˖ ִֶָ༘: ⋆.ೃ*:

20's | writer | editor |

[ttabacco]

you can also find me on wattpad under @ n1cotine3

𝙅𝙚𝙤𝙣𝙜𝙜𝙪𝙠

Faux Colors- story about a restoration major who can't see color and an audio engineer who refuses to let her stay quiet. when life gives you a devastating breakup, you could go to therapy—or you could sign a dark, highly transactional "friends with benefits" pact on top of an aluminum mixing console. did i mention the guy is stupid hot but also arrogant?; xfemale!reader; colorblind!reader; synesthesia!jk;

⤷[Playlist]–[Edit]—Chapter 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | ongoing

Messy thoughts- Oneshot

𝙅𝙞𝙢𝙞𝙣

Busan Nights- Oneshot

𝙏𝙖𝙚𝙝𝙮𝙪𝙣𝙜

Suits and Sigils — Teaser

[ttabacco]

Faux Colors

chapter 16

weeds in the concrete

Synopsis; one lives in a world under the weight of shadows the other lives in a world that screams.

"The sky is blue like Sacrifice by Elton John"

warnings; swearing, heavy themes pairing; jeongguk × female reader genre; angst, slowburn, smut, fwb word count; 11.3k

a/n: hi guys. still in the trenches of finals. no i don't want to talk about it. yes i finish them mid july. this is my way of destressing, so let me destress and stress you.

this fucking chapter ohmygod. the big revelation is here. bring tissues, or whatever. cry maybe? drink water.

buckle up, literally. (it'll make sense later trust me.)

____

"You should have worn a higher collar. The ink on your throat is bleeding into your jawline."

The voice didn't carry anger. Anger had a vibration to it—a jagged, violent crimson that forced a man to raise his guard. This was worse. This was a flat, unyielding navy-green, dense and heavy as wet cement, pressing the oxygen right out of Jeongguk's lungs. It was the color of a mountain that had spent years blocking out the sun.

Jeongguk kept his eyes lowered, tracking the precise, mechanical movement of his chopsticks as they parted a piece of braised fish. The Saengseon Jorim was perfectly prepared, traditional and meticulous, but it tasted like iron and dust in his mouth.

"It's a mock-neck," Jeongguk said, his voice dropping into that hollow, agreeable cadence he hated but used exclusively to survive in this house. "The fabric handles the structure better."

"It looks untidy. Unserious." A quiet, scraping sound of porcelain cut through the suffocating silence as his father set down a side dish. "A man your age should be concerned with gravity, Jeongguk. Not theater."

Jeongguk knew the script. Every critique of his collar, his piercings, and the heavy dark ink coiled around his skin was never just about the surface. It was a targeted strike to a place right behind his ribs—a territory he spent his entire life trying to barricade. It was the silent, bitter accusation that he was too loose, too free, too fragile.

A living, breathing copy of a nature that had no place in this rigid house anymore.

Attempting to offer a piece of his own world to fill the agonizing quiet, Jeongguk cleared his throat. "The arrangements for the gala were finalized today. The design showcase is taking the main hall."

His father didn't look up from his bowl. A quiet, sharp scoff escaped his nose—a sound that made Jeongguk feel instantly, suffocatingly small.

"Dressing up high-society sycophants isn't a legacy," his father said flatly. "It's a distraction. Movement without progress. A waste of time on things that don't last."

Outwardly, Jeongguk just took it. He let his shoulders drop a fraction of an inch, absorbing the blow with a practiced numbness. But internally, his synesthesia was drowning in his father's color, the navy-green thickening until the entire dining room felt like a concrete vault built over a grave.

The silence returned, heavier this time, stretching between them like a physical weight. His father's eyes drifted toward the dark window, looking out into the yard where the shadows of overgrown branches swept against the glass.

"The yard is sour," his father stated, his voice clipping the edge of the quiet room. "The soil is being neglected. Nothing is being kept the way it was intended."

Jeongguk's fingers tightened around his chopsticks. He knew what his father was tracking. He was looking at the precise deterioration of the property, measuring the exact absence of the only person who had ever been able to make the cold house breathe.

"What about the gardenia?" Jeongguk asked.

The question was too quiet, a tentative, desperate slip of his tongue that he regretted the moment it left his mouth.

His father paused. His chopsticks hovered for a fraction of a second over the porcelain dish, a rare break in his perfect, rigid posture. Then, he set them down with an unbearable, final click.

"Wilted," his father said, his voice entirely devoid of emotion. "Dead."

The finality of the word hung in the air, dense and cold, settling over the table like a layer of frost.

Jeongguk's father didn't lean back in his chair. He didn't slouch, nor did he loosen his jaw. He sat with his spine perfectly straight, dressed in a crisp, pressed white dress shirt and dark slacks. He hadn't left the house all day, yet he was dressed as if he were attending a state funeral. He was honoring the meal. He was honoring the strict, solemn ritual of the date, treating the grief not as a wound to be healed, but as a duty to be executed with flawless, unbending precision.

Sitting across from him in his loose, designer black mock-neck, Jeongguk felt entirely out of place. Frivolous. Disrespectful, even, though he had canceled meetings just to be here.

Including the one with you in the car.

"The house is too quiet," Jeongguk muttered, desperately reaching for anything to fracture the silence before it crushed him entirely. "Do you... do you get by alright? In the evenings?"

"The house is exactly as it needs to be," his father replied, his tone level, clipping the end of Jeongguk's question with systematic efficiency. "Silence requires no maintenance."

"Right." Jeongguk swallowed around the dry lump in his throat, his eyes scanning the immaculate, lifeless living room visible through the archway. It looked like a museum exhibit. "I just thought... maybe you should get a pet. A dog, or something. To keep you company. Give you something to care for."

His father finally lifted his eyes. They were a piercing, unblinking dark grey, entirely mismatched with the heavy, navy-green aura that bled from his shoulders.

"A dog," his father repeated. It wasn't a question; it was a dissection of Jeongguk's foolishness. "To make a mess. To demand attention that belongs to practical matters. You always want to introduce chaos into spaces that require order, Jeongguk."

The words hit right behind his ribs, a dull, familiar ache that made Jeongguk's hands feel suddenly heavy.

"It's just company," Jeongguk said, his voice shrinking, dropping an octave into a defensive, quiet murmur.

"I do not need company. I need structure," his father said, picking up his chopsticks again with a steady hand. "When you rely on external things to keep you anchored, you fail the moment those things are removed. I taught you that. Or, rather, I tried to."

But she didn't, Jeongguk thought bitterly, the words screaming in the confinement of his own mind. She built me up. She told me the chaos was beautiful.

But his mother wasn't sitting at the head of the table. His father was. And under the weight of that unyielding, navy-green shadow, Jeongguk felt himself reverting, shrinking down until he was just a terrified, suffocating boy in a storm, praying the walls wouldn't collapse on top of him.

"You've always been too soft," his father continued flatly, his eyes returning to his plate. "Looking for distractions. If you spent half as much time focusing on a serious vocation as you do on your ink and your music or whatever, you wouldn't feel the need to fill empty rooms with noise."

The words didn't carry the edge of an insult, they carried the weight of a sentence already passed.

"You look like a sketch," his father murmured, his eyes tracking the dark, intricate patterns of ink crawling out from Jeongguk's sleeve and curling around the back of his hand. "An unfinished thought. Always shifting. Always unanchored."

Jeongguk swallowed hard, his throat tight. He gripped his chopsticks so tightly the bamboo threatened to splinter. He wanted to look up, wanted to flash the sharp, calculated arrogance he wore like a second skin at the studio, but his father's navy-green aura was a physical press against his forehead, keeping his eyes glued to the table.

"I wished, for a long time, that you had inherited some of my gravity," his father said, his voice dropping into a rare, quiet cadence that was heavier than any shout. He didn't stop eating. His movements remained perfectly mechanical, honoring the plate before him. "If you were a man of structure... if you didn't carry so much of that fluid, reckless nature..."

He paused, a momentary break in his breath that felt like ice freezing over water. He didn't look up, but his shoulders tightened beneath the crisp, pressed white linen of his shirt.

"Perhaps it wouldn't hurt so much to look at you."

The blow hit exactly where his father always aimed—straight through his sternomustcular armor, deep into the raw, unhealed marrow behind his ribs.

Jeongguk's lungs seized.

Suddenly, the smell of the braised fish was entirely wrong. It tasted like ozone. It tasted like a wet, asphalt road, like the suffocating, metallic static that filled his mouth right before the sky cracked open.

The quiet dining room began to hum with a low, vibrating grey noise—the static of a panic attack clawing its way up his throat. The walls felt like they were leaning inward, the dark wood of the dining table tilting, his synesthesia flaring into sharp, blinding spikes of charcoal and bruised violet that threatened to blind him.

Don't break, he commanded himself, his heart hammering a frantic, erratic rhythm against his chest. Not here. Do not show him the storm.

He forced his fingers to loosen, letting his chopsticks rest against the porcelain holder with a small, trembling rattle. He focused entirely on the small, square tile of the floor between his shoes, trying to count the grain of the wood, trying to build a wall fast enough to contain the rising pressure in his chest.

Before the panic could fully swallow him, his father's voice cut through the static again, shifting the air with brutal efficiency.

"Are you seeing anyone?"

The question was so stark, so utterly practical, that it forced the air back into Jeongguk's lungs. He blinked against the grey spots in his vision, his throat working as he tried to find his voice.

"What?" Jeongguk managed, his voice sounding hollow, incredibly small, even to his own ears.

"A girlfriend," his father clarified flatly, finally setting his chopsticks down and crossing his hands over the edge of the table. "A woman of good standing. Someone who provides a tether. It's time you settled into something with a foundation, rather than drifting from one frivolous distraction to the next."

The question seemed to hang in the air, vibrating with a dull, clinical gray that slowly began to quiet the roaring static in Jeongguk's ears.

A girlfriend.

Instantly, your face flashed in his mind. Not because he had a soft spot for you, and certainly not because there was any sentimentality attached to your name. It was a purely visceral reaction.

He thought of you because he'd fucked you.

Because right now, in the barren landscape of his life, the raw, skin-on-skin friction of your bodies under the rain was the closest thing to intimacy he had. It was a transactional, desperate bruising, but it was something.

A bitter, dangerous thought crossed his mind as he stared at the untouched rice in his bowl. Would she have liked you? If she were still sitting at the head of this table, laughing softly into her wine glass, would she have approved of this calculated, dark pact he'd made with a woman who was already bleeding from someone else's betrayal?

She had been all warmth, all light, all poetry. She probably would have looked at the two of you—two ghosts using each other's skin to block out the cold—and wept.

Jeongguk swallowed the metallic taste of his own panic and forced his jaw to unlock. "No," he said quietly. "There's no one."

His father let out a short, heavy breath. It wasn't the sharp scoff from before, but something slightly weathered. "Shame," he murmured, his eyes dropping back to his hands. "You're good looking and young. It shouldn't be difficult for a man with your resources."

The sudden change in tone made Jeongguk pause. For a fraction of a second, the suffocating navy-green aura around his father seemed to thin, exposing something pale and fragile underneath.

It was the grief. It was the love—the heavy, misshapen love his father didn't know how to carry without crushing everything around him.

"I don't have the time," Jeongguk offered, his voice dropping its defensive edge, softening just enough to meet his father halfway in the quiet room. "The studio takes everything out of me right now."

"Time is a currency you manage, Jeongguk, not something that happens to you," his father said, but the words lacked their previous bite. He picked up his tea cup, his fingers tracing the smooth ceramic edge. "A companion isn't a drain on your focus if you choose correctly. When it's the right person... the world outside gets quieter. It makes the work easier to bear."

Jeongguk looked up, his eyes finally meeting his father's dark gray gaze. There was a profound, exhausting loneliness in the older man's face. He wasn't just giving a lecture on high-society etiquette, he was talking about what he had lost. He was bleeding through the cracks of his own sternness, showing the jagged edges of a man who had been utterly ruined by the very thing he was advising his son to find.

"You think I'm too strict with you," his father said softly, almost to himself. "You think I don't see what you build. I see it. I hear it. I see the charts. I see the names of the people who buy your music." He set the tea cup down with a quiet, careful touch. "But a legacy built on sound is easily drowned out, Jeongguk. I am hard on you because when the wind blows this house down, I want to know you are heavy enough to stay standing."

"You are old enough now to find your own footing," his father continued, his voice steadying as the cracks began to close, the familiar, rigid navy-green settling back over his shoulders like an iron shroud.

But it was a lie. Jeongguk could see right through it. The truth was simpler, uglier: his father couldn't handle him. He didn't know what to do with a son who felt everything in colors and sounds, who bled across the room instead of keeping it neatly tucked inside a starched collar. His father couldn't handle him the way she had. His father had spent his entire life marching to a strict, military drumbeat, while Jeongguk had already learned to walk to her fluid, syncopated pace. His father looked at him and only saw a boy whose cadence of steps was entirely wrong.

A sudden, violent wave of anger surged up from the pit of Jeongguk's stomach. It wasn't a clean, righteous anger; it was a chaotic, unhinged fury—like Alice in Wonderland mad, a volatile, distorted madness that made his heart thrash against his ribs. The unfairness of it choked him.

He could feel the skin around his eyes stinging, hot and tight. A vicious migraine began to bloom behind his temples, a sharp, white-hot needle that fractured his vision. His synesthesia went completely wild, untethered from the silence, painting the dark wood of the dining table in a grotesque kaleidoscope of colors—bruised, rotting plums, ash-greys, and a sickening, weeping gold.

Colors that only grief would recognize if it caught its own reflection in a mirror.

He wanted to scream. He wanted to flip the immaculate table, to shatter the porcelain dishes honoring a ghost they were both too cowardly to name.

Instead, he forced his trembling hands into his lap, his jaw clenching so hard his teeth clicked.

"Do you still play the piano?" his father asked.

The question hit the room like a sudden drop in pressure. The wild, chaotic colors on the table flickered, momentarily stunned into a cold, hollow blue.

Jeongguk stared at his father. His throat felt like it was coated in sand.

The truth was, he hadn't touched the piano. Not since the day the music in this house died. The grand piano still sat in the parlor, covered in a velvet cloth, a massive, silent coffin of polished mahogany. He couldn't bring himself to lift the lid. He couldn't bear to strike a chord and hear how empty the room sounded without her harmony accompanying it. He had traded the ivory keys for digital mixing boards and heavy basslines—noise loud enough to drown out the silence, sound he could control, sound that didn't hurt.

"No," Jeongguk said, his voice raw, the madness in his chest souring into defeat. "I don't play anymore."

"Shame," his father said.

The word dropped into the space between them like a lead weight, flat and entirely final. He didn't elaborate. He didn't ask why, or how a man who built an entire career out of sound could simply abandon the very instrument that had introduced him to it. He just took another slow, deliberate sip of his tea, the ceramic cup hiding the lower half of his face, leaving only those unblinking, dark grey eyes exposed.

To his father, it was just another abandoned structure. Another piece of discipline Jeongguk had let rot, much like the garden outside.

Jeongguk's chest heaved, a shallow, ragged breath escaping his nose as he fought to keep the stinging behind his eyes from spilling over. Shame. The sheer, clinical indifference of the word made the Wonderland madness in his mind twist into something venomous.

His father didn't know that every time Jeongguk even looked at a piano, his synesthesia didn't just show him chords—it showed him a suffocating, blinding wave of her color. It was a hue so bright, so violently tender, that it felt like an eviction notice from his own sanity. He hadn't stopped playing because he was lazy or drifted to a new distraction; he had stopped because the music was a direct wire to a phantom limb. He couldn't touch the keys without feeling the crushing weight of everything his father refused to speak aloud.

"The digital arrangements require a different focus," Jeongguk managed to say, his voice tight, the words tasting like copper on his tongue. He was trying to rationalize it, trying to drape a serious, corporate sheet over his trauma so his father would understand it. "The piano doesn't serve the current project."

"The piano serves the mind," his father corrected flatly, setting the tea cup down with that same, excruciating precision. "It forces you to sit with the notes you create. Electronic noise allows you to hide behind layers. It's an escape from the fundamental discipline of the craft."

Jeongguk looked away, his eyes burning as they tracked a splash of weeping gold on the dark wood of the floor—a hallucination of his migraine, a visual ache that throbbed in time with his pulse.

He thinks I'm hiding.

The irony was a bitter pill to swallow. His father sat here in a perfectly starched white shirt, treating a tragedy like a checklist of stoic duties, never once using her name, and he had the audacity to accuse Jeongguk of hiding.

"Maybe I don't want to sit with the notes," Jeongguk muttered, the boundary slipping before he could stop it. The admission felt dangerous, a crack in the armor he had carefully maintained since walking through the front door.

His father's eyes narrowed just a fraction, the heavy navy-green aura around him solidifying into something sharp, almost combative. "Then you are a coward to your own talent, Jeongguk. If you only produce what is comfortable, you aren't creating anything of substance. You are just making noise to keep yourself from having to think."

The accusation hung in the dead air of the dining room, a cold, clinical blade that sliced straight through the remaining tatters of Jeongguk's composure.

A coward.

The word vibrated in a harsh, metallic zinc-grey that set his teeth on edge and sent a vicious spike of pain directly through his left temple. His vision blurred, the edges of the room warping under the pressure of the mounting migraine. He wanted to scream at the man across from him. He wanted to scream that hiding behind a pristine white shirt and a perfectly set table while pretending the world hadn't ended was the truest form of cowardice.

But the words choked in his throat, suffocated by the heavy, unyielding navy-green that filled the space between them. Under his father's gaze, he was always stripped of his adulthood, always reduced to a boy whose rhythm was entirely wrong.

"I'm done," Jeongguk whispered, the syllables small and frayed around the edges.

He didn't wait for permission. He stood up so abruptly his chair screeched against the dark wood floor—a sudden, violent sound that tore through the immaculate silence of the house like a gunshot. His hands were shaking, the dark ink on his skin twisting into chaotic, unreadable patterns as he gripped the edge of the table to steady his knees.

His father didn't flinch. He didn't even look up from his teacup. He merely sat there, a monument of rigid discipline and buried grief, letting the silence settle back into place with agonizing speed.

"You haven't touched your rice," his father said flatly, his tone completely level, as if Jeongguk's quiet unraveling were nothing more than a minor breach of etiquette.

"I have to go to the studio," Jeongguk lied, his voice thick, his chest heaving as he fought the rising tide of the panic attack. The room was spinning now, the walls leaning inward, the heavy scent of the traditional braised fish turning completely rancid in his nose. "There's a track... I have to finish it."

"Always running toward the noise," his father murmured softly, almost to himself. It was a final, devastating dismissal.

Jeongguk turned and practically fled the room. He didn't grab his coat. He didn't look back at the parlor where the mahogany piano sat like a silent tomb under its velvet shroud. He just needed out. He needed air that didn't taste like dust and iron. He needed a space where his steps weren't measured and found wanting.

He burst through the heavy front doors, the cool night air hitting his face like a physical blow, but the suffocating weight of the navy-green followed him, clinging to his skin like oil. His heart thrashed against his ribs, a frantic, unhinged rhythm that made it impossible to breathe.

He threw himself into the driver's seat of his car, his hands trembling violently as he gripped the steering wheel. The silence inside the vehicle was deafening, a direct continuation of the house he had just left. The migraine was a blinding, white-hot roar behind his eyes, painting the dashboard in sharp, chaotic fragments of color.

The phone felt abnormally heavy in his palm, the glowing screen cutting through the dim, rain-streaked windshield of his car. His thumb hovered over your contact name, twitching on pure, feral instinct. He wanted to demand your presence, to pull you back into the leather seats where your scent still lingered. He wanted to press his face into your neck and let the sheer, suffocating heat of your breakdown erase the cold, navy-green walls closing in on his mind.

But his internal discipline, the rigid machinery he used to guard his boundaries, violently kicked back in.

No.

He threw the phone onto the passenger seat. He couldn't text you. Not again. Not twice in the same day after he had already explicitly stated that you were asking too many questions, that your psychoanalysis wasn't part of the deal. If he reached out to you now, unraveled, bleeding from a wound his father had just ripped wide open, the transaction would warp. The clinical, safe distance of your pact would collapse. He couldn't let you see him like this—small, caved-in, stripped of his armor. He would see you tomorrow at university.

Tomorrow, when he could wear his arrogance like a shield again.

With a low, frustrated curse that rattled against the glass, Jeongguk slammed the Mercedes into drive, his knuckles turning white against the leather steering wheel as he sped away from the monolith of his childhood home.

His apartment was dark when he unlocked the door, but it offered no sanctuary. The silence here was different from his father's house; it wasn't a heavy concrete vault, but it was just as empty.

He didn't bother turning on the main lights, navigating by the dim, ambient violet hum of his makeshift studio gear in the corner of the living room. Synthesizers, dual monitors, and high-end mixing boards glowed like a digital life-support system. It was his noise machine. The place where he engineered loud, heavy basslines specifically to drown out the grey, vibrating static in his head.

He threw himself into the leather desk chair, the white-hot needle of his migraine pulsing violently behind his eyes. His synesthesia was a chaotic, unhinged mess, painting the dark room in jagged streaks of ash-grey and rotting plum.

He pulled up a project file—a dark, aggressive electronic track he'd been working on for weeks. He jammed his headphones over his ears, turning the volume up until the sub-bass rattled through the bones of his jaw. He began to twist knobs, adjusting the frequencies, desperately trying to map out a structure he could control.

"Electronic noise allows you to hide behind layers. It's an escape."

His father's words echoed perfectly in time with the kick drum. Jeongguk ripped the headphones off, letting them clatter against the desk. He couldn't do it. The layers felt thin, artificial, utterly useless against the rot behind his ribs.

He couldn't play the piano, he couldn't build a legacy on sound, and he couldn't even text the one person whose skin acted as a sensory override for his panic. He was trapped in his own labyrinth, completely alone, with nothing but your lingering scent of gardenia fading from his clothes, and a million unanswered questions waiting for the morning light.

He dragged his hands down his face, the rough ink of his fingers scraping against his eyelids. The silence in the studio felt like a rising tide, thick and inescapable.

His eyes drifted to the corner of the room, where an old acoustic guitar sat propped against a velvet-lined case. It was covered in a thin layer of dust. He rarely touched it; stringed instruments required a tactile intimacy that reminded him too much of the physical weight of music, of the way she used to press his fingers down onto the ivory keys when he was a child, teaching him how to make a melody breathe.

But the words were clawing at the back of his throat now, desperate and unhinged, a direct byproduct of the Wonderland madness his father had injected into his veins. If he didn't get them out, the migraine would split his skull wide open.

He reached over and grabbed the guitar, pulling it onto his lap. The wood felt cold against his skin. He didn't bother tuning it perfectly; the slight, discordant drone of the open strings matched the volatile, jagged colors flashing in his peripheral vision.

He didn't have a melody yet, only a rhythm—the heavy, syncopated cadence of a boy who had learned to walk to a different tempo than his father's march.

He struck a low, hollow chord. In his head, the progression belonged entirely to a piano. It needed the deep, resonant sustain of a grand mahogany body, the heavy dampening of a foot pedal, the clean, weeping clarity of a live acoustic space. It needed the very thing he was too terrified to touch.

Instead, he forced it onto the strings. He strummed a jagged, fractured minor progression, his thumb digging into the thick wire until it bit into his skin.

"You look like a sketch," his father had said. "An unfinished thought."

Jeongguk pulled a microphone close, his chest heaving as he opened a blank audio file on his monitor. He didn't write down lyrics. He didn't have the patience for structure tonight. He just leaned in, his lips nearly brushing the metal grille, and let the raw, bleeding poetry pour out of him in a low, raspy cadence.

The words were dark, fragmented, and entirely transactional. He didn't sing about love; he sang about the cold. He sang about two ghosts tearing at each other's skin in the back of a car, trying to find a heartbeat through the layers of rain and ruin. He sang about you—not with tenderness, but with the desperate, feral hunger of a drowning man reaching for an anchor he knew was already splintering.

The guitar chords beneath his voice sounded thin. Frustrated by the lack of gravity, Jeongguk slammed his hand against the strings to mute them and turned to his mixing board.

He began to loop the raw, acoustic phrase, but he didn't leave it clean. He systematically began to destroy it. He ran the guitar through a heavy distortion pedal, crushing the mid-tones until it sounded like a dying engine. He layered a massive, suffocating sub-bass underneath it—a digital wall of sound so dense it made the windows of his apartment rattle. He chopped his own vocals, stuttering the syllables, hiding the raw vulnerability of his words behind a clinical, metallic glitch effect.

He was doing exactly what his father had accused him of. He was burying the notes. He was building an artificial fortress of noise specifically so he wouldn't have to sit with the hollow, weeping gold of his own grief.

By the time the track was looping, a chaotic, industrial mess of electronics and bleeding acoustic strings,

Jeongguk was panting, his forehead resting against the edge of his desk. The migraine was still throbbing, but the static in his head had finally been drowned out by a monster of his own creation.

He stared at the audio wave on the screen. It was heavy. It was loud. It was a complete distraction.

𓂃 ࣪˖ ִֶָ༘࿐: °❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･

The low hum of the studio monitor filled the tense silence between them. Yoongi leaned back in his ergonomic chair, his eyes fixed on the sound waves glowing across the dual screens, though his mind was clearly tracking something entirely different.

He didn't look up when he spoke, his voice carrying that familiar, grounded rasp. "You've been dragging your feet on this track for three days. That's not like you."

"Just trying to get the arrangement right," he replied, leaning against the edge of the mixing desk, staring down at his own sneakers. It was a lie, and they both knew it. His thoughts weren't on the bassline or the vocal layering; they were completely consumed by the sheer, chaotic mess of the previous night.

Yoongi finally spun his chair around, crossing his arms. His sharp eyes locked in, seeing right through the deflection. "The arrangement is fine. You're the one who's off. If this is about the contract discussions, let it go until Monday. If it's about something else..." He paused, letting the implication hang heavily in the air. "Fix it. We have a deadline."

"It's under control. I'm fixing it," he muttered, though the knot in his stomach only tightened.

Before Yoongi could push any further, the heavy acoustic door of the studio clicked, breaking the tension.

Both of them turned as the door swung open, and you walked in.

Jeongguk's eyes dropped to your hands, his focus locking onto the familiar leather-bound notebook you were holding against your chest.

Taehyung's.

He knew that worn cover anywhere—the scuffs on the spine, the way the elastic band was stretched out. But his mind blanked on the connection. He had no idea how it had ended up in your possession, or why you of all people were holding onto it. A heavy, uneasy silence settled in the room, the unanswered question hanging thickly between you.

He tracked the precise mechanical way your posture shifted the second you stepped over the threshold. Your shoulders pulled inward, your spine stiffening into a guarded line. He heard the sharp, shallow hitch in your breath—the telltale sign of your internal rhythm fracturing under stress. The moment your eyes darted past him and landed on Yoongi, your face clouded with genuine confusion. You clearly hadn't expected anyone else to be invading this space today.

Instantly, you retreated. The defensive, painfully shy demeanor you always reverted to when facing an unfamiliar face completely took over. You shrank back, attempting to turn invisible right in front of him, clutching that scuffed leather notebook to your chest like makeshift body armor.

Beside him, Yoongi slowly raised a sharp eyebrow. His eyes narrowed as he evaluated you from head to toe, the silent, clinical scrutiny radiating from his posture making it obvious he had absolutely no clue who you were.

Jeongguk's internal calculations were abruptly cut short when Yoongi finally spoke, his flat baritone slicing through the dead air.

"What are you even doing here?" Yoongi asked, his tone demanding a practical reason for the interruption.

You cleared your throat, your voice dropping into that small, hesitant register that irritated Jeongguk just as much as it focused him. "Taehyung asked me to bring this up to the studio," you muttered, lifting the book slightly. "He's downstairs... stuck with the juniors. They don't understand the concept of the lace for the panels, and he said you needed this back immediately."

Jeongguk's eyes drifted back to the worn leather in your hands as the pieces clicked into place. Right.

He had completely forgotten. Yesterday afternoon, before the entire world had devolved into absolute madness, he had needed to map out an equation for a frequency arrangement. He hadn't had a single scrap of paper on hand, and Taehyung, annoyed by his pacing, had tossed him his own design notebook to use.

It was a completely mundane, clinical chain of events. A routine piece of studio business. Yet, seeing that specific notebook bridging the gap between Taehyung, you, and his own workspace left a bitter, metallic taste in his mouth. You were supposed to be a tool—a strictly managed, predictable asset to dull the static in his head—and he didn't like the sudden, unchoreographed ways you kept inserting yourself into his peripheral vision.

Yoongi leaned back in his chair, his interest evaporating the exact second he realized the interaction held zero professional relevance to him. He didn't say a word, simply spinning his seat back toward the dual monitors and pulling his phone out, his thumb casually scrolling as he completely locked himself out of the conversation.

Jeongguk reached out and took the leather-bound notebook from your hands. His fingers brushed against yours for a fraction of a second—cold, dry, and brief. He didn't look at the cover. His eyes remained fixed on your face, tracking the way your pulse fluttered against the shallow hollow of your throat.

"Thank you," he said. His voice was level, stripped of any of the jagged, unhinged edges from the night before. It was the voice of a man who had successfully rebuilt his walls.

You nodded once, your eyes darting briefly toward Yoongi's turned back before landing back on Jeongguk's chest. "No problem," you murmured, keeping your tone just as small, just as transactional. "He seemed desperate. Who is that by the way?"

"Yoongi. Is that relevant to you?"

"No."

"Thought so."

Jeongguk set the notebook down on the edge of the mixing desk behind him without looking. His mind was already operating on a cold, tactical track. He didn't want you leaving yet. The static from his father's visit was still humming in the back of his mind, and you were the only tool capable of grounding it. He needed a distraction, something structured and entirely under his control to reset the rhythm of his day.

Right there and then, he made the calculation.

"We're continuing with the color lessons today," Jeongguk said, his tone shifting into something firmer, leaving no room for argument or hesitation. He leaned back against the desk, crossing his arms over his chest as he looked you up and down, evaluating the lingering exhaustion in your posture. "How are you?"

You stood there, completely taken aback by the sudden shift. Your eyes darted instinctively to the back of Yoongi's head, his shoulders completely still as he remained absorbed in his phone, before you looked back at Jeongguk. The panic in your chest flared, making your voice drop to a frantic, hushed whisper.

"Does he know?" you asked, the implication heavy and terrified in the small space between you. You didn't mean the color lessons. You meant the calculated pact you had just struck. You meant the fact that you were fucking.

Jeongguk didn't answer right away. Instead, a slow, incredibly amused smile spread across his face, a sharp contrast to the coldness he had carried all morning. It was a big, flashing grin that crinkled the corners of his eyes, thoroughly entertained by how quickly you had panicked.

"Should he?" he asked, his voice a low, teasing murmur that barely carried across the room.

The hit was instantaneous. A bright, furious flush crept up your neck, heat rushing into your cheeks as you blushed deeply. It was the exact same reaction you'd had back in his car when he had casually brought up car sex—that immediate, transparent vulnerability that you couldn't hide no matter how hard you tried.

He could get drunk on your reactions.

You are so easy to rattle up, he thought, his  eyes tracking the crimson stain on your skin with a clinical sort of satisfaction. You were a textbook layout of predictable reactions, completely transparent under his gaze.

"No," you said promptly, the word rushing out of your mouth in a desperate bid to shut the topic down before Yoongi actually heard something.

"Well, then he won't," Jeongguk replied smoothly, his smile fading back into something more controlled, though the amusement still danced in his eyes. "No one will. I'm speaking about me teaching you colors."

You blinked, trying to catch up with the whiplash of his pacing. You held your ground, though your fingers clutched at the strap of your bag. "Why?" you asked, your voice cautious. "Why do you suddenly want to continue that now?"

Jeongguk shifted his weight against the edge of the desk, his arms remaining crossed over his chest. In his head, the logic was perfectly mapped out. The color lessons provided the perfect blueprint—a clinical, highly structured framework where he was completely in control, dictating exactly what you looked at, what you learned, and how you reacted. It was the ultimate barrier against the chaos of the night before, a way to keep you firmly categorized as a useful tool without letting any unwanted emotional bleeding ruin the arrangement.

"Because you still don't understand the depth of what you're looking at," he said, his tone turning flat, authoritative, and completely businesslike. "And if we're going to keep this arrangement functional, I need you focused on the structure I build for you. Nothing else."

Silence stretched between you. One beat. Two beats. Three beats.

It was obvious you were weighing the options, your gaze dropping down to the floor as your mind worked through the sudden proposition. To Jeongguk, your hesitation was almost ridiculous. It was a complete no-brainer. You were getting a chance to expand your perspective, to learn new things—good things—directly from someone who actually understood the mechanics of the medium.

Besides, from a purely operational standpoint, he enjoyed teaching you. He liked it. There was a unique, satisfaction in breaking down complex visual structures and watching you process them, molding your understanding from scratch. It kept his mind sharp, and it kept you right where he could monitor you.

After what felt like an eternity, you finally looked back up, your jaw setting in a rigid line.

"Yeah okay," you said, the words coming out with half a mouth, tight and entirely reluctant. You shifted your weight, clearing your throat before adding, "When?"

Jeongguk uncrossed his arms, tapping his fingers against his thigh as his internal schedule locked into place. "I have some work to finish up here with Yoongi right now," he replied, gesturing vaguely toward the mixing console behind him. "But maybe later. In a few hours."

You nodded slowly, processing the timeline, but your eyes remained guarded. "Where?" you asked, your voice dropping to that quiet, cautious register again.

Jeongguk tilted his head, eyes narrowing slightly as he considered the logistics.

"Not university grounds," Jeongguk said firmly, his voice flat and definitive. "A park or something. Somewhere outside the usual perimeter where we won't be bothered."

You looked at him, your eyebrows drawing together as you tried to parse the logistics of what he was actually proposing. "So we're going there together?" you asked, your voice laced with that familiar, cautious hesitation.

Jeongguk didn't hesitate. "Yes. I'll drive."

You stared at him for a beat, processing the image of the two of you crammed into the front seats of his car again, isolated from everyone else. "So we're basically hanging out," you concluded, the words sounding heavy, almost clumsy as you tried to label it.

"I'd say that, yes," he replied smoothly, his tone entirely detached, as if he were agreeing to a standard business meeting rather than an afternoon trip outside the pact lines.

"Isn't that too intimate?"

The question came out sharp, a sudden, defensive wall you were trying to throw up to protect yourself from the boundaries of the pact blurring. You were looking for a catch, looking for the catch in his cold comfort.

Jeongguk let out a dry, breathy chuckle, the corners of his mouth twitching with a familiar, mocking amusement. He leaned in just a fraction closer, his eyes locking onto yours with absolute calculation. "Okay, first a street upsets you, then my proximity?"

The heavy, soundproofed air of the studio seemed to swallow up the remnants of his words, leaving you standing there under his intense, unyielding gaze, completely unable to find a retort.

Jeongguk watched the silence settle over your face, eyes tracing the slight tension in your jaw.

You really are scarred, he thought, his mind breaking down your hesitation with cold precision. He couldn't comprehend why mere proximity bothered you this much. This wasn't an emotional investment; it was entirely physical, a clinical transaction designed to serve a purpose. In his world, bodies occupying the same space was just mechanics, yet you treated his presence like an incoming threat.

It irritated him, but it also highlighted a massive flaw in your utility. He needed you functional, not constantly shrinking into the background. I should teach you to exist louder, he decided, his gaze narrowing as he evaluated your rigid posture. You're so completely locked inside your own shell. It's inefficient.

You still didn't reply, the quiet in the room stretching out until it became a physical weight between you.

Jeongguk leaned forward just an inch, deliberately cutting through the remaining distance. His voice dropped to a low, quiet murmur that barely carried over the hum of the mixing desk, a sharp contrast to the flat tone he had been using.

"So," he whispered, his eyes locked onto yours, waiting for the predictable flash of panic on your face. "What would happen if I invited you over?"

You smacked him—right in the center of his chest. It wasn't a heavy blow, just a sharp, panicked swat that had his lips twitching into a wide grin before he could even stop himself.

You frantically pointed a finger at the back of Yoongi's head, your eyes practically bugging out of your skull as you shot Jeongguk a look that screamed Are you out of your mind?

Jeongguk didn't even flinch from the hit. He just leaned back slightly, his dark eyes sparkling with that deep, mocking amusement that always took over when he managed to completely shatter your composure. He glanced over his shoulder at the mixing desk, then looked back at you, entirely unfazed.

"He can't hear us," Jeongguk said, his voice dropping into a smooth, unbothered cadence. He nodded toward the desk. "He has his headphones on now."

You looked, and sure enough, the heavy black studio monitors were clamped securely over Yoongi's ears, his fingers clicking away at the keyboard, completely lost in his own world.

Jeongguk tilted his head, bringing his focus right back to your flushed face. "So?" he prompted, his voice a low, challenging whisper. "What's the answer?"

You clutched the strap of your bag tighter, your chin lifting in a desperate attempt to find a shred of dignity. "I wouldn't come," you muttered, trying to sound firm, though the crimson stain on your cheeks completely betrayed you.

Jeongguk let out a dry, breathy laugh, leaning his weight back against the edge of the console. He crossed his arms again, looking down at you with a cold, predatory sort of logic.

"We can't fuck only on university grounds, I hope you're aware," he said flatly. The words were blunt, transactional, and completely devoid of any delicate filtering. He wanted the reality of the pact laid out clearly, without any of the romanticized fluff you seemed to be clinging to. "Unless you have a sudden preference for lecture halls and empty stairwells, we're going to need actual walls at some point."

