𝑲𝒊𝒔𝒔 & 𝑻𝒆𝒍𝒍 p.sh ┃ 𝒑𝒂𝒓𝒕 𝒐𝒏𝒆
Since freshman year, you’ve run the university’s anonymous gossip blog, Kiss & Tell. You’ve seen it all: cheating allegations, toxic situationships and at least forty-seven complaints about the cafeteria chicken. But nothing floods your inbox more than posts about PARK SUNGHOON — the university’s resident fuckboy and walking bad decision. So for the blog’s final exposé, you decide to write about him. Too bad Sunghoon’s already in the middle of a bet with his friends: to keep a girl for thirteen days. And somehow, the anonymous girl tearing him apart online becomes the only one he can’t stop thinking about.
pairings. fuckboy!sunghoon x female!reader ┃ wc. 13.2k
content warnings. dual pov · hidden motives · miscommunication · fake dating adjacent · emotional manipulation · pining (both sides, they’re so stupid) · explicit sexual content — oral f. receiving, fingering, multiple orgasms, overstimulation, size kink, praise kink, dirty talk, light possessiveness, marking · dramatic irony · this will hurt you and I’m not apologising for it
laceys note // the fic I’ve been most nervous to post… there is SO much happening in this one and I genuinely don’t know how yall are going to react 😋 yes this is heavily inspired by How To Lose A Guy and Gossip Girl x anyway hope yall enjoy and as always thank you for reading 🥰
🤍 kiss & tell
This year I’m giving you something special.
You’ve been asking for it since freshman year. The tips have been piling up in my inbox for three years running — do a piece on him, Kiss & Tell, someone needs to say something, Kiss & Tell, he did it again, Kiss & Tell, Kiss & Tell, Kiss & Tell.
Ask and you shall receive, darlings.
Introducing: 13 Ways To Lose Your Certified Campus Fuckboy.
Thirteen tips. Thirteen days. One subject who has absolutely no idea what’s coming.
We begin next week. You didn’t hear it from me though, because I don’t kiss & tell. x
[1,204 readers. 47 comments.]
FINALLY.
is it who I think it is.
kiss & tell if you’re reading this I have THREE submissions about this man please check ur inbox.
—
The thing about Park Sunghoon is that he is, by every available metric, exactly what the submissions said he was.
You’ve done your research. Three weeks of it, thorough and methodical, the kind of research you’d do for an actual piece — which this is, you’ve decided, this absolutely counts as journalism, your professor would probably disagree but your professor also gave you a C minus on your piece about the university’s dining hall monopoly which was genuinely your best work so his opinion is noted and filed in the bin.
You have a google doc. It has sections. There’s a tab called subjects and a tab called timeline and a tab called tips (working) and another one called notes which is mostly just screenshots of anonymous submissions that all say some version of the same thing: he’s charming, he’s beautiful, he made me feel like the only person in the room, and then he was gone, and I’m fairly certain he didn’t know my name by the end of it.
Seventeen submissions. Seventeen different girls. One name, consistent, at the centre of all of them.
Park Sunghoon. Figure skating scholarship. Second year Humanities, now final year. Shares a house off campus with Jay Park and Lee Heeseung, both of whom feature in the submissions as background characters — his friends were there, they seemed nice, Jay remembered my name even if Sunghoon didn’t appearing in three separate accounts with the specific poignancy of a detail nobody coordinated.
He has a type, according to the submissions. Which is to say he doesn’t have a type. He’ll talk to anyone, charm anyone, make anyone feel chosen — and then the choosing stops, and he moves on, and the girl is left standing in the aftermath wondering what she did wrong when the answer is nothing, the answer is that’s just what he does, the answer is you were never going to be the exception because Park Sunghoon doesn’t do exceptions.
He does this, you’ve established, approximately once every two to three weeks. He’s been doing it since freshman year. He has never, by any account you can find, caught feelings. He has never once, to anyone’s knowledge, repeated a girl.
He is, in short, a certified campus fuckboy, and he has been getting away with it for three years because he’s beautiful and charming and genuinely good company right up until the moment he isn’t, and by then it’s too late.
Not anymore.
You have a plan. The plan is elegant and slightly unhinged and Minji — your best friend, Kiss & Tell’s only reader who knows the writer — has called it both those things and also added extremely on brand for you which you take as the highest possible compliment.
Thirteen tips. The clingy, overwhelming, emotionally catastrophic playbook of everything a man like Sunghoon runs from. You’re going to deploy every single one, document it in real time, post it to the blog, and by day thirteen he’ll have run screaming and Kiss & Tell will have its most-read piece of the year and you’ll have actually done something with your journalism degree that matters.
The only thing you need is an in.
Which is, currently, the one gap in the plan.
You’ve been thinking about this for three days when Minji texts you at 9PM on a Friday: jisoo’s having people over. sunghoon will be there. i heard jay mention it.
You look at the message.
You look at your google doc.
You close your laptop, get up, and start getting dressed.
Jisoo’s apartment is the kind of place that fits thirty people comfortably and currently has approximately sixty, which means the music is too loud and the drinks are wherever you can find them and the air has that particular quality of a Friday night that’s fully committed to itself.
You arrive with Minji at ten, already knowing the layout — Jisoo’s place is a known quantity, you’ve been here before, the kitchen is to the left and the living room is straight ahead and the back patio is where people go when the inside gets too much.
You find a drink. You find a wall. You survey the room with the practiced efficiency of someone who has been reporting on this campus for three years.
You find him in four seconds.
He’s not hard to find. That’s the first thing — he doesn’t try to be found, he doesn’t need to, he simply exists in a room and the room orients around him without being asked. He’s tall, which you knew, and he’s wearing something simple, which you didn’t expect, dark jeans and a plain shirt and the specific ease of someone who has never once had to try very hard.
He’s laughing at something Jay said — Jay, beside him, is grinning with the energy of someone who said something very funny and knows it — and the laugh is real, you can tell from here, unperformed, and this is information you file away because it matters. The charm is one thing. The realness underneath it is something else.
You’ve been looking at him for approximately thirty seconds before Minji says, very quietly, “you’re staring.”
“I’m researching,” you say.
“You have a look on your face.”
“It’s my research face.”
“It’s not your research face,” Minji says, and takes a sip of her drink with the serenity of someone who is going to be right about this and knows it and is content to wait.
Three hours earlier, Jisoo’s apartment is already filling up when Jay Park has his idea.
This is, historically, how most problems begin.
He’s standing with Sunghoon near the back wall, both of them with drinks, watching the room do what rooms do on Friday nights — fill up, get louder, become the kind of atmosphere where things happen that people talk about on Monday.
Jay is on his second drink. Sunghoon is on his first. This ratio is relevant.
“Can I ask you something,” Jay says.
“No,” Sunghoon says.
“When’s the last time you actually—” Jay makes a vague gesture that encompasses a significant amount of meaning. “You know. Stayed.”
Sunghoon looks at him flatly. “What.”
“With someone. Longer than — you know. The usual.”
“I don’t have a usual.”
“You absolutely have a usual,” Jay says. “8 days maximum. You don’t learn their names by the end. You move on. It’s a whole thing.” He tilts his head. “When’s the last time you actually kept someone around?”
Sunghoon is quiet for a moment. He drinks his drink.
“Why,” he says, which is not an answer.
“I was just thinking,” Jay says, with the careful casualness of a man who has been thinking about this for longer than just now, “that it’s been a while. And I was thinking about whether you actually could. If you tried.”
“Could what?”
“Keep someone.” Jay looks at him. “Like. Actually keep her. Not the thing you do. The real version.”
“I keep people.”
“Sunghoon.”
“I do.”
“You kept Chaewon for seven days in second year and forgot her name on day four,” Jay says. “She was in three of my seminars. It was a whole thing.”
Sunghoon says nothing.
“Thirteen days,” Jay says, and the number arrives in the air between them with the particular weight of a challenge that’s been building to its own conclusion. “That’s what I’m saying. Thirteen days. One girl. You actually try. I don’t think you can do it.”
And there it is.
Sunghoon looks at him.
