just remember your room looking unfamiliar because the boxes made it feel like someone else’s house. You remember your mother worrying about things that didn’t make sense to you yet. You remember adults saying things like it’s not that far and we’ll visit all the time in voices that sounded like they were trying to convince themselves.

And for a while, they were right.

The families still met.

At least, they tried to.

But there was a difference between something being possible and something being easy. Before, reunions happened because nobody had to plan them. Someone would call in the afternoon and somehow everyone would end up at the same house by evening.

After you moved, everything needed a date. A time. A reason.

The casualness disappeared.

“Come over this weekend.”

Slowly became:

“We should all meet soon.”

Soon became next month. Next month became whenever everyone’s schedules finally aligned. And somehow, without anyone deciding it, the reunions became less like a part of life and more like an event you waited for.

The boys changed the most. Not in a way you noticed immediately.

At first, they were just around less. Which was strange because you had never thought of them as people who could disappear. Especially James.

James had always been there.

Like the loud voices downstairs during family dinners.

Like the extra pair of shoes by the door.

Like the person who would steal food from your plate and then act offended when you complained.

But then he got older. And you realised then that older people had a habit of becoming busy.

First it was school and exams. Then things you didn’t understand because they involved words like applications and future and career choices.

You were still young enough that your biggest problem was finishing homework before dinner.

James was already preparing for a life that didn’t include running around his parents’ house with Martin and Juhoon every weekend.

You just started hearing about him more than you saw him.

“James got into a good university.”

“James is doing well.”

“James came home last week, you should’ve visited.”

You would nod.

You would say, “Oh, nice.”

And then you would go back to whatever you were doing. Because that was the thing about childhood.

You think the people around you are permanent.

You think the house you grew up in will always smell the same.

You think the people who annoyed you will always be there to annoy you.

You don’t know that one day you’ll miss hearing someone call you annoying.

—————————

The third thing you learnt was that time changes people in the most inconvenient ways. You weren’t sure who’d changed more though.

Because high school changed you in louder ways than you expected.

Not all at once.

There was no morning where you woke up and suddenly felt older, suddenly understood who you were supposed to become. It happened in smaller pieces.

You became good at things.

Not just good in the way children were when adults smiled and called them clever. 

You became the kind of good that required effort. The kind that came from staying up later than you wanted to, from rewriting notes until your hand cramped, from choosing one more chapter instead of one more episode.

You liked knowing that if you worked hard enough, there was a result waiting for you. There was something comforting about it.

Time was unpredictable. And so were people. 

People grew older. People moved away. People who promised they would always be around slowly became names you heard in conversations instead of faces you saw across a room.

But exams had answers.

Hard work had proof.

Your future was something you could build with your own hands.

And so you did. You became focused.

Maybe too focused, according to some people.

Your parents would tell relatives about your grades with a certain pride in their voices, and everyone would say the same things.

“You’ve become so responsible.”

“You’re so hardworking.”

“You’ll go far.”

You never knew exactly what to say to that. You would smile, thank them, and move on. 

Because you weren’t working hard because you wanted people to be impressed. You were working hard because, somewhere along the way, being the youngest person in every room had made you hate the feeling of being underestimated.

You had spent years trying to catch up to everyone else.

Now you were determined to be ahead.

So when the reunion came, you went into it with the same steady calm you brought to everything else. You were 15 then, the time you saw him after five years.

The house was warm with bodies and voices and the soft clatter of dishes being set down and moved around again, everyone talking over everyone else in the familiar, careless way that made old gatherings feel like they had never really ended. 

And then you heard his voice.

It came from behind you, loose and amused, threaded with the same teasing note that had once made you bristle on instinct before you had even turned around. “Still studying all the time?”

It should not have done anything to you. It was such a normal thing to say, so ordinary and so James that for one brief second your body forgot how to react at all. But the sound of it slipped under your skin in a way you had not expected.

You turned.

And there he was.

Not the boy you remembered, though some impossible part of him still belonged to that memory. 

He was taller now. Obviously. Broader in the shoulders, carrying himself with a kind of ease that had not been there before, a quiet confidence that sat on him almost lazily, as if he had grown into his own skin while you had not been looking. 

His face had changed in the gentle, inevitable way time changes people, soft edges made sharper, childishness worn down into something more defined, more grown.

You hated that your first thought was how much better he looked.

It was the way the light caught the side of his face, the way his voice had deepened, the way he stood with his hands in his pockets as if he had all the time in the world. 