Your breath hitched, your mouth opening and closing as the raw weight of his words hit you. "That—that's different," you stammered, looking around the room as if the acoustic panels could save you. "Going over to your place is... it feels like a date. It feels like something else."

"It's a location," Jeongguk corrected smoothly, his voice dropping into that authoritative, instructor-like register he used during your color lessons. "My apartment has a bed. It has doors that lock. It is an efficient environment for what we agreed on. Don't overcomplicate the geography."

"You make it sound like a business meeting," you whispered, glaring at him through your embarrassment.

"It is a business meeting," he murmured, his grin returning, sharp and entirely satisfied with how easily he could wind you up. "The business of keeping you from breaking down, and keeping me from going crazy. Now, are you going to meet me later, or are you too afraid of a park?"

"Fine."

𓂃 ࣪˖ ִֶָ༘࿐: °❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･

The afternoon sun offers no warmth you can visually identify, manifesting only as a heavy, radiating heat against the skin of your face.

The concrete of the campus parking lot transitions from a pale, chalky grey to a deep, absorbent charcoal that seems to drink in the brightness without reflecting a single drop of it back.

You navigate the lot by the familiar textures of the perimeter—the rough, crumbling bark of the ancient oak trees lining the edge, the gritty friction of loose gravel beneath the flat soles of your shoes, and the sharp, metallic glare bouncing off rows of polished chrome.

And then, you spot it. Or rather, you spot him.

Jeongguk is waiting exactly where he always does, leaning carelessly against the hood of his car. The vehicle is a sleek, matte block of shadow against the washed-out concrete, its surface absorbing the harsh light like velvet. He's sitting on the edge of the hood, one heavy combat boot braced against the asphalt while the other dangles, his long legs crossed at the ankle.

The contrast between him and the environment is striking. His leather jacket is a coarse, heavy texture compared to the smooth, cold expanse of the car's metal body. Even from a distance, you can see the slight breeze catching the softer, loose strands of his dark hair, pulling them across his forehead. He isn't looking at his phone. He isn't looking at the passing students. His head is turned entirely in your direction, his gaze tracking your approach the moment your silhouette breaks away from the textured brick of the university building.

He  stays anchored to the metal, watching you absorb the reality of the situation, his eyes locked onto yours as if testing to see if you're going to turn around and run.

If you changed your mind.

You didn't. You're breaking down your walls—or rather, trying to.

You're going to hang out with him.

Not on university grounds.

Not by accident at a bar Sora chose and he just showed up.

Nope. By choice.

"Look at you," Jeongguk says, a lazy, arrogant smirk playing on his lips as he slides off the warm metal. He stands at his full height, casually tossing his keys into the air and catching them in one fluid motion. "I half-expected you to fake a medical emergency to get out of this. Glad to see you managed to drag yourself here."

You swallow down the dry lump in your throat, forcing your chin up to meet his gaze with equal defiance. "Don't flatter yourself. I just wanted to see if you actually knew the way to a park, or if you were going to get us lost five minutes from campus."

"I know parks."

"Do you studio hermit?"

He lets out a low, amused huff, turning to open the passenger door for you. "Get in."

You step past him, the heavy leather of his jacket brushing against your shoulder as you slide into the smooth, firm interior of the passenger seat. But as the door clicks shut, separating you from the gritty gravel and the familiar hum of the parking lot, your sarcastic armor cracks from the inside out.

Deep down, you are completely freaking out.

The cold truth settles heavily in your chest: Jeongguk is the first guy you've ever gotten close to like this.

Close because you've already had sex.

Kinda close because... well, it's him.

It's a calculated pact, yet it requires a level of raw, unfiltered exposure you've never allowed anyone else to see.

When you mentally catalog the guys in your life, the math is terrifyingly simple. Jimin doesn't count at all. He was Sora's ex, which meant he was automatically off-limits from the very beginning. That boundary took all the pressure off, making him completely safe. Minho was a disaster who cheated, cutting off any real chance of long-term vulnerability before it could start. All while breaking your heart in the process. And Taehyung? You've only hung out with him twice—he's a fleeting acquaintance, a nice guy, but nothing deeper.

That leaves Jeongguk as the only real, active variable in your orbit. The only man who has truly breached your perimeter.

And experiencing that reality by choice feels deeply, profoundly weird.

Jeongguk slides into the driver's seat beside you. The space inside the car is compact, isolating, and thick with the scent of his cologne. He doesn't start the engine right away. Instead, he rests his hands on the smooth leather of the steering wheel and cuts a sharp look sideways, his hyper-observant eyes tracking the rigid line of your shoulders and the way your fingers are white-knuckled around your bag.

"You look like you're heading to an execution," Jeongguk murmurs, his voice dropping into that smooth, slightly mocking register as he reaches forward to turn the key. The engine roars to life, a low, vibration that ripples right through the soles of your shoes. "Relax, Void. I'm just teaching you about colors, remember? The dangerous part is already over."

You roll your eyes, desperately trying to find a footing in the thick, restricted air of the car. "I'm not afraid of the colors, Jeongguk. I'm just mentally preparing myself for an afternoon of your insufferable ego."

It's meant to be a sharp, biting comeback, but the delivery misses the mark entirely. Your voice cracks slightly at the end, the bravado sounding thin, brittle, and completely forced.

Way to go.

Jeongguk doesn't shift the car into drive. He keeps his foot on the brake, the low, deep rumble of the engine vibrating beneath your thighs. Slowly, he turns his head to look at you. His gaze traces the rhythm of your breathing, tracking the faint, stubborn flush that hasn't completely left your skin.

He doesn't mock you this time. Instead, his gaze softens into something heavy and entirely unreadable.

"Your makeup is nice today," he says softly as he gestures to your eyes.

The words are simple. True. Entirely devoid of his usual sarcastic armor.

The compliment hits you like a physical force, catching you completely off guard. The smart-ass retort dies instantly on your tongue, your mind blanking as your heart takes a violent leap against your ribs. The sheer sincerity in his low baritone makes the space between you feel suffocatingly small.

"Thanks," you whisper, the word slipping out before your defenses can stop it. You look away, staring blindly at the matte textured dashboard, your pulse hammering in your ears.

Jeongguk's gaze lingers on your profile for a beat longer before his eyes drop down. He notices the loose, unbuckled strap hanging beside your shoulder. He lets out a low, rough exhale, a sound that feels entirely too intimate in the enclosed space.

"You forgot your belt," he murmurs.

Before you can reach for it, he leans across the center console.

The shift in weight is sudden, and suddenly his frame is invading your entire perimeter. The heavy scent of his musky cologne rushes over you, thick and intoxicating. He moves with a deliberate, agonizing slowness, his chest pressing close enough that you can feel the radiating heat of his body cutting through the fabric of your clothes.

You freeze, your breath completely hitching in your throat. Your hands grip the edge of your seat as he reaches over your hip to grab the metal latch. His leather jacket brushes against your bare forearm, the coarse, cool texture frictioning against your sensitive skin and sending a sharp, electric shiver straight up your spine.

Jeongguk doesn't hurry. He pulls the strap across your chest, his knuckles deliberately grazing the slope of your ribs, a slow, dragging pressure that makes your stomach knot with an unbearable ache. He stays there, hovered entirely over you, his face inches from yours. You can hear the deep, steady rhythm of his breathing, can feel the warm puff of his exhale catching against the skin of your neck.

Warm.

He clicks the buckle into place, the sharp snap echoing loudly in the quiet cabin.

But he doesn't pull away.

Jeongguk keeps his hand anchored right beside your hip, eyes slowly rising to meet yours. At this distance, you can see every detail—the razor-sharp line of his jaw, the dark intensity swirling in his gaze, the faint, almost cute tilt of his head.

Your eyes instinctively drop to his mouth, then dart back up, entirely trapped under his spell.

Abort, abort, abort.

He tracks the movement of your eyes, his lips parting a fraction of an inch as his gaze lingers on your mouth just long enough to make your heart fall to your ass before he finally, slowly, pulls back into his own seat.

Jeongguk wrapped his fingers around the steering wheel, his knuckles white against the smooth leather as he shifted the car into drive. He didn't look at you, but the lazy, satisfied smirk returned to his face, his voice smooth and entirely too casual for the havoc he had just wrecked on your nervous system.

"That belt has a problem," he murmured, his eyes scanning the rear-view mirror as he backed out of the space. "It doesn't close well. That's why I did it myself."

You just hummed. A low, noncommittal sound that stayed trapped in the back of your throat. You didn't dare trust your voice to say anything else.

Staring straight ahead through the windshield, you forced your brain to work, desperately trying to rationalize the sudden, suffocating physical closeness. This was supposed to be outside the parameters of the pact. The pact was cold. It was transactional. It was dark. This... whatever just happened, felt entirely too real.

You mentally listed the facts to steady yourself.

Yes, Jeongguk was wildly, undeniably attractive.

Yes, he had made you finish, and the memory of it still sent a liquid heat straight to your core.

But you weren't some hormonal 15 year-old boy. You could keep it in your pants. More importantly, emotionally, you were a complete shell of a woman right now, and he was an arrogant, calculating asshole.

Two broken pieces making a mess.

It was a done deal. There was no room for anything else.

The heavy, gritty friction of the parking lot gravel smoothed out into the steady, rhythmic hum of the main road. The car accelerated, the engine roaring quietly as the campus blurred into a streaky gradient of pale greys and dark asphalt behind you.

With the physical distance restored, the suffocating tension in the cabin finally fractured, paving the way for your usual dynamic to take over.

"So," you started, crossing your arms tightly over your chest, deliberately anchoring yourself into your seat. "Are you going to tell me where we're actually going, or is kidnapping part of the color curriculum?"

Jeongguk let out a dry, amused chuckle, his thumb tapping a slow beat against the steering wheel. "I told you. A park. Somewhere outside the usual perimeter where I don't have to look at the university's atrocious architecture."

"A park," you repeated flatly, raising an eyebrow at his profile. "How specific. Should I be worried about ending up in a ditch?"

"If I wanted to put you in a ditch, I wouldn't have wasted my time buckling your seatbelt," he shot back smoothly, cutting a sharp, teasing glance sideways at you. "We're going to a botanical reserve about twenty minutes out. High texture, low civilian density. Perfect for someone who shrinks into a shell the moment a stranger looks at them."

"I do not shrink," you snapped, your defense mechanism flaring instantly at the accurate call-out.

"You do," he countered, his smirk widening as he navigated a turn. "You practically tried to merge with Taehyung's notebook earlier. It was pathetic. Entertaining, but pathetic."

"I was caught off guard," you muttered, looking out the side window to hide the small smile tugging at your lips despite yourself. "And Yoongi looks like he cuts people open for fun."

"He does," Jeongguk agreed easily, his tone shifting into something a bit more relaxed. "But only if they interrupt his mix. You got lucky."

"Okay but a botanical reserve?" you echoed, turning your head slightly to look at his sharp profile against the window. "Why there? Don't tell me you're secretly fond of flowers. Altough your tag name is a plant...or weed. Whatever it is"

Jeongguk didn't answer right away, his fingers flexing against the leather of the steering wheel.

"It's not a weed," he said, his voice dropping into a flat, defensive register that caught you completely off guard.

You blinked, surprised by the immediate pushback. "Some people call it a weed."

"It's a plant," he countered sharply, his jaw tightening as he stared straight ahead at the dark asphalt stretching before the car. "I find it pretty."

"No one said it isn't."

"I think you fucking did."

The raw, sudden profanity sliced through the cabin, heavy and completely uncalled for. You recoiled slightly against your seat, your eyebrows drawing together.

"Woah... what's with the attitude?" you asked, your voice dropping its playful edge entirely.

No reply. He went completely dead silent, his mouth pressed into a rigid, hostile line as his eyes remained locked onto the road ahead. The easy, teasing rhythm you had just built completely shattered, leaving a thick, suffocating quiet in its place.

You stared at him, genuinely confused by the sudden outburst. It felt like you had accidentally stepped on a hidden landmine, tripping over a wire you hadn't even known was there. Why did a simple comment about his tag name pull such a raw, defensive spike out of him?

The heavy silence stretched out for several long kilometres, the only sound the rhythmic, muted thumping of the tires over the expansion joints of the road. You kept your face turned toward the side window, staring at the blurred, colorless landscape shifting outside, your chest tight with a mixture of confusion and lingering irritation.

Just as the tension was reaching a boiling point, Jeongguk let out a long, slow breath. The harsh rigidity in his shoulders visibly deflated, his grip on the steering wheel loosening just a fraction.

"I'm sorry," he muttered, his voice rough and low, stripped of all its previous sharp bite.

You didn't look at him right away, keeping your eyes on the road. "For which part? The cursing or the random whiplash?"

"Both," he said quietly. He ran a hand through his hair, his fingers catching slightly in the dark, soft strands before dropping back to the console. "I had a very bad day. A really fucking bad day before you walked into the studio. I shouldn't have snapped at you over that."

Hearing him actually apologize—directly and without any sarcastic deflection—stilled the defensive thoughts in your head. The tag name was clearly a boundary too close to his raw nerve.

"It's fine," you murmured, turning your head back toward him. "Just... give me a warning next time you're about to implode."

A tiny, faint ghost of a smile tugged at the corner of his lips, though it didn't quite reach his eyes. "I'll try to put on my hazard lights next time."

The smooth cadence of his voice signaled that the danger zone had passed, and slowly, the familiar, banter began to weave its way back into the car. But you were more reserved this time. The sudden outburst had reminded you of the invisible lines drawn around him—the sharp edges of his private world that you hadn't earned the right to touch. You kept your tone lighter, a bit more guarded, ensuring you didn't dig into any more hidden landmines.

"So, Mr. Hazard Lights," you said, leaning your head back against the headrest, your arms still loosely crossed. "How much further to this high-texture sanctuary of yours? Because if it takes much longer, I'm going to start rating your driving, and I don't think your ego can handle a failing grade."

"A failing grade?" Jeongguk scoffed, his voice gaining back its arrogant, confident rhythm as he skillfully shifted lanes to take an off-ramp. "I'm a flawless driver. You're just a nervous passenger who doesn't appreciate precision engineering."

"Precision engineering doesn't involve tailgating the delivery truck we passed three kilometres ago," you shot back, though your voice lacked its usual bite, a quiet, observant reserve settling deep in your chest.

"It's called drafting," he countered smoothly, cutting a quick, amused glance your way, his eyes lingering on your face just long enough to ensure you were no longer pulling away from him. "Saves fuel. You're welcome."

"I might need you to turn on some music," you said, shifting in your seat and adjusting the strap of your bag. "Your ego is getting way too loud in here, and it's starting to give me a headache."

Jeongguk let out a dry, breathy chuckle, his fingers reaching out toward the center console. Instead of pulling up a playlist on his phone, he simply tapped the power button on the dashboard, and the sudden, fuzzy crackle of a local FM station filled the small cabin.

You stared at the glowing digital numbers on the screen, completely incredulous. "You don't connect your phone to the car? You're actually using the radio? Like a grandpa?"

"It's classic," he shot back easily, not even looking at you as he adjusted his grip on the steering wheel. "And it requires zero effort. Besides, sometimes it's better to let someone else choose the vibe. Keeps things unpredictable."

"It keeps things outdated," you countered, though a small, involuntary smile tugged at the corner of your lips.

Before he could offer another arrogant defense, the static faded out, replaced by the unmistakable, iconic opening chords of a song. A slow, dripping guitar melody began to echo through the studio-grade speakers of the car, followed immediately by the smooth, melancholic swell of a string section.

The bickering died instantly.

You both froze, the sudden shift in the atmosphere almost palpable as the opening notes of Prince's Purple Rain washed over the interior of the vehicle.

For a moment, the world outside the windows didn't matter. The fact that you couldn't see the color in the song's title didn't matter either; the audio itself was so rich, so deeply layered, that it felt entirely three-dimensional in the quiet space of the car.

Jeongguk's gaze flicked sideways to you, eyes wide with a rare, uncharacteristic flash of surprise. The teasing smirk completely vanished from his face, replaced by a quiet, genuine look of recognition as he realized you were tracking the exact same rhythm.

"Don't tell me you actually have good taste," he murmured, his voice dropping low, matching the smooth, atmospheric depth of the music as the first verse began to play.

"I could say the exact same thing about you," you shot back, a genuine smile breaking through your previous reserve as the drums kicked in with a heavy, satisfying thud.

As the song built toward the chorus, the urge to drown out the rest of the world became mutual. You reached your hand out toward the dashboard dial at the exact same fraction of a second he did, both of your mouths already silently shaping the words to the lyrics.

Your fingers collided.

It wasn't a brief, passing brush this time. Your hand landed directly over his knuckles, the skin-on-skin contact sudden and surprisingly warm against the backdrop of the air-conditioned cabin.

"Sorry," you both blurted out instinctively, the word rushing out in a simultaneous, breathless chorus.

You pulled your hand back as if the plastic dial had suddenly caught fire, tucking your fingers into your lap. Jeongguk's hand froze mid-air for a beat before he let it drop back down to the gear shift, his gaze fixed determinedly on the road ahead, though the tips of his ears turned a faint shade of dark grey under his hair.

"I just wanted it louder," you muttered, looking down at your bag to avoid his eyes.

"Yeah," Jeongguk cleared his throat, his arrogant

composure faltering for a rare, fleeting second. "Me too. I wanted the song louder."

He reached out again, much more deliberately this time, and cranked the volume dial up. Prince's soaring vocals and the heavy, dripping texture of the guitar solo flooded the car, filling the silence that threatened to swallow you both whole.

Jeongguk's posture slowly relaxed back into the seat, his left hand steering with a loose, practiced grip while his right arm rested over the center console, just inches from yours. He didn't try to initiate any more bratty banter, and for once, you didn't feel the need to throw up a sarcastic defense. The music did all the heavy lifting for you both, bridging the chaotic gap between the dark, calculated pact you'd struck in the studio and the terrifyingly intimate reality of where you were heading.

Through the windshield, the pale, washed-out highway began to give way to denser, more organic textures. The smooth concrete fractured into darker, older asphalt, and the horizon line thickened with the heavy, jagged silhouettes of towering trees as the car approached the outer boundary of the botanical reserve.

You looked away from the dashboard and stared out at the passing landscape. You still couldn't see the colors he wanted to teach you, and you still didn't know how to navigate the blurry lines of whatever it was you were doing with him.

But as Prince's final, haunting falsetto notes began to fade, bleeding into the quiet, low idle of the engine, a cold realization settled heavy in your chest. Hanging out with him was going to be so much harder than you thought.

next chapter | previous

tags @svitozz

[ttabacco]

Faux Colors

chapter 15

liability clauses

Synopsis; one lives in a world under the weight of shadows the other lives in a world that screams.

"The sky is blue like Sacrifice by Elton John"

warnings; swearing, heavy themes pairing; jeongguk × female reader genre; angst, slowburn, smut, fwb word count; 8.8k

a/n: i'm back. not really. not for long. definitely fighting for my life. was this chapter filled to the brim with symbolism? maybe. are finally seeing some cracks? 100% yes.

enjoy the debauchery.

—

Jeongguk is still leaning across the console, one hand resting lazily on the top of the steering wheel, his dark eyes fixed on your face with a clinical, unblinking intensity. The question hangs in the air, blunt and abrasive, designed to strip away whatever armor you have left.

You let out a sharp, breathless laugh, the sound entirely hollow. "Car sex? Seriously? Is that where your mind goes?"

"It's a straightforward question," he replies, his voice low, a slow, mocking tilt pulling at the corner of his mouth. He doesn't shift an inch, his gaze tracking the way your fingers twist into the fabric of your sleeves. "You look like you've been evicted from your own skin. Usually, people only look that wrecked when they've done something they can't take back. So, did you?"

"No," you bite out, turning your head to look out the side window, watching the streetlights bleed into long, distorted smears of light against the wet glass. "Minho wasn't exactly the type for spontaneous, reckless decisions. He preferred his betrayals carefully planned and kept behind closed doors."

The banter is a defense mechanism, a flimsy shield you're throwing up because the alternative is letting him see the sheer magnitude of the rot inside your chest. But Jeongguk doesn't let up. He watches the rigid line of your shoulders, his internal radar picking up on every tremor, calculating your breaking point with the hyper-focused discipline.

"But you're still thinking about him," Jeongguk states. It's not a question. It's a cold appraisal.

"I feel physically sick," you whisper, the admission slipping out before you can stop it, raw and completely unpolished. "It's pathetic. He ruined everything, he humiliated me, and I still... I feel like a part of me is completely broken because I can't just turn it off. I hate him, but I still love him, and it makes me want to rip my own chest open just to make it stop hurting."

The silence that follows is thick, punctuated only by the low hum of the engine and the steady rush of the climate control. You keep your eyes shut, braced for another sharp remark, another cynical piece of commentary from a man who claims he doesn't do guilt or messy emotional attachments.

You open your eyes. Jeongguk isn't looking at you with pity—he looks entirely unbothered by the storm inside you, his expression fixed in that calm, steady authority that feels dangerous and numbing all at once.

"It will pass." he says simply.

His voice is flat, devoid of any soft reassurances, offering nothing but a brutal, transactional truth. He doesn't tell you it's going to be okay; he just gives you a definitive end point, treating your grief like an illness that simply needs to burn itself out. And under the steady, heavy pressure of his gaze, the nausea slowly begins to recede, leaving behind a cold, calculated stillness.

"How are you so sure?"

The question leaves your lips before you can filter it, your voice sounding small and fragile against the heavy, mechanical hum of the dashboard.

His fingers begin to tap a slow, deliberate cadence against the leather of the steering wheel.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

He's looking straight ahead now, his  profile cut sharp against the bleeding  glare of the streetlights outside. He looks entirely empty, his mind clearly working behind those unblinking eyes, processing your outburst not with empathy, but with the detached logic of a technician fixing a glitch.

"I'm sure the hurt will pass," he says finally, his voice dropping an octave, flat and absolute. The drumming of his fingers stops. He tilts his head slightly, not looking at you, but letting the words settle between you like heavy weights. "The true love never truly goes away. You just learn to build walls around it until you can't hear it screaming anymore."

Your chest tightens. It's the most vulnerable thing he's ever said, a tiny crack in the sleek, impenetrable armor he wears like a second skin. You lean in slightly, your eyes scanning the  line of his jaw, desperate for a foothold, desperate to understand the man who is currently offering you a lifeline wrapped in barbed wire.

"Who taught you that?" you press, your heart hammering against your ribs. "Jeongguk, who did you have to build walls against?"

But the moment you push for more, the shutter slams down. Jeongguk isn't one to talk about feelings. He doesn't do emotional post-mortems, and he certainly doesn't dissect himself for anyone else's benefit. His internal discipline is too rigid, his boundaries too fiercely guarded. Talking about the past, about pain, is a liability.

It's messy.

And Jeongguk only deals in things he can control.

He turns his head slowly, eyes locking onto yours, effectively choking out the lingering vulnerability in the air. The detachment is back, but this time, it's laced with a heavy, deliberate heat. He steers the conversation away from his psyche and directly into the territory he manages best.

Something physical. Something transactional. Something you two already shook hands on.

"You're asking too many questions," he murmurs, his gaze dropping to your mouth, his voice dripping with a low, commanding gravity that makes your stomach do a completely different kind of flip. "We didn't establish this deal so you could psychoanalyze me."

He reaches out, his fingers wrapping firmly around your chin, tilting your face up until you have no choice but to meet his stare.

"You're physically sick because your brain is running in circles over a problem you can't solve right now," he says, his tone entirely pragmatic, diagnosing your panic with cold efficiency. "If you want the nausea to stop, you need a distraction heavy enough to override it. We have an arrangement for exactly that. So stop talking about him, and let me give your body something else to process."

Inside you, a sudden, suffocating wave of inner turmoil flares up. You look at him, your throat tight, wondering if you are becoming entirely unhinged.

Is this greed?

To want this—to want him—twice in the same day? Only hours ago, you were unraveling under his touch, using his body as an emergency brake for your own mind. To ask for it again feels gluttonous, a desperate, pathetic dependency on a drug that hasn't even settled into your system yet. You are supposed to be mourning a multi-year relationship, yet here you are, practically begging a dangerous, clinical acquaintance to numb you again because you're too cowardly to face the empty space in your own chest.

Maybe it is pathetic.

Maybe there's no right or wrong in love and war.

This wasn't love. Not for him, at least.

It was for Minho. So was war. His actions determined both nouns of the saying to fly around in your mind.

Is it fair? Sleeping with someone else?

He did cheat. He did lie. He did destroy you.

Why are you still scared of what he'd say if he found out?

Your mind frantically scrambles for some kind of footing in the wreckage, and weirdly, a random line from a book you'd read. Dostoevsky's The Idiot—a passage you had highlighted and never truly understood until this exact moment, sitting in the heavy silence of a stranger's car.

I think that if one is faced by inevitable destruction—if a house is falling upon you, for instance—one must feel a great longing to sit down, close one's eyes and wait, come what may...

This deal, this car, the terrifying gravity of Jeongguk—this was you closing your eyes. It wasn't a choice to heal; it was a choice to stop fighting the collapse.

The realization settles like lead in your stomach, and suddenly, the air inside the cockpit feels entirely too thick. You pull your chin back, breaking his grip, and look away. Your hands find the edges of your hoodie sleeves again, pulling them down over your knuckles in a frantic, defensive motion.

It's awkward. Incredibly so.

Earlier, in the soundproof basement, the breakdown had been loud and chaotic, giving you a frantic sort of momentum. But here? In the quiet, expensive containment of his passenger seat, with the dashboard casting moody  shadows over your lap, the shift from emotional ruin to clinical physical transaction feels jarringly mechanical. You don't know where to look. You don't know what to do with your legs.

"Right now?" you whisper, your voice cracking slightly into the quiet space. You glance at the sleek leather center console dividing the two of you, then up at the steering wheel. "In the... here? Like this?"

Jeongguk doesn't shift his posture to accommodate your sudden clumsiness. He stays perfectly still, his large frame relaxed against the driver's seat, watching the erratic, nervous shift of your eyes with an infuriatingly steady patience. He doesn't laugh at the awkwardness, but a slow, faint twitch at the corner of his mouth proves he's tracking every bit of your hesitation.

"The car has tinted windows," he says simply, his voice a low, practical rumble that sounds completely unbothered by the logistics. He shifts his weight slightly, the leather creaking beneath him. "And the campus is dead. Unless you want to go stand back out in the burnt orange mist."

You swallow hard, your throat feeling incredibly dry. You look down at your damp shoes, your heart hammering a messy, lawless rhythm against your ribs. Every instinct you possess is telling you that this is clumsy, that you are acting entirely out of character, but the dangerous promise of the numbness he provides is still the only thing keeping the panic from pulling you back under.

"I don't even know how we're supposed to..." You trail off, gesturing vaguely toward the confined space between the seats, your face burning with a sudden, humiliating heat.

Jeongguk lets out a low, breathy chuckle, the sound vibrating through the quiet interior of the car. He finally shifts his weight, leaning back into his seat and throwing an arm lazily over the steering wheel, though his unblinking stare never leaves your burning face.

"You're not escaping your Virgin Mary reputation with this level of panic," he says, a sharp, mocking tilt pulling at the corner of his lips.

The blunt words hit you like a splash of icy water, making your breath hitch. Your eyes snap to his, wide and defensive, your cheeks flushing an even deeper, humiliating shade of crimson. It's exactly the kind of  irreverent tease designed to rattle you, but under the heavy weight of his gaze, it also cuts straight through the suffocating awkwardness that had been paralyzing your limbs.

"I am not in a panic," you lie. Poorly.

"Right," Jeongguk murmurs, eyes tracking the frantic rise and fall of your chest with a slow, calculating appraisal. "That's why you're breathing like you're about to pass out, and you're staring at the gear shift like it's a bomb."

He reaches out, his hand unhurried as he presses a button on the side of his seat. With a smooth, mechanical whir, his driver's seat glides backward and tilts into a deep, low recline, instantly creating a wide, open clearing in the center of the cramped cockpit. The sudden shift in space is deliberate and loud, a silent command that tears away the last of your excuses.

"Come here," he says simply.

His voice has dropped the mocking edge, replacing it with a flat, commanding gravity that leaves no room for hesitation. He stays reclined, one hand resting casually on his thigh, waiting for you to cross the leather console and bridge the gap you've been freezing over with your own doubt.

You swallow down the last of your hesitation, the sheer weight of your own thoughts driving you forward. Moving awkwardly in the confined space, you lift yourself over the sleek leather center console, your knees finding the edges of his seat as you slide to straddle his lap. The transition is clumsy, your hands coming down against his broad shoulders to steady yourself, but the moment your weight settles fully against him, the distance between you completely evaporates.

Jeongguk's hands don't hesitate. They instantly find your waist, his  palms anchoring you against him with a firm, bruising grip that immediately stops the trembling in your legs.

When his eyes lift to meet yours in the dim glow of the dashboard, there is no more mockery left in them. Without a word, he pulls you down.

The kiss is sharp, desperate, and entirely devoid of gentleness. It's exactly the kind of friction your brain was screaming for—a heavy, overwhelming sensory overload that instantly suffocates the lingering image of Minho's face. You are tangling your fingers into the short, dark hair at the nape of his neck, pulling him closer, chasing the numbing heat of his mouth as if your life depends on it. Jeongguk responds with a low growl deep in his chest, his grip on your waist tightening until you are pressed flush against his chest, completely consumed by his rhythm.

He shifts his focus, his lips leaving yours to trail a line of burning kisses down the tense line of your jaw. You tilt your head back, your eyes closing as a breathless gasp escapes you, the outside blurring into nothing but white noise.

He nuzzles his head deep into the crook of your neck, his hot breath fanning across your skin a split second before his lips press against your pulse point. He inhales deeply, absorbing the raw scent of you mixed with the damp mist clinging to your collar, and a sudden, sharp tremor runs through his heavy frame.

His grip on your hips turns almost feral, burying his face deeper against your skin.

"Fuck..." he mutters, his voice a rough, gravelly scrape that vibrates directly against your throat, entirely stripped of his usual control. "Your scent."

"What about it?" you whisper, your voice thick and breathless, your fingers still knotted tightly in the dark strands at the nape of his neck. Your heart is hammering so violently against your ribs that you're certain he can feel it through his chest.

Jeongguk doesn't answer you. He lets out a low, rough exhale against your skin, his jaw tightening as he pulls back just enough to look at you.

"You talk too much." his tone raw and impatient.

Before you can even process the words, his hand snaps up to the back of your head, his fingers tangling brutally in your hair to tilt your face up. He smashes his mouth back down onto yours, cutting off any remaining words before they can even form.

This time, the kiss isn't just sharp—it's entirely hungry.

There is a lawless, feral desperation to the way he claims you, completely destroying the polite boundaries of the deal you just made. His tongue shoots into your mouth, wet and heavy, sloppily but effortlessly finding dominance against yours. It's an aggressive, chaotic intrusion that forces your jaw open further, drowning you in the sharp, intoxicating taste of him—strawberry-mint, tobacco, and pure, concentrated heat.

You can barely keep up with the rhythm he's dictating, your own tongue getting tangled in his as he deepens the kiss, consuming your breathless whimpers before they can escape into the quiet cockpit of the car.

There is nothing left but the bruising pressure of Jeongguk's mouth and the suffocating heat of his body.

You like it like this.

Then, his hands grip your hips again, his palms sinking into you with a definitive, grounding force.

Slowly, deliberately, he guides your body. With a low, rolling tilt of his own pelvis, Jeongguk starts moving your hips, forcing your ass to grind down against him in a lazy, agonizingly heavy friction.

The physical friction is immediate and electric, sending a sharp jolt straight up your spine. He moves you with a slow, agonizingly steady control.

Every lazy swipe of your body against his is a calculated reminder of exactly what you asked for—a distraction so heavy, so consuming, that you couldn't think of anyone else even if you tried.

The sudden, heavy friction of your body against his pulls a soft, ragged moan right out of your throat, the sound echoing entirely too loud within the small, leather-bound confines of the dashboard.

The moment it leaves your lips, a sharp spike of heat flushes through your skin—not from desire, but from a sudden, paralyzing embarrassment. Your eyes snap open, and your movements stutter to a clumsy, awkward halt. You instinctively bury your face into his shoulder, your forehead pressing against the dark fabric of his jacket as you try to hide the burning color of your cheeks.

Jeongguk's chest rumbles with a low, quiet vibration as you freeze. He doesn't laugh, and he doesn't use the moment to tease you with his usual biting irony.

Instead, his hands remain firmly anchored on your hips, keeping you pinned to him, his thumb rubbing a slow, heavy circle through the fabric of your pants.

Soothing.

He leans up slightly, his lips brushing against the shell of your ear as your face stays hidden in his neck.

"Don't do that," he murmurs, voice a calm, gravelly weight that somehow manages to pacify the burning humiliation in your chest while simultaneously setting your nerves on fire.

He slides one hand up from your hip, his fingers tracking the rigid line of your spine until his palm settles flat against the back of your head. With a gentle but unyielding pressure, he forces you to lift your face, tilting your chin up until you have no choice but to look at him.

"I want to hear you," he says simply, hot breath fanning across your lips. "Stop holding it back. If you're going to let me distract you, let me hear exactly how well it's working."

"Okay," you whisper, the word barely a breath against his lips, but it's the only permission he needs.

The last wall of your hesitation crumbles, and Jeongguk takes absolute advantage of the ruin. His hands abandon their steady hold on your hips, immediately starting to roam everywhere, his warm palms mapping out your body with an urgent, heavy possession.

One hand slides down, his fingers sinking brutally into the meat of your ass, gripping you through your clothes with enough force to lift you slightly. He uses that leverage to fasten the movement, destroying the lazy, teasing rhythm from before and replacing it with a harder, more demanding friction that makes your head spin.

A breathless, broken sound escapes your throat, and this time you don't try to hide it.

His other hand sweeps up your torso, his long fingers trailing a path of pure fire over your ribs until his palm cups the curve of your breast. He caresses you through the thick fabric of your hoodie, his thumb brushing deliberately over the apex over and over again until a sharp, tight knot forms low in your belly. The contrast between the rough, calloused weight of his hands and the sensitive, aching reality of your skin is completely overwhelming.

Then, you feel it. Really feel it.

With every heavy, accelerated roll of his hips, the rigid, swelling length of him presses directly against your center. The thin barrier of your clothes does nothing to dull the sensation; he is growing fiercely hard beneath you, a thick  pulse that perfectly aligns with the frantic rhythm he's dictating. The sheer, solid geometry of his arousal forces your thighs to split wider, your body instinctively molding itself around him as the raw, heavy pressure of his size grinds deep into your core.

You let out a jagged gasp, your hands clutching at his shoulders as if you're drowning, entirely consumed by the undeniable, terrifying reality of how much he wants you in this exact moment.

The heavy fog of heat and friction is shattered by a sudden, jarring noise.

Bzzz. Bzzz. Bzzz.

The mechanical vibration cuts straight through the quiet, leather-bound interior of the car, buzzing aggressively right against your inner thigh. For a second, you try to ignore it, trying to stay submerged in the numbing rhythm of his mouth and the brutal weight of his body against yours. But the vibration is persistent, a cold injection of reality that completely disrupts the heat building in your core.

You pull your mouth away from his, your breathing ragged and uneven. "Jeongguk..."

He doesn't stop. He let out a low, needy sound deep in his chest, completely dazed by the proximity and the scent of your skin. His hands stay locked on your waist, his head dropping heavily back into the crook of your neck as he tries to keep moving your hips against him. He's entirely lost in the friction, his usual calculated composure completely fried.

Bzzz. Bzzz.

"Jeongguk, stop," you pant, your face burning as the buzzing continues right between your legs. A ridiculous, dazed thought hits your brain before you can filter it. "Do you... do you have a vibrator in your pocket?"

"What...?" His voice is a rough, completely ruined whisper against your collarbone. He whimpers softly into your skin, his jaw rubbing against your neck, entirely unbothered by the distraction. He sounds half-conscious, his brain running entirely on the raw physical sensation of your body molding into his. "No... what are you talking about..."

"Jeongguk. Your pants are vibrating," you repeat, your hands shifting to his shoulders to firmly push him back.

The blunt statement finally seems to pierce through the thick haze over his mind. He blinks, his eyes slowly focusing on your face.

The clinical, untouchable Jeongguk is nowhere to be seen; his hair is messy, his lips are wet and swollen, and his chest is heaving as he tries to recalibrate.

He clears his throat, a sharp line appearing between his brows as he finally registers the aggressive buzzing inside his pocket.

Someone is calling him.

With a low, frustrated curse, he lets go of your waist, his hand sliding down into his pocket to pull out the glowing screen. From your position straddling his lap, you can see the bright glare of the phone illuminating the dark cabin, but the angle is completely obscured—you can't see the caller ID.

Jeongguk stares at the screen for a fraction of a second, the muscles in his jaw tightening so hard they turn white. The heavy, unraveled heat that had just been radiating from his skin instantly evaporates, replaced by a sudden, rigid tension that makes his entire frame go rigid beneath you.

He presses the phone to his ear, his fingers gripping the device with a quiet, white-knuckled ferocity.

"Yes," he says.

His voice is completely different now. The rough, gravelly rasp from moments ago is gone, but it hasn't been replaced by his usual smooth  arrogance either. Instead, it sounds hollowed out.

Flat.

It's a voice stripped of every single defense mechanism he owns, leaving him sounding almost... small. Stripped of his armor, the towering, dangerous man beneath you suddenly looks like someone carrying an impossible, exhausting weight.