Jay looks back with the grin of someone who has just deployed the one thing that has never once failed to work on Park Sunghoon, which is I don’t think you can.
It goes all the way back to when they were seventeen and Jay said I don’t think you can land that triple and Sunghoon landed it, and then again at eighteen when Jay said I don’t think you can get into that programme and Sunghoon got into that programme, and now they are twenty-two and standing at a party on a Friday night and Jay has said I don’t think you can and the outcome is, as always, inevitable.
“Thirteen days,” Sunghoon says.
“Thirteen days.”
“Fine.”
Jay blinks. Even knowing it was coming, even having built to it, the speed of it catches him off guard. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Sunghoon finishes his drink. Sets the glass down. “Fine.”
Jay opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again with the expression of a man who has just heard the trap click shut and has only just registered that he was also standing in it.
“Great,” he says, slightly less certainly than he’d like. “That’s — yeah. Great.”
“Who loses,” Sunghoon says.
“What?”
“If I lose. What do I owe you.”
“I—” Jay hadn’t gotten this far. “I don’t know. Bragging rights.”
“Bragging rights,” Sunghoon repeats, unimpressed.
“And you do my laundry for a month.”
“And if I win?”
“You won’t.”
“Jay.”
“Fine. If you win I’ll do your laundry for a month and I’ll admit in front of Heeseung that you were right about the Ateez album.”
A pause.
“Deal,” Sunghoon says immediately.
They shake on it. Jay watches him scan the room with the quiet, unhurried focus of someone who has just been given a task and is already approaching it systematically, and feels, somewhere in the vicinity of his stomach, the specific sensation of having made a decision he doesn’t fully understand yet.
He takes a long drink.
He tells himself it’ll be fine.
—
“He’s at the drinks table,” Minji says. “Corner of the kitchen. Jay’s with him but Jay just got pulled into something in the living room so Sunghoon’s alone.”
You look at her.
“You’ve been tracking him,” you say.
“I’ve been observing,” she says. “Go. And look like you’re going for a drink, not like you’re going for him.”
“I know how to walk into a kitchen, Minji.”
“You know how to walk into a kitchen like a journalist on an assignment,” she says. “Which is different. Relax your face.”
You relax your face.
“More,” she says.
You relax it more.
“Good. Go.”
You go.
The kitchen is quieter than the living room, the particular relief of a party room that isn’t the main event — a handful of people, the counter lined with bottles, the window cracked open letting in the cold October air.
He’s exactly where Minji said he’d be.
You clock him in your peripheral vision and do not look directly at him, which is a skill you have developed specifically for this kind of thing — the journalistic sidelong awareness, present without being obvious. You move toward the drinks table with the energy of someone who wants a drink and only a drink and has no awareness whatsoever of the person three feet to her left.
You reach for a bottle.
He reaches for the same one.
Your hands arrive at the neck of it at the same moment.
You look up.
He looks down.
Up close he is — and you’re going to note this for the record and then never think about it again — significantly more than his submissions prepared you for. Which is saying something, because the submissions were not understating it. But there is a difference between objectively good looking as a reported fact and objectively good looking as a thing happening to you personally at close range on a Friday night, and the difference is considerable and you are a journalist and this is a story and you absolutely clock it and file it away and move on.
“Sorry,” you both say, at the same time.
A beat.
He takes his hand off the bottle. “Go ahead.”
“No, it’s—” You gesture. “You were here first.”
“I wasn’t, actually.” Something in his expression is doing a thing — a quiet recalibration, the kind of look that assesses and concludes and moves forward. “I just got here.”
“Same time, then,” you say.
“Same time,” he agrees. He picks up the bottle. Pours two glasses without asking. Hands one to you.
You look at it.
“Bold,” you say.
“You were reaching for it,” he says simply. “Seemed like you wanted it.”
You take the glass. You drink. It’s good — he poured the right thing, which means he clocked what you were reaching for in the half second before you both arrived at it simultaneously, which means he notices things, which is information you file immediately in the subject tab of your mental google doc.
“Sunghoon,” he says.
“I know,” you say, and then catch it. “I think Jisoo mentioned you. She mentioned a few people.”
He looks at you with an expression that suggests he’s heard this kind of recovery before and found it charming rather than annoying, which is somehow worse than if he’d called you out directly.
“Y/N,” you say.
He says your name back, once, quietly. Just to himself. Like he’s storing it.
Something in your chest does something completely unauthorised and you attribute it to the drink.
“Final year?” he asks.
“Journalism,” you say. “You?”
“Literature.” He leans against the counter — not performing it, just settling, the ease of someone completely comfortable in any room he’s in. “And the rink. Early mornings.”
“Figure skating,” you say, as if you’re learning this for the first time, as if it isn’t highlighted in yellow in tab one of the google doc.
“Don’t,” he says.
“Don’t what?”
“Whatever you were about to say.”
“I was going to say it sounds peaceful,” you say. “Early mornings. Quiet rink.”
He looks at you for a moment. Like he was braced for something and got something else instead. “Yeah,” he says, and his voice is slightly different. “It is.”
The kitchen moves around you — people coming in, going out, the ambient noise of a party in full swing — and neither of you moves.
“Can I ask you something,” he says.
“You just did,” you say.
The corner of his mouth does something. Not a smile exactly — the precursor to one, the thing that happens before the decision is made. “Fair,” he says. “Can I ask you something else.”
“Depends what it is.”
“What are you doing tomorrow.”
You look at him. He’s looking back with the steady patience of someone who is used to waiting for things he’s decided he wants, and underneath it something that wasn’t in any of the seventeen submissions — a directness that isn’t performance. He’s not deploying the charm right now. He’s just asking.
You are a journalist. This is a story. Day one begins tomorrow and tip one requires a pet name and you need his number to deploy it.
“I might be free,” you say.
“Might be.”
“Probably am.”
“Can I have your number,” he says, no preamble, just the question, and you think about seventeen girls who probably said yes to this exact question in this exact tone of voice and you think about the google doc and the thirteen tips and the fact that you are not going to be number eighteen.
You are going to be something else entirely.
“Sure,” you say, and take his phone when he hands it over.
You type your number. You type your name. You hand it back.
He looks at the screen. “Just Y/N?”
“You don’t need my last name yet,” you say.
“Yet,” he repeats, and the corner of his mouth commits this time, the full thing, and it gets out before he decides to let it and you think that this specific smile — the unguarded one, the one that isn’t the charm — is going to be the most dangerous part of this entire assignment.
You file it. You move on.
“Goodnight, Sunghoon,” you say, and you take your drink and you leave the kitchen and you do not look back.
In the living room, Minji is waiting with the expression of someone who has been watching through the kitchen doorway for the last four minutes and has formed approximately forty seven opinions.
“Well,” she says.
“I’m in,” you say.
“And?”
You look at your drink.
“He’s worse than the submissions,” you say.
Minji opens her mouth.
“Don’t,” you say.
She closes it. She has the expression of someone who is going to be right about something and has infinite patience.
You drink your drink.
Across the room, through the kitchen doorway, Sunghoon is looking at his phone. You watch him save your contact. Watch him type something. Delete it. Type something else.
Your phone buzzes.
unknown number: it was good to meet you tonight
You save the contact immediately. You stare at what you’ve typed for a moment, then change it.
hoonie 🤍
—
that night, 1:47AM:
hoonie 🤍: it was good to meet you tonight
you: who’s this
hoonie 🤍: you know who this is
you: I might need a reminder
hoonie 🤍: I owe you a drink
you: the one you poured me was actually really good so I think we’re even
A pause. Three dots. Gone. Back again.
hoonie 🤍: what are you doing tomorrow
you: why
hoonie 🤍: no reason. just asking.
you: I’m probably free
hoonie 🤍: I’ll pick you up at 12
you: bold of you to assume you have my address
hoonie 🤍: do I not?
you: …I’ll send it to you
hoonie 🤍: good
you: goodnight
hoonie 🤍: goodnight Y/N
—
🤍 kiss & tell
tip 01: give him a pet name. immediately.
Here’s what nobody tells you about a man who runs on charm — he’s built his whole personality around the way his name sounds in other people’s mouths. He knows how it lands. He’s been watching it land for years.