It was the way he looked at you now, directly, without the smug distance of an older boy looking down at a younger child, but with real attention, as though he was actually waiting to hear what you would say.

That was worse than if he had been rude.

Rudeness you could deal with. Rudeness you understood. 

But this new version of James had softened in all the places that used to irritate you most. 

You gave him the expression you had perfected over the years, the one that said you were unimpressed even when your heartbeat had started doing something stupid and uneven behind your ribs. 

“Still talking too much?”

His mouth twitched, clearly pleased that you had answered immediately. “Still rude, I see.”

You should have been able to dismiss him then. Instead, you stood there with the noise of the room drifting around you, with the smell of food and perfume and old walls around you, and felt the strange, disorienting click of something shifting into place.

Because James was still James.

That was the problem.

He asked about your classes and actually listened to your answer. 

He teased you in that easy old way, but his voice had changed enough that it no longer felt like he was making fun of a child.

It felt almost unbearably affectionate.

And you hated that too.

You hated that he could say something small and thoughtful, something like, “You’ve worked hard, haven’t you?” in a voice so matter-of-fact it nearly sounded casual, and make your throat tighten around a response you did not know how to give. 

You hated that he looked at you as though your effort was visible, as though he could see the late nights and the sore eyes and the stubbornness it had taken to become this version of yourself. 

You hated the absurd, embarrassing warmth that spread through you when he did not treat your seriousness like a joke.

Most of all, you hated the fact that somewhere between one conversation and the next, your thoughts had begun to wander toward him when they should have stayed neatly arranged around your future.

It was gradual.

A look held a little too long. 

The awareness of him moving somewhere nearby, speaking to someone else, and the ridiculous, traitorous part of you that kept noticing where he was as though it mattered.

You told yourself it did not.

You told yourself very firmly, and more than once.

You were busy. You had plans. You had exams and deadlines and a life you had worked too hard to build to let yourself be distracted now. 

There was no room for this, for whatever this was, for the inconvenient little tug in your chest. 

So you did what you had always done when something threatened to become too important.

You ignored it.

You told yourself, with all the seriousness you could gather, that this was nothing. Just a reunion. Just James. Just one more small interruption in a life that had already decided where it was going.

———————

The fourth thing you learnt was that sometimes people come back at the exact moment you have finally stopped waiting for them.

By nineteen, you had stopped expecting James to be around.

Not because you had forgotten him.

You couldn’t have, not really.

Some people become so woven into the background of your life that even their absence leaves a shape behind. James existed in small, strange ways. In stories your parents told. In the occasional calls you made to his parents, because you were ever so fond of them, and they always loved to dote on you. In the occasional photo that appeared from some gathering you had missed because you were busy with classes or your friends or one of the hundred other things that seemed to fill your life now.

Because your life had become full.

Not in the lonely, exhausting way people sometimes imagined when they heard the word ambitious.

You still had late-night conversations with your friends that turned into arguments over the most pointless things. You still took too many pictures at events because you liked having proof that you had been there. You still had group chats muted because the notifications became impossible to keep up with. You still complained about assignments, procrastinated occasionally, laughed too loudly when something was funny, and made terrible decisions like agreeing to plans the night before an exam.

Somewhere along the way, you had become the person everyone expected you to be.

The smart one.

The reliable one.

The girl who had a plan.

And you liked that version of yourself.

So when the reunion came, James was not something you were looking for.

He was not some unfinished chapter you had been secretly waiting to reopen.

He was just James.

Or at least, that was what you told yourself.

Because then he walked through the door.

And suddenly, he was not twelve anymore.

Twenty-three sat on him differently than nineteen had. His shoulders were broader, his voice had deepened, the last traces of boyishness had completely vanished and there was a kind of calmness in his face that made him look like someone who had long ago stopped needing to prove himself in the same ways boys used to.

And James, James had expected to find the girl he remembered.

Not literally, of course. He knew time had passed. He was not stupid. He had seen enough family updates, enough scattered comments from his parents, enough occasional tagged posts and photos from people who were still connected enough to know what you were doing, to understand that you had grown up. 

He knew you were in college, knew you were doing well, knew you were the sort of person who was always busy with something. 

He had heard things in passing: that you were good at what you studied, that you were involved in clubs, that you had friends who adored you, that you still showed up at gatherings sometimes with your hair a little messy and your mind already on three other things.

He even knew, because his mother had no concept of private information, that you had once had a boyfriend and had ended it like you ended most things in your life that no longer fit: cleanly, with more composure than most people managed.