The voice on the other end of the line is nothing but a faint, metallic mumble through the speaker, but the tone is sharp, demanding, and completely unyielding. Jeongguk doesn't interrupt. He just listens, eyes staring blindly out the mist-slicked windshield, his heaving chest slowly forcing itself into a disciplined, quiet rhythm.

"I know," Jeongguk murmurs, his voice dropping into a submissive, quiet register that sends a strange, uncomfortable chill down your spine.

There is a long pause. The muffled voice on the line continues to speak, heavy and reprimanding, chipping away at the untouchable persona Jeongguk wears like a shield every single day.

"I know," he repeats, weaker this time. His head tilts down slightly, his chin nearly brushing his collarbone as his shoulders slightly cave inward.

Watching the swift, brutal shift in his demeanor causes a cold wave of sobriety to wash over you. The physical daze completely shatters, leaving you acutely aware of the raw, awkward reality of the situation. You are still straddling his lap, your bodies still warm and tangled, but the intimacy has been completely violated by the ghost on the other end of the line. The heavy silence of his submission feels like a private chamber you aren't supposed to be witnessing.

Taking his hushed, rhythmic capitulation as a clear signal, you carefully lift your weight off his thighs.

Jeongguk doesn't try to stop you. His hands stay resting uselessly on his own lap, his fingers twitching slightly but never reaching out to hold you back as you awkwardly maneuver yourself over the leather center console and slide back into the passenger seat.

"I'll be there," Jeongguk whispers to the empty air of the car, his eyes closed as he closes the call, the bright screen fading to black.

He clears his throat, the sound rough and deliberately detached as he adjusts his seat back into its upright, clinical position.

"I'm sorry," he says, his voice flat, completely devoid of the gravelly warmth from moments ago. He doesn't look at you as his hands find the steering wheel, his grip tight enough to turn his knuckles white. "But I can't continue what we started today. I have to go."

He shifts the car into drive, the mechanical click of the gear shift loud in the quiet. "I'll take you home."

Your mind is spinning, entirely confused to say the least. You sit frozen in the passenger seat, your hands tucked into your sleeves, staring at the side of his face. You have never seen him like this—so completely unlike himself. The untouchable, arrogant designer who dictated the terms of your dark pact with a smirk had just vanished into thin air. For a few minutes on that phone, he hadn't looked like a threat at all; he looked small, like a little boy trapped in the heavy, broad-shouldered body of an adult male. It's a jarring, unsettling sight that makes your chest ache in a way you weren't prepared for, peeling back a layer of him that you were never supposed to see.

"You don't have to," you respond softly, your voice breaking the heavy atmosphere. You look down at your lap, trying to match his sudden detachment. "I'm staying at Sora's tonight. You can just drop me at the campus gates."

Jeongguk's brows knit together, his dark eyes cutting to you for a fraction of a second as he maneuvers the Mercedes toward the exit of the dead campus lot. "So?"

"So..." You swallow hard, the sudden domesticity of the geography making you uneasy. "Sora's apartment is only three blocks away from my actual house. If you drive me there, you're going to be too close to my own place. So no."

A bitter, humorless tilt tugs at the corner of Jeongguk's mouth, though his eyes remain fixed on the dark, rain-slicked road ahead. The clinical shield is fully back in place, but there's a raw, defensive edge to his voice now.

"I'm not a criminal," he says quietly, his grip tightening on the wheel. "I'm not going to go hunt you down just because I'm in the neighborhood."

"No, but... I think it'd be intimate if you knew my neighborhood," you mutter, looking out the side window as the dark campus buildings blur past.

Jeongguk lets out a dry, humorless breath, his dark eyes cutting over to you for a fraction of a second. "I've seen you naked. A street upsets you?"

The bluntness of it makes your cheeks flare up all over again, the sudden reminder of your vulnerability earlier today hitting you like a physical weight. You shift uncomfortably in the leather seat. "I'm just saying we need some boundaries."

"Void, let me just take you home," he says, his voice dropping into that weary register. He sounds completely exhausted now, the heavy aftermath of his phone call still weighing down his shoulders.

"I can go by myself," you push back, your stubbornness flaring up out of pure, defensive instinct. "I came here by myself, it's no big deal."

"I'm not about to let you go alone when it's dark," he states flatly. His tone leaves absolutely no room for negotiation, the adult male authority returning to his frame as he handles you with a quiet, stubborn efficiency.

"Womp womp," you shoot back, entirely fed up with his sudden shift from unraveled lover to clinical dictator.

Spurred by a sudden burst of petty defiance, you reach out and grab the chrome handle, shoving it forward to open the passenger door. You fully expect to feel the cold rush of the night air—but the handle bounces uselessly in your grip with a heavy, mechanical click.

Nothing happens.

You pull it again, harder this time, but the door remains completely unyielding. Your eyes snap to the center console, and you realize with a sudden jolt of frustration that the central locking mechanism is red.

He locked the doors.

"Void," Jeongguk says, his voice dangerously quiet, the low rumble of it vibrating through the cramped interior of the car as he keeps his eyes fixed firmly on the dark, rain-slicked road ahead. "Let me take you home."

You let out a sharp, frustrated breath and sink back into the leather passenger seat, folding your arms tightly across your chest. The small, petty defiance leaves you feeling completely drained, and the heavy silence returns, punctuated only by the steady click-clack of the windshield wipers cutting through.

You don't say anything for the first ten minutes, staring out at the blurred  signs and streetlights of the city. When the turn for Sora's neighborhood approaches, you finally break the quiet, your voice tight as you shoot him brief, clipped directions.

"Take a left at the next light."

Jeongguk complies without a word, his  hands moving smoothly over the steering wheel, his eyes fixed on the dark road.

"It's the second building on the right, after the convenience store," you mutter a few minutes later.

As the car glides deeper into the familiar grid of streets, the proximity to your old life starts to claw at you, but it's eclipsed by the jarring memory of Jeongguk's voice on that call. Curiosity eats you alive, gnawing at your resolve until the tension inside your chest becomes completely unbearable. You've seen him arrogant, cynical, and entirely unraveled by your touch, but you've never seen him look so small.

You turn your head to look at his sharp profile, the  glow of the dashboard catching the rigid line of his jaw.

"Who was that on the phone?" you ask quietly, the question cutting straight through the hum of the engine.

He stays completely silent, his jaw clenched tightly as he stares straight ahead, refusing to give you the satisfaction of an answer. The quiet only seems to fuel your determination, and you keep pressing, leaning into his space, refusing to let the subject drop.

"Why does it matter?" he finally snaps, his voice low and grating.

"I'm curious," you counter, offering a sharp, relentless smile.

He lets out a harsh, mocking laugh. "Oh sure, fucking Curious George."

"That's mean," you huff, crossing your arms.

He rolls his eyes, the dark tension of the pacted agreement still hanging heavy between you both, but his thoughts are a chaotic mess of irritation and a strange, grudging fascination with how easily you can annoy him.

Defiant to the wall of silence he's putting up, you don't shut up. You pivot, launching into a stream of utter bullshit just to fill the quiet, expensive void of the car.

You talk about the heavy rain, about how Sora's radiator makes a clicking sound that keeps you awake, about a stray cat you saw outside the convenience store earlier, and about how much you hate the  mist hanging over the city lights tonight.

You keep talking and talking, your voice a desperate, manic buffer against the lingering ghost of Minho's house only that  would be at only two blocks away if you were to make a right at this light, and against the heavy, unreadable tension radiating from the driver's seat.

Jeongguk doesn't respond once.

He keeps his  hands locked at ten and two on the steering wheel, his eyes dead ahead, his jaw so tight the muscle keeps twitching. He doesn't even blink as you ramble, completely icing you out as the car glides to a smooth, silent halt at the curb right outside Sora's apartment building.

The wipers slap against the glass. Squeak. Squeak. You finally run out of breath, the awkwardness of your own voice catching up to you, and you reach down to pull the door handle—which clicks open this time.

But before you can step out into the night, his voice cuts through the quiet cabin, hollow and flat.

"It was my dad."

Oh.

The words hang heavily in the damp, enclosed air of the car, completely freezing your movement. You sit with your hand still hovering near the open door handle, the cold air misting against your bare arm, but your mind is running in furious circles.

His dad.

If it was just a phone call from his father, why did it leave him looking so entirely hollowed out? Why did the untouchable, cynical man who usually carries himself with such absolute authority suddenly look so incredibly small? A million questions flash through your head at once, your mind weighing whether you should press for more, whether you should ask what kind of man could reduce Jeongguk to a whisper, or if you should just make some light, deflective remark to ease the suffocating tension.

But the rigid line of his shoulders warns you against pushing your luck; he has already given you more than he ever intended to.

Finally, after a long, stretching silence, your lips part and you land on the only safe syllable left to you.

"Oh."

Jeongguk lets out a low, defensive breath, his fingers tightening against the leather steering wheel until his knuckles turn white. He still won't turn his head to look at you, his eyes fixed blindly on windshield.

"Uh... Whatever," he mutters, his voice clipped, trying and failing to inject his usual  arrogance back into his tone. "It's really not your business."

The sudden wall he throws up should probably sting, but after witnessing that strange, quiet vulnerability over the phone, it just feels like a clumsy attempt to scramble for his armor.

"That's fair," you say softly, pulling your hoodie sleeves down over your hands one last time.

"It is," he responds flatly, a sharp, definitive nod ending the conversation before it can spiral into anything remotely resembling comfort.

The awkwardness returns, heavy and thick, completely choking out the memory of the heat you'd shared just minutes prior. You shift in your seat, clearing your throat as you finally push the passenger door open all the way. The cool, damp night air rushes into the cabin, instantly breaking the suffocating spell of the violet dashboard lights.

"Goodnight, Jeongguk," you mutter, stepping out onto the wet pavement.

"Yeah. Goodnight," he murmurs back, his voice barely carrying over the sound of the downpour.

You shut the door behind you with a solid, heavy thud. Without looking back, you slip into the relative safety of Sora's apartment building. Behind you, the muffled rumble of the Mercedes engine fades as he pulls away into the dark, leaving you alone in the quiet hallway with nothing but the lingering scent of tobacco, mint, and a million unanswered questions.

The elevator ride up to Sora's fourth-floor apartment feels entirely too fast and entirely too slow all at once. In the reflection of the cheap, scratched mirror, you look a little rough around the edges, but your mind isn't even on the messy state of your hair or the slight flush on your collarbone.

Instead, your thoughts are completely hung on the sudden, bizarre aftermath of that phone call. His dad. He actually said the words out loud. He's in contact with him. The realization loops in your head, tangled with the memory of how his broad shoulders had caved inward, how his deep, arrogant voice had flattened into something so hollow. He had become almost small.

As the elevator dings, a strange, unbidden thought creeps into your mind, drawing a terrifying parallel. You almost start to see a mirror between how you used to manage yourself around Minho—walking on eggshells, shrinking into compliance—and how Jeongguk had just behaved with his father.

But the moment the comparison forms, a cold spike of panic hits you.

Are you insane to think that?

It feels like a massive leap, an entirely too intimate position to take. Who are you to assume you know exactly how he feels, to project your own trauma onto him based on a two-minute phone call and absolutely no backstory? You don't know him. You don't know his life.

The wire snaps.

You violently erase the thought from your mind before it can form into anything else, locking it away in the dark. You are here for a distraction, a calculated arrangement, not to psychoanalyze the vulnerabilities of a man who explicitly told you it was none of your business.

You take a deep, stabilizing breath, forcing your hands into your hoodie pockets as you reach Sora's door. You open it as quietly as possible, hoping to slip inside unnoticed, but the moment the door swings open, the bright, warm light of the living room hits you—along with two pairs of eyes.

Sora is sitting cross-legged on the sofa, a mug held halfway to her mouth, while Jimin is leaning against the kitchen counter, scrolling through his phone. The heavy, protective tension in the room is instant.

"Where the hell have you been?" Sora demands, setting her mug down with a sharp clatter. She's on her feet in an instant, her eyes scanning you from head to toe with frantic, maternal fury. "You vanished without saying a word. Your phone was going straight to voicemail. Do you have any idea what kind of thoughts were running through my head? I thought you went back to his house."

The mention of Minho's house—only two blocks away—makes your stomach do a sick flip.

Jimin sets his phone down on the counter, his expression softer than Sora's but deeply intense. He reads people entirely too well, and his eyes linger on your slightly disheveled clothes and the sheer exhaustion rolling off you. "We were worried," he says quietly, his voice a calm anchor compared to Sora's panic. "Sora was about to call the police."

"That's a bit dramatic...I don't think police would do anything for that."

"Then who am I supposed to call?" Sora questioned.

"I just... I needed air," you lie, the words tasting like ash on your tongue. You pull your hands out of your pockets to gesture vaguely toward the window, trying to sound normal, though your voice cracks slightly. "I felt like the walls were closing in on me. I went down to the 24-hour convenience store to get a pack of gum and just... walked for a bit. I lost track of time in the rain. I'm sorry."

Sora eyes you skeptically, her arms crossing over her chest. She steps closer, her analytical gaze narrowing as she takes in the dampness of your jacket. "For two hours? It's cold as shit outside. You only have a hoodie on?"

"I wasn't thinking straight, Sora," you say, and that, at least, is the absolute truth. "My brain is just... fried. I didn't mean to scare you guys."

Jimin walks over, placing a gentle, grounding hand on Sora's shoulder. He looks at you, his eyes holding a quiet, knowing look—he clearly senses that you're hiding something massive, but he chooses to protect you from the interrogation for now.

"She's freezing, Sora. Look at her," Jimin says softly, diffusing the sharp edge in the room. He gives your arm a warm, reassuring squeeze as he passes you. "Go change into some dry clothes. I'll make you some tea."

Sora lets out a long, defeated sigh, the anger melting out of her to reveal the raw worry underneath. "You're going to give me a heart attack," she mutters, though she steps forward and wraps her arms tightly around your shoulders for a brief, fierce second. "Just... don't disappear like that again. Please."

"I won't," you whisper into her shoulder, a heavy wave of guilt settling over the lead already sitting in your stomach.

By the time you change into an oversized sweatshirt and sweatpants, the sharp edge of the evening has fully softened.

They're Sora's. She always has such comfy clothes.

Jimin has the tea ready, three steaming mugs sitting on the low wooden coffee table. The living room is dim, lit only by a floor lamp that throws soft shadows across the walls.

You sink into the middle of the couch, and within seconds, everyone is cuddled in. Sora curls her legs up under a heavy wool blanket, pressing her shoulder against yours, while Jimin sprawls on your other side, his thigh a warm, grounding weight against your own.

For a long time, nobody speaks. You just hold the warm ceramic mug between both hands, watching the steam curl into the air.

Your mind, however, refuses to sit still. It drifts from the suffocating memory of Minho's betrayal, to the brutal, calculated heat of Jeongguk's hands, and finally back to that hollow, small voice Jeongguk had used with his father. The world feels entirely too heavy, entirely too compromised.

"Do you think people are inherently good?" you ask quietly, your voice cutting through the steady hum of the rain. "Like... we start out whole, but then circumstances just break us until we become the bad guys in someone else's story?"

Sora shifts slightly, her eyes reflecting the amber light as she looks at you. She doesn't dismiss the question. She takes a slow sip of her tea, considering it. "I think people are born as blank slates with a desperate need to survive. Sometimes, surviving makes you cruel. It doesn't mean the good parts disappear completely, but they get buried under a lot of armor."

Armor. The word echoes in your chest, making you think instantly of Jeongguk's clinical, untouchable defense mechanisms—and how easily they had shattered under a single phone call.

"Is it possible to take off the armor without a disaster happening?" you murmur, staring into the dark swirling liquid of your tea. You swallow hard, the thought shifting into something more personal, more frightening. "Do you think a woman can actually find her path... without a man attached to it? Like, completely on her own?"

"Of course she can," Jimin says instantly, his tone fierce and unyielding. "She could. She should."

"I know," you whisper, a bitter, helpless knot forming in your throat. "But it feels like every book I've ever read tells a different story. Every narrative out there says she only truly found herself because she found true love. Like her entire identity is just a waiting room until a man walks in and unlocks the door."

Sora lets out a soft, cynical chuckle, leaning her head back against the cushions. "That's because the people writing the rules wanted us contained. If you look at old books—the classics—if the main character is a female, she basically has two choices. By the final page, she should either be married or dead. Those were the only acceptable endings for a woman who dared to have a narrative of her own. Either she gets absorbed into a man's life, or she's destroyed by the world for trying to exist outside of it."

Married or dead.

The words settle like a physical weight in your chest. Minho had tried to absorb you. He had tried to map out your entire existence, to rewrite your worth based on his own lies, and when you finally pulled away, it felt like a small death. You had felt completely destroyed.

And now, there was Jeongguk.

You weren't looking for true love with him—the dark, transactional agreement you had just struck in his car was the furthest thing from it. But as you sat there wrapped in Sora's blanket, you couldn't help but wonder if you were just running straight toward the other ending. Was trading pieces of yourself to a dangerous, cynical stranger just another way of choosing destruction? Was it your own twisted version of letting the house fall on you, just like Dostoevsky wrote?

Jimin reaches over, his warm hand covering your knuckles where they are wrapped tightly around the mug. He doesn't know about the Mercedes, or the pact, or the way Jeongguk's hands had felt on your skin, but his thumb rubs a soothing circle over the back of your hand, a quiet anchor in the dark.

"Books are just fiction," Jimin says softly, his deep voice carrying a gentle, absolute certainty that makes your throat tight. "You aren't a character in an old novel. You don't have to get married to be saved, and you sure as hell aren't going to let this town destroy you. You get to write the ending, even if the pages feel completely blank right now."

You look at him, then at Sora, the pure, unconditional warmth of their presence slowly melting the residual chill from your bones.

But even as the temperature returns to your skin, the philosophical knot in your chest refuses to untie itself. You stare down at the amber fluid swirling in your mug, watching the steam rise and break against the dim lamplight of the living room.

"I want to believe that, Jimin. I really do," you murmur, your voice sounding small against the steady, rhythmic drumming of the rain against the glass. "But look at what we're up against. Look at how easily people get twisted. I was just thinking down there... about how Minho started. He wasn't born a monster. At some point, he was just a person making small, compromised choices until he became someone who could destroy a whole life without blinking."

Sora sets her mug down on the wooden coffee table with a soft thud, shifting her weight so she's leaning forward, her sharp eyes locking onto yours.

"Don't give him that excuse," Sora says, her tone carrying a protective, analytical bite. "Circumstances shape the environment, sure, but choice is a filter. Minho chose to bleed his poison onto you because it was easier than dealing with his own rot. People aren't inherently good or bad—they're inherently selfish. The 'good' ones are just the people who choose not to make their survival everyone else's problem."

Jimin lets out a soft, thoughtful hum, his thumb still tracing that slow, anchoring circle over the back of your hand. "That's too cynical, Sora. If everyone is just a survivalist looking out for themselves, then why are we sitting here? Why did we spend the last two hours stressing about where Y/N was?"

"Because she's our exception, Jimin," Sora counters immediately, gesturing between the three of you. "We protect our own. That's still a form of tribal selfishness. But out there? In the wild? People morph into whatever shape keeps them from breaking. Look at the people who inherit power in this city. They inherit a system that demands they be ruthless. They pull someone else under the falling timber to shield themselves."

The phrase pull someone else under to shield themselves hits you like a physical blow. Your mind instantly flashes back to the Mercedes. To the dark, suffocating cockpit. To the sudden, chilling shift in Jeongguk's demeanor when that phone call broke his armor.

'It was my dad.'

He had looked so incredibly small for a fraction of a second, his voice stripped of its clinical, mocking venom. You had seen a glimpse of a completely different structure beneath his usual untouchable facade—a structure forged by a system, or a father, that clearly demanded absolute ruthlessness. You had almost seen a mirror between your own survival tactics under Minho's thumb and the way Jeongguk shrunk under his father's voice.

"And what if someone is already broken by the system?" you ask quietly, the question slipping past your lips before you can stop it. "What if they're so deep in the wreckage that they don't even know how to function without a transaction? Can you blame someone for being cold when they've never been allowed to be warm?"

Jimin tilts his head, his dark eyes studying your face with that intense, intuitive focus that always makes you feel entirely too exposed. He senses the hyper-specific direction of your thoughts, even if he doesn't have the context of the man currently driving with your scent on his leather seats.

"Are we still talking about Minho?" Jimin asks softly, his voice dropping an octave, testing the waters.

"No," you say, a little too quickly. You swallow down the lump in your throat, trying to smooth out your tone. "Just... people in general. The world feels crowded with people who only know how to trade pieces of themselves to get by."

"There's a difference between a victim of a circumstance and an architect of it," Jimin says, his hand tightening slightly over yours, offering a grounding, certain pressure. "If someone only knows how to deal in transactions, it means they've chosen to view people as commodities. You can understand their backstory, you can even feel sorry for whatever broke them, but you can't let them turn you into a transaction just to make themselves feel secure. That's where the line has to be drawn."

Sora nods in agreement, reaching over to pull the wool blanket higher up around your shoulders. "Jimin's right. The second you start finding excuses for why someone is cold or cruel, you're halfway to letting them ruin you. You're trying to read a map of a person who has already chosen to live in a labyrinth. You'll just get lost in there with them."

Too late, a dark, treacherous voice whispers in the back of your mind. The pact is already signed.

You had explicitly walked into that labyrinth tonight. You had sat in the dark with Jeongguk, looked at his cold, calculating terms, and instead of running from the destruction, you had accepted it. You had chosen to stop fighting the fall. It wasn't about love, and it certainly wasn't about being saved—it was about using each other's venom to numb the pain of the old wounds.

Transactional bleeding.

"Maybe some people belong in the labyrinth," you mutter, leaning your head back against the cushion, staring up at the shadow-draped ceiling.

"Nobody belongs there," Jimin says firmly, his eyes unyielding as he catches your gaze. "Especially not you."

Sora lets out a long, deflating sigh, her expression softening from its fierce defensive edge into something deeply weary and tender. She scoots closer, wrapping an arm around your waist and pulling you against her side. "We've parsed the universe enough for one night. Your brain is running on fumes, and you look like you're about to collapse."

"I am," you admit, the sheer weight of the secrets you are carrying suddenly making your eyelids feel impossibly heavy.

"Come on," Sora murmurs, gently nudging you up from the couch. "Bed. Both of you. Tomorrow we deal with the real world, but tonight, the storm stays outside."

Jimin releases your hand, giving you a warm, reassuring smile as he stands up to collect the empty mugs. "Sleep well. No thinking about dead authors or old books."

"I'll try," you say, offering them a small, genuine smile that takes more effort than it should.

You leave the cozy glow of the living room and slip down the short hallway into the quiet sanctuary of the guest bedroom. The darkness here is total, broken only by the faint, translucent streetlights filtering through the mist-streaked window.

As you pull the crisp, cool sheets over your shoulders and sink into the mattress, the silence of the apartment wraps around you like a shield. You are safe here. You are loved by people who want nothing from you but your safety. But as you close your eyes and press your face into the pillow, a faint, undeniable trace of tobacco and mint catches on the edge of your senses—a ghost from the Mercedes that you can't seem to wash off.

The pages of your life with Minho were ruined, burned to the ground. But as you finally drift toward an exhausted, dreamless sleep, you know the new script has already been written in the dark with Jeongguk, and come what may, you are going to have to play the part.

next chapter | previous

taglist: @svitozz

[ttabacco]

Faux Colors | edit

i mostly post on tiktok but i need everyone to see wtf i've done. i’m very very very sorry. someone shouldn't let me edit ever again even more so on ethel cain.

yes this does have to do with his story. yes this is a sneak peek. yes i’m generous. all hail nic.

[ttabacco]

Faux Colors

chapter 14

out of bounds

Synopsis; one lives in a world under the weight of shadows the other lives in a world that screams.

"The sky is blue like Sacrifice by Elton John"

warnings; swearing, heavy themes pairing; jeongguk × female reader genre; angst, slowburn, smut, fwb word count; 10,5 k

a/n: hello hello. quick update i know. thing is,,,i’ll start finals soon (bummer) so the updates will take exponentially longer. i’m feeding yall now so you don’t miss me too much.

—

The quiet of the hallway was a different kind of quiet—not deadened by acoustic foam, but expansive, damp, and smelling faintly of rainy asphalt.

You walked toward the humanities fountain, and goddamn, your muscles were aching. It was a deep, heavy ache, the kind that radiated from your thighs and the small of your back, but it was an entirely good way to hurt. It was the physical proof of an eviction. For sixty minutes, your body hadn't belonged to your racing thoughts, or to the devastating humiliation Minho had left in your chest; it had belonged entirely to the friction, the noise, and the ruthless, grounding weight of Jeongguk.

You had finished. Genuinely, entirely finished.

Even more jarring was the realization that you had finished from oral, which was something practically unheard of in your past sexual escapades. Usually, that part of it was a performance—a chore of adjusting your angles, worrying about how you looked, or quietly waiting for the other person to get tired and move on. But Jeongguk hadn't been looking for a performance. He had taken care of you with a clinical, hyper-focused discipline, tracking the hitch in your breath and the tension in your hips until he delivered exactly what you said you needed. He had systematically dismantled your panic and replaced it with exhaustion.

But as the cool evening air hit your face, clearing the lingering scent of his strawberry-mint breathe from your senses, a persistent question began to hang in the space between your ribs.

Did you deliver your end of the deal?

He had been meticulous, unbothered, and entirely in control, but did he actually get what he wanted? Did he feel whatever it was he needed to feel, or had you just been a chaotic, frantic mess that he took apart out of sheer curiosity? It was impossible to tell with him. The deal was transactional, and the hour was up, leaving you with nothing but the ache in your bones and the sudden, terrifying silence of his absence.

By the time the stone perimeter of the humanities fountain came into view, you forced your shoulders to drop, fixing a practiced, unbothered expression onto your face.

Sora was already there, pacing under the amber glow of the courtyard lights, clutching a plastic container of warm soup like a shield against the damp evening. But she wasn't alone.

Leaning against the concrete pillar beside her, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his oversized jacket, was Jimin.

"Finally!" Sora exhaled, her eyes sweeping over you the second you stepped into the light. "I was about to start a search party. You look... completely wiped out. Are you okay?"

Before you could construct a believable lie, Jimin straightened up. His dark eyes locked onto yours, sharp and instantly assessing, cutting right through the casual shrug you were trying to manifest.

"I'm coming too," Jimin announced smoothly, his voice cutting through the space between you. He reached into his pocket, the familiar metal jingle of his keychain echoing in the quiet courtyard. "And obviously, I'm driving."

Jimin's car was a very sexy, polished Mazda Miata—because, of course, that was Jimin for you. It was sleek, immaculate, and possessed a low, purring engine that felt entirely too sophisticated for a campus parking lot.

You've been told in the past it's a red car and that it's "very Jimin" so you just rolled with it.

As Jimin unlocked it, the headlights cut through the misty dark, reflecting off the damp pavement in sharp glints. You braced yourself to open the passenger side door, expecting Sora to claim it, but she bypassed the front entirely and yanked open the back door.

"I am taking the rear," Sora announced, practically tumbling into the back seat with a dramatic, full-body sigh. She threw her legs across the row, completely unbothered, and propped her chin up on the headrest. "Do not argue with me. I have been hunched over a canvas for seven straight hours trying to calculate pillar girths for an architecture project, and if I have to keep my spine at a ninety-degree angle for one more second, I am going to snap in half."

"Pillar girths?" Jimin echoed, a slow, amused smirk tugging at the corner of his lips as he slid into the driver's seat. He adjusted his rearview mirror, his eyes briefly flicking to you as you climbed into the passenger side. "Sounds thrilling, Sora. Truly."

"Shut up, Minnie. It's a nightmare," she groaned from the back, shifting her weight to get comfortable. "My eyes are literally crossing. I just need to stretch out and pretend the physical world doesn't exist for twenty minutes."

You closed the passenger door, the solid, expensive thud of the Mazda sealing the three of you away from the damp campus air. Sitting in the front seat suddenly felt incredibly exposed. With Sora sprawling out in the back, it left you right next to Jimin, trapped in the intimate, lit bubble of his dashboard, where every shift in your posture was completely visible to his quiet, razor-sharp observation.

Jimin started the engine, the low, throaty purr of the Mazda vibrating right through the soles of your shoes. He shifted into gear with an effortless, practiced flick of his wrist, pulling out of the campus lot and onto the empty, slick roads.

For the first few minutes, the silence inside the car was heavy, filled only with the rhythmic clicking of the turn signal and the soft rush of the heater warming up. You kept your eyes locked on the passenger side window, watching the blurred streetlights smear against the glass, trying desperately to ensure your breathing sounded completely normal.

Sora broke the quiet from the back, her voice muffled against the headrest. "Jimin, please put something on. If I have to think about classical columns or structural integrity for another second, my brain is going to hemorrhage."

"Say no more," Jimin murmured.

He reached over, his silver rings catching the faint glow of the dashboard as his fingers tapped the touchscreen.

He skipped past his usual indie playlists and purposefully dialed into a radio station that was currently blasting a ridiculously high-energy, completely cheesy early-2000s pop song. It was the kind of track that was impossible to take seriously—over-produced, aggressively upbeat, and entirely out of character for Jimin's sleek, sophisticated car.

Sora sat up instantly, her exhaustion vanishing in a split second. "Oh my god. No way."

"Oh, yes way," Jimin grinned, his eyes crinkling at the corners as he checked his blind spot.

Before the first verse even hit, Sora had already rolled up her plastic container of warm soup to use as a makeshift microphone. She leaned forward between the two front seats, screaming the lyrics at the top of her lungs, completely off-key and entirely unbothered. Jimin didn't skip a beat—he joined in on the chorus, throwing his head back, pulling off a series of absurdly dramatic, soulful vocal ad-libs that had no business being delivered with that much passion while navigating a roundabout.

The sheer, ridiculous chaos of it caught you completely off guard.

For the first time in hours, the suffocating weight in your chest cracked. The phantom ache in your thighs, the memory of the acoustic foam walls, and the exhausting, lingering panic of Minho's betrayal were suddenly drowned out by your best friends screaming pop lyrics in a sexy Mazda.

Toxic by Britney Spears. You made a mental note to thank the pop princess for this insane performance.

A genuine, breathless laugh escaped your throat. You leaned your head back against the leather seat, the tension draining from your shoulders as you watched Sora aggressively point her "soup mic" at you, demanding you take the next line. You actually sang along, your voice mixing with theirs, filling the small car with a messy, loud warmth. For those few miles, you weren't a fractured person holding onto a dark, transactional secret just to survive. You were just you, driving home with your friends.

By the time Jimin pulled into the driveway of Sora's apartment building, the song was fading out, replaced by the quiet hum of the idling engine. Sora was out of breath, laughing as she collapsed back into the rear seat, grumbling about how she had definitely ruined her throat.

You let out a soft sigh, a small, residual smile still lingering on your face as you reached for the door handle. "That was... exactly what I needed. Thank you."

"Anytime," Sora exhaled happily from the back, already gathering her canvas bags. "I'm going to run up and unlock the door before my legs cramp again. Don't take forever." She hoisted herself out of the back, leaving the door open behind her as she hurried toward the building's entrance.

You went to unbuckle your seatbelt, but as the car door clicked shut behind Sora, the playful energy in the front seat instantly evaporated.

Jimin didn't turn off the ignition. He just rested his wrist on top of the steering wheel, turning his head slowly to look at you. In the dim, ambient light of the dashboard, his  eyes were completely still, stripped of all the theatrical humor from a moment ago.

He looked at you—really looked at you—with that terrifying, quiet intuition that always made you feel completely transparent. His gaze swept over the slight stiffness in your posture, the heavy way you carried yourself, and the strange, quiet numbness that had settled back into your eyes the exact second the music stopped.

He clocked it instantly. Your aura was entirely different. The frantic, erratic frequency of a girl drowning in a public breakup was gone, replaced by a dense, unreadable gravity.

You froze under his stare, your hand tightening against the fabric of your seatbelt. The silence stretched between you, heavy and loud, making you wonder if he could somehow smell the faint strawberry-mint or the unmistakable scent of another person's skin on you.

Jimin tilted his head, eyes narrowing just a fraction as he assessed the shift. He didn't know what had happened in the art building. He didn't know about the sixty-minute timer or the calculated pact you had just signed with a specific music loving man. But he knew you were hiding something massive.

For a long, agonizing second, you thought he was going to press you. You thought he was going to demand to know where you had been.

Instead, Jimin just let out a very soft, quiet breath through his nose. The tension in his jaw relaxed, and he gave you a small, incredibly gentle nod. He didn't push. He respected you enough to let you keep whatever boundary you were drawing, even if it clearly worried him.

"Let's go inside," he said softly, his voice dropping into a comforting, protective cadence as he finally turned off the engine, plunging the car into shadow. "Before the soup gets cold."

Stepping into Sora's apartment was like stepping directly into her mind. It was very fucking Sora, to a T.

Every square inch of the space reflected her chaotic, hyper-creative architecture major lifestyle. Cardboard mockup models of buildings with tiny, hand-cut windows were stacked precarious on the coffee table, right next to tracing paper, loose charcoal pencils, and thick textbooks on structural load-bearing. Swatches of heavy linen fabric hung over the back of the couch, and a massive, paint-splattered drafting board occupied the corner by the window.

Yet, despite the creative debris, it was incredibly warm and cozy. A soft lamp glowed from the kitchen counter, casting long, shadows across the hardwood floor, and the entire apartment smelled deeply of apple cinnamon—a comforting, sweet scent from a wax warmer plug-in she kept running near the entryway. It felt safe. It felt like a home.

Sora didn't waste any time. She kicked her shoes off into a messy pile by the door, dumped her canvas bags on the nearest chair, and immediately disappeared into the kitchen to grab three ceramic bowls.

Within minutes, the three of you were crowded around her small wooden dining table, the steam from the warm vegetable-and-barley soup rising into the air, fogging up your vision just a little.

"Eat," Sora commanded, pushing a bowl toward you and handing you a heavy metal spoon. "You look like you're about to evaporate, and I refused to let my architecture project claim two victims today."

You took the spoon, the heat of the bowl seeping into your cold palms. Sitting here, listening to the clink of silverware against ceramic and watching Sora aggressively blow on her hot broth, the contrast of where you had been just over an hour ago hit you all over again.

In Jeongguk's studio, the air had been thick with the sterile, artificial scent of strawberry, mint, tobacco and the heavy, electric hum of subwoofers. Here, it was apple cinnamon, homemade soup, and the familiar, grounding presence of the people who actually loved you.

You swallowed a spoonful of the soup, the warmth spreading through your chest, momentarily soothing the raw, exhausted ache in your throat.

Jimin sat directly across from you, eating quietly. He had pulled his hair back, a few loose strands framing his face as he navigated his spoon with characteristic grace. He was participating in Sora's mindless banter about her professor's impossible standards, laughing at her jokes, but his eyes never completely left you. Every time you took a bite, or every time you shifted in your chair—careful not to let your aching thigh muscles tighten up too visibly—Jimin's gaze would subtly track the movement.

He still wasn't pressing you. He was letting you eat in peace, letting you fade into the background of Sora's frantic energy. But the heavy, knowing quiet in his posture remained, a silent reminder that your secret was safe from Sora, but it wasn't entirely invisible.

The clink of your spoon against the ceramic bowl suddenly felt too loud. The warmth of the soup, the heavy scent of apple cinnamon, the sheer, unconditional safety of Sora's kitchen—it was all supposed to comfort you, but instead, it felt like a pressure cooker. The contrast between this gentle room and the clinical devastation you had been running from all day finally cracked your ribs wide open.

A hot, sudden tear spilled over your lower lash line, splashing directly into your bowl.

"Hey," Sora murmured, her voice instantly dropping its frantic, comedic edge. She set her spoon down, her eyes widening with immediate concern. "Hey, what is it?"

"I'm an idiot," you choked out, your voice breaking on the last syllable. You pressed the heels of your hands into your eyes, trying to force the water back, but the dam had completely burst. The exhaustion from the studio, the phantom ache in your muscles, and the absolute humiliation of Minho's betrayal all surged to the surface at once. "I'm a fucking idiot. How did I not see it? How did I let him make me look so stupid?"

Before you could spiral any further, Jimin reached across the small wooden table. His hands were warm, his fingers firm as he gently but unyieldingly pulled your hands away from your face, forcing you to look at him.

"Look at me," Jimin said, his voice dropping into a deep, steady register that demanded your attention. "You are not an idiot."

"I loved him, Jimin..I mean I still do maybe or I dont know—"

"It's okay to still love him. It's okay to not know right now and that is not a flaw," he interrupted softly, his dark eyes fiercely holding yours. "Cheating does not define you. It doesn't mean you were lacking, or blind, or stupid. It defines the person who did it. It is a reflection of his lack of integrity, his cowardice. Not your worth."

Sora abandoned her chair entirely, sliding her seat right next to yours and wrapping a tight, fierce arm around your shoulders. She pulled your head down to her neck, letting you lean into her. "Minnie is right. You didn't do anything wrong except love a guy who didn't deserve it. You didn't do anything wrong by trusting the person who promised to hold your heart."

You let out a ragged, trembling breath, burying your face against Sora's shoulder. The tears were coming freely now, hot and silent, washing away the numb, synthetic armor you had tried so hard to build in the art building.

You've just loved a guy.

The phrase echoed in your mind, heavy and tragic. Because in a world this fragile, sometimes that's your death sentence. Sometimes, pouring your vulnerability into someone else's hands is the very thing that executes you, leaving you to wander around campus like a ghost, looking for any dark corner or dangerous transaction just to make the bleeding stop. You had let Minho kill a part of you, and the grief of that realization was suffocating.