So take it away.
Give him something else. Something soft and slightly ridiculous, something completely at odds with everything he’s spent three years carefully constructing. Don’t ask permission. Don’t explain it. Just deploy it, directly, and watch what happens to his face.
The goal isn’t to annoy him. The goal is to see who he is when the thing he relies on gets gently, cheerfully removed.
Results to follow
You didn’t hear it from me. x
[1,847 readers overnight. 63 comments.]
she’s actually doing it.
KISS AND TELL THE WAY I SCREAMED.
I know exactly who this is about and I have never felt more seen in my life.
—
He picks you up at twelve.
This is the first thing that surprises you, which you don’t let show — that he said twelve and it’s twelve, exactly, his car pulling up outside your building at eleven fifty-eight and him not texting to say here or outside or any of the things people say when they arrive, just waiting, engine running, until you come out.
You clock this on the way down the stairs. Filed under: he’s punctual. he waited. he didn’t announce himself.
The car is clean. This is the second thing. Not aggressively clean, not the sterile cleanliness of someone performing tidiness — just maintained, looked after, the cleanliness of someone who takes quiet care of things they own. There’s a jacket on the back seat and a reusable coffee cup in the holder and a small air freshener hanging from the mirror that smells like cedar and you are absolutely not going to find this endearing.
“Hey,” he says, when you get in.
“Hi, hoonie,” you say.
A pause.
He looks at you.
You look back.
“Hoonie,” he repeats.
“Mm.”
“That’s—” He stops. Starts again. “Where did that come from.”
“I don’t know,” you say cheerfully. “It just suits you.”
“It doesn’t suit me.”
“I think it really does.”
He looks at you for another moment with an expression that is trying to be flat and not fully succeeding — there’s something underneath it, something that might be the effort of not reacting, which means he is reacting and choosing not to show it, which is more interesting than if he’d just been annoyed.
He puts the car in drive.
“Where are we going?” you ask.
“There’s a place,” he says. “Near the rink. Good food. You’ll like it.”
“How do you know what I’ll like.”
“I don’t,” he says simply. “But if you don’t, we’ll go somewhere else.”
You look at the side of his face.
Filed under: he has a contingency. he’s already thought about what happens if the first plan doesn’t work.
You face forward.
“Hoonie,” you say again, conversationally, and watch his jaw do something in your peripheral vision.
“Please,” he says.
“Please what?”
“Stop.”
“Stop what?”
He glances at you. You are the picture of innocence. He looks back at the road.
“You’re going to keep doing it,” he says. It’s not a question.
“Probably,” you say.
A pause.
“Fine,” he says, and there’s something in it — resigned, but underneath the resignation something else, something that sounds almost like he finds this funny and is refusing to admit it.
You face forward and smile at the windscreen where he can’t see it.
Tip one: deployed.
The place near the rink is small and warm and the food is exactly what he said it would be, which you note because it means he knows what good food is and he knew enough about you after one conversation to make an accurate prediction.
You eat across from each other at a small table by the window and it’s — easy. That’s the thing that keeps catching you off guard, the thing that wasn’t in the submissions. The submissions covered charm, the warmth, the way he makes you feel like the only person in the room. What they didn’t cover was this — the version of him that exists when he’s not performing anything. The version that eats his food without making it an event and asks questions that are short and real and actually listens to the answers.
He asks about journalism. Not oh cool what’s that like but specific things — what you want to do with it, what kind of writing you actually care about, whether you think print is dead or just resting.
“Resting,” you say, firmly.
“Resting,” he repeats, like he’s testing whether he agrees. “Why.”
“Because people still want stories. They just want them differently. The format changed, not the hunger.”
He looks at you across the table. “What do you write?”
“Pieces,” you say. “Long form, mostly. Campus stuff. Culture, people, the way things work underneath the way they look.”
“Anything published?”
“The university paper. Some external stuff.” You take a sip of water. “Nothing that’s set the world on fire yet.”
“Yet,” he says, giving you your own word back, and the corner of his mouth does the thing.
You look at your plate.
Filed under: he pays attention to the exact words you use. he remembers them. he deploys them back.
This is, you think, how he does it. Not the obvious charm — the specific attention. The making-you-feel-like-your-words-matter thing. You’ve been watching for the playbook and this is it, this is the whole thing, and knowing what it is should make it easier to withstand.
It does not make it easier to withstand.
“What about the skating,” you say, because you need to redirect. “How long?”
“Since I was seven,” he says.
“Competitions?”
“Through high school. Regionals, a few nationals.” He says it the way people say things they’re proud of but have learned not to lead with. “Scholarship for university. Now it’s just — mornings. Keeping it.”
“Do you miss competing?”
He’s quiet for a moment. Longer than the other answers.
“Sometimes,” he says. “Not the competing. The clarity of it. When you’re on the ice and there’s a programme to execute, everything else goes quiet.” He looks at his water glass. “I miss the quiet.”
You look at him.
He seems to realise he’s said something more than he meant to, because he looks up and recalibrates slightly — not retreating, just adjusting. “Sorry. That was—”
“Don’t apologise,” you say.
He looks at you.
“It was a real answer,” you say. “Those are better than the other kind.”
Something in his expression shifts. The recalibration stops. He holds your gaze for a moment with the look of someone encountering something unexpected in a place they thought they knew the map of.
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “I guess they are.” You are a journalist. This is a story. You eat your food.
He drives you back at two-thirty.
Outside your building he doesn’t turn the engine off, just parks, and you sit there for a moment in the particular quality of the end of a first — not a date, this is not a date, this is day one of thirteen and you have twelve tips left to deploy.
“I had a good time,” he says.
“Me too,” you say, which is true, which is fine, which is completely consistent with the plan.
“Tomorrow?” he says.
“What about it.”
“Are you free.”
You look at him. “Why, hoonie?”
The jaw thing again. “Because I’d like to see you again. Obviously.”
“Obviously,” you repeat.
“Is that a yes?”
“That’s a probably,” you say, and get out of the car, and don’t look back, and get into the lift, and press your floor, and the second the doors close you take out your phone and open the google doc.
Day 1 — complete. Tip 1 deployed. He hates the nickname.
You pause.
He also doesn’t hate the nickname.
You close the google doc. You open the blog dashboard. You start writing.
In the car outside your building, Sunghoon sits for a moment after you go in.
He looks at the building entrance.
He thinks about real answers are better than the other kind said with the particular directness of someone who means exactly what they say and has no interest in softening it.
He thinks about hoonie delivered with complete sincerity and zero apology and the way he couldn’t find a single thing to do with it.
He picks up his phone. He opens the text thread.
tomorrow works. I’ll come to you this time.
He looks at what he’s typed. He sends it. He puts the car in drive.
Across town, your phone buzzes.
hoonie 🤍: tomorrow works. I’ll come to you this time.
You stare at the contact name.
You type back: okay. noon again.
You put the phone down.
You pick up your notebook.
You write: tip two. the move-in. start small. a candle.
—
He comes at noon the next day.
You’ve been up since nine preparing, which is not something you will ever admit to Minji, who would make a face that would live in your memory for years. You’ve done your reading and drafted a column and had two coffees and told yourself that the preparation is logistical, it’s for the piece, it has nothing to do with the fact that someone is coming over at noon and you’d like the flat to look — not different exactly. Considered. Like you live here intentionally.
He arrives at noon exactly. Same as yesterday. You are starting to understand that this is just who he is — the punctuality, the quiet reliability of it — and you are filing it accordingly and not finding it anything other than useful data.
He’s in a different hoodie today. Still simple, still worn-in, still somehow doing more than it should.
You let him in.
He looks around your flat with the attention he gives everything — quiet, unhurried, taking it in properly rather than performing interest. He looks at your books, your desk, the organised chaos of a final year journalism student who lives primarily in her own head.
“Nice,” he says, which from him means something because he doesn’t say things he doesn’t mean.
“Thanks,” you say. “Make yourself at home.”
He sits on your sofa.
You go to the kitchen.