What he had not expected was the way you would occupy the room now.

There was no tentativeness in you anymore. No leftover childlike uncertainty, no looking around to see whether you were allowed to be where you were. You were the same and not the same, and that was the problem, because James had spent years remembering you one way and had just been given the unnerving task of noticing you all over again.

He leaned against the wall near the doorway while you spoke to someone else, and only half listened to the conversation happening beside him.

“Are you even listening to me?” his mother asked under her breath.

He blinked and looked back at her. “What?”

She followed his gaze, then gave him one of those looks mothers somehow always had, the kind that understood far more than they ought to. “You were staring.”

“I was not.”

“You were.”

“I was looking.”

“At her.”

He exhaled through his nose, because there was no point denying it to a woman who had raised him and survived every lie he had ever tried on her. “She’s changed.”

His mother smiled to herself. “Yes, she has.”

James frowned slightly, still watching you where you stood across the room, laughing at something Martin had said. “You knew that was going to happen?”

“Of course she changed,” his mother said, as if he were being deliberately dense. “She’s not fifteen.”

He gave her a look. “I know that.”

“Do you?”

He ignored that.

Because the truth was, he did know it.

He knew it in the abstract, the same way he knew the sky was blue and summer eventually ended. But knowing something and actually seeing it were different things. 

Seeing you like this, seeing the way your smile reached your eyes now, seeing the confidence in the way you carried yourself, seeing the ease with which people crowded around you because they wanted to be near you, had landed in him with a force that was almost absurd.

You looked up at that exact moment, as if you had felt the weight of his attention, and caught him looking.

For a second neither of you moved.

Then you lifted one brow in silent challenge, and it hit him all at once that you were aware of him too.

That was when the evening changed for him.

It happened gradually, in tiny, inconvenient moments that kept catching him off guard.

The way you laughed with everyone and then turned, almost instinctively, to include him when someone called for another opinion. The way you remembered details about his family without making a big show of it, as if of course you would. The way you spoke about your classes with the kind of passion that made it obvious you were not just surviving them, you actually cared.

And, worse than all of that, the way you seemed so entirely yourself.

At some point, while the adults were still talking and the plates were being moved and someone had turned music on low in the background, you ended up beside him in the kitchen, both of you reaching for the same glass of water at the same time.

You looked at the glass, then at him. “Seriously?”

He raised his hands, amused. “What? There’s only one.”

“There are three more.”

“I like this one.”

“You are impossible.”

He took the glass anyway, and you made an affronted sound.

“You still get dramatic over the smallest things,” he said.

“You stole my water.”

“I borrowed it.”

“That’s not how borrowing works.”

“It is when I give it back.”

“You haven’t given it back.”

“I haven’t finished.”

You stared at him in disbelief, then let out a laugh so full and genuine it made his chest feel tight for no reason he could immediately identify.

He paused.

You noticed. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“You were staring.”

He looked away a fraction too late, caught cleanly. “You’re still loud when you laugh.”

You narrowed your eyes. “That was rude.”

“It was not.”

“It was.”

“No,” he said, and there it was, that same easy confidence from childhood, only now it sounded lower, calmer, and somehow far more personal. “It was honest.”

That made you smile in spite of yourself, and James felt the strange, helpless sensation of something inside him shifting, settling into place with a kind of quiet certainty he did not know what to do with.

Because it was not just that you were pretty, though you were, and that was obvious enough to be irritating. 

It was that he liked you. 

Not because you were the girl he remembered, but because you were the woman standing in front of him now, bright and alive and clever and sharp and impossible to pin down.

You did not notice the moment it turned for him. Or if you did, you pretended not to.Which, to be fair, was exactly the sort of thing he would have done at your age too.

James told himself, for exactly two seconds, that he was only looking because you were still talking.

That explanation did not survive the next moment.

You were standing near the kitchen counter with your head slightly tilted as you listened to his dad say something ridiculous enough to make half the room laugh. 

The light from above caught softly in your hair, turning the loose waves near your shoulders almost glossy, like they had been brushed with gold at the edges. A few strands had fallen free around your face, and you kept pushing them back absently without seeming to notice that the gesture made you look even more effortless. Your lip gloss caught the light every time you smiled, a thin, dewy sheen that made James stare a second too long at your mouth before he jerked his attention back up with a level of self-control that felt, at that moment, deeply overestimated.

He should have looked away.

Instead, he watched you and thought it was unfair, really, how little you seemed aware of yourself. Unfair that you could stand there in a fitted top and loose jeans, with your hair falling over one shoulder and that soft shine on your lips, and still look like you had no idea what you were doing to the people around you.