Jimin squeezed your hand, his silver rings pressing into your knuckles, grounding you to the present moment. His expression was incredibly tender, a rare, raw softness rewriting his usually sharp features.

"It feels like an ending right now," Jimin murmured, his voice a soothing, quiet frequency in the amber-lit kitchen. "It feels like you're completely ruined. But you're not. You are going to love again. You are going to blossom again, even if the soil feels completely toxic right now."

"I don't know how to do this," you whispered into the quiet room, the scent of apple cinnamon wrapping around you like a shroud. "I don't know how to feel normal."

"You don't have to know right now," Sora whispered back, resting her cheek against the top of your head, her grip tightening. "We're going to carry it until you can. You just have to breathe."

"You have to allow yourself to feel all the conflicting emotions. You can still love the person that hurt you while aknowledging that's the end. It sucks—yes, but one day the ache will dull, " Jimin's wisdom washed over you. "Imagine how much love you'll carry for the person that will not mess up while holding your heart."

For a long time, the three of you just sat there at the cramped table, the soup growing cold as the conversation drifted into a quiet, deeply comforting space. They didn't ask you to map out your future, and they didn't expect you to be strong. They just sat with you in the wreckage, pulling you back toward the light, entirely unaware that you had already anchored your survival to a guy who sees colors in a soundproof room.

As the quiet, tear-stained safety of Sora's kitchen seemed to freeze in time, the heavy, comforting scent of apple cinnamon and hot broth gradually dissolved, bleeding into the sharp reality of a completely different room across the city.

In another dimly lit apartment—one where the air didn't smell like cinnamon, but carried the dense, bitter tang of strong coffee and the dry metallic scent of heavy sewing machinery—the atmosphere was thick with a completely different kind of chaos.

The floor was a minefield of structural ruin. Bolts of expensive, heavy silks and raw denim were rolled out across the hardwood, pinned down by heavy pattern weights. Discarded measuring tapes coiled like snakes over stacks of fashion lookbooks, and the low couch was practically buried beneath a mountain of unstructured cushions, velvet swatches, and stray tailoring pins that caught the amber glow of a single, industrial floor lamp.

Jeongguk was sitting on the edge of a sturdy cutting table, one leg dangling lazily as he spun a heavy silver ring around his thumb. His jacket was gone, his dark hair falling over his forehead in damp, unruly strands, and his mind was still locked in the deadened, synthetic silence of the soundproof studio. He was tracking the time in his head—the sixty minutes had expired long ago, the contract was technically fulfilled, but the residual weight of your voice breaking under his hands was still vibrating behind his ribs. He had delivered exactly what you needed, yet the quiet in his own chest felt uncomfortably loud.

Purple. Purple moans.

Across the room, standing under the harsh light of a drafting lamp with a pair of heavy fabric shears in hand, Taehyung paused.

Taehyung didn't look up from the collar line he was meticulously pinning into a mannequin, his long fingers working with a fluid, artistic precision that matched Jeongguk's own discipline. But Taehyung's sharp, eccentric intuition was always running in the background. He had been quiet for the last twenty minutes, letting Jeongguk stew in his characteristic, brooding silence.

Without warning, Taehyung snipped a loose thread, tilted his head, and finally cut his eyes over to the cutting table. A slow, knowing smirk crawled up his face.

"You have your 'I got my dick wet face' on," Taehyung remarked smoothly, his deep, baritone voice cutting through the hum of the apartment with zero hesitation.

Jeongguk didn't even blink. He didn't drop his gaze, didn't flinch, and certainly didn't try to deny the accusation. Denial was for people who felt guilty, and Jeongguk didn't do guilt. Instead, a slow, entirely unbothered smirk tugged at the corner of his lips, pulling on his lip piercing with a faint, metallic glint under the industrial lamp. He just kept spinning the silver ring around his thumb, his posture loose, dangerous, and perfectly composed.

He didn't care that Taehyung knew he'd gotten laid. He just had absolutely no intention of uttering your name in this room.

Taehyung set the heavy fabric shears down on the drafting table with a deliberate, metallic clatter. He leaned his hips against the edge, crossing his long arms over his chest, his sharp eyes practically gleaming with amusement as he surveyed Jeongguk's smug silence.

"Care to share with the class?" Taehyung asked, tilting his head. "Because you've been sitting there staring at a blank wall for twenty minutes like you're trying to decode a baseline, and frankly, it's disrupting my creative flow."

"Gentlemen don't kiss and tell," Jeongguk replied smoothly, his deep voice carrying that low, arrogant cadence that usually kept people from pushing him. He shifted his weight on the cutting table, the leather of his boots creaking slightly in the quiet apartment.

Taehyung let out a dry, incredulous scoff, a theatrical roll of his shoulders following it. "You're not a gentleman."

"And you're not a priest," Jeongguk countered instantly, his smirk widening into something sharper, his  eyes locking onto Taehyung's with zero intention of backing down. "So don't come at me for not telling you all my dirty deets. Go back to your mannequin, Kim."

Taehyung threw his head back, letting out a deep, booming laugh that echoed off the high ceiling of the studio apartment. "Jeon, you're so stiff sometimes when it comes to things, I'm sure you could pressure cook an egg inside your ass."

"Fuck off," Jeongguk muttered, though the corner of his mouth twitched up. He picked up a stray wooden pattern weight from the table and tossed it lazily at Taehyung's chest. Taehyung caught it with one hand, completely unbothered, chucking it back onto a pile of velvet cushions.

"I'm serious," Taehyung said, stepping back to examine the silhouette of the denim jacket he was constructing. "You walk around campus looking like you're carrying the weight of the entire engineering block, and then you disappear for an hour and come back looking like you just reset your master clock. It's unnatural."

"It's called efficiency, Kim. You should try it instead of spending four hours draping a single shoulder," Jeongguk fired back, his tone slipping into that easy, rough-edged banter that only existed between the two of them.

"I need perfection. You wouldn't know the difference between a pagoda and epaulet shoulder if it slapped you in the face."

"You say that like it's a bad thing."

"Jeongguk... It's a fashion crime."

They both burst laughing.

They traded a few more sharp stabs—boyish chatter about an upcoming exhibition, Taehyung complaining about the soaring prices of imported silk, and Jeongguk making fun of a horrific avant-garde shoe design Taehyung had sketched the night before.

It really was an unnatural way to wear a shoe.

But as the laughter died down, the atmospheric pressure in the room subtly shifted. Taehyung wiped his hands on a scrap towel and looked over at the master console in the corner, where Jeongguk's mixing gear sat dark.

"So," Taehyung began, his voice dropping into a more grounded, serious register. "What about the recording? The voice memo." He leaned against the drafting table, looking directly at Jeongguk. "Did you give up on finding out who the voice is?"

Jeongguk's thumb stopped spinning the silver ring. His jaw tightened just a fraction, the boyish amusement instantly completely evaporating from his dark eyes. He kept his expression locked down, keeping his thoughts entirely to himself.

He would never give up. Truly.

That recording was his safehouse. Before he found it, his mind had been a hostile, hyper-stimulated territory—a constant, deafening roar of frequencies, internal chaos, and a restless anger that nothing else could quiet. Not the alcohol, not the mindless hooks, not even the brutal, systematic discipline of his own music production. Nothing had helped him manage.

Until he found that little piece of plastic.

It had been an accident. He remembered the exact texture of the afternoon—the air in the art wing had been thick with the smell of turpentine and wet clay. He had been practically tearing a communal desk apart looking for a lost guitar pick, his frustration peaking, when his fingers hit something small and solid. A bright red flash drive, looking completely ridiculous with a frayed, faded koala keychain dangling off the loop.

He had waited. He had left it on the corner of the desk for three days, posted a vague note on the department board, and asked the evening janitors if anyone had been looking for a drive. No one claimed it. It was a ghost asset.

So, he took it as his own. He plugged it into his laptop in the dead of night, expecting to find corrupted project files or boring lecture notes. Instead, he found the raw, unedited voice memo of ultramarine. The second the audio file initialized, the spoken-word poetry had washed through his headphones like a physical wave, grounding his frantic pulse instantly. The voice was an absolute refuge. It possessed a perfect, tragic resonance that managed to isolate all the noise in his head and kill it. He had spent months analyzing the wave file, isolating the breath patterns, trying to find the owner, but the trail had gone entirely cold.

The silence stretched long between the two friends, the hum of the industrial lamp the only sound in the room.

Jeongguk finally broke it, his voice low and raspy as he slid off the cutting table, shoving his tatted hand deep into his front pockets.

"I didn't give up, necessarily," Jeongguk muttered, his eyes flicking toward the dark window, his mind briefly flashing back to the raw, breathless weight of you shivering against his chest in the soundproof room just two hours ago. "But I'm focused on something else right now."

Taehyung arched a perfect eyebrow, a sharp, knowing glint returning to his eyes. "Focused on something else? Since when does Jeon Jeongguk get distracted from a puzzle? Especially one he's been obsessing over."

He pestered because he knew how Jeongguk worked. Taehyung was well aware that if left to his own devices, Jeongguk would gladly drown inside his own head rather than talk. He would let the thoughts calcify until they turned into a physical weight behind his ribs.

But Jeongguk just held his gaze, entirely unbothered. He liked to keep to himself—especially when the "something else" was you.

The truth was, the intense, grounding mystery of that voice memo had subtly begun to recede into the back of his mind over the last few weeks. It had been replaced by a much more visceral, chaotic frequency. He had completely forgotten about the recording now that your relationship with that asshole had finally exploded.

Happy accident.

Breakups were brutal—he'd watched the fallout from a distance, tracking the erratic, fragile panic that had been clinging to you all week—but they were always better than living a lie.

And you and Minho? Both of you had been lying to yourselves from the very start. Minho had lied to you about pretty much everything, weaving a cheap, cowardly narrative to keep you docile. And you? You had lied to yourself just to please a liar, shrinking your own edges and ignoring your instincts just to keep a fraud comfortable.

Jeongguk pulled his hands out of his pockets and walked over to the industrial window, leaning his forearm against the cool glass. From this high up, the campus looked dark, washed out by the persistent mist.

"It's just a thing," Jeongguk said quietly, his voice cutting through the dry, metallic air of the apartment. He thought of the deep, heavy ache you were probably feeling right now, the way you had finished so entirely against him, and the dark, transactional pact you both had signed. "Something that needed to be cleaned up."

Taehyung let out a soft, mocking hum, turning back to his mannequin with a slow shake of his head. "Right. Whatever you say, Jeon. A 'thing.' Just make sure you don't accidentally engineer your own downfall."

"I don't make structural errors," Jeongguk muttered, his eyes still tracked on the dark campus streets below.

"Sure, sure." Taehyung picked up a handful of tailoring pins from the table, expertly sliding them between his lips as he went back to adjusting the denim collar. "But honestly? You should get laid more often. You're actually almost talkative after you finish. It's a nice change from the usual gargoyle routine."

"Eat shit, Tae."

"Just stating the facts," Taehyung murmured around the pins, his long fingers pinning a sharp pleat into the jacket's shoulder.

They drifted back into a lighter rhythm, the tension dropping as they traded a few more insults about each other's work ethics. But Taehyung, as usual, couldn't just leave a quiet room alone. He was a creature of observation, someone who collected campus gossip the way he collected vintage buttons, treating every piece of drama like a texture to be analyzed.

Without looking up from his seam allowance, Taehyung casually smoothed down a layer of heavy fabric.

"Oh, by the way," he said, his voice dropping into that specific, theatrical cadence he used whenever he was about to drop a bomb. "Have you heard?"

Jeongguk didn't move from the window. His forearm remained braced against the glass, his silhouette dark and imposing against the reflection of the industrial floor lamp. He didn't answer, refusing to give Taehyung the satisfaction of an eager reaction, but his ears picked up the shift in frequency anyway.

" The medical and restoration departments are practically in mourning," Taehyung continued, a dangerous, lazy smirk playing on his lips as he stepped back to view the mannequin's silhouette. "Our resident golden boy, Minho, finally got caught with his pants down. Apparently, the whole facade completely crumbled."

Jeongguk didn't move an inch from the window, his forearm still braced against the glass, but every muscle in his back locked up. He let out a low, bored grunt, carefully modulating his tone to sound completely detached.

"Minho? The guy with the immaculate transcript and the punchable face? What did he do, plagiarize a drug?"

Obviously, he knew. He knew the precise structural damage of that blowout, down to the exact shade of devastation in your eyes when you had crossed his threshold. But in front of Taehyung, he had to play dumb. He had to act just interested enough to see exactly how much of the wreckage had made it to the campus grapevines.

Taehyung, for all his eccentricities and sharp gossip-mongering, was a sweetheart at his core. He stopped pinning the denim jacket, his expression softening into something genuinely sympathetic. "No, worse. He was sleeping with some upperclassman in the studios. I heard it was brutal. Honestly, I just hope she's alright, truly. Y/N, I mean."

Taehyung sighed, wiping a hand down his face. "Though, I saw on Sora's close friends story that she's over at her place right now. They're eating soup with Jimin. She looks completely wiped out, but at least she's with them."

Jeongguk's brain snagged on a single phrase, his internal radar instantly spiking. He turned around slowly, leaving the window and leaning back against the sill, his dark eyes narrowing into an aggressive glare.

"Hold on. Sora has you on her close friends?" Jeongguk's voice dropped into a rough, incredulous scratch. "How the fuck? She literally can't stand me. She glares at me like she wants to slice my throat every time we pass in the humanities hall."

Taehyung shrugged, completely unbothered by Jeongguk's sudden intensity as he reached for more pins. "I don't know, man. Both Sora and Y/N followed me on Insta that night after Teaspoon of Sin. I guess I just have a trustworthy face."

There it was. A sharp, ugly twist of irritation flared in the center of Jeongguk's chest.

You followed him? You had actively looked up Kim Taehyung, clicked follow, and let him into a digital circle close enough to see your best friend's private stories—but you hadn't even blinked in Jeongguk's direction online.

You still didn't even follow him back.

The sheer irony of it was maddening. You didn't even care. You hadn't given a single thought to Jeongguk's digital presence, completely freezing him out, even though he was the one who had spent  minutes on his knees in a soundproof room. He was the one who had literally been inside you, learning the exact rhythm that made you lose your mind, delivering exactly what your broken body needed—and yet, to the rest of the world, he didn't even exist on your radar. You had given Taehyung a free pass into your life, while Jeongguk was kept entirely in the dark, restricted to a secret, transactional pact sealed behind a heavy acoustic door.

He knew the shade of your moans and sounds. He knew that cause he's heard that.

Because they were for him. Because he basically delivered them to you.

"Right," Jeongguk muttered, turning his head back toward the dark window so Taehyung wouldn't catch the sudden clench of his jaw. "Trustworthy."

Taehyung went back to talking, but Jeongguk completely tuned him out. His mind was already drifting back to the reality of how you were actually doing.

Taehyung thought you were just a girl recovering from a brutal breakup over a bowl of soup with your friends. Sora and Jimin thought you were fragile, an innocent victim who had just loved the wrong guy. None of them actually knew.

No one on this damn campus knew that you were doing bad—completely, destructively bad. No one knew about the girl who had entered his studio at 10 AM, shivering and crying so hard she couldn't breathe, looking for a place to hide from the debris of her life.

And absolutely no one knew about the girl who had left that same studio in the evening, her muscles aching in a good way, her throat raw from spilling moans and whimpers, and her mind finally quieted after being systematically taken apart and finished off by his hands.

Back in Sora's quiet, apple-cinnamon-scented kitchen, the heavy emotional crying session has finally wound down. You're sitting back in your chair, exhausted but emotionally hollowed out, feeling the comforting weight of Sora's arm around you and Jimin's warm hand still loosely anchoring yours on the table.

Then, your phone buzzes on the wooden table.

j.jk97: interesting how you have time to follow Tae but u couldn't even bother to tap follow back on me before you ran out of my studio.

Your heart dropped like an anchor through your ribs, hitting your stomach with a cold, heavy thud. You stared at the lowercase letters of his handle, the familiar initials striking a violent contrast against the safe, domestic sanctuary of your friends.

You didn't reply.

Your thumb hovered, trembling slightly, before you flipped the device face-down on the table, your pulse hammering against your throat.

Across the city, the silence in the messy designer apartment was just as thick.

Jeongguk didn't throw his phone down when the minutes ticked by without a response. He didn't lock his screen and go back to the conversation with Taehyung. He just sat on the edge of the heavy cutting table, his legs dangling, his  eyes fixed entirely on the glowing interface of his screen.

He was stalking your page. Methodically. Incessantly.

He refreshed the feed, his tatted thumb dragging the screen down over and over, waiting for the little bubble to pop up, waiting for you to reply to him. He didn't care that it was weirdly similar to caring about you, he cared about the silence. But on the third refresh, his sharp eyes caught the shift.

The grid had changed. A specific, rounded icon at the top of your profile was suddenly gone.

You had deleted the highlight with Minho.

Jeongguk's thumb paused on the glass, a slow, predatory spark igniting deep behind his eyes. He didn't need a text message from you to know exactly what you were doing. Right there, under the cover of the evening mist, while sitting in the safety of your best friend's house, you were finally scrubbed clean. You had systematically deleted the digital diary of a man that definitely wasn't for you—wiping away the curated smiles, the fake anniversaries, and the cheap, hollow promises of a fraud.

You were evicting the ghost, pixel by pixel.

A low smirk pulled at the corner of Jeongguk's mouth, tugging on his lip piercing. He didn't wait for your permission. He tapped the text bar and typed out a second message, his dark, heavy thoughts bleeding directly onto the screen.

Back in the kitchen, the phone buzzed a second time against the wood.

j.jk97: let's meet.

You stared at the text, your throat going completely dry. You could feel Jimin's quiet, hyper-observant gaze tracking the sudden stiffness in your shoulders, but your mind was already racing, trapped in the dark gravity of the art building basement.

Why? The question screamed in your head. Why now? Why outside the boundaries of the soundproof room? Why was he breaking the clinical structure of the transaction?

You swallowed hard, your thumb hovering over the glass before you forced a steady breath and typed a single, trembling line into the direct message bar.

y/n_00: The hour ended. We have a deal.

A minute passed. Then two. The low, rhythmic click of Jimin's spoon against his ceramic bowl felt agonizingly loud in the sweet, apple-cinnamon warmth of Sora's kitchen. Beneath the wood table, your fingers tightened around the aluminum edges of your device.

The three dots bloomed, dissolved, and then settled into a single sentence.

j.jk97: i'm parked by the brick pavilion.

You froze.

The brick pavilion. He meant the heavy, covered structure right outside the architecture block back on campus. The realization hit you with a cold jolt: he didn't know where Sora lived.

He had no idea you were across town, tucked away in an apartment that smelled like autumn, trying to piece yourself back together over a bowl of warm broth. He had simply messaged you, assumed you were within his immediate radius, and dropped an ultimatum.

Or so you thought.

If you wanted to see him, you couldn't just slip down a flight of stairs. You would have to actively choose to call a taxi. You would have to slip out of the apartment, book a ride in the dead of night, and travel all the way back to the very campus that had broken you hours ago.

Your chest tightened, a wave of profound hesitation washing over you.

Are you seriously going to do this? The question screamed in your head, sharp and critical. Are you really going to go?

You looked up from the glowing screen. Sora was leaning back in her chair, a soft, sleepy exhaustion washing over her features as she murmured something to Jimin about a morning lecture.

Here, there was safety. There was soup, there were blankets, and there were people who actually valued your heart.

But out there, past the glass of the window, the dark gravity of the art building basement was pulling at the edges of your mind. Jeongguk was sitting in the cold mist, completely unbothered, waiting to see if his influence over you had survived the sixty-minute timer.

Your thumb hovered over the screen, your heart hammering a chaotic, lawless rhythm against your ribs as you stared at his lowercase handle, caught between the warmth of the room and the dangerous, numbing promise of the dark.

You closed your eyes for a brief second, the aluminum edge of your phone digging sharply into your palm.

It was a test. A calculated, silent appraisal of power.

Jeongguk hadn't tracked your location, and he hadn't breached the perimeter of Sora's apartment building. He had simply dropped a pin at the epicenter of your worst day and waited to see if you would gravitate toward it. If you stayed here, wrapped in the apple-cinnamon safety of Sora's kitchen, you kept your dignity. You kept the boundary. You proved that the pact only existed within the sterile, soundproof limits of his studio walls.

But if you called that taxi...

If you spent the money, braved the  fog, and walked back onto that campus just because he typed a four-word sentence, you were giving him something far more dangerous than your body. You were giving him proof.

"Y/N?" Sora's voice drifted over the table, soft and laced with a sleepy, heavy concern. She was looking at you, her brow furrowing slightly as she noticed you hadn't touched your spoon in minutes. "You've been staring at that screen like it's a structural failure. Are you sure you're okay?"

"Yeah," you forced out, the word tasting like ash in your mouth. You slipped the phone face-down onto your thigh, out of sight. "Just... a classmate asking about the project slides for tomorrow. I need to handle it before I forget."

Jimin's eyes narrowed by a fraction of a millimeter. He didn't move, his jaw remaining relaxed, but the sheer intensity of his quiet observation felt like an interrogation. He knew the face you had from a school notification. This wasn't it. He could see the slight, erratic tremor in your hands and the way your breathing had gone entirely shallow. He was practically begging you with his eyes to just speak up, to let him handle whatever was threatening to pull you under again.

But you couldn't. How could you look at Jimin—with his clean, protective loyalty—and tell him that you were secretly mapping out a route back to him?

"I'm just going to go to the bathroom and wash my face," you murmured, pushing back your chair. The legs scraped against the hardwood with a sharp, jarring whine. "My head is just really heavy."

"Take your time, love," Sora said gently, already leaning her head back against the cushion of her chair.

You walked into the narrow hallway, the shadows swallowing you as you stepped out of the amber light of the kitchen. Instead of turning toward the bathroom, you stopped by the coat rack near the front door. Your hands were trembling violently as you pulled up your rideshare app.

Destination: Campus North Gate.

The app whirred, searching for a driver. A little silver car icon popped up on the map, four minutes away. Your thumb hovered over the screen, the weight of the choice pressing down on your chest until you could barely expand your lungs.

This wasn't about sex. This wasn't about the transaction. Jeongguk didn't care about the sixty-minute timer right now, and he certainly hadn't caught a single soft feeling for you. This was a matter of his own ego. He wanted to know if he possessed the slightest bit of influence over you when the physical contact stopped. He wanted to see if you would crawl out of a safe, warm bed and throw yourself into the freezing mist just because he beckoned.

It was humiliating. But he was the only one who got it.

Jeongguk didn't offer comfort. He didn't offer soup or soft words or promises that you would blossom again. But he had been in the wreckage. He knew how to exist in the absolute, frozen center of a storm without breaking. He could handle the sickness of things.

Before your brain could talk you out of it, your thumb pressed the screen.

Ride confirmed.

You quietly grabbed your heavy hoodie from the hook, sliding your arms into the fabric that still faintly carried the sharp, illicit scent of his studio. You didn't look back at the kitchen. You didn't look at Jimin's empty chair. You just turned the deadbolt, the metallic click sounding like a clean fracture, and slipped out into the freezing midnight air.

By the time the car pulled up to the North Gate and idled to a stop, the campus was completely deserted, swallowed by a thick, heavy midnight fog that muffled the sound of the engine.

You paid the driver with numb fingers, stepped out onto the damp pavement, and pulled your hoodie tightly around yourself. The chill cut right through the cotton, but it wasn't the weather that made your teeth chatter. It was the sheer, reckless idiety of what you were doing.

As you rounded the corner toward the brick pavilion, you saw him.

Jeongguk wasn't on his motorcycle. He was leaning against the hood of a heavy, matte-black Mercedes, his arms crossed loosely over his chest. The headlights were cut, but the ambient glow from the pavilion's overhead lamps caught the sharp, dangerous angles of his face and the silver glint of his lip piercing.

The visual hit you like a physical blow to the sternum, forcing a bitter, choked laugh from your throat. It was an insane, twisted parallel. Minho used to wait for you exactly like this. He'd lean against his clean, sensible sedan outside the architecture block, checking his watch, offering that practiced, golden-boy smile the second you walked out of a long critique. Minho had looked like a promise. He had looked like safety.

But Jeongguk? Jeongguk looked like a threat. Standing there in his oversized black hoodie, his hands exposed to the freezing air, his silhouette bleeding into the shadows—he looked like the exact place where promises went to die. Minho had waited for you to give you a curated version of love. Jeongguk had summoned you here just to prove he could.

As your shoes crunched on the gravel, Jeongguk slowly tilted his head up. His dark, unhinged eyes mapped your approach, watching the way you shivered, completely unfazed by the frantic, defensive energy rolling off you.

"You actually came."

There wasn't a trace of warmth in his voice, just a low, dangerous satisfaction.

"Shut up." you snapped, stopping a few feet away from him, your hands shoved so deep into your pockets your knuckles ached. "Don't flatter yourself. I only came because I had to see the look on your face when you realized how pathetic your little power trip is."

A slow, lazy smirk crawled up his face, pulling on his piercing. The familiar, razor-sharp banter—the specific,  frequency that only existed between the two of you—snapped instantly back into place, filling the void between you with a strange, dark electricity.

"Is that why you spent twenty text-less minutes in a taxi?" Jeongguk countered smoothly, stepping away from the car hood. He closed the distance between you with slow, predatory strides until he was towering over you, blocking out the cold wind. "To tell me I'm pathetic? You could've done that from the comfort of whatever cozy bed you ran away from."

"I was eating soup, actually," you fired back, tilting your chin up to look him dead in the eye, refusing to flinch as his shadow enveloped you. "Before you decided to act like a digital stalker. What is this, Jeongguk? The hour ended. The transaction was closed. You don't get to command my presence outside the basement."

"I didn't command anything," he rough-whispered, leaning down just a fraction, his eyes dark and consuming as they locked onto yours. The faint scent of strawberry-mint and cold leather rolled off him, instantly making your head spin. "I dropped a hint. You're the one who booked the ride. You're the one standing in the freezing fog with red eyes, looking at me like I'm the only thing keeping you from collapsing."

"I am not collapsing," you breathed, though your voice trembled just a fraction on the last syllable.

"Sure you aren't," he murmured, his gaze dropping to your mouth before cutting back up to your blown-out pupils. He didn't reach out to touch you sexually. He didn't pull you against him. Instead, he just stared right through your defenses, stripping away the lies you'd been telling yourself all evening. "You deleted the highlight. With Minho."

The name slipped into the air and transformed into a dagger that was aimed at your heart. You didn't dignify the statement with a response.

He had won the gamble, and you both knew it.

He had wanted to see if his influence lived outside the soundproof walls, and you had handed him the proof on a silver platter. It was sickening, a completely toxic realization that you were already hooked on the numbness he provided.

But as you stared at him, the coldness in his jaw seemed to settle into something steady. He didn't mock your vulnerability, and he didn't coddle your grief. He just stood there, a solid, unyielding force in the middle of your ruined world, proving that while everyone else was trying to fix your pieces, he was the only one who could look at the wreckage and not blink.

Jeongguk let out a low, dry breath through his nose, a cloud of pale vapor blooming between you before it was instantly torn apart by the midnight breeze. He didn't look away from your eyes, but his gaze drifted over your shoulder, tracking the way the distant campus streetlamps bled through the heavy, wet fog.

"Look at the lights," he murmured, his deep voice dropping into a raspy, observant cadence. He didn't point, just tilted his chin toward the edge of the pavilion. "The mist tonight. It looks like a shade of burnt orange."

You blinked, the sudden shift from his usual cutting arrogance to an artistic, quiet observation catching you completely off guard. You turned your head slightly, looking at the way the halogen glow from the old architecture building filtered through the thick moisture, turning the air into a dense, rust-colored haze. It looked heavy. It looked suffocating, like a canvas that had been overworked until the colors turned bruised and dirty.

"It looks suffocating," you whispered, the sharp wind biting at your lips. "It looks like the whole campus is under water."

"It's not suffocating," Jeongguk countered smoothly, his eyes cutting back to your face, tracing the sharp line of your jaw in the dim light. "It's just dense. It filters out the background noise. Everything else gets erased when the air gets that heavy. It's practical."

"You find a way to make a toxic fog sound practical," you muttered, a bitter, breathless laugh escaping your throat as you shoved your hands deeper into your hoodie pockets. "Figures."

"I find a way to survive the climate," he said, stepping just a fraction closer, his towering frame cutting off the worst of the wind. "You're the one standing out here pretending you aren't freezing to death just to keep up an attitude."

As if on cue, a violent, uncontrollable shiver wracked your entire body, making your teeth click together. You tried to lock your jaw, tried to force your shoulders to remain rigid and unaffected, but the damp  chill had thoroughly soaked through the thin cotton of your clothes.

Jeongguk's eyes dropped, tracking the slight, erratic tremor in your frame. A tiny, almost imperceptible twitch of irritation crossed his brow, his  expression hardening. He didn't reach out to wrap a hand around your wrist, and he didn't offer you his own heavy hoodie like a conventional gentleman would.

Instead, he turned on his heel, his silver chains clinking sharply as he reached back and pulled open the heavy passenger door of his vehicle.

"Get in," he commanded flatly.

It was a direct order. Typical.

The interior of his car instantly glowed with a dim, moody ambient light, the soft leather seats looking entirely too luxurious for the bleak, gritty courtyard. The low, expensive hum of the climate control was already running, pushing out a wave of dry, enveloping warmth that practically begged you to step inside.

You hesitated for a fraction of a second, your pride warring with the bone-deep exhaustion weighing down your limbs. But the cold was malicious, and the dark gravity of his presence was already a done deal. You pulled your hands out of your pockets and climbed into the high passenger seat, the heavy door closing behind you with a solid, expensive thud that instantly sealed out the rest of the world.

The interior of the Mercedes smelled deeply of him—leather, expensive musk, and that dark, illicit hint of strawberry-mint tobacco.

Jeongguk walked around the hood, his movements fluid and unhurried as he opened the driver's side door and slid into the cockpit. He didn't look at you right away. He just rested his forearms against the steering wheel, his long fingers tapping a slow, rhythmic pattern against the leather.

Sitting there in the  warmth, the realization hit you all over again, settling into your chest like concrete.

He was so violently different from Minho.

The contrast wasn't just in the cars they drove—Minho's sensible, pristine sedan versus Jeongguk's aggressive, blacked-out Mercedes. It was in the very fabric of how they existed in your space. Minho's car had always felt like a stage. When you sat in Minho's passenger seat, there was an unwritten expectation to perform. You had to look a certain way, smile at his jokes, ask about his day, and carefully maintain the clean, perfect image he had designed for the two of you. Minho required your energy to keep his own ego inflated.

But Jeongguk? Jeongguk didn't demand a single thing from you.

He didn't ask you how you were doing, he didn't expect you to be polite, and he didn't need you to put on a face. In his car, you could be entirely ruined. You could sit in the dark, bleeding your silent panic into the expensive leather, and he wouldn't look at you with pity or discomfort. Minho had loved you for the lie you were living; Jeongguk was the only one who seemed entirely comfortable with the truth of your disaster.

"You're staring," Jeongguk murmured, not even turning his head to look at you. His  eyes were fixed on the windshield, watching the burnt orange fog roll against the glass.

"I'm not staring," you lied instantly, your tone automatically snapping back into that bratty, defensive frequency. You shifted in the leather seat, crossing your arms tightly over your chest. "I'm just trying to figure out why someone who claims to be entirely transactional is currently running up his gas mileage to sit in a parking lot with me."

"I told you," he said, a faint, lazy smirk tugging at his lip piercing. "I wanted to see if you'd come. And you did."

"Because I'm an idiot," you muttered, cutting your eyes back toward the side window. The glass was entirely fogged up now, thick condensation turning the streetlamps outside into smeared, bleeding halos of rust. "A literal, textbook masochist. I should be in bed right now. I was actually warm."

"You were freezing when you walked up to my car," Jeongguk countered smoothly, his tone low and even as he shifted his weight. The dark leather of the driver's seat creaked beneath him, a heavy, expensive sound that filled the quiet cockpit. He didn't sound triumphant or smug; he just stated it like a cold, architectural fact. "Your teeth were chattering."

"That was from anger, not the cold."

"Sure." He finally turned his head, his dark, sharp gaze dropping down to watch the way your hands were still tightly clenched against your ribs. "That's why your shoulders are still up to your ears."

Before you could fire back another sharp, bratty retort, Jeongguk reached out. His finger clicked a button on the sleek console, and the low hum of the climate control shifted, a steady, intentional stream of hot air blowing directly into the passenger footwell, melting the chill right out of your damp shoes.

The immediate, enveloping warmth made the defensive bite in your throat dissolve before you could stop it. You let out a quiet, defeated breath, your shoulders finally dropping an inch.

The silence that settled over the car wasn't like the heavy, clinical vacuum of the soundproof studio. It felt different—vaguely nostalgic, pulling your mind back to weeks  ago, long before the chaotic breakdown and the dark, transactional pact you'd signed earlier today.

There had been a day on the far edge of the campus benches, where the two of you had just sat in the talked.

No performance, no masks. Just two people trading rough, cynical observations about nothings. About colors. About his weekends when he was 10. About your car revving maroon top.

"The highlight," you breathed softly into the dark, the admission slipping out before your brain could build the wall back up. "I deleted it because looking at it made me feel like I was actively participating in a lie. I just... I couldn't look at his face anymore."

Jeongguk stopped tapping his thumb against the leather steering wheel. He didn't offer a shallow platitude, and he didn't tell you it was going to be okay. He despised Minho too much for fake sympathy, and he respected your intelligence too much to feed you cheap comfort.

"Good," he said, his deep baritone dropping into a raw, raspy resonance that felt entirely too close in the violet shadows of the dashboard. He leaned his elbow on the center console, turning his upper body toward you. "He didn't deserve the real estate on your page anyway. You're better off empty."

"It feels heavy," you whispered, your voice cracking just a fraction as you stared at the glowing  lights of the dashboard. "Being empty."

Jeongguk didn't answer right away. He reached out, his hand moving with a slow, deliberate discipline that gave you every opportunity to pull back, to demand the clinical boundaries of your deal. But you didn't move. His thumb, slightly rough and smelling faintly of tobacco and cold metal, hooked gently under your chin, tilting your face up until you had no choice but to look into his unhinged, deep eyes.

He just held you there, his grip steady and unyielding, anchoring you in the middle of your ruined world.

"I told you," Jeongguk murmured, his thumb brushing against the line of your jaw, his gaze mapping out the raw, exhausted reality of your face. "The air is dense tonight. It filters out the noise. Let it be empty for a while. I can handle the weight."

He took his hand back slowly, his thumb trailing off your skin with a lingering, heavy drag that left a patch of intense warmth behind. He slid back into his side of the cockpit, his large frame relaxing against the leather as he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his lighter.

He didn't spark it. He just flipped the heavy metal casing open and closed, a steady, rhythmic click-snap filling the quiet  interior.

"So," Jeongguk began, his voice dropping a register, sounding casually detached but carrying that sharp, engineering focus that noticed everything. "Sora and Jimin. They're babysitting you through this?"

You swallowed the small lump in your throat, leaning your head back against the headrest, your eyes tracking the small orange flame as he finally flicked the lighter alive for a brief second before snapping it shut. "They're not babysitting me. They're just... being good friends. They care."

"Right. Friends," he echoed, a dry, cynical tilt to his mouth. He knew exactly what Jimin's protective frequency looked like, and he knew how much your circle wanted to shelter you from the ugly parts of this breakup. But Jeongguk also knew you had run straight out of that shelter the moment he gave you a destination. "They think you're sleeping in the bathroom right now or what?"

"They think I'm clearing my head," you muttered, cutting your eyes over to him, the bratty edge returning to your voice just to cover up the sudden vulnerability. "Which I was. Until you decided to drag me out into a parking lot to analyze my social media habits."

Jeongguk let out a low, rough chuckle that vibrated deep in his chest. He stopped flipping the lighter, sliding it back into his pocket as he leaned his head back against his seat, turning his face to look at you in the dim, moody light. His eyes narrowed slightly, a sudden, wicked spark dancing behind his pupils—the exact, unhinged look he got right before he dismantled your composure.

"You know," he murmured, his lip piercing catching a glint of violet as a slow, dangerous smirk stretched across his face. "Taehyung was talking a lot of shit earlier about how immaculate and proper you and Minho used to be. Said the two of you looked like a goddamn university brochure."

You frowned, your chest tightening slightly at the mention of the ghost you had just deleted. "What's your point, Jeongguk?"

"I'm just saying, as bad as he was for you, you put up quite the reputation."

"So...?"

Jeongguk leaned in just an inch closer, his gaze dropping to the leather console between you before lifting back up to lock onto yours with absolute amusement.

"So," he rough-whispered, the cadence of his voice turning entirely dark and provocative. "Is it real you've never fucked in the car?"

next chapter | previous

[ttabacco]

<imma rant>

you know, i have a feeling if i ever encountered somebody like jeon in real life, i'd be soooooooooooooooooooooooooooo pissed. like genuinely makes-me-want-to-pull-my-hair-out pissed. cuz he's an asshole. just an a-grade asshole and i've actually never met this kind of a guy.

because there are times i so agree with sora, he does come off as an arrogant asshole who thinks he is greater than anyone and yes, it's because he sees things others dont and is weighed down by the sensory overload he is put through every day.

but i also, and that's a 10,000 percent ALSO, know very well that i'd be so intrigued by this man and the cocky way he speaks in, no matter what, because some of us live within lines so clearly defined, trouble seems like a mess and a mess makes us question our choices, and when we question our choices, we realize there was never actually a time we lived. because we were always busy making sure we didn't step out of the line. making sure we didn't blur it.

so in that scenario imagine a guy with a great jawline who smells like musk and bad decisions all wrapped into one shows up with an annoying smirk and an i-know-how-shitty-your-life-is persona.

we'd alllllll fall down.

oh and minho? he can go fuck himself. because he wanted a placeholder he could come home to and even when she basically rubbed it into his face how he was cheating on her , he leans against somethings and goes "pathetic". jesus.