You come back with two coffees — his black, which you know from Minji’s intelligence and are absolutely not going to reveal that you know — and a candle, which you set on the coffee table with the ease of someone simply adding to their space, nothing deliberate about it, just a girl putting a candle in her own flat.
He looks at the candle.
“Cedarwood,” he says.
“Mm.”
“That’s—” He pauses. “That’s what my car smells like.”
You meet his eyes with complete innocence. “Is it? I’ve had this one for ages.”
He looks at you.
You hand him his coffee.
He takes it, still looking at you, with the expression of someone who is doing a calculation and arriving at a result he finds interesting.
“Hoonie,” you say, sitting beside him. “What do you want to do today?”
The jaw thing. “Stop calling me that.”
“I genuinely don’t know what you mean,” you say.
“You know exactly what I mean.”
“Sunghoon is a lot of syllables,” you say. “Hoonie is efficient.”
“It’s two syllables.”
“Exactly. Same as Sunghoon. But softer.” You look at him with perfect sincerity. “It suits you.”
“It doesn’t—” He stops. Closes his mouth. Opens it again. “You’re doing this on purpose.”
“Doing what?”
“I don’t know yet,” he says, and his voice is different — not suspicious, more like genuinely curious, the specific tone of someone encountering a puzzle they actually want to solve. “But you’re doing something.”
“I’m drinking my coffee,” you say. “In my flat. That I’ve lived in for two years.”
He looks at the candle. Then at you.
Then, slowly, he smiles. Not the charm one. The real one, the unguarded one, the one that got out before he decided whether to let it. “Okay,” he says.
“Okay,” you agree. You drink your coffees.
He stays for four hours.
This is not planned. The plan was two hours maximum — enough to establish presence, enough to deploy the beginning of tip two’s territorial creep, enough to leave him wanting more rather than enough. Four hours is not strategic.
Four hours happens because he mentions a book on your shelf — something you’ve had since first year, annotated to within an inch of its life — and you end up in an argument about whether the narrator is unreliable or just mistaken, which are different things, which he agrees they’re different things but disagrees on which one applies, and the argument is so genuinely enjoyable that you don’t notice the time until the light through your window has gone from afternoon to early evening and you’ve both moved from the sofa to the floor at some point without registering the transition.
“Unreliable implies intention,” you say, for the fourth time. “He’s not lying. He just doesn’t know.”
“Not knowing is a form of unreliability,” he says, also for the fourth time, from the other side of the coffee table. “Your perception shapes what you report. An unreliable perception makes an unreliable narrator regardless of intent.”
“That’s a really broad definition of unreliable.”
“It’s the correct definition.”
“According to who?”
“According to the text,” he says, and picks up the book and reads you a passage with the ease of someone who has it half-memorised, which means he’s read this book before, which means he recognised it on your shelf, which means—
You stop that thought.
“That passage supports my reading,” you say.
“It supports mine.”
“It doesn’t—”
“It—”
“Hoonie.”
He stops. Looks at you. Something in his expression does the thing — the almost, the precursor — and then he looks back at the book and says, very calmly, “I will concede the passage is ambiguous.”
“That’s not the same as conceding the argument.”
“No,” he agrees. “It’s not.”
You look at him across the coffee table, the cedarwood candle burning between you, your annotated book in his hands, and you think about seventeen submissions and thirteen tips and the google doc with its four tabs and the fifth one you opened and immediately closed.
“It’s nearly six,” he says, checking his phone.
“Is it?”
“I should go.” But he doesn’t move. “Jay’s making dinner. He does this thing on Sundays where he decides he can cook and Heeseung and I have to either eat whatever it is or pretend we had plans.”
“Do you ever just tell him he can’t cook?”
“Every time.” He stands, finally, handing you back the book. “He does it anyway.”
You walk him to the door.
He picks up his jacket from the hook — he hung it up when he came in, you noticed, without being asked — and pauses.
“Tomorrow,” he says.
“What about it.”
“I have the rink in the morning. But after.” He looks at you. “Come to ours. Jay will make too much food regardless.”
“You’re inviting me to dinner at your house,” you say.
“Jay’s inviting you to dinner at our house,” he says. “Jay just doesn’t know it yet.”
You look at him.
“So that’s a yes?” he says.
You think about tip two. Move your stuff in. Start small. Establish presence in his space.
“Sure,” you say. “What time?”
“Seven.” He opens the door. Pauses. “Bring the candle.”
He says it completely straight-faced and leaves before you can respond, and you stand in your doorway watching him go down the hall and thinking that Park Sunghoon just made a joke about the candle, which means he knows about the candle, which means he’s paying attention to everything, which means this is going to be significantly more complicated than the google doc accounted for.
You close the door.
You pick up your notebook.
tip two update: he invited me to the house. didn’t even have to engineer it. he did it himself.
You pause. Read it back.
this is either going really well or really badly and I can’t tell which.
That night, after Jay’s food — which was aggressively fine, not bad, not good, aggressively fine — and two hours on their sofa watching something none of you were really watching, you leave the candle on their kitchen counter.
You do it on the way out, smooth and casual, setting it down like you’re just putting something down while you put your jacket on.
Heeseung sees you do it.
He says nothing.
You say goodnight and leave.
In the kitchen, Jay looks at the candle.
“Is that—”
“Don’t,” Sunghoon says.
“I’m just asking—”
“I know what you’re asking.”
“It smells nice,” Jay says. “That’s all I was going to say. It smells nice.”
Heeseung, from the sofa, turns a page of whatever he’s reading.
“She left it on purpose,” he says, to the page.
“Obviously,” Sunghoon says.
Jay looks between them. “And that’s—”
“Fine,” Sunghoon says. “It’s fine.”
He goes to his room.
Jay looks at the candle. Looks at Heeseung. Looks at the candle again.
“He likes her,” Jay says.
“I know,” Heeseung says.
“It’s day two.”
“I know,” Heeseung says again.
Jay pulls out his phone. Looks at the bet, the text thread, the terms. Puts the phone back in his pocket.
“We’re fine,” he says, to nobody in particular. Heeseung turns another page.
hoonie 🤍: you left your candle
you: did I? I didn’t notice
hoonie 🤍: you noticed
you: I’ll pick it up next time
hoonie 🤍: or I could bring it when I see you tomorrow
you: you’re seeing me tomorrow?
hoonie 🤍: apparently
you: bold assumption
hoonie 🤍: is it wrong
A pause. You look at the ceiling of your room. You look at your notebook, open on the bed beside you, tip two update written in your handwriting.
you: no
hoonie 🤍: goodnight Y/N
you: goodnight hoonie
Three dots. Gone.
Then:
hoonie 🤍: I’m not calling you anything back
you: I know. goodnight.
hoonie 🤍: …goodnight.
—
🤍 kiss & tell
tip 02: start moving your stuff in. casually. let him notice slowly.
Don’t announce it. Don’t make it an event. Just — leave things. Small things first. A candle. A jacket over a chair. Let the object do the work while you do nothing at all.
The goal isn’t possession. The goal is presence. The goal is to become a feature of his space so gradually that by the time he notices, you’re already there.
Did it work? He texted me about the candle.
Draw your own conclusions.
You didn’t hear it from me. x
[2,341 readers. 81 comments.]
the CANDLE.
she’s an evil genius and I mean that with full respect.
anonymous: I recognise this man’s entire behavioural pattern and Kiss & Tell you are doing the lord’s work.
—
🤍 kiss & tell
tip 03: cry. in front of him about something small.
Not a breakdown. Not a scene. Something small and genuine and completely disproportionate to the situation — a sad video, a dog, a song that comes on at the wrong moment.
The objective is simple. Men like this have spent years perfecting the art of emotional unavailability. They’ve built entire personalities around not being the one who feels things in public. So you introduce feelings — small, manageable, completely non-threatening feelings — and you watch what they do with them.
Do they run? Do they freeze? Do they do the stiff-shoulder-pat of a man who has never once been asked to sit with someone else’s emotions?
Results to follow.
You didn’t hear it from me. x
—
Day three arrives with the particular energy of something that has already decided what it’s going to be.