“Bro.”

James did not move.

“Bro.”

Still nothing.

“James.”

That finally got him.

He blinked and looked over.

Martin was standing beside him with the most ridiculous expression James had ever seen on another human being. One eyebrow raised, lips pressed together like he was physically fighting the urge to laugh.

“What?” James asked.

Martin looked behind him, then back at James.

“Nothing.”

The tone alone was enough.

James narrowed his eyes. “What?”

Martin’s grin appeared slowly. “Nah.”

“You’re being weird.”

“I’m being weird?”

“Yes.”

“You have been standing here for, like, five minutes.”

James frowned. “So?”

“So you have been staring in the exact same direction for five minutes.”

“I was not.”

“You were.”

“I was looking.”

Martin immediately turned to Juhoon, who had been quietly drinking his drink beside them.

“Did you hear that?”

Juhoon glanced over. “Hear what?”

“He said he was looking.”

Juhoon looked at James, then followed his gaze.

There was a brief pause.

“You were staring.”

James stared at him. “You too?”

“I’m just saying what happened.”

Martin nodded seriously. “Exactly. We’re not judging.”

“You are absolutely judging.”

“No, no,” Martin said, holding up his hands. “I support love.”

James nearly choked. “What love?”

Martin looked between him and you.

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe the love where you suddenly forget how eyes work?”

“Shut up.”

“You know she’s not going anywhere, right?”

James looked at him. “What?”

Martin shrugged. “You keep looking like she’s going to disappear if you st-”

“Finish that sentence and I’ll throw you out the window.”

Martin lifted both hands. “Okay, okay, relax. I’m just saying.”

Juhoon, still leaning there like this was all mildly entertaining background noise, looked over at you again and then back at James. “She’s pretty,” he said, not teasing, just stating it like a fact.

James went quiet for half a second.

Martin’s expression lit up with immediate mischief. “Ooh. See? Juhoon said it, not me.”

Juhoon glanced at Martin. “I said she’s pretty. I did not say he’s doomed.”

“That was implied,” Martin said.

James stared at them, then exhaled through his nose, half amused and half furious at being seen so quickly. He had known both of them long enough to understand that any attempt at denial now would be a waste of oxygen. 

————————

The fifth thing you learnt was that love did not always arrive like thunder. 

Sometimes it came quietly, with the ordinary weight of a shopping bag cutting into your fingers, with the smell of tea steeping too long in a kitchen that was already warm, with the soft, almost embarrassingly intimate comfort of knowing exactly how someone liked their toast.

It started in the smallest places, in the places that did not look like anything at all while they were happening. A message from James at an hour when the rest of the world had already gone dim and sleepy, his name glowing on your phone like a private little window left open in the dark. A joke sent while you were sitting with your notes spread across your desk, your highlighter uncapped, your hair tied up and falling loose in the back because you had stopped caring somewhere between the second page and the fourth cup of tea. A photo of something stupid he had eaten for dinner, the kind of meal that looked thrown together in a hurry, with a caption so dry it made you laugh into your sleeve. A voice note where he said your name like it meant something he had not yet decided to admit.

It was all so ordinary that you almost did not notice it becoming important. That was the trick of it, you thought.

Your life had edges to it. It was full of movement and noise and laughter and all the small messy freedoms.

James found his way into that life the way certain smells do, almost without permission, until you realise later that they have been with you all along.

And every time he appeared, the room seemed to change shape around him.

He still teased you, still wore that same maddening smile when you gave him attitude, still made you roll your eyes just to prove you could. But now there was something steadier underneath it, something that made you think of toothbrushes left in the same cup, of keys dropped into a bowl by the door, of the private ease of someone who knew how to return. 

He no longer seemed like the boy who had once stolen your snack and laughed about it. He seemed like the man who would remember to buy the right kind of fruit because you once mentioned, months ago, that you preferred the sweeter ones.

That was the sort of thing that began to frighten you.

Because love did not begin, for you, with some grand, cinematic revelation.

At some point, without deciding to, you started noticing details that had nothing to do with the conversation and everything to do with the person having it. The way he looked in the soft warm light of someone’s kitchen, sleeves pushed up to his elbows, a glass of water in one hand and a half-smile on his mouth as if he had just stepped out of your ordinary life and into a place where everything familiar had become a little bit shinier. 

The shape of his laugh when it slipped out unexpectedly, low and brief and somehow always enough to make your stomach do something inconvenient. 