#i'mdonerantingnowgotosleep

uh..this is gonna be equally long so buckle up.

now, now. i may be biased (duh bitch you’re the author) but i love jungkook. truly and irrevocably.

because you’re 10,000% right—in real life, a guy like jeon would make anyone want to violently pull their hair out. he’s arrogant, he’s selfish, and his ego could eclipse the sun. but as the person pulling the strings behind the screen, i can’t help but see him through a softer lens.

he operates from a different plane and he’s in constant sensory overload. he reads the room too well, see underlying flaws in people. he's insanely good at what he does BUT..

he’s illiterate at humans!! it’s a defense mechanism. he treats them as means to an end because aknowledging them as humans with real heavy, raw, emotions and feelings would probably downright break him. the sheer 'volume' would be too much.

he doesn't flinch at the void's mess. he doesn't demand her to put on a smile. he looks at her disaster, says 'yeah, this is fucked,' and provides a quiet gravity that lets her finally stop performing. he’s the storm that safely swallows the wreckage.

jungkook's softness comes thru in his dark utility and while being the author, i do admit he’s flawed.

all of them are. they're complex characters who won’t always make the decisions you want while reading and that’s okay.

minho is designed to hate on. that being said, he’s not unilateral. he has some complexities too which will be revealed in due time. hehe

ahhh...i think i wrote too much but i absolutely LOVE dissecting them with you guys.

thank you for reading!! <3

[ttabacco]

bro u write so well, im crying T-T, the turning everything into a color or taste , into sensations is just such a nice concept. it feels so fucking real.

ahhhh!!! thank you thank you thank youuu <33

it really means a lot. i really try to make it a point, but i’m just so happy when you guys notice little details or make theories :')

making my day!!'

[ttabacco]

Faux Colors

chapter 13

friction and inertia

Synopsis; one lives in a world under the weight of shadows the other lives in a world that screams.

"The sky is blue like Sacrifice by Elton John"

warnings; swearing, heavy themes pairing; jeongguk × female reader genre; angst, slowburn, smut, fwb word count; 11.1k

a/n: ohmygod. it's here. i've been waiting to write and publish this for the longest time haha!!

fasten your seatbelts, lock the door, and grab a glass of ice water. jeongguk said the studio was soundproof, which is great, because you guys are going to need to scream. yes there is smut in this. you've been warned!!

—

"We broke up."

The words tasted like acid against your tongue.

The cafe's background noise—the sharp hiss of the espresso machine, the clinking of porcelain—seemed to instantly vanish under the sudden, suffocating weight of Jimin's gaze. Sora froze, her coffee cup hovering halfway to her mouth.

"What?" Sora whispered, her eyes widening. "What do you mean, you broke up? You guys were fine yesterday."

"He was cheating," you forced out.

You kept your voice level, entirely flat. You anchored your hands firmly in your lap so they wouldn't see the slight tremor in your fingers.

You didn't give details. You didn't mention Irina, or the precision of Minho's hands, or the way your ribs had felt like they were collapsing into your lungs just twelve hours ago. You gave them the bare minimum—a clean, digestible heartbreak.

Sora's face went entirely pale before a dark, dangerous flush crept up her neck.

"With who? Since when? I'm going to kill him. I swear to God, I'm going to his apartment right now—"

"Sora, stop," Jimin cut in. His voice was low, his sharp eyes locked onto your face with a terrifyingly intuitive intensity. He looked fiercely protective as his hand reached across the table to cover your cold knuckles. "Let her breathe. Look at her."

You leaned into Jimin's touch just enough to play the part, letting your shoulders drop as if the weight of the confession had broken your spine.

As they kept talking—Sora's voice rising in a sharp, appalled cadence in the background, Jimin murmuring his quiet, steady counterpoints—the world outside the cafe patio seemed to drift into a blur.

A sudden, sharp gust of  wind swept over the outdoor seating, catching the damp ends of your hair and whipping them across your face.

The movement released a heavy, concentrated burst of the gardenia shampoo you had fished out from the bottom of the trash can.

If Minho can lie, you can use the good shampoo.

It bloomed in the cold air—thick and sweet and intoxicatingly loud. It completely enveloped you, drowning out the faint, lingering scent of Minho's cologne. It didn't smell like safety anymore. It smelled raw. It smelled like an invitation.

You've officially washed any lingering scent of your past lover.

It hurts.

As you stared blankly at the rim of your mug, your mind began thoroughly chewing on the reality of the deal you had made.

Was it actually a good idea?

The rational, stable part of you—the part that belonged here, sitting with friends who cared about you—knew it was insane. It was a dark, dangerous gamble. You were stepping off a cliff with a man who didn't offer safety nets, only exit ramps.

But as you stared down at Jimin's hand over your knuckles, your throat tightened with a deeper, uglier question.

Could you even do this? Could you actually be intimate with another person right now?

The mere thought of a normal, soft touch made your stomach turn. The idea of someone trying to gently heal you, or kiss you with pity after what had happened, felt entirely impossible. Your body felt like glass that had already shattered, you couldn't be handled with care.

Maybe that was exactly why your skin wasn't rejecting the thought of him. He didn't want to fix the pieces, he just wanted to manage the chaos.

Every time you closed your eyes to blink against the wind, the image of Jeongguk sitting in that dark leather chair—his unhinged, dark pupils tracking the movement of your bruised mouth—flickered behind your eyes.

The next time the loop starts running, you know where the studio is.

"...right?" Sora's voice broke through the fog, eyes full of frantic sympathy. "You shouldn't be alone tonight. You should stay at my place."

You looked between her and Jimin, the weight of their concern pressing hard against your ribs. You couldn't face your apartment yet. You couldn't face the quiet.

"Okay," you breathed, managing a small, tired nod. "Yeah. I'll stay with you."

Sora immediately let out a breath of relief, her shoulders dropping. "Good. I'll make that soup you like, and we can just shut the world out."

But first, you had to survive the rest of the day. You had to live.

Sora leaned back against her chair, her fingers nervously tapping the table. She was clearly trying to find a wedge to break the suffocating silence, her mind searching for any topic that didn't involve Minho's ghost.

"Honestly, at least the weekend wasn't a total bust," Sora murmured, a small, genuine soften in her expression before it quickly shifted to a deep scowl. "I mean, Taehyung is great. He's genuinely sweet. But that Jungleguk motherfucker? I seriously cannot stand him. He is too arrogant."

Jimin let out a low chuckle, shifting his weight against the back of the chair.

He liked Taehyung. He knew him.

He liked Jeongguk. But he didn't know him.

"Jeongguk's alright," Jimin offered, a slight note of limitation in his voice. "He's fine when he's just standing on his own, doing his own thing. But honestly? I don't know what to think about him when it comes to you. He operates on a completely different frequency, and it makes me uneasy."

Hearing his name drop into the crisp afternoon air sent a sudden, sharp spike of heat straight beneath your collarbone.

"Yeah," you murmured, keeping your voice level and entirely hollow as you stared down at your lap. "He is... different."

As their voices kept moving in the background—Sora still ranting about why exactly Jeongguk rubbed her the wrong way, Jimin defending him with careful boundaries—your mind completely derailed.

You couldn't help it. Your thoughts drifted straight back to the blue-lit vacuum of the studio last night, replaying the exact pressure of Jeongguk's mouth against yours.

It was... different.

Not in a bad way.

Just entirely foreign.

With Minho, intimacy had always been carefully packaged as "safe." His touches were gentle, predictable, and polite. Kissing Minho was like stepping into a well-lit, sterile room where you knew exactly where everything belonged. It was comfortable. It was the kind of safety that made you feel tucked in, shielded from the world.

But Jeongguk's kiss didn't care about your comfort. It was daring.

It felt like a deliberate, lawless collision. There was a raw, unhinged edge to the way his hand had anchored the back of your neck, demanding your absolute presence without a single ounce of pity or caution. He wasn't trying to handle you like fragile glass or help you piece yourself back together. He was just pulling you directly into the dark with him.

And looking down at your trembling fingers, you realized the most terrifying part.

Safe had left you completely ruined. Daring was the only thing loud enough to make you forget.

"Hey," Sora's voice gently tapped against the fog in your head. Her hand waved slightly across your line of sight. "You still with us, babe?"

"Yeah," you lied softly, clearing the tightness from your throat as you forced a synthetic smile and reached for your bag. "Just... realizing how much stuff I actually have to cancel today if I'm staying over at your place."

You stood up from the table, needing the physical movement before the secret inside your chest could bleed through your expression.

As you reached for your jacket, a cold, heavy wave of guilt suddenly crashed straight through your ribs, hitting you so hard it made you slightly breathless.

You had just agreed to the deal. You had practically signed a contract to touch, to use, and to be used by a man your best friend utterly despised probably for good reason.

He's arrogant and direct and doesn't care about he how delivers information.

Even if the information is correct.

It was correct.

A hollow, twisting anxiety settled deep in your stomach, instantly feeding the toxic spiral of low self-esteem that Minho's betrayal had left behind.

Was something deeply wrong with you?

Were you just a bad person?

You just broke up.

The ink on the ending of your relationship wasn't even dry yet, and here you were, already anchoring your survival to a lawless, transactional pact in a dark studio.

You felt cheap. You felt fractured and impulsive, like a stray wire throwing sparks in the dark.

But then your mind flashed back to the precision of Minho's hands, to the agonizing reality that he had been the one to shatter the rules first.

He had cheated.

He had systematically dismantled your worth while you were busy trying to be his version of perfect.

You weren't looking for a rebound. You weren't looking to heal. You were just trying to survive the suffocating weight of the quiet, and Jeongguk was the only one who had offered an exit ramp without forcing you to explain the wreckage. Because he knew why.

He told you.

The sky was Sacrifice by Elton John.

Did Minho steal the gold chime in the color of your eyes or was it buried deep under tears of yesterday?

"Hey," Jimin's low, steady voice broke through your thoughts as he stood up beside you, evaluating the sudden paleness of your face. "You okay to walk to campus? We can take a cab if you're feeling dizzy."

"No, I'm okay," you lied softly, adjusting the strap of your bag to anchor yourself. "The walk will be good for me. I just need to send these messages first."

You pulled out your phone as the three of you began heading toward the exit, your fingers trembling slightly as you opened your email app.

First, you typed out a polite, formal message to Mr. Zhang, canceling your evening appointment and requesting to reschedule. The digital click of the send button sounded like a tiny, sharp snap in the quiet of your mind.

Next, you pulled up the tutoring coordinator's contact. It felt like a fresh sting of failure, but there was absolutely no way you could put on a bright, patient smile for a room of energetic eight-year-olds when your own head was a lawless mess. You sent a generic excuse about a sudden fever, watching the confirmation bubble pop up with a heavy dose of shame.

By the time you locked your screen, the three of you were crossing the threshold onto the university campus grid lines, the sprawling concrete plaza swarming with students who had absolutely no idea your entire world had turned into a classified file.

Sora and Jimin walked you as far as the humanities building, their heavy presence on either side of you acting like a temporary shield against the crisp autumn air.

"We'll meet you right back here at the fountain the second your seminars are done, okay?" Sora reminded you, her fingers hooking briefly into the sleeve of your jacket to ground you. "Don't check out on us."

"I won't," you lied, offering a tight, practiced nod that seemed to satisfy her enough to let go.

The moment you pulled open the heavy glass doors of the lecture hall, the wall of over-circulated, suffocating heat hit you.

The room was massive, an amphitheater of steep tiered seating rapidly filling with the rhythmic clatter of plastic theater seats flipping down, the collective zippers of hundreds of backpacks, and the aggressive clicking of laptops waking up.

You climbed the stairs to the very back row, deliberately seeking out the highest, darkest corner of the room. You needed the distance. You needed to look down at the crowd rather than be a part of it.

When you sat down, you pulled your laptop from your bag, opened a blank document, and stared at the blinking black cursor.

For the next ninety minutes, the professor's voice became nothing more than a low, droning frequency bouncing off the acoustic panels of the ceiling.

You tried to take notes. You forced your fingers to type out phrases like structural methodology and historical framework, but the words looked completely hollow on the screen, like a language you used to speak before your ribs were crushed.

Instead, your eyes kept tracking the digital clock in the bottom right corner of your desktop.

2:14 PM.

2:19 PM.

2:27 PM.

Tick-tock. Seconds passing. Time pouring.

Too fucking slow.

Every minute felt like a grueling, physical climb through wet cement. Your anxiety was a living, breathing thing inside your chest, a tight coil that tightened every time you blinked.

The internal spiral of low esteem was relentless, chewing away at whatever confidence you had left.

Was something fundamentally broken in you? Were you actually a bad person for what you had done in that blue-lit studio?

Normal, good people grieved. They went home, they cried into blankets, and they let their friends handle them with care.

But you? You had gone to a lawless vacuum.

And as the professor finally dismissed the class, the echoing roar of hundreds of students packing up their things drowned out the thoughts, leaving you completely numb as you headed down the stairs toward the library.

The third floor of the library was a stark contrast to the lecture hall—quiet, sterile, and smelling of old paper and industrial carpet cleaner.

You found your group project mates already huddled around a long wooden table covered in highlighters, printed rubrics, and half-empty energy drinks.

Sour cherry and lime.

Yikes. Not even energy drinks give you a break.

"Finally,"  Paul muttered, not looking up from his tablet as you pulled out a chair. "We're trying to lock down the media presentation structure before the deadline next week, and the rubric is completely brutal."

"Sorry," you murmured, opening your laptop and sliding into the empty space between them. "I'm here. What do we have left?"

"Just the audio-visual framework and the final summary slides," Minji sighed, rubbing her temples. She looked exhausted, her eyes wide as she turned her screen toward the group. "But honestly, everything I'm finding for the modern sound design section feels so generic. We need something that actually feels contemporary, or the department head is going to tank our grade."

Logan leaned back in his chair, locking his hands behind his head as a sudden, eager spark lit up his face.

"If you want contemporary sound design, we should just analyze the gala track," Logan suggested, knocking his knuckles against the wood of the table. "Have you guys heard the rumors? The art department's annual gala is in less than a week, and it's supposed to be massive this year."

Minji's eyes perked up. "Wait, the one at the gallery downtown? Did they finally announce who's handling the production?"

"Yeah, it leaked this morning," Logan said, a grin spreading across his face. "This guy Jeongguk is doing the official remix for the opening showcase. Apparently, it's some heavily guarded, totally unhinged electronic set. The department spent half their budget just to secure him for it."

Your fingers instantly froze over your keyboard.

The sudden drop of his name in the middle of a sterile library table felt like a physical blow to your sternum. The heat from earlier flushed right back up your neck, hot and suffocating.

"Jeongguk?" Minji repeated, her brows furrowing as she chewed on the cap of her pen. "As in Amaranth?"

Logan nodded quickly. "Yeah, him."

"God, he's so elusive. His stuff is brilliant, but he's such an arrogant asshole to deal with. My roommate tried to interview him for the campus paper last semester and he completely blew her off without even looking up from his console."

Love-lies-bleeding. Amaranth. His tag name.

"Who cares if he's a jerk? The guy is a genius," Logan countered, tapping his phone screen. "Everyone is talking about it. It's the biggest event of the semester. Honestly, having that gala looming over this boring month is the only thing I'm actually looking forward to right now."

"True," Paul chimed in, finally looking up. "If we can somehow tie his production style into our final slides as a case study, the professor will probably give us an automatic A."

As they kept talking, their voices shifting into a debate about how to break down his mixing techniques, the air in your lungs turned to ice.

It was looming. He was looming. He was everywhere.

The very man you had made a secret deal with last night was a campus legend, an unattainable force that your classmates were treating like some untouchable god of sound design. They were stressing over grades and slide layouts, looking forward to a fancy gala, completely oblivious to the fact that the man they were analyzing had his thumb pressed firmly against your neck.

That he had kissed you.

You stared at your screen, the letters blurring together as the memory of his daring, unhinged mouth flashed behind your eyes again.

You were in his orbit now. There was no escaping it.

Minji sighed, pulling up a shared document on her screen and turning it toward the center of the table. "We can't just throw him in there for extra credit, Paul. Our entire thesis is supposed to focus on the preservation and replication of acoustic environments in historical spaces. We're restoration majors, not media critics."

"But that's exactly why Amaranth works," Logan argued, leaning forward, his eyes bright with the debate. "Think about it. The gala opening downtown isn't just a concert. The gallery is a converted industrial warehouse from the early twenties. The concrete walls, the high iron rafters, the exposed brick—the acoustics in there are an absolute nightmare for sound clarity."

He swiped on his phone, pulling up a leaked schematic of the venue.

"Jeongguk isn't just playing a track. Rumor has it he's using digital mapping to actively counteract the structural echoes of the warehouse, blending industrial noise with classical ambient tones. He's literally doing sound restoration in real-time, matching the history of the building to the frequencies he uses."

You sat perfectly still, your hands resting flat on the cold wood of the table to hide the way your fingers were vibrating.

"Y/N, what do you think?" Minji turned her head toward you, her brows slightly furrowed in concern. "You've been quiet. For our section on the 19th-century theater acoustics replication, do you think we can draw a parallel to how modern artists treat industrial spaces, or should we stick strictly to the physical plaster and wood restoration models?"

The question hung in the air, forcing you to drag your mind out of the blue-lit basements and back into the sterile light of the library.

"I think..." You cleared the sudden tightness from your throat, forcing your voice to sound analytical, professional—the version of yourself you had spent years cultivating. "I think the parallel works if we focus on the integrity of the space. We shouldn't try to change the cracks in the stone; we work around them to preserve the original resonance. If he's using digital frequencies to fill the void of the industrial warehouse without altering the brickwork, it's the same principle."

"Exactly!" Logan snapped his fingers, pointing at you. "See? It's a conceptual mirror. The department head will love that."

" Fine," Minji conceded, though she still looked skeptical as her fingers flew across her keyboard, updating the presentation outline. "We'll add a case study slide on modern industrial acoustic mapping. Yo,Y/N, since you already have the notes on the physical materials side, can you take the lead on drafting the introductory summary for that section?"

"Yeah," you murmured, staring at the cursor blinking inside the shared document. "I can do that."

"Great. Let's lock down the specific timeline for the slides," Paul said, pulling up the assignment rubric. "The presentation is due next Wednesday, but we need everything finalized for peer review by Friday afternoon. We're running out of time, and with the gala looming at the end of the month, the campus is going to be completely chaotic."

You nodded mechanically, typing a few placeholder lines into the document.

Preservation of original resonance.

Non-invasive acoustic interventions.

Every term you wrote felt like a twisted metaphor for your own life.

You were trying so hard to maintain your outer framework, to look like a dedicated  student, while the internal structure of your world was completely hollowed out.

The meeting dragged on for another forty minutes. Paul and Logan argued over the formatting of the bibliography, while Minji meticulously checked the image resolutions for the architectural diagrams.

You played your part flawlessly. You chimed in when necessary, adjusted a few sentences in your assigned section, and kept a polite, distant smile plastered on your face.

But beneath the table, your phone remained dark. No messages from Minho. The complete, heavy silence of the breakup was starting to settle into a cold, permanent reality. He wasn't going to call. He wasn't going to explain. He was simply gone, leaving you with the suffocating aftermath of his betrayal.

When Paul finally closed his laptop and announced that they were done for the day, the relief that washed over you was almost sickening.

"Okay, fire." Logan chimed.

"See you guys tomorrow in the lab," Minji said, packing her bag and giving you a small, encouraging smile. "Get some rest, Y/N. You look a little pale today."

"I will," you lied softly, hoisting the strap of your bag onto your shoulder as the group began to disperse.

You left the third floor of the library alone, deliberately letting Paul, Logan, and Minji take the elevators while you opted for the concrete stairwell. You needed the isolation, even if it was just for a few flights of stairs.

When you stepped out of the library building, the crisp afternoon air hit your face, catching the strands of your hair and bringing forward the faint, clean scent of your gardenia shampoo.

You had an hour to kill before you were supposed to meet Sora and Jimin back at the humanities fountain.

Instead of heading toward the student center or a crowded cafe, you found yourself walking aimlessly through the older quadrant of the campus. This part of the university was filled with gothic-style architecture—heavy stone facades, arched entryways, and weathered brick walls that always smelled faintly of damp earth and ivy.

Usually, walking among these buildings grounded you; it reminded you of why you had chosen restoration in the first place—the desire to protect things that time had tried to wear away.

But today it felt useless. Rome wasn't built in a day but it did fall in one. So what's the point?

The hour of isolation you had carved out was supposed to be a reprieve, a small pocket of time to reconstruct your walls before you had to look Sora and Jimin in the eye again.

Instead, it was just a long, agonizing corridor of echoes.

You turned the corner of the courtyard, your boots crunching quietly against the stray gravel lining the path. The sun was filtering through the high glass atrium of the neighboring fine arts pavilion, casting long, geometric shadows across the stone floor. You kept your eyes down, tracking the line of your own shadow, desperately wishing you could just dissolve into it.

Then, a voice broke the quiet.

"Y/N?"

The sound of your name wasn't loud, but it hit you like an electric current delivered straight to the base of your skull. Your entire body went rigid. The faint, clean scent of gardenia shampoo suddenly felt like an iron collar around your throat.

You didn't want to look up. Every survival instinct you had left screamed at you to keep your chin tucked, to turn on your heel and sprint toward the crowded library elevators. But your head moved on its own, a slow, mechanical rotation that forced your eyes across the narrow courtyard.

Irina was standing less than ten feet away.

She looked exactly like she always did—effortlessly integrated into the campus environment, a thick charcoal scarf looped loosely around her neck, carrying a leather portfolio under one arm. She looked whole. She didn't look like someone who had spent the last twenty-four hours carrying a torch through another person's life.

She took a small, hesitant step forward, her fingers tightening around the edge of her portfolio. There was an expression on her face that made your stomach turn—a soft, careful look of concern that felt entirely unearned.

"Y/N, wait," she said, her voice dropping into that quiet, confidential register she used whenever she wanted to sound gentle. "Please. I didn't think I'd see you here today. I wanted to talk to you...about yesterday."

The precision of Minho's hands. The familiar layout of his apartment, suddenly made grotesque and alien because she was probably inside it.

The sterile, polite way he had broken the rules while you were busy trying to preserve them.

The memories didn't flash behind your eyes—they felt like they were happening right now, in real-time, overlaying themselves onto the grey stone of the courtyard until you couldn't tell where the wreckage ended and the university began.

Your chest tightened, a sharp, white-hot line of anxiety slicing straight through your ribs. You couldn't breathe. The air in the courtyard felt forty degrees hotter than it had a second ago, thick and choking.

Irina took another step, her leather boots clicking against the gravel. She reached out a hand, her fingers extending toward your sleeve as if she had any right to ground you.

"Look, Minho and I... it's complicated," she started, her eyes wide with a desperate need to explain away the rot.

"It wasn't supposed to happen like that. If you just let me tell you what happened—"

"Don't."

The word came out of you before she could finish, but it wasn't a shout. It was a low, jagged vibration that barely cleared your teeth—flat, hollow, and laced with a terrifying finality that made her hand freeze mid-air.

You didn't recognize your own voice. It sounded like the dead space between radio stations, empty and cold.

Irina's mouth remained slightly open, her fingers hovering a few inches from your arm.

"Y/N, please. We've known each other for three years. You can't just—"

"Don't speak to me, Irina," you whispered, your hands balling into fists inside your coat pockets until your nails bit into your palms. You needed the pain to keep from completely dissociating right there on the gravel. "Don't look at me. Don't say my name. Just... don't."

The look of shock that crossed her face should have given you some small sense of satisfaction, but you felt entirely numb. You couldn't look at her for another second without vomiting up the sheer volume of anxiety rising in your throat.

Without waiting for her to drop another syllable, you turned your back on her.

You didn't walk toward the humanities fountain where Sora and Jimin will be there for you. You couldn't.

If you went to them now, Sora would see the phantom print of Irina's voice on your face. They would handle you with sympathy, they would take you to the apartment, they would feed you soup and try to cushion the fall with soft blankets and gentle words.

They would try to make you feel safe.

But safe was a lie. Safe was the sterile room Minho had kept you in while he dismantled your worth from the inside out.

Your legs moved faster, your shoes pounding against the concrete plaza as you bypassed the main exit entirely, heading straight for the perimeter of the campus grid lines. Your heart was hammering an unhinged, lawless rhythm against your ribs, the toxic spiral of low self-esteem whispering that you were already ruined, that you were cheap, that you had already crossed a line you could never walk back from.

The next time the loop starts running, you know where the studio is.

The daylight was already beginning to die, the horizon bleeding out into that cold, bruised gray color as you descended the concrete steps into the depths of the music department.

Your lungs felt raw, still suffocating under the weight of Irina's voice, your chest tight with a frantic need to just stop existing in the clean, safe world that had discarded you.

But the moment your fingers wrapped around the heavy brass handle of the studio door, the adrenaline vaporized.

A sudden, paralyzing wave of shyness hit you, anchoring your feet straight to the floorboards. Your throat went completely dry. The wild, reckless impulse that had carried you all the way across the campus suddenly felt terrifyingly real.

Wow. You are really doing this.

You were standing at the threshold of a pact about to hand your body over to a man who was practically a dangerous stranger.

What if he kills you?

What if he doesn't?

You pushed the door open slowly, the heavy soundproof vacuum instantly swallowing the muffled noise of the city outside.

The studio was washed in its signature midnight state—suffocatingly dim, quiet, and completely illuminated by the cold, electric glare of his dual monitors. Jeongguk was exactly where you had left him. He was slouched low in his dark leather chair, a black oversized hoodie pulled up over his head, shielding his face in shadow. His long fingers were resting idly against the master faders of the mixing console, tapping a silent, erratic rhythm.

He didn't turn around when the door clicked shut. He didn't even blink.

"7 hours," Jeongguk rough-whispered into the quiet room, his voice a low, gravelly vibration that instantly made your heart spike. A dark, humorless curve touched the corner of his mouth as he tracked your position purely by the sound of your uneven breathing. "You lasted longer than I thought you would, Void."

You stayed frozen against the door, your hands gripping the straps of your backpack like a shield. You felt incredibly small beneath the high, acoustic-paneled ceiling, your skin hot with a mix of anxiety and sudden, crushing vulnerability.

You had no remark in this moment.

Like the cat got your tongue.

Jeongguk finally spun his chair around. The blue light from the screens caught the sharp angle of his jaw, the dark, unhinged depth of his pupils tracking your pale face and the slight tremor in your jaw. He looked as arrogant as ever—completely detached, fully aware of the power he held in this vacuum, and entirely unfazed by the wreckage written all over your expression.

He didn't mock you, though. For all his cold arrogance, there was a steady, deliberate calm in the way he stood up from the chair. He didn't rush your space. He closed the distance between you with slow, measured steps, his heavy boots making no sound against the studio floor.

Like a cat.

He stopped just a foot away, his towering frame completely blocking out the glare of the monitors, casting you in his shadow. Without a word, his tatted hand reached out. His fingers didn't touch your skin—instead, he gently took the heavy strap of your backpack, sliding it off your shoulder with careful precision, before reaching for the other side. He set the bag down on the sofa behind you, treating you with a quiet, grounding discipline that felt entirely steady.

"I have to leave soon," you whispered, your voice cracking slightly under the weight of his proximity. You forced yourself to look up, meeting the anarchic dark of his eyes. "We only have one hour."

Jeongguk's left brow twitched upward, a slow, dangerous tilt of his head as he looked down at your bruised, trembling mouth.

"One?" he repeated, the word dropping between you in a low, gravelly drawl.

"Because I have to meet Sora and Jimin," you murmured, the talk about your schedule tasting like cotton on your tongue, though the sheer panic of being caught in this dark transaction was real enough.

Jeongguk didn't blink. He took one step closer, invading your space until the faint scent of his musk, leather and something oddly sweet today completely choked out the trace of gardenia on your collarbone.

Strawberry?

His hand rose, his long, calloused fingers wrapping firmly around the back of your neck—not rough, but with that same daring, absolute authority that left no room for retreat.

"I'll manage," he rough-whispered against your lips, his thumb pressing just hard enough against your pulse point to make the loop in your head completely die.

His thumb stroked the side of your neck, a slow, calloused sweep that ground you completely into the present. He was incredibly soft with you.

He leaned down just a fraction more, his nose tilting into the curve of your jaw, inhaling deeply. A faint, knowing smirk touched his lips in the dim blue light of the monitors.

"You changed it back," he murmured, his breath hot against your skin.

"Changed what?" you breathed.

"You know what."

He noticed it. Of course.

Quiet. Silence.

He noticed again.

"I'm glad though, suits you better anyways."

For all the cold defiance he projected to the rest of the world, his touch didn't have a single drop of violence or rush in it. It was disciplined. Deliberate. He handled you with the absolute precision of a master artisan working with a highly unstable, fragile material—knowing exactly how much pressure to apply so you wouldn't shatter under his palms.

Jeongguk didn't say another word, giving you a quiet, heavy moment to change your mind. When you didn't pull back, his other hand settled against your waist, the wide texture of his palm warm and unyielding right through the thin cotton of your shirt.

Then, he leaned down and closed the final inch between you.

The first point of contact was the sudden, biting chill of his  piercing. The cold metal pressed right against the corner of your bottom lip, a stark, freezing shock that sent a violent wave of electricity straight to your core.

Your breath hitched, a soft gasp escaping your throat, and Jeongguk immediately used the distraction to deepen the collision.

His lips were surprisingly smooth, a plush, heavy texture that caught against the raw, chapped edges of your own mouth. He wasn't aggressive, but he was entirely unyielding—parting your lips with a slow, commanding swipe of his tongue that tasted faintly of sweet, minty fruits. It was a clean, sharp flavor that instantly cut through the stale, suffocating air of the university courtyard still lingering in the back of your throat.

You let your eyes close, grateful for the familiar darkness that always leveled your world.

Your entire universe narrowed down to the raw, tactile mapping of his body against yours.

The heavy, coarse weave of his black cotton hoodie beneath your trembling fingers.

The scratchy friction of the silver chains looping around his neck as you unconsciously reached up to anchor yourself.

The blunt, solid pressure of his tatted knuckles sliding up your jawline, holding your head at an angle that left you completely exposed to him.

Jeongguk didn't inspect. He possessed. He was a soft, obstinate weight that simply took over the space where your panic used to live, replacing the toxic spiral of your low self-esteem with the sheer, undeniable reality of his hands on your skin. He wasn't trying to heal you, and that was exactly why it worked. He was just managing the chaos, taking the wheel while you finally let yourself drop into the dark vacuum.

He broke the kiss for a fraction of a second, his lips dragging slowly across your cheek to find the sensitive skin right beneath your ear. His hot, mint-laced breath fanned over your neck, making your knees instantly buckle.

But you didn't fall. Jeongguk's arm tightened around your waist, hoisting you effortlessly against the solid, unmoving wall of his chest.

"I've got you," he rough-whispered against your pulse point, his teeth grazing the skin just enough to leave a stinging promise. "Keep your eyes shut, Void. I'll handle the clock."

His hand slid down from your waist, the wide, heavy plane of his palm mapping the curve of your hip before his fingers hooked into the waistband of your jeans. He didn't pull or jerk; he just applied a steady, grounding downward pressure that forced you to step even closer, until your thighs flushed completely flat against his.

"Open your mouth a little more for me," Jeongguk murmured against your lips, his voice a low, physical vibration that left no room for hesitation.

You obeyed instantly, a soft, involuntary whimper escaping the back of your throat as his tongue swept back in. The sound was small, raw, and entirely pathetic, echoing loudly in the soundproof vacuum of the room.

Jeongguk caught the sound directly in his mouth. A low hum of approval rumbled deep in his chest, the vibration transferring straight into your lips. His touch remained agonizingly soft, but there was an absolute authority in the way he guided you. His fingers unhooked from your waistband, his palm sliding up the bare skin of your stomach beneath your shirt. His hand was warm, slightly calloused, and large enough to completely cover your ribs.

"You're shaking," he rough-whispered, breaking the kiss just enough to brush his lips down to your jawline. His cold lip piercing dragged a sharp, electric trail along your sensitive skin, making you shiver hard against him. "Look at how much you're vibrating. Do you feel that?"

"Yes," you breathed, your fingers desperately clutching the heavy, coarse cotton of his hoodie to keep your knees from giving out.

"Say it properly," he commanded softly, his hand sliding higher, his thumb tracing the soft underside of your breast with a agonizingly slow, deliberate stroke. He wasn't rushing you, but he was completely taking over. "Tell me exactly what you feel."

"I feel... your hands," you whispered, another ragged whimper clipping your breath as his thumb brushed over the sensitive peak of your skin through your bra.

You could slap yourself for how easy you've given yourself.

But his hands.

"And do you like it?" Jeongguk's voice was steady, conversational, and entirely arrogant, yet the way his fingers cradled your ribcage was incredibly gentle. He was looking for your voice, demanding your presence in the dark. "You have to tell me. If you don't talk to me, I don't know how hard I can press."

"I like it," you confessed, the admission slipping out in a broken rush. You leaned your forehead against his shoulder, letting the dark vacuum completely swallow the leftover image of Irina and the suffocating guilt of the university courtyard. "Please, Jeongguk."

"Please what?" he asked, his teeth grazing the soft slope where your neck met your shoulder, biting just enough to make you gasp before his tongue immediately licked the sting away. "Be specific, Void. We only have an hour, remember? Don't waste the clock being shy."

His hand moved down to the button of your jeans, his tatted knuckles brushing against your skin as he popped it open with a single, practiced motion. The slow, metallic slide of your zipper tracking down sounded deafeningly loud in the quiet studio.

Jeongguk didn't slide your jeans down yet. His hand remained flat, hooked firmly over your hip bone, using his weight to keep you pinned entirely against his solid frame. He leaned back just an inch, his eyes locking onto yours in the deep gloom. The soft, gentle cadence of his movements didn't change, but his jaw clenched, a sudden wave of dangerous gravity anchoring his voice.

"Look at me," he murmured, his thumb rubbing a slow, heavy circle against your hip. "Stop hiding in your head and look at me."

You blinked, forcing your focus through the dark vacuum to meet his gaze. His pupils were wide, consuming the irises, tracking the frantic rise and fall of your chest.

"I need you to promise me something before I touch you any further," he said, his tone conversational but completely unwavering. "I know who you broke up with yesterday. I know what he did. And I don't give a single fuck about his ghost in this room, but I need to hear you say that this—this right here—is exactly what you want."

His hands cupped your head, locking his gaze onto yours.

Has he always had such expressive captivating eyes?

"Promise me, Void," he rough-whispered, his lips brushing yours as he spoke, tasting of those sweet, minty fruits. "Promise me you're choosing this. Choose me for the next hour. Say it."

"I promise," you whimpered, your fingers clutching the thick, coarse cotton of his hoodie so tightly your knuckles turned white. You leaned into his palm, desperate for the friction. "I want this. I really want this,Jeongguk. Please."

"Just a transaction. A deal. You have the kill switch. You can stop this at any point."

You nodded.

The confirmation hit him like a physical jolt.

A sudden, fierce heat flared behind his eyes, the soft, patient discipline he had been using completely evaporating. He didn't break out into a frantic rush, but the intensity of his grip shifted instantly. The person who held you softly a second ago tightened into something deeply primal, fired up by the absolute surrender in your voice.

"Good." he growled against your mouth, a low, guttural vibration that went straight to your core.

Before you could even process the shift, his  hands gripped your waist, his  forearms flexing as he effortlessly lifted you off your feet. You let out a sharp gasp, your legs instinctively wrapping around his hips to anchor yourself against the sudden loss of gravity.

He took two heavy steps back, carrying you through the dim blue light, and literally plopped you down backward onto the massive mixing console.

The physical layout of the studio shifted beneath you. The cold, smooth plastic and aluminum chassis of the audio desk met the bare skin of your lower back, a shocking, freezing contrast to the intense heat of his body. Your hands flew back to stabilize yourself, your palms brushing against the textured plastic sliders and the cold metal knobs of the master faders, a few of them sliding out of place with a soft, mechanical clatter.

Jeongguk didn't care about the audio equipment. He stepped deep between your thighs, crowding your lap, his towering frame completely eclipsing the glare of the dual monitors behind him.

"Jeongguk—" Your voice was a ragged whimper, your head tilting back as you adjusted to the hard, cold surface beneath you.

"Shh," he murmured, his long fingers instantly catching your jaw, tilting your face up. "I told you I'd handle everything. Don't worry about the gear."

He leaned down, his mouth abandoning your lips to bury itself directly into the sensitive crook of your neck. His soft, heavy lips delivered a sharp, burning suction that made your entire spine arch off the console.

"Are you leaving a mark?"

"No."

Oh.

"I only mark people I'm romantically involved with."

His words felt like a splash of freezing water straight to your face, instantly triggering a sharp, familiar spiral.

Romancially involved. The word tasted like a warning label. The heavy, dark fog of self-esteem immediately began to crawl back up your throat, bringing a fresh wave of suffocating anxiety with it.

Of course he wasn't leaving a mark.

Why would he? This was a transaction. A cold, calculated deal struck in a soundproof basement to keep you from drowning in your own head. You were a mess, a fractured girl who had practically run away from her real life because she couldn't handle the quiet. You had no right to expect anything more than the bare minimum of physical contact to numb the pain. Minho had spent months convincing you that you were disposable behind closed doors, and here you were, proving him right by throwing yourself onto a mixing console for a man who didn't even want his name tied to your skin.