You know this before you’re fully awake — the specific quality of the morning, October light coming through your curtains in the thin gold way it does when the weather can’t commit to itself, and your phone already buzzing on the nightstand with a text that came in at seven forty-two AM from a contact saved as hoonie 🤍 which is, you think, perhaps a sign that day three has opinions.
hoonie 🤍: rink was good this morning. you’re up?
You stare at this message for a moment.
He texted you at seven forty-two in the morning, voluntarily, to tell you the rink was good.
You file this.
you: I am now
hoonie 🤍: sorry
you: don’t be. what made it good
A pause. Longer than his usual response time, which you’ve already clocked is short — he’s not a leave-it-on-read person, he responds when he sees it, which means he has his phone nearby most of the time, which means the deliberate pauses are deliberate.
hoonie 🤍: landed something I’ve been working on for two weeks
you: the triple?
hoonie 🤍: you know about the triple
You freeze.
you: you mentioned it. yesterday. when you were talking about the programme.
This is a lie. He did not mention it yesterday. It is in tab one of the google doc, sourced from a submission sent in by a girl who went to one of his morning sessions three months ago and described watching him attempt a triple axel for forty minutes with the specific admiration of someone who has been thoroughly won over against their will.
Three dots. Then:
hoonie 🤍: I don’t think I mentioned it
you: you definitely did
hoonie 🤍: …okay
He doesn’t push it. You exhale.
you: so you landed it?
hoonie 🤍: yeah
you: how does it feel
hoonie 🤍: like the ice gave me permission
You read this three times. You put your phone face down on the pillow. You pick it up again.
you: that’s a really good way to put it
hoonie 🤍: I’m a literature student
you: is that your excuse for everything
hoonie 🤍: it’s not an excuse it’s a qualification
You laugh, alone in your room at seven fifty AM, at a joke made by a boy you are assigned to lose over thirteen days, and you file this too — he’s funny. not performed funny. actually funny. — and you do not examine the filing too closely.
you: come over later?
You send it before you can think about whether it’s too eager, too fast, inconsistent with the planned arc of tip deployment. It doesn’t matter. It’s day three. The scrapbook is day four. Today is the crying, which requires proximity, which requires him to be here.
That’s why you sent it.
hoonie 🤍: what time
you: whenever. I’ll be in all day.
hoonie 🤍: two?
you: two works
hoonie 🤍: see you at two Y/N
You put the phone down. You open the google doc. You open a new document — not a tab, a separate one, private, not part of the Kiss & Tell infrastructure — and you write:
he said the ice gave me permission. I don’t know what to do with that.
You close it without saving.
He arrives at two with food.
Not a lot — just things, from the place near the rink, the good one, without being asked, without announcing it. He comes through the door and sets a paper bag on your counter and shrugs off his jacket and hangs it on the hook, which he does automatically now, second time and already automatic, and you think about establish presence from your own tip and feel the specific irony of him doing it back to you without knowing.
“You didn’t have to,” you say, nodding at the bag.
“You had food here last time,” he says. “Fair’s fair.”
“I had coffee.”
“And a candle.”
“The candle was already here.”
He gives you a look that says he absolutely knows the candle was not already there and is choosing not to press it, which is its own kind of move — letting you have the small fictions, not calling them out, keeping the game friendly.
You are a journalist. This is a story. You find this extremely interesting and nothing else.
You eat the food he brought at your kitchen counter, standing, which turns into sitting on the floor with your backs against the sofa because your flat is small and the counter doesn’t have stools and somehow the floor is just where you both end up, plates balanced, talking about — nothing. The specific nothing of two people who are finding out that they can fill time with each other without effort, which is either the most ordinary thing in the world or the most significant, depending on who you are.
He’s telling you about Jay’s latest cooking disaster — something involving rice and a confidence level that was not supported by the actual skill — when your phone, face up on the coffee table, plays a video.
Autoplay. Something from your feed. You’d been scrolling before he arrived and left it open.
You both look at the screen.
It’s a dog. A golden retriever, elderly, being reunited with a soldier coming home. The dog sees the soldier and its whole back half starts wagging and it makes a sound — a specific, desperate, you’re back you’re back you’re back sound — and the soldier gets down on his knees on the tarmac and the dog practically climbs into him.
You watch it for four seconds.
Your eyes fill up.
This is not entirely the plan. The plan was to deploy the crying strategically, with a video you’d pre-selected, at a moment you’d engineered. What is happening instead is that the video arrived without warning and you are apparently the kind of person who cries at dog videos at two forty-five in the afternoon in front of someone you are professionally obligated to remain detached from.
You blink. Hard. Once.
Too late.
Sunghoon looks at you.
He looks at the phone. Looks back at you. Looks at the tear that has made it approximately halfway down your cheek before you get a hand up to intercept it.
“Are you,” he starts.
“I’m fine,” you say. “It’s a dog.”
“I can see it’s a dog.”
“He was so happy,” you say, which is not a sentence you planned to say, which arrives from somewhere entirely outside the tip deployment framework. “He didn’t even — the sound he made—”
“Okay,” Sunghoon says.
“I’m not crying,” you say.
“You’re definitely crying.”
“It’s a dog,” you say again, as if this is a complete explanation, which to you it is.
He is quiet for a moment.
Then he does something you did not put in the google doc, which is that he reaches over and hands you a napkin from the food bag — not with ceremony, not with the performance of someone doing a kind thing, just hands it over, plain and practical, the way you’d hand someone a napkin — and goes back to his food.
He doesn’t say anything else about it.
He doesn’t make it weird.
He doesn’t do the stiff-shoulder-pat. He doesn’t freeze. He doesn’t make a joke or look uncomfortable or redirect the conversation with the energy of someone escaping a situation they don’t know how to be in.
He hands you a napkin and goes back to his food and lets the moment be exactly what it is — small, genuine, completely disproportionate — without making it anything more.
You wipe your face.
You go back to your food.
“He was really happy,” Sunghoon says, after a moment, to his plate.
You look at him.
He is very focused on his food. The tips of his ears are faintly pink.
“Yeah,” you say. “He was.”
You do not put this in the blog post.
You write the tip. You write the strategic version, the one about emotional unavailability and the shoulder-pat and watching what he does with feelings he didn’t expect to encounter. You write it with the detachment of a journalist who has the story under control.
You do not write about the napkin.
You do not write about his ears.
You open the private document — the separate one, the one that isn’t part of the Kiss & Tell infrastructure — and you write:
he handed me a napkin and didn’t make it weird. that’s it. that’s the whole thing. I don’t know why I’m writing this down.
You stare at it.
You close it without saving. Again.
—
Day four arrives and you have a scrapbook to make.
You’ve been thinking about the scrapbook since you planned the tips. It’s the most unhinged one — the most deliberately, strategically overwhelming — and it requires actual effort. You need photos, which means you need photos from the last three days, which means you’ve been taking them.
You have, it turns out, taken more photos than you planned.
The food from the place near the rink, the brown paper bag with its logo. A screenshot of a text exchange that made you laugh. The view from his car window on day one, which you took while he wasn’t looking because the light was doing something through the glass that you wanted to keep. His jacket on your hook — just the jacket, the empty shape of it against the door, which you took on day two after he left and have not examined why.
You print them at the campus print shop on Wednesday morning. You buy a scrapbook from the art supplies place next door — not a nice one, not a proper one, the kind with a flimsy cover and pages that are slightly too thick, which is exactly right. You buy stickers, because of course you do, and some tape, and a marker, and you sit at your kitchen table for an hour and make something that is objectively both ridiculous and, somewhere underneath the ridiculousness, completely genuine.
Because the photos are real. You actually took them. The light through his car window is actually beautiful. The jacket on the hook is actually — it looks like it belongs there, which is the thing you noticed when you took the photo, the way it looked like it had always been there, and that’s why you took it, and you are a journalist and this is a story.
You close the scrapbook.
You put it in your bag.
He comes over at noon. He’s in the hoodie again — different one this time, grey, slightly older, and you’ve started to understand that the hoodies are his version of comfortable, that he dresses for other people sometimes and for himself other times and the hoodie version is the himself version.
“Hoonie,” you say, letting him in.
“Y/N,” he says, with the patience of someone who has accepted this is simply going to happen.