You told yourself, at first, that it was just the mere novelty of seeing him more often.

Then you told yourself it was because he had matured.

Then you told yourself you were only admiring how easy he made things seem, how naturally he folded himself back into your life without needing permission.

But the truth was much worse and much softer than any of that.

And he, for his part, had begun to change in ways he did not yet understand.

James was not the kind of person who fell quickly. 

He had always been too careful for that, too amused by the world to let it catch him entirely off guard. He liked to keep one hand on the steering wheel, even when he pretended not to care where the road was going. 

But with you, that began to fail him in the smallest, least dignified ways. He found himself looking for you in rooms before he admitted he wanted to see you. He found that your laugh stayed with him like the smell of something baking in a house. 

He noticed the domestic things first, because those were the things that slipped under his guard.

The fact that you could make a room feel lighter simply by walking into it, as if someone had opened a window and let the air move again. He noticed how you existed in the middle of your own life with such vividness that being near you felt less like visiting and more like being invited into warmth.

It made his chest ache.

It annoyed him how domestic his mind had become.

Worse, it unnerved him.

Because those were not the thoughts of someone who merely liked a girl from his childhood.

Those were the thoughts of someone who had started to want a life shaped around her ordinary presence, around the private rituals of knowing her, around the possibility of sharing small things with her until those small things became a world.

He noticed, too, the ease with which you made room for everyone. 

How you could be serious without becoming stern, fun without becoming careless, ambitious without ever losing the softness that made people feel comfortable around you. You were not one thing. 

That was part of the problem. You were everything at once. 

Bright and funny and stubborn and thoughtful and a little reckless in the way only a young person with a future to build can be. 

James had once known you as the baby, the kid who refused to stay out of older people’s conversations. Now he knew you as someone who had learned how to speak for herself, and the sound of that was enough to make his thoughts go strangely quiet.

He liked your focus. He liked your momentum. He liked that you were serious about your life without being consumed by it, that you could talk about your plans with shining eyes and then turn around and laugh at something unbelievably stupid. He liked that the world had not flattened you. If anything, it had sharpened you into someone who seemed somehow more alive for having had to become herself on purpose.

And that was the cruelest part, really.

Because love would have been simpler if you had been easy to reduce to one beautiful, obvious thing.

If you had simply been pretty and nothing else, he could have admired you from a safe distance and called it nothing.

If you had simply been clever, or kind, or ambitious, or funny, he might have filed it away as admiration and moved on.

But you were all of it.

You were the sound of someone laughing in the next room while the kettle began to whistle on the stove.

You were the taste of too-sweet tea at midnight.

You were the little domestic life he had not realised he was starving for, the one made of shared glances and inside jokes and messages that arrived at exactly the right time and the quiet comfort of being understood without having to explain every inch of yourself.

By the time he understood what was happening, it was already too late to call it anything else.

He did not fall in love with you in a single moment.

He fell in love with the repeat of you.

That was what love became for him.

A habit of the heart.

Something as ordinary and natural and terrifying as buying the wrong kind of fruit and hoping, stupidly, that she would still smile when she saw it.

———

That evening went on the way reunions always did.

The dads occupied the living room, talking loudly over each other with drinks in their hands. They had eventually moved from casual conversations into the kind of stories that only got funnier the more they repeated them. The mothers were in the kitchen, occasionally joining in from across the room. Music played quietly somewhere in the background.

Martin and Juhoon stayed sober, mostly because they had no interest in dealing with the consequences of everyone else’s choices.

James, unfortunately, did.

“You’re done,” Martin told him at one point.

James looked offended. “I’m fine.”

“You said that five minutes ago and then almost walked into a chair.”

“I was avoiding it.”

“You walked directly into it.”

“It moved.”

Juhoon looked at him. “The chair moved?”

“Yes.”

There was a pause.

Then Martin turned to you. “See what I deal with?”

You laughed.

James looked at you immediately.

And there it was again.

That little pause.

That moment where everything else seemed to disappear for half a second because he was too focused on the fact that you were laughing.

You shook your head. “You’re impossible.”

His smile softened.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “You’ve mentioned.”

It was later when his mother found you.

The house had gotten quieter. Not silent, because your families had never been capable of that, but softer. The kind of quiet that came after hours of noise, when everyone had settled into their own corners and the evening was slowly beginning to end.

“Could you do me a favour?” she asked.

You looked up. “Of course.”

She hesitated for a second, “Could you check on James?”