The realization twisted painfully in your stomach, your fingers locking so hard into the fabric of his hoodie that your nails bit through to his shoulders. Your breathing went shallow, your chest tightening as the mental loop threatened to drag you under.

But before the panic could completely swallow you whole, Jeongguk moved.

He didn't give you the space to retreat into your thoughts. He stepped deeper between your thighs, his large hands shifting from your jaw down to the small of your back, lifting you slightly off the aluminum chassis. He pressed forward, his heavy, solid frame leaning into you until the thick, unmistakable ridge of his bulge pressed firmly, unyieldingly, right against your center.

"Stay with me now, don't float." His hot breath fanned over your skin, making you shiver. "I can hear your brain short-circuiting from here, Void. Stop thinking."

He ground his hips forward into you, just a slow, deliberate fraction of an inch, forcing a ragged, breathless whimper out of your throat.

"I told you I don't give a fuck about the ghost in this room," he murmured, his thumb finding the patch of skin he's warmed already on your ribs, applying a steady, torturous pressure that made your hips helplessly tilt into his hand. "And I don't need to be romantically involved with you to make you forget your own name. Do you feel how hard I am for you right now? Tell me."

"Yes," you cried out softly, your head dropping onto his shoulder as your fingers clutched his hoodie for dear life.

"Good," he growled, his soft lips dragging back up your neck to find your mouth, his cold lip piercing shocking your system all over again. "Then let me do my job. Wrap your legs tighter around me."

You obeyed, your thighs flexing as you locked your ankles behind his lower back, anchoring yourself completely to the heavy, merciless heat of his waist.

The movement forced your pelvis even harder against him, and a dark, rumbling sound of pure approval vibrated deep in Jeongguk's throat. He broke the kiss, his breathing coming in heavy, jagged patterns that fanned hot against your wet lips.

"Let's get these off," he murmured, his voice thick and low as his hands moved with a sudden, efficient purpose.

He reached down, grabbing the hem of his oversized black hoodie. In one smooth, fluid motion, he pulled it up and over his head, tossing it blindly into the dim shadows of the studio.

Oh.

Your breath caught completely in your throat, your eyes widening as the cold glare of the dual monitors washed over his bare upper body. You had known he was in good shape, but you had never seen anything like this. He possessed an incredibly lean, intensely toned physique—every muscle group defined with razor-sharp precision, his broad shoulders tapering down to a ridiculously narrow waist.

It's almost a shame he was into music and not modelling for anatomy books.

But it was the ink that made your heart completely stop. You knew he had tattoos, but you hadn't anticipated just how far they stretched. The dark, intricate designs weren't just a sleeve; they bled aggressively over his shoulder, mapping the heavy contours of his chest and trailing down the side of his ribs like a permanent, lawless armor. In the electric light, the dark ink against his smooth, pale skin looked almost lethal.

Jeongguk didn't give you time to admire the view. His expression remained fiercely arrogant, fully aware of the way your eyes were tracing his skin as he stepped back into your space.

He didn't wait. His hands descended, his fingers hooking firmly into the waistband of your unzipped jeans and underwear at the same time. He began sliding them down your thighs, exposing your legs to the cool, conditioned air of the basement.

Suddenly, a cold, sharp spike of vulnerability hit you. The sheer reality of what was happening—the speed of it, the raw nakedness of the transaction—slammed into your chest.

You froze. Your muscles locked up instantly, your hands flying down to grip the cold metal edges of the console as you tried to pull yourself back, your knees tensing up.

Jeongguk stopped immediately. He didn't force a single thing. His hands stayed resting lightly against your knees, his dark, unhinged eyes scanning your face, reading the sudden panic written across your features.

"What's the problem?" he asked, his voice steady, quiet, and completely level.

"What... what are you doing?" you whispered, your throat tight, your eyes darting from his bare, tatted chest down to his hands.

A slow, devastatingly confident smirk touched the corner of Jeongguk's mouth. He didn't look annoyed, if anything, the absolute cockiness in his gaze only deepened as he slowly slid his hands down to your ankles, parting your legs just a fraction wider.

"I intend on having a nice meal before we get to it," he rough-whispered, his head tilting to the side with an effortless, boyish charm that made your pulse instantly hum. "Why?"

Your mouth fell open slightly, a warm flush crawling up your throat that had absolutely nothing to do with the cool air of the basement. You swallowed hard, trying to anchor your defenses as you looked down at his beautiful  torso.

"Don't bother," you whispered, your fingers tightening into the edge of the aluminum console. "I don't... I don't come from oral. It's pointless."

He didn't look discouraged in the slightest.

"Pointless?" he repeated, his voice dropping into a low, gravelly vibration that sent a direct spark to your thighs. He stepped closer, the heat of his bare chest hovering inches from your skin. "Is that a challenge, Void? Because you're talking to a perfectionist."

He reached out, hands gently mapping the backs of your thighs, lifting your legs until they rested securely over his broad, bare shoulders. The position was entirely exposing, leaving you completely vulnerable beneath him. But he didn't move an inch further. He kept his head right there, his eyes locking onto yours, waiting.

"I need your permission first," he murmured, his arrogant demeanor melting into that soft, incredibly disciplined focus. "Tell me I can prove you wrong."

"You can try," you breathed, the challenge slipping out in a ragged, breathless whisper.

A nod. That's all.

Jeongguk leaned down, and the first point of contact was the freezing, shocking bite of his silver lip piercing pressing right against your sensitive, aching center. A violent gasp tore from your lungs, your spine arching off the cold console as the sharp contrast of the icy metal and his boiling hot skin sent a wave of electricity straight to your core.

Then he dived.

He didn't handle you with the polite, cautious hesitation you were used to. Jeongguk was unhinged, using his mouth with a heavy, wet precision that completely erased the remaining walls of your sanity. His tongue was wide and unyielding, delivering deep, rhythmic strokes that targeted your sweet spot with a terrifying accuracy, while his hot breath fanned over your slick skin.

"Oh fuck," you cried out, the loud, uninhibited curse echoing sharply in the soundproof vacuum of the studio.

Your hands abandoned the metal frame of the desk, reaching down blindly through the dark to find him. Your fingers tangled deep into his thick, dark hair, gripping the strands tightly, pulling him closer, burying his face directly into your warmth. You couldn't help it.

The sheer, overwhelming texture of his mouth was too much, completely drowning out the toxic loop of low self-esteem and the ghosts of your past.

It was good. Too good.

Jeongguk let out a low, muffled moan against your skin, fired up by the desperate grip of your fingers in his hair. He didn't slow down.

He only got dirtier, his movements turning heavier, suctioning against you with a fierce intensity that had your hips helplessly rolling against his mouth.

"Jeongguk—oh my god," you whimpered, your head thrashing side to side against the plastic surface of the console. Your voice was broken, a string of raw, pathetic sounds filling the room.

He knew exactly what he was doing. Hands slid up to grip your hips, his thumbs pressing firmly into your hip bones to lock you in place so you couldn't back away from the pleasure. He increased the pace, his tongue flattening out, creating a heavy, desperate friction that had you vibrating from head to toe.

You were melting. Every single theory you had about your own body was being systematically dismantled by the arrogant man between your legs. The tension in your lower stomach built into a tight, unbearable coil, a heavy pressure that made your thighs tremble violently against his bare shoulders.

"Please," you sobbed out, your fingernails digging into his scalp as the edge of the cliff loomed closer than it ever had before. "Please, Jeongguk, I can't—"

He didn't stop. He gave a sharp, wicked flick of his tongue right against the swollen peak of your skin, his cold piercing catching the friction perfectly, sending you entirely over the edge.

You fractured completely, a sharp, choked cry tearing from your throat as your orgasm crashed over you with a violent, rhythmic intensity that left you blind. Your hips jerked off the console, your thighs trembling uncontrollably against his broad shoulders as the heavy, crushing waves of release completely emptied your mind.

Every leftover thought of the university, of Irina's voice, of the suffocating weight of the past forty-eight hours—it was all violently burned away, leaving nothing but the slick, burning heat of his mouth grounding you to the desk.

Jeongguk held you through it with an absolute, anchoring grip, heavy hands keeping your hips locked in place until the last of the tremors finally began to fade.

When he slowly lifted his head, he looked absolutely insufferable.

A massive, fiercely arrogant grin stretched across his face, his dark eyes practically beaming with a dangerous, triumphant satisfaction in the  gloom.

He reached up, casually wiping the corner of his mouth with the back of his tatted hand, his piercing catching the glare of the monitors.

"Pointless, huh?" he murmured, his voice a low, gravelly purr that vibrated with pure confidence. He leaned down, catching your chin between his fingers and giving your bottom lip a soft, possessive bite. "Don't ever debate me on sound design or your own body again, Void. I don't lose."

Before you could even drag air back into your lungs, he stepped back just half a foot. His hands dropped to the waistband of his dark trousers, unbuckling them with a swift, fluid motion. He didn't bother stripping them all the way down; he just lowered them just enough to clear his hips, freeing the  heavy length of his erection that was already glistening in the dim light.

You watched him through half-lidded eyes, your chest still heaving, your skin hot and completely flushed. From the small pocket of his jeans, his tatted fingers expertly slid out a small, square foil wrapper, tearing it open with his teeth with a ruthless, practiced ease.

"I'm on birth control," you breathed out, your voice a ragged, breathless whisper as you watched him roll the latex down.

Jeongguk paused for a fraction of a second, his dark eyes snapping up to meet yours in the shadows. A slow, mocking tilt of his head accompanied the devastatingly arrogant smirk that re-centered on his face.

"We don't know each other like that for raw, you impatient little overthinker," tone dripping with a steady, dominant amusement that instantly made your face flush even hotter.

He didn't give you a syllable to argue. He stepped right back into your space, crowding your lap on the console, his hands gripping the undersides of your thighs and flaring your legs wide open to receive him. He aligned himself against your slick, dripping center, the blunt, burning head of his length pressing directly against your entrance.

Holy fucking shit.

"Hold onto me," he commanded softly, his jaw clenching as he prepared to push inside. "And keep your mouth open. I want to hear exactly how this feels."

The blunt, burning pressure of him at your entrance made your entire lower stomach tighten in a violent mix of anticipation and raw, sweet agony. Your hands flew to his bare shoulders, your fingers digging into the firm, tatted curve of his skin, searching for a single steady point in a world that was tilting completely on its axis.

"What if someone hears?" you breathed out, the words small and frantic, your head thrashing back slightly against the hard surface of the desk.

"It's soundproofed in here," Jeongguk rough-whispered, his jaw clenching hard as he took a slow, deep breath to steady his own racing pulse.

He didn't wait for your anxiety to spin another thread. With a slow, heavy, and completely unyielding thrust, he pushed all the way inside you.

The sensation was massive—an absolute, stretching fullness that forced a loud, high-pitched gasp straight from your throat. Your eyes snapped open, your vision narrowing to the sharp, lit contours of his face as he buried himself to the absolute hilt, taking up every bit of the empty space inside you. The piercing brushed against your upper lip as he leaned in, a sharp spike of sensory contrast that made your inner muscles instantly clamp down around him.

Jeongguk let out a ragged, gravelly groan against your mouth, his eyes closing tight as your tight, your slick warmth gripped him. He stayed perfectly still for a long, torturous beat, letting your body adjust to the sheer size of him, hands squeezing your thighs where they were draped over his shoulders.

He began caressing your thighs, trying to ease you to the size, peppering kisses on your neck.

"Look at me," he commanded softly, his voice dropping into that quiet, grounding register as his eyes blinked open. "Open your eyes and look at me, Void."

You forced your eyes to meet his, your breath coming in short, uneven hitches.

"Good. Very fucking good."

A low, arrogant hum rumbled in his chest, his hips immediately establishing a steady, agonizingly deep rhythm. He wasn't slamming into you with reckless violence; it was a disciplined, heavy pace, each thrust deliberate and deep enough to hit the exact spot his tongue had spent the last minutes priming.

"I've got you," he rough-whispered, his chest heaving against yours as he picked up the speed just a fraction. "Keep your eyes right on mine. Don't drift off. Stay right here with me."

"I am," you cried out, a loud, broken whimper escaping you as his pelvis ground hard against yours, the friction hitting your sensitive spot with a merciless accuracy. "Oh god, right there... do that again."

"Like this?" he murmured, delivering a sharp, angled thrust that had your hips helplessly rolling into his heat. He talked you through every single movement, his voice a steady, unfiltered stream of reassurance and dominance that completely blocked out the rest of the world. "Do you like it like this? Tell me."

"I like it," you sobbed, your head dropping back onto the console as the aluminum sliders shifted beneath your shoulder blades. "Fuck, Jeongguk, it's too much... I'm going to break."

"You're not going to break," he growled softly, his hands sliding down to hook under your lower back, lifting you up slightly to meet his pace. His bare  chest was slick with a thin layer of sweat, his heartbeat a frantic, heavy thudding against your own ribs. "I've got you completely. Just breathe and take all of it."

The steady, heavy rhythm of his hips became a relentless tide, driving you closer and closer to a second breaking point. Every verbal reassurance that left his lips—low, gravelly, and entirely centered on your body—acted like a physical weight anchoring you to the cold aluminum desk, refusing to let your mind drift back into the dark.

He never once took his eyes off you, sucking up all your little indentations and contorsions your face made. Like he was an addict. Like he needed to see what he's doing to you.

"Look at me, Void," he muttered, his pace shifting from long, sliding strokes to a shorter, devastatingly deep cadence that targeted the very core of your heat. "Don't you dare close your eyes now. Look at how hard you're gripping me."

"Jeongguk—" Your voice fractured entirely, a broken, desperate sound as the internal coil tightened to an impossible, burning knot. Your fingers dug into his bare, sweat-slick shoulders, your head thrashing against the hard surface of the console. "Oh god, please... I'm going to—"

"Go," he growled softly, his jaw clenching as he delivered a sharp, angled thrust that hit the exact center of your release. "Come for me again. Let me feel it."

The second fracture was even more violent than the first. A sharp, muffled cry tore from your lungs as your core violently clamped down around him, a series of intense, rolling spasms crashing over your body. Your hips arched off the console, your legs tightening around his shoulders as the sheer, overwhelming release flooded your system, completely wiping out the last remaining thread of your anxiety.

Hearing the broken, ragged hitch in your breathing, Jeongguk let out a low, guttural sound deep in his chest. The absolute, pulsing surrender of your body was the final straw for his own control.

He didn't slow down. He leveraged his weight, his forearms flexing as he buried himself to the absolute hilt, his thrusts turning fast, heavy, and desperate. His head dropped into the crook of your neck, his hot breath fanning against your skin as he chased his own edge through the tight, burning friction of your release.

"Ah... fuck," he rough-whispered, his voice cracking with a sudden, rare vulnerability as his entire body went rigid.

With two final, deep, and utterly blinding thrusts, Jeongguk came. His posture locked completely, a low, breathy groan vibrating against your collarbone as he poured himself into the latex barrier, his chest heaving violently against yours as the waves of his own release took over. He stayed buried deep inside you, his forehead resting heavily against your shoulder, his frame trembling slightly as the two of you slowly collapsed back into the absolute silence of the soundproof room.

It felt deeply intimate how you can hear his heartbeat beating against your own.

How even under all the sex smell and slight sweat, his scent is still at the forefront.

How you actually finished from oral. How he listened to your body.

Weird.

The only sound left in the vacuum was the synchronized, frantic wheezing of your lungs and his, a messy cadence that slowly began to level out against the sterile hum of the hardware beneath you.

Jeongguk remained heavy and unmoving over you for another full minute, his face still buried in the curve of your neck. His skin was blazing hot, slick with a thin layer of sweat that glued his chest to yours, the sharp, solid line of his collarbone pressing firmly into your sternum. Slowly, the tight, possessive grip of his  fingers on your hips relaxed, his hands sliding down to rest idly against the cold plastic casing of the mixing desk.

He let out one last, long breath that fanned warm across your collarbone before he pulled back.

With a smooth, practiced retreat, he disengaged, the sudden absence of his heat leaving you feeling instantly exposed to the cool, conditioned air of the basement. You watched through heavy, half-lidded eyes as he stepped away, his tatted hand reaching down to efficiently strip off the latex barrier and dispose of it in a small bin tucked under the console. He pulled his trousers back up to his hips, fastening the buckle with a quick, metallic click that sounded brutally transactional in the quiet room.

You stayed exactly where he had left you—sprawled backward across the audio desk, your unzipped jeans bunched around your thighs, your chest still heaving as the post-climax tremors slowly left your muscles.

You swallowed hard, your throat feeling completely parched as you weakly pushed yourself up onto your elbows. Your fingers brushed against the shifted knobs and sliders, a dull ache beginning to bloom in your lower back from the hard aluminum chassis.

You glanced toward the digital clock illuminated in the corner of the dual monitors.

"See?" you breathed out, your voice a tiny, raspy thread that barely carried through the space. "It didn't even take an hour."

Jeongguk didn't look up immediately. He reached into the pocket of his discarded trousers, his fingers pulling out a crumpled pack of cigarettes and a matte black lighter. He slipped a single cigarette between his now puffy lips, the cold silver metal catching the  light as he clicked the flame to life.

He took a deep, dragging pull, the cherry glowing a bright, violent orange in the gloom before he exhaled a thick cloud of grey smoke that smelled faintly of toasted tobacco and mint.

"Well, I timed it," Jeongguk rough-whispered, his dark eyes finally snapping over to you through the haze.

The fierce, triumphant satisfaction from earlier hadn't completely vanished; instead, it had settled into a quiet, devastatingly arrogant calm. He leaned his lower back against the edge of the adjacent workstation, crossing his bare arms over his chest as he held the cigarette between two fingers.

He's smoking shirtless, of course.

"I handled the clock exactly the way I wanted to," he murmured, his gaze dropping down to track the flush on your bare stomach and the messy layout of your clothes.

"Which means I still have ten minutes left. And I intend to spend them smoking this cigarette and looking at you."

The unfiltered directness of his stare made your skin burn all over again.

"Fix your pants, Void," he commanded softly, taking another slow, dragging pull from his cigarette without breaking eye contact. "Sora's waiting for you."

next chapter | previous

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Faux Colors edit | jungoo.

i can’t stop editing fc jungkook to ethel cain someone sedate me

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Suits and Sigils | Teaser

⤷sypnosis: Kim Taehyung's worldview relies on three absolute truths: the law is malleable, his Tom Ford suits are impeccable, and every woman in the city wants him. Then he gets hijacked by a stranger who forces him to pay a luxury-car-sized vet bill for a stray puppy and looks at him like he’s an annoying fly. He thinks your "mysterious intuition" is just a high-effort tactical play to get into his bed. You're just trying to survive your day job while your tarot deck screams that this idiot's logic is about to violently implode. It's fine. Everything is fine.

⤷pairing: kim taehyung x f!reader

⤷genre: lawyer!taehyung, witch!reader, rom-com, urban fantasy, workplace/legal!au, fast-paced flirtation, one-sided slowburn.

⤷warnings: corporate arrogance, heavy wealth flexing, swearing, mild supernatural peril later on, taehyung getting completely humbled. also features some highly un-professional legal counseling that eventually violates several workspace boundaries (yes, there is smut, he’s a womanizer, what did you expect?).

“Help me!"

Taehyung stopped in his tracks, one hand pausing on the door handle of his matte-black Mercedes. He adjusted the lapels of his tailored suit jacket, his sharp eyes instantly tracking the source of the frantic shout.

A girl. In the middle of the city sidewalk, looking entirely out of her depth. New York will remain New York.

Taehyung’s lips twitched into a practiced, effortlessly charming smirk. He was used to people asking him for help—usually clients begging him to get them out of a legal chokehold, or women looking for an excuse to get his phone number. He could already see the headline in his mind: Brilliant, handsome defense attorney rescues citizen on his lunch break.

He closed the distance, smoothing down his tie. "Is everything alright? If you’re looking for directions, or perhaps a—"

He stopped. You weren't looking at him. You were crouched on the concrete, staring down at a tiny, shivering, wounded baby puppy tucked against your chest.

"I just moved here for a new job, I don't know where any vet clinics are, and he's hurting," you said all in one breath, finally looking up at him. Your eyes were wide, but underneath the panic, there was a strange, unsettling groundedness to you. Like you were looking straight through his expensive suit and reading his entire energy profile in three seconds flat.

Taehyung blinked, his smooth-talking brain taking half a beat to recalibrate. A puppy.

Right.

"Right. Well," Taehyung cleared his throat, gesturing toward his idling car where his chauffeur was already watching through the rearview mirror. "Luckily for you, I happen to be nearby. Take my car. My driver will take you to the nearest 24-hour vet clinic."

"Great," you said, immediately standing up with the puppy securely in your arms and marching right past him toward the luxury vehicle. As you tucked yourself into the pristine leather backseat, you looked back out the open door at him.

"You're paying for this, by the way."

Taehyung stared at you, dumbfounded. The smirk completely vanished from his face. "Excuse me? You found the dog."

You didn't even blink. You just gave him a deadpan, incredibly unimpressed look that no woman had ever given Kim Taehyung in his entire life.

"You have a chauffeur and a Mercedes, dude. So you pay."

Before he could even construct a logical argument against that—because logistically, legally, and financially, that made absolutely no sense—you pulled the door shut.

Taehyung stood on the sidewalk, his hand still suspended in the air, watching his own luxury car pull away with a stranger and a stray dog. His sharp, calculating mind was completely short-circuiting.

Taehyung stood on the pavement for a grand total of two seconds before his brain rebelled against the sheer absurdity of the situation.

You pay dude.

The words echoed in his head like a direct insult to his law degree. No one talked to him like that. Women usually tripped over themselves trying to thank him if he so much as held a door open. He was Kim Taehyung. He had a track record that made corporate executives weep, a face that belonged on a billboard, and a tailored Tom Ford suit that cost more than most girls' likely annual coffee budget.

Before the chauffeur could even put the Mercedes into drive, Taehyung strode forward, yanked the front passenger door open, and slid inside.

“To the nearest emergency vet, loosen the speed limits a little, Marcus," Taehyung commanded, adjusting his cuffs as he looked back at you through the rearview mirror. He turned around in his seat, draping one casual, expensive arm over the leather headrest to look at you properly.

He flashed his signature, high-wattage smile—the one that usually got him out of speeding tickets and into exclusive clubs. "You know, usually people ask for my name before they ask for my credit card. I’m Taehyung. And you are?"

You didn't look up. You were gently stroking the shivering, scruffy little animal in your lap. "Busy."

Taehyung’s smile rigidified. His mind genuinely could not compute the lack of a reaction. Were you blind? Deaf? Objectively speaking, he was a catch. He waited for the inevitable blush, the nervous tuck of hair behind the ear, the something.

Nothing came.

Clearing his throat, he decided to pivot to the only other occupant of the backseat. He leaned a bit closer, looking down at the creature tucked against your chest. "So... what’s the deal with the dog?" He stared at it, trying to find something analytical to say. I mean... it was a dog.

Two eyes, a mouth, four legs. Standard animal blueprint. "He’s cute. Is it a he?"

"Yes," you murmured, keeping your thumbs moving in soothing circles over the pup's ears. "And he's terrified."

"Clearly has poor taste in company if he's turning down my chauffeur's driving," Taehyung quipped, his tone smooth, trying to inject some playful banter into the suffocating lack of interest you were throwing his way. "So, you mentioned you're new to the city. For a job. What is it you do?"

He braced himself for something mundane. Marketing? Accounting? A corporate desk job where you probably dreamt of marrying a guy like him? He was ready to smile patronizingly and offer some witty insight about the city's corporate ladder.

You finally lifted your gaze. Your eyes met his in the rearview mirror first, then locked onto his face. There was a faint, knowing tilt to your lips—not a flirtatious one, but the look of someone who knew exactly what kind of game he was playing and found it entirely amusing.

"Don’t bite off more than you can chew, counselor," you said softly, your voice carrying an unsettlingly calm weight. "You might find out my line of work doesn't fit into your neat little ledger."

Taehyung’s chest tightened slightly, a bizarre prickle of heat racing up the back of his neck.

Counselor? He hadn't told you he was a lawyer. He wasn't carrying a briefcase, and his lapel pin was just a subtle geometric shape, not a scales-of-justice badge.

He opened his mouth to demanding how you'd made that deduction—his sharp, logical brain already scrambling to find the data point you must have stolen from him—but the car smoothly pulled up to the curb of the veterinary clinic.

“We're here, sir," Marcus announced.

You didn't wait. You threw the door open, cradling the puppy safely, and stepped out into the afternoon air. But right before you shut the door, you peered back inside at his stunned, processing face.

"Bring your black card. The clock's ticking."

a/n: i am a mere victim to the Kim Taehyung so you know i had to do something about it. please, arrogant but has a reason to be? give me 5 of them.

Coming Soon!

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NEED a part 2 for busan nights holy shit that was hot

do not fret my child, i shall begin cooking it up for hungry mouths.

it will come. both part 2 and you.

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Faux Colors

chapter 12

transactional bleeding

Synopsis; one lives in a world under the weight of shadows the other lives in a world that screams.

"The sky is blue like Sacrifice by Elton John"

warnings; swearing, heavy themes pairing; jeongguk × female reader genre; angst, slowburn, smut, fwb word count; 8.4k

a/n: this chapter means a lot to me. it really depicts how a person can strip you from every single fiber that you like and leave you in the corner to collect dust. please read it carefully, comb the information, sit with it. i did leave crumbs along the way.

we're officially entering peeling back layers, heavy with symbolism territory. i'm both your host and bearer of doom. you can yell at me later.

Ptolomae / Ethel Cain

Ptolemaea- the third of four sections within the ninth circle of hell.

The air in the bedroom doesn't move. It settles over your chest like wet wool, heavy and entirely static, trapping the sour heat of your own breath against your skin.

When your eyes drag open, the morning light doesn't feel like a new day.

It feels like an execution.

A sharp, clinical blade of gray sun cuts through the blinds, slicing across the floorboards to illuminate the exact space where your life collapsed last night. Your eyelids are so swollen they feel glued shut, heavy with the crust of dried salt, the skin around your lashes raw and throbbing with a dull, rhythmic ache that matches the pounding in your skull.

You try to swallow, but your throat is a desert. It's scraped raw from hours of silent, violent sobbing, the muscles so tight it feels like a hand is squeezed around your windpipe.

A sudden, violent downward plunge hits your stomach all at once. The urge to vomit isn't just sickness, it's a physical rejection of the reality you've woken up into. You scramble out of the sheets, your limbs clumsy, your knees hitting the floorboards with a hollow thud that vibrates right through your teeth. You barely make it to the bathroom before you're on your knees in front of the toilet, hands gripping the porcelain so hard your knuckles turn a bloodless white.

You dry-heave into the bowl, your body convulsing as nothing but bitter, acidic bile forces its way up your throat. You lean your forehead against the cold edge of the seat, panting, small, broken whimpers slipping past your lips because even the expansion of your lungs feels like it's ripping something open inside you.

The walls are actively closing in, the strings of your mind snapping one by one under an immense, invisible pressure. The ambient noise of your empty apartment is screaming at a pitch so loud it's deafening, vibrating with an impending doom—a terrifying, unhinged panic that whispers that the worst has already happened, and yet, the ground is still falling out from under you.

You force yourself up, your vision swimming with dark spots, and stagger back into the bedroom. Your eyes, bloodshot and sunken, immediately latch onto the nightstand.

There is his watch. The vintage Omega he left behind three days ago because the leather strap was getting worn.

It's sitting neatly next to your lamp.

Clean. Precise. Clinical.

Are his hands on her right now? The thought tears through your mind like a rusty nail. You stare at the silver face of the watch, the second hand ticking forward with agonizing indifference.

You imagine those same long, pale fingers—the ones that used to trace the line of your collarbone with cautious, measured movements—gripping Irina's waist.

You see them digging into her skin, unbuttoning her clothes with that same effortless, methodical precision he used for everything.

Did he touch her hair the way he touched yours? Did he slide his palm down her spine to pull her into him, his touch lingering in the dark while you were sitting in that velvet booth being dismantled?

Your breath hitches, a jagged, choking sound escaping your throat. You look away, desperate to break the image, but your gaze lands on the edge of the dresser.

A stray hair tie. A book he gave you. A half-empty glass of water. Every single object in the room is infected with him.

You look at the glass, and all you see is his mouth. The mouth that told you he loved you, now pressed against Irina's neck. You can see it clearly—borderline obsessive, a vivid, nauseating loop playing on the inside of your eyelids. You see him leaning over her, his chest heavy against hers, his fingers tangling in her hair, pulling her head back to taste her.

He is giving her the heat he always denied you.

He is taking everything that was supposed to be yours and burying it in someone else.

The air in the room runs out. The ceiling feels lower, the corners of the walls bleeding inward until the space is no bigger than a coffin. You are suffocating in his memory, drowning in the mental imagery of his betrayal until your skin feels too tight for your bones.

Until you feel like the air is actively trying to poison you.

You can't stay here. If you stay in this room for another second, the walls will crush you completely.

You don't wash your face. You don't change out of the oversized, wrinkled shirt that smells faintly of your own panic. You grab your keys on pure, unhinged instinct, the metal biting into your palm as you burst through the front door into the gray morning.

You need the imagery to stop. You need the looping projection of his hands on her body to go black. You need someone to force you back into reality before you completely unravel.

𓂃 ࣪˖ ִֶָ༘࿐: °❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･

The high-pass filter on the vocal track was sitting at 120 Hz, cutting out the low-end mud, but the vocal stem still sounded entirely hollow.

Empty.

Jeongguk clicked the mouse, dragging the cursor over the parametric EQ grid to pull down a harsh frequency spike at 3.5 kHz. His ears had been fatigued since midnight, but the silence outside this room was always worse, so he kept twisting virtual knobs, chasing a mix that didn't exist.

On the auxiliary track, the tape saturation plugin was driving the signal into a soft, clipping distortion.

Warmth.

That's what the label called it when they wanted a track to sound human. To Jeongguk, it just sounded like copper wires heating up under too much voltage.

He reached for a cold, half-empty can of cold brew on the desk, his dark eyes tracking the green audio meters on the master bus as they bounced in perfect, mechanical rhythm.

Up and down. Green, yellow, a flash of red at the peak.

Flick, snap. He struck his silver zippo with his left hand, letting the sharp smell of lighter fluid briefly drown out the stale tobacco smoke clinging to the walls. The flame caught. He stared into the small orange light, counting the seconds before the heat got too close to his thumb.

The studio was locked down. Soundproofed to −60 dB. You could detonate a grenade in the hallway and the acoustic paneling would absorb the shockwave before it ever hit his microphone. It was a clean cage. A perfect vacuum.

Until the heavy brass handle on the isolation door gave way.

The seals broke with a sharp, pneumatic hiss, and the air pressure in the room dropped instantly. Jeongguk didn't move his boots from the edge of the mixing console. He didn't look up immediately. He just let the lighter flame die between his fingers as the sudden intrusion of outside air pulled a new scent across the room.

It was you.

But it wasn't the version of you that usually walked into his space—the one with the quiet posture and the neat, clinical boundaries meant to keep him at a distance.

The door hit the rubber wall-stopper with a dull, heavy thud that rattled the plastic casing on his headphone rack. You didn't slide in. You stumbled across the threshold, your weight shifting clumsily like your limbs weren't quite communicating with your brain.

Jeongguk's eyes drifted over to the door, and his hand froze completely over the master fader.

You were wearing a pair of oversized, pitch-black  sunglasses.

Indoors. In a studio that was already dimly lit by nothing but the blue glare of three LED monitors. They were sitting crooked on the bridge of your nose, entirely too big for your face, reflecting the glowing green audio meters back at him like two dark, empty screens.

It looked ridiculous. It looked completely unhinged.

It didn't look like the you he knows.

Underneath the plastic frames, your face was a total disaster. Your skin was blotchy, a raw, angry crimson creeping up your neck from the collar of an oversized, wrinkled shirt that looked like it had been dragged straight off the bedroom floor. Your hair was a bird's nest, static and wild, clumping against your cheeks where cold sweat and dried salt had glued the strands together.

You were shaking. Not a small, nervous tremble—your shoulders were heaving in jagged, erratic hitches, your chest expanding and collapsing so fast you looked like you were running out of oxygen in a room full of it. In your right hand, your apartment keys were clamped so tight in your fist that the metal edges were digging straight into your skin, the silver rings rattling a frantic, metallic rhythm against your knuckles.

You looked loud. You looked like a lightning strike that had just torn through his isolation foam, bringing the whole gray, screaming storm inside with you.

The track kept looping through the monitors, that hollow, distorted synth chord rolling over and over in the dark, but the technical noise suddenly felt incredibly small to him.

Jeongguk let his legs drop from the console, the leather of his boots hitting the floorboards with a heavy, deliberate snap. He didn't say a single word. He just stayed in the shadows of the desk, watching the way you stood there in those stupid, dark glasses, bleeding out in the middle of his studio room.

Silence. A beat.

It stretched, thick and suffocating, filling the space between the monitors like heavy smoke. The only sound was the mechanical hum of the hard drives and the rhythmic, metallic clink-clink-clink of the keys vibrating against your trembling fingers.

Jeongguk didn't move. He didn't offer a polite word, didn't pull out a chair, didn't do any of the normal, clinical things a decent person would do when someone slammed into their room halfway to a breakdown. He just leaned back against the edge of his desk, crossing his arms over his chest, his dark eyes fixed on the crooked line of your sunglasses.

He was reading you. Mapping the tremors in your shoulders, the raw, chewed edge of your bottom lip, the defensive way you held yourself like your ribs were trying to collapse inward.

You stood there, breathing in the smell of his tobacco and the faint, phantom ghost of sandalwood still on you, until the pressure in your chest built up so high it felt like it was going to shatter your teeth.

Finally, your jaw unhinged. Your voice didn't sound like yours—it was a thin, dry scraping sound, completely emptied of air.

"You were right."

The words dropped into the quiet room like lead.

Jeongguk's head tilted slightly, a fraction of an inch, the blue light of the software grid catching the sharp edge of his jaw. He didn't look smug. He didn't smirk. His face remained dangerously blank, a flat canvas of cold, observant curiosity.

"About what, Void?" he rough-whispered, his voice dropping into that dark, low register that always seemed to strip away the distance between you.

"About him," you choked out, the name Minho catching in your throat like a piece of broken glass, refusing to form properly. You reached up with your free hand, your fingers clumsy and trembling as you snatched the oversized sunglasses off your face.

You couldn't hide behind them anymore. The armor was useless.

You shoved them into the pocket of your pants, exposing your face completely to his gaze—the bloodshot, sunken eyes, the tear-stained cheeks, the absolute, unmasked wreckage of your ego.

"About the anatomy of the cage," you whispered, the words tumbling out in a jagged, breathless rush as you stepped deeper into his space, your feet dragging against the floorboards. "About the silence. He didn't... he didn't even fight for me, Jeongguk. He just looked straight through me. Like I was a clinical mistake he needed to clean up."

Jeongguk didn't move. He stood perfectly anchored in the dim blue wash of his monitors, his arms crossed over his chest, watching the frantic, shattered pieces of you fall all over his floorboards.

He didn't think you looked pretty. Pretty was a word for things that were manicured, things that stayed inside the clean, quiet lines of a display case. Pretty was a clinical word—it was Minho's word.

To Jeongguk, you looked entirely ugly. Your face was a violently blotchy crimson, your eyes were swollen and bloodshot, and you were vibrating with a raw, unhinged grief that made you look small and monstrous all at once. You were a total disaster.

And he couldn't take his eyes off you.

The scent of the room—the sharp, bitter sting of his tobacco smoke mixed with the synthetic heat of the hardware—was completely overwhelmed by the sudden, suffocating presence of your misery. Through the chaotic filter of his synesthesia, your crying wasn't just a sound. It was a visual laceration across his dark studio. It was a loud, jagged shape that didn't belong in his soundproof vacuum, tearing through his isolation foam like a physical blade.

It tasted like salt. It looked like blood.

His mind stalled, a sudden, dark static flickering beneath the loop of the synths. For a fraction of a second, the green audio meters on his screen blurred, flashing a violent, blinding color that didn't belong to the software.

A ghost of a memory. A distant thunderstorm. A boy crying in the dark.

Why only love the pretty flowers?

The thought came and went in a heartbeat, a quiet, foundational fracture he buried before it could touch his face. He didn't want to fix the wreckage in front of him. He didn't want to prune you back into a quiet, acceptable shape that would fit neatly on a shelf.

"You're not answering," you choked out, your voice cracking as the quiet became too heavy to bear. "Say something."

Jeongguk's head tilted a fraction of an inch, the blue light of the monitors cutting a sharp, lethal line across his cheekbone. When he finally spoke, his voice didn't carry a hint of mockery—just a low, gravelly weight that stripped away any secret you thought you could hide.

"What do you want me to say?" he whispered.

"That he's a coward? You already know that. A man like Minho doesn't know what to do when things get heavy, Void. He handles you like a specimen under glass. The second you show him a real, bleeding edge, he looks straight through you because he's terrified of anything he can't clinically control."

The absolute silence of the room was too much—a sudden shock of reality that shattered whatever fragile composure you had left. You pulled your shoulders back, your limbs trembling under the blue glare of his monitors, but he just sat there, forcing you to look at him from his seat.

"Stop it," you whispered, a hot tear finally spilling over your lashes, burning a trail through the dried salt on your cheek. "Stop talking about what he wants. Just... answer me."