You make coffee. You bring it to the sofa. You sit beside him with your bag and he’s looking at his phone, something about the rink schedule, and you pull the scrapbook out and set it on the coffee table.
He looks at it.
Then at you.
“What’s that,” he says.
“A scrapbook,” you say.
“Of.”
“Us,” you say. “Mostly. The last few days.”
He is very still.
“We’ve known each other for four days,” he says.
“Three and a half,” you correct. “But a lot happened.”
He looks at the scrapbook. At the cover, which has a sticker on it — a small gold star, because you had the stickers and it felt right — and his name written in marker in your handwriting, hoonie, which you did partly for the tip and partly because by the time you were making it you’d stopped thinking about the tip.
“Can I—” he starts.
“Go ahead,” you say.
He picks it up.
He opens it.
You watch him.
He goes through it slowly, which you didn’t expect — you expected a quick flip, the polite skim of someone who doesn’t know how to receive something like this and is looking for the exit. Instead he takes his time. Each page. The food bag photo. The text screenshot. The light through the car window.
He stops on that one.
“When did you take this,” he says.
“Day one. On the way to lunch.”
“I didn’t see you take it.”
“You were driving.”
He looks at the photo. At the light through the glass, the way it caught and scattered, the particular quality of it that made you reach for your phone without thinking.
“It’s good,” he says, quietly. Not performing it.
“I know,” you say. “That’s why I took it.”
He turns the page.
He finds the jacket photo.
He’s quiet for a long moment. Long enough that you stop watching him and look at the coffee table instead, the cedarwood candle — his candle now, in their kitchen, you brought a new one for yours — and the two coffees going slowly cold.
“You took a photo of my jacket,” he says.
“It looked nice on the hook,” you say.
“On your hook.”
“On my hook. Yes.”
He closes the scrapbook. Sets it on the table. Picks up his coffee.
You wait.
“You’ve known me for four days,” he says again.
“Three and a half.”
“Y/N.”
“Sunghoon.”
He looks at you. And here is the thing — here is the thing you didn’t put in the google doc and couldn’t have — he doesn’t look unsettled. He doesn’t look like a man encountering an overwhelming situation and calculating his exit. He looks like a man encountering something he doesn’t have a category for and finding, to his own apparent surprise, that he’s not looking for one.
“You’re something,” he says.
“I’ve been told,” you say.
“I don’t mean it like that.”
“How do you mean it.”
He looks at the scrapbook on the table. At the gold star sticker on the cover. At hoonie in your handwriting.
“I don’t know yet,” he says honestly. “I’ll tell you when I do.”
You look at him for a long moment.
Filed under —
You don’t file it.
For the first time since the google doc, since the seventeen submissions, since the plan that is elegant and slightly unhinged, you look at Park Sunghoon sitting on your sofa holding his coffee with the scrapbook of three and a half days on the table between you and you don’t file it.
You just look at him.
“Okay,” you say.
“Okay,” he says.
You drink your coffees.
He leaves at four. He picks up the scrapbook on the way out, without asking, and you watch him tuck it under his arm like it’s something he’s taking home, which it is, which means it worked, which means tip four is complete.
You should feel like you won something. You mostly feel like you did something real.
“Tomorrow,” he says, at the door.
“Tomorrow,” you agree.
He goes.
You close the door.
You go to your desk. You open your laptop. You open the blog dashboard and you write the tip post — the strategic version, the scrapbook-as-weapon version, the this-is-how-you-overwhelm-a-man-who-runs-from-feelings version.
Then you open the private document.
You stare at the blank page.
You type: he took it home.
Four words. You look at them.
he took it home and I don’t know if that’s the tip working or something else and I think the problem is I’m not sure it matters anymore which one it is.
You close it.
This time you save it.
In the house off campus, Jay finds the scrapbook.
Not snooping — it’s on the kitchen counter, which is where Sunghoon put it when he came in, and Jay sees it because he goes to the kitchen for water and it’s just there, and he picks it up because it has a gold star sticker on it and he’s curious.
He opens it.
He looks at the photos. The food bag. The text screenshot. The light through the car window. The jacket on the hook.
He closes it.
He goes to the living room where Heeseung is reading.
“Heeseung,” he says.
“Mm.”
“We have a problem.”
Heeseung turns a page. “I know.”
“She made him a scrapbook.”
“I know.”
“It’s day four.”
“I know, Jay.”
Jay sits down heavily on the sofa. He looks at the ceiling. He thinks about the bet — the text thread, the terms, thirteen days, one girl, you actually try — and he thinks about Sunghoon’s face when he came home, which was not the face of a man who is running a bet.
It was the face of a man who took a scrapbook home and is not entirely sure why and is not entirely bothered by not being sure.
“We should say something,” Jay says.
“Should we,” Heeseung says, not looking up.
“One of us should—”
“Which one of us,” Heeseung says, “is going to walk into Sunghoon’s room and tell him that the girl who made him a scrapbook on day four is doing it on purpose, and also that you made a bet, and also that we’ve both been watching this happen and said nothing?”
Jay opens his mouth.
“Which one of us,” Heeseung continues, turning another page, “is going to do that.”
Jay closes his mouth.
He looks at the ceiling.
“We’ll give it a few more days,” he says.
Heeseung says nothing.
Which is, Jay is beginning to understand, Heeseung’s way of saying you have made a catastrophic error and I am going to let you arrive at that conclusion yourself.
Jay goes back to the kitchen.
He looks at the scrapbook on the counter.
He gets his water.
He goes to bed.
—
🤍 kiss & tell
tip 04: make a scrapbook. day four. show him.
Physical evidence of a relationship that is three and a half days old.
Print the photos. Buy the stickers. Write his name on the cover in your own handwriting. Make it real enough that he can’t dismiss it and ridiculous enough that he should want to.
The goal is overwhelm. The goal is to be too much, too fast, too sincere — to deploy the kind of gesture that sends men like this running for the nearest exit.
Here’s what happened instead… he took it home.
I don’t have a tip for that. I’ll get back to you.
You didn’t hear it from me. x
[3,102 readers. 114 comments.]
SHE DOESN’T HAVE A TIP FOR THAT I’M LOSING MY MIND.
kiss & tell are you okay.
anonymous: I know who this is and I need everyone to understand that this man has never once taken anything home in three years.
⤷ from Kiss & Tell: …noted.
—
🤍 kiss & tell
tip 05: name it. (as in his penis ;))
Give it a full name. Something formal. Something that requires introduction. Deploy it with complete sincerity and maintain eye contact with him while you do it.
The objective here is simple — men who have built entire personalities around being untouchable tend to have one specific vulnerability, which is being caught completely off guard in a situation where charm is not a useful tool.
This is that situation.
Results to follow.
You didn’t hear it from me. x
—
Day five starts with a text at seven AM.
hoonie 🤍: rink. triple again. landed it cleaner.
You read this lying on your back in the dark of your room, phone screen bright in the early morning, and you think about like the ice gave me permission and the private document you’ve been saving things to and the fact that he texts you about the rink now, voluntarily, without prompting, like you’re the person he tells things to.
You’ve been the person he tells things to for five days.
you: cleaner how
hoonie 🤍: the landing. rotation was right last time but the landing was off. today it was right.
you: what does a right landing feel like
The pause is longer this time. The deliberate kind.
hoonie 🤍: like the ground caught you on purpose
You stare at this message.
You type: that’s a really good sentence
hoonie 🤍: I told you. literature student.
you: qualification not excuse
hoonie 🤍: exactly
you: come over tonight?
You send it before you think about it, which is becoming a pattern you haven’t fully addressed. The plan accounts for frequency of contact — it’s in the timeline tab, maintain consistent but not overwhelming presence, let him initiate where possible. You have been initiating more than the timeline accounts for.
You file this under logistical adjustment and move on.
hoonie 🤍: yeah. eight?
you: eight works
hoonie 🤍: I’ll bring food
you: you don’t have to keep doing that
hoonie 🤍: I know
You put your phone down.
You open the google doc.