You raised an eyebrow. “Is he okay?”

“He’s fine. Just…” She smiled a little. “Very drunk.”

You tried not to laugh. “That sounds like his problem.”

“It is.”

You looked toward the stairs.

“And you want me to?”

“I think he’ll listen to you.”

That was a dangerous amount of confidence to place in you.

Still, you went.

You found him upstairs in the room at the end of the hall.

He was perched on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees, one hand loosely covering his mouth, his head bent slightly as if he had been thinking too hard and then losing the thread of whatever it was he had been thinking about. 

The room was dim, lit mostly by the yellow glow of the lamp on the side table, which softened the shape of everything in it. The blanket had been shoved halfway down the bed. His shoes were off. His shirt was untucked in a careless way.

When he lifted his head, his eyes found yours slowly, as if the room had to make a small effort to bring them into focus.

“Hey,” you said softly, closing the door behind you. “Your mom sent me up.”

He gave a quiet laugh that sounded a little rough around the edges. “Of course she did.”

“You disappeared.”

“I didn’t disappear,” he said, though his voice was looser than usual, words dragging just slightly like he had to reach for them. “I came upstairs.”

“That counts as disappearing.”

He looked at you for a second, then leaned back on his hands and stared up at the ceiling as if the answer to that lived there somewhere. “I guess.”

You crossed the room carefully and stopped a little way from him, because even drunk James still had a way of making you feel too aware of where exactly he was in relation to you. 

The room was quiet except for the faint noise drifting up from downstairs, muffled laughter and the occasional clink of glass against glass.

You shifted in your seat. “You should drink some water.”

He made a small face. “You sound like my mother.”

“That was the goal.”

His mouth curved, slow and a little helpless. “That’s not very kind.”

“I came upstairs to babysit you. Kindness is over.”

“Babysit me?” he repeated, offended in a lazy sort of way,. “I’m older than you.”

“Yes, and yet here we are.”

He let out a short breath that might have been a laugh if he had been a little less drunk. He looked at you again and the whole room seemed to go still around the edges.

“You’re wearing gloss,” he said suddenly.

You blinked. “What?”

“Your lip gloss.” His voice had gone a little quieter, slightly rougher now, like he was thinking too close to speaking. “It’s shiny.”

You stared at him, caught between disbelief and the embarrassing fact that your face had warmed at the comment. “That’s a very weird thing to notice.”

His expression shifted into something almost apologetic, though he did not look sorry enough to take it back. “I notice things.”

“You’re drunk.”

“Yes,” he said simply. Then, with a faint smile that did not quite reach his eyes, “I know.”

You should have let that be the end of it. You should have stood up, handed him a glass of water, and walked back downstairs before the night got any stranger than it already was.

But James was looking at you in that soft, unfocused way that made it feel like he was trying to say something with his face that he could not quite get out with his mouth. And because you had known him long enough to be able to read the smallest shifts in his expression, you stayed where you were.

He was quiet for a moment, then he said, “Come here.”

It was not a command exactly. It sounded more like a request that had slipped out before he could stop it.

You frowned. “Why?”

He looked at you for a long second, then gave the smallest shrug. “Because I want you to.”

Your heart gave one very stupid, immediate jump.

You did not move.

James seemed to notice your hesitation. He leaned back slightly, only now there was something different underneath it. Something softer. Something that looked almost like he had been trying to hold himself back and had finally gotten tired.

“You don’t have to,” he said, and the gentleness of that almost made it worse.

You rose anyway, because apparently you had never once in your life been capable of making good decisions around James, and walked to stand in front of him. He looked up at you from where he sat, close enough now that you could smell the alcohol faintly on him, mixed with soap and laundry detergent.

His eyes moved over your face slowly.

“You’re looking at me like that again,” you said quietly.

“Like what?”

“Like you’re about to say something stupid.”

He laughed under his breath, “Maybe I am.”

“Don’t.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re drunk.”

He nodded once, but it was absent. His gaze dipped briefly to your mouth and then back up again, and the room seemed to close in by an inch.

You noticed.

He noticed that you noticed.

That was the problem.

James lifted one hand, slow enough that you could have stopped him if you wanted to, and let it hover in the air near your wrist as though he was asking without asking. His fingertips brushed your skin lightly, just enough to make you feel it all the way up your arm.

Your breath caught.

He looked at your hand, then back at your face. “Can I?”

You swallowed. “Can you what?”

He smiled faintly, almost shyly, and that should have been impossible for him to pull off while intoxicated, but there it was anyway. “Touch you.”