Jeongguk didn't flinch. He stayed leaned back in the shadows of his chair, his arms still crossed tightly over his chest, his dark eyes tracking the frantic, unhinged rhythm of your breathing. You weren't the woman who usually walked into this studio—the one who kept her head down and her boundaries sterile. You were loud now. You were a total disaster, stripped entirely of your armor, begging a man who didn't care about rules to piece your ego back together.

"Answer what?" he said, his voice dropping into a low, dangerous register from the dark depths of his chair.

"Irina," you choked out, the name tasting like poison on your tongue. "Do you find her hot?"

The question dropped like a millstone into the silence of the room. Jeongguk's expression didn't change. He didn't smirk, didn't offer a polite lie to soften the blow. He just watched the raw desperation bleeding out of your eyes from across the small distance.

"She's a pretty girl, Void," he said flatly, his tone entirely detached, clinical. "The label knows how to pick them. You know that."

"That's not what I asked," you snapped, your voice cracking, a sharp, ugly sound that vibrated through the quiet studio. You took a step closer to his chair, your keys clumping loudly against your own leg as you pressed your weight into his space. The mental loop of Minho's hands on her skin was screaming behind your eyelids, borderline obsessive, driving you past the edge of reason. "Is she attractive? To you. When you look at her, do you think about it?"

Jeongguk didn't tilt his head. He didn't reach out. He just kept his hands tucked away, anchoring you with nothing but the absolute, crushing weight of his gaze. "I don't think about anyone at the label that way. It's a waste of energy."

"But would you?" You were spiraling, your chest heaving as the plummeting weight of your own self-worth clawed at your throat, begging for a weapon, begging for something real. You took another unhinged step, standing right over him now, your knuckles white as your hands balled into fists at your sides. "If she walked into this room right now instead of me... would you fuck her? Or want to at least?"

Jeongguk stared up at you from his chair, his features casting a long, lawless shadow over your face in the blue light. He didn't blink. He didn't pull away from the desperate, frantic heat radiating off your skin.

"You're making a mess of yourself," he said quietly, his voice carrying that heavy, tobacco-laced scrape that made your knees want to give out.

"Tell me," you pleaded, your voice dropping to a breathless, pathetic whisper, your shadow completely tangling with his in the dark. "Me or her, Jeongguk? If you had to choose. Right now. Who would you pick?"

Jeongguk didn't move an inch. He didn't rise from his chair, and he didn't give you the validation you were practically begging him to throw at you. If he answered that question, he'd be stepping directly into your orbit, playing by the rules of the frantic, messy game you were trying to construct in the dark.

Instead, he just watched you bleed.

"Why are you asking me that, Void?" he murmured, his voice deadly quiet, cutting through the high-pitched ringing in your ears. He didn't sound angry. He sounded analytical, like he was listening to a bad frequency in a track and tracing it back to the source.

"Just answer it," you choked out, your fist clutched so tight around your keys that the metal teeth were biting deep into your palm, leaving angry red indentations. "It's a simple question. Me or her?"

"It's a stupid question," he corrected flatly, his eyes fixed on your face, refusing to let you look away. He leaned forward just a fraction, resting his forearms on his knees, his entire presence expanding in the small space between you until you felt completely pinned by him. "You don't give a shit about who I'd fuck. You don't give a shit about Irina, either. So why are you standing in my room at ten in the morning asking me to grade you against her?"

The bluntness of it felt like a physical blow to your chest, knocking the remaining air straight out of your lungs. Your jaw trembled, your mind scrambling as the walls of the studio seemed to edge closer, tighter, suffocating you.

"Because I need to know," you whispered, the words

coming out small, frayed, and entirely stripped of pride.

"Know what?"

"If I'm... if I'm just fundamentally broken," you confessed, the truth finally tearing its way out of your throat, ugly and visceral. Your voice cracked on the final word, a ragged sound that made the green audio meters on his screen spike in the dark. "If there's something missing in me that she has. He didn't even hesitate, Jeongguk. He looked at me like I was a chore. Like I was some plain, invisible thing he was tired of looking at. I just... I need to know if I'm even up par. If anyone could ever look at me and actually want me, or if I'm just the girl people use until they find something better."

There it was. The raw, bleeding root of it. Your self-worth hadn't simply plummeted, it had shattered entirely on his clean studio floor, leaving you completely exposed.

Shards everywhere that could cut.

And they will cut.

Jeongguk stayed perfectly still in his chair, his gaze dropping to your trembling lips before rising back to your bloodshot eyes. The ghost of that distant, dark thunderstorm flickered through his thoughts again, the memory of a loud, unyielding thing that didn't fit into a clean garden. He could see how badly you were spinning, how desperately you needed an anchor before you floated away into your own head.

He let out a slow, heavy breath, the smoke from his earlier cigarette ghosting past his lips.

"You really think you're that easy to erase?" he rough-whispered.

"I am," you breathed, the word a frantic, choking confession that made your whole chest heave. "I'm so easy to forget, Jeongguk. You don't get it. He didn't even look hurt or ashamed at all."

The mental projection behind your eyes turned into a violent, blinding fever. While you were suffocating in a dark studio, Minho's hands were on her. Those long, pale, clinical fingers—the ones that had always touched you with a cautious, measured restraint—were digging into Irina's skin with an uncharacteristic, desperate hunger.

The image was borderline psychotic, looping on the inside of your eyelids with a sickening, vivid clarity. You saw Minho leaning over her in the quiet dark of his apartment, his palms sliding up her thighs, gathering the fabric of her skirt, pulling her against his chest with a heavy, unhinged urgency he had never given you. He was tasting her. He was burying his face in her neck, giving her the raw, frantic heat you had spent months starving for.

You were the neat draft he tore up, she was the masterpiece he wanted to ruin.

"He's touching her," you whispered, your voice dropping into a terrifying, obsessive register, your eyes wide and completely unanchored as you stared right through Jeongguk's shoulder. "He's touching her right now. He's holding her head back. He never held me like that. Never. I was always too... I was always just the quiet thing in the corner."

You took another step, your shoes almost touching the toe of his heavy leather boots. You were standing entirely over his chair now, your shadow completely consuming him, your breath coming in hot, ragged gasps that hit the bare skin of his throat. You were loud. You were an entire ecosystem of unhinged, bleeding ruin, vibrating so hard you looked like you were going to burst out of your own skin.

"Tell me I'm not invisible," you begged, your voice cracking into a pathetic, high-pitched plea as you leaned down into his space, your face inches from his. "Please. Just... tell me someone can look at me and lose their mind. Tell me you'd look at me."

Jeongguk didn't move. He didn't rise to meet you, and he didn't reach out to pull you down. But the air between you turned into absolute concrete.

Desperate. You're desperate.

His forearms were still resting on his knees, his large hands dangling loosely between his thighs, but his entire posture had locked into a predatory, dangerous stillness.

His eyes tracked the frantic pulse in your neck, the raw corner of your bitten lip, the way your chest was rising and falling against the cotton fabric of your shirt.

Through his synesthesia, your obsession wasn't just words anymore. It was a physical weight.

It smelled like the iron of wet soil after a lightning strike.

It tasted like the sharp, bitter salt of a storm he couldn't outrun.

The green audio meters on his monitors were flashing red, red, red, reflecting off the dark plastic of the sunglasses still peeking out of your pocket.

He was teetering right on the edge of the cage, the ghost of a voice whispering in the dark background of his mind—Why only love the pretty flowers?

"You're begging for a lie, Void," he rough-whispered, his voice dropping into a register so low and gravelly it vibrated straight through the floorboards into the soles of your feet. He didn't blink. He just let his gaze crawl slowly up from your mouth to lock onto your bloodshot, frantic eyes, holding you captive with nothing but the sheer, suffocating solemnity of his stare.

"You want me to tell you you're a pretty little thing so you can go back to your quiet life and pretend you didn't just come in here and bleed all over my floor."

He leaned back just a millimeter, his chest expanding with a slow, heavy breath that smelled of nicotine and pure, lawless intent.

"But you don't actually want to be pretty right now," he murmured, his eyes darkening until the iris vanished into the pupil. "You want to be wanted. You want to be Irina, no?"

The name hit like a cold splash of water, but it didn't wake you up—it only made the obsession burn hotter. You didn't pull back. You couldn't. You just stood there, towering over his chair, a trembling, broken entity looking down into the face of a man who held all the answers to your ruin.

Jeongguk didn't move. He kept his hands dropped loosely between his knees, refusing to touch you, refusing to offer a single shred of physical comfort. But his head tilted back slightly against the headrest of his chair, his eyes scanning your face with a slow, agonizingly thorough precision.

He was looking at you. Really looking at you.

In his head, the wires were tangling again. Objectively, you were a complete mess—the blotchy skin, the wild hair, the tear-stained cheeks. He tried to process you the way he processed everything else in his life: clinically, analytically, breaking you down into simple, manageable data points. He asked himself if he found you attractive, if there was a single technical reason a man would look at you and lose his mind the way you were begging to hear.

His brain told him no. His brain told him you were just a fractured girl having a pathetic breakdown over a mediocre man in his studio.

But his senses were lying to him.

Through the lens of his synesthesia, his eyes didn't track the flaws. They tracked the pure, unfiltered gravity of your presence. The deep, heavy crimson of your flushed skin didn't look ugly to him—it looked loud. It looked like a sudden, violent burst of color in a room that had been dead and gray for twelve hours. The way your chest heaved, the sharp, desperate scent of your panic, the raw shape of your mouth—it all carried a physical, crushing weight that was actively dragging him under.

He didn't register it as attraction. He didn't have a word for the way his pulse suddenly spiked, or why the air in his lungs felt thick, or why his gaze kept dropping to the wet, trembling curve of your bottom lip. To Jeongguk, desire had always been a clean, predictable transaction.

This wasn't clean. This was a physical intrusion. You were crowding his space, your shadow tangling with his, your breath hot against his collarbone, and it felt exactly like a storm rolling into a quiet room.

He found you entirely, dangerously attractive in your ruin, but his mind buried the realization under a layer of cold, protective stone. He wouldn't let himself know it.

"You want to be her," he murmured, his voice dropping an octave, a gravelly vibration that felt like a physical hand sliding up your throat. He didn't blink, his dark pupils consuming the frantic reflection of your bloodshot eyes. "You want me to look at you and see a perfect, quiet little doll that belongs on a shelf."

He let out a short, humorless breath through his nose, his gaze crawling slowly down from your eyes to the bitten corner of your mouth.

It's stained with hot, pure red blood.

"But you're not her, Void. Look at yourself. You're shaking. You're bleeding out right in front of my desk because someone didn't want to handle your mess." He leaned forward just a fraction of an inch, his face so close to yours you could see the light of the monitors dancing in his irises. "So stop asking me about Irina. She doesn't exist in this room."

"Then what am I?" you whispered, your voice cracking, a raw, jagged edge splitting the small distance between your faces. "If she doesn't exist here, what do I look like to you? Tell me. Tell me I'm not just a chore."

Jeongguk didn't flinch. He leaned even further forward, his face tilting up from the dark leather of his chair until his breath was hitting the wet, blotchy skin of your cheek, warm and heavy.

"You look like a disaster, Void," his voice dropping into a register so cold and clinical it felt like a razor blade sliding across your chest. "You look completely unhinged. Your eyes are a mess. Your face is purple. You've got his name stuck in your throat like a bone you're choking on, and you're standing over my chair begging me to tell you you're pretty just so you can use my mouth to fix what he broke."

The words hit you right in the center of your fragile, hollowed-out chest. It was too blunt. Too honest. The sheer weight of your own pathetic reality crashed down on you all over again, and the fragile dam you had tried to build since walking into the studio completely dissolved.

A fresh wave of tears spilled over your lashes, thick and hot, tracking through the dried salt on your face. A small, broken whimper escaped your lips, your shoulders hitching violently as you tried to turn your head away from his suffocating gaze.

But Jeongguk didn't let you look away. He didn't move an inch to comfort you, but his eyes tracked the exact trajectory of those tears, watching the way they pooled at your jawline, the way your lips unhinged into that ugly, desperate expression of pure grief.

He didn't want to swim. He didn't want a clean, safe baseline anymore. He wanted to drown in it. He wanted to pull the whole gray, screaming storm down into his lungs until he couldn't breathe either, because this—this total, unvarnished ruin—was the only thing in his entire world that felt real. It was raw. It was loud. It was the only honest frequency left in a city full of synthetic noise.

And then, beneath the jagged rhythm of your breathing, he recognized the exact pitch of your sob.

It was the I'm broken cry.

He knew that frequency all too well. It was a sound he had spent a lifetime burying in the back of his own mind, a low, suffocating vibration of someone realizing they've been completely cleared out from the inside. He knew the absolute panic of it, the unhinged terror of feeling invisible.

His own bleeding on the floor bleached to perfection resurfaced for a moment.

Love does lie bleeding.

You opened your mouth to speak, another frantic, trembling question about Irina, about Minho, about the hands you couldn't stop visualizing in the dark—

But Jeongguk didn't want to hear his name anymore. He didn't want to hear the game.

He shot up from his chair.

The movement was sudden, violent, and completely unanchored by boundaries. Before the keys could even rattle in your hand, his large palm came up, his long fingers wrapping firmly around the back of your neck, his grip solid and unyielding as he slammed his mouth down onto yours.

He was kissing you.

It wasn't gentle. It wasn't a reassurance. It was a physical execution meant to tear the loop right out of your head and shut you up completely.

Your breath caught in a sharp, choked gasp against his teeth, your hands instantly flying up to press against his chest, but he was concrete. He held you there, tilting your head back, his lips moving against yours with a heavy, lawless hunger that didn't leave room for air.

He tasted the salt. He tasted the hot, bitter wreckage of your morning, the dried sweat, and the sharp sting of broken promises. It tasted exactly like him—like the version of him that existed before he learned how to find the poetry in the fractures, back when the cracks were just deep, bleeding holes he didn't know how to fill. He was drinking your panic, consuming the very worst parts of your grief until the mental imagery of Minho's hands on someone else's skin went completely black.

The studio monitors kept looping that hollow, distorted synth chord in the dark, but the noise was entirely buried by the sound of your frantic heartbeats colliding.

When he finally pulled back, he didn't go far. His thumb stayed anchored against the side of your throat, his dark, lawless eyes staring down into your wide, bloodshot gaze as his breath hit your wet lips.

You tasted like a home he forgot.

You stumbled back a half-step, your chest heaving, your lips tingling and raw from the sudden, bruising weight of his mouth. The room felt like it was spinning, the impending doom suddenly replacing itself with a sharp, terrifying electricity.

You stared at him, your voice a breathless, unhinged whisper in the dark.

"What the hell was that?"

Jeongguk didn't instantly drop his hand. His thumb lingered for one more fraction of a second against the frantic pulse in your throat, a heavy, grounding reminder of what he had just done, before he finally let his arm fall back to his side.

He didn't look guilty. He didn't look surprised. He just stood there, towering over you in the dim blue light of the mixing desk, his features fixed in that same dangerous, unanchored stillness.

"I don't know how to comfort people," he said flatly, his voice carrying that a low scrape that sounded entirely unapologetic. "I don't know the words for it. I don't have the patience to sit here and tell you everything is going to be fine when your whole life just took a shit on my floor boards."

A harsh, disbelieving laugh tore out of your raw throat—a  sound that felt closer to a sob. You wiped the back of your hand violently across your wet lips, tasting the lingering heat of his tobacco and the bitter salt of your own grief.

"So you fucking kiss me?" you snapped, your voice pitching high and unhinged, vibrating against the soundproof foam of the walls. "That's your version of a solution? I come in here crying out, and you just leverage it to put your mouth on mine?"

Jeongguk scoffed, a short, dark sound that cut right through your panic. He didn't look down, he looked straight through you, his eyes narrowing as he finally let a trace of lawless irritation break across his face.

"Don't act like I just crossed some holy line, Void," he rough-whispered, taking a deliberate step forward until his boots were practically locking into yours again, crowding you back into his atmosphere. "You've been standing over my chair for the past ten minutes losing your absolute mind, begging for a weapon. You've been asking me if Irina is hot. You've been asking me if I'd fuck her. You literally asked me—to my face—if I would rather look at her or look at you."

He tilted his head, a cold, humorless edge sharpening his jawline under the glare of the software grid.

"You were practically vibrating out of your own skin asking me who I'd rather put inside a bed, but somehow a kiss to shut you up is out of bounds?" He let out a heavy breath, his chest expanding against yours. "You wanted to know if you were invisible, remember? You wanted to know if someone could look at you and lose their mind. I just gave you the data point."

"What the fuck does that mean?" you spat, the swear word tasting like copper on your tongue. Your hands were still shaking, your fingers curled into tight, defensive knots at your sides. "A data point? I'm having a panic attack, Jeongguk. I am drowning, and you're treating me like an experiment."

Jeongguk blinked . He  watched the way your chest heaved, his gaze dropping to the wet, raw line of your mouth before tracking back up to your red-rimmed eyes.

A heavy, deliberate silence settled between you, ticking in time with the green audio meters on his monitors. Inside his chest, something shifted—a dark, mechanical gear locking into place. The realization didn't come to him with a flash of light.

It arrived like the cold, quiet settling of dust after a collapse.

He didn't know how to fix a person. He didn't have the stomach for the soft, manicured promises Minho had used to keep you in a cage.

But he knew how to manage a storm.

He knew what it felt like to be completely unanchored, to look around a room and find nothing but empty air to hold onto. Ever since the one person who understood his loud, chaotic frequency had vanished from his world—leaving behind nothing but the phantom scent of greenhouse soil and a truth he carried like a scar—he had been drifting in a vacuum. He had been looking for a weight. An anchor that didn't require him to be floating aloof. Someone who could turn him into who he wanted to be.

Someone to be proud of, someone worthy of the sacrifice.

Someone tranquil in a thunderstorm.

You were that weight.

You were a total, unhinged disaster, stripped of your ego and bleeding all over his soundproof room. It was completely transactional, entirely devoid of the sterile boundaries that made him want to claw his own skin off.

If he gave you his mouth, if he gave you his body, it wouldn't be a rescue mission. It would be an exchange of gravity.

You needed someone to make you feel heavy so you wouldn't float away into the mental imagery of Minho's betrayal, and he needed a raw, honest ecosystem to drown out the silence in his own head. No feelings. No clinical expectations. Just a mutual agreement to hold the wreckage together in the dark.

"It means exactly what you think it means, Void," he rough-whispered, his voice dropping into that dark, low register that stripped away the remaining distance between you. He leaned back against the edge of his desk, crossing his arms over his chest, his boots firmly planted. "We could make a deal. Friends with benefits. No strings. No neat little lines to keep our boundaries straight."

You stared at him, your breath hitching as a cold shock of disbelief cut through your grief. "Are you fucking insane? We're not even friends."

"I'm pragmatic," he corrected flatly, a trace of his lawless arrogance seeping back into his jawline. "Look at you. You're borderline psychotic right now, looping images of his hands on someone else behind your eyelids. You want a weapon to stop the noise? I'm offering you one."

"A weapon?" Your voice cracked, an ugly, breathless laugh escaping your lips as you took a step back, your keys rattling violently in your fist. "You think offering to fuck me is a weapon? You think that fixes the fact that he discarded me like a piece of trash?"

" I think it gives you an anchor," Jeongguk snapped, his eyes narrowing as he tracked your movement, his stillness turning dangerous again. "Minho wanted a clean garden, and you couldn't stay inside the lines. I don't give a fuck about the lines. You want to know if someone can look at you and lose their goddamn mind? I just showed you I can. So stop bickering about the morals of it and face the reality."

"The reality is that you're an asshole!" you screamed, the volume of your own voice startling you, echoing sharply off the acoustic foam. "You're just capitalizing on the fact that I'm completely broken!"

"I'm capitalizing on the fact that we both need a hit of something real," he roughly said, his head tilting as his unhinged, dark pupils locked onto yours, refusing to let you run. "So tell me, Void. You want to keep suffocating in his memory, or do you want to get past the storm?"

"What are you getting out of this?" your voice dropping into a sharp, suspicious whisper. You shook your head, a bitter, defensive laugh escaping your lips. "Because you're not doing this out of the goodness of your heart, Jeongguk. You don't have one. So what is it? What do you get from a broken girl who can't even look at a glass of water without seeing her ex?"

Jeongguk didn't blink. He stayed leaned back against the edge of his desk, his arms tightly crossed over his chest, his eyes holding your frantic gaze captive under the blue wash of the monitors.

"It's not your place to know my margins, Void," he said flatly, his tone entirely unanchored by the desperate gravity of your panic.

"Then make it my place," you snapped, stepping closer, the keys in your hand rattling like a warning bell. "If you're asking me to hand over the wreckage of my body, I want to know why you're so eager to build a house in it."

A heavy, suffocating silence fell between you, ticking in perfect sync with the glowing green audio meters on his screen. For a fraction of a second, the lawless, untouchable mask on Jeongguk's face cracked, just enough for a shadow of that distant, purple-skied thunderstorm to bleed through his features.

When he spoke again, his voice dropped an octave, rough and scraped bare of its usual arrogance.

"Someone once told me that I wasn't broken," he murmured, the words falling into the dark space between you with an unexpected, poetic weight. He didn't look down, he kept his gaze locked on yours, intense and intrusive.

"Someone who knew the exact frequency of my noise told me I could do anything. They were the only anchor I ever had that kept the noise from swallowing me whole."

He took a slow, heavy breath, the scent of stale cold brew ghosting past his lips.

"Anyways, they're gone," he rough-whispered, leaving the detail hanging in the dark, a clean fracture he wouldn't let you touch. "And ever since, the room has been too quiet. I don't want to fix you, Void, and I don't want your love. But when you're in here screaming, when you're this loud and this ruined... managing your chaos is the only time the signal goes clear. I need to be the anchor I lost. I need to handle something that fights back just to feel close to the earth again. To feel accomplished."

You stared at him, the raw honesty of his selfishness striking you right in the throat. He didn't want a pretty flower, he wanted a weight to hold him down in the dark.

"It's transactional," you whispered, the realization settling into your bones.

"Entirely," Jeongguk replied, his head tilting a fraction of an inch as a dark, unhinged pupil caught the blue glare of the master bus. "A mutual destruction. So, are we going to keep bickering about the price, or are you going to let me buy in?"

"And what do I get?" you whispered, your voice dangerously thin, almost swallowed by the low-end vibration of the monitors. You took a half-step back, your eyes searching his face for a catch, a punchline—anything that would prove he wasn't completely serious. "Besides a distraction. What do I get from letting you use my head as a lightning rod?"

Jeongguk's gaze drifted down to your white-knuckled fist, tracking the way the silver rings of your apartment keys were still biting into your skin.

"Distraction," he said flatly.

The word dropped like a heavy stone into the small, suffocating space between you. He didn't lean in, but the sheer intent in his eyes made the room feel three degrees hotter.

"You get to stop looking at every object in your room and seeing his ghost," he rough-whispered, his voice carrying that dark, unbothered certainty that made your ribs ache. "You get to pull the plug on the projector behind your eyelids. Every time you start visualizing his hands on Irina, every time you start spiraling about whether she stays inside the lines and you don't—you come here. You give that noise to me, and I'll drown it out. I'll make you so heavy you won't have the capacity to float away."

Your breath shattered in your throat, a small, defensive laugh slipping out before you could choke it back.

"You're talking about an addiction, Jeongguk. You're asking me to swap one cage for another."

"It's not a cage, Void," he corrected instantly, his tone dropping its sharp edge, replaced by a blunt, unyielding clarity. He didn't blink, his pupils holding yours steady in the blue glare. "There's no lease on this. There aren't any secret clauses or fine print you have to read between. The exact second you wake up, look in the mirror, and feel like you're officially okay—it's over. You walk out that door, you don't call me, and we go back to being exactly what we were before you walked in here. Acquaintances at most. You have the kill switch."

He tilted his head, his posture remaining perfectly loose against the edge of his desk, intentionally giving you all the space in the room to make a choice.

"I'm not looking to trap you," he murmured, his gaze falling to your trembling lips one last time before locking back onto your eyes. "I'm offering you an exit ramp from your own head. You want to go back to that empty apartment and let the walls crush you, or do you want to use me until the storm passes?"

You looked at Jeongguk, searching for a lie in the dark, heavy contours of his face, but there was nothing there but that same lawless, predatory patience. He was letting you hold the knife.

"An exit ramp," you repeated softly, your voice barely a breath against the steady, synthetic hum of the hard drives. Your fingers slowly uncurled, the silver keys slipping against your damp palm, leaving deep, white indentations across your skin.

"An exit ramp," Jeongguk confirmed, his arms still tightly crossed over his chest, anchoring his weight against the console. He didn't push. He didn't lean in to tempt you. He just stayed perfectly still, a solid block of shadow waiting for you to cross the grid line.

Jeongguk watched the exact moment the realization hit your eyes. He didn't push his advantage. He didn't move to trap you against the console or pull you back into the bruising, lawless heat of his mouth, even though the violent surge of your crimson frequency was still vibrating right against his skin. Instead, he uncrossed his arms, letting the predatory tension drain from his shoulders as he took a deliberate step backward, giving you back your air.

"Go home, Void," he said. His voice sounded flat, mechanical, a clinical frequency he used like a barrier to force the distance back between you.

You blinked up at him through those swollen, red eyes, your lips still visibly wet and tingling from the bruising weight of his mouth.

"What?"

"Go home," he repeated, turning his back on you completely as he dropped back down into the dark leather of his chair. The blue light of the monitors caught the sharp line of his profile as he reached out, his long fingers wrapping around the mouse to bring the mixing software back onto the main screen. "Wash your face. Sleep. The next time the loop starts running behind your eyelids, you know where the studio is. But right now, you're done bleeding on my floor. I have to work."

"Right, yeah, totally. Okay"

You're flustered. Cute.

Jeongguk could practically see the static of your embarrassment blooming through the soundproof insulation, a chaotic lavender frequency that always signaled a sudden retreat. His fingers clicked the mouse, dragging an audio region across the timeline with a clinical precision that didn't match the heavy, rhythmic thudding currently hammering beneath his ribs. He was forcing his pulse back down to a cold baseline, hardwiring his focus back into the lines of the monitor.

The heavy, foam-padded door groaned on its hinges, letting in a brief, violent slice of the hallway's sterile fluorescent light before clicking shut. The vacuum sealed perfectly.

The studio felt too big suddently.

His thumb slowly traced the edge of his bottom lip, where the sharp, intrusive taste of your salt and grief still lingered like a stubborn stain on a pristine track. He tried to mentally categorize the transaction, to file it away under his strict margins of cold necessity, but the math wasn't adding up.

He had given you the kill switch to keep the arrangement sterile, to ensure he wouldn't have to carry the emotional wreckage of another broken thing. But as his fingers finally reached for the master switch, plunging the entire console into absolute, lawless darkness, Jeongguk knew the signal had changed.

The room was dark, but the silence was loud.

next chapter | previous

[ttabacco]

Faux Colors

hello guys. i cooked up a little playlist for it here.

you’re free to suggest new titles and i’ll add them, i love hearing your input!

kisses, muah.

[ttabacco]

Faux Colors

chapter 11

ribbon bound

Synopsis; one lives in a world under the weight of shadows the other lives in a world that screams.

"The sky is blue like Sacrifice by Elton John"

warnings; swearing, heavy themes pairing; jeongguk × female reader genre; angst, slowburn, smut, fwb word count; 9.5k

a/n: here we are again. ahem. cautation: very long chapter. i'd apologize in advance, but we all saw this coming. do not fret little monsters, this is just the begging. (this will make sense after you read i promise)

now before reading i have some things to say but if you don’t care, by all means, dwelve in the basement of joy's stealers. anyways, i’m working on a playlist which i’ll drop after i add more into it aaaand i left a Taehyung moodboard on tumblr to those interested. he’s been a fan favourite until now (i get it) and i wanted to feed the hungry mouths.

The word slices straight through the tequila fog, hitting you like a bucket of ice water.

You know exactly what he means by good shampoo.

To Jeongguk, anything that is actually, aggressively you is better than a pretty lie.

Suddenly, your lungs feel entirely too tight. The whole table is a blur of noise, but your corner of the booth is dead silent, heavy with static. Your chest aches because you just spent minutes slurring to a hyper-observant Jimin that there is nothing going on, that the boy in the leather jacket doesn't matter.

And now, your stupid, tequila-poisoned brain is making you do stuff you'd never do sober.

Because you're staring at his neck.

Not by choice, it's just there. Obviously.

You can't look away from the pale, smooth skin of his throat, tracing the sharp line of his jaw as he leans back against the dark velvet.

He's close. Too close.

You can see the tiny pulse jumping against his skin, and if you breathe in, the bitter salt on your tongue tangles right into the thick, electric heat radiating off his body. His thigh is pressed solid against yours under the table, the rough denim of his jeans scraping against you in the cramped booth.

Across the sticky wood, Taehyung's boxy laugh rings out as he bickers with a completely trashed Sora about god knows what.

But right next to them, Jimin's eyes dart over. The noise seems to die in Jimin's throat for a second, his sharp gaze dropping straight to the tiny, nonexistent space left between you and Jeongguk. He's counting the seconds.

He knows.

Jeongguk doesn't even glance at him. He just keeps his eyes locked on you, a slow, mocking, impossibly sharp smirk pulling at his lips. He's watching you scramble, daring you to open your mouth and tell another lie when your entire body is already giving you away.

You let out a dry, breathy huff, forcing your eyes up from his neck to meet that heavy, dark gaze. The tequila makes you bolder than you should be, wiping away any desire to look flustered in front of him.

You slowly lean back against the velvet, mimicking his posture, and give him a lazy, entirely unbothered smile.

"Or I could find another scent." you murmur, your voice low enough that it barely carries over the noise of the table, though you know he hears every single syllable.

"You know, since you hate both gardenia and lime..and I can't  seem to get rid of you."

Jeongguk tilts his head, his dark eyes locking onto yours with an intensity that makes the tequila humming in your veins feel suddenly volatile. He shifts slightly, the rough denim of his jeans scraping against you again in the cramped booth as he brings his face inches closer to yours.

"I don't hate it," he says softly, his rough voice a private whisper that completely bypasses the loud music. "Gardenia is just perfect."

You let out a small, skeptical huff, leaning back just enough to look at him properly, refusing to let him see how much that word rattles your chest. "I thought it's loud."

"It is," he replies without a second of hesitation. His gaze drops to your lips, then climbs back up to your eyes, slow and deliberate.

"So?"

"Some loudness I enjoy."

A brief, heavy silence stretches between you, the static in your corner of the booth growing so thick it suffocates the background noise of Taehyung and Sora bickering across the table. You swallow hard, your fingers tightening around the cold ceramic of your drink.

"So you enjoy it," you say, trying for a triumphant little tilt of your chin, testing the boundaries of the tequila-fueled boldness thumping behind your ribs.

Jeongguk's smirk returns, sharp, cynical, and impossibly arrogant. "I never said that."

"You just did."

"No," he murmurs, his eyes dropping back to your neck, tracing the exact spot where the fading sandalwood is still desperately fighting the sour lime. "I said it's better than a lie."

Your head spins, the sharp, circular logic of his words tangling with the heavy alcohol clouding your thoughts. You glare at him, a faint line forming between your eyebrows as you lift your cup to take another defensive sip.

"You're confusing," you mutter under your breath.

Jeongguk lets out a short, quiet huff of a laugh against your skin, a low vibration that makes your collarbone twitch. He doesn't pull away. If anything, his presence only feels more immediate, crowding you right into the velvet cushions.

"You're drunk," he corrects softly, his voice cutting right through your stubborn defenses with a terrifyingly intimate clarity.

Across the sticky wood of the table, the sharp clink of a porcelain cup breaks the spell. Jimin sets his drink down, his analytical eyes dropping straight to the tiny, space left between you and Jeongguk.

There isn't any.

He's watching you, a heavy warning written clearly across his face.

Go home after this. Don't go back to Minho's place tonight.

But the timeline is already getting slippery, and the fire under your skin is moving much too fast for warnings.

The tension breaks as the waiter finally drops off the next round of porcelain cups, the clink of ceramic against the sticky wood forcing your bubble with Jeongguk to widen.

"Alright, clear out some space," Taehyung says, his warm, velvety rumble cutting right through the lingering static as he signals the waiter. "If we're staying in this rain cloud's vicinity, I need something sweet to balance the atmosphere."

Taehyung immediately orders an aggressively bright, layered cocktail served in a wide tea saucer, while Jeongguk doesn't even bother looking at the menu. He just gestures to your empty cup. "Whiskey. Neat," he tells the waiter, his dark eyes finally shifting away from your neck, though his thigh stays heavy and unmoving against yours.

"Oh, vintage leather boy drinks whiskey, how shocking," Sora mumbles, her eyelids fluttering open as she props her chin up on her hand, squinting across at him with absolute, alcohol-fueled sass. "Let me guess, you drink it to feel like a tortured artist who inks his soul onto painfully cliché tracks?"

Jeongguk lets out a dry, entirely unbothered huff through his nose, leaning back into the velvet cushions. "I drink it because I don't need three napkins and a toothpick to explain why it tastes good, Sora."

"Hey! The napkins were a structural masterpiece," Sora fires back, sticking her tongue out slightly before turning her chaotic gaze to the rest of the table. "We're losing the wonderland energy. The vibe is getting stale. We need a game."

"No games," Jimin says instantly from his corner, his voice mild but fast. He's still sitting back, his sharp profile caught in the bleeding red light, but his eyes haven't stopped tracking the tiny, imaginary space that doesn't exist between you and Jeongguk. He's doing the math, calculating how easily you just let Jeongguk slide right into your personal bubble after spending all that time insisting there was nothing.

"Shut up, circle, you don't get a vote," Sora trills, hitting Jimin's arm sloppily. She taps her fresh, smoking rosemary drink against the wood. "Never have I ever. Simple. You lie, you drink. You've done it, you drink. And since we have some very secretive people at this table tonight..." She darts her eyes meaningfully between you and Jeongguk, her sharp, protective instincts blinking through the hazy fog. "I want to see who's actually keeping a straight face."

Taehyung boxy grin brightens immediately, his patchwork sleeve brushing the table as he lifts his saucer. "I'm down. I have nothing to hide. My life is an open lookbook."

"I'll start," Sora announces, leaning across the table, her cheeks flushed a bright hue as she pins Jeongguk with a challenging look. "Never have I ever... crashed a conversation in a courtyard because I was moping and couldn't handle being ignored."

Taehyung lets out a loud, dramatic gasp, immediately looking at his friend. Next to him, Jimin doesn't drink, but a quiet, knowing intelligence sparks in his eyes as he watches the reaction across the table.

Jeongguk doesn't even blink. A slow, incredibly cynical tilt curves his lips as his fresh whiskey is placed in front of him. Without breaking eye contact with Sora, he wraps his pale, ink-stained fingers around the glass, lifts it, and takes a slow, deliberate swallow.

"Your turn," Jeongguk murmurs, setting the glass down with a soft click, his gaze sliding slowly, heavily back to you. He leans his forearm onto the wood, his eyes daring you to play along. "Let's see what the quiet girl is hiding."

The challenge is set. The whole table is looking at you now.

"My turn?" you murmur, your voice a little breathy from the tequila, but the alcohol makes you reckless. You slant a look over at Jeongguk, a small, daring smile playing at the corner of your lips. If he wants to play the game of uncovering secrets, you can play it too. "Fine. Never have I ever..." you trace the rim of your cup, your eyes locking onto the sharp line of his jaw. "...been marked by someone I wasn't in a relationship with."

A beat of absolute silence hangs over the sticky wood as the game demands its toll.

Taehyung doesn't even hesitate, lifting his saucer cocktail with a grin and taking a large gulp. Right next to him, Sora proudly downs a huge swallow of her smoking rosemary drink, cheering at the memory. Even Jimin, after a fraction of a second, lets out a low, amused huff and tilts his glass back, drinking smoothly without breaking his sharp, analytical gaze from your face.

Everyone drinks. Except for you.

You keep your hands flat on the table, your tequila-poisoned brain basking in a brief, messy flash of triumph as you watch the entire booth take a sip.

Jeongguk doesn't break eye contact with you. Not even for a fraction of a second. His smirk turns sharp, a dangerous, low hum vibrating deep in his chest as he reaches for his whiskey glass. He lifts it in a silent acknowledgment, taking a slow, burning swallow that makes the muscles in his throat work beneath that pale skin.

He sets the glass down with a soft click, shifting his weight. The rough denim of his jeans scrapes against you again in the cramped booth as he bends his neck, leaning down to whisper a fraction of an inch from your ear.

"Thought you got me?" he murmurs. His voice is a rough, private rasp, meant entirely and exclusively for your ears, his dark eyes glinting with a mocking, lazy heat.

Before you can even process the warmth of his breath against your skin, Sora slams her empty ceramic cup down onto the wood with an offended thud.

She looks straight at you, her eyes wide, visibly and audibly appalled.

"Wait, hold on, you didn't drink!" Sora announces loudly, throwing her hands up in the air and pointing a sloppy finger across the table.

"I’m in a relationship, " you deadpan.

"So you got them in a relationship."

"No."

"You're telling me you have never had one? Not a single hickey? Ever?"

"Sora, please," Jimin sighs, a loose, heavy grin breaking across his face as he casually twirls her tiny silver spoon between his fingers.

"No, I am genuinely outraged!" she huffs, leaning over the table, completely scandalized by your empty cup. "You've been in a whole ass relationship with Mr. Perfect Structure for how long, and your neck is a completely unprinted canvas? It is a tragedy!"