You open the private document instead.
he said like the ground caught you on purpose. I’ve been thinking about it for twenty minutes. I should probably stop thinking about it. I’m not going to stop thinking about it.
You close it.
He arrives at eight with food from a different place this time — further from campus, somewhere you don’t recognise the bag from, which means he went out of his way, which you note and do not remark on.
He’s in the grey hoodie again. The himself one.
You’re in your flat in your own version of the himself thing — an old university shirt, jeans, hair that’s been up since this morning and is making its own decisions at this point — and when you open the door he looks at you with the expression he gets sometimes, the brief unguarded one, before he recalibrates into easy and casual.
“Hi, hoonie,” you say.
“Hi,” he says, with the patient resignation of a man who has stopped arguing about the nickname and is choosing to interpret this as winning.
You eat on the floor again. This is simply where you eat now, apparently — sofa abandoned in favour of the rug, backs against the coffee table, food between you. You’ve stopped thinking about whether this is strategic. It’s just comfortable.
He tells you about the rink. About the programme he’s been working on for three months, the one the triple is part of, the way the whole thing builds toward a specific feeling he’s been chasing.
“What feeling,” you ask.
“Like it’s inevitable,” he says. “Like every element was always going to be in that order. Like the programme is just — uncovering something that was already there.”
You look at him.
“That’s what good writing feels like,” you say. “When it works. Like you’re not inventing it, just finding it.”
He looks back at you.
“Yeah,” he says. “Exactly like that.”
The room is quiet for a moment. The good kind, the kind that doesn’t require filling.
You are a journalist. This is a story.
“So,” you say, and something in your voice shifts, and he hears it — you see him hear it, the slight attention change, the orientation. “I’ve been thinking.”
“About.”
“About the fact that it’s day five,” you say, “and we’ve been spending a significant amount of time together.”
“We have,” he agrees, carefully.
“And I think—” You look at him with complete sincerity. “I think it’s time we took the next step.”
He goes very still.
“The next—”
“I want to,” you say, and you hold his gaze, “if you want to.”
A pause.
He looks at you. You look at him. The space between you on the rug is not very large and the lamp is doing something warm with the light and he’s in his grey hoodie and his hair is doing the unstyled thing and his expression is—
“Yeah,” he says, quietly. “Okay.”
The thing about Park Sunghoon, which was in the submissions but which the submissions did not adequately convey, is that he is extremely good at this.
Not in the way you expected.
You expected the practiced version — efficient, warm in a generalised way, the kind of good that comes from having done something enough times that it stops requiring thought. You expected charm applied to a physical situation. You expected to feel, somewhere underneath everything, the low hum of being processed. Another girl. Another night. Another name he wouldn’t remember by the end.
What you get is the opposite of all of that.
He notices things.
He gets your shirt off and looks at you with that expression — the brief unguarded one, the one you’ve been cataloguing — and it doesn’t recalibrate this time. He just looks. Openly, unhurriedly, like you’re something he hasn’t finished figuring out and is in no rush to.
His eyes move over you slowly. Your face. Your throat. Lower.
“Hi,” he says quietly, and it sounds like something else entirely.
“Hi, hoonie,” you say, because you can’t help it, and he makes a sound that is almost a laugh and presses his mouth to your collarbone.
And then he takes you apart.
He gets your bra off and looks at your tits with the focused attention of someone making a decision, and then his hands are on them — cupping, thumbs brushing your nipples — and you inhale sharply and he does it again, watching your face while he does it, filing away the reaction.
“Sensitive,” he says. Not a question.
“Shut up,” you say.
The corner of his mouth does the thing. He lowers his head and closes his mouth over your nipple and your hand goes into his hair immediately, gripping, and the sound you make is embarrassingly immediate. He works them with his mouth and hands — unhurried, thorough, learning what makes you twitch versus what makes you actually make noise — and by the time he starts moving down your body you are already significantly less composed than you planned to be.
He gets your jeans off and looks at you and says “fuck” quietly, to himself, like it got out before he decided to let it, and that single unguarded profanity is what tips you from oriented into something else. Because it’s real. Because he means it. Because Park Sunghoon, looking at you in the lamplight of his room, forgot for one second to manage his expression.
You were not prepared for him to mean it.
He gets your underwear off and puts his mouth on your pussy and you stop being a journalist completely.
He eats you out the way he does everything — with complete attention, unhurried, like there’s a right answer here and he’s going to find it. His tongue works through your folds slowly and then finds your clit and stays there and you grip his hair and he takes that as information and presses closer. Two fingers push into your pussy and curl and you arch off the bed.
“Sunghoon —”
“Mm,” he says against you, which is not words, which is just sound, and somehow that’s worse.
He learns you methodically — finding the specific pressure on your clit that makes your thighs shake, the angle of his fingers against your walls that makes you lose language, and then staying there, patient and relentless, not moving on until he’s got exactly the response he was looking for. You have both hands in his hair and you’re not being careful about how hard you’re pulling and he seems to actively prefer this, his fingers curling deeper when you do.
The first orgasm hits harder than you expected. You cry out properly — loud enough to echo off the walls of his quiet house — and he works you through every second of it and then keeps going and you try to pull him up by the hair.
He ignores you.
“More,” he says against your pussy, simply, like it’s obvious.
“Sunghoon —”
“More.” He looks up at you over your body and his eyes are completely dark and the composed literary student is entirely gone and something about the specific way he’s looking at you — focused, certain, like you are a problem he is enjoying solving — makes heat bloom all the way up your chest. “I want to hear it again.”
You give it to him. The second one builds slower and hits differently — deeper, rolling through you in long waves — and you’re shaking by the end of it, thighs clamped around his head, and he pulls back and looks at you and his mouth is slick and his expression is thoroughly satisfied.
He moves up your body. Looks at you. Checks — actually checks, the same care underneath everything.
“Yeah?” he says.
“Yeah,” you say. “Obviously yeah —”
He kisses you and you taste yourself on his mouth and pull him closer and he makes a low sound and reaches over to the nightstand and then he’s back and lining up and pushing into your pussy slow and —
You understand immediately why seventeen girls kept coming back.
It’s not just the size, though that’s — relevant information, significant information, information you are filing carefully. It’s the way he’s completely there. No part of him is somewhere else. His forehead drops to yours and he gives you a moment, feeling your walls adjust around his cock, and when he starts to move the sound he makes against your neck is low and genuine and nothing like performance.
“Fuck,” he breathes. His hips drive forward and you arch up and he groans. “You feel so good.” He pulls back and pushes in deeper and you make a sound that has no consonants in it. “Yeah.” His mouth finds your ear. “Just like that.”
“Sunghoon —”
“I’ve got you,” he says. “Relax.”
He sets a pace that is deep and thorough and completely unhurried — long strokes that drag against your walls perfectly, his cock filling you on every thrust in a way that keeps short-circuiting coherent thought. His hands move over you while he moves — your waist, your hips, sliding up to your tits and gripping before moving back down — like he wants to touch all of you and is working through the logistics of it.
You are loud. You were not planning to be loud. You are very loud.
“There,” he says, when you make a specific sound, and adjusts his angle and does it again. “Right there?”
“Yes —” Your hands grab his shoulders. “Yes, right —”
“Good girl.” He stays at that angle. His thumb finds your clit and you cry out. “So good for me.”
The words land somewhere that surprises you with how directly they land. Your whole body responds to them — clenching around his cock — and he groans at the feeling and his composure slips a fraction.
“Tight,” he says against your throat. “Tight fucking pussy —” His hips snap forward and you cry out again. “You feel that?”
“Yes —”
“Yeah.” His thumb keeps working your clit, small and precise, and his cock is deep and his mouth is at your jaw and your ear and your throat. “Take it.” He drives in harder. “Just like that. Take it.”
You come on his cock with your nails in his shoulders and your head thrown back and a sound that you will think about with some embarrassment tomorrow and he works you through every second of it — hips maintaining that deep steady rhythm, thumb relentless on your clit — until you’re grabbing his wrist and making incoherent noises.
“Too much —” you manage. “Too —”
“One more,” he says. Not unkind. Just certain, the way he’s certain about everything. “Give me one more.”