Your chest tightened in a way that was almost painful.

It was not a dramatic question. He did not sound hungry or reckless or careless with it. He sounded careful. Almost reverent.

Like even drunk, even with his head tilted slightly and his words slightly blurred at the edges, he still could not quite bring himself to treat you like anything less than something he should be gentle with.

You did not trust your voice, so you nodded.

His hand settled around your wrist with a warmth that made your thoughts go momentarily blank. 

“You’re warm,” he murmured before he seemed to realise he had said it.

You stared at him. “James.”

“What?”

“That was not a normal thing to say.”

He looked briefly embarrassed, which was almost funny given that he was still holding your wrist and staring at you, “I’m aware.”

You huffed out a small laugh despite yourself, and his eyes flicked to your face again with something like relief, as if hearing it had eased a knot in him he had not admitted was there.

“Sit,” he said after a moment, nodding toward the bed.

You hesitated. “Why?”

“Because I’m asking nicely.”

“You are not being nice.”

He looked offended. “I’m being very nice.”

“You’re being weird.”

“That’s not new.”

You rolled your eyes, but there was no heat in it, and after a second you sat down beside him on the edge of the bed. James looked at the space between your knees for a moment, then shifted a little closer as if the distance itself had begun to bother him.

When he spoke again, his voice had gone quieter.

“I missed this.”

You turned your head toward him. “This?”

He made a vague motion with his free hand, like he meant all of it and none of it at once. “You. Talking to you. Having you around.”

The honesty of it made you still.

James stared at the floor for a second, then let out a small, helpless breath. “It’s annoying.”

Despite yourself, you smiled faintly. “What is?”

He looked up at you, and the expression in his eyes made your smile falter before it had fully formed.

“You,” he said.

Then, before you could decide whether to be offended, he added, almost immediately, “Not in a bad way.”

You gave him a look. “That did not sound reassuring.”

A soft laugh left him, low and tired and too close to fondness for your comfort. “You know what I mean.”

You did, which was worse.

He leaned back again, one hand still loosely around your wrist, thumb brushing over the inside of it in a movement so absentminded it might have been accidental if not for the fact that he kept doing it. 

“You’ve been doing that,” he said after a while.

“Doing what?”

“Making it hard to look anywhere else.”

Your stomach tightened.

“James,” you said again, more carefully this time.

“You keep doing that thing where you act like nothing’s happening,” he murmured.

Your pulse had started doing something stupid and irregular.

“You talk to me like I’m just James. Like I’m still the same idiot you used to argue with in hallways. And I should be grateful for that, probably. I know I should. But then you laugh, or you look at me like that, or you say something sharp enough to make me remember exactly who you are, and suddenly it gets really difficult to keep pretending I’m not noticing.”

You could not breathe properly.

“Noticing what?” you asked, though you hated how small your voice sounded.

James was quiet for a second, and when he answered, it was with the kind of softness that made the words feel far more dangerous than if he had said them outright.

“You.”

His gaze never left yours.

“You make it so fucking hard for me to keep pretending I still see you as a kid.”

———————

@seonghwaswifeuuuu @rateater0369

[toomanyfanficrecs]

reading this again and I'm like 🤔 wish i could write like this 🤔

in my own very wise words...HOLY FUCKERONI everybody get on my girl's work ASAP and show her so much love because both parts of this are AMAZING they're GORGEOUS everyone now please and thank you 🙏💗💗

wow. yeah. that's all i have to say. wow. 💗💗💗💗

big fan of how I reblogged this twice bc i forgot that I already rec'ed it...whoops...tells y'all how good this is 🤷‍♀️ 💗 'cept this time it has the part 2 linked xxx

[awkward-bob-reynolds]

[konolien]

LOVERS - martin edwards

synopsis: on his first ever tour, he misses you so much.

warnings: cringe couple, swearing.

[toomanyfanficrecs]

wtf that's so cute 🥺🥺💖💖

[lettheleavesflow]

mysterious stranger in my phone -how to pull an idol (a series)

idol!martin x reader ⋆ ִֶָ˖·˳˖When you let a random stranger rant for a whole ten minutes, you not only gain a new favorite band but also a devestating crush. ݁‧₊˚⋆ִֶָ

next warnings: suicide mentioned (later explained as a joke), cussing

tysm for requesting twinski!! I planned this whole thing out aaaand i fear it's gonna be atleast like 10 parts.....oops

@doofydumbfuck @taelvvrzz

(reply if you wanna be added to this or the perma taglist<33)

[toomanyfanficrecs]

EVERYBODY DROP WHAT YOU'RE DOING AND READ MY GOAT'S SMAU

omfg dude it was so good, i was giggling, i was invested, i was on the edge of my seat, they're so stupid and its SO GOOD. 💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗

ilysm twin, you made my day better, thanks for adding me to the perm tl because im invested in all your writing x

okay bye guys, read this asap!!

[heatherwitch]

Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” that was written in 1950 is set on the day of August 4th, 2026 (tomorrow)!! Now’s your chance to read it around the time it’s based in!

Audio: A recording of Leonard Nimoy reading it on Internet Archive.

Text: A PDF version.

Graphic Novel: On Internet Archive.

[froggibus]

— Late Nights

Pairing: Peter Parker x gn! reader

Summary: after a rough night, Peter finds comfort in your bed

Word Count: 500

Content/CW -> mentions of mild injury, mostly cute and wholesome

froggi yaps -> guess what i saw today that also totally rekindled my love for marvel :p i'm on a writing kick rn so if you guys have any ideas for marvel OR dc i'd loooove to hear them <3 enjoys!

You’re half-asleep when you hear the familiar sound of your window becoming unlatched, scraping against the old frame. In an instant, you’re sitting up in bed, rubbing at your eyes and letting them adjust to the dark of your room.

Through the dim lights provided by the billboards and streetlights outside, you can just barely make out the scarlet suit patterned with shiny blue. Spider-man.

“Haven’t we talked about this?” He says, maneuvering himself through your window like he’s done it a thousand times. “You need to keep your window locked.”

You smile sleepily, sliding over in your bed to make room for him. “Then how can handsome strangers come into my room at—” You squint at your alarm clock, “jesus, 3:01am.”

“Strangers? Plural?”

You watch as he lands softly on the floor, shutting the window behind him before peeling his mask off and discarding it on your windowsill. There’s a fading bruise above his eyebrow, surrounded by a few stray cuts that look much newer than that.

“You didn’t answer me,” he says, kicking off his shoes next. “Strangers?”

“I’m kidding, Peter.”

He scrubs a hand over his face, brushing the sweaty strands of hair out of his eyes. He takes a breath before starting to shimmy out of his suit, hopping around awkwardly on one foot.

“You should be locking your window, though.” You smile and he smiles right back, “I’m serious.”

“Then how will you break into my room when I’m sleeping?”

“You weren’t sleeping.”

“I was.”

He discards the suit on your floor, leaving him in nothing but the pair of dark boxers he’d been wearing underneath. There’s more bruises littering his body, some new, some faded, all of which make you frown.

He cringes, “did I wake you?”

“Would you be more or less worried if I didn’t wake up at someone coming through my window?”

He flops back onto your bed, loosing a breath you’re sure he’d been holding for a while. “Ask me that in the morning.”

You move to lay next to him on the bed, equally sprawled out, your head resting in the crook of his arm. “How was your night?”

“Ask me that in the morning,” he sighs, curling his arm in to pull you flush against him. He rolls onto his side to face you, eyes tired and lined with dark circles, “Hi.”

“Hi.”

He dips his head down, letting it rest against the side of your neck. You feel his breaths against your skin, deep and warm. “I’m so tired,” he mumbles against you.

“You can rest,” you say, equally as quiet. “It’s okay.”

“But—”

You rub a hand down the back of his head, “the world’s not going to fall apart if you take a couple hours to rest.”

Peter starts to speak only for the words to die on his tongue. He snuggles closer to you, not an inch of space between your bodies. It’s not long before he’s softly snoring into the side of your neck, his body becoming deadweight against yours. 

You try to adjust yourself slightly only for his grip to tighten, a sleepy ‘no’ leaving his lips.

marvel masterlist | navigation

thanks for reading & have a wonderful week /ᐠ > ˕ <マ ₊˚⊹♡

[toomanyfanficrecs]

FROGGIIIIII UGHHHHH THANK YOUUUUU (how did you know that i wanted peter parker hugs 👀)

he's so cutie, please keep the love for marvel kindled or wtv you call it im just giggling rn 🤭🤭

love you 💓💓💓

[underscorecip]

I need to draw more Peter

[frostedorchard]

I woke up today and sadness washed over me right away, because I wasn’t playing with wally west's beautiful hair while his head lay on my chest, and I couldn't trace the freckles on his nose, and I couldn't listen to his morning jokes about a pigeon that landed on our windowsill