"It's an aesthetic milestone you've been entirely deprived of!" Sora continues to lament, slouching back into the velvet with a profound, deeply alcohol-fueled pout. "Minho needs to be court-martialed. Next semester, I'm lower-bounding my standards, and clearly, you need to do the same."

"Sora, leave her alone," Taehyung chuckles softly, his boxy grin widening as he reaches across the table to gently pat her arm, completely unfazed by her dramatic outburst. "Not everyone measures relationship milestones in bruises."

"It's not a bruise, Tae, it's art," she grumbles into her empty glass.

Jimin lets out a slow, quiet breath, leaning back against the cushions. He isn't tracking Sora's complaints anymore. His sharp eyes immediately drift right back down to you.

He's trying to map out the exact coordinates of why you look like a live wire sparking right next to a boy who isn't your boyfriend.

Right next to you, Jeongguk doesn't pay a single bit of attention to the bickering across the table. He just keeps his dark, intense gaze locked sideways onto you, the slow, mocking curve of his smirk completely immovable.

He leans back, mimicking your lazy posture, but his heavy denim-clad thigh shifts under the table, pressing a fraction more solid against yours. The thick, electric heat radiating off his body is entirely overwhelming, trapping you right back in that suffocating, private bubble.

He slants his head down toward you again, his lips dangerously close to the shell of your ear as he takes advantage of the loud noise across the table.

"An unprinted canvas. Almost cute if it wasn't boring," Jeongguk rough-whispers, his voice dropping into a low, rumbling vibration that hits you straight in the chest. A dangerous, knowing glint cuts through his dark eyes as his gaze deliberately traces the bare, unblemished line of your collarbone. "Sounds like he doesn't know what to do with a little loudness."

"Oh, please, the 'bruise' debate is so last year," Sora groans, waving her hand dismissively before anyone else can chime in. She sits up straight, her chaotic energy suddenly returning at full volume as she slaps both palms flat onto the sticky wood of the table. "We are getting bogged down in logistics. The vibe is stalling again. If we're doing this, we need to get to the fun stuff already."

Taehyung lifts an eyebrow, a lazy, amused smile tugging at his lips. "Define 'fun stuff,' Sora."

"The scandalous stuff, obviously," she says, a wicked, flushed grin spreading across her face. She looks around the circle, her gaze lingering a second too long on your corner of the booth before she leans in, dropping her voice to a theatrical whisper. "Alright, my turn again. Never have I ever... had sex in a car."

Taehyung lets out a sharp, dramatic gasp, instantly clutching his patchwork sleeve to his chest. "In public? In broad daylight?"

"I didn't say daylight, Tae, stop adding clauses to my contract!" Sora giggles, already lifting her glass to take a sip, clearly guilty of her own charge.

Across the table, Jimin lets out a soft, low chuckle. He doesn't look surprised at all as he smoothly tilts his porcelain cup back, taking a calm, measured swallow. He's completely unbothered, comfortable in his own skin, and entirely transparent about it.

You, however, freeze. Your fingers lock around the condensation-slick cup. Your tequila-poisoned brain immediately coordinates the math: you haven't. Minho owns a pristine, leather-scented luxury sedan, and the absolute last thing he would ever allow is any kind of mess, let alone a chaotic, cramped encounter against a dashboard. Everything with him happens on egyptian cotton sheets, perfectly scheduled, perfectly sterile.

600 thread count. Insanely soft.

You stay completely still, keeping your cup firmly on the table.

Right next to you, the heavy, electric heat radiating off Jeongguk suddenly shifts. You don't even have to look at him to know he's moving.

Slowly, deliberately, Jeongguk reaches out and wraps his pale, ink-stained fingers around his whiskey glass. He lifts it in a smooth, unhurried arc, his dark eyes locked sideways onto your face as he tilts the amber liquid back and takes a deep, burning swallow.

He sets the glass down with a heavy, deliberate clink.

"No way," Sora gasps, leaning so far over the wood she nearly knocks her rosemary garnish over. She points directly at Jeongguk, her eyes wide with drunken delight. "Leather boy! You actually have?"

"I have a motorcycle, Sora," Jeongguk says smoothly, his voice a low, cynical rumble that sends a strange, sharp shiver straight down your spine. He leans back into the velvet cushions, a slow, impossibly sharp smirk pulling at the corner of his lips as his gaze deliberately slides from Sora right back to you. "Cars are for when you want a little more legroom."

"Legroom is highly overrated," Sora declares, waving a hand dismissively as she flags down the waiter for another round. "It ruins the urgency of the moment."

"You're a menace," Jimin says softly, though his laugh finally breaks through his analytical composure. He shakes his head, setting his cup down, but the lightness in his expression doesn't last. As Taehyung and Sora dive into a chaotic, highly animated argument about the physics of bucket seats versus a leather interior, Jimin's eyes slice right back through the purple haze.

He's looking at you. Then his gaze drops, deliberately, to the centimeter of space where Jeongguk's solid thigh is still pinned flush against yours.

Jimin knows your life is clean. He knows your relationship with Minho is a series of silent, perfectly curated gallery openings and minimalist furniture. And he knows, with absolute certainty, that you just sat through two consecutive questions about reckless, unfiltered heat and didn't touch your drink once.

You feel the flush creeping up your throat, hot and entirely separate from the tequila. To break the standoff, you finally lift your glass and take a long, defensive swallow of the sour lime, trying to wash away the sudden, dizzying image of Jeongguk in the cramped, dark interior of a car—large hands gripping a steering wheel or a leather seat, dark eyes completely unanchored by rules.

"Don't look so stressed," Jeongguk's rough voice cuts into your thoughts, so low and private it's practically a hum against your jaw.

You look up, your eyes colliding with his. He hasn't broken his lazy, leaning posture, but his forearm is resting on the sticky wood again, his knuckles just inches from your hand.

Rings glimmer. Musk and leather invade your nose.

"I'm not stressed," you mutter back, the lie tasting bitter on your tongue.

"You look like you're trying to solve a puzzle you already know the answer to," he murmurs, his smirk flattening into something heavier, darker. His eyes trace the line of your jaw, completely indifferent to the fact that Jimin is sitting right across from you, practically reading the air quality. "Some people spend their whole lives staying inside the lines. It's boring."

"Maybe I like being bored," you whisper, tilting your chin up, trying to claw back that unbothered, lazy confidence you had five minutes ago.

Jeongguk lets out a short, quiet huff of a laugh, his dark eyes crinkling at the corners in a way that makes your chest ache. "Liar. If you liked being bored, you wouldn't be sitting so close to me."

"You sat next to me."

"You accepted it."

Before you can fire back, Taehyung slams his hands on the table, the porcelain cups rattling against the wood. "Alright! The fresh rounds are here, and I am taking over the narrative. My turn. Never have I ever..." He looks around the table, his grin turning sharp and entirely devious. "...looked at someone at this exact table and thought about what they look like without their clothes on."

The table goes dead silent. The heavy bass of the bar suddenly feels entirely too loud, vibrating right through the soles of your shoes.

Sora lets out a loud, dramatic groan, her head hitting Taehyung's shoulder before she forcefully props herself back up. "Oh, come on, Tae! That's completely unfair," she slurs, waving a hand around the circle. "I already saw both Y/N and Jimin naked. That's a total cheat question."

Taehyung pauses, his glass halfway to his mouth. His grin morphs into a look of pure, unadulterated shock as his brain takes a sloppy second to process her words.

"Oh! Yeah!" Taehyung gasps, his eyes going wide as he points a finger between you and Jimin. "I still can't believe you two are ex's! That always slips my mind because you're both so... different."

Taehyung, entirely immune to the lethal drop in atmosphere, leans forward over the sticky wood, squinting at Sora with wide, entirely scandalized eyes. "Wait... You saw her naked?"

"Duh," Sora snorts, waving her hand dismissively as if she's stating the most obvious fact in the world. "We literally shared a tiny, windowless studio apartment for two years during our foundation courses. I've seen every square inch of Y/N. I've seen her run through the kitchen entirely naked because she forgot a towel, I've seen her–"

"Sora, please stop talking," you break in, the words slipping out in a frantic rush.

A fierce, burning blush instantly creeps up your face, starting at the collar of your shirt and rushing straight up to your cheeks. The tequila fog doesn't do a single thing to cool the sudden, intense heat radiating under your skin. You stare hard at your glass, desperately wishing the ice would melt faster so you could bury your face in it.

Beside you, the shift in Jeongguk is instantaneous.

He doesn't say a word, but his entire posture alters. He slowly shifts his weight, his denim-clad thigh pressing even more solidly against yours under the tight table as he turns his head. The lazy, mocking indifference completely vanishes from his face.

Suddenly, Jeongguk is very interested in what Sora has to say.

He rests his chin in his hand, his dark, intense eyes locking onto Sora across the table with a terrifyingly sharp focus. The slow curve of his smirk returns, but it's heavier now, dangerous and deeply curious. He doesn't look at you—doesn't have to—but the absolute stillness of his body tells you he is hanging on every single syllable.

"Go on, Sora," Jeongguk rough-whispers, his low voice cutting right through Taehyung's giggles. He tilts his head, his gaze glittering with a quiet, wicked heat. "Don't let her interrupt. What else did you see?"

"Wouldn't you like to know, emo boy?" Sora shoots back, a sloppy, triumphant grin plastering across her face as she leans her chin on her palm. She taps her glass against the wood, utterly delighted by the fact that she has officially caught the attention of the most unbothered person at the table.

Jeongguk doesn't even flinch at the nickname. He just keeps his dark, intense gaze locked onto her, the slow curve of his smirk deepening as he lets out a quiet, rough huff of a laugh.

"I would, actually," he murmurs, his voice dropping into that low, cynical register that completely bypasses the thumping bass of the bar. He slowly shifts his eyes sideways, his gaze crawling up from your white-knuckled grip on your glass, trailing up the fierce, burning flush on your neck, until he's looking directly at you. "Someone so quiet, so hard to derail from coloring inside the lines... must have some ammunition."

The word ammunition rolls off his tongue like a private threat, the heavy heat of his thigh pressing dangerously flush against yours.

He's completely cornering you without moving an inch, his eyes daring you to scramble for a defense while your entire body is already giving you away.

Across the table, Taehyung lets out a loud, dramatic whistle, shifting in his patchwork sleeve. "Oh, the tension is thick enough to carve. Jimin, back me up here, we're witnessing a breakdown of diplomatic borders."

Jimin, who had been quietly twirling Sora's silver spoon, finally sets it down with a soft, deliberate click. His eyes don't slide to Sora, and they don't slide to Taehyung.

They lock straight onto the heavy, dark focus in Jeongguk's face, then drop to the bright red flush consuming your cheeks.

He isn't smiling anymore. The easy, loose amusement from a moment ago completely evaporates from his profile, replaced by that heavy, silent calculation. He knows exactly how dangerous that "ammunition" is—and he knows you're running out of ways to hide it.

"Alright, alright, change of subject before Y/N actually vaporizes into thin air," Sora giggles, entirely missing the shift in the air as she slumps sideways against Taehyung's shoulder. "Besides, I'm not giving away roommate state secrets for free. You have to buy the next round for that, leather boy."

"Done," Jeongguk murmurs without a second of hesitation, his voice a low, gravelly vibration right next to you. He doesn't take his eyes off your face, his smirk tracking the way your breath hitches at his instant compliance.

"Oh, he is invested," Taehyung crows, clapping his hands together. "Jimin, you're up. Save us from Sora's blackmail archive before she starts listing my embarrassing bedroom habits next."

Jimin doesn't laugh. He slowly lifts his gaze from your flushed face, his sharp eyes finally settling on Jeongguk.

The contrast between them is deafening—Jeongguk is all loose, dangerous edges and dark, leaning gravity, while Jimin sits perfectly still, a quiet, protective wall of pure calculation.

"Never have I ever," Jimin starts, his voice dropping the playful edge completely, ringing out with a clear, sober weight that cuts straight through the tequila fog in your brain. He looks directly at Jeongguk, his fingers tapping a slow, rhythmic beat against his porcelain cup. "...stayed in a room where I knew I wasn't welcome, just to see how much damage I could cause."

The bickering between Sora and Taehyung instantly dies down, the sudden shift in Jimin's tone putting an abrupt brake on the chaotic energy of the table.

Jeongguk's eyes slowly slide away from your neck, turning to meet Jimin's gaze across the sticky wood. The silence that stretches between them is suffocating, a heavy, unyielding pressure that makes the loud bass of the bar feel miles away. Jeongguk doesn't drop his smirk, but it sharpens, turning into something cold and entirely unbothered.

Without breaking eye contact with Jimin, Jeongguk reaches down, wraps his pale fingers around his fresh whiskey glass, and lifts it.

He takes a slow, deep swallow, the muscle in his jaw flexing as he downs the amber liquid. He sets the glass down with a heavy, deliberate clink.

"Damage is subjective," Jeongguk rough-whispers, his dark eyes flashing with a wicked, lawless heat before his gaze slides slowly, heavily back down to you. "Sometimes, you just have to clear out the structure to see what's actually underneath."

The air in the booth feels thick, nearly unbreathable, entirely consumed by the dangerous, magnetic frequency humming between you and Jeongguk. It's infuriating how solid he feels beside you, how completely unshakeable he remains under Jimin's warning glare and Sora's prying questions.

It fills you with a sharp, bitter wave of annoyance because he is so entirely, ruthlessly sure of himself—of his space, his words, the exact weight of his thigh against yours—while you have never felt sure of anything in your life.

He looks at you as if he has the chaotic map of your entire psychology figured out, as if your quiet predictability is a lock he picked months ago without even trying. And beneath the tequila-induced haze, your mind circles right back to the terrifying, unresolved question that has haunted you for weeks: how easily, how effortlessly, he dismantled the rigid, years-long structure of your relationship with just a few low words and a single, unbothered glance. He didn't even have to break the lines of your life; he just stood there and let you realize how desperately you wanted to cross them.

"You guys are being entirely too deep for a night out," Sora groans, breaking the heavy spell as she slumps completely against Taehyung's shoulder, her eyes half-closed. "The structural integrity of my brain is collapsing. Jimin, take me home before I fall asleep on this sticky velvet."

"Yeah, I think we're done here," Taehyung says, his warm voice dropping into a gentle, sleepy register as he wraps an arm around her to steady her. He looks across the table, his boxy grin softer now. "Jimin? You splitting the cab with?"

"Yeah, I'll take Sora too since she's on the way," Jimin murmurs, his eyes lingering on your face for one final, heavy second. He sets down his wallet, his profile tightening with that silent, protective warning as he stands up from the booth.

The cold night air hits your face the second you step outside the heavy doors of the Teaspoon of Sin, but it does nothing to cool the persistent, stinging flush on your cheeks. Beside you, Jimin practically has to carry a completely deflated Sora down the concrete steps, while Taehyung walks a half-step behind them, his hands shoved deep into his pockets.

A pair of bright headlights cuts through the dark street, a sleek silver sedan pulling up to the curb with its hazard lights blinking.

"Ooh, that's us," Taehyung hums, expertly shuffling Sora toward the door as it clicks open. He looks back over his shoulder, offering you a sleepy, fond wave. "Get home safe, Y/N. Don't let the emo boy convince you to buy a motorcycle."

"Goodnight, Tae," you murmur, your voice still a little thick from the tequila.

Jimin pauses by the open car door. He doesn't look at Taehyung, and he definitely doesn't look at the space behind you where Jeongguk is currently standing, his heavy leather jacket catching the dim glow of the streetlamp. He doesn't say anything out loud—he doesn't need to—but the tight line of his jaw repeats the same warning he's been calculating all night: Go home to yours.

Then, the door clicks shut, and the taillights disappear into the city traffic, leaving a sudden, ringing silence on the pavement.

The street is empty. The ambient noise of the city hums somewhere in the distance, but right here, the only real sound is the quiet, rhythmic click of Jeongguk's lighter. You don't turn around, but you can smell the immediate, sharp scent of tobacco blending with the lingering traces of his heavy woodsmoke cologne.

You pull out your phone, your clumsy fingers tapping the screen to check the progress of your own ride.

8 minutes away.

A shadow stretches over yours on the concrete. Jeongguk steps up right beside you, the heat radiating off his body instantly cutting through the crisp night air. He doesn't look at his phone. He just leans his shoulder against the cold brick wall of the building, exhaling a slow, grey plume of smoke into the dark.

He takes his time. The silence stretches, tight and loaded, until he finally drops his hand, the cherry of his cigarette giving the rings that decorate his finger a specific, shy glint.

"You're going to his?" he asks.

His voice is low, a rough, gravelly rasp that feels entirely too intimate for the open street. There's no mockery in it this time, no lazy smirk trailing the syllables. It's just a flat, direct question, his dark eyes cutting through the shadows to lock onto the side of your face, waiting to see exactly how much structure you're about to run back to.

You stare down at your phone screen, watching the little digital car icon lag across a map that feels entirely too small for how vast and empty the street suddenly is.

7 minutes away.

"Yes," you say, the word coming out a little stiffer than you intend. You shift your weight, your heels clicking softly against the concrete, trying to summon that unbothered, lazy slant of your shoulders you had back in the booth. "I'm going to his place."

Jeongguk takes another slow drag of his cigarette. The tip glows a violent, angry orange in the dim space between you, illuminating the sharp, cut line of his jaw and the tight, flat set of his lips. He doesn't look surprised. If anything, the answer just seems to feed into whatever cynical equation he's been running on you all night.

"To the tax form," he murmurs, his rough voice carrying a faint, mocking edge as he throws your own game back at you. He exhales the smoke sideways, away from your face, but the wind catches it anyway, wrapping you in his scent. "Back to the sterile sheets and the room spray."

Your throat tightens. It annoys you how easily he strips away the defense mechanisms you spent the last two hours building up. "It's my life, Jeongguk."

"It's a cage," he corrects smoothly, his eyes cutting through the haze to pin you down. He steps away from the brick wall, closing the small distance between you until his leather jacket is practically brushing your arm. The sheer mass of his presence is overwhelming out here without the crowded table to act as a buffer. "You spend the whole night biting back, looking like a live wire because someone dared to pull you out of your little lines, and now you're just going to click right back into place? Let him put the collar back on?"

"You don't know anything about my relationship," you snap, finally turning your head to glare at him, your heart doing a strange, frantic skip behind your ribs. The tequila is still humming, making you entirely too raw.

"I know you didn't drink when the question about the car sex came up," Jeongguk rough-whispers, tilting his head down, his gaze dropping to your lips before lifting back to your eyes with a slow, heavy gravity. The smirk returns, but it's small, dangerous, and devoid of humor. "And I know you didn't drink when Taehyung asked who you've been thinking about naked."

"Why would I?"

"Because you’re bored out of your mind with Dr. Proper"

Your breath hitches, the crisp night air suddenly feeling hot in your lungs. You want to tell him he's wrong. You want to tell him that Minho is safe, that Minho is the future you planned, that Minho doesn't leave a mess.

"You think you have me completely figured out," you breathe, your voice dropping, thick with the tequila and the sudden, suffocating proximity of him. You tilt your chin up, your eyes locking onto the sharp line of his jaw as you step closer, matching his dangerous gravity. "Just because I haven't had sex in a car?"

Jeongguk doesn't flinch. A slow, heavy smile finally pulls at the corner of his lips, his eyes darkening by a fraction of a degree as they slide deliberately down to your mouth. The sheer, electric heat radiating off his leather jacket is overwhelming, trapping you in a private, lawless bubble right there on the pavement.

"That just denotes you're afraid to live. Or have fun," he rough-whispers.

His voice is a low, gravelly vibration that hits you straight in the chest, his lips brushing the cool air just a centimeter from the shell of your ear. He takes a slow drag of his cigarette, the tip glowing violent and angry between his ink-stained fingers, illuminating the intense, unbothered focus in his gaze.

"You're terrified of the mess," he murmurs, exhaling a thin plume of smoke that wraps around your face, his thigh shifting just enough to graze your leg. "You want to keep everything in your neat little lines because you know the second you let someone break them, you won't want to go back."

He drops the cigarette to the concrete, crushing it beneath the sole of his boot with a slow, heavy twist, never breaking eye contact. He steps fully into your space, his towering frame completely blocking out the dim light of the streetlamp, trapping you against the cold brick wall. The heavy woodsmoke and tobacco scent on him is entirely intoxicating, clouding your judgment far worse than the tequila.

He leans down, his chest nearly brushing yours, his hand rising to rest flat against the brick right beside your head.

He doesn't touch you, but the sheer, suffocating proximity makes your breath hitch.

"Let's play one more round," he rough-whispers, his voice dropping into a dark, gravelly register meant entirely for the tight space between your lips. His dark eyes lock onto yours, heavy, intrusive, and completely unanchored by boundaries. "Never have I ever... had to pretend to finish because the person I was with was too clinical to actually get me there. Ball park, Void."

The question is an absolute violation of your privacy, a direct, ruthless strike to the center of everything you keep hidden under Minho's sterile sheets. But Jeongguk doesn't care. He just watches the way your throat swallows, his smirk turning into something deeply knowing and lawless as his gaze deliberately tracks the sharp, erratic rise and fall of your chest.

"Tell me, Void," he murmurs, his lips brushing the hot, flushed skin right at the edge of your cheek. "Do you need to take a drink for that one?"

But your phone buzzes in your hand.

Your ride is arriving.

A pair of bright headlights sweeps across the asphalt, bathing both of you in a harsh, revealing white light as a sedan pulls up to the curb.

Jeongguk doesn't move away. He stands right there, his ink-stained setting free the wall they've held captive.

He looks at the car, then looks back at you, his eyes darker than the street behind him.

"Go on then," he murmurs, his voice dropping into a low, gravelly vibration that feels less like a permission and more like a dare. "Go back to the quiet. Let's see how long you can stand the silence before you want to be loud again."

The ride inside the sedan passes in a dark, neon-blurred trance, the sound of your own pulse hammering against your eardrums far louder than the rattle of the car's exhaust. Jeongguk's final words loop relentlessly through your mind like a dangerous rhythm you can't shake, his rough voice still clinging to your skin alongside the sharp, smoky trace of his tobacco.

When the car pulls up to the familiar, manicured curb of Minho's apartment complex, the sudden absence of the car's motion snaps you back to reality. You step out onto the pavement, your legs feeling heavy, weighted down by a volatile mix of tequila and sheer emotional exhaustion.

The lobby is dead silent, a pristine expanse of polished marble and muted corporate lighting that feels completely devoid of life. As you ride the elevator up to his floor, you catch your reflection in the mirrored walls. Your cheeks are still flushed, your hair a little windswept from the street, looking entirely too chaotic for the space you are about to enter.

You stand before his door, your clumsy, trembling fingers fishing the key out of your bag. When you turn it in the lock, the mechanism slides open with a smooth, well-oiled click.

Stepping inside, the apartment wraps around you instantly—not with warmth, but with the crisp, sterile scent of Clean Cotton room spray and absolute, suffocating stillness. There is no thumping bass here. No reckless laughter. No dangerous, ink-stained fingers crowding your space. Everything is perfectly aligned, minimal, and terrifyingly quiet.

"Babe? You're home late," Minho's smooth, melodic voice carries from the open kitchen.

He stands by the marble island, already changed into a pristine, heather-gray lounge shirt, looking completely unbothered, completely stable.

He sets down a mug, a gentle, welcoming smile gracing his features as he steps toward you. He doesn't look angry.

He never gets angry.

He just opens his arms, stepping into your space to draw you into a secure, predictable embrace.

As your chin rests against his shoulder, your eyes drift past him, locking straight onto the kitchen counter where his phone lies face-up on the spotless surface.

The screen lights up with a fresh notification.

silly goose🎀: thanks for checking the layout edits! see you tomorrow. left my keys on your desk btw x

The little pink ribbon emoji and the casual, privately intimate nickname stare back at you. Your mind instantly flashes to your own contact entry on his phone, saved with sterile, legal precision: your first name, your last name. No emojis. No nicknames. Just structure.

Standing in his arms, the tequila in your veins suddenly curdles into pure, scorching adrenaline. Jeongguk's intrusive, dark question echoes in your mind with a violent clarity, tearing right through the neat, quiet lines of your life.

You pull back from his chest, your hands dropping to your sides as you look up at him, your voice cutting through the lifeless, synthetic air of the room.

"Who's silly goose?"

Minho pauses, his arms hovering in the empty space between you for a fraction of a second before they drop elegantly to his sides. The gentle, welcoming smile on his face doesn't vanish; it simply tightens, morphing into that smooth, slightly patronizing expression he uses whenever he thinks you're being unreasonable.

"Babe," he says softly, a low chuckle bubbling in his throat as he reaches out to brush a stray lock of hair behind your ear. His fingers are cool against your burning skin. "I've told you about the project with Irina. She changed her own contact name on my phone weeks ago as a joke during the gallery layout crunch. Don't be dramatic."

"I'm not being dramatic," you say, stepping backward, away from his touch. The movement is sharp, entirely uncharacteristic of the quiet, compliant girl he's used to. Your knuckles white-clench around the strap of your bag. "You have me saved by my full government name, Minho. First and last. Like a tax document. But she gets a ribbon emoji? She gets to text you x's at midnight?"

Minho's eyes flatten, the warmth completely evaporating from his gaze even as his perfect posture remains entirely intact. He lets out a slow, controlled breath through his nose—the classic sign that he is exercising his immense, saintly patience with you.

"You're drunk," he states flatly. His voice drops into that hypnotic, measured cadence meant to make you feel small, loud, and entirely irrational. "Those chaotic art friends of yours have clearly filled your head with nonsense tonight. I am not going to argue with you when you smell like a smoky basement. Go wash the liquor off your skin, and we'll talk in the morning when you're rational."

"No," you snap, the word ripping out of your throat with a violent, unvarnished force that shocks even you.

The pristine, minimalist walls of his living room suddenly feel like they're caving in on you. Jeongguk's low, gravelly whisper on the street echoes in your ears with terrifying clarity—denotes you're afraid to live.

You look at Minho, standing there in his perfect heather-gray shirt, so stable, so clean, and so completely incapable of matching the absolute storm raging behind your ribs.

"We're talking about it right now," you breathe, stepping fully into his space, your chest heaving in sharp, erratic breaths. "Why is everything with us a legal contract, Minho? Why do I have to fit into this perfect, quiet little box just to keep you happy, while she gets to make a mess?"

Minho's jaw flexes, a dangerous, icy stillness settling over his features as he steps up to the marble island, setting his mug down with a sharp, heavy clink that shatters the sterile quiet of the kitchen.

"Because you wanted a real future," he says, his voice dropping into a low, menacingly calm register as he looks down at you. "And a real future requires structure. If you want reckless, disorganized drama, you can go back to the dive bars. But in this apartment, we don't act like children."

The word children acts like a match dropped directly into a barrel of gasoline. Every single ounce of restraint you've practiced for months, every quiet nod, every time you shrunk yourself to fit into his minimalist aesthetic—it all vaporizes in a single, scalding second.

"Don't call me a child," you say, your voice cracking, but carrying a terrifying, unstable weight that actually makes him blink. You take a step closer, your chest heaving against the suffocating boundaries of his perfect kitchen. "I have spent years erasing every single edge of myself so I wouldn't make a mess in your life! I let you dictate how I dress, who I talk to, how loud I can be, because I thought it meant you cared about me. But you don't want a partner, Minho. You want a piece of furniture that doesn't talk back!"

Minho doesn't flinch. Instead, his expression softens in a way that makes your stomach instantly turn. He lets out a tiny, pitying sigh and takes a slow step toward you, lifting his hands in a placating, peaceful gesture.

"Look at how worked up you are, babe," he says, his voice dropping into that terrifyingly gentle, hypnotic register. He steps close enough that you can smell his expensive, clean cologne, entirely devoid of the smoke and raw earth that was just crowding you outside. "You're yelling. You never yell. Do you hear how irrational you sound right now? You're letting your insecurities over a dumb little emoji turn into a full-blown delusion."

He reaches out, his cool, steady fingers gently clasping your upper arms, his grip firm enough to anchor you but soft enough to look like comfort.

His comfort.

"I know you've been stressed about your reviews," he murmurs, his eyes looking down at you with a perfectly orchestrated display of deep, soulful worry. "And then you go out, get poisoned by cheap liquor with Sora, and let her toxic drama get inside your head. You're projecting their mess onto us. I'm the one who protects you, remember? I'm the one who gives you stability when your world gets chaotic."

He leans down, trying to catch your eyes, pressing his thumb gently against your skin. It's the exact routine. The flawless, structural dismantling of your sanity. He creates the outline, labels you as the problem, and then offers himself as the only solution.

"Come on," he whispers, a tender, reassuring smile tugging at his lips. "Let's get you out of these clothes. You're not yourself right now. Tomorrow you're going to wake up and realize how silly this entire scene was."

"Oh silly like silly goose Irina?"

The words cut straight through his calm, rehearsed rhythm. Minho's smile doesn't just tighten this time—it freezes completely, his fingers stiffening against your arms. For a split second, the polished, unbothered facade cracks, revealing a cold, defensive wall underneath. But before he can open his mouth to deploy another measured, hypnotic excuse, something shifts violently inside your chest.

The anger that had been keeping you upright suddenly bottomless-drops into a hollow, exhausting ache.

A hot, stinging tear spills over your eyelashes, cutting a wet path down your flushed cheek, followed instantly by another. Your shoulders shake as you forcefully wrench your arms out of his cool, steady grip, stepping backward until the small of your back hits the cold edge of the marble island. You wipe at your face with the back of your hand, but it's completely useless; the integrity of your restraint has completely collapsed, and you are finally breaking apart in the center of his perfect room.

"Why isn't there any citrus scent in your apartment?" you choke out, your voice cracking completely into a wet, desperate sob.

Minho blinks, his hands still hovering in the empty air where he had been holding you. A look of genuine, profound confusion crosses his face as his analytical brain scrambles to find the logic in your sudden, tearful detour.

"What?" he asks, his tone losing a fraction of its smooth control. "Babe, what are you talking about? You know I only use the Clean Cotton spray. Citrus is completely overwhelming for this layout."

He doesn’t even understand what he said. Minho doesn’t fucking remember he said he liked citrus.

You’re the idiot who remembers.

"Exactly!" you cry out, a fresh wave of hot tears blinding you as you gesture wildly to the sterile, gray-toned living room around you. "Exactly. It's overwhelming for your layout. Everything is for your layout!"

"Everything has a designated shelf, Minho! Every single thing down to the millimeter!" you sob, your chest tight, completely fracturing under the weight of the years you spent shrinking yourself to fit into his lines. "Even me. I'm just a decoration you picked out to match your minimalist aesthetic, aren't I? I have spent years suffocating in this quiet, wiping my own tears before they could stain your pristine counters, because God forbid I make a single mess in your perfect world!"

Minho stands entirely paralyzed, his hands still frozen in that empty, useless space between you. He doesn't step forward to hold you while you break. He doesn't drop to his knees to gather up the pieces of the girl he claims to love. He just watches you cry with a horrifying, detached curiosity, his brain desperately trying to categorize your raw heartbreak into a flaw in the system.

"You don't even look at me when we're in bed," you whisper, the realization ripping through you so violently it feels like a physical tear in your chest. A fresh, blinding wave of hot tears spills over your lashes, blurring his flawless, unmoving silhouette. "You touch me like you're checking items off a checklist. Perfectly scheduled. Perfectly sterile. I have to pretend... I have to fake being happy just so your ego doesn't get bruised by my reality."

You look around the lifeless, gray-toned room, the heavy scent of Clean Cotton suddenly tasting like ash in your throat. Your heart is completely emptying out, leaving nothing but a vast, hollow ache behind your ribs.

You thought safety meant love. You thought compliance meant a future.

"I don't even know who I am anymore," you choke out, a broken, breathless sound escaping your lips as you press your palms flat against your face, trying to stop the bleeding. "I am so, so tired of being the quiet girl, Minho. I am dying in this silence."

"You're dramatic. You've never complained until now."

The cold, matter-of-fact tone hits you like ice water, instantly freezing the breath in your lungs. He doesn't even use the word dramatic to validate your pain—he treats your heartbreak like a design flaw, an unexpected shift in a baseline he thought he had permanently locked down.

"I didn't complain because I was terrified of losing you," you whisper, your hands dropping from your face as you stare at him through a blurred, heavy lens of tears. Your voice sounds so small, so completely gutted, echoing off the high concrete ceilings of his living room. "I thought... I thought if I just behaved, if I was clean enough, quiet enough, you would finally love me the way I needed you to. But you don't even see me, Minho. You never did."

Minho's expression remains perfectly, chillingly composed. He slowly crosses his arms, leaning back against the edge of the spotless counter, his posture entirely unbothered by the fact that you are standing three feet away from him, completely bleeding out.

"I have given you everything a rational person could want," he says, his voice a low, terrifyingly steady drone that cuts right through your quiet sobs. "A beautiful home. Stability. A future. And you're throwing a tantrum over a work thing's text and a lack of citrus scent. It's pathetic."

The word pathetic doesn't make you angry. It just sinks into your chest like a lead weight, dragging down the very last piece of hope you had left for this relationship. The realization settles into your bones, heavy and devastatingly permanent: there is no version of this story where he holds you. There is no version where he understands the absolute agony of drowning in a life that was built to look like a gallery display.

"You're right," you choke out, a broken, empty laugh escaping your lips as a fresh wave of tears blinds you. You reach down, your trembling fingers grabbing the handle of your bag from the counter. "It is pathetic. It's pathetic that I stayed here for so long, letting you convince me that I was the problem just because I wanted to feel alive. Making me feel like I'm broken. There is life devoid of colors by the way. I've seen it."

You turn toward the front door, the crisp, lifeless scent of Clean Cotton wrapping around your throat one last time, suffocating and entirely synthetic.

"Where are you going?" Minho calls out, his tone sharpening by a single, icy fraction, the first real sign of irritation breaking through his mask. "It's past midnight. Don't do something you're going to regret."

"I'm already doing what I regret," you whisper, not looking back as you push the heavy door open and step out into the sterile, quiet hallway, leaving his perfect layout behind you in the dark.

The heavy door clicks shut behind you, the sound echoing through the empty, carpeted hallway with a terrifyingly permanent snap. You walk toward the elevator on autopilot, your legs shaking so violently you have to press your palm flat against the cold drywall just to keep from collapsing.

The tears are still coming, silent and hot, blurring the sterile fluorescent lights overhead into streaks of jagged white. You press the button, and as you wait in the dead quiet of the corridor.

Your eyes catch on the timestamp of Minho's lock screen from just ten minutes ago. silly goose 🎀: left my keys on your desk btw x.

The fog in your brain, the heavy tequila, the suffocating panic—it all clears in a single, brutal second of absolute, freezing clarity.

Left my keys on your desk. Minho doesn't have a desk at the university gallery. He hasn't worked on campus layout reviews in over a year. He’s always in the medical research lab.

The only desk he uses for catalog proofing is the custom-built, walnut workstation in his private home office. The one at the back of this very apartment. The one he locks when he goes to meetings.

She hadn't left her keys at a university office. She had left them here. In his sanctuary. While you were at studio reviews. While you were shrinking yourself into a corner, trying to figure out how to be a better decoration for his life, another girl was leaving her keys on his desk and changing her name to a nickname with a pink ribbon.

He was cheating.

He had been cheating.

The structure wasn't there to protect you—it was a cage built to keep you blind, a calculated system designed to make you question your own sanity so you would never look closely enough to see the rot underneath.

A broken, breathless sound escapes your lips, a sob that turns into a sharp, bitter laugh in the empty elevator cabin as the doors slide open.

Jeongguk was right.

The thought hits you like a physical blow to the chest, making your knees buckle as you step inside the mirrored box. He did see the right frequency. He had sat across from you in that sticky velvet booth, with his lawless smirk and his dark, intrusive questions, and he had looked straight through the neat, quiet lines of your life to the exact place where you were bleeding out.

He didn't even know Minho, but he knew the anatomy of a cage. He knew the precise weight of a silence that was killing you.

You press your back against the mirror, sliding down until you're sitting on the clean elevator floor, burying your face in your knees as the elevator drops. You aren't just crying for the betrayal anymore. You're crying because of how ruthlessly, how easily, Jeongguk had dismantled your entire existence with a single look on a street corner—and how desperately, terrifyingly right he was.

You’re drowning in your own tears, you need to swim.

But do you want to?

next chapter | previous

[ttabacco]

Taehyung in Faux Colors moodboard

yes, he does smell like Relique d'Amour by Oriza L.Legrand. he also listens to jazz. i need him

[ttabacco]

hey dear, are you a new writer? can you recommend me which fic of yours to read first.

also you dark core aesthetic is amazing :)

ahh hello darling!! i’m new to tumblr, yes. ive been posting on wattpad since i was 14. however in a tragic accident i lost my OG account and i have a new one now.

I only have one ongoing fic rn which is Faux Colors with Jungkook.

I have posted two other one shots—smutty jimin one, and an old jk one.

thank you so much for the compliment also :)

[ttabacco]

i'm sorry but u r so hawtttt for ur smoky aesthetic, u always remind me ok ash, rainy wednesdays, water against hot asphalt and Taylor's delicate for some reason😭❤😭❤im obsessed ngl.

and faux jk is doing things to me i didnt know cud be done even when he's being an innate ass.

you’re being so sweet stopppp (but also don’t)

huge compliment, thank you.

regarding faux colors jk..yes. you haven't even seen NOTHING yet. he didn't even trespass in the freaked out territory, you should see the things he’s capable of [gulps]

i’ll leave crumbs tho, yk i will. maybe a never have i ever game? who knows.

i do leave snippets and teasers on tiktok (hyangsu.txt) if you’re interested.

once again thank you for reading my story!! and for sending such a sweet message. <3 made my day