“Sunghoon I literally —”
“One more,” he says, and shifts his angle, and you sob, and give him one more.
He comes shortly after, buried deep, his forehead to your shoulder, groaning low against your skin with his hips pressed flush against yours and his cock pulsing and staying buried while he rides it out. His hand at your hip is tight enough to leave something tomorrow and neither of you are thinking about tomorrow.
He stays there after. Breathing. Not rushing the aftermath.
You are not going to put all this in your blog. What you are going to put in the blog is what happens approximately forty minutes in, when you are in his bed — you ended up at his, Heeseung and Jay both absent, the house quiet and warm — and things have arrived at a natural pause, and you look at him and the tip, the one you’ve been planning since the google doc, arrives.
“Hi,” you say.
He looks at you. “Hi.”
You look down. Then back up. Very seriously.
“Hi, Gerald,” you say.
The silence is immediate and total.
Sunghoon stares at you.
You maintain eye contact.
“What,” he says.
“Gerald,” you say. “I think it suits him.”
“You—” He stops. “You just—”
“Formally,” you say. “I wanted to do it formally.”
He stares at you for a long moment. Something is happening in his face — a sequence of things, moving through quickly, surprise and bafflement and something else underneath both of them, something that is fighting very hard not to become what it wants to become.
It loses the fight.
He laughs.
Not a small laugh, not the quiet almost-laugh you’ve catalogued — a real one, full, the kind that takes him by surprise, that gets out before he can decide whether to let it, that turns into another one before the first one’s finished, and he puts a hand over his face and laughs into his palm and you watch this happen and feel something in your chest that is completely outside the scope of the assignment.
“Gerald,” he says, from behind his hand.
“Strong name,” you say. “Classic.”
“You planned that,” he says.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You one hundred percent planned that.”
“I acted on instinct.”
He looks at you from behind his hand, eyes visible above his fingers, still doing the aftermath of the laugh — the residual warmth of it, the particular quality of someone who has just laughed properly and the room is different because of it. “Instinct,” he repeats.
“It felt right,” you say.
He drops his hand. Looks at you properly.
And here is the thing that doesn’t go in the blog, that goes in the private document, that you will think about at seven AM tomorrow when he texts you about the rink: he looks at you like you are the most interesting thing that has happened to him in years. Not in the charming way, not the way he probably looks at everyone. In a specific way. The way you look at something that keeps being different from what you expected and you’ve stopped expecting it to stop.
“Gerald,” he says again, quieter.
“Do you hate it?” you ask.
“Yes,” he says.
“Good,” you say.
He laughs again, smaller this time, and pulls you back in, and the rest of the night is — the rest of the night goes in the private document, not the blog.
What goes in the blog is the tip. The strategic version. The maintained-eye-contact version.
What goes in the private document, at one forty-seven AM, lying in his bed while he’s asleep, phone screen dim so it doesn’t wake him:
he laughed. the real one, the full one, not the almost. I’ve been cataloguing the almost-laughs for five days and tonight I got the real one and it happened because of Gerald and I think I need to be honest with myself about something.
I think I need to be honest with myself about something and then a long blank space where you couldn’t find the words, and then:
the ground caught you on purpose. that’s what he said this morning. and I keep thinking about it and I think I’m starting to understand what he means and I don’t know what to do with that.
You save it.
You put the phone down.
Beside you, Sunghoon sleeps with the specific quality of someone who is completely comfortable, one hand near yours on the pillow, not touching but close, and the lamp is still on because neither of you got up to turn it off and the room is warm and the scrapbook is on his desk, the gold star sticker catching the light, and outside the window the campus goes about its late night and inside this room everything is—
You don’t finish the sentence.
You close your eyes.
In the morning you wake up before him.
This surprises you — you expected him to be the early one, the rink-at-five-AM one, and he will be tomorrow and the day after, but today is not a rink morning and so he’s asleep when the light comes through the curtains and you lie there for a moment in the particular disorientation of waking somewhere that isn’t your room.
Then it lands.
Right. Yes.
You turn your head.
He’s asleep on his back, one arm at his side, hair doing something completely unmanaged, and he looks — he looks like himself. The version underneath everything else. Without the careful ease, without the recalibration, just him, and you lie there and look at him and think about seventeen submissions and the google doc and the private document and Gerald and the laugh and the ground caught you on purpose.
He opens his eyes.
Finds you immediately, without looking — just turns his head and you’re there and he looks at you with the specific expression of someone waking up and finding exactly what they were hoping to find and not trying to manage that expression at all.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi, hoonie,” you say.
He closes his eyes again, briefly. “You’re doing that in the morning now.”
“I do it all the time.”
“It’s worse in the morning.”
“Because you’re less defended.”
He opens his eyes. Looks at you. “Yeah,” he says, quietly. “Maybe.”
The room is morning-quiet. The lamp is still on, pale now against the daylight. His desk has the scrapbook on it, gold star, hoonie in your handwriting.
“Rink tomorrow,” he says.
“I know.”
“Early.”
“I know.”
“You could—” He stops.
“Could what,” you say.
“Come,” he says. “If you wanted. It’s early. You probably don’t want to.”
You look at him.
“What time,” you say.
Something in his face does the thing. “Five-thirty.”
“I’ll be there at five-twenty,” you say. “To be annoying.”
He looks at the ceiling. But his mouth is doing the thing and he doesn’t try to stop it, not this morning, not in this room.
“Obviously,” he says.
Jay is in the kitchen when Sunghoon comes downstairs at nine.
He’s making coffee with the focused energy of someone who has been awake for a while and has been thinking about things and has decided to make coffee because it’s better than the alternative. He looks up when Sunghoon comes in. Clocks his expression. Looks at the scrapbook, which has migrated from the counter to the kitchen table at some point. Looks back at Sunghoon.
“Good night?” Jay says, with the careful neutrality of a man defusing a situation.
“Yeah,” Sunghoon says. He opens the fridge. Gets juice. “You?”
“Fine.” Jay pours two coffees without being asked and sets one on the counter. “She go home?”
“Earlier.”
“Right.” A pause. “She’s—” Jay stops.
“What.”
“Nothing,” Jay says. “She seems good. She’s good.”
Sunghoon looks at him.
Jay picks up his coffee.
“What,” Sunghoon says again.
“Nothing,” Jay says. “I just—” He stops again. He has the expression of a man standing at the entrance to a conversation he should have two days ago and is finding the door very heavy. “I just think she’s good. That’s all. I like her.”
“Okay,” Sunghoon says slowly.
“Okay,” Jay says.
Sunghoon picks up his coffee. Looks at Jay for a moment with the particular look of someone who knows a conversation is being avoided and is choosing, for now, not to push it.
He takes his coffee upstairs.
Jay stands in the kitchen alone.
He looks at the scrapbook on the table. At hoonie in someone else’s handwriting. At the gold star sticker.
He takes out his phone. He opens the bet thread. He stares at it. He puts his phone back in his pocket. He drinks his coffee.
—
🤍 kiss & tell
tip 05: name it.
Full name. Formal introduction. Complete sincerity. Maintained eye contact.
Here’s what I can tell you: it worked. The overwhelm landed. He was, briefly, completely caught off guard in a situation where charm was not a useful tool.
Here’s what I can’t tell you: what happened after.
Not because it isn’t relevant. Because some things are happening in this story that I didn’t plan for and I’m a journalist and I know when a story is going somewhere I didn’t map out and I need a minute to figure out what that means before I report on it.
Tip six is boys night. I’ll be there Thursday.
You didn’t hear it from me. x
[4,891 readers. 203 comments.]
KISS AND TELL WHAT DO YOU MEAN SOME THINGS ARE HAPPENING THAT YOU DIDN’T PLAN FOR.
she’s in trouble.
⤷ we’re all in trouble.
the name reveal is going to be in the comments for the rest of time.
anonymous: I go to this campus. I know who this is about. I need everyone to understand that this man smiled at someone in the humanities building yesterday and it was not his normal smile.
⤷ from Kiss & Tell: …I’m going to need you to expand on that.
laceys note // if you guys made it to the end thank u! and yes before yall ask i do have part 2 in the making 😉